Lukas Resheske - The Copywriting Business Formula

Congratulations, you are officially in a client services business! As a copywriter, you are delivering work to a client...and there are only twoprimary drivers of your entire business. Those two primary drivers are getting clients and delivering work.

Youre paid for the output of your time. If youre doing things withyour time that are not actively producing an output, you are spending thattime, just like youd spend your money.

You get paid to write copy. The client pays your invoice, and youre obligated to produce the deliverable.Any time spent not working on that deliverable is time spent on non-output producing activities...aka: unpaid activities.

To fully realize the income potential of being a freelance copywriter, you need to focus on removing yourself from the non-paid activities involved in these Primary Drivers as much as possible. Every minute you spend on tasks that arent revenue generating is time youre taking away from your life, your hobbies, your family, and your income.

How? Think about it this way: If you want to earn $250,000 per year as a copywriter, you need to make $20,833 a month. If you want towork 10 hours a week, that means you need to make ~$5,200 a week, or $520/hour.

But wait...you need to be PAID to work those 10 hours. So what happens when you spend 8 of those 10 hours doing administrative, legal,accounting, or prospecting activities? What happens when you spend several unplanned hours on the phone with a client that isnt productive?

If you do the math, when you waste 8 hours, you need to make $5,200 in 2 hours. Thats $2,600 per hour. Your rates dont magicallyincrease when you waste those 8 hours...so youre going to come up short. That is why you need to systematize and automate as much of your business as possible. Because, when you dont...youre stealing money and time from yourself and your loved ones.

You can build these systems in two specific ways. The first way isto imagine youre going to sell the business to another copywriter. That means that you will sell the business to a person who can do thesame exact job that you can.

The second way to build the system is to build it as if you could sell it to anybody. That means youll be able to sell the business to an investor or bigger company, primarily because youve removed yourselfentirely from the responsibility of writing copy.

The first way is what well be discussing in this book. There are plenty of online courses available to start and grow an agency...but for us freelancers, we often like the autonomy and simplicity that comes from operating solo (or as close to solo as possible)

This book is divided into 2 parts. Part One is about the principles behind a copywriting business. I need to get philosophical on you first...but if you want to skip that and get to the tactics, go to Part Two, where I talk about the How-To of each system that you need.

Also, this book was originally spoken in audio form, and then transcribed. For Volume 1, the content will still sound spoken. In subsequent volumes, the text will be edited and refined to more suit awritten book.

First, well start by talking about getting clients. We're going to talkabout a couple key factors. We're going to talk about positioning. We're going to talk about your ideal market. You're going to talk about offers and leads and pricing. We're going to talk about high-ticket selling and how to do it, and then we're going to get deeper into the tech, the systems and processes and the business model that you're going to be using to be getting these clients. Finally, we're going to finish up with the niche thatyou choose to be in, and how to do proposals.

Then well talk about delivering work, which will focus on the systems you can create that make writing consistently good copy, easier. These are lifesavers for the chronically busy, but also highly important ifyou want to maximize your ROI from freelancing. The less time you spend figuring out how youre going to write...the more time you have to make money from writing.

In Part Two, Ive compiled a list of different systems youll need tobuild, and some ideas on how to build them for yourself. Youll need to modify this information to fit your personal needs...but the skeleton is usable by anyone.