The Copywriter Underground

The emails come almost weekly. And while they take different routes, the copywriters sending them all pretty much end up in the same place:

“How do I build a career as a copywriter?”

The answer is not what they expect.

Your ability to build a lasting career as a copywriter will not be based on your knowledge of “The Ten Headlines That Always Get The Sale” or a Super-Secret, Can’t Miss Sales System or knowing by heart the “Five Reasons Twitter Will Change The Universe Forever” blog post.

In fact, no post, article or book will prepare you for what’s to come.

And while businesses would like you to believe otherwise, the success of your copywriting career doesn’t rest on your choice of smartphone, Twitter client, or high-bandwidth wireless connection.

So exactly what is the key to long-term survival?

Simple. It’s your ability to adapt.

Marketing – Now With the Great Taste of Chaos

I just hung up the phone after a lengthy client conversation – but only after agreeing to teach several more online marketing classes.

Teaching was never a career goal.

In fact, I never considered it prior to the last couple years. Yet here I am, teaching classes. A lot of them.

It’s something I couldn’t do if I was close-minded about my career.

But then, when I typed my first paying copy jobs on an electric typewriter (I wasn’t man enough to go manual), I never imagined I’d write ads for high-end racing helmets, sell $10 million semiconductor manufacturing systems, eventually derive most of my income from consulting, or be successful enough to live on a beautiful property located on the flank of an inactive volcano.

In short, you may think you’ve got it all planned.

But history suggests your long-term plan is more fiction than reality.

Guess what?

For the smart, aware and adaptable copywriters reading this, that’s a good thing.

Really.

Adapt, Adapt, Adapt

If you’re building a copywriting career today, you’re facing a fast-changing marketplace, fickle customer base – and a marketing universe which will look very, very different when you wake up five years from now.

In prehistoric times (as little as ten years ago), you could handily pay the grocery bills writing corporate capability brochures. If you sprinkled in a handful of B2B direct response packages, life was pretty good.

Annual report gigs were the frosting that funded retirement accounts and new cars.

Today, two of those markets are largely toast. The other is a shadow of of its former self.

And the copywriters who specialized in the above – and didn’t see the fast-moving bus that was the Internet – became roadkill. (Ask veteran copywriter Copywriting Maven Roberta Rosenberg what happened to a couple of her print-only copywriting friends – who never made the transition to online marketing.)

The World Is Spinning Faster

If a decade seems too long ago to feel relevant, simply consider online marketing’s recent history.

Only a few years ago, every business “needed” a Second Life presence. Then a MySpace presence.

At one time, email was hot. Then it wasn’t. Now, it’s hot again (proof common sense sometimes prevails).

And let’s not forget the latest “hot” channels: Facebook and Twitter.

Twitter’s cruising, though Facebook is experiencing the inevitable backlash against their ham-fisted handling of their users and partners.

It’s tempting to say the old media channels are fading, but they’ll likely be back, albeit in different forms.

They’ll fight for survival alongside the new marketing channels, which are springing to life almost hourly.

Simply put – even within the narrow confines of the online marketing universe – much has changed in just 12 months.

And don’t doubt for a second that more change is on the horizon.

Has your business changed with it?

All The Little Fingers, Typing

Here’s an unpleasant reality: There have never been more sets of fingers willing to type for hire.

And many of the emerging copy markets are – how do I put it tastefully – sorta low rent (the product of a [hopefully] transient lack of taste on the part of search engines, which are still in their infancy too).

And while we’re toting up the bad news, copywriting’s customer base has never been so reluctant to pay a living wage for words.

Which means today’s novice copywriter faces:

• A chaotic media landscape
• A search-engine derived emphasis of quantity over quality
• The accelerating obsolescence of existing media (which will soon include some of the current “hot” channels)
• Free-falling fee structures
• Intense competition
• Media channels which encourage “do-it-yourself” client marketing
• A guarantee of more of the same

What keeps a new copywriter fed and dry in a landscape like that?

Hint: It’s Not The Alphabet

Clearly, the basics of copywriting will never change; “what’s in it for me” will still be the first question asked by prospective buyers, and your ability to answer it will determine the health of your bank account.

Still, even the basics of marketing may be bending a little under the strain of the Internet.

After reading uber-thinker Nicholas Carr’s latest book (The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains), I’m fairly certain my current thinking is right; we’ll have the same sales conversations as before.

