TCC Podcast #52: Working with a copy coach with David Garfinkel

When we launched The Copywriter Club Podcast, we made a list of copywriters we wanted to interview and the guest for episode 51, David Garfinkel, was at the top. Known as the World's Greatest Copywriting Coach, David is a world-class copywriter who regularly consults with clients like Agora Financial and GKIC along with several high-level copywriters to help improve the performance of their copy. During our interview, David talked about: •  how he got his start as a copywriter •  a “this will only work for me” method for finding your first project •  the story behind his $40 million dollar sales letter •  the mistakes he made as he was just starting his business •  how he made the shift to coaching and what he does as a coach •  the three things to look for in a copy coach •  how to overcome objections with your copy •  what mistakes he sees over and over again that you will want to avoid •  the importance of “relevant credentials” when making any sale •  when you should start coaching other writers •  the two or three things to go from good to great as a writer Plus David talked about what his business looks like today and he shared details about the breakout hit song he wrote for the urology department at the University of California’s Centennial celebration. (This is stuff he hasn't even shared on his own podcast.) To hear it, you need to click the play button below, or scroll down to read a full transcript. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Sponsor: AirStory McGraw Hill World News Gary Halbert’s Newsletter Aaron Sorkin Barbara (Bloch) Stanny Jay Conrad Levinson Jim Camp KOLBE Copy Chief Breakthrough Copywriting Garfinkelcoaching.com Kevin Rogers Scientific Advertising The Billion Dollar Copywriter Peak by Anders Erickson Agora Financial Fast, Effective Copy Homespun.com David’s Facebook Page The Copywriters Podcast Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity Full Transcript: The Copywriter Club Podcast is sponsored by Airstory, the writing platform for professional writers who want to get more done in half the time. Learn more at Airstory.co/club. 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 52 as we chat with the man who has been called the world’s greatest copywriting coach, David Garfinkel, about the lessons he’s learned coaching and working with so many copywriters, what it takes to be truly great as a copywriter, how his life away from copywriting makes him a better writer, and how to do an effective copy critique. Kira: David, welcome. David: Thank you. I’m glad to be here. Rob: Yeah, we’re excited to have you. Kira: It’s an honor to have you. Yeah, this is the highlight of my day. David: I know I’ve been looking forward to this for a while now. Kira: I feel like every time I think of you, David, I think of the beach because I listen to episode 13, Why Customers Buy, while I was running on the beach on vacation last month. I’m just happy anytime I hear your voice because it takes me back. David: Yeah. I think you mentioned that in an email to me. Which beach? Because I’m about six blocks from the Pacific Beach in San Francisco. Kira: Oh, this was Myrtle Beach. David: Oh. Yeah, I went there when I was in high school. I grew up in Maryland. We went there in the spring break or something. It was a very nice beach. Kira: Yeah, it was great. Rob: A great place to do some running, some copywriting learning. Kira: Exactly, yeah. David: Well, everyone has their own use for the beach. I think that’s a good one, frankly. Rob: Yeah, exactly. David, we really like to start a lot of our episodes with a story, your backstory, how you came into copywriting. Tell us where you came from. David: Well, I had been a business journalist. My last corporate job was as the San Francisco bureau chief for McGraw-Hill World News, which is like an internal news service for McGraw-Hill’s business and trade magazines, and it came time to leave. I was doing well, but I wasn’t happy. I knew if I wasn’t happy, I was going to find a way to screw it up. It’d probably be better just to leave. I was wandering around looking for what to do and had a lot of false starts. I co-authored a book and then I created a little audio program called Referral Magic: 17 Ways to Let Your Clients Do Your Selling, and I didn’t have the skills to sell it. I was, believe it or not, teaching public speaking at the time. My business partner got one of Gary Halbert’s newsletters as a six-month gift subscription. I remember looking at the first issue. He said, “Davis, this isn’t for me, but it might be for you.” I looked at it, I said, “What in the world is he doing? I don’t know what he’s doing, but I’ve got to do this.” Sooner or later, I found out about Gary and I found out about copywriting. I said, “This is my next step. This is my path,” and then I just dove into it. I love it. I love copywriting. I love what you can do with it. I love the fact that it uses a very basic emotional language, and it can be so powerful for a business. It can help the business grow. For an individual who knows how to do it, you can buy or earn or acquire freedom and control of your life like with nothing else I know of. I got hooked. Kira: What did those early days look like for you when you knew you wanted to get into copywriting and then you figured out, “Well, I need clients”? How did you get your first few clients? David: The early days looked like a lot, a lot, a lot of work and a lot of frustration. I think I got clients by referral. I was big in the speaking world at the time, so I used to go to all these National Speakers Association meetings and all the speakers needed help promoting themselves. Just through networking like that. At that time, I would take anything, I would do anything. If you don’t call it copywriting, if you call it advertising, and if you call it advertising, that actually gets people, clients make sales. People are interested. I just fumbled my way from one thing to another until I started figuring out what I was doing and having a lot of success with it. Rob: David, I’ve heard you talk a lot ... Well, not a lot. I’ve heard you talk occasionally about this letter that you wrote. I believe it was for a travel company that was like a $20 million successful control, something like that. How do you find a client like that? Tell us the story of how that all came together. David: Okay. I’ll tell you the exact method, but I’m not sure anyone else can do it. You need to have a girlfriend in Phoenix named Sally, who knows the owner. Rob: We can work on that. We’re adding that to our ways to find copywriting jobs list. Kira: Right. David: Number 133: have a girlfriend named Sally who lives in Phoenix. Yeah, it was a referral. That was an interesting story because they had this beautiful, slick, heavy, well-designed glossy brochure that could have, as I often say, hung in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Everything was great about it except they weren’t getting any clients with it. They were getting all of their business through referrals. This was fairly early in my career, and I had some of the skills, the information-gathering skills, the interview skills, the research skills, but I really didn’t know how to write copy. Fortunately, I had a mentor who helped me. I remember completely rewriting the letter seven times. Actually, that’s nothing compared to what some people go through, but I mean if you’ve ever seen Aaron Sorkin talk about his screenplays, he will retype the screenplay three or four times. This is a 120-page document. But I didn’t know about that at the time, and I just kept going after we put together a terrific offer. They got a really good list. I used what I’d learned from Gary Halbert about white male, which is something that was stamped and it had a return address, but not the name of the company so someone opens it out of curiosity or out of worry that it might be something that they really missed out on if they hadn’t seen it. It worked. Their unit of sale was an ongoing relationship with an entrepreneurial businesses that did a lot of travel and would like to have the capability in-house. In those days, unlike today, you had to go to a travel agent or at least you had to have a ticket printing machine in your business. The two owners, Bonnie and Dwayne, had both worked for several airlines before. Well, I’m not sure Bonnie had, but Dwayne had been a vice-president of two different airlines and Bonnie knew the travel business inside and out. They were able to offer ... I mean it sounds easy now. It sounds easy, but getting all that information out and then getting them convinced to present it and then figuring out how to actually present it that way, it was a lot of work. Actually, it wasn’t $20 million, it was $40 million. Bonnie was a CPA. The CEO was a CPA, too. She calculated it and then wrote me a testimonial. Just brought in these big clients, and they stayed with them for years. Kira: Wow! David, I want to back up because you mentioned that you wrote the book Referral Magic and that you landed a lot of those early clients through your referrals, through your girlfriend. A lot of our copywriters in our community are new and they struggle to even get referrals. I know you can’t share the whole entire book with us, but are there some tips to help us land the referrals? Maybe it speaks to what you said about don’t call it copywriting, call it making sales. Maybe we’re just positioning that wrong. David: Yeah.