How did you get started in copywriting?

I've always loved to write but never saw myself as making money from it, unless of course I got my act together and wrote a book.

I have been in sales most of my life, most of it in the car business and most of that online sales. As you can imagine online sales has a lot to do with email and resurrecting your database to keep people buying and sending in referrals.

I wrote my first direct response print ad in a local newspaper after the owner became impressed with how many sales each email campaign I did resulted in. The ad did very well and resulted in about 500 calls in three days and 12 sales.

As you can imagine the owner was very happy with the results and I wrote a few more with the same or better results. That's when he had this huge idea that if one of his employees could produce these types of results what could a professional copywriter do! Well... the pro didn't even come close and that's when I figured I had a talent.

Fast forward a couple years and while working as a National Sales Trainer I happened into a forum and saw a personal trainer asking for some help on his web copy so I helped where I could, worked on a direct mail piece for him and low and behold that little direct mail piece converted 6%. He was happy and I was happy and that's when I decided to stop writing for free, as I have done all these years for friends and clients.

So to answer your question, once I decided to go freelance I just jumped right into it, didn't even check to see if it would be dangerous to jump in head first, I just did it. My first big (huge really) account came fast and have had a steady stream since because I treat my clients like gold and give them more than they ever expected, this ensures that they preach my name whenever they get a chance.

My advice: Give, Give, Give if your want to Get, Get, Get. Just make sure you charge for it because if your worth it, they will pay.

Well stated Vin. I don't know why people call article writers copywriters or call writing articles copywriting. They are 2 totally different things.

One of my closest friends, Tom, also happens to be the guy who introduced me to my future wife. Tom owns an industrial farm in Lancaster County, PA, which you can learn about here: Beechdale Animal Supplies — Frozen feeder Mice — Frozen Feeder Rodents — Live Crickets — Worms.

His online sales were awful (0.1% to be exact). He bugged me for months to write up a good home page for his site until I finally agreed to do it. He insisted on paying me $100 for my time.

It was late 2005. He became my first official copywriting client. I've been writing my own copy for my businesses since 1993 but hadn't written for anyone else until then.

I wrote something up for him in a few hours and then uploaded it to his site for him. A month later he calls me to give me the news. Turns out that his response rate for orders coming from his website shot up to 1.5% -- a 1500% increase in response.

Again, to the average internet marketer, 1.5% isn't great. But to the small business owner who's losing money on their website every month, it's a real life-saver. He was so excited that he gave my name to 4 other small business owners he knew who needed marketing help. Keep that in mind if you decide to work with offline businesses -- they care more about ROI than conversion rates.

Tom hasn't let me update his site since then because he's happy with how it's performing.

I did random word of mouth client work like this until August 2006 when I decided to treat it like a real business. Two months later, I was ready to go full-time as a copywriter and I've been full-time ever since.

Take care,

Mike

Paul, you're the exception to the rule.

I know of more copywriters who barely finished high school than ones with marketing degrees. Guys like the late Gary Halbert, John Caples, and Dan Kennedy come to mind as I type this.

There's other successful ones who made a career change and went into copywriting without going to school for it. They may have studied with a master copywriter (i.e. John Carlton with Jay Abraham and Gary Halbert) or they may have studied tons of copywriting/marketing books/tapes/courses.

Personally, I've never taken a college marketing or copywriting class. I have studied hundreds of books, courses, tapes, etc on copywriting, marketing, sales, and so on to create the best marketing I could for my own business. Then years later, I started writing for other people.

Granted, if you want to do more agency-related copywriting, the marketing degree could be helpful.

But 99% of the copywriters I know don't have a marketing degree. And I've never had a problem getting paid nicely to write copy professionally.

Take care,

Mike