Do You Make Seven Figures a Month?

Copywriter Chris Orzechowski is our guest for the 112th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. We met Chris through our friend Kim Schwalm after they got in a bit of a fight over the best kind of clients. Needless to say, we're all friends now, but it was touch and go there for a little while : ). Rob and Kira sat down with Chris to talk about: •  Chris’s path from school teacher and wrestling coach to copywriter •  how he “embraced the suck” to make things work as a marketer •  how his teaching and coaching skills make him a better copywriter •  landing his first “real” clients—what worked and what didn’t work •  the moment he knew things were going to work out •  why you need to treat copywriting like a business and outwork everyone •  the #1 thing copywriters need to do in order to truly succeed •  how to find good retainer clients—exactly what to look for •  how to manage the back and forth with a retainer client •  what Chris charges for retainers and how it’s changed <-- this is good to know •  why retainers are better than going from project to project •  how he started (and why he ended) a fight with Kim Schwalm •  his approach to writing emails <-- Kira calls this “sexy” advice This is a good one. As always, to listen simply click the play button below or download the episode to your favorite podcast app. If you’d rather read, scroll down for a full transcript. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Zach Evenesh Kim Schwalm Brian Kurtz theemailcopywriter.com Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity Full Transcript: Rob:   This podcast is sponsored by The Copywriter Underground. Kira:   It's our new membership designed for you to help you attract more clients and hit 10K a month consistently. Rob:   For more information or to sign up, go to thecopywriterunderground.com. Kira:   What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts? Ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits. Then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work. That's what Rob and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Rob:   You're invited to join the club for episode 112 as we chat with launch specialist and email copywriter, Chris Orzechowski about what it takes to land a retainer client, his closely held secrets for writing email that customers want to read, the lessons he's learned from creating high performing funnels and how copywriting is a bit like high school wrestling. Kira:   Hey Chris, welcome. Chris: Hey Kira, Rob. Thanks so much for having me. Kira:   We’re excited to have you here. So Chris, let's kick this off with your story. How did you get into copywriting? Chris: So I got into copywriting a little over five years ago. I went to college to become a teacher because I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I was a wrestler, so I figured I guess I'll go teach or coach wrestling and that'll be my life. And then I got done with my first day of school, my first day of work and I went home and I said, man, I had made a huge mistake. I do not want to do this at all, let alone for the rest of my life. So I started looking around. I said, you know, there's always people who use the internet and they make money. And I was like, I wonder how that works. And I wonder if I could figure out how to do the same thing too. And one of my mentors, this strength coach, his name was Zack Evenesh, he was one of the early strength conditioning publishers back from like 2003 is when he first started online. He was always like selling e-books and programs and doing all this online marketing stuff. I was always following along with what he did. And I was like, man, this is really cool, maybe I can do the same kind of thing. So I started going down that rabbit hole and studying everything. I started to see blogs and websites. One actually got a little bit of traction, was about coaching wrestling because that's what I was pretty good at. You know, I had a few articles go viral, I had like a weekly podcast. I was doing daily emails to an email list and blogging and do all these things. And I wasn't really making much money with it. So after about eight or nine months, I said, this is really cool, but I'm taking six to eight hours a day working on this after my day job. \I'm not really making the kind of money that I thought I would. So let me just pick one thing that I really want to focus on and go deep and, as all the things that we're involved with kind of trying to build that online business. The copy was the part that I loved the most. I loved writing the emails. I was like, this is something that is so cool to me, like I can literally get paid thousands of dollars to hand people a Google document with words on it. And I was so enamored by that idea, I was like, this is what I'm going to learn. I'm going to get really, really good at this. Kira:   Cool. So when during these early days, were you teaching and then figuring this out on the side? How did you have time to figure this out and have a podcast and emails and learn? Chris:  Well, I didn't really have a life for about four years. I was working full time as a teacher. Commuting ... on my first job, I was commuting like 45 minutes to an hour each way, sometimes longer depending on traffic. So I'd wake up at 5:00 AM I'd do an hour of work. I'd go to work all day. If I had a lunch break or a prep, most of those, especially later on in my teaching career, were spent on the phone with clients or answering emails and doing all those kinds of things. And then after school I would get home at three, 4:00. If it was wrestling season, I'd get home later. I'd work until nine or 10, sometimes 11:00 at night. I'd work six to eight hours every Saturday and Sunday on the weekends. I'd get up early. So yeah, it was just a grind. It was a real, real long grind for four years. But that's what I wanted to do and I knew that that was my only way out. I call that like embracing the suck, right? Like you just have to ... it's going to suck and you just have to get through it. It took me a lot longer than most people because I didn't really know what I was doing. But eventually I figured it out, so. Rob:   It's interesting, Chris, a lot of copywriters find their way to copywriting from other careers. And we've certainly talked to a bunch who've done similar things. Would you say that there are things about being a teacher that helped you become a better copywriter or things that you learned as a wrestling coach that you apply to your job as a copywriter today? Chris: Yeah, absolutely. So I was a special education teacher and I taught math and English. I originally started in elementary school and one of the coolest things that I really hold on to today from that whole experience was when I was teaching these kids, third, fourth, fifth graders who had learning disabilities have a right. You know, it's not like a regular classroom where you can just give kids a piece of paper and say, Hey, alright, we're going to write an essay or we're going to write a story. So here's, get your big idea and just start going. What we had to do was really break everything down into like a structure. And so much of copy is structures, right? Like a sales letter has a structure, an email has a structure, a VSL, a Webinar. All these things, even a launch, they all have structures to follow. So I think one of my advantages was when I was teaching these kids who, they can barely write their own name. I had to teach them how to write a page or two page long story or essay or whatever it was. So the way we did that was to say, okay, we want to do this huge thing, this two page story, right? What we have to do is we've got to break it down into little parts. And then each one of those parts has a template. So we'd give them sentence starters or we'd give them these other little pieces that they could kind of grasp onto and things to get them started. And so much of copy is like that, right? We know that we all have headline formulas and swipe files and we know, okay, we have the headline, the subhead, we have the opening sentence, we have the lead, we have the sales argument, we have the transition to the product, right? So it's just being able to see that before I ever got into it, it really helped me analyze what I was seeing in the marketplace and just through studying ads and people's products and all those things. So it kind of gave me that vision. And then when I started helping other people with their writing, I had that framework to work from. It wasn't just like, hey, you know, go do the research and start writing. It was like, no, okay, let's fill in these blanks here. We have all these things that we need to fill in. We have the bullets over here. We have the close. We need to ... it just helped me progress a lot faster and the people that I worked with, it helped them progress a lot faster. Rob:   Cool. Let's talk a little bit about the shift from working on your own projects to working for other clients. How did you land those first couple of clients? What were you doing? Chris: Oh man, I tried everything. I did ... I probably got like 300 no’s before I ever got a yes. You know, I kind of just went all in. So I was doing, I was reading all these books that said, oh send letters in the mail to local businesses. And that did not work very well at all. I cold called a couple places. Where I really started getting traction though was just meeting people online, like in Facebook groups, buying people's products, buying copywriting products and getting into groups and circles where there were either other copywriters who could introduce me to someone or other business owners where they were hanging out. And once I started offering some work for free to a few people, you know,