How I Broke Into Copywriting

My last post, where a dis­grun­tled copy­writer demanded “the truth” about cre­at­ing wealth in copy­writ­ing, inspired copy­writer Andrew Cavanagh to share the story of his begin­nings on my forum:

“Here’s how I made my first ‘money’ in copywriting.”

Then one by one, other copy­writ­ers started adding their own. The responses were noth­ing short of amazing!

Many of the sto­ries show that there’s indeed hope. They also show that we were all strug­gling copy­writ­ers once, too. And we didn’t all become overnight mil­lion­aires with million-​​dollar clients, as “Chuck,” the dis­il­lu­sioned copy­writer, postulated.

I loved it so much that I posted my own story. I’ve decided to share it with you here. (By the way, the pic­ture at the top is of me, circa 1991. A lot thin­ner, with glasses, and a lot more hair!) Any­way, here is my story…

When I first started out, I was actu­ally a sales­per­son. And the worst part was, I hated prospect­ing. Espe­cially since I had this excru­ci­at­ing fear of rejec­tion. I still have it.

(If you know me, then you know about the story of my alco­holic father and how my fear was the result of years of him telling me I would never amount to much. But I digress.)

I acci­den­tally stum­bled onto copy­writ­ing not by chance or by edu­ca­tion, but by desperation.

You see, I was work­ing on strict com­mis­sions. I was a licensed insur­ance sales­man at the time. I dove into sales in order to fight my fears head-​​on. I also had a young fam­ily to support.

So I thought that the pres­sure would help kick me into gear. But I was doing so poorly that my fam­ily and I had to eat 25-​​cent ramen noo­dle pack­ages for months!

Even­tu­ally, I was forced to declare bank­ruptcy at 21 years old. In fact, I remem­ber that time like it was yes­ter­day — the humil­i­a­tion and the hurt I felt is indescribable.

In a mat­ter of days, the car com­pany repo’ed my car, the land­lord evicted us from our home, and my wife at the time took our daugh­ter and left.

I was des­per­ate to make money. I had to find a way to get peo­ple to lis­ten to my pre­sen­ta­tion. So I tried my hand at writ­ing let­ters that I could mail out to see if any­one would be will­ing to set an appoint­ment with me to hear my “pitch.”

That way, I no longer had to be rejected.

(It didn’t work at first. I tried sev­eral times and I was about to give up a num­ber of times, too.)

Then, things “clicked.”

I later became the top sales­per­son for this insur­ance com­pany for about eight months in a row. In all of Canada!

Prob­lem is, I hated my job. I hated it because I had a poor ter­ri­tory (sales­peo­ple were assigned ter­ri­to­ries), and this was back in the old days when insur­ance agents also had to visit every sin­gle client each month to col­lect their premiums.

(My ter­ri­tory was so poor, some paid their pre­mi­ums with empty beer bottles!)

So I moved on.

Even­tu­ally, I found a job as a con­sul­tant for a hair restora­tion com­pany. Some of their ser­vices included hair trans­plants and surgery, with a doc­tor on staff.

My main job was as a patient advo­cate, where I con­sulted clients on the appro­pri­ate hair restora­tion method for them. I was paid a very small base salary but with commissions.

Part of my job, among oth­ers (and sim­i­lar to what I did in the insur­ance biz), was to help increase appoint­ments of con­sul­ta­tions with prospects.

That included writ­ing copy for direct mail pieces, dis­play ads in news­pa­pers (with dense copy), infor­ma­tion pack­ages, and even infomer­cial scripts. Which is why I liked the job. I didn’t have to do any prospecting.

You see, the way it works is that peo­ple first read the ad or see the infomer­cial on TV, and then they request a free infor­ma­tion kit to be mailed to them. If the client was inter­ested, they would call to book a con­sul­ta­tion with me.

Dur­ing my first year, I noticed some­thing peculiar.

I noticed that the com­pany had boxes upon boxes in stor­age, which con­tained sev­eral years worth of filled-​​out “con­sul­ta­tion forms.”

Before a con­sul­ta­tion, prospects would have to fill out a form (e.g., ask­ing about their health, med­ical his­tory, other forms of hair replace­ment tried, etc). If a prospect went ahead and bought, a client file was created.

