Freelance Copywriting: What Qualifications Do You Need?

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Michael Masterson is the self appointed copywriting guru who makes a living selling cheap, usless, hyped get rich quick books and CD's.

Perhaps his best known is Michael Masterson's Accelerated Program for Six-Figure Copywriting. It's sold by his company AWAI although it is sometimes offered thru his ezine ETR. Honesty is not their best suit.

This whole “get rich copywriting” thing is comparable to the old envelope stuffing con of decades past. It’s all done with careful omissions, half-truths, lies, distortions, deceptions, selective memories, phony testimonials, exaggerated claims, over-simplifications, forced conclusions, unsubstantiated “facts” and good old fashioned trickery.

It really is a remarkably involved and finely crafted charade that convinces people they can truly earn $100,000+ a year after taking some poorly written, lame correspondence course or attending a silly 3-day rah-rah “bootcamp”… for a hefty price. It's all designed to separate you from your money. They even have people whose job it is to search for negative comments online and respond with favorable and phony testimonials.

Unfortunately, the scam is so good, and so convincing that many people are into it for quite a while before they begin to realize they've been continuously shelling out money and still don't have a career. The truth is, this weak correspondence/home study course will not prepare you to compete with others who have master's degrees in business and marketing and universities around the world are cranking such graduates out by the hundreds of thousands each year.

There is a new book coming out later this year entitled Copy Crooks which highlights AWAI and the Michael Masterson’s copywriting course as prime examples of direct marketing scam. I've only seen part of the introduction and part of the table of contents, but it looks devastating. It “dissects him like a frog in a biology lab.”

And with the success of the copywriting course, they branched into other areas like travel writing, resume writing, etc.

AWAI operates out of a dinghy little building on a side street in Delray Beach in Florida. If you ever visited the place, you'd never buy a thing from them.

And Michael Masterson isn't even the guys real name. It's Mark Ford and he uses testimonials from other family members to sell his products. It's all pretty shameless.