Our guest for the 87th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is none other than A-list copywriter Paul Martinez. We covered a lot of ground in this one, including how Paul landed a place as Parris Lampropolous’ copy cub (for seven years) and his process for finding ideas that hook the reader so they’ll see his offers. The resources he shares are excellent. Here’s most of what we cover in this episode:
• how an English degree and a job in real estate helped him find copywriting
• what he did to recover from losing almost everything and how that still impacts how he spends his time today
• what he learned from real estate sales and how that’s made him a better writer
• what he did to find clients as a new copywriter and the #1 thing that reallymade a difference
• how you get yourself in the right room with the right people
• what he learned as a copy cub for one of the world’s best copywriters
• what you can do right now to be a better copywriter (you may not want to do this)
• how he keeps his copywriting skills sharp today
• how Paul finds big ideas playing around on the internet all day long
• how he structures his projects today (and his advice about retainers)
• how he deals with failures
That’s a lot of hows and whats—and every one of them is worth the listen. There are also a whole lot of links. To hear this episode in its entirety, click the play button below. Or for a full transcript and links to the stuff Paul mentions, scroll down.
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The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:
Google AdwordsParris Lampropolous
Brian Kurtz
Dan Kennedy
John Carlton
Barnaby Kaelin
Alexi Neocleous
Jim Rutz
Raymond Carver
Joe Sugarman
Todd Brown
Atlas Obscura
How We Got to Now
At Home by Bill Bryson
History of the World in 100 Objects
Now I Know More
This is Your Brain on Parasites
Clayton Makepeace
Clayton’s Sales Page Template
Agora
NatureCity
Soundview
Weiss Research
Mike Ward
Money Map Press
Jed Canty
Paul on Facebook
PaulMartinezCopywriting.com
Kira’s website
Rob’s website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
Intro: Content (for now)
Outro: Gravity
Full Transcript:
Rob:What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That’s what Kira and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast.
Kira: You’re invited to join the club for episode 87, as we talk with copywriter and business owner Paul Martinez about digging deep to turn things around after losing it all, the importance of sales skills in copywriting, emotional hot buttons and what really makes people buy, and what it takes to create successful promotions for companies like Motley Fool, Soundview, and Nature City.
Kira:Welcome Paul.
Rob: Hey, Paul.
Paul:Hi; hi guys.
Kira: How’s it going?
Paul: It’s going great; great to be here.
Rob:Yeah, we’re stoked to have you here.
Kira:So Paul, a great place to start is with how you ended up as a copywriter.
Paul:Yeah, sure, sure. So I began my journey actually in the real estate world. Well, going a little further back, my background is actually I went to school for fiction writing and ending up getting an English degree. I pretty quickly realized that, you know, that really wasn’t going to pay the bills. So I ended up in real estate, and actually discovered that I really liked sales. And I was pretty good at it, I studied it a lot. I got better and better but, there was a problem: that I didn’t know how to generate leads.
And, you know, this was 2000, 2001. Real estate marketing at that point was, believe it or not, still really based around cold calling. Like, literally going through this thing called a “colds directory”, which was like a phone book, but it has a little diamond next to the people who owned a house. And my broken told me, just like, “Call those people and ask them if they want to sell their house.” And I didn’t that for probably five or six months, chuckles, like hoursa day, and I got nothing from it. And finally one of these other brokers at the office was like, “Hey man, you got to send letters. Way better. You know, you spend a few hundred bucks on stamps; you hired some kid from college to pull them up and stuff the envelopes, and boom.” And he showed me kind of the rough way he did it. And so, I instantly started working; I started listing property, making money.
And then I got interested in this, kind of, “How do I make these letters better?” So I started looking into copywriting. I discovered Dan Kennedy and, you know, Jay Abraham, and then ended up going into a real estate coaching program with a guy named Craig Proctor, who’s one of Dan Kennedy’s protégés, and the copy was a huge, huge piece of it. And you know through that, you know, I went through the coaching; I went through their graduating coaching, my real estate business grew and grew and grew as I got better at writing copy, and, you know, better at implementing things. Like I started exploring Google Adwords really as soon as it came out. That was a great, great way to get real estate leads back in 2003, 2004 when they started getting big. But I pretty quickly realized that, you know, I didn’t actually like—laughs—driving around in my car, and like going to listing appointments, and walking through buildings and all this stuff, like all hours of the day, and working, you know, six or seven days a week.
So I started getting more into the copywriting thing, and I knew all these really high-level agents, you know, really successful agents and brokers from my coaching programs. And they all got copywriting, they all got marketing. So, I started kind of working, doing some side jobs for them. And I think my first job…you know, this guy wanted me to do some Google Adwords stuff for him, and this was probably like 2005, 2006. And I was like, “Alright. It’s going to take me, like, two or three hours. That’ll be like $1,500.” And he was like, “No problem!”
Rob:Wow. Yeah.
Paul:Wow….O-o-o-o-okay!! So maybe I could actually do this. So like I was still doing real estate but, you know obviously, 2007 the market started to shift. 2008, 2009, it really…you know, I’m sure everyone remembers that there was a little small recession around then, focused on the real estate industry. So not only did my real estate business collapse, my side business writing for real estate agents collapsed, because suddenly these agents who were making 5, 6, 700,000 dollars a year were making like 50 or 60 grand, and scraping by and couldn’t pay their own bills, so they certainly weren’t going to pay me to write copy.
And that’s when I kind of had to make a decision at that point. You know, I had honestly burned out on the real estate game. It’s real high pressure, it’s very, very cutthroat. You do not get paid unless the deal closes. So, you know, if you can go three months working on say, like an investment building sale, and it can fall apart at the last minute over something stupid. And, you know, you thought you were going to make 50 or 60,000 dollars and now you got nothing, you know?
Kira:Oh my gosh.
Paul:It’s a constant up and down. And I kind of just was like, “You know what? Real estate’s not working. I’m just going to shut down the business. At that point, I couldn’t even sell it because it wasn’t worth anything anymore. It went from being, you know, probably worth one million, one-point-five million, to nothing.
Kira: Wow!
Paul: Laughs. In about twelve to eighteen months. And during that time, you know, I had also had some personal stuff where I had lost three really good friends in a year.
Kira: My gosh!
Paul:I had a four-year relationship end suddenly. You know, and it kind of all happened in 2008 and finally I was like, “You know? I need a fresh start. I need to go do something else. I’m just going to hang up my shoes as a freelance copywriter and see what happens.” Because it couldn’t be possibly any worse than real estate right now, and it’s, you know, the only thing that I can think that I really love doing.
