Why I wouldn't become a copywriter in 2024

Hey, what's going on here? Okay. This is gonna be a weird video to make. I wanted to write like an email about this, my email list, and I feel like I have so much going on in my head that I need to instead do it as a video. And I also feel like people are going to be pissed off, some people when they watch this video. And I'm using loom, so the video quality is not as good as it could be, but I'm going to share a bunch of stuff on my screen. So before I do that though, let's just talk about, like, what is this video about? It's about what I would do instead of copywriting in 2024. And it's an opportunity. The reason it's gonna piss people off, I think, is because I don't think most people should become copywriters. That's probably the case before AI, but it's definitely the case now. The landscape is shifting so much right now, and there's more copywriters than ever before and more people being sold copywriting as biz op than ever before. And it's happening at the worst time possible to become a copywriter because of AI, right? Oh, I say right. You may not know that, but let me kind of talk about what I mean, let me make this smaller so you can still see me. Okay. So when people opt into my email list, they get this email. It's like, hey, this is Stefan. It's really important, you know, let me know what the number one thing you want to learn is. And I get thousands of these responses every year and hundreds every month. And I just. So I just went through and just searched for this subject line. Hey, you know, it's Stefan. This is really important that you know, for all the replies. And I post them out and I'm trying to do this in a way where I don't show the people's email addresses or names. Cause I don't have to redo the video if I did. But this is like kind of like a variance of these replies you get every time. Okay, I'd like you to tell me all you know about copywriting and how a beginner can land his first big client, including the strategies and methods he can use in this new AI driven world. Okay, so essentially how to get a client, right? My gnome is Gabrielle. I would like to be able to receive content about creating direct response copies. Thank you very much. This person, not a native English speaker. That's okay, but we'll come back to some challenges there in a second. I Was super stuck on how to find client and how to identify whether they need my services or not. What kind of businesses need sales letters and sales pages. Thank you for providing value prospecting, AKA getting clients. I want to hear about what strategic offers can be used as fast standard samples made of AI we can use to get clients and how to use AI to write fast samples, how to get clients copyright and how to get so darn good at it faster as a newbie. Okay, not necessarily clients, but how to get good because they're a newbie. Right. I would like to learn how to not be afraid of ia. I know they meant AI taking copywriters jobs. Possibly not. Correct there. How to be a copywriter who works with it, not be afraid with it. Thank you for accepting me. Okay. Probably not a native English speaker based on this. It's okay. Looking forward to reading your emails. Number one thing I'd like to hear about is finding closing clients in your niche. All right, so I'll go back to full screen for a minute. This is always the case that I got a lot of people who are looking for clients, but it's even more so now and again. I see it on X for example Twitter, Twitter now X people are getting sold copywriting as biz op at the worst time, like I said possible. It's the worst time possible for a bunch of reasons. Okay, the number one reason is because AI makes you able to write a lot of copy faster and it's pretty good. And so experienced really good copywriters are faster, more efficient now who are using AI. Okay? But number two, brands and businesses that used to hire kind of new or intermediate copywriters for email copy, more branded copy, web copy, things like that, a lot of them then use AI and one person on their team overlooks it, changes it, and then, you know, they don't need as many copywriters necessarily, right for all this output, which means fewer jobs for like the beginners and newbies. Number three, this is actually really important and it could be this whole separate video or whatever. Is that the structure in the world of Direct Response, especially the kind of offer structure and funnel structure that works, has changed a lot. And I actually think this is why a lot of businesses in Direct Response are struggling too. There are a lot that are because the classical model of put up a video sales letter, send a bunch of eyeballs via affiliates, make sales, or buy via buying media on