[RTB:E2] “Why Perfection Is The Enemy” - The Road to a Billion with Stefan Georgi

You're listening to the Road to a Billion podcast. I'm your host, Stefan Georgi, along with Ed Ray, of course, and I'm going to be talking today about mindset, copywriting, entrepreneurship, scaling funnels, relationships, money, and more. And more importantly than talking about these things, I'm going to be answering your questions. So I'm really happy to have everybody here. We're going to be kind of covering a lot, I'm sure. And if you don't know the reason why this is called the Road to a Billion radio show, or if you don't know if you weren't on the first call, the main reason is there's two reasons, actually. One reason is because the revenue from the sales copy and the offers I've created and the funnels I've made is getting close to reaching a billion dollars. And so there's a road to billion in that perspective. And because my goal is to help a billion people in the next 20 years or to make an impact on their lives, I don't. Obviously, it cannot work personally with a billion people, but hopefully, through content, positive messages, teaching, training, mentoring, and more, I can have some kind of measurable impact on the lives of a billion people over the next 20 years. So that's why we call this the Road to a Billion. So the way it works here is, as Ed mentioned, you're going to be putting your questions into the Q and A section of Zoom, and then Ed will be going through and reviewing the questions and feeding them to me. He'll kind of give a basic summary of the question. Then you'll be unmuted and be able to kind of give context on the question. And then we'll. Yeah, we'll go from there. We'll answer it together. Ed, do you want to go ahead and just say hi to everybody here?

Hey, everyone. My name's Ed. I'm Ed Ray. You may have heard of me. Probably not. Who knows? I am a young copywriter. I specialize in Facebook compliance, helping people scale up their funnels and get their stuff to work on Facebook. Because, man, Facebook can be challenging sometimes. So I help with that. I'm 19 years old, super ambitious. I love breakdancing. It's my favorite thing to do. And just in a really good mood today. Just kind of feel like sharing, having fun today. So, Stefan, monologue time.

Yeah, that was great, man. Just about monologue time. I will answer one bonus question, which is that Nate Goddard asked, why does everyone pronounce my last name Georgie when you clearly say George I. And That's a great question, Nate, and I have no idea. People just really seem to have a passion for pronouncing it georgy. Even Justin Goff, who's my business partner in Copy Accelerator, considers it calls it says Georgie as well. And he's known me for a year and a half, and we have, like, a multimillion dollar mastermind that's creating a billion dollars a year in value for people, and he can't get my name right. So what hope do we have for the rest of the folks, you know? But anyway, we'll come back to the name stuff later. Yeah, so go ahead and start putting your questions in the Q and A now if you guys aren't already. And like I said, Ed will unmute you and we'll talk. But yeah, before we get to the questions and do the Q and A stuff, the kind of monologue let's say that I want to do here, and that's sort of the format I'm playing with, is, you know, we do the intro, we do A. I kind of talk about something for a few minutes, and then we move into the Q and A's. And. And again, make sure you're putting your questions into the Q and A section, not the general chat. But today, what I wanted to talk about for just a couple minutes here is the belief I have about how perfection really is the enemy and why I like being kind of messy with things and why I don't worry about being perfect. And I think some of you guys may have heard me talking about this before. Some of you may have not, but I did want to address it. The reason this came up and the reason it's on my mind is I got an email yesterday from somebody who was newer to my list, and they were kind of afraid to mention it to me, but an email I had sent to my list a little bit a few days ago about how I never look at my Facebook newsfeed and how all that negativity and kind of seeing people arguing can have a negative effect on you. And I guess I put worst W O R S T a couple times where I meant worst W O R S E. And this person was like, yeah, I'm really. He did it in a really great way. He was very diplomatic. He was like, I was listening to two colleagues having an argument over language, and the one was able to correct the other who was misusing a word in a way that wasn't at all condescending. And, you know, that really helped him to understand. And so I hope that I can do the same thing for you. Because I noticed in your email that you put worst twice when you meant to say worse. And you know, I just want to let you know, and I totally appreciate it wasn't, you know, at all offended that the guy emailed me. But, but for anyone who's on my email list, you guys know I have typos all the time, right? I have typos, I misspell stuff, I have grammatical errors and all of these things. And on one hand you look at it and you say, isn't that kind of embarrassing? You're like a billion dollar copywriter. You're a business person, you're a marketing expert, you know all this stuff. You're supposed to be a master communicator and you have errors and typos and your email list. But the thing I look at it is as I'm waking up every morning at 6am and I'm writing this email at 7:30 after drinking coffee or doing whatever I've done, I'm honestly just typing the email in one take and hitting send. And there's going to be issues, there's going to be typos. And it's just one of those things where I've accepted it because the alternative is that I don't send out daily emails. I worry too much about it. I worry about typos, I worry about errors and issues and my messages never get out to the world. And I feel like it's much better. The net positive is way higher to send something out that's imperfect than to try to strive for perfection and be really worried about that. But that's just one example. I really do this with everything. Like in business. This radio show that I've launched, I just launched it. I decided to launch it last week. We had our first episode last week, this is our second episode. And I just kind of made up this format and you know, it's like, is this the best format? Should I go to monthly? Should I have a theme for every call? Should I have guess? Like there's a lot of stuff that wasn't decided before I launched this, but I was like, I'd rather just launch it, start doing it and figure out what the best format is over time than to kind of sit around playing it for two months, get distracted, things come up and I never launch. I'd rather just get things out into the world and, and create and get things onto the market. And this really goes. There's so many more examples, another two more I want to share with you guys before we move to Q&As. What is kind of cool is the I was recently featured in Paycheck Solution which is from Revealed Films and Jeff Hayes and I was one of the people and they said hey, we're happy to promote something for you to our list of people. So if you want to send them somewhere. And I have my RNBC course which is like $1,000 but but it's kind of specific for people who want to learn copy. And I knew it'd be a broader market so I was like I don't think that promoting the RNBC course really makes sense. So I'm like, why not just create a funnel where it's going to be an opt in to my email list which you have to apply. So I'll write some copy, shoot a video and then when you send people to my opt in, anyone who opts into my email list, I'll pay you guys $3. And then in my head I'm like, I should create a whole backend funnel. So after they've opted into my email list then I can immediately sell them something and try to make more money from it and blah blah blah. But I didn't do any of that because I'm lazy and have not really lazy. I have a lot going on. So instead I just said it's fine. So they promoted my email list. I got maybe ended up paying them not a ton, maybe $800 worth of commissions from new opt ins. Let's say it was about 300 people who opted in. So maybe it was like $900. But out of that two people bought RNBC and one person joined Copy Accelerator Lite. So RNBC is 997. So basically call it 1000, that's $2,000 there and Copy Accelerator Light is $12,500 a year. We're not doing it anymore. It was a window but basically I got on a $900 investment, a $14,500 return. But I didn't know if that was going to happen or not return. But that was the gross at a high margin. But I wasn't doing it to monetize people. I just figured if I get people on my email list and into my universe and my world, I'm going to communicate with, I'm going to connect with them, I'm going to do what I do and I'm going to have valuable things that some of them are going to want. So rather than worrying about creating some perfect funnel that could take or telling them not to Mail for me, because I don't have it. I just figured, I'll just set this up and have it. And the last example I want to share before we move into Q and A is even with freelancing. When I started off as a Freelancer back in 2012, and I was a copywriter, but I got on upwork, which is, well, elance, which is now upwork. And it's just that you are not all about the money. Robert said, yeah, totally, man. That is true. When I was on elance, which is now upwork, and I was doing copy projects, but I would apply for, like, everything, and people would, I do a good job writing web copy for somebody or content or whatever. And they'd say, hey, can you build me a website? Do you know WordPress? Are you good with SEO? And I'd be like, yeah, oh, I can totally do that. And I would go and figure out how to do it, and I would teach myself SEO or teach myself WordPress or do whatever it was to get the job, because I wanted the gig and I wanted to have money coming in, and then I wanted to be able to win that client over. And I figured, I can always figure this out, but I'd rather just keep working with this person and develop those relationships so that I have more opportunities down the road. So rather than being really worried and scared, because one question I get from freelancers a lot is, when am I good enough to really charge money? When am I good enough? How long do I have to wait? How long do I have to pay my dues? And I don't feel like you have to really do that. I don't like, if you totally suck, then that's its own issue. But if you're fairly competent and you're a smart person, I just think I'd rather just jump in and figure it out. And the classic entrepreneur thing people talk about is entrepreneurs are people who jump out of a plane and build the parachute on the way down. And that's really the way I approach everything, whether that's freelancing early my career or launching funnels today or doing a radio show or creating content. And so I just really want to encourage anyone on this call or who will watch the replay later or listen to it on itunes, to not be a slave to perfectionism, because it really just ends up slowing you down and it robs you of so many opportunities. It doesn't mean to do sloppy work, but it means you don't need to worry about everything being perfect. You can launch stuff and you can tweak and modify as you go. So that's my monologue for today. And with that, we can hop into some questions here.