Rob:I’m trying to put my feet in your shoes, and going through that experience; having all that hit at once, it must’ve been at some level terrifying to lose all of that stuff. Why did you think that copywriting was the thing to move you forward?
Paul:Well I mean, I’d already had some success at it, you know? Like I said, I’d already been getting paid as kind of a side gig to write copy for other real estate agents, and you know you, I’d been studying internet marketing for a while. So I knew people paid copywriters a good amount of money to do their thing. So I was like, “There’s no reason why I can’t do this.” You know? It’s just that I I’ve got to learn another business the same way I learned real estate, I can learn the business of copywriting. So, yeah. I mean I guess, for me, you know, that fear of failing is like…well, so what, right? Laughs. At that point, my entire life had fallen apart. I mean, and when I say fallen apart, I mean I went bankrupt, my condo got foreclosed on.
Kira: Oh my gosh.
Paul:I was almost homeless. I had lost everything I had worked for, and again, you know, I had a guy who was like a second father to me had passed away. Three days later a really good friend of mine died in a motorcycle accident. A few months had later another mentor of mine pass away from cancer. And then, you know, the woman who I was with four years—and I was actually planning to ask her to marry me—came back from a yoga retreat and dumped me.
Kira:Oh my gosh…!
Paul: So…
Rob:Wow. That must’ve been some yoga retreat.
Paul: Yeah, so I was like, I’ve got nothing else to lose, so, let’s see what happens.
Kira:Wow. So, let’s see if this question comes out correctly, but, how do you manage all of that at a time like that when you’re losing people who are close to you; losing a relationship; losing your business; like, losing your mind?How do you deal with it while you’re in it?
Paul:Well for me, I mean, I was lucky that I had some really close friends that helped me through it, you know. One of them, her partner had been a flight attendant, so like she was able to fly me out to visit them in L.A. for free, so I stayed with them for a few weeks and kind of got some space from my life situation. Went down to visit my brother who also lives in California, he’s down in San Diego; I stayed there for a little bit. So I kind of got some breathing room, came back, and then connected with a really, just, great group of people, actually through a meditation center, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You know, a bunch of people around my age. We were significantly younger than the general crowd there. And we all kind of went off and just became like a tightly-knit group of friends and people looking for support, and also willing to lend support. So having that was huge. And of course my family was there too, but at that stage, you know, it was so, so much loss in such a short time, this onething probably wouldn’t have been enough.
Rob:It’s interesting to hear you tell that story because it gives some context. I’ve heard you talk about how important it is for you to spend time with your family today, especially with your daughter. It feels like there’s a direct relationship between losing it all and now understanding what you’ve got, and the opportunity you have with your copywriting business to spend time with your family.
Paul: Yeah, and i have two sons, too, who are just eleven months old now. So it’s still a balancing act, right, because, you know, copywriting can be very demanding; it’s a deadline driven business. but it’s really, really important to me to have that balance, and that was actually one of the reasons I decided to go with copy, because of copyright, because I was like, well it’s freelance. I can work from home, or work from a coffee shop. You know, I may have to work a lot, but I can kind of structure my hours around other things in my life, and I don’t have to give up everything in my life for a business, which is what I did with the real estate.
Kira:So I’d like to hear just what you learned from your time in real estate. Like, what business advice would you give to copywriters who are trying to build your business, based off what you learned, growing this business that was worth a million dollars at one point?
Paul:Yeah. And you know, I think the biggest thing is—and this may sound a little silly because it’s kind of self-evident I think—but I learned how to sell. Right? I learned how to sell face-to-face; I learned how to anticipate and answer objections. I learned how to understand what’s important to people. I did a lot of work with investors, but my team also, we also did a lot of buyer and seller work, where’s there just people buying and selling homes, and understanding the motivations that each own, or you know, a retired couple selling their home and moving down to a condo has a very different set of expectations, needs, wants, and worries than anyone else.
And you have to understand those and talk to people about that stuff so they feel understood. And what I always get from my clients is they’re like, “You know, we feel like you’re the first one who’s actually listened to us. We’ve talked to five real estate agents, and you’re the first one who actually listened. And I think that actually came from my writing background, because when I was doing the fiction writing program, it was a lot of short story work, and I had a mentor who really pounded into my head that you have to love your characters, and the way you build your characters is you have to care about people. And you have to understand what motivates people, and you can’t judge them. You have to really have a lot of empathy. Because when a writer doesn’t care about their characters, you can tell. You can feel the judgment in the writing; you can feel that there’s no connection there. But when a writer has empathy for their characters, it draws you in and you find yourself—even if they’re a terrible person, you know—you kind of get drawn into this character, right?
So I think that lesson without realizing it, applied to my sales work. And you know, I also learned the mechanics of sales, like how to ask for the sale, you know? How to walk people along that path until there’s just the logical next thing to do, is just to sign that contract. Which, again, that came and really helped for copywriting because, you know, in good copy, you’ve got to build empathy, show them you understand that you get their problem, and not only do you have a solution, but you got to them along the path, right? You can’t just say “Hey, I’ve got this great new thing,” and “Buy it!” You know, you’ve got to answer the objections, you’ve got to kind of get them excited about it; you’ve got to move them faster and faster and faster until when they get to that order button, the only logical option, right, like it’s the only thing you should do.
Kira: Right. So, I’d like to hear about how you built your copywriting business, you know. You started—well, you didn’t start from scratch. You’d had copywriting experience and some jobs, but you were really building this new business. What did it take to start lining up clients and getting some steady work to be able to buy a new place, and afford the things that you needed at the time?
Paul:So, you know, I started out doing the kind of thing that a lot of people do, which is like, having a website, and driving leads to it; you know, at the time Google Adwords—this was 2008, 2009–so like Google Adwords is really the only game in town. I mean, you could do, back then, it was Yahoo, and now it’s Bing, that had some traffic, but Google was really the game. But by that time, you know, so many people were using it that so many keywords were soexpensive. There’s no way you were making money on them.
So…and frankly, a lot of the clients I got from there were not great. Where I did get a lot of good clients was I, you know, I kind of found marketing websites, and just asked them if they wanted me to write for them, you know? Just write articles. And I actually got a great long-term client through that. A few long-term clients, actually. So one thing I would say is if you can not only have your own blog, where you talk about stuff, marking-related things in copy, but if you can get on to like a good—like someone else’s blog that has an authority and some impact? You know, because these people are always looking for content. And if you have good content and you can write well and say interesting things, even if it’s not news to you…
As copywriters we assume that people know what we know, but for a lot of small business owners, like, they don’t know anything about copy, so like we’re magicians. So we just explain the very basics, they think we’re awesome. So it’s stuff like that I think is really, really effective. The key I think is finding the right people to partner with, and, you know it can be a little difficult starting out to prove that you can really provide good content. And of course, you’re doing it for free, right? They’re not paying you; that’s the other thing. So a lot of people will have a hard time getting their head around that. But, the return in investment could be huge. And again, that actually came out of real estate because I convinced the local newspaper to let me write a real estate column once a month.
