My 10 Rules Of Copywriting Mentoring

People ask me all the time what I do when I mentor copywriters and business owners.

I mean, why do people call me “The World’s Greatest Copywriting Coach?”

I’ve decided to come clean. Now, I’ve never kept it a secret.?

On the other hand, I’ve never spelled out in full detail what I do, why I do it, and why I do it.

Until now.

After this brief introduction, I’ll tell you my 10 Rules and explain all of them in specific detail.

Here’s why I decided to share this information:

Look, If I got fully booked for the next 30 years, I wouldn’t be able to mentor all the people who want and need help with their copywriting. So I might as well bring what I do out in the open.

I’ve mentored dozens of clients one-on-one for more than 20 years. I was on-retainer as a copy consultant with publishing giant Agora Financial for 5 years. And I was hired to critique sales letters for members of the GKIC Inner Circle for a couple of years.

I’ve worked for dozens and dozens of people and individuals.

The biggest results have come for one-on-one clients.

Some of them have gotten incredible results. Chris Haddad is the best known. And Million Dollar Mike Morgan. I’ve had business owner clients who have added considerably to their bottom lines.?

I usually mentor clients for one year, but a lot of them stay on for longer. One—that I’ll tell you more about? later—started out as a freelance copywriter and grew into a business owner with sales of $1 million in the first month.

Everyone’s different, but one thing I can say is the work is transformative. People get a really solid foundation and some powerful skills, working with me.?

Before I jump into the rules, you may want more nuts-and-bolts information on my mentoring. If that’s what you’d like, you can find it here: https://GarfinkelCoaching.com

Now, let’s get to my 10 Rules Of Copywriting Mentoring I use to help people get results:

1. Mentoring is a long-term process to build up knowledge, skills, and what I call “copywriting reflexes” to become a truly excellent copywriter.

I mentored an entrepreneur who was running a $100 million business but never finished high school. You would never know that he hadn't been a good student in the past. He couldn't write very well when we started, but he took the assignments I gave him seriously, and worked hard consistently.?

This approach paid off for him. Not only did he get good enough to write world-class copy, but he also ended up writing a book by the time we were done working together. Beyond that, he credited $5 million profits his company made to our work together.

Many people I’ve worked with have never been mentored before, or have been mentored only in other kinds of things like sports or music. There's very little popular knowledge about what true mentoring is, in our culture. People might imagine that the work involves lightning bolts of sudden awareness that magically transform them.

While there are breakthrough, 'aha' moments like that, most of the work is more incremental. But the good news is, even this kind of slow progress can be incredibly profitable in the relative short term.

2. Mentoring includes key activities, and the mentee has to analyze and reflect on the activities after they’re done. This is crucial to making progress.

Copywriting is primarily a mental activity. But in many ways, you can get a lot better a lot faster by looking at copywriting the same way you would look at a physical activity.

Think of a guitarist or a golfer. The guitarist needs to practice scales, riffs, chord progressions and entire songs over and over again, until they become second nature. A golfer needs to work on their swing, and sometimes break the swing into smaller segments and work on those. Same idea as what the guitarist has to do.

If you want to become a great copywriter, it’s no different.?

Because practice and thoughtful reflection all lead to internalized excellence.?

With copywriting, you have a number of specific skills to improve and hone.?

Coming up with hooks and writing headlines... telling stories... smooth transitions between different parts of the copy... writing subheads in a sales letter that keep the reader's attention but also serve as a high-level "skeleton" story on their own for the skimmer... asking the right questions to get the right information… and a number of other things.?

The way you get good at these skills is through what's called "deliberate practice"—getting review and feedback to improve each individual skill, and, putting them all together in your finished copy.

There’s repetition.

And facing sometimes really tough feedback.

It takes commitment to stay the course.

Some people say that learning to write copy is much easier than that. And it is, if you want to be a mediocre copywriter. But the copywriters who excel need to know what they're doing. And this knowledge comes not just from study or memorizing formulas, or filling in templates, but from taking consistent action and reviewing the results—and, because of that, they get constant, ongoing improvement.

Becoming a good copywriter is a form of personal growth. It requires effort and change. Sometimes it's fun and sometimes it's a little stressful. But when you take into account the power and freedom it gives you in your life, it's more than worth any stress you have to go through.

3. Mentoring is different from working under a copy chief in a business. It involves a commitment to learning skills and developing what I call “a Copywriter Mindset,” not just acquiring knowledge or improving on some copy you have written or launching promotion after promotion.

