Hi,

I have been reading this forum for a while but am sorry to report that I'm still a lousy copy writer

... and there for I need to hire a good copy writer !

I have a great product and the page has good traffic (500 - 1000 visitors/day) , already generating income for me for over two years but the convert ion rate sucks (only about 1/2%).

Maybe the proble is that I'm not a native speaking English.

And when you see the sales letter you understand why ... phoo. (it's baaad)

I, however, would like a guaranteed results !

=> If you make great changes to multiply the convert ion rate, I'm ready to pay... and pay well.

=> but if there is no increase, I of course am not into putting out any money.

So if you are interested, please email me and I'll replay with more detailed information and the URL of the page for you to take a look...

My email is:

christian@TheRisingLeo.com

Christian:

I can tell you right now, only the most desperate of copywriters would accept the ridiculous terms you just presented. However, there are a lot of desperate copywriters out there, so you just might get lucky! Personally, I'm not interested!

Ditto what Dean said.

You may get lucky and find a desperate copywriter who is actually pretty good and just needs a project like this to get a break. But you don't outline likely financial reward, which would be easy to do, so how can anyone assess whether it's worth spending their time to do the writing up front for potentially no reward.

Also, good copywriters won't be tempted by this, so you might be shooting yourself in the foot by not be willing to take any risk or make an investment. Please let me know when business becomes entirely risk free - then I'll start jumping out of planes instead!

Jane

Thank you all for great replies.

Friend of mine once said that the worst thing anyone could do was to ignore you. Therefore I prefer people who disagree with me and speak it to my face than like-minded folks who won't tell me.

However ... I sense a little contradiction here. On one hand I'm told that this would be too much of a risk for any copywriter ... and then I hear that there is no life or business without some risk.

I'm confused (but it's easy to confused my simple mind).

My proposal could make some copywriter great money. way more than most make for "contracted", "non-risk" project. If you are willing to invest time in testing and show results.

And I don't mind seeing a desperate copywriter make a good money.

Just one more thing,

Please don't take this as me trying to offence
your profession, I am not. I am a great admiror
of those of you who can somehow swing out a
magical strings of words that graphs our eyes and
pulls us in like puppets. This is more than writing,
and more than art. Like I said this is closest to magic. And
a fantastic magician deserfts to be respect in every
way.

So thank you all for great sharing on this board.

Christian

Hi,

Quick tip for copywriters, that will save you lots of grief. (I know this from personal experience)

Writing for free is a good way to build a portfolio. BUT you MUST choose your free clients wisely.

My advice is ONLY write for free for clients WHO ARE ALREADY PAYING copywriters to write for them. Why?

- Because they value your work. They'll treat you with respect, and they'll offer you a series of PAID jobs if you do well.

- Because they're much more likely to give you good testimonials if you do well.

- Because these are the PLAYERS, and you'll learn something valuable from working from them.

AVOID the clients who want you to write for free because they aren't willing to pay. I call them "junk clients" -- and a big red flag that someone is a junk client is, they've don't pay for copywriters (or they only pay peanuts for copywriters. Anything less than $1,000 is "peanuts")... and... they dangle the carrot by saying "I'll pay you if the letter does well." Most of the time it's an empty promise -- stay away. Why?

- Because they DON'T value your work. They'll either do NOTHING, or they'll tinker with your copy until it doesn't work. Then they'll blame their lack of success on YOU. (So of course, you don't get paid. You won't even get a testimonial!)

- Because they won't give you paid work even if you do well. They'll just look for the next greenhorn who'll write for free.

- Because these are NOT the players. You won't learn anything useful from them. (Other than the fact that you NEVER, EVER want to work for them again)

- Because companies that will let you write for free are EVERYWHERE. Since you're writing for free anyway, why write for junk clients when you can be writing for good clients? Just write a simple 2-page letter to a good client and approach them with your offer.

As I said, I know this from experience. I started out by writing for free, for both junk clients and good clients (I didn't know how to tell the difference back then).

The good clients are still giving me paid work today.

How about the junk clients? Treated me like a whore (gigolo?). Didn't even get a testimonial from them for my efforts.

So -- choose wisely.

Best,
Jerry

[EDIT: Forgot to add -- Another big red flag is, junk clients often go around posting on discussion boards asking for someone to write for peanuts, or "guaranteed results".

