Posted by: Clayton Makepeace
June 19, 2006
Issue #48

Yes, You CAN Build a Super-Profitable Copywriting Business!

• How big an opportunity is copywriting really?
• What you must read – frequently – to become a world-class copywriter or copy chief …
• The toughest job any copywriter has – and how to do it spectacularly …
• Why smart marketers are beating the bushes for great writers …
• How to convince a reluctant marketer to give you your first assignment …
• How to get paid – handsomely to make a name for yourself in this business …
• And much, MUCH MORE!

Hiya, Business-Builders!

Gorgeous Monday, isn’t it? Hopefully, you’re well rested and ready to spend the next five days taking your business to the next level!

I’m up to my eyeballs in deadlines for my Response Ink™ clients and things are changing mighty fast here at The Profit Center™, so I know it’s going to be another 100-hour marathon for me – and I can’t wait to get started!

As I’ve told you, we’re busy building The Profit Center website into a world-class tool for direct response marketers – and we’re adding new features just as fast as we can.

Last week, we unveiled The Total Package Blog to better help you connect, learn, share and grow as a marketer. I hope you use our blog to grow your knowledge base, share your ideas with others and explode your business.

Our first comment on last week’s question was from Caleb, who writes that his greatest challenge as a marketer is finding great clients – companies that understand his true worth and the impact he can have on the client’s revenues and response and be willing to pay handsomely for that asset!

So in Caleb’s honor, I’m dedicating this issue of The Total Package to him!

Actually, I’m going to go beyond that: This issue is the first of a three-part series dedicated to bringing young copywriters along and helping direct marketing pros find the great new copywriting help they need.

I’ve got super powers.

One of the best things about editing a newsletter is that it gives you some pretty impressive superpowers. Like the ability to turn back time and alter the past.

About a year ago, when we had, maybe one-tenth as many readers as we do today, the great Robert W. Bly interviewed me to get my thoughts on building a profitable copywriting business. And for this issue, I’m turning back the clock and returning to that interview.

… Kinda.

This is where the “altering the past” thing comes in: I’ve taken this opportunity to both update and add significantly to my comments in the interview – so there’s a lot new here.

Whether you’re a copywriter or a marketing pro looking to attract hot new writers and top talent, you’ll want to read every word…

Bob Bly: My name is Bob Bly and I’m interviewing Clayton Makepeace, who is one of just a handful of freelance copywriters in the world who make more than a million dollars a year and some years, $2 or $3 million strictly as a freelance copywriter.

Clayton is, I believe, the highest-paid freelance copywriter in the world and one of only a handful, maybe half a dozen, that are in seven figures. There’s a bunch of us below Clayton who are earning six figures anywhere from $100,000 to $700,000, $800,000 a year but he’s in the million dollar category.

So let’s get right into it. When I started copywriting 25 years ago, it was an unheard of profession. There were a few people doing it, but no one knew what it was. But now, it’s sort of a hot thing and everybody’s saying, oh, this is the greatest job going. Is that true? Is it really that good?

Clayton Makepeace: Well, I think it is. I started back in the early 70s, after having worked in television and film for a while. But in ’74, the recession shut down most production, so I found a copywriting job with an ad agency for $15,000 a year.

That doesn’t sound like much, but I had no training or experience and I was a high-school dropout. And after all, $15,000 a year in ’74 is the same as $62,000 in 2005 dollars. So it wasn’t a bad way to start.

Within six years, I was doing close to a quarter million dollars a year in today’s money. Within eight years, I was over $700,000 in today’s money. In the early ’90s, I hit a million dollars a year and never looked back.

Bob Bly: So did you have a mentor or a coach who got you into that? How did you discover how to do this?

Clayton Makepeace: No, that’s the beauty of it. When I got started, all I had were a few books by the great advertising masters to guide me: Reality in Advertising by Rosser Reeves, Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins, Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples, Ogilvy on Advertising and Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy. And then to get the nuts and bolts of the business, I read Successful Direct Marketing Methods by Bob Stone.