The Copywriter Mindset is a real thing. You might say it's a way of looking at the world. You can have copywriting skill without having? a copywriter mindset. You can even create copy that works, but without the Mindset, the copy can often come across as hollow and a little mechanical.?

High-level copy comes across as much more human, and Copywriter Mindset is what equips you to write high-level copy. This kind of copy connects you with your targeted prospect, because of the perspective you write it from.

This is one reason AI will never replace high-level copywriters. It is possible to inform AI what a good ad looks like, but there is a series of decisions, sometimes difficult decisions, a real copywriter has to go through to produce high-converting copy.?

You can’t train an AI to make those decisions, because being able to make them requires experience and know-how. That means, as a copywriter, you draw on different experiences and skills depending each time, so it’s not always the same decisions. That works for humans, but it is very frustrating to AIs.

Mentoring is the best way to build a foundation for The Copywriter Mindset. A certain amount of the work acts as a very realistic and effective “decision simulator” that sharpens your mind and informs your mindset.?

Mentoring ends up “rewiring” your mind to see things in the way only a seasoned entrepreneur or copywriter can. You develop the ability to see into the mind of your market, your prospect. Which includes understanding how those people feel, and what they will respond to.

One great example is the role of emotions in motivating people. Average copywriters are taught that people are mostly motivated by fear and greed. Someone who has a Copywriter Mindset will realize that's not always the case.?

Shame and guilt are powerful motivators in some cases, but completely unimportant than others. And will totally bomb in yet other situations.

Envy, or jealousy, can end up being a more powerful motivator than simple greed in certain situations.?

Altruism is often a very ineffective appeal, but understanding the exceptions—both in terms of different niches, and also in terms of certain types of altruism that are nearly irresistible—can make a huge difference for a copywriter. Even when the offer has nothing to do with making a donation to the charity.

In school, teachers often assume that if they teach you the principle, then you will know how to apply it automatically, or figure it out quickly. That’s almost never true in the real world, and certainly not true in copy. Application is a whole learning curve in and of itself.

Mentoring can help you organize and direct your thinking in this way so you can get good at it on your own, and feel confident about your ability to solve this kind of problem in any situation.

Except for a few top schools (in subjects like medicine, engineering, law and very rarely, entrepreneurship), classroom instruction never teaches how to apply what you learn in the real world. And not knowing how to do certain advanced things can put a temporarily unbreakable ceiling on a copywriter's or business owner's career.

4. Mentoring can seem to go in a nonsensical direction. But an experienced mentor is always deliberate about what they’re doing, and the mentor may use methods the mentee doesn’t always understand at the time. Let's start with a mechanical analogy. If your car is not driving straight ahead, the obvious reason for someone who doesn't work with cars all day is that there's something wrong with the tires. Why else would the car pull to the right all the time?

And to be sure, uneven tread or tire pressure could be the cause. But an experienced mechanic will know that it could be a problem with the brakes, or the front-end alignment. It could also be that there’s a worn-out part in the steering.

Now imagine your car kept pulling to the right and you kept replacing the tires, meanwhile obsessively checking air pressure every time before you got in the car, to make sure it was exactly the same on all four tires. And yet, if your car still kept pulling to the right and you didn’t try a different solution, you would literally be spinning your wheels!

An experienced and well-trained mechanic knows there could be an obvious, direct solution to your problem as well as a more indirect, less obvious one. A mentor works in the same way. Though a human being is not a car and a mentor is not an auto mechanic, a copywriting mentor knows, from training and experience, that some solutions to problems are obvious and direct, and some require a more investigative and innovative approach.

One of my clients did a lot of copy for alternative medicine supplement companies. He was a very good writer but sometimes got a little too down in the weeds with scientific explanations of how the biochemistry worked in the body when you took the supplement.

One assignment I gave him was to read a comedy book and write some jokes. He had a natural sense of humor and was good-natured in conversation, but that part of his personality hadn't made it through to his writing.

After the comedy exercises, his writing lightened up—and his income skyrocketed. He wasn’t putting jokes in his copy, but overall he had a lighter, more engaging tone. He started a company with a partner, selling custom-formulated supplements. Their sales were over $1 million the first month and he has had seven- and eight-figure years ever since.

The point here is not that he made all that money. It's that something was holding him back that would not be obvious or direct, and an indirect solution let him break through to the next level.

I had one client, very bright but not all that experienced, who would start to go on tangents when he was this close to coming to a copy decision. This habit was slowing him down considerably and not doing him any good, and he knew it. But he didn’t know what to do about it.?