Beautiful.

All right.

Excellent monologue. I loved it.

Thanks, man.

So we have our first question from Omezikamugwa. Sorry if I mispronounced your name, but I think I did a pretty okay job. And his question is, how do you write copy that converts well and still remains compliant on Facebook? So, Omezicam, you can go ahead and unmute.

Hello. How are you doing? I'm doing well. And, Ed, you did a good job pronouncing it.

Thank you.

So, yeah, that's a big question. I know. I've been bugging Stefan about this for a long time now, so I'm sure.

You'Re going to be like, yeah, there she goes again.

Well, I'm just trying to. Go ahead, please. Sorry. No, it's okay. You go ahead. Oh, well, that's basically the question, because, you know, people are always talking about how you shouldn't use the word you and I know a bunch of other rules around Facebook, but sometimes when you. When you. It's really difficult trying to really figure out how to write when there are all these rules and you don't know what. How to approach starting copy, and then in the middle, like, trying to build, like, a really solid sales argument and stuff like that. So I don't know. No, that makes. It makes sense. I mean, one thing I'm curious about, Mozikam, is because I know you are very kind of infatuated with this question, and I'm wondering, you know, you are, and. Which is totally cool. I'm just wondering, is it. Are you kind of coming up to a situation where you're coming to a situation where clients are asking for that now, or is it something that you're just sort of. Kind of worried about because you don't understand it? Yeah, it's actually the second one. I'm actually very worried about it because the clients that have been writing, like.

Sample copy for are all running stuff.

On Facebook and Google as well. So I don't want to have to give a client copy and they run it and then the account gets shut down.

I would hate for that to happen.

So, yeah, I'm mostly very worried about it and do you know, for the client. So basically, the way I've approached this. And I will have Ed chime in in a minute, too, because he's a compliance expert as well. The way I approach it, though, there's two things. One is certain Clients are going to do their own compliance editing anyway. And it really also depends on the client. So, for example, when I write stuff for V Shred and Sculpt Nation, and they're tracking to do 200 million in revenue this year, and a lot of that is on Facebook, I say you all the time. I can basically write whatever. I don't make egregious claims, but I'm not overly worried about it because they're spending enough money on Facebook that they have, like, reps and dedicated people who are gonna basically tell them if something's wrong and be like, hey, you go change that. Fix this, or whatever. So a lot of the easiest thing is to let the client sort of handle that. And there are a lot of clients who actually are gonna want to do that anyway. I'm talking to a prospective client right now who's trying to hire me for a few projects, and I'm kind of figuring out if I want to do it or not. Cause I'm kind of trying to not take on a bunch of work right now. But because I asked him the same thing, I'm like, hey, you know, do you need this to be, like, Facebook compliant? What are you looking for? And he said, yeah, we are gonna run on Facebook, but I'd rather you just go more aggressive. And then me and my team can kind of tone it down from there. So that's. That's the easiest thing. Like it is. It's not always on the copywriter to have to know all of the rules of Facebook compliance. I generally feel like if you look at the basic guidelines and stuff, like, for example, in health, right? No disease claims, no, not much diseases. You're not curing, treating, reversing anything. You're not giving a specific time frame to achieve a specific promise. So it's not like, lose 20 pounds in 30 days. It can be like, burn fat. Totally cool. Burn. Burn 20 pounds of fat in 30 days. Not cool. So little things like that, the you stuff for people who are listening or watching, there's sort of a school out there that says you shouldn't mention you at all because you're calling out the user, and Facebook doesn't want you to call out the user. And I think that is a safe route to go, and I think it's a very valid one. But I do think it, again, depends on the client and how much money they're spending and who their reps are and things of that nature. Because, again, I've gotten things where everything that do great that mentioned you quite A bit. And then I've done had things that couldn't run on Facebook until we removed you, and then they were able to run. So hopefully that's starting to help. And then as a compliance guru, I'd love for you to jump in and share your thoughts as well.

Yeah, for sure. So, omezicom. So when I answer these kinds of questions, I always like to answer them to the lowest common denominator of someone who, you know, may not have a client who's at a level where they have a compliance team.

Right. Okay.

You know, someone who's just starting out, who's like, hey, you know what? I want to learn compliance because my clients are asking for it. I don't know how to do it, and neither do they. So, Stefan, this might be a little bit in depth. Is that okay?

Yeah.

How far can I go with this?

I think, I mean, take a 2 minutes, 3 minutes. But. But I mean, I think. Is this an interesting topic for other people on the call? If it is, pop in the chat, if you guys are interested in.

Yeah, let us know how far you want me to go on this because.

Okay.

Because so deep it seems. It seems people want. It seems people want it. So when I was helping Justin Goff put together his compliance, his Facebook compliance course, I'm not going to give away too much, but one of the key things is there's three key categories that Facebook doesn't want. That's like a problem when you're advertising on Facebook. So the first thing is data mining. So Facebook doesn't want people to feel like their information is being sold because of the Cambridge Analytica, you know, scandal in 2018. The last thing they want is people to feel like their data is being harvested and sold.

Right.

So, for example, this one person came to me and they had an ad, like a video that kept getting disapproved, like a video ad, and they showed me the copy. And the first line in the video was, got back pain, question mark. To most people, that's like, whatever.

Right.

But the problem is because of the data mining issue, that implies the reader has back pain. So then someone reading that will go, oh, how does Facebook know that about me? Are they selling my data? And they don't want that? That's the first pillar. The second pillar is. What's it called? Data mining. Second pillar is user experience. They're a public company. They want to have good public relations. So obviously, to keep their stock prices high, they want to have a good user experience. Things that could impede on a Good user experience could be making the user feel bad about themselves. Like it could be having exit pops in your funnel potentially that are really aggressive or have like an upsell sequence holding them hostage. Anything that. Or going to a, like a sales letter that's super sensational and clickbaity, has tons of claims and like no proof to back it up and just looks like really low quality content. They crack down that really, really fast because they want their users to have a good experience. Then the third pillar is misinformation because they want to reduce the amount of, you know, fake news and information that's not correct or legally allowed. Right. So big, like any kind of results in a time frame not allowed. You can say fast, you can say faster than expected, faster than you'd ever imagined. Quick, swiftly, easily, but results in time difficult.

What about instantly?

Nope, because that's. That implies that it's right away, which is a time frame, right? It's. Yeah, yeah, it's very, very nuanced. And the other thing I want to also point out is not everything. Like with compliance, everybody wants this laundry list of what you can and can't say, but that doesn't exist. There's never like this. There's very, very few cases where there's a black and white. You can or cannot say this. So, like what Stefan said with is a school of thought that says to remove the word you from the vocabulary. For people who are just getting started in compliance, I highly recommend it. Because if you think about it, right, if using the word you, it's like, are you sick and tired of xyz? Don't you hate it when xyz, right? It calls out the user, but so it's just like the 80, 20 of it make it really easy. Just remove the you. Because it removes a lot of the issues that you can run into, especially as someone who's newer to compliance. But down the road, as you get better, you can start putting you back in, but in certain areas. So it's more like conversational. Like it would be like, you see. Or you know.

Maybe you've heard this before or maybe, you know.

Yeah, yeah, you know, maybe you've heard a story similar to mine before, right? Where it's a conversational you, not a pain driven you or, you know, a personal attribute you. If that makes sense. Me rambling at this point?

No, makes a lot of sense.

Awesome. I'm glad to help. If you guys want more information, you can go to my Facebook while I post almost every single day. Compliance, business mindset, whatever it is, yeah, it's awesome.

Ed, thank you so much. Most of that helps. Yeah, a whole lot. Thank you very much, Stefan and Ed. Cool. Yeah, our pleasure. Thank you for that, Ed. One other thing on the, on the negative user experience as well. I just want to point out it's the same thing with, even in your copy and your messaging focusing a bit more on positivity versus, like, negative stuff. Right. So, like, if you're doing weight loss, you don't, you can't sit around like fat shaming somebody or if you're doing investing and it's like you can talk about, you can talk about being frustrated. Sure. But if it's something about, you know, I was humiliated and felt like a piece of crap and I wanted to die and you start going really dark and negative, Facebook's just not going to be into it because they want the users to feel good. Because the more the dopamines are, the more dopamine's firing in people's brains and the endorphins, the longer they'll stay on Facebook, the more addicted they'll get, the more ads they can sell. But, yeah, so, yeah, it's true. Don't go too dark on Facebook. That's a great rule of thumb, even for one of the weight loss offers I have now, which is doing a couple million dollars a month in revenue. You know, the original version had humiliating, like, embarrassing, all this stuff, and I just changed it to like, frustrating. It's like, oh, this was a frustrating experience. Which is very different than I was humiliated and felt like a total piece of garbage. I mean, it's a huge difference. So even little tweaks like that can be really helpful for Facebook.