But we’ll have them in smaller chunks.

An illustration?

When I first wrote corporate web sites, the word count on the average page was far higher than today’s sites.

Then we went through a spell when “clean” design was hot (I cynically named the trend “corporate sterile”), and the pages hardly said anything at all.

Thankfully, that phase passed.

Today’s site is fast becoming a convergence point for an organization’s feeds and streams (“Feed and Stream” is likely the best unused social media magazine title ever).

Home pages can no longer be considered a site’s main landing page, and in fact, the readership of many business blogs far exceeds that of the rest of the site.

Those copywriters and marketers who can’t adapt to streams, or chunking, or insist on writing web sites the same old way because “they worked before and they’ll work now” (something I once embarrassingly said) – will see their business (especially the interesting stuff) wither away.

The Big Finish

It would be wonderful if I could boil down a foolproof survival tactic into three short bullet points.

That would be highly tweetable, but not very real.

Instead, I can offer you the following:

Challenge Your Assumptions

What’s true today could be tomorrow’s empty (and cashless) cliche. Conventional logic suggested Amazon.com was never going to turn a profit (neither was Facebook or Twitter).

Something changed, and those who recognized that change prospered as a result. I have my own ideas about the future of marketing as it concerns copywriters, but what are yours?

And more importantly, which of your assumptions (“the annual report will never go away“) are about to go down in flames?

Let me add one thought. Listening to everybody else – and accepting it as gospel – is simply a cheezy way to substitute their assumptions for theirs.

The Internet is full of parrots, con men and weak-minded fools, and like Carson Brackney said, it’s your job to avoid them.

Stay Aware Of Your Revenue Streams

This is manifestly not sexy, but it is critical. Small shifts in the kinds of projects you’re seeing – and in your own revenue sources – may herald a larger, long-term shift in your business.

Ideally, you’d stay ahead of those shifts, but that’s expecting a lot.

If clients start asking for the same kind of project, is that coincidence? Or a whole new (and largely untapped) revenue stream?

Make Things Happen

If there’s one constant on the Underground, it’s that I constantly flog my readers to go out and find the clients/work/projects they want to write.

It’s truly marvelous when the world comes to you, but you don’t have to be a statistics whiz to know your chances of achieving happiness are a lot higher when you decide what happiness looks like instead of the next guy to call.

Have a Sense of Wonder

Admittedly, this concept hasn’t found a home in too many MBA programs. But it’s absolutely essential if you’re going to survive.

It’s my final piece of advice to my online marketing boot camp students, and one of the few things that can sustain you over the course of a long career.

There are few certainties in copywriting, though we can make pretty safe assumptions about two of them.

First, you will deal with rejection. Perhaps a lot of it. New clients won’t like your pitch. Existing customers won’t like your first draft (or your second). Your mother will urge you to find a real job.

Get used to it.

Don’t take it personally. And recognize that hiding in a totally safe, rejection-free world is akin to living in a padded room because it’s safer.

It might be safe, but you’ll eventually go crazy.

And – oh yes – you should regularly marvel at the idea that somebody pays you to write for a living.

Second, we can safely assume the copywriting universe is going to change.

A lot.

You either lead the change, ride along with it, or get run over.

If you see emerging technologies as interesting, wondrous things (maintaining the kind of skepticism it takes to survive in a hype-driven field), then you’ll last a whole lot longer than if you embraced a dark, sinister worldview.

I started the Copywriter Underground simply to see if blogging really was an effective lead-generation strategy – something I’d have to know if I was going to recommend it to my clients.

Four years later, my business has morphed to the point this blog has become a pointless artifact.

The time I invest here largely reflects that. Yet this is where it truly gets interesting.

I could look at the Underground and suggest it’s been a colossal waste of time. Or marvel that I could reach so many people just by typing a few ideas into a text editor every now and then.

How could anyone not have a sense of wonder about that?

Keep writing (and adapting), Tom Chandler

A couple weeks ago we experienced what the local paper termed “The Storm of a Lifetime” – which left six feet of snow on the ground, many of the trees on my wooded three-acre lot broken and toppled over, and the power out for the better part of a week.

That it happened while I was running headlong into several copywriting and consulting deadlines is likely proof of a vengeful god, and – like the snow-shattered trees in the yard – I’m still cleaning up the mess.