So once a month, I basically took, you know, a common real estate problem that I wrote about in sales letters, took that sales letter, turned it into an article so it wasn’t so salesly, and then submitted it. And so people would be like, “Oh yeah, I’ve seen you in the paper!” So that, again, got me a lot of business in the real estate, and it got me a good amount of business in copy. But as far as like, what really make a difference for me? It wasn’t until I started really going to events, and networking with people, and meeting people who are higher up the food chain so to speak that I started really, really doing well. I mean I had a lot of connections through Parris, and you know, I’d know Brian Kurtz for a long time, and that had always been a good source of business. But as I expanded that network, not only did the network directly feed me business, but you know, I got referrals. So, you know, again, that also comes from real estate, where I’d always ask for referrals.
Obviously do great work so you can get referrals, but then always ask for them, you know. And then allow your network to feed you. Because, if people are really happy with what you do, they will more than likely give you more business. They’ll tell you about someone else who can use your services. Even if they’re in the same industry; I’ve had marketing managers, you know, in the nutritional industry, say, “Hey, these guys aren’t our direct competitors because they’re too small, but they may be a good match for what you’re doing right now, so why don’t you give this guy a call, and you know he needs some help with some sales letters. You know? So…and that’s all because of asking for it, right?
Rob:I definitely want to ask more about the networking aspect of how you’ve grown your business, but, I want to go back to the first pitches that you were making to, you know, marketing sites. You want to write for them. What were you saying to them? What did the pitch look like? Because I hear from a lot of people who try cold-pitching that doesn’t work, or that it’s not working for them, and so I’m curious, what was the message that you were pitching, and is just offering free service enough, or was there more to it than that?
Paul:I would send them an article. I would write something that was like, “Hey, you know, I would like to write to your website. I really like what you’re doing.” And it would be sincere, like, I wouldn’t…you know…if someone’s got a garbage site, and they sell crap, I don’t want to be associated with that. So, you know, be sincere with why you want to work with them, and then send them a sample. Like say, “Here, here’s an article. Just check it out,” you know. We’re talking like five hundred words, right, on literally any copywriter topic. Any copywriter could probably crank out ten of these in a week without even breaking a sweat in your spare time. I mean, some of them would be like, “Why a headline is important”, you know. “How to ask for the order.” Chuckles. “Why people don’t buy from you.” Okay, here’s five reasons why people don’t buy from you. Stuff that weknow, like I said. Stuff that we take for granted, but that a lot of people reading this stuff, it’s like a revelation.
Kira:So, you mentioned networking. What did that look like for you early on? I mean, you also—you know, you mentioned Parris, Brian Kurtz… So, how were you even introduced to these big names like Parris Lampropoulos and Brian Kurtz? I mean, how do you get into a room with them to begin with, and then how do you continue to network, and do it the right way beyond that?
Paul:I really do prefer calling them “relationships”, because “networking” to me implies it’s just very sterile, back-and-forth exchange. It doesn’t really hit on the fact that when I network, I only want to do business with people that I really like and connect with. And that i think are a good fit, and that offer something that I think has actual true value in the marketplace. So, as far as Parris, you know, I actually connected with him by a friend who I met at a Dan Kennedy group that met in Boston, and met and this guy hit it off; he was another copywriter. We’re still buddies today. And, it’s like 2009. He called me up and he’s like, “Hey, man. You know, there’s this guy named Parris Lampropoulos.” And I was like, “Who the hell is that?”
Kira:Laughs.
Rob:Laughs.
Paul:He’s like, “He’s a really big copywriter but he doesn’t like his name out in public. But he’s looking for ‘Copy Cubs’, and you know, I don’t want to do it because I have my own thing, but I think it’d be really good for you, so here’s his number. I told him you were going to give him a call. And he’s going to want to see like what you think your best sales letter is.” So, you know, I called him up, and he was like, “Oh…I’m… really busy. Uh, let’s set a time to talk. Okay, bye.”
Kira:Laughs.
Paul:And we finally get on the phone—and he asked me to send the sales letter I wrote. And he proceeded to just, like, tear it apart.
Kira:Laughs. This is like the second phone call, right?
Paul: Well, this was like…the first phone call was like very brief. I mean, literally like, “Hey, okay, send me this thing, and then we’ll talk. In like a week, after I’ve had a chance to look at it. Okay bye.” It was like that long.
Kira:Laughs.
Paul:And then, the only call was like an hour, at first, after he—I should say beforehe tore apart my sales letter, he asked me things like, “What’s in your bookcase?” You know, he wanted to hear all the copywriting books that I read. So I ran through everything I had, and apparently that was enough for him to be like, “Hmm…okay.”
Kira:Laughs.
Paul:And then he asked me about my background, you know, “Where did you come from?” So I told him about being in real estate. And I think that helped because he actually has a real estate background as well. And yeah. And then, you know, apparently even though he hated my sales letter, he felt it was decent enough to get me into the door. So I ended up, in mid-2009, starting in this Copy Cub program with Parris. And, you know starting, I mean, realizing that I thought I knew what I was doing, and suddenly realizing that I was totally clueless, you know? I’d been writing my own copy for, you know, a good eight years at that point.
Kira:Wow.
Paul:And yeah. I mean, just, the other people in the group too were just on a much, much higher level. I was definitely the low man on the totem pole, you know. You know, like Barnaby Kalan was in there. Barnaby at that time had already written controls for Boardroom. Alia Carson, who’s now moved on from the copywriting world, but was, you know, also doing really big stuff. A guy named Alexi Neocleous who’s like the number-one copywriter in Australia. He’s like the Dan Kennedy of Australia, basically.
Kira:Wow.
Paul:Yeah. Hugely successful business. He actually was… You guys know who Ed O’Keefe is, right? I think he was Ed’s…he was working with Ed for a long time as well. So a lot of the stuff that, you know, I think that the strategy was actually maybe Alexi’s that took Ed to the next level in the last couple of years. Brilliant, brilliant guy. I mean Ed’s brilliant too, but I think the two of them together was just like the perfect mix. Yeah, and it was just an amazing mix of people. And, you know, Parris—once you’re in, you get it all. He, you know, takes you through the entire process, you know. Starts you at the very beginning, and just kind of builds you up over time. And I was with him for…I was officially a copy cub until late 2016, so it was a good seven years or so. And then—it wasn’t that I left. I mean, our copy cub group, he kind of wound it down, because he was starting a new group with a new group of cubs.
