How Anyone with Zero Experience in Copywriting Can Start Making Money Lightning Fast!

If you’re going to be a copywriter, you might as well start a business. In a few moments I’m going to tell you how I’ve been doing that.

Recently, I was talking to someone about getting into copywriting and that’s what I told them.?

Start a business.

If you don’t have a clue about what kind of business to start, here it is: start an information marketing business.

A lot of copywriters, like Bob Bly, start their careers out by writing copy for people as freelancers.

Others, like Dan Kennedy, were in to sales and slid into the copywriting arena because those gigs complement each other.

Alan Forrest Smith, of Orange Beetle, started hair dressing salons and promoted them with his copywriting. Now he’s one of the best.

Whoa, I’m not in any way equating my skills to those guys.? They are “A list” direct response copywriters at the top of their game.

I, on the other hand, have been doing this for years and use it to promote my businesses and products. Yes, I have written exclusively for people and their businesses, but I have mainly been writing for my own products.

But every good copywriter I know is selling info-products of some kind.

If you don’t believe me, get on Bob Bly’s email list.? You’ll get loads of emails that are high value and every other message he’s pushing one of his eBooks, CD courses, published books, (he has over 100 of them) and a host of other info products.

So, Here’s My Business Story…

In my 100th LinkedIn article , I told you how I got started in copywriting by selling products my wife was sewing.? Heck, I didn’t even know that I was copywriting at the time.

So, here’s another business where I used copywriting to sell stuff.

As I mentioned above, my wife is into sewing. We have 5 sewing machines and we had to buy an 860 square foot cabin because one of them is 12 feet long.

So, back in 2001, we bought a 12-needle embroidery machine and called our business Ellistrations.

I love graphic arts, but I’m not a very good draftsman. I took a lot of drawing classes, but I don’t want to make a living at it.

But embroidery was cool because you can easily use your own graphics and make hats and shirts of any kind.? We purchased digitizing software to make our own designs with and I bought a video course on how to do it at an embroidery convention in Nashville.

To cut a long story short, I created my own line of hats and shirts for musicians and ran with that niche. They were pretty cool, I had kind of funny designs like my “Bad to the Bone” trombone hat with shirt set.?

A lot of my designs had never been seen before. I had oboe hats, bassoon hats, banjo hats, etc. (I think I even had a harp shirt.)

At that time, the Internet was now moving into everyone’s home, and instead of renting a kiosk at the local mall for $5,000 + a month, I decided to run my business online.

I had many hurdles to get over, because I had never heard of PayPal, WordPress, or any of those things that make website building so easy. Those companies were still in their infancy and WordPress didn’t start up until 2003.

So, I had to build my Ellistrations site by learning Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).?

At that time eBay was booming, and I started selling my hats and shirts on there. My music apparel became quite popular, and people migrated from following me on eBay to my own site.?

Enter Email Marketing

Another aspect of the Internet that was in full bloom was email.?

Email marketing had become a force to be reckoned with and there were all kinds of email marketing eBooks you could buy.? I purchased as many of them as I could and set myself up an account with the email platform, Constant Contact.

Once again, I was doing copywriting with email, and didn’t even realize I was copywriting.

But something kind of funny happened with our embroidery business.

I noticed that I was sending out a lot of my orders to two places, The Netherlands, and Japan.? In both cases, I started getting fan email from them.?

In Japan, jazz is a big thing and young people are really into it.? So, there was a group of teenagers who were collecting my stuff and wearing them to school. They formed a group and stated asking me for different hats and shirts. For example, I had to make a hat for baritone sax players.?

In the Netherlands, there was this older group of musicians who started wearing my designs and met weekly to have rehearsals.?

Every week, these individuals would look forward to getting a newsletter that talked about our business and new music apparel.

They had actually started a music club and wearing my designs was a part of it. They were always thrilled to hear from me, and it was an honor that they liked my music apparel that much.

I was also selling a ton of products on eBay and the volume got rather high around the holidays. My wife was a postal worker at the time and I was a full-time history teacher.

Eventually, I had to give up the embroidery business due to stress. I wasn’t prepared to give up my teaching job. So, we discontinued it and sold everything.

Note: We’ve recently started this business back up and are now selling on Etsy. But that’s another story.

What I Learned from This Business

The reason why I encourage new copywriters to start their own businesses is because you’ll learn a lot. ?

Think about it.

You are going to be writing for other people’s businesses, right?

So, if you already have a business background it will help you understand them tremendously. Not only that, but it is far more impressive to a potential client if you have been running your own venue.

Another valuable lesson I learned is that if you have a business or products that are easy to duplicate, you’ll get a ton of competition.?

When I started selling oboe hats on eBay, people were bidding high to get them.? I sold a $3 oboe hat for over $80.?

But guess what happened?

People with silk screening businesses, started reproducing cheap, similar designs to mine. Before I knew it, I was in a battle for apparel supremacy.

I’m not saying that it killed my business, but it got a lot tougher.

You have to find a way to stand out from the rest of the crowd, like making your stuff better than the rest.

Getting Back to My Earlier Point

If you remember back at the beginning of this lesson, I mentioned information marketing.

If you are new have never heard of it, info marketing is writing and packaging content and then reselling it. ?

The most common form of products are eBooks.

(Yeah, people still buy them like crazy, but you have to make them specific (niched) and high-quality.)

I recently bought an excellent eBook on how to survive on only an acre of land. It was amazing!

It was loaded with a lot of great ideas and information that was high-quality. It also had step-by-step directions and photos on how to do build and fix things.

The great thing about information marketing is anyone with a laptop and time can create products - and you markup can be considerable.

Bob Bly, one of the top copywriters on the planet, is a good example of how to do info marketing right.? On my resource shelf is a CD set by Mr. Bly on how to create information products. (Ha-ha! What else, right?)

It is a set of recordings by Bob and another guy discussing how they both became millionaires selling information products that they made.

They recorded the CD in a house for several hours and had it packaged up to sell using a fulfillment company.?

I’ve made similar products in the past, and they are very cheap to produce.? I would say, they probably spend $4.00 per unit to create and were selling them for around $50.

Great markup, eh?

You Don’t Have to Sell eBooks

Just like the example above, you don’t have to sell eBooks, there are all sort of information products you can create.

Here are some ideas:

·?????? Online Courses

·?????? Webinars

·?????? Video Tutorials

·?????? Audio Programs

·?????? Templates and Checklists

·?????? Whitepapers

·?????? Reports and Research Papers

·?????? Membership Sites

·?????? Email Newsletters

·?????? Infographics

·?????? Interactive Workbooks

·?????? Digital Magazines

·?????? Mobile Apps

·?????? Podcasts

·?????? Planners and Journals

·?????? Virtual Summits

·?????? Case Studies

·?????? Masterclasses

·?????? Expert Interviews

And now, you have video sites like YouTube and Rumble where you can create a series of videos (basically a course) on different subjects and automatically collect revenue.

Conclusion

We live in an amazing time, but as history has taught us, they don’t last very long.

So….

Dive in and take advantage of it while you can!

I hope I gave you some good ideas on how you can start making money immediately from copywriting.

Please leave a comment in the section below, it would really make my day.

As Stan Lee used to say…

Excelsior!

Mark Elmo Ellis

ElmoCopy

Nov 3rd, 2023

Next to the Valley View Ferry

?