Whether you like it or not, there will be situations when you’ll come across slow-paying clients. What’re you going to do when this happens?
For starters, the first thing you’ll be taught in copywriting is to get the full payment or at least 50% of the payment before starting the project.
The remaining 50% should be obtained after submitting the first draft and before giving the client the final copy.
But remember that you should never give the client the final copy before receiving the dues.
Here are a few things you can do if the client is delaying your payment:
a) If your client is a big marketer, he’ll surely be too busy to look at your emails. So just send him an email or two and follow it up with a paypal request.
b) Some clients have 30-day and 15-day pay cycles. Make sure beforehand they don’t have anything like that in place.
c) Follow up the email with a phone call to make sure he has seen it.
d) Always send the client a locked pdf or scanned image of the first draft. Tell the client you’ll only proceed if he makes the remaining payment at that stage.
e) If the amount is on the higher end but less than $8000, you can take the assistance of the small claims court.
f) Get the agreement in print if possible, so as to avoid legal hassles later.
g) Fire the client and find a new one.
Headlines are the most important part of your copy.
A headline can either attract your visitors instantly and make them eager to read more (or) cause them to click away and visit another website.
Here’s a FREE tool that lets you analyze the emotional value of the headline you use for your copy.
Advanced Marketing Institute Headline Analyzer
This tool analyzes whether your headline offers anything important to the reader and whether it’ll appeal to them or not.
A drawback of this tool is that it analyzes headlines only up to the length of 20 words.
If you’re a new copywriter or writer, you’ll have a lot of people telling you to work for FREE.
This can be dangerous because there’ll always be more freebie seekers compared to the people who will pay you for your work.
This mean they can get a lot of work done for free with the pretense of testing you out.
Hence, be careful when someone asks to write a FREE sample for him.
There are a number of FREE resources available for copywriters are the internet.
While these resources are free, they’re in NO way poor in quality.
Some of these are:
1. The Total Package
2. Michel Fortin’s Blog
3. Copywriters Board
4. CopyWritersInstitute
5. Bly.com
6. Hard to Find Seminars
7. The Gary Halbert Letter
8. Bencivenga bullets
Are you thinking about freelancing for a living? Do you want to escape the drudgery of an office job and be your own boss?
Well, there couldn’t be a better time to think about that!
The freelance industry is growing in leaps and bounds. People are now understanding the importance of doing things correctly, rather than just getting the job done.
So, if you can offer a service of high-quality, you can earn pretty well being a freelancer.
There are a number of sites which help connect the freelancers with the employers. Some of these are:
a) getafreelancer.com, b) elance.com and c) rentacoder.com
If none of these is for you, you can set up a website of your own and start offering your services – which could be graphic designing, programming, writing content for the web, or anything else you’re good at.
So if you haven’t thought about freelancing yet, now is the time to do it!
JV deals are one of the best ways to get a copywriting gig for yourself when you’re still a newbie copywriter.But there are a few things about them that you need to know.
JV deals are good because people will have less to worry about before they hire you.
Obviously, they’ll be paying you nothing (or maybe just a small fee) up front and so are more likely to try you out. You’ll have a sample for your portfolio.
At the same time, JV deals are also bad. If a person is eager to let a newbie write his sales copy, then he must be a newbie himself.
It’s quite certain that even if you give him a great sales copy, he’ll not know how to market it. You’ll most probably never get your share of profits from the JV and might even be ripped off intentionally.
Hence, you need to think twice before you JV again.
How important a factor is the type of offer you’re making?
People have often said that copy needs to be really good to make big sales.
While this is partly true, there’s also more to it.
Along with the copy, your offer also needs to be good.
When the offer is good, people will have less resistance to buying your product. Hence, writing sales copy will also be comparatively easier in this case.
If you offer is bad, good copy will make you sales but they’ll certainly be lesser in number.
So always be careful about what you offer to your buyers.
Many people offer a FREE ebook or course to get people to fill the opt-in form.
But they don’t realize that what they offer as bonus, can have a huge impact on the conversion rate of the copy.
For example, many people offer a chapter of their course or ebook to get people to sign up.
In many cases, people sign up, download the free chapter, read it and forget about your product.
Sometimes, they may not even read the chapter.
So you should not offer just about anything to get your prospects email address.
You should offer something that reminds them to buy your product quickly.
You’d have heard the saying “Think before you leap”. And now there’s “Think before you buy“.
This saying is particularly true when you buy ebooks and reports on the internet.
How do I know? Because sometimes I’ve fallen into such traps too.
Recently I came across a report in a particular niche that offered to provide in depth information about an issue. The author of this report was supposedly an expert in that niche.
So I purchased this ebook only to find it contained a lot of useless crap. Most of this information can be found free of cost on any website.
And the cost of the report was $12. It was supposed to be a 10 page report but the information given in it only came up to 7 pages.
Not that $12 is a lot, but this report contained useless information that I wouldn’t offer to anyone for FREE.
So take a cue from my experience and be careful while expending your money on ebooks.
Think before you buy.
The most surprising thing I’ve observed many a time is – people selling products are afraid to ask prospects to buy it.
They don’t know which is the opportune time to ask for an order in the copy. They fear their project will be rejected. They’re not sure whether the price they’re quoting for their product is accurate.
All these doubts lead to just one outcome. You don’t ask the reader to buy your product in the way you should. You don’t give him proper instructions. You don’t give him contact info.
As a result your buyers wouldn’t know how to buy your product even if they wanted to…and you lose sales.
I assume you’ve created your product and written copy for it only to sell it. If what I say is true, please instruct the reader clearly on how to order your product.
That’s the sole purpose of using sales copy.
