Posted by: Clayton Makepeace
June 5, 2006
Issue #46

Yes, You CAN Build a Super-Profitable Copywriting Business Part II

• How to negotiate the same royalty rates the big dogs get …
• How to find clients even when you have no real-world samples to show …
• The 6-step strategy I used to fill my dance card with high-paying clients …
• How to get paid to create an impressive portfolio …
• When accepting a $50/M royalty is a DUMB idea …
• How to create a world-class swipe file for a song …
• 4 best places to look for high-paying clients …
• The #1 business blunder new copywriters make …
• And MUCH MORE!

Dear Business-Builder,

A couple of weeks ago, I promised I’d give you the rest of the interview Bob Bly did with me on the subject of building a profitable copywriting business …

… And here it is!

Bob Bly: How would you suggest a new copywriter charge for his or her services?

Clayton Makepeace: Well, if I were beginning today, I would probably begin with an advance plus royalty arrangement. I would probably start out asking for something in the range of a $12,000 to $15,000 advance against a royalty. And I would ask for the same royalty rate they pay their top writers.

Now the advance may be negotiable – years ago, I accepted jobs for far less than twelve to fifteen grand. But in all fairness, the royalty rate should not be different from writer to writer.

There are some clients out there who will say, “We don’t pay our top royalty rate for new writers.”

Sorry – but that’s just specious. If your copy beats their control, you deserve the same royalty the control-writer got. And if it doesn’t win, your royalty rate is immaterial because the client won’t have to pay it.

Bob Bly: Interesting way to present that.

Clayton Makepeace: Some marketing or creative directors will say – and this was actually said to me the other day by a good friend, who’s a marketing director – “But new writers aren’t consistent, so we pay the higher royalties to experienced writers and writers that we have a track record with, because we know we have a higher percent chance of getting a control when we work with that person.”

Again, it’s a totally specious argument. If you’re worried about consistency – if you want to mitigate the risk of working with an unknown writer – cut the advance to the bone. That’s your hard cost anyway! But fair is fair – and if a new writer trashes your precious control, he or she deserves the same royalty the big dogs get.

When someone tells you that the customer you generate doesn’t have the same value to that company as the customer that Gary Bencivenga or I or Jim Rutz or Arthur Johnson generate, I’m sorry, he’s just horse-trading. He doesn’t believe it, either.

Bob Bly: Earlier, you used the phrase “copy chief” – for the sake of less experienced readers, could you define it for us?

Clayton Makepeace: A copy chief is simply somebody – a mentor, an A-level writer, or a marketing director at a client company – who agrees to work with you to develop the theme, the headline, the organization and the copy. Their job is to work with you to make the package more successful.

In short, a copy chief critiques each draft – we call it “critting.”

Dan Rosenthal, for example, is the most famous critter in the universe. The guy is brutal. He takes a sadistic joy in absolutely eviscerating copy and beating copywriters bloody. In fact, his e-mail address is “CopyOgre.”

Now, if you ask an A-level writer or a coach to crit your copy, he or she will typically take a portion of the advance and a portion of the royalty. And depending on your experience level, that portion could be substantial.

Bob Bly: So what’s the best way for someone who is a beginner and doesn’t have a big track record and hasn’t written a lot of promotions to find a copy chief?

Let’s say you wanted to get into the newsletter field and you haven’t worked for a newsletter publisher before. Is your best bet to go find an A-level writer and apprentice under him? Or is it to do as you said, to pick a product from a major publisher, write a package, and show it to them?

Clayton Makepeace: I really think it’s all of the above. It’s like deep-sea fishing. You’ve got to have a lot of lines in the water.

When I launched my freelance career back in the 1970s, I had a six-step program for getting my name out there and finding new clients:

Here’s how I used to do it…

First, I’d pick my targets carefully. I created a mailing list of 400 prospective clients.

Since I was focusing on self-help publishers, I picked all the biggest companies – firms I already knew about – Phillips, KCI, Agora, Boardroom, The Ruff Times and others – and used the Oxbridge Directory to select the rest.

If I knew the name of the person in the organization who hired writers, I included that in each address on my list. If I didn’t, I called 100 organizations per week and said, “I need to send a letter to the person there responsible for creating your direct mail promotions. Could you please tell me who that is?”

Second, I would get their attention. I wrote a short, one-page personalized letter saying that next Tuesday, May 15, would be a Red Letter Day.

The FedEx guy was going to deliver a very important package to him/her – a package that would bring a big bump in sales and profits. And I asked my prospect to take a quick look at it, saying that it could be the most profitable few minutes he’d spent reading in years. (You may want to do this with an e-mail – it should work even better!)