Those books – and studying what people were mailing were my foundation in copywriting.

Beyond that, I had to pretty much learn as I went along. There weren’t coaches. There were no e-zines telling you how to do it. And nobody had ever heard of a top writer mentoring copy cubs.

I’ve done that six or seven times now, and each one of those writers is a mid to high six figure writer or a million-dollar writer.

Bob Bly: Can you name a couple of them, or is it confidential?

Clayton Makepeace: Not at all, no. Carline Anglade-Cole came to me in the mid-1990s. She was making six figures a year as a marketing pro at Phillips Publishing, but she was not a trained copywriter by any stretch of the imagination.

Carline asked me if, as a friend, I would help her break into this business. I agreed and her very first year, she made more as a copywriter than she had been making with her six-figure salary at Phillips.

When Kent Komae came to me, he was a five-figure writer just getting started and I hired him to help me with some work I had at Weiss Research. Kent is now a solid six-figure writer. The same is true with Bob Hutchinson. Parris Lampropoulos took off like a house afire and is making seven figures now as a copywriter and has his own copy cubs.

And there are a couple of others. Brien Lundin made enough money as a copywriter that he bought Jefferson Financial from his boss and now runs the New Orleans Investment Conference and publishes several newsletters and trading services. I hired Brien from a radio station, where he was writing spots for local customers/clients.

So of the six or seven people that I’ve worked with over the last five or six years, every one of them has done very, very well for themselves. It’s great.

Bob Bly: So you’re not an anomaly. It can be done.

Clayton Makepeace: Not only can it be done, but these young guys are doing it faster than I did.

It took me a considerable amount of time to hit the million-dollar mark and Parris did it in a matter of just a few years.

Bob Bly: Now, speaking of people who start out younger or are starting out maybe after another career, the guys you all mentioned work for major clients, but for many people listening to this call, the idea of going out and contacting and selling yourself to a major client is very intimidating.

When you started, how did you overcome this?

Clayton Makepeace: Self-promotion was a tough one for me and it still is. Of course, after more than three decades in this business, I no longer have to promote my copywriting or my agency, Response Ink™. We don’t pursue clients; they pursue us.

But when I founded The Profit Center™ and The Total Package, I knew it meant I’d have to put myself out there: Promote myself, my background, my experience just to get subscribers – and it’s just not in my nature to do that.

The same was true when I was getting started with copywriting. I was extremely shy and had a severe case of stage fright. Fortunately for me, I was unemployed when I went freelance. I had a wife and two kids and an overhead I had to meet every month.

That meant I awakened on the first day of each month with bills to pay and no money coming in. I had no choice but to bang the phone and to contact clients and say, “Here I am!”

Let me tell you: It was intimidating! I’d spent months admiring, studying and learning from promotions a company was mailing and suddenly, here I was on the phone with the legendary copy chief who had directed the production of that piece. It was pretty daunting.

But I quickly discovered that major marketers are just as interested in finding new copywriters as we are in finding new clients.

Bob Bly: But at the time, you may have been great in terms of your raw talent, but you were not a proven commodity, were you?

Clayton Makepeace: Absolutely not.

Bob Bly: So why would they talk to you?

Clayton Makepeace: It all turned around for me when I realized that sales copy is the one missing ingredient that these companies need to promote their existing products and to add new products. They can’t grow without great sales copy.

That’s why major direct marketing firms have managers and in some cases, entire committees whose job is to find the next hot copywriter.

If you can just give them a couple good ideas, a few samples of your work, it costs them more not to test you than to go ahead and give you a try.

Bob Bly: So you’re saying that when copywriters contact larger direct marketing firms, they are not an annoyance. We’re actually helping them do their jobs.

Clayton Makepeace: Yes. When a marketing manager at a major direct marketing firm finds a copywriter who proves to be an asset to the company, it’s a feather in that marketing manager’s hat.

