Hi there…

I sold my first salesletter for a pittance.

You wouldn’t believe me if I told you what a tiny sum it was.

And I’d like to say it was long enough ago for it to be a serious amount of dough back then, but it really wasn’t.

I wrote slower then too… so it took me 3 or 4 weeks to earn that pittance.

Not exactly the glamorous, high flying copywriting world I’d read about… but you know what?

I enjoyed every single second of it.

That in itself is priceless, the joy, the love of your art, whatever you do.

But that’s not the point.

The point is, I priced it that low because I didn’t know what I was doing.

Not the actual writing part… I had that handled, through obsessive studying of every course and book I could get my hands on.

Aside from that though, I was clueless. I had no idea what I was bringing to the table, and what my skills were worth.

That’s what got me working for so little. It’s also what made me commit dozens of other bungling mistakes in those early days.

You see, there’s just stuff you don’t get told. All the book learning in the world won’t prepare you for what’s going to jump out at you during your freelance journey.

I feel pretty lucky to have gotten this far in my career this fast… but I can also see it would have been even faster if I’d been aware of just a handful of simple facts.

So those facts are what I wanted to share with you today…

… and without further adieu, here are the 5 things that you absolutely MUST know, to get maximum benefit from your freelance career, in minimum time.

Read them, internalize them, and they’ll definitely accelerate your path. I promise.

1 – Your Clients Will Sabotage Your Letters.

They will. Not knowingly. But they’ll do it all the same. They’ll change the copy without consulting you. Rip out the headline and put in their own at the last minute. Hack up your carefully paced letter and reorder it. All kinds of bizarro stuff… and they’ll do it all having never written a successful ad in their life.

Or my personal favorite, they’ll take advice from people who have no business even having an opinion – and they’ll follow that advice, against your wishes… despite hiring you as an “expert”.

And guess what?

Even after they completely ruined the letter, tanked the launch with shoddy mailouts, and staunchly ignored your hard fought expertise… even after all that, when the letter fails, they’ll blame you.

It will be 100% your fault. No exceptions.

It sucks when this happens… and that’s why you have to work hard to defuse the potentially-career-ruining situation long before any of this stuff even has the chance to become reality.

You see, aside from stringing words together in a way that whips mere mortals into a buying frenzy, part of our jobs is client wrangling. At some point in your relationship, you need to let the client know what happens if they don’t follow your advice to the letter.

And you have to be harsh. Leniency here will bite you on the ass in 3 months, or 6 months, or whenever the project goes live.

Remember, you’re not being paid to be the client’s friend.

You’re being paid to write a winner. And if you let the client stop that happening, YOUR reputation will suffer. Not his.

So even if you need to use a contract to make sure that your letter goes live… not the hacked-up bastardized version the client and his JV partners have cobbled together, do it.

2- Remember To Balance Your Life.

When you’re deep in the game, it’s easy to lose track of everything but the game.

After all, we spend weeks at a time working on one single thing, obsessing and thinking about it every waking hour. This isn’t a 9 to 5 job. Hard as it may be to shut down the laptop for the day, sometimes it’s even harder to shut down the old noggin.

This is especially true once you see a little success, and you’ve got people waving dollar bills in your face all day every day.

It’s very easy to fall into the trap of  just jumping on that treadmill and churning out copy, day after day… but beware. Your skills will suffer, and if that happens, suddenly people aren’t so keen to throw cash at you.

Pace yourself, balance your work with life. Do stuff. Play instruments. Socialize. Read books that have nothing to do with marketing or writing.

Just be.

And you’ll find your writing is even better as a result, too.

3- Learn The Carlton Rule of Food Chains

This one simple fact can change every aspect of your freelance career, almost instantly. Quicker than overnight.

I got it from John Carlton’s freelance course (get it), and it’s a game-changer. As soon as I read it, I instinctively knew that every single aspect of my career from that point would be different.

Ready?

“You are the food chain”

Seriously. You are.

Clients will want to treat you like just another service provider. They see a dentist when they have toothache, they call Dominos when they want pizza… they want a salesletter, they come to you.

It’s a nice way to compartmentalize stuff, but it’s flawed.

You see copywriters… good ones at least, get paid on potential. We get paid for what the client hopes will happen when they hire us.

And rightly so.

If you let a skilled, driven copywriter loose in most businesses, she could multiply the profit by ten times, without even breaking a sweat.

Now, it’s hard to know this when you start out. You’re trading your stuff for peanuts, working with clients whose biggest concern is usually cost.

And that’s fine… after all, everybody has to pay their dues.

But while you’re paying them… while you’re working for cheap with people who don’t appreciate it, remember that it all comes down to you. You can make or break this guy’s business.

The first time you really hit a home run… you know, your letter makes a million bucks, converts like a rabid missionary, whatever – the first time you do that, you’ll know that you’re the whole food chain…

… or you’ll at least get an inkling.

Without you, it wouldn’t have happened. A lesser writer may have blown the whole thing… and sure, a better writer may have hit a bigger home run… but all that’s irrelevant, because you made it happen. You’re the guy who made the client a million dollars. You’re his food chain.

Once that happens – once you realize that you created that situation – it really will change the way everything works from there on out.

Just remember it. You’re the one with the skills these guys need, so don’t be afraid to call the shots.

(Funny thing is, once you internalize this, it helps with points 1 and 2 also)

4- Get A Mentor

Seriously. Get one. If you don’t have one, do it right now. Approach writers you see online, forums, Facebook, Twitter, whatever, and just flat-out ask them to mentor you. The worst they can say is no, and in my experience, it’s rarely a bad thing to put yourself on their radar like this.

The right mentor will accelerate your career more than you’d probably believe if I told you here. I say the right mentor, because it’s important to find someone you can trust, whose personality works for you.

This is very important, because otherwise, it will almost certainly hold you back.

I had one good mentor, Vin Montello, and he pushed my career into overdrive almost immediately, from the first day.

Before Vin though, there were 2 others, and they were awful. I can see now that neither of them could write their way out of a paper bag – but that didn’t stop them both giving me months and months of bad advice, or taking thousands of dollars from me.

I’m not bitter, things turned out great for me… but I hate to think of anybody else getting into that situation.

If you’re at all serious about your career, get a mentor. It may be expensive, but I promise it will be the best money you ever spend. It would have taken me 4 or 5 years to get to where I am now, without having a good mentor. Maybe even longer.

And always, always do your homework on the mentor, before getting involved.

5- Forget About The Money.

Seriously. Forget it.

After a certain point, it’s just numbers. Get paid every single cent that you’re worth, but don’t make the money your goal… it’s a great way to keep score, but this business should be about more than that.

If you can’t make it about more than money for yourself, then you really will struggle to shut down at the end of the day, and that makes everything suffer.

Your relationships, hobbies, friendships, all of it…

… seriously, if it’s just a numbers game, you run the risk of turning into a kind of addict. Nothing will get you the rush you need from closing big deals or writing big winners, and everything else in life will pale in comparison.

That road leads to burnout central my friend. Turn around and kick back with the rest of us slackers.

… so there you are.

5 fundamentals for more success, and happier life.

Read them. Re-read them. Absorb them on a cellular level.

They’ll help you every single day of your freelance career.

I really do consider myself blessed to get this far… but with those 5 nuggets of knowledge, I could have done it without the blessing.

Wouldn’t you rather take luck out of the equation?

Always bigger conversions,

David Raybould

www.DavidRaybould.com