Nothing. Not a sausage. Now that this is out of the way, I can explain it. Copy is only about 15% of your overall success. The other 85% lie in...
And except the last one, you control all those babies.
No, no one can guarantee you results. Not even you, although you're the business owner.
Nicole Kidman was right in saying to Tom Cruise in the movie Days of Thunder...
"Control is an illusion, you infantile egomaniac. Nobody controls anything."
Although people with low self-esteem desperately try to control everything around them, but often end up losing control over those things too that they controlled before. And their self-esteems dip even lower.
In a weird way, copy is like a toilet in a house. It occupies less than 10% of the total floor space, and you spend less than 30 minutes a day there, well, unless you're seriously constipated, but without it the whole house is worthless.
Try convince a serious buyer to go and take a leak in the back yard behind the blackberry bush.
Also, I know from experience that most clients, although they are not copywriters and have never written copy, tweak my copy before putting them to work. And more often than not, they destroy the copy in the process of making it more likeable to them.
They fail to realise that the copy was addressed to someone else, not for them.
It's like telling a military general that he's responsible for victory, but then telling the soldiers they don't have to take orders from the general but have the right to do whatever the hell they feel like doing.
So, I do my best to guarantee your satisfaction with my services, but I can't guarantee specific results.
Hell, I can't guarantee results even in my own business, let alone in others, although in my own business I'm supposed to be the decision-maker.
This reminds me a section in Lin Yutang's 1937 book, The Importance Of Living...
"To me, spiritually a child of the East and the West, man's dignity consists in the following facts which distinguish man from animals. First, that he has a playful curiosity and a natural genius for exploring knowledge; second, that he has dreams and a lofty idealism (often vague, or confused, or cocky, it is true, but nevertheless worthwhile); third, and still more important, that he is able to correct his dreams by a sense of humor, and thus restrain his idealism by a more robust and healthy realism; and finally, that he does not react to surroundings mechanically and uniformly as animals do, but possesses the ability and the freedom to determine his own reactions and to change surroundings at his will. This last is the same as saying that human personality is the last thing to be reduced to mechanical laws; somehow the human mind is forever elusive, uncatchable and unpredictable, and manages to wriggle out, of mechanistic laws or a materialistic dialectic that crazy psychologists and unmarried economists are trying to impose upon him. Man, therefore, is a curious, dreamy, humorous and wayward, creature. In short, my faith in human dignity consists of the belief that man is the greatest scamp on earth."
Yes, we're the greatest scamps on earth. Yes, you too. Me too.
So while I can guarantee doing my part, I can't guarantee yours.
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