Facebook, YouTube, whatever, really does not work that well anymore. It works for a handful of the top offers on a place like clickbank. Yes you can send traffic to a vsl, but realistically the brands, companies, offers that I see crushing and I have a lot in my copycuster Mastermind. I just put in 25 new businesses. They're all doing between 5 and 100 million a year. And the model that works is a lot of Facebook ads. One to two minutes, sometimes kind of mid length VSL that they run as an ad in Facebook or sometimes even YouTube still, although YouTube penalizes it a lot by mid length, I mean like eight to 15 minutes. And then it goes from there either to a kind of E Comm landing page, a hybrid type of landing page, an advertorial and then an E comm landing page. But it's not going to a vsl. I think the days of driving traffic to a long form VSL are numbered or at least it is not the best strategy. And things are cyclical. Maybe it will be again in five years from now. But right now in general, trying to win with long form VSLs is a losing strategy. And so that makes a difference both for businesses but also copywriters who aren't adapting. And also a lot of the stuff you can do for copy, like the short 2 minute ads and hooks and things can be generated with AI and so you need fewer copywriters doing that stuff. And businesses haven't figured it out so they're not sure who to hire. And all that creates issues. Right? So the point of all that is I don't think a good time to be. I wouldn't get into copywriting, I wouldn't come in as a newbie. And I just, it was hard. It was always hard. But it's not only harder now. I just think there's less jobs than there's ever been and I think there'll continue to be less jobs. And I said that when I first saw AI in late 2022, I was like, most copywriters will be out of a job, right? There's a small handful of like the top 10% that will be, you know, doing well I think for, for a while more. But most copiers wouldn't. I want to become a copywriter. I got a ton of hate. I still get hate from people about this. People go like, oh, that's because he's trying to sell AI trainings and courses. And sometimes I've sold those and I've got free ad copy.com and different platforms. But I created. It's a chicken and egg thing. It's like I created these trainees who try to Help people so that they can leverage AI, so that they can continue to bring value to the marketplace, so that they can continue to get jobs and so that businesses can continue to scale. Free ad copy is so people can see what AI is capable of and play with it versus being afraid of it and do it for free. You know, which is why it's called free ad copy dot com. I'm trying to help people, but there's always haters. Well, who's selling that stuff? And it's like, dude, I'm also running like an eight figure peptide company. I've got Capexer Pro business owners. It's not how I make my income. I don't make my income by selling warm traffic offers. I make some money from it. It's nice, but that's not how I generate income. I'm sharing this to try to help people and you know, so that's that. Okay, so now with that being said, I want to show you an example actually. First and foremost, let me. Actually here's the deal. What I would do right now. Sorry, I'm going to pivot on this for a second. So I was thinking about this. I'm like, all right, if I was, you know, coming into the world from scratch from, you know, not having like not know anything about copywriting, probably not, maybe not even being a good writer, but I'm trying to make like a couple grand a month income. What would I do? And you know, some people will sell you off roadership as like a biz op thing. Like people. I, I'm not gonna name names that go down that rabbit hole, but generally that's a bad idea. You're. It's expensive, it's hard, it's, you know, you might be able to make a little bit of money at it, I guess at a really low level. The issue is like people like if you're trying to make like a couple hundred dollars a day as an offer owner running like a very small budget on Facebook with some info product or a physical product, like you can do it. I mean a lot of people don't succeed. I don't know that's the best bet. But that is an option. Okay. Where I have an issue with is when people talk about like 7, 8, 9 figure offers and then that to me is like our businesses, like it's hard to do that. Right. If it was easy, everyone would be a deca or sent a millionaire. It's not easy to do, but you could do that. But to me I'm like, you know, Affiliates, right? Affiliates make a lot of money. It's kind of nice. You don't have to deal with being an offer owner. You have to have product inventory set, the whole funnel. It's like you just have to drive clicks to another brand and