Dear Writer,

So you want to be a copywriter?

That must mean you love sales!

The correct use of the term “copywriting” has to do with “sales copywriting,” as in writing words with the singular goal of increasing customer purchases.

Copywriting examples:

• Writing Video Sales Letter (VSL) scripts—to drive/increase purchases.

• Writing ads that drive click-throughs, opt-ins, and purchases.

• Writing landing pages that drive/increase purchases.

• Writing sales emails that drive/increase purchases.

• Etc.

Copywriting is a very specific “world” of writing—and, from my experience, an “insider” community. If you’re in the Copywriting world, everybody knows everybody and it’s a competitive & lucrative space to be in. But if you’re NOT in the Copywriting world, chances are you have no idea this community of writers exists—and if you were to step inside of it (especially if you were, say, a Literary writer), you would be shocked at how differently Sales Copywriters think about language, persuasion, and human psychology.

Quick Context: I have generated millions and millions of dollars as a Sales Copywriter—both for myself and my own businesses, as well as for other businesses. I have also been mentored directly by some of the most successful sales copywriters in the world, and have been “in the room” at some of the most insider-y Sales Copywriting masterminds.

Copywriting vs Ghostwriting vs Content Writing

In the short-term, Content Writing, Ghostwriting, and Copywriting can all earn you about the same amount of money. (There are tons and tons of writers who provide these services and all hover in the $5k/mo - $25k/mo range.)

That said, there are some core differences between these 3 services:

• Content Writing: Usually “content for the sake of content,” and almost always the ongoing creation & management of a company’s blog. However, less “digital-marketing savvy” companies tend to refer to the creation of any asset as “content writing/marketing.” Since these services are the most vulnerable to AI, this is the least valuable service of the three services listed here.

• Copywriting: Any written asset specifically engineered to “sell” the reader on something. It could be an email. It could be an ad. It could be anything. But Copywriting is sales.

• Ghostwriting: Any written asset specifically engineered to “educate” the reader on something. Similar to Copywriting, this could be anything from social content to weekly newsletters to YouTube scripts. But Ghostwriting is education.

The major difference with Sales Copywriting, however, is that the best copywriters in the world (the top 1%) can negotiate revenue share deals—which is where you’re able to jump out of trading hours-for-dollars and into a more scalable & lucrative vehicle. (This never happens in the world of Content Writing. Although it can happen, in different ways in the world of Ghostwriting—like negotiating a royalty on a book you ghostwrite.)

For example: There’s a little-known book in the Sales Copywriting world called The 16-Word Sales Letter. The author, Evaldo Albuquerque, was a highly successful copywriter within Agora Financial—one of the most well-known publishing companies in the world and the pioneer of the “paid newsletter” category. (Their yearly revenues reportedly exceed $1 billion.) And in this book, Albuquerque explains how he has generated hundreds of millions of dollars for Agora Financial through his sales letters—of which he was paid a percentage, making him rich.

The Art of Copywriting

Copywriters are master communicators, not necessarily “master writers.”

Which is ironic, because writing is a game of communication and clarity of thought. It’s just the masses tend to associate “great writing” with “beautiful writing,” which is not always the same thing as “effective communication.” Someone can be a beautiful writer and an average communicator (eloquent sentences that say nothing novel). Conversely, someone can be an incredible communicator and a mediocre technical writer. But that’s fine, because in Copywriting, the beauty of the sentences doesn’t matter. What matters is the psychology behind the message.

Let me tell you a story:

When I was 27 years old, and had just moved to Los Angeles, I got introduced to arguably the most successful Sales Copywriter on the planet: Craig Clemens. He and his brothers had built a billion-dollar company called Golden Hippo, and Craig’s superpower was his ability to write compelling VSLs (video sales letters) for their portfolio of health & wellness brands.