Yeah. And one of my favorite things to do on Facebook is to make neutral statements. So one of the ads that I wrote a while back, which really, really crushed, so most people writing copy would go at the lines of, don't you hate your job? Aren't you sick and tired of having a boss that shits on you and makes you feel like a horrible human being and underpays you? But the way that I went about it was one of the greatest struggles in today's world is being stuck in a dead end job. And that's part of my hyper compliant viralab framework, which is the self identifying pattern interrupt. So it's like that first line is something that catches somebody's attention and they go, oh, wow, that actually I resonate with that. Even if you don't speak directly to them, saying like you, the message catches Their attention because it's something that they can relate to or they've heard about or point out a truth that they may not have been looking at.

Yeah, that's awesome. Thanks for sharing that. This is great. I think there's a lot of good value here. So. But yeah, let's do another question, Ed.

Let's do it. Oh, okay. Okay, Got you. So we got a question here from Sean Caesar Cesar Saysr. I'm not sure because there's no second a. But anyway, he asked, does writing successful ads work? I'm assuming he means as a newer copywriter. Like to like handwriting, he says, or do you suggest better exercises for copywriters? So, Sean, let me unmute you. There we go.

Hey, what's up, Sean? How are you?

Hey, how are you doing?

Well. So was it Cesar or Cesar?

It is Cesar.

Yeah. Cesar. Cool. And then you. Yeah. Just to clarify, you're thinking about as far as the cam writing ads goes, Is that kind of the question? That's it.

Handwriting ads.

Cool. Yeah. I still like doing that. I don't. But I type them. I don't get. I don't physically handwrite. You know, people talk about. It was like, it was. Was it Gary Halbert or Eugene Schwartz who said to handwrite everything? And when it wants to put in Gary Halbert, I think you say Albert. Yeah.

Because ego and state, everything is different.

I feel like the. He didn't use, like, computers as much, though, you know, Like, I don't know. I just feel like you can type, like, in this. It's the same thing. So my personal opinion, the way I approach this is. This is what I did early on when I was starting out and getting better, is I would read a lot of winning sales letters, and I would watch the videos and I would transcribe them. So if it was a video, I would play the video and type out word for word as it was going. And if it was a sales letter, I'd have that up and a word document next to it, and I would go through and I would repeat it word for word. And I still do that today. If I'm gonna write in a market that I'm not very familiar with, I will find, like, other successful sales letters in that market, pull them up, and I will just go through and just rewrite the sales letter, like, by hand, but via typing. I know. I saw what Rachel just said. Physiologically, typing doesn't give the same result. Totally get it. I've heard the studies on that too. But honestly, yeah.

When I first, like, they told me you have to handwriting them. So I started to handwrite them. And once I write several paragraphs, I feel poor. Then this is not working for me. But when I read the ad, only reading it, I can identify that, hey, he meant this in this paragraph, he said that. And I can make like a analysis to the ad just by reading it without a. Without writing. But they say, no, you have to write it too, so that the scheme of the ad will be downloaded in your conscious mind. And when you will start writing ads, you will use the same tone and voice and all these things. Is that true or it's not?

Right? Well, I mean, yeah, I think that. I think everybody's different. Everybody's learning style is different, too. I think one danger we fall into is. But anyone who's had success when they say stuff, we always take it as being like, canon or like an, you know, inviolable law. I don't know how you say that, but basically a law that can't be violated. And I think that, you know, if that is a style that's working for you, I think that could work. But I think probably, maybe there's a hybrid there where you read and then you write down sort of your thoughts or notes on each section and you kind of type and maybe you write out the phrases specifically that you really are getting value from and all that. Because my thing with handwriting, like physically handwriting, is that my hands are going to cramp. I'm going to. It's going to take me so much longer. And I just don't feel like it's worth it, honestly. So I don't think you have to do it by hand. But I think being exposed to a ton of copy and looking at it and reading through it and making notes, I think that's where the real value is. For me, the real value is if you're reading a bunch of sales letters and scripts and sales copy and ads or whatever it is, and you're getting exposed to that, and then you're writing down what you're noticing. You're writing down your observations on commonalities and patterns and phrasing. I think that will make you very attuned and really get your brain working in the right direction. So when you go to write your own copy, you can draw on that experience, you can draw on those memories, you can draw on some of the phrasing and you can do it that way. But I. Yeah, for me, I'm just. I don't. I just can't get behind handwriting stuff. If it works for you or anybody who's watching or listening. I think that's great. But for me, personally, I just don't think it's. It's worth my time.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, my pleasure. Cool. Ed, who we got next here? Beautiful.

All right, so we have a good question here from. Let's see here. A lot of good questions from Sean.

Wow.

Okay. I like this. This is a good question from. Man, you guys. Are your names Marcus Sortillas? So, Marcus Ortiz asked when. When you transitioned from working on other people's offers to your own offers, what were some of the differences you discovered?

Cool. What's up, Marcus? How are you? I'm doing good. Good. So just. I've seen that a lot of copywriters start off working on other people's offers, and then later they start doing their own. So I'm just kind of curious, like, what are the differences that you've noticed, like, when you make the transition? Yeah. And are you thinking specifically in terms of writing copy, or would you want me to go kind of even into running a business and that sort of stuff, too? Yes. Okay, cool. So, yeah, I think as far as writing copy goes, when it's your own offer, it's not any different. I think the way you have to do, you have to treat yourself as a client and just treat yourself as your best client. I think where people run into trouble is that they don't go as hard for themselves as they would for a client, and they sort of feel like they can take it easy and they feel not as motivated because there's no deadline and there's no external pressure. So I think the most important thing there is to just treat yourself like you're vip, really premium client. And if you write copy in that and you kind of do it from that mindset, I think that helps tremendously. That's probably the most important thing, because otherwise it's easy to put it off because there's no one breathing down your neck. There's no real deadline. It's easy, again, to just sort of worry about. Would I say this, but if you almost remove yourself here and you think of yourself as. Again, like, pretend it's not for you, almost. Right. I just think that that. That tends to be the best. Best approach that I've seen. And I'll add that one concern I had about running my own offers, like, how do you avoid getting, like, sucked into, like, spending all your time, like, on customer service and, like, answering support emails and stuff like that, especially if you're just Starting out. Yeah, I think even just starting out, you can probably outsource that pretty easily. You don't have to go hire like a whole call center, but it's like you could find a va, a virtual assistant on upwork or somewhere and pay them, you know, seven or ten dollars an hour and they're like in the Philippines or something. Right. To answer emails for you. And maybe, you know, it costs a couple hundred bucks a month, but assuming that you're making sales that that's offset as you scale, you could then of course move to a call center or someone who's a little bit more advanced. But I would look to just outsource those sorts of things so you can focus on the key needle moving activities that are going to increase revenue, increase profitability, increase sales and all that kind of stuff. Thank you. Yeah, that was one of the biggest obstacles for me. I was worried about dealing with a problem in events like that. Yeah, no, it makes sense for my first health supplement company. And I was doing email drops at the beginning and I felt really, I was excited. And then I hand checked the customer support email and I'd launched maybe like a week or 10 days before and I never checked the email. And I logged in and there were hundreds of emails from people and I had a total panic attack. Right. Yeah. But, you know, and then I ended up hiring in house customer service pretty fast and doing all of that. But again, yeah, I think you can just outsource that to somebody like a virtual assistant and it'll be pretty cost effective and it'll save you a lot of time and allow you to get a good roi because again, you can focus on what's actually generating sales and revenue. All right, thank you. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks, Marcus.

All right, excellent, excellent. Great question. Great answer. Oh, okay. Got a really, really, really great. A lot of copywriters on this call. A lot of copywriters. But a question here from Simon Chiem Cham. I'm sorry if I mispronounce your name. Yes, hi, Stefan. What are your practices and habits for overcoming resistance when sitting down to write copy? Simon, go ahead.

Hey, Simon, how are you? I can't hear. Simon, can you hear? Simon? Ed. No. Okay, I'll give it a second and then I can always answer without.

Yeah, we can always. Oh, Simon, can you hear me?

Yeah. There we go. Okay. Awesome. Sorry about that.

Had headphones.

Doing well, guys.

Thanks for the question.

Yeah, yeah, so. So I've been following you for a while and Ian Stanley, and you know.

One of the biggest challenges Just sitting down and you know, pushing through creative resistance.

And it's, it's obviously just like sitting down and like just writing.

And I was curious, like, do you have any sort of habits that you like to do, like meditation and all that stuff?

Just curious, what kind of writing are you normally doing.

Right now?