their, their website, their products, and, you know, they're qualified clicks that convert. Right? But there's always issues with that historically as well, right? One of the issues is that you are needing to like, spend media or pay for media, right? You gotta, you buy Facebook ads. You, you, you, you send traffic for the company, you pay for Facebook or YouTube ads or whatever it is, and you hope that the commissions you make from the clicks you send are more money than what you spend on traffic, right? And that difference is like the margin and that's what you make. So, for example, you spend $10,000 on Facebook traffic to Bob's, you know, blood sugar offer, right? You make, Bob pays you a, for simplicity's sake, 100 commission. Okay? So you spent $10,000. You know, Bob's blood sugar offer, you know, basically you make 100 sales. That'd be 10,000, I think 10, 100 times 110,000. You broke even. You make 150 sales, you made $5,000. I really hope I'm doing the math right. I'm doing off the top of my head. If I'm not going to do it, whatever. I think you get the point, right? So it's like, okay, can I spend $10,000 to make $15,000 in commissions? If I can, $5,000 is my margin. I'm good, right? But hey, I gotta spend $10,000, right? Or I start with like, you know, $100 or $200. And I hope I make a sale and I can parlay that back in. But I need to have several good days in a row or I burn through my money. How do I get more money? It's totally, it's doable, but it's hard, especially if you don't know media buying. Like, there's a lot of stuff that goes into that. Same thing for YouTube, native, all that, right? Email stuff. If you're new to the road of direct response, affiliate marketing, even E comm, whatever it is, you don't have an email list, then what are you gonna do there? You basically need to go build an email list. How do you do that? You don't have a lot of money. It's like organic traffic SEO, try to viral content, whatever it is, to build a list and then send affiliate offers. That can absolutely work. Takes time all that. So I'm like, well, affiliates would make sense, but that's like problematic in that, you know, people, it takes a lot of time and money. But then I started looking into like TikTok shop, okay. And like you might have heard about how TikTok shop is, is blowing up and heard people talking about it. And one of my friends, he actually was at the first Copy Starter event, but he goes by an anonymous name of Wi Fi Money Guy. You can find him on Twitter. I mean, I'll pull up his Twitter in a second or something. But you know, he's running this thing called the TikTok Syndicate. They have a discord, it's a paid group. We connected over some stuff. I wanted to train for them. And then I'm looking at the wins people are getting as a TikTok shop affiliate and I'm like, damn, that's pretty, pretty impressive. So let me, let me go to my screen here. Okay, so this is like in their discord, right? And this is. This dude just got suspended yesterday, but made like $7.1k in commissions. This guy went live for two hours this morning. Made over $1,000 for the day. This guy made 3.2 thousand for commissions on May 8th. He posts a lot, right? May 3rd through the 7th. This guy basically first 24 days. So again, it's not like an overnight get rich thing, but $478, okay, made some money. This guy making money, right? And so on this guy's first go live, I think he made 1.1000 first go live, $554, right? It goes on and on. So I'm like, all right, a lot of people are doing really well with this. If you go on X and look at people talking about it, which is Twitter, you'll see the same thing. And so it hit me and I'm like, this is a really good platform for people because you don't need. You can essentially start for free, doesn't cost any money. You what? I now know I've dove into it. So here's the spoiler. Okay? On next week I'm going to do a five day promotion to my email list. Not on Facebook or anything like that, but or YouTube, but to my email list of like, you know, step by step thing of how to do this, which I partnered with my buddy Wi Fi Money Guy who runs this group. And it's like literally everything. How to set up an account, whether you're in the US or not. The US like international account, how you can sort of buy an Account for under $500 if you want, want to. You don't have to, but that's the way to, to move way quicker. You know how to go select products, how to actually write ad scripts and how to do ads if you're want to be on camera or a faceless kind of narrator style. We basically just cover everything. It's a step by step how to do this. I'm not selling that in this video. And this is where I know people go, oh, so he's just saying all this because he wants to sell this course and it's like, I'm