Well, Craig and I bonded over our shared love of writing and, one day, he invited me over to his house to give me a crash course on Copywriting—since, at the time, I knew nothing about it. I had studied fiction writing in college, and become a proficient Ghostwriter, but didn’t know a thing about “writing words that sell.”

So, I drove up the Hollywood Hills to his ultra-modern home—the same house Britney Spears & Justin Timberlake used to live in—and sat next to him at his kitchen table. Through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, I had a bird’s eye view of the entire city of Los Angeles. Behind us in the kitchen was a staff of personal chefs preparing lunch.

He opened his laptop and pulled up the VSL script that had put their company on the map. Then he turned the word document toward me and said, “This script sold over a hundred million dollars of probiotics in our first year.” The fact that this Google Doc of words in front of me had led to $100M+ in sales, in a single year, was hard for me to comprehend.

But what was even harder to understand was that, when I started reading, the script was full of incomplete sentences… spelling errors… and weird tense changes that, on paper, would absolutely be flagged by an English teacher for being incorrect.

And so my first impression of Copywriting was that it wasn’t “real writing.”

Oh, how wrong I was.

When I would ask Craig what his favorite books were on writing, he wouldn’t name the literary world’s canon—On Writing by Stephen King; Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott; etc. Instead, he cited books on psychology, and obscure case studies of little-known marketing campaigns no one knew about, but had changed the world. Like this one: in 1929, American Tobacco Company wanted to promote their Lucky Strike brand, specifically with the goal of increasing cigarette sales among women. So they hired the “father of public relations,” Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud’s nephew), to come up with a campaign. Bernays then arranged for women to hold cigarettes up in the air as “Torches of Freedom” during an Easter Sunday Parade in New York to associate smoking with women’s independence and empowerment. Before Bernays’ campaign, it was largely taboo for women to smoke in public—but afterward, newspapers and ads began showing smoking as a fashionable and even emancipatory act for women.

What does that have to do with Copywriting? Everything.

Craig helped me realize that Copywriting is the art of getting inside the reader & potential customer’s brain—oftentimes understanding them even better than they understand themselves. And what moves them to “buy” isn’t some clever combination of sales-y phrases (a reductive understanding of the craft), but your ability to articulate the customer’s life experience even better than they can. Because when you can name, in excruciating detail, their hopes, dreams, pains, problems, ambitions, dreams, and deepest desires, they trust you. And when they trust you, they come to the conclusion you are the best person to help them—which is why they buy.

Run-on sentences, grammatical errors, and tense changes all came second to this priority number one, which was making the customer feel understood.

Over the years, Craig became a close friend and mentor and completely changed the way I thought about writing. We rarely talked about individual sentences, word choice, or any of the minutia most “real writers” spend their lives obsessing over. Instead, all of our conversations sat way up high in the hills, and were rooted in deep questions about human nature. “What do people care about? What are they afraid of? What do they want, more than anything else in the world?”

This is what the art of Copywriting is all about.

Case Study: Gary Halbert

Does that mean Copywriting isn’t “creative?”

Of course not!

If Hemingway had fallen in love with advertising instead of literature, he would have become Gary Halbert.

If you aren’t familiar, Gary is one of the most successful Copywriters ever. And he generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for his clients long before the age of Internet marketing. He dominated during the golden era of direct mail in the 1970s through the early 2000s, and helped pioneer many of the tried-and-true direct-response advertising strategies still around today.

However, in my opinion, the sales letters Gary wrote for his clients aren’t even his most impressive body of work.

His greatest contribution to the art of Copywriting is a paid newsletter he started in the late 1980s, called The Gary Halbert Letter.

It was a newsletter printed and sent through physical mail where Gary would share marketing insights, critiques of advertising, and stories from his personal life that he tied back to sales psychology. It cost a couple hundred dollars a year for a direct-mail subscription, and by the early 1990s, The Gary Halbert Letter had become a go-to resource for direct response insiders and aspiring copywriters. This is also where he would bundle in other special offers, or promote upcoming seminars where he taught copywriting & persuasion.

The reason I associate Halbert with Hemingway is because, if you’ve read Hemingway, then you know he is best known for his short, terse style. Reading old Halbert Letters, their styles are nearly identical. Both short, terse, simple, yet profound. You can tell in Gary’s personal newsletter that he’s more than just a copywriter. He’s an artist, dissertating about copywriting, persuasion, and psychology. And these newsletters he wrote are timeless. Sure, the tactics are outdated, but the writing is not.

Fun fact, in 2018, I found a website that had compiled every single issue of The Gary Halbert Letter, printed them out, and organized them in chronological order into two massive three-ring binders. The entire collection cost approximately $2,000.

They’re sitting on my desk right now.

The Copywriter Career Path

So, what is the career path for becoming a Craig Clemens or Gary Halbert?

How do you get paid millions of dollars to “write words that sell?”

There are three levels, and generally speaking, this is the order in which most copywriters ascend:

• Level 1: Tactical. There are a lot of tactical copywriting jobs in the world, because there are a lot of things that need to be created/written when constructing a sales funnel or maintaining a direct-response marketing campaign. These tactical jobs usually involve building or writing smaller assets: newsletters, abandoned cart sequences, short ad scripts, landing page copy, etc. At this level, your compensation is almost always tied to time or effort in some way. You’re either getting paid per hour, or per month—or you’re getting paid to create a specific asset as a stand-alone project. You can make great money at this level, but this is where the vast majority of copywriters stay stuck.

• Level 2: Strategic. The next level-up usually gets unlocked only once you’ve proven your supernatural ability to “write words that sell” inside a company, or by selling products on your own. Once your skill is undeniable (and irreplaceable), you can start to negotiate upside, usually in the form of a revenue split—which means collecting some sort of royalty on sales you generate inside a funnel you have ownership over. This is how Evaldo Albuquerque at Agora Financial made his millions, as do many other under-the-radar copywriters within massively successful companies.

• Level 3: Ownership. The last level, which is really the final destination of all writer career paths, requires you to be entrepreneurial. The highest-paid copywriters in the world eventually realize, “Wait, hang on a second… why don’t I just do this for myself?” This means more risk, sure, but it also can mean 10x more upside. For example, Craig Clemens didn’t make millions of dollars cashing royalty checks from writing someone else’s funnel. He made millions of dollars by starting his own company and writing “words that sell” his own products.

Copywriting Book Recommendations

If you’re brand new to the world of Copywriting, here are some good places to start:

• Positioning by Al Ries & Jack Trout: This book is considered the Bible of product positioning. It explains the importance of figuring out the unique “position” in which your product can sit in the target customer’s mind—and how to use persuasion to reinforce that unique & differentiated position over and over again.

• Copywriting Secrets by Jim Edwards: Written by another copywriting legend, this book is a great “tactical guide” on how copywriting strategies actually get executed in written text. It’s less psychology, more How To—a great read for beginners.

• Very Good Copy by Eddie Shleyner: Another great tactical read for beginners, this is full of little “nuggets of wisdom” that sit at the intersection of copywriting psychology & How To tactical advice.

There are hundreds of books on the topic of Copywriting though, so these are just a couple of my favorites.

The truth is, no book or course or training will teach you more about copywriting than you trying to sell a product or service on your own.

All the best Copywriters are self-taught!

Copywriting Skills

So, if you want to become a proficient copywriter, what skills do you need to build?

And maybe more importantly, what are the best ways to practice them?

Skill #1: Customer Research

Fundamentally, you will not be able to write copy that converts unless you know everything there is to know about your target customer.

Craig Clemens shared an amazing exercise with me that he does before writing any piece of copy for any product. He will first read as much as he can about the target industry. Then, he will identify the archetype of person who would be considered the ideal customer. And then he will write an entire first-person narrative from that person’s point-of-view—almost like an autobiography. He’ll give them a name. A backstory. A past. A future. And he’ll get as detailed as possible about who they are, what they care about, what they’re afraid of, what mistakes they’ve made in the past, what “solutions they’ve tried” that didn’t work, their goals, their hopes, their dreams and ambitions, until it feels like this fictional character is as real as a friend in real life. This first-person narrative might be dozens of pages.

Then, and only once the character feels real, does Craig start writing copy.

Because now he knows exactly who he’s talking to.

Practice Recommendation: To practice this skill, I highly recommend using AI. Have detailed conversations with ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Ask AI to educate you on the industry you’re trying to write within, and use AI to help you build this first-person narrative of your target customer. The more up-front work you can do, and the more clarity you have over exactly who this person is, the more persuasive your copy will be.

Skill #2: Experimentation & Specialization

There are so many different types of assets a Copywriter can create—which means there is tremendous benefit in copywriting “lots of different things,” but also benefit in eventually specializing in just one.

For example, writing an hour-long VSL is a completely different skill than writing a short-form newsletter. The structure is different. The pacing is different. The amount of time and space you have to play with is different. The medium is different (a VSL is intended to be read aloud, whereas a newsletter is intended to be skimmed quickly and quietly in someone’s inbox).

So, if you’re a beginner, I would recommend experimenting with as many different copywriting opportunities as you can. Because each “thing you write” will teach you something that will make you a better copywriter overall.

But eventually, you will want to specialize. Not forever—you can always “change your specialization” later. But for periods of your career, you will see more rewards by specializing in one specific type of copywriting, or creating one specific type of asset, because then you’ll start to become known as the go-to-person for that specific thing.

Practice Recommendation: Do free work. There is no faster, more effective way to experiment and power-level your skills as a writer than to do free work. And by the way, I drink my own Kool-Aid here. Whenever I am trying to learn a new skill, the first thing I do is ask around for opportunities where I can help other people for free—just to get some reps in, experiment, and learn.

Skill #3: Industry & Business Model Expertise

The same way different copywriting assets have different structures, pacing, and rules, so do copywriting assets for different business models in different industries.

For example, writing a persuasive newsletter in health & wellness is very different than writing a persuasive newsletter in financial services. Why? Because there are actually laws in health & wellness about what you can and can’t say as it relates to the promised benefits or outcomes of health products. And those laws are different from financial services laws about what you can and can’t say as it relates to promised financial returns.

These industry-specific nuances are more important and valuable than most copywriters realize. In fact, when you are being hired as a copywriter, this is arguably 50% of the value you provide. Which is why you want to avoid “bouncing around” copywriting any asset for any company in any industry—because there’s no compounding of knowledge.

Practice Recommendation: Try to commit to one industry for at least 4 years. The more time you spend copywriting in a single industry, not only will you become more proficient but you’ll also become more in-demand. The “value of your value” will start to compound, because you speak the language.

Skill #4: The No-Sell Sell

This is a core principle I teach inside our Premium Ghostwriting Academy—because the truth is, many of the tried-and-true copywriting principles also apply to ghostwriting, and vice versa.

Bad copy is when you make the sale overt: “Buy now and save 20%!”

But great copy is when you make the sale feel like free education.

Dentists do an amazing job of this. I went to the dentist recently, and she was trying to sell me on Invisalign. Now, did she “sell me” on why Invisalign is so great? Nope. What she did was give me a 15 minute free consulting session on why my teeth were crooked in the first place, and all the bad things that were going to happen if I didn’t fix them.

“See this tooth right here?” she said, pointing to it on the screen in front of me. “This tooth is grinding against this one. And as they grind, that’s what’s causing your TMJ. And over time, this is also what causes your teeth to break down—which means, later in life, you will probably need to get a handful of root canals.”

The more she educated me on the problem, the more I started to sell-myself on the solution.

And at the end, the problem felt so visceral and urgent that I ended up buying Invisalign.

Practice Recommendation: Again, nothing will teach you more about how to write effective copy than trying to sell products or services yourself. And taking that a step further, nothing will accelerate your learning faster than phone or in-person sales. In hindsight, I think this is why I picked up copywriting so quickly. By the time I got introduced to the art of copywriting, I had already held 1,000+ sales calls and closed hundreds of ghostwriting clients on the phone. “Writing copy” was really just the same skill, except writing instead of speaking.

Skill #5: Objection Handling

Maybe the most important skill of all is learning how to anticipate the objections your target customer(s) will have—and proactively addressing them ahead of time (in your copy).

And over the years, I’ve come up with a very simple framework for how to do this.

After using copywriting to sell millions and millions of dollars of my own digital products, I have learned that all questions are really objections in disguise. “Will this work for me? Can I do this as a beginner? What do I do if something bad happens?” All of these aren’t actually questions—they’re objections phrased as questions.

Master copywriters then anticipate all of these objections by proactively answering these questions in their copy.

Practice Recommendation: This is where AI can be tremendously useful. Before you begin writing any piece of copy, you should have a firm understanding of all the questions someone might ask before, during, or after your “free education.” So, what should you do? Tell AI all about your target customer, and have it help you identify all the questions this sort of person would probably ask you if you were having this conversation with them in-person. Then, proactively answer their questions (and overcome their objections) in the writing.

Time Horizon

Like most forms of writing, copywriting is fairly easy to learn but takes a lifetime to master.

If you can sell even a single dollar’s worth of digital or physical products using copywriting, congratulations… you’re ahead of 99% of people. Because the truth is, the hard part isn’t really learning how to “write great copy.” The hard part is having the courage to put your reputation at risk and sell something in the first place.

Once you “start,” getting good is just a matter of practice. The more hours you put in, the more skill you acquire.

Over and over again, I am humbled by the “infinite game” that is copywriting. Every year, I feel like I’ve learned all there is to learn about writing effective copy, and every year I find some new nuance that makes me look back at all the copy I’ve written in the past and think, “Man, I had no skill back then!” That’s just how it goes.

But, to give you some reasonable expectations in terms of time:

• Year 1: $5k-$20k/mo: There is absolutely no reason why you can’t start making 6 figures as a ghostwriter and/or copywriter in your first year. And I will tell you (because I’ve trained a lot of these types of writers) the biggest bottleneck here isn’t the person’s “ability to write great copy.” It’s all the faulty beliefs they have around pitching clients, doing cold outreach, and pounding the pavement to find work. The writers who embrace the sales side make the most money. Everyone else sits on Upwork and waits for someone to pay them $10/hour.

• Years 2-5: $20k/mo - $40k/mo: Generally speaking, this is where the vast majority of ghostwriters & copywriters get stuck. And it’s a combination of lifestyle comfort (right around this level is when the desire to “work harder and make more money” starts to fall off a cliff for most people) and capped business model. Especially if you’re just working for yourself, it’s hard to get much higher than $30k or $40k per month because you’re constrained by time. You only have so many hours in the day, and you can only work with so many clients at a time.

• Years 5-10+ is Infinite: Most millionaire ghostwriters & copywriters don’t even begin reaching 7+ figures in annual revenue (personally) until the 10-year marker. Part of it is that it just takes a long time to develop that level of mastery. But more often than not, the “big change” writers see here in terms of income has less to do with writing proficiency and more to do with choosing a different monetization vehicle. Instead of getting paid to write copy for other people, for example, many of these copywriters decide to just start companies of their own—meaning their upside is infinite.

The Business of Copywriting

There are 3 things every single business on planet earth needs help with:

• Traffic: Letting more potential customers know you exist.

• Opt-In: Getting more potential customers on your email list and deeper into your educational/sales funnels—nurturing them to buy.

• Conversion: Getting more customers to buy.