It's direct response, long form sales and email sales pages and emails. Cool. Yeah. The biggest things for me would be one to have like hard time scheduled where I'm going to be writing copy. So having that time blocked off on my calendar and knowing, okay, during this period of time I'm going to write, I think that is important when I. And then when that happens, I close everything. So I quit Skype. I keep Skype quit all day actually. But if I happen to have it open and make sure it's quit, I collapse all my like browser windows. I X out of Facebook. I don't have Gmail open. I have my phone face down. Everything like that, that's, that's number one. Because I don't want to have my, if I get into a flow state, I don't want to have it get interrupted by a ding or a message or whatever it is, you know. Another thing would be for me, using RNBC does help a lot. Like my methodology. Because if you, if you've done the research, you kind of know, right, you've done the research and if you've done the mechanism and you've done the brief, then when it comes time to write the copy, then you sort of have a lot of the copy already written. So it's easy to just have a place to jump off from. And that really helps me a lot to really avoid writer's block or anything like that. I have in the past I've practiced. I don't like meditate, I would like to get more into meditation, but I have practiced doing a routine where I listen to a song that kind of gets me fired up. And as I'm doing that, I then kind of repeat some affirmations. I had a coach who told me to do this and, and frankly it worked. And then I sort of stopped doing it. But it was, it was cool, cool exercise. So just stuff like, you know, I'm one of the best copywriters in the world and my writing, you know, helps people and brings, changes the lives of my clients, the customers. And you know, I kind of had like a cool set of affirmations that I would do. And so yeah, those are two of the main things. But again, if you have that method or Process. Like, I'm not trying to plug RNBC on the call, but like, again, if you have a process where you're writing little chunks of copy already, then when it comes time to actually write a full direct response promo, you already have all the copy written and it's a lot easier to jump in. The big thing is like a blank white page. Right. Staring at a big blank white page is kind of always intimidating, but if you already have some parts and you know where it's gonna. Where stuff's gonna go, it makes a lot easier to sort of fill in the blanks, if that makes sense. Definitely.

Got it. I appreciate it.

Thank you so much. Yeah, happy to. Happy to share. All right, who we got next?

Oh, next up. Oh, we got yo. So this just. Just to give you guys the quick rundown on the story behind this. This one question. So this question was buried at the very, very bottom. And then I put in the chat, I said, hey guys, make sure to vote for what question you wanted answered next. And when I said that, this one question was at the bottom. All the way to the top, baby. So next up, we have my good friend Jaz Cortine asked when the client's well researched and the mechanism behind the problem solution. So for those who aren't aware, Stefan's. One of like, one of my favorite parts about Stefan's method is has explanation of the mechanism behind the problem and the mechanism behind the solution. It's completely unique approach I've never heard of before and actually changed the game of copywriting for me. So that's amazing. Jaz. Basically asking if your client's done the research for you, do you still take the time to research your own stuff or just go off the client's expertise?

Cool. And then there he is. Hey, Jaz, how's it going? Hey, Stefan. Thanks, Ed.

Yeah.

Yes, definitely.

You know who I'm writing for. So this guy obviously is genius.

And he overwhelmed me on the call that we all had and he kind.

Of already knows a lot of behind why the product works, why other things don't work. And I'm doing my own research too.

Going through the mechanism. But what do you do when your.

Client already knows so much?

Do you take the time to come up with your own mechanism or are.

You mostly going off of what the client already knows?

Yeah, that's a really good question. So I. It definitely depends. If the client has a really unique mechanism that I've never heard before, then I'm totally down with using that. I'm still gonna do Research to kind of back it up. And I'm still gonna write it out in my own terms and go through the mechanism step. You know, I think that that's really important. But if it's a really unique mechanism that is really novel and special, then I'm all about it. And that's, that's great. And that does shortcut the process. The challenge that a lot of copywriters run into is there. I don't know if it's one or two, but I'll kind of just vocalize it. Sometimes the client thinks they have a mechanism when they don't. So I've seen this twice recently. One is I'm doing an offer for a client and kind of the anti aging space, and they have on their page a whole breakdown of this one ingredient. It's actually not even a mechanism, it's like an ingredient. But they're talking about this one ingredient and how great it is. And it's an ingredient that everybody's heard of or a lot of people have heard of before. And like, so that's what their whole sort of current page talks about. But as I was going through the formulation, there's another ingredient that I'd never heard of before that has crazy cool research. It basically is the only ingredient known to science to allow you to create new mitochondria, which are the powerhouses of your cells. And there's all these double blind human studies on how it can help you to like, your mental clarity and your mind and just it protects your liver and it does all these amazing things. And so when I'm kind of going through and looking at that, it became really clear to me, even though the client has this existing copy and it's talking about this common ingredient, like, no way my star ingredient is going to be this one that I just did. All that is way more interesting than novel. So in a case like that, even though the client is an expert and he's like, you know, the one who formulated it and done all this stuff, I'm still going to go with my gut and go with what I think is actually the most interesting thing. The other example I have, Jaz, that happened recently is a coaching client of mine is working with an ex client of mine. I connected them together and he's doing a job for this guy. It's also in the health space. This one's actually a skin product, so it's relevant, but he is. Then the client had my friend get on. Let's call my coaching client, like my friend and call the Client who's paying him. The client. Right. So the client had my friend get on call the formulator guy and supplier, and the guy kind of broke it down for him, but he basically gave him like a seven step thing and it does all this stuff. And then my friend was trying to like write the mechanism and he kind of had all of these steps and all these things it does. And essentially I was like, dude, you got to like take all of that and kind of throw it out the window and focus on the one real cause of the problem. Right. What's the one root cause? Why is that really surprising? Right. Even if you're going to say it's, this is a random example, this isn't relevant to that product, but, well, this isn't the actual mechanism. But, you know, say your whole thing is, you know, collagen. Like, you, you know, you're skewed wrinkles because you don't have as much collagen once you hit the age of 40. Like, that's not really unique. But if you go like a step deeper and you're like, well, why don't you have more collagen? And you find out that there's some protein in the human body that feeds collagen, but that, that starts to vanish after the age of 35. And that's why then we don't have as much collagen and we have more wrinkles. Right. So, like, you can take what people are telling you, but I generally am still going to want to go another layer deeper. Otherwise, I just think, like, yeah, I think it would be a mistake to trust the client kind of fully. And I think if you can make it more unique or more of an exciting discovery, I think that's still an important thing to do. Wow, that's really deep.

Thank you.

Yeah. Does that help, though?

Yeah, that helps a lot.

That's wisdom right there. Okay, cool. Awesome. Really, really glad to help. And I'm glad I see some other people saying it was helpful too. So. Awesome.

Sorry, I was, I was just answering a question in the chat, which I will actually read out because it's a good question. So Elizabeth B. Asks, can your RNBC course be used for, like, your methodology used for emails, Facebook ads, e commerce, et cetera, or is it only for long form? And I said in the chat, I said, elizabeth, you can use RNBC for any type of copy because it teaches you not how to write, but how to think as a copywriter. So you can apply that to any type of writing you do.

Yeah, I agree with That I think the process, like the research process, you know, the first thing you used it for, Ed, when you joined Copy Accelerator and I taught research and like just from the research module you created a new set of ads for who you were working with at the time. And it was like some of the best click through rates you ever had, right? Yeah, it was like crushed. Yeah. So just stuff like research, the mechanism stuff. I think about it because even on E Comm, I think a lot of E Comm pages actually are missing good mechanisms and I think that's a huge mistake. And again, you really want to differentiate your product so you can have a. A unique mechanism for almost anything. I mean even like even clothing. Right. What makes this clothing unique? Is it more comfortable than other clothing? Is it more stylish? And you can find sort of things that really help you to differentiate what you're selling from everybody else. And then a lot of the other stuff, I mean we have specific modules in RNBC on email marketing and on Facebook ads and on all this other stuff. So there's specific modules. But even just things like fascinations or curiosity bullets or writing great headlines, I mean there's so much stuff that applies everywhere. So I really do think that is something that, you know, applies to almost any type of copy or selling.

Yeah. If you're thinking about buying Stefan's course, do it, do it. Seriously, it's.

Thanks Ed.

Seriously dude, your Facebook group is killer. Like people that. Oh yeah, you get to join my Facebook group. No, you have like step. Some of the heaviest haters in the industry in there just chillin, you know, answering comments and connecting. I know one guy who went in, brand new copywriter. He's already secured like 8k worth of gigs. He's only been there for like a month. But most copyrights are struggling to get like $300 gigs on frickin upwork or another Facebook groups. It's a different caliber, man. Seriously, it's incredible.

Thank you. And I see people saying some nice stuff in the chat too. I really appreciate you guys. Thank you so much. But let's go. More questions. I'm a humble, modest guy. I don't want to turn this into an RNBC infomercial.

Brought to you in part by rnbc.

Yeah, right.

This is Stefan. Georgia.

Are you sick and tired of staring.

At blank white paper when you try to write sales letters for your clients?

I know.

Next up, we have a question from Jessica Baines. And by the way, Sean. So Sean asked this question earlier. Sean asked like four or five questions but his question is the number one question. So we'll get him back on after this next one just to give everybody else a chance. Jessica says hi. Thank you so much for doing this. How much study of copywriting do you recommend doing in a day for newbies? She's struggling to balance her time and knowing how much time she should spend a day to be successful.