Rob:Yeah. Interesting. So, I know a lot of the stuff Parris teaches…it’s confidential, it’s proprietary, and most people who are in there don’t even talk about their experience. I’m really curious though, what were some of the “ah-ha”s that you had? You know, you mentioned that you realized that you were doing everything wrong. Especially early on, what were some of those light bulb moments as you started working through the frameworks and the constructs that Parris was sharing?
Paul: Well, yeah. I mean, a lot of the stuff is confidential, but I think I can share some of the big picture stuff that got me; really hit me over the head. So, you know, at the time, I was writing a lot of, like, well okay, it wasn’t as good as John Carlton, Dan Kennedy, obviously. But I was tryingto write like them. And, you know, John and Dan are really good at understanding what motivates people and they’re underlying emotions, and their headlines and copy play to that. But people see it and they see the hype, right? They don’t get the mechanics behind it. So at the time, I was doing a lot of that. I was imitating the hype, you know: “The amazing real estate secret of a one-legged golfer from Arizona.” You know, like…
Rob:Yeah. Laughs.
Paul:I mean, I look back and I wince. But I mean, it worked, right? Like, that wasn’t a literal headline, But I mean, it was along those lines. And Parris’ thing was like, “Look. You don’t get what’s going on here. You don’t know what you don’t know yet. So, the biggest thing here is, think about sitting across from someone—someone you reallycare about—and this is a really important thing that they need to use, and you got to convince them.
Kira: Hmmm.
Paul:Right? And that’s like huge. And we hear it all the time, right?
Rob:Yeah, all the time.
Paul:We hear, “It’s like a letter to a friend. Copywriting like a letter to a friend.” But what does that really mean, right? And that’s all; Parris just said it in a different way. You know, that’s really what it boils down too, right? You’re writing a letter to a friend. Or better yet, you’re speaking to someone you really care about; a really close friend that you love and care about. And they’ve got a problem that you have the solution to. You really think it would help them. And then how would you do that? Would you scream in their face?
Rob:Laughs.
Kira:Laughs.
Paul:No!
Kira: Maybe.Laughs.
Paul:No, of course you wouldn’t. I mean you would maybe be emphatic about it, right? You may even raise your voice and pound the table to make a point. But, you know, you’re doing it because you care, right? So you have to care. Like, you have to care about your customers. because if you don’t, like again, that’ll come right through in your copy. Just like I said earlier about when fiction writers create characters, they have to love their characters; they have to have empathy for their characters. You don’t have to likeyour characters. But you have to have empathy for them. Same thing with your customers. Like, I write a lot—I’m pretty liberal, and I write a lot for the financial and health markets that skew pretty conservative. And you know, I’m like,ugh. Man…
Kira: Laughs.
Paul:That’s….that’s tough for me, and all of these people are “Trumpers”. But here’s their problem, and I have empathy for their problem, and I understand where they’re coming from, you know. And I want to help them solve this problem. I don’t want to sell them a thing just to sell them a thing.
Kira: So, as a Copy Cub for seven years, did you know you were getting into it for seven years, when you first “yes” to Parris?
Paul:I—laughs—I don’t think the seven years was an, like, official plan, you know? That’s how long we—some of us to turn around that long.
Kira:Laughs. Yeah.
Paul:And then Parris was like, “Alright. Kicking you outta the nest. Get outta here.”
Kira: Laughs.
Paul:“Go off on your own; you got this.” But he did say, you know, this was a long-term commitment. You’re going to spend a lot of time working on stuff for me that you’re not getting paid for. Basically homework, which we had every week, chuckles, for years. Which took a ton of time, and took me from paying clients—he was very upfront about that. He was like, “This is probably going to cost you a lot of money in the short-term. But in the long-term, you know, if you follow through, you know, you’ll be able to be at the upper tier of what copywriters are getting paid, because you’ll be able to get the results that people pay for.
Kira:So when you’re in it, you’re not getting paid for the projects you’re working on? It’s just really training…?
Paul:Oh no, no, no. So, we may, like, do stuff like write bullets for homework…
Kira:Okay.
Paul: …on a project, but I also did projects with Parris and of course I got paid for those.
Kira:Okay.
Paul:But, at times, he’d be like, “Okay. Well, we’re going to use this as a homework example, so, here’s a thing for Boardroom that we’re working on. Write bullets, and then next week we’ll rip them apart, and I’ll tell you what’s good and what’s bad and then we’ll redo them, and then the next week we’ll come back and we’ll edit them again”, and through that process, you learn how to write really, really good bullets.
Kira:Right.
Paul:So there’s also a context to it, right? Like you have an actual product you’re writing for. Otherwise, it wouldn’t really work very well if you didn’t have—that was a real thing you were writing to.
Kira:So if a copywriter’s listening, and they’re like, “Oh, this sounds so awesome, you know, but I don’t know Parris and Parris may not even want me to be a Copy Cub; there are only so many people that can be one of his Cubs,” what would recommend to someone who’s hungry to get some type of training and education like that?
Paul:Well, I think the first thing is like, Parris is not—probably going to nottake someone or work with someone who is really green, or like, doesn’t have some experience under their belt. You know, a lot of it comes through, you know, personal referral or people he meets at events, and he’s impressed with their work. So I would say, if you’re starting out, you know, like the AWAII course; John Carlton’s freelance course. Awesome, awesome course. The thing that’s super unpopular right now: hand-copy controls. It totally works. I know people think it doesn’t…
Kira:Laughs.
Paul: It’s super boring. I’m left-handed and I have terrible handwriting, and Parris made us hand-copy so much stuff. I have notebooks and notebooks filled with hand-copy controls. But I got to tell ya; it makes you way better as a copywriter. And I know people who are making 500, 600, 700,000 dollar-a-year copywriters, and they stilldo it.
Rob:Okay, so what’s the “why” behind that? Because you’re right; I hear a lot of people saying it, and a lot of people who say they swear by it, and then I hear others who are like, “Eh, you know, it’s more important to study the reasons why, rather than to copy.” Like, for you, Paul, what was the psychology behind it? Why did it work?
