Lovin’ for freelance copywriters who’re confused about what kind of fees to charge

Part 2 of my interview with A-list copywriting Kim Schwalm below. It’s about how freelancers can figure out what fees to charge & writing headlines. Here you be: === elBENBO: Pricing is a total mystery to a lot of freelancers. Even a lot of well-established ones I know. What tips do you have for pricing yourself, getting royalties, etc. KIM KRAUSE SCHWALM: I recommend talking to other copywriters and finding out what they’re able to charge for the same or similar clients. There are also various copywriter surveys out there that The Copywriter Club and AWAI have put out that give you ranges of the going fees (the latter I’m not sure I found to be as accurate the last time I looked at it). When it comes to pricing, I would recommend a few things… #1: Know your value, but be aware of your experience level. If you don’t have much of the latter or any winning promos yet, don’t try to charge high fees. But don’t go dirt-cheap, either. You are providing a valuable service, and need to be paid like a professional. On the other hand, if you have at least a few years of experience and some successes under your belt, you should at least be in the middle of the range. Many copywriters, especially women but sometimes men, end up way undercharging for the value they bring to clients. #2: Make it a “win/win” with your clients. You can absorb some (not never all) of the risk by adding in performance-based compensation to what you’re charging. For example, maybe a client doesn’t want to pay you $20,000 to write a long-form sales page. So you could tell them you’ll write it for $16,000, but then they’ll pay you a one-time bonus of $4,000 if it becomes a control. That way you still get your $20k if you write them a winner. That’s in addition to royalties. Royalties generally only make sense when you’re writing a promo that converts people into buyers—i.e., a sales page, VSL, or direct mail magalog. What your client gets in exchange for paying you royalties is an ongoing partner in the promo’s success. For example, if they need a new email to drive traffic or fresh new headline angle and lead when the existing control starts fatiguing, you write that for them without an additional fee, assuming they’re paying you decent royalties, because you have a stake in keeping it a successful control. I’ve also done incentives when writing emails for clients… things like I get a bonus equivalent to my total fee if I write their new control email or campaign. I’ve gotten paid $2k for a single email that way. Hopefully this provides some new ways of thinking when it comes to structuring “win/win” deals. elBENBO: Your best tip for writing Headlines? KIM KRAUSE SCHALM: When you’re going through your research process, you’ll collect a lot of copy ideas. You’ll also analyze who you’re writing to, put your product or service under the microscope so you can fully dimensionalize its biggest benefits, and identify any unique mechanism. You’ll then put together your top copy platform ideas and organize everything so that the rest of your writing process goes much more smoothly (I have a course that teaches my exact six-step process called Research Beast). When I get to that last step, I write a sample headline for each copy platform idea that crystallizes the idea. But it’s not the perfect or final headline by any means. It becomes my working headline when I start writing the copy, and I continually tweak it or start coming up with a list of a dozen or more alternate headlines as I’m writing the promo. Then when I’ve gotten a full first draft done, I often find “buried” headlines within my copy. That’s why the final headline is never FINAL until that promo copy is final, or it may still be tweaked while in design. It’s very similar to how I hear movies are made (I’m writing my first screenplay). The screenplay is still being edited and tweaked up to the point filming begins, and even after that. So my #1 tip is to not settle on that first or even 14th headline idea you’ve come up with. Keep working on it until you know it’s as strong as possible. The best headlines open a loop and create an insatiable curiosity that makes you HAVE to read more. It needs to sound like something new, like something the prospect hasn’t heard before that stops them in their tracks. There are several different approaches and techniques that can achieve those aims—too much for me to cover here. I go DEEP into my best strategies and tactics for writing successful headlines in my Get Dangerously Good Copywriting System, which I just created last Fall. === Continues in part 3 tomorrow. In the meantime: I made a special deal with Kim to give my boys & ghouls a special discounted price on her new Copywriting Maximus bundle of training through my affiliate link below. It ain’t cheap, though. In fact, it’s downright expensive, as it should be. But, it’s discounted via my affiliate link until this coming Friday, 4/7 at midnight EDT. Go here for more info: [https∶//www.EmailPlayers.com/kim]( Ben Settle P.S. Buy from my affiliate link by the deadline and I’ll also ship you (at my expense, not yours) another bundle of copywriting joy I am officially calling: “Email Players: Copy Salesliloquies Vol 1” Specifically it includes: The June 2020, February 2021, June 2021, & May 2022 Email Players issues. Plus, also, the transcripts of a couple intense line-by-line sales letter analyses (for my Subscription Biz & Social Lair book offers) I did for our $499/month Profit Pirates clients. Here are a few of the things I share in this bundle of trainings: * Word-for-word the single most valuable copywriting bullet point technique I have ever used. * An extremely clever persuasion secret invented thousands of years ago (and more recently perfected for copywriting by the late, great copywriter Gene Schwartz) that can potentially “ratchet up” your sales copy response like nothing else you’ve ever tested! * A bestselling writer’s secret for writing sales copy, emails, and other advertising that is so “tight” you can practically bounce a quarter off of it! * How to master the lost art of combining content with promotion in your emails. * How to develop your own copywriting style — and avoid sounding like a wannabe of someone else. * The secret technique Jack London, Hunter S. Thompson, and Benjamin Franklin used to quickly excel at the art & craft of writing. * A brand spanking new way (I invented after watching a couple Tarantino movies) to do market research that has put me in touch with my market in a way where I could probably make sales if I wrote my pitches on a wall in crayon. * A clever trick Steve Jobs used to have his audiences literally “leaning in” to hear what he had to say. * The “O” word that is quite possibly the single most persuasive word ever invented for bullets. * An ingenious 2-word combo that can give even outrageous headlines and/or sales letter openers “built in” credibility & believability. * An old magalog trick you can use to make your bullets look like they are giving an entire tip away… where the reader thinks they are learning something free… but really it just makes them want to buy the offer even more. * An infamously kooky newspaper ad copywriter’s secret for using 1 & 2 word headlines to drive up readership & engagement with your sales copy. * 4 sneaky ways to “invalidate” your competition in your sales copy — even if they sell a better offer at a better price. * A 3-word transition sentence the late Gary Halbert used to help keep prospects reading his sales letters top to bottom. * The powerful “sentence stringing” method the late Gene Schwartz used all the time that can help even people with gnat-like attention spans reading your long form copy from headline to order form. * A verbal “twist” gurus & experts can use to stand out in markets full of other gurus & experts all competing for attention. * A secret way (invented by Aristotle over 2,000 years ago) for keeping even your most outrageous bullet point claims from being instantly rejected as typical marketing hype and empty promises. * How to make even “fantasy claims” that would ordinarily sound like complete and utter horse shyt sound completely true & legitimate in your sales copy. * How to increase your sales copy response by making it more legally compliant. * An engagement trick the brilliant late copywriter Jim Rutz used to make his copy easier to keep reading than to NOT keep reading. * 4 advanced bullet point tricks that can help drive your prospects practically insane with curiosity to get your offer. * The mysterious C-word that can potentially sell prospects on buying offers they normally wouldn’t care one iota about otherwise. * How to make “plain vanilla” features and ideas in an ad or email instantly sound dramatic & sexy. * How to make something that’s high ticket & expensive sound downright cheap by the time the prospect gets to the order form. * How to “borrow” credibility from Google and other big organizations in your niche to help sell your offers. * An old school negotiation trick you can apply to your order links that can (1) make you sound more credible (2) potentially nab your business anywhere from 2-5 times more sales than it would get otherwise and (3) sometimes even severely cut down on refunds all at the same time. * A tip (I learned straight from the single most prolific copywriter who has probably ever lived) that can let you pump out reams of pages of sales copy if you’re the easily bored & distracted type who has trouble focusing one project for long periods of time. * The big copywriting secret behind the empires created by history’s two most hated, most reviled, and most successful media tycoons. * A little-known (and almost never talked about) time management trick that can help reduce writing ad copy that normally would take hours to complete into mere minutes. (Before applying this trick it used to take 2, 3,4, even 5 times longer than it does now to write sales letters and emails, with zero reduction in quality.) * Why hardly any of the sales letters for the Email Players “pantheon” of offers & books has a story in them. * The only person on the planet I “endorse” to coach or consult on my behalf. * The secret way I use to write software offer ads that has resulted in 4xs the sales than even our most optimistic hopes when launching them. * The “application plan” sales letter secret that can potentially overwhelm people into wanting to buy from you. * A truly creepy-sounding writing trick bestselling author Stephen King uses to draw people deeper into his books - that can also be directly applied to your bullets, stories, offers, and other parts of your sales copy. * A cunning way to get more sales by urging your readers to leave your sales pitch and come back again later. * An old Hollywood producer's screenwriting trick for picking stories to develop into movies that can also work like crazy for selling offers via sales copy. * A simple bullet point template (anyone can use) that can sometimes make it all but neurologically impossible for your prospects to ignore your sales copy. * An old school MLM tactic (taught to new distributors so they are taken more seriously by friends, family, etc before "showing the the plan") that can help juice up your business’s credibility with your prospects. * A social engineering method that can help create lots of raw, almost neurotic, & completely irrational urgency to buy your offers at the close. * A little known bullet writing method that can literally help create new “neurological connections” in your prospect’s mind as they read. * A quirky memory trainer secret for making words, sentences, and even entire pages of your sales copy almost impossible to forget and far more likely to sell your offers. * How to make otherwise ordinary, “plain vanilla”, and even outright boring-sounding words & claims seem more dramatic, interesting, and sexy in your sales copy. * The bizarre reason why it’s almost always a good idea to put some kind of Biblical reference (even if selling to fire-breathing heathens) in your sales copy if you want to get as much engagement as possible. * Two sleepy little words (used by the late, great Gene Schwartz in some of his crazier ads) that can help make even your most outrageous headlines, bullets, and claims sound more believable. * An example of how to use the psychology behind why humans are so bizarrely attracted to seeing “freak show” exhibits (at circuses, in books, on TV, etc) to make your sales copy bullets more engaging and interesting. * A borderline devious (but totally ethical) way to put prospects in the “defensive crouch” right off the bat — with them finding ways to justify why they are qualified to buy, instead of you constantly proving why you should be bought from. * A powerful twist you can put on some of your bullets that can literally “light up” a prospect’s neurology — giving them almost no choice but to keep reading and wanting to buy whatever your business is selling. * How to open a prospect’s mind to at least hearing you out in your ad copy before telling them about a claim they’d otherwise find crazy, silly, stupid, or flat-out insulting to their intelligence. * A quickie way to “blunt” skepticism about one of your ad’s claims or benefits. * The single best place in your copy to put your offer’s biggest flaw, weakness, or drawback. * The strange reason why getting prospects to argue with your bullets can make them more susceptible to being influenced by your ads and buying your offers. * And lots more. Above isn’t even going into the analysis transcripts. (I’m too lazy to write more bullets — and this email is already way too long..) Bottom line: This bonus bundle of trainings I’ll ship you alone is several hundred dollars worth of value. And it’s all yours. But only if you buy Kim’s Copywriting Maximus offer with my affiliate link by the deadline. Here’s my affiliate link once again: [https∶//www.EmailPlayers.com/kim]( This email was sent by Ben Settle as owner of Settle, LLC. Copyright © 2023 Settle, LLC. All Rights Reserved. No part of this email may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from Settle, LLC. Click here to [unsubscribe]( Settle, LLC PO Box 1056 Gold Beach Oregon 97444 USA