I recently read the plight of one newish copywriter. He is hoping to make the transition from “Hey, I write copy” to “Hey, I get XYZ results.”
That’s smart. It’s the easy way to start making more money with copywriting. But here’s the trouble:
This guy says none of his clients are sharing data with him. They seem to be using his copy. But when he follows up with them a few months down the line, they never respond about the sales his copy was responsible for.
I’ve been there and it sucks. So let me tell you what I did to deal with it:
1. Kept going. Eventually you’ll get to a client who will get value out of your work AND share the results with you.
2. Followed up with clients 3-4 weeks after I delivered the copy. “Have you had a chance to put it into production? How is it doing?” Don’t expect them to write you… and don’t wait months to write them. People forget, and they get lazy.
3. Kept learning and getting better on my own. Once clients really start getting results from your copy, it stops being “one-off.” It then becomes much easier to press them for the results of your copy.
4. Increased my rates. Better clients are more likely to share this kind of info with you.
5. Started working on my own side projects. You get all the data when you run your own small campaigns on Facebook, or send out emails to your own list.
Once upon a time, the name of the game in copywriting was “controls.” Today, there’s so much more work, and many successful copywriters are not writing for one of the big publishers. But it’s still helpful to throw out sales numbers that you can attribute to copy you wrote.
Claude Hopkins, one of the first people who got really rich as a copywriter, started out as a bookkeeper. He had the following insight to share about it. It still holds true — for both bookkeepers and copywriters:
“A bookkeeper is an expense. In every business expenses are kept down. I could never be worth more than any other man who could do the work I did. The big salaries were paid to salesmen, to the men who brought in orders, or to the men in the factory who reduced the costs. They showed profits, and they could command a reasonable share of those profits. I saw the difference between the profit-earning and the expense side of a business, and I resolved to graduate from the debit class.”
Maybe that’s gonna help you out. And here’s something else that might:
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