I woke up this morning to a bang.
I’ve been staying at my friend’s Adams-family-like mansion in the Bolton Hill area of Baltimore.
I have an entire floor of the house to myself.
It’s been great. Except each morning I’ve been here, I’ve been woken up in the same way.
Bang. Against my window. Then a few seconds later, another bang. On and on and on.
A robin – a strange, possibly idiot bird — keeps flying against the window all morning long. After it hits its head against the window, it flies to a nearby branch. It resets. And then it flies at the window again.
And like that until I wake up, get up, and leave the room so I don’t have to listen to him any more.
This week, in fact ever since I got to Baltimore, I’ve been promoting Shiv Shetti’s Performance Copywriter Method.
I’ve been getting a lot of comments from readers who have good things to say about Shiv, and who are happy to hear I’m working with him.
I’ve also gotten a few questions, including the following from Dr. Liza Schermann, formerly the Crazy Email Lady, now a full-time copywriter with an ecommerce brand. Liza wrote:
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So cool you are now one of the coaches in Shiv’s programme!
I was actually considering his retainer coaching a few years ago because I figured that if I was going to quit my job at the time, it would have to be for a retainer or retainers. Which is pretty much what I ended up doing without him, only a couple of years (and a lot of sweat and blood) later.
Out of curiosity: what’s the problem with retainers? (If it’s public info.)
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The answer to Liza’s question is really Shiv’s territory, and he goes into it in detail in his video in which he makes the case for the Performance Copywriter Method.
That said, here’s a few possible issues with retainers:
From the copywriter’s side, it’s typically a lot of work, for not all that much money…
It’s a lot of stress because the client could decide at any moment to sack you…
It’s not too scalable because you can only have so many of these retainers before you run out of hours in the day…
Plus it’s hard to sell clients on the retainer agreement to start with.
On the other hand, from the client’s view, it feels like an ongoing expense and a need to find stuff for the copywriter to do to make it worth while. And that means they keep wondering whether they should keep it going or sack you before the next retainer payment.
I’m sure not all retainer deals end up like that. Liza has a retainer-like gig. And it’s going well for her.
At the same time, I’ve had a couple retainer-like deals myself. I could never make them work, so I can believe retainers do go bad often.
And yet, for many copywriters, retainers remain some kind of enchanted castle, a magical destination they keep hoping to reach.
Perhaps i could tie that up to that robin beating his head against my window each morning.
Or perhaps I can just tell you there is a legitimate new opportunity for copywriters, a way to make great money, in a scalable way, without the storm and stress of retainers.
It’s called the Performance Copywriter Method. If you’d like to find out more about it: