ICA Getting Started Part 4

PART FOUR – position yourself

When a prospect comes across you, they’ve got one question on their mind: “will this be another big waste of time?”

People in business know all about wasting time, so it becomes a key objection that needs to be handled fast.

Objection handling is POSITIONING (if you’ve ever read about positioning before, it will not have been described the way I’m about to describe it).

Everyone has a position – you, your prospect, your prospect’s clients.

Everyone is in one of three states when it comes to their position.

1. They’re for it.
2. They’re against it.
3. They’re undecided.

If you are for something and you let people know exactly what that is, then those whose position is for it, will flock to you.

You become a magnet. That’s how and why my Science of Copywriting groups on Facebook grew so rapidly without spending a penny on advertising.

Heroes and Villains

The important point here is that I only want people in my groups who are on my side of the fence, so I purposely state my position as often as possible. I don’t want villains.

I do want heroes (those who appreciate value and the satisfaction a good life delivers), so I make certain I serve them at every opportunity.

I know from experience that most of these people will become lifelong advocates (and many of them friends). We stand together so we can serve each other and our common causes.

The Heroes

That’s why I set up the ICA. It’s for all the heroic copywriters out there (both starting and professional) who want to make a difference.

So with that in mind, in the earlier part 3 of this series, we looked at clients and how to think about getting them.

We learned we needed to use FIRST PRINCIPLES if we wanted any chance of finding them.

The Villains

The alternative is to pay any of the many villains out there who promise to deliver ‘a ton of new clients in 36 hours or your money back’, but who singularly fail to deliver.

The internet marketing world is full of false claims like this: “How to become a 7 or 8 figure copywriter just by doing this one thing”, but it’s not true.

How do I know? Less than 1% of the world’s population are millionaires. And of those, most don’t work – they’re NOT copywriters. They’re investors.

They invest in businesses and property and increase their income that way. The number of copywriters who earn 7 or 8 figures is tiny.

So how can they get away with claims like these? Simple. They work for a company with an 8 figure turnover and, using a technique called association, they make out that they are the cause of that turnover (“my clients have earned over $8billion in the last year alone”).

The Scam

Why do these villains keep telling us we can earn all that money? To scam us into buying their products. That’s how they earn their money (obviously there are exceptions, but those exceptions are mostly well known figures who do not sell courses on how to become millionaire copywriters).

At this point, you may be thinking “oh, so this is not as good as I thought”, in which case you’d be right. The thing about copywriting (and anything else worth doing) is that the money is not the top thing on a professional’s mind.

The top thing is how to write copy persuasive enough to get people to do the things you want them to do. Get that right, and you can write your own pay-slip. Get that right, and you truly learn how to sell anything to anyone.

This is why people have been trying to figure out the ultimate persuasion equation forever. It’s quite evident they’re not there yet, or we’d all be millionaires, but far more importantly, that can never happen – someone has to do the work (and workers are always the lowest paid in society).

There are the rich and the poor, the good and the bad, the healthy and the unhealthy. We have a certain amount of control over all three states. We can certainly choose to be good or bad. We can choose to eat better foods and exercise for a healthier lifestyle, and we can choose to stay poor by not doing anything.

All of the above is called POSITIONING.

The way you come across to a prospect is down to the way you choose to BE. People always judge a book by its cover, so you’d better make sure your cover is polished.

The best of us (that is, the people we want to work with) always dig deeper, and if you can show them what you’re really made of, these people (the good people) will take notice.

How do we do that? Marketing.

How do you market yourself as a copywriter? That’s what we’re going to cover in part 5

International Copywriters Association

PS. If you truly want to be a world class copywriter and win new clients, you must embrace all of the above. Take it deep into your soul and absorb it so you feel at one with it. Your love of writing and curiosity about human behaviour will carry you through. And when you’re ready to join the ICA, enrol here.