This morning I was thinking back to what my business (and my life) was like before I discovered this crazy world of copywriting.
I was a warhorse when I first started freelancing – pumping out page after page of technical content for 30 bucks an hour.
At the time, I was living in Melbourne, Australia – working a sales job where I went door-to-door selling government-funded training to business owners.
I’d walk into a KFC or McDonalds (or “Maccas” as the Aussies call them), and give the spiel:
“Did you know you can get paid to certify your employees in Hospitality?”
They knew the deal. It was an easy sale if I could convince them to deal with the paperwork…
And I learned a TON about good ‘ole fashioned direct sales.
After a full day of driving around the less-appealing parts of Victoria to hawk these training programs…
I’d rush home and flip open my laptop to start writing the textbooks and training materials for the very same companies I was working for (and even some of their competitors. Get your employees to sign a non-compete folks!)
I had dabbled in other creative skills in the past – designing logos, building websites…
Basically anything that I could Google my way through to build a little side-hustle.
But the WRITING…
That’s the first time I realized that this could be a real thing.
So I quickly figured how to read the bureaucracy-laden curriculum outlines that the Australian government provided as a guide for these textbooks…
And spent my nights Googling answers to questions about child development, aviation security, meat processing – whatever textbook the current gig required.
While it is slightly concerning that Australia’s youth was learning how to teach kids or build a career based on what 23-year-old-me dug up from the interwebs…
I was pretty good at building out the content needed to deliver these Certificates and Diplomas.
It wasn’t long before I wrangled some of my more creative friends into the adventure, and showed them how to interpret the jargony curriculum instructions so I could take on more work and have them help with the writing.
I thought I had it all figured out…
I would pay them $25 an hour to help me pump out more of the writing, and deliver triple the work, in half the time…
And still make a little profit for myself. (Very little. I hadn’t really learned about “profit. margins” yet… but mine were pretty damn tight) .
Obviously, Baby Rachel hadn’t heard of this whole “outsourcing” thing yet, and thought she was very clever.
Little did I know that I was in the midst of building my very first agency.
It wasn’t until one of my friends plagiarized an entire chunk of another textbook (which I unknowingly submitted to my client under my own name)…
That I realized this current model of having extra writers help me under-the-radar wasn’t sustainable.
It was a a huge (and painful) lesson for me. But it was also the catalyst to help me launch my official agency where we provided keyword-optimized content for affiliate marketers and SEO professionals.
I very unimaginatively called the business “SEO Conversion Content” 🙄
But my ads were on-point (and by “on point” I mean cheesy and cringe-worthy)
We quickly grew to around 15 writers and editors, and became the go-to source for high-quality SEO content in the industry.
You see, the SEO content industry prizes 4 things above all else:
1 – it’s gotta sound like a real-live-English-speaking-human wrote it…
2 – it’s gotta bring in more organic traffic…
3 – it’s gotta convert cold traffic into buyers…
4 – and it’s gotta be CHEAP.
Since we were better than anyone else at the first 3…
The 4th quickly became irrelevant, and we steadily raised our rates from $30 / page, to $100 /page, to $300 /page and more.
It wasn’t until I met my business mentor Kevin Rogers years later, that I realized these seo-optimized “articles” were really high-converting pre-sale copy that primed readers for a sale using strategic sales psychology and persuasion strategies.
After I explained to Kevin what I was doing, he said, “So it kind of sounds like an Advertorial.”
And that single realization changed my business forever, as I finally made the leap from “content writer” to “copywriter.”
Making that mental shift changed the way I approached my writing, and eventually allowed me to charge 5x the amount for the same copy…
Because I had learned how to identify the businesses who got the most value from these pre-sale pages, measure the results, and position my services as a way to move the needle fast when driving traffic to your sales funnel.
Fast forward to today, and I still feel that Advertorials are one of the greatest gateways for content marketers to make the transition to direct sales copywriting.
They’re shorter and much easier to learn than a big behemoth sales letter…
But are still easy to measure and optimize, and are tied directly to the sale (something that’s more difficult to do with top-of-the-funnel “content”).
You see, I had always been intimidated by copywriting in the past – thinking sales copywriters must have some super secret knowledge only bestowed upon the Don Drapers of the world.
They had the ability to persuade, and come up with magical ideas that would get readers begging to click that buy button…
And I knew they got paid bookoo bucks for it.
What I learned later, was that storytelling and writing techniques I used as a content marketer…
Would only make my copy BETTER once I learned the strategies and science behind persuasion and sales.
And that’s exactly why I created my Advertorial 101 Course.
To help business owners and marketers convert more of those hard-to-convince cold and skeptical audiences…
But also to help freelancers with great writing skills easily learn the persuasive skills to make leap from “content” to “copy.”
If you’re a writer who’s great at creating interesting and engaging content…
And you want to learn the 80/20 of persuasive sales psychology so you can write high-converting copy and get paid MORE for your skills…
Then check out my Advertorial 101 Course here.
It’s everything I’ve learned about writing persuasive pre-sale pages through years of trial-and-error…
All boiled down into a simple system that I walk you through step-by-step – with lots of real life examples along the way.