But if they didn’t, I would do some phone follow-​​up. And if that didn’t work either, their con­sult form was sim­ply filed away in those stor­age boxes.

That’s when a light­bulb lit up in my head.

I asked my employer to buy a com­puter (the only per­son who had a com­puter at the time was the accoun­tant!), hire a data entry clerk (from a temp-​​help agency), and cre­ate a data­base of all these peo­ple who didn’t take action.

Next, I wrote a direct mail piece, which made a limited-​​time offer.

The direct mail touted some new hair replace­ment pro­ce­dure that looked a lot more nat­ural than its pre­de­ces­sor, as well as new advance­ments in the field of cos­metic surgery that were intro­duced since their last consultation.

That’s when things started to explode! I don’t remem­ber the exact num­ber, but this lit­tle direct mail cam­paign resulted in over a mil­lion dol­lars in sales.

(Keep in mind, the price range for hair restora­tion solu­tions ranged any­where between $2,000 to $20,000, par­tic­u­larly in the case of hair transplants.)

I even remem­ber on the last week of the pro­mo­tion, there was a lineup out­side the wait­ing room of peo­ple want­ing to get a con­sul­ta­tion before the pro­mo­tion ended. I was obvi­ously ecsta­tic. In fact, it was also my high­est gross­ing week in terms of com­mis­sions. (It was around $7,000 Canadian.)

Since then, we repeated this feat sev­eral times. Many of my dense-​​copy dis­play ads would get a ton of new clients and patients, and I was doing quite well.

My base salary? $22,000 a year.

(But I made a lot more than that in commissions!)

Now, over the period of a few years, this com­pany grew by leaps and bounds. I would say mostly because of my help. (Although, I must admit that my employer at the time, who was also my men­tor, was a bril­liant sales­per­son, too.)

As the com­pany grew, open­ing sev­eral fran­chises across North Amer­ica, I was tasked with the job of hir­ing and train­ing sales­peo­ple in them, and con­sult­ing their own­ers (includ­ing doc­tors on staff) on how to mar­ket themselves.

And yes, that included copy­writ­ing, too.

My employer flew me to almost every major city to con­duct these trainings.

Here’s the problem.

While I’m on the road train­ing other peo­ple about mar­ket­ing and con­sult­ing, I wasn’t sell­ing. So my income went back down to $22,000. I was get­ting worried.

He had hired another con­sul­tant to take my place, so I couldn’t go back to sell­ing. But I was work­ing really hard while the com­pany made a ton of money. “There’s got to be some­thing bet­ter than this,” I kept say­ing to myself.

So I approached my employer and asked for a raise. After much back-​​and-​​forth over sev­eral weeks, one day I was called into the meet­ing room. The office man­ager then said to me, “You’re doing fine work, Michel.”

“Oh, great,” I said to myself. “I can feel some­thing good is going to happen!”

She said, “I know you’ve been work­ing hard train­ing all these fran­chises while not mak­ing any com­mis­sions like you used to. We want to give you a raise for your hard work and dedication.”

“Your new salary will be increased as of today by…

(I was grin­ning with anticipation.)

“… An extra $3,000.”

I said, “Oh, $3,000 a month! Great!”

“No, no,” she said, “your new annual salary is now $25,000.”

“Huh?” I was so dis­ap­pointed. And don’t for­get, those are Cana­dian dol­lars. (In the early 90’s, $25,000 was worth about $17,000 US.)

As you can imag­ine, I was also furi­ous. And with every protest I made, they gave me a dif­fer­ent rea­son as to why they couldn’t “afford” to raise it more.

So I quit the very next month.

It was the best deci­sion I ever made.

I went free­lance, and shortly there­after cre­ated a com­pany called “The Suc­cess Doc­tor.” (I spe­cial­ized in doc­tors since I gained a lot of expe­ri­ence in that field. So the name implied “I help doc­tors become successful.”)

I wasn’t doing too bad. But I was still eking out a mea­ger liv­ing charg­ing any­where between $100 to $500 per copy­writ­ing project. (My clients at the time were pri­mar­ily local doctors.)

