How To Get Copy Clients Pt. 3

What kinds of companies need DR copywriters?

Things are heatin’ up for this newsletter.

So if you missed it, Part 1 in this series talks about my personal story of how I went from broke high school dropout to making $25k/mo as a copywriter while also shedding light on how to break into the industry (HINT: It all starts with ONE good connection).

Part 2 (sort of — let’s call it Part 1.2) is a 35 minute interview with Phillip Ekuwem — a Nigerian local who, despite having zero experience, broke into the direct response industry.

He wrote a front-end promotion that made $11 million and makes about $250k/year.

He shared how he broke into (including his persistent cold emailing mentality) and it was an awesome interview.

By the way — I have another interview coming your way with a Portuguese buddy of mine who speaks English as a second language and was able to break into the industry with no prior experience.

He doesn’t even write big promotions like Phillip — he mainly writes emails and still pulls in about $5,000 a month base pay plus royalties.

Just a little carrot to dangly-dangle there for you.

Now — onto the good stuff.

In Part 3 we’re going to delve into…

The niche industries where big direct response businesses operate in.

Now it’s important to remember that “Direct Response” essentially means a style of advertising in which someone has to respond DIRECTLY to the ad in order to get their hands on the product / service.

This is different from “brand awareness” style advertising where it’s more about building awareness on a general basis. I think content marketing / SEO falls into this space as well.

Now — this brings us to the KINDS of businesses that do which kind of advertising.

First of all, if you advertise online by buying ads — even as a little local business — you are technically doing “direct response.”

Because someone has to click on the ad in order to find out more information (hence “respond directly.”

Most of the small local type businesses buying ads have no idea what they’re doing (although they think they do). Think your dentist offices, coffee shops, chiropractic clinics, commercial cleaners, landscapers, roofers, renovators…etc.

They don’t know how to optimize their funnels, analyze data, split test, or even really understand the importance of copy.

Effectively the use ads as a sort of Yellow Pages.

For those of you who are too young to remember back in the “before times” (or just aren’t American) a giant, fat book used to be delivered to your door called the “Phone Book.”

That book had two sections — the white pages and the yellow pages.

The white pages were for residential phone numbers. Did you forget your buddy Bob Kaminsky’s number? Well you could look in the white pages.

Flip to “Ka” and dial every damn Bob Kaminksy in there until the right one picked up.

The Yellow Pages were for businesses. And in order to stand out many of them would purchase quarter page, half page, or if they were REALLY rich, full page ads in order to stand out (under the correct alphabet listing of course).

And really that’s kind of how small local businesses use PPC. They buy an ad and say “here we are.” It usually goes to some website and on the website is a number.

They don’t do much more than that.

If you think “Hey boy oh boy — I bet these dumbasses needs somebody to show them the light. I could go around to all my local businesses doing stupid advertising like this, charge them a bit of money, then use my burgeoning expertise to get them better results.”

Don’t do it. Stay away. These people don’t understand what you do. They’re not going to pay you well. They won’t be convinced of the worth of what you’re doing. They will micromanage you and think they know more than you and you’ll make peanuts.

Sure — if you REALLY wanted to you could build an agency to service these kinds of clients.

My friend does that. His name is Rohan and he owns GrowRev. He has TONS of clients.

He’s been able to transform small operations like I just described into $5 million to $10 million per year juggernauts by optimizing their online funnels and strategically scaling ad spend.

He has a business worth millions and millions. I love working with him and helping him out.

But I have NO desire to do what he does.

It’s a lot of cold emailing (I’m talking thousands and thousands a day). Lots of “convincing” people of why they should pay my buddy to do their advertising (and why their method of direct response is superior).

You can do that if you want by targeting those types of businesses, but here’s my view on it…

I don’t want to “run a business” and I don’t want to have a ton of clients that I have to constantly reassure about the value of my services (and constantly be convincing new ones in meeting after meeting of why they should pay me).

I want to work from home and make a high six figure income working with no more than 3 clients at a time who already know and understand the value I provide, don’t need any convincing, and never ask me to justify my costs (ever).

That’s just my take — and those are the kinds of businesses I target.

NOW — these same types of small businesses also will do brand awareness.

They’ll buy billboards (for example a friend of mine who is a Real Estate agent in Atlanta does that — and despite people recognizing him on the street as that guy who’s on the billboard he made so little money from it he had to get a job selling tractors at John Deer).

They’ll still do radio spots, sponsor local events, and more.

But this kind of goes back to the old quote by John Wanamaker, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

When most people think of “advertising” they still think of direct response advertising.

The idea of just plastering your offering / logo / products all over the damn place and hoping that if enough people seem them / hear about them they’ll become customers.

The issue is, if you’re a smaller business (and a “small business” typically means anything under $10 million a year revenue give or take — so not necessarily a small potatoes).

Or even a medium sized business (which is basically anywhere between $10 million and $1 billion)…

Then you can’t afford to just plaster your logo all over the place and hope that makes people buy your stuff.

Of course in today’s world brand awareness agencies have more sophisticated tools and also typically employ a combination of brand awareness marketing and direct response to gauge the success of a campaign.

But all in all — a brand awareness (or combination) campaign involves a lot of up-front money, a lot of devotion to the idea. and a pretty large rollout.

If you get it wrong you can’t just pivot on a dime.

But that’s not the case for direct response.

When you use direct response methodology you’re able to quickly and effectively rollout a variety of different ideas all testing against each other allowing for you to kill anything that isn’t reaching certain benchmarks while scaling up and optimizing what is working.

And for a business a $5 million per year business to about your $1 billion per year business — this is the sweet spot for companies who are essentially solely focused on rolling out and testing constant offers, ad campaigns, email campaigns, sales pages, VSLs, lead magnets, retention efforts, backend upsells and more.

So what are the “niches” these types of businesses are typically in?