The person who first hired me to create a health promotion at Phillips … the person who first hired Gary Bencivenga to write a financial promotion at Phillips … these people now are heroes. Finding great writers got them the corner offices, the company cars, the big bonuses, and all the things that go along with moving up in a company.

Bob Bly: Well, I understand they’re looking, but when you’re a beginner and you call them, the question becomes, “Why should they be interested in you?”

How did you overcome that as a beginner? Did you have some great samples? How did you sell yourself as the solution to that need?

Clayton Makepeace: There were several ways. One was “The Challenge.” For example, I remember a day when I had just $70 in the bank because I had just returned a rental truck that I had used to move my family from Los Angeles to Prescott, Arizona.

I picked up the phone and called a publisher I knew of in Phoenix who I was just dying to write for. He had seven or eight newsletters that he promoted. It was Johnny Johnson at Research Publications.

I told Johnny that I thought his package stunk and that I could beat it. I showed him, page by page, how I’d improve that package; the mistakes the writer had made. And by the time I got off the call, I had an assignment.

Now, I offered to write the package for free, telling him he would only have to pay me if it worked. I felt I had to make an offer like that because he didn’t know me from Adam and I didn’t have a big portfolio to show him.

I had some direct marketing promotions I had written, including an audition I had done earlier for an advertising agency and a few product promos for water heaters, a restaurant in Beverly Hills, those kinds of things but no newsletter promotion experience.

So I basically used an offer that was too good to refuse: “Let me spend a month of my life trying to create a breakthrough for you. If you don’t think it will work, don’t mail it. And if you mail it and it doesn’t double-platinum, you don’t owe me a red cent.”

It was risk-free for him. It was a no-brainer.

He went for it, and within a year, I was doing promotions for all seven of his newsletters.

Bob Bly: Now, some would say, that was then, this is now. A lot of copywriters email me and say, I’m very worried. I look on the Internet and it seems there are all these AWAI students and there are all these copywriting boot camps and there are so many copywriters today.

So now, is it different? Are there too many copywriters, or is the demand still greater than the supply in copywriting?

Clayton Makepeace: I can tell you for a fact that the demand for good copywriters still outstrips the supply – by a country mile.

Just last week, Martin Weiss of Weiss Research asked me to help him find two full-time copywriters. This week, Sandy Franks of Agora asked if I’d run an ad in this issue of The Total Package to help her recruit writers.

Now, these are full-time jobs. They don’t pay six figures. But they pay you to learn. You’re immersed in copywriting and marketing 40, 50, 60 hours a week. You’re working with and learning from legendary marketers and copywriters. You have time and the opportunity to refine your skills and to make a name for yourself.

Do well, and in a year or two, you’ll pretty much be able to write your own ticket.

And all you need to get an interview is an audition piece that demonstrates the level of your copywriting skill.

Bob Bly: Explain what you mean by an audition piece.

Clayton Makepeace: An audition piece would be something that I think our AWAI (American Writers and Artists Institute) students are very, very familiar with.

Bob Bly: We call them spec assignments.

Clayton Makepeace: Right. First of all, there are the spec assignments you may have created as part of your AWAI education.

But there’s another type, as well: You pick a product let’s say it’s Health & Healing, Julian Whitaker’s newsletter and you write the best promotion that newsletter has ever had, the best promotion you know how to write.

You can take as long as you want, because nobody at Healthy Directions has any idea you’re working on it. When you’re done, you send it to Ed Elliott. Or if you’re writing for an Agora Health product, send it to Jenny Thompson. Or Sandy Franks or Greg Grillot at Agora Financial. Or Michelle Wolk at Boardroom.

In your cover letter, say that you’d like to talk to them about your copy and some ideas you have for the product, and ask them to call you. Say that if you don’t hear from them in a week or so, you’ll give them a jingle.

