Most people think that "copywriting" is a career.
It’s not.
"Copywriting" should not be viewed as a great career choice.
Instead, "copywriting" should be viewed as one of the highest income producing skills that’s available for anybody to learn.
One of the main reasons that I decided to do this short series on using the "PSRB Method" to boost your income is because of some of the weird misinformation and hate for copywriting gurus I see floating around on the internet and especially on Reddit in the r/copywriting group.
There seems to be a large percentage of people who miss the entire point of why they should learn copywriting.
They view copywriting as a normal career, and the act as a traditional job. They’re an employee of a company that tells them exactly what to write. They write it, and they take home a modest income that is nothing near the incomes they hear your favorite copywriter, entrepreneur, or business guru talk about.
People get all upset when a great copywriter or solopreneur tells others what’s possible and they claim that the income numbers are inflated.
For example a big name copywriter and CopyHour student, Ning Li, wrote some emails about making $600k last year and how he’s headed towards $1mm this year. A lot of folks have a hard time accepting that a copywriter could make that much. But as I’ll show you, these numbers aren’t pie in the sky because Ning isn’t only just a copywriter – copywriting happens to be one high income skill Ning (and most other big name marketers you know) applies to his career.
Now, when I’m talking about "boosting your income" I’m specifically talking about how you build the necessary skills that take you from $25k/$50k/$75k up to $150k. Or if you’re already there, how you go from $150k to $250k and then up over $500k+ from there.
You can even take the skills I’m about to talk about to $1mm/year but that very much requires what I’ll talk about tomorrow (the "R" in the PSRB Method) and of course some extra sacrifices.
Okay, so today I want to talk about the 2 best skills every copywriter or solopreneur should build if they want to earn a great income – and boost things up over a couple hundred grand per year.
Yesterday, I went over why you need to become a Problem-Solver. That’s step #1 of this process. You need to solve money making problems that businesses have if you want to boost your value (and your income).
Money making problems are most often related to growth related problems for a business. Review my email from yesterday to learn more about Jay Abraham’s "3 ways to grow a business" concept and how to spot problems you can solve.
What you might have noticed from yesterday is that the skills needed to grow a business basically fall into 2 camps:
- Sales skills
-
Offer creation skills.
If you can build sales skills and learn how to create offers that will sell starting from scratch, you will be able to help a business grow (and be able to demand more compensation or rake in more profits in the process).
Again, today we’re talking about the 2 best skills to learn if you want to boost your income to multiple six figures without killing yourself putting in crazy hours.
How to Build Sales Skills – And What Type of Sales Skills To Build
My favorite form of sales skills is obviously copywriting.
"Copywriting is salesmanship in print."
Copywriting is the best form of sales for many reasons, but I like copywriting mainly because I do the work once, and it continues to make me money without more of my time input.
A lot of other forms of sales involve you putting in time or repeating tasks. Think real estate agents working all weekend or sales people doing Zoom calls.
So to boost your income and ensure your efforts aren’t wasted on one-off sales, you should learn the skill of copywriting. That’s a pretty obvious comment coming from me (and even just based on the beginning of this email).
But what type of copywriting is best?
Should you write ads, landing pages, sales pages, emails, webinars, upsell copy?
From decades of experience here’s my opinion: the best type of copywriting to learn, and the type that will pay the most, is the type of copywriting that’s closest to a sale.
Meaning, someone sees an ad first. That’s farthest from the sale. Then they click an ad and go to a landing page. Then they see emails. Then a sales page, then they buy.
The sales page is the closest piece of copy to the sales transaction.
You will get paid the most if you can write sales pages that convert (that’s why CopyHour’s main focus is sales pages).
And in fact, AI is quickly replacing copywriting that’s farthest from the sale (ads and even some content).
The best copywriters and highest paid copywriters in the world write entire promotions including the sales pages. The business owners who know how to write copy (aka sell at scale), grow the easiest – with the least effort.
Take-home point: Learn the skill of copywriting – and specifically learn how to write sales letters if you want to boost your income more quickly and easily.
How to Build Offer Creation Skills
If you can build an offer from the ground up – one that actually creates customers – you are a huge asset to any business.
An offer is simply what your product is and does. It’s your book, it’s your course, it’s your app. It’s the package (including bonuses) you offer to a specific audience know as your market.
To get good at crafting offers you need to figure out exactly what an audience wants and is willing to pay money for. To find a big winner you often need to be one step ahead and predict what people will want next.
To make the most money – it’s better to learn how to build offers that are scalable. Meaning each time you sell a unit, the owner of the offer doesn’t need to increase their time or money input.
Info products like courses, SaaS products, supplements, and any physical product where the cost of production goes way down with more units sold can fall into this category.
Learning the skill of creating exciting offers means a business can immediately make money (grow) off of your work. You should be compensated very well, and will be, if you’re building truly scalable offers.
Think about the highest paid traditional employees today: they are often coders and developers. They get paid so much because they create the actual products, platforms, apps and websites for tech companies.
They are involved with offer creation that is scalable. A construction worker is not. The product creation requires his or her effort and time to create the product and to build more of the product.
Take-home point: Learn the skill of offer creation – learn how to predict what a market will spend money on, and build offers that can be sold without extra time or money input.
To recap:
Step #1: First learn how to identify money making problems for businesses – you do this by studying how a business is lacking in the growth department (use Jay Abraham’s "3 ways to grow a business" as a guide).
Step #2: Learn the skills that are "closest to the sale" that would help solve those growth problems. Copywriting is my favorite and darn near universal for every industry, especially online businesses. But copywriting is not all I think you should learn. If you can learn how to build attractive offers this is how you get to that $500k+ a year mark – this is what Ning started to do for example.
Those are the first parts of the PSRB Method for boosting your income: "P" & "S" are Problem-Solving and then building right Skills.
The next part, "R", is how you take the limiters off and achieve the higher income levels that have always just been dreams and felt out of reach. This is how you take your skills and scale up towards $1mm/year (and if that sounds impossible – you desperately need "R").
I’ll explain what "R" means tomorrow.
Talk then!
– Derek