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Comment by il | Hacker News Reader

Read Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins, the granddaddy of all copywriting books. Do it now. It's very short, it's available online for free, and it has no fluff and all useful information.

It was written a few years ago, so it doesn't have the latest techniques for maximizing conversions for SaaS products.

However, it's written for direct response advertisers and not brand advertisers, so it covers the basics of getting sales, tracking, split testing, etc very well.

You can take the techniques Hopkins presents for writing short, effective classified ads and apply them very effectively, with minimal modification, to your AdWords ads and landing pages.

These techniques have been tested by dozens of advertisers since, and they work VERY well.

A good copywriter will usually charge $10-$15K plus a percentage of sales. I would strongly recommend bringing your copy skills to "Good enough" and doing it yourself.

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For those that don't want to give their email address away to a page for a marketing book (I was a bit wary): http://sahillavingia.com/ScientificAdvertising.pdf

The Wikipedia page for the book lists an online copy and a PDF download that are both formatted nicely with just the text and no distracting graphics - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Advertising

A good copywriter will usually charge $10-$15K plus a percentage of sales.

That's rubbish. I write copy for clients all day; very few companies I work with launch without copy for websites and marketing materials written by me. I bill this at my standard daily billing rate. I am without doubt a good copywriter although it's not what goes on my business card; it's just part of what I do for clients so that they launch as well as possible. The pro copywriters I know may be charging 10x what I'm charging but it's still nothing like what you're talking about.

You're either vastly undervaluing your service or you don't work in direct response :)

Good copy takes weeks if not months to write and refine- you should adjust your prices to reflect this.

"A good copywriter will usually charge $10-$15K plus a percentage of sales" -> ok, to be clear, all the copywriters I've worked with in the past (who call themselves professional copywriters) are paid salaries or as contractors. Never do they charge this much, and NEVER a percentage of sales.

I think you're talking about a very specific kind of work, could you define what that is?

$10-$15K + % ... wow! That's way outside of my price range and an order of magnitude higher than I was expecting.

Thanks for the Claude Hopkins tip.

Amazon has a kindle version for 99 cents. I downloaded the sample chapter to my Kindle for Mac.

http://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Advertising-ebook/dp/B003Z4...

Ok, I've got to ask. $15K for one text? Percentage? It's THREE orders of magnitude more other than other general text writing. How can this be justified? (Kind of looks like daylight robbery to me)

If good copy can result in even a 10% increase in sales for a mass market product, that could be worth millions of dollars, much more than $15K. This isn't for a blurb, it's for several thousand words of copy(think something like a 10 page salesletter, or all pages on a website).

Keep in mind that writing the actual text is a very small portion of the work. 90% of a good copywriter's time is spent researching your competitors, customers, and target market...understanding your product in great detail to fully highlight its benefits...finding which psychological hot buttons exist in the specific segment of the market you want to target, and how to push them in just the right way to create a red-hot burning desire in your prospect's minds to buy your product NOW.

To write good copy, you need an absolute understanding or a market, basically all of the steps of a comprehensive market research project. This takes time and money.

You can definitely find someone to write you an article for a few bucks. It won't convert, and it won't represent your product/startup in the best way.

That's why I recommend startup founders learn the basics and write good copy themselves, You already know your product and customers best- you can skip the through research a copywriter would have to engage in.

If it's a skill people can learn with reasonable effort, though, why would it be that expensive to purchase? In a market without artificial moats, the cost of services should approach the cost of providing them, not approach some measure of their "value". Even if a service is really valuable, in a competitive market with low barriers to entry, many people will compete to provide it, driving down the prevailing price.

Simple version: you can learn it in the same way you can learn to paint. Sure, you might be able to knock out a decent picture, but you're not going to get something that looks like it was painted by one of the masters of the craft.

Knowing the theory and being able to produce great work are two different things. The price is what it is because, despite it being learn-able, the experience of writing thousands of pages of sales copy, refining them and getting the craft so down to a fine art just comes from experience and practise.

Copywriting has nothing to do with general text writing -- it's about salesmanship in print. Paying a one-time fee of $15k and a small percentage of all future sales generated by the copy isn't expensive if you compare that to what it would cost to hire even a half-decent salesman, working full-time, for a year.

In some cases, a good sales letter can be used for years and years. Take a look at this classic two-page direct mail piece that was used -- with small variations -- during 28 years and made the Wall Street Journal ridiculous amounts of money: http://www.copywriting1.com/2007/10/wall-street-journal-lett...

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