Cool. How's it going, Jessica? Good. Can you hear me? I can, yeah. Oh, great. Thank you. Yeah. So that's what I struggle with is like knowing how much is enough, you know, because there's no like, metric that says, oh, great, you put two hours in today. You know, I mean, obviously, you know, kind of like, oh, I think I'm getting this. But you know, where is that thing of. I guess I want to know is like, how much time in a day is sufficient or good enough? Yeah, yeah. And do you have a, like a full time job right now as well and you're kind of studying on the side? No, I'm unemployed, but I am taking an AWAI email copy class. And so I do have some homework with that, which is reading and trying to write emails. So I do that in addition to just trying to study. Cool. Got it. Yeah. You know, I don't think there's any magic number or answer. Right. But really the way I would look at that is, and I think if you spend too much time, you hear people who, they're obsessed and they study for 12 hours a day and all that, but I think that's a good way to get burned out, honestly. Right. Like maybe that works for a couple weeks or a month or something like that. Sorry, one second here. But over time I think that that's going to be negative and not beneficial. So I really look at it as a perspective, as much time as you can put into it comfortably without getting burned out and still feeling excited and still feeling passionate, all that kind of stuff. Like, I think, you know, that's fine. So if you can spend two hours a day most days, I think that's incredible. That's way more than most people are doing. And then I think over time the practicing component is cool too. So the studying is one thing, but actually writing and getting practice with writing and getting experience doing that is really, really important too. So, I mean, I look at it, last thing I'll say to you, Jessica, is like, maybe the thing about like the atomic habits type stuff, like if you look at like, even if you get like 1% better at something right over time, like that adds up exponentially so if you just can get 1% better every. Not even every day, but like every week or, you know, whatever. Even every month over, you know, over time, that compounds and you really can accelerate pretty quickly just by doing that. It was Ed Ray. It was Atomic Habits. It's a really, really good book. So does that make sense, Jessica? Yeah, it does. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Yeah, happy to help. Okay, thanks. Cool.

Awesome.

Cool.

All right, so Christopher has to go, but his. His question was number two and Sean's given the A.

Okay.

That we can let Chris go first. So Christopher Ogle back again. Nice. Because question asked you last week. He's back on again today.

Yes. Good. That's what I want. I won't be able. You guys can come every week. This isn't a one off thing.

He goes, hey, Stefan, my question for the week. What factors go into how you value yourself to clients and new clients? How did you. Or did you have a process to determine your rate in the early stages and what elements went into deciding that? Is it a logical process? Intuitive?

Both.

Or is there a formula?

Cool. Great question. How are you doing, Christopher?

Hey, really well.

Thanks, Stefan.

Ned, good to be back. Thanks for all of the value so far on this call as well. It's brilliant.

Yeah. Thank you for being here. Are you in the middle of family time right now?

No, it's about seven minutes and about seven o' clock is when the little one needs to be. Needs to be fed and then put down. So that's why I'm very, very grateful that Ed and Sean let me slip in. I'll get through this one because I did send you an email about this one yesterday for your YouTube videos. But I think there's a few people who might get some value from this question as well. And you know what? In the beginning of this call, you really did answer a lot of it in your mindset section about not being a perfectionist. And it does answer a lot of the question. But I suppose in my specific example, it's because of the time sensitivity of the situation that we're in. And, you know, the COVID kind of wiped out the majority of my business and I switched to copywriting. So I've been writing for a number of years, but not professionally. So I kind of went back to basics, went on upwork and that sort of stuff. But now that I've got a couple of clients, I'm starting to get confident in that professionalism, sort of sort of part of it and actually running it as a business. I Kind of feel like, how do you then go from say, doing $30 an hour on upwork to actually charging really good rates? And I just wanted to get your thoughts on what goes into that. If you were in my position, would you say, okay, I'm going to make an investment decision to actually go into rnbc, because then I can use RNBC as a tool to say to potential clients that my value should be higher because I actually study the number one copywriters course, so to speak. How would you find ways to increase your value besides the actual results that you get from clients? I suppose that's kind of my question.

Yes, it's a great question, Christopher. So the way a couple of thoughts come to mind, one is the way I would look at it from like a charging perspective is figuring out what your hourly rate should be or what you want it to be, right? So like, for example, say you're like, my rate is like $100 an hour. I think I'm worth a hundred dollars per hour. And then you look at it that way and you figure for projects like say for a long form sales letter, you think it's gonna take you 40 hours to write it. And you're like, okay, So I charged $4,000 for a long form sales letter. So that's a way to kind of figure out a good ballpark of like what to charge people. So I wanted to share that component of it. It's really actually very valuable. If you look at say I charge 50,000 for a sales letter and I'm like, alright, well my hourly rate is like $5,000 and I think I can write it in 10 hours. That's not true. I probably can't write in 10 hours. So really I'm probably looking at my hourly rate there being $2,500 and I'm kind of undercharging at $50,000, which is sort of one of the reasons why I'm not taking on much new client work or new sales letters right now. Because I can do other activities that actually generate more for me. But again, super advanced, very lucky, all that. But whether that's $100 an hour, $50 an hour, whatever it is, it's kind of like that's a good way to figure out what you're quoting. And then the other part, as far as positioning goes, and this is something I've talked about a bit previously as well, and I think it's really important is doing the math for the clients, right? And have you heard me talk about this before, Christopher?

I haven't actually. So this is really interesting.

Cool. So the way I look at that, I'll give you an example that's like a big numbers example, but you can apply this exact same thing to anything. So say someone is going to hire me for $50,000 to write a sales letter. If I'm talking to them and they're sometimes again, because of reputation, all that, people just sort of email me and say, hey, I want you to write me something and whatever, it's great. It takes time to get to that place. Awesome. Once you get there. But if somebody comes in who maybe doesn't know anything about you, which happens to me from time to time too, and I'm like, I'm gonna charge $50,000. So first of all, I would make sure they actually, by asking them questions about their business. How many sales per day are you doing? What's your average order value? If they answer those questions, then I know. Say they say, I'm doing 200 sales a day. My average order value is $200. I'm like, all right, cool. So they're grossing $40,000 a day, 30 days in a month. They're grossing $1.2 million a month in revenue. They're running to, you know, over 12 million a year in annual revenue. They can afford $50,000. So I'm asking those questions to kind of get a feel for if they can actually afford me earlier on. Right. Depending on what you're charging, that may not be as important. But I do want to kind of share that part. But then if I'm talking to them and I'm kind of going through and I'm adding value, I'm being doing a consultative selling approach. Right. Where I'm going through what they have. I'm giving them pointers, I'm giving them advice, I'm giving them value for free, doing all this kinds of really important stuff. And I'm doing that with the mentality that if I just give them a bunch of value and they don't hire me, no problem, their life is better and I made a positive impact for them. But then when it comes time to actually quote them, I'll be like, alright, so My rate is $50,000. And you may think that's a lot of money. You may think that's about right and what you expected. Maybe you think I'm undercharging. I honestly don't know. But let me kind of explain why I charge what I do and why people are so happy to pay it and why, you know, they do Consistently. Right. So you're saying that you are doing your average offer. Can. Can, you know, make about $200 per sale, right? Like, yeah. And is it fair to say that probably your profit margin is at least 20%? Yeah, that's about fair to say. Okay, cool. Um, and so you're doing, like, right now a million dollars a month, give or take, right? Like, yeah, a little bit more. Okay, awesome. Cool. So then you're netting about $200,000 a month, right? Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Well, when you hire me, if you're gonna pay me $50,000, you're doing this because you're expecting that I'm gonna write something for you that's going to gross at least a million dollars, right? Yeah, totally. They're not, you know, if you're not expecting that, then I'm not the right person for you. I've got tons of people I can refer to you. Totally. All good. But I'm guessing you're expecting that this will gross at least a million dollars, correct? Yes. Perfect. Okay. So given that we know that your net profit margin is going to be about 20%, that means on a million dollars, your net profit is going to be about $200,000. You're paying me 50,000. And the reason you're paying me the 50,000 is because you know that with me and my track record and my experience, there's a very good chance that we'll actually create something that grosses a million dollars and brings you back 200,000. So a 4x ROI on what you pay me. There's other people who charge lots of money, but they just don't have the track record or the experience I do. They don't have the knowledge, the expertise. We've already been talking. I've shown you all these things that you could be doing right now that you're not doing. So I really get this. Whereas other people don't. And that's kind of why I'm able to charge what I charge. But the other really important thing to think about is we aren't really going after this for a million dollars, right? That would be fine. But really, your funnel right now is doing over 10 million a year. And, like, I think, I'm sure you probably really want something that has a chance to do 10 million too, right? So say we could do 10 million in revenue from this, what I'm writing for you. That would be instead of 200,000, that'd be 2 million in net profit. So now if you pay me $50,000, you're actually getting a 40x ROI, and that's just pure profit. And then that doesn't include the emails, the data monetization, all these other things. So of course that doesn't mean every single thing I write is going to be a home run blockbuster. But if you look at my experience, my knowledge and what I've demonstrated to you already, you have a higher chance of achieving that by hiring me than somebody else. And that's why I charge $50,000. Does that make sense to you? Now that's a bunch of money. But you could do the same thing with an email where you're like, hey, I'm going to charge 100, I charge $100 per email. And maybe that sounds like a lot. There's other people on upwork who charge $20 an email or $30 an email. But what do you really, what's the point of this email? Right, like, well, I'm hoping to promote this thing. Okay, cool. How much? You know, what's the revenue goal for you? Well, I'm hoping that it's gonna gross $40,000 in the next year. Awesome. Cool. And then what do you think your profit margin is gonna be? I think it's 50%. Okay, cool. $20,000 is what your profit would be. Awesome. So you're paying me $100 for an email. Maybe you're hired me for five. That's $500 for the chance to get $20,000 in profit. And again, there's other people out there, but you've seen my track record. I've studied from the best copywriters in the world. I'm writing actively, I'm having wins for clients consistently and that's why you should hire me and not somebody else.