I’m also making big changes to my business model, and if it’s one lesson I’ve learned over the years, writing your own copy and consulting on your own marketing plan are much, much harder than doing it for others.

As several other bloggers have noted, the copywriting world is changing fast, and not always for the better. I’m simply recognizing those differences.

The new venture is the logical outgrowth of my focus on the value-added copywriter, and while I’d suggest I’m taking a bold new step, the reality is less hyperbolic; I’m hurrying the transition that’s been occurring for the last handful of years.

I’m a fly fishermen, and given water’s tendency to flow downhill, I’ve always known that you never foot in the same river twice.

Given the nature of our times, it’s equally true you never step out of bed into the same world you left when you crawled in.

Ignoring that reality is a prescription for something other than fulfillment, gratification and success.

We’ll resume normal function here soon – once the trees are off the roof (and the porch, and the driveway, and the…).

Keep writing, Tom Chandler.

It turns out that pitting our tiny new daughter against my previously comfortable writing routine results in the following: the wholesale slaughter of the routine.

Embarrassingly, I had to read my own blog to discover where my last post left off (hint: Zombie Copywriter attacks Slacker Building Contractor).

The Good News?

• The new kid is doing great (she is a sweetheart and my cynical marketer’s heart soars every time I see her – unbearably adorable photograph added below)
• Despite the madness, I launched a tourism Web site project (with all the trimmings), and the client is happy (they should be)

The Bad News?

I remain barely a half-step ahead of my client commitments.

Which leaves little time for a blog. Or personal writing. Or sleep. Or even a shared (fun) Web site project (aided and abetted by another copywriter).

Naturally – now that the Thanksgiving Madness is over (as is the last-minute Black Friday client rush) – I’m teaching four nights a week for the next three weeks.

Like raising a kid, teaching is hugely exhausting and wildly gratifying at the same time (more on that in an upcoming post).

I expect to have a lot of fun.

What Else is Coming on the Underground?

I’ve got some great stuff ahead.

I’m putting the finishing touches on an update to the profile I wrote of Airgun niche writer Tom Gaylord, who now hosts a TV show and is even signing lucrative product development contracts.

In his typically direct, impassioned style, Tom offers ample food for thought for anyone dominating their niche – but wonders what comes after you own the space.

Then there’s my call for a Modern Word Processor for the Contemporary Online Writer. Today’s writers are using yesterday’s writing tools, and it’s time that changed.

In other words, the Copywriter Underground’s not dead, just moving at whatever pace the world’s best one year-old daughter allows.

Keep writing, Tom Chandler.

Adorable Photograph of Reason You’re Not Reading This Blog Very Often:

An influential professor always told me that comfort is your enemy, which is why – every once in a while – we all need to pick up a brick and toss it through one of the plate glass windows which so neatly contain our lives.

In other words, if you want to grow, you sometimes need to make uncomfortable, life-altering choices.

Like that day in college when I realized words were cool things, and perhaps I could make a living arranging them for people.

Or the decades-later realization that my clients had email addresses, so maybe I could live near a good trout stream instead of the alternate universe known as the Silicon Valley.

Then there was the afternoon I realized life with a certain woman looked a more appealing than life without her, and that it was time to make this whole thing permanent.

Every one of those decisions seemed huge at the time – and each created its fair share of anxiety – but all worked out beautifully.

Time to pick up another brick.

Soon, my wife and I are saddling up a Boeing 777 jet and flying literally halfway around the world to meet our little daughter.

Our new little daughter.

Holy shit.

I’m about to become a parent.

The New Reality

And yes, since this process began over a year ago, I have often huddled in bed at 3:30 in the morning, eyes wide open, mentally bulleting the ways I could emotionally (and physically) scar a kid already facing the challenges of adoption.

The good news? While adoption rules forbid me from posting her picture or name here, the pictures we’ve seen clearly indicate Little M (my clever code name) is cuter, smarter and just plain better than all the other kids on the planet.

In fact, it’s likely she’s a world-class athlete, a brilliant chessplayer, and a natural-born fly fisherman.

I just know it.

You can tell by looking. Plain as day.

(And yes – I already have the whole Proud Poppa thing down pat.)

The Parent Trap

I suspect I’m not entirely alone in this, but as parent-to-be, I’m already excellent at cycling between excitement and sheer terror.

One minute I’m convinced I’m going to be a great dad, teaching my daughter all the really cool, important stuff while driving her to her next athletic triumph (track/tennis/soccer/etc – I’m easy).