not, it's, it's annoying. I just gotta deal with it. The people are always, there's gonna be skeptical people out there and there's gonna be people who, who just always think that there's some angle on everything. But I'm not doing it because I'm trying to sell some kind of course. In fact, my wife, I hear her walking down right now, she just got done going live in her closet. I have no idea if she made sales or not, but literally I shared this with her. I'm like, babe, you gotta get on this. And she's doing a lot of stuff and she's like, alright, she bought an account for a couple hundred dollars, just did her first go live, shared it with my hero. Her, her friend who's my, her, her cousin's wife who bought an account already is going live doing videos as well. Like we're, we're acting on this, right? And she used the, the training that I'm selling. But the point is like, I think it's just like a golden window of time and this, this opportunity where you can potentially make pretty good money. And I'm not talking about like, you know, necessarily get rich could be right. But I'm also talking about like even just a couple grand more month, whatever it is, just shooting videos on your phone. And again, you don't have to buy an account. You can also do it organically. There's other ways to do it for essentially very like no money, maybe a hundred dollars, whatever it is. So I'm like, the barrier to entry is really low. The reach on TikTok is amazing. There's a giant marketplace of different products and goods that you can kind of promote videos, go viral. You have a way better chance of a lot of eyeballs than you know, even buying media or trying to do anywhere else. Um, and you know, it's still pretty much brand new. So that's why I'm doing that training. But but regardless of if you're on my email list, if you see that training, I don't really care because I want you to understand, I guess, the reality of the, of the marketplace and I want you to look at TikTok shop as an opportunity regardless of. Again, I don't care if you, you get it from me or not. Okay? So, like, let me show you a couple of really interesting things, right? One is, okay, here's a brand Q all in nutrition, Keala Nutrition, okay? If you go to their page, 56,000 followers, 76,000 likes, sounding crazy, and all of their content is basically just like influencers and people on TikTok talking about their product. And these are ones that they've sort of posted or pinned or whatever. I don't even, you know, whatever it is. So, like, you know, why did nobody.

Tell me that you could buy the kiela greens on TikTok Shop right Now for only 23? I've been paying like 50 for this every single, single time. I don't know if this is some tick tock shop flash sale or how long it's gonna last, but it's literally only 23 right now. I don't even think you need a code because I just looked and it's just straight up like a hat, okay?

Some people don't even do this editing, okay? And like, if you're doing a video like that on your phone on TikTok Shop, then like a little thing, you know, you're. If you're set up as a seller, little bar comes in the bottom of the mobile phone. Like, click here. It's got your affiliate link. Every time someone buys Kellogg greens, you get a commission, okay? So here's what's wild about that, right? So actually I want to show you one more thing. Let me, let me go back to searching them. Keala Nutrition. Okay, Another thing is this video here, 1.8 million views, right? They're not pinned on theirs. Selling Keala, okay? 3.9 million views. 3.9 million views, right? These are all like affiliates doing their thing. And as you may notice, TikTok Shop or TikTok in general as a platform, doesn't matter what race or ethnicity you are, okay? Doesn't matter about your gender, though apparently women do do better, frankly. But men still can do quite well. Doesn't matter if you're, you know, classically like a sexy or you aren't considered good looking or you don't think you're good looking. There's people of all body shapes, sizes, ethnicities, everything. And there's AI videos that crush it as well. Like, I have one. Let's find this example here. I don't want to go too deep down this rabbit hole, but I know where I saved it to. Basically there's like these faceless narrator kind of videos that can do really well too. Like, let me see, I think there's a CMOS video. Let me see if I find. If I search real quick. Okay, so you can see. I can't find it here in the search. That's okay. Shows you all this content. I wonder if this one, it just stitched that in. That's fine. Okay. 7.9 million views.

All right, Want a bigger snake? Take Ashwagandha. Want to increase your muscle mass? Take CMOs. Want thicker hair? Take black seed oil. Feeling low on test.

