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What I'd tell myself if I were just starting out again
Advice for anyone thinking about starting a digital marketing or copywriting business.
I recently got an email from a driven young man who writes,
I graduated 3 weeks ago and I want to start a digital marketing business one day. I’m currently in the process of trying to find my first client/hire. But I’m not here to put in my application to YOU.
What I want to know is, can I get some advice man? Like, if you were in my spot, or starting over, what would you do? I am currently in a course for email marketing, but I’m interested in all the areas of copywriting.
If I were just starting out again, honestly, this is going to sound self-serving, but I'd check out the copywriting course that I created here. I wouldn't rely on it exclusively, but it covers everything I'd have to know, and does so in a systematic way, so it's easy to get a handle on all the moving parts of the work I do. The first module is free here:
I'd also get hold of books by David Ogilvy (especially Ogilvy on Advertising), Drayton Bird (especially Commonsense Direct & Digital Marketing), as well as a few other classics like Tested Advertising Methods by Caples and Scientific Advertising by Hopkins. And of course there are others along these lines (the internet will tell you).
The main thing is to spend your time focusing on internalizing the best teaching, rather than reading too widely. I'd also be reading swipes of successful copy that men like that had written.
One of the names that will probably come up when you ask the internet is Eugene Schwartz. I'd read his Breakthrough Advertising, but I wouldn't spend much time on swipes of his actual copy. He rubs me the wrong way and I find his style obnoxious, even manipulative, with a kind of lowest common denominator vibe. That's just me.
You should add Strunk & White's Elements of Style, and Zinsser's On Writing Well to the list, to make sure you're grounded in the technicalities of writing.
There's more recent stuff you should read too. I think Masterson's The Architecture of Persuasion is a pretty good primer. Marshall's 80/20 Sales and Marketing is well worth a read. And then I would spend a lot of time watching any videos I could get hold of by Flint McGlaughlin at MarketingExperiments.
This in turn will probably teach you the value of having the broadest and deepest appreciation possible for ideas in general. Good copywriters are interested in everything. It will also teach you the necessity of clear thinking. Doing some university-level reading in philosophy wouldn't hurt, although you'd probably be better off grabbing some books by men like Jonathan Edwards and John Owen. And to bend your brain a bit, you could do worse than old lectures by James B. Jordan. That will get you thinking connectively, which is at the heart of creativity. It'll also make you better at reading scripture, which can't hurt.
This is really just scratching the surface, and focusing only on the writing, sales and strategy side of things; there's much more to learn about web design if you're going to be doing that too. You should at least be familiar with some basic design principles, such as those I articulate here:
https://www.somedaymighty.com/frodo/
Then it's a case of getting in front of people who need your services. On that point, a piece of advice that is probably quite counter-intuitive: I would prioritize creating a landing page, email sequence, and sales page, over creating a business website. It's not that you shouldn't have a business site. But I have found most of my customers came through having a fitting offer that I could share with likely prospects. Get their email, email them often in the way I describe in my course, and have a good offer on the back end. For me, site audits have been one effective and low-commitment back-end offer to make customers.
In terms of places to get in front of prospects, I've had some success with content marketing, although it's hard to sustain, and predicting that space is not something I'd care to do with the rise of AI. My sense is that referral marketing is going to become more important for people like us who want to build a new Christendom rather than monuments to people who hate us. Services like https://kingdomcome.io are promising, but who knows what the future holds.
Godspeed.