Brilliant. I think that high level conversation where you're actually showing the client that you are concentrated on their profits and building a long term relationship is just from having a sales background that is really the most powerful thing you can possibly do. So seeing it from this angle and from your experience as a copywriter is absolutely brilliant.

Thank you very much for that.

And I know track record is really, really important. So being in the early stages, if.

You don't have that track record of.

Showing how you move the needle on conversions or how much revenue you actually generated for someone, then I suppose it comes back to doing Justin and your.

Approach of writing a sales letter for.

Someone to get that quickest possible route to getting those results, Would that be fair to say? So you have that backup when you're talking with the next level of client.

If I Explained that correctly. Yeah. I think that that is a fair way of looking at it. And I think if you are getting clients, you can kind of take the same approach and just sound really confident and be like, you know, like, I've written for xyz and they've loved the results. And this person, they've loved the results. And you can kind of keep it a little blinder and a little more broad. So I don't think you have to have, like, a crazy track record. I think you can just sort of talk about how, you know, I've been doing this for other people and they're loving what's happening as well, you know, So I think you can kind of do that and you don't have to worry too much about having some crazy laundry list of accomplishments. Yep.

Okay, perfect. Well, I'll jump off. But really, that was. That was amazing. That really helped to answer.

And, you know, I think for your.

YouTube channel, putting something together like this on exactly what you just shared would be super valuable for a lot of people out there. So I really appreciate it.

Thank you. Cool. Awesome. Thanks, Chris.

Good man.

Hey, Ed, before I. I want to just kind of riff on that for a few more seconds real quick, because I just really want to point out for the freelancers on the call who are going to watch this replay or whatever, the biggest shift in mindset you need to make is that. And this is all stuff that's going to be in the mindset course or the freelancing course that I'm doing, and I'm going to do it with Ian Stanley. And I think this is really valuable stuff that I'm just giving away for free here on this call. But it's really true is that couple things. One is, okay, like, and Justin, I've talked about a little bit, too, but clients need you as much as you need them. First of all, that's really important, right? Like, there are people out there right now. There's tons of clients out there right now who are just saying, I really wish I had a really competent freelancer who could help me with xyz. Like, they need you. They need copy or they need content or they need videos or, like, we're talking about copy on this call. But this is. It's the same thing for, you know, any freelancing service. There's someone out there who needs you right now. And I think you really have to look at it as you're shifting your mindset from that you're asking somebody to pay you to that you're Asking somebody to, like, invest in themselves to get a return is a really important mindset, because I think too many freelancers come in and they're scared, and they're so worried about the ask and the money. And, like, I'm gonna say $2,000. What if they say no and they don't pay me? And it's like, you're making it all about you and you getting paid and your money, and, like, then you're gonna sound scared. Your pitch is probably gonna suck. Like, it's just not gonna be that helpful. But if you're able to come in and be, like, all about them and that they have the opportunity to give you money so that you can help them realize an roi, it's just an extremely, totally different mindset. And you're way more likely to get to yes with the client than by coming in and sort of feeling like, you know, thinking about you and what you're getting paid. Think about the ROI for them. So just shift your mindset on that one thing when you talk to prospective clients, and it can be a massive game changer for you. Boom.

Dude.

Let'S go.

Seriously, I put it in. So Jaz in the chat says, seriously, I can't believe this is free. And I put in the chat, you know, Stefan's free stuff. Then, you know, they're like the greater than, like, symbol. And then most people's paid stuff, everyone's like, I appreciate that you can say that again, man. But seriously, there's so many people out there who like, will charge, you know, thousands of dollars and then not even teach copywriters how to get clients. And here you are just doing it for free.

Yeah, it's my passion. I really. I don't know, man. I just love it. And I've talked about before, but I feel so lucky to have kind of discovered freelancing, to have discovered copywriting, to have met my wife, who is one who told me about copywriting, and then to have gotten clients. And of course, I worked hard and I did all that stuff, but I also just got totally lucky. And I feel like I won the lottery. I really do. But I struggled. And I'm like, man, now I'm in this really awesome, like, kind of privileged, lucky place where, you know, I'm at the top of kind of what I'm doing, and if I can help other people to get there faster, it just really. I don't know, man. Sorry, I'm start crying. It sounds weird because I'm getting an old man. I just need testosterone or Something. But I just feel like, you know, it just really. It just. Nothing makes me happier. I mean, very few things make me happier. So.

Yeah, dude, that's why you have this amazing community around you for real.

This is rewarding, right? It's just fulfilling, though. It's just, like, so much better than, like, fake guruing or just selling charging money for everything. It's like just helping people. Just genuinely helping people. I'm not trying to get my high horse here. I want to get to the next question, but it just. It feels really good. It feels fulfilling. It makes me excited when I wake up in the morning and I'm gonna send out an email that people are gonna read, or I'm doing this and I'm doing calls like this, or creating content or mentoring people, it just really, really, again, selfishly, I feel great. And then knowing I'm having an impact on people's lives, it's, like, way more fulfilling than anything. And one thing I wanna say, I'll be honest, right? Is I've talked to guys who make a bunch of money, and then they sit around and they're like, oh, you're focused on money. That's lame. And you're like, dude, you're only able to say that because you have a bunch of money. I met a supplement guru back when I was first starting a supplement company, and this guy was so, like, ugh, supplements. And I'm like, dude, the only reason you're here and you're retired and living rich is because you sold your supplement company for, like, $20 million. So now you can sit around, sit around and shit on somebody else who's trying to make it. It's so stupid. So I totally get it. That's my thing. It's like, I'm in a blessed financial position where I can give back, but I want to actually do it. And I'll do it from a place of love and then help people to get in that position. Because then once you're in that position and you're not worried about all these things in life and there's less stress and less anxiety, then you'll be free to follow your highest purpose and calling and help and give back, too.

So, yeah, Stefan the giver. I love it. All right, next up, we have.

I can't hear you. Maybe it's my. My headset got weird. Give me one second. Let me switch to my.

Can you guys hear me, by the.

Way, for a minute here?

I can hear you just fine.

Yeah, I know. I think it was my stupid headset.

Let me know.

I can hear you now. Yeah, I'm gonna. I'll just take this off for now.

If you can hear the voice of God, let me know. Okay. Sean. Caesar, another good question. This by far crushed all of the questions in terms of votes. What is the number one factor that makes you and all the master copywriters the masters?

Good question.

It's a good question.

Hey, and Sean, again.

Hey, I just want to say that you are a gift from God. Thank you so much.

Thanks, man. I really, I really appreciate that, Ed. Well, Ed says I'm doing God's work, but then Ed just referred to himself as having the voice of God. So then I'm wondering.

I'm the moderator. I'm the moderator. I'm the moderator. Right? The voice of God. I'm the messenger.