In one session, I used a Socratic-method type of coaching where I allowed him only to answer yes or no, to keep his mind from wandering. I used leading questions but I took him down a clear logical path to get back to the conclusion he had already told me about that he liked, but then started doubting and considering alternatives.

I knew that in this case his first idea was completely on target. He didn't. He probably thought it was much more reasonable to consider many possibilities rather than accept a good idea. I had seen this as a habit that had been repeatedly getting in his way and slowing down his productivity. Really, as a form of procrastinating.

So by giving him the experience of having a clean, narrow set of decisions to get to a conclusion he had already reached, but then backed away from, I was helping him develop a simpler and more accurate decision process.

It worked. He started becoming more decisive and having better experiences talking with his clients, as well.

A lot of times, people look for what's known as the Occam's Razor answer: The simplest solution is the best one. By the way, it usually is, but when it isn’t, that doesn't always mean you need another direct, simple solution. Sometimes you need to go "the long way around the barn," as the saying goes.

Part of the skill of the mentor is knowing when simple and straightforward is the way to go, and when solving a problem requires a slightly more creative solution.

~~~ If you’ve seen enough and you’d like to explore mentoring with me, please visit https://GarfinkelCoaching.com. If you’d like to read more, keep going! ~~~?

5. My form of mentoring only works with people who have already taken some action and gotten some results with copy, whether they are freelancers or business owners. I can’t work with beginners or people without at least a few years’ experience.

One of the things about copywriting is, no matter how smart or knowledgeable you are, no matter how good a learner you are, you can't get very far without desire, motivation, and continuous action fueled by that desire and motivation.?

This has been consistently true in my experience over 20 years. In my early days, I mentored people who were “interested” in copywriting, but never wanted to roll up their sleeves and actually do it. I was unable to help them do anything more than just "check the boxes"—and it was never a good use of time for either one of us.?

One way to understand this is, for someone to work with me, they need to have traction and momentum. Otherwise, results are not at all likely.

As a high-level copywriter, one thing you do have to do is perform under pressure. That includes dealing with a lot of unexpected problems and rapid shifts in direction. It's just the nature of the marketing world, especially these days.?

In the last week, for example, one of my mentoring clients had to do an emergency email campaign less than 24 hours before a client's webinar to raise the registration from 24 to 160. Another client of mine had to reschedule a call with me to fix a denial-of-service attack on one of his clients’ websites. A third client had to rapidly revamp his company’s high-powered advertising approach to one of their niches because of sudden new regulations that could have knocked them out of the market.

That’s what I mean by performing under pressure.

And that's why having some fundamentals and practice under your belt is so important.

6. Mentoring is designed to help copywriters and business owners develop solid, confident and independent thinking. However, to be a successful mentee, a person has to be willing to follow specific instructions, and complete assignments from me exactly as I explain the assignments.

One thing you learn pretty quickly when results are on the line—that is, when money is spent, whether to run your copy as paid ads, or to get paid traffic to a website you have written—is that a lot of what you used to think about sales, marketing and advertising is just, simply, wrong.?

For one thing, the kind of writing you were taught and praised for in school—and in business, and in the military, if you served—just won’t work writing for copy that sells.?

There are many, many other things that will surprise you as you slowly transform into a powerful, results-oriented copywriter. Arguing about these things or tying variations when you are first learning them is not a good idea. Why? Because you are learning tested and proven principles. You are essentially remodeling your mindset. Not for your whole life, but for strategizing as a direct marketer and for writing copy.

Once you have internalized the basics and are operating from a good foundation, then there's plenty of room for debate, independent thinking, and trying out your own ideas.?

But first, you've got to learn the ropes. And there's a good chance that a more than a little of what you'll be learning is contrary to what you thought (but never actually knew, from experience) was true.

There are certain words, phrasings, structures and sequences that work. Many copywriters are creative people by nature. Many business owners are a little stubborn and strong willed. You may fit into one or both of those categories. And either one isn’t going to naturally love following instructions exactly.

If you decide to do "your own version" of certain things that work before you know why they work, how they work, what you can change and what you absolutely can't, you'll never build the strong foundation you need to think clearly about copy and direct marketing.

7. A mentoring client must be in a position to make back the mentoring fee, which is a real investment, within the year that the mentoring takes place. That means that improvements you make during the mentoring could reasonably be expected to open up new ideas, higher fees, and greater profits.

