Copywriting – How To Start Making Money Right Away

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes

Despite having only recently hung-out my own shingle as a writer-for-hire, I’ve been writing copy for my own business ventures, and learning a thing or two, since at least 1999. Even though my businesses until 2005 or were mostly local concerns (aside from selling old tools on Ebay), I still used copy in ads and promotional materials.

I also learned some hard lessons about how many balls you need to juggle to make it in the hard goods business. Finally I threw in the towel and went into marketing and selling stuff only instead of what I had done before, which was design, customize, manufacture, maintain machinery, pick-up all manner of heavy and awkward materials, advertise, kiss clients’ butts, install stuff, work long hours for low pay, market, write copy, try to sell, network, and generally run myself ragged trying to do it all by myself.

Did someone call me a fool?

Actually I learned a lot. I learned that owning a small business is a lot more complicated than doing the same thing just for pleasure, especially if your business involves working with clients AND physical labor.

Call me stupid. Somehow I thought that despite the hard work, cabinetmaking was somehow an honorable profession and a desirable career because OTHER people told me how much they envied what I was doing… people who made WAY more money than I did and lived in big, beautiful homes told me how grand it was for me to be an artisan, how they wished they could do such a thing themselves.

Hogwash.

Being in business for yourself is way too much work to do it without the intention of creating wealth for yourself. In this day and age, if you have the capacity, desire and mental focus to run a business you can get rich doing it.

Why not aim high?

Don’t get me wrong: I value my experiences and skills as an artisan. I just found out it wasn’t a BUSINESS I wanted to be in anymore – even though I still have a soft-spot for helping artists market and sell their work more effectively.

The one overwhelming benefit of having transformative sales copy working for your business is the way it works for you like a 1000 little salesmen – each person who reads your copy is getting a one-on-one sales presentation. This is an awesome advantage because once you have the right copy figured-out to sell a particular product you can “scale-up” your advertising and rake in the cash until you’ve exhausted the market for the time being or taken on as much business as you want according to your capacity to serve your customers.

However, unlike a lot of self-styled copywriting pundits out there I won’t tell you that the ability to write persuasive copy is a license to print money. It is only as powerful as your ability to make the kind of offers people want in the REAL marketplace, and back-up those offers with real value.

That is… if you want a real business with long-term customers and not a lot of trouble with the law. Copywriting skill CAN be used to mislead and bamboozle people. The roll it plays in a legitimate direct-marketing business is powerful and essential, but it is NOT, I believe, essential unless you are in the business of actually writing copy for clients yourself – ie. The copywriting is both the method and the product AND the customer service your provide.

Now if you are, or want to be, a freelance copywriter this is good news because it means that pretty much the whole show resides inside your head. No bulky equipment, warehouses, shuffling materials around, all the stuff that goes with the hard-goods industry.

Currently a lot of copywriting material in the current “make money in your bathrobe” frenzy goes awry telling you it’s all about writing to sell ebooks and information products.

Nothing could be further from the truth; because unless you are an information-product junkie the majority of the purchases you and most people make are for hard-goods and sales copy is actually a persuasive force which is working on you, often subconsciously, on a daily basis to affect your preference for one brand of stuff over another.

Internet marketers are supremely guilty of navel-gazing myopia – because there is a huge world of opportunity to adapt whatever marketing and copywriting skills you have into selling all sorts of hard-goods – by which I mean stuff people can hold, enjoy, touch or put stuff in without any requirement of literacy, like purebred cats, dressers, automobiles, pianos… you get the idea.

In fact, by making a study of the way all these sorts of things are sold with copy, every day, you open-up a whole new world of awareness for yourself… and writing persuasively is all about awareness – seeing and drawing attention to things most people don’t notice or think about.

If you’ve been writing copy for information products, especially in the “make money” niche, you are up against the twin forces of skepticism and very, very real competition to sell people stuff they might WANT but do not in fact believe they NEED.

In reality we don’t “need” a lot, but in a skeptical marketplace you will find it takes considerably more persuasive skill to sell “wants” like another ebook than it is to sell tangible goods. Selling intangibles can be extremely lucrative – as information products are… just don’t overlook your own opportunities to turn, for example, that old junk in your garage into hard cash by applying your writing skills to something as mundane as writing a Craigslist ad to sell your old lawnmower – you might be surprised at how writing to sell tangible stuff gets the juices flowing.

Give it a try.

Loren Woirhaye prefers to play gypsy music on guitar or accordion – but when he isn’t doing that he writes direct-response copy, consults with clients to help them make money with their websites, coaches people who want to fire their employers and blogs about success, life, his personal foibles, and online marketing at http://malibumentor.com

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.