How to lose every single one of your clients in one fell swoop

1) Don't do any research, thinking, or writing right up until the deadline, then say "y'know, I sat at the kitchen table in my underwear just like the manual said; I don't know WHY I got no results..."

2) Break down in tears in the middle of an important conference - preferably toward the end of a large project - and sob "I'm SORRY... I was JUST PRETENDING to be a copywriter, just FAKING IT ALL..." (Hint: yelling "PSYCH!!!" after that isn't likely to help. Unless, of course, you wanted multiple stab wounds from a letter opener.)

3) Forget some tiny unimportant detail, like "clients can plug your copy into Google and discover that it's a straight-up ripoff of someone else's material". What happened to the Good Old Days, when they'd have had to pay a research librarian or something? Sheesh.

BONUS POINT) Talk lots of crap about a control by one of The Big Guys and how you're going to Whoop. Their. ASS., and have your copy fail to make one single sale. (Sure, you could always move to Pago Pago and grow a big mustache, but even their newspapers will carry that story forever. Besides, the mustache will look strange if you're a woman.)

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(If you were looking for an actual point in this... oh, I suppose you might say that I'm picking up A LOT of peripheral stuff while trying to learn copywriting. We now return you to your scheduled programming.)


Cheers,
Ben