Wanna make the big bucks as a copywriter?

The biggest leap in income that ANYONE can make comes from quitting the time-and-efforts economy, and moving into the results economy.

The traditional model of employment is based on a thousand versions of the “dollars per hour” payment structure.

Salaries.  Hourly wages.  Project fees.  And so on.

They all represent doing a certain chunk of work, and getting paid based on the work completed.

Is the project a total failure (by whatever measure)?  Is it a breakthrough success?  Doesn’t matter.  You did the work, and you got paid for the work.

That’s time-and-effort.

Getting paid for results, on the other hand, has almost unlimited upside.

If you do something for a client that’s worth $100,000, and you get paid 5% of the results, you make $5,000.  But if you complete the same amount of work, and it’s worth $100,000,000, you make $5,000,000.

These are extremes, for most people.  But they’re to make a point.

If you can create $100 million in value, and you have an arrangement (such as royalties) to earn 5% of the results, your take is $5 million.

With NO additional work.

This was one of the biggest appeals when I discovered copywriting in 2005…

As I’ve said before, the first book I read on copywriting was The Well-Fed Writer.

Author Peter Bowerman made the point that he was NOT a copywriter.  Rather, he calls himself a “Freelance Commercial Writer.”  (At least, he did.)  And that title was specifically to distinguish himself from the renegades like I would eventually become, who write sales letters for entrepreneurial direct marketers.

Bowerman was content making a nice six-figure income writing boring corporate reports (and similar), getting paid for the time and effort put in.

Good for him.

But there was something about that club of writers that he made a point to disclaim any membership in.  The copywriters.  The direct response guys and gals.  The folks who lived and died in the results economy, who had to get results to really earn their keep.

The rebels.

The renegades.

There was an appeal to me in getting paid for my copywriting based on results.

This was not a foreign concept at the time.  I’ve worked a handful of jobs where I’d get paid some kind of base rate, to make sure I wasn’t making nothing.  But the brunt of my income came from results generated.

I was never a superstar in those jobs.  But I often did well.  And usually, my weekly take from those gigs was at least as good as the jobs where I’d get a time-and-effort paycheck.

And I figured if I really went deep and got good at royalty-paying copywriting, maybe, just maybe, I could make a small fortune.

Since 2010, pretty much every project I’ve completed has included royalties…

It’s worth noting here that for professional direct response copywriters, we work in BOTH economies.

Every project I do today includes both fees and royalties.  That is, I get a flat fee to do the actual work.  But based on the results generated, I also get paid a royalty, starting with the first $1 in revenue.

This covers my monthly nut — my monthly bills — and lets me put a little bit aside, just on the fees alone (I’ve worked to get to this point, but that’s where I’m at).

Then all the royalties are considered “get rich” money.  That is, they go into either my personal or corporate “war chest” to pile up, to protect me from rainy days while compounding my business value and personal net worth.

Now I won’t have it otherwise.  Literally, to hire me, you have to be willing and able to pay these royalties.

It’s pretty much an immediate disqualifier if you can’t or won’t.

And I’ve turned away clients I’ve wanted to work with, on this ground alone.

Because this is something I’ve made well-known, I often get asked about it.

How do I get paid copywriting royalties?

— How does that work?

— And how do I find clients willing to do it?

And since I was asked this question a few times in the last week or so, I’m circling back around with a fresh take on my answers to these questions.

It really comes down to three things…

You have to be WORTH IT.

First things first.

You wanna get paid on results?  Well, that assumes you can actually generate them.

Here’s a dirty truth: many copywriting wannabes (or sales wannabes, or others in other industries whose greed glands light up when this idea comes up) aren’t able to generate results for clients.

Uh oh…  I said it.

This came up more than once last week, during the Financial Copywriters Workshop.

There are a lot of people who want to be copywriters, who can’t even get their first client.  Much less generate a win for those clients.  Much less generate repeat wins, using something resembling a consistent process.

If you aren’t bringing in profits for your client, worry about that before anything else.

Start racking up the wins.

