Right around a year ago now, I made my first cent online. It was literally a cent — $0.01 — and it showed up in my Google AdSense account after a certain number of people had viewed an ad for dog food or a shiatsu massager or whatever on my old humor blog.
That first cent was exciting, because it proved that you really could make money online in the way it seemed that everyone said you could — by creating sites populated with ads, and then sitting back and letting the earnings pile up. Then, if the gurus were to be believed, it was only a matter of time before I would be living in Hawaii, while bikini girls used the Mona Lisa to wax my Lamborghini.
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I remember hearing a factoid a while back that said that your income is destined to become the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
At the time, that bothered me. Outside of my family, I was hanging out with some folks who weren’t exactly rolling in dough. So to me, this factoid said:
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The way people talk, you’d think there are like four customers in the world. Maaaaybe five if you look around really hard — but that’s about it.
So whatever you do, if you’re lucky enough to have one of those customers, you’d better not do anything that minimizes the income you receive from them.
You’d certainly better not share them. You’d better cut your expenses to the bone on the back end, and hey . . . if you know that a competitor is courting one of the other three or four customers? Well, then you’d better get over there and work on stealing them away.
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You know that “inner child” we hear so much about — the one that’s supposedly deep inside of all of us?
Well, I live with it. As a matter of fact, I call him “Austin.”
In the five years I’ve been a parent, I’ve realized that the notion of the inner child is more than just a neat psychological construct. It’s very nearly a literal thing. As we grow up, we don’t change so much as drape layer after complicated layer of adult emotion on top of that inner child. The child doesn’t vanish; he just gets obscured and filtered.
You don’t get an evolved, new mature being. You get Austin with fifteen blankets over his head.
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I keep running into this little conundrum.
One of the most important goals of copywriting is persuasion.
In fact, it’s kind of the most important goal, because if you’re not trying to get your readers to do something, you’re probably going to stop calling yourself a “copywriter” and just go for “writer.”
Writers can write without a call to action, but then writers also get to mull their words carefully while drinking tea. Copywriters can’t do that. They’re on deadline. They need high-octane espresso.
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I’d like you to stop and think about something for a second.
Try to remember the last time you visited a site that had good, solid content but read like a technical manual. I’m talking factual and helpful, but not terribly compelling.
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