Stuff to check out:

Get Jacob’s Playbook here
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Research Mastery

Transcript:

Rob Marsh: Most podcasts about email don’t get into the nuts and bolts of how it really works. Until now. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

When you hear a podcast host like me say we’re talking about email on the podcast today, do your eyes glaze over? Do you think, here we go again… more advice about how you need to build your list, need to have a lead magnet, need to email regularly… or maybe you think of tired advice and adages like “the money is in the list” and “the more you hit send, the more you earn”. This is not that.

This episode is not that.

My guest on the podcast today is Jacob Suckow. This is Jacob’s second appearance on the podcast. The first time was about four years ago. And the change in his expertise and business is substantial. He was just figuring things out in that first interview. Today he runs a six-figure email business helping his clients grow their sales with high-level strategy using regular emails and email sequences stacked on top.

How do you go from writing emails and pitching products to landing mulit-year retainers taking on not just the writing duties, but also strategy and responsibility for increasing response rates and sales? We talked about exactly how to do that in this episode. 

We also talked about exactly how much you could be earning doing email for clients… Jacob shares all three of his pricing tiers to give you an idea of what you could be earning… and using his pricing structure you could create a six-figure business with just 3-4 client retainers.

And we talked about what it looks like to lever your experience with email strategy into a fractional CMO role and what that looks like too.

Finally we talked about newletters and how this is probably the biggest opportunity for copywriters out there today… the opportunity to grow and own an audience, then partner with offer owners or create your own offers for the audience you own is huge and one that perhaps every copywriter should be chasing down… and I’m not talking about writing weekly emails to other copywriters. These are niche opportunities that can be very profitable for the copywriters willing to put in a little work.

There’s a lot of good stuff in this episode so stick around.

Before we get to my discussion with Jacob, this episode is brought to you by Research Mastery. Research Mastery is the one-stop program or course that will change your writing for the better. Instead of just organizing words, you’ll have the tools and strategies you need to truly understand your customer so they relate to your offer and buy more often. Research Mastery digs into the 4 critical areas of research… if you miss one of them, your research just isn’t complete. And it includes the A.I. tools you need to do research faster, more effectively, and more profitably. You can learn more about this unqiue program at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery 

And now my interview with Jacob Suckow.

Stuff to check out:

Dani’s website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: Sometimes you can plan for change. Other times you can’t—and you have to adjust anyway. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

One of the strategies we teach in The Copywriter Accelerator and our other programs where we talk about getting things done is planning ahead for when things don’t go as planned.

It’s pretty easy to set goals and expect the future to behave as expected. But the reality almost always turns out differently.

So you might come up with a plan to spend next Friday creating a new product or service, strategizing who its for, the various things to include to make it valuable, and so on. But then Friday arrives and you’re not feeling well, or a friend from out of town calls and wants to see you, or a family emergency ends up taking up a significant chunk of your day.

What happens then? Planning for the invevitable things that go wrong is a huge part of success. Thinking through the options before they happen can help keep you on top of things. But you can’t plan for everything.

A lot of copywriters we’ve had on the podcast have shared that a career they planned on pursuing turned out to be less than they expected. And they make an unplanned switch to writing copy. But there are other ways that life throws you a curveball and you need to quickly adjust expectations and behaviors to make things work.

My guest on the podcast today is Dani Paige. She started a corporate career that didn’t go as planned and found copywriting as a result. She’s changed the services she offers more than once. And she’s tried things she thought would work that failed.

More recently, she made changes to her business to prepare for maternity leave. Everything was ready to support her new family situation but once again, things turned out differently than she had planned.

So how do we as copywriters adjust on the fly when things don’t turn out the way we expect them to. That’s a big part of what we talked about on today’s episode.

Dani and I also talked about her journey into copywriting and how she learned to write sales pages and launch copy… if you want to write those kinds of projects, you can learn a lot from Dani and her approach to learning these skills.

And what Dani says about community and connection is a theme that has come up several times in the last few months here on the podcast. If you’re not building connections and participating in communities, you are not building a skill that is critical for your future success.

There’s a lot of good stuff in this episode so stick around.

Before we get to my discussion with Dani Paige, this episode is brought to you by Research Mastery. Research Mastery is the one-stop program or course that will change your writing for the better. Instead of just organizing words, you’ll have the tools and strategies you need to truly understand your customer so they relate to your offer and buy more often. Research Mastery digs into the 4 critical areas of research… if you miss one of them, your research just isn’t complete. And it includes the A.I. tools you need to do research faster, more effectively, and more profitably. You can learn more about this unqiue program at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery 

And now my interview with Dani Paige.

Stuff to check out:

Hacking the Human Mind by Michael Aaron Flicker
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: Want more responses, sales, and customers? Let’s hack the human mind. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

Several months ago, I was fortunate enough to get an advanced copy of a book called, Hacking the Human Mind. Now… if you have a book and want me to read it, giving it a title like Hacking the Human Mind and including ideas and insights from behavioral science, neuro marketing, and psychology is pretty much guaranteed to get my attention.

But this book goes one step farther by looking at marketing in the real world then searching for the psychology that explains why something works. The approach basically flips the usual marketing tactic to-do list from: here are a bunch of psychological triggers… exclusivity, scarcity, risk removal, curiosity and so on… make sure you include them all into your sales process, and instead look for what works already and figuring out why it works.

That’s a bit different from the usual approach. So I asked one of the authors, Michael-Aaron Flicker to talk with me about some of the concepts from the book. 

We talked about the Pratfall or Blemish effect and how to turn a product flaw into an asset. There are very few perfect products in the world, so understanding how to use this effect in your copy is incredibly useful.

We also talked about how to address product changes in a way that doesn’t generate backlash. We’ve seen customers revolt against design and formulation changes over the last few years—Kraft Mac and Cheese did it the right way. And to hear that story, you’ll have to keep listening to this episode.

Another idea we talked about is offer simplicity… we’re often tempted to stack feature on feature and then benefit upon benefit. We do this to pile on the good stuff and make our offers more valuable to our clients. But the actual effect may be the exact opposite. Again, to hear how that works you’ll want to keep on listening.

One thing Michael Aaron points out that it takes more than knowing about a particular psychological effect or persuasion trigger, often you need to find new and innovative ways to use these triggers.

Before we get to my discussion with Michael Aaron, this episode is brought to you by Research Mastery. Research Mastery is the one-stop program or course that will change your writing for the better. Instead of just organizing words, you’ll have the tools and strategies you need to truly understand your customer so they relate to your offer and buy more often. Research Mastery digs into the 4 critical areas of research… if you miss one of them, your research just isn’t complete. And it includes the A.I. tools you need to do research faster, more effectively, and more profitably. You can learn more about this unqiue program at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery 

And now my interview with Michael Aaron Flicker.

Transcript summary coming soon.

Stuff to check out:

Krystle’s Email List
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Research Mastery

Partial Transcript:

Rob Marsh: When your business stops working for you, what can you do to fix things? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

There are a lot of copywriters who build a successful business writing for clients. Or maybe they build an agency around their offers and niche. But then after a few years they don’t love the business they created for themselves. Sometime we just burn out and need to do something a bit different. Maybe they no longer want employees or contractors. Maybe they get tired of working directly with clients. Maybe they realize that instead of using their skills to attract customers to other peoples businesses, they decide to use their skills to sell products to their own clients. And then many of us are entrepreneurs at heart and have always wanted to build a business other than writing for a list of clients. Shifting a business from offering services to clients to something else can be a challenge.

It’s a very different kind of work. Instead of creating assets for clients, you may spend your time creating assets for your own business, then spending even more time getting attention for your offers.

For many copywriters, this is the dream—a copywriting business with customers instead of clients.

But there’s a lot of work that goes into a business switch like this. Validating offers. Finding a client base for your offers—which is almost certainly a very different set of clients than you’ve been writing for. Building out marketing systems to sell your new products. Figuring out how to deliver value when you’re not actually delivering copy.

I wanted to talk about this with someone who’s gone through the process recently. So I invited copywriter and coach Krystle Church to come back to the podcast and talk about the changes she’s made to her business over the past couple of years. The business Krystle has today is very different from the one she was running two years ago. She’s excited about the new direction and having more fun than when she was burning out with a calendar full of projects that required her attention from the time she woke up until she went to bed at night.

If you’ve been thinking about re-imagining your business, this episode may give you a few ideas to try. You’ll get a few tips about validating a new offer. And you might even decide to dabble with an offer for your niche that at least gives you a taste of what a different kind of business would feel like. This kind of business isn’t for everyone. In fact, it’s probably not for most copywriters. But it’s worth thinking about how you might be able to add to or change your business so it fits your needs a bit better.

Before we get to my discussion with Krystle, this episode is brought to you by Research Mastery. Research Mastery is the one-stop program or course that will change your writing for the better. Instead of just organizing words, you’ll have the tools and strategies you need to truly understand your customer so they relate to your offer and buy more often. Research Mastery digs into the 4 critical areas of research… if you miss one of them, your research just isn’t complete. And it includes the A.I. tools you need to do research faster, more effectively, and more profitably. You can learn more about this unqiue program at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery 

And now my interview with Krystle Church.

Stuff to check out:

Turn the Page Newsletter
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Research Mastery

Transcript:

Rob Marsh: Copywriters are teachers. So should more teachers be copywriters? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

A few years ago I had a conversation with one of my copywriting mentors. She mentioned that she had considered teaching as a possible career path. And I shared that I had the same thought when I started my career. Then we talked about the number of former teachers we knew who had left the classroom to write copy. And that’s when it dawned on me that copywriting isn’t just something that former teachers or potential teachers do. 

Copywriting is teaching. But instead of practicing that skill in a classroom, copywriters are teaching on the page or on the screen, helping potential customers learn about products and solutions, about processes and unique mechanisms, and how to solve the very real problems and pains they are experiencing in their lives.

In the years since, I’ve interviewed close to a dozen former teachers on this podcast… people who are still teaching, just not in a formal classroom any more.

Do you feel this as a copywriter? Do you see yourself as a teacher for your clients and their customers?

My guest for today’s podcast is Meredith Cooley, a teacher turned copywriter who has helped dozens of other teachers leave the classroom and become copywriters for various businesses around the world.

Teachers have so many skills that copywriters need, from project management to engaging with stakeholders at various levels of a business. And perhaps most importantly, good teachers have to be able to take dry, boring content and make it exciting for an often disinterested and bored audience.

And if you listened to last week’s episode, you heard me talk about how I’ve started teaching marketing at a local college here in my home town. The crossover between teaching students and writing for customers is large. And that’s what this episode is all about.

Even if you don’t see yourself as a teacher, this episode may change your mind about how you think about your relationship with the customers you write for.

Before we get to our interview, this episode is brought to you by Research Mastery. Research Mastery is the one-stop program or course that will change your writing for the better. Instead of just organizing words, you’ll have the tools and strategies you need to truly understand your customer so they relate to your offer and buy more often. Research Mastery digs into the 4 critical areas of research… if you miss one of them, your research just isn’t complete. And it includes the A.I. tools you need to do research faster, more effectively, and more profitably. You can learn more about this unqiue program at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery 

And now my interview with Meredith Cooley.

Stuff to check out:

The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Research Mastery

What we talked about:

Transcript is underway…

Stuff to check out:

Tiana’s YouTube
Tiana’s Newsletter
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Research Mastery

Highlights from this episode:

Rob Marsh: What is the biggest opportunity in copywriting today? We’re about to reveal the answer. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

When inviting guests to share their experiences on this podcast, I often look for writers who are doing something a little bit differently than their peers are doing. Someone who has a different approach, a unique viewpoint on something, or maybe they’re testing things that the rest of us just aren’t up to speed on yet.

My guest on today’s podcast is Tiana Asperjan. Lately I’ve been seing Tiana everywhere… although that might just be a function of the algorithm showing me more stuff like the stuff I’ve seen recently. If you’re a copywriter, Tiana’s Youtube channel, social media feed, and newsletter are excellent. She’s teaching what works in ads and copy right now. But she doesn’t just say what’s working, she focuses on the strategy and psychology behind an ad so you know not just that it works, but why it works.

She’s doing things a bit differently from a lot of other copywriters and most of us who are sharing ideas and insights about copywriting with other writers. So I asked her to join me on today’s episode and boy am I glad that I did. I like all of the interviews I share with you each week, but this one really stands out.

Tiana’s story of how she got to where she is is a masterclass on the steps to success as a writer. It’s less about the destination, and more about accumulating the experiences and expertise you need to be great. I think as you listen in, you’ll learn a lot from Tiana’s experiences.

As for the answer to that question I posed at the opening of this episode… what’s the biggest opportunity for copywriters working today who want to stay relevant for years to come? Well, you’ll just have to listen to this episode because Tiana reveals what it is and why this particular “niche” —and I’ve got niche in air quotes here—is where more copywriters ought to be focusing their efforts today. If you want a look at a industry or niche that is desperate for help from good copywriters, you’ll want to keep listening.

Before we get to all that, this episode is brought to you by Research Mastery. Research Mastery is the one-stop program or course that will change your writing for the better. Instead of just organizing words, you’ll have the tools and strategies you need to truly understand your customer so they relate to your offer and buy more often. Research Mastery digs into the 4 critical areas of research… if you miss one of them, your research just isn’t complete. And it includes the A.I. tools you need to do research faster, more effectively, and more profitably. You can learn more about this unqiue program at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery

Stuff to check out:

Newsletter Circle
Ciler’s LinkedIn
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Here’s a summary of the episode:

Stuff to check out:

Jamie’s website
Jamie’s free Strategist Copywriter Course
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: If you’re a copywriter who wants more input into the work you do and more money for contributing your insights early, keep listening. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

Far too many copywriters are content taking an assignment from a client and simply writing the words. In fact, there are thousands of copywriters and content writers who think that’s what copywriting is—choosing the right words to make a client sound good. They even call themselves wordsmiths as if all they’re doing is coming up with the words.

Now obviously, writing the words is a big part of what we do. Often, it’s the only obvious part of a project that we can point to and say, that’s my work.

But great copywriters don’t start with writing the words. They get involved in their client’s projects much earlier in the process. Before design direction is figured out. Before the brand voice is settled. Even before a client decides what exactly they need to solve the marketing problem they have. This is where copywriters should start on a project.

That work is strategy… deep diving on the problem to be solved and exploring the various ways to find a solution, some of which might not even be copywriting-focused.

Okay, so how do you do it. My guest for this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is Jamie Thomson. Jamie takes his clients from discovery call to paid workshop to project in a process that immediately puts him in charge of driving the strategy for a project. It’s a process that makes him significantly more valuable and critical to the success of a project than simply taking a project from a client and writing the copy.

What’s more, because Jamie plays such an important role in his projects, and his impact is obvious to his clients, they often come back for even more work which takes the pressure off client-finding and allows him to spend more time client serving.

In the age of A.I., when the machines can write copy faster than you can… and yes I know, it’s not as good, but can your clients tell the difference? So in the age of A.I., this is one strategy that makes you more valuable as a copywriter who solves problems and gets paid to do it. If that sounds interesting to you, then stick around. And if that doesn’t sound interesting to you, maybe Jamie’s soothing Scottish accent will be enough to keep you engaged. It works for me.

No matter what kind of copywriting business you want for yourself, The Copywriter Underground is packed with resources to show up as a business owner—not just a freelancer—to help you find clients, and solve big problems that clients are happy to pay big money to get off their plates. From copywriting and business templates to get you started (including a legal document and a proven onboarding process) to workshops to help you build your authority, attract clients, create products and services your clients want to buy, how to be more strategic and a lot more—The Underground is like a starter-kit for your writing business… It’s a complete business-in-a-box that you can plug into your own business and hit play. As questions come up, you have access to our private slack community, monthly group coaching, and regular feedback on your copy. I’ve been inside a lot of memberships and The Underground is the best value for content writers and copywriters I’ve ever seen. You can learn more by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu-2.

And now, my interview with Jamie Thomson…

Thanks to Jamie Thomson for sharing his process for getting involved with strategy early on in a project where you can have a bigger impact and show how valuable your thinking is for solving real problems. 

Like I said at the beginning of the show, when A.I. can write copy that clients think is good enough, you need to contribute to your client’s marketing efforts in new ways, hopefully ways where you can add even more value. Jamie’s process is one of those ways. It’s not exactly a roadmapping session which is another way to play a strategic role with clients—with a workshop you take the lead in helping clients determine what needs to be created and getting buy in on direction which helps eliminate changes and rework later on. If you implement Jamie’s approach, email me to let me know how it goes. I’d love to hear how you make it work for your business.

And of course, another place to find resources to help you show up as a more strategic thinker is The Copywriter Underground. There are workshops on finding clients, pitching, discovery calls, using diagnostic tools like a scorecard to get clients to say yes to working with you… workshops on copywriting, A.I., voice, and so much more. Check them all out at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu-2. 

Stuff to check out:

The Feisty Freelancer Website
The Feisty Freelancer Book
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: What’s the best adjective to describe a hardworking, client-pleasing, financially successful copywriter? How about feisty? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

When it comes to freelancing, this is no one right way to do things. There are thousands of niches to serve. Millions of clients with millions of needs. There are hundreds of ways to find those clients and thousands more ways to solve their problems. But every writer who owns their own business has lots of things in common with others doing the same thing.

And if you try to describe them… especially those freelancers who are actually finding clients, doing good work, and earning enough to make a living, well one word that comes to mind is feisty.

The feisty freelancer brings energy to their work. They’re not afraid to stand up for themselves or the clients they’re writing for. And they even might be a little playful. The Feisty Freelancer is also the name of a new book written by content writer and former Think Tank member, Suzanne Bowness. Sue’s book is a primer for freelancers of all kinds—not just writers—who want to do more than struggle for scraps. The feisty freelancer has what it takes to succeed.

This is Sue’s second appearance on the podcast. The first one happened almost three years ago. It’s episode #319 if you want to check it out. Given Sue’s expertise as a freelancer, it’s probably not a coincidence that some of the ideas we talked about then made it into the book. But it’s been a while since we had that discussion, so I took the opportunity to ask Sue about the topics she covers in her book. Things like pitching, working with corporate clients, marketing a writing business, strategies for being productive and getting things done. We even talked about whether freelancing is something people should be considering at all today. I think you’ll like what she had to share.

Before we get to my interview with Sue, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. The Underground includes monthly coaching and expert workshops, an accountability group to keep you moving toward your goals, and more than 70 different workshops  to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. Recently I asked a new member why she joined the Underground and she said she did it for the copy reviews. She wanted feedback on her work to help her improve her writing. And where many writing coaches charge as much as $1500 to look at a single sales page, you can get unlimited reviews in The Underground for less than $90 a month. Honestly this just might be the best value in the copywriting world. You can learn more by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu-2.

And now, my interview with Sue Bowness…

Transcript is underway…

Stuff to check out:

CursorAndInk.com
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: Is strategy a big part of your copywriting business? If it isn’t now, it probably should be. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

Every client needs a strategy. But they don’t always see it that way. They just want the emails or the web site or the launch plan. But it’s the strategy that ensures that the deliverables go to the right person, include the right message, have the right call to action—all at the right time. Clients want the deliverables and the benefits of the strategy, but they don’t always connect the two.

So it becomes your job as the copywriter or content strategist to connect the dots for them, to show how strategy leads to better copy and content.

On this episode of the podcast, my guest is Kristen Vanderhoek, a copywriter who focuses on brand strategy. We talked about how to approach strategy projects—Kristen shared exactly how she does it. And we talked about how you sell strategy to clients who usually just want to deliverable. We also talked about Kristen’s HOME framework, the step-by-step process she follows when working with clients to ensure they get well-thought out, strategic copy and design.

Finally, one of Kristen’s differentiators is her white-glove service. She takes steps to make working with her feel like a high-end experience and makes sure her clients aren’t left wondering what’s going on, or feeling like they overpaid because the presentation at the end of the project isn’t just a file hand-off.

If you’re a copywriter who is ready to level up the projects you work on and the way you deliver that work to your clients, you’ll want to listen to this interview.

Before we get to my interview with Kristen, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. The Underground includes monthly coaching and expert workshops, an accountability group to keep you moving toward your goals, and more than 70 different workshops  to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. Recently I asked a new member why she joined the Underground and she said she did it for the copy reviews. She wanted feedback on her work to help her improve her writing. And where many writing coaches charge as much as $1500 to look at a single sales page, you can get unlimited reviews in The Underground for less than $90 a month. Honestly this just might be the best value in the copywriting world. You can learn more by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu-2.

And now, my interview with Kristen Vanderhoek…

Transcript coming….

Stuff to check out:

BlackFoxMarketing
Lacy’s Instagram
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: Thinking about writing a book? Yeah me too. For a couple of years now. So let’s talk about how to actually get it done. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

If you’ve been listening to this podcast for more than a year or two, you’ve probably heard me talk about wanting to write another book. It’s been a goal of mine for a couple of years even though I haven’t made a lot of progress on it lately.

And you’ve probably heard at least one guest talk about the book writing process… guest like Laura Gale, Jennie Nash, Stephanie Chandler, Mary Adkins, Ryan Guthrie and Allison Fallon have all shared their approaches, their secrets for finding time and organizing thoughts for a book, and their frameworks for putting together a best-seller or at least a book that appeals to their readers. It’s been a few months, but we’ve covered this ground before. So why talk about it again?

Because if you’re anything like me, it’s less about learning the latest secret for writing a book and more about reminding yourself that this is still a goal, and now is as good a time as ever to get it done. So if you have a goal to write a book, or like me want to write another book—one that better reflects the work that you’re doing right now, or even a novel that will connect with readers today… this episode is for you.

My guest today is author and book marketer, Lacy Lieffers. Lacy runs a community for authors and she helps writers at all stages of the book writing process from organizing ideas to creating a game plan to make your book a best seller. She knows her stuff, so I was more than a little interested to see if what she has to share will light that fire under my backside and get my book moving again.

We talked about pen names, picking the right book topic for you, how to figure out if your book idea will work, book marketing, and a lot more. If you want to write a book, or you’re stuck in the middle of your book, or you don’t know where to start, this episode is for you. And for me. 

Before we get to my interview with Lacy, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. The Underground includes monthly coaching and expert workshops, an accountability group to keep you moving toward your goals, and more than 70 different workshops  to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. Recently I asked a new member why she joined the Underground and she said she did it for the copy reviews. She wanted feedback on her work to help her improve her writing. And where many writing coaches charge as much as $1500 to look at a single sales page, you can get unlimited reviews in The Underground for less than $90 a month. Honestly this just might be the best value in the copywriting world. You can learn more by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu-2.

And now, my interview with Lacy Lieffers…

Thanks to Lacy Lieffers for helping me reset my goal and efforts to finally get to writing my next book. I’ve written a book before, and I’ve got to admit that while I think it’s a good book, by the time I finished writing it, I was no longer in love with the topic or the book itself. And at least in the case of that book, it’s on a topic or niche that I don’t do a lot of work in any more. So it’s definitely time for a book that’s more relevant to my business today. 

If you want to connect with Lacy or use some of the tools she has created for authors to write and market their books, connect with her on Instagram where she’s got a long list of links to resources for authors. You can also find her at blackfoxmarketing.ca 

During our discussion we talked about the “speak your book” formula for writing a book. I want to be clear that I’m not saying that that process can’t work. But as Lacy points out, we tend to speak differently than we write. And we listen differently than we read. So you CAN speak your book, but you’ll want to put in a lot of work to make sure it actually reads like a book and not like a transcript which can be hard to follow. If this is the only way you’ll get your book out of your head and down on paper, go for it. 

And while having a book for it’s own sake may be worth the effort, a book opens all kinds of doors for you and your business that other marketing materials simply can’t. Even a podcast which can be a great way to get your voice and thoughts into the world, it doesn’t have the permanence of a book. There’s a reason why author and authority are basically the same word. When it comes to building trust, getting the attention of your ideal clients, and even booking yourself onto podcasts or events… having a good book makes all the difference. If you want to write a book, drop me an email and let me know. I’d love to hear your process for getting it done. It might help inspire me to get mine done too.

Finally, a quick reminder that if you want your copy reviewed by someone who can give you expert advice on how to make it better, jump into The Copywriter Underground now and let me see your latest project. You can learn more about the Underground at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu-2.

Stuff to check out:

Kristen’s LinkedIn
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: Writing for the health and wellness industry takes a special set of skills. And that’s what we talking about today on The Copywriter Club Podcast.

One of the questions I get asked the most as a copywriting coach is which niche pays the most. I’m on the record as a big proponent of niching… our own research which you’ll find published on our blog shows that copywriters who write in a single niche make almost two times more than copywriters without a niche. And copywriters who are focused on 2-3 niches make 30% more than writers without a niche.

But not all niches are equal. Some niches pay more than others… the financial niche is one of those and we’ve published several episodes in the past talking about that niche… look for our interviews with Clayton Makepeace, Kyle Milligan, Jake Hoffberg and Ridge Abraham. Most of those episode are a few years old. Partly because of its reputation as a profitable niche, it’s hard to break into work with the high-paying financial publishers.

Another niche that is generally thought of as high-paying is the health and wellness niche, especially writers who work with supplement makers, fat loss products and medtech. So what do you need to know to break into this lucrative niche? I asked Kristen Driscoll, a health copywriter, to talk a bit about how she broke in and the work that she does. It’s a roadmap for your own path to success with wellness clients if you choose to follow it.

We talked about how Kristen found her first client in the niche, why she chose health as the industry she wanted to work in, and why wellness is a such a massive opportunity for writers today.

I think you’ll like this discussion that Kristen and I had so stick around.

Before we get to my interview with Kristen, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. The Underground includes monthly coaching and expert workshops, an accountability group to keep you moving toward your goals, and more than 70 different workshops  to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. Recently I asked a new member why she joined the Underground and she said she did it for the copy reviews. She wanted feedback on her work to help her improve her writing. And where many writing coaches charge as much as $1500 to look at a single sales page, you can get unlimited reviews in The Underground for less than $90 a month. Honestly this just might be the best value in the copywriting world. You can learn more by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu-2.

And now, my interview with Kristen Driscoll…

Hey, Kristen, welcome to the podcast. I am really excited to talk to you about how you became marketing strategist and a direct response copywriter for health and wellness brands and all of the things. So tell us your story.

Kristen Driscoll:  Well, thank you so much for having me on. I think, like many direct cop direct response copywriters and marketing folks… so that was my first career, and then I was a full time yoga teacher for 14 years, and still teach yoga. And also a lot of kind of some similarities there that I could draw upon with copywriting and getting started. So from moving on from copywriting or moving on from full time yoga teaching, is when I discovered copywriting and went full off the deep end and kind of immersed myself in in learning the craft, because it really is a craft, you know, some getting those principles down, I think, is key for a longevity of a career.

Rob Marsh: Let’s talk a little bit about what you did in the music industry. I know you got a couple of good stories, but, yeah, what were some of the bands that you helped promote? What were some of the things that you were doing to bring people in, you know, to the audiences, to the venues for all of these bands?

Kristen Driscoll:  Well, the very first, my very first job in the music industry was for an entertainment law firm, and that’s where I think I shared with you on one post. You know, there’s that question that goes around like, name one thing you’ve done that you’re sure that none of no other friends of yours has done. And one of the ones I example, I use in that a lot is that I am the witness on Deedee Ramone’s prenup.

Rob Marsh: This is awesome. This is such like if, if I, if that was me, that would be like the headline on my website. I would just that would be, probably has nothing to do with anything that I do, but I just think that’s such a cool thing about you. I love that.

Kristen Driscoll: Yeah, thanks. And it’s another example of you can really use a whole lot of fodder to get people’s attention, and sometimes the actual story behind it isn’t quite as glamorous as as as it can sound. But…

Rob Marsh: Well, let me stop you there, because tell the because I think this is actually a really good copywriting lesson. Tell the story like because you’re right, it’s just something that kind of happened, but then the headline is amazing, right?

Kristen Driscoll: So really it was nothing much more than I was in the right place at the right time, my assistant, the assistant to the lawyer, who was Dee. Dee’s lawyer, was out to lunch, and they needed somebody to pull into the conference room and be the signatory. So it really was kind of that, that simple. But then, when you know, know how to take just your, your own individual rich history, and pull out the little nuggets that are true, but will also, you know, get people’s attention and get get, uh, get the get the party started.

Rob Marsh: We’ll definitely dive into this a lot more when we’re talking about writing for health and wellness brands. Wellness brands. But to me, this is like one of the things that I really love about writing supplement copy, because you’re always looking for that one detail that you can pull out and build a story around, or that one little thing about it that nobody else is talking about, that you can you know, have be the mechanism, or have be that interest thing that pulls people in, and then it’s not, you know, usually the story is much bigger than that one small detail, but you’re looking like that’s, to me, that’s one of the main skill sets of writing supplement copy. So anyway, that’s, I kind of wanted to draw a line into that. Because I just think this is a key skill, and that story illustrates as well as anything else.

Kristen Driscoll: I think that’s a really great point, a really, really great example. And also, on the other end, knowing just how to tell a story that nobody else is telling, you know, you can go back to the Schlitz beer. You know, everybody was making the beer the same exact way, but just taking the time to stop and tell the story and romanticize it and use every possible thing that you have at your disposal.

Rob Marsh: So while we’re still talking about music, tell me a couple of your favorite bands that I should probably add to my listening list as I’m sitting down writing copy, what were some of the bands that you really loved promoting or loved listening to?

Kristen Driscoll: Sure, well, the one I’ll say, and I’ve never worked with him personally, but I get to see him often here in Austin, and more and more, he’s getting rightful attention as just one of the major lyricists. You know, people like to talk about Stephen King’s book on writing. Well, Stephen King just named James McMurtry as the number one lyricist like ever. So I think it’s like a master class in storytelling in like five minutes or less. And so many different examples you could pull from, you know, starting in the middle of the story, coming on with a lyric that just grabs you right from the beginning. There’s so many different examples of how to do it well, using picture words, you know, just one sentence that just sets this incredibly vivid scene. So I think we could go on for an hour on all the different ways that you could look at really great songwriters as master storytellers and paying attention to how they’re doing it.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, there are definitely copywriters who have, you know, come from the music industry or play around in the music industry. And that’s, I think, one of the things that sometimes makes them a little bit different. They’re really good at tempo, at, like you said, picture, words, or, you know, telling a story in a very simple way. So I’m adding James McMurtry to my Spotify list. And we’re done recording here. I’m gonna, I’ll be relaxing, you know, with the Coke Zero.

Kristen Driscoll: I think you can’t, you can’t go wrong. There’s just so many great examples there that you can pull from.

Rob Marsh: And then, after being in the music industry for a while, you were this Bikram yoga teacher. Talk a little bit about some of the lessons from yoga that apply to copywriting, or at least to the writing that you do.

Kristen Driscoll: Absolutely, I think, you know, pulling back to the bigger lens, I think there’s so many similarities. So in Bikram, we talk about the five qualities of mind that you need to practice yoga, and all of them are applicable. So you need a determination. You know from the very beginning, you need to be able to roll up your sleeves and do the work. Be disciplined, get in there and do it self control, which is another one from, again, doing the work, learning the craft, to starting to understand client negotiations and client management. You know, we’ve all been in a difficult client situation where, gosh, if you can just stop and take a deep breath and walk away and come back composed is a big one concentration. You know, there are so many templates and so many tools we have now, but if you’re going to be in the long game and you’re going to learn this craft. It’s not as easy as just slapping something into AI. You have to stick with understanding the really basics and all those just old school things that you can’t really skip over. Patience is one, you know, if you listen to patience and faith, which especially for newer copywriters coming in. You know, there are offers out there that make it sound like you’re going to be making a million dollars in a month, and it’s just doesn’t work that way. So having that patience to know it’s gonna it all good things are there for you, but it’s gonna take, likely, a little longer than you might want it to, a little longer than some people might paint a picture for, and having the faith that if you just do all of the right things and you kind of keep at it, you’re gonna find your way, and you’re gonna find your niche and find your clients.

Rob Marsh: So if that is a baseline, then why the turn to copy. And how did you start, you know, with your first client, how did you decide you wanted to be a copywriter?

Kristen Driscoll: I stumbled onto copywriting Christy Goldfeder, who is a successful, wonderful copywriter in this space. You probably know her. She and I were went to college together, so I was wrapping up my time as a full time Bikram teacher and trying to figure out what I was going to do next. I’ve always been a writer, but I didn’t know kind of the direct response world. And I had, I had dinner with Christy, and I was like, how are you traveling the world? You know that dream of being a digital nomad, like, how are you traveling the world and working? Like, what do you do? And it’s like, I’m a direct response copywriter, you know, I leaned in, you know, tell me, tell me more. And really, just immediately dove off the deep end, bought my first Awai course, and just finally found something that was a perfect blend of my natural creative writing ability, my marketing background and where I could apply my love for health and wellness, um and I was also off to the races.

Rob Marsh: So with that learning then, and I’ve seen a lot of aw eyes resources and the things that they do, how did you find your first client?

Kristen Driscoll: My very first client, I believe I founded an AWAI conference. Okay, yeah, so I kind of went all in on that conference. Really put my last bit of financial resources into getting myself there and got my first client so that all that all worked out.

Rob Marsh: And what did that interaction look like? Because, you know. I imagine there are a lot of people who are thinking, Okay, well, I’ll go to this event where maybe I’m the only copywriter, and I’m talking to potential clients. But it’s one thing to be there, and it’s a whole other thing to strike up a conversation where people are thinking, hey, this person can help me solve this problem that I have.

Kristen Driscoll: Yeah, absolutely. And for being a newbie, I think realistically, like you’re not gonna go in with different copy chops that are, you know, you’re not gonna go in with that level of being able to compete on on that. So I think having the underlying interest, it was for health and wellness brands. So I think my natural passion for true health and wellness and coming up with those solutions shown through, shined through. And I think it’s a personality match too, like, don’t be afraid to go out there and show up as yourself and, you know, make those one on one connections, because that, I think, ultimately, is going to be what gets you in the door. And then you just got to roll up your sleeves and be willing to do the work and rinse and repeat, you know.

Rob Marsh: So why did you choose health and wellness as your niche?

Kristen Driscoll: Because of my yoga background, really is where that that came came through in I’m going back to it now too, in a way that I’ve been coaching a lot of clients recently through some offer changes and maybe some business changes, kind of bigger picture, and over and over again, what it’s coming down for me and for clients. And this goes back to just why health and wellness in general is you have to have that duck in a row before anything else can be built. And so one thing I’m I’m my point with that being like, right now, I’m seeing a lot from copywriters with AI and kind of people pivoting that way, and some business coaching that I’m doing where people are trying to pivot. It comes if you can come back to being your best, healthiest version of you. Like, this is some messaging that is oddly coming into the My ether, and I think is worth talking about here. Now I just was at the Destiny event and in Austin, and Joe Polish was talking about it too, like and any time of transition, at any time of starting something, you can show up in your best possible health and wellness. You know you can get your sleep, you can have good nutrition. You can prioritize managing your nervous system and until those big building blocks are in place, nothing else is really gonna ultimately fall in place easily or for very long. So I think that personal interest and commitment to health and wellness really drove it for me. If that makes sense?

Rob Marsh: Yeah, it makes sense. It feels to me like health and wellness is a growing industry. It’s one of those places where there are more and more opportunities rather than fewer. And I know there, there are some things going on in all of the markets with AI and and stuff like that. But because of the way that populations are aging, and the baby boomers are kind of in that 60 to 80 year old phase where nutritional supplements matter, where, you know, if you haven’t been taking care of your health, you’ve got to start doing something significant right now. And then millennials, you know, two generations back, are sort of moving into their 40s, where, you know, awareness of this kind of stuff matters as much as ever, and people are really trying to take care of themselves. So as far as, like, a niche to consider writing in, it feels like there’s a ton of opportunity here. Talk a little bit about that.

Kristen Driscoll: There’s a ton of opportunity. And not just, I mean, you mentioned, like the supplements, but that is really only one possibility. You know, you could write for yoga studios. You could write for sleep brands. You could it. There’s so many. There’s your mental health. You know, you could start getting into tools for more mental well being. It’s like a limitless…

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I mean, off the top of my head, I can think of like. Medical devices and doctors, even even things like, I mean, this isn’t really wellness necessarily, but even like hospice services and elder care, like, they’re just so many of these industries that are critical for people who need them, and that population right now is growing.

Kristen Driscoll: Absolutely, that’s actually the talking about hospice is an area, more and more I’m starting to see really interesting things happening with deaf death doulas and coaches who are not just, you know, wellness coaches, but are death coaches Helping people transition and their families. So there really are so many possibilities and so many brands that need help.

Rob Marsh: So when it comes to writing for these kinds of brands, is it just like everybody else, you know, if I’m a SaaS copywriter, can I, can I turn around and just, you know, identify a benefit, or what are some of the differences when we want to be thinking about wellness, as opposed to, say, software or coaching, or, you know, any of the other big industries that copywriters tend to gravitate to?

Kristen Driscoll: I think it always goes back to the basics of the problem that you’re solving and the person that you’re solving it for, and especially with with health and wellness, there’s another there’s added layers like so there’s a compliance layer, you know, you’re going to have to have more knowledge about what you legally can and can’t say for compliance. But ultimately, it really comes back to making sure you are understanding how to how to install, instill that, that hope, as well as point out the things that they’re struggling with. And I think sometimes you see a lot of really heavy hit hitting, like fear based copy, and that’s, I think, a misstep a lot of kind of newer copywriters can do is just fear, fear, fear, fear, fear, without immediately offering that hopeful solution. Because, you know, we do need to find a path forward. So I think that’s a really crucial part, is showing people the possibilities of how their lives can be less, you know, more enjoyable, more freedom, longevity.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I like that, because it does seem natural to gravitate towards the fear. You know, you you’re in your you’re a male in your 50s, you’re going to have a heart attack, you know, by the time you’re, you know, this age, or if you’ve, if you’ve had pizza and burgers, you know, once or twice a week for the last 40 years, your arteries are clogged. And it’s not only your heart health now, it’s also your brain health and and risk for things like Alzheimer’s and dementia. Obviously, there are all kinds of, you know, immuno diseases and and conditions that people struggle with throughout their life. So it’s really easy to gravitate to like, oh, here are all the horrible things. So what’s your trick for turning it to hope and you know, the positive potential futures?

Kristen Driscoll: Yeah, you have to. Because the thing is, if you don’t, if you just come on too heavy handed with the fear you’re just gonna shut people down. Nobody wants to, like shy shy away from that. Again, it goes back to just really doing the deep research on your product, on the unique mechanism of your solution, and finding that truthful nugget of how it’s going to to be a positive change. You know, there’s a lot of smaller little things like you can look at speed of results and make sure that you’re highlighting that these changes can happen. And as little as you know, however fast your product can work. So just you gotta really understand what is your prospect is worried about. That’s another thing I see come up a lot is like the faux benefits, you know, like, get off the roller coast, the blood pressure roller coaster. You know, nobody wakes up in the middle of the night being like, oh my god, I really wish I could just get off the blood pressure roller coaster.

Rob Marsh: I mean, they think, but, but that that’s a real problem. But they think about like, oh, wow, I’m taking too many pills, or my blood pressure still. High or I’m not living the life that I want to live, right?

Kristen Driscoll: Yep, I think the answer really is as simple as you have to keep peeling a bat back, like you may have, you may think you peeled enough layers of the onion, but you’ve got to go like 12 more layers deep. I was just working on a coaching project last week, and we were sitting down, and this woman had a real breakthrough, and we were talking about it in the session the wrap up session afterwards, and they’re like, oh, so she finally got it after like five whys. I was like, No, we skipped five. Whys. It took us like 17. Wise, you know, so if you stop at the like, Okay, I got this exercise that I was taught to do, and I did it. I asked five times, okay, well, maybe in some cases you might have to ask 27 times. You have to just kind of be ruthless in your peeling back what is really underneath it all.

Rob Marsh: And exercises like those, sometimes are really difficult to conduct with a client, because ultimately, you know, there are only so many needs that we have. You know, people want to have more money, they want to have more time, they want to have more companionship or sex, or however you want to, you know, characterize that. You know, maybe there’s, there’s some form of self actualization, you know, that, that all this stuff goes to but those kinds of things also are not that appealing, you know, you can’t, you can’t promote, you know, this vitamin supplement saying, well, you’re just going to have better health, right? Like you have to go so deep, and so it’s, I mean, I like how you say, you know you’re peeling back the each layer. But it almost takes an expert to realize that what we’re dealing with at that level five or maybe level even still, level seven or eight is still so general that it doesn’t really address the pain points or the triggers that people are experiencing in their lives.

Kristen Driscoll: What I most more often find is when you start peeling back, it’s that people are resistant to say out loud something that they want but maybe shouldn’t want. Interesting, like, are ashamed to want?

Rob Marsh: Can you give an example of what sounds shallow?

Kristen Driscoll: So I’ll use the example from last week. And this woman, she’s a health and wellness coach, but it was, we were talking about her own marketing, and there was some resistance in her. She was a perfectionist, and there was resistance in her getting this offer out. So I was like, Well, what are you really afraid of? And it took like going she was afraid to kind of admit that. She was afraid of what people were going to think of her once the offer was out there, you know, and it’s something that is so basic and so simple, but it was creating this huge friction that was preventing her from getting the thing done. So, you know, sometimes we’re searching for this magic new answer, and there might not be. It might just be kind of cracking that resistance in the client or, you know, to get to that that point. So that’s an example more of how to interview your clients, and you know, then you have to do the work and how that’s going to all translate to whatever your headline and end lead is for the product. But like we said before, even in these stories, that might seem like nothing. But then you get down to Oh yeah, and I was DDS witness on the prenup, you know, like these things that aren’t that your client or your product might be taking for granted. Yep, you know, you got to kind of keep hammering at, yeah.

Rob Marsh: I mean, the way, you know, when I’ve written for supplements, you know, it’s always interesting, because the supplements, the bottle says, you know, ingredients include, you know, vitamin C or potassium or whatever. But as you dig deeper and look at like, okay, where does the supply come from? Or, where does that particular ingredient come from? Yeah, it just happens that this one comes from some rare berry that only grows in, you know, certain fields in the Himalayas or whatever, and, you know, is harvested once, you know, a two week period, once every winter like there, there’s almost always something like that that you’re then. Now I’ve got a really interesting story about, you know, the harvest. Just in the Himalayas, not even related to the fact that maybe it addresses my knee pain, but it’s something that I can get attention with up front before we start talking about all of the things that this thing does. Right? That’s, I think that’s what i and this might be a little bit more difficult, you know, finding something that different about, say, a health coach or, you know, a therapist. But there are stories like that too in their lives. You know, the therapist who, you know, studied at a particular university where, you know, maybe there’s this experimental thing going on or, you know, like, and that’s the kind of digging that most research courses don’t teach. You know, most copywriting courses don’t even talk about they do talk about finding the big idea, but they don’t always talk about how to go so deep that you can actually get the idea. And so when I hear supplement writers, health writers, who talk about, oh yeah, I did research for three weeks. And I think copywriters go three weeks like, What in the world are you looking at for three weeks? Well, this is what they’re doing. They’re looking for that.

Kristen Driscoll: Yeah, and it can also be the difference in the brand or the owner, instead of like, if you can’t find something, maybe the formula isn’t so different. But there really is so much truth to the fact that 12 different people could be selling the same exact thing, and it’s going to appeal to 12 different people based on the spokesperson, based on the person creating the product. It really, there really is that room for nuance in attracting our best people. Yeah. So it’s not about creating, you know, again, going back to just timeless marketing principles, it’s not about creating this desire. It’s about fi, you know, unveiling what’s already there and just making sure it aligns with the same the right people.

Rob Marsh: So when you stumble on an idea like that, how do you know it’s the one? How do you know, like, Oh, this is something I can build a promotion around, or I can write a sales page around, or a series of emails, or whatever.

Kristen Driscoll: The thing is, yeah, it’s usually just kind of a gut hit, you know, like something just sticks at you. You’re like, Oh, that’s interesting. I personally like to print things and use a highlighter and, like, have my hands in different color on things. I think one of the biggest ways I made my life easier is, you know, when you first start a project is just absorb all the information and then set it, set it aside. I don’t know if I’m sure I’m not alone like this, but sometimes you start a project and there’s, like, this initial like, maybe a little procrastination, maybe you don’t crack into it a couple days later than you plan to, but if I can just put all of that aside and like, just get a raw read first and then let it sit. It’s amazing. What will percolate, you know? So there’s that first pass of things that pop out at you, and then doing that early, early, early, like the day you get that or whatever, just don’t let yourself sit on it and then kind of put it on the back burner for a little bit, revisit it. That’s my my process. It just immediately what strikes and very rarely is what struck me first. Not had that same hit. When I go back to it a couple of days,

Rob Marsh: It seems like also there can be this opposite problem, where, when you’re so deep in a niche, you sort of know it all. And I know that’s not always true, but, but so a new copy project will come to you, and it’s this familiar problem that you’ve written about maybe a couple of times before. And you think, Well, I know how to deal with this. I’ll just write x right? Like, it’s that approach that I’ve used before. And I think it can be really difficult to take a step back from that and say, Okay, wait a second. I actually need to go deeper here,

Kristen Driscoll: 100% and another, like, word of warning that I had to learn the hard way, is sometimes you become so ingrained in those immediate benefits, like, it’s second nature to you. Like, I’ve written for a long term client, like for a blood pressure supply, like product where I caught myself like, oh my god, you didn’t even mention the benefits of the blood pressure because I was so used to saying it over and over again. So I think that’s a word to the whys of something we have to remember, like, just because it’s so ingrained in us, the reason. Readers hearing it for the first time. It’s kind of an opposite point of what you were just asking.

Rob Marsh: But in some ways it’s the same, because it’s that curse of knowledge, right? I see this all the time in things that I write, and then I see what other people are writing the same kind of a product, and I think to myself, Man, that is so the way they’re talking about it is so basic, you know, I’m so beyond that, but then it’s selling. And clearly I am not the market, right? And we are not our markets. And so, yeah, that, I think that becomes a really hard thing to get over as a writer, especially maybe in the health dish.

Kristen Driscoll: Yeah, that’s another thing where I can tie that to yoga and like that, that beginner’s mind. It’s a real it can be a real gift to approach every new project with that beginner’s mind like kind of pretend you don’t know what you don’t what you know. Come at it with a fresh, fresh eyes.

Rob Marsh: As you’ve built your business, Kristen, what are some of the biggest challenges that you’ve dealt with? I mean, obviously there are challenges with writing the copy, but also business challenges finding clients, you know, all that kind of stuff. Where have you struggled and really had to work hard to figure things out?

Kristen Driscoll: Yeah, I feel like I’ve probably had all, all the problems that anybody can. You know, you have different levels of problems as as you grow. You know, so first is just getting any, any client. Is that that that first hurdle, and what I still sometimes struggle with is I’m horrible at prospecting. I’m like the cobbler has no shoes. I don’t do my own marketing very often or very I’ve, I luckily have gotten to a point where most of my work is word of mouth and referrals and clients. But, but still, you know, like, I’ll, I’ll be, I’ll get so wrapped up in doing my work, I’ll forget to build my business. And that’s something that I still this long in the game. Have ebbs and flows of because, again, I’ve kind of, for the most part, gotten my lead generation under control. So it’s not a problem until all of a sudden it’s like, oh, wait, this project’s wrapping up. I guess I should reach out to some old clients.

At first, there’s just getting your copy chops up enough to be able to to know what you’re looking at and to give good advice. Then, then there comes a level of understanding that there’s only so much you can guide somebody towards, you know, like you can. I work with some clients today. I love working with them. They’ve got, you know, million million dollar brands, and still, sometimes you’ll give a strong recommendation of something, and they’ll do the opposite. And, you know, I’ve had some copywriters and marketers be like, well, you have to fire any client that’s like that. And if they’re not gonna, if they’re gonna change a word of your copy, you shouldn’t work with them. And there’s some you know, like, if you’re doing all for, you know, heavy royalties, or things like that, there’s absolutely a time, you know, to choose your battles. But if you are going to be a person who comes in and collaborates with other brands, it’s not your company. Like, if you’re going to continue to work with those clients, there is going to have to be a a certain amount of being willing to surrender. Like, I know that that subject line is awful for 27 different reasons, but he loves it. He’s gonna run with it. Like Choose, choose your battles a little bit.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I’ve heard the same thing. There are times, obviously, if you’ve got red flags and your clients not respecting you, of course, yeah, fire the client. But the client ultimately owns the product. They own the business, right? And so while you do your best, you have to respect that they know what they’re doing.

Kristen Driscoll: And respect that it’s their choice and that, you know?

Rob Marsh: It’s their company at the end of the day, exactly, okay, Kristen, if you had to start over, you have none of your experience, but you know, you want to be a supplement copywriter. I mean, maybe you’ve got the music industry, the yoga stuff, but you’re ready to launch your business as a supplement copywriter. Do you wanna do it as fast as possible? You wanna have success as quickly as possible. What would you do starting today to make sure that you were a success three or six months from
now?

Kristen Driscoll: I would be careful of who I’m writing for. Would be, be one, especially with supplements. There’s some really, really great quality products out there, and there’s some snake oil out there. I firmly believe that the better you position yourself and the like the company you keep you know, like I try to write for brands that I personally am behind, I think that at the end of the day is going to be a huge help. So work with a quality supplement that will actually give you some something to work with, you know, an interesting brand that’s got a story, or just something that you can kind of get get behind our own personal passion really shines through with products. So if you know it’s just a big pile of poop and you’re trying to put lipstick on a pig, I think you’ve got an uphill battle. If you find a product that you’re really excited to get the word out about, you’ve already got that wind underneath your wings, and working with a quality thing is going to give you more quality ideas that you can can work from.

Rob Marsh: Is there a trick for identifying the snake oils from the quality products? You know, for somebody who isn’t in the industry, you know, one product may look very much like another?

Kristen Driscoll: Yeah, I do your research. We’re copywriters. We should be able to research right? So I think if it’s a brand that’s been around for a little while, you understand the person’s story, you know you can dig into whether it’s a real unique mechanism, or whether it’s just, you can kind of tell the ClickBank really, I don’t want to say everything on Clickbank is one of these offers, but you can tell, like the really far fetched promises.

Rob Marsh: I know a lot of this comes with experience as you know, as you work with a client, you realize, Wow, I don’t ever want to, you know, do that again or have that experience, but being able to, you know, research, look up, you know, if anybody’s been reported to, you know, the better business bureau, or their complaints or bad reviews, those kinds of things. But often we’re so excited to get work, you know, if it’s the first project or, you know, whatever, sometimes we skip that step…

Kristen Driscoll: And honestly, I think that’s appropriate if you’re just starting out. If you’re just starting out, I would say, don’t be so precious. Keep your morals like don’t work with anything sleazy that you can’t feel okay about working with but all your clients aren’t going to be winners. I mean, they’re just not. You do it’s more important to get your reps in than to get this, you know, pristine, wonderful, Perfect Fit client. There’s very few Perfect Fit clients. So, you know, do what you got to do to stay in your own integrity. But do expect like you’re going to kiss some frogs and you’re just part of the process of doing it. Yeah, and I know that going in.

Rob Marsh: Do you use AI tools at all in your in your processes?

