Stop Reading Stupid Arguments Online
People debate all the time about the whole online business thing.
It doesn’t matter if it is affiliate marketing, copywriting, building websites, running an email list… people will say:
- It’s all a scam
- You can’t make £X doing that!
- How does that even work?
- What about starting a real business?
And really, you have to ignore all of that.
INVESTIGATION
There’s a guy I barely know called William McCanless. The direct response guys who read this blog will probably know of him. He’s written a few big threads on Reddit about direct response copywriting.
Well yesterday, it turns out he’s back at it. He’d written a thread on Reddit’s entrepreneur section about being a direct response copywriter.
And just like all the other times he has done it, he got a ton of people saying the things above.
And more.
People said the fact he did lived in Thailand meant he was poor and his girlfriend was obviously a hooker. People saying that copywriters could spend decades and be seniors at big agencies and only earn $50k a year and all sorts of other stuff along the same lines.
Really, I don’t know why William McCanless does all this. And I don’t know whether he makes the money he says he does because I’ve never looked at his bank accounts and I’ve only ever had a couple of conversations with him via messages.
But on this subject, I can tell you what I do know.
The information he shares checks out.
He posted a hiring interview with a guy who works for The Agora. The Agora are a direct response marketing company that does millions in revenue every year. In that interview, the rates and royalties are confirmed at $7000 + 3% for an untested, new freelance copywriter.
He’s also talked about working with affiliate marketers and the rates fit there as does his process for getting clients. The rates he talks about are rates everyone talks about. The projects he talks about are the projects copywriters do.
Copywriting Is A Skill
People on the internet say, “If you’re a copywriter you work for shady scammers!”
Ok.
The thing is that copywriting is a skill. Same with affiliate marketing and pay-per-click advertising.
Sure, you can promote scams and there are some shady guys out there.
But Rolls Royce use direct response copywriters and Coca Cola use Facebook Ads, so your market isn’t limited to online supplements or whatever.
Copywriting is a skill. You can use it for whatever you want. You can be a freelance copywriter and work solely with charitable foundations if you want. Or you can be a copywriter and not even do freelancing at all.
You can start your own business selling whatever you want and use direct response copywriting to get clients, customers and sales.
Once you accept that, you worry less about whether you’ll be condemned to hellfire and brimstone for using “sneaky” techniques.
But then the question is… do they work?
It’s All A Scam… Nobody Falls For These Tricks!
This is one of the most common and senseless things you’ll hear about copywriting.
“Nobody reads those sales pages!”
“I’d never buy anything from a copywriter!”
And I could go on with the list, but this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard regarding online business stuff.
If none of it worked, then why would anyone bother doing it?
This is included all the way up to the biggest companies in the world, who spend billions on advertising.
If advertising didn’t work, there’d be no point in throwing money at it.
What’s more… you can read tests upon tests and also run them yourselves.
“Who would sit through a video sales letter?”
All the people that sit through video sales letters and then buy are the reason that people run sales letters.
But the thing with this is… if a person who says none of it works wants to test out that none of it works, they’re free to.
By all means, start a business that doesn’t use paid advertising. Start a business that uses short copy versus long copy and advertise without using sales techniques.
And let me know because if there’s a better way to do things, I’m all too happy to adopt it.
You Can’t Make That Money!
Weirdly, people quibble about how much some words on the internet make. Every time someone says, “I makes $X” there’ll be fifty people saying it’s impossible.
I’m not sure what that’s about, but it’s the reason I never (well, almost never,) share income stuff with people anywhere.
To go back to our topic-starter, I don’t know if William McCanless makes $10,000 a month as a copywriter. I don’t actually care. He could be sat in Thailand making the whole thing up. The information he gives out is accurate, and so the figures he talks about are possible.
But in a wider sense, so what if a freelance copywriter’s income caps out at less than $10k a month?
To go back to the above section, copywriting is a skill.
If you are a freelance copywriter and you get paid less than you think you’re worth, you have the base skill to do whatever a person is hiring you to do and you can learn some more skills and do what they do.
Someone working on Fiverr earning $5 an article could say, “No freelancer makes more than $5 an hour because the people paying me only pay me $5 an article!”
Or you could do what I did and say, “Hey, why am I earning $5 an article and doing all the hard work and how are these clients making money from my articles?”
And so you level up your skills and try new stuff that increases your pay grade.
Final Thoughts
Yesterday I wrote that I was suffering burn out. The thread on Reddit that I mentioned today was a catalyst.
It’s easy to get into the internet habit of wasting time reading stupid arguments written by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. That’s why it’s good to detox every now and then.
So I’m detoxing and getting on with actual work.
I guess the theme of the day is to stop wasting your time online and work on better things like learning valuable skills and getting paid for using them.