Third, I’d deliver the goods. I created a second, short letter to go out with my samples. I introduced myself, gave a short recitation of my accomplishments … said that in two weeks, I’d be filling my writing schedule for the second half of the year … that I had some intriguing ideas for boosting his revenues and response … and asked the prospect to take a look at the enclosed material and call me to discuss it.

I told him I’d be waiting for his call, otherwise, if hadn’t heard from him by a certain date, I’d give him a ring.

Fourth, I got my spiel down pat. I spent time thinking about exactly what I would say if anyone responded:

• I would answer the phone on the third ring – not too eager, not too lethargic.
• I would be polite, friendly, and excited that they had called. I would compliment him on the stuff I’d seen coming from his organization.
• I knew exactly what I would say if they asked, “How much do you charge?” (depends on the product and the promotion – we can discuss that later)
• I knew precisely what I wanted the next step to be – to schedule a call a few days later to discuss potential projects.
• And I knew that I’d ask the prospect to send me a “Care Package” – samples of his best promotions, premiums, issues of his newsletter, etc. – that I could study in the meantime.

Fifth, I mailed 100 introductory letters and 100 sample kits each week. Timing was crucial. I mailed 100 introductory letters each Monday, so my prospects would get them before the samples arrived.

And also on each Monday, I would overnight 100 sample kits so the prospects who’d received my Introductory Letter the week before would get my samples exactly when my Introductory Letter said it would – on Tuesday.

I waited by the phone: I didn’t expect anyone to call. Surprisingly, a few did call.

Some politely told me they had all the writers they needed at the time. I’d say, “Cool! Maybe we’ll have a chance to work together some other time.”

Some said they liked what they saw and wanted to know more – in which case, I told them a little about myself, asked what they were looking for, requested the Care Package, and scheduled a call to discuss it all with them in a few days.

And sixth, I made my follow-up calls RELIGIOUSLY.

I set aside at least one full day each week to bang the phones, calling all the prospects who should have called me the week before – but didn’t.

I started with the prospects I knew were the biggest mailers and worked my way down. If the person was unavailable, I left a voice message:

“Hey, Bob, it’s Clayton Makepeace. I sent you some samples of my work last week and promised to give you a call about them. I’ve got some ideas to boost your response and can’t wait to share them with you. Give me a call?” I left my number, and said I’d be in all afternoon.

If they answered, I said, “Hey, Bob, it’s Clayton Makepeace. I sent you some samples of my work last week and promised to give you a call about them. Did you have time to take a look at them?” – and things progressed naturally from there.

Fact is, every success I’ve had as a copywriter can be traced to the contacts I made with this little “six-step program. Not only did it get me assignments, it got my name out there – and when I started getting controls, prospective clients already had my number.

Bob Bly: So how important is it at the beginning to get samples? Is that more important than the money you make for the first six months or year?

Clayton Makepeace: Samples are at least as valuable as the money in the early going.

Of course, you can’t eat samples and if, like me, you’re trying to support a wife and a couple of kids and the world’s dumbest cocker spaniel while trying to get your business going, you obviously need the income as well.

But samples are money in the bank and the more you can put in your portfolio the better. It helps if your samples are for products that are similar to what your prospective clients are selling – but it’s not absolutely necessary.

At first, I had no newsletter promotion samples. But I did have a promotion for a point-of-use water heater – the kind they put in hot tubs and airplanes. I had one for a shop that sold exotic desserts in Beverly Hills. And I had some fundraising samples I’d done to promote Proposition 13 in California.

If you’ve got an industry-specific promo, flaunt it. If not, use whatever you’ve got.

See, anybody who does direct marketing can look at copy and know whether it’s hot or not. They’ll read it and they’ll know intuitively, “This makes me want to buy… this makes me excited about the product… I can see this person writing for my newsletter and doing a bang-up job.”

Bob Bly: That’s a major point and I want to emphasize it. You’re saying you can impress a major publisher of newsletters with really good copy, even if that copy is not selling newsletters?

Clayton Makepeace: Absolutely. Fledgling copywriters send me their samples all the time. I can literally spend 30 seconds scanning a sample and know right where this person is and exactly how much work it would take on my part to get a finished package out of him or her that will be a winner.

If the person has a handle on the dominant, resident emotion of their market, if they’re speaking to the benefits in an exciting, compelling way, and if they can make failing to order the product feel like the dumbest thing a prospect could ever do, then this is somebody I want to be in business with.