The next minute I imagine falling prey to one of my absent-minded fogs, forgetting to feed my daughter, wandering off, then coming home to find her swilling drain cleaner from the bottle I left on the floor next to the gasoline-soaked rags piled on the accidentally left-on stove.

Clearly, anticipation is a two-edged sword.

Stepping beyond the glass window that defines the limits of your “normal” life means picking up a brick and creating a little chaos.

You throw the brick, life changes, and then you sweep up the broken glass – and notice the view is clearer, plus you’ve got more room to grow than before.

Things may be challenging for a while, but you remember that’s the way things are supposed to be, and you can’t really complain.

I mean, it’s what you asked for when you picked up the brick in the first place.

Keep writing, Tom Chandler.

[Update: Amusingly, Twitter's been very unhappy since I posted this, and suggesting it's in the midst of a meltdown wouldn't be out of line...]

You can’t help but hear the drumbeats about Twitter. Depending on who’s talking, it’s either a colossal waste of time, or humanity’s last, greatest hope.

I’ve used Twitter for months now as a simple micro-blogging sidebar on my Trout Underground fly fishing blog. In that relatively undemanding capacity (and helped along by Alex King’s excellent Twitter Tools), it worked fine, though hardly perfectly.

Recently I tumbled for a personal Twitter account to see about all the fuss.

Well, I tried to see.

Seems like the service is down a lot. In fact, as I write this — having just shipped a messaging platform advocating a radical repositioning of a client’s product (something I was willing to crow about) — I can’t log on.

Can’t tweet. Can’t do anything. (I wrote this yesterday. Today — right now — we seem to be experiencing another temporary outage).

While not everything about Twitter is trivial, it’s clear that most tweets aren’t exactly life-changing, which is precisely why the service needs to work flawlessly.

The Experiment Continues

Still, I’m going to continue the Twitter experiment.

You can find me there hiding behind a ChandlerWrites address.

I invite you to follow along, and I promise not to clog the pipelines with “shorts or sweatpants?” subject matter.

After all, I initially “followed” a lot of people in an attempt to quickly gain perspective. And the noise level was… high. Too high.

I find Twitter an interesting idea. Perhaps once I’m following the right people, the light bulb will come on. And regardless of of whether it sticks, you have to do these things to speak about them with your clients.

Still, Twitter feels more like a proof of concept — a proving ground for something better that has yet to evolve.

Keep writing, Tom Chandler.

Technorati Tags: twitter,tweets,copywriting

I’m at my parent’s home in Central California, my brothers and I converging on our home because of the death of my father.

Those of you who’ve gotten The Call know the jarring mix of emotions that come with it, and right now we’re digging through the accumulated belongings of a man who — like many who lived through the Great Depression — threw little away.

It’s a little like an archeological excavation, with the artifacts getting older as you dig deeper, until finally — at the bottom of one box — we found the little cards he handed out to people at his high school graduation.

I’ll be back and blogging by the end of the week.

Technorati Tags: painful stuff

While I’ve written a lot of direct response projects over my 22+ year career, I’ve happily avoided getting myself and my clients in trouble.

That’s because I’m a staunch advocate of ethical marketing practices, and long been an outspoken critic of deceptive mailing practices.

In an age of increasingly jaded customers, deceptive marketing practices harden customers, eventually harming all marketers — especially those marketing fairly.

That’s whyBRANDWEEK sourced me when they wrote a story about the growing practice of deceptive mailings. While they ran several quotes, this stood out:

“The public is exposed to so many messages that when a growing percentage of those messages turn out to be deceptive, the result is yet another upward ratchet in consumer cynicism,” said Tom Chandler, a 20-year ad copywriter and consultant based in Mount Shasta, Calif., who operates ChandlerWrites.com. “That growing suspicion of marketers and brands has become so profound, some companies can’t even get customers to open envelopes containing real documents.”

Delight, Don’t Deceive

The rule here is simple: rather than deceive, why not delight recipients with a novel or creative approach?

Most deceptive marketing practices rely heavily on fear appeals. Unfortunately, the psychology of fear is well understood; the next time fear is falsely used as a motivator, you’ll need more of it to get the same response.

Where, exactly, will that end?

There’s also the larger question of brand value; as a proponent of engagement marketing, I must ask why anyone would risk their brand?

