Many copy­writ­ers, both new and expe­ri­enced, strug­gle with how much to charge their clients. In fact, it is a prob­lem that many in the ser­vice indus­try face.

The dilemma?

Charge too lit­tle and you risk los­ing cred­i­bil­ity in the eyes of your cus­tomers and poten­tial clients. Addi­tion­ally, the qual­ity of your work, even if it is worth 100 times what they paid for it, will be seen as hav­ing dimin­ished value.

Worst of all, when you charge too lit­tle, you may begin to resent the project, the client, or even your cho­sen profession.

In short, charg­ing too lit­tle doesn’t do any­one any good, least of all you.

On the other hand, if you charge too much you run the risk of los­ing a poten­tial client. You may lose out on oppor­tu­ni­ties to work with clients who could open doors and pro­vide you and your busi­ness with an abun­dance of work.

The solu­tion?

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My wife and I are shop­ping for a new home. We’re quite excited as one house has caught our eye, and we’re mak­ing an offer on it as I type this.

With the excite­ment comes a bit of trep­i­da­tion, how­ever, since we know we’ll have to start pack­ing, mak­ing mov­ing prepa­ra­tions and, of course, go fur­ni­ture shop­ping in order to fill some of the “extra space.” (Our new home is dou­ble the size of our cur­rent one.)

This reminds of the last time I went shop­ping for fur­ni­ture when I bought my pre­vi­ous house. Why? Because some­thing strange occurred that reminded me of the power of apply­ing pres­sure in copywriting.

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An inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion is going on in one of my favorite online forums, The War­riors Forum, about short copy win­ning over long copy. And the author of the thread cited a study he con­ducted, where he proved that shorter copy won over long copy.

Some peo­ple are scream­ing “heresy!” Oth­ers agreed.

Per­son­ally, I believe the study con­ducted is indeed valid because it makes sense. In this par­tic­u­lar case, short copy was war­ranted for this par­tic­u­lar mar­ket with this par­tic­u­lar offer.

But is this true in all cases? When you look at his study closer, you real­ize that it lacks infor­ma­tion about the vari­ables involved, which makes the study, and its find­ings, a bit misleading.

Here’s what I mean.

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