Remember, it's NOT a copywriter's job to take the risk for someone else's business.]

Christian,

On the point of risk:

Even if you agree to pay someone and pay them 50% up front, they're still taking a risk. They're risking that you won't pay the final bill, that you won't accept the copy and will keep asking for re-writes, or that you'll damage their reputation through no fault of their own. All projects have elements of risk for all parties.

Having come a cropper with loosely worded arrangements in the past, where I put in many hours of work only for the client to then radically change the offer rendering my original copy unusable before he borrowed heavily from what I'd written and then refused to pay me anything, I know how easy it is to drift into contractually murky waters.

Let's put this another way. If you have a successful company with reasonable cash flow and are not too worried about making this month's mortgage payment, then you can probably afford a copywriter. Even if it all went horribly wrong, you probably haven't exposed yourself to a huge amount of risk. However, a copywriter might be giving up 2 weeks to a month to write your copy, with no guarantee of any payment at the end. How does that copywriter know that you will even put their copy up on your site and test it? How long do they have to wait before they get paid? Whilst they have no income coming in because they're doing your free job, how are they supposed to pay their bills?

Anyway, my suggestion is that you put some figures on the table. It might go something like this:
Profit per widget is $X. We will pay 20% of our profits for every widget sold via this copy, and we will provide the copywriter with a log in to check our ecommerce sales figures. We are currently selling Y many widgets per month, but think this can be increased to 2Y with the right copy, which would mean a residual income of 20% of 2Y x X to the copywriter to be paid over a period of 24 months. We expect the copywriter to make 24 x 20% x 2Y x X= 9.6XY over 2 years, which is considerably more than they would likely to be paid on a fixed fee.

In this scenario you are offsetting short-term risk against long term gain for the copywriter, assuming you don't change the offer, pull the copy, change the product and any number of other variables.

And, of course, all of this assumes that the copy is the determining factor in the success of your promotion. If you're selling waterproof raincoats to three legged ducks, then it probably won't make any difference what your copy is like - ducks don't read!!

Jane

Jerry:

That's an excellent analysis of this situation. You pretty much elaborated on what I was thinking. When I first read the post, I felt like there was something rotten in Denmark. I still feel that way. Something just doesn't feel right about this whole thing.

I understand your pain brother Jerry. It's horrible feeling to be betraied out of your money. I know it, I've been there. I've even hired writers who didn't do their job. I had a writer (not copywriter) who was writing a ebook for me (not the one the project is on) and when I checked it out it was all copy and paste from the web - he wanted me to pay the last payment but I said NO. I lost a lots of money on this one.

I also had a sales trainer once who was so jelous of how much money I made (and spent) that he tried to sabotise my carier.

We all have horror stories but lets get over our selfs.

I'm not asking for free ride, I'm asking for fair ride... Joined venture.

Okay, Jane.

Great words of wisdom, like always. You are right, everything needs to be very clear when making a deal like this.


I actually have a very clear deal in my mind, just don't want to revel it out on a message board. Thats why I put my email there and have allready sent few promising writers the information about my site. I just figured that a talented writer had better stand to estimate what he could do than me.

My plan was to give the writer ftp access to the site and unlimited testing space. I learned on this messge forum that testing was the better half of any copy. And of course the copy writer needs to have access to how much income we are making. That's only fear.

And why should I want to hire a copywriter and then change the copy my self? I have pleanty to do with my time other than screwing up someones elses great work.

My site is listed in it's catagory in ClickBank as the 3rd best site for affiliates to promote (not marketing nich). It has steady income and steady traffic from pretty much the same source all the time. I didn't even want to think about hiring a copywriter untill I got to this point.

So this is where I stand. Not a looser with a looser site who doesn't want to pay. But with pretty good site and good income that needs to be improved even better. And I want to pay well for it.

Christian

[/quote]

(This is not a direct answer to you, Christian.)

Jane made the best post here. And for me, I think the best gem is her last paragraph. The majority of the projects I worked on, in a royalty or commission-based arrangement, and where the conversion ended up less than desirable, was often for a poor product, with a poor demand or for a poorly researched market.

"Show us the money," or in this case, show us the potential, would be a copywriter's best question. Give the copywriter an idea of the research, the demand and the supply (the competition and sales history with competing or similar products). At least, give the copywriter an idea of what it is, so she can make the research.