Once upon a time, I used to do email critiques.
Specifically, for “Email Players” subscribers who would get one critique per month. This was when the customer list was much smaller, of course, and I could manage to do it for the handful of people who took advantage of it.
Nowadays?
I not only don’t do critiques, I actively discourage them for most people.
Why?
Many reasons:
1. If I did a critique for one person, I’d have to do it potentially for several hundred others, which is impossible if I want to actually build my business and have some time to eat, sleep, and use the latrine.
2. I hate doing critiques anyway.
3. Like the great A-list copywriter Doug D’Anna once told me:
(Paraphrased)
The best critique you can get is not from a copywriter, it’s from your market.
I’d bet you someone else’s left testicle, that if you gave your copy to two people — a professional copywriter who does not know your market and someone who is in your market who knows nothing about “copywriting”, the latter guy will give you feedback that is 10x’s more useful. Yes, a critique from a smart copywriter who does not know your market can still be helpful from a mechanical point of view. But if they don’t know your market’s unique hot buttons, peculiarities, trends, pains, desires, anxieties, insecurities, values, etc… they will very likely miss the many nuances of that market, and either miss many opportunities to help you strengthen your copy and emails, or possibly even give you outright bad advice without realizing it.
Thus, I don’t do critiques.
And, unless you are willing to pay a very expensive copywriting coach or teacher like the great David Garfinkel or “Email Players” subscriber Kim Krause Schwalm, I discourage it.
That’s the bad news for people asking me for critiques.
The good news?
While I don’t offer “Email Players” subscribers critiques anymore, and haven’t in some 5 years or so, what I do offer is to answer subscriber questions — via email only — about topics I am qualified to give advice on.
The only caveat is I don’t do small talk.
i.e. we won’t be penpals.
Got too many people I have to talk to and deal with as it is, thank you.
Plus, if the question is something that can’t be summed up in a quick reply, I refer them to a book I sell that will answer it.
All right, so that’s that.
Maybe this added to your life, and maybe it didn’t.
But there it is…
To learn more about the newsletter, go here:
Ben Settle