So whenever someone says to me, “Cole, copywriting is so saturated, there aren’t any opportunities,” I know they are an uninformed beginner. Because the truth is, the amount of copywriting & ghostwriting opportunities in the world endless. Look around. Is your favorite restaurant down the street even running localized ads? Why doesn’t your friend’s e-commerce company have an abandoned cart sequence? Don’t you think the home page of that cold plunge company you were just checking out would convert better if it had a VSL from the founder?

Copywriting opportunities are everywhere.

Because every business wants to generate more traffic, get more potential customers on their email list, and turn more email subscribers into long-term buyers.

The Copywriter Business Model

As I explained earlier, there are a couple different ways copywriters can charge:

• Level 1: Effort - The most common business model for copywriters is to simply charge per hour, per month, or per asset. Said differently, you’re being paid for your time and effort. This isn’t a bad place to start, but if you want to make serious money as a copywriter then you will have to eventually ascend to Levels 2 & 3.

• Level 2: Revenue Share - This is where you can start earning hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars as a copywriter. And the honest answer here is, “You get what you negotiate.” Every opportunity is different. For example, some companies like Agora Financial have an entire staff of master copywriters, each of whom they pay a revenue-share split based on performance. In other cases, you might be able to negotiate a much smaller revenue share with a solopreneur or small business owner—if and when you’ve proven yourself to be “indispensable.”

• Level 3: Entrepreneurship - Lastly, the real uncapped upside only occurs if you choose to take on the majority of the risk yourself. Now, it’s worth noting that a lot of times talented copywriters will skip Levels 1 & 2 and jump straight to Level 3. This is what I did. I had sold millions of dollars of my own products, writing copy for my own companies, before I had ever been hired to write for other people. (Your individual success also creates a flywheel of opportunity, because the more you achieve on your own, the more other people will want to pay you a premium to help them generate a similar result.)

Levels 1 & 3 are fairly straightforward, but I’d like to give a little more context on how Level 2 works.

When you are a copywriter negotiating a revenue-share deal, typically what happens is the following: first, the company gives you detailed metrics on how a specific funnel is performing, including current traffic and conversion rates. Then, you negotiate some sort of revenue share on the increased impact you have on that funnel above baseline metrics. So for example, if the funnel was converting on average at 10%, then anything above 10% could be attributed to “your efforts” and you would get paid a percentage of that upside. Industry standard as far as royalties go is anywhere from 10% to 50% of the upside—depending on how much leverage you have, and the sort of outcome you successfully generate.

Some rough math to show you how this works: if a funnel is doing $1,000,000 per month in revenue and converting at approximately 10% from the product’s landing page, then you could negotiate a revenue-share deal by rewriting the entire landing page and increasing the conversion rate to 20%. That “delta” between the 10% conversion rate the company had before, and the 20% conversion rate you are responsible for driving, is then what you would get paid on.

I will tell you though, from my experience, these types of revenue share deals are very relationship & reputation driven. You won’t find these opportunities on Upwork, or even by cold-pitching clients. Typically, these opportunities either come as a result of years working with a specific company or client, or your reputation attracting people who want to work with you, and only you.

Which is why most copywriters don’t start unlocking these opportunities in the first five, or even ten years of their careers.

My Recommendation

If you are a beginner or aspiring professional writer, I would pick either ghostwriting or copywriting.

Both of these career paths have the highest likelihood of increasing your income the fastest—because both are directly correlated to helping businesses make more money. With ghostwriting, you help companies and founders educate their target customers… which makes them more likely to buy… which makes the business more money. And with copywriting, you help companies “sell” their target customers… which means answering all their questions (aka overcoming all their objections)… which makes them more money.

Both of these are amazing career paths to use to power-level your skills and your bank account.

Furthermore, the reason I would advocate for every writer to study copywriting no matter what career path they choose is because copywriting is all about psychology, and psychology is the secret to all great writing.

You are in the business of “selling” readers on your ideas.