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Your offer is the foundation of your marketing campaign. Get it right, and everything else will fall into place. Your headline will grab readers, your copy will sing, your ad layout will hardly matter, and you will have customers running to your door. Get it wrong, and even the best looking, best-written campaign will sink like the Titanic. 

A powerful offer is an irresistible offer. It’s an offer that gets your audience frothing at the mouth and clamoring over each other all the way to your door. An offer that makes your readers pick up the phone and open their wallets. Irresistible offers make your potential customers think, “I’d be crazy not to take him up on that,” or “An offer like this doesn’t come around very often.” They instill a sense of emotion, of desire, and ultimately, urgency.

Wait. Cost of Sale? Don’t sales make us money? How can it cost us? Coming from the hypothesis that God does not make direct deposits, the fact that they gold rush is over, bitcoin possibly but it’s up in the air, and stealing is unacceptable -- getting money effortlessly is nearly impossible. It takes effort to turn prospects into long-term customers. You must focus on generating awareness, establishing trust, building a relationship, and creating a conducive environment where people are ready to buy from you.

Some of the things you will read in this post have been covered or previously touched upon. But, I have decided to dedicate a whole post to explaining this in detail because this is the process of copy engineering that we go through at eLaunchers. This process can serve as a baseline to deviate from and integrate into your standard operating procedure. Here are the five main parts of the process:

A few posts ago, we talked about project P&L. To quickly recap the concept behind project P&L is let me give an example regarding fixed fee projects:

If I ask a client for $10,000, then I will do X. If they give me $1000, then I will do Y. If I ask for $45,000, then they will get the Z package. For each package, there is a finite scope of work. I give them the scope and then the either sign or don’t sign the deal. But it is not always that simple. Sometimes, it takes me longer to do what I said I will do. Sometimes, I underestimate the needs of the project and I have to do a lot more than I originally estimated.

Hopefully by now you have figured out -- or started to think about -- who will be doing your types I - IV copy. But before you decide exactly who will write for you, you first need to decide WHAT needs to be written and its TYPE of copy. Frankly, even thinking about the different types of copy is even more important than who will actually write it because once you DEFINE the ROLE, it is easy to assign the role to the most adept person. In classic business administration, you can have multiple humans in a role and you can have multiple roles in a human.

When my son was eleven years old, I had a conversation with him about accountability. I was telling him that in economics, everyone must carry their weight and pay for their own way in the world. He was drinking milk and eating toast while I was practically ranting to him about the state of the world. When I started arguing that it was not fair for over-performing assets to subsidize underperforming assets and non-performing liabilities, he put his mug down and exclaimed, “I should stop drinking this milk then.”

To start out, I would like to express my gratitude to master copywriter Russell Martino for educating me on the extreme depth of the copywriting process and the life of a copywriter. I wasn't always like this. I have previously uttered the words, “it's just copy, anyone can do it,” “just hire anyone,” “just dictate it,” and worst of all, “just write it yourself, all I need is some copy.” Being uneducated about copy and copywriting made it very hard for me to do my job.

As a data scientist, numbers do not scare me. In fact, I love numbers. When those numbers have a dollar signed attached to them, I love them even more. Money and data go hand-in-hand. In the business world, the best thing to keep track of finances is a profit and loss (P&L) chart. This is also known as the common accounting practice of job costing.

One day, an operations manager at a fellow digital marketer agency approached me. He asked if I could introduce him to a good copywriter. So naturally I agreed and asked what he wanted them to write. And he responded with “everything”. I wanted to make sure I was understanding his request so I said, “you are looking for a copywriter to write everything for all your clients and you want to know who that person is, how much they charge, how you can make a profit, and how can you bring them into the position of a staff writer. Is that what you are asking for?” He was thrilled that I understood so when I said “no” two seconds later, he was slightly shocked.

It was eight p.m. on a Friday night and I was out with some friends. We were sitting around a table and chatting. At some point, it became a bragging contest where we were essentially trying to outdo each other. My friends and I went back and forth for a little while. Finally I said, if there was a sweet deal on the table tonight, then I could have more than a million dollars in cash in this house by midnight. Suffice enough to say that I won our playful argument.