award-winning, revenue-driving creative in all media
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for clients such as
resulting in
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(+/-) (Or, Why Some Copywriters Can Charge $2,000 a Day)
Expert chicken sexers distinguish male and female chicks with 98% accuracy up to 1,000 times per hour, day after day. Untrained people get a baby chick's sex right only about 50% of the time, no matter how slowly they work.
Nothing strange about that -- until you know that male and female chicks look the same to everyone -- including the expert chicken sexers. The experts can't point out the difference any better than an average person can. But when they look at an upside-down chick, they somehow "just know" without being able to explain.
The experts' skilll, vital to the chicken ranching industry, is as mysterious to themselves as it has been to everyone else, at least until now.
Thanks to research in cognitive science, "expert intuition" is finally well understood. Turns out the expert mind doesn't work any differently than yours or mine, it's just been trained in the expert's environment. Chess masters, brilliant diagnosticians, bomb squad technicians and chicken sexers all come to their correct expert conclusions the same way you might know your girlfriend is upset before she does, without being able to explain why. We all make snap decisions based on unconsciously recognized patterns, all the time.
But after getting thousands of hours of useful feedback over years of experience in countless different situations, the expert's unconscious mental pattern recognition software has been trained to cue correct responses in highly specialized circumstances with which the rest of us aren't familiar. It's that simple.
Which brings us to when a copywriter is like a chicken sexer. When you need copy that generates conversions, leads, phone calls, store visits or direct sales -- copy that has to drive revenue -- one headline or layout can look as good as another to the average person. Or worse, one headline or layout can look better than another to the average person, but for the wrong reasons.
That's when you need an expert who's spent decades being tested in environments where advertising results are measured by instant feedback like clicks, calls and purchases. Then you've got someone whose unconscious mental pattern recognition software has been trained to cue the best responses and "just knows" what to do, who can give you better results, faster, and often at lower cost overall.
If you don't need copy that drives revenue, you don't need someone so expensive. But for the times when you do, it's worth it to hire a copywriter who's put in his or her "10,000 hours" experiencing what didn't work, what did, and what worked even better when it came to driving specific customer actions to build businesses.
Who cares if they can't tell you why?
P.S. I've got three decades and about 30,000 hours under my belt.
P.P.S. I do discount my rates for longer-term engagements. I also like to do pay-for-performance. And I've always taken some projects with small entrepreneurs for whatever they could pay me or even nothing because, weird as it sounds, I do this for fun. (-)