Bad news:
I might have to stop sending you emails soon.
It’s not that I don’t like you.
(I think you’re great — you’re funny, you smell good, and you have great taste in email newsletters.)
But the problem is …
I’m starting to get too many clients from these emails.
“What? Don’t you have a waitlist?” you ask. “And anyway, how is that even a problem?”
Well — yes. I have a waitlist.
But I also have many clients who have been on the waitlist for a long time and are getting kinda … edgy about it.
Some people might think that’s a good thing … why not squeeze ‘em in and make some extra cash?
But I reckon most freelancers see clients like lungs:
Sure, they keep you alive … and they appreciate when you don’t blow smoke at them … but if you have more than two at once, you’re gonna start having, uh, issues.
(Then again, maybe I’m the only one who uses that analogy? 🤔)
But to make things worse:
Lately I’ve had several clients burst out of the bars of my client waitlist cage, and knock on my door … who I have had to chase back to the waitlist with a stick, since I already have other clients who’ve been waiting for ages.
Now, maybe some potential clients are reading this and getting turned off at my tone here.
Maybe they’re about to fire up their laptops and write me an angry email demanding to come off my waitlist because I was so rude.
Well … oops 🤷♂️
Now I’m not saying I don’t ever want to do client work again … just that right now, I have heaps of other stuff I want to work on.
And I was on Zoom earlier today with my friend & marketing legend Steven Alexander Young, talking about precisely this.
“I’m so busy,” I moaned. “I just want to work on my market research product!”
“Then DO it!” he said.
“I need to finish up my client work first!” I protested. “But I have been taking a harder line towards new work. Honestly, right now I couldn’t care less if someone doesn’t want to work with me.”
“That’s the secret!” exclaimed Steven.
I blinked. “The secret to what?”
He looked at me like it should be obvious: “To charging $1,000 per hour. It’s simple: just don’t feel like doing any client work!”
(For context: Steven is one of the few freelancers who can lay claim to having charged that rate — he literally broke Upwork, who wouldn’t let him charge more than $999 per hour.)
Steven picked up his PS4 controller in one hand to demonstrate.
“You see, if a client came to me tomorrow and said, ‘I’ll pay you $1,000 per hour for this job, but I need it done today …’”
His eyes flicked toward the PS4 controller in his hand.
“Well …”
He moved his hands up and down, as if he was weighing the controller in the balances against this imaginary offer.
“$1,000/hr … video games. $1,000/hr … video games. You know what I’m saying?”
He paused, and then flashed me a wry smile:
“Now if they offered me $2,000/hr, that’d be a different story …”
Moral of the story?
… well, isn’t it obvious?
(An aide rushes in and leans down, whispering something in my ear, before running out of sight again.)
Uh … excuse me. Apparently, it’s not so obvious. My apologies.
In that case, the moral of the story is that if you want to raise your rates …
You need to start caring less.
Being needy is the enemy of freelance copywriting success. Ironically — clients LOVE freelancers who don’t need them. It shows they’re the real deal.
Of course, getting to that point takes time. And remember: to get there, you have to actually be REALLY DARN GOOD at writing copy — because otherwise what are you going to do when you charge $6,000 for a sales page you don’t know how to write?
But fear not.
For I have come up with something wonderful:
A brand new coaching program, called Inbox Detonator, which is designed to help you take MASSIVE steps towards being a world-class writer … in as little as one month.
And being a world-class writer is, I believe, the best (and ONLY) long-term strategy if you really want to feel as busy with client leads as I do.
(Trust me, it is an overrated feeling, but I won’t judge you if client overwhelm is your goal)
But that’s all I can tell you about the program for now.
It’s still in beta, and I have less people in the program than I have fingers on my hands, as I carefully road-test it. (And for all you know, I could have been in some horrible chainsaw accident when I was a kid — which would make this a REALLY exclusive program!)
But if you want to know when I open up more spots, I suggest you click here to join the waitlist.
Be quick … because I think there are already more people on the waitlist than I can reasonably take on. And that is not an exaggeration.
Oh, and — one more thing.
Once you are on the waitlist …
WAIT!!!
😊
Daniel Throssell