Daniel Throssel is a copywriter and the founder of The Persuasive Page.
Please enjoy his 582-word Micro-Interview:
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Thanks, Daniel.
Let’s get started:
1) "Do you have a work routine?”
I wake up at 4:30 every day of the week and work out while listening to an audiobook. After that I’ll make a coffee and study the Bible in Hebrew and Greek until my kids wake up around 7. Then I’ll dress and feed them, make breakfast, and spend some time playing around on the piano/drums.
I usually go into my office and start work at 9am. I use a program called SelfControl to disable most internet functions until afternoon so I can get several hours of what Cal Newport calls “deep work”. I’ll spend the first few hours working on whatever course or project I’m creating at the moment, or anything else important I need to work on in my business. Then around 1pm I’ll start working on the daily email I send my email list. Around 2pm I’ll check my emails for the first time, and schedule my email to send the next morning. I almost always stop working at 5pm and shut down the computer.
2) "What do you wish you'd known about your work when you first started?”
Don’t be in such a rush to persuade people. All the old-school stuff you read about writing copy is amazing, but their world was different. Back then everything cost money, so you had to make every ad count, and recoup as much money as possible as fast as possible.
So you had a lot of very hard pitches, because if someone didn’t buy from that one ad, it was a loss. Today is different. If you try and hard-sell someone upfront, it’s not so effective. These days, a series of entertaining, personality-laden sales emails — convincing and building trust over the course of weeks, or months, or even years — will beat the pants off the world’s best sales letter that has to make the sale on-the-spot.
3) “What did your biggest professional failure teach you?”
When I was a new copywriter, the first thing I learned was how to write those crazy old-school sales letters with wild promises that went straight for the sale.
So one of my first experiments was to print a bunch of sales letters for my dad’s home alarm business with the aggressive headline “I Could Have ROBBED You Today!” … and hand-deliver hundreds of them across my neighbourhood. It got a ‘direct response’ all right … the phones were ringing with abuse for my dad for days afterwards.
I learned that
a) there’s a time and a place for everything;
b) some products are best sold only to audiences who are ready to buy them; and
c) it’s best not to directly threaten the person you’re trying to sell to…
4) “Has anything helped you shorten your craft's learning curve?”
Having my own email list — with total control and responsibility of building, managing and emailing it — taught me more in a few months than five years of copywriting for clients. I recommend it to every copywriter.
5) “Do you have a book recommendation?”
John Carlton’s Kick-Ass Copywriting Secrets of a Marketing Rebel started it for me. Honourable mention to Ben Settle’s Email Players Skhema Book.
6) “Any parting piece of advice?”
I genuinely believe that writing copy can and should be awesome fun. But that only happens when you have the freedom to write what you want. So either find a client who’ll give you that freedom … or build your own business to write for.