Let's talk about the difference between static and dynamic. If you want to get a boulder rolling, and it's not moving, then it's static and it takes a lot of energy and intention just to get it rolling. But once the boulder is in motion, it's dynamic. And giving it a little push can get it moving a lot faster.

Same thing with copywriting mentoring. A newbie is usually struggling to write even serviceable copy and to find clients. Though that person is not literally motionless, they are, for all practical purposes, static. A lot of things need to happen before they can start to get good.

Compare that to an active copywriter with some wins (and, to be sure, some losses) under their belt. Going from good to great is still a heavy lift, but it's much more doable if the person is "in the game" and has some existing momentum to build on.

It is increasing this momentum that leads to higher income, better opportunities, and higher-quality clients. Those kinds of improvements are what my clients and I are both looking for, and it's preferable to have a better-than-even chance to make those improvements right from the start of mentoring.

I had a client that almost always doubled response rates (and more than doubled profits) on promotions after he and I had gone over his copy on existing promotions and he made a few key changes. Important to note: His work was always good to begin with.

And while it's not part of the service I offer, sometimes I'll suggest a tagline or a positioning strategy for a client. Some of my most successful ones have accepted the suggestions I made, and are now famous within their niche for these suggestions. I did that for Million Dollar Mike Morgan, and when someone referred to Chris Haddad as “moneyfingers” in an email, I suggested he use that for his branding, and he did.

8. If you want to learn to write better copy, you're going to have to read copy that's better than the copy you're writing now. At first, a lot of it. Less over time, but always on a regular basis.

If direct-response marketing copy were just another version of the prose we see every day on news websites, TV commercials, blogs and in books, then it would probably not be all that important to immerse yourself in dr marketing copy right from the start of a mentoring program.

But direct-response copy uses the kind of language we are used to in spoken form, but not that often in written form. So our built-in contexts for reading and writing are different.

To change, or at least fine-tune, that context, you need to have repeated exposure to the very best examples of copy that sells. Not one or two ads, not just an outstanding sales letter or two. Lots of it. So you can develop an informed awareness of what this looks like, and, in the case of your own finished copy, what it should look like.?

9. You must accept the practice of mastery, and understand: the better you get, the longer it takes between noticeable improvements. But that doesn’t matter as much as you might think, because this kind of incremental training builds in skills and confidence that won’t backslide on you and will hold up really well under pressure.

Mastery is a concept that is not well understood, so let me explain a few things. First, mastery is not a destination; it's a journey. Though we commonly refer to high achievers as masters, people who are truly committed to mastery understand that you never actually "get there." While you can become very, very good at something—even the Greatest of All Time, like a Tom Brady—as long as you are in the game, the work continues to take place and life never truly becomes Easy Street.

You have to make some commitments and sacrifices you have to make to be on the path of mastery. And the rewards far outweigh the costs, the pains, the inconvenience.

Because you'll inevitably end up better—more highly skilled, better compensated, more highly regarded—than most other people in your field (in this case, in copywriting) because most people are never willing to make the commitment to do the work to get on the path of mastery in the first place.

10. An important rule for mentoring is: "progress, not perfection." As long as you are making the effort and really seeking to improve your copy game, consistently, that's enough. Excellence is always a far better target than perfection.

Nobody knows they have written the "perfect" sales letter or ad just before they publish it. I can't count the number of times that people were so confident something would work... and it bombed.?

Similarly, when I wrote a sales letter myself for a client that made over $2 million in two days—after it first broke the server—I was nervous ahead of time and deeply afraid it would bomb.?

So, please understand, there is no such thing as the "perfect" copywriter. Even the most accomplished fail on one or two attempts out of every five they make. That's just the way this business goes. You want to use proven principles, techniques, phrasings, offers, but there are so many factors you can't control. Including the fact that if what you have written is too new, or too much like what your prospect has already seen, it won't be appealing. There are a couple ways mentoring can give you an advantage here:

? You'll learn how to limit your risk and increase the chances that you'll do well

? You'll get support and practical techniques to help you bounce back after a disappointment.

Motivational speaker W Mitchell has a famous saying: "It's not what happens to you. It's what you do about it." A lot of wisdom in those 12 words.

The best thing you can do to grow in these ways is to take consistent action on as much as a daily basis, but oddly, the results rarely show up as consistently as the action you need to take.?

If you've never had mentoring like this before, you might find this description of progress surprising. But it's real, and it's an important part of the journey.

To find out more about advanced professional copywriter mentoring and business owner mentoring, visit https://GarfinkelCoaching.com