Kristen Driscoll: I do. I use it to research. I use it to, like, compile reviews that I think, like that, stuff like that, I find it’s really helpful to scan reviews and pull up certain themes. But one thing I you do have to be careful about, it’s becoming so easy just to dump like reviews into the machine, like, keep reading it. Keep actually reading the information you’re you know, don’t use it as a tool, but I wouldn’t hand everything over blindly and take yourself out of the process. I think that’s a little bit of a slippery slope that I think we could get on.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that’s actually really interesting, because I do think a lot of copywriters are turning over big chunks of the research process to AI, especially the analysis itself, and while it certainly can help you identify trends and things across large data sets, I just saw, in fact, I think it was this morning, a study about the impact of AI tools on. Of reading and learning, and when we outsource that, we actually don’t, we don’t absorb any of that information. So, you know, if you’re trying to be an expert in wellness, you I suppose you could be an expert in wellness, AI, but that’s a very different thing than, you know, being an expert in the the niche itself.

Kristen Driscoll: Yeah, yeah. So that’s my caution, is to don’t get don’t let your own skills get rusty, like read the stuff yourself, and also have ai do it. I think that’s really the sweet spot. Going through the exercises manually, doing your own work, getting that to sink into your skull and also see what AI comes up with that you might have missed.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, what are you most excited about moving forward, either with your business, with the wellness industry, something that you’re working on or building?

Kristen Driscoll: I’ve been kind of business coaching, a little bit more than just straight up, copy writing, and that’s exciting to me, because I like looking at the bigger, how it all kind of fits in together. Yeah, and helping people get back to really what made them excited about their brands in the first place, so that, so that I’m excited about, um, yeah, I’m excited. I’ve also been really working on, you know what I was saying earlier, like we can be the best in this time of so much change and so much rapidly shifting between AI, between, like, World Politics, like, it just seems like there’s like a lot right now going back to that health and wellness of keeping yourself as well slow, You know, well rested, well exercised, a lot of nutrition, using everything I know from health and wellness and working in health and wellness to stay really grounded. As you know, we’re kind of riding this wave right now.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that feels like great advice for everybody, whether you’re in the wellness industry or not.

Kristen Driscoll: I think we could all be reminded to keep ourselves level.

Rob Marsh: Exactly. Kristen, if somebody wants to connect with you, you know, follow you find out more about what you do. Where should they go?

Kristen Driscoll: Probably, LinkedIn is probably the best place. Or you can email me at describe Inc is my email address. You feel free to shoot me an email or catch me on LinkedIn is probably the two best spots.

Rob Marsh: Amazing. Well, this has been fun conversation. I love writing in you know? I mean, I’m particular just like supplements and that kind of stuff. But this industry is, just like I said earlier, there’s a ton of opportunity here. It’s super fun because there’s just so many good stories, whether it’s the founder or brand story, whether it’s ingredient stories, whether it’s customer success stories. It’s just there’s so much good happening in that industry. So yeah, maybe somebody will connect with you, but hopefully we’ll have a bunch of other health and wellness writers that are turned on by this episode.

Kristen Driscoll: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Rob. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat today.

Rob Marsh: Thanks to Kristen Driscoll for sharing her thoughts about writing in the health and wellness niche. I’ve linked to Kristen’s linkedin in the show notes in case you want to connect with her.

Early on we mentioned that changing demographics, the aging of the world’s population, and growing awareness of wellness trends is creating all kinds of new opportunities in the health and wellness industry. It’s a niche that is growing in spite of the up and down economy and will continue to grow for the next decade or two. There are plenty of clients who need copywriters and more entering the industry all the time.

I want to mention again that if you want your copy reviewed by someone who can give you expert advice on how to make it better, jump into The Copywriter Underground now and let me see your latest project. You can learn more about the Underground at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu-2.

Stuff to check out:

Emily Reagan’s Interview
Tanya Geisler’s Interview (Imposter Complex)
Brian’s Website
Imposter Complex eBook
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
The How to Write Emotional Copy Masterclass

Transcript:

Rob Marsh: Maybe the thing keeping you from getting what you want and working with the clients you deserve is you. Want to know more? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

Content writers, copywriters, social media writers, and marketers of all kinds face a bunch of challenges when it comes to building a successful business that supports the lifestyle that we all want. 

We talk about finding clients on the podcast a lot… maybe too much because there are other challenges… figuring out our niches, creating irresistable products and services that clients want to buy, pricing, positioning, marketing, and of course writing and so on.

All of those business skills are important. If you can’t do them yourself or if you can’t hire someone else to do these for you, you’ll struggle as a business owner.

But there is a whole other set of skills that we often overlook that also impact your ability to grow your business. We generally think of these hidden skills as mindset. And that’s what we’re talking about on today’s podcast.

My guest is former copywriter and current mindset coach Brian McCarthy. Brian works with copywriters and others to help them work through mindset blocks and develop new skills to overcome them. Things like growing confidence, finding clarity and alignment, over coming imposter complex and a lot more. If you’ve been doing everything right but still struggle to get traction or feel like you’re making a difference in the world… or even just for your clients, maybe refocusing your efforts on mindset is what’s called for. So keep listening for our thoughts on these critical, but often ignored, mindset skills.

Before we jump into our interview, a little while ago I recorded a masterclass to show copywriters, content writers and other marketers how to write “emotional” copy. Everyone says emotions sell, but how do you actually write emotional copy? I walk through more than a dozen examples in this masterclass and give you a proven process for figuring out the right emotions to focus on as you write… and how they change as you make your pitch. The masterclass includes several bonuses on storytelling, using A.I. to find dominant and transformational emotions, and much more. You can get this masterclass at thecopywriterclub.com/emotion

And now, my interview with Brian McCarthy.

Brian, welcome to the podcast. I’m thrilled to have you here, like we were saying, just as we were chatting before we started recording, we met briefly a bunch of years ago, you were doing something slightly different than what you did today. Yeah, tell me just how did you get here. You’re a mindset coach, but you also have a pretty big background in copywriting. So tell me about that?

Brian McCarthy: Yeah, so I started copywriting, I don’t know 20, 2014 or so got into that world, and I was always copywriting for a lot of personal growth companies and coaches. I was just very into the personal growth world. And then eventually, like, found my I was doing launches, I was doing case studies, those became like my my main even wrote a book on how to do case studies like that kind of became my main focus. And then I was when the pandemic hit. One of my clients was this big life coach, Ronnie Britton, she’s amazing, and she has a coach. She has a program teaching people how to coach. And then I was like, that seems like a useful skill. I’ll do it. And then took the program, and as I started coaching people, I was like, Oh, this is the greatest thing in the world. And eventually moved from copywriting into coaching full time. And it was one of those, like, oh yeah, no. Like, I was always feeling that nudge to be in the personal growth world, like, yeah, no, wonder. And even during my copywriting career, it always felt like this is a stepping stone to something else. I just didn’t know what that something else was. Then once I found coaching, I was like, oh, it’s it’s that, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So before we jump into all the stuff you’re doing as coaching, I’d love to dive into your copy career just a little bit, because six, six years as a copywriter is nothing to sniff at, you know, writing a book about case studies. So let’s talk about that. How did you get started as a copywriter, and how did you really find those first couple of clients? I got started. I was just listening to podcasts while working at a corporate desk job that was slowly destroying my soul. And I was like, Oh, this sounds kind of nice, yeah, just, you know, travel and write and be on a beach and fire off a letter, and you make a bunch of money and everyone loves you. That sounds like a pretty good career.

And then so I ended up, like, getting a severance from that job, say, like, merged and, and I was like, I’m just gonna try this Copyright thing, and spent the first year and a half just fighting for jobs on jobs boards being making little to no money, literally, like, I’d calculate my hourly rate, and I’m like, I made pennies on this ebook per hour. Like, so just slogging it out that was tough. And then eventually things started to stabilize. I got a job with Ramit Sethi, I Will Teach You To Be Rich. 

I was a senior copywriter with them for about a year, and then left that after a year, and then started to do the freelance thing, and got ended up with, like, feast or famine kind of thing. Like, it was actually going pretty well, but it was really unstable. Like, I finally did that, like, all right, making six figures, traveling the world a bit. It wasn’t, wasn’t all that easy to get to that point, but I got there and then got a couple steady retainer clients eventually after that, where I had like two clients, was making good money working, you know, three or four hours a day and able to travel. So that was kind of like my initial goal of what I wanted, what I wanted to hit as a copywriter. And I was like, oh, hit that. And then, of course, had, and again, it was like for personal growth companies, this parenting company that’s wonderful. 

So I was very fortunate. I’ve always loved my clients and been able to write for just wonderful people and great programs. Again, doing a lot of launches, case studies, some email marketing stuff. I always liked the longer form sales page and the more in depth, bigger projects, the you know, Hey, can I hire you for four emails? I’m like, What are you talking about? I have to learn so much to write four emails. I can write you like a 40 page letter. That was always more what drew me

Rob Marsh: Me too. I’m the same way. I love writing emails, but sales, sales. Email sells copies where I live. Okay, so you’ve got this interesting skill set that you’ve developed since then, but I wonder, you know if you were coaching Brian McCarthy, copywriter just starting out making pennies per project, what mindset skills would you teach him, or would you basically walk him through in order to help him deal with that struggle or make progress faster for beginning copywriters, I guess the question is, what are the mindset things that we need to be focused on in order to make progress?

Brian McCarthy: Yeah, great question. A couple things jump out based on a lot of the copywriters that I coach, and especially the ones that are just starting out. There’s one big piece is alignment of finding what actually inspires you and excites you. It’s really easy, and it’s copywriting world and online marketing world to get to seduced by like, Well, the big name person says that this is the best route to go. So now I’m gonna start us build a social media presence. Do you like social like? Do you like Instagram? Do you like social media? No, but it’s the it says. They say it’s the best way. So now I’m going to do that. I’m like, no, no, let’s find what actually works for you. So maybe that’s Instagram and social media, but maybe feeling more inclined to something else, whether that’s the method for growing your business, or the type of copywriting you want to do, or the type of companies you want to do, one is just getting like, the noise and all the stuff out there can be helpful and has its place. But first, let’s start with what’s really inspiring and aligned for you. Then the next piece. So that would be the first like clarity piece, and then the next piece would be the confidence piece of like, okay, how can let’s build up your confidence in a way that’s authentic, where you can own, even if you’re just starting out, you can still own the various skills and values and what you bring to the table beyond because a lot of people get stuck in, like, what I I don’t have the copywriting experience, and that’s all that matters. And it’s just the skills. It’s like, yeah, that’s yeah, that’s all important. And other things matter too. Are like, your ability to take feedback is super important. Your ability to communicate well, to hit deadlines. There’s all these other things, your passion for the work, your ability to listen and like find what the actual like thing worth talking about, even is there’s all these other things that people don’t they lose sight of the importance of it, and because they just focus on what they don’t have versus the pieces they do. So the next part, after the clarity would be the confidence in like, well, what are you bringing to the table and sharing that in a way where you’re not you know, trying to a lot of copywriters think they need to come in and kick the doors down and proclaim that they’re God’s gift to copywriting and gonna make you $10 million overnight. Like, no, don’t do that. Come from an honest, authentic place where you’re owning. Your value and what you bring to the table in a way that feels aligned, and they can see the value, but it’s not this big, you know, puffing out your chest nonsense like, because clients see and feel that, and they’re pretty sick of that too. They don’t want it. And then the last piece would be, the other mindset. Pieces outside of clarity, then confidence would then be like building more consistency. So a lot of what gets in the way that procrastination, self doubt, which is related to the confidence piece, and or again, lack of clarity of how I want to grow my business, like getting consistent with putting yourself out there, developing the habits, that’s another big piece, and that’s a lot easier too, once you have the clarity and confidence pieces in place.

Rob Marsh: So as far, I’d love to break this down just a little bit more to understand each set. So starting with alignment, if this is a really difficult thing, obviously I’ve coached hundreds and hundreds copywriters as well. This is one of the starting pieces where you’re really trying to figure out your positioning, the product or service that you’re offering, the value you’re creating, the problem you’re solving, all of that stuff. And it takes, it takes time. I mean, there’s a reason why a lot of beginning copywriters don’t make a lot of money in that first year. It’s because, at least it feels to me like we’re bouncing from thing to thing trying to figure this stuff out. So how do we how do we shorten that process and make it a little bit easier? Because oftentimes a copywriter comes into it, yeah, we might have some background experience. You know, I I was a bartender, or I was a school teacher, I was a nurse and and we can bring that to the table, but sometimes we’re trying to get away from that stuff too, and we’re looking for something that rings a bell for us or really turns us on, but we don’t know what that is yet.

Brian McCarthy: And it definitely is an exploration piece. One thing that immediately comes to mind, and this came from a coach I work with a lot, Kavita Singh, so it’s something that she helped me with and and that’s looking at the difference between, like, what you can do versus what you’re meant to do. And it’s like, okay, can I do this thing? Yes, I have these skills in this background, and that’s a needed thing, versus, yeah, more of that internal radar of what excites you and what gets you going. And there is, there is sometimes gonna just be that process of, like, trying things out and getting feedback and, like, there is a okay, like, figure it out as you go. It’s not necessarily like you’re in the garage and get it all fixed up, and then you go, it’s, it’s, it is more of a guess and check thing. So even I mean, that would be my biggest thing is, one is just really focusing on that internal radar and homing in on that and what you’re meant to do outside of like what looks best, or what you should do, or what’s smartest, like, you can still look at that, but make sure you’re not doing it at the expense of that inner peace or that piece inside you. And and the other part is even just honoring the the idea that it might take a little bit like it’s worth doing right, rather than rushing through to get the first thing. And again, this is an industry that very much values speed and instant transformation and all that kind of thing. And it’s an industry that, what do, you know, also has a lot of burnout, also has businesses that don’t exist in five years, you know, because it was more about like, well, this works. Let’s do more of that. And then people build businesses and go, like, I don’t even care about what I’m doing right now. I don’t care about these people. Like, I got sucked in the thing, because it’s what paid the bills, and people said yes to it. And now I’m doing group coaching calls that I hate to a bunch of people that I don’t even want to help. Like, that kind of thing happens in my mind, because a lot of that internal piece and like, what are you really meant to do? What really inspires you? What are the big problems that you know a lot of times that, like you faced in your life, that you want to help people with that kind of thing gets might get cut over or, like, jump through, that piece gets missed a little bit.

Rob Marsh: This feels like where the typical advice about finding a niche sometimes goes wrong. And I’ll be upfront, I’m all about finding a niche and working in a niche. I think the data is there in salary surveys that we’ve done that show that somebody working in niche makes significantly more money than somebody who’s a generalist. So obviously choosing a niche is good for your long term copywriting or whatever it is, service business that you’re running. However, sometimes it takes a while to find the niche. You know, as an example, you might become a copywriter thinking, hey, I’m I could write sales copy. I’ve done maybe door to door sales at one point when I was in college, or I sold shoes at Nordstrom, or whatever the thing is. And so I’m going to. Write, you know, sales emails or sales letters, and then as you get into it, you discover this entire world of Salesforce and sales enablement tools and all the things that happen in the background that you could fall in love with. You may not have even known that that stuff exists until you get into the process. And so again, while I’m really big on choosing a niche. I’m also really big on taking time to figure out what it is that you’re interested in, to explore that stuff, to learn the new things, so you can even discover and open yourself up to whatever it is, like you said, that you’re going to be aligned with.

Brian McCarthy: Totally, yeah, it’s like, it’s like, how can you be expected to make the decision of the direction to go. If you don’t have, if you’re of a very limited information like you explore these things exactly like you said, then you have more information to work with, and you can make a more informed decision of what direction you want to go. And also, nothing’s forever, right? I mean, you were talking about building a business, and three, four years down the road, you find out that this isn’t something that lights you up anymore, so you can always change that as well. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s, we’re always evolving. So it’s very likely that it’s gonna evolve whether, whether you expect it to, or wanted to, or not. Like, yeah, you almost, you almost can’t help it. So yeah, a lot of that fear of like, oh, but if I pick a niche, I’m like, I’m in a prison forever. It’s like, No, you like you, literally like you’re going to keep changing. So as long as your business is a reflection of you, then it’s going to be changing as well.

Rob Marsh: Let’s talk about confidence, because, and this is a challenge, we always seem to want to wait to do the thing until we’re confident that we can do it. And we all we’ve talked about this on the podcast a few times, but we all know confidence. You can’t just hand somebody confidence. You can’t teach it. You can’t even learn it unless you do the thing. And so I liked what you were saying about, you know, looking at your background and thinking about some of the things that have sort of gotten you to this point where you are. But let’s, let’s go a little bit deeper on this. How can we sort of borrow confidence or create confidence until we’ve actually proven we can do this thing and we own the confidence that we’re showing out to the world?

Brian McCarthy: Yeah, I’ve got a lot to go there. So first of all, that was my biggest I’d say that was probably my biggest hurdle when I was a copywriter, was I always felt like I wasn’t good enough. I was just like, I’m one bad sales page away for like, this is gonna be bad clients gonna hate it. They’re gonna fire me. They’re gonna tell everybody I’m terrible and I’m never gonna get a job again. That, like, I had that for a good five years, like that was just always there. And of course, yeah, that confidence keeps you from like, it kept me, like, under charging at certain times. Kept me from going for certain jobs. It just made me more stressed all the time, kept maybe work longer hours than I need to, kept me buying more courses that I wouldn’t even go through because my own insecurities like, but if I have this magic knowledge, then I’ll be good, right? And that, like, that whole cycle that people get in of chasing shiny objects is just a lack of confidence. So, yeah, there’s, there’s a lot to go in here where you talk about, can you borrow confidence? Like, yeah, absolutely. I think there’s that that can be a little bit of a band aid. But, you know, if you get, like, I had certain mentors and coaches that knew the industry, and that would tell me, like, oh, you can charge that much for that. So be like, Oh, okay, I guess I’ll charge more now. Like, I guess I’ll charge 250 for a copy critique call instead of 100 great. And so you can get that, or even just that was another big thing I did. I would very often hire other copywriters to look at my work. So it’s like, Oh, okay. David robbold told me my copy is good. Okay, it’s good. Like, now I can feel better about it. So having these kind of, yeah, mentors, coaches, people you can hire, even if just a one off, that’s that’s super valuable. And I’d say the other piece where confidence really gets gets going and owned, is when you look at some of the deeper fears and beliefs and expectations people have that’s keeping them from having that confidence, and you start to look deeper at that and unravel it, that works a lot more effectively than a lot of what people are generally doing, of the like, well, just tell yourself this positive thing. Just remind yourself of the wins you do have over and over. Like, yes, that’s important, but if you haven’t done the deeper work of unraveling some of the deeper fears and beliefs, then it’s like planting seeds in a garden that’s already full of weeds. Like, it’s it’s not going to really take it’s not, it’s not going to take root. It’s you’ve got to, like, rip this other stuff out, and then that creates the space for those more, you know, owning your value, and those more confident beliefs, to really settle in and get embodied. And then then you feel that confidence and conviction more yourself.

Rob Marsh: Can you give us a. Couple of examples of those existing beliefs that really keep us from developing confidence?

Brian McCarthy: Sure. So one that I run into a bunch when I work with copywriters, like they have this idea of, I’m not a real quote, unquote, I’m not a real copywriter, right? Or I’m not or even just, I’m not a real writer. And then so I’m like, okay, cool. So what does a real copywriter mean? And we just go into their definition of it. So like this one client I worked with, she she had these kind of, like, personal issues going on, but basically meant she could only write for two hours a day. And she’s like, well, and she had a full time job for a well known, you know, company that hires a lot of copywriters. She’s like, well, if I can only write two hours a day, like, I’m not a real copywriter. So I’m imposter. I’m a joke. So then I’m like, Well, where did this idea come from that a real writer needs to work write six hours a day or whatever? Like, okay, oh, this is just a made up thing that you created. So she had this definition in her mind of what a real copywriter is. And we just looked at that and looked at the truth of it, and I just would ask a bunch of questions, and basically just start poking a bunch of holes at it, and then it fell apart. Then we found it like, well, what’s a new definition that feels more real and more true to you? And then she’s like, actually, I could be a real copywriter and still work two hours a day and then, and this is how the other parts of my day look, and, and was like, So, and does that feel true to you? Right? Not just a nice idea intellectual exercise, but getting to the point where, like you, honestly, like in your soul and bones, believe that, okay, cool. And, and then she could start to remind herself and operate from that place of like, well, yes, I’m a real copywriter, even if it’s not showing up in this way that I initially thought I had to show up. So that’s, that’s one idea is, how do you work through these beliefs and fears and everything? Look at your definitions. Look at your definitions of what you have, what a copywriter means, of what being successful on this project means that’s, that’s, there’s like several different ways to kind of attack this, and sometimes it takes multiple but that’s one, and it can be a very strong one for helping people get more confidence in in their role.

Rob Marsh: I like that approach. A few weeks ago, on another episode of this podcast, I interviewed my friend Emily Reagan, and she told a story. I had actually forgotten of this about this, but she told a story how we were at the copywriter club in real life event in San Diego, talking at the bar, and she mentioned that she she didn’t feel comfortable being a copywriter. She wasn’t a copywriter, and she wasn’t even sure why she was at the event, and it was crazy because she was writing copy for her clients, but because she had assumed the title, you know, whether, whether it was marketing assistant or administrative assistant or virtual assistant, or whatever, at the time, she she wasn’t giving herself permission to be a copywriter, and she reminded me of this on the episode. So if anybody wants to go back and listen to go back and listen to this example, it’s episode 441, I think. But she basically said to me, or I said to her, you have permission. You are a copywriter, right? I it was kind of that sword to the shoulder, you know, you are now a knight, or you are, you know. But the idea here is that you don’t need to wait for, you know, a senior copywriter to say you’re a good enough writer to be a copywriter anymore, or a manager or, you know, and when we work for ourselves anyway, that person’s not coming along. Even a lot of coaches aren’t going to take the time to say you are a copywriter. Give yourself permission. So anyway, kind of a long answer back to you, but it’s such a good example. You don’t need to wait for permission if you’re writing, especially if you’re writing copy for clients. You’re a copywriter, and you might as well own it and start getting better at it.

Brian McCarthy: And again, like, that’s, that’s a great example of, like, yeah. The almost like, the borrowed confidence that can can help, right? And like, Oh, cool. Rob told me that, and I’m good. I’m sure there’s a lot of people that have felt that way. And it’s Yeah, ultimately, you do want to get that source yourself, because, like, why, you know what, and what’s the definition of copywriter that works for you, and and why do you need somebody else to bequeath it onto you? Why, like, there’s a little bit of that, why it still can stay a little wobbly and like, it can give us confidence, but it’s still we still have those doubts, is because we’re still getting that confidence from outside of ourselves. We’re still giving the power of who we are and what we’re doing to somebody else. We need somebody else to validate it and to tell us we’re okay and tell us, like what we are, versus owning that and claiming that for ourselves. And yeah, part of that is like just knowing, like just getting really clear on what that is and what we’re showing up with and what we’re bringing. And valuing that, and yeah, and what if you what you want to call yourself based on that that feels true and right for you.

Rob Marsh: Okay, so that’s alignment, confidence. Then we have consistency. Consistency feels to me like it’s just a matter of daily practice, or we’re setting the flywheel to do the thing that we do over and over, is it more than that?

Brian McCarthy: So I’d say it’s more than that in there can be some blocks in that, right? So what’s keeping you from being consistent? Oh, there’s procrastination. Oh, why are you procrastinating? Oh, well, there’s some deeper fear of, you know, being seen as a fraud, or I’m gonna mess up and everyone’s gonna see I’m incompetent, or whatever it is, or, sometimes it’s misalignment, right? It goes back to the beginning of, why am I inconsistent? Because part of you knows this, ain’t it, and you’re trying to force yourself to do something that just like there’s, there’s just something a little off. So there can be pieces, either based on the first two things, or maybe something else that’s kind of in the way of that consistency. And then, yeah, there’s also just simpler things for, like, tactical steps for building that consistency. Like a lot of times, you know, people put big pressure on themselves of what that needs to be for them to be writing every day, or doing all this kind of outreach, or whatever it looks like to grow their business. And so just one helpful thing that is, you know, there’s always books on small habits and all that kind of stuff, and that’s just a super impactful way to get people going, of like, take the pressure off, do it for five minutes. It’s not even about getting the clients. It’s just about you building the habits of doing that. And when you start to take the pressure off, take the expectations you have for yourself off, then the consistency develops, and then it kind of starts to continue with itself. And these things that you are avoiding become more enjoyable, more automatic, and then you’re doing the things to grow your business and get yourself out there, deliver the copy for your clients, whatever it is.

Rob Marsh: Those are some pretty good tools. As far as thinking through those first couple of months of being in business and getting up and going. But a lot of us, we start to hit other bumps as well. The one that really stands out and really hits from the beginning right up, and pros still suffer with it, and that’s imposter complex or imposter syndrome, depending on how people like to define that. We’ve had a really, I’ve pointed people to a previous episode of the podcast where we’ve talked about that with Tanya Geisler, and I think it’s episode number 47 and definitely worth a listen. But let’s, let’s talk about that again. Because no matter, no matter how much you know about imposter complex, it still seems to pop its head up when we try something new, even sometimes when we’re just doing the thing that we do, but maybe it’s for a new client or a new product, whatever. So let’s, let’s talk imposter complex. So what can we do to overcome it?

Brian McCarthy: Sure, yeah, and that I went through that podcast, and it was awesome, and I think there’s a lot she shares that can really, like, shed a lot of light for people and help bring clarity. And the kind of crusade I’ve put on lately, because I learned this maybe a year ago, and then I started applying it. And really like seeing changes is that the the fundamental idea that imposter syndrome doesn’t go away, it’s just there forever. You just got to deal with it. It’s just not true. And then so once I learned that, and I started applying to my own life, and I started applying that with clients more, and I’ve seen the truth of that, like, it’s, I understand a lot of the common thing, it’s like, hey, it’s just fear. Like, yes, it’s based in fear. And that doesn’t mean, like I was afraid of dogs when I was three. Doesn’t mean I’m still afraid of dogs. You know, we can overcome these fears. We can dissolve them. And there was another point that just escaped my head. Oh, well, okay, yeah, basically, the idea that it can be, it’s there forever, just isn’t the truth. It doesn’t have to be the truth. And so the the ways that I look at imposter syndrome and help people work through it, it kind of, it’s the first is just looking at the the different fears and beliefs and expectations attached to it, which is similar to what I said before, about like the definitions we create, the definitions of what success means, how we think we need to be these expectations we have in our heads, all this stuff, and looking at that, challenging, that dismantling that, and doing that in a like it takes, it can often take a pretty deep and thorough exploration. That’s why people can think that they know like, Oh, I know I’m putting this outrageous. I know I’ve got this perfectionism thing, and it’s not actually true, but it still feels like I need to be this amazing copywriter with million dollar launches under my belt, or I suck. And I know that that’s ridiculous, and I know that that’s not true, but I still buy into it. It’s like, cool, okay. That just means you haven’t gone deep enough yet. There’s just still more stuff to explore. Or what’s hooking that in your system still? So that’s the first level. The second layer is some kind of core fear that can be kind of dissolved and broken free from. And the third layer is kind of what we touched on before as well, really looking at and owning your skills, knowledge and what you’re bringing to the table, your intention and how you’re showing up even and embodying that, not just knowing it intellectually, not just knowing, oh yeah, I’ve got skills that that are important, but actually, genuinely feeling that. And sometimes there’s internal, other internal blocks that keep us from actually feeling that, that we can get into and owning that. But when you’re when you have that piece too, and you’re able to get all three of those pieces, like imposter syndrome just goes away, because imposter syndrome is just it’s just a mental construct. It’s just this idea we have in our heads of how we think we need to be and how we think people need to react to us. And when you dig into that and let it fall apart, then you’re just showing up, however, like, with a certain intention and how you want to be. You’re just, hey, this is just me, and this is what I’m bringing and that’s it. And there’s, there’s no, like, there’s no room for impostor syndrome anymore. It’s, it just doesn’t, it doesn’t fit. It does. There’s, he’s left the room, it’s gone. And it might still come up a little bit, but it just means, Oh, there’s one of these areas. Is there’s something I’m not quite seeing, and then you explore that area, and then it can be gone again.

Rob Marsh: For me, it a lot of this is based on our genetic fears, right? Because fear of rejection is literally built into our genes. 10,000 years ago, if you were rejected by the tribe, you lost family, you lost food, you lost opportunities for mating, you probably died. And because of that, we have a very healthy sense of needing to belong and and be accepted by others, just built into our genes, and anytime that we’re stepping out of the comfort zone, doing something new, doing something that’s challenging, or something where we’re putting ourselves out, maybe it’s on social media where other people are seeing us and may reject us, triggers that Very natural discussion with our brain. It’s like, Hey, you’re you’re putting yourself in jeopardy here, of all of these things that used to be real jeopardy for us, and it’s not anymore. You know, making a mistake on social media is probably not going to affect your ability to eat, or the fact that your loved ones are going to give you a hug tonight. You know, as long as it’s not some egregious, awful thing that you’re saying, you’re probably not even going to get canceled, right? So just being aware and taking a step back to think through what am I feeling, feels like a really big step towards overcoming imposter syndrome, imposter complex. But there’s maybe there’s more to more other fears that I’m not even thinking about here as well.

Brian McCarthy: That’s that’s absolutely huge, that that really does come down to a lot of the core piece of it. There can be within that, within that fear of rejection, the fear of, uh, kind of being out of the tribe, there can be different kind of core fears. This is one of the things that I got from Rhonda Britton and her wheel of fear, which is all about finding, like, the specific core fear for you so and it’s not just about like, how people will react, and, you know, my my physical safety, and where I stand in the tribe and all that stuff. And that’s 100% a part of it. And then, yeah, there can be other aspects of it too, right? It’s like and what does this say about me, if I’m kicked out of the tribe, and who I am, and what am I gonna feel, and the shame that like we’re it’s not even just the, you know, survival being the social group. There’s also just certain feelings that we are so afraid to feel of this is proof I’m a loser. This is proof I’m in confident and then I’m going to feel so much shame and worthlessness, and I don’t want to feel that, so I’m going to avoid that feeling. And that’s where the imposter syndrome pops up to help us try to avoid ever facing that and feeling that. And so that’s why another piece of and why you don’t actually have to just live with imposter syndrome forever. Sometimes it can be linked to certain fears, certain pieces of shame, certain things that happened in our past, and if we just let ourselves feel that more fully, then it loses a lot of its power. So that can kind of be another doorway out. Sometimes it’s, you know, we built up this, this fear, and we’re just so afraid to feel it, and it might be tied to something that happened, and we let ourselves feel it, and it moves through us, and to go to that other, to your other point of like, well, this is just ingrained in evolutionary Okay, yeah, and there’s a lot of people that are afraid to post on social media. At first, then after five years, they’ve been doing it and they’re no longer afraid, right? Like sometimes imposter syndrome sticks around, and sometimes it doesn’t Okay, cool. So, so you’ve learned to have this feeling of safety even as you’re posting all this stuff now. Well, do you necessarily need five years of posting to build that sense of safety that you’re okay in who you are and yourself in the standing in society, regardless of the posting. Or are there ways to look at address some of those fears that are coming up so you can get in that state before without needing five years of posting every day to get there? And that’s what I believe and have seen, is can be true. If you go deeper into that fears initially, you can start to unravel them and evaporate them. And yeah, it might still take now, instead of needing five years of posting every day to finally feel confident with it, then now you’re there in a couple of weeks.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, so much of this really comes down to just do it anyway. And I know that’s really terrible mindset advice, because there are all these blocks and the head trash that we deal with, but ultimately, the reason that we go through so many of these exercises is to allow us to just do it anyway.

Brian McCarthy: There’s a lot of value in the doing it anyway, and it can also be a bigger problem than I think a lot of people realize, because if you’ve got all this fear of what’s everyone gonna think, and I’m gonna get kicked out of the tribe and all that stuff, and then you do the thing anyway, and then you get that negative backlash, man, it’s, it can be now, now the fear got even stronger, right? You raise the bar even higher, it can be even harder to do that. So, like, if you’re not in the pro like, and also, if it’s, if the if the action, so that’s, that’s one possible detriment. And why I’m more focused on, let’s get into and release the block in the first place. So doing the action comes more naturally and easily, and it’s not a thing you even have to force yourself to do. So that’s that’s one piece of it. The other part of forcing yourself to do it anyway is sometimes you forcing yourself might be coming from a place of fear, a place of scarcity, a place of I need to do this so I fit in. So if you’re doing your outreach, you’re posting on social media from a place of fear, then you’re again feeding that fear making it strong, versus if you’re posting from that place of like I believe in this copywriting thing I’m learning about, and I’m excited to share and talk about it, even if I’m not the world’s biggest expert, I’m just sharing a thing I think is cool, and I just want to see who else is think thinks it’s cool with me, such different energies sharing from those Two different places. And if you’re sharing from the place of kind of like forcing yourself, then you can just reinforce that need to work from that place, that fear, the I need to fit in, and then like to go on what we talked about the very beginning, when people build these businesses and realize they’re not satisfied, they’re burned out, they don’t even like what they’re doing all that much. A lot of it’s because they built it from this place of forcing themselves. And I just gotta, you know, do it and like coming from fear and scarcity and having to prove themselves. So there is absolutely a place, I think for Hey, you just got to do it anyway. You just got to watch some of that alignment. And where is that action coming from? Because there is a trap of it can kind of reinforce some of the things and just make them stronger and just keep them with us, if we’re not careful in how we do that makes sense.

Rob Marsh: I want to switch our conversation just a little bit. You mentioned burnout, and I think this is a really interesting phenomena. A lot of times, people get burned out, and they don’t really realize they’re burned out, you know, they’re just tired, or they’re tired of the work, or, you know, things that are happening in their business, things just feel like they’re slow, or you’re moving through molasses, however you want to describe that. And then there’s full on burnout, where you almost don’t want to get out of bed, because, you know, whatever it is that is burning you out is, is, you know, holding you down, holding you back. So I’d love to explore this a little bit, but maybe the first question is, how do I even know if, if burnout is happening before you know it gets to the point where, I mean, I just don’t even, I can’t even look at my business anymore. I can’t even face the inbox or my calendar or whatever you know is is just causing that dread.

Brian McCarthy: That’s that’s such a good point. And for how to look at spot burnouts happening. I mean, looking at your energy levels, your excitement, one indicator can be your whole life kind of feels like an obligation, like a to do list. And you make such a good point. Like, people don’t see it coming, in part because they’ve just been in it for so long, like it’s what they know. So actually, another, like, kind of random thing, I do improv comedy as well, and that’s also a thing that I like Teach and part of my coaching, but I also perform, and I just love it. And a lot of people will do an improv comedy class or a couple, and then they realize, like, Oh, this is what feeling good is. This is what fun is. This is what joy is. And then they start to realize how much they’ve been missing it in their everyday life. So one thing is just getting out of your kind of everyday stuff and doing other things that can help you start to get that contrast of, like, you know, there’s taking a trip or doing some improv class, or, like, another client, yeah, it took a took a two week vacation, then comes back is like, Oh, I like this helped me get perspective on how much I don’t like what I’m doing right Now, and like, what’s available and what feelings are available. So one is just getting out doing other stuff, and then seeing how you feel and seeing that contrasted to how you feel on an everyday basis can be one helpful thing, and it’s just good to do anyway, because novelty and new explorations and new stuff is good for us. That’s one piece. Another piece is like, if you just wake up and feel like you start going through the to do list in your head and it’s just a non stop slog of obligations, and you’re just going through it, that can be some warning bells. If you’re looking at your day and like, hey, when when did you feel lit up? When did you feel excited? When did you enjoy what you were doing? And if you’re having trouble finding answers to those questions, that could be another sign, if you’re feeling like a sense of purpose, because you can, you can not be enjoying it that much. But man, you know where you’re going, and you know that this is a strong like a necessary piece, and you’re okay with that, like that can be beautiful. So is there a sense of purpose as well for Where are you going longer term? And like, this kind of being the thing that’s going to get you to that next thing, whether you’re clear on what that next thing is or No, but you have a strong belief in it, and you still just have a sense that this is right, that would be another thing I’d check in on. So like, check in on your sense of enjoyment, check in on your sense of purpose. Check in on is everything feeling like an obligation, or is this feeling like expansive and like it’s what you want to be doing so and you know, how much of your day and your week, are these things? These are kind of like different indicators I’d be looking at and kind of ranking different areas, along with your sense of purpose to help see, are you potentially on a road for burnout?

Rob Marsh: Let’s say I’m there, burned out. Yeah, what? What do? And I know there are a lot of copywriters that hit this point, and I think the question becomes, should I quit and do something totally different, or is there a way to get the joy back, assuming that we want to get the joy back. What do you recommend?

Brian McCarthy: I work with a lot of a lot of my clients. It’s funny, they’ll come to me like being like, I need to quit and get a new job and doing something new. And I’d say maybe half of them end up doing that, and half of them end up like, loving their work again. So there’s, yeah, I would, I’d first look at the patterns I kind of create that created the burnout and some of the internal stuff that led to it. Because otherwise, if you just go jump another thing, cool. But if these patterns repeat now you’re just gonna find another job to get burned out by, and you’re gonna keep doing this cycle. So I would definitely look at, you know, what created the burnout first, and a lot of times, what happens with my clients, and what I find is it’s, it’s due to a lot of internal processes and to how they feel about themselves and their work and their relationships with people in their work. So one example, had a client who was super burned out, and we got and it’s like, oh, the you know, company needs more we need to hire more people. We need better systems, right? It’s what you’re if you’re burned out, you’re probably pointing the fingers at all the people and things, how it’s their fault and the revenue is not good enough, and all that stuff, and then we looked more internal and of like, what how she was viewing herself in the situation, and what we found for her, big time, people pleaser, big time I need to take care of everybody else, and my own needs are on the back burner, and I’ve. Got to, like, be I got to be super responsive. No one else needs to be super responsive. But I need to holding expectations for herself that she doesn’t even have for anybody else. Feeling like, yeah, she’s got to take care of everybody else, and she’s got to make everybody else happy all the time. And so, like, really, the people pleasing thing was like, okay, cool. Let’s work through that. And that was the big thing that allowed her to then start taking bits of time off. And then as she was taking more time off, she started to get more energized again. Another thing I’ll do with clients is just schedule, like 30 minutes a week, an hour a week, to just do nothing, just let themselves do nothing, because their whole day is obligation and doing things, and this sense of, I need to do everything for everyone else. So just giving them a little period of time to just not have that starts to get some internal energy going, of like, Oh, okay. Like, okay. I can feel myself again. I can start to ask myself, What do I want here? So that was almost a little tangent, but just a little like side trick tactic people who start to use, but the other things are like, yeah, the deeper stuff around people pleasing. That’s one example. Another people realize so much of their work is like, I’ve got to they’re actually trying to prove themselves to their peers, to people in their company. It’s this, this drive to prove themselves, show that they’re good enough, show that they’re worthy, is actually what’s causing the burnout. So that’s why again, cool man, get another job. If you’re still trying to prove yourself, you’re gonna end up burned out again. So let’s, let’s deal with that deeper issue so it can be other things as well, people pleasing, proving yourself. These are kind of different, different areas, but these are some of the internal things that create the burnout. And when you look at and dismantle them from the inside, it can be such a quick shift of, you know, within couple months, couple weeks even, it’s like, oh, the burnout is gone, and I enjoy my work again, right? Like, that’s literally what I see that all the time. It’s super cool. Sometimes it takes longer, and, you know, everyone’s got their own path. And sometimes it’s like people pleasing and proving yourself. Like, sometimes you might have a lot of these different things that need to kind of get worked through and sorted out and dismantled and let go of and but those are, those are some of the inner pieces. It’s, it’s really about looking at like, well, what’s been driving you is it obligation, trying to please people, what people think of you, all this kind of stuff, and then learn to be driven from a place of more authentic expression and confidence and expansiveness and inspiration instead.

There’s probably some variety here as well. You know, I imagine if I was hired to write the same blog post over and over and over and that, I mean, it happens, right? You get a client that needs you to write about their thing, and you’ve got to figure out the 18th, 19th, 20th, different way to write about their thing, that lack of variety can can cause it as well, and that might be an extreme example. But if all you’ve written is blog posts, maybe it’s time to change it up. And, you know, add some new products to to your writing, or if you have been writing in a niche, as we talked about earlier, and you just you’re seeing the same kind of thing over and over, maybe it’s time to switch that up a little bit and play around in another niche, or with a different kind of client, or with a different kind of copy or voice. Or, you know, there’s so many different ways that we can change up our businesses, but it’s really easy to get into that rut, and then two years, three years, where you’ve been doing the same old, same old, it just it doesn’t light you up the way that it used to. So I don’t know that you’ve got all of the answers on, how do we keep things fresh, but the and obviously, this is why we take vacations. This is, you know, why we try to have hobbies, although oftentimes a lot of copywriters, our hobby is copywriting. It is marketing, right? And reading the books about the stuff, or going to the events about the stuff. And so even your hobbies start to impede on your work and and your well being. So variety feels like a big missing piece here too.

Brian McCarthy: Yeah, that’s a great point. And yeah, sometimes that can just be a signal for like, hey, maybe it’s time to level up. Maybe it’s time to try something new. Add a different type of writing into your system. Start, you know, be step up to an editor. Do that, move into a different, higher level role. And I’ll also say there’s, there’s also ways to look at how to make that monotonous work more interesting for you. So I had a client who was in that exact situation, and he was writing these scripts, and he’s just like, I’ve been writing these scripts for years, like I’m so sick of it, and I get that was part of what made me leave copywriting. Like, I’m just like, Man, I just, I just don’t want to do it anymore. I used to be nerd out to it so much. Now I just didn’t care. But you can look at like, and this can be very for individuals of like, okay, but what could make it interesting for you? So me and this client started to explore that and play with these different ideas and what that might look like, and what he found he likes to be, like, intellectually challenged, like he wants it to be hard, so he would like make it hard on himself. I forget exactly what he did, but that was the point. Like he was like, I’m like, what would it look like for this to be more challenge? Like, he’d like give himself different challenges to try to do, to like, write it in this different way that he’d never do before, that he initially thought his clients wouldn’t like, but then it ended up being the most popular video they ever did, and it was just, like, totally out of left field. So he’s like, How can I actually make this more difficult and more challenging became like, the thing of inspiration for him. And there’s, you know, there’s a million other ways, and I’d say it’s probably different for each individual of like, well, how could you make that fun for you? I was also thinking of like, you know, again, fellow of improv comedy. So it could be like, Man, what if you just, like, took on a character and start writing from this character, just to see what they express, and how that can be, right? That could be like, a totally different, you know, just thing to explore, and that, like, again, that would be on a very kind of personal case by case basis. Of, like, what would it take to make this monotonous thing you’ve done a million times kind of fun and interesting and a little bit exciting, and, you know, let yourself explore that a little bit, instead of immediately. And, you know, maybe you know, maybe you find something, maybe you don’t, and then it’s time to move on to something else. But I think it’s definitely a question in an area worth exploring a bit before just being like, well, I guess I’ll just quit this and become an Uber driver or whatever.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, as you’re talking I’m thinking about musicians who have that one hit. So my, one of my favorite bands is the Barenaked Ladies. Almost 30 years ago, they have a hit. You know, if I had a million dollars, I bet you that they have probably played that song at least. You know, at all of their shows, the fans demand it. So 200 performances, 30 years, you know, we’re talking six, 7000 times. And and, of course, they’ve got to be sick of the song, like, when you when you’ve done something that many times. And so that band in particular, like, they changed it up a little bit. You know, there’s, they changed the verses, they changed the words and the live performances. But also, there’s, they’re not only doing that song right? They’ve written 20 albums since then. They’ve, you know, done all kinds of different explorations into different kinds of music and and so they’re keeping it fresh. So yeah, while they, the fans demand that they keep going back to that one thing, there’s all of this other stuff that’s happening around that. So there’s a copy writing lesson there. Maybe I’ll drop this into an email to my list as I’m talking it through. But you know, the way to keep it fresh isn’t necessarily quitting, and it’s not necessarily stopping doing the thing that is making you the money and that your clients are demanding, but it’s adding all of these other pieces that allow you to still explore and enjoy the thing that you love doing in the first place?

Brian McCarthy: Totally. Yeah, and it just, I thought of a quick like tool that might be helpful for people of if they’ve got, you know, okay, I’m gonna wake up tomorrow and write these emails that I’ve written 100 times if, if your goal isn’t write the email, but it’s, have fun writing the email, like, that’s the rule, if you’re not having fun, stop and then see what it takes, and see what that’s like and and have that be the goal, and see what comes from it, instead of, you know, just just slogging through and checking another box. Yeah? And I think that’s, that’s a great point of, like, they barricade ladies found a way to make it fun for them cool. Take that for yourself. How can you make this fun for yourself?

Rob Marsh: I like that, and I’m going to see if I can apply that to you know, how do I have fun while doing my taxes or keeping my books? The things that I really hate about my business? How can I make it fun? Probably pay somebody else to do it is, is the final answer?

Brian McCarthy: There’s certain things that you’re just gonna hit a wall, or it’s just like, Nah, man. It’s just, ain’t it? Yeah, that’s not.

Rob Marsh: I’ve never, I’m never gonna be the tax happy copywriter, I guess.

Brian McCarthy: So expectations there too, because it’s not about, like, how do I make taxes the most fun. It’s like, okay, well, you probably maybe that might be a bit high, but can you at least make it like, not suck, if that’s okay, how do I make this just like, Fine, you know, finds a big increase from dread and misery, you know?

Rob Marsh: This is going to be a weird question. But I’d love to see how you, you know, work through this. But if there was a copywriter mindset, what is that? What would that be?

Brian McCarthy: Oh, I like this. A copywriter mindset, to me, would be full ownership of what you’re doing, who you are, what you bring to the table, and a belief in yourself and your value that comes from you, it could be informed by mentors and people around you and you know and what you’ve seen and learned in the industry and everything, but ultimately, it’s it’s you taking ownership of that, and rather than being dependent on what other people believe a copywriter should be, what you’ve heard a copywriter should be, again, that can inform you or other other people’s standards of what, what, what needs to be done and delivered and all this stuff, again, that informs you, but ultimately, like you’re Creating this road and owning your value fully yourself. Does that make sense?

Rob Marsh: Yeah. Brian, there’s been really interesting discussion. If somebody wants to reach out to you or connect to you, follow you in the things that you’re doing and talking about and helping with, where should they

go?

Brian McCarthy: McCarthymindsetcoaching.com, I’ve also got, if you like the imposter syndrome talk, which copywriters tend to if you go McCarthy mindset coaching.com/imposter, I’ve got an e book that shows you how some of my clients overcame imposter syndrome, goes a bit deeper to some of the stuff that we talked about. So that could be immediately valuable. And then, yeah, I’ve also got, you know, loads of case studies and stuff on my website, a lot of which are copywriters and showing how helped, how they’ve worked through other areas, like procrastination, self doubt, all that stuff.

Rob Marsh: I’ll link to both of those in the show notes so people can find them pretty easily. And I appreciate your time. Brian, thanks. 

Brian McCarthy: You bet this is great.

Thanks Brian for walking through a bunch of the mindset issues that hold us back. I’ve heard marketing guru Perry Marshall call this stuff head trash and I really like that way of framing this stuff. It often is trash that is keeping us from moving forward, but it’s very real and needs to be dealt with so we can move on.

If you want to follow Brian, you can find him at McCarthyMindsetCoaching.com. And you can get his free ebook on imposter complex at mccarthymindsetcoaching.com/imposter. And of course you should check out that old episode I mentioned as we were just starting out with Tanya Geisler about imposter complex if you are struggling with confidence or that nagging voice inside your head that is telling you that you’re not ready, or that you’re a fake, or that you’re not qualified. There’s a lot of good stuff on that episode which I’ve linked to in the show notes.

If mindset is a struggle for you, I don’t want to miss this opportunity to mention several episodes of the podcast we’ve done’ with mindset coach Linda Perry. You can find those on our website or just google The Copywriter Club and Linda Perry and they should pop up… we’ve covered a lot of ground with Linda and those episodes are also worth adding to your list.

Early on in this interview I mentioned that you don’t need to wait for permission to be a copywriter. If you write copy for clients, then you are a copywriter. However, I don’t want to minimize the actual writing chops you need to have in order to be a copywriter. You have to be able to deliver results. You have to know how to persuade and sell. You need to be able to write legibly and clearly and help your clients solve real marketing problems. You can just write a blog post and call yourself a copywriter. I mean, you could, but you’re faking it. If that’s where you are in your journey, focus on picking up those skills. We have a bunch of resources in The Copywriter Club to help you do that… maybe the best place to start is The Copywriter Underground—you can learn more about what that includes at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu-2

And of course you should check out the How to Write Emotional Copy Masterclass that I mentioned at the top of the show… you can find out more about that game-changing workshop at thecopywriterclub.com/emotion

Stuff to check out:

Divya’s LinkedIn
Find Your Clients on LinkedIn (Divya’s Lead Magnet)
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
The How to Write Emotional Copy Masterclass

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: If you’ve got enough clients or you’re not willing to put yourself out there to find the clients you need, well, you can probably skip this episode. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

Like last week, we’re revisiting a recurring topic on the show this week, but unlike last week, the recurring topics isn’t persuasion or psychology. This week we’re talking about the biggest challenge facing almost all copywriters and that’s finding clients.

Even established copywriters will struggle with this from time to time. One of the trusims of business is that if you don’t have clients willing to pay you for the work you do, it doesn’t matter how good your website is, it doesn’t matter how good a writer you are, it doesn’t matter that you can solve your client’s problems better than anyone else… without the client, you don’t have a business.

My guest this week is Divya Agrawal, a SaaS and Tech copywriter who has deep experience finding clients on LinkedIn. 

Divya started her career as a programmer but quickly figured out she was on the wrong job track, so she switched to writing. The lessons she shares from her experience launching this new business will help any copywriter or content writer who is looking for clients to work with. Specifically, Divya used LinkedIn to create connections with prospects. Her success posting content and making comments on other posts is a model for other writers who want to do the same… and LinkedIn is where a significant number of the people who hire copywriters hangout and connect. If your clients are there, you need to be there too.

In this interview, Divya shares the questions she uses to vet her prospects before they become clients, and she outlines exactly how you can connect with clients on LinkedIn yourself. This is informaiton she charges her coaching clients for, but she’s sharing much of it today for free.

Before we jump into our interview, a little while ago I recorded a masterclass to show copywriters, content writers and other marketers how to write “emotional” copy. Everyone says emotions sell, but how do you actually write emotional copy? I walk through more than a dozen examples in this masterclass and give you a proven process for figuring out the right emotions to focus on as you write… and how they change as you make your pitch. The masterclass includes several bonuses on storytelling, using A.I. to find dominant and transformational emotions, and much more. You can get this masterclass at thecopywriterclub.com/emotion

And now, my interview with Divya Agrawal.

Divya, welcome to the podcast. I’m excited to hear your story and to talk about how you’re finding clients, but tell us, how did you become a freelance copywriter for Tech.

Divya Agrawal: Thank you so much for having me on the podcast, Rob, I highly appreciate this chance to talk to you. I have been a big fan of your podcast, so it’s really cool that I get to sit here and share what I know.

Yeah, I became a freelance tech writer back in 2017 end of 2017

after a year long stint at a IT company as a software engineer, I was a Salesforce developer for a year, and that didn’t work out. I did not like the corporate environment. I did not like the work I was doing. So then I was like, I need to do something else. I had always been a writer. So I was one of those kids in school who is asked to write other kids speeches. So I was the introvert writing speeches for my more extroverted friends, who would get on stages and deliver those speeches. I was participating in essay competitions, all of those things. 