So I would take every assignment I could get. I’d see if the local Chamber of Commerce would let me speak – extoll the virtues of direct response marketing – at one of their luncheons. I would walk down Main Street and haunt the local malls and talk shopkeepers into letting me do a direct mail series to get customers into their stores.

I’d grab the Yellow Pages and look up all the B2B companies in my town – manufacturers, for example – visit with their marketing people and ask what they’re doing to generate business. I’d find or create my own products and make money by promoting them on the Internet and in direct mail, print and even TV and radio ads and infomercials.

I’d do anything I could think of to get paid for plumping up my portfolio. And then if I still had time on my hands, I’d give myself spec assignments to create new controls for prospective clients.

Bob Bly: Are royalties based how effective your sales copy is? Or on the number of pieces mailed?

Clayton Makepeace: It’s the same thing. The response to the mailing ultimately determines the number of pieces your client will mail.

Marketing managers have a red line – an objective given to him or her by a boss. The objective might be, for example, “I want new customers for free.” That means the objective is to mail as many lists as possible while recovering 100% of the cost of list rental, postage, printing and lettershop.

Some clients are more aggressive. They’re willing to lose money to generate a new customer because they know each new customer will make a secondary purchase in his or her first 30, 60 or 90 days on board. They mail every list that will produce break-even response or better, PLUS lists they project will come in at 80% or 90% of cost. They know in the first 60 days, they’ll recover that money – and that that client will continue spending money with them for seven years or so.

Still others – and these are the ones I don’t understand – say, “We want to make money on every new client.” Those are the ones you’ve gotta be careful about. It means he’s only going to mail his best lists, and that means fewer pieces mailed and lower royalties for you.

Bob Bly: So the royalty itself is actually based on the number of pieces mailed?

As you would put it, it’s $10, $20, $30, $50, per thousand pieces mailed? Or a penny to a nickel per piece mailed?

Clayton Makepeace: Yes – but only on direct mail new customer acquisition promotions. Sometimes, you’ll be asked to create a direct mail or web promotion for existing customers – or perhaps a web-based promotion to create new leads or customers.

The marketer’s goal here is to make a profit by mailing ONLY to customer names he already owns. On these mailings, both response rates and average sale are many times what they are in acquisition mailings to cold, rented files, and clients make a fortune on them.
But if you spend a month of your life creating one of these promos on a standard $50/M royalty arrangement and the client only has 100,000 customers, your total income would only be $5,000. Not even worth doing for you.

That means you need a different compensation plan for these kinds of promotions. Now, my clients think my $50/M is fair in customer acquisition mailings. And since they break even on those mailings, my $50 is about 10% of the revenue they generate. So when one of my promos is sent to a client’s customer file, I ask for a royalty equal to 10% of total revenues I produce on that promo.

Bob Bly: Makes sense. When you and I were preparing for this conference, you mentioned that you wanted to talk about “How being a direct response bully can make you rich”.

So who’s the bully? I suspect it’s you.

Clayton Makepeace: One of the best things you can do as a copywriter – and it’s not easy for people who are starting out, because money’s tight – is to get on the mailing list of the competitors of the companies that you want to work for.

If you want to work, for example, in the financial publishing industry, cough up the bucks and take a one-year subscription to one of the newsletters offered by each of the major players.

Bob Bly: And it doesn’t cost a lot, because each of them has a front-end newsletter that’s only $49 or $99 a year or so.

Clayton Makepeace: Right. And when you get on those lists every time that list is rented to a competitor, you’ll receive that promotion in the mail.

Let’s say you subscribe to Oxford Club or Strategic Investing over at Agora. Well, within 30 days or so, you’re gonna get a promotion from Phillips Publishing because Agora rents its lists to Phillips. So you’re going to start seeing all of the promotion pieces that Phillips does for their products.

In fact, you’re going to start seeing ALL the promotion pieces mailed by everyone who rents the list you’re on. That gives you the opportunity to see everyone’s promotion pieces – both test panels and controls.

Be sure to keep that in mind when you’re studying your mail. You may discover a promotion from a major mailer and think, “Man, this thing really stinks. I can beat the living daylights out of it!”

But when you call and tell them that, they may say, “Yeah, I know. That was a test and it bombed." So be prepared for that.

After you’ve seeded your name on all these lists, study each package you receive carefully and then be a bully: Pick the wimpiest kid on the block – the one you’re sure you can whip in a New York minute – and the tell the prospective client so.

Just because a company is huge and just because they’re mailing something doesn’t mean it’s great and doesn’t mean it’s working well. Even top marketers mail lame promotions from time to time.
A few months ago, one of my major clients sent me two promotion pieces that they had mailed within the last year that hadn’t worked, and asked me to tell them why.