Right, you, messenger, sure. Well, thanks, Sean. I do appreciate that, man. Yeah. What makes us different? You know, it's tough. I don't. I don't know if I have a perfect answer for that one. I think that there is. There's a level of maybe obsession early on, but again, I don't think that means you have to. I never spent like 12 hours a day just reading letters and handwriting them and stuff like that. I think for me, I really wanted every piece I write, though, to be the best. I mean, honestly, here's a huge part of it, in my opinion, is a lot of copywriters get paid, and that's their peak is when they get the money from the client. Right? It's like you talk with the client. You go back and forth. The client's like, I'm sending you the money. Like, this is gonna be great. Yay. You get the money. And then like a week later, these same writers are sitting around like, ugh, I have to write this f this client. I don't want to do the work, all that stuff. Whereas what I've really tried to do from my perspective and mentality mindset, is like, I like getting paid up front, and I normally do, but I'm still gonna approach it. Like, every piece I do, I'm trying to make this the best piece of copy that I've ever written in my life. I'm trying to make it like a long standing kind of masterpiece. And I'm gonna do it in a vast amount of time thanks to rnbc. But it's not an obligation. It's not something like, I have to do. It's something that I want to do that I get to do, and then I'm really gonna enjoy myself. And have fun doing it. And I know that sounds really simple, but again, I see so many freelancers. There's memes, there's groups that are just people shit on clients all the time. My mentality has always been to be, like, thankful for clients. Does that mean every client is great? No. There's some awful clients. Even at my level. I've had a couple of bad clients in the last year or two where they were a total nightmare and it sucked and that. Then of course, you're like, all right, I won't work with that person again. But I really think it comes down to just wanting to be the absolute best. Like, I envision myself as, like, the Tom Brady or the Michael Jordan or the whoever it is of my craft, and I get the opportunity to exercise that might give some that ability while I'm writing.

I have experienced this, but not as much as you. When I'm reading these successful ads, like, studying them, I just feel dopamine is going everywhere. And I'm getting so excited, learning. And I go to the next letter and next letter, even the same day. And I felt that there is something drives me to. To be a copywriter. It's not just for the money or the success.

Yeah. I think that's really important, and I think if you're feeling that, that's really good. And, you know, to get into, like, a flow state, it sounds like you're kind of getting into a flow state when you're. You're reading them. And if you feel that way when you're writing as well, and I think that's a really good sign that that's probably what you were meant to do.

Oh, great.

Awesome. Cool. Sean. Well, I'm glad I could answer that.

Thank you so much. All right, awesome. Next up, we have. Oh, I was gonna say Carlos, but I think he left.

I'm gonna try putting my headset back on while you're doing this, so.

Sure that's the case?

Feel free to riff for a second.

Yeah. All right.

It's the fastest way to see all the numbers just drop down. Yeah.

You know, everyone's like, hey, guys, Stefan, I want to refund.

And the headset is working now, so that's good.

Okay. Beautiful. All right, next up, we have Peter. He asks, what are some of the best ways to find good quality clients when you're first starting out as a freelancer? And before you answer, I want to say, join our NBC or go ahead. Peter.

Hey, Peter. How's it going? Good.

How are you?

Seven. Good, man.

I'm already in our NBC anyways.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you've kind of answered this question already, but I'm wondering if you just go deeper on that. I'm blessed enough to not have to worry about kind of the money too much, but I really kind of want to develop the skills. I really do love the whole copy aspect.

So how can I kind of get my name out there and kind of.

Start finding clients that are not only that are good to work for, but that'll actually test my shit, you know?

Right, yeah, that's super, super important. I mean, you know, there's the kind of the free sending them something for free strategy, which I've talked about before and I'm sure you've heard it, and I think that is one option. It does work. I've heard. And I brought this up previously. You know I'm talking about. Right, Peter, with the kind of. Yeah, yeah, yeah, cool. You know, I've heard some people who've come back to me and been like, hey, I tried it with four people and nobody responded yet. I'm kind of disappointed. And it's like, it doesn't work like every single time. But I also hear from people every week who do that and get jobs with clients doing it that way. I think another really good strategy and for people who are going to watch and don't know what I'm talking about. If you watch the first episode of this show, we talked about it on that. But yeah, I think another thing is honestly, for getting your name out there is posting a lot. Like posting, being involved, being active. Like you're talking in Facebook groups, talking in adding value and content. I see this happen in Justin and Stefan Talk Copy, which is our Facebook group, Justin and I's where someone comes in and creates a lot of value with like one post maybe, and it feels a little bit manufactured, but you're like, yeah, there's some good value there, but then they don't follow it up. Versus somebody like Christopher Ogle, who I think got off this call but asked that question. He posted like, he's posted several times, I think four or five or six times now, and continually putting out kind of value in that group. And then he got on like my radar because of that. Right. And I'm like, oh, wow, this Christopher guy keeps posting. People are engaging, interacting with it. Like, that's really cool. And then now he's on the call and stuff. So I think that's obviously Ed. You do a really good job of doing that. You started really just a couple Months ago, I don't know, two months ago. Putting more of your content out and things like that. How's that gone for you so far?

It's gone really well, actually. Consistently putting out content, especially in front of the right audience, has definitely. Well, think about it, right? Like, even Stefan just referred to me as, like, you know, earlier, if you guys are, you know, new on here or just tuned in, the, like, the compliance guy, the compliance guru. I hate that word, but. And it's like, that's because I deliver a lot of value in my post. So when the trick to it is delivering value in such a way, it's kind of like. And this is like a mechanism working on for one of my clients, which is kind of cool. Talk about it. It's kind of like when you go to the food court and there's so many options, right? And then, you know, maybe you see, oh, Panda Express, right? And they're giving out samples, and you're like, actually, you know what?

Let me.

Let me go for that. And then you try it. It's like, oh, this is pretty good, but I'm not in the mood for this today. And then come back to the food court the next day, next day, next day, next day, until eventually it's like, hey, you know what? And, yes, Panda Express is incredible. And then you go, hey, you know what? Actually, I'm thinking about getting Asian food. First thing you think about is Panda Express, right? So similar to the way that you position yourself in your content, at least the way that I've done it, is I give out so much value for free with just my Facebook posts that, like, just, like, who's in the chat just said it. John Caprani says when anyone mentions Facebook compliance to him now, the first thing he thinks of is me, apparently, which is, thank you. I appreciate that. It means they worked. So how can you position yourself differently just through your content alone? So when you can have the right message with the right offer in front of the right audience, it's killer. Just keep putting out content. Just keep, you know, delivering value to people who are gonna find your stuff valuable, because not everyone's gonna find it valuable. That's why you got to get really clear on who you want to talk to and then key to your message to that.

Peter, one thing I want to. I want to add, and Ed, that was amazing, is it could probably. It helps if you kind of find a specific niche or category that you really want to take ownership of. So Ed is kind of taking ownership of compliance, which is funny because I could back up what John says, but I, you know, before we have a, you know, whole like partnership with a compliance kind of group of Facebook advertisers and copy accelerator and they do a biweekly call and prior to, you know, Ed decided to come out as a compliance guy, I would have probably referred people to them. But then Ed started posting and I know he actually knows what he's talking about, which is important. Right. And he's posting content, all that. So now my first person is like, I think about Ed too, and I'd refer people to Ed because he's put himself out there as that person. And now I refer to him. If you look at what, like Ian Stanley did. Ian Stanley, sure. He does lots of other stuff, but he really was like the email guy, right? He's. You want to know how to write good emails and make money from your list and all that. Ian Stanley is that guy. If you look at me, I mean, I'm honestly, I'm a lot of things now today as well, but really it was like, I'm the best health supplement VSL sales letter. So you want to do a health supplement offer. I'm the person you talk to. So I think that that's kind of an important point as well. Is there something that you can sort of take ownership of? Like Troy Erickson kind of took ownership of deliverability and email list management, things like that. And now I have Troy on retainer, but just a bunch of examples. So is there something like, you know, Peter, that you think maybe you can kind of a niche you could carve out?

I do love, like stories, kind of that story aspect and really building out not just a nightmare story, but a hero story and the whole journey through a sales page. Yeah, yeah, that kind of aspect. I know it's a little bit broad, but.

But it's not. I mean, I think people struggle with finding good emotional stories to share in their copy. So, yeah, I mean, I think there's probably space there to be like the emotional storytelling expert person, like, who owns that space. Right. Chris Haddad is really well known, but he's not out teaching actively about emotional storytelling a lot. I don't think anybody really owns that space. So if you. And people are asking all the time, how do you come up with these stories? Roy, for some people mentioned a few other people, but I think that's a pretty cool space. So I would play around with that and then just creating valuable content, posting it both in groups and on your own personal page. I don't know how many Facebook friends you have, but I would just add a shit ton of people and get to 5,000 friends or, you know, whatever it is. And then some more people are exposed. You can put on LinkedIn too. But I would just be doing that.

Okay, cool. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Steph. Yeah, Ned.

Beautiful.

Awesome.

That was a really good question.

That was.

Dude. Just the value in this fricking thing, man.

Bailey, what if they're not my friend in real life? I don't care. I have five. I don't mean any way. I have like 5,000 friends. And I don't like. Not trying to sound cocky, but I haven't added. I very rarely add friends. Like I just have people requesting it because I put myself out there and then I go through and actually have to delete people who aren't active. So there's space to add new people. And it's kind of a pain at that point. But I'm never gonna do that self indulgent post where it's like, we're not. You don't comment on my stuff. Like I'm unfriending you. Like you. I hate when people post that personally. Uh, but it doesn't matter. Like, especially if you're marketing. And anyone who adds me, if I see it's tough now that I have like 5000 ish friends and I. Cause that's the limit Facebook has. But up until recently, anybody who added me, if we had mutual friends, I'll go to their page and if they were sort of seem like a normal person, I'll add them pretty much every time. Like, shut up. Ed's making fun of me here. It's kind of annoying. I wish I could. I wish there was a higher cap.