But some of them did work really well. My first roy­alty arrange­ment was while work­ing for a hair trans­plant doc­tor in Toronto. I was get­ting paid a salary plus com­mis­sions plus a per­cent­age of the clinic’s profits.

One day, while work­ing for one doc­tor, a sales rep came to the clinic sell­ing adver­tis­ing space on this thing called “the world wide web.” Their ser­vices included a web page and a list­ing in their directory.

My curios­ity was piqued.

You see, part of my job as a mar­ket­ing con­sul­tant was writ­ing copy in dif­fer­ent media to get expo­sure for my clients. I was a big fan of the yel­low pages. So this seemed like a nat­ural complement.

Plus, since a lot of peo­ple saw our TV infomer­cials but failed to call for our infor­ma­tion kit, it made per­fect sense to be in as many places as pos­si­ble when they finally did decide to do some­thing about their hairloss.

Over time, I worked with other types of cos­metic sur­geons. Then other types of doc­tors (e.g., den­tists, chi­ro­prac­tors, acupunc­tur­ists, phys­io­ther­a­pists, etc). Then other types of pro­fes­sion­als and ser­vice providers.

But as a result of that one sales rep’s pre­sen­ta­tion (which sold me on hav­ing a pres­ence on the world wide web), I decided that I should have a web­site for myself, pro­mot­ing my free­lance work.

So I signed up on Geoc­i­ties in the mid-90’s and cre­ated my first web­site. It was noth­ing to sneeze at. It was just a sim­ple, brochure-​​like web page, with con­tact infor­ma­tion. (It was only later that I reg­is­tered “Suc​cess​Doc​tor​.com.”)

The result? Noth­ing. Not a sin­gle sale.

Years before, how­ever, I wrote a book­let called “The 10 Com­man­de­ments of Power Posi­tion­ing.” I used it as a way to get clients to hire me offline — the report was much like a saleslet­ter in dis­guise. And it worked quite well.

So going online, I decided to dig­i­tize my report and offer it for free, espe­cially if peo­ple joined my email list. (As far as I can tell, I was one of the first ones to do this way back then. At least in the free­lance mar­ket­ing or copy­writ­ing business.)

I started with some arti­cle mar­ket­ing. It worked well. But the day my traf­fic and busi­ness really exploded was when I decided to let other peo­ple pass that book­let around.

As a result of that lit­tle book, my site was bom­barded with quote requests.

I was doing some saleslet­ters and web page copy for as lit­tle as $300-$2,000 each. Mind you, I also did a lot of free ones at the time only to get my name out there and start build­ing my port­fo­lio. I also bartered a lot.

That’s when things started mov­ing very quickly.

It was late 1998, and I made a bar­ter­ing deal for a well-​​known mar­keter. I did his long web copy for just $2,000 in exchange for get­ting refer­rals from him and for pub­lish­ing my arti­cles to his list, which was part of our arrangement.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Bot­tom line, it does take work. And there’s no such thing as “overnight riches.” Think­ing that this hap­pens when you first start out as a new copy­writer is an illu­sion. It took me the bet­ter part of 20 years to get to where I am today.

How­ever, with so much train­ing and infor­ma­tion avail­able, it shouldn’t take that long for any­one with enough gump­tion, bounce­back­a­bil­ity, and the right atti­tude to get there.

It may have taken me 20 years. But know­ing what I now know, I can safely say that, if I were to lose every­thing once again, even overnight, I can eas­ily make it all back — and then some — and do it in a lot less time.

To echo some­thing my friend the late, great Gary Hal­bert once said, “If you’re a good copy­writer, there’s no rea­son why you should be starving.”

There you have it!

Now let me ask you, what’s YOUR story?

About the Author

Last 5 Posts By Michel Fortin

• Superior Value Equals Superior Sales
• On Not Playing The Blame Game
• The Future of The Internet is Cloudy
• Carve Your Niche By Dominating One
• Can Copy And Content Commingle?

Other Related Posts

• Three Tips For Finding Top-Shelf Clients (12)
• Risk-Reversal's Role Reversal (8)
• How to Negotiate Better Copywriting Fees (17)
• Headlines That Pull, Persuade, And Propel! (25)
• Giving Thanks With This Birthday Giveaway (26)