Last Friday, while I was selling my Most Valuable Postcard #2, I got a message from a new buyer, Joseph Robertson. Joseph is a marketer and copywriter who, for more than a decade now, has also been publishing Extracted, a magazine for coffee fanatics.
Joseph’s message was very thoughtful. I am reprinting it in full below because it might be useful to a few people, especially to copywriters working with clients:
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Thanks for this opportunity. My first purchase from you. Impressive work.
Several realizations for me…
I’ve come to the point in my personal copywriting-as-career journey where I finally feel like I know myself and what I’m doing, to the point where I don’t feel moved to understand the secret… I’m not searching for a new way to do something, or a new answer, but rather looking for insightful perspectives to augment/enhance my own understanding and work.
And seeing your work has given me the odd realization that there is indeed great value in productizing one’s own understanding of fundamentals, if that presentation helps bring valuable new perspective/ideas to someone else.
I say odd because I think until this point I put “selling my own knowledge” on a pedestal, and just settled into good consistent client work (I haven’t needed a new client in a long time). But that client work has given me an enormous amount of context for developing my way of doing and understanding.
Before you announced this new offer, I’d been thinking deeply and incorporating a new understanding/perspective on structural tension. What you share here fits right in with that very well, naturally, but in a way and with a perspective I don’t think I’d come across on my own. Maybe in time (i’ve been finding the longer I let myself sit with an unknown or a question, the more MY interpretation of the understanding emerges, which is quite valuable).
Anyway. Just felt like I ought to share and express my thanks for your work.
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Here are my two added shekels:
If you’re a copywriter working with clients, but you don’t yet have your own email list, start one today.
If you have your own list but you haven’t sold anything to it, do like Joseph says above. Productize your own knowledge, and sell that to your list.
There’s little new under the sun. But if you present proven ideas in a way that manages to reach someone, that they resonate with, that they finally benefit from even if they might have heard the idea 1001 times before, then there’s real value in that.
And beyond the money:
I’ve personally found that whenever I sit down to put together a course or a training, I do so because I feel I know that subject fairly well. But by the end of the process, I realize how confused or shallow my previous understanding was, and how much cool stuff I figured out simply by forcing myself to put the course together.
All that’s to say, if you do package up and sell your own knowledge, the benefit can often be way beyond the actual money people might send you.
But of course, the money. Always the money. I gotta get back to work:
Today, I’m still promoting my coaching program on email marketing and copywriting. I include offer creation in that.
In fact, I previously called this coaching program Income at Will, because that’s the ultimate pleasure island that I want this coaching program to take people. But after I wrote an email a few weeks ago about taking out the poetry from what you’re doing, I decided to be more blunt and and simply call this “coaching on email marketing and copywriting.”
The goal of my coaching program is to help you sell more and more easily via email, and who knows, maybe even deepen your understanding of things you thought you knew well.
This coaching program is only right for two kinds of people:
1. Business owners who have an email list and want to use email to both build a relationship with their customers and to sell their products (or their productized knowledge)
2. Copywriters who manage a client’s email list, and who have a profit-share agreement for that work
If you fit into one of the two categories above and you’re interested in my coaching program, write me an email and say so. Also tell me who you are and what your current situation is, including which category above you fit into. We can then talk in more detail, and see if my coaching program might be a fit for you.