When you get them on the phone, be humble. Tell them that you think your copy has potential, but that to make it useable, you’ll need their input.

When you do this, one of three things will happen:

First, they might say, “Absolutely, we want this package, how much you want for it?” If that happens, you’re a genius and you’re home free. I don’t know anybody who has ever gotten that kind of response on their first submission, including me.

Or second, they could say, “It’s close. We would like to work with you to see if we can make it good enough to use.”

Now, there are two types of education in this world: There’s the education that you pay for and there’s the education you get in the real world where people pay you to learn. If a top marketer offers to work with you on your copy, they’re offering to pay you to learn from them.

Or third, the worst thing they can do and they’ll be nice, believe me is to say, “Well, we just don’t have the need for a writer right now…” They’re lying through their teeth, but they’re trying to be nice to you.

What they’re really saying is, “This copy is so far off-target, it’s unsalvageable. And frankly, we think you still have a way to go before you can help us.”

Bob Bly: So what do you do in that case?

Clayton Makepeace: Ask them for suggestions. “What you could do to become the kind of writer you’d want to hire?

Remember, these people are nice people. After 30 years with these folks, they’re friends of mine. They went to my wedding. When we get on the phone, we chat for much longer than we should about family and about other things.

These folks are highly motivated to discover the next great writer, so my suggestion is, take a deep breath, bite the bullet and say, “You’re being really honest with me here, and I appreciate that. What do you think I might do to hone my craft? What were the weak spots you saw in the copy that I didn’t? Where did I miss the boat?”

In most cases, they’ll be more than happy to talk to you about it.

Bob Bly: Now, suppose they like – but don’t love what you’ve sent them. They figure they’ll have to invest a significant amount of time with you, and aren’t sure of the outcome.

How can you convince a fence-sitter to go ahead and give you a shot?

Clayton Makepeace: It’s all in the art of the deal. You can simply offer to finish the package to their satisfaction for no up-front fee. Instead of a fee, you ask for a royalty if – and only if – they decide to use your final copy.

Just say, “Look, I’ll tell you what. Not only won’t I charge you an advance, but if you copy chief me to finish this, I’ll only take $10 a thousand. I know it’ll take a little more of your time, but I think it’s a good investment.”

Oh – and when you send your copy to a potential client, consider sending it to similar clients as well. Tell them, “Here’s a spec package I’m creating for Health & Healing. It’s a rough draft still, but it’s in process and it’s a sample of my work.”

That way, the thing that you wrote for a prospective client could get picked up and it could also be a sample or a sales tool that you can show around the industry and let people know that you’re a serious writer and that you’re talking to people who are hiring serious writers.

Bob Bly: Let’s say you write a spec package for a Healthy Directions publication, and decide to show it to other potential clients, such as Agora or Soundview. Do you tell them it’s a spec assignment, or do you not say anything about it?

Clayton Makepeace: I would absolutely be honest. It’s a very small and incestuous business. All of the competitors know each other.

They go to the same conferences and they talk to each other and they compare notes on copywriters. Realize that there’s a very good chance that anything you say to a prospective client is going to be repeated to other marketers.

Bob Bly: Now, I’ve heard you in action, so I know that you are a really good negotiator and you seem to negotiate and arrange all of your own deals.

You’ve told me that there are about half a dozen different combinations and permutations of fee arrangements for copywriters under which the top people work. Can you run through those for us?

Clayton Makepeace: Sure. When I first got started we worked for a flat fee. Believe it or not, in the ’70s, I got $600 flat to write a direct mail package – envelope teaser, an eight to 16-page sales letter, two-page flyer, lift letter and response device.

To add insult to injury, the work process was brutal. We were writing on IBM Selectric typewriters, so every draft meant a complete retyping of the entire project. There was no email or Federal Express, and the only faxes we had were those little Qwip machines that took three minutes to transmit a single page and stunk to high heaven while they were doing it.

