Copywriter pricing

When it comes to sales copy you tend to get what you pay for. Sure you find copy for under a hundred bucks but what good is it if it doesn't convert?

Often times you can write your own copy if you simply study the market and what they want in detail. It's more about honing in on the exact desires of your market than being masterful. Read Dan Kennedy's ultimate sales letter book. It's a crash course that should get you up and running alright.

Plus you can get it at your local bookstore for under $100. Well worth it!

Andrew

I would say expect to pay a minimum of $1250. There are a lot of good copywriters in the $2-5k range. I am not one that thinks you need to pay more than that for a good letter, but you certainly can. I think you see increasingly diminishing returns as you get above $3000.

I think above $3k a lot of what you pay for is:

1. "Name" -the bigger the name, the easier it is to get affiliates on board

2. Marketing expertise. Higher-priced copywriters are far more capable of helping you make a huge splash in the market place, because they're got the track record and experience to advise you on how to hit it out of the park.

Finally... although there may be a formula of diminishing returns... even an extra .01% conversion rate can mean hundreds of thousands if enough people see the offer.

Ultimately it depends on you and your project, I suppose. But I did want to put out the other side of the coin.

-Daniel

Make sure whatever copywriter you hire addresses the issue of differentiation. "Make money from Adsense" products are prevalent, so you'll need to stand out from the crowd to be successful.

Alex

On Elance, you can get it very cheap - it's a race to the bottom.

The quality will reflect that - and in copywriting, quality = sales.

Grazina,

I'm not joking... I really didn't pick you weren't a native English speaker.

Now... for your other Q... let's put it this way.

Say you get a hundred thousand eyeballs on your copy.

at a 1% conversion rate, that's 10 sales.

At 1.1%, that's 11 sales.

Now... say the lifetime value of a customer for your company is $100 000.

That one extra sale has just paid for the higher price of the copy.

Granted... not every situation can benefit from this.

But many can... IF they're willing to market it aggressively enough.

-Daniel

P.S. Just pulled these figures out of thin air for purposes of explanation.

Greetings,

At 100,000 eye balls, that is if somebody isn't looking with one eye shut would be 500 sales at 1% and 550 sales at 1.1%.

M E

Cool... noted.

Apologies for the confusion.

The point is... it can make a huge difference.

-Daniel

You got it kinda backward!

It isn't how much you should pay to have your ad written that you should focus on. What you need to do is look at the prospective copywriter's portfolio and see if you like their style and copy.

Only then, should you ask the price.

I say find someone you like first because I have seen some cheap copywriter's that write great copy and some expensive copywriter's that should be put in jail.

So first find a good writer and then find out if they fit in your budget.

Later,
Jason

In most cases I'd agree with this 100%...

You pay a couple of grand to get a page converting at 2% in a tough niche, if you go out and spend $10k on a rewrite there's pretty much zero chance any writer is going to get it up to 10%.

So looking at it like that returns do diminish once you reach a certain level.

So if it's just a "here's the offer, get to writing" type of thing I totally agree.

BUT, the guys who charge the big bucks often bring more to the table than just the copy...

...There are some guys who just having their name attached to the launch will attract more affiliates and that alone can justify the extra price.

And there are some copywriters who will get their hands dirty for clients. Meaning offering suggestions from everything on how to position the offer to ideas for the back-end funnel.

Or converting a front-end offer into a premium to bribe customers into a continuity program instead of selling it outright...

Or knowing a market well enough to speak the language. For example in the IM space, finding a copywriter who knows from experience how frustrating the Google quality score is, or how tough it is to compete in the SEO arena without a lot of tools and specialized knowledge...

...Copywriters like that, they can hit nerves no one else can. They can resonate with prospects in ways no other copywriter can because they know the market so well.

I'm working on a health product right now.

I've spent probably 20 hours interviewing different MD's to get different perspectives on the product. I want to know every little detail, every point of view... If there's a story there I want to know it.

I'm working with the SEO team, I want to know what people will be searching for when they find the site.

I'm working with the CPA network. I want to see what similar products they're promoting, and what we'll have to do to win them over to ours.

I want to know our competition. I know exactly who we're competing against. I know what kind of volume other guys are doing. I know the market like the back of my hand. I know what our customers want to buy and the most efficient way to sell it to them...

Every good copywriter knows you have to dig deep and research hard to really nail a market.

But sometimes it goes beyond even research...

Sometimes to get everything running as highly optimized as possible you have to work on a whole lot of other factors beyond just the sales letter.

Point being, sometimes "copy" is the least valuable thing a good copywriter brings to the table.

So when you get a copywriter that reinvents your brand, that positions your product from a WSO making a couple of hundred bucks a day to a million dollar Clickbank launch...

For the right client, with the right product in the right market... And you bring on the right copywriter with the right skill-set, all of that extra stuff the right copywriter can bring to the table can multiply returns exponentially.

I'm not disagreeing with your statement Bruce. In a lot of cases you're right, a $10k guy may not bring a massive return over say a $3k guy...

I just wanted to sort of point out, that given the right circumstances, the higher priced guys can and do justify the higher fees, sometimes exponentially, and in ways that clients probably wouldn't expect coming into the deal.

-Scott