Net Frontier Marketing

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Over the last 8 months, I’ve pretty much become a copywriter. Not in the sense that I actively look for copywriting jobs or even accept them when they are thrown my way. And not in the sense that I do it full time or it accounts for an appreciable amount of my online income.

I became a copywriter in regards to the quality of the sales pieces I can write.

How do I know? Because people spontaneously offer me money to write their letters or go over their copy despite the fact I’ve made no effort to sell myself in this manner. It’s taken place 4 times in the last week…

Here’s how it happened.

In the days of yore before I stumbled upon the privilege or working for myself (despite the extraordinary hours it entails), I was a reader.

Particularly of the classics: Dostoyevsky, Dumas, Camus, and yes Shakespeare. But not just those great masters, also their modern day equivalents like Roman Gary, Milan Kundera and scores of others.

And let’s not forget Steven King even for one instant. When I started reading him, the words seemed coarse and unpolished. I almost thrust it aside. But then I realized coarse and unpolished was perhaps the best way to describe the world we live in and the reality in which carve out our existences.

And so I started writing. Short fiction almost exclusively. And it was just for me. Less than a handful of people have ever seen any of it and it will remain such for some time yet until I pull out my Writer’s quill once again when things settle down and I’ve bought a nice stone house amidst plentiful evergreens overlooking a serene lake in some place where time is slower.

But I got into the habit of putting words on paper and then making those words sound better. That’s the important part so far as this story is concerned.

Later on in my late teens, I thought I might want to write for a magazine such as Maxim or FHM. I couldn’t get enough of their funny articles and witticism.

At some point I did write for such a magazine, although it wasn’t any of the big guns.
Eventually I stopped as the rewards were not forthcoming and a mix of incentivized marketing and Black Hat Seo made it so I could safely quite my job and pursue far greater riches on the internet.

That was until October of last year.

Before that, I had written exactly 2 sales letters and both were pitiful. The first wasn’t so bad because I copied a piece that was made to sell an ebook on how to make money on Ebay. It wasn’t terrible and did have the distinct flavor or an infomercial on paper.

The second was awful. I did it with no model at all, no real knowledge of selling principles in writing and near complete disorientation.

No matter how much I played with it, added red glaring text, underlines, highlights and bold sentences, it still read like crap.

And that really pissed me off.

Fast forward to October 2006. I wrote my second ebook, Project Black Hat, a guide to Black Hat SEO. The book was easy enough to write since I could string ideas together well and I knew the subject inside out.

But I needed a sales letter. Some nagging voice told me to outsource it and pay a pro. There was just one big fat problem lying in the way: my ego.

My ego wouldn’t let me get away with it. We had a conversation that went a little something like this:

Ego: Hey Alex, you think you can be a writer? You think you’re good, I know you do, don’t lie. You pride yourself on it.

Me: Yeah that’s right.

Ego: If you outsource it, won’t that kind of show you’re not as good as you think? Won’t you be giving up just a little? If you do it, I mister Ego, will have to shrink and make excuses and I think neither of us wants that eh?

Me: Ugh! Damn you! It’s for the greater good, we’ll make more money this way and you can use that as food to grow bigger and stronger than you were before.

Ego: Suit yourself buddy, but “writing” is one of your “who am I s”, if you lose it, it’ll hurt, I know it, you know it.

Me: Fine, you’re right, I’ll do it. But I still hate you.

This time, I said to myself, there is just no way I’m writing another junker. I have skills and if I follow a formula, I can make something of it.

Although not entirely convinced, I bought a bunch of ebooks and “secret packages” and started reading. Eventually I fell upon Yanik Silver’s Instant Sales Letters.

They had a kind of fill in the blanks simplicity to them that would only require me to spruce things up a bit.

That was Big Turning Point #1. With one of those templates, I wrote the Project Black Hat Sales letter. I haven’t touched it since November last year when it seemed to me I couldn’t improve upon it much. When I look at it today, I can immediately spot dozens of improvements I could make in a snap.

It’s a very basic, cookie-cutter piece, but you know what? It worked. That letter has converted at over 7% during its lifetime. That’s huge in case you were wondering. Of course I only send very targeted traffic but that’s a story for another day.

I then proceeded to write 3 more sales letters following the same template. By the 4th, I was getting it in a way I never had before. Whereas before I was simply adding A to B resulting in C, now I understood exactly why that was happening. I saw patterns and formulas arise, the same way a practiced veteran can solve a Rubik’s cube during a commercial break.

And that was Big Turning Point #2: proven formula plus practice or application = constant improvement and measurably rewarding results. Yeah, it’s pretty obvious but I think we all need to be reminded once in a while. Me for sure.

So I won’t start selling copywriting services. Even $5000 for a sales letter isn’t really worth it to me. For more I might be tempted but I probably couldn’t get it now. And it just doesn’t fit the model I’ve chosen.

To fit my model, a venture has to multiply me, not monopolize me. If I can’t scale it and outsource it, I don’t want it.

What I will do is start writing a bit more about copy on this blog. It should fit right in with the general theme of making money with sharp marketing and dedicated application.

Can you see one of my latest sales pieces and judge for yourself whether I’m just throwing myself flowers or not? Sorry, but no. I want to show you but the people I’ve written for are secretive and private. They want to claim credit or say they hired one of the big shots to do their work. That always sounds better.

And it’s fine with me.

You’ll see it soon enough when my new products hit the market.