Cost of copywriter

Who said it was a dumb comment?

I view it more like tough love -- something the vast majority of successful copywriters have experienced when they were just entering the field. It's better to point out something that he needs to improve upon before it costs him a future job -- a job he might be counting on to support his family and himself.

To this day, I'm very appreciative that when I was a new pro copywriter, a more experienced copywriter handed me my head in a public copy critique because I had made a terrible mistake with a project's hook & theme. That mistake could have really set my copywriting career back a lot because the salesletter would have been a major bomb and my client would have lost a lot of money driving traffic to the offer.

Applying for a copywriting project where your written phrasing is full of typos and ESL-slanted grammar mistakes will cause many bright people to be immediately disqualified as a copywriter that a potential client wants to work with. For the record, when I say ESL-slanted that means writing in a way which may be textbook accurate but is not the way 99% of the English speaking population (people who are not English teachers) would talk or write.

The harsh reality is when you start working with bigger clients (i.e. projects paying 4-5 figures plus royalties), there will be certain unspoken expectations they will have and writing the way "ordinary" English-speaking people do is one of them.

Full disclosure: One of my former copywriting students is someone who English was not their native language. One of the first things we worked on was getting better at writing the way most English speaking people (US, UK, and Aussies) speak and that's rarely grammatically correct. It took a number of months but it made a world of difference in his copywriting career to date.

Between his pen name and his ability to write copy in English you would never know that English was not his native language.

Still, how many other public forums do you know about that have good traffic and that you'll probably get decent advice at?

And now many in French?

There really aren't many other places to ask. In my quick google search for "francais forum", "francais forum on marketing" and "francials forum copywriting" I only found another WF thread looking for a french copywriter.

@Marsel: if you're writing in your native language and it's you're first copywriting job, $10-15/hr for freelancing is typical. And low. If you have some experience, $20-30/hr is reasonable. If you're proven, now we are in the $100+, perhaps even hundreds or thousands of dollars per hour range--but you wouldn't be applying for this job at that level.

I thought positioning was asking what you think the value was you are
offering. The price depends upon you. I don't see how what you said
is different to what I said, as "confident" as you sound.

The long answer to his question is Value-Based Fees by Alan Weiss.

-Ray Edwards