Paul:So, yeah. I hear both arguments, and the thing I think people who say “it’s more important to understand the reason why” don’t understand is that, when you hand-copy thing, it forces you to break it down, and look at why it works, right? And also by hand-copying things, you remember them. You imprint them on your brain. So, people who hand-copy lecture notes retain more information than people who type it on their computer, right? Actual scientific studies. So I assume it’s the same mechanism with bullets. And, you know, this is not an unusual thing, like, you know, great painters throughout history…how did they learn how to paint? They copied mastered. They learned technique by copying the masters. Writers, same thing; I was told in fiction writing programs, if you love a writer, hand-copy their work. You’ll understand the flow, you’ll sort of break down their writing. You’ll naturally start to understand, and then you can actually intellectualize and be like, “Oh, okay. This is why they did that thing.” But you may not see that unless you slow down and actually go through the process of writing it out by hand.”
Kira: Okay. Because we’re digging into this, I want to ask, you know, for….again, for new copywriter, and they’re like, “Cool, I want to do that,” where do I find a really good control to hand-copy because my concern would be that, especially when you’re new, you end up copying something that’s actually not that great, and you get worse, or you just don’t improve because you’re copying crap.
Paul:Right. I mean, I think one thing you want to do is look at what companies are killing it right now in the direct response space. So like, Stansbury, right? Stansbury hasawesomecopy. Money Map? Awesome copy. Agora Financial? Awesome copy. They’re all Agora companies, noticed. Boardroom, you know? Awesome copy. The easy way to get this stuff by the way is if you subscribe to like one financial newsletter from Agora, like if you subscribe to like Stansbury Research’s…I think it’s like $99 a year letter…you’ll get alltheir copy; they’ll just send you promotions forever. Same thing if you buy like a product from Agora Health. They’ll put you on all their mailing lists. You’ll get all their controls; they’ll just show up in their mailbox. Same thing with Boardroom; you’ll start getting stuff. And anything that consistently shows up in your mail, that’s good, you know? Or in your inbox, you know. That’s another thing, is I always keep an eye on what’s coming through my inbox from different companies, because if I see something more than a couple of times, I know that it’s working, right? So that goes into a little file, and I’m like, “Okay, that’s obviously something that’s winning for them.” The other thing I look at is, you know, when you read articles online, you go look at those little ads in the bottom. And if there’s anything direct response related, like “the one weird trick”, or…
Rob:Yeah.
Paul: You know, the James Altucher ads that were everywhere for the Bitcoin? Like, they’re spending a lot of money on those. Obviously, that works. So you know, you click on that, follow it; if you can get a transcription of that, VSL, just by, you know, you go to close and they ask if you want to see it, hit print and save it as a PDF so you can analyze it later. If not, just go to Rev, and they’ll transcribe it for you probably. But, that’s what I do. I mean, whenever I see something that catches my eye, and I see it consistently in those little display-ad network things, I’m like, “Obviously this is working; let’s check it out and see what they’re doing here. Somebody’s spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on those ads, right? So, obviously they’re getting results. So obviously that control, that whatever they’re sending it to, is a really strong control. because no one sends cold traffic to crappy control.
Rob: So Paul, I’m curious, you know. You mentioned that you talked about the books that you read, you know, as you started working with Parris, and we’re talking about the processes like hand-copying, that kind of a thing. Now that you’ve gone through that process, you know, ten years later, how do you stay sharp? You know, what are you reading today, or what are you doing today, that’s beyond what you were doing, you know, as you were getting started as an A-lister—or an-almost-A-lister, however you want to call yourself. Chuckles.
Paul:So this is maybe not the best advice for other copywriters: I don’t read a lot of copywriting books anymore. I don’t really even read a lot of business books anymore. There’s books that kind of get my brain going, and then there’s the stuff I read because I enjoy the stories, of, you know, fiction. So, looking at my bookcase right now, you know, there’s a bunch of Raymond Carver books. Raymond Carver is a fantastic writer to emulate for anyone, just, I think, because he packs a ton of emotion into very simple, sparse language.
Rob:Yeah. And they’re great stories, too. I mean, they’re compelling.
Paul: Yes. Great stories. And they’re short. So there’s really good copywriting lessons in Raymond Carver. And I’m not saying you should try to write exactly like him; obviously he was a master at what he did. but the biggest thing is “show, don’t tell”. And by showing, all this stuff gets implied about their characters and who they are in their background, and then that carries you through the story. Likewise, you know, in copywriting, you want to show, not tell, and showpeople you understand. Don’t just tell them: “Oh, I understand your pain.” You know? Tell them a story about someone who has the same problem. Better yet, tell them a story—a real story—about someone who had the same problem, and how they fixed it.
Kira:So Paul, we had chatted a little bit about coming up with really big ideas, and you mentioned that you figured out—you’ve mastered—the way to come up with really million-dollar big ideas, so would you mind sharing that with us?
Paul:Yeah. What I think i said in my email was, and this was a little bit tongue-in-cheek by the way, how to find million-dollar big ideas by dicking around on the internet.
Kira:Yeah, that’s what it was. Yeah.
Rob: Yeah, I want to do that. I spend way too much time, you know, on the internet, withoutthe million dollar ideas. Let’s…
Paul:Right! So you might as well make it productive, right?
Rob:Exactly.
Paul: And the nice thing is, is you can kind of do the same thing, right, that you’re already doing. You’re just doing it looking for ideas. So like, here’s the basic thing, right: so, I think it was Joe Sugarman who said it originally, was that, you know, to be a great copywriter, you have to have specific knowledge about your market, and you have to have general knowledge about the world at large, right? You know, a lot times, you find great ideas by linking those two things, right? And the example I love is back in the ‘70’s, and if you guys don’t know who Joe Sugarman is—anyone who’s listening—he came up with Blue Blocker Sunglasses. He’s a multi-bagillionaire, probably made more money than any copywriter in history. Brilliant, brilliant guy. Re-buy and read any of his books, they’re amazing. But he had this thing in the ‘70’s called a “pocket CD”. And it was a walkie-talkie, right, and walkie-talkies were knew. But people knew about them, but they were still kind of new. But the CD craze was big, right? So that was the general. Walkie-talkies were specific. Crossed them over: pocket CD, right? That’s the big idea.
Rob:Yeah, I like it. And anybody who doesn’t remember the ‘70’s, you know, there was, you know, shows on TV—BJ and the Bear was like about a trucker, and there were, you know, The Cannonball Run, and you know, there were a whole bunch of movies… Convoy came out, like, there were a whole bunch of movies sort of in the late ‘70’s that there, the CD-radio was everything, and it was a major plot point in everything.