For new writers today especially if you’re working with the Internet or with local clients not familiar with royalty arrangements a flat fee is a great way to get paid while you add some real-life samples and some success stories to your portfolio.

Another way to go is royalty only, which we just discussed. It’s a great way for a young copywriter to get going. You simply go in and say, “Look, I’m not even going to charge you an advance because you have no way of knowing how great my copy’s going to be or if it will earn out.”

See, when a client pays you an advance on your royalties, he calculates how many pieces he’s going to have to mail in order to reimburse him for the advance he paid you. If you charge a $25,000 advance and a $25 a thousand royalty, they’re going to have to mail a million pieces in order to get their money back.

Unfortunately, a lot of packages don’t earn out particularly promotions written by young, unproven writers so offering to write for a royalty is an excellent way to build your portfolio and to get going.

Bob Bly: Okay, so flat fee, then royalty only, and then you mentioned the idea of an advance plus royalty. Is that what most writers do?

Clayton Makepeace: Most of the writers I know work on an advance plus royalty. The advance and the royalty are established in negotiation between the copywriter and the client.

From a copywriter’s standpoint, you’re interested in how large this guy’s mailing universe is and what the mailing potential is. If you hit an out-of-the-park home run for the guy if you blow away his control you want to know how many pieces of your copy he’s capable of mailing each month.

If the client’s mailing universe is gigantic, you could give him a bit of a break on the royalty amount. Take, for example, the health market. There are about 300 million Americans who have physical bodies and some large percentage of them are fairly interested in keeping those bodies healthy.

Many of those folks have qualified themselves as excellent prospects by purchasing products from other health companies, and their names are available to my client to rent and to mail my package to. That’s a huge market, so you might be willing to take a smaller royalty – say, $10 to $20 per thousand when you write a package for the health market.

Same thing when it comes to personal finance market. Everyone has money and there are huge lists at Rodale and Boardroom of people who have qualified themselves by buying books and newsletters on how to save money, how to cut your monthly budget, how to get out of debt, how to cut your taxes, those kinds of things.

On the other hand, the investment advisory market is substantially smaller, so your royalty rate should be higher – say, $30 to $50 per thousand.

Bob Bly: So is the money you get paid up front an advance against the royalty or just a flat fee that’s in addition to the royalty?

Clayton Makepeace: I use several different arrangements. Quite often, the money up front is an advance against the royalty, and I receive half of the advance when they reserve my time, up to two years in advance.

I may only have an opening in 2007, but if they want that opening, they’re going to have to pay me $12,500 today half of the $25,000 advance. They pay the balance either when I begin the work, or when I deliver a first draft.

For the clients I haven’t worked with before, who need assurance that not only will I deliver the copy, but it will be powerful when I do, I’ll often agree to take the second $12,500 payment upon delivery of approved final copy.

Another arrangement is the fee plus royalty, and that’s when you’re getting cocky. That’s when you’ve been around for a while and you say, “Look. There’s no point in an advance. You know this is gonna earn out. I’ve got a fantastic track record. So I want an upfront non-refundable, non-deductible fee PLUS a substantial royalty.

Bob Bly: Now, you’ve also mentioned to me that sometimes you have a commission that’s not based on the number mailed, but on the actual sales of the product. How does that work?

Clayton Makepeace: Well, the projects copywriters do fall into two categories. The first category is promotions to the clients existing customers – and the second includes direct mail packages and Internet promotions that are designed to generate new customers.

These “new customer acquisition” promotions are quite often done on a break-even basis. In other words, the client plans to produce the maximum number of pieces he can mail and still recover 100% of his costs on each mailing.

That way, he gets his money back plus a gaggle of new customers.

And some clients are willing even to lose a little bit of money on each new customer they attract. They know that each new customer will make additional purchases in the first 30, 60 or 90 days onboard, so it makes sense for them.

So what does that mean? Well, it means that they’re going to be mailing max quantities, right? If that’s the case, you want to tie your royalty to the number of pieces mailed.