So I also had a lot of passion for technology. I was always learning about new technologies. I was good at development, if I do say so myself. So when I decided to shift gears, I was like, let me try and combine two of my passions, writing and technology, and that’s how I got into it. I had a little bit of an internship experience at a local IT company writing their social media content. So I when I decided to do this full time, I reached out to the HR. I was like, This is what I’m doing full time now. Do you have contacts for me? And he put me in touch with a bunch of companies, and that’s how I got my first client.

Rob Marsh: So as you were reaching back to the school and they gave you these contacts, did he make warm introductions, or did you have to reach out to them directly, like how. Did that all come together?

Divya Agrawal: Yes. So when I reached out to the HR at the company that I had interned with, I just had to tell him that, you know, this is what I’m doing full time, and he knew that I was good at writing. I understood technology and how it worked. So he confidently put me in touch with other people, and I actually didn’t have to do a lot of convincing. It was actually really easy to get my first client. Of course, I have experienced other struggles in business later, but getting my first few clients was not a struggle.

Rob Marsh: So you have a background in programming and technology, obviously, that gives you some advantage in writing for tech. But as a writer, do you think that copywriters need to know you know tech, to write for tech or SAT you know they need to have maybe done some development work in order to write for SaaS companies? Or how does that skill set benefit you or hold copywriters back?

Divya Agrawal: I would say, if you are working for SAS, you do not need a lot of development experience. But for the for the kind of clients that I work with, they are deeply into technology, and I, even I with my background, have to spend some time understanding what exactly they do. So let’s say I worked with a an AI ops client. So then I had to understand what aiops does. I had to understand how IT operations work in IT companies and all of those areas. I had to deeply read and understand about them before I began working with the client, my clients also help me with the right materials, like they have internal marketing materials that I study and prepare myself with. But if you are doing SaaS or less complicated technology writing, I don’t think it’s important to have a degree in computer science, because as writers, I believe we can write about anything, because the skill lies in asking the right questions and not in knowing all the answers. So I don’t think that a degree is important. And I have proof about this because I worked as a writer for a age for an agency in the US that works with law firms, and I didn’t know anything about any laws, even in India, let alone the US, but I was able to work with them because I was able to ask the right questions.

Rob Marsh: And what are some of those questions, and I should maybe just jump in. I totally agree with you. I think you know, when we’re writing about things, obviously it helps to understand how a mechanism works or how a program functions, but the real thing that we’re selling is the benefit for the client or the end user. And so as long as you understand how that, you know, this transformation happens this result they get, obviously, we could write about it, but you know, in in thinking about this of what are those questions that you’re asking to get to that end result?

Divya Agrawal: First of all, I asked about the buyer group that we are targeting for a specific piece of content in B to B, there are buyer groups. And then I try to understand if there’s a specific buyer persona that the post or the white paper is aimed at, what are their specific challenges? What is the status quo? What are they struggling with right now that my client is trying to solve with their product, and then I try to understand what is their competitive positioning. So who are the other competitors in the market? A lot of the times, status quo is the competition. So how things are done in legacy companies with legacy IT systems is generally the competition. So then I try to understand whether if that’s the case, or if there are other players in competition, and how my client’s product is different from those competitors, and how they are trying to position and what is the narrative that they are bringing to to make the buyer understand that this is the status quo. This is what you’re losing out on right now, and here’s what how we can shift it, here’s how we can improve it, and here’s how the competitors are doing, but here’s why that’s a weaker solution, and here’s why ours is stronger. So those are the things that go into it. And then, yeah, and then finally, bringing the products, features, benefits, into the limelight as and when the piece demands it.

Rob Marsh: That makes sense. Okay, so let’s go back to your story. You were launching this writing business, you reached out to get these referrals. But obviously, referrals don’t last forever. You’ve got to continue to grow your business. So what was the next step for you as you were looking for additional clients?

Divya Agrawal: Yeah, early on, I really heavily relied on LinkedIn. LinkedIn was still very in its early stages. This is 2018 2019 and there were a handful of creators who were doing videos on LinkedIn. And I started doing videos, you know, I was in that young person. I was with that young person energy in my early 20s. So I was experimenting with everything, and then somehow I started getting a lot of leads from LinkedIn. From all this experimentation, I was posting a lot. I was posting videos. I was doing carousels, everything. And then other writers started asking me how I was being so active on LinkedIn, being so visible, growing my business, and that’s when I started the second arm of my business, which is coaching freelance writers and copywriters on the lead generation strategies.

Rob Marsh: So when we were talking a while ago, I mentioned we’ve talked a lot about LinkedIn on the podcast. In fact, some listeners may see that, you know, oh no, here’s another episode about LinkedIn. And, you know, I even said to you, hey, we’ve covered a lot of this stuff. So what can we talk about that might add some additional ideas for copywriters and content writers, and hopefully, like, we can really dive into your process and and go, you know, so granular that people walk away from this episode knowing exactly how to succeed. But as you started out, you’re posting a lot of video content. Is that still like the stuff that’s working today? How has, how have things changed since 2018 2019 to where we are here in 2025…

Divya Agrawal: Oh, a lot actually. LinkedIn used to be so much less crowded and noisy. Back then, like I said, only a handful of creators were doing content at all on LinkedIn. Today, there are a lot of a lot more professionals creating content on LinkedIn from all kinds of careers, which is really great to see. However, specifically with video, I don’t think that video is that big on LinkedIn right now, because I see it from the perspective of, okay, when I log into LinkedIn, am I watching videos? And I’m not. I scroll past them. Um, usually I feel like LinkedIn is a very text heavy platform, and I expect to read a lot when I go on LinkedIn, but when I’m in, when I’m on Instagram, I expect to see a lot of videos. So yeah, I don’t think videos are big on LinkedIn right now.

Rob Marsh: Okay, so what is working right now?

Divya Agrawal: What I believe works for freelance writers and copywriters is creating lead generating LinkedIn posts. And what I call lead generating LinkedIn posts are posts that are written from the perspective of your ideal clients you disregard all the distraction and the noise on LinkedIn, and you focus on what your ideal clients need to know about you before they can hire you. So how can you build that know, like and trust factor with them? And then you just put the blinders on and create your own content, and that’s how I have been finding leads on LinkedIn, growing my business, etc.

Rob Marsh: So can we talk about some specific examples of how you’re doing that and what you’re posting, the kinds of problems that you’re talking about, or the ideas that you’re sharing that really pull in these potential clients?

Divya Agrawal: Sure. So how I see it? I see LinkedIn. I see my services, specific services that I offer as LinkedIn pillars. Content, pillars, so let’s say thought leadership, content, white papers, case studies, interview led blog posts. So all of these are specific content pillars. And then for each of these services, what do your ideal clients want to know? So they want to know, what is your process of creating content? What are some of the testimonials from you having done the same work for other clients. How do you approach these deliverables, and what do your collaborations with clients look like? How far do you invest in your projects? So are you just doing writing? You get a brief and you write and you’re done, or are you also doing strategy work? How do you ensure that each piece. Of content fits into a bigger strategy and fits into the bigger picture and helps the clients. Helps your clients achieve their goals. How you maintain client relationships and partake in your clients success? How much do you charge? What are the timelines you work with? Whether you prefer long term engagements or one off projects, and then, do you conduct interviews? How do you conduct interviews? What’s your process there? How you handle revisions and feedback? All of those things are what your ideal clients are interested in knowing about your business. And that’s what I focus on the most in my own LinkedIn content, and this is what I teach freelance writers to also do. Of course, there are other kinds of content, like introducing yourself on LinkedIn every once in a while, sharing some behind the scenes from your business, or maybe sharing your pets pictures, your kids pictures, things like that.

Rob Marsh: Okay, and this is probably obvious, but I just want to be crystal clear so that nobody misunderstands. You just gave us this long list of things to be writing about on LinkedIn, but you’re not suggesting we put all of that into one or two posts. These are individual ideas for posts. So one day I might write about revision process, my revision process, and the next day I might write about, you know, how much I charge, or why I charge the way I do, and then the next day, or it’s probably not even every day, you know, three days later, or whatever I write about. So you’ve just given us, it was probably about 2425 things that could easily fill a content calendar for a month or two, and then almost just start over and sort of talk about those same topics again in a slightly different way.

Divya Agrawal: Yes, and if you match each service to each of those ideas, you probably have like three months of content right there which speaks to your ideal clients, which talks about how you specifically deliver service, how you specifically work with clients, so it’s not generic content. It really brings out your expertise, your experience, why you do things the way you do them, even how you learned to evolve your processes anytime you’re making a small change in how you deliver a service or how you set up your back end processes, you can create a post about it.

Rob Marsh: And would you say that these these post ideas are LinkedIn specific, because they’re so based around your business, or could you take some of these and also use them, say on Instagram or Tiktok or some of the other platforms.

Divya Agrawal: For sure, all of these ideas can be content ideas for other platforms, if you are using other channels for your business’s marketing.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I suppose if you’re gonna take those ideas though, you obviously you’re gonna customize them for that channel. So you mentioned earlier Instagram you expect to see videos. So you wouldn’t be posting copy or text on Instagram. You’d probably want to make a video talking about the same kind of a thing as you go through. But I also, I like that you break it up by product and making those your content pillars. So, you know, if I write sales pages, you know, I’ve got 25 things that I can write about sales pages. But I also happen to write case studies, and so I’ve got those 25 things about case studies, and each of those pillars may attract a slightly different client into my business.

Divya Agrawal: Yes, exactly. And talking about specific services, you could also match that up with multiple niches. So if you are working in tech, and let’s say you also do healthcare writing, then you can create all sorts of combinations there and talk about things repeatedly, which is completely fine. Sometimes writers are like, you know, my content is not unique. Other writers are also talking about the same things, but that is a common objection when you think about things from the perspective of your peers, because you are connected with probably hundreds of writers on LinkedIn, but your ideal clients are not connected to hundreds of writers. They are only they may only be connected with a few or more, probably you might be the only writer in their network, so they are not seeing this content over and over again. But so again, it’s like you center your ideal prospects when you think about content and you forget all of the other distractions.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think that’s actually a really important point that I think point that I think people forget. We see so much marketing and so many things from, like you said, peers, other copywriters, other designers, programmers, you know, all of these people who are doing the same things that we do as freelancers, but our our audiences don’t always, you know, there. Not necessarily in the marketing space, right? So if I write for roofing companies, I’m not sure that there’s a lot of roofers on LinkedIn, but let’s assume that there are. They’re not seeing 100 posts from other copywriters. They’re seeing mostly people in the construction industry or people that they’re connected with. So I think that that’s a really good point. But let’s also talk about, how do we make our content stand out? Because one of the things that’s happened with LinkedIn is that there is so much sameness Now, part of it is that we see it over and over and so, you know, maybe the problem’s not quite as bad for our clients as it is for us, but I have a feeling that there are clients who are seeing, you know, the same kinds of posts, the same and especially with AI, you know, literally, the same kinds of headlines, the same ideas, over and over. And so how do you make content stand out? And how are the people that you’re working with on LinkedIn doing that as well?

Divya Agrawal: One way to make your content stand out is to incorporate stories. So things that are happening in your business every day. You went on a discovery call, it went well, you talk about that. You went on a discovery call, it didn’t go well. You talk about that. You recently completed a project. You provide some context into how you made it successful, whether there was a challenge that you had to overcome, whether it went smoothly, and what are the processes that you put in place to make it so. So all of these stories make your content unique, because a lot less people on LinkedIn are sharing real business stories and showing, okay, this is what’s up in my business. A lot more are out there talking about, here’s how to do things in your business, or a lot more like how to achieve something, how I achieved something. But a lot less content on LinkedIn is about actually sharing behind the scenes of your business. So that’s one way that your content can stand out.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, stories are big, and obviously stories tend to be personal, and so you know, the things that have happened to me haven’t happened to you, so that that definitely helps. So what kinds of success have you seen with LinkedIn? So you know, you’ve been posting this stuff, but how did this impact your business

in a big way?

Divya Agrawal: I would say last year alone, I received 115 plus leads from LinkedIn for both my short term and long term projects, and I have had all kinds of opportunities come in. One was a book feature, so one of my freelance writer friends wrote a book, and I got to be one of the interview features in the book. I have had guest contribution opportunities to contribute guest articles on some really great websites. There have been podcast appearances and so, yeah, all kinds of opportunities, actually.

Rob Marsh: And how often are you posting?

Divya Agrawal: Right now, I’m posting five to six times a week.

Rob Marsh: Okay, so literally, every day you post, yes, nine leads a month. You know, that’s roughly 115 leads a year. Is pretty good. Obviously, they’re not all for tech projects or tech writing projects. But how do you then go from somebody who reaches out and says, hey, I’m interested. You know, what does the conversation look like so that you can actually close those clients?

Divya Agrawal: Yes, my first priority is to qualify the lead. So I have a pretty tight system that I use to qualify whether or not a client is going to be good for me. And how I do it is, I qualify the company, the person and the project. So there has to be a fit in all three of those areas for someone to be an ideal client. First of all, I will look at their like, what company they are associated with, what is the project they are talking about. I will get on a discovery call, and then I’ll find out more details. And as I go, I will keep checking these boxes that I have, and yeah, at the end of it, hopefully, if they’re a good fit, we get to work together.

Rob Marsh: So what are those boxes that you’re checking? What like? How do you know that a company is a fit, a person’s a fit, and a project is a fit?

Divya Agrawal: Yeah. So I have this series of questions, and I think everyone should make their own series of questions. So for example, to qualify the company, I am asking how much foundational work this client already has. So if there are startup, they could be starting marketing from scratch. Much if they’re a more established company, they might already have their value proposition, positioning different audience segments that they target. They might know why their customers buy, how their product differs from the competition, et cetera. Then what is their budget for content marketing? How much revenue they are making annually than their payment terms. So are they okay with upfront payment? Do they have a 30 or 45 day payment policy? Do they need me to sign a non compete clause? Do they want me to sign an NDA and not reveal that I’m working with them how big of a company it is, so the biggest companies usually have a lot of bureaucracy. On the other hand, startups often come with a lot of chaos and change because they’re figuring everything out. So I like to be somewhere in the middle of those two and then what is the project? So for the project, are they providing clear expectations for what they are looking for? Will they provide me the topic to write the content, if it’s a series of blog posts, or do they want me to help with the editorial calendar? Do they provide me additional background material, or is it my job to do an in depth research? Are there interviews involved? Is there any kind of SEO work involved? Is there designing work involved? And then I also measure a project by Is it like a next level project for me, or is it more of the same? So depending on your experience level, you might prioritize more of the same projects, or you might want to reach out of your comfort zone and go for next level projects. And then what are the timelines that the client has set up? And yeah, if it’s an ongoing project or a one off project, and then people. So there are a lot of red flags that I now avoid, having worked with some problematic people in the past. So some of those red flags is um, if they are engaging in some fear mongering, you know, like AI is already taking over, there’s less work to go around. Are you sure you’re um ready to let this project go? If they are using that sort of language to negotiate, um, negotiate me on my price. Then, is, is the person looking for help with a single project or hoping to build a long term relationship with you that is a big green flag for me, because I like to work with clients over a long period of time. Then, are they late for calls? Are they constantly canceling calls on the last minute? So yeah, and over the years, as I’ve worked with people, I have created this huge list of things that I look out for.

Rob Marsh: It’s a good list, and obviously we’re all looking for those red flags. So having those of the leads that you get then, and you put them through this discovery call process, how many of them do you close on a monthly basis? And what does a typical project look

like?

Divya Agrawal: I don’t have that statistic for you right now, because it’s really hard to like measure. I do have an Excel sheet where I capture all the leads, but I just don’t do a good job of finding out what that percentage is. But yeah, this is my process of closing them. I like to sign contracts. I like if they have a policy of upfront payment, or if I suggested and they are ready to do that.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, and you mentioned you like to work long term. So you know, usually you’re signing a retainer of some kind. What does that work look like on a month to month basis? Is it a couple of blog posts? Are you working on a variety of different projects? What does that typical retainer agreement look like?

Divya Agrawal: Yes, sometimes it’s a series of blog posts month after month, and other times it has also been white papers, it has been case studies. So I had this client who I was writing two blog posts and a white paper for every month, there was this other client who I was refreshing case studies for every month. So those two were like long term, recurring work.

Rob Marsh: That makes sense. So going back to LinkedIn, let’s say that I have not been posting on LinkedIn, or maybe I posted a four. Few times last year, but I haven’t posted in several months. The idea of posting five or six times a week, even though you’ve given me this list of all of these things that I could write about, you know, 25 ish items, you know, across my different content pillars, it still feels like too much, really too much to get started. So what is the bare minimum that I would need to do, or another copywriter would need to do in order to start seeing traction.

Divya Agrawal: Yeah, there are a few things if you don’t want to directly go into publishing your own content, you can start by engaging with other people’s content. You probably follow a lot of freelance writers. You probably follow a lot of your ideal prospects, so start engaging with their content. Leave really thoughtful comments under their posts, and really try to make a conversation. And don’t just do it for the sake of getting visibility, but really see how you can add to the conversation. Bring a different perspective. Again, share a story. All of the things that you can talk about in your own content can also be stuff that you can post under someone else’s content. So comments are content too, and that will help you warm up your posting muscle a little bit, and then once you’re more comfortable being visible on LinkedIn, and you have sort of a network of people that you’ve engaged with, you’ll feel more comfortable posting on LinkedIn, because then those people might engage with your content also.

Rob Marsh: And as I start out is once a week enough, or do I really need to be posting more than that in order to, you know, to grow my presence there,

Divya Agrawal: I would say whatever you can start with is the ideal cadence for you. So if you all you can do is once per week, then start with that. And as you go, you can ramp it up. You can then do twice per week. There’s this law. I don’t know what it’s called, but it works. When you want to start anything new, it goes like, first you just do it, then you do more of it, then you do it better, and then you add something new to it. So that’s the law that goes with everything. So first of all, just do it, then do more of it, then you do it better. So you look at okay, how can I make my posts better? How can I fix the hook a little bit so that people are intrigued about my content? How can I add some storytelling into it, make it sound better, flow better, and then you add something new. So then maybe you start experimenting with other formats on LinkedIn, like carousels or add images, or maybe videos.

Rob Marsh: Okay, that, yeah, that definitely makes sense. So as I’m again, thinking about this process of how we do it in your posts. Do you specifically have a call to action in any of them where you say, Hey, I have an opening this week, or I’m taking on new clients, or if you want help with web copy or blog posts or whatever, do you ask for work? Or do you let people figure that out on their own.

Divya Agrawal: Yes, I do add calls to action to some of my posts, but that’s like a call to action that’s there after they have consumed my entire post. So the entire post is not about me asking for work. It’s about maybe sharing a sample that I did for another client, and then adding some context around the project, like this is how I executed this, et cetera. And then at the end, I might say, I’m open to new projects. If you are looking for something similar, DM me.

Rob Marsh: So it’s kind of a soft sell, but you’re making the invitation, yes. Okay, so obviously, this has helped you grow your business, and you’ve done it well enough that you’ve brought in other copywriters, content writers who want help from you to do this. How are other copywriters succeeding as well? Obviously, they’re following your process, but can you share, just like some examples of some of the things that they’re doing and the success that they’ve seen.

Divya Agrawal: Yeah, I was on a catch up call with a bunch of freelance writers, and one of them has taken one of my content workshops, and she was sharing that a recent client that she converted came in as a lead from a post that she created after, like, learning from my workshop. So yeah, it and even, like, sometimes writers are not very open to sharing that they landed a lead or got a client like we, we all forget. We learn from people, and then we implement their systems. We move on. But when I see them posting on LinkedIn consistently, I just feel very happy that they have started showing up on LinkedIn and being visible. And yeah, I think I’m the cheerleader. I’m always liking posts from people in my network.

Rob Marsh: So yeah, again, Yeah, makes sense. So earlier on, as you were telling us your story of how you got started, you mentioned that you had several struggles as your business has grown. Tell us about some of those. You know, what have the what have been the hard things about growing your business and the things that you’ve struggled with as you’ve started to find success?

Divya Agrawal: Yeah, I think one of my biggest struggles has been discipline. So because this is a one person business, and if we are not disciplined, there’s literally no one to tell us to do things or not do things, so that has been one of my biggest challenges. I am so much better at it now, but I do remember a time where I had gotten a little bit lax with my marketing, and then two of my biggest clients that made up like 80% of my income, suddenly they stopped working with me in the same month, and this was during the pandemic too. So then I had to ramp up my efforts on marketing, and it takes a lot of time to build the same momentum, as opposed to if you are always consistently marketing your business. So and other little things also, like discipline shows up in all aspects of business. So, yeah, I feel like being my own boss. I kind of felt like I could get away with things, but I have discovered that that’s not true. You have to stick to processes. You have to do things consistently in your business that keep it running and keep it at a healthy growth trajectory.

Rob Marsh: How much time are you spending creating content for the marketing side of your business versus the content for your clients?

Divya Agrawal: I would say a couple of hours. So I when I sit for a couple of hours on a day, I’m able to create content for two to three weeks. So, yeah, okay.

Rob Marsh: So what does that process look like? Because I have a feeling somebody might hear you say two hours, and that’s 15 ish posts, 15 to 18 posts. That seems like, I mean, discipline doesn’t seem like a problem at that point, because clearly you are putting out a lot of content. And so what does that writing process look like so that you can get that much

stuff done?

Divya Agrawal: Yeah, I would also say that I’ve been doing this for a long time, like ever since I started posting on LinkedIn in 2018 just one or two breaks that I’ve taken. Besides those, I have been consistently posting content, so there’s a lot of practice that I’ve had, but what my process looks like is that I will so I continually document what’s happening in my business. First of all, I’m always taking notes on my phone, and this is something that I also think writers have a mental block around. We think that we have to sit in a chair and spin up ideas about content from thin air, or we are like, we feel like we’re always short of ideas and we are thinking about ideas, whereas what I teach is that you need to notice content in your everyday life, in your everyday business. So anytime something interesting happens in my business, anytime I notice myself doing something differently or doing anything interesting, I make a note of it. So anytime I sign a new client, anytime a prospect says something interesting in a conversation, all of those are content ideas. Anytime you finish a project, anytime you start a project, there are things that you do in your business every day that you might think are pretty normal and regular, and you feel like everyone must do it, but we operate in very different ways as business owners, and something as regular as like how you set up your desk can be idea for content, because we all do things differently, and that can become like a point of conversation on LinkedIn. So first of all, noticing things and taking notes all week long, and then at the end of the week, probably on a Sunday evening, when I’m well rested, but also thinking about work again, I sit down for a couple of hours and I look at those notes on my phone and I flesh out those posts. So that’s also why it takes me a. A less amount of time to quickly create content. And the other thing that I do is something that I shared earlier, which is focus on one service at a time, and think about how I deliver that service, what my process looks like. I might zero in on one part of that service. So let’s say, if I want to talk about writing blog posts, I might focus on how to create unique blog post introductions, how to conclude your blog posts, or, like, how to create infographics for a blog post article. So zeroing in on a particular part of the service, sharing samples on LinkedIn about that service. All of these, yeah, give me your view.

Rob Marsh: Do you repost content or reuse content that you wrote, say, last year and you and if you do, how do you change it up?

Divya Agrawal: Oh, yeah, all the time I actually teach this, and I highly encourage people to repost their content. If it’s been a couple of months and you want to talk about the same service again, sometimes I just shamelessly repost it. No changes made nothing. Some other times I do, like, if I posted something last year, I might notice that I have changed my process a little bit, or I’ve added something to it, which is when I will update the post. If I shared a sample or a testimonial, I might update that to a more recent sample or testimonial from a client.

Rob Marsh: Are you using AI as part of this process at all?

Divya Agrawal: I am not.

Rob Marsh: Are you using AI in your business at all, or it’s all your brain?

Divya Agrawal: In my business? Yes, in my business, I use it to Oh, actually, in my content also, I sometimes use AI. I will tell you how. So if I want to focus on a specific service and I feel like I’m out of ideas, I will simply tell AI to give me, like, a broad range of ideas. I will just ask it a question related to that service, like, what are some of the challenges with blog post writing today, or what are the trends in blog post writing, but those will not become my content. What AI throws at me will not become my content. That will just give me things to think about, so then I can respond to something that it’s saying, instead of just again sitting there and thinking of ideas and in writing for my clients, yeah, again, I use AI to think widely about things. So I will search a topic, and then it throws a bunch of stuff at me, and then I can decide if this thing needs to be part of the narrative that I’m building for this article, or if this deserves a place, if this needs to be researched more, which is when I’ll more deeply research it and then include it in the piece.

Rob Marsh: So going all the way back to when we started talking, you were a computer scientist, a programmer, but you also were a writer on the side. How did you sharpen your copywriting skills, or learn how to be a copywriter coming from the background that you came from. What are some of the things that you’ve done to continue learning?

Divya Agrawal: I would say I read a lot, so I have learned from reading and observing a lot. I follow a lot of freelance writers and copywriters who do really great work. And when they post something that they have worked on, I try to see what are the different elements. I try to pick it apart essentially, and really focus on okay. They have structured this article a certain way. They have include, included these perspectives, or this is how they are building the narrative. They’ve included a lot of examples from different sources. So, yeah, I think I have learned by reading widely.

Rob Marsh: And I suppose, I mean, that’s probably how I learned the most as well. You know, do you have a favorite author or book or reference that you’ve gone to?

Divya Agrawal: Oh, no, I have hundreds. I could not name one, but yeah, there are a lot of writers out there who just do phenomenal work, and I’m always reading what they’re posting.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I agree. Divya, this has been helpful as I think about, you know, I don’t post on LinkedIn a lot. I have some guilt around that, where I feel like I should probably be there, posting, talking about some of the stuff that we talk about on the podcast, a lot the things that, you know, I teach on in the copywriter underground, and the workshops that I do there, and even. The clients that I you know, happen to be working with. So this has given me a lot of things to think about. Hopefully it’s been helpful for other copywriters who maybe struggle with the same kind of thing. You know, how do I show up in this place where there are so many clients? But I appreciate your approach to this and your advice to us. It’s been really helpful if people want to reach out to you or follow you, where should they go?

Divya Agrawal: Yes, please connect with me on LinkedIn. That’s the best place.

Rob Marsh: Thanks. Thanks for your time,

Divya Agrawal: Divya, thank you, Rob.

Rob Marsh: Thanks Divya for laying out the process for connecting with potential clients on LinkedIn. If you’re wondering what to share, go back and listen to the list of 25 things that you can write about and then do it. Use those prompts to create content for your business.

Of course, if you don’t love LinkedIn, much of the advice—and those 25 topic ideas that Divya shared also work on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube and anywhere else you are showing up with content for your prospects.

And if you don’t want to be in any of those places… my question for you is where are you showing up? Where are you connecting with potential clients? Because no matter how good we are as writers, there is no line of prospects out there just waiting to magically discover you. If they can’t see you somewhere, you might as well not exist. 

If you want to run a service business… and copywriting is a service business… you have to do something. If you’re not going to post on social media, you need to go to events, or work your network, or respond to posts on job boards, or spend money on ads, or blog and guest blog for others in your niche, or post videos, guest on podcasts or something… you have to be out there. What Divya shared in this episode will help you do that.

Don’t forget to check out the How to Write Emotional Copy Masterclass at thecopywriterclub.com/emotion

Stuff to check out:

The 10 Commandments Book
John’s first interview
The Katelyn Bourgoin Interview
The Sarah Levinger Interview
The Richard Armstrong Interview
The Parris Lampropouos Interview
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
The How to Write Emotional Copy Masterclass

Transcript:

Rob Marsh: Looking for non-obvious ways to be more persuasive? Today we’re talking about the ten commandments of con men, pick up artists, comedians and others. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve interviewed a couple of guests about psychology and persuasion… on episode 447 I talked with Katelyn Bourgoin and on episode 448, I spoke with Sarah Levinger. In both of those interviews we talked about using psychology and principles from behavioral economics and neuroscience. Today’s episode covers similar ground in a very different way.

My guest is copywriter John Bejakovic. John runs one of the best daily email lists out there, sharing his throughts on marketing, sales, and persuasion. He recently published a book about these topics called, The 10 Commandments of Con Men, Pick Up Artists, Magicians, Door-to-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Professional Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand Up Comedians, and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters. It’s a long title for a short book that covers a lot of ground. I wanted to talk to John about the ideas in his book, but more than that, I wanted to discuss the ethics of using these kinds of tactics to get our readers and prospects to take action. 

If you want to be a better writer or a more effective communicator or simply want to help your children or customers or friends use information to make better decisions, I think you’ll like this episode.

These topics really appeal to me. Not just as a writer or marketer so I can use these techniques myself, but also as a consumer. You can’t avoid the con men who use these tactics unless you understand the tactics and how they use them. Being smart is not enough to avoid responding positively to the ideas we talk about on this episode.

Before we jump into our interview, a little while ago I recorded a masterclass to show copywriters, content writers and other marketers how to write “emotional” copy. Everyone says emotions sell, but how do you actually write emotional copy? I walk through more than a dozen examples in this masterclass and give you a proven process for figuring out the right emotions to focus on as you write… and how they change as you make your pitch. The masterclass includes several bonuses on storytelling, using A.I. to find dominant and transformational emotions, and much more. You can get this masterclass at thecopywriterclub.com/emotion

And now, my interview with John Bejakovic.

Rob Marsh: Hey, John, welcome back to the podcast. You were here, I think it was literally two years ago, Episode 365, where we talked about a lot of different stuff, and people maybe can go back and listen to that, but catch me up on what’s been going on in your business, and this new book you’ve got.

John Bejakovic: Yeah, sure. So, yeah, I was thinking about that. It’s been about two years since I was on the podcast last and I think we talked about email and things like that, because that’s kind of my bread and butter. And then at the end of that podcast, you were kind of asking me, what I’m what am I working on? And I was working on this book at that time, and the plan was to have this book, which is a kind of an intersection of different disciplines and the commonalities between disciplines like sales and copywriting, but also things like con artists and pickup artists and stand up comedians and screenwriters. And at that time, I already had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to write in the book, and I was very, very enthusiastic and thinking, I’m going to get the book out in the next few weeks, month or two. And it took me a long time to get the book out, and I finally managed to do it this spring, so, or maybe a little more than a month ago. So the book is out, and it’s exactly what I was planning on being in. You know, you helped me out with, actually, some of the final edits and so on. So that’s kind of the main thing. Otherwise, I’m still very much just focused on email and writing daily emails and writing about persuasion and marketing and copywriting, but the book is the one significant achievement advantage in the past couple of years.

Rob Marsh: I love this book. I actually sent an email to my list, sharing it with people and talking about something that Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote the book Big Magic, talks about in her book. There, she mentions this experience that she has where she had an idea for a book and she was noodling on it for a while. And didn’t really do anything with it. And then she had lunch with another friend who had the exact same idea come to her, and she basically said, hey, when you know ideas move from person to person, and if you don’t take it on, somebody else will. And I think I told you this, you know, maybe shortly after we talked on the podcast, I’ve been thinking about writing this, almost this exact same book. Your your title is a little bit more comprehensive. You know, I was thinking of, you know, the persuasion secrets of con men and charlatans and copywriters. And you’ve literally written the, not exactly the way I would write it, but it’s literally the book that I wanted to write. And I don’t know if the idea hopped for me to you, or occurred to us both simultaneously, or it’s just this idea that needed to happen, but you brought it to life. And I think it’s a fantastic book.

John Bejakovic: Thank you. I think it’s something that’s in the water because of the people that I’m profiling in the book are all of the disciplines. There’s a lot of people. That’s something I didn’t really write about in the book. There’s a lot of people who started out in one of these disciplines and then who moved to another one, who spotted the same commonalities. So, you know, I think the most famous in our little world is maybe Dan Kennedy, who talks about how all the best copywriters had direct door to door to door sales experience, you know, and all the copywriters that he knows who really became excellent copywriters, they started out going to door to door and how, you know, so many of the the mindsets as well as the techniques from sales apply to copywriting. And I think, like Gary Bencivenga was also famous at that Gary Bencivenga never did the door to door stuff, but he definitely talked about how one of the the secrets to being, you know, a successful one of the secrets to his being such a successful copywriter, is that he went back and he studied what salesmen were were doing. But it goes the other way around. So again, going back to some of these disciplines. So, you know, I’m profiling pickup artists in there, and one of the most famous pickup artists, this guy named mystery, who wore this big top hat, and he was on BH one, well, he started out as a magician, right? So he was like a club magician, before he started approaching girls in clubs. And I don’t know how consciously he brought in some of the ideas from that into into that pickup, seduction world. But it was definitely there. And likewise, for hypnosis, I feel like there’s people who have noticed that there’s a lot of commonalities in these things. So I think it was, I think, I think a lot of people who are, who have been in parts of this world that I’m talking about, I’ve noticed the commonalities is just that, because I already had that concept of the 10 Commandments, and I wanted to have 10 separate disciplines, I went and I really looked at 10 separate disciplines that have some sort of an overlap, or that have a significant overlap. And I think there might have been one or two more that that I skipped just because they wouldn’t have fit within the umbrella of 10 Commandments, but, um, but, yeah, I think it’s, it’s kind of just in the water.

Rob Marsh: It’s good. I’m holding up the book for anybody who’s listening. But it, The book is called The 10 Commandments of Con Men, Pickup Artists, Magicians, Door-t-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Professional Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand up Comedians and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters. Yeah, let’s talk about some of these commandments or secrets. The last time we talked, I mentioned a book by Darren Brown that you pointed out we’re not actually like. It’s one of the supposed secret books that sort of passed around underground amongst copywriters and everybody says, don’t talk about it. It’s, it’s one of those secrets. People can go back and listen to that episode if they want to know what book that is. But Darren Brown happens to make an appearance in this book, as well as one of these experts, persuasion. I don’t he’s not a con man, necessarily, but he exposes a lot of cons, you know, in his shows and stuff. So, yeah, let’s talk about some of these commandments.

John Bejakovic: Darren Brown appears twice in the book, and I don’t know, for people maybe, who don’t know Darren Brown. So he’s, he’s kind of a stage performer. He’s done hypnosis, he’s done mentalism. He’s also had a bunch of TV shows in the UK where basically the kind of stuff that I cover in this book is the kind of stuff that he talks about in his shows, but he actually puts it into practice. And so when I was writing this book, I did. Part of the reason that it took so long is that I did a lot of research, because I really wanted to dig in and find interesting stories, and not simply, kind of right off the top of my head of like, Oh, here’s kind of like, what the connections are. But it really wanted to have good illustrations for all these things and and I’m, I’m a big. Big reader of, of the New Yorker. You know, here’s my most recent copy, and I really like their style of writing. And one of the things that they one of their kind of go to techniques for, for opening up an article, I don’t know, for people again, who don’t know, maybe in the New Yorker, The New Yorker writes on very random topics.

So there can be very, seemingly uninteresting or niche topics that they manage to write about very interestingly. And one of their go to ways of opening up a topic is to go back to kind of the initial historical background of how this topic, you know, how it even came to be or or some sort of the historical incident. So for the book, since the book opens up with the 10 Commandments of of con men, I wanted to go back and find out, where does that term confidence man, con man. Where does it even come from? Or where does it appear? And I managed to track it down to, I believe it was 1849 in New York, and it was this guy, William Thompson, who would walk up to rich looking New Yorkers on the street, and he’d start a little conversation, and within a few minutes, he had convinced them to hand over their gold watches. And he wasn’t lying, he wasn’t begging, he wasn’t bleeding, he wasn’t throwing out, you know, any kind of fake authority. He wasn’t really promising them anything. So it was a remarkable story, because eventually he got caught and arrested for stealing, even though he wasn’t really technically stealing. And so there was a an article in The New York, I think, Daily Herald reported on this guy, and it was an interesting story, but it didn’t really explain how he was doing it.

And Darren Brown, I don’t know whether consciously or not, but he repeated this exact same thing where he went onto the streets of a small holiday town in England, and he went up to people, and he started a conversation, and very, very quickly, he convinced people to hand over their wallets, their, I believe, watches, and in one case, somebody’s house keys, right? And the first commandment is about how to do that. And in the beginning, I wasn’t, I wasn’t really sure how to put these commandments in a way that was both succinct and that didn’t give the commandment away. And so from that Darren brown episode, I said, you know, thou shalt ask for directions. Because ultimately, that’s what Darren Brown was doing. He stopped people on the street, he asked for directions, and by doing that, he broke down a lot of the resistance that a lot of us normally feel when we’re faced with a stranger, when somebody’s kind of trying to do something to us, when they’re when it seems like they’re trying to ask us for something, get us to do something, when they’re possibly trying to manipulate us or trying to take advantage of us. When people put themselves into that position, that they’re a little bit helpless, they’re a little bit lost, they’re asking for directions. It’s a very small things, but it’s a very small thing, but it can be very powerful in opening up people to influence. And so that was, that was the first commandment. And, yeah, Darren Brown was a great illustration, because otherwise, I don’t know where I would have taken that episode with William Thompson from 1848

Rob Marsh: I think in the book, if I’m not mistaken, you mentioned, as one of Darren’s credentials that he actually convinces somebody to push somebody off of a building in one of his specials. And if you didn’t write about it, you know, I’m thinking about that because I think this, this is, that’s one of those TV shows. It’s on YouTube. Everybody listening should go and watch that. Because if you want to know the power of influence and the power that we as marketers have to, you know, move people from where they are to, you know, some other state That special is, it’s both fascinating and also incredibly frightening in some ways, because, you know, I’ve said this a few times, but persuasion is a superpower, and when you are able to use it, hopefully to help people. But you know, some of the examples in your book are slightly more nefarious, you know, and people are taking advantage of people with these superpowers that we have, that literally can, can make people act against what they would say is their own best interests.

John Bejakovic: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I had to be very careful, and I tried to do that in multiple places in the book to basically highlight that, you know, I’m not encouraging people to do criminal things. I’m not encouraging people to do immoral things. And that’s not the point of this book. This book is, in a way, a collection of techniques, the way I just described. You know, if you want to, let’s say. Soften somebody up or open them up to influence then, yeah, asking for directions or making yourself to be vulnerable in that way is, is a way to do that. But the reason that I wrote this book was because, yeah, branding, these techniques are very transferable, and you can use them in in lots of different ways, including ways that are completely beneficial to both sides.

And also, I think it’s, you know, all of these techniques are pointing to some sort of deeper thing within human beings and human minds and the way that we work. And I try to write about those things as well. So, you know, the fact of, you know, why does it happen that in so many disciplines, people keep discovering that, oh yeah, if you ask for a favor or if you make yourself out to be a little bit a little bit inferior or a little bit somehow lost or somehow vulnerable, why does that make people predisposed to liking you, you know, and I feel that that that points to some interesting stuff that that’s telling me about myself, and that I think tells me about how other people are, so that whether you want to use this stuff in in a business context to persuade or whether you simply want to use it to understand yourself better, because I don’t know about you, Rob, but one of the reasons I kind of got into marketing, or that I stay in it, is that I think, you know, Robert Cialdini talks about this in his book Influence. He says he’s kind of a patsy in the sense that he’s really a sucker for for all sorts of, like marketing ploys, or all sorts of like persuasion techniques, or, you know, people on the street stopping him and asking him for money. And in many ways, I’m the same. I’m very, very gullible. And it only takes me, it takes me some time after that to say, like, what happened, you know, like, how did this work? How did this work on me? Why did I do this? And, and so, yeah, that’s one of the things that I wanted to figure out. Not just, well, okay, there’s these common techniques to these different disciplines, but what’s really going on, and what is a what does it point to at a more fundamental level about human you know,

Rob Marsh: You mentioned Cialdini, I think, in pre suasion, his second book, he actually deals with that. He says so many people came up to him when he would teach his seminars and say, hey, you know, why are you teaching us to manipulate people? And there’s a chapter in persuasion where he talks about this is actually a manual for people to understand what’s happening so they’re not manipulated or taken advantage of. And that’s why he wrote influence in in the first place, was to help people understand what was going on. And so there’s definitely value in understanding this so that we’re not fooled, or we can see the people around us who maybe are being taken advantage of by some people. But yeah, then it’s our responsibility to use use what we know wisely to help people help themselves, right, and to not take advantage.

John Bejakovic: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I know a lot of these techniques, and even so, I’m still, I still find myself getting, you know, not necessarily suckered, but in this, I definitely still react to these techniques, you know. So there’s some part of the human brain which is just so instantaneously reacts to some of this stuff. And I think that that’s kind of one of the things that I tried to get across in the book of some of the things that I talk about, for example, the Darren brown thing, stopping somebody on the street and getting their wallet 3040, seconds later. It’s, it’s hard to believe that that’s possible, right? And and yet it is possible. And it happens. It doesn’t happen in every case, but, yeah, the the way that our brains work, it’s, it’s very strange, and there are some sort of short circuits there. And you know, if you know the right buttons to push, you can activate those short circuits and strange, strange stuff can happen.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I remember seeing a study that was talking about how intelligent people look at this kind of stuff and say, oh, you know, I’m smart. I’m not going to fall for this stuff. That’s what less intelligent people do. And the study measured the IQ of people who joined cults and fell for cons and various things, and they found that the people who were most able to fall for these kinds of things were actually the more intelligent people. So there’s some correlation between being smart and still, you know, falling for this stuff, whether it’s that we think we’re smart enough to not be fooled and so we get fooled, or there’s something else going on, but there’s a there’s a lot of usefulness in knowing this stuff so that we can look for it.

John Bejakovic: Richard Armstrong, the copywriter, he wrote a he wrote a book about con men, a novel about con men. And then to get people to read that, he had a little PDF where he was writing about, you know, the techniques of con men and how that applies to ethical persuasion. And one of the things was the very beginning of that little PDF was how con men choose their marks and or their, you know, the the target or their victims, let’s say, and one of the things that they looked for was definitely intelligence where, where? If you are not of sufficient, let’s say intelligence, you’re not going to get the opportunity. You’re not going to be interested. But the people who were sharp enough, they could immediately, kind of see what it was, and they kind of jumped to the conclusion of like, wow, there’s a really great opportunity here and and that’s why they that’s why they made, you know, good prospects or good victims for this. Another thing that I mean just about how crazy marketing can be, this is another Dan Kennedy thing. I guess Dan worked with, or he knew somebody, or maybe this, no this, I think this one back to Gary Halbert. Apparently, Gary Halbert worked with some company, I think, out of Arizona that was selling very suspicious male enhancement products, I think back in the early 2000s or something like that. And and this, I think stuff was completely hoken Like this was just complete snake oil. Eventually, this company, I think, was prosecuted by the FBI or somebody else, and not even because they were selling completely bogus products, but because of it, in tax reasons, but because of that, all of this stuff surfaced about who their customers were and what was happening. And it turned out that out of their, you know, they had a huge database of people who had clicked on a link and read that some magical powder would, you know, increase body parts by three to six inches. And it turned out that the number one category of people who are buying this were doctors and dentists, right? So that’s to say that, you know, these are people who are not only somehow pre selected to be intelligent, but they supposedly have a significant amount of professional training and tell them that there’s no way, there’s no way that this is going to work, and yet that in the privacy of their own home, that desire or that response to those triggers is so strong that it overrides the experience, it overrides the intelligence, it overrides all of that training and education and and the most, and the people who should know the best that it’s not going to work are the ones who fall for the most. I suppose,

Rob Marsh: If you’ve fallen for a con, or you find yourself, you know, easily manipulated, there is some respite, or, you know, some satisfaction in knowing that you’re probably one of the more intelligent people out there, even though you might keep doing these dumb things. So one of, one of my favorite ideas you talk about in the book is you phrase it a little bit differently, but it’s this idea of making the skeleton dance that we have bad things, you know, or some, sometimes there’s a flaw in a product. And I don’t just mean a blemish. I think the blemish effect is a little bit different from, you know, having an actual skeleton. But let’s talk a little bit about that. Why does this work? You know, when something clearly is broken, and yet we can make this skeleton dance, and it makes us still want something.

John Bejakovic: So, yeah, I think, I think it’s a few different things going on. I think, first of all, and I think these are kind of main themes that are running through this book. One is the theme of of trust, which I think is such a crucial thing in marketing and copywriting. And, you know, I think for people who might be newer to copywriting, I know that this was my reaction when I when I got into this field, when people who seem to be very experienced, they would talk about the importance of trust, and I would say, Yeah, okay, but I mean, I really need to know the headline formulas and the secret words and so on. And really, no, you know, really, it is about, how do you get how do you build sufficient trust, particularly when it’s somebody that maybe you’ve never met before, that only appeared in your, I don’t know, inbox or your Instagram feed or in your physical mailbox two minutes earlier. How do you build up that trust so that you’re willing to say, Okay, I’m willing to take the next step, and sometimes that next step means actually, you know, sending money to that person. So I think trust is one thing, and another thing is the power of the reason why, right, and just the fact the very fundamental human need, not just for proof, but for this specific kind of proof, for having a coherent understanding of like cause and effect and reason why, and making the skeleton down. Dance takes those two things and and combines them, right? So, for anybody who might not know, this idea making the skeleton dance is basically, if there’s a flaw or an objection or some sort of aspect of your offer, or you personally as the salesperson that is going to bubble up to the consciousness of your prospect. You want to raise that objection or flaw or whatever it is, you want to be the one to bring it up first, and that’s the part that that addresses trust, right? Because if you don’t, then you become suspicious, right? Because it’s something that you knew about, but you tried to hide and and for most things that are really big problems, that are the skeleton in the closet, they’re going to bubble up, right? They’re going to bubble up either before people buy or after they buy, and if they if it bubbles up after they buy, then they won’t buy anything else. And, you know, we are in the copywriting world, and we’re in the direct response world, and then direct response world things, you know, the profits are made on the back end. So if you, even if you manage to sell something to somebody once, but then, then they discover the skeleton in the closet and they feel burned, then you’ve effectively, you know, gotten a customer at break even who’s never going to buy anything from you again. So you you’re at net zero, or maybe worse off, right? So that’s one aspect of making the skeleton dance, is that trust aspect. And on the other hand, if you do bring up a negative voluntarily, then that automatically puts you on the same side of the table with your prospect, which is a powerful place to be in, because suddenly you’re in this position of collaboration and kind of playing the advisor rather than a salesperson, or some sort of a conflict of being on the other side of table. But the other aspect of it is that, you know, it’s not simply bringing out the skeleton from the closet, but it’s actually making a dance, right? And this is an idea by by this guy. What’s his name? Mar, yeah, I forget his first name, but his last name is Mark and and Barry Marsh, so Barry Mar and basically the idea is you don’t simply want to bring up a negative, but you want to make it work for you, and you want to show how some positive comes out of that negative, right? Whether it’s that the negative is a consequence of the positive or the the negative is the consequence, or the positive is the consequence of the negative. Or somehow there’s some connection, right? So that you can turn around this, this negative into actually being a proof element and into being a reason why there’s something attractive and good about your offer, right? And that’s that’s a powerful thing because of proof, but it’s also a very necessary thing, I think, for humans to simply have that awareness of like, there’s a coherent story here, and there’s a reason why this negative is here, and that’s super important.

Rob Marsh: I think my favorite example of this in the marketing world is Buckley’s cough syrup. This gets popped up quite a bit, you know, where people will say, Oh, this is a case of, you know, showing off a blemish or that kind of thing. But it’s, it’s actually more than that, because cough syrup tastes awful. You know, if you buy it thinking that you’re, you know, buying a cherry flavored cough syrup, and your cough is going to go away, you know, automatically, you can be severely disappointed with that first swallow. In fact, you may, you may, you know, throw up. I mean, it really is that nasty. And so they basically make that dance by by showing the whole reason it’s nasty is because it works like that. The ingredients that make cough syrup work do not taste good, and you can’t mask them with flavor. And that’s the whole idea here. And so the fact that it’s this terrible tasting thing is an indicator that, you know, it’s actually going to do what you’re hiring Buckley’s cough syrup to do. But we see this in all kinds of things. You know, some of the examples that use in the book. There is comedian Patrice O’Neill, who, you know, uses talks about how he’s racist in order to tell a racist joke, and gets the audience laughing along with him, which, even the way I’m talking about it probably makes some listeners feel really uncomfortable, you know, because this, these are the cultural norms that we have that say you can’t do this thing or this is unacceptable. And yet, by again, putting it out in front of the audience and making the skeleton dance, he brings an audience along along with it. So in some ways, this is one of the biggest marketing superpowers. I think that there is out there is if you can make. Or a products less than positive aspects actually be positive, then you’re a pretty good marketer, copywriter,

John Bejakovic: I think if you do that, you not only, you not only kind of take away the sting from the objection, but you, you know, in a very subtle way, you also put the burden onto the onto the downsides of any alternatives, right? Because suddenly people have nothing to, you know, their their negatives or their doubts have been taken away. And then they start thinking, Well, okay, this, this, I, you know, Rob’s offer is queen. He’s, he’s told me all the negatives, and he’s actually shown me how these are, in some way, even positives, for me, these other alternatives. So, you know, John’s, John’s solution, it sounds good on the surface, but there don’t seem to be any negatives, right? And that makes me a little bit suspicious. And, you know, somehow that same need for a reason why a coherent story makes it so that people start to spin up their own story and so that, so that they spin things in a negative way that you know works against the alternative. So I think you’re absolutely right. I think it’s, it’s very powerful thing. The only thing is that it sounds very scary, and I think a lot of people, including if you’re doing it for yourself, it’s very scary, but maybe you can will yourself to do it. If you’re doing it for a client, then it’s doubly more so that the client might just be like, Okay, that’s that might be a fine idea in theory. I definitely don’t want to run this as a campaign or as an ad, because it’s very counterintuitive to do this.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, this is something that comes up in so many areas too, you know, I think about people looking for work, you know, for jobs that may have, you know, gaps in their employment record, or, you know, things that that they would typically want to hide, and if you can surface that, say, hey, you know, yeah, I didn’t work for the last year, but that’s because I was doing this great thing that’s actually really beneficial for what I want to do next in my career, you know, though, to be able to turn those kinds of things into a positive again, I said it already. It’s a superpower, but it’s the kind of skill that, if you want to progress, if you want, you know, to we all have flaws, you know, without a doubt, and some of them are pretty big, so we have to be able to figure out a way to make those things work for us.

John Bejakovic: I can speak to this, I feel like, you know, I’ve been working as a copywriter for a while now, 10 plus years. I guess I feel like the one thing that keeps getting better, that I keep getting sharper at, is exactly this of just like, kind of running a sales argument through and then realizing, okay, well, what’s the, what’s the likely objection or or suspicion that a client or that a prospect might still have at this point, and then proactively, you know, attacking that or addressing that even before it pops up, you know? And I feel like, you know, this is ultimately kind of what the the bottom the gist of the game is, I think, like, you know, agora had that, I think copy boarding process, or whatever it was called, and all it was was like, Okay, there’s some sort of a, if you’re writing a sales letter, there’s some sort of a sexy idea to open it up that sucks you in. And then all it is is really a series of objections addressed, I mean, written in a sales letter format, but proactively thinking, what’s the next objection they’re going to have, and bringing that up yourself, and then working out why, you know that’s actually something that works in your favor. It’s not what you think, or it’s proof of something else, or whatever it is.

Rob Marsh: Do you have a favorite chapter in the book? John?