Both promos were copy chiefed by strong, creative people and written by top copywriters – and they missed the mark at almost every level.

I’m not going to say which client that was, but it knocked my socks off because I have very, very high respect for the people who copy chiefed and supervised the production of this package.

So go ahead and be a bully. Pick on the weakest packages out there. Develop your plan for taking it to the woodshed. Then go to the group publisher or marketing director and strike up a conversation about it.

Bob Bly: Great advice. Young writers are always asking me if they should widen their horizons by getting experience in several industries or if they should concentrate on just one. What’s your advice?

Clayton Makepeace: A cardiologist makes more money than a general practitioner. And in copywriting, it’s really the same thing. Specialists make more than general practitioners.

And frankly, it just makes sense to focus on one field of specialty at a time. If you decide to specialize in financial copywriting, you have to learn a lot more than just “How to be a good copywriter.”

You need to know the difference between a mutual fund and an exchange-traded fund. You need to know what price/earnings ratios and price/book ratios are. You need to know why the market goes up, why it goes down. You need to know about economic trends.

The same is true in the health area. You don’t have to necessarily know which alternative remedies work the best, because the editor will tell you that. But when he starts talking about an embolism, you need to know what that is. And when he starts talking about a cardiac infarction, you need to know he means heart attack.

My advice is to pick a field and specialize in it. You can add other fields later.

Arthur Johnson got started really at Franklin Mint, selling collectibles. That was his first experience and he really made a name for himself in that field.

Eric Betuel – he’s in the Hall of Fame of the four or five best writers of all time – began writing soft offer promos for Rodale.

Bob Bly: So, you see, you can really specialize even deeper. Not just books, but soft offer, one-shot book promotions.

Clayton Makepeace: Exactly.

Bob Bly: I’ve found several sources where writers can go for lists of prospective clients…

First of all, there are directories that cover the direct marketing industry and there’s one called the Directory of Major Mailers, which is a massive book that lists almost every company that does direct marketing in any volume.

You can purchase it on CD or in paper, and that’ll give you thousands of companies and you can find out exactly what they sell and what they mail and how many packages they do per year.

Clayton Makepeace: Absolutely. I’m looking at it now. It’s available from Target Marketing Group at www.majormailers.com. The book’s about three inches thick and not only does it tell you who the major mailers are, but it tells you what they’re mailing.

Bob Bly: And then if you’re interested, for example, in newsletter publishers, you can search www.newsletters.org and that’s the website of the Newsletter & Electronic Publisher Association, which is the major trade association for business and consumer newsletter publishers. So those are two sources you can use.

Clayton Makepeace: Right. I’d also check out the Direct Marketing Association.

I haven’t looked at it in a long time because I haven’t been beating the bushes for a long time. But they do conferences and they quite often have directories of exhibitors and I’m sure they also have a directory of members.

Bob Bly: And if you have a local chapter of the Direct Marketing Association, you can join that local chapter. It’s a great way to network and usually, they give you the membership directory, which will typically have 100 or 200 potential clients with all their information listed.

Bob Bly: We’re just about out of time. We have two minutes, so I want to ask one last question. What’s the #1 blunder new copywriters make when building their businesses?

Clayton Makepeace: Being too available. Just this week, I saw an ad a copywriter placed to promote himself in DM News. Now when I see writers do that kind of thing, I immediately figure they must really stink.

See, prospective clients figure that if you were any good, you’d be booked up. Run an ad like that, and you’re telling the world that you’re not good enough to have a long line of clients vying for a position on your dance card.

Folks who hire writers remind me of Groucho Marx when he said, “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.” Marketers want writers who are so red hot, they have to work to get on their schedules.

What’s really embarrassing is that you’re also telling the world, “Hey world! I’m not smart enough to know that you want writers who are too good to have time available!”

So rather than doing this kind of broad advertising – ads that tell the world you’re desperate for clients, keep your communications private – between you and only a handful of prospective clients at a time.
And make sure you always have a ready reason why you have time in your schedule at the moment.

You might tell two or three marketers, “Look, I fill my schedule just twice a year, and I’m booked for the next six months – but I’m booking my schedule up for the first six months of next year. I’m sending this letter to seven clients and the slots are going first-come, first-served basis."

You don’t want to be the ugliest girl at the dance. You want to be the one that everybody has to hustle to get on your dance card.

* * * * *

That’s plenty to chew on this week – see you again next Monday!

Yours for Bigger Winners, More Often,

Clayton Makepeace
Publisher & Editor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE™

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