My first gig writing copy paid me $20 an hour. (Plus a percentage of profit.)
After about 7 months I told the owner of the company that I hated getting paid hourly as a writer. I wanted a monthly flat fee. We agreed to $3500/month as a base.
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I was hoping the profit sharing would start to add up to boost the income. One month I got a $1500 bonus, some months I got less than that, but the profits rarely actually added up to much. Which taught me one of my most valuable lessons I ever learned:
You should (almost) never use profit sharing as a bonus incentive as a copywriter.
The problem is you have almost no control over profit. You can only really affect revenue. The owner can write off ANYTHING he wants to show less profit. He or she has earned this right, but it doesn’t make it a good deal for you.
About 16 months into that gig I applied to write copy at a different company. I ended up beating out about 30 copywriters to get the gig. They offered me $5k/mo salary plus a bonus structure based on revenue.
I’ll tell you what happened with that bonus in just a second…first I need to tell you the other thing I did when I took on the new job.
I decided to create my own product about writing email copy. At that point I had written hundreds of emails, tested thousands of split variations to a list of over 1.2 million people, and sold millions of dollars worth of products.
I hated all the online gurus who only earned money online by teaching people how to make money online…but I felt like I had earned the right to teach what I had learned because of my track record.
I had an idea for a product so I sent an email to a guy named Derek Johanson to see if he’d have a drink with me. I thought he was an untouchable celebrity at that point, but he met up with me.
Long story short…we sent emails to his list for a week. We made $12k in sales, which means we each profited $6k that week. I made more in a week than I had ever made in a month.
But that was just the beginning. I sent emails to that list for the next year and ended up making $55,000 from it. The best part? The list only had 200 people on it and I had spent a total of zero dollars to build it. (It was $49,000 in profit when you factor in the $6k for Derek’s commissions.)
Here’s the craziest part of all:
-The initial product took me two hours to create.
-I wrote the sales page in 20 minutes.
-I probably only sent a couple of emails per week to the list.
-I averaged around 3 hours per week of work for that list. (Some weeks it was probably 10 hours, some weeks it was zero.)
-I did all of this while also working a full-time gig writing copy.
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Actually, I lied, here’s a crazier part…
If I had run just a little traffic to build my list I could’ve made double or triple that from almost the same amount of work.
Now back to the full-time gig…
We ended up doing almost $18,000,000 in sales that year. I got a bonus of $50k if we hit $17.5 million in sales. That means I ended up making $110,000 from my job and an additional $55k from my list.
But I spent 3 hours a week (give or take) on my list and I spent 30+ hours a week (sometimes more) on the job.
Now here’s the really awesome part…
When I left that job I had made good money and learned a TON. I had built a reputation for myself that got my high paying clients. (I made more in the next two months than I had in the entire year prior…from just ONE client.)
That was all great stuff…but I didn’t own shit from that business. I didn’t have a tangible asset from it.
But I did own my own tiny little list.
Over the past few years that list has grown and made me over a million dollars. All while working on it part time. (I’ve hardly ever put in over 10 hours per week on this business and now it does more in a month than I used to do in a year.)
I’ve spent the rest of my time building other businesses, traveling the world, and overall just having a lot of fun.
Most people build their life around their business, I build my businesses around my life.
That’s why I’m so excited to finally share my system for how I’ve been able to do this…and how you can do it for yourself.
I’m calling it the One Hour Workday. I’ve had the idea of teaching this for almost a year, but the time is finally right. You can read about it here if you’d like:
I’m amped to share this…and a little scared. I’ve never shared the full concept and system before. Hope to see you there.
Talk soon,
Ian “5 hour workweek” Stanley
