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Hi, I’m Robert Hawkins. I’m a British ex-pat living in the Caribbean.
For most of my early working life, I was a professional musician. I had a few short-lived stints in other occupations, when I needed to.
I became involved in more ‘normal’ businesses as the 1980s turned into the 1990s.
It was the time of MS DOS computers, bulletin boards, and dial-up modems. No Windows, and no Internet. My second computer had a 2MB hard drive. That’s MB, not GB. My third computer had 10MB and I couldn’t imagine how anyone could possibly need that much.
After a few false starts, I started a business with a partner, which we managed to build into a very successful company. My role in this company was marketing and specifically copywriting. I had always had an interest in the English language, I liked words, and I had always been a big reader. The effects of words in marketing quickly became a fascination.
The internet had appeared by now, but there is no ‘online business’. My first autoresponder, with AWeber was still several years away, in 1999.
So marketing for me, and for my business at this time, consisted of placing adverts in national newspapers, and sending a sales letter and information pack to inquirers from those adverts. Snail mail. Typical two-step direct response marketing.
I have told the story elsewhere of how copywriting was the tool that allowed us to build this company from nothing to a multi-million-dollar company. As we built the company up and ratcheted it higher and higher, copywriting was what allowed us to do that. Copywriting was the only thing that changed! That and the number of staff.
It was an unforgettable lesson, highlighting the monumental power of sales copy with blinding clarity. And underlining it in case you missed it.
Eventually, we sold this company for a lot of money. I moved to the Caribbean and built a beautiful villa right next to the ocean.
The next phase in my career was as a trader. I was a full-time independent stock trader, trading my own money for more than 15 years.
I saw a lot of ups and downs as a stock trader. Truly an emotional roller coaster which requires a good degree of mental fortitude to cope with.
Some stand-out memories: making $96,000 profit in closed trades in one month, and buying myself a brand new Land Rover out of the proceeds. We lived 7 miles out on an unmade road, right out by the ocean. We needed off-road — it wasn't a pose.
Then, there was making over $250,000 profit in the early part of one year and giving back $179,000 by the year end. And I made over half a million dollars in one long-term trade alone.
But, there are lean times, too. Ultimately there is one element in the life of a stock trader which bears a surprising resemblance to the life of a musician — income that goes up and down like a fiddler’s elbow!
Just like in direct response copywriting, markets are driven by human behaviour. And the basic human emotions that drive human behaviour do not change.
But although human behaviour doesn’t change, the markets were changing. As the percentage of trades transacted by HFT algorithms and Artificial Intelligence increased, most of the recognisable behaviours and patterns in trading either disappeared, or did not have the same effect on the market. After the 2008 crisis, the markets were noticeably different. Market moves became shorter and more jagged in character.
After participating in much of the greatest bull market in history, from 2009 to recent times, I had much less to show for it than it seemed I should have. Once again, I shut up shop and moved on.
So in this year 2020, I pondered what I could offer, to give the best service to the most people. I have been fortunate to have 3 distinct careers — it's like 3 different lives, really — and to have developed a lot of experience and a degree of expertise in each.
Would I provide a service based on guitar playing, marketing and copywriting, or trading financial markets?
I chose copywriting, and I’ll tell you why.
Guitar playing and stock trading are both rabid markets, full of passionate people. BUT... it takes a lot of time and experience to produce expert results. You could be given all the information you need to become expert and, in both cases, you’re still going to need to put an awful lot of time and effort into practice and gaining experience.
People talk about 10,000 hours as the requirement for gaining expert status. I'm not sure it's that much — but it’s going to be a lot.
Copywriting is different. There's still no shortcut to becoming a true expert. No substitute for experience.
BUT...
If I give you a structure for a sales letter, broken down into its essential sections, and if I give you fill-in-the-blanks sales copy for each of those sections, you can produce a professional level sales letter the same day.
And that’s exactly what I have done with The Ultimate Copywriting Formula, which I started to create at the end of this summer in 2020.
Over a period of several years when I was copywriting for my business, I undertook hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of testing. I diligently recorded the results of the tests, and built a copywriting system based on that work. I built it for my own purpose and my own benefit.
But the sales letter structure, the elements that go into that structure, and the copywriting examples and formulas for each section are actually applicable to any business in any niche.
And that is what I based my Ultimate Copywriting Formula on.
You can check it out over on Practical Copywriter
Welcome to my website. and I wish you the best of luck in all your marketing efforts.
