TCC Podcast #87: From Losing Everything to the A-List with Paul Martinez

Our guest for the 87th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is none other than A-list copywriter Paul Martinez. We covered a lot of ground in this one, including how Paul landed a place as Parris Lampropolous’ copy cub (for seven years) and his process for finding ideas that hook the reader so they’ll see his offers. The resources he shares are excellent. Here’s most of what we cover in this episode: •  how an English degree and a job in real estate helped him find copywriting •  what he did to recover from losing almost everything and how that still impacts how he spends his time today •  what he learned from real estate sales and how that’s made him a better writer •  what he did to find clients as a new copywriter and the #1 thing that reallymade a difference •  how you get yourself in the right room with the right people •  what he learned as a copy cub for one of the world’s best copywriters •  what you can do right now to be a better copywriter (you may not want to do this) •  how he keeps his copywriting skills sharp today •  how Paul finds big ideas playing around on the internet all day long •  how he structures his projects today (and his advice about retainers) •  how he deals with failures That’s a lot of hows and whats—and every one of them is worth the listen. There are also a whole lot of links. To hear this episode in its entirety, click the play button below. Or for a full transcript and links to the stuff Paul mentions, scroll down.   The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Google Adwords Parris Lampropolous Brian Kurtz Dan Kennedy John Carlton Barnaby Kaelin Alexi Neocleous Jim Rutz Raymond Carver Joe Sugarman Todd Brown Atlas Obscura How We Got to Now At Home by Bill Bryson History of the World in 100 Objects Now I Know More This is Your Brain on Parasites Clayton Makepeace Clayton’s Sales Page Template Agora NatureCity Soundview Weiss Research Mike Ward Money Map Press Jed Canty Paul on Facebook PaulMartinezCopywriting.com Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity   Full Transcript: Rob: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 Kira and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Kira: You’re invited to join the club for episode 87, as we talk with copywriter and business owner Paul Martinez about digging deep to turn things around after losing it all, the importance of sales skills in copywriting, emotional hot buttons and what really makes people buy, and what it takes to create successful promotions for companies like Motley Fool, Soundview, and Nature City. Kira:Welcome Paul. Rob: Hey, Paul. Paul:Hi; hi guys. Kira: How’s it going? Paul: It’s going great; great to be here. Rob:Yeah, we’re stoked to have you here. Kira:So Paul, a great place to start is with how you ended up as a copywriter. Paul:Yeah, sure, sure. So I began my journey actually in the real estate world. Well, going a little further back, my background is actually I went to school for fiction writing and ending up getting an English degree. I pretty quickly realized that, you know, that really wasn’t going to pay the bills. So I ended up in real estate, and actually discovered that I really liked sales. And I was pretty good at it, I studied it a lot. I got better and better but, there was a problem: that I didn’t know how to generate leads. And, you know, this was 2000, 2001. Real estate marketing at that point was, believe it or not, still really based around cold calling. Like, literally going through this thing called a “colds directory”, which was like a phone book, but it has a little diamond next to the people who owned a house. And my broken told me, just like, “Call those people and ask them if they want to sell their house.” And I didn’t that for probably five or six months, chuckles, like hoursa day, and I got nothing from it. And finally one of these other brokers at the office was like, “Hey man, you got to send letters. Way better. You know, you spend a few hundred bucks on stamps; you hired some kid from college to pull them up and stuff the envelopes, and boom.” And he showed me kind of the rough way he did it. And so, I instantly started working; I started listing property, making money. And then I got interested in this, kind of, “How do I make these letters better?” So I started looking into copywriting. I discovered Dan Kennedy and, you know, Jay Abraham, and then ended up going into a real estate coaching program with a guy named Craig Proctor, who’s one of Dan Kennedy’s protégés, and the copy was a huge, huge piece of it. And you know through that, you know, I went through the coaching; I went through their graduating coaching, my real estate business grew and grew and grew as I got better at writing