After read­ing some of my arti­cles on how to find copy­writ­ing clients, one of my stu­dents, Jeff, asked me an inter­est­ing question.

He’s an aspir­ing copy­writer and wants to build his own free­lance copy­writ­ing busi­ness. When he read that I wrote copy for free when I started my career as a copy­writer, he told me he was think­ing about doing the same.

How­ever, he won­dered if he should ask for some­thing, any­thing, in return. In fact, here was his question…

“Mike, my friends have a very small busi­ness, and they have asked me to do copy for them. They say they can’t really pay me that much. I have told them I will do it for free as long as I get rights to the copy and can use it for a ref­er­ence and in my port­fo­lio. I think this is a won­der­ful oppor­tu­nity to get more expe­ri­ence, but my wife wants to see some money on the table.

“I value your opin­ion. Can you help?”

Here was my answer.

Ask­ing for a con­ces­sion in exchange for offer­ing one is always the way to do it. While I believe your trade-​​off is good in prin­ci­ple, it’s still mea­ger. I would con­sider some money — or some larger con­ces­sion on the part of the client. Here’s why…

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“If you like to gam­ble, I tell you I’m your man. You win some, you lose some, it’s all the same to me.” — Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades”

I’m get­ting fed up.

It seems to me that prod­uct launches of late have less to do with sub­stance and strat­egy, and more to do with tricks and tac­tics. Blame it on the econ­omy. But I think we need to blame it on some­thing else. Some­thing more sinister.

In fact, have you not noticed that a grow­ing num­ber of mar­keters are urg­ing you to join their “club,” as if it’s some secret, back-​​of-​​the-​​room, clan­des­tine poker game?

Speak­ing of poker, busi­ness is some­what of a gam­ble. And admit­tedly, gam­bling can be prof­itable. Very prof­itable. After all, the more you gam­ble, the greater you win, right?

But do we really need to gam­ble with our customers?

What about the long-​​term? What about build­ing busi­nesses rather than just mak­ing money? What about invest­ing instead? What about invest­ing in your cus­tomers that can pay some­times 10 to 100 times more over the long run?

For exam­ple, some­one men­tioned a new pay-​​per-​​follower pro­gram on Twit­ter. (Ugh. How is that any dif­fer­ent than from spam­mers buy­ing bulk email lists?) I responded, and this pretty much sums up my phi­los­o­phy — it should be yours, too — with:

“I’d hate to treat my cus­tomers like pris­on­ers or prostitutes.”

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One of the most ven­er­a­ble and com­mon ele­ments of good saleslet­ters, fol­low­ing the head­line, is the post­script or “P.S.” at the end.

The end of every great sales let­ter should be capped with a strong P.S. We are often told that the P.S. is the sec­ond most read part of a saleslet­ter, because after read­ing the head­line many peo­ple tend to scroll or jump to the bottom.

It’s like the “sec­ond head­line,” so to speak.

This is par­tic­u­larly true when we know that most peo­ple tend to read the head­line or the “Dear Friend” salu­ta­tion, then turn to the clos­ing of the let­ter to see who signed it or who is it from. Partly out of curios­ity. Partly to jus­tify read­ing it in the first place.

Includ­ing a P.S. in your copy may not always be nec­es­sary. I’ve seen some great, proven saleslet­ters that did not have any post­scripts at all. But if you do include one, don’t add it just for the sake of adding one. Make sure it does the job.

In fact, you shouldn’t use a P.S. the way it’s sup­posed to be used…

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“There are many who are liv­ing far below their pos­si­bil­i­ties because they are con­tin­u­ally hand­ing over their indi­vid­u­al­i­ties to oth­ers. Do you want to be a power in the world? Then be your­self. Be true to the high­est within your soul and allow your­self to be gov­erned by no cus­toms or con­ven­tion­al­i­ties or arbi­trary man-​​made rules that are not founded on prin­ci­ple.“
– Ralph Waldo Trine

“Take away the cause, and the effect ceases.“
– Miguel de Cervantes

In every­thing you do or want to do in life, you are always gov­erned by law and not by chance. Nat­ural laws are prin­ci­ples or expla­na­tions of why things are the way they are. Prin­ci­ples defined by Web­ster are “fun­da­men­tal laws or facts of nature.” Out of the many you have read or will read about in this book, there is one, how­ever, that is the foun­da­tional prin­ci­ple to all success.

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This small book­let con­tains ten core prin­ci­ples based on my “Power Posi­tion­ing” con­cept — a set of pow­er­fully effec­tive strate­gies that have made tons of prof­itable busi­ness for many entre­pre­neurs and pro­fes­sion­als like you.

These ideas are dis­tilled from my inten­sive train­ing sem­i­nars that have cost some peo­ple up to $2,495 to learn. They are offered to you here for a much more mod­er­ate invest­ment that, if applied prop­erly, will surely return your invest­ment a thou­sand times over!

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What I have said in the last chap­ter applies as well to the pro­fes­sional per­son and the wage-​​earner as to the per­son who is engaged in sell­ing or any other form of business.

No mat­ter whether you are a physi­cian, a teacher, or a cler­gy­man, if you can give increase of life to oth­ers and make them sen­si­ble of that fact, they will be attracted to you, and you will get rich. The physi­cian who holds the vision of him­self as a great and suc­cess­ful healer, and who works toward the com­plete real­iza­tion of that vision with faith and pur­pose, as described in for­mer chap­ters, will come into such close touch with the source of life that he will be phe­nom­e­nally suc­cess­ful; patients will come to him in throngs.

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You must use your thought as directed in pre­vi­ous chap­ters and begin to do what you can do where you are, and you must do all that you can do where you are.

You can advance only by being larger than your present place, and no one is larger than his present place who leaves undone any of the work per­tain­ing to that place.

The world is advanced only by those who more than fill their present places.

If no one quite filled his present place, you can see that there must be a going back­ward in every­thing. Those who do not quite fill their present places are dead weight upon soci­ety, gov­ern­ment, com­merce, and indus­try. They must be car­ried along by oth­ers at a great expense. The progress of the world is slowed only by those who do not fill the places they are hold­ing. They belong to a for­mer age and their ten­dency is toward degen­er­a­tion. No soci­ety could advance if every­one was smaller than his place; social evo­lu­tion is guided by the law of phys­i­cal and men­tal evolution.

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