Paul:Yeah, yeah. And that’s when those ads came out, you know? He was listening to what was going on in the world, and he linked two different ideas. So, how o you do that now? Well, the nice thing is we have limitless information, right? The bad thing is, we have limitless information, right? So you’ve got to kind of sort through it and figure out what’s going on and what’s going to be useful to you and what’s not. So like, the example I use it, I wrote a control called Patriot Health Line—it’s a joint cream, you know, it comes in a little roll-on, which is a little bitunusual, but it’s not unusual enough that I wanted to make that the sell-point, right? And it didn’t really have any super-unique ingredients; it had natural versions of stuff that’s in a lot of other pain creams. So, it had like, wintergreen, and all this other stuff. All of which is great, right? It all works.
But people have heard about it before. And if you have joint pain, you have a bad back, or a bum shoulder, it’s something you’ve dealt with for a long time. And if you’re on a natural health website, chances are you’ve tried all this other stuff, right? Or at least you’ve tried some of them. It’s not enough just to tell people that you’ve got this new formula that has all these things in it. because you’ll only get some people who’ve never heard of them before. You want to get all the people, right?
So, you’ve got to engage them with…and Todd Brown talks about this a lot…with a unique mechanism, right? You got to find a really cool thing within your product research that you can hang your hat on, that kind of is a hinge that makes the promo work. But before you get to that hinge, that opens the big door to all the money, you’ve got to have a way to intrigue people and get them to read it. Because even a great mechanism still needs something to pull people in, and here’s how you do it: so, the headline for this is “How a Pennsylvania Coal-Fire Led to an Amazing Joint Pain Breakthrough”. and then the subhead tells you about the benefits, right? ‘Cause the headline is total, like, “What? What the hell is that?” You know, it kind of implies that there’s a breakthrough—it says there’s a breakthrough, so obviously, you know, it kind of lets you know if you have joint pain, this is for you. And then the subhead says, this natural remedy brings blessed relief in just minutes, lasts up to twelve hours, and works on even your most stubborn joint pain.
So I hit all the big pain points, and that all came through research, right? Like I know that obviously they’re on a natural health website, they want natural. Nothing works fast, right, even chondroitin, which works great. Takes sometimes weeks or longer to kick in. Same thing with glucosamine. A lot of joint creams where off really quickly. So, lasts for up to twelve hours, and a lot of them don’t work, if you have really painful, like really bad knees, this stuff does.
So I hit all of the big pain points and all the things they wanted. And then I went into the story of this city called Centralia, Pennsylvania, which a coal seam caught fire—it was a coal-mining town—and basically, like, no one knew there was a problem. And then all the sudden, you know, fire started springing up all over town, you know, and it’s still burning, and it’ll burn for hundreds of years. And, what I linked that to is the idea of inflammation, alright? So, if you have joint pain, you have inflammation, but you don’t always have joint pain, right? Like, it flares up. You know, like you’ll bump your knee, and all the sudden your knee will just hurt for days. You’ll turn to pick something up and your back goes out. Or you’re carrying your grandkid and like your shoulder just spasms, and you’re in agony for a week. And people are always wondering, “Well, why does that happen,” right? Well, so the story I told them was, “Well, you know, you have this inflammation in your cells, and just like the fires burning under Centralia, Pennsylvania—the coal fires—you got these fires from inflammation are smoldering every cell of your body, especially your joints.
And when you bump your knee, or twist or back, or pick up your grandkid, they flare up. And here’s why.” And then I go into the mechanism, which is, you know, really, boring science about a specific molecule that, you know, causes inflammation, and does a whole pain cascade thing and, you know, it’s too complex to tell people off the bat, but if you can get them in, you know, then we go into the reason why, right? Like whydo you still have this pain. But the story is what gets them in.
So, how do you find the story? That’s when the dicking around on the internet comes in. So I found that story on a website called atlasobscura.com. And Atlas Obscura started out as a book of exactly what it sounds like: weird places around the world. Random facts about weird places around the world. Really fascinating. And then they started a website. So, they update it constantly. There’s tons of stuff on there, you know, and sometimes just by going through that, you’ll find all these interesting ideas, you know.
Other things I like at are just books like…there’s a great one called How We Got to Now, which is like how the modern world happened. Bill Bryson has an awesome book called At Home, which is like the history of these weird everyday objects. There’s also a book called, i think it’s, History of the World and the 100 Objects, or something like that. And if you just go on Amazonand start looking at any of those, you’ll find all—a bunch of them. Like there’s a bunch of them. Like there’s one called Now I Know More, which is, again, a whole book of weird, random trivia stories. And, you know, fill your head with this stuff, and as you read this stuff, a lot of times ideas will pop up. And if you’re looking for the link, right, sometimes you can find the links between whatever you’re working on, and the thing you’re selling.
I just finished a promo, and it hasn’t been released yet so I’m can’t talk about the specific headline or anything, but it’s a probiotics, right? And everyone in the world knows that, “Oh, probiotics, they do this stuff to your gut, and their good bacteria; they kill, get rid of the bad bacteria…” You know, no one wants to hear that, right? So I had to find a new way to say it, so, I went on Amazon, starting typing and looking for books on probiotics, and leaky-gut, and all this stuff…and you got to sort through all the crap, for want of a better word, with those kind of searches, just ‘cause you got all of these people who are just like selling whatever garbage their selling by writing a crappy book about it. Chuckles. You don’t want those. But what I found was a great book called This is Your Brain on Parasites, which was interviews with all these scientists and really well-written too, but, massive support about how gut parasites take over your whole body, right? And how any parasite takes over your whole body. So, like, there’s a parasite in cat poop that makes you like cats more.
Rob:Interesting.
Paul: Yeah! But there’s another that blew my mind. I didn’t use this in the promotions so I can talk about it, where the flu makes you more social before you actually get sick. So there’s a lag between when you get infected with the flu, and when you manifest symptoms. But the flu needs to spread itself, right? That’s how it survives. So if you’re too sick to move, and you’re at home, and you’re sweating, and you get the chills, and you’re sneezing and coughing, and no one wants to be around you, right? And you’re not out in public. So, it actually will make you go be social in those two to three days before you manifest symptoms where you’re actually the most contagious!
Rob: Yeah, I’m going to have to read this book. I’m like, really intrigued.
Paul: Yeah, so you can see how I read that, and I was like, “Holy crap! Here’s my big idea!” Right? Like, here’s this idea about how these parasites control you, which is way scarier, right?
Rob:And it seems to me that you probably kill it at trivia night at the local bar, you know, having gone through all of this stuff.