In the old days, we always talked in terms of dollars per thousand. Today, a lot of people talk about cents per piece mailed.

Bob Bly: Right. You said $30 to $50 per thousand, which is three cents to five cents per piece mailed.

Clayton Makepeace: Exactly.

A few years ago, though, Weiss Research hired me to do some promotions to his customer file. Well, he only had 120,000 customers, and it would take me just as long to write the promotion for his customers as it would to write a promotion to generate new customers.

At the time, he was mailing around 20 million of my new-customer-acquisition packages every year and paying me about $1 million a year in royalties.

Bob Bly: Right, but if you took a month to write a promotion for his customer file, it would only go to 120,000 people. So even if you’re making five cents apiece, it’s not worth doing for you.

Clayton Makepeace: Exactly, and so I called my client and said, “Hey Martin, look at this: Your new customer acquisition mailings, cost you about $500 per thousand to mail including list rental, printing, postage and my $50/M royalty.

“And you’re mailing to break even, meaning that for every $500 you spend in the mail, you get $500 back. And that means when I create a customer-acquisition package for you, my $50-per-thousand royalty is roughly ten percent of the money that promotion will generate.

“So I’ll be more than happy to write for your house file for ten percent of the revenue that my promotion generates.”

Bob Bly: Gross revenue?

Clayton Makepeace: Gross revenue that my promotion generates, that’s correct. Now, in his case, gross revenue and net revenue were very similar, because he was selling electronically-delivered products to his house file. He had no printing costs or mailing costs in terms of fulfillment. And no marketing costs, because everything we were writing were e-mail blasts.

Bob Bly: Right.

Clayton Makepeace: Now, Martin’s a brilliant guy. He did the math in his head and figured, “Ten percent of revenues from my house file promotions is huge money for Clayton. His copy could generate as much as $4 or $5 million a month in revenues. His take could be as high as $400,000 or $500,000 a month!”

A lot of clients would have just shut down at that point and declined my offer. But Martin was smarter than that. He knew three things other marketers don’t.

First, he knew that my copy could easily increase response by much more than the ten percent I was going to charge him – and that if I didn’t give him a lift in response that more than offset my royalty, he could simply fire me.

Second, he knew that even if I didn’t give him a big jump in revenues, having me on his team meant he’d be able to field more promotions to his house file each month. And that meant he was pretty much guaranteed that my involvement would generate new revenues far in excess of my ten percent royalty.

And third, Martin knew that if my involvement let him field more promotions each month and also boosted response over what he was getting now, his revenues and profits would skyrocket.

So we inked the deal and the rest is history.

I just don’t understand why more marketers don’t deal with top copywriters this way. Seems to me they’re focused on risk instead of profit potential.

They’ll pay copywriters a fortune on new customer acquisition promotions mailed to strangers because that’s where their greatest financial risk is and because stronger copy means less risk of bombing.

But they recoil from the idea of paying for top-notch copy in their house file promotions – and so they leave tens of millions of dollars on the table each year.

The rationale seems to be, “The customer file promotions our in-house copywriters create are working just fine – why pay for freelance copy?”

The answer of course, is that top-flight sales copy is never a cost. It’s a profit center.

Your own customer acquisition mailings have taught you that strong copy can produce two, three, even four times the response you get from weak copy.

What if working with a top writer on your house file promotions could generate two, three or four times the response you’re getting now?

Since your house file promotions are the engines that produce your profits, you could double, triple or quadruple your profits almost immediately!

More to come!

That’s enough to chew on for this week. Look for the conclusion of this interview in a couple of weeks.

Hope this helps – see you next Monday!

Yours for Bigger Winners, More Often,

Clayton Makepeace
Publisher & Editor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE

Get more of Clayton’s insights into building your freelance copywriting business …

Read more of Clayton Makepeace’s articles …

The Total Package direct marketing article archives …

---

No Comments »

No comments yet.