Direct response copywriter, Roy Furr, stops by The Copywriter Club Podcast to talk about writing control-beating direct mail and how he raised his rates from just $2000 per project to $20,000 plus royalties on everything he writes. We also talk about how he writes and sends an email with over 1,000 words to his list every day, what his typical day looks like, and a whole lot more. One word of caution, as we were getting started, a fire alarm went off in Roy’s office. Everyone is okay, but the sudden shriek of the alarm is a bit jolting. If you listen to the podcast while trying to fall asleep, you may want to fast forward a bit.

Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:

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The Well-fed Writer

Perry Marshall

Ken McCarthy’s System Seminar

AWAI

FoamWingCutting.com

Clayton Makepeace

Workflowy

Clayton’s 20 Point Outline

Great Leads by Michael Masterson

Milton Erikson

Story Selling Master Class

Breakthrough Marketing Secrets

The Copywriter’s Guide to Getting Paid

Trello

Kira’s website

Rob’s website

The Copywriter Club Facebook Group

Intro: Content (for now)

Outro: Gravity

Full Transcript:

Kira: 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 Rob and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast.

Rob: You’re invited to join the club for episode 24 as we chat with direct response copywriter Roy Furr about his process for writing control beating sales pages, writing for royalties, sending long emails to his list every weekday, and other breakthrough marketing secrets.

Kira: Hey, Rob. Hey, Roy. Welcome to the show.

Roy: Hello, hello.

Rob: Hey, guys. It’s great to have you with us, Roy.

Roy: Absolutely. It’s great to be here. I love doing interviews like this, and as soon as I heard about everything that’s happened on your podcast up until now, it was clearly a place that I wanted to find myself too.

Rob: Great. We’re especially glad to have you because you do a different kind of writing than most of our guests have done so far and you’re sort of in a different industry, and so we’re excited to hear a little bit about that and to understand how you got there. But before we get into all of that, I think it’s probably appropriate that we back up just a little bit and start with your story. Did you want to grow up to become a control beating financial copywriter? Is that the kind of thing you dreamed about while the rest of us wanted to be firemen?

Kira: Of course.

Rob: How did it happen?

Roy: Absolutely. I discovered copywriting when I was two and ... No, I was in college and when I was enrolling in college my mom said, “Oh, I think you’d really like advertising and marketing.” At the time I knew that like Superbowl commercials were advertising. I didn’t think it was a great idea, but she really encouraged me to get a major, so I enrolled as a marketing major. Then when they were trying to teach me Microsoft Word, which I had been using for four or five years at the time, I quit my marketing major and said psychology was way more interesting. I didn’t think about marketing much until about five years later. I had a degree in psychology with a minor in English, and my biggest financial success as a copywriter was when my grandma bought my self-published poetry book for herself and nine of her 10 kids, because my dad already had a copy. I don’t think I ever actually made my initial publish-