Paul:Oh yeah. Laughs. But that also goes back to, you know, specific knowledge about your market, right? So that book? I read that book because I was like, “Well, I need some more knowledge about this; I know all this other stuff but, this is new knowledge about this market, potentially. And I need to know this stuff.” That’s why I read that book, so that goes back to the Sugarman thing, but it also plays into the idea of, you know, finding the big idea in really weird, random places.
Rob: Yeah. So once you have the big idea, is there a framework that you, sort of, bolt on to the back of it, or, you know, is it specific to each different assignment, each product that you’re writing for? Do you have a checklist that you’re writing against?
Paul:I use a general outline, like a template, pretty much, but that’s really just to give myself some structure. I do not do well with no structure. I just go around in circles and drive myself crazy. So, about a year and a half about, two years ago, I went to a seminar by Clayton Makepeace called Speed Writing. I believe you can actually buy the DVDs or replays from AWAI. I would recommend everyone buy. It’s expensive, it’s probably like $3,500, but it’s 100% worth it. Best copywriting seminar I’ve ever been to. And again, I can’t give away the outline, because it’s part of the seminar, but the outline he gives you and the process he shows you is just so good for organizing your ideas. And as a result of, you know, forty years of experience, and super simple, but man, it kills. And it’s not the same, so I don’t use the same thing for every promotion, but in terms of organizing ideas, there’s a definite process that I swiped completely from Clayton.
Kira:I was just going to say that I’m sure there’s a lot more detail in the $3,500 program, but you can Google Clayton Makepeace’s 20-point outline for sales pages, which is also really helpful, and free, if you can’t afford the course.
Paul: Yeah! Yeah. And so a lot of that stuff was actually a freebie before the seminar, so that may actually be the same…
Kira: Yeah, maybe! I don’t know.
Paul:…It may be the same thing. If not, it’s still a really good way to organize your thoughts, and I would recommend that anyone, you know, who wants to write faster, use a template. You may not end up with that template as your finished product, but it will at least allow you to get all the thoughts organized and get them on paper, and then, you know, that’s your biggest battle, right, is getting stuff down on paper. And then you can start to cut and paste, you know, move stuff around, start to figure out what works better where, cut things out, and it’s a much, much easier process than it is sitting there and being like, “Okay, how do I make this work?”
Kira: Yeah, definitely. I’ve used that outline many times in recent projects. It’s been really helpful. So I just want to know more about, like, where you are today and, what are your projects look like? Like how many clients are you working with today? I just want more details about your current business.
Paul:Right now I’m working with, probably, three of four different clients and a variety of projects. And I’m also, you know—Parris always gives me crap about this, but—I tend to do more than one project at a time. I find that I’m more creative that way, when I have to shift my brain halfway through the day and work on something else. Even if it’s just research, I just do better that way. So…and I don’t recommend everyone do this. My ADD brain just works better that way, but yeah. I mean, I generally, like, right now I’m doing projects for, you know, Agora, White Street Search, and a couple other smaller clients who aren’t in the financial space at all. And you guys are asking me what those deals look like, or how do I get those deals, or…?
Kira:Yeah! How you structure those projects. Are you working more retainer model with a couple different clients, or are you working with new clients every quarter? What does that look like?
Paul:Yeah, I generally work with clients on a repeat basis, and the only way I find new clients now is if I get a referral, or if you now, I meet someone like, you know, at Titans, I may work with them or at another event if we connect well. But I don’t really go out and find clients. I don’t do retainers, generally. I’ll do consulting work, but that consulting is a specific package, you know—ten or twenty hours, usually. And that’s paid 100% up front. Or I do project fees. So, you know, advance plus percentage of profits, or bonus structure on the back end. I would actually advice anyone, unless you’re really good at keeping boundaries, retainer deals and be very, very, very difficult. Because you can end up doing way more work than you should for that money, and a client and kind of feel like they got you on the hook. I’m not saying never do them, but, you know, you got to be very careful how you structure them, and you’ve got to be very clear on, you know, this gets you x-hours of time per month, no more. If you want more you got to pay for it. And you got to be very upfront about that. And you’re going to have to constantly reinforce that kind of relationship, even with a great client, you know, because business people—great business people—and busy and they’re crazy and they’re always juggling twenties roles. And they’ll be like, “Hey, hey man…”
Kira:Laughs.
Paul:“Hey, hey, hey… Uh, can you just like, write up a sales page?”
Kira:“Like, by tomorrow.”
Paul:“By tomorrow!” Well…yeah, but it’s going to cost double! Laughs. You know? It’s double my hourly rate. So, when I used to do that for some clients, I used to have an hourly rate that I would just either figure out what it would be, right, and I still do that with consulting agreements, right? I charge five hundred bucks an hour. So, that’s what it costs to do consulting with me. So if you want ten hours my time, that’s five grand. Twenty hours so of my time, that’s ten grand. It’s really straight-forward. You know, in terms of per-hour, I did that for a long time and again I do it with the client and, you know, he was okay with me being like, “Well, if I have to drop everything to get this done in two days, I’m going to have to charge you double. So, instead of a hundred…” but, and this was—it was a hundred an hour back then—I was like, “Instead of a hundred, it’s going to be two hundred an hour.” And you know, they’re like, “Okay, fine. No problem. Understood.”
Kira: Since you mentioned money and $500 an hour for consulting, would you mind roughly what you charge for sales pages?
Paul:Oh yeah, no problem. I generally do—and this kind of varies depending on what the back-end structure looks like—my rule of thumb is I want a project to have the potential to make, like at a bare minimum, fifty grand, and ideally, closer to a hundred. Now, not every project’s going to do that, right, because a lot of projects like…your stuff doesn’t get mailed, or it doesn’t get, you know, promoted the way it should, or it just doesn’t work, you know. Obviously we don’t win every time. But, as long as I get to that—and this is a discussion I have with clients—I say, “Well this is my goal for every project I take, right? Like, here’s my ballpark of what I want to make. So, my advance is, you know, $20,000. And if we can get to fifty or a hundred on the back end, great. And then what I usually tell people is, you know, “I’m doing more; just, I want the entire fee upfront.” Not everyone goes for that. Like Agora will never do that; you know, that’s just not how they roll. A lot of old school marketers will never do that. But a lot of newer ones will; they don’t care.
So, what I say a lot is, if you can’t give you—bring yourself to like askfor that full upfront, just say, “I don’t really care whether you give me the money upfront or in two halves. Whatever is easier for you, it doesn’t matter to me. I’m more concerned about the back end.” And what you’ll find is that a certain percentage of clients will be just like, “Oh, well I’ll just give it to you all upfront then, okay; no problem.” I stumbled on that one totally by accident, right? So, if you adjust whatever you advance is, if you’re getting paid, you know, in two parts, you know—one, on start, and one, on completion—try that. And, you know, you never know. A lot of clients will just say, “Okay, no problem.” Obviously, new clients, right? Existing clients are used to working with you under certain structures.