But wish I had less friends. Boo hoo.

I wish I could have more. I wanna be friends with everybod. I want 10,000 or 20,000 friends. But seriously, Bailey, nobody, especially in our space, in our industry. It's kind of expected. Facebook is still a really powerful networking tool for people in our industry in our space. And so you should be doing that. I told the same thing to Michael Roshin, who's in Copy Accelerator now and who I've kind of mentored and helped to come up. And he had been. He joined, he bought a ticket to Copy Accelerator or event. And he was really scared to do that. It was a big investment for him. It was like $3,000 and he has. But he was also scared because he had imposter syndrome and a lot of fear. And so he had reached out to me about it and been like, hey, I really do have imposter syndrome and I really am scared and I have anxiety. I said, hey man, let's get on a call. So we did. I got on a zoom call with Michael before our event, and I don't normally do that, and I didn't know him, and my intention was nothing but to just talk to this guy. So we got on a call and I kind of talked through and I kind of helped him to feel better and kind of was like, you know, what's the worst that's going to happen? What's the upside? What's. What are the benefits to coming? And you know, he decided based on that that he was going to buy a ticket. I do, I do do that. I got on zoom calls with people randomly sometimes and never tell anybody about it. And I. Bandwidth is a challenge. But yeah, so with Michael. Fuck, I forgot I was going with this whole point though. Damn it, like, and help me. Where was I?

Just friends, by the way. She was kidding. She was kidding.

Okay, I'm back. My point's back. So yeah, so then Michael bought. He bought a ticket, right? And then because he bought a ticket, he was put into the Copy Accelerator private Facebook group, which is just for our mastermind. But when you buy a ticket, we put you into this group so you can kind of sample Copy Accelerator out. And it was like three weeks later and we were talking and I was like looking, I clicked on his profile and it was like two mutual friends. And I blasted him. I was like, michael, what are you doing? How do we still have two mutual friends? I was like, you need to go through the Copy Accelerator group right now and go through every person who's in the group and send them a friend request. And I'm gonna sit here, I'm gonna keep refreshing until I see that we have at least 50 mutual friends. And he was kind of like, hahaha. I'm like, I'm dead serious. So he did it. And the next day we had like 70 mutual friends and then more. And then now if you've seen Michael, he's, you know, he's gone from not being able to put. Get presents for his kids for Christmas, making over $10,000 a month, and he puts himself out there publicly and he's done all of that. But the point was it was just like, yeah, you can't. You add friends. It doesn't matter if you know them in real life or not. True.

Next up, we have Justin Lucas. That's. I think this will be the final one for today. Yeah, he says. Hey, Stefan, new COP Accelerate member here. Learn so much. The past two weeks, he's planning on making his own ClickBank digital offer and then eventually a supplement offer. So he's asking how much money he would roughly have to save up to allocate for both a digital ebook offer and a blood sugar supplement offer.

Cool. What's up, Justin? Hey, what's up, Stefan? How you doing? Good, man. How are you doing? Good, good. Sweet. So, yeah, I mean, I think, Ed, do you want to add anything or is that. It was pretty self explanatory. Yeah, that's pretty much it for sure. Yeah. I mean, I think you can launch both. Pretty. Pretty lean. Surprisingly lean. So on the info product side, you know you're gonna do it on clickbank, what do you really need? You need to create the info product. That's why something you can hire somebody to write for you on, you know, upwork or wherever. And it's gonna cost you maybe between 500, $1,000 probably, you know, you can maybe get someone to do it for 250 or you could do it yourself. But if you're trying to hire somebody, you know, some design, a little bit of like integration, I honestly think that's probably under $2,000. You know, I don't think that's really expensive. I honestly there's like not a lot of an info product, which is nice, but let me do a physical one because I think that's surprisingly cheap too, if you do it the right way. Oh, really? For example. Yeah, because the way I would do it, and I do want to do a course, I have so many courses I want to do when I have the time one day. But I would just say on how to launch a supplement business as well. But if you look at it well. Okay, so one thing that could apply to both. I didn't mention this for info products is the copywriting, but I was kind of assuming you're writing your own copy. Yeah. Okay, cool, perfect. So you're writing your own copy for a physical one. The supplements, I would just be going on demand to start. So I would work with somebody like ship offers who has a blood sugar formula already and they'll handle fulfillment and shipping and all that. And you only pay them when you actually sell like the product. So that's a way better model in my mind than trying to do a custom formulation, having to Invest, you know, 20, 30, 40, $50,000 in inventory out the game.

Definitely not doing that.

Yeah, I don't think you need to. Right. And over time, if you want to switch to a custom formulation, great. But I would just start with an on demand formulation. So yeah, that's that. So really the supplements don't really cost you anything out the gate. If you're going to use ClickBank, then that doesn't really cost you anything. If you're going to create your own CRM or not create, but use your own CRM, like connective, which is what I honestly would probably do. That's probably like $250 or $500 a month to start. Same thing with design and dev kind of integrations. I think you can probably get all that done for under $3,000, maybe under $2,000. You know, customer service, I think like it's good to have you can be your own customer service to start. But I do think, you know, if you want to hire somebody like a virtual assistant like we talked about earlier in the call, who can do some kind of answer emails for you and things, I think that's, that's helpful. You know, merchant processing is important for a supplement company. I guess that's the pro. Yeah. Mids, right? So if you're using, if you're using ClickBank, you get their Mids, which is great. If you do it on your own for different CRM, then you do need to have your own mids set up and that can take time. It doesn't cost money though up front. Obviously they charge you per transaction and then it's just like little miscellaneous things like what are you going to use for your emails and autoresponders? Are you going to use OnTraport or ActiveCampaign or Marrow Post? Gavin asked what MIDs are. MIDs are basically like the banks, the people who are gonna actually collect money. So someone wants to give you a credit card, they type it in, right. Who actually is gonna kind of collect that money, run the transaction, collect the money, hold it and then pay it out to you. Right? Because it's not gonna really go right into your bank account. It's gonna go through an intermediary or a third party. So like Stripe is a mid for people who know about Stripe, but there's a lot of other banks out there that like Stripe doesn't really like house supplements. If you're doing a big direct response type of offer, that's kind of like a lot of claims, Stripe's not gonna work for you. PayPal, you know, can operate as a mid, but kind of the same issue there. So there's a ton of different kind of Independent banks and companies that will kind of do that payment processing stuff for you. And it's very important. So, yeah, I mean, I've always felt like you could launch your own health supplement company for under $5,000 for sure. Oh, wow. I don't think even need traffic, bro. Because, like, you need traffic. But I mean, I don't think you need to pay for traffic. I think you can. Yeah, you could test on Facebook, but really, if you know the right people and you build the relationships, you get affiliates to send for you, so then you're only gonna pay them when you make a conversion. So, you know, I think that's really helpful. And so you don't need to spend money on traffic. Like, you don't need to buy Facebook ads, anything like that. And so, yeah, I really. I think it's probably like five grand you could, like, launch.

Oh, it's a lot less than expected. I was thinking like maybe 50,000 or something.

And I was like, okay, like, I'm.

Probably gonna have to save up for all this. But yeah, like, I'm. I'm a media buyer and like, I came from the affiliate space, so, like, I already have a pretty good idea.

Of, like, what to do with traffic. It was just more of like the.

Setup and all this. Like the setup of the offer and all of this, like, really helped a lot.

Cool, man. Yeah, I mean, the biggest expenses are going to be hiring a copywriter, but you're gonna write your own copy and then inventory, but you're gonna get inventory on demand. And then, like I said. Really? Yeah, I think design dev, like, all that. Like, maybe you could use code clouds. You know, I've got a person I could recommend refer you to, but yeah, I think, yeah, a couple grand for that stuff. And there's some miscellaneous stuff there, but it's really not that expensive. That's awesome.

Thank you so much.

Cool. Yeah, my pleasure, man. Happy to help. Cool. Awesome. So that's gonna wrap up this episode of the Road to a Billion Call in radio show podcast with Stefan Georgi, who is me. Love you guys. Really appreciate everybody who came in today and asked questions. If we didn't get to your question, I'm really sorry. But we will be back next week. Hopefully you guys will keep coming. I know doing it weekly, it's like a lot, but I'd rather keep doing this every single week because I know if we wait like a month, then I'm afraid that people have questions that don't get answered. So my plan is to keep doing this weekly. And just appreciate it. Ed, I thank you so much for being awesome and not just being the moderator, but also providing so much value and insights as well. I really appreciate that, too.

My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Happy to help.

Awesome. All right, well, we'll see you guys next week. Thank you so much.