This email might ruffle a few feathers…
But in the end, I think it will be helpful for a lot of people.
There’s been a large number of posts in the Justin & Stefan Talk Copy group lately that have not sat well with me.
For example…
A few times a week I see posts from copywriters in the group offering advice to other copywriters…
Which is great (that’s what the group is for).
However for many of these people, it’s blatantly obvious that the person offering advice has never made a dime from copywriting.
So the person offering advice has probably read Gene Schwartz or a Halbert book…
They’ve probably watched my Youtube videos…
Maybe they even hand-copied old ads to practice…
All that stuff is good.
And will improve your copy…
However…
It’s obvious to me that most of them have never actually written copy, and tested it in the real world.
They’ve never written a new lead and tested it against a control…
They’ve never written an email and sent it to a list to see how many sales it made.
And that’s a problem…
Cause here’s the reality…
You shouldn’t be giving out advice if you’ve never had to put your copy out there…
Cause you don’t know what works.
You haven’t put in your 10,000 hours.
You haven’t run hundreds of split tests.
You’re simply regurgitating what you learned from other people.
And that’s not helpful.
It’s not helpful for the person you’re giving advice to…
And it’s not helpful for you either.
Honestly one of my biggest regrets from early on in my career was that I didn’t just put my head down and work.
Cause I was guilty of the same thing…
I was always offering up advice…
And acting like I knew what I was doing.
Sure I had SOME success at that point.
But I would have been better off just putting my head down and focusing on making my copy better.
I shouldn’t have been spouting off advice.
But I did it because it made me feel important.
And now that I’m seeing similar stuff in our Facebook group, hopefully I can convince a few people to stop doling out advice…
If you haven’t had a bunch of success yet, you’re better off just keeping your head down and focus on your own work.
It’s a much better use of your time.
Keep that in mind,
– Justin
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