Okay. 7.9 million views. They probably made, you know, six figures in commissions off of that video. And it's just like AI images and AI voiceover, some music in the background, which anybody can make. All right, so just want you to see that there's different styles. Now back to. And by the way, probably more people would do this, but they don't know how. But it's not hard. Back to Keala. Right? Back to Keala Nutrition, though. So you just got videos like that. So I'm like, all right, let me look at these guys. Right? Let me go look at their website. Like their website. I'm on desktop. I know that. But mobile, right? Okay. Benefits. Some social proof products save 25% if you subscribe and save lots of happy customers. Look at their FAQs. Okay? What do they taste like? They're refreshing, smooth and full of flavor. What do they help with? Literally not even copy here. What's the best way to take my greens? What time to take it. Okay, so FAQs, and then that's it for this homepage. Okay? Right. It's literally benefits. Some social proof reviews, more social proof FAQs. Then like, oh, maybe the product copy is gonna, you know, maybe it's like the product pages have more copy. So check it out. Here's Watermelon, right? You've got these images that aren't even that easy to see. And you just got reviews, benefits, the same benefits from the homepage FAQs. That's it. Their whole website has virtually zero copy. But on TikTok alone, if I go look at their different products, right? Like the watermelon one, we just looked at all that. Like, how much has it been doing? Okay, this is total revenue. I don't Know what period? But really just like the last like six months or something like that. 3 million, 3.24 million 900,000. Right. And some of these ones are smaller SKUs. That's just from the, from TikTok shop, based on this competitive spy tool. But you're still talking about like almost like $10 million in revenue over not that long a period of time. And they're doing all of that. So if you're a brand, I hope you're paying attention. Right, because they're doing all of that without no VSLs, no. No video ads, no anything. Right. It's literally like their website sucks. It's like straight up on TikTok shop having people who are TikTok shop affiliates just talk about it, get the discount, click, that's it. So if you're a copywriter and this is happening right now, do you see why your, the need for your services is going to go down? Like, yeah, people could, could use help writing scripts, but why would you not consider writing scripts for yourself and being an affiliate for not just Kayla Greens, but a lot of these products? And so if I go over here, this is another competitive spy tool called Kalo Data. Callo data. I don't know how you pronounce it. Okay, sorry, let me go back to the page for this. Where can I go? Category of product. Okay, so this here is a $1.5 million. And how long since May 3rd? Let's look at it. 1580, gut cleanse. They're paying a commission of 14 to $20 for the last six days. It's done a million dollars in revenue, which means. And these are people, right, who have. This is what they've generated in revenue, like with their videos. Okay, so 135,0001-3000-0870-0058,000. This is not their affiliate commission, but this is how much revenue they've done for this product in the last, you know, like 15 days. Okay. Or six days. Sorry. And so like you can see other stuff they promoted too. Like they promoted the scale, other things like that as well. Okay, so like what do these videos look like? Well, I'm going to show you. Give me one second. Okay, so this is like a saved one. These are just some other ones. Okay. Like 3420-001910-00180,000. This is just like a certain search isn't even like all the top ones. So like what does the video look like?

I'm just saying. But there are no two hands that can do what this foot massage is doing to my feet right now, literally heat, compression and massage on another level, I wish you could see the inside of what's going on. I'm sorry, but you are never going to have to beg your husband for a foot massage ever again with this. There are no two hands that could do what this is doing.

And so on the actual video, right? So I'm make that big so we can view it on Tick Tock. I'm. I mean, you know, look at all the engagement, all that kind of stuff. Basically, if you watch on mobile TikTok shop, little banner pops up at the bottom. Click here to buy her affiliate link. So you know, say she's making about a 20% commission revenue. 342,000. So it's probably 60 or $70,000 from this video. That's mind blowing. That should, that should sink in. Again, I'm not saying, I'm not selling you anything in this video, so I'm not saying like, but I'm not saying you're going to make $70,000 from video. But it's like right now if you can go on TikTok shop and shoot videos like this, right? She can show her face on her fucking feet, you know, and make these kinds of commissions. Then like why would you not compare to being a copywriter and trying to get good at copy and trying to get clients and grinding for the next six or nine or 12 months for something where there's gonna be less clients and AI is gonna replace more and more copywriters. It doesn't make sense to me. For now, this makes a lot more sense to try, try this out. It doesn't mean guaranteed probability of success, but it does mean, I think it's a higher probability than really making good money as a copywriter. Unless you just love copy so much. If