copy, and, you know, better at implementing things. Like I started exploring Google Adwords really as soon as it came out. That was a great, great way to get real estate leads back in 2003, 2004 when they started getting big. But I pretty quickly realized that, you know, I didn’t actually like—laughs—driving around in my car, and like going to listing appointments, and walking through buildings and all this stuff, like all hours of the day, and working, you know, six or seven days a week. So I started getting more into the copywriting thing, and I knew all these really high-level agents, you know, really successful agents and brokers from my coaching programs. And they all got copywriting, they all got marketing. So, I started kind of working, doing some side jobs for them. And I think my first job...you know, this guy wanted me to do some Google Adwords stuff for him, and this was probably like 2005, 2006. And I was like, “Alright. It’s going to take me, like, two or three hours. That’ll be like $1,500.” And he was like, “No problem!” Rob:Wow. Yeah. Paul:Wow....O-o-o-o-okay!! So maybe I could actually do this. So like I was still doing real estate but, you know obviously, 2007 the market started to shift. 2008, 2009, it really...you know, I’m sure everyone remembers that there was a little small recession around then, focused on the real estate industry. So not only did my real estate business collapse, my side business writing for real estate agents collapsed, because suddenly these agents who were making 5, 6, 700,000 dollars a year were making like 50 or 60 grand, and scraping by and couldn’t pay their own bills, so they certainly weren’t going to pay me to write copy. And that’s when I kind of had to make a decision at that point. You know, I had honestly burned out on the real estate game. It’s real high pressure, it’s very, very cutthroat. You do not get paid unless the deal closes. So, you know, if you can go three months working on say, like an investment building sale, and it can fall apart at the last minute over something stupid. And, you know, you thought you were going to make 50 or 60,000 dollars and now you got nothing, you know? Kira:Oh my gosh. Paul:It’s a constant up and down. And I kind of just was like, “You know what? Real estate’s not working. I’m just going to shut down the business. At that point, I couldn’t even sell it because it wasn’t worth anything anymore. It went from being, you know, probably worth one million, one-point-five million, to nothing. Kira: Wow! Paul: Laughs. In about twelve to eighteen months. And during that time, you know, I had also had some personal stuff where I had lost three really good friends in a year. Kira: My gosh! Paul:I had a four-year relationship end suddenly. You know, and it kind of all happened in 2008 and finally I was like, “You know? I need a fresh start. I need to go do something else. I’m just going to hang up my shoes as a freelance copywriter and see what happens.” Because it couldn’t be possibly any worse than real estate right now, and it’s, you know, the only thing that I can think that I really love doing. Rob:I’m trying to put my feet in your shoes, and going through that experience; having all that hit at once, it  must’ve been at some level terrifying to lose all of that stuff. Why did you think that copywriting was the thing to move you forward? Paul:Well I mean, I’d already had some success at it, you know? Like I said, I’d already been getting paid as kind of a side gig to write copy for other real estate agents, and you know you, I’d been studying internet marketing for a while. So I knew people paid copywriters a good amount of money to do their thing. So I was like, “There’s no reason why I can’t do this.” You know? It’s just that I I’ve got to learn another business the same way I learned real estate, I can learn the business of copywriting. So, yeah. I mean I guess, for me, you know, that fear of failing is like...well, so what, right? Laughs. At that point, my entire life had fallen apart. I mean, and when I say fallen apart, I mean I went bankrupt, my condo got foreclosed on. Kira: Oh my gosh. Paul:I was almost homeless. I had lost everything I had worked for, and again, you know, I had a guy who was like a second father to me had passed away. Three days later a really good friend of mine died in a motorcycle accident. A few months had later another mentor of mine pass away from cancer. And then, you know, the woman who I was with four years—and I was actually planning to ask her to marry me—came back from a yoga retreat and dumped me. Kira:Oh my gosh...! Paul: So... Rob:Wow. That must’ve been some yoga retreat. Paul: Yeah, so I was like, I’ve got nothing else to lose, so, let’s see what happens. Kira:Wow. So, let’s see if this question comes out correctly, but,