million dollar copywriting lesson from water

There’s a popular meme circulating around on social media about water. I believe (and don’t quote me on this) an NBA player first shared the post. And it’s been spreading like wildfire ever since.

While it’s just a silly meme about water… It's also a million dollar copywriting lesson in disguise.

Here’s how the meme goes:

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A bottle of water can be .50 cents at a supermarket. $2 at the gym. $3 at the movies and $6 on a plane. Same water. Only thing that changed its value was the place..So the next time your worth is nothing, maybe you’re at the wrong place.

Know Your Worth

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Need I add more?

Okay, how about I give you an irl example from the months before I started my freelance copywriting business.

~~~Time travels back to early 2019~~~

When I realized my worth as a copywriter exceeded my salary at my job, I decided I needed to quit and try freelancing. This decision, after 3 years of hindsight, has been one of the best decisions I made in my young life.

But it didn’t start that way:

I worked on the marketing team for a design company. So, I wasn’t sure which niche I should pick to take a stab at freelancing. I had a bunch of ideas — some stoopid and some smart.

Alas, I started with a stoopid niche:

Chiropractors in my local area.

Now, there are a bunch of reasons I thought this niche made sense:

* Chiropractors have a lot of expendable income

* They always need more clients

* They’re not marketers or masters of persuasion (besides a few exceptions)

I thought I struck gold! So I started compiling a list of emails of every chiropractor in my area. This took about a week of mind-numbing “grunt work.” But I had 100 email addresses of chiropractors. So, I loaded them into my cold email software and waited for all the eager replies.

Annnnnnnnd…

Not a single chiropractor responded.

I didn’t just send them one cold email either. I sent them an entire sequence of 5-7 emails over a 4-6 week period.

Nada.

Not even a “fvck off.”

Just nothing.

Boy that stung. Especially when I wasn’t “proven” as a cash-generating asset.

But there were a lot of reasons this was a stoopid decision:

* Chiropractors, on average, didn’t even use email, let alone have an email list. (It’s hard selling something—even the best thing on the planet—to a market that doesn’t need what you’re selling.)

* I live in a “poorer” part of Ohio, and the chiropractors I reached out to didn’t practice abundance.

But instead of getting defeated, I decided I needed to attack another industry.

I chose ecommerce companies broadly (and supplement companies narrowly) and the rest is history:

Within a few weeks, I hopped on my first few sales calls, quit my job, and landed my first client.

Same offer. Same cold email sequence. Wildly different results.

Anywho:

If you need help transforming your .50 cents water into $6 bottles with email, book a call here. And let’s see if partnering makes sense.

John