you're truly passionate about copy, cool. But even then your AI is gonna replace you and you may, yo, you can get good with AI. And by the way, you still can use copy. If you love copyright for these types of videos, you can think of hooks. You can, you know, there's a structure. You can write scripts, test different stuff out. Especially if you're not going to be on camera. Although I think be on camera is good. But if you want to be on camera, you can do it like as like, you know, like faceless narrator. You got to write copy for it. But I don't understand, like to me I would, I would, I would look at that. And so I guess that's towards the end of this video because I Know, it's already really long and people have short attention to spans and all that kind of stuff. But I wanted to explain a couple things in it. I want to explain, you know, why I want to become a copywriter in 2024, what I would do instead, which is probably tick tock shop again. My wife's doing it actively. My cousin's wife is doing it. I'm probably gonna mess around with it too, because why not just for fun. And I'm gonna sell a course on it next week. But that's not why I'm doing this content, right? Like I don't care. I don't care about the course. Like truly. I just think this is a better probability of success for the average person right now. I guess real quick too. What about the TikTok ban, right? What about they're gonna ban TikTok? It's like, well, it's a divestiture, could get banned. It's gonna go to the Supreme Court. If it does happen, it's probably not gonna happen for like another, I don't know, six to 12 to 24 months. Maybe they will divest. There's also like the thing is you could like my wife signed up two days ago. She's going live now, right? Like you can, you can if you know what you're doing. That is why I'm selling the course. Because it's like to shorten the time frame. Right? But if you're smart, you don't, you know, figure it out on your own, whatever, I don't care. Point is you can be doing this in the next two days. So who cares what happens six months from now if you can have a lot of success today, right? Okay, so that's number one. Like what I want to become a copywriter. What I would do instead in 2024. Number two for business owners. If you want to understand why the landscape's changing, this is part of the reason why there's a whole other ways to sell to you. Like with Facebook and you know, doing like a, like a 8 to 12 minute kind of mini VSL. You test 100 different kind of hooks or openings in front of it. You find one that works. You scale that to 3 million plus per month. You go to an advertorial or just to a landing page down on your landing page. That's like the model that works, right? Besides like top page of Clickbank for aggressive ass offers. Like that's the model that generally works. Golden Hippos Gundry MD is doing like a long form. Cool yeah, they've been doing it for years. You're not going to MD v Shred, you know, has some long stuff like, sure, I'm not saying that it can't be done the other way, but it's less probability is lower, it's harder to do, it's more expensive, the economics are worse. That's just not the way for most people trying to sell direct to consumer physical products. And then there's this that's looming, which is again, you got a brand like Cal Greens, where you know, the cmos people, stuff like that, it's like they're doing like, you know, pretty insane numbers without even having a website essentially, Right? The most basic ass website. So I want to explain that too, because it explains, I think, why a lot of people. There's a whole shift happening, right? And that's, I guess number three is like why as a copywriter are. You know, you're going to have to infer jobs and what AI is going to be doing and already is doing as well. But to me, there's also more opportunity because again, TikTok shop still pretty early on when I was in shop plus, go back to the dashboard, I thought it was here. Where did I. Let me see if I can find this page. You know, basically the amount of revenue generated on TikTok shop and e comm in the past seven days, 84.94 million per week is not bad. But frankly, you know, if you look at the amount of stuff that, like actual transactions that happen globally, it's still kind of early days. You see the top places, skincare, all of these things. So you can see how it's been. Let's see. I guess the 8th was a big day, right? Sales, revenue, what is that? It's a billion, actually. I don't know what I'm looking at. What's that? That's revenue for maybe it's 510 billion. I don't know. I don't know what also I'm looking at there. All I know is that it's still early days though, because most people are not on TikTok shop right now. So I don't know. I'm stopping the video now. Like I said. I'm sure some people are going to be all pissed off. They're gonna say, I'm saying this because I want to sell them courses about AI and TikTok. They're gonna get mad because they're gonna be like, but I love copyright. It's like, cool, great. They're gonna be like, what about the TikTok ban because they didn't watch the end of this video. It's like, well, figure it out. I'm not. I'm ultimately, I'm more interested in building and scaling things, like including on TikTok shop as a. As an offer owner. But I also feel like I. I want to try to help people, and so I had to make this video. So. All right, I'm stopping here. Thank you for watching. For those of you who did watch this long goodbye.