John Bejakovic: I have particular stories that I like, but I think in terms of one that I particularly find, consistently, for me, useful, I believe it’s chapter chapter eight or chapter nine, and it’s about committing to the bit, because I feel like a lot of the other chapters are very specific techniques. They’re like, Okay, here’s like a little thing that you can do, or you can, you can ask for directions, or you can, you know, make the skeleton dance. And I had to hide that chapter about committing to the bit deep into the book, because it’s much less about the specific technique. It’s ultimately about the idea of you just got to do it, or you have to be confident. But that idea of being confident is so not helpful. I feel in in many situations, if you could be confident, then people will be confident. And you you know being told to be confident doesn’t help. And so in that chapter, I had some stories where I think I took that idea of like, Okay, what does it mean to be confident? How does that actually look? How do you deal with that, even if you’re not necessarily feeling confident and and what happens if you try to be confident, it doesn’t work out, and you have, instead of getting a good reference experience of like, oh, I pretended to be confident, and it worked out, and now I’m a little bit more confident, and things are better. But what happens if you try to be confident, you act and then it flops, right? And I feel like this is super relevant in in a lot of situations, right? So if you know, just recently, I was talking to somebody about creating a course, you know, you know, some a copywriter who had decided to create his own course, and he was talking about how he felt imposter syndrome, or nervousness about about taking that next step, even though he knew the material well. I think it’s relevant for that. I think it’s very relevant if you’re talking to talking to clients, if you’re trying to get jobs. I think it’s very relevant if you have your own email list, and if you want to write emails daily. I think it’s very relevant in everyday situations. Again, in the book, I talk about, you know, pickup artists and guys who are going up to girls in clubs and trying to appear smooth and confident and having something interesting to say. I talk about hypnotists trying to hypnotize somebody and looking very authoritative and saying sleep, you know? And I’m talking about comedians who go up on stage and they have a routine that’s good, and they’ve worked through this, but unless they have an authoritative, confident delivery, the audience isn’t going to laugh right. And on the other hand, even if they have mediocre material, then the audience will still get into it, and they will laugh, right? And so there is magic. There is some magic about this charisma or some energy, except it’s not useful to me personally to hear, Oh yeah, you just gotta be cool dude, or you gotta be, like, confident, or you just gotta have charisma, or you gotta be yourself. I needed something more operational. And that’s kind of what that chapter is about. And so that’s something that I find myself thinking back to on a daily basis, squad, you know, I’m ready to quit something, or I’m ready to say I’m just not. This isn’t working. And then I remind myself of things that I’ve written. And I say, Okay, well, if I wrote this, and if other people are reading it, I should be acting on it as well.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, one of my favorite chapters is the chapter on focus, and this is something that I’ve noticed. So I think you’re like this too, but I love watching magicians, you know, do their acts, and then, you know, most people are, I think, are wowed, and then they move on. But I like to go back and re watch the acts and see if I can see where the misdirection is happening, you know, and where my focus is being, where I’m being told to move my my focus so that something else can happen in the background. Kind of ruins magic in a way, you know, when you start to see it, but it’s, it’s fascinating to me how easily all of us are directed into, you know, look, look here, or watch the light, or don’t look at that in order for something to happen behind the scenes. And I think this is one of those things where, you know, when people start thinking about, they’re like, well, marketing shouldn’t be about misdirection, which is true, it shouldn’t be, and it’s not, but directing focus on specific things that we need people to pay attention to is, again, a huge part of what we do. And some of the stories that I think you had in that chapter were pretty fascinating as well.

John Bejakovic: I don’t think I’m going to be giving away a huge insider secret here. But a long time ago, Parris Lampropoulos had this webinar series where he was sharing his kind of some of his biggest secrets. And I don’t think this was a really big secret. It was just very, very impactful to me. And Paris kept saying over and over, he said, does it help your case? Does it hurt your case, or is it neutral, right? If it hurts your case, or if it’s neutral, it goes out, right? And you only include things that help your case. And you know that chapter on focus is in many ways, let’s say, you know, the way you can apply that to marketing is specifically that thing that I mean again, in the beginning, I said that this book is about techniques, and it’s about kind of the underlying psychology or neurology. And I think the underlying neurology here is that we don’t really realize how limited our focus is and how. Very little we can actually focus on at a given moment, and then our brain stitches that together into something that feels like a coherent picture, where we feel like we’re really looking at something that looks like a poster or a photograph, but it’s really not we, you know, the our visual field is incredibly blurry, and we have about, you know, a dime’s size worth of focus is just we keep flicking around to things that are interesting. And, you know, that’s not just vision. It’s kind of how reality is. And when it comes to an opportunity or a product or a course, you know, there’s 1,000,001 things you could potentially say about it, right? And as marketers, yes, we want to be transparent, and yes, we want to make the skeleton dance, but at the same time, we also want to orchestrate some sort of like a presentation of what it is that we’re selling that paints it in the best possible light. And that means guiding people from unsold to sold, like, you know, showing them a series of mental images, or giving them a series of facts or arguments that, you know, build up a certain emotional state in their brains and and that get them to say, Okay, this is, this is something that is good For me, right? And again, you know, this is something that all copywriters who reach a certain level of success keep repeating, but that means you want to work with good clients, right? Because you can, you can do. You can paint that series of pictures for crap products. You know, again, it really won’t probably work long term for you or your client, you can, you can make a large money grab quickly, but it’s not a sustainable business. And there are enough people out there with good products that that you really can sell stuff that is worthwhile, but the way you sell it is exactly this. You know, Paris is thing of, does it help my case. And you know, magicians do the exact same thing, where they get you to look exactly where they want you to look, and they build up this story in your mind, where the conclusion is, this is magic, and something magical just happened. And I agree with you. I watch those videos a lot, and I love watching them. And in a way, it spoils the magic trick when I know it, but it also like the next, next magic trick, I’m just as much of a sucker for it, and I get just as much, like, satisfaction and joy. Like I feel like nothing puts me into that state of mind of, like, being like a kid again, like watching a magic trick because I’m genuinely, like, amazed. I feel like I I follow again. I’m such a patsy, and I follow exactly what the magicians want me to do. And I really get into that state. And I just get an absolute thrill out of something magical happening and something disappearing when it shouldn’t have disappeared, and something appearing when it shouldn’t have appeared, and things change in color and so on. So even though I know some of the tricks, now, I’m not a magician, and I never really studied this stuff, but even though I know some of the tricks, I still fall for it every time.

Rob Marsh: What’s really frustrating is you could watch a magician do a trick. You can figure it out. You can see where the misdirection is happening, or where somebody forces a choice, you know, in order to make sure that the right card or puzzle piece or whatever gets selected. And then you watch a similar trick by maybe a different magician, and you can’t, like, I can’t see where the misdirection is happening, right. Or I can’t see where the person moves off stage to appear, you know, in a different suit, you know, in 10 seconds. Or like, and so, you know, it’s like, I know how this trick should be working, but I still, no matter how many times I watch it, I can’t figure out how the magician is pulling it off. And and you’re right, it’s, it’s still magical, and it still tickles my brain in a way. That’s, it’s really pleasurable to watch.

John Bejakovic: That brought to mind. I have a quote in the book from Gary Benson Vanga, where he says, the only power we have as marketers is to anticipate what people are going to think and, you know, for magic, or for any of these other disciplines, it’s the same. It’s like, kind of the, you know, the market, let’s say, or the audience moves on and becomes more sophisticated, and then it’s the magicians or the copywriters, or, I don’t know, the pickup artists role, to say, Okay, now that the market has moved on, how do I adapt to that, and how do I integrate what they now know into what what I’m doing? And I think there was this famous story of of a magician. I think it was di Vernon who so Harry Houdini, who I have in the book, Harry Houdini had this thing where I think he had a challenge. I think it was maybe like, okay, $100 if you can come and have a magic trick, the fools Harry Houdini. Houdini was, of course, a magician. He became. Am known as an escape artist, but he started his career, and he ended his career as a magician and and he was also, you know, very fond of these challenges, and he was very fond of debunking other magicians, and kind of position, positioning himself as the guy at the top of the pyramid who was so good he could even give tricks away, because, you know, it was a way of of putting other people beneath him. Well, the one guy who managed to fool Harry Houdini was di Vernon. And again, I’m not a magician, so I don’t even really know what the trick was. It was a card trick. All I really know is that it was a trick where I think, like, maybe it was like a way of putting an ace into the middle of the deck and having it pop back up to being the top cart. And I think one of Houdini’s conditions was show me the trick three times, and I’ll figure out how you do it right. And guy Vernon showed him the trick three times. It was the same trick each time in the in terms of the card popping up to the top, and Harry Houdini couldn’t figure it out. And the reason was that each time, Dai Vernon used a different technique to do it, so it was the same end result. But he knew that okay, if he repeated kind of the same thing, Houdini was probably looking for that, even though, you know, it all looked very much the same every time. But it looked, you know, it looked pretty much the same, but Houdini would have probably figured out had die Vernon done the same thing three times. He got the same effect, though, by doing three different techniques. And that’s how he managed to fool Harry Houdini and that kind of, again, goes back to, you know, the same thing about knowing these tricks and then still falling for them, right? So that ultimately, people still laugh at jokes, even though the tricks of comedians are kind of well known. You exaggerate. You, you know, have triplets, you, you know, you make fun of some sort of a group, or you make fun of yourself those you know, all of these things are well known, yet people go to comedy clubs and they laugh, right? Or people know that, yeah, you know, there’s a certain format to a headline, and you throw in some testimonials, and you have free shipping. And people are gonna, you know, react to that and buy to that, even though it’s well known. And so somehow, you know these, these ideas and these tricks and the underlying psychology there’s, there seems to be infinite permutations, and you can apply them over and over and over.

Rob Marsh: A related idea that you bring up in the book. It’s almost the opposite idea, and that is that you can’t always tell people exactly where to look or what to do. Sometimes you have to let them come up with the idea themselves. And I don’t remember what the title of the chapter is, but one of the examples you use is when Ronald Reagan is running against Jimmy Carter in the presidential election. And, you know, he finishes up this debate with his final pitch. It’s just a few days before the election, and he could have said things like, you know, inflation is, you know, X percent out of control. We’ve had these long gas lines. You know, Carter told us all to turn down the thermostat like he could have pointed it at a bunch of things that people knew were going on, but he didn’t do that. He basically let people come to their own conclusion by simply asking, Are you better off today than you were four years ago? Which naturally lets people think all of these things that are going on without being told them by somebody who they would then react and say, well, he’s just saying that because he’s a politician, or, you know, whatever reason. And so in some cases, you want to direct attention, and in other ways, or in other cases, you want to be able to be a little bit more open. And, you know, obviously he’s, he’s guiding your thoughts. He’s taking you back to to where we were four years ago and to where we are today. He’s inviting a comparison, but he wants you to bring the data to the argument, and again, related idea, but almost the opposite.

John Bejakovic: Yeah, I’m glad you bring that up, because I guess the first podcast, I kind of like hinted at this book, and then two years later, the book is out. And then the next book I want to write is exactly on this idea of, like, how do you get people to have a certain idea and feel like it’s their own? And yeah, absolutely. What Reagan was doing was, I mean, this is another one of the currents that’s running through the book, is that none of us likes to feel manipulated, none of us likes to feel bullied, none of us likes to be told what to do. I mean, there is a certain point at which we come to trust somebody sufficiently, and we put ourselves into somebody else’s hands, whether that’s a leader who we kind of trust them to guide us to the new place. We. Or it’s somebody like a hypnotist, you know, we say, okay, just tell me what, what I should be doing, right? Or a therapist, or somebody like that. But in a normal day to day situation, there’s this prickliness, right? There’s this reactance, where as soon as we feel that somebody’s telling us something, or a natural reaction is to say, yeah, actually, but, and then to argue for the other end, right? And so what Reagan was doing is absolutely like you said. He it was, it was a very tricky thing, just basically rephrasing things in terms of a question and saying, you know, are you better off? Right? Do you feel more secure? Do you feel our country is more respected today. Do you feel that you can get more for your money than you could? And of course, he wasn’t. This wasn’t a disinterested, you know, completely Socratic dialog, or, you know, where he was really inviting people to discover things for themselves. He was guiding them to a very specific kind of outcome, but the way he was doing it was so that he eliminated or minimized that reactance, right? So that people could say, well, he brings up a valid point, even though he’s not really telling me about it. But you know, that thing he asked about, am I better off now? Now that I think about it, I’m really not, but had, you know, had he said basically the same thing, but simply just turned it into a statement, instead of asking it as a question, it probably would have, you know, gotten people’s hackles up, but, but, yeah, I think that in marketing, you know, marketing is not psychoanalysis, where we really want to guide people to discover things completely on their own. So we do want to guide them to a certain kind of conclusion. But the question is, how do we do that in a way where they have the feeling like it was their own discovery, or that they feel ownership of the idea, or they don’t feel that resistance and reactance that we all normally feel when we feel that somebody’s trying to tell us something, or trying to get us to do do something, or trying to command us, right? So questions are definitely a very, very effective and very subtle and very simple way to do that.

Rob Marsh: I feel like we could keep going on, but I want to leave something for people to actually, you know, find in the book themselves. It’s like, I said, it’s a great book. It’s relatively short. It’s about 150 pages, very easy to read. It’s loaded with stories, in fact, as you go through your learning principles, but it’s not textbook. Ask, you know where it’s like, Hey, here’s a principle, and this is how I’m going to show it to you. You you discover it through all the stories that you’re telling, which is its own kind of genius, I think, in its own persuasion technique. So John, tell us where we can get the book, and you know where we can follow you if we want to get that next book about, yeah, how do we, how do we persuade people and let them come to the belief that they’re doing it on their own and and we won’t, hopefully have to wait two years for that one?

John Bejakovic: Yeah. So the book basically is available on Amazon. If you go on Amazon and and look for 10 Commandments of con men, or if you just type in my name, the book will come up. It’s got that charming black cover. Was only the text on there, so it’s very noticeable. And if you want to read more stuff like that, because I’m writing these daily emails, and often I’m writing about the same kind of persuasion and influence stuff, including about, you know that topic of, how do you get people to have that idea on their own? Then it’s just go to my, my personal website, which was my last name.com, Bucha, which.com and and then you can sign up. Or you can, I have a an archive of 2000 plus emails. So if you don’t want to sign up, you can read, read the archive, or if you want to sign up, then you get on the list. And my emails arrive every night, so you can, you can see if you like them.

Rob Marsh: It’s one of the few daily emails I really look forward to. You know? What you share usually leaves me thinking of something that I hadn’t thought of before, and even, even when I have thought about it before, it’s usually a new take or a new way of looking at it. And so yeah, sign up for John’s emails. Get the book. It’s definitely worth reading. You kindly mentioned me at one point in in the acknowledgements. So thank you for that. But again, fantastic book. Highly recommend it. It belongs alongside, you know, Cialdini influence and all of those other books that we read about persuasion is it’s a lot of fun. So yeah, go grab that. Thanks John for for sharing.

John Bejakovic: I appreciate it, Rob, thank you for the opportunity. And thank you again that you said you’re in the acknowledgements, and that’s because I. Um, you know, you helped me edit this book and get it out. And you had some, some great feedback that I integrated into the book. So you helped me make it what it was in the end.

Rob Marsh: Well, it’s, it’s 99.99% John. And you know, I might have fixed a comma or two, but, yeah, it’s, it’s a good book worth reading. Thank you, John.

Rob Marsh: Thanks John for talking through many of the ideas in this book. I’ve linked to it at the top of the shownotes so you can easily find the link to the book on Amazon. If you’re listening using a podcast app, that link should be in the description so you can just click it there. Or you can find it at thecopywriterclub.com/podcast. I don’t get a commission for recommending it, I just think it’s the kind of book that will help just about everyone be a better writer and marketer.

Some of you may have heard me share on a previous episode that I teach a college class on marketing. A couple of weeks ago, after a class on the way the media and many marketers use these technique to manipulate their audiences, a student came up to me afterwards and told me this whole topic was making her rethink her career in marketing. Maybe this topic does the same for you.

I told her that it should actually be the opposite. That marketing needs more people who are bothered by manipulative tactics to help make sure we use persuasion and psychology to help our customers, not take advantage of them. Just because a tactic can be used unethically, doesn’t mean we can’t use it ethically. If that were the rule, we’d have to shut down the entire internet. And publishing industry. Let alone activities like public speaking, acting, broadcasting and more.

By learning these principles, you can help make sure the companies you work for always use them to do good instead of bad.

Don’t forget to check out the How to Write Emotional Copy Masterclass at thecopywriterclub.com/emotion

Stuff to check out:

The Copywriter Club Youtube Channel
The Finding Clients Ignition Kit
The P7 Client Acquisition System
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: How do you find new or better clients? Here are 21 different ideas you might want to try. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

This episode of the podcast is going to be different from any episode I’ve done recently… in fact, in more than 450 different episodes, I can’t remember ever having an episode where not only did I not have a guest, but also didn’t have a co-host or someone else to chat with and bounce ideas around with. So in a sense, we’re making Copywriter Club history right now.

But we’re not covering a new topic. In fact, we’ve talked about finding clients on almost every interview we’ve conducted with copywriters over the last eight years. And my guests have shared a ton of great ideas for finding clients. At some point in the future, I’d love to create a supercut of all the ideas we’ve shared over the years… but that would be dozens of hours long and it’s not at the top of my to-do list at the moment.

However, on this episode, I’m going to share 21 different ideas, actually it will probably be more, 21 different ideas for ways to find clients. Not all of them will work for you. But I promise, if you stick around to the end of this episode, you’ll find at least one and probably five or six ideas that WILL work for you and that you can start using right now.

I’m also going to share some advice… the dos and don’ts of reaching out to clients—some of the things you need to do first and what you absolutely can’t afford to do.

If this topic appeals to you, I’ve got a couple of resources for you. The first is The Copywriter Club Youtube channel. I’ve posted several videos there about finding clients, pitching clients, the questions to ask to attract clients and more. Those videos are relatively short and will help you improve your outreach process so be sure to check them out.

And I’ve put together a mini offer I’m calling the Client Finding Ignition Kit. It includes a 36 page report that covers what I’m talking about in this episode at more depth, and also includes three different workshops on finding clients. One focuses on Upwork and other online marketplaces, another is all about what’s working on LinkedIn, and the third is all about what to do if you need to find clients right now. And it also includes a one-time coaching call to talk about your approach and your pitch to make sure it will work. If you want that, go to thecopywriterclub.com/ignition

Finally, I won’t go through all the stuff it includes, but there are a ton of resources in The Copywriter Underground to help you find, pitch, and land clients. If you want to find a full-time job, there’s a workshop all about that. If you want to improve your discovery calls, there’s a workshop and playbook all about that. If you want to go deep on what’s working on LinkedIn, Upwork, and several other places to find clients, there are resources for all of those too. And that’s on top of all the other workshops, coaching, community, lead sharing and more… that’s all available at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu-2.

Before I jump into that first idea, though, I want to just talk about a couple of things that are really important to keep in mind before you start finding clients. The first idea is that you do not have a business without clients. This is the thing that we do. We write copy. But if we’re not writing copy for a client who’s paying us to do it, we don’t actually have a business. We’re just doing this thing. So whether you have one client you spend all of your time on, or you have 19 or 20 clients, you’re writing small things for over the course of the month, someone has to pay the bill. Someone has to pay you for this skill that you have, and if you don’t have clients, that’s the very first thing that you need to do. So don’t spend any time getting ready in your business.

And by that, I mean don’t spend any time building a website. Don’t think about even building a portfolio. You don’t have to worry about having a social media presence. You don’t even need a LinkedIn page or anything like that. What you need is a client. And so I want you to go out there and land that first client. Now there’s some things that you’re going to have to do in order to do that. We’ll talk about these in a minute, but I want you to land that first client, and then once you’ve had that client, you’ve done. The assignment. You’ve created a piece of copy, you’ve solved a problem for them. You’re going to do it again. You’re going to find a second client, and you’re going to do the same exact thing before you do your website, before you have a LinkedIn page, before you have social media presence, you can go out and find the second client. You’re going to solve a problem for them, and then the third time, you’re going to find a third client, and you’re going to solve a problem for them, probably writing copy or the thing that you want to do. And once you’ve done that three times, once you’ve acquired and proven that you can find clients, that’s when you’re going to back up and say, Okay, I’m going to get my business assets ready. So it’s going to make it easier for me to find the next client.

In order to do that, you need to do a couple of things. First, you need to identify who you serve. There are so many ways to look at this, and mostly we think about this as choosing a niche. I help people in the health and wellness niche, or I write copy for finance companies, or I help Coaches find clients, right? We talk about this generally by industry, the industry that we work on, but there are so many different other ways to think about niching as well. You can niche by the type of client that you work with. Let’s say that you like working with enterprise level clients or mom and pops or startups that have gone through their second round of funding. Lots of different ways to cut this so that you’re working with a certain kind of client, but if you you know, help mom and pops solve their marketing problems, or help them solve their email sequence problems, or whatever. The thing is, you can do that for mom and pops across many industries, or you can do that for a variety of different clients across all kinds of other ways that we think about niching.

Another way that you can be thinking about this is the problem that you solve. So if you are a copywriter who helps businesses or memberships reduce churn, or helps a SaaS company reduce the churn on their monthly signups. You could you’re basically identifying that problem reducing churn, right? Or maybe you’re the problem you solve is onboarding customers into different kinds of programs or software. Maybe the problem that you are solving for people is acquisition, customer acquisition, Facebook ads, those kinds of things. So there are lots of different ways to look at marketing problems. In fact, there are so many marketing problems always copywriters can solve.

We put together a list of more than 30 different marketing problems and included it with our P7 Client Acquisition Program. I didn’t talk about that at the beginning of the show, but if you want more information about that, you can find it at thecopywriterclub.com/p7 there’s this massive list of problems that you as a copywriter or a content writer as a marketer can solve for your clients. Oftentimes it will involve writing copy or writing content, but sometimes these problems are attached to the things that we do, and we can think a little bit bigger about the problems that we’re helping our clients solve.

Another way to think about who you serve is the voice of the style that you write in. There are certain clients who want a particular voice or style, and if you can capture that and talk about that in a way that attracts them again. It’s another way to niche your business. You could also help businesses at different stages. So you know, whether they are a startup, whether they are in a later stage of development. You know small to medium size or medium to large size businesses, the different stages that a business goes through, comes with additional problems that they need to solve, and additional opportunities where you can step in and help.

Another way to think about this is the deliverable you create. Maybe you are the only person who writes welcome sequences for your clients, or you help them solve a problem with creating weekly regular content that drives traffic to a variety of products, whether that’s on their blog or elsewhere online. Maybe you help with social media and the deliverables there are related to the platform where you’re posting. So there’s lots of different ways to think about who it is that you serve, but after you have found those first three clients, what are the things that those clients have in common, and is there something that can indicate who it is that you are able to help right now that doesn’t have to stay static. You can change this over time, but when you’re just getting started, or when you’re looking for clients, you want to be looking at some of the clients that you’ve already worked with. What do they have in common? Because you know, you can help them, and you should be able to find more people like them.

You also want to be able to identify the problem that you’re solving. So we’ve talked a little bit about that as we’re talking about niching, but the more you know about the problem you solve, the better. You can talk about it, the better that you can bring it forward so that people can identify, oh yeah, this is the person to talk to if you need help with that. That will help you as you reach out to potential clients, and later on, as they reach back to you to help identify the thing that you do for them, you also have to be able to talk about the value that you deliver. So oftentimes, as copywriters, we talk about the thing we do. Yes, I write blog posts for small businesses, or I write sales pages for health and wellness companies, or I write welcome sequences for coaches and course sellers. But that’s not really the value. That’s oftentimes what clients come to us, asking us for hey, I need blog posts, or I need a sales page, or I need a welcome sequence. But the real value is the thing that those assets get for our clients, and so it might be authority, it might be attention, it might be additional traffic. It’s almost always also going to include revenue and sales and the ability to continue to do this, because your client is actually making money, but identifying the value of the thing really matters for talking about it. And as we go through all the ideas I’m about to share here, you need to be able to talk about that value that you bring. It’s not just a blog post, but it is authority building content that’s going to help you connect with your clients. It’s going to help bring additional sales. It’s going to get you out into the world in front of new audiences, all of the kinds of things, the what you do has value, and we’ve got to be able to talk about it a couple more things to think about when you’re reaching out to clients is we want to remove as much risk as possible for clients. So a lot of clients have worked with copywriters in the past who disappeared on them, who didn’t deliver what they promised, who missed deadlines, who allowed scope creep to happen, and so what they got was not exactly what they wanted or what they needed. And because of that, a lot of clients look at working with copywriters and other freelancers as risky.

They don’t know that if they cut you that first check before you start working, that you’re actually going to deliver on what you promise. And so if you can remove the risk for those clients in order for them to see that it’s not just low risk, but they’re not going to lose you need to do that. And of course, there are different ways to do this. One the best way is probably to offer a guarantee. We usually say we don’t guarantee copy, because you can’t guarantee the performance of the copy that you write, because it’s based on so many different variables, whether they’re going to show it to the right audience, whether they’re going to be running traffic to it, whether the ad is actually going to be talking to the right people, bringing the right people to your copy. But guarantees are a really easy way for us to say, hey, yeah, we will remove the risk, or I will continue working with you until we get this thing working for you, so that we are delivering on our promise.

Other ways to remove the risk is to show testimonials, to show case studies, to show that you know how to do this, that you’ve done it before, to show examples of the work that you can do, so that your client can envision, that they can see you actually do the thing that you promise to do, having a framework or a process that you work through that is consistent and delivers a proven result, and being able to talk about that with your client another way to remove the risk. Again, there’s so many ways to do this, but you’ve got to make it easy, ultimately, for your client to say yes, and part of that is removing the risk. Other parts are make that buying process easy. Sign up for stripe or wave app or something that allows them to easily charge a credit card or to click the button, say yes. If you make that process of working with you, signing a bunch of forms, getting all of the materials that you need in order to get started, if you make that difficult, if you make that, you know, increase the friction there, and make it really hard for clients to say yes, then they will say no. We need to make it easy for them say yes. And so all of those things that we can do on the front end matter. But back to my original point here, don’t wait to start reaching out to clients until you have those things in place. You need to find clients first. The you don’t have a business unless you’ve got paying clients, and until you’ve got two or three paying clients, you really haven’t proven you can do this over and over.

Okay, having said all of that, let’s talk about some of the ways that you can actually get out there and find clients. And the number one is something we’ve talked about a lot on the podcast, but that is networking. Everyone has a network. Your network includes. It’s everyone from your parents and your siblings, your friends, the people you went to high school with or college with, teachers, professors, the person who works at the coffee shop that you see you know, the different professionals that you might work with, if you’ve got a masseuse or you work with an attorney or a bookkeeper, work acquaintances, neighbors, even people in line at the grocery store, the folks at the dog park, anybody that you run into during your daily life, people at the gym, people at church, people at your coworking space, former coworkers or bosses or supervisors, anyone that you meet and interact with. These people are in your network, and many of them want to help you succeed. And so your first step, as you are thinking about who is in your network and who you can reach out to, is make a list of these people there.

My guess is that as you start this out, you can find at least 25 but it might be more like 150 or 200 people who are in your network, loose affiliations or connections, relationships that you have with these people that you might be able to reach out to and let them know what you do, the problem you solve, and who you solve it for. There are all kinds of different ways. So again, we’ve talked about this on the podcast, but I’ve talked with copywriters who landed clients you know, talking to people at the laundromat, people who you bump into at the store, people who have a conversation with at a cocktail party. All of these people are potential clients, and as long as you can direct the conversation to their problems, the problems that you help them solve, and how you do that anybody in your network could help you. It’s not just about asking the people in your network if they have work for you, but also asking them if they know somebody. So if you have 100 people in your network, and each of them has another 100 people in their network, well now we’re talking to as many as 10,000 people, and that’s more than enough connections to start a very successful business, if you get all of your ducks in a row, and if you’re able to talk about that problem you solve, who you solve it for, and are able to deliver on those promises. So get out there. Tell everyone that you meet, what you do, the problem you solve, and who you solve it for, because your network is the number one way for you to find and connect with clients.

Number two is to find clients on Facebook or in Instagram or in other groups. There are groups on LinkedIn. There are dozens of groups now popping up in places like telegram and slack, and you know, all these other tools that we have for connecting with each other. But what you want to do is you’re not just going to show up in a Facebook group and start spamming all of the members. You’re not going to be DMing everybody. You want to show up and demonstrate your expertise, your focus, by commenting when people ask for help in a Facebook post or in a LinkedIn post, or even content that they’re posting elsewhere.

We can do this in a couple of different ways. So not only is there the content that you’re going to comment on and show that you can think deeply about the problems or the questions that they’re asking. But there are also groups where people collect and so if you happen to work with, say, software developers and help them create website copy in order to sell their products, well, join a few groups for software developers. Open up Facebook and search for software developer, and you’re going to see the groups that cater to those people join the group and then start commenting on the content that’s in there. Like I said, Don’t be DMing and pitching outright, but demonstrate your ability to solve problems, your ability to think strategically about the questions that are being asked. Propose ideas for free, share the different things that you would do, and people will start to notice and even recommend you as the expert. Idea number three, you’re going to be looking for clients in online job marketplaces. So usually when we talk about this, we’re thinking about things like Upwork or Craigslist or any of the other marketplaces that are out there.

Now there are some trade offs in this, and that is that there are 1000s of other writers on these forums fighting tooth and nail for the exact same projects that you want, and many of them are going to be charging less than what you can afford to charge. That’s okay, that that they’re there, because what the marketplace helps you do is what we’ve been talking about already. Focus on the client you serve, the problem you solve, and how you do it. And if you get the Upwork workshop that I mentioned in the ignition kit at the top of the show, we’ll show you how to create the. Type of profile that will stand out, and how to use the search features in those marketplaces in order to connect with the people that you could work with.

There are a couple of rules of you know to follow as your their rules of thumb number one, ignore the beginner projects. Even if you are a beginning copywriter, you want to be looking at intermediate and expert projects, just because you don’t want to be competing for those $5 type projects, but you need to have a profile that helps you stand out. And so there’s work to be done there. We’ve talked about this on the podcast in the past, so you can go way, way back to Episode 19, where we talked about Upwork with Danny Margulis. We talked about it on episode 315 with Rob Perry, if you want to check that one out as well. And of course, I mentioned that there’s the workshop in the Ignition Kit and The Copywriter Underground, if you want to see exactly how to attract clients on job boards like or job marketplaces like Upwork.

Idea number four is looking for gigs on job boards. So there are literally hundreds of these out there. I can name off just a few flex jobs, remote of IO, let’s work remotely. There are other copy writing boards on Facebook, things like cult of copy, contently, skyward. Some of these may have been acquired by other job boards. They change over time. You can use LinkedIn for this. There are other job sites as well, ladders, lensa, again, there’s so many out there, and most of the stuff that you’re going to see posted on these job boards is not going to be a fit for what you do, but you want to keep an idea out, or, sorry, an eye out for the opportunities that might be applicable to what you do, and you want to figure out a way to respond to those posts so that you stand out from all of the others.

Now a job posting on LinkedIn will oftentimes receive 100 200 maybe even more, applicants to a job. I was just talking to somebody earlier this week about a job posting that they posted, and they had 1400 respondents to it. And so you definitely need to figure out a way to stand out when you’re going to be competing with other writers on job boards. But job boards are really good at collecting the various jobs that are out there, and if you can find a couple of really good ones, you’ll have two or three different jobs every single day that you can consider and possibly respond to. Oftentimes they are full time jobs or part time jobs, but there are contract and freelance jobs out there as well.

So job boards can be a great place for you to find clients. I mentioned LinkedIn earlier, but number five way to find clients is looking on LinkedIn. Now this can be a longer term strategy, but by posting content on LinkedIn, and by having a completed profile that tells people exactly who you help and what you do, the problem that you solve, the value that you bring to your client. Once you do that, now you can use LinkedIn to search. So that’s certainly one way to do it. You know, go to the Jobs tab search for freelance copywriter or contract copywriter or sales copywriter, or any of the words that are related to the kinds of work that you want to do. You can add a location filter if you only want to look for jobs, say in the United States or maybe in Atlanta or maybe in Texas, or however you want to filter those out, and then you will see things that are there. You do need to be a little bit careful. There are a lot of fake jobs out there. There are content farms that, you know, post jobs that are looking for cheap help. And so you do need to put a little due diligence into this. But you can find good opportunities on LinkedIn. There are lots of them.

And like I said earlier, you just need to figure out a way when you respond, a way to make you stand out. You’re not just responding with a hey, I’m interested, and here’s my resume. You really do have to stand out from the hundreds of other people that are out there while we’re talking about LinkedIn. Also, you can cold pitch prospects on LinkedIn. So as you connect with people or follow people on LinkedIn and comment on their work and see the content that they post, you start to see opportunities that you might be able to help with. And so you can use the DMS on LinkedIn in order to reach out to potential clients as well, and if you’ve got a decent template for that, that can, you know, speed things up.

As far as making that connection, we talk a lot about how to connect, how to warm up cold leads in that client acquisition system, the p7 client acquisition system I mentioned briefly, and you can find out more about that at the copyrighted club.com, forward slash p7 Is all about how to warm up somebody from cold or from a loose connection to somebody who is really interested in working with you, and it’s all because you write what I call a love note pitch. So you can find out more about that, but look for five to 10 people in your niche on LinkedIn, the exact person that you can help and send a connection request. And then, you know, follow up with them as they post content. Post your own comments on that, not just Hey, nice, nice work or good idea here, but really substantive, thoughtful comments so they start to see you. And then when the time is right, you can reach out with a direct message offering to help with whatever problem that they have.

Idea number seven for finding clients is using social media. So again, there’s nothing new here. If you’re posting content on Instagram or on LinkedIn or any of the other social media channels you’re you’re basically doing the right thing. But you don’t just want to be talking about copywriting, because potential clients don’t really want to learn how to be copywriters. They want a copywriter who’s going to handle that stuff for them. So you want to be posting about the problems that you solve. You’re going to want to share case studies and testimonials and talk about the work that you do. You’re going to want to talk about your process and how effective it is. Post about exactly how you solved a problem for your last client. And of course, be sure to respond to the comments that you get that your prospects might be leaving on your content if they’ve interacted with you a few times, reach out with a DM or an email, let them know exactly how you could help solve a similar problem, and obviously we’ve been talking about doing that in various different ways, but social media can be a great place to find clients. If you’re into the kind of content that you want to post on social media doesn’t have to be there. Again. We’ve got a lot more ideas to go through here now.

Idea number eight is to start your own group, especially for your prospects. So this isn’t what I would call a beginner level strategy, but if you are an experienced copywriter, this strategy can create a steady stream of clients that literally could last for years. As the leader of a group, you are collating a bunch of potential clients that need your experience and expertise, and as the thought leader in the connector, the person who is connecting people in the group, you’re able to show up as the expert and become the natural person that they want to reach out to. So you can create a group in all kinds of places, Facebook, LinkedIn, Discord, Slack circle, again, so many different places to do this. But the key here isn’t to create a group for copywriters or for content writers. You want to target the people in your niche. You want to choose a name that makes it easy for your prospects to see that that’s the place where they can connect with people like them and hear your expertise. So if I were going to create a group for coaches, I would choose a name like the coach marketing group or something like that, where people are easily able to see the value that might be in that group from the name, and then, of course, once they see that, they’ll want to join.

Idea number nine is finding clients by cold emailing so much like cold calling or reaching out via DM on Facebook or LinkedIn, you can find emails of potential clients and reach out to them directly. Hunter IO is a tool that’s fantastic for this. I think there’s a free option with hunter that you can get something like 20 or 25 different emails a month for free. But when you’re looking for these clients to reach out to, you know, listen to for podcast interviews, or look for posts on their blogs or or look for the movers and shakers in the industry or the niche that you serve, and reach out directly. Don’t use standard cold email templates that you get from someone else. You’re going to want to customize it. You’re going to want to write, basically, again, what I call a love note pitch and send that to them in order to warm them up.

But there’s just so many different ways to identify these people, and email is a great method for reaching out to potential clients related to that is idea number 10, and that is finding your next client by snail mailing. So good old fashioned show up in the mailbox with some paper or with something that is so different. Now, one of the things I love about this idea is that you are virtually guaranteed to be the only copywriter or the only content writer or the only marketer showing up in that place. Unfortunately, with cold pitching and email, there are probably going to be, certainly, within a week, three or four others that may be doing the. Same thing. But if you’re willing to pay for an envelope and a stamp and write a letter, you can actually show up where nobody else is and where people are actually looking for something besides credit card mailers and card stacks and newspaper deals that all go straight to the recycle bin. They’re looking for some kind of one to one contact, and if you can be the person that creates that for them. You can create a really good connection where nobody else is, and like I said, that’s their home. You can actually do something even more creative, if you want to create something that we would call a shock and awe mailer. That’s a term that I’ve borrowed from Dan Kennedy, but this is where, instead of just sending a letter and a standard envelope, you’re going to get a larger envelope. You’re probably going to put inside it some samples, sales materials. If you have a book, you can put a book in there, you know, some kind of tchotchke or something that makes it lumpy, because people, once they receive this because, you know, it’s in a colored envelope, or it’s in a big envelope, or a FedEx envelope, something like that. It’s different. It’s unique, and it can really stand out. Something as simple as a greeting card can also stand out because people like that. Personalized one on one, one copywriter that I know did this with a newsletter and created a newsletter identified 200 different people that they would mail this four page newsletter out to, and over the course of three or four months, sending out to these 200 potential clients with just advice, the sales material, you know, all of the different ways to solve the problems that they had filled his entire client roster, and he has gone on to make more than a million dollars a year, and that is a true million dollars. Fantastic way just to get in front of your ideal clients where nobody else is.

Idea number 11 is to connect with fellow copywriters. So I’ve mentioned this even recently on the podcast, but if you can reach out to other copywriters who know you know the work that you do, and you know you staying in touch with them when they get leads that they perhaps can’t work on because maybe they’ve got too much work, or it’s not a fit for them because it’s not the right niche, or some other thing, they can often pass them on to you, and obviously you can do the same for them, but this is a little bit of a long term strategy. You’ve got to do the groundwork, you’ve got to create a relationship and build trust with these other copywriters in order for that to happen. So you’ll be reaching out to them in places like social media or LinkedIn or at conferences, masterminds and in person events, so that you can get to know each other and trust each other, so that you’re willing to share those kinds of leads and relationships. I mentioned this, I think, in last week’s podcast, but copywriter I know passed my name on to somebody she had been working with but didn’t have time to help that person ended up doing three or four projects with me. They passed me on to a project manager who did another three or four projects with me. It was almost six figures worth of work over time, and that was all through one friendship made in one group, when I connected with a fellow copywriter. And I’ve done that over and over with a variety of copywriters over the past 10 years or so.

Idea number 12 is to build partnerships with content agencies or marketing agencies, SEO agencies, design firms, anybody who might need copy but maybe doesn’t have their own copywriter on staff. This is a tactic that can result in work and a full roster really, really quickly, because a lot of agencies, when they get too much work for their internal team, they need resources that they can reach out to. And so if you can become the freelancer for a an agency that they’re turning over their extra work to, they can do their overflow and hand that off to you. That’s a really valuable service for them, and that’s a great way for you to find work without having to pitch a variety of different clients. Now if you do this, oftentimes, you might need to have an agency rate, because agencies are going to mark up your work and pass it on to their clients. So this probably won’t matter a whole lot. If you’re charging, say, 50 or $75 an hour, agencies will generally market up considerably more than that. But if you’re charging, you know, 150 $200 an hour, you may need to reduce what you charge to something like 70% of that so that the agency can mark it up 30% and, you know, pass it on. But because you’re not doing the work of finding clients, you’re not even doing a lot of client management work, trading that small percentage off of what you normally would get paid can often be very worth it. So reaching out to agencies can be a great place to find clients.

Idea number 13 is hobnobbing with clients. Conferences and events. So again, this is a really good way to establish relationships, face to face and build trust, where a lot of other copywriters are not going to be too many copywriters are there in social media, or they’re showing up in the DMS, or they’re pitching in the inbox, but very few actually show up to industry events for their clients. Now I’m not necessarily talking about showing up at events for copywriters or for marketers, so this might not be,
you know, a Content Marketing World, or, you know, those that kind of an event. But if you serve a niche that has industry events, and most industries have events. Let’s say that you work with attorneys. You might want to show up at, you know, an event or an expo for attorneys or for whoever it is that you serve, and a couple of things that you may want to do, because you are the only copywriter there. But you need to make sure that everybody knows that you are a copywriter who works with the people at that event, and so you may want to wear a t shirt with the word copywriter on the back, just so people can see them. If there is an opportunity during any of the presentations to ask questions, you might want to step up to the microphone and say, hey, you know, my name is Rob. I’m a copywriter who works with you know whoever is there at that event, name, you know the the person that you help. So, you know, coaches, attorneys, whoever that is, and then ask your question. So everybody in the room is focused on you, saying you’re a copywriter. You work with people like them, and then you’re going to ask a smart, strategic question. And they know that you’re, you know, a thinker and able to help them. Other copywriters I know, who’ve gone to events have printed out stickers with their business and logo and handed them out. They’ve, you know, my friend, Joel, he did this at an event, and he offered prizes to event attendees who shared photos of the stickers on social media. And so they were posting them on all kinds of places, you know, even sticking them to walls, and maybe some places where stickers don’t belong, but it’s a good way to get your name passed around. Get Noticed. If you’re using the event hashtag, you can see stuff like that. And of course, you can always hand out things like notebooks or pens or give out different things that remind people that you’re there while you’re at the event. Being at an event and being the only copywriter there, whether it’s in your own city, whether it’s somewhere nearby, is a really good way to connect with clients that I promise other copywriters aren’t going to miss out on.

Idea number 14 is using online ads. So again, this is not a beginner strategy, but if you’ve got a proven offer that clients respond to, you could post ads in places like Facebook or Google. It’s becoming more and more popular to run ads on YouTube, even Reddit does ads. Now you can run ads on LinkedIn, Twitter, Tiktok, Pinterest, Amazon, there’s so many different places, so find the place where your audience is set a daily budget doesn’t have to be a whole lot. Could be 10 to $20 a day, and have an ad that’s going to either introduce a lead magnet so that you can be start emailing and connecting with these people or advertise your offer and your service. We recorded a podcast a few weeks ago with Tara Zirker about this. If you want to check out what you can do with ads, that might be a great way just to follow up and take some action on that I did.

Number 15 is connecting with marketing consultants who have related services, so like the agency strategy SEO consultants or sales funnel consultants, email system consultants or ESP, like, there’s so many different marketing consultants who don’t write copy, but oftentimes they Need copy to put into the systems that they are building or working on. And so you know, if you know a HubSpot consultant or maketo consultant, Email List Manager, Facebook ad consultant, you may be able to connect with them, and they could connect you with their clients who might need ad copy, sales enablement, copy, case studies, emails, all of that kind of stuff. Idea number 16 is to attract prospects with the what I’ll call the free ideas method. So with this method, you are providing a mini critique or an audit that identifies mistakes that potential clients are making on their websites or in their funnels or email campaigns or other marketing assets, and you’re going to suggest ways for them to improve.

So once you find a prospect that you want to work with, check their website or their funnel or email sequence, whatever it is that you want to audit and look for things that you can improve, and what would you do differently or better, and what could they be doing to improve their responses? And once you have a. List of ideas, send an email and ask if you can share those ideas. If they don’t say yes, follow up with another email, with a recording, say, using a tune, a tool like loom or zoom, where you’re actually walking through the ideas that you came up with. Now you want to be a little bit careful with this method, because most clients don’t like to be told that their copy is bad or their marketing assets suck, or that they’re terrible at what they do. So you want to make sure that you’re keeping things positive, that you’re suggesting ideas for improvement, and you’re not assuming that things don’t work just because it doesn’t look like what you would do. Oftentimes, the stuff works, and if you don’t have access to the numbers behind what they’re doing, you don’t want to be saying, you know, you’re definitely not getting the clients that you think you are. You’re not doing a good enough job. They may be doing a pretty good job. And so you’re really looking for a way to keep it positive, but to offer some improvements.

Idea number 17 is to reach out to clients with remarkable content, wherever it is that you post. So LinkedIn, medium, another publishing platform, when we say remarkable, we mean it’s really got to be something that’s a little bit different. So you’re not just regurgitating the same old, same old. You’re not just posting AI fluff, but you’re doing really deep thought leadership that stands out. There’s just so much mediocre content in the world. We’ve all created it. We’ve all put it out there, and it just disappears into that sea of sameness. And it’s not worth doing if that’s the level of create creative work that you do. But if you’ve got ideas, or you can do surveys or information that’s not readily available anywhere else. It can be a great way to attract the audience that you’re looking for. So one example that we have done at the copywriter club, and many of you have participated in, is our annual salary survey. Now, obviously we’re talking to copywriters, and so we’re asking copywriters information about that. But in your niche, you could create some kind of a survey or industry report that has this kind of proprietary information that you have collected, you’ve curated in some way, and you make that available for people so that they will connect with you. It’s a little bit of a long game. You may need to follow up with people after you’ve published it or made it available, but it’s a great way to get attention and reach out and connect with the clients that you want to be working with.

Obviously, I did number 18 guest posting, so this just gets your work in front of your ideal clients. You can post on your own website, but my guess is you probably have very little traffic there. Most copywriters don’t get more than a few visits a day, if that. But there are large sites that publish content that have audiences that are eagerly awaiting for more ideas. There are newsletters that you can connect with that will help you get in front of the people who are reading those kinds of newsletters or guest posts, and so look for those kinds of opportunities. One way to identify that is to go to Google and search for terms like submit a guest post or guest post guidelines, become a contributor. Things like that will help you identify those sites that accept guest posts. And of course, you want to put those terms in quotes so that it looks for those specific terms, as opposed to, you know, pages that include all of those words.

Idea number 19 is to attract prospects with a regular newsletter. So I touched on this when we were talking about showing up in the inbox. But I want to come back to it, because I really, really love this idea. So there are newsletter platforms now with recommendation engines and Paid Subscriptions. You know, online tools like sub stack, beehive, Convert Kit and so you can create these kinds of newsletters that are hyper focused on the kinds of clients that you want to work with, whether that’s an industry or whether it’s a type of problem or service or deliverable, you could easily create the preeminent newsletter for that industry. And of course, tools like substack, beehive, they are online, so it shows up in the inbox. There’s tools for helping you find additional readers that can be super effective. And I mentioned, you know, the idea of taking this and actually making it a hard copy and sending it out again. Just worth underlining that idea, because it’s such a great way to connect with your ideal clients.

Idea number 20 is to place an ad in a newsletter that’s already out there. And so there are dozens of newsletters that may already be going after your industry. If you’re writing in AI. There’s probably 30 different AI newsletters on sub stack that have readerships of more than 5000 or. Readers, and some of them have hundreds of 1000s of readers. If I wanted to put an offer in front of them, I can buy an ad in that newsletter and show up as a sponsor. Newsletters do it in different ways, but you can show up as the sponsor of the newsletter with several paragraphs talking about you or your product. Maybe there are smaller ways to do sponsorships, but to be seen by 100,000 potential clients with an offer that you know they want to sign up for, that you’re putting in front of them can be a great way to start that client attraction funnel.

Idea number 21 we’re on a podcast right now. So being on podcasts can be exceptionally good for talking to the clients that you want to talk to. Again, it matters the kinds of podcasts that you choose. So you want to be looking for podcasts in the industry or the niche that you serve. You know, again, if you’re a copywriter and you show up here on the copywriter club podcast, that’s great. You’re getting in front of other copywriters, but if you’re writing for coaches, your reach for coaches may be a little bit limited by the audience that listens to this show. So look for shows that help or talk to the audience that you want to write for, and then pitch the hosts of those podcasts you know show up and let them know what are the three or four things that you can talk about, what are a couple of topics that they haven’t covered over the last four or five months on their shows?

I’m serious when I say, go back and listen to all of the shows to see what they talk about. Because if you can find those ideas that are missing when you reach out to the podcast host and say, Hey, I noticed you haven’t talked about haven’t talked about this idea or that idea, and I would love to talk about my framework for that and my process for accomplishing this, or how your listeners can do these three things in order to see a success, those kinds of pitches really do work when you’re Talking to the right podcast hosts.

Okay, so that’s 21 ideas. Of course, there are lots more, and maybe we’ll get into more in a future episode. Before we leave off, I want to just mention a couple things you don’t want to be doing when you’re looking for clients.

Number one, you do not want to wait to be chosen. You can’t sit back having built a great website, or knowing that you’re a great copywriter, or knowing that you can solve a problem for a client and wait for the client to come and find you, or wait for somebody else to say, Hey, Rob is a great copywriter. You should hire him, because that’s not going to happen. You have to get out there. You have to find one or two or four or five ideas where you can start showing up and say, hey, here I am. This is the problem I solve for you. You are. This is the person that I help, and this is the value I bring to the table. Let’s talk about how I can help you.

Number Two, don’t beg for work. So even if you are desperate, even if you know that you can help this client, you don’t want to show up, asking them or begging, putting yourself in a subservient position, because when you do that, clients can feel that you’re desperate, and people who are capable, people who are expert at what they do and are proven successful at things like copywriting, they don’t have to beg for work, because people come to them. And so when you start to beg for work, when you plead, when you show up desperate, it shows that you are not the expert that you need to be. So don’t ever beg for work, no matter how desperate you are.

Number three, don’t list is, don’t waste your time convincing people that they need copy. If the person that you’re talking to doesn’t already believe that copy is part of the solution to their problem, move on, because you’re going to spend way too much time convincing them they’re not really going to believe you until they see proof. They’re going to be difficult clients to work with. You’re going to have so much more success if you are talking with clients who already believe in the power of copywriting or the power of marketing to solve many of the problems that they have and finally, don’t work for free. Now let me be clear on what I mean by that. I’m not saying you shouldn’t get paid, because you absolutely should get paid, but there are ways that we get paid that aren’t necessarily in dollars, and so it is perfectly okay for you to work for no dollars, but when you do this, you should be getting something else from the effort that you’re putting in.

Number one, you should be getting a sample that you can use or in order to drop into your portfolio or to share with other potential clients, to show that you do this kind of work for real clients, you should be getting a case study that shows the thinking that went into the process. It talks about the problem. You’re trying to solve, and the various approaches that you considered, and then the results that you get, if you are, you know, doing a project for no dollars, you should get a referral from the person you’re doing it for. You know, let me know, you know, one or two people who you know, who also need help. Or, you know, talk to them about me. There are different ways to do that referral thing, but these are all ways that you can get paid if you’re actually working for no dollars. That’s not for free, because, again, you’re getting paid, but it’s by something that’s not money. So don’t ever work for free, even if you are not getting paid.

Okay, I mentioned a bunch of helpful resources the top of show the ignition kit, which dives into what I’ve shared here in much more depth, and gives you three different workshops to help you find clients if you need them right now, and includes a short coaching call to help you dial in your pitch, your niche and more that’s at the copywriter club.com, forward slash ignition.

I’ve referred to our p7 client acquisition system a few times. There’s all kinds of stuff that’s included in that. And you can find details about that proven system at thecopywriterclub.com/p7 and I mentioned The Copywriter Underground at the top of the show, which is like a home for all kinds of resources, including leads from other copywriters, workshops, coaching, community and more you can find that at thecopywriterclub.com/TCU-2.

And of course, I have linked to all of those and more in the show notes for this episode. As I said at the top of the show, this episode is a little bit different. So if you liked it and you would like more episodes like this with me, just sharing some of the things that I know, in addition to the regular interviews that I do, please email me to let me know I’m at rob@thecopywriterclub.com that is my real email, and I do get all of the emails sent to that address. And I really appreciate your feedback. You know, again, tell me if this is helpful and I can share more thoughts on other topics, anything from say, AI to offer creation to how to get better as a copywriter. So let me know.