Start creating marketing that generates leads, customers, sales, and profits.  Do it until you think you’re underpaid for the amount of results you’re generating.  Then, do it some more.

Around that point, you MIGHT be worth it.

Around that point, you may be able to start asking for royalties.

I was in marketing for five years, with pay increases (reflecting my increasing worth) but without royalties, as I was learning to do this.  Then, even in my first year, I took a few projects that weren’t yet royalties-based, because I was still working up to generating results for more direct-response clients.

Next…

You have to DECIDE that it’s a condition of working with you.

You can’t be on the fence.

Seriously.  You can’t make it an option.

You have to make it a decision, and be willing to lose every single client you have, if they’re unwilling to pay on results.

You can do this slowly.  As-in, all NEW clients must pay royalties, but past clients get a certain grace period where you’ll accept non-royalty projects.

Or you can do it quick.  You may want to have a nice little rainy day fund, if you do it this way, because you may go through a period where it’s harder to get work.

Either way, you have to make the decision.

You have to establish a fee and royalty rate that works for you, and that is REALISTIC among the clients you’re going after.

Jay Abraham’s 25% of all additional profits?  That worked because of a couple very specific conditions.  First, he invested his own personal money in the marketing that brought in the sales.  Second, he understood the math and ONLY took 25% of net revenue after fulfillment expenses, typically in higher-margin industries.

Most copywriters should be happy with the 2% to 10% royalties, with a sweet spot somewhere in the 3% to 5% range.  And there are MANY factors you have to consider.  So don’t get cocky.  Your client brings a HUGE pile of assets to the table, that justify them keeping the percentage they do.  If they give you 5%, they’re usually being generous.  More than that, and they’re exceptionally so.

There are outliers here that everyone loves to point to.  But often what you’ll find is the little startup who is willing to pay you 20% does it because they don’t understand their finances, and they have an inability to scale.

But I’m getting away from myself.

Make your decision.  Get crystal clear on your fee and royalty.  And make sure it makes sense in the context of the results you’re able to generate for clients, and their economics.

You have to pick THE RIGHT CLIENTS.

Finally, the BIGGEST factor in all of this is working with clients who are ready, willing, and able to pay royalties.

This means they have great tracking on a campaign level.  It means they have good accounting practices in place.  It means they have a system and a process for paying royalties on whatever schedule you agree to.  It often means they have a handful of copywriters who are all earning royalties right now.  And it means they have the results-economy attitude that they’re happy to pay big money to copywriters because it means their company is doing even better than they are.

The late Marty Edelston, founder of Boardroom, LOVED to pay copywriters even more in a year than he took home as the founder, owner, and CEO of the company.  Why?  Because he knew that every dollar paid to a copywriter represented the increased total value of his business assets, including his buyers list and total company value.  That’s the right attitude.

And yet — REMEMBER, attitude is NOT enough.

I’ve worked with clients who’ve been eager to pay me big royalty checks.  They’ve had the money to do so.  And we’ve generated substantial results.  But alas, actually getting the money out of them was occasionally quite painful.  Not because they were unwilling to pay.  But rather, because they didn’t have the process to pay on the timeline they’d promised, nor the actual business habit of doing so.  Checks came irregularly, and often after some prodding.

On the other hand, I’ve had clients who paid me for years, usually quarterly, by the calendar, long after I’d completed my last bit of work for them.

Because they had the system and the process, and it was just one of those things that they did to schedule within their business.

Truthfully, there aren’t a ton of businesses out there who do this.

Often they work with the world’s top copywriters.  In many cases, you’d recognize their names (especially if you’re in their industry).  And they can be hard to get in with.

But, they also represent the biggest opportunity.  And once you’re in with even one of these clients, they can provide an almost unlimited amount of work, because they know how to make full use of copy that gets results, and they can’t get enough of it.

Want to go deeper, including understanding the many types of pay-for-performance arrangements that are possible once you generate results?

Check out the BTMSinsiders training on Copywriting Royalties and Pay-for-Performance.

Yours for bigger breakthroughs,

Roy Furr