Lessons Learned

I've now done four complete sales pages as a professional copywriter. They're my first. I don't have numbers yet, because the launches are on the first of September.

But a lot of people are complaining about the $1,000 to $3,000 cost for a copywriter. They don't see why it costs so much. I do, so I'll explain it.

I've been a content writer for the past couple months. As a content writer, I can write about twenty 500 word articles a day. At five cents a word, that's $500. My actual workload is about half that, or $250 a day. It's not a bad living... not where I want to be, but it's not bad.

So because I expected a sales page to take about a day, I priced my copywriting services at $500 - the amount of work I'd be giving up to do the sales page. I knew people here were saying a good sales page took a week, but I didn't believe them.

Well, they were right. It takes about a day to understand your product, another day to design your approach on a high level, another one to come up with your headline (don't neglect this one!), and then one more to do your first polished draft. Then you get the edit round, which takes about another day - you'll spend about 80% of it explaining what you did and why you did it, then the other 20% changing things for the client's peace of mind.

So the accurate price for my services was actually five days of work. That's a real cost of $1,250 for the articles I'm actually not doing on those days, and an opportunity cost of $2,500 for the articles I could be doing on those days.

Which means that, yes, a copywriter should cost $1,000 to $3,000 for a sales letter. That's not some random amount pulled out of the air - it's a very real and accurate calculation of what the time and effort is worth.