Stuff to check out:

American Copywriter Co.
Topaz’s new Instagram
The first interview with Topaz
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Research Mastery

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: Are you prepared for the worst in your business… economic downturns, recessions, the loss of clients and ongoing projects? If not, this episode is for you. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

In today’s episode I’m catching up with Topaz Hooper who was a guest on the show several years ago. Topaz’s business has followed the trend that so many copywriters and other freelancers followed through the pandemic and afterwards. Most of us saw a nice bump in clients and revenues but then things started to change and she’s had to reinvent her business to adjust to the changes. We’ll get into that in the interview.

Topaz also happens to be the second American expat who is living and working in The Netherlands that I’ve had on the podcast over the past couple of weeks. That wasn’t intentional, but maybe this was a hint that more of us could be living overseas and working with clients here in the states. I don’t know.

The big topic we covered in this podcast is how to survive in a recession. We are not in a recession—at least as far as the general business cycle goes—at the moment, but there have been some difficult economic events that have scared a few people and caused them to predict that a recession is somewhere out there on the horizon. We are not predicting a recession, but we are talking about how to be prepared for it if it happens to come… maybe this year, maybe next, but certainly at some point in the future.

But beyond the general economic environment, there have been micro effects in the copywriting world… things like A.I. taking on a lot of work, especially at the lower end of the spectrum. And some industries, finance and tech come to mind, have suffered their own downturns with layoffs and clients cancelling projects. So while these haven’t shown up in the overall macro-environment, what you see happening in your niche may be close to a what an actual recession might feel like. If you’ve felt that, you’ll want to listen to this whole episode.

One more thing I want to mention, I talked about this topic—preparing for a recession—at The Copywriter Club In Real Life in 2020… that was right before the last mini-recession happened. Topaz and I talk about some of those ideas on this episode, but you can go even deeper with them in an article written by Anna Hetzel. I’ll link to that article in the show notes if you want to check it out. It’s worth reading.

Before we jump into our interview, this is probably the last time I’ll mention this for a while but I want to share with you all of my research secrets… especially my 4:20+ research method that helps copywriters like you uncover the ideas and insights you need to write great sales copy. It’s part of Research Mastery which also includes more than twenty different techniques for capturing ideas, all of the questions I use to learn more about my client, their product, their customers and their competitors as well as the documents you need to capture your research and several tutorials on how to use A.I. to speed up your processes and even help with your research itself.  There’s a bonus on using Airtable to collect and sort your data and more… You can learn more about this unique resource at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery… research mastery is all one word. Check it out now at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery.

And now, my interview with Topaz Hooper.

Topaz, welcome back to the podcast. It’s great to have you here, excited for this discussion, talk, chat, whatever we’re gonna whatever we’re gonna call it, but you were here a few years ago episode number 305, catch me up. What has changed in your life since we talked about cruelty free copywriting and sales and all of those things.

Topaz Hooper: So the first time we chatted, thanks for having me back, Rob. It’s so good to be here. Yeah, life has changed quite a bit. Cruelty Free copywriter was my baby in 2021 I think I jumped on the pod, like you said in the 300th episode somewhere. And at that time, vegan food, plant based fashion, clean beauty were all rising and they were really heavily funded, and they needed copywriters everywhere. And I couldn’t be everywhere, but I had a very good, successful business. And since then, you know, people are feeling a bit of a financial pinch these days, and those industries are not doing as well. So I’ve had to pivot quite a bit and launch new things and do new things. So I’m excited to get into how I’m sort of pivoting in this era of quasi recession, energy and maybe how others can learn from what I’ve done.

Rob Marsh: Okay, this is really interesting, and I think it’s going to be a really good conversation, because, like you said, things have changed. Especially here in the States, there’s a lot of uncertainty about what’s going to be happening tomorrow or next week, or what’s not going to be happening. And things seem to be up in the air. There is talk of recessions, political policy, maybe bringing that faster or slower. But regardless of, even if you set all of that stuff aside, the business cycle itself, every 7 to 10 years, we go through some ups and downs. And this last cycle, we’ve had things like AI, we’ve had some layoffs in the tech sector because of that, which has brought more people into the copywriting world. And so before we start talking about some of the things that you’ve done to shift as you were looking at your business, what made you realize that things were changing? What were some of those first indicators where you’re like, I need to start paying attention or like, for a lot of us, sometimes that just goes over our heads and suddenly we just don’t have money, or we don’t have clients, and we’re like, Okay, we got a problem here.

Topaz Hooper: Honestly, I was paying attention to my clients on social media. Every single client that I have, or potential client. I follow them on social, and I like all their stuff, and so the algorithm sends me all their posts. And I just started seeing more and more of my favorite brands closing. And I was reading time after time due to unforeseen circumstances, we’re closing the business, or, due to this sort of difficult time to launch a company, or to grow a company, or, you know, import, exports, you know, all these sort of business owner terms, I started to see that people were just closing shop. They’re just like, people aren’t buying our shoes anymore, or people who don’t don’t have money for this extra special thing, and we’re closing so I start to see this trend happening, probably like middle of last year, 2024, to about now, 3 or 4 years after the other started closing, and I started to look into why that was happening. And so that’s when I started to get a little bit worried.

Okay, you know, if these are the people that I know of, imagine all the other brands in my niche that I typically serve. What are they going through? I also started to pay a lot of attention to LinkedIn. Some bigger brands were closing meaty, which is a popular vegan mushroom brand, sold for less than their value this year. I think they were valued at 50 million and they sold for 4 million recently. Those are signs that, you know, my industry is not doing well. And so what I started to notice was my favorite brands were closing shop, and that’s why my inbox started to sound a little empty, a little bit like a cave with an echo. And so that’s when I started to think, okay maybe something’s wrong. And so I kind of had to become a bit of a quasi economics professor, and start digging into what is supply chain, and what are factors that make businesses close or open, and what does this mean for my business?

Rob Marsh: This is interesting. So obviously, we need to be paying attention to the industries that we’re working in if we’re seeing this kind of stuff happening in our industries as well. What do we need to be doing? Let’s talk about recession proofing, or preparing for what could happen with an economic downturn. 

Topaz Hooper: Yes, first of all, kind of circling back, you got to become an economics professor or something. I know many of us, we are in the copywriting business because we love writing, or we love marketing or we love sales. We’re not economics people. Maybe we know how to do our bookkeeping, but we don’t look at inflation necessarily. And in the context of our business. We might think of it in our homes, oh, the price of milk is up or something. But we don’t think about, what does that mean for my clients? 

You know, I think we all need to start reading the jobs report. We should all start listening to the federal Federal Reserve Chair. We need to all be looking at the growth trajectory of our niches in the last six months or a year. And so I think we all need to start putting on our economics hats, because that tells us why we’re not getting clients. It’s more so those factors that impact the businesses that we serve, and less about whether your marketing was good that day or whether your social post was seen. And so for me, the big recession proofing process has been just that deep dive. Is it me or is it the market? And when I started to realize it’s not me, my website still converts, my emails are still good. The market’s not doing well. I started to say, Okay, what do I need to do now? And so I think step one is just getting in tune with the local economics of your area. I know the copywriter club serves, you know, has people from all over the globe, and I know if tech is declining here, but tech is doing well in India, and is doing great in China or wherever. People are listening. You know, we have to sort of think about our own local economic situation. And so, you know, be an economics professor. Read all the nerdy stuff, you know, look at Forbes, whatever you need to do to get a sense of your industry. So that’s number one.

Rob Marsh: So before we move on from that, let’s talk a little bit about inflation. There was worldwide inflation that happened over the last two or three years, and at the same time that a lot of the prices were going up for our businesses, for our personal lives, we also had in the marketing world, AI come on the scene and start to push down some of the things that at least copywriters in the middle ranges and the lower ranges were able to charge and so we sort of had pressure from two sides happening here, where prices were going up, but our ability to charge more was stymied a bit by that. So that kind of an impact starts to show up, even if you’re not able to watch a lot of the economic indicators that you’re talking about, that starts to show up in our P&L, or when you look at the end of the month and there’s no money there, this is part of why that is going on. That’s not really a question. But I just want to throw that out, because it is the reality that we’re all dealing with.

Topaz Hooper: You’re so right, Rob, and I would say if you want to recession proof your business in the era of AI, you have to take the bull by the horns, so to speak. You know, I am so guilty of being the person saying, AI is never going to take my job. You know, honestly, I’m good like, I don’t need to learn it. I don’t need to engage with it. It’s just going to be there. And if clients want to use it, great, but other clients will use copywriters like me, and that’s not untrue, but more and more clients are saying, can you please use AI to speed up your copywriting process, or can you run that headline through AI, just so that we, you know, have another idea here. And so copywriters who are feeling a little bit threatened by AI right now and aren’t able to charge the rates that they usually do, keep your rates steady. Just use just but jump on the AI train. 

I know that The Copywriter Club has done so many episodes about how to engage with AI, and I do think that is going to be a tool that’s going to save your business in the long run. For example, I was doing some Substack content writing for a thought leader in the clean beauty space, and she used AI for a ton of her articles. And I’m like, there’s nothing wrong with that, but they’re not that good. Let me use what you’ve written with AI, and let me make it more human. Let me adapt it. Let me clean it up. Let me target it better. And those articles performed better. I didn’t tell the client to stop using AI, but I jumped on top of it and said, Okay, let me fix it for you. I still charge my same rate. I just gave her a better article with AI. So I would suggest people to not fight it, but to own it and to use it, and to take the power away from AI and make it a tool for you instead of a replacement for you during approach.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, it reminds me of the way that I talk to my kids about bullies. You know, you take, you take away their power by doing certain things or whatever. And I suppose that’s an apt analogy here, because some of us have seen AI as a bully. To us, it’s taking away our livelihood, or it is impacting the way that we work, or the way that clients are thinking about the value that we bring to the table, and so taking away its power, it’s just a good reframe on that. 

Okay, let’s talk about what do we need to do to prepare for this is the reality we’re in? What do we need to do to make sure that we’re gonna actually survive the next year or two, assuming that things may get worse?

Topaz Hooper: Let’s get personal here. We all live in a place where we pay rent or mortgage. We have to go get food, we have, we have living expenses. And more and more copywriters use their business funds just for living. Many of us live hand to mouth. Many of us, you know, maybe 80% of our income from copyright and go straight into our personal living expenses. If you want to prepare for a recession, please lower your cost of living. Maybe it might be a little too late. Maybe you’re stuck in something that you can’t get out of. But if you can get out of a high cost of living area, if you can get out of paying for an extra bill or an extra car or an extra thing, please try to reduce your cost of living before it’s too late. And the reason why I say this is because during the peak of the pandemic, we copywriters, I know we’re making six figures. I was making six figures. It was a great era. Times have changed, and now my friends who upgraded their life during the height of the pandemic, they got new Teslas, they got a new mortgage, they got a new this. Now they’re saying, oh my goodness, this is way too expensive, and I can no longer afford it like I could in 2022 and so my suggestion is, before the pandemic comes, try to save 50% of your business income. I know it’s hard, because we all have living expenses, but if you can save 50% put half away, use, use the rest, you’re going to thank me in a year when the when the actual height of the recession hits, or knock, knock on wood, hopefully it doesn’t hit, but you’ll be happy in a half a year.

Two years when the recession has come. And the truth is, there are, there are recessions within the United States. They’re always there. It has nothing to do with you. It’s always going to happen. So the more that we can prepare by keeping our cost of living low, the better. In addition, you also want to lower your business expenses. Maybe you were an agency in 2022, 2023, 2024 you had subcontractors. You had a lot of tools. You had a lot of apps. Now you’re starting to realize, did I really need to spend $130 a month on SEMrush for one project that I do once a year? Or could I have just done the free version? Or do I need eight subcontractors? Maybe I just need one or two. And so, you know, how can you diminish the cost of working so that you can save that 50% of your business income and put it away, put it away, put it away. So, yeah, cost of living, and then saving 50% of your income is going to be a game changer for the recession. That’s how so many of us survived. That’s how I’ve survived those good and bad months. Save, save, save, cut, cut.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I love this advice. This is something that I’ve done in my own business recently, and looking particularly at software tools where I see, okay, I invested in this tool because it’s got five or six different things that I might use in the future, and ultimately, I’m only using two of them. Is there a tool out there that actually gives me those two, and I’m not paying for all of these extra features, and because of that, I have changed email service providers. I’m looking at alternatives to tools like Asana. Asana is not incredibly expensive, but you know, if you’re paying a couple of $100 a month and can switch to a tool that’s maybe 25 or $30 a month for you know, that’s going to cover 80% 90% of what you’re using a tool for those kinds of trade offs can be very worthwhile. And at the same time in personal business, you know, do you really watch Netflix and Prime and Disney+ and Max and, you know, there’s places where we can say one at a time, we can cut back so that our personal number helps reduce the pressure on our business to provide for this high cost of living. And I’m being a little flippant in saying streaming services is the problem. There’s this conversation out there that all you need to do is give up avocado toast and you’re gonna have a safe retirement. We’re not being flippant about that. There are legitimate things that people can do and enjoy life, but at the same time, you want to be careful that you’re not over indulging in things that you’re not using in order to bring your expenses down.

Topaz Hooper: Oh my gosh, you nailed it. Rob, one cool thing that I’m so, like, surprised that I didn’t know about was Google Tasks, which acts like a note taker, slash Task recorder that does something more. It’s more basic than Asana, but it can act as an Asana. So look at all the tools out there that can do, what your favorite tools do, but a little bit cheaper or free. You know, I worked at Google for two years. There’s a ton of tools… for example, my phone is now on Google Voice. I save money by changing my phone from a $90 a month bill to a 100% free internet based phone. People can still leave me voicemails. People I can still call my mom like nothing’s changed, except that I don’t pay anything anymore. And so it’s just one of those things that if you can find tools that are free or low cost that do exactly what you need them to do, go for it, find it, do it. And especially when you’re in a slower period and you’re feeling like your business is walking into a recessionary period, this is a great time to start digging around and cleaning house, fixing things, screwing in light bulbs, you know, repairing and painting the the facets of your business that were kind of looking crusty when you were at your height, and now you have the time to fix them. So go for it. 

How? You know, go under construction, do some auditing on your expenses, and figure out, how can I save $300 a month for the rest of the year? One other thing I would mention, and that saved me, is, instead of getting an app and spending monthly on it, buy the one year payment of that app. So for example, I use Calendly. It’s like 90 bucks a year. Instead of paying, you know, $8 a month, I pay 90 bucks a year, and that bill goes away for an entire year. So during the peak of my business, when I’m super rich and everything’s going well, I buy all my subscriptions for the year, so that during my slow month, I don’t even have to look at a bill anymore. It’s just all running on its own. That can be a really cool way to kind of have it out of sight, out of mind, and you’re not worrying about something month to month. When you’re in your slow period, that’s a really good idea if your business cycles through, you know?

Rob Marsh: So a lot of us have very quiet periods. Say, the end of December into January. Sometimes there’s a quiet period around tax season. Sometimes summer quiets down a little bit, just because of the realities of the school year, the business year, the business cycle. So being able to stagger those expenses to make sense? Well, obviously it makes sense. Back in 2020 at TCC, IRL, I gave a presentation on stage. It was basically, how do you prepare your business for a recession? This was right, as COVID was hitting, we were all looking, you know, down very similar kind of a situation where we’re very unsure of what the future was going to look like. And the very first thing that I talked about was, don’t run out of money. And that’s exactly what we’re talking about here. Is you’re just ensuring that you’re going to have enough money to make it through the month, or you’re gonna make it to the next positive client experience so that you can keep going. And so all of this stuff is really about, how do you make sure that you don’t run out of money?

Topaz Hooper: Yes, and that’s a great segue into my next tip for how to recession proof your copywriting business multiple streams of income and building a backup business. Now, some of us started copywriting as a side hustle. You know, we had a full time job and we started a copywriting business, and it was our side hustle. Now it’s a full time thing, but maybe you need a side hustle for your copywriting business or an adjacent one. So for example, cruelty-free copywriter gave me six figures. I loved it. I saved everything. And then when the industry started to decline, I started to look around and say, Hmm, is there another industry or niche that I can serve? Are there other services that I can offer that still make me feel good. I’m I’m an expert in them. I feel confident in those subject matters or in those deliverables. But I can build it while cruelty-free copywriter is still running strong. I can build an adjacent business on the side. Lots of big companies do this holding. Holding companies have eight different companies underneath them, and they all run them separately, and when one goes down, the other one rises, and they manage to keep themselves afloat by having multiple companies in their portfolio. Copywriters can think about it in the same way. Let me have a business that’s just for cruelty-free, and let me start a new business that’s for real estate or luxury or a totally different construction, a totally different industry that has a different market and has different fluctuations. So I’m super happy to announce that I just launched a new copywriting business. 

It’s called the American Copywriter Co and we help global businesses reach American audiences. This for anyone that knows me, they know that I’m a traveler and I’ve always, always, always loved building relationships with global companies, global people. I love being everywhere. And many of the companies I would meet are like, wow, you seem like a great girl, but your niche didn’t cool too free, and we’re not, we’re furniture, or we’re or we’re tech, or we’re not quite Are you sure you want to work with us? You seem like you don’t serve us. And it was very hard for me to say, Oh no, I do serve you, I promise. And they look at my website, they’re like, Are you sure? Now I’ve created a business where I can say, Yes, I do serve you. I do serve global companies that want to launch and grow in the United States, and I’m their translator in chief, their copywriter in chief, to help translate their French furniture brand messaging into something that an American in New York City or LA can understand and relate to and want to purchase from. This is something that I think is in demand and makes me unique. It still leans into sort of what makes you special? What are you an expert in? This idea of copywriting and building your niche, but it leads into a new, untapped niche that’s growing. And so I would highly recommend any copywriter who’s looking at their niche, whether it’s tech or health and wellness or something, and they’re just like, oh, is this gonna keep going down? Like, I need to do something without totally abandoning what you’ve done. Build another side business and see and then grow them, cultivate them, you know, together and lean into the one that really serves that season and, you know, scale down the one that is kind of in a dormant state.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, this is really good advice. Let me add to that just a little bit for those who are thinking, Well, I don’t really want to run two separate businesses. There’s also a way to do that within an existing business, and that is to come up with several different offers that are doing different things. So if you have in the past been writing case studies and white papers, maybe it’s time to branch out and start offering your clients something more like emails or sales pages, or maybe you’ve been writing sales pages and emails, but your clients are leaning into more content that could get picked up by AI in order to be found in AI search, right? So here’s an opportunity to expand your offers. Making more offers within an existing business does something similar. So I admire what you’re doing, building, you know, entirely a second business focused on a second set of you. Niches, clients and offers, but there’s maybe an easier way to, like you said earlier, create a side hustle for your side hustle, and that is, you know, make more offers to your existing clients in your existing business.

Topaz Hooper: Nailed it. You’re totally right. I think if you’re someone who has a brand name that’s not totally niched, it’s like, you know, Topaz Hooper copy or or something that can be reinvented or expanded upon. Go, diversify your deliverables. Super, super smart as copywriters, we’re taught to do social listening. We’re taught to listen to what our clients want, their their customers. What are they saying? Let’s practice social listening in our business. Go. Let’s walk over to our ideal client, or our past clients, and say, How are you doing? What? What are you struggling with? What do you need now? Oh, you don’t need a website anymore. You need ongoing email. Well, I don’t quite offer that, but I can. And so I think we all have to go back into the clients that we’ve served and start doing some social listening about what the market needs. What I’m hearing now is people are moving away from, you know, certain deliverables, and they want more different types of deliverables, like, maybe they’re doing more trade shows. They don’t want websites anymore. You did that for them last year. It’s beautiful. Now they need some trade stuff, or they need packaging, or they need brand strategy, because they’re looking to rebrand soon. You know, how can you listen in and say, Is there something that you need that you would like this season? And some of them will tell you they’re like, Yeah, we could really use more packaging stuff. Do you do that? And you can say, Yeah, I do that. Yeah. I do that. Quickly. Add it to your website.

Yeah, definitely expand your deliverables. Don’t be afraid to listen in and be adjustable to your comp, to the companies that you serve. This advice of listening goes back to what you were saying when you first started talking about the reason for your shift. If you can see that your clients are struggling, you know to make sales or to do something in their business, and you can see it early enough so that you can actually help them solve that problem, create some value for them, help them launch a new product, or create sales for an existing product line. You’re watching them and seeing what’s happening in real time. That’s an opportunity where you can step in and say, hey, I can see what’s going on in the business, and I may be able to help you fix that. I may be able to bring more customers to the table. I may be able to help you reduce churn so that you’re not losing customers all of these things, all these problems that we can solve for our clients. But if you’re not watching your clients, paying attention what’s going on in your business, you’re gonna miss those opportunities. Yes, and that’s a great way to recession proof your business is leaning on the relationships that you have existing if you’ve done great work for a client and they love you, they just don’t need any more website stuff, you can totally lean in again and say, How can I help you this season? How can I help you next week? How can I help you next year? And cultivating those relationships can lead to more work, especially during a recession, when people are usually cutting their full time staff and looking to lean back into freelancers or sole sole solopreneurs. I guess you could say who they trust. And so, you know, how can you be the trustworthy person who has the right deliverables at the right time and you show up in their inbox on the perfect day? And so I would say, don’t be afraid to Yeah. Adjust your deliverables, pivot your niche a little bit as well. That’s one thing I learned with cruelty free copywriter. I was so heavily niched in plant based CPG, which is consumer packaged goods, for those that don’t know, basically plant based snacks, vegan fashion and beauty, that there was people in the luxury realm that are also cruelty free or sustainable that were like, Oh, we’re kind of in your niche, but we’re not quite Are you open to ethical diamonds, like lab grown diamonds? Oh, maybe that seems Are you open to sustainable furniture? Okay, maybe or, or are you open to compostable gloves. Is that something that you serve, you know, it is cruelty free, it is plant based, but it’s not quite in those specific niches. So, is there some kind of outside, quasi neighborhood niche that can also meet your business’s criteria, or, you know, or offer the or for people that want the deliverable that you offer. You know, Can you expand a little bit? Can you pivot? And so that’s what I learned, too. So I did, I took on an ethical diamond company, and it was awesome. And I took on a French furniture brand that does, you know, sustainably made, handcrafted furniture from the coast of Brittany, and it was great. And I was like, There’s nothing that’s not vegan or cruelty free about this. It’s just not food, fashion or beauty. And so there are some ways that you can still keep your company’s mission, your company’s direction, your company’s goals, your deliverables, and just sort of see what else is ancillary or what else is neighboring around, which. Where that industry is growing.

Rob Marsh: You mentioned these relationships and really dialing in on those. And I think this is a really important point as far as recession proofing a business, not just the existing relationships, although those are really good, you know, it’s easier to sell a customer who’s happy with your work and you’ve worked with before than it is to find a new customer. But this is the time that we should be building our network of friends and relationships outside of our customer base of the few copywriters that we’ve talked to, because those relationships take time to build and develop, and they don’t pay off, sometimes for months, sometimes for years, but when the recession hits, if you don’t have those relationships in place, building them becomes desperate, and you’re you’re sort of too late to make it work, and clients start to see it not as a relationship, but as a desperate plea for money and work.

Topaz Hooper: Oh my goodness, networking is such a dirty word for some people. It feels icky for introverts or people that kind of don’t like that. But I want to reframe networking in the context of recession proofing your business, which is networking should not be a tit for tat. Give me this. Give me that I’m using you. You’re using me. I think a lot of people approach networking in that way, and it leaves a really icky taste in everyone’s mouth. Networking should be a

relationship building tool and a reputational amplifier. You walk into conferences and say, Hi, my name is Topaz, and I do American copywriter CO and and Hi, that’s just what I do. What’s your name? Show me a picture of your dog. What do you do on Sundays? And the sort of relationship building aspect is so much more sustainable. And what happens is you start to become friends with people. Like, networking is like professional friends. It’s like, LinkedIn, you know? It’s like professional friends. And then whenever someone’s like, Man, I really could use a copywriter for something, you’re the first person that they think of because they met you two weeks ago at a conference. And so I would say your network is your net worth, and those and people that you know are oftentimes the people that will hire you. And I think as long as you lean in on networking as a relationship tool instead of a give me this, give me that you’re gonna have so much more success than other people during this processionary period. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that’s exactly right. It. We have to think about networking as friend making or relationship making, instead of, like you said, the tit for tat, you know, you give me this, I give you that, the cheesy, you know, mixer, cocktail party thing that we envision. I can think of several people that I’ve met over the course of my career who have become true friends. You know, we go to lunch, we hang out, who also, as time goes on, you know, every six months or so, there’s an opportunity for me to provide a lead for that person or for them to do it. For me, I don’t maintain the friendship because it’s going to lead to that kind of a thing. They are friends, and I enjoy going to lunch. We, you know, talk about our families, you know, things that are going on in our lives. But you know, because that friendship exists, sometimes these positive benefits for our businesses come out of that, and that’s how we have to look at building networks. It’s not too late. Start today, but look at it like I’m looking for friends, I’m looking for people to hang out with. I’m looking for people to talk with online, just to share ideas and thoughts, and not necessarily to beg for work,

Topaz Hooper: yes. And I think one of the things that has changed since the since the pandemic is that people are looking to meet you in real life like we. I think many of us in the copywriter world got kind of lost our networking chops a little bit because we were stuck in our houses during the pandemic. I mean, everyone lost everything was online. Yeah, everyone from all ages, lost their social skills during that period. But we got so used to doing online things, networking online, and now people are like, so do you want to get coffee again? And we have to be like, Yeah, I will I will walk, I will take a train, I will take a bus, I will bike ride, I will drive to go get a coffee with you. And I think something really powerful is cultivated there when you start to have these relationships with people, where you’re meeting in person, and they see you again and again and again. For example, I was working with a CPG company, and I started having coffee with the founder. I just met her through some networks. I was like, we should get coffee. You seem like a girl that I would love to nerd out with about this or that. We started becoming friends, we started hanging out. And then all of a sudden, she asked me to do some work for her. And I was a little bit surprised, because I never pitched her at all. I was just like, Hi, I just happen to be a copywriter. So what’s your favorite color, you know? And she said, I really want.

Work with you. And I said, why she’s like, because I know you. And that was it. That was the only reason why she wanted to hire me, is that she knows she knew me. And so if you want to recession proof your business, continue to be known, continue to go to networking events, to private parties, to to places where you don’t even think there’s clients, but just be that person that’s like, hi, yeah, I just don’t happen to be a copywriter, but I’m also a really great tennis player. Do you want to play tennis sometime and just see what happens to

to your business when in those desperate moments when you really do need clients, you don’t have to beg. You can just say, Hi so and so it was nice meeting you last week. It just so happens that I’m open to client work. If you know of anybody that is looking for a copywriter in the email or launch, just let me know and send them. Send them my way. I have gotten,

I would say, 6k to 8k worth of work just from that casual, let’s play tennis together, relaxed thing alone, and now I’m not struggling during this recessionary period or this quasi recessionary period, because I just made a bunch of friends. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, another place to make these friends, it’s been really beneficial to me personally, and you’ve seen this, I’m sure, in your business, but sometimes in joining a program or a membership or a mastermind, something like that will connect you with the right people.

I’ve mentioned this once or twice on this podcast, but I joined a mastermind and met, you know, a bunch of other copywriters, one of whom connected me with somebody that was in her network and she didn’t have time to help them with a project. So I hopped onto that project, which then turned into, like, four or five other projects, and I made almost six figures from that one contact. And that would never have happened if I hadn’t joined the membership where we met. And so I know, you know, on this podcast, I pitch our membership quite a bit. The copywriter underground, it doesn’t have to be that particular membership, but being in programs with people who are doing similar things to what you are doing is a fantastic way to build that network of other people that you could reach out to, again, not not necessarily for work, but for friendship, for Help that results in these kinds of positive business outcomes.

Topaz Hooper: Yes, I was part of The Copywriter Club membership, and I met a woman named Michelle Carrington, who is a beauty copywriter. And again, she and I were just friends. I’m like, hi, you’re in the same you know, membership, let’s be friends. We became friends. And then I started to notice a dip in my business, and I thought it was me. I was like, maybe it’s me. And I reached out to Michelle, and I said, Hi, Michelle, it’s so good to see you again. Blah, blah, blah, I’m noticing, you know, I would love more clean beauty clients right now. Is there anybody that knocked on your door that, you know, just didn’t seem like the right fit? She said, Actually, yes, there were two people that didn’t seem like the right fit. One wanted website copy, but it wasn’t quite beauty. And one woman wanted social media support, but I don’t do social media stuff, and I’m like, Well, I do, do you want to send them my way? She said, Sure. One of those clients became a regular client for six months, and the other one, I did a four figure website copy revamp for and so sometimes you meet people in networks that you again, you never pitch them. You just happen to say hi, just if you have anybody, let me know, and then they do. And so like The Copywriter Club is a gold mine of brilliant, amazing, smart, well connected individuals who are just fantastic humans, but also people that maybe can help you during

a recessionary period, and why not lean on them? Why not get coffee with them? Why not tell them that you need help from time to time? And let’s see what happens. And that’s another thing. I hate asking for help. And there is a way to ask for help or ask for support during a recession that’s not desperate, and there is a way to lean in and tap your networks without being like, beggy, and that is doing what I did with Michelle, reaching out and just saying, hey, let’s get coffee. Let’s have a life update. And here’s what’s going on in my business. And sometimes people really are like, you’re an amazing copywriter. I know people let me, like, make some phone calls and all of a sudden, when you thought your business was sort of declining, it’s rebounding. And so that simple tool alone to help bulletproof your business from recession is literally asking for help, leaning into your networks and doing it in such a way where you’re open to receiving new clients or new support.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, as we’ve been talking about this, you kind of made a comment, and we’ve skipped over that. I want to go back to when you were talking about as your business started to decline, you started to look at different, related areas in the business that you could serve. You mentioned the French furniture company, I think, and some others. And that comes to this point where you need to be thinking about how you’re framing your business, the problem you solve, the message that you’re putting out into the world. And it might be time, as you look at your copywriting business, to reframe it in a different way, so that either you go more narrow into a niche, or maybe you broaden out a little bit so that you can take on additional clients. But the way that you’ve been talking about your business for the past two or three years may not be the way that you need to talk about it for this coming year, or for the challenge that we’re moving into.

Topaz Hooper: Yes, you are right on the money. And I would say that that could be just a simple messaging rebrand. Should you rebrand your messaging? Do you need to say something different this year? Back in the pandemic, people might have said, Oh, you know, clients are now online, and your website looks terrible. Let me help you. Nowadays, people might need to hear. Listen, there’s so much competition. I can help you stand out. And so have you looked at your messaging? Have you reimagined your ideal client? Your ideal client can change companies, change their demographics all the time. You know, I served plant based CPG for years, and for years, it wasn’t just vegans buying plant based meat, it was health conscious omnivores that said, Oh, maybe I should try something new for my heart or whatever. Now those health conscious omnivores are like, you know, I kind of did like the steak. I think I’m good. I don’t need to go back to beyond. And now those companies are like, Well, what do we do now? We’ve been targeting omnivores this whole time. How do we switch it up and go back to vegetarians or vegans or so on. And so you can do the same thing in your business. You can look at your messaging and say, Has my client changed? And the answer is yes, your client probably has changed. Your client probably is in a different place. They probably launched different products. They’ve targeted different people. And so what you can do, kind of circling back to the very beginning is again, do that deep research on look at your website. Look at your client’s website. What is their messaging these days? Does it seem like their clientele has changed? Can you learn more about their new clientele so that you can write better copy for them in the future? You know? What can you do to rebrand, reframe? And that’s why I started a new company because I figured out I wasn’t going to be able to make the hard pivot from culture free copywriter to American Copywriter Co. It was just too hard of a pivot. The domain was purchased. I couldn’t do it. I needed to start something new. And so if you feel like you can rebrand, amazing, do it, refine your messaging, re target. But if you feel like you just kind of got to keep that ship afloat, but go buy a new one and start something new. You can do both, too.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, some ideas aren’t expandable, and that’s when you need to say, Okay, we’re going to do something new. Some ideas are and you should lean into it. So, yeah, thinking about the way that you’re framing, talking about the business, talking about the problems that you solve, talking about the clients that you serve. Clients that you serve. Huge part of getting ready for a potential downturn. What else? What else should we be thinking about and preparing for?

Topaz Hooper: I think people have to remember that it’s not just them, and that’s a psychological thing to prepare for a recession, people get very nervous that they were the problem. You know, their social media didn’t work, or their landing page is no longer converting. And I think one thing to know is that it’s not sometimes it’s not you. You did everything right. What you can do is change your mindset and say, What can I do to pivot? And that’s sort of the big picture for everything. If you want to recession proof your business, start with your mindset. Remember that it’s not always what you wrote that caused your decline. Is there something bigger? And what can you do to pivot? And I find that it can be difficult for some people to pivot, because they really got so used to being in tech that, you know, they’ve been in tech for five years, they’re happy there. But maybe there’s something else beyond tech that you can do, and maybe there’s some skills that you can expand upon. Some of my favorite copywriters during down periods, they like to re skill. For example, I’ve had five people come up to me and say, Hi, do you do paid ads? And it’s been embarrassing for me to say, No, I don’t do paid ads, but then I’m like, should I be doing paid ads? And that’s what all my clients want now. So how can I re-skill? How can I make my business bulletproof by adding skills that are high, that are highly advantageous, are growing right now and that my ideal client wants. So let’s take this time to reskill. Let me, let me go, take a new course. Let me go, join a membership group. Let me, let me retool and then come back sharp and so, bulletproofing your business often means re imagining and rebranding and re and retooling. So just take advantage of that downtime. Enjoy it, you know, go on a second, you know. You know, walk today and listen to a copywriter club podcast episode and think about what you can do to retool today, you know.And so there’s so many things that you can do that are mental, that are financial, as we discussed, that are networking, and that are also just straight up rebuilding from the ground up. So I would just say, Don’t be stuck in your ways. That’s one way to be a sinking ship. There’s nothing worse than being someone who got really stuck in their ways and now the ship is down. You have the tools to pull yourself out, to reinforce your ship, to add new gadgets when there’s no rain and when there’s no waves, and then when the waves come, you’re stronger than ever.

Rob Marsh: I really love this idea of re-skilling. Obviously, you know, we have courses and things that can help copywriters add to their skills, but this is really vital or crucial, especially, you know, as we’ve talked about, ai, ai in particular, is a skill that every copywriter needs to be leaning into learning how to use, whether it’s knowing how to prompt to get good content or ideas out of it to building AI agents. I saw something today as I was going through some email that I think it was Upwork, or maybe Fiverr had mentioned that requests for jobs around AI agent building, and you know, the kind of work that these process tools can help with, has gone up something like 15,000%

which is a ridiculous number. Now it’s probably going from a very low number, so it’s easy to make that number look high, but even if you’re starting with just, you know, a few dozen that massive increase shows where part of the market is moving and so are skilling to take advantage of those kinds of needs that clients have, or at least they’re expressing, is a massive part of preparing for a downturn,

Topaz Hooper: And again, I had to change my mindset around that. I was really anti AI forever, and now I’m seeing you gotta, you gotta go for it. You gotta go with it. You can’t beat it. You gotta join it. And you know, one final thing I would say around how to, how to recession proof your business is try to be open to part time roles. There’s a there’s a it’s like a bit of a sin in the copywriter community to say that you took a full time in house copywriting job. It’s like you’re not a copywriter, a freelance copywriter, anymore, and it sort of has a stain. People feel like they have to announce that they’re no longer trying to stay 100% freelance, but what if you did a full time freelance copywriting in-house gig? That is still a contract rule, you know, and you still get benefits, but you’re not looking for eight clients a month. You’re just you’re working with one big one. That’s how I survived in many, many years of cruelty free copywriter, I just had one gigantic 30 to 40 hour per week client, and then any other copywriter, client, copywriting clients that came my way, I was like, Okay, I’ll make room for you in mid March or this or in this area, but I’m good. And so what I’ve done this time around as well as I’ve secured a 20 to 25 hour part time role with an amazing supplement company that’s doing a lot of great work, and I’m happy there, and I’m good, and the recession is going to come and go, but I’m good, I’m anchored. And so copywriters can also start to think about you’re not less of a business owner. If you work a certain amount of hours or have a very stable client. You’re not an imposter, right? You’ve just found a way to secure yourself to a good, solid client. And then whoever comes in between can come right? And it takes the stress off of your business, it takes the stress off of the monthly, day to day expenses, and then you’re not as scared and desperate as you would be otherwise.

Rob Marsh: I’m really glad you mentioned that, because I have seen this happening over the last year where a lot of copywriters are taking on part time roles, maybe even moving into a full time role with a company and keeping their freelance business as the side hustle. We’ve even created some resources in the copywriter underground, just note, because we know this is happening to help people find those kinds of roles.

But you’re right. It is not a failure of any kind. In fact, it’s a really smart move, especially if you struggle finding clients, or struggle with all of the business things that happen around serving clients when you have an in house role, the process, the structures, they’re all in place around you, and you’re able to just write. Hopefully you have a manager or somebody there who can give you positive feedback. Help you grow, help you learn. Help you increase your skills, if not.

But oftentimes those companies have budgets where you can hire coaches, join programs and get that kind of feedback to help you. So it’s a hugely advanced, an advantageous opportunity, sometimes, to move out of the struggle and into something that becomes a bit of an anchor for your business, and then maybe a year or two from now, the opportunities change and you’re ready to move back out into freelance, maybe a different role, in house, somewhere else, or at an agency. All of these are legitimate ways to work as a copywriter.

Topaz Hooper: Yes, and I love being a part of a team. Again. I’m not the only copywriter at this part time role. There’s another copywriter that’s just focused on content and brand strategy, and I’m focused on PDPs and landing pages, and it’s fantastic. And now I’m like, Hey, can you take a peek at this PDP does this make sense? Do you think this is gonna work well with your you know what, what you’re doing? She’s like, No, change this and change that. And I’m like, it’s so nice to have another copywriter there. So if you’re also someone who has been a solopreneur their entire career, you know you’ve been in this echo chamber with your copy, and you’re not quite sure if it’s still kind of good. Sometimes getting a part time role and getting other opinions, getting some other marketing folks to kind of peek at your stuff is a great way to rebuild your confidence, too. After some months of being like, wow, clients are kind of declining. Is it me? Does my copy suck? Have I lost my chops? No, you haven’t just get some other folks to work with that might offer you a confidence boost and some new copy ideas.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, while we’re talking about some of these mindset things as well, I want to just add staying positive is really critical here, and it is not easy to do if your business has suffered a downturn, if clients are leaving, if you’re struggling to increase rates, or, you know, people are asking for reduction in hours, reduction in projects, those kinds of things. It’s really hard to stay positive, but it is so important that you do stay positive, that you’re reflecting, you know, these, these positive outcomes, not only for yourself, but for your clients, because people see that they’re drawn to positive energy. And you know, if we, if we start approaching clients negatively or in desperation, you know, all of these things that we might be feeling internally, it sort of goes against this industry advice that you need to be vulnerable. You need to be sharing everything. And there are times when that’s appropriate, but when you are trying to find clients, when you’re trying to find work, when you’re trying to connect with people, build your network, build friendships or relationships, that is not the time to be evoking all of these negative energies. So stay positive.

Topaz Hooper: That’s true. And one way to keep your spirit up, if you’re someone that just really loves to give, you really love the act of giving copy and writing copy, because it’s an act of service for something. You can volunteer. It’s incredible. You can join a board and do some of the copy for the for the for the Board’s website. For example, I just recently started volunteering at an animal sanctuary, and they’re like, We need a copywriter to help us. And I’m like, great. I’m like, they’re like, they want three hours a week. I’m like, I can do that. And what it does is it still keeps my optimism high. I’m like, I’m still valuable. I still have something to give. It’s not that I am valueless because my clients have shriveled up these last three months, I still have something to give, and I’m doing it for a very good, good cause. And kind of circling back to the networking thing, what happens is, is when you volunteer, you get introduced to new people. And those new people say, Wow, this animal sanctuary websites, amazing. Who wrote this? Of course, the founder is happy to say, this person that I know is a copywriter, and she’s fantastic. And then companies start to look at you and say, Oh, well, we actually are hiring, you know. Do you have some time, you know? And so sometimes a volunteership, or, you know, helping your kids, you know, school organization with some marketing stuff, or spending your energy in a positive way can reinforce the positivity in your mind and your business, but also continue to operate as a networking tool as well. And so keeping yourself busy is fantastic, and it’s a good way to keep your spirit high if you’re feeling like the recession is looming. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I love that. This whole discussion, I think, has been a really good reminder of the things that we should be doing in our business all of the time. They become a little bit more critical as we approach some kind of a potential downturn or a recession or a change in business. So this is the stuff we should be doing. If you haven’t been doing it, start. Start doing this stuff more. Do it now. You know, work on your systems. Work on how you’re talking about your business. Look for new relationships, new friends. Stay positive. All of these things are so critically important.

Topaz Hooper: Yes, and just keep your mental, your financial and your business health in order at all times, if possible, especially at your highest times. You know, don’t be afraid to go back in and say, How can I keep this strong?

And I just would encourage all the copywriters just to really know, like, if you’re feeling there’s a slowdown, it’s not you. I just want everyone to know it’s not you. Your copy still rocks. You know, you’re still an amazing business owner. Keep going, and there’s always a rainbow at the end of the storm. So we will get through this. We will survive, and we will have amazing copywriting businesses.

Rob Marsh: Absolutely. That sounds like a really good place to stop, but topaz, if somebody wants to catch up with you, follow you. Find you as the American copywriter living right now in Europe, helping businesses, you know, Americanize their copy or reach new audiences. Where should they go?

Topaz Hooper: Yeah, so you can find me at americancopywriterco.com, and also you can find me on Instagram, at the same handle, and on LinkedIn, you can punch in American copywriter CO, and you’ll find me in the company section, but yeah, those are great places to connect with me. And if there are any global businesses out there that need copywriters or need a copywriter to help them translate their amazing business into a message that American audiences will understand, I’m your girl, so thanks again for the time, Rob. I really appreciate it. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, of course, I will link to all of that in the show notes, so people can find you easily. Go back and listen to episode number 305, when Topaz talked about her first business, you get to know a lot about her as well. This has been a great conversation. Thanks Topaz for making it happen. I appreciate it.

Topaz Hooper:  Thank you so much. 

Rob Marsh: Thanks Topaz for sharing the details of your career journey, business change and what you’re doing to prepare for an economic downturn. It’s hard to predict where the economy is headed with changes to inflation, tarrifs or not-tariffs, the just flared up war in Iran that may spike oil prices which can have effects on other parts of the economy… it’s quite possible we don’t see a recession this year or next. But it’s also very possible we see one, so it makes sense to prepare. Getting ready for the inevitable, won’t hurt your business in the meantime, but it will help if the worst actually happens.

I’ve linked to Topaz’s website in the shownotes, as well as our first interview with her a few years ago, and the article on our website about prepping for a recession. You can find them all at TheCopywriterClub.com

There’s nothing new about these ideas we’ve been talking about… building your network, starting a side hustle, making more offers, cutting expenses both in your business and personal life so you don’t run out of money, and staying positive… if you do this stuff in addtion to building a great busienss by solving big problems for your clients, you’ll do okay when the worst happens.

Finally, I mentioned this at the top of the show, our course, Research Mastery will give you the ideas and insights you need to write better copy, get more impressive results, and increase sales and conversions that will keep clients coming back to you for more. You can learn more about this course at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery. Get it today.

That’s the end of this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast.

If you like what you’ve heard, please share it with someone you know. Simply copy the link from Spotify or Apple Podcasts, drop it into a short email, and let your friend know you were thinking of them as you were listening to The Copywriter Club Podcast.  I promise, when you share The Copywriter Club Podcast, your friends will thank you.

See you next week.

Stuff to check out:

AndreaSager.com
Legalprenuer.com
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Research Mastery Course

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: Do you have questions about contracts, trademarks, business entities, and your legal risk and liabilities? Today, I have answers. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

About a year before I took on my first freelance writing project—I’m going back a long time here—I took the LSAT, that’s the test for admittance into law school. I had thought I would become a lawyer from about the time I was in eighth grade. And I did well enough on the test to get into most of the schools I was planning on applying to. 

My plan at the time was to practice law in the non-profit sector. And to help with that goal, I decided to enroll into a Masters program in public administration. But once I started that program, I was so bored by the curriculum, I couldn’t envision myself finishing. 

At the same time I met someone who asked me to write an article promoting a product for a company she was working for. When I realized I could make money as a writer, I turned my back on my dream of being an attorney and started writing copy.

So when it comes to legal advice, I can’t really help, but my friend Andrea Sager can. Andrea has helped hundreds of small businesses with legal advice and services. I tried to ask her all of the legal questions copywriters tend to have about things like using A.I., contracts and agreements, trademarks, and how we limit our exposure to legal liability that could cost you your business, your home and more. This stuff matters. And I hope you enjoy this interview.

Before we get to the interview, the last couple of weeks I’ve mentioned that I put everything I know about conducting research and using A.I. as part of my research process into a short course called Research Mastery. It includes a lot, but it’s not an overly long, impossible to watch course. Instead it’s the kind of course you can watch in an afternoon or weekend and walk away with a research process that helps you uncover the insights you need to write great sales copy. ..more than twenty different techniques for capturing ideas, … all of the questions I use to get find big ideas about my client, their product, their customers and their competitors as well as the documents you need to capture your research and several tutorials on how to use A.I. to speed up your processes and even help with your research itself. But unlike other research courses that take hours to watch and implement, this one will teach you everything you need to know in a single afternoon. You can learn more about this unique resource at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery… research mastery is all one word.

I’ll link to that in the show notes so you can easily find the link if you can’t type the URL into your browser right now… thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery

And now, my interview with Andrea Sager.

Hey, Andrea, welcome to The Copywriter Club Podcast. I am thrilled to have you here. It’s been quite a while since we talked to an attorney about all of the stuff that we need to be thinking about in our businesses. So I’m excited to have you here, but before we get started, maybe you could tell us your story. Just how did you become an attorney, an author, founder of the legal preneur.com and if I’m reading your website correctly, last year, you were ranked in the number 22 trademark lawyer in America. How does that all happen? 

Andrea Sager: Thank you so much for having me. I so I way back when I started my journey in big law I got the big, fancy, quote, unquote dream job right out of law school, which was the plan. I thought I was going to be married to my job work my way up to partner. And the first week there, I it hit me all of a sudden, and I remember thinking there is absolutely no way I can sit here for the next 40 years of my life, so immediately I’m trying to plan my exit. But it was a little harder because my husband, at the time we he was staying home with our son, and I was the only breadwinner. I was the only one making any income. But about seven months into my journey in big law. I always tell people I manifest getting fired, but ultimately I just wanted to work with small businesses. I had a previous small business where I had connections with other small business owners, and they kept coming to me at the firm, asking for help with trademarks and similar things that I do today for small businesses. I. And the firm didn’t want to help them. And at the time, I was confused, because nobody was asking for a discount, nobody was asking for a discounted rate. They just needed help, and nobody to go to and so I saw this clear need in the market, and after seven months being at the firm, I had an idea that I would be able to survive if I went out on my own, but I couldn’t exactly make the leap on my own, and luckily, the universe pushed me out and said, All right, here you go. You no longer have a job here, so you got to figure out how to make it work. So that the day that I got fired, I launched my law firm, and I was I was ready. I was planning on it. I launched my law firm, had my first client that night, and that was seven years ago, and it’s been quite the journey ever since I launched my law firm. Andrea Sager law in 2018 legal preneur came about in 2020 when I wanted to reach even more entrepreneurs. And legal preneur Is the what we what I call the DIY side of things. We have all the resources. We can file your LLC. You can buy all the contract templates, all the legal related but no attorney client relationship. That is what legal preneur is. So it’s just an opportunity to meet even more entrepreneurs where they’re at and still providing all of the resources that you need to set up and grow and be successful as a business owner. So that’s how I got started. It’s been a wild ride, but it’s it’s been quite the journey, and just so fun. And I’m every day, I’m so honored to be able to serve entrepreneurs. And in my law firm, I primarily now just do trademarks, and that that’s how I have been ranked so highly I’ve it honestly is an honor, just because that is my passion, is helping small businesses, and just being able to continue doing this year after year, day after day after seven years, it gets better every day, and I’m just excited for the next seven years.

Rob Marsh: I’ll bet most people, when they get fired, don’t have the plan. They’re not ready to go. It seems to be pretty shocking, and there’s sort of a period of adjustment. Doesn’t sound like that happened to you? You hit the ground running.

Andrea Sager:  I was ready. What’s funny, actually, is so we were living in Cincinnati at the time, and we were making the move to Houston, so on that Monday, we put our house for sale. Wednesday, I had texted my husband and said, I you know I can’t he we knew I wasn’t happy. We knew I wasn’t going to stay there. But I said, I can’t stand it here. I want to quit today. Can I just quit? I think we have enough money to hold us over until we move. And he said, Just wait until we have a contract on the house. That way we know it’s going to sell. And I said, fair enough. Absolutely, that makes sense. Friday morning is when they walked into my office and told me that I had a choice to make, and they offered me a severance package, and I actually just packed up my thing so quickly and never went back.

Rob Marsh: Well, that’s the start of a good thing, and so what you’re doing today is helping a lot of entrepreneurs, like you said, with legal stuff. So let’s talk about this. Obviously, our audience here is copywriters, content writers, marketers, most of whom, but not all, most of whom, are freelancing in some capacity. Maybe it’s their full time business. Maybe they’re doing it on the side. Maybe they’re trying to figure out how to do it full time. Where should they be thinking about legal stuff? That’s maybe a terrible way to ask the question. What’s the first thing that they should be saying? Okay, if I’m gonna do this thing right from the beginning or from where I am now, I’m gonna start doing it right, what’s the first question they should be asking.

Andrea Sager: Number one that you want to always take care of, no matter what business you’re in, no matter what stage you’re in, if you haven’t done this already, it needs to be done yesterday, and that is filing an LLC, which is a limited liability company. And what I want to make sure everybody understands is, even if you’re a freelancer or a contractor, you are a business owner. And I worked with so many people throughout the years where there is a misunderstanding and they think, Oh, I’m just a freelancer. I’m a contractor. I’m just a 1099, I don’t have a business that is actually a business. And you have to make sure that once you take that first step to being a business owner or a freelancer, a contract, whatever you want to call it, you have to make sure you are protecting yourself every step of the way. And step number one is filing that LLC, which is a limited liability company, and the whole purpose of that is to make sure that you as an individual are protected from the debts of your company.

Rob Marsh: So you say LLC, obviously there are a lot of different kinds of business entities, and there’s maybe some crossover here between, say, a tax advisor and attorney and what people will say, but why an LLC and not say an LLP, which I think is a partnership or even a corporation, a C Corp with, say, an S election or. Why would an LLC be the optimal option here?

