By the Ocean
Sunny 75 Degrees
5:56 a.m.
When I started my copywriting business, I thought that hunting clients was the thing to do. I sent out simple letters, a few hundred every month, in hand addressed envelopes, delivering a message about how great I was.
This was a dumb thing to do. But it also worked! I succeeded and failed all at the same time! To be clear, it got me phone calls, it generated clients, it paid the bills.
What it did not do was create authority, respect, or any of the other ingredients you need to be considered an expert who is paid high fees for what he does.
My letters did something different. They got the door to open and someone to say, “well, let’s see what you can do.”
“Do your dance Jason, let’s see what kind of magic you can make!”
This is a bad way to start when you’re in a business where WHAT YOU DO has limited impact on the overall result. If you’ve been listening to the loud speakers in guru-land for too long, you might think that great sales copy changes everything.
It CAN. If the product is good and the buyers want it. Without those things though, “great copy” tends to end up in the trash can with all of the other junk that is not longer adding any value.
Client attraction is not usually a linear process. You don’t do X and get Y. You do A, B, C and D and watch as X eventually pops out the other end. I call this “indirect marketing.” You’re putting a recipe together where the result tastes great even though you can’t point your finger at the ONE ingredient responsible for that success. This is especially true as the size of the engagement grows. People don’t tend to spend $25,000 or $200,000 after an email or two, it doesn’t matter WHO writes it.
The thing to remember is that you don’t build a client attraction system for a business, you build it for you as the leader of that business. What that means is that your system will probably be different than the one someone else has because YOU are different than everyone else out there.
Gurus can’t sell that because you can’t put it in a box! It certainly doesn’t “scale” because the only thing that scales is SAMENESS. And that’s not what we’re here to do.
Stop listening to other people’s answers. Find your own. Get help if you need it. Build a client attraction system that works for who you are, what you’ve got and who you’re trying to reach. It might take some experimenting to get it right. When you do, you’ll know that all of the work was well worth it.