Hi All,
This week I had quite a stressful experience. It was my own fault... well at least I think it was. What happened was...
I have an account on Elance (www.elance.com), which I set up about 8 or 9 years ago as a means for finding a few new clients. It's a good place to find new entrepreneurial marketers who are looking for someone to help them promote their products or services. I still have clients with me now that selected by bid on their projects all those years ago. A few have made many thousands from my sales letters so I guess they want to keep me close.
So, last week I was searching around to see if there were any jobs I might find interesting and also whether they were willing to pay the right price. By that I mean some people post jobs and are only prepared to pay peanuts so what do they expect to get? Yes... exactly!
I found a couple of interesting jobs and I placed my bids on them. I soon got some interest from what I think is a marketing agency based in the US. I say I think because you never can tell who you are dealing with. Now the problem with agencies is they are acting on behalf of their client, who happens to be my client. Get my drift?
Okay, well basically they are the middleman. They find the clients, find out what the clients want, give them a price for delivering, and then recruit freelancers via sites like Elance. Believe me working for any type of agency is hard work.
That's because most of the time they don't really know what their client really wants and so the brief can be quite fuzzy or at best a little ambiguous. Basically, an agency can keep the freelancer producing work and forever revising it until their client is happy and of course they take all the credit.
Well, I found myself mixed up with this agency who told me what their client wanted but not exactly how they wanted it. I mean the layout and construction of the web page content they needed. So, being a direct response copywriter I wrote some content as I would for any web page. That is, I communicate with the reader on a one-to-one level. You know... like I am with you right now. To be honest, it's the only way I know how to sell with words.
Well, I sent off my draft for their perusal and guess what? They hated it. They wanted the old institutional type ad copy you read in the Yellow Pages, you know that stuff that never really worked for anyone. I thought we'd all moved on from that stuff but evidently not.
When I was lecturing in college, many years ago to young start-up business people, I had to break down the barriers to their beliefs about traditional sales and marketing, and educate them about how to talk to their customers through words on paper, which now applies equally to the web. Direct marketing or direct response copy has been responsible for billions in sales so why would anyone want to ignore it? Beats me!
There's a kind of irony in this story because some of the best direct response copywriters in the world came from the US. Many of their proteges exist and flourish in the US today. Some of the old masters like Gary Halbert, Ted Nicholas, Clayton Makepiece and Bob Bly have made such a huge impact on direct response copywriting techniques in the US over the past 40 years. Makes you wonder why some of the ad agencies haven't even heard of these guys.
Anyway, back to my experience...
So I was now faced with the question of... what do I do now?
Do I revise and submit, revise and submit until eventually we get somewhere near what this client wants? I needed an exit strategy. So I thought, the best and fairest thing to do is to write another version and let them have it for free. In fact I didn't earn anything from the whole exercise, which after all is said and done probably took around 4-5 hours of my time. At £50 per hour that was quite an expensive mistake.
The moral of the story? Don't deal with third party agencies. Only deal directly with the client. It will save a ton of time and stress in the long run.
All for now. Have a nice day.
Bill
Knight-Writer
BusyVids
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