Dear Chase,
There's a saying that marketers use a lot, and I'm sure you've used it yourself before.
"I don't need to be right, I just need to make money."
This comes from the idea that sometimes, marketers have to use techniques and methods that they disagree with in order to get a result.
Marketers, specifically copywriters, are creatives. They're visionaries.
They have these amazing ideas for campaigns that they dream about. They stay up all night mapping out how something will look, feel, etc…
They have grand plans for how they wanna sell a product. They draw it up, they present it to the team, everyone's on board, and they push it live.
And then it flops.
It could be a promotional YouTube video that they thought would change the game.
Or a set of ads that they thought would crush.
Or an organic content series that they expected to perform better than anything they've ever done.
And it just straight-up flops.
Here's the sad truth that I had to come to grips with many years ago as a copywriter:
When we have these urges to do something outside of the box, 99% of the time, you need to keep it in the drafts lol.
I remember the first sales page I wrote, back in 2021.
I had only ever written emails and ads, specifically for e-commerce brands. Easy stuff. You can be creative with those.
I got assigned this sales page for a $997 internet marketing course. This guy who ran a semi-successful agency wanted to break into info, and he had me write a 5000-word sales page to help sell this thing on cold traffic.
I dreamt for days about how I was gonna go outside the box and make this sales page the equivalent of a movie script.
I wanted to go hard on story-telling, go deep into the primal depths of human emotion.
I wanted to make this page so good that people would share it around.
It took me a week to write it, and when I finally finished, I handed it in.
This agency owner was a great marketer, and I knew that he'd respect the craftsmanship of what I'd just done.
I honestly thought it was a masterpiece.
I got an email back from him within 15 minutes saying:
"Alex…what is this man? This is not a sales page. We need to rework this whole thing."
I was kinda heartbroken. My grand vision was just squashed.
I ended up scrapping the entire thing. Didn't use a word of it.
Took another 48 hours and rewrote it in the way that our direct-response forefathers would approve of.
Typical, bland, direct-response copy that follows the same cadence as every other IM sales page online.
Submitted it, client loved it. And guess what?
It actually worked. It printed cash. He ended up making $70k in the first week, which was big for me.
That's when I learned that you should never try and get fancy when selling stuff. 99% of the time, just stick to the basics. Do what's worked for decades.
You can be a 7/10 copywriter by just doing exactly what everyone else is doing, and putting a tiny little spin on it.
Flex expensive cars.
Use typical industry jargon.
High-urgency VSLs and webinars.
It all works.
So just do that.
Don't get fancy.
Trust me.
Any thoughts, Chase?
Yours truly,
Alex.
Sent from my Starlink (I'm in the Mexican jungle right now)
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