By Clayton Makepeace
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- And MUCH MORE!
The other day, Stephen Davies of The Copywriter's Institute (
FREE Copywriting Tutorials) called to ask me a bunch of questions that beginning copywriters most often ask me. And because they’re the same questions many of you send to our feedback box daily, I figure the answers will be helpful for you too.
Stephen Davies: Clayton, how did you get started writing copy? Would you advise others to take the same path you did?
Clayton: Well, it would be kind of hard for someone to take the path I did. I had to drop out of high school when I was 16, and took a job at a printing plant to help support the family. The printing plant did a lot of fundraising direct mail, so I’d sit at a folding machine all night long and read the appeal letters I was folding.
After a while, I decided I could probably do a better job writing this kind of thing than the highly paid consultant who was doing it at the time. So I gave it a try. And when they actually mailed my letter, I beat the company’s $300,000-a-year consultant. That was my first indication I could do this thing.
But my first love was film and video production. I moved to LA and I was very active in that for a while. However, in 1974, the freelance film & video industry just about died. There was almost no work there because of the recession.
That’s when I saw an ad for a small direct mail agency that needed a
copywriter. I spent several years there, and finally, I think it was 1979, I left and went out on my own.
So I really just kind of stumbled into this. It wasn’t anything I chose to do. I was basically trying to feed a wife, two kids, and the world’s dumbest Cocker Spaniel. The opportunity just to work in 1974 was what drove me into copywriting at the time.
Stephen: How long did you write copy before you actually branched out on your own?
Clayton: I went to work at that agency, I believe it was late ‘74, and I worked with them until, if I remember correctly, probably late 1978 or early 1979.
I didn’t leave the nest voluntarily. There was a dispute over a bonus the agency’s owner owed me, and when I requested payment, he fired me.
So I suddenly found myself with no job, no prospects. But I did have a newly acquired skill from four or five years of agency work, so I immediately began contacting potential clients in the Los Angeles area.
We had BBD&O and several other Big Eight ad agencies there in LA, plus Smith & Hemmings, which was exclusively a direct response agency.
So I formed a small company called Copy Overload and sent a letter to every advertising agency in the area. The premise of the company was that even agency copywriters go on vacation, and whenever you need more copy then you can produce for whatever reason, we are here for you.
My promotion for that company said, “Only a ski mask and a loaded 45 will get you more money quicker than a Copy Overload promotion.”
I immediately started getting telephone calls from creative directors who needed copy done that they couldn’t get done in house. And that was kind of the beginning of my freelance career.
Stephen: How much experience should a person have in the field before becoming a full‑time copywriter? In other words, how do you know when you are good enough to go full-time?
Clayton: When you’re creating winners part-time.
See, a lot of people could tell you how to get clients and how to structure your deals, and how to build your copywriting business. But the bottom line is, can you produce winners?
If you have several promotions in your portfolio that have mailed big numbers or generated big numbers in terms of response, average sale and ROI, you can take that portfolio and, in effect, “sell” it.
Put simply, the decision to go out on your own shouldn’t be denominated in time. It should be denominated in the winners that you have produced.
Ultimately, when someone who has never heard of you is considering hiring you, all they want to know is that you have produced winners for others.
Stephen: Would you define “success” as beating somebody else’s controls?
Clayton: Well you know, “success” is a pretty broad term. Success in life could be just defined as happiness. In this business, success is defined as creating winners for your clients.
You do that by honing your skills, learning to tell the difference between a product that people will want and one that they don’t, and then writing only for products that give you a good shot at success.
Beyond that, greater successes come from learning to avoid situations where you have to try to beat a strong control -- in other words, launch products, or products that have very, very weak controls or no controls at all.
When
Gary Bencivenga and I were talking some time ago, he told me that one of the first questions he would ask when he was offered an assignment was, “Did Makepeace write the control?”
It was very flattering for him to say that, but the point he was trying to make was, always try to find out who wrote the control and how strong it was before you go up against it. Otherwise, the odds of winning are going to be much diminished.
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