“What I don’t understand is why organizations allow deceptive practices to undermine their carefully [and expensively] cultivated brand images in the first place,” said Chandler. “I recently received a series of envelopes from a large credit-card bank where I held an account. All shared the same alarmist stamp that “Important Information” about his account was enclosed. “Of course, it wasn’t important information,” Chandler said. “It was a series of cross-selling pitches. After a month or two, I canceled my account.”

The Ethical Marketer

Every seasoned copywriter I’ve ever spoken to has a similar story; a chilling encounter with a client pushing them very, very hard to do something unethical.

In the moment, it’s always tempting to succumb, reasoning the work’s unsigned and nobody will know (how I wish copywriters received the credit/blame for their work).

Believe me, you’ll know.

Of course, one marketer’s “deceptive” is another’s fair game. And where that line should be drawn is never clear, though one thing is; if marketers keep stepping over that line, eventually regulation will be created that limit those transgressions (and probably do it poorly).

As copywriters, we are responsible for our work, and blaming clients for “making” us engage in deceptive practices is simply a wonky moral dodge.

Keep writing, Tom Chandler.

The human brain can track up to four complex thoughts simultaneously, and yet — just before lunchtime today — I counted the open windows on my new 17″ laptop.

Six OpenOffice windows (five text, one spreadsheet), four Live Writer windows (my blog editor), three draft e-mails, a still warm-to-the-touch Google Talk window, and yes — two Copywriter windows (perfect when line and character counts are important).

By my count, that’s 16 writer-driven windows , and in that environment — one running at 4x my brain’s rated capacity (no jokes, please) — how much room am I creating to think?

Multitasking With a Mono-Brain

You may have noticed a lack of posts lately. A story of alien abduction would cover my tracks in the most traffic-friendly way, but the reality is different; I’ve started a book-length personal project.

For a writer who’s spent the last two decades hammering out 300-word pieces centered around single-sentence headlines, it’s a change.

A big change.

Almost immediately, I ran into a hitch. It wasn’t writer’s block.

It was the sheer number of writer-facing media channels calling for my attention.

At the risk of sounding like a codger, it wasn’t always this way. And yes, it’s interesting how the addition of a “deep thought” personal project finally exposed the problem, which kinda snuck up on me.

Still, this isn’t a plea for time management tips; I’m figuring out what works, and yes, it’s overdue.

The Hard Part

Fitting a couple hours of personal writing into a day already crammed with dangling participles and caffeine isn’t without its difficulties.

But neither does it lack in satisfaction.

I’m not going to bore you with detailed summaries of writer’s angst.

I do aim to interest you in the juicy bits. After all, this book project came to life at the intersection of blogging and what others have called the online world’s “empowerment of the individual.”

In less stuffy terms, it means I wouldn’t be writing the book if it wasn’t for a blog, and I wouldn’t have written the business plan if it wasn’t for the Internet.

The Value Added Author

I talk often of the Value-Added Copywriter. It’s a laudable concept — the idea that someone knows how to do things beyond their narrow specialty.

Equally laudable is the idea that we’d leverage that value-added knowledge for our own benefit.

Stay tuned. And keep writing, Tom Chandler.

Technorati Tags: writing,book,writing a book,brain function

Sometimes the weight of a couple deadlines, too much coffee, and a late night can have a mildly hallucinagenic effect on a copywriter — especially when you’re trying to pop out a half dozen “brilliant” ads.

And yes, there were times when I was reasonably sure my typewriter/computer/fingers/brain were conspiring against me. And if anyone else were to see my ad concept doodle notebooks from a decade ago, they’d be tempted to check me into rehab — despite the fact I’ve never touched any of the truly interesting drugs.

Today I’m headed out the door for yet another new client meeting (they’re coming thick and fast right now), so while I’m driving, enjoy this little bit of writer humor, courtesy some other copywriter.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=kvtcmdvsY-A[/youtube]

[tags]copywriting, writing[/tags]

No freelancer likes to get sick. It’s not as if we get sick days from the HR department. And there’s little worse than missing deadlines because you’re too busy driving the porcelain bus.

Yet it happens. It’s been happening to me all week.

I’ll be back at work next week. Preferably without the headaches, nausea, fever — and all the other messy symptoms you don’t want to read about.

Keep writing. And stay well.

[tags]copywriting, diseased copywriter[/tags]