Rob: Paul, you mentioned that not all of your sales pages work, or work as well as you had hoped. Will you tell us a little bit, maybe, about some of your biggest failures, and what you did to either fix them, or turn that around, and make things work?
Paul:I don’t know if I can say huge. I mean, not beating the control, right? And that like…that makes me crazy. Like I get so pissedwhen I don’t beat a control. Like, so I’ve a client in the nutritional space, and I didn’t beat their control, and it’s been gnawing at me for months. So I went back to them; I’m like, “Look. I’m going to redo the lead, and the headline. It’ll cost you this much upfront; same back end deal, but I want another swing at this.” And, you know, so that’s how I’m dealing with it, right? Like I’m just getting back on the horse, and saying, the rest of the copy was good. They loved the copy, they thought it did really well. They were surprised when it didn’t work. So, I’m going back to the drawing board. And I think that’s what you generally want to do if you can, if you have a good relationship with the client, and you’ve had some wins for them in the past, they’ll generally be happy to do that.
If it’s a newclient, man that’s tough. Because if…a lot of them… if you don’t, you know… if you don’t win right off the bat, then you’re just done. Like, okay; I’ve got a good one. So, I got a email on LinkedIn outta the blue, like in 2013 from a guy named Mike Ward, and Mike Ward is the publisher over at Money Map Press at Agora. These guys are just killing it; Mike’s an amazing marketer; really knows copy; hires top, top talent; and for some reason, he wanted to talk to me. So he was like, “Hey, I, you know…I’ve seen some of your work. Why don’t you come down? We’re looking to hire people. Come down to Baltimore.” And it didn’t work out. You know, like, I didn’t really have a lot of financial experience at that time. Plus, I was like, there’s no way I’m moving to Baltimore, laughs. Right? No offense to anyone who lives in Baltimore, but, like, my entire family’s in Massachusetts; my wife’s family is in New York and Massachusetts. Wouldn’t really work for us to pick up and move to Baltimore. If it was like Tahiti, or like Hawaii, I’d be like….
Rob:Laughs.
Paul:…”That’s a little better”, right? Like, you know, that sounds pretty good. So I ended up not getting the gig with them, but you know, Jedd Canty, who’s one of the head copywriters over there, was like, “Hey, talk to this guy over here—he’s a really, really smart dude, he runs the financial division over at Newsmax.” And I was like, “Alright man, this is my big break; this is my big break!” And I just bombed. I just freaked out, and like, I turned in…I don’t know what the hell was wrong with the promo. It was…looking back at it…it’s just such a piece of crap. And the publisher was like, you know, “I understand this is like your first swing, but uh…”
Kira: Laughs.
Paul:“…there’s so many problems with this I don’t even know where to begin, and I don’t even want to edit it.”
Kira: Whoa!
Paul:And I came back; I was like, “Look man, I’ll take another swing at it. Just—let’s jump on the phone for an hour and tell me what’s going on.” And he was like, “Yeah. You know, it’s just…it’s so all over the place, man. It’s just…it’s not bad writing, and there’s like a lot of good elements in there. It’s just like, it feels like you through together six different promos.”
Kira:Laughs.
Paul:Because I panicked. Right? And I was like, “I’m just going to make this like…”
Kira:Laughs.
Paul:“…I’m go after everyone I can.” And it just bombed. I mean, didn’t even get a chance to bomb, because they didn’t even…they just paid me a kill fee.
Kira:Uh no! Oh….man.
Paul: Yeah. So everyone has those failures, right? Like, if anyone tells you they have like a 100% win rate, they’re full of crap. I mean, Parris has, by far, the highest win rate I’ve ever heard of, and I think he wins like four out of five times. So even Parrisdoesn’t hit a home every time. And I would say, even other A-Listers, I mean, they certainly don’t have hishit rate—I don’t know for sure, but I would—they’re somewhere between 50 and 80%, you know? And some, like you know, Jim Rutz was, I mean, he’s had some of the biggest controls for Boardroom, but I know sometimes he would do awesome, and he would literally hit these grand slams that would mail for years and make millions and millions and millions of dollars, and other times, it would just bomb, right? He either bombed, or he made all the money.
Kira:Wow. Paul, I’m just checking the time. I know we’re already out of time; there are still more questions I want to ask you, but, we’ll just have to have you back on again, so…
Paul:No problem.
Kira:…if anyone’s listening, and they want to find you, get in touch with you, ask you a question, where can they find you?
Paul:Laughs. I am like the hardest copywriter to find.
Kira: I know!You are!
Rob:You are! You hide out; you’re a little bit like Parris that way.
Paul:Yeah, totally. My mentor has taught me well. Yeah, so the easiest way to find me is on Facebook. Just, Paul Martinez; look me up. I’m the goofy-looking guy with the big beard and glasses, who knows all the people in the copywriting world. I’m on a lot of copywriting groups, so if you like post something to my attention and ping me, I’ll maybe have time to answer a question, but I don’t really use my website for anything, so it’s not the best place to find me. It’s paulmartinezcopywriting.com, but it’s….laughs. You’ll see when you go there. It’s kind of a smart-ass website…
Kira: Laughs.
Paul: …which explains…
Rob: It’s a little bit of a sales letter.
Paul: It’s a little bit of a sales letter. But, the headline is: “Congratulations, you’ve made the best decision of your life to hire me as your copywriter.” And I go into like,” Oh, wait, you’re not sure? Oh, okay. Well, here’s the thing,” you know, and then I talk a little bit about like, I’m not going to promise you the world, like you’ve been around the block, man. You know what’s real and what’s not, so just look at my samples. If you like my stuff, give me a call; if not, cool.
Kira: Laughs.
Paul: Which, some of that is like conscious positioning, right? But, a lot of it’s…I don’t want business through my website; I want business through relationships and referrals.
Kira: Awesome. Well thank you so much for you time, and for sharing and being really open with us, and sharing everything! We really appreciate it.
Paul: Hey, no problem guys; thanks for having me on. I’d love to do it again.
Rob: And it’s been fantastic, Paul. Thanks.
You’ve been listening to The Copywriter Club Podcastwith Kira Hug and Rob Marsh. If you like what you’ve heard, you can help us spread the word by subscribing in iTunes, and by leaving a review. For show notes, a full transcript, and links to our free Facebook community, visit thecopywriterclub.com. We’ll see you next episode.
