Don't Hire a Copywriter Until You Answer These Questions

By Ryan M. Healy

Not everybody should hire a copywriter.

With that in mind, answer these questions to find out whether you're ready or not.

Question #1: Are you getting sales?

The copywriter's primary job is to increase response... to get more sales from the same amount of potential prospects.

If your offer hasn't produced any sales yet, what can be improved? Professionally written sales copy can't multiply zero and get anything else except zero.

Famous ad man, Claude Hopkins, says this in Scientific Advertising: "The reason for most of the non-successes in advertising is trying to sell people what they do not want." p. 225

Before you decide to hire a copywriter (and possibly pay him a large fee), you need to know for a fact that the market wants your product or service. So put it out there at low cost and see if it sells.

If you get sales, then you may want to hire a copywriter to improve your response.

Question #2: Are you in a position to risk some money?

Copywriters are highly paid because what they do usually more than pays for itself.

Still, not every effort is a success. Among many winning promotions, there are a handful of failures.

Hiring a copywriter is like any other investment. You hope to get your money back -- with an increase in profits -- as quickly as possible. And you could get 1,000% ROI or more.

Naturally, your investment could fail to produce the kind of response you want. Which is why it's important for you to have some money to risk. After that, the decision of hiring a copywriter is up to you.

Question #3: Do you test ad copy?

There is only one way to guarantee the success of any ad, sales letter, or promotion. That is to test.

The whole purpose of testing is to determine what works best in the real world. For instance, you might test two different guarantees. One converts 2% of all prospects into customers. But the other one converts 4%, twice as much.

If you had relied on your preferences, you might have chosen the losing version, thereby sacrificing half of all the profits you could have earned.

Here's why you should test your ad copy. First, it gives you solid insight into what really works. And, secondly, whenever there is a disagreement between you and your copywriter (or anybody within your company), testing serves as a non-biased way of discovering the truth.

Perhaps you now understand why I believe split-testing is so important. It is the most direct scientific way of determining how well your sales copy is doing.

So how did you do? If you answered all three questions correctly, congratulations. You have an uncommon understanding of copywriting and advertising -- and would probably benefit from hiring a copywriter.

About the Author:

Discover more about writing sales copy, promotion techniques, and Internet marketing when you visit Ryan Healy's business growth blog. New articles are published every single week.