Andrea Sager: So most of the time, as a small business owner, an LLC is the way to go, because you get the same liability protection as a corporation, but there’s less fees, there’s less maintenance involved. And a lot of people want to say, Oh, I have the S Corp. Actually, you are either an LLC taxed as an S corp, or you’re a corporation taxed as an S corp. So you’re not an S Corp is not a standalone entity. It’s just the tax election. So usually, if you are definitely, if you’re a single member, solo business owner, LLC is the way to go. My broad, general advice as to when you should go the corporate route. To have a full Corporation, usually it’s when you have investors, but if it’s just you, maybe you have another partner or two. LLC is the way to go. An LLP, there’s a lot more tax consideration. There’s more liability considerations, but for simplicity purposes, most of the time, an LLC is your best option. It’s the best for simplicity purposes. It’s the best for tax purposes. And when you initially create the LLC, you’re taxed the same way as a sole proprietorship, which means you’re filing a Schedule C on your taxes. Once you’re making enough money, that’s when you make the S corp election. Typically, I mean, you definitely want to chat with your tax advisor. I’m definitely not the tax pro here, but most of the time, I’ll hear, Oh, somebody said I shouldn’t file the LLC until I’m making a certain dollar amount or the LLC doesn’t have any benefit until you’re making a certain dollar amount. They’re confusing it with the S corp election, and that is correct. In regards to the S corp election, you cannot actually make the election until you are making a certain dollar amount, because you can’t get the benefits until you’re making a certain dollar amount. But always, always, always, always, you want to protect yourself as an individual, and from day one, that’s the LLC.

Rob Marsh: So you say, protect yourselves. Let’s talk about some of the risks. Let’s say that I just heard you tell me I need to do this LLC thing, but it feels hard. I don’t want to go to my state incorporation office or online to do it. I’m thinking I can get by for this first year while I figure out if this is even something that I want to do. What are the risks? What might happen if I don’t do this?

Andrea Sager: So the biggest risk is creating liability where somebody can come after you and your personal assets and this. So ultimately, that means anything that happens before you’re an LLC, you can be sued for personally, even if at the time of the lawsuit you do have the LLC, because at the time of the act, whatever happens, and it’s not anything you’re doing maliciously, it’s something you do on accident, which I’ll cover some of those instances, but you want to protect yourself against all of those, what ifs those accidents that you’re not sure of. We don’t know every which way we could or could not be sued. We’re in we’re in the US. We can be sued for any and every million but it’s just that simple added layer of protection. And if you’re thinking, Oh, I don’t have assets, I don’t have anything that they could even come after, I’ll do this to protect myself later. Honestly, it’s just a little bit of time and a little bit of an investment to protect yourself years down the road, to protect yourself from 1000s, potentially millions of dollars down the road, and the goal is to have assets. The whole purpose we’re trying to build our empire, our future. The goal is to have assets. So you never know when somebody’s just sitting by waiting for you to acquire those assets. And then here comes the lawsuit. And of course, I am talking worst case scenario. Not everybody’s going to get sued. Most people are not going to get sued, but don’t be that person. Don’t be that one person.

Rob Marsh:  So let’s talk about some of these mistakes that we could make. Again, we’re talking mostly to copywriters or content writers. Are we saying things like, you wrote a website for a client, the client decides that it didn’t perform well enough that maybe they had a higher expectation so they’re going to come after you for for performance issues. Or is it more like the risks of say, you know you’re meeting together and somebody accuses you of some kind of harassment or something like that?

Andrea Sager: Yeah, it can be all the above. The most common issues that I see, number one, especially for a copywriter, would be not performing on the contract. So if you maybe you leave something out or the work isn’t as great as the company wanted, or what they expected, we want to make sure we cover those bases in the contract. But if they are not, you. And they could sue you. That’s why you have the LLC to where they can only come after what the business has. They cannot come after you personally. So always you want to make sure you have backups in the contract, to make sure that you know the the work product is not to their satisfaction, because that’s always subjective, making sure you know they ask for 20 revisions. You’re getting compensated after a certain number of revisions. You know how to bake all that into your contracts, but it’s just accounting for all those little things that you don’t know, what you don’t know. And the other big one, especially for a copywriter, is copyright infringement? You know, played plagiarism. Where is the line? How do you know if you’re infringing on someone? Is it your original work, or is it inspired by someone else? And Copyright infringement is not always the easiest to say yes or no, it is infringement. And another big one right now is AI, of course, you know, can we use AI? How you know, what are the parameters around that we can get in that in a second? But when it comes to copyright infringement, specifically, the legal test is substantial similarities, substantial similarity. What is that nobody knows? The courts don’t even know. So I always tell and there’s no such thing as changing it up 30% or 50% whatever number somebody’s thrown out there. No court has ever said that in America. So you want to be as original as possible. However, that being said, there are no original ideas. The laws were written in place to allow inspiration, to allow people to have the same ideas, because ideas actually cannot be protected. It’s the expression of the ideas. So when you are trying to ensure that you’re not infringing on someone else’s copyright, be original, be as creative as possible, and if you can prove that, hey, I was original, I was creative, likely you’re not infringing on anybody, but if you’re copying someone, maybe you’ve changed like, one or two words out of a 300 page document. That’s probably infringement.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, obviously that second example is pretty blatant, and most of us would say, yeah, that’s plagiarism. You shouldn’t be doing it. But it seems like the real risk here is having the same idea that somebody else has and expressing it in a similar way, not necessarily knowing that that other person has also had the idea, but because they had it a year before, or whatever they find out about it now you’ve got a problem. You’ve written some copy for a client that is substantially like it, and you didn’t intend to do anything wrong. You weren’t plagiarizing. It just happens to be similar. Is that, does that track? Right?

Andrea Sager: And where you want to make sure you are staying on track is the idea can be the same. So if you’re writing how to do X, Y Z, and somebody else has written how to do X, Y, Z, that’s perfectly fine, as long as your expression of that is different, it’s in your own words. Because ideas themselves cannot be protected. It is the expression. So just think about is okay? So they can have the same idea, I can have the same idea, but it’s how we’re expressing these ideas, that’s what makes it not infringement. 

Rob Marsh: If I’m trying to be clever and make my logo look like Coca Cola logo, I’m gonna have a problem, because I’m expressing it in a way to be funny, maybe, or even in parody, but doing something, especially with a firm like Coca Cola that is definitely gonna wanna protect their assets, right?

Andrea Sager: And not only may that trigger copyright infringement, that may also trigger trademark infringement so really quickly, the difference between trademarks and copyrights, and because these are two of the most misused terms with entrepreneurs, trademarks protect your brand identity, your branding, your logo, your slogan, a product name, any unique name within your business, it can probably be protected with a trademark. Copyrights are your content, your creative work, your photos, your videos, your blog posts, your website copy, your social captions, so the consistent creative work that’s a copyright, usually like the one and done, naming of things. That’s a trademark. Okay?

Rob Marsh: That makes sense. So I can imagine somebody thinking, well, this really won’t be a problem for me, because if the client gets upset, I’ll just refund the project fee and no problem. What do you think about that?

Andrea Sager: That could work if the client isn’t. Getting in trouble for copyright infringement, and this is one thing you do want to make sure is covered in your contracts. Who’s liable if there is copyright infringement. Because if the client says, hey, I want you to write on this topic, this project, I want this covered. I want this covered, and you’re really just changing up a little bit of what the client’s giving you who’s liable for that the client’s telling you what to do. You’re really just following what the what the client’s saying. So you always want to make sure that your contracts are covering who is liable for copyright infringement in these cases. And another added layer of protection, of course, is insurance. Especially as a copywriter, you want to make sure you have IP insurance. If something happens and you do, you are found and you’re in trouble for copyright infringement. And honestly, sometimes it just happens. Sometimes, you know, clients come to me whether they’re trademark infringement, copyright infringement, they come to me like I did the work I did, I did the searching, I thought, I did my due diligence, and sometimes it it’s still infringement, unfortunately, so you just have to make sure, as a business owner, you are taking the added layers of protection. So what you know, can you just offer the client a refund? Potentially, yes, but if the client’s actually getting sued for infringement, they may want more if they’re getting pursued for more,

Rob Marsh: So that’s why we need the legal entity that will protect us. And then if we are being sued, you know, let’s say we have the entity in place. We are being sued for something that happens. How does that protect us? What are the limits involved there? You know, again, you mentioned insurance, which you would hopefully have, that will cover losses if that happens. But you know, what are? What are the protections that you actually get from having this entity, entity in place?

Andrea Sager: Now, when you have your LLC, and let’s play this out, you, you have your LLC, you you you get sued for copyright infringement, and it’s a black and white case. Yes, you did commit infringement, and now the company, or you’re getting sued for $100,000 I am making this up $100,000 and the business only has 5000 in assets. What happens? Likely, if they are actually suing you, they’ve done their homework. They know there’s something that they can get and another and if so, if your business only has the 5000 they may try what’s called piercing the corporate bail, which means you lose that LLC protection. Number one way to lose the LLC protection is commingling funds. So if you’re getting paid for a project, you have that deposited into your personal account instead of your business account. So rule number one, when you have the LLC treat it like an actual separate entity. You have to have a separate business bank account make sure all payments to the business are going into that business bank account. And you can also chat with an accountant around how to how to actually pay yourself, or how to actually ensure that you are maintaining the corporate structure as far as payments go. But if they are able to pierce that corporate veil, that’s bad. That is very bad news for you as a business owner, because ultimately the LLC is useless, but a lot of times it doesn’t go that far, so they’re ultimately usually just going to be able to go after what the business owns.

Rob Marsh: And if there really is only $5,000 in the business entity, that’s all they can go after your home or other assets. If you have been really solid about honoring the business entity, you’ve kept things separate, all of that is in place exactly. Yeah, so that’s the number one reason we want to be doing this in the first place.

Andrea Sager: Exactly.

Rob Marsh: So that’s business entity we kind of started like drifting into, you know, trademark protection and some other stuff. But let’s, let’s talk about trademarks. What can we trademark? What should we trademark? What should we just be thinking? Well, that’s, you know, everybody talks about that, so I’m not going to touch that. How do we break that down?

Andrea Sager: I always suggest starting with your brand name, because that’s, that’s typically the business, the biggest business identifier that you have. And remember, trademarks are your brand identity, so trademarks equal branding. So you likely have multiple trademarks within your business. I can’t tell you how many times a business owner comes to me and they say, oh, I want to file a trademark, but I don’t think I have any trademarks. And you know, we go through and we point out a number of trademarks, so you likely already have a. Number of trademarks that you can file. So if you’re you’re listening to this, make a list of what you have. So think about your brand name, your logo, if you have a slogan that you use, if you have different offering names, maybe you have different packages, those names can be protected with a trademark. If they are unique names, if it’s like platinum, gold, like, Absolutely not. Those can’t be trademarked. But if you have some unique name as a copywriter, I can imagine many of you have some clever, some clever phrases and terms in your business, and if those become synonymous with your business, if they become really identifiers for your business, that is something that you should be trademarking, because that’s how you grow your brand’s value. That’s how you grow your brand’s recognition.

Rob Marsh: And those become assets. Obviously you can sell later.

Andrea Sager: Exactly, you can sell them, and not just that. We can license them. You can get royalties. So a lot of people don’t realize when you know, we know passive income is just a buzzword thrown around everywhere online, but one of the true, only true passive income avenues is intellectual property, through royalties and licensing fees. So IP is not just a business, a way you want to protect your business, but it can also create those additional revenue streams in your business.

Rob Marsh: Okay, so your names, titles, that kind of stuff. We should be protecting it. What’s the, what’s the first step on that, other than identifying, okay, I want to protect my business name. What do we do in order to make that happen? 

Andrea Sager: So you can, you can always spot. You can always DIY. And I’m not the type of lawyer that’s going to tell you, Hey, you have to work with the lawyer to do this. You have to hire me to do this. Everything is figureoutable. You can DIY all the legal stuff, and it’s not illegal if you don’t do any of it. The whole purpose of what I’m talking about on this entire podcast is lowering your risk level as a business owner, as an entrepreneur. So in order to file the trademark, if that’s something you want to do on your own, you can go to uspto.gov, which is the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and file your own trademark applications. You pay the filing fee. Right now, it’s 350 and you file. And as of today, it is at least 14 months from the day you file to the day you’re registered. And that’s the bare minimum. If there are refusals, there’s office actions, it could be a lot longer. If you work with an attorney such as myself, we do a search first. So the search is usually about a week or so. We scour the internet, scour the trademark office to find out what else is out there and determine what your risk level is going into the application process. Because I’m not going to file something that I know is not going to get approved. That’s why I’m ranked number 22 I don’t file just anything, so we do the search to make sure that you are pretty much getting approved. It’s just a waiting game. And the thing that you have to understand about trademarks, it’s not just the same name. That’s infringement. Trademark infringement is when likelihood of confusion is present, so the name or the mark, if it’s a logo, the mark only has to be similar. It does not have to be the same. So it’s the mark that has to be similar, and the goods and services also have to be similar. If both are similar. And there’s an argument that consumers are likely to be confused as to who is who. That is trademark infringement, and that’s what we need to avoid. So when you’re if you’re doing your own search, of course, you want to try and find the low hanging fruit, the same, or, you know, whatever pops up in a Google search. But you really have to also try and look at and search for phonetic similarities, and adding a word like the or making something plural that is not going to relieve you of infringement. So it has to making any change. Has to relieve yourself of, you know it. Can there be an argument here that somebody may purchase from me, thinking that it’s this other person, because if that argument is likely that is trademark infringement. So the search, that’s really the most important part, especially when working with our team, because once we get through that search and we give you the green light, you can run with the name. You don’t have to wait any longer to use the name that’s the search. Is your go ahead from us, and then we file. And, you know, handle all the steps in the trademark process. But starting the trademark process, just understand it’s going to take well over a year,

Rob Marsh: Understood, and while we’re talking about this, the difference between the circle R and the TM trademark. Mark, and even SM service marks, when can you use the TM and when can you use the circle R?

Andrea Sager: Yeah, so the TM or the SM that can be used honestly at any time, that means you claim to have the exclusive right to use the mark. It does not mean you have the exclusive right the R circle symbol. That is what you can use when you have the registration, not when you’ve submitted the application, but when you actually have made it through that whole process, and you have your registration certificate, you can use the R circle, and that means you do have the exclusive right to use that name.

Rob Marsh: My understanding I’m not an attorney. Don’t play one on a podcast. My understanding is, and you were kind of touching on this, a trademark say in one industry does not mean that you can’t use those same words or ideas in another industry. So if I saw a really cool trademark say used by my area hospital, you know, we save lives or whatever. And I thought, hey, I want to use that in my copywriting business. I save lives. There’s a chance that that’s allowable, right? Because they are different industries, different uses, different I mean, everything really is different, but the words.

Andrea Sager: I’m right about that, yes, and two brands can have the same exact name, the same exact mark, and it not be infringement, because the goods and services are so different. So we all know Delta airline and delta The Kitchen Sink Faucet Company, those coexist. They both have a federal trademark registration because it’s not likely that somebody purchases an airline ticket thinking they’re buying a kitchen sink faucet and vice versa. So brands can coexist with the same exact name.

Rob Marsh: The danger here, though, would be okay. I really like this Disney character that I and I want to name a business after it. So, you know the let’s call it the Snow White service. You know, in my business, I’m guessing that’s gonna run into some problems, even though we’re in totally different industries,

Andrea Sager: One more thing that so the power of a trademark, because I’ll get a lot of pushback, sometimes from people that say, oh, a trademark is not worth it, because you have to sue to enforce it, and so unless you have a lot of money to sue, it’s not worth it. But today, it’s a very different case. So 15 years ago, yes, absolutely, that was the case. But today, everybody’s online, and most clients that I work with they’re concerned with policing their brand, maintaining their brand online. Once you have a trademark registration, you don’t have to sue, you don’t have to send a cease and desist letter. You can submit a trademark takedown online wherever the infringement is. So if you have your brand, and you get a trademark, and you have your website, and then there’s somebody on Facebook that has this Facebook page that’s in the same or a similar name as your trademark, and they’re infringed. It’s infringement. You can go to Facebook or meta and submit a trademark takedown, submit all the information, and usually it’ll be removed within a couple of days. And you can do that on your own. You do not have to have a lawyer do that for you. That is the power of a trademark. We do that constantly for clients. You can do it on Instagram, Tiktok, you can on every, pretty much every website. You can submit these takedown forms. And that’s the power of a trademark registration, because as we’ll get into copyrights, you’ll learn that you can do this at any time. For copyrights, but for trademarks, you have to have the registration. So you want to have that registration as soon as possible in order to be able to enforce it and police it online.

Rob Marsh: And you have to have the circle R to be able to do that, not the TM, right, correct?

Andrea Sager: And you don’t have to use the circle R, you just have to have that registration. So absolutely, I always suggest using the circle R, but it’s not a requirement. But once you have that registration, you can start submitting those takedowns online.

Rob Marsh: Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about copyrights. This should be something that copywriters know about, because everybody in the world thinks that, you know, when you say, I’m a copywriter, that we’re attorneys doing, you know, copyright work. So what are some of the differences and what do we need to do differently to protect our copyright to our content?

Andrea Sager: Yeah, so copyrights, remember, this is your content, your creative work. The cool thing about copyrights, you automatically have protection the moment the work is created. So you write this 500 500 word something, and the moment you finish it, as long as it’s unique and creative, you have a federal copyright to it. You don’t have to submit an application. You automatically have federal copyright protection the moment. Snap a photo on your phone, you automatically have federal copyright protection. There are benefits to getting the registration. However, it’s not necessary. Copyrights are automatic, and there’s no I think these call it like a poor man’s copyright, where you’d mail it or something like that.

Rob Marsh: Don’t open the envelope.

Andrea Sager: Because I think there used to be, like people would think there was a publish, publishing requirement, which meant sending it, but it’s automatic. So snap a photo, record a video. It’s automatic, which is really cool, because, like I said, policing your work online. If you post a photo to Instagram and somebody else posts it as their own photo to Facebook or wherever, or they take your blog post and they post it as their blog post, you can immediately submit that copyright takedown, and it’ll be taken down within a couple of days, because that is copyright infringement. 

Rob Marsh: So where does Fair Use come in with this? And the reason I ask is a lot of copywriters have swipe files where, you know, maybe we’ve collected five or six examples of a guarantee statement. We think, Hey, this is really good, and we swipe it, we drop it into a sales page, maybe for our own business. So it’s not risking it for a client. But you know, there are only so many ways to word a guarantee, you know. So how does Fair Use play in all of this. And when are we stepping beyond fair use?

Andrea Sager: So fair use. I let me preface this by saying Fair Use is actually a very, very tough hurdle to fall into. And I would never tell somebody like, Hey, meet these requirements and you qualify for fair use. You always want to chat with a lawyer before trying to claim fair use. And the thing about fair use is you can still be sued for copyright infringement. Fair Use is only a defense to copyright infringement, so there’s a people always will try to use fair use in the wrong way. So just First things first, understand that it is very hard to fall into fair use, but about the actual like guarantee statements or refund policies, those likely may not even qualify for copyright protection because the Copyright Office specifically says short quotes are not protected. 

Rob Marsh: What’s a short quote? What does that even mean? Short quote?

Andrea Sager: Nobody knows. So nobody knows, but they I mean it for me as a copyright attorney, I just have to see it, and there’s no like, if it’s this many words, it’s a short quote. If it’s this many, it’s a long it’s a longer quote. There’s, there is a court case. I think it was around 150 words that starts to be a safe harbor for for more than 150 that that does start to qualify as a longer quote. However it’s not a slam dunk either way, whether it is or isn’t. But when it comes to those policies, there’s really no unique words there anymore. So unless somebody can prove like, Hey, this is so unique to me. Because, you know, here’s my proof that I wrote it this way five years ago, and here’s all these unique words that nobody else has ever used before. Likely It’s everybody’s using the same version somehow. So I wouldn’t definitely no fair use there, but it’s just something that’s common, just common to use, and doesn’t qualify for copyright protection.

Rob Marsh: Anything else we need to be thinking about when it comes to copyright copyright protection

Andrea Sager: When to get the registration. So remember, you don’t need the registration to have copyright rights. However, if you have the registration before somebody infringes, or if you submit the application within three months of publishing the work, you’re eligible for statutory damages. Statutory damages, long story short, it just makes it easier for you to prove your case in court, or easier to prove the damages in court, and the other party may have to pay your attorney fees if you have to sue for copyright infringement. The reason why that’s important is because it’s actually pretty hard to quantify damages in copyright cases. Let’s say you post the and this is an easy example. You post this video on Tiktok, and, you know, you get some views, whatever. And then somebody else posts this video on Tiktok, and they go viral, and they make millions of dollars because the your video went viral for them, you’re gonna think, Oh, I’m I’m damaged, millions of dollars. You. But you’re actually not damaged. It may actually have made you more money if they found out who the original creator was. So just because somebody made millions off of your work, it doesn’t mean you were damaged that much. So it’s it really is hard to prove damages in copyright cases, so it having the statutory damages eligibility, it’s a big bargaining chip when pursuing someone for copyright infringement.

Rob Marsh: Let’s talk about contracts. Obviously, we’ve got our entity set up now. We’ve got our trademarks, but we’re gonna be working with clients on a pretty regular basis, or we may have partners or affiliates, or we may be working with, you know, being an affiliate for other people, what do we need to know about contracts and have in place so that we’re protected there?

Andrea Sager: Rule number one is, don’t be afraid to use them. Never be afraid to use a contract. I hear from small businesses all the time, oh, it’s just a handshake deal. I don’t want them to think I’m trying to pull one over. No, we are business owners, we use contracts. Now, what contracts you need will depend on what you’re doing, but anytime money or value is changing hands, you need a contract. So on your website, you always want your privacy policy in terms of use hands down, you need those every website. Now for an affiliate agreement, there’s so many situations to account for. You know, how often do you get paid? What if there are refunds? What if you know, somebody files a chargeback, not even a refund. So there’s a lot of situations to account for in affiliate agreements, and my and regardless of it, if it’s an affiliate agreement or whatever kind of contract, if you’re a newer business owner, don’t be intimidated by the contracts you may need. I’m I’m hugely a fan of starting with contract templates, because as a newer business owner, you likely don’t know what you want or don’t want in your contracts. So if you go work one on one with a lawyer, they’re going to just give you best practices, and likely it’s their template, but you’re going to pay them 1000s of dollars for their template. So I would say starting with Attorney drafted contract templates, usually the best way to go. As you gain experience in business, you’ll learn what you like, what you don’t like. You may have some mistakes. You’ll learn from things, but you’ll know when the time is right to then graduate. I call it graduating to a custom contract. And then, and I always tell clients, make notes of you know what you like or don’t like in your current contracts, and then you’ll know when the time is right to go work one on one with a lawyer to make sure that everything you want to be accounted for is in those contracts. So number one thing in your service agreements, so as you’re providing these services to clients, the most underrated provision is intellectual property. In my opinion, that’s always the most important. Who owns the work, and the client is always going to think, Oh, I’m paying you for this. I own the work. But actually, the default law says the contractor owns the work, unless you’re an employee and you’re creating intellectual property for your employer. The employer owns that IP that the employee creates. But if you’re a contractor, by default law, you own the IP, and if the client wants to own it, I always tell I especially in this situation where, if it’s a copywriter or a photographer, charge more if the client wants to actually own the intellectual property, because if they want to own it, you may not even be able to sample from it. You may not be able to use it different version for different projects. You may not even be able to use it for your portfolio. So and another thing there is just under maybe explaining to the client, like, Hey, you’re free to use this. You have this license to use this for x, y, z, but I own it, and that’s ultimately the best situation most of the time for contractors, is you own the IP. You’re giving a license, which is permission to use to the client.

Rob Marsh: This seems really useful if you’re working with a lot of clients in the same niche, say, in different demographic areas or different cities, that kind of thing. So if I’m working for, say, tennis clubs, and I’ve written some copy for a sales page for tennis lessons that I can relicense out to tennis clubs, say in San Diego or in New Orleans or Miami, they’re not competing with each other, so they probably don’t really have a problem with that, but I get to keep the ownership and actually turn my copy into something that’s more valuable than a one time sale.

Andrea Sager: It’s licensing your intellectual property.

Rob Marsh: So let’s say a. Client wants to own it. Obviously we can write in some exceptions to that as well that preserves our right to use it for advertising purposes or portfolio purposes, whatever. What other kinds of exceptions to that rule should we be thinking of if we are giving the client the rights to the work that we do?

Andrea Sager: So what I tell clients is to have your base rate. And this may be this, I don’t know how, for those of you listening, I don’t know how you think about your rates right now, but what I tell clients is have your base rate and have it include XYZ, like hey, you can use it for ABC up to, you know, people can view it up to 2000 times. And if they want to have it to where 10,000 people can view it. So then you have the rate times five. Then if they want it to be in print publications, if they have it. So this is a big one for photographers. Where they get they’ll get brand photos, and the photographer tells them, like, yeah, you can use this on your website. And then they get interviewed for Forbes, and the photos and Forbes, well, the the client thinks like, Oh, I’m just going to give them that photo. No, you have to actually go back to the photographer and get a bigger license, because a lot more eyes are on that photo. So same thing when you’re thinking about your copywriting, how many eyes are going to be on it, and that’s what you want to think about when charging your rates is how many eyes. And you may want to have a viral, virality clause, if, depending on what the work is being used for, if it has the potential of going viral and being more successful. Hey, here’s my bonus, if this does go viral,

Rob Marsh: Makes sense, what are the kinds of contract stipulations should we thinking about earlier we were talking about the liability that we might have, and so I’m thinking some kind of an indemnification clause is really important to make sure that we limit that amount of liability.

Andrea Sager: So, and that’s going to come back to how much creative control do you have versus the client. Because if the client is basically saying, hey, I want XYZ, just, you know, add some more words here, the client’s really telling you what to do, you don’t want to be liable if it is infringement. So you definitely want to be indemnified in that situation. If you’re if they’re saying, hey, I want you know this big project, you just do your thing, write it all, do whatever. You have a lot of the creative control. So if it is infringement, likely the client is not going to want to indemnify you. So indemnification means that the client, the party, hiring you. They will step into your shoes, or they will take liability if there is infringement issues the client. Sometimes they understand that, sometimes they don’t. So if they push back, it may be a negotiating point for for compensation, and it’s also a big consideration for your insurance, if you are or are not going to be indemnified, do you need different insurance for this project? So just, just a lot of different things to think about when it comes to liability. Who’s responsible? You know, if is there a limit to the response the responsibility you may have. So thinking about indemnification, the limitation of the liability, all of those need to be baked into the contract, and they all all of those considerations should affect the compensation that you received,

Rob Marsh: Along with that probably very similar idea, but if you are writing for the client, and you don’t have the resources to do, say, you know, a check to make sure that it’s 100% original. You You’re obviously, we’re writing something that’s original. We’re doing our best, but we maybe can’t check that, specifying in a contract that it is the client’s responsibility for, you know, any kind of legal checks, that kind of a thing would be another, at least in my head, seems like a really smart move. Yes, exactly. Okay, so that’s entity we’ve talked about, trademarks, copyright, contracts, what else. What other legal hurdles are there out there that we’re just not thinking about or seeing now?

Andrea Sager: So those are the main three for every single business, no matter what stage of business you’re in, there likely will come up other things if, depending on what kind of trouble you get yourself in. But once you have those three covered, you’re pretty solid. You’re pretty solid unless you’re doing something malicious, fraudulent, not something that I want to cover, but when you have those three set up in your business, that’s going to take you a long way of being protected, and it’s not something you want to put on the back burner. Once you tackle these things up front, you’re going to be set for a long time. You’re it’s going to take you a long way make the investment, the time and. In monetary investment up front to ensure all of these are set up properly, and that’s what’s going to save you a lot more money in the long run.

Rob Marsh: we’ve all seen, you know, all the TV shows or whatever, when something happens and somebody says, well, we’ll talk to my lawyer, right? Or call my lawyer. Most of us don’t have a lawyer to call. Or, you know, here’s my lawyer’s card. Call them that kind of at what point does it make sense to actually have a lawyer, as opposed to using a site like the legal preneur or, you know, contract shop or something like that. You know, when should we have that one to one relationship with an attorney?

Andrea Sager: I think it’s actually an internal feeling. I when you’re feeling uncomfortable like, Oh, I feel like, maybe I should have somebody that can go to and talk to and especially if you have a lot of questions that come up here and there a lot of lawyers, especially similar to me, that have a smaller practice, we have a pretty affordable, one to one rate on a monthly basis. So a subscription model, a membership model, and I would find a lawyer that you really resonate with, you work well with and be on that subscription model, because, like for us, it’s very low cost, and you get all access to your own attorney every month, and all your questions are answered, all that, all the LLC, the contracts, the intellectual property, all that’s taken care of. So there is the DIY route. But also, just for a little bit more of an investment, you can have that one on one attorney relationship to not. And it’s not just about, hey, this issue is coming up, that issue is coming up, but it’s also, can be, hey, how do I negotiate this? Hey, how do I fight for this rate? How can I negotiate this in the contract? So don’t think it’s always for when issues come up, but it’s also lawyers should be helping you negotiate your contracts.

Rob Marsh: That makes sense. This has been really fascinating discussion as fascinating, I suppose, as legal discussion can be. But obviously this is important stuff to cover and take care of, and it’s the kind of stuff that I think we tend to leave and just kind of ignore until there’s a problem, in which case it might be too late. Yeah, exactly. Let’s talk about AI. Last topic for today. You mentioned it earlier. What are the risks there? You know, a lot of writers are using it now, not just for ideas, but to actually write deliverable copy. We’ve all heard that AI can’t be copyrighted because of the source material. But what are the risks and what should we be aware of so that, yeah, we don’t get into trouble, say, two years from now, because what we’re doing today,

Andrea Sager: yeah, so, and keep in mind there’s, as the years come up, there’s going to be a lot more to say in the legal space around AI, but as of right now, anything created from AI is not protected because there’s no human component. It has to be created by a computer, by a human in order to be protected with a copyright. However, even if you use something created by AI, not just getting ideas, but actually like, hey, you know, chat, write me this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they spit it out, and you use that, even though you cannot protect that with a copyright, it doesn’t mean it’s not infringing on somebody else’s work, because all of that is being sourced from the internet. And so somebody did actually come up with that, or something very similar. So you’re still running the risk of infringing on somebody else’s copyright if you use exactly what comes out of chat or whatever AI you’re using.

Rob Marsh: So I suppose this goes back to something you mentioned earlier, but what if I change it up 20%?

Andrea Sager: Well, then even if you change it up 20% How do you know you’re not still matching somebody else’s original work?

Rob Marsh: These are really questions, who knows? Who knows what’s going on with it? I don’t suppose that a lot of copywriters are going to stop using AI because of the risks. I think a lot of people probably perceive this is a really general risk, and everybody is stepping into it together. But on the other hand, you know, there are, there are some litigious companies or groups that are out there that are looking for opportunities to step in. And so, yeah, maybe you’re not worried about it because you don’t own your house, but if you do own your house, you don’t have an entity set up, and you step into something like this, it could be really costly. So it’s definitely something we should be aware of.

Andrea Sager: I personally love AI for ideas. I use it all the time for ideas, but I absolutely do not have it spit out any, even a full product for me, I just get the ideas and drum up my own product. So that’s my suggestion on how you should be using AI. I know. That that is not what everybody does, though.

Rob Marsh: I teach a college class, and it’s eye opening what kids are doing with AI today. I think it’s just gonna get worse and worse. I can only imagine Exactly. Thanks. Andrea, this has been great. I really appreciate your time, your expertise. If somebody wants to follow you or check out some of the contracts, the resources that you have. Where should they go?

Andrea Sager: Yeah, the legalpreneur.com you can find all of our resources there. Andreassager.com is the law firm, and you can get started with your trademark there. You can follow along on Instagram at AndreaSagerLaw and then Instagram and Tiktok at @thelegalpreneur.

Rob Marsh: Thanks to Andrea for the legal education I delayed a couple of decades ago. Andrea’s advice about lower your risk level is good whether you’re thinking about trademarking a framework or a business name, or you simply want to have a contract in place to ensure you and clients are on the same page.

This stuff is important. And while I’m not trying to scare anyone, the risks are real, so it may be worth the time and effort to talk to an attorney like Andrea. I’ve included links to her site in the show notes. What’s more, if you need a legal agreement to use with your clients, there’s a good one inside The Copywriter Underground which you can join at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

And I should just mention again you can get all my research secrets at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery

Stuff to check out:

Matt’s LinkedIn
Matt’s Website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Research Mastery Course

Transcript:

Rob Marsh: Looking for ideas for finding and connecting with potential clients on LinkedIn? You’re in the right place. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

There are a lot of ways to find and land clients. There’s cold emailing which allows you to choose the clients you want to work with—and if your pitch warms up your prospect and offers to solve the right problem for them, it can be very effective. Incidentally, if you want to learn how to cold pitch effectively, check out thecopywriterclub.com/lovenote. 

Beyond cold pitching, another popular method for attracting clients to you is posting content on social media. And for copywriters, Instagram or LinkedIn seem to be the two go-to platforms. And yes, there are copywriters using other platforms like TikTok or Threads and seeing success there, most of the action seems to be on these other, older platforms.

We’ve talked about finding clients on LinkedIn several times on the podcast. And in fact, we’ll talk about it again in the near future. But because so many copywriters are using thise platform to build an audience, it bears repeating some of that advice from time to time. But it’s not just repeating the same stuff… we’re looking for new ideas that work now. The algorythm is always changing, so keeping an eye on what’s working now is important.

So with that as our preamble, I invited copywriter turned LinkedIn Audience Building Strategist, Matt Barker, to share with me—and you as my listener—what is working on LinkedIn right now. Matt has built an audience of more than 170,000 followers on LinkedIn. His posts get 100s of comments and when he shares his programs or other products, the sales follow.

Matt will be the first to say that getting attention on LinkedIn is harder today than it was two or three years ago. But that doesn’t mean it’s hard to stand out. In this interview, Matt and I talked about what works, what he’s posting more of lately, and how sharing content to inspire and motivate can bring in more clients than posts pitching your services. 

I think you’re going to like this interview…

Before we get to the interview, just in case you missed this last week when I mentioned it, I put everything I know about conducting research and using A.I. as part of my research process into a short course called Research Mastery. It includes the 4:20+ research method that helps copywriters like you uncover the insights you need to write great sales copy. ..more than twenty different techniques for capturing ideas, … all of the questions I use to get find big ideas about my client, their product, their customers and their competitors as well as the documents you need to capture your research and several tutorials on how to use A.I. to speed up your processes and even help with your research itself. But unlike other resource courses that take hours to watch and implement, this one will teach you everything you need to know in a single afternoon. You can learn more about this unique resource at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery… research mastery is all one word.

I’ll link to that in the show notes so you can easily find the link if you can’t type the URL into your browser right now… thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery

And now, my interview with Matt Barker.

Matt Barker: Yeah, thanks for having me on. By the way, I used to listen to this podcast a little bit when I was getting to learn copywriting and that sort of stuff three years ago. So thanks for what you do with your episodes, it’s helping people maybe more than you know, appreciate that, yeah, but yeah, with my LinkedIn profile, it was I started writing on there in January 2022, the main purpose for that was to get copywriting clients. I just left my job about three or four months prior, I worked in marketing. I was in marketing for about eight years, B to B and B to C, so I kind of understood marketing pretty well, and copywriting was a small part of that, but I wasn’t really sure how to be a really good copywriter. So. Yeah. Fast forward to when I started link running on LinkedIn, January 2022, I was using it primarily to try and get clients for my new copywriting business. I’d started, and it was pretty difficult at the start, because I just didn’t I had this thing that a lot of people experience at the beginning, when they start kind of writing content online that’s from their own perspective and their own personal profile, not through like a company logo, or like through their work, through a brand, where you just feel really kind of anxious and worried about what people will think of you, and you know, you’re, you’re putting yourself out there. And it was really difficult for the first sort of two or three months trying to, you know, kind of get over that. But so glad I did, because it and I kind of stuck to it. I would, I would read a lot of content about people who were doing similar things, writing content on LinkedIn consistently, and the kind of the power of, you know, having your, your own personal presence on on LinkedIn specifically, and as well as just set social media in general, so I could see that there was a long term benefit to it. So I kind of always had in my mind that I wanted to just stick to it and see what would come of it. And then after three months, I kind of had that, like there was a little breakthrough, of, like a post that done particularly well, and that was enough for me to be like, Ah, okay, this is, this, is really, this, like, could be, really be something. And it just kind of snowballed from there, really, I, I’m very data driven, so I was always looking at, like, what, why did this post work? How can I do more of that and do it and just consistently get better and better and better. And so it became a bit of an obsession, a bit of a kind of, you know, competition. You’re looking at other people growing and doing other things and, yeah, just managed to be really consistent and constantly wanting to improve. I think is, is one of the big things

Rob Marsh:  Or, you know what you were, you bumping along with one or two comments, and suddenly this one has, you know, hundreds or you know what, what did that look like?

Matt Barker: The difference was, I was, yeah, I was posting every night, every two or three times, every week for about three months, and I was just getting like one like, three likes, four likes, no comments. It took me ages to even get a comment, I think, which is quite funny, but I think that’s what most people experience. But yeah, the difference between that, that post that kind of had that initial reaction was, I think it got something like 80 likes or and 2030 comments, I can’t remember, but I think, I think there was a certain creator with about 6,000 followers at the time who managed to see it, catch it, and engage with it, and I think that had a big impact. But the difference in writing of that post versus the other ones was kind of night and day, when you look at, like, what works on LinkedIn, it was like, there was a there was a proper hook, like a real hook that actually, like, grabbed someone and talked to a pain point and was compelling someone to actually read it. It was concise, it was kind of formatted. It was easy to read. So it was, yeah, I think when you look at that versus the stuff I was doing before that, it’s quite clear, yeah.

Rob Marsh: Let’s talk about that a little bit more deeply. You know, what is the best content to be posting on LinkedIn, so that you’re actually getting engagement, and not just engagement from anybody, but engagement from the people that you want to work with, you know, people that maybe would hire you, you know, to do copy your content for them.

Matt Barker: Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s an ever evolving thing the way, because, because these social platforms, they have their algorithms and that kind of dictates, you know, how much, how many impressions, and how what reach your posts get. But so that can, that can be a bit of a minefield, and that that can kind of make things not so consistent as they should be, as opposed to, like, traditionally, if you’re writing a landing page or, like, a sales letter of some sort, where you’re just driving traffic to that that piece of copy will just perform as it performs and you improve it, or as you improve it. You know, the only variance is the visitors. And on social platforms, you’re kind. If there’s, there’s external factors which are kind of out of your control, but typically the kind of the writing process is the big frame. The main framework that was the most helpful for me, was understanding problem, agitate, solution. To start off by highlighting a big, painful problem for a specific target audience, agitate that problem, make it really feel real, and kind of be able to make the reader feel like, oh, this person really understands, like, the problem that I’m facing. They truly understand me, and obviously that comes from the research that you put into understanding your target audience and then presenting a solution. So whether that’s like a step by step process that you have, or whether it’s just a one line kind of motivational kind of sentence that’s going to change their kind of beliefs. That was the main framework for me that has always worked well on LinkedIn, because you’re able to use it in so many different ways. You’re able to tell stories with that kind of framework. You’re able to educate your audience on, you know, problems that they’re experiencing, but you’re also able to use it to show off, you know, like results and outcomes that you’ve driven for other clients and past clients. So it’s such a helpful framework that I think just works across the board on LinkedIn, and then the other kind of variants of that are like the formats that you use, is it text only? Is it you adding some sort of visual to help illustrate the point? Or any, or, you know, some, there’s a kind of a format on LinkedIn that that gets a strangely large amount of reach is these kind of PDF guides called carousels that they call them on the platform. And they’re kind of these multi page guides. They’re typically not really following that kind of problem, agitate solution framework. They’re more kind of in depth pieces, but those kind of pieces of content can do extremely well. And if you, if you hold someone’s attention for that long, and you really, and you really educate them and kind of dive into their into their conversation that’s happening for them right now, that that’s those pieces of content can really have a big impact in terms of kind of lead generation, because they can get that really high reach, but then they can also really deeply resonate, because you can go into a lot of detail.

Rob Marsh: When it comes to trying to talk to the right people, you know, potential, ideal clients, Dream clients that we might have, are you letting the algorithm do that work based off the content, or are you doing anything specifically to target them beyond just knowing what your ideal client’s problems are?

Matt Barker: Yeah, so there’s kind of, I’d say there’s three, there’s there’s three kind of areas of of LinkedIn, ultimately, there’s your profile, there’s the net, there’s your network, and there’s your posts, the kind of three kind of main things that kind of have the biggest impact within those is your profile, where you have your headline, you have a very short amount of you have a very short headline that when you post, you your image is there, your name is there, and then there’s a headline underneath which is essentially, or should essentially be, your value proposition. So what? Who? Who am I helping out of that? How do I help them? That can be extremely powerful, because that’s essentially your, you know, your advertisement. It’s at the top of all of your all of your posts, no matter what your content is, that’s going to be the thing that’s there, if that, if that, if that headline is very targeted and calling out your ideal customers, showing them how you can help them, showing the problems that you solve in that really concise, like 10 or eight word sentence that can have a really big impact if your if your posts are then dialed in so we can come on to the posts, part of that, that kind of TRIO now. So with your content, the main thing that drives ideal clients and target audience to your content is the hook, because that’s obviously the first thing that people see if someone’s scrolling the feed, if your hook is, you know, calling out your ideal client, if it’s talking to a past or current pain that that person is experiencing, if it shows a potential kind of outcome that they’re looking for, if it includes any other you. Are words, phrases or kind of emotions that just trigger your ideal client and your target audience. So specifically it doesn’t matter what the format is, it’s gonna grab them if it, if it, if it gets into their feed and if it gets in front of them. So then that brings us on to the network side of it, in terms of connecting with the right people. So, you know, using the search bar to find, you know, founders, whoever your target audience is, using sales nav, if you have it, to go deep and really dial in, drill into those kind of demographics to find exactly your ideal client, connecting with them and then actually having conversations with them in the DM so the direct your direct messages, so actually talking to them. Because what that does when you actually talk to them in the DMS, which is a trick that a lot of people, I don’t actually think, realize is when you talk to them in the DMS, it the next time they log into LinkedIn, the likelihood of your most recent post being top of their feed is extremely high. So if you’re able to combine all that together, so connecting with the right people talking to them, having a headline that is optimized to speak to that person, and then having content going out that is also optimized speaking to that exact person. It is just all of a sudden your post is right at the top of their feed, and it’s something that they can’t ignore, essentially.

Rob Marsh: So this is a really interesting thing that I hadn’t thought of, and I want to make sure that I understand it correctly. So when it comes to commenting and appearing in somebody else’s feed, does that happen when you’re commenting on your posts, or does so let’s say you post something, I comment on your post, will that then put my content and we have a conversation in your in your comments, so it’s not just, Oh, great post, Matt, you know, or, you know, those, those kinds of non comment comments, will that put my content into your feed? Or does that have to happen on my content that you would, that conversation would be on my content that you’ve basically opted in and said, Oh, I’m interested in this because I’m commenting on Rob’s post, and now my stuff will show up in your feed. Does that question make sense?

Matt Barker: So I would for for your post to show up in my feed or to my audience, I would have to comment on your post. So that’s why, that’s why you know what I referenced earlier with that, that early post blew up for me. There was that one Creator who just had a much bigger audience than me, who engaged with it and that sent my post into their audiences, into his audiences feed.

Rob Marsh: Okay, that makes sense. So let’s talk about how we get our first followers, and how we make sure that we have the right first followers? Because, you know, like any audience, you know, it’s great to have 100,000 followers, but none of those are your potential clients, your potential buyers there. It’s really not that great. You’re just creating content that’s going out there and being enjoyed but doesn’t actually have any kind of real business impact. So what do we do to get those, you know, first 1000 plus followers.

Matt Barker: So the main thing is actually going out and finding them and pulling them in. So, like we mentioned, actually going out and connecting with them. Obviously, that is quite difficult if you, if you are completely starting from zero, because you would need to work on your profile and kind of build your profile out. So when you connect to someone, and that pop that connection, request pops up in their inbox. If they click on your profile, they can actually see all the reasons why they should connect with you, even if your connections are at one or two or whatever, there needs to be all the information on your profile specific to them and showing them how you can benefit them and why you’re why you’re A beneficial connection. So that’s going to be really important for someone just starting out to make sure their profile looks really good, looks really strong and compelling, and talking to a specific person. Because when you do that connection request, that’s going to be essentially their, their only one of their only kind of part, one of the main parts of their thought process, when it comes to accepting or rejecting, obviously, your content works with it as well.

Rob Marsh: I was just trying to make sure that I understand this. So let’s say that I want to work with supplement companies, you know, people who are making vitamin supplements, nutraceuticals, you know, that kind of thing you’re basically saying, I need to go out and find 2050, 100 of these people, maybe they’re marketing directors, vice presidents, founders, whatever, and start to connect with it, like either put in connection requests or start to interact with their content. Is that right?

Matt Barker: Bit of both, yeah, connection requests. The reason for the connection request is, then if, if they become a first degree to connection, when you are then putting out content that is targeted for that target audience, it’s going to be highly relevant to them, and the likely it increases your chances of them hopefully engaging with your content. And that’s ultimately the goal, because the kind of you want your if you’re if you want your post to perform, well, there’s this kind of testing, kind of phase that the post goes through after you post it, and if your close connections aren’t engaging with it at a high rate, then it’s not going to be pushed out to any anyone. It’s not going to be pushed out any further. So want to keep your con that’s that’s the kind of good thing about LinkedIn these days, is that it is rewarding that kind of like people with really niche, targeted audiences and people with really niche, targeted content, because it’s just, it’s making sure that those people are seeing the right the right content.

Rob Marsh: That’s kind of an interesting idea then. So, you know, let’s say that I’ve got, you know, because I’ve collected these over the career, you know, several different jobs, or whatever, co workers who are maybe not my ideal clients. Should I be unfriending them and friending people who are my clients to curate that really tight group of potential clients I like, I’ve never, I mean, I’ve always just sort of thought, the bigger the network, the better. But it sounds like maybe having a more curated network is actually better on LinkedIn, at least if you want to use it for client acquisition.

Matt Barker: Yeah, this is where it kind of gets a bit tricky. And I think it I think a lot of people disagree, and a lot of people would agree, depending on how you kind of go about it. So the strategy that I’ve always approached with LinkedIn is, it kind of looks a bit like a traditional marketing funnel with your top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom funnel content. And that top of funnel content is really, I guess, and more, what I’ve been kind of leaning towards recently with it is it’s more showing your identity, like who you are, why I should trust you as a human, you know, because ultimately, we’re just speaking to each other through screens and now, especially with like AI and how much just copy paste content there is out there. It’s kind of got to this weird position where the more human you are, the more you can stand out. So there’s almost this kind of battle to just prove that you’re human and that can have a really big impact on your sales, right? Because, you know, obviously that building relationships of scale is what the kind of game is it on LinkedIn. So there’s that element of it where you you actually just want to put kind of human, humanized content out which isn’t necessarily always educational or targeted towards that target audience, who you would, who would be your ideal client, because you kind of just want to let people know, like, Hey, I’m human. I’m just doing like, normal life things you want to kind of get, you want to kind of tap into, like the different emotional side of your audience, to help them kind of believe in you as a person. And that is, in turn, going to then help when you’re posting this kind of middle funnel content where you’re showing off, like, your expertise and the skills you have around the service you provide, and then the bottom funnel content when you’re showing, like, you know, Client Results, outcomes that you’ve driven specifically for clients. So it’s a really important part of it, but that’s where it gets a bit shady, because you don’t want to, it’s good to have a niche audience, but it’s also you need a reason for people to trust you as a person. So it’s difficult.

Rob Marsh: I guess that’s worth thinking through. It might be worth, you know, somebody setting up some accounts to really test, you know, a super, super dialed in profile that only follows potential clients, versus one that’s that’s got maybe a more general application, and just sort of, I may not be a real test or a real way. Yeah. I mean, it might not be scientific because, you know, setting the profiles up for two different people, or, you know, the connections that you would get, but yeah, it’s just kind of an interesting conundrum.

Matt Barker: I think it really depends on how you ultimately want to approach it, like long term. I think for me, I always wanted to approach LinkedIn long term as a place of I want to attract clients to me, which long, long term would mean I have to do a lot less outreach. I don’t have to spend as much time sending DMS and doing outreach. I can leverage my audience post, get a lot of reach and attract people to me, but early on, right at the start, that just doesn’t work. So you have to do all the outreach to get things going. So you can kind of, you can do it at the start just by DMing and having conversations and and doing the outreach, but the effectiveness of your profile in the early days of when you’re doing that, it’s not going to, it’s not going to show as much social proof. You know, because you don’t have as many followers, you may not have the content that is getting all the engagement, and whether we like it or not, that does have an impact on people’s kind of psyche, you know? So, yeah, I think early on, you can definitely get clients on LinkedIn by really going heavy on outreach and just being really targeted with it. And then if you get those conversations going, then, if you’re good at sales, then you can, you know, get on a call. You can show all this work that you’ve done, if you’re if you’ve got all that experience, and you’re an experienced business, then you just need to get them on that call and show them what you’ve done. But if you’re someone like me, who, back in 2022 was just kind of just starting out, you need to really build up that portfolio and give people a reason to trust you. So it’s, yeah, it’s kind of two different approaches, I guess.

Rob Marsh: At what point are you trying to move people off of LinkedIn into, you know, a freebie or a product, or get them to your website, or some other kind of engagement. Or are you looking at and saying, Hey, as much of this as I can get to happen on LinkedIn, I’m happy to have it there on the platform.

Matt Barker: I’m very regularly plugging like, I guess I call it, you’d call it lead magnet, but lead magnets, that phrase is a bit overused now, isn’t it?

Rob Marsh: But everybody hates them, right?

Matt Barker: For me, I’ll rotate between different types of ebooks or email based kind of courses to give them some give, give my audience something for free to then get them onto my to my email list, and then I can send them regular emails. So that’s something that I’ve been doing pretty regularly. In my content. There’s a, there’s a bit of a, it’s a, I’m not sure whether we could class it as a myth or not, but putting a URL into your LinkedIn post can typically destroy the reach. So if you, if you write a post, put a link saying, hey, go here and grab this thing. LinkedIn doesn’t like you, sending people off platform, obviously. So then the algorithm catches it and says, no, no, you’re not, you’re not doing that. But sometimes it can be really effective if you kind of disguise that link in a kind of educational piece of content and attach, you know, like pictures or PDFs or something like that, to kind of disguise the link, you can and word it properly, then you can kind of bypass it appear and yeah, that that the the conversions you get from just plugging the link straight in the post to send them to a lead magnet or another resource to then take them off platform, massively outweighs if you kind of, if you just man, if You just type, go to my bio and download this thing, it’s an easy one click versus finding something else, clicking to your profile, finding the next clicking again, it’s just a lot less clicks. But yeah, the conversion rate, or the amount of clicks you can get by just putting the URL straight in the post can be really good.

Rob Marsh: I see a lot of conflicting information about the kinds of posts that work on LinkedIn. You know, I’ve seen people say you always have to have an image. I’ve seen people lately saying video works really well. You mentioned the carousels, and I seem to engage. I seem to be seeing a lot of carousels. In my view. Indeed, and I tend to engage in a few of those at least go three or four pages deep. What’s the best content right now, in your opinion, on LinkedIn, what’s working and, you know, what should we be thinking about doing more of it.

