Claude Hopkins

How big is your…?

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I saw the following size-measuring question today:

“How big is your confidence in copywriting? I know this is the softest metric of one’s success, but I wonder greatly. How confident are you in your job and what’s your confidence based on?”

This is honestly not a question I’ve thought about ever.

I don’t worry about confidence. Instead, I think about having a system for moving forward, and about following that system. As long as I do that, I feel I’m safe.

(Or maybe I’ve been influenced too much by dating coach Tom Torero, who said something like, “Confidence is just when you’ve seen the same situation many times over.”)

But if you’re looking to start out as a copywriter, maybe this doesn’t help you.

So let me give you another quote, this one by Claude Hopkins, the great-grandfather of modern direct response marketing.

(About a century ago, Claude wrote a book called Scientific Advertising, which the famous David Ogilvy, the “King of Madison Avenue,” said is so important that “nobody, at any level, should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times.”)

Anyways, back when Claude was just a wet-behind-the-ears lad working for peanuts at the “Felt Boot Company,” he got to talking to a successful businessman in his town.

The businessman was impressed when he heard that Claude would work from 8 in the morning until after midnight, and be back the next morning for more of the same.

So the big businessman offered Claude a new, higher paying job. And here’s what Claude concluded from this:

“In the early stages of our careers none can judge us by results. The shallow men judge us by likings, but they are not men to tie to. The real men judge us by our love of work, the basis of their success. They employ us for work, and our capacity for work counts above all else.”

Maybe this will help you if you are agonizing about where you are on the copywriting totem pole.

And in case you want to grab a free copy of that “must-read” Claude Hopkins advertising Bible, so you can add a bit of length or girth to your copywriting confidence, then here’s where to go:

https://www.scientificadvertising.com/ScientificAdvertising.pdf

The night of the yellow ad

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On the evening of December 5th of this year, websites across the Internet started displaying an unusual ad.

There was no text on the ad.

No image.

Nothing was being advertised.

It was just a plain, 300×250 yellow square.

And to make things weirder, the revenues from these ads were huge. Some websites saw an 800% increase in their ad revenue. Altogether, this little yellow square, running for less than an hour, was responsible for somewhere between $1.6 million and $10 million in ad spend.

Was it all a brilliant marketing campaign?

Or some behemoth company that could afford to throw away millions of dollars on a bizarre stunt?

Neither, actually. The company behind the yellow ad was a small Australian ecommerce fashion brand called The Iconic. And the whole thing was a mistake, made by an ad team at Google, which helps companies learn how to use its ad platform.

(The Iconic apparently won’t be billed for Google’s mistake, and publishers will still be paid, I guess out of Google’s deep pockets.)

Now I’ve recently been dabbling with pay-per-click.

Not on Google, but on Facebook and, more recently, on Amazon.

So the story above is pretty relevant to me.

You see, any of these companies will gladly tell you how you should run your ad campaigns. They will give you advice. They will even offer to automate away much of the work.

The trouble is, even if they don’t make a nasty technical snafu like the “night of the yellow ad,” they aren’t really experts in marketing.

And I don’t think their advice really has my best interests in mind.

So instead, when I make my PPC campaigns, I keep it simple.

Instead of relying on the fancy advice of companies like Facebook and Google, I apply 100-year-old principles from Claude Hopkins’s Scientific Advertising, and go from there.

Does this apply to you?

Probably not. But it might be something to keep in mind in case you run (or are planning to run) paid ads.

On a related note:

If you are getting started as a freelancer on Upwork, I would also not go with the recommendations of that particular company for how to become successful.

Instead, I would recommend another resource.

It’s not 100 years old.

In fact, it’s not even published yet.

It’s an ebook I’m putting together right now, called How to Become a $150/hr, Top-Rated Sales Copywriter on Upwork.

If you want to get notified when I’m finished with this book and it becomes available, sign up below and I’ll keep you in the loop:

https://bejakovic.com/upwork-book-notification-list/