33 Profitable Nuggets of Copywriting Advice

Don’t write the way you talk, write the way your prospect talks.

Your competition rests on the weekend.

Read Profit First.

Include a bitcoin address on your invoices.

Respect comes from results.

Use Chrome extensions ColorZilla & Fontanello to give proposals the same vibe as your prospect’s website.

Don’t call them proposals, call them action plans.

Take a break if you need a breakthrough.

Learn from the all-time giants, not the latest gurus.

David Ogilvy is your north star.

To write better than others, you have to WANT to write better than others.

Buy your clients random gifts.

Work to a timer.

Little tweaks make a big difference.

Black coffee with a green tea chaser is a great drop.

You will outgrow some clients.

Benefit + Curiosity is the only copywriting formula worth remembering.

Have a deliberate practice.

Surveys are your friend.

Leverage your subconscious to work 24/7.

Filing copy dopamine > push notification dopamine.

Know your hourly rate (tell no one).

DR copywriting isn’t about writing, it’s about making offers.

Keep track of where your clients come from.

Trending on YouTube & Medium are great for inhaling pre-validated hooks.

Be wary of ‘of’: often an opportunity to tighten your phrasing.

Have your own list + keep it warm.

Buy and use a printer.

Watch Succession on HBO.

Read Resonate by Nancy Duarte.

Quality is its own reward.

Defend what you’ve written.

Don’t be nice. Be cool, be excellent & be gone.

P.S.P. French

Copywriting Year One

In my first year freelancing, I read 15 books, bought 3 courses, signed 14 clients and made $107k…. here are my 11 rules.

There’s no need to “be ready.” Stop spinning your wheels, release the brakes, ignore fear and learn your lessons as you go.

Avoid project work. You can eliminate the early anxiety around the “feast and famine” of freelancing by focusing on retainer-based offers. Get some work, gain some confidence, stack some cash.

The most important skill isn’t getting clients, it’s keeping them.

The “best niche” exists at the intersection of work you enjoy doing and who has money. The short answer to “who has money?” is rich guys and B2B.

There are two dimensions to the game: your ability to position yourself and your copywriting skill level. Progress stalls if you secretly favor working on one over the other.

Don’t get memed into thinking hand-copying sales letters and ads isn’t the greatest thing you can do to improve your skill level.

Clients aren’t looking for years of experience or fancy credentials. They’re just looking for a high-quality sample of something similar to what they need.

If you can summon “flow” every day, you are never going to struggle.

As Twitter’s greatest teacher @abrasivisms hammered home to me, direct response is more about making offers than writing copy.

There is a not-insignificant percentage of your overall annual effort that should be spent meditating on how to best procure and promote results-based testimonials for your work.

The barrier to entry is so low and the demand so high that it’s easy just to drift around and make a good living. You have to desire to grow and expand your powers, woo bigger clients, kill others, work on bolder campaigns, risk failure to meet with glory.

P.S.P. French

The One Mega-Valuable Thing

There aren’t that many real grown-ups.

There are people building rockets, editing DNA sequences with Raspberry Pi enabled iPads, commercialising supersonic flight, building holographic brain-machine interfaces and decentralizing large parts of civilization.

But that’s a very small slice of business.

Mostly, the business world isn’t run by geniuses.

Mostly, it isn’t even run by adults…

… mostly, it’s a chaotic cohort of well-intentioned but ill-informed idiots, sociopathic sycophants, CERTIFIED LOONS, risky-frisky adrenaline junkies, bums, winos and crack addicts with exceptional work ethics.

Even Steve Jobs, who it is generally but sometimes reluctantly agreed was a genius, admitted this. “Everything around you that you call ‘life’” he said, “was made up by people who were no smarter than you. Once you learn that, you will never be the same again.”

What does this have to do with you and freelance copywriting?

Well, those people taking the plunge and running businesses who are no smarter than you can’t and won’t survive long without decent copywriting and advertising.

And mostly, their stuff needs some work.

Good copy is the SPLENDID SOUL of any successful business.

You only have to read a couple of the right books and practise just enough for your interest in persuasion to develop into an ability.

And that ability, once packaged into an offer that solves an immediate and painful problem with little or no risk, will have you up and running as a freelance copywriter.

Dive in, ignore fear and learn your lessons as you go.

P.S.P. French

The Road to Freelance Copywriting Freedom

To get you started on your journey to freelance copywriting freedom, the only question that matters is:

Which small group of people with deep pockets urgently needs me to write some wickedly effective copy for them?

To answer this, we use “inside information”…

1) Small group of people

This has less to do with the literal number of people you can help and more – much more – to do with whether or not they are easily and precisely targetable. You need to know where they hang out online.

2) Deep pockets

Are they already spending money on marketing? This should be the easiest part. You should instinctively be able to tell from their social media, website and general online “vibe” if they are equipped to wire you at least $1,000 without stammering or “running it past” someone else. If you have any doubts about this whatsoever, revisit 1).

3. Urgently needs me

This is where we thread the needle through the precise group of people who have deep pockets and loop it around the common problem that transcends industries. 

An example that “transcends industries”:

I have written copy for startups in the healthcare, travel, online learning, and crypto industries.

The problem all startups have is they’re in a hurry not to die. The feature they all share is a pot of cash they are prepared to spend quickly on someone who can guarantee to communicate quickly, clearly and with effortless artistic grace what makes them so great.   

This is how you get paid.

P.S.P French

The Bit Copywriters Musn’t Skip

(unless you WANT to remain dead broke)

If you want to cut through the copywriting competition and rise to the top, all you have to do is concentrate for the next 195 words. 

The down and dirty reason I recommend positioning yourself around a problem is that if you don’t, you force yourself to do battle against everyone else who wants to write fitness emails or stock-picking sales pages. 

And guess what happens then?

The only way you get the gig is if:

a.) you already have an established reputation or

b.) you are prepared to compete on price or timeframes or any of the other variables that result in you doing more work for less reward. YUCK. 

When I started, I didn’t deliberately position myself around a problem. I do not recommend this. It’s like putting yourself in a financial bodybag. 

If you want to compete on price, there are plenty of guys doing that over on Upwork. I hear it’s a real hoot. 

But if you want to compete on value – and you measure your value by the pain attached to the problem you can solve with your words – price issues VANISH!

In the plainest vanilla language I can muster… what this comes down to… in practical terms… is finding a small group of people who have deep pockets and urgently need what you can write.

P.S.P. French