Matt Barker: It completely depends on your goals. You know, if you the format that I found that works the best for follower growth, it and impressions, has been these carousel posts, specifically educational, step by step, carousel posts. So if you say, for example, here’s how I write a LinkedIn post, start to finish. I’ll then show you screenshots, step by step. What I do to do that process is that specific type of content for me, and that it’s been consistent over the last three years, has always been the piece of content that has really big spikes in follower growth and gets a lot of impressions. So that’s for that kind of outcome, for posts where I’m looking to drive inbound leads, because I’m not, not necessarily looking to do that from every post. When you kind of look at a strategy as a whole. It plays a part of it, but you need to kind of be fairly kind of softly, softly with it, because you don’t want to kind of, you know, annoy people and being too salesy and that sort of stuff. So if there’s a particular post around, trying to drive inbound leads from it, and really trying to pull in that ideal client. It can be text only, or it can be text with a really clear screenshot or image of proof of a client getting a result, like a happy message, saying, I just got this result. Thanks so much, or a testimonial, or something like that, or even a video, whatever that, whatever the format of the thing you’re attaching is, it just needs to show social proof of a customer or a client happy and new. And the text is, is you documenting kind of how it happened and talking about that at win? So the format, it really depends, you know, on what your goal what your goals are, but, but equally, there’s, there’s people who, and it’s been the same for me. I’ve written text only posts which are, you know, 2500 characters long, and they have completely blown up, which typically isn’t the kind of optimal kind of format for explosive growth, or kind of a viral post, if you want to call it that. So it kind of ultimately comes down to how good is your copy, in my opinion, if your copy is really good, really interesting, and talks to the right problems and the right person, then that’s always the main, the main thing. And you can go text only if you really get that dialed in.

Rob Marsh: When we first started talking, you mentioned how you kind of like to look at the data and see what’s performing, what’s not performing. How do you look at that now, do you kind of keep an eye on the baseline, and you know, if you have a post that is above average, are you still breaking that down and saying, What did I do differently here? Or if one performs below average, are you still looking at that saying, you know, where’s the mistake here? Or does it just kind of come so naturally now that you just know what’s going to be an above average post, and it all still works.

Matt Barker: There’s an element of that, yeah, because it’s got to a point now, I’ve written probably 5000 plus LinkedIn posts, so there’s a bit of that kind of ingrained in the process when I’m writing and creating, but I actually just did my kind of my Quarterly Review, where I sit down and I I open up my analytics and I filter by either impressions or repost or reactions, depending on it. Can I think when I just did it, I looked at impressions. It’s not too important which one you look at, but impression looking so looking at impressions as a metric can be a little bit misleading because of what we were just talking about with the algorithm. Yyou can post the same thing today, you can post it again next month, and it will be wildly different, but with reactions and engagement rate, I see that as someone has intentionally clicked like or they’ve done something to say I like that. Yeah. And that’s been in someone’s control, versus like this mythical algorithm. So yeah, you can sort your post by either of those metrics, whatever you want. And I’m looking at, I’m looking at the top 20, or the top 10% of posts that I put out, I’m putting them in a collection, and then I’m copy and pasting the hooks into a kind of document so I can see all the best hooks, and kind of analyze what the what the structures of those were, what the topics were, what the topics of the posts were that performed very well, what kind of pain points they were touching on. And I’m essentially looking at that every quarter, or, yeah, every quarter normally. So I’m kind of making sure that I’m using the right kind of hooks that are working well on LinkedIn for my audience right now, and I’m talking about the right topics that my audience are caring about right now and responding to right now. Because these platforms can change so much, it’s almost not worth looking at what worked last year. Sometimes that can sometimes they can work. If you take that post from last year, for example, this time last year, and kind of rehash it, it can there are the there are the odd posts that can work, but people, what people want to consume and what people want to read about, just changes so much on on social media. I think LinkedIn is a bit slower than than other platforms, I think, because just naturally what it is, it’s a professional place, not necessarily like a kind of quick, twitchy trend kind of platform, but yeah, looking at, looking at the last three months data, and just trying to find what those top 10% with posts were so you can take them and say, Okay, how can I create more content around these specific topics? How can I create more content that is using these kind of hook structures and these, these, these formats of content that I’ve used, and just really dial in on those specifically. Because I think when I looked at my data, it was something like 45% of the impressions I gained in those three months came from less than 10% of the posts, which, to me, sound is well crazy. And I think that was out of something like 180 posts. So it’s, it’s something like 2018 posts that contribute to almost half the impression. So it just shows you how much of a game is. Of like consistently posting things that you think are good and just seeing and just waiting and see which, one kind of pops, you know?

Rob Marsh: So you just went through this process of analyzing these aside from the PAs formula we already talked about, what did you see? What other trends did you see in your high performing content that people seem to be reacting to?

Matt Barker: It was, I mean, I post a lot of educational content. So it’s hooks that are kind of, you know how to or calling out a kind of specific problem in the hook. But then there was also stuff like, I posted something about how my dad, he’s 64 and he’s retiring soon. And that post got a lot of engagement. So there’s this kind of, it was a real mixed bag, to be honest, but it just kind of shows where the platform’s at right now with kind of, you can, you can, it likes the educational content, so, you know, kind of showing people how to do stuff, how you do stuff works. But then there’s also this kind of human side of it that still works, where, you know, I’m talking about my dad, who’s retiring, and there’s that, there’s those sorts of things that still work, and there’s no real kind of set formula. I don’t think there were hooks that are four or five sentences long, you know, over 30-40, words long, that worked very well. There were hooks that were less than 10 words that worked very well. Carousels done well. Text Only did well. There was such a mixed bag. It’s, actually, it’s quite hard to just say, Okay, this is the, this is the one thing, but, but ultimately, it’s, it’s, it’s more a case of kind of listening to what you’re. What your audience are signaling to you, it’s going to be completely different for everyone. So it’s almost, you almost can’t say, like, this is, these are the topics that work really well because it’s completely dependent on what your audience are telling you. The topics that performed really well for my audience and what I put out might be completely different to someone else.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that makes sense. So I have a question that I want to ask. I do not mean this as a criticism or to be cheeky, but there are a lot of people on LinkedIn who are doing really well, and they are selling a lot of the same things that you do, which is how to do well on LinkedIn. I’m curious. You know, what you’re seeing outside of that? Hey, follow me, you know, and I can show you how to grow on LinkedIn. But rather, what you’re seeing other people accomplish with LinkedIn in other niches, you know? So maybe it’s people you’ve worked with, or people that you’re seeing on LinkedIn, and the things that they’re doing to grow obviously, these ideas that we’re talking about could work in other niches, but how are you seeing it being applied elsewhere, you know, to land clients, to Grow audience. That’s you know, beyond this will help you grow your audience on LinkedIn. 

Matt Barker: It’s an annoying one, because you don’t, you don’t want to be the person who’s talking about and growing on LinkedIn, on LinkedIn, or, you know, writing about writing on LinkedIn, on LinkedIn. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s a weird one. But, yeah, clients that I work with, I’ve just early parts of this year, I’ve been growing a group called Copy builders, where we’re all writing posts together, helping people write posts quicker, more effectively, getting better engagement and attracting clients to their business or new opportunities, whatever their whatever position they’re in. And some of the range of people in there are quite interesting. There’s, there’s one guy who’s an offshore driller…

Rob Marsh:  I wouldn’t imagine seeing that on LinkedIn…

Matt Barker:  Yeah, not your typical business world on LinkedIn at all. But he’s just been absolutely, like, crushing it. Like, I don’t like the word crushing, but he’s been, he’s just been doing so well. And what he’s been doing really well is, so the position he’s in right now. Is he still working in offshore drilling, but he just has this passion for photography, so he’s mixed the two things. And what he’s been doing is kind of posting observations and opinions on the offshore drilling industry, stories of and experiences of his, you know, his experience in that industry, as well as some educational content around it, which almost feels weird to do for offshore drilling, but he’s done a bit of that, but mainly it’s been the stories, observations and kind of opinions on the industry, and he’s pairing that up with really nice photography of, you know, people on the, you know, working the drills, people who are working, and it’s just been doing really well. He’s grown to, I think, eight or 9000 followers now. I think he started out, I think he only started on LinkedIn a few months ago. And, yeah, I think, yeah, that’s, that’s a really good, I think that’s a great example of kind of how you can apply it for a niche that just isn’t anything to do with the platform. And then there’s other other kind of niches, like, you know, marketing agencies tend to do particularly well on there, whether it’s web development, advertising, branding, they don’t, they tend to do very well in terms of, it’s a great place to show off their projects that they’re working on. You can post videos and images. So if you’re, if you’re very design focused, you’re able to use that, that kind of visual element, to really show off your work. And that really works well to attract clients, whether it’s, you know, completely not LinkedIn related at all. So yeah, they’re kind of the two that kind of spring to mind.

Rob Marsh: How big does an audience have to be to you know, really start to support a freelancer in their work, in their business, to bring in enough clients, enough prospects every month?

Matt Barker: It’s tough to say, but in my experience, it was, it took me a. It took me about five or six months to really start seeing lead consistent lead flow. And that was starting from scratch. And I was a freelancer to start. Freelancer starting completely from scratch. Business from Scratch. Audience from scratch. I think my audience at the six month point was at something like 8000 or 9000 maybe maybe 10. But I really don’t think you need that many. I think that I’ve seen people who have taken my courses, and people who have worked with who are, you know, newer freelancers, and they’ve got 2000 followers, and they post fairly pretty niche content, and they’re able to attract clients and use the content they put out as kind of you know partners to their outbound and outreach that they do. So, yeah, I really don’t think there’s a minimum. I think it’s how effective you are with your copy and your content, and how effective you are with your outreach, and how well your profile is set up, kind of like how we’re talking about.

Rob Marsh: To me, it seems like one of the big challenges that a lot of us have on LinkedIn is this idea that we need to self promote, especially, I think copywriters, maybe designers, freelancers. You know, a lot of us are introverts. We like working alone, you know, we don’t, you know, love being out there, and so it can be really difficult. You know, talking about successes or talking about our own expertise, how did you overcome that? And you have, you know, advice for people who are sort of struggling with that, saying, I don’t really want to talk about myself in that way, or I am uncomfortable telling people how awesome I am.

Matt Barker: Yeah, it is really hard. It’s weird, isn’t it? Especially since I’m British, and we have this thing of self deprecating and putting ourselves down. It may even be worse for you right there. I’d love to see the stats on that, if we could somehow figure it out. But yeah, it’s really hard. I definitely have that kind of streak in me. And even now, it sometimes gets a bit like, do I kind of feel, you know, confident putting this, this result out? I think it’s definitely a lot easier now. But yeah, I think at the start it was the turning point were was just being more comfortable and kind of absorbed with the idea that every that the piece of content that I put out today could just be completely forgotten tomorrow. And I think for me, that’s, that’s quite reassuring. It’s a bit, it’s all it’s kind of depressing, but it’s reassuring at the same time, I think, because it doesn’t matter how many followers you, you could put a bad post out, and it doesn’t do very well. It can. It will deflate you, and it will kind of knock your confidence. But you can just do another one tomorrow, and you can do another one the next day, another one the next day, and the likelihood of someone seeing all of your posts is just extremely slim, because, you know, there’s a very small percentage of people who are logging into LinkedIn every day, same time, looking at the same person, checking for the same person’s posts. So it was, it was kind of coming around to that idea, really, that not every post is that important, and I’m kind of playing this longer, longer game. So when I do promote myself, it doesn’t feel like that much of a big deal, because if it say it bombs or it doesn’t do very well, it’s like, Ah, okay, well, I’ll have another go next week.

Rob Marsh: What part do pods and other groups play in LinkedIn? Growth, growth today, and these are these groups that are sort of invisible to, you know, anybody who’s just kind of scrolling through the feed, but obviously groups of friends or colleagues, coworkers that hop on like each other’s posts, promote each other’s posts. Is that still something that you need to be involved in to jumpstart the stuff? Or can you get around that?

Matt Barker: So, so for me, at the start of when I was growing my profile, I wouldn’t it wasn’t a pod, but just naturally through meeting people and connecting with people and kind of finding these guys who I really got. Along with who were kind of on the same kind of trajectory as me of kind of wanting to grow their profile. We were, we were putting out posts every day as well, and we were kind of doing the same things. So we would create this Whatsapp group, and we weren’t sending posts in or kind of, you know, just chucking the URL in and saying, Hey, engage with this. We were just engaging with each other’s content anyway. But by creating a WhatsApp group where we could actually just talk, share ideas, share what’s working, and kind of collaborate in that way and kind of keep pushing each other, that was the biggest kind of growth driver for me, because I was able to kind of grow alongside a small group of other people, and it was all organic. It wasn’t forced. It wasn’t manufactured. Because the problem with these, these kind of big engagement pods that seem to run is the content can be just complete trash. But if it’s thrown in these pods or whatever, then, because there’s so many people going and liking it, it can, it can, it can blow up. But the minute you stop using that, all that engagement just goes away, because your content is then not very good. So then you’re just left with, you know, so you end up, you would end up being stuck in this kind of perpetual loop of needing to use this, this pod, which is a bit of a kind of sad reality, really, because you’re never, you’re never truly kind of growing your your own skills, if it’s, if it’s A profile that you’re writing content for yourself. But there is definitely, there’s definitely a point of when you, when you grow on LinkedIn. I was talking to someone about this the other day when, obviously, there’s not many people who would, who would hit this mark, but when you hit the 50,000 follower mark. I’ve spoken to quite a few people about this, and it’s as soon as you hit that mark, your engagement just seems to just drop a bit and plateau. And you really struggle to get going after that. So you really have to have a really engaged audience and really, really get your community, your, you know, your community kind of side of things and your networking side of things going. You really have to keep that going. But then what happens is you either do that or some people then say, Damn, I need to try and manufacture this, this engagement back. And that’s when they start going to pods.

Rob Marsh: I mean, it’s, again, it’s another challenge that, I guess you have to decide if it’s worthwhile or not. I’m not sure about that. I mean, I’ve been in groups where people have definitely shared each other’s content, but I’m not sure that I would want to play in a pod the same way for the reasons that you that you mentioned, what would you say is the biggest mistake you’ve made as you’ve grown your audience posted on LinkedIn, you know, basically turned LinkedIn to the into the platform where your business lives?

Matt Barker: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think there’s, there’s probably two. There’s kind of two moments where that come to mind. One of them is pretty much right at the start. It took me, I think it took me two or three months to actually comment on anyone’s posts or DM anyone I was just because I’m naturally introverted. I was just so kind of scared of commenting and engaging with people. That was the thing that was kind of holding me back in those early stages. And as soon as I started doing that, everything, everything grew because my content was was decent, but I just wasn’t doing that the other the networking side of it and the engaging side of it to make friends and find, you know, make new connections that would would then come and visit my content and give me some more engagement. So there’s, there’s kind of that element and and we’re along with that, not not seeking help, like not try. I wasn’t looking for I wasn’t finding enough resources, and I wasn’t taking the kind of the leap on any kind of courses which would help me accelerate my my LinkedIn, writing skills, my LinkedIn. You know, skills in general. You know, copy, networking approaches, content strategy. I was figuring that all out myself, and it just took so long for me to really kind of get to a point where it was working. It took probably sort of six or seven months really, which for a freelancer just starting out is trying to cope. Business that wasn’t too helpful. So there was definitely that. So I think looking back, I would, I would definitely get help at the start, and just try and find that that kind of, either that, course, or that, you know, something, that person, that coach, or someone who can just help me skip all that horrible start bit and just say this is what you need to be doing from the start, because I think that would save you so much, so much time. And then two, there was, there was a moment, and this, this is really kind of a mistake around audience growth, not business related. Business related. It was, it was great. But if we’re strictly talking audience growth on LinkedIn and content related, there was a period around the start of think 2023 where a friend of mine, another copywriter on LinkedIn, we were having this kind of race to grow our followers and try and get to 100,000 followers. And it was great for us. We were competing, and our content game, like, really leveled up, and we were kind of really understanding how the platform worked, and what was, you know, what content was best for our audience a lot quicker, because we were competing against each other, not the best for business. I’m not endorsing that as a strategy, but I built up so much momentum in that period of where we were growing, I think I went from something like 40,000 to 100,000 in about five months. So it accelerated really rapidly. But then once I hit 100,000, I completely changed my approach. And I went from I was posting, kind of broader writing, copywriting, kind of content, and then I really changed that, that approach to being very strictly kind of content strategy for founders and agency founders, and that, that that shift, just completely took the momentum that I’d built and and I was all of a sudden neglecting a very large part of my audience, so that engagement dropped. And I did that for a few months. Business wise, it was great, because I was able to start signing, you know, higher value clients, more clients. I launched a course in that period, which performed extremely well for me, and I was able to kind of attract much better clients for me. So business wise, it was fantastic, but audience growth wise, I would have kept that momentum going, because by now that it could be something, you know, like three, 400,000 followers or more,

Rob Marsh: Imagine how much bigger your business could be if you had. This has been really interesting, Matt, and obviously given me a few things to think about that I’ve never considered with LinkedIn before, if people are still here listening, want to get in contact with you, I know you have free book on your profile at LinkedIn, but where should they be going to follow you?

Matt Barker: Yeah, so if you go to Matt Barker on LinkedIn, my headline is, I make LinkedIn posting fast, easy and fun. There’s a how to build your LinkedIn audience ebook right at the top of that page. If you click on that, you can download that for free, and I’ll give you some kind of tips and show you through some mistakes and stuff that I’ve made along the way, so you can help build your audience, that’s the best place to find me and can follow my content and and if you enjoy it, then you can get engaging and reach out.

Rob Marsh: Thanks, Matt. This has been, like I said, interesting, you’ve given me a lot to think about. I appreciate your time.

Matt Barker: Thank you. Thanks for having me on. 

Rob Marsh: Thanks to Matt for sharing how he grew his own following on LinkedIn, starting with struggling to find clients for his own business to helping dozens of clients build their own followings. You can follow Matt on LinkedIn. I’ve put a link to his profile in the shownotes for this episode. You can also check out copybuilders, the program Matt is building that works for just about any niche. I’ve linked to Matt’s site in the show notes so you can find that.

Matt’s advice on how to write content that resonates with potential clients should feel very familiar to copywriters. He mentioned how research uncovers the beliefs and emotions you can use to tap into in order to entertain and educate your audience. These are the kinds of insights you can discover with Research Mastery, our short course that will help you find the ideas that resonate with your audience. We didn’t create the course specifically for posts aimed at your LinkedIn audience, but if you’re posting on LinkedIn, it will help you find the ideas that will connect with your audience. Get it at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery

Clearly LinkedIn is a great environment for connecting with clients specifically because it is entirely business focused. But it takes time, so get started. Follow Matt. Post once or twice a week, but more importantly connect with potential clients and post comments on their content. Success happens when you connect to others more often than when you capture someone’s attention temporarily.

As Matt shared, the topics and content types that will work for you may not be the same as someone else’s. So in order to make LinkedIn work for you, you need to be trying new things, different things, and some of the same things you see others posting… in order to figure out what will work with the readers in your audience.

Stuff to check out:

Grace’s Newsletter
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Research Mastery

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: Hidden inside this podcast are a couple of ideas that will take your research game to another level… and I promise at least one of these you’ve never heard before.  This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

I’ve interviewed close to 350 different copywriters and close to another hundred or so other experts on this podcast over the past eight years. And you would think that by now, I’ve heard just about everything there is to learn or know about copywriting, research, persuasion, finding clients and the many other topics we talk about every week. Often the topics we cover are good reminders of things I already know but maybe don’t apply to my business the way I should. Other times I hear ideas that I have implemented and what we talk about is a confirmation that what I’m doing in my business is helpful to my clients.

And yet, I am constantly surprised by new ideas, new ways to do old things, and new insights that guests share that have never occurred to me before.

That happened as I was recording this episode. My guest today is my friend Grace Baldwin. Grace is a copywriter with a background in strategy and product development. She’s in the process of building her own design agency. Grace has constantly leveled up as she’s built her business, working with bigger clients, taking on bigger projects and helping to create more impact for the brands she works on.

While we were talking, she shared one way she does brand voice research—something I have never heard other copywriters doing and something that has never occurred to me before… and yet it’s the kind of idea that may help you as you conduct research for your clients, especially if they are in early stages and don’t yet have a lot of customers to intervew or survey. 

After hearing that, I shared my favorite research technique for getting a founder to share the features, benefits and other details about a product in a way that helps me capture these for my sales copy.

If you want to hear either or both of these ideas, you’re going to have to listen to the rest of the podcast.

Before we do that though, since one of the topics we touch on in this podcast is research, I want to share with you all of my research secrets… the 4:20+ research method that helps copywriters like you uncover the ideas and insights you need to write great sales copy. I’ve shared them all… more than twenty different techniques for capturing ideas, plus all of the questions I use to learn more about my client, their product, their customers and their competitors as well as the documents you need to capture your research and several tutorials on how to use A.I. to speed up your processes and even help with your research itself.  You can learn more about this unique resource at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery … research mastery is all one word. Check out thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery.

I’ll link to that in the show notes so you can easily find the link if you can’t type the URL into your browser right now… thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery

And now, my interview with Grace Baldwin.

Hey, Grace, 

Grace Baldwin: Hi Rob. 

Rob Marsh: I am so excited to have you here, so let’s let’s start with your stories. You were in the think tank. We hung out so much together a few years ago, but it’s been a little while. So catch me up and catch up our listeners. How did you get to be marketing consultant, copywriter for B to B, Tech brands, branding specialists, like all these things that you’re doing, and now you’re building an agency.

Grace Baldwin: Yeah. So okay, the story starts kind of while I was still in school, so I kind of became a copywriter on accident, like everybody or like, I think most of the people that are on the show, right, never really imagined that this is kind of what life would look like. But when I was in high school, I would always really had fun writing like flyers, and, you know, I threw parties in my basement, and I loved writing the invitations. And then around my senior year of college, I kind of realized, Okay, wait, people will pay me to do this, which was amazing. 

And then after school, I moved to Amsterdam and fell into the world of B to B technology. I started working in ed tech. Then I went to e-commerce tech, and then finally ended up in, like, in a space tech company, which was really interesting. And that’s kind of when I came into Think Tank. I was working at a space tech company. I knew I always wanted to be freelance, and so I was really building the foundations through the Think Tank while I was still there, and then, since 2022 I’ve been out on my own, and now I’m building a branding agency.

Rob Marsh: So let’s talk about that. Because, yeah, building an agency. I mean, on the one hand, it’s pretty easy to say, Oh yeah, I’m building an agency. On the other hand, there is so much work that goes into it. So yeah. Tell us about that.

Grace Baldwin: Yeah, I tried starting to build an agency last year, and I kind of burned myself out on it because I didn’t have any of the processes or anything in place. And to be fair, it’s still a fairly new thing this time around, but this time, I have a co-founder who has some experience with building agencies and managing people, and so that’s making a big difference. And we’re working with, we’re going to be working with a coach to help us avoid some of the big mistakes that I think I started to make last year when I was trying to do it by myself. Yeah,

Rob Marsh: That makes a ton of sense. So who are you trying to serve? And like, What is the vision for the agency? What does that look

like? 

Grace Baldwin: Yeah. So the vision for the agency right now is to be really working with innovative technology companies. So and when I say innovative, I mean kind of like deep innovation. So my background is in space tech and in the energy industry as well. And we want to be working with companies that are supporting we’re calling it planet tech, right? So within agriculture, within space, within Climate Technology, just people that are making really interesting solutions that are kind of what I like about beauty is like, it’s kind of the back doors of the world, and I want to help them tell their stories. 

Rob Marsh: I love that, and I love the idea of planet tech, that’s just a really unique way to talk about it.

Grace Baldwin: Yeah, we’re kind of kicking around different names and everything right now, but that’s kind of what we keep coming back to.

Rob Marsh: Okay, I want to come back to this, but I want to kind of jump back to as you were getting started as a writer. Obviously, you had some in house experiences, but your goal was always to be freelance, and you were freelancing on the side. Tell us just how you launched that side of your business. You know, how you got started, how you found your first clients…

Grace Baldwin: So the first clients, so I discovered the copywriter club, actually, when I was still in school, and I joined the free Facebook group then and listen, I binged every episode of this podcast. And maybe, maybe it wasn’t when I was still in school, but was within the first year. And I’ve kind of found my first clients through these Facebook groups, and maybe not necessarily the copywriter club one, but through another writing Facebook group. And that’s kind of how it all got started. 

And then for two and a half, three years I was I ended up working in house, but I always had this. I was very tapped into the copywriting club community in the backs, in the back of things, and continued trying to build up a brand while I was doing it, which then helped when I got laid off,

for sure. 

Rob Marsh: And as far as like reaching out to clients, were you pitching clients individually? Were you posting content and clients were finding you like, how did that all work?

Grace Baldwin: In the beginning, it was pitching and just connecting with people on, yeah, in these Facebook groups and just saying, hey, you know, I’m looking for work, anything I can help out with. And then eventually, eventually, when I got more serious about my business, I started posting content on, posting content on LinkedIn, and people were coming

to me, 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of your content on LinkedIn. You seem to be pretty, pretty good at the whole LinkedIn game. I mean, spill your secrets on that as well.

Grace Baldwin: I don’t really have any secrets. So whenever I have talked to Chris Collins about this too, but I say that the one of the best things about my business, and one of the worst things is that whenever I have an idea, I can put it on the internet, and that’s kind of how I write content.

Rob Marsh: So you’re just like, oh, it’s Tuesday morning. You’re not thinking, I’ve got to get a post up. It’s just whenever an idea occurs to you, you share it, 

Grace Baldwin: Yeah, or whenever I see something that one of my clients is struggling with, and if I am able to see kind of a connective thread between what client is struggling with and what client B is struggling with. I’ll post about my thoughts on it, not obviously naming my clients names, but just talking about the larger problem that I’m noticing or the different trends that I’m seeing across whatever is happening the different conversations that I’m having. 

Rob Marsh: I like that approach because it immediately suggests that you’re the expert working on big problems. And I think when readers see it, they’re like, oh, wait, I have that problem. As opposed to so much of the other content that’s on LinkedIn, it’s like, you know, well, I mean, all the listicle type stuff that’s just, it has been out there and is over, but even a lot of the shared templates that we have for hooks and that kind of stuff. Just, I don’t know, so much of LinkedIn just feels templatized and un-useful.

Grace Baldwin: Yeah, and I think that that’s a trend I’m seeing, you know, online in general, in LinkedIn specifically, is that people want to hear your stories and your experience. It’s very easy to for anybody to, especially with chat GPT or with AI to, you know, create a post that’s like three messaging tips, but I think people want to hear more about what you did and what the lessons that you learned and how you applied them moving forward, and that’s kind of what I’ve embodied. 

Rob Marsh: And do you take the same approach then, like as you’re thinking about your clients with your agency or for freelance. Are you ever helping them talk about that stuff too? Or are you 100% in on branding?

Grace Baldwin: We’re kind of 100% in on branding right now, but that might, you know, might evolve. But as part of the branding, what we’re trying to do is give people, give these companies a perspective on the world, or, like, a point of view on the world. That’s a big pillar of what we do, and then they can use that as a filter for whenever they’re creating content.

Rob Marsh: So let’s talk about that process, because that’s really interesting to me. I mean, again, so many of us work with our clients. We touch their brand. Sometimes we even help them develop their brand, voice or, you know, give them input on their the visuals that they’re working on. But I mean, it’s a, it’s a really involved process to get this right. So will you walk us through the process that you go through, and so we can see, kind of, like, how that all comes together? 

Grace Baldwin: Yeah, definitely. So it kind of, it’s a it’s evolving now that I’m working with a design partner, but historically, what I have done in, like I when I was working in house, I discovered the world of Product Marketing, and I realized, okay, a lot of the foundations of conversion copywriting overlap with product marketing and, um, so, and that means really starting with, you know, the positioning of the business and understanding where they sit, where this business sits in the product sits in the eyes of the consumer, right? And what is unique about the product, and what is the story about the product that we can tell, rather than the story that we want or that we you know, the client wants to tell. Because sometimes what the product does and what the client wants to tell the world are two different things. And you know, if you want to sell the product, you have to find them the angle that works for that product. So that’s what we start with, that positioning, and from that a message usually kind of develops, and we also create the next step is like personality and perspective. So we try and create a brand archetype and point of view through which they can filter all of their business making decisions through, and then only after all of the positioning messaging, and then kind of messaging concept is done. Do we move into the brand? And that’s where we take the message, take these two couple different messaging ideas, and combine them with the brand so it’s a unified concept. Because what I’ve learned is that it’s very easy for companies to do positioning, do messaging, and they’re these kind of islands, and then brand comes in afterwards and tries to retrofit onto the strategy. But what we’re trying to do is align strategy, or bring brand into the strategy side of things.

Rob Marsh: Okay, I want to go deeper on this, if we can. 

Grace Baldwin: Yes, I’m rambling a little bit, but yeah, 

Rob Marsh: It’s not even rambling. It totally makes sense. But I think we’re covering a lot of really deep ground, really fast? Yes, yes. Can we? So it sounds like we can kind of break down the process into three major steps. One is front end research. And then there’s some some strategy around identifying the archetype and what that strategy looks like moving forward. And then there’s branding beyond that. Is that? Is that correct?

Grace Baldwin: Yeah, so that’s a much better way of saying what I was trying to say. But what we call it the brand stack, and we have the three it is exactly three parts. It’s first is like positioning strategy, then it’s personality, and then it’s presentation. So the actual, you know, visuals and how it actually looks out in the world.

Rob Marsh: Awesome. I like that. So let’s talk a little bit about your research process then, because this is obviously where all of those ideas come from. What are you doing that helps you surface the unique things to help you identify things like voice archetype, the different things that become part of that brand? 

Grace Baldwin: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So a lot of my clients, if I can talk to customers, that’s amazing, or if I can listen in on recordings with customers, recordings with customers, that’s amazing. But I have found with my clients, it’s sometimes more useful to try and find I’m a big fan of using podcasts for voice of customer research, and when I say podcasts, I mean like peer to peer podcasts for their target audience. And I like this because often I find that if you’re interviewing a customer, they’re gonna their natural tendency is to try and be helpful, and that is skewed, or that they’ll provide a skewed perspective. But when you listen to a podcast that says that’s all about you know how to be the best Customer Success Manager of the Year. You find out what their deeper values are and what they really are focused on in their work. And so that’s kind of where I start in terms of desk research.

Rob Marsh: That’s a really good idea. I hadn’t actually ever thought of that before, but I mean, that feels like a game changer in some ways.

Grace Baldwin: So that really emerged a couple of years ago. I was working with a client on a landing page, and I was doing research, and I didn’t have access to their customers. So I started, it was around the end of the year, so I started listening to a couple of these podcasts, and I realized that what we were trying to put out into the world about this product was wasn’t actually matching what our what in this case, it was like what a customer success managers actual KPIs are, and what they really cared about. And so. We were able to tweak the messaging a bit to be way more powerful, just because we were a fly on the wall, rather than, you know, trying to have direct conversations with the client. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah. I mean, I’m just kind of like thinking through how I could use that same idea on my own, with my own clients as well. Because again, I think it’s kind of a game changer. So when you’re doing that, what are the kinds of things that you’re looking for, or that you’re pulling out? Is it just stuff that feels unfamiliar, or like, how do you, how do you identify the ideas like, oh, wait a second, that’s something that I can build on.

Grace Baldwin: That’s a good question. Normally, it’s just kind of intuitive, you know, like just actively listening and trying to see, okay, what is you what is the pattern that’s emerging? What is the thing that they keep bringing up? And it’s nice if I can find, like, two or three podcasts that are in the same realm, and you can hear, okay, this, this idea is echoed across a couple different spaces, and that’s where you’re able to find something. But then from there, you take that research, plus whatever research you have from your internal workshops with the client. And then that’s kind of you start iterating on concepts from that, okay.

Rob Marsh: And then as you start to move into step two, how does your process sort of evolve so that you’re turning ideas and insights into strategy?

Grace Baldwin: So what we do, we take, we try and approach it from a messaging concept perspective, which is something that I learned from, really, from reading breakthrough advertising Right? Which the whole what we try and do is we look at the market sophistication, the customer stage of awareness. They’re like mass desires, which is what we identified in the first stage, along with the product capabilities. And then we create, we’re trying to create two to three different concepts from there, and each concept will be have a slightly different flavor. And then we, at that point, we also introduce the beginning of a design concept as well, because what we want is that the brand’s visual design matches the overall message and positioning. And then from the client, then kind of picks from there, and whatever concept they go with is how we start building out the personality. Rob Marsh: So I know I’m putting you on the spot here a little bit with this question, but can you give me an example of how that works? 

Grace Baldwin: We did this with a client recently where what we did there in the energy industry, and so we kind of worked with them, and we did some research in their early stage. So we didn’t have time for a ton of research. They didn’t have any customers or anything. But we presented a couple different options. And said, Okay, we can go basically in this direction with your brand, or we can go in this direction with your brand, and the messaging is slightly different here, because it might be, for example, you might have, like, more cool, toned, like, precise design, you might have cool, more cool tone, precise designs, and then your tone might also change slightly there. Or you could have something that’s a bit warmer and a bit more of a like a lover brand archetype. But we gave them two options, and then they picked one, and we went with

1. That’s it. 

Rob Marsh: And when it comes to the kinds of clients that you’re working with, it seems like there’s some real trade off opportunities for, you know, again, we’re talking planet tech. So, you know, you want people to like you, or to see that you’re doing good things for the planet, but at the same time your tech and so you’ve got a side of the brand that is scientific and functional and delivers results, right? And so there’s, it’d be interesting to balance the two.

Grace Baldwin: Exactly. And a lot of clients that we talk to don’t, they don’t want to scream necessarily that they’re eco friendly, right? I mean, that’s not their main purpose. You also want to be able to avoid greenwashing if that’s not the main driver. A lot of times, I’ve worked on products where the main driver and the main value of the product is not about reducing carbon emissions, it’s about helping the team operate more efficiently, which is then a business outcome, rather than, like a climate outcome. 

Rob Marsh: And obviously, if you’re showing up and accused of greenwashing, that can hurt your brand. Tell me about the last stage, which is really design and copy. How does that all come together?

Grace Baldwin: So from that point, it’s just a matter of refinement. Once we kind of pick a direction, my design partner, he goes and he, you know, works his he’s like the creative genius, and so he works with magic on that. And then I will create the brand voice guide, and we bounce each one of the nice things about having a co founder is that we can bounce the ideas off of each other and make sure that it’s all aligned. And then we put it together in a final presentation. And then from there, we can work with the client on web copy and any other assets. 

Rob Marsh: Okay, so I love this process, and right now the agency is just you and your partner, but like, What is the vision as far as team goes?

Grace Baldwin: That’s a really good question. You know, we’d like to keep it pretty small, but you. We’re still kind of in the early stages of defining what we want the vision to look like, okay, but we both want it to be something that feels easy and fun. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, exactly the kind of business that I want, too. So what has copywriting taught you about building brands and branding?

Grace Baldwin: That’s a really good question. I think the answer is everything. I think that you know, and admittedly, I’m biased, right, like, as you know, I’ve worked for 9, 10 years as a copywriter, and I really think that copy is the foundation. And I think that what it’s taught me is that copy needs to be involved earlier on in the process. I think that often copywriting, and specifically, tone of voice gets kind of added on afterwards. But really, copy is how you shape your messaging. It’s how you shape the presentation to the world. It’s how you shape your you have to come up with slogans and headlines and things like that. And it should be leading. It’s strategy incarnate. And it should be leading kind of the crusade,

Rob Marsh: I think a lot of copywriters see it this way. Sometimes designers don’t see it this way. And yeah, it’s interesting. You know, when you’ve got a design partner, really, the real answer is that both design and copy should be in the meeting from the beginning. And that strategy impacts both copy and design, although it tends to show up in the copy more obviously, at least to me.

Grace Baldwin: We’re biased that, yeah. I mean, if we had my designer on the phone, he might be like, he might have something different to say, but, but, but no, I agree. I think that, like, I have a massive respect for design, and I think that that’s why we work very well together. He also has a huge respect for copy, and we both think about it strategically, and that’s why we’ve moved towards this kind of concepting, idea of presenting the ideas together and then so that our clients can sort of see how they work together.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I like that. I’ve been and I’ve seen so many situations where design and copy, it’s not that they’re necessarily at cross purposes, but because one, you know, person is advocating for the importance of copy, and the other is advocating for the importance of design, you end up with, you know, a designer saying, well, the copy’s got to fit in this space or or The copywriter demanding that there’s got to be, you know, additional space for storytelling, and it just can create conflict in ways that are detrimental to finishing a project.

Grace Baldwin: Totally, yeah, and I’ve just learned that it’s all about compromise. And I’ve been blessed to work with amazing designers when I was in house, and, you know, just throughout my career and the great ones, see you as a teammate.

Rob Marsh: So I asked about copywriting, teaching you about brand, but you’ve also got, like, a massive amount of experience on the product side and on product development. So how does that impact what we do with brands?

Grace Baldwin: Yeah, I think that kind of I said, what I think product marketing has taught me is that branding really needs to be around the product right? And I think that too often there’s a disconnect between what the brand is saying and what a product actually does. And so it’s the same thing, like your product team also needs to be involved in the branding process because they are understanding, or, you know, they’re shaping what it actually is, and they know the technical details about it, and they’re able to give insights that other people on the team can’t, or, like, a commercial team can’t,

Rob Marsh: Have you brought some of that into your process as well? Again, because that’s your brain is in that process. You’ve done it so much. How does that show up in in the process that you do as you develop copy and and design together?

Grace Baldwin: So one of the things we really do is we try and always start with a product demo. And for my clients, you know, I’m working with on client, working on projects where with clients who are truly experts in a very specific thing, right? And there’s no way that I can match that. But so what I tell my clients in our process in general, is that it’s very collaborative, and I can help with the strategy and I can help with the words, but I really need their help with all the nuance.

Rob Marsh: I like that. One of my secrets for writing sales pages, I like to start with a product demo also, because to me, if you have the person who build the thing try to sell it to you, they’re talking through what they think are the most important points, features, benefits, whatever it is. Now, they’re not always their best their own best customer, but like that as a starting point. So you understand, you know what the founder or the developer or whatever, like this is the thing that I built for the thing that it solves is immensely helpful, absolutely, and it helps with products. You know, if you’re talking to somebody that, or if your audience is very technical, they want to know all the technical details. It’s important to get that insight from, you know, the person developing it. But it’s also important to get the sales pitch from sales and sort of see where there’s overlap. But yeah, having those technical details and the stories behind, behind specific features, that’s where you can those are opportunities for differentiation. Yeah,

one of the things that you know, as we’re chatting, I realized, obviously, you’re doing way more than writing copy, your leading strategy. And there may be a lot of people who are listening, thinking, Okay, how do I go from the person who’s asked to develop, you know, a couple of emails or to write a blog post or a sales page to the point where I’m actually advising my clients on what to do? How did you jump from copywriter to strategist?

Grace Baldwin: That’s, I think my honest answer is that I mean, working in house for several years was really, really helpful in that, because I got to understand how, how, and I worked in house at startups, right? So, I mean, where I was on a marketing team of maybe three people, I was the only writer, and so I was doing all of the writing. And I think understanding kind of how my clients businesses operate, helps, helps a lot. But then I also think that just time and, like, really digging into the principles of conversion copywriting has helped me be able to leverage strategy so much more.

Rob Marsh: So do you think it takes time then, like, does it? Is there a short cut to learning strategy or to being a strategist? 

Grace Baldwin: I think just doing it, you know, over and over, you learn every time that you do something new, and I’m continuing to learn, right? But, yeah, this is it. I do think that experience helps.

Rob Marsh: That’s probably an obvious question, because I was thinking the same thing as you’re answering that I’m like, I was just working with a copywriter or marketer who’s building her business, and, you know, is talking about the things that she wants to help do. And the her biggest problem is that she hasn’t actually done a lot of this stuff, you know, at this point. And we see this a lot, where people try to step into a role that they haven’t actually had any success in, but they’ve read about it, or they’ve learned how to write a prompt for AI to tell them what to do, and the outcomes are just not the same.

Grace Baldwin: And in that case, you know, if you’re freelance too, something that I learned from Annie Bacher actually, is to just subcontract for other copywriters that are where you want to be, right? And that’s something that I subcontracted for Annie I’ve subcontracted for Aaron Pennings. I’ve subcontracted for several people, and I did it because at the, you know, at the time, I didn’t have time to manage my own clients, and I was also just kind of burnt out. But I also learned a ton from their processes as well. Also subcontracting for agencies helps me understand, help me understand and get that experience, because agencies are just doing it so frequently.

Rob Marsh: I think a large part of mastering anything, obviously, is the doing. And I love that approach, working with a variety of other copywriters who are a couple steps ahead of you, who can offer coaching. You can see their processes, you can learn from them, and agencies like you said, this makes it’s, it’s almost understating it to say, Oh, that makes sense, yeah, because it’s almost like, No, this is the path. This is actually how you get great.

Grace Baldwin: It’s really easy to say, but then, I mean, you have to actually do it, which takes. I mean, I’m in year three, year three of doing my business full time, and I’m only now just kind of getting to the point where I, like, am able to put all the puzzle pieces together. But yeah, it just takes. If I could go back and tell myself, you know, give myself advice, it would be just relax and enjoy the journey. 

Rob Marsh: And so when you talk about subcontract for copywriters, one of the things that makes that happen is that you were able to build relationships with copywriters, other copywriters. How did you do that? Grace Baldwin: Think Tank. Think Tank, The Copywriter Club. I mean, I’m in a Slack group now with like seven other people that I met through the copywriter club, and I talked to them daily I commute. I cannot emphasize how important community has been to me over this journey.

Rob Marsh: This is one of the things that I’ve come to really late in my career. That is one of those no does, but I tried for so long to be the the solitary copywriter. You know, I can do it. I can find my clients. I can do the work. And when I got into my first mastermind, surrounded by other copywriters as well, I’ve mentioned the story on the podcast in the past. But I just remember in that first meeting, kind of having an aha moment where I was like, Wait a second. I have so much to learn from, from these other people in the room. Like I thought I was good, I was good, but when I could see their advantages, what they were doing differently from what I was it was, I mean, it was like, I turned the dial from, you know, three, where I was playing around, to like, nine or 10.

Grace Baldwin: I am just leaving a mastermind right now, actually, where, you know, I joined wanting to be the dumbest person in the room, which is the same thing that happened when I joined Think Tank. I really wanted to be, you know, the youngest person, or like, the least experienced there. But with both of these experiences. I saw where other people were operating at and I knew that there was a path to get there, and it was just eye opening. And then you also, you just meet people and you can who can empathize with your daily struggles.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, yeah. I mean, again, it was a total game changer for me as well, yeah. So tell me about some of the things that maybe you do outside of work that actually influence the way you think about business or make you a better writer.

Grace Baldwin: Well, I run a lot. I just signed up for my first ultra marathon last night, actually, so that’ll be happening in October. But yeah, running and endurance sports is something that I never did that as a kid. I only got into it. I got into it in like, 2018 and fell in love with it, but it’s just taught me a lot about, like, slowing down and pacing myself and not burning myself out.

Rob Marsh: So I also have taken up running the last few years. I used to think of myself as a cyclist, but getting my bike out and, you know, pumping the tires full of air and putting on the kit and road biking has become a lot more dangerous with cars that, you know, don’t seem to be looking for bikes. So I’ve run a lot more. I don’t know that I call myself a runner. I’m more of a plodder, maybe a jogger. I can’t even envision running an ultra marathon like that is so beyond me.

Grace Baldwin: Me either Rob That’s nervous about it

that seems that’s I back in my biking days like I could knock off 100 miles, you know, in a day, or whatever. That was no big deal. 

Rob Marsh: But an ultra marathon is a whole other kind of torture…

Grace Baldwin: It’s the same thing that we were talking about, right? Like, when you’re just getting started, or think there’s no way I can. Mean, I remember, I had some friends who ran a half marathon when I was I think we were 19, and I remember thinking, I will never do that. And then, you know, here I am now getting ready to run an ultra marathon. It’s just something that’s slow, and you get better at over time, and you slowly improve, and your endurance grows, and it just gets easier, or it doesn’t get easier, but you get better at it.

Rob Marsh: I actually saw somebody mention that yesterday. It’s like, hard things. Hard Things don’t get easier, but your strength increases your ability to do hard things increases. Yeah, totally. So maybe marathons is a good or races, whatever is maybe a good place to start developing some of those discipline skills that we need to succeed as copywriters. 

Grace Baldwin: 100%. For me, at least, it has been an amazing way to learn all learn all those lessons in like a safe container, right? And learn to trust myself, and also be able to tell the difference between when something is tough but manageable but or tough but unmanageable.

Rob Marsh: Let’s talk a little bit about working out of the states, being a being an expat copywriter. Oh my gosh, yeah. Obviously, there’s some challenges with that. How have you made it work? 

Grace Baldwin: Well, challenges is kind of an understatement. There’s a lot, you know, I can tell I moved abroad before my prefrontal cortex developed, because I didn’t, never considered international retirement planning, which is a whole minefield of regulations. But we won’t. We don’t need to get into that. Maybe we should get it. My advice for anybody, if who wants to move abroad, or at least out of the US, is find a good tax attorney to talk to before you do it. But beyond, beyond that, I mean, it’s I just, I moved here for love. I’m still with my boyfriend, and just, yeah, it’s been an amazing adventure.

Rob Marsh: I’ve talked about this on the podcast in the past as well, but I am all in on travel. My wife and I, we kind of have a motto, you know, experiences over things. Experiences are better than things. And so every chance we get it’s like, hey, let’s hop on an airplane. You know, who cares about the new car or whatever? You know, let’s do that. And so part of me is jealous that you get to have this full time experience in Amsterdam that you know so many of us, and when we travel for vacations, you know, it’s a totally different experience as well, because you’re trying to hit the three or four highlights. You’re always in a hurry, you’re standing in lines. And when you can actually do it slow, you know, actually experience the culture in the way that you are. I’m, I’m so insanely jealous of of your experience there, Grace Baldwin: Yeah, but then at a certain point, it just becomes kind of normal every day, although, as an, you know, I call myself more of an immigrant than an expat, but I still discover new things about the country on a weekly basis, especially if I like I was at a family reunion for my boyfriend’s family, and I was around a bunch of more Dutch people than I normally am around, and I learned, and there’s just all these like small little things that you never will learn unless you’re actually. Surrounded by that culture,

Rob Marsh: When we were living in France, I’m as I’m saying this. I’m like, nobody wants to hear Rob. I want to hear this. I didn’t know this. Yeah, when we were living in France, I realized how different FedEx is in in France than it is in the States. You know, when you would order something from FedEx? Well, here it shows, you know, sometimes, like, place the order by four o’clock in the afternoon. It’ll be there by 7am right in France, you know, you had, we at least had to go to the shop to pick it up. And oftentimes the shop was closed because, yeah, they just decided to spray off. Yeah, like, like, the immediacy of American culture is just not a thing. And nobody cares, you know? And so sometimes it would take us two or three visits to the place where our package would be delivered just to get it. So those kinds of culture differences, I mean, they’re kind of funny to talk about, but also when you experience them, it’s in some ways, like when you’re talking about being in a community of copywriters, it opens your minds to just different things, different ways that people do things. And in some ways, it’s like a creative playground that just gets you thinking in different ways,

Grace Baldwin: Absolutely, and I think, you know, something that I related when i My first job was, you know, in a Dutch company, and I had a Dutch manager, and my my manager was Dutch, it was me, and then our designer was Canadian, and there we were working on a website project, and my design, my designer, who’s a very dear friend of mine, now, we were stressed out about getting it done on time, because, I mean, we were very deadline driven, and my and it caused, it caused tension in the group. And my manager said to us, guys, like, we can always move a deadline, which was something that she and I were not we’re not. There was a concept we were not familiar with, right? Because we had grown up in these cultures of, okay, there’s a deadline. We have to hit it. And one of the things that I like about Dutch culture, in which I have tried to embrace in my work life, is that Dutch people believe that you have eight hours to work and that’s it, and if you’re working beyond eight hours is a sign that you weren’t efficient with the time that you have, rather than a symbol that you’re going over, above and beyond, which is something I really appreciate,

Rob Marsh: Yeah, something I probably should adopt into my life when I’m sitting at my desk, you know, seven o’clock at night trying to finish something up. 

Grace Baldwin: I mean, it’s 630 in the afternoon for me, or in the evening right now for me, so I’m totally guilty of overworking as well, but it was nice when I was there were more boundaries when I was in house and like, salaried.

Rob Marsh: How much? How much does fun play into that kind of thinking as well? Because oftentimes what I find is, if I am still at my desk at 630 or seven, it’s because I’m actually enjoying the work, and not because it’s a deadline I’ve got to hit tomorrow. Is that like part of the consideration as well, or is it just like, nope, you’ve got your seven and a half eight hours, and then you’re done.

Grace Baldwin: I think it’s a consideration of you know? I mean, if you’re having fun with something, nobody’s gonna say no, but, but I have found that managers will reprimand you for working overtime. Even if you are having fun, they’ll say, Okay, well, go, you know, take a half day off, then if you were working on this on Saturday. 

Rob Marsh: So for those of us who manage ourselves, then we just need to be better managers. Give ourselves the hardest part, though, right? Grace Baldwin: Yeah, I’m a very bad manager of myself, not a bad, not a very bad one, but I’m always learning to be a bit kinder, yeah.

Rob Marsh: So what are the biggest things that you’ve struggled with as you’ve, you know, gone from, you know, moving over, taking that first job, you know, product management, copywriting now, launching your agency. What have been the biggest challenges that you face now,

Grace Baldwin: You mean right now, or through the process? 

Rob Marsh: Through the process…

Grace Baldwin: I think a big I mean moving abroad, you, there’s always a kind of a sense of loneliness that you have to content, you have to contend with because is your you’re very obvious the minute I open even though I speak Dutch, the minute I open my mouth, people know that I’m not Dutch, which is a bit isolating at times. So that’s all about, like, you know, I’ve been, I joined run clubs. I’m trying to build more community here. And so that’s, that’s something that has been a struggle, and that’s also, you know, in terms of business, building those, realizing that’s just a big theme for me, is okay, it’s about finding the right people who can support you. So that’s been a challenge and a learning lesson, but also, yeah, lots of freedom and room to play and explore and try out new things. So the upsides as well. 

Rob Marsh: There’s definitely a part of me that’s very jealous of the business that you’ve built. It sounds like a ton of fun. The projects that you get to work on are game changers. So, yeah, just listening to you talk about what you’ve built since the last time we hung out together, which was, you know, five years ago, it’s amazing to see how far you’ve come.

Grace Baldwin: Yeah, thanks. Sometimes, sometimes it feels like I haven’t made it that far, but then I’ve had. Look back at where I was five years ago when I first joined Think Tank, it’s a world of difference.

Rob Marsh: So as you think about your business now, what’s next for you? What are the big challenges that you have coming up with the things you’re most excited about?

Grace Baldwin: I’m definitely excited about building out this agency and building it up and turning it into something recognizable and that, you know, my co-founder and I, we really just want to focus on doing great work and delivering awesome results. And I’m just excited about leaning into that, and, yeah, exploring leveling up in a new way.

Rob Marsh: So for those of us who want to watch what you’re doing and hear about, you know, the successes as you move forward, where should we go? Where should we be looking for your latest writings?

Grace Baldwin: So LinkedIn is one place. I also have a sub stack where I’m trying to just kind of document what I’m learning. It’s not, I call it a semi regular missive, because I don’t promise to put it out every week, but I’m trying to do every other week, minimum. But those are probably the two places and

Rob Marsh: I’ve seen some of what you’ve put on sub stack, documenting, you know, what you’re learning a lot of the process that you’re going through. So I highly recommend hopping on Grace’s newsletter, checking out what she has to say, because I promise you’re going to be inspired.

Grace Baldwin: Thank you. Yeah, those are good words, yeah.

Rob Marsh: Well, it’s and it’s been awesome catching back up with you grace and seeing what you’re up to in your business. So thanks for taking the time to talk to me.

Grace Baldwin: Thank you for having me on Rob. I mean, I was telling my business partner that it’s such an honor to be on this podcast, because I hope you recognize how big of an impact you have had on people’s careers and with the copywriter club. I mean, I’m just one example, and I’m really grateful for the work that you do. 

Rob Marsh: You are so kind to say that I really appreciate it. I may just have to take that clip out and play it for me every morning. 

Grace Baldwin: Make it your alarm to wake you up to every morning. 

Rob Marsh: Well, people have been listening to me prattle on for so many years, so it’s only fair.

Grace Baldwin: That’s only you know only fair, I guess then,

Rob Marsh: Thanks Grace for sharing the details of your career journey and what you’re building at your agency today. I want to echo what Grace said about finding a community of copywriters who can help you on your own career journey.

I’ve told my own story several times, but it bears repeating the lesson, surrounding myself with several other good copywriters who were willing to read my work, share leads and clients, and even just talk about what is working in their busineses right now was a complete gamechanger for me personally, and I’ve seen it have the same effect in hundreds of other copywriter’s businesses too. If you’re missing that, you should check out The Copywriter Underground at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu where we are focusing on creating more opportunities for copywriters to come together and share these kinds of business changing ideas. 

Coming back to our interview, I’ve linked to Grace’s newsletter  in case you want to follow her journey. You should also check out Grace on LinkedIn where she shared other ideas she’s working on with her clients.

And finally, I mentioned this at the top of the show, our course, Research Mastery will give you the ideas and insights you need to write better copy, get more impressive results, and increase sales and conversions that will keep clients coming back to you for more. You can learn more about this course at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery … research mastery is all one word.

Stuff to check out:

Sarah’s Twitter
Sarah’s Community
Tether Insights
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: Can psychology help you capture and hold the attention of your readers… then sell more of your products to your customers? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

On last week’s episode of the podcast, we talked about buyer psychology and how to use it to sell your products and services. It’s a great interview and I recommend you don’t miss it. This week’s episode is a kind of part 2 to that interview.

In addition to specific persuasion techniques, today we’re going to go deep on research and discovering insights that a good copywriter can build a sales argument. If you want to use the techniques we talked about last week, what we talk about in this interview will give you the baseline insights to make them so much more effective.

My guest today is Sarah Levinger, founder of Tether, a research insights platform that helps uncover emotional, behavioral, and identity-driven insights so marketers can connect on a deeper, more human level with their customers. And she uses A.I. to augment the process.

Sarah walks through the process and framework she created for finding the kinds of insights that resonates with customers. She categorizes comments and research data by emotion, which leads to a better set of avatars and marketing ideas based on emotion rather than taglines or words that get a little tired as prospects see them over and over in your ads and other marketing. 

Then Sarah goes even deeper than feelings to uncover beliefs—she talks about why in this interview. I think you’re going to like what she has to share about that.

Sarah also mentioned something about A.I. that I hadn’t considered before that kind of shifted the way I’m thinking about using tools like Claude and ChatGPT to analyze data. If you don’t understand this change, if you use A.I. in your research or analysis process, your copy will probably not connect as well you expect.

Before we get to my interview with Sarah, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. If you haven’t jumped in to see what the Underground includes, now is the time. It’s guaranteed, which means you can join and if you don’t find the resources you need to grow your business, just let us know and we’ll refund your money. The Underground includes more than 70 different workshops—and accompanying playbooks to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. This week we’re adding another expert workshop all about how to create the perfect for you copywriter website. If your website doesn’t stand out or doesn’t help you land clients, you’ll definitely want to join us.

The Playbooks make it easy to find quick solutions to the challenges you face in your business everything from finding clients, conducting sales calls, using A.I., building authority on LinkedIn or YouTube or Pinterest, and dozens of other workshops. You also get dozens of templates including a legal agreement you can use with your clients, monthly coaching, regular copy and funnel critiques, and more. You can learn more and join today by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. 

And now, my interview with Sarah Levinger…

Sarah, welcome to the podcast. Before we hit record, I told you I’ve been wanting to have you on for quite a while. I’ve been following your stuff online. The way you talk about persuasion psychology, it just rings my bell. So I’m so glad to have you here. But before we get into all of this stuff, how did you get to where you are, where you’re basically, you know, this marketing consultant to DDC companies using psychology to help, you know, increase responses, all of that kind of stuff. How did you get here?

Sarah Levinger: Oh, gosh, that’s that I don’t even know that the journey that I’ve taken to get there has been a really interesting one, and I really do think I landed here on purpose at this particular time. So I started in marketing when I was 21, really, really young. I went to school to be an equine scientist. I wanted to be a vet for horses. I thought I wanted to be an equine scientist and go be like an equine vet. And then I found out very quickly, I don’t like blood, but I don’t like needles. This is not for me. So during that first, like, college year, I took a course in InDesign. Does anybody remember what InDesign was? I miss that platform so much. Oh my gosh. I really, really enjoyed designing in there. So that was, like an elective that I took, and I just got so hooked. I was like, This is so fun, like, I love the art side of this. 

So I moved back home. I was up in Wyoming for a minute, and then I moved back home with my parents. Went back to college for graphic design, and I had a professor in my second semester of college who was like, you know, if you’re good at this and you really enjoy doing design or marketing or art or whatever it is, you don’t have to have a degree. You can just go work. And I was like, what I don’t have to pay for college? Great. I don’t like college anyway. So here we go. So I quit college, and then I basically just, like, freelance for the next 10 years straight. And it was interesting, because this was, like, it, I mean, this was 2010 2011 so it was right at the start of YouTube being a thing. Tutorials online were just barely beginning to like, blow up. So there wasn’t really a whole lot of information on how to market or how to do things online in the digital space. So I had to go to the library of all places and just check out a bunch of books to learn how to do all this stuff. So I would go and check out books on like WordPress websites and Amazon, FBA, how to copyright, how to do all the sorts of stuff. And next to that section was this giant, like, I don’t even know, old textbook section on early childhood development and neuroscience, psychology and consumer behavior, stuff that was like, nobody has touched this book in years. But it was so interesting. So I kept checking those. But that just because they were, like, fascinating to me. And then I did that for like, 10 years straight. I just devoured information on how people work. 

Now, I didn’t tell anybody that I had this information or I knew anything about this for decades, until I kind of accidentally fell into paid advertising right before COVID hit in 2019 I had a newborn and a two year old at home, and I was like, I’m gonna die, like I have to talk to somebody. So I got on Twitter, and I just started chatting with people in the industry who were also doing media buying at the time, and then it just kind of exploded, mostly because I think I hit it just at the right time, the right place. This is why I kind of like alluded to that earlier. Sometimes your journey leads you to just the right time, the right place. At the time, when I was on Twitter, I thought I was going to be the last one talking about it, but I ended up being one of the first to talk about how you can apply psychology to add specifically when it comes to messaging, and see amazing drastic results. And I, I guess people just kind of really grabbed onto it and just ran with it because I grew a following. You know, within a year, I had probably about five to 10,000 followers, and I was starting to, like, get good business and drag good leads. And I was like, this is fun. This is a good role for me. So fast forward to now. I’ve kind of created, like, the perfect job for Sarah, where I get to study humans all day long, and I get to focus primarily on marketing and messaging. So, yeah, it’s been a journey. 

Rob Marsh: It’s a cool journey. So, and what you’ve built today is called Tether, and tell me how you’re doing that, like I’ve seen the products that you offer. I’ve seen how you talk about some of the stuff. But in the copywriting world, the content writing world, there’s a lot of research, but, and we’re all talking about like, how do you do research, or whatever, but oftentimes there’s a little bit of a disconnect between getting the research done and actually being able to apply it. And I think you’re bridging this gap a little bit. 

Sarah Levinger: I’m trying my hardest. Yes, it’s really interesting, because I think everybody kind of understands what research is, why it’s important. A lot of people understand how to do it. And then there’s then there’s many, many people out there, I think, that do it very, very well. They’re adept at it. Then there’s this, like, very, like you said, big gap between the people who have the information and the people who need to use it. And that, I think, has always kind of existed in business in general. We understand that we need to go after a specific customer type, or a specific person, and then there’s a big gap, and then there’s all the people who talk to that specific person and draw them into the business. So when I started to do paid advertising, I fell in love with it, mostly because I was able to take what I was learning on the psychology side, tactically, put it into an ad, and then see results within maybe four hours, sometimes less. Within 30 minutes, I could tell whether it worked or not. So it was much faster way of testing the messaging that I wanted to test. But that in between, Spot kind of became where, I guess, the sweet spot for Sarah kind of started to kind of morph. I guess so Tether came out of a lot of requests, honestly, from my customers and. Asking me, I would go in and I would run their media, buying their ads for them, and they would always ask, how is it that your ads fit better than everybody else? Like, we have lots of other ads in here, and you seem to be getting consistent good results with your ads. How would that happen? And so out of necessity, I was like, I have to come up with some sort of tactical framework to show them what I’m doing. So at the time, like I said, I didn’t know I was doing any of this. It was just like a part of Sarah’s process for research. I was going through and on the brand Instagram pages for any of these D to C brands that I was working for. I was pulling down all of the comments that was underneath all of their organic pieces of content that talked about the brand or even the product, even the ones that didn’t have anything to do with anything. I just pulled them down and then analyze them one by one. Now this was before AI, so I had to go through by hand and categorize them into the categories that I wanted, which, at the time was emotional categories, because I was like emotion psychology, this kind of all makes sense. Obviously, people buy things for emotional reasons, and then we justify them with logic, so I’ll categorize them into emotional category, and then I’ll just go ahead and, like, run an analysis on that. So this was all done in Excel spreadsheet, and based on frequency numbers, I could tell which emotions were coming out of just the language that customers were using. So I don’t know that I was necessarily a better writer or a better like, you know, Ideator for abs. I think it was more of the fact that I just got much, much closer to the customer, and then I was able to take what I found and basically repurpose it. So I had a framework that just I repeated over and

over and over, 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, it seems to me, then, in my experience, you know, working with copywriters, a lot of the time, you know, we’re looking for specific words. Sometimes we’re looking for emotions, but, but you know, when, even when I go through research, knowing that I should be looking at all of it together, every once in a while, something will jump out. I’m like, oh, that’s the idea, right? And then maybe I stop or and so, having gone through and done that work to, like, really figure out, okay, every single comment, it feels to me like that’s almost the putting in the 10,000 hours kind of thing that trains your brain so that, so that it becomes really effective and insightful. 

Sarah Levinger: Yeah, yeah. Well, and it was interesting, because that was the very first product I ever really had, was what I was calling it NLP at the time. So it was the NLP research panel, and it was called NLP because I didn’t know this was the term, but what I was doing was basically manual natural language processing. So there’s computers that do that. Obviously, Sarah was just doing it by hand. So I’d pull all the data down, categorize it, pull out frequency numbers for the emotions, emotional categories that I was looking for, and then I would write new copies based on the emotion that I felt, not necessarily the keywords and phrases that the customers were using, mostly because the keywords and phrases are important, and they I mean, they still are important. They were important. They are important. But the problem was, in paid advertising, if you use that keyword and phrase too many times. It’s fatigue. People kind of stop paying attention to it, and then it doesn’t work anymore. So fast forward, a couple years later, I had someone ask me, this is great. We love your NLP, it’s really interesting. It’s helping. But do you have any information on getting accurate avatars built, like customer types from all of the data that you’re pulling down. And at the time, I was like, No, but I could probably build that. I constantly look at these things like, I think I could probably make that. Why not? Like, we’ll see if we can ever so the next product that I built was called the CIM. So the CIM is a core identity map, and this particular research panel uses picture based surveys and metaphorical surveys to pull out these emotional like deeper insights out of our customers. So they’re very odd surveys, because about 80% of them are non-functional, I would say. So we ask questions like, if this product was a superhero, which one would it be? And why? Those types of things. Once you’re going to make an association of the brain, you would help pull out some very interesting insights of what people believe about things, not just how they feel about it, that in general, for humans, what you believe affects how you feel, and what you feel affects how you behave. So for consumption, especially since I’m on the paid advertising side, studying just the behavior of clicks or conversion rates and those types of things, not entirely helpful for me, because I have no idea what caused it, right? I just know it happened. So some people take one step back and go, Okay, we need to study the emotion, which is very, very helpful. But again, that’s only one piece of the equation. We can tell how they felt about what caused the conversion, but we can’t tell why they did it. So I go all the way back to the beginning and study behavior with the CI or study belief, sorry, that the CIM, so that way and understand more. Can you give me an example of how that works? Yeah. So, for instance, one of the best you kids into this I’ve ever saw was we had a CIM that was interesting. They had built basically this one. A skincare brand, and they were having a really hard time because the acquisition customer type was too expensive, like that. They were just, like, bleeding money, basically. So we ran a CIM basically just to see what their customers believed about the whole industry, not just their particular product. Because most businesses study themselves, or they study competitive they don’t study the industry, which I find fascinating, because I’m like, Oh,

Rob Marsh: That totally rings a bell, too. I do the same thing. Like, of course, you want to look at your three or four closest competitors, so you don’t copy what they’re doing, but you also clue into, you know, the basics, and then, of course, your own product. But yeah, industry wide, that’s a lot, and that’s a lot for one person to handle too, or one small agency. 

Sarah Levinger: Yeah, that’s why they usually come to Sarah, because I’m like, don’t go do this yourself. Just hire someone to do it. Blind you. So industry wide, though, this is a very interesting it’s a very interesting ecosystem, if you start to study industry, mostly because a large majority of the time there is one person at the top and then there’s a number two, and they fight with each other constantly, COVID, colon, Pepsi, right? Apple and Microsoft. Then there’s an outlier, usually a third player in here who’s quietly serving an audience that’s like secondary to the larger market that these two are fighting over. Right? That third base. Sometimes they are brand, brand new meaning, like you’ve never seen them before. They just came out of nowhere. Liquid Death is probably a good example of this. Like nobody really saw them come and they just were all of a sudden, there. You also have some of these who have been quietly like practicing their skill for such a long time that they notice a market gap before the two top players do and can like slip in immediately. So I think it’s beneficial to study your competitors and beneficial to study yourself, obviously, but it’s even more beneficial to study the industry as much as you possibly can, because you’ll start to notice consumer shift. That’s what we’re kind of looking for, especially at Tether. Consumer shifts happen all the time for all sorts of different reasons, political reasons for economic reasons for cultural movement. In particular, celebrities have a huge like play on cultural sway, like your customer type is swaying their behavior based on what they believe. And if their beliefs change, then all of their behaviors change too. So back to skincare. When we ran a CIM for them, we found that their customers were a little overwhelmed, not necessarily by like, the industry, like they understood what their problem was. It was usually acne or dry skin or wrinkles or whatever. They were more overwhelmed with the fact that I now have like, 70 bottles that sit on top of my counter, and I’m constantly, like, swapping them out in and every day and like, I just, I’m just overwhelmed with the amount of like ridiculousness that I have in my life now due to these bottles on my counter, it had nothing to do with the skincare, which I found really interesting, but it was such a definitive thread that they the customer types were just like, You know what? I’m just kind of done with the mess and the chaos of what this industry has brought into my life. Now, that’s a very definitive belief and emotion that we can start to message to on the coffee side, to talk about the fact that, like, this is the last time you’ll ever have to switch to another skincare brand. 

Rob Marsh: So part of this, what you’re doing is trend spotting, which is maybe a little bit different, again, from what most typical copywriters or even researchers do. So, you know, aside from, you know, running your own panels, are there other tools that you’re using to spot trends and to see what’s coming in order to get ahead of that? 

Sarah Levinger: I have tested a ton of stuff recently, and I think this is something you and I were talking about, $4 pocket there. There’s a place for AI. I think in this conversation, I don’t think it’s where people think it is. I typically use AI as a second brain. So I will have it do data analysis for me, because it can spot patterns and things that I just can’t see. If I have spreadsheets or data, I’ll go through and have it analyzed for me and just say, what do you see in here that I just don’t see? So that’s incredibly helpful. When it comes to research. I have a difficult time using AI as a production tool, and this is something that I’ve been slowly starting to learn more and more about. Because when we first started, I think everybody was just like, this is going to cut years off of our production time. It can do analysis, so it can tell us exactly what we should run from what I’m seeing. That’s not at all true. So in general, I typically default to surveys in particular, because it’s voluntary information, and it’s information that’s like, non biased. It’s just, this is just a person out there. It’s anonymous. We don’t collect any sort of email addresses or names or anything. It’s headed we just collect the actual data of people answering the pictorial survey or the metaphorical survey. And that’s on purpose, because I don’t want it to cloud kind of the what we’re trying to actually learn. So ideally, use AI, but it’s, it’s not as a production tool. It’s primarily just to help me think a little bit more, if that makes sense. 

Rob Marsh: Since we started talking about AI, let’s, let’s keep going here. Because, like you said before we started recording, you said you have a few thoughts, and I think they probably track pretty closely to what what I think about A.I. But as far as AI goes and writing copy, tell me where you are in your brain and with your experience. 

Sarah Levinger: So far, AI has been a very interesting tool to track. When it first came out, this was, like the most amazing thing we had ever seen. Like we just everybody grabbed it, everybody used it. They went from like zero to 5 million users in like 48 hours. It was bonkers, mostly because it is an incredible tool. The interesting part about it is, though, as you start to watch the metamorphosis of AI in particular chat is, well, the one that we use the most often in DTC, you start to notice some like, glaringly obvious issues with this platform. The I think the primary one being this is not really assisting workflow. I find which I think. What do you mean by that? Okay, so most people grabbed onto this because they were like, Oh, I don’t need a copywriter anymore. Save me time. Well, I don’t need any, but I could get rid of my entire team and just use this. That is technically true, but the issue is now you’ve basically replaced a team of experts who can get you a headline within a good 30 minutes to an hour, that will probably work 80% of the time with a system who is making basically an educated guess based upon the data you feed it that’s basically suited to you the user, because the more you use the llms, the more gets trained on you as the person, and it will start to feed you stuff that it knows you like. And this is the most difficult thing about llms. It’s like they’re very, very powerful. I still use it constantly because it’s trained on Sarah’s brain, so it’s almost like talking to myself. But toughest part about this is often the output is terrible, so I have to QA two times as much as I used to. I used to QA inside my own brain before I put it on a piece of paper. I think about it for a long time in the shower, like when I’m driving, or what I’m doing things with my kids, without me having to know that I was thinking about it, because it was all subconscious processing. Now we’ve taken our subconscious and stuck it into a computer and said, you do the subconscious processing for me, but let me help you do it. So we’re spending two to three hours QA one headline instead of just sitting and thinking quietly about it in the background before we sit down to our desk.

Rob Marsh: I just kind of had a light bulb go off as you’re mentioning this when you said that llms get trained on our voice, and they get to know us. The biggest problem here is that is that even if we know our customers intimately, we are not our customer, and the knowledge that we bring to the table in order and then to have LLM reflect back what Rob is thinking instead of what Rob’s clients or customers are thinking, or Rob’s clients customers are thinking. Customers are thinking, which is even two steps away, like now. Now we’ve got a really big gap between what’s going to work and what sounds good, because it’s going to sound good based off of, you know, my feedback. I mean, I’m a pretty good writer, yeah, but it’s not necessarily the thing that’s going to work well. 

Sarah Levinger: And in paid advertising, we’re using this primarily to produce massive amounts of ads. So our issue used to be that we had teams of like six to 10 to 20 people, all producing ads for us, copywriters and graphic designers and creative strategists, lots of different things, and all of those people, it would probably take us a good week to two weeks to generate a good 10 to 20 ads. Like it’s a process now we can do it in 20 minutes. Now, if you can take that amount of time, squish it down into 20 minutes, and you can take basically 10 ads and like, double or triple your production, that means a massive amount of messages are now being flooded into the systems on paid advertising. So meta, Tiktok, Instagram, right? That means the consumers are also seeing more messages. That means they’re also now becoming desensitized to any messages that are generic or completely boring, right? No offense to AI, but like, it’s a lot of what comes out of there is quite generic, yeah, so I’m watching this, and I’m tracking it as we’re going through just thinking, in the background, wondering, how long is this going to go before we start to see large scale kind of systemic issues in marketing in general, due to the fact that people think this is faster, but it’s not, or think that it’s better, but it’s not because we are the ones that are feeding all the data into The llms and telling them what to think. Now they still have the ability to go and, like, scrape the web, which is helpful. They can go and look to Google. But who produced all that stuff on Google? We did. So again, I am on the fence. I feel so torn about this, mostly because AI has something called projection bias, meaning they kind of just get. Tests at what they think is probably the best course of action based upon the statistical, mathematical patterns in the data. So we can feed it all the customer data we want, but if you’re feeding it on historical customer data, it’s only going to go after people who bought yesterday, not people who are going to buy tomorrow, so you’re dipping the bottom of the bucket constantly, bottom of funnel customers. And it gets even worse when you think about how many 1000s and 1000s of brands are in one industry. It’s intense. 

Rob Marsh: It’s crazy. So while we’re still talking about this, I know you’re using AI. I use AI. How are you using AI to maximize its effectiveness and not let it get in the way of actually, like, relating to the customer.

Sarah Levinger: So I primarily use it as a data analysis tool, because I’m not a data analyst, and, like, I have people on my team that are helping me with research, but in general, it can see a lot more than I can. I don’t want it to produce and I don’t want it to think for me, because I’m the one that has the real world experience. We all have to remember that AI lives inside a computer. It’s never seen a comb or a shoe or a house, right? It’s never experienced love. It’s also never really experienced rejection or embarrassment. It understands which emotions and words are connected to that word, but it will never be able to understand what it feels like to like be around that. Yet, I don’t know if they’re gonna make that someday. Maybe that would be terrifying, but it’s possible that will happen to them. So because of this, though, I really wanted to pull out things that I am unable to see. So I typically run these metaphorical and pictorial surveys to understand underlying belief systems. And so when I run that data through, we typically have basically qualitative answers that come with the pictures. So we’ll ask one picture of what do you think about this question. Here’s your picture answers. You choose one. They’ll pick an image for us. And then that very next question is going to be, why did you choose that image? Those qualitative answers for why did you pick that are very, very interesting, because they show a whole lot about what people think about themselves. You’ll choose based on emotion, but then you’ll try and justify it with something else, so you can compare them pretty easily. Now, the toughest part about this is I have to describe the image to chat pretty intensely and then tell it. Here’s the image they chose. Here’s what they answered as to why they chose that image. You do this analysis for me and tell me what you see, not necessarily what you think. I don’t try and use that word too much with chat, just because it’s trained on me. So it’s going to think like me. I want to just see what do you see in here that I use all the time, because I want to understand what patterns are in here that I just can’t see right now.

Rob Marsh: So it’s helping you uncover patterns, emotions, ideas, and then you’re taking that, and either you’re writing it yourself or you’re working with a copywriter to put that into action. Sarah Levinger: Yep, exactly, exactly. So like the skincare thing, that was a pattern that I didn’t recognize. Like, when I looked at the data, I was like, oh, confidence. A lot of these women are really into feeling COVID. Into feeling confident. They want to boost their skin, they want to look good, those type of things, but those are normal, everyday things that I would think are a part of skincare. That’s normal, makes sense, yeah? And I said, it’s logical sense. So then I ran it back through the system and said, Okay, go find me some stuff that’s weird in here. Go, go get me some keywords or phrases that are like, I don’t know why anybody would say this about skincare, and one of the ones that came up was, I’m overwhelmed with the amount of bottles on my sink, which I’m like, that has nothing to do with skincare. So it was fascinating, but very, very cool thread that they found, and they’re able to use it now a whole lot better just because it spotted something that was weird. It’s an outlier,

Rob Marsh: So where this stuff seems to be going is, again, moving into the psychology side of this. And this is something that we talk about. We say it a lot, but it’s hard to make actionable. And that is the idea that people don’t buy products. They buy what the product says about them, right? So they’re buying an identity, or they’re signaling something about them. So as an example,I love Jeep. I don’t currently own a jeep, but I have had Jeeps in the past, and I love them, and even though they’re kind of bumpy and clunky in some ways. There’s probably something—I might need to go to a therapist to talk about this—but there’s something about Jeeps that I like that it says about me as a jeep driver, right? So, yeah. So how do we get more of this into the copy and content that we’re creating?

Sarah Levinger: Oh, gosh, yes. So this is really interesting, because this goes down into what how many different associations have you built with Jeep in your head, and what are they attached to? So normally, when you build a memory or some sort of an association as a human, it has to do with how heightened your emotional state was during that particular time period in your life. So it’s possible somebody in your family owned a jeep, or you knew somebody who wasn’t in your family, but was aspirational, somebody sort of like, I want to be that person that owned a jeep. Or it’s very possible that you just had you saw it a lot, right? But same thing happens for like, my kids are. Watching Sponge Bob right now, and like, it’s the funniest thing ever, because I watch it and I can, I can verbatim, just like, go every single line I know, everything that that guy said, because I watched it so much as a kid. So now the just seeing that experience on the TV elicits an emotional response for me, because I saw it so much as the chat. So it just kind of depends. And again, emotional states don’t have to be traumatic. They sometimes they can just be it was there and that was gone. I was excited, and then it was gone, that type of thing. So to get more of this, this is the reason why I’m testing these picture based surveys, metaphorical surveys, because I want to see how close can we get to eliciting that response from somebody without them having to basically, what’s the word without them having to answer in a logical way, if that makes sense. So it’s difficult to get this out, and this is reason why not a lot of people are in this type of research, because hard, it’s very difficult to get this out and to do it without leading an answer, because that’s what most surveys do, especially on like post purchase side, is we just kind of give them a general frame of reference, of like, where did you come from, or what did you like most about it today? What do you wish we had? These are very logical questions, and they’re also well suited to people who read most post purchases are just questions and answers in text based form. If you don’t read well, or if you’re the type person that just doesn’t care, you just button mash your way out of there, and then have gone right? So in general, when it comes to pulling out more of these things, there’s a lot of really good research around picture based surveys that help kind of pull out those emotions. To apply it, though, I think is probably where, like, the bulk of the benefit is. So the nice part is, once you start to find these weird trends, like the bottles on the counter type of thing, you’ll start to be able to understand a little bit more about what these consumers are experiencing in their everyday life. And you guys, copywriters have been very, very close to the psychology of customers more than almost any other role, I would say, in marketing, because you guys had to think so deeply about it to be able to draft good messaging. So finding these tiny little trends and being able to speak to the relatable experience of that customer is probably where this is going to go eventually. And when I say relatable experience, I’m not talking about the problem at all. Almost everybody wants to default to your problem is dry skin. Here’s a solution, very Aida framework. My pushback on that is, I think I’d rather you talk about her experience around her dry skin, because dry skin actually causes all kinds of problems, not just like it’s uncomfortable, but also, if I go skiing this weekend, I’m gonna have to put chapstick on my face, and that’s sticky and uncomfortable, and I don’t like that. It’s a secondary problem that I now have to deal with again. Or if my face is dry and, like, cracked and I flake everywhere, like, that’s uncomfortable because I have a date tonight, and I don’t want him to think that that’s weird, right? There’s like, connected experiences all over the place that stem from one problem, but there’s like, 15 problems that are around it we can talk to as well. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that becomes really interesting. You know, copywriters know the PAs formula, problem, agitate, solve. And oftentimes we’re, we’re really focused on all of the good things around the solution. You know, we will quickly we’re taught, and I don’t know that it’s always correct, but it’s like, Oh, you don’t want to be negative too long, right? Like, mention the problem, but don’t make people feel bad or whatever, but then, so we were really good at if you take this, it solves this problem, and it shows up in your life in these ways. Now you can do all these things you couldn’t do before, but I think like focusing in on the secondary issues is a really interesting idea to me.

Sarah Levinger: Well, I think it’s interesting because if you watch, and this is why I get I get freaked out. There are things too deep. I get freaked out sometimes because I’m like, everything’s attached to everything. Over the course of the last probably 20 to 25 years, we have started to shift as a culture, especially in the US, towards this notion of, Do not offend anyone, right? Do not offend anyone. And it’s happened mostly due to kind of how the millennial generation was parented. But the millennials in particular were very, very sensitive to this idea of everybody included. We’re all in a community. We all want everybody to feel safe. Safety was kind of high priority for this customer type. Now, the interesting part about that generation is they taught it to their Gen Z kids, who are now kind of ramping it up, like there’s even more of this notion of like, don’t offend, no bad feelings. Everything’s fine. That seeped its way into everyone’s mindset because we heard it so much like he talks about the copywriters in the 80s had no problem being me. Like, if you look at some of the long form content from the 80s, copywriters got really harsh about the problem, like they would try and trigger the crap out of people, and all of their content was very, very intense, like they would talk very specifically about this is your problem. This is how you feel about it, and it’s not good. You need to change this, right? They spent a little bit of time on the solution, but they would constantly wrap back into what we call naked. To focused, right? Not so much anymore. Copywriters nowadays, as you said, are so conscious of this idea of like, I need to be careful not to trigger people. But that has caused a little bit of a negative shift in marketing, because now we refuse to talk about the problem. We almost get too soft with ourselves, which means nobody’s selling, which means all of the consumers are kind of bored and just kind of turned out, so it all kind of melds into each other. And so I think about this sometimes, in this respect of psychology applies to everything, first of all, and it’s also interesting to watch, because the herd, the whole group of humans on the planet, we all follow each other a little bit. And I’m not saying that, like, safety is incredibly important, especially mental safety, psychological safety, feeling safe in your body, safe who who you are. I think feeling accepted. These are all good things that came out of like that generation and that movement. But there are always side effects to random things like this, and in marketing, it’s just going to get worse and worse, because the Gen Zers are really intense about it, so it’s gonna be fascinating. What happens the next couple years? 

Rob Marsh: Well, as you talk about this, you mentioned Liquid Death. Liquid Death seems to be like perfectly fit into a reaction to that, right? I remember when I first saw Liquid Death, or within a few months of its launch, I saw a marketer who I really respected talking about how this was an awful brand, toxic masculinity, all of this stuff. And I remember thinking, Wait a second, there’s actually something really smart happening here. Now, obviously there, you know, the heavy metal branding and the name Liquid Death or whatever like, they’re obviously going for a reaction, but it’s, but it’s the fact that all of soda pop branding has been happy, family, pop music, whatever, it opens up this opportunity for literally water to be the bad guy, right? And by bad guy, I don’t mean the evil person. It’s that bad boy image, the James Dean riding in on its motorcycle type image, right? 

Sarah Levinger: Yeah,yeah. Well, this hits on some trends culturally that are really interesting, because Liquid Death probably would not have been able to do what they did in the 80s, right? Because the 80s group did not care literally at all about anarchy or becoming some sort of a misfit or rebelliousness, because they already were, like, there was a whole bunch of people who did not feel stifled in that mostly because a lot of the boomer generation in the 80s already had, like, a good handle on we’re different. We’re already different from our parents. We’re going to start to push our voices out into the world. They became kind of their own group of movement makers in the 80s. That’s what the Boomers were. Now you fast forward to today’s day and age. A lot of millennials and Gen Xers in particular, feel very stifled, like, again, because they’re starting to hear these cultural messages of, like, be careful, don’t hurt anybody. Like, just like, all the time. If you feel that, if you feel stifled in yourself, you’re going to resonate with products that are like, No, we’re going to get loud and we’re going to be weird and it’s going to be whatever we feel it needs to be. So the interesting part is, again, global emotion is really interesting, because you have a group of people that feel this, you bring a product in that solves that need to feel okay with being rebellious, and people will grab it immediately. And you could spot these patterns, but it takes a minute. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, clearly, it takes a lot of work and a lot of research. So, you know, beyond like going into the spreadsheet and, you know, coding everything for emotions, or having a tool like ChatGPT do it. What else are you doing in your business at Tether to spot what’s coming or where the opportunities are? How are you helping clients see that? How do you see that the rest of the industry or the other competitors are here, and that’s why there’s this really good opening for you over here?

Sarah Levinger: Okay, so I run something called the Tether BPE. Everything I have is an acronym, which is not on purpose. That’s just kind of how it happened. The Tether BPE is a brand personality engine. And this was a giant prompt that I read through chat. It starts with doing that kind of, like, deep research about the whole industry, whatever industry we’re studying at the time, all the way back to, I’ll take it back to the 60s, if I have to, like, what was happening in, like beverages in the 60s, so I can understand the history of where we came from. This entire prompt is basically built to help me understand historically what happened throughout the generations and throughout the decades. Where do we sit currently, and what’s the market gap, and predictively, what’s probably going to happen next, mostly so that I can kind of identify, can we see, is there a trend that’s similar to what happened to liquid death? Now they didn’t know that they identified a trend. They just went with what they were going with, mostly because, like, they’re genius, but also because that was part of him, and he noticed a giant people, giant group of people, that were being underserved. That’s what I’m trying to spot with the BP is what’s being on. Deserve that people are craving heavily. So the bbe was kind of born on its own, like off to the side, and then I added to it after reading the Innovator’s Dilemma. I don’t know if you’ve read that book. 

Rob Marsh: I love everything by Clayton Christensen. He was brilliant, and one of my favorite thinkers ever. 

Sarah Levinger: Yeah, I can’t get enough of his work, because I’m just like, oh, my God, that one blew my mind. It was such a dry, technical read, but I had to, like, really stick with it. But the underlying tones of what he was studying are so clear that in market, in industries, especially when you’re helping brands businesses grow, and your job as a copywriter or a graphic designer or somebody who’s like, fronting the load of the operational work. Your job is almost always going to be told to you as go get a sale, but that’s not at all what your role is. The people on the on like the ground floor of the business, our job is to spot patterns quicker than they can spot it at the top, because we’re closest to the customers. So in that particular book, they were talking about the standards industry and how it morphed, and all kinds of crazy things that happened. The people that were at the top of the industries had a very difficult time noticing that the customer bases started wanting smaller, faster, quicker, not necessarily more like more capacity. With this, they just wanted smaller, faster, quicker. So there were a couple companies like scandals or, you know, later it was Sandisk was able to come in and undercut some of these massive brands, because it was like, we’re solving a problem for one teeny, tiny customer group. But the customer group is growing. It’s not really that, like demand is really growing. There’s just more of them kind of coming into the circle. So what I do with the BPE is I’m trying to understand historically what has happened, so that I can kind of track the growth of things, but then predictively, I want to see if we can identify some trends that are coming out of the BPE, like the bottles on the table. And then can we track what the whole industry is saying so that we can kind of put our brands right in the right spot to hit at just the right time. Now, that’s difficult, and I have no idea whether it’s going to work, but it’d be interesting to see if we could do it, because it’s happened in every industry across history.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. I mean, as a real simple example of that is the history of soda pop. You see this happening about every five to six years. There’s a new trend, right, like so, you know, in the 60s and 70s, there was the uncola and Mountain Dew, and then you get things like Snapple and the teas that come along. And the interesting thing is, the soda pop industry is always being disrupted this way, but either Coke or Pepsi comes along and they buy up the company in order to preserve their space. And we, I mean we literally, I think two weeks ago, Pepsi just bought Poppi, or one of the nutritional soda pop brands, right? That’s kind of the latest, the latest thing happening in soda pop. And before that, you know, Liquid Death and water and energy drinks and like you sort of see this happening. And I guess my point here is, if you can figure out how to do that for your clients, this is the kind of superpower that I mean it doesn’t just like, it creates literally 100 million dollar industries. So, how do we do more of that?

Sarah Levinger: Yes, I think chat is making it a whole lot easier for people who would like to stay at home mom in Colorado to sit in her office and be like, what’s happening with the consumers. Get curious. Get curious if you see something specifically, if you see an outlier, stop tracking things that are normal. I don’t care what the consumers are doing. I also don’t really care what the competitors are doing all that much. If it’s normal, if the consumers are acting normal today, cool. Just keep it going. If somebody comes in that door that says something wild to me, that’s like, that has never been attributed to our product. Why would you think that? Like, what is that? Pay attention to it, get curious about it, because at the end of the day, if you see more people coming in saying that same thing, or even if you see something that’s like, I don’t know, one person said this and the other person said that, and they’re kind of related, keep track of it, because trends change slowly, right? And consumers do things very quietly, but they’re always telling you what they want constantly, because they’re voting with their dollars. So you could see it everywhere. And I tell people, track your sister industries too, like track the ones that you don’t think you’re related to, but you definitely are. For instance, in one of the brands that I was looking for, they sell these really cool little flasks, right? They were just gorgeous, beautiful things. They’re 100% attached to the alcohol industry because of what goes in the plow. However, they’re also attached to body positivity. I can’t talk body positivity is one of the industries they’re attached to, specifically because if the millennials stop drinking, they go under so you have to track, you’ve got to look at the entirety of the ecosystem. And this is why you know the study of economics exists. You got to track the whole thing. And I know it sounds intense, and it’s like, oh my God, how would I start that? The best place that you can start, I think, is with chat. Though. This is where I’m like, it’s a second brain. Just use it as a way to go look for things that you can’t book for on your own. It’s got deep research. Now it’s incredibly well versed. I’m pretty sure one of these, one of these models here, was just passing the training test I was reading. 

There’s like, about that a week or so ago, yeah, where it’s like, oh my god, the models are outscoring the humans in the Turing test, and people are identifying the model as the human.

So use the tools that you have. I would not use it to produce again. I try really hard to default to I think humans still should be writing and producing for humans. But I would go and look at what what’s connected to you. Take your industry, plug it in. Just say, what do you see? What’s out there? What’s the history of this? Learn, learn, learn. Just act like a historian. But the more that you know, the more that you can kind of see out into the future to tell what’s happening next. Rob Marsh: This feels like a place where you know, we should mention that niching actually becomes part of your superpower, too. So there’s, you know, this conversation in the marketing world, should you niche? Should you not niche? And there are good reasons on both sides to do one or the other. But if you niche, you have a much better ability to spot this kind of thing as it comes up, because you’re familiar with the industry. You’re not just jumping from one project or one client to another. 

Sarah Levinger: Oh, 100% I have that issue right now because I’m so solidly connected D to C. There for a minute this year, I was trying to decide, do I want to move to B to B? Do I want to see if I can open up SAS or like service based or consulting. The toughest part about it is I know too much about DTC, so it’s way too easy for me to come over here and just be like, these are my people, and I know a lot about them, and I can help and serve them, but it could be a blind spot for me and for Tether. If we continuously go down the path of our normal customer, we’re going to miss outliers that might be a better customer type. So, and not to say that, I’ll leave you to see I’ll probably be here forever, but in general, this happens in every business. So this is why it pays to look. It pays to pay attention. 

Rob Marsh: The flip side of niching is that you’ve missed the exposure that’s happening in those other industries, and you can’t bring new ideas from those industries into it. So maybe the answer here is that you need one person who’s focused and niched, and you need a team member next to you who’s paying attention to everything else. 

Sarah Levinger: Yep, yep, yep. That’s why people hire Sarah. Usually they’re like, go out there and find us and stuff, and then we’ll stay close to our customers. So now we have Beth to both room. Yeah, yep. I think that’s probably the best way to do it. 

Rob Marsh: So we haven’t really even talked much about, like, specific psychological tactics or things that you know you’re paying attention to, or that you’re doing with ads and advising your clients to do. But do you have like, just a top two or three tactics? You’re like, okay, these are my go tos. I’m gonna start here. I’m gonna try this stuff first, because I know it’s a good place. 

Sarah Levinger: This is not copywriting related, but rounded buttons tend to produce better clicks, better conversion than sharp ones do, which I find really interesting. They’ve done a lot of studies around that and that, that one in particular has to do with sharp things feel a little unsafe to the mind. Now, I’ve seen a couple of studies that have gone the opposite direction with this, that talk about the fact that it depends on the product. If you have a tool or something utilitarian, rounded corners don’t do anything at all for conversion rates on button, interesting. So if I’m selling an ax or something dangerous, I might want a square, right? Something with sharp edges?

Okay, so second one… I saw it here that was really, really interesting study I read talked about the fact that italics, italics and ads in particular, tend to increase engagement, where people like, like it and share it and do all kinds of stuff. Like, if the text is slanted, now they they specifically said over slanted, but typically italic says, like, I don’t know, it’s like eight to 10 degrees, not that much, right? Yeah, they were talking about like 30 to 33% like, really slanted text, for some reason that does really well. And they said it happens not just on ads, but landing pages and emails everywhere. So without…

Rob Marsh: Would you do it in with, like, small blocks, or like, the entire piece of copy, like, in a Facebook ad, you’ve got that introduced the introductory block, or whatever you want, that whole thing slanted. 

Sarah Levinger: From what I read, I’m pretty sure it’s just headlines like, don’t do the whole thing. Slanted, yes, but headlines, as long as they’re short, like, I don’t know, and that was probably the third study I read, was sweet spot for headlines on advertising in particular, at least, is four to eight words long, interesting. Tapped at eight, yeah, they seem to lose effectiveness at over eight words. So and again, I. I only know studies that pertain to pay to advertise, because that’s what I’ve been to. But for the slant, it’s interesting. If they’re short headlines, make the whole headline slanted, but then your subhead, your body copy, all the rest of it, just keep it a normal, normal font. So weird stuff. Humans are really sensitive to a longer,

strange thing. 

Rob Marsh: I think maybe part of this goes back to just standing out, just being different, right? Because every other headline is straight or slightly italicized, right? So something’s different that triggers our innate sense that I need to pay attention to this, because, again, it might be dangerous, it might be food, it might be an opportunity for connection, right? 

Sarah Levinger: Yeah, that makes sense. I guess the lesson here is, try lots of stuff. Try lots of different stuff, be different from everyone else. Yes, the end of the day, that’s what it comes down to, awesome.

Rob Marsh: This has been fascinating for me. I wish I had another hour, because I think we could just keep going and going. But Sarah, you have a newsletter, if people want to get on your newsletter and follow you, where should they go?

Sarah Levinger: You can actually go to tetherinsight.io. That’s probably the only place to get access to it right now. I feel really bad. I should probably update my email. I get so deep in the weeds on my own business, I’m like, I should really work on that this week. But yeah, so sign up for that. I usually do brand breakdowns in particular. So if you’re looking for studies of brands that have used psychology in the past and how they used it to grow or get more customers or cut costs, that’s usually the first half of it. The next section on that newsletter is most interesting to me. They’re Tether signals. So all of the little insights that we pulled out today from all the brands that I work with. I’m providing those inside that newsletter. So if you want to get access to like a random trend that nobody sees yet, they’re going to be inside that.

Rob Marsh: And then you also write a lot on LinkedIn and Twitter, and so we’ll link to to your accounts there, so people can follow. And before we start recording, you mentioned you might be launching a community here, or by the time this goes live, have launched a community. Tell me a little bit about that.

Sarah Levinger: Okay, so I’ve been asked to do this for years and years, and I just haven’t had time to do it. But I’m finally going to do it this year. I have a community that’s going to be starting up specifically around consumers, consumption, behavior, psychology, identity, and in particular, we’re going to be studying not just d to c, but basically any customer type, anybody that you want to bring into your ecosystems. How do you use psychology to get them in the door faster and cheaper? And primarily, I think this community, it’s going to be good, because I want to start talking to the people who are studying the consumers the most. So I’m hoping to bring in a lot of people from the large scale universities, large scale market research firms, people who know and understand consumers really well. So we can start to talk to them a little bit about what they’re seeing as well. But primarily we’re going to do brand breakdowns basically once a week, so you can submit your brand, or if you want to come in and submit your service, whatever it is, and I’ll take a look at it, and then we’ll talk about here’s all the psychology things you need to put in place. Here’s the way you need to shift emotionally to bring people in. And then I got lots of resources, tons of courses and trainings and things around learning psychology specifically for marketers. 

Rob Marsh: So I’ll link to those in the show notes as well.

Thanks to Sarah for walking through her research and analysis process, how she uses—and doesn’t use—A.I., and we can all get better at spotting changes in trends before they happen. If you’re not already on Sarah’s newsletter, you definitely should be. She write about her research and shares case studies about how she’s applying the strategies and frameworks we talked about on this episode. There’s a lot to learn when it comes to making this stuff work and Sarah is one of the best.

I’ve linked to her site in the show notes as well as her brand new community if you’re interested in finding out more about that as well.

And of course there are lots of resources around persuasion and psychology in The Copywriter Underground. If you’re a member, you’ll find those resources in the new dashboard. And if you’re not a member, you can fix that now at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

That’s the end of this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast.

If you like what you’ve heard, please share it with someone you know. Or, if you don’t know another writer or freelancer who you can share it with—and I find that very hard to believe—visit Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts and leave a review. If you haven’t left a review, now is the time. I promise, when you share The Copywriter Club Podcast, your friends will thank you.

Don’t forget to check out The Copywriter Underground at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

See you next week.

Stuff to check out:

Katelyn’s Newsletter
Wallet Opening Words <— Get this!
The Milkshake Video
Clayton Christensen’s How Will You Measure Your Life?
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Transcript:

Rob Marsh: Why do people buy the products and services we write about? If you don’t know the answer to that question, you need this episode. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

Before you can sell the products and services you write about, you need to understand why your customers buy in the first place. This includes marketing concepts like market/message match, jobs to be done, market sophistication, clarifying an offer, finding pain points, and finding under-served markets. 

My guest today is buyer psychologist Katelyn Bourgoin. She writes the Why People Buy newsletter and focuses on using science and psychology to sell more of whatever it is that you are writing about. Personally, these are the topics I could talk about for hours. If you want to sell more of the products and services you write about, you’ll definitely want to listen to this entire episode. What Katelyn shares about “trigger moments” is in my opinion one of the most important concepts in marketing that doesn’t get the attention it deserves. 

Katelyn and I also talked about making difficult decisions like shutting down a business that isn’t working, or choosing between taking a real job and doing something on your own, and the mindset shifts required to make these decisions. And I grilled Katelyn on the methods she used to grow her newsletter. If you write a newsletter (or want to write a newsletter), her ideas will help you attract new readers faster.

Before we get to my interview with Katelyn, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. If you haven’t jumped in to see what the Underground includes, now is the time. It’s guaranteed, which means you can join and if you don’t find the resources you need to grow your business, just let us know and we’ll refund your money. The Underground includes more than 70 different workshops—and accompanying playbooks to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. This week we’re adding another expert workshop all about how to create the perfect for you copywriter website. If your website doesn’t stand out or doesn’t help you land clients, you’ll definitely want to join us.

The Playbooks make it easy to find quick solutions to the challenges you face in your business everything from finding clients, conducting sales calls, using A.I., building authority on LinkedIn or YouTube or Pinterest, and dozens of other workshops. You also get dozens of templates including a legal agreement you can use with your clients, monthly coaching, regular copy and funnel critiques, and more. You can learn more and join today by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. 

And now, my interview with Katelyn Bourgoin…

So Katelyn, welcome to the copywriter club podcast. I’m thrilled to have you here. I’ve been wanting to have you on the show, literally, for like, a year. I’m not sure why it took so long to make the right connections, but thanks to Jordan for helping to make it happen. But since you’re here, tell us your story. I know you’ve got a great story of, you know, some business success and failure, but you have created an amazingly successful newsletter. I love it. It’s one of those that I wait for it to come into my email box, and probably because the topic is the topic that just rings my bell, which is persuasion. So anyway, tell me your story. How did you get here?

Katelyn Bourgoin: That’s a long question. 

Rob Marsh: It was a terrible question. 

Katelyn Bourgoin: No, it’s a great question. I just feel like I’m, you know, I’m always kind of thinking about the best way to share this story, because it’s long and winding as most entrepreneurs are, and like, to your point, things look great today, but there have been a lot of ups and downs to get to this point. And so maybe I’ll share a little bit of the journey before launching the newsletter, which is why we buy so prior to launching the newsletter, if we go all the way back to like 2014 so we’re talking like 11 years ago, I was running a branding agency. I’d actually just sold the sister company, which was a restaurant consulting agency, and I was having this kind of crisis of identity, like I think a lot of folks do, or I was like, I need to stop selling time for money. I want to sell something that scales, something more scalable.

And at the time 2014 I was under the impression that the online course and online, you know, creative world was too busy, so I should do something else. Now, this is funny, considering that it’s still an amazing opportunity for anybody who wants to get into that world. And that’s, you know, really what the business is that I run today, 11 years later. So I decided I was going to do something else, and I was going to launch a tech company. Because how hard could that be? Really, really effing hard, Rob. Things did not go as planned. We launched an initial product, got some venture capital funding. Inc Magazine was saying we were building the next LinkedIn for women. Everything looked awesome from the outside. It was not going awesome on the inside. We really understood the customer we were going after. And of course, I was good at marketing and PR, but not so good at building the right product. I built the wrong product, and it wasn’t solving the core pain point that the audience that we decided to go after needed us to solve for them. It was janky. It didn’t work very well. And so we’d have 1000s of people signing up, and they would post, and they kind of create a profile, and they did not stick around. They didn’t really maintain their activity. And so in the last dish effort, I ended up pivoting to more of a think tank model. 

But at that point, I was so burned out, and we were out of money, and I was just like, I can’t keep going. And so ended up closing down the company, super sad, licking my wounds, trying to decide, what am I going to be when I grow up? Had to go bankrupt because I’d taken a bunch of personally guaranteed loans in the early days before we raised venture capital and trying to figure out what’s next. And I was really fortunate, because I brought on these great investors, and one of the investors that I brought on had a huge portfolio of companies, and was like, Hey, you weren’t so good on the product side. I was like, Yeah, I know. But you were really good at the marketing side. And we have all of these founders that we support that are building incredible products, and they’re not great at explaining them, getting people excited about them, selling them. Will you work with some of our companies? And I said, Yes, are you gonna pay me? It’s like, I really need money. And yeah. So they’re like, Yeah, you can come on as a consultant, and we’ll pay you to work with these companies. And so I started working with all of these brilliant founders who were building world changing technology, their clients were like Boeing and NASA and Tesla and like they were changing the world. And I would go and I would sit down at their boardroom tables, and I’d ask them the question that we want to know as marketers, which is, tell me about your customers. And I was really surprised that most of them could not give me a straight answer. They would be like, oh, you know, like we target, you know, entrepreneurs, or, we target companies like this, but also kind of like this, or the founders would be fighting about who the target customer is in the session. And one time, a founder looked at me straight in the face and he said, our target customers are B to B, online businesses with anywhere between 10 and 500 employees. 

Rob Marsh: Pretty much every business? 

Katelyn Bourgoin: Yeah. So I was like, Okay, there’s clearly a problem to be solved here and helping people to better understand their customers. And so I got really nerdy with this problem started, like, hungrily consuming all of the literature that I could. I’m like, why are so many people having this issue where they don’t understand their customers? They don’t understand the demand that customers have. 

And that led me to discover Clayton Christensen and Bob Moesta work around jobs to be done, which is kind of a whole other conversation we could get into. And it led me to thinking, I’m going to start an insights agency. I want to build an agency that helps companies understand their customers. Will do customer research on the graph, will feed them insights. They need this information to build successful companies. Well, around this exact same time that I have this big idea like, I want to start generating demand for this. I was doing a lot of consulting work. I was running workshops and training for mostly companies in the innovation space, helping them to better understand their customers. And so I started thinking, okay, I need to start priming people for when I eventually launched the agency. And so I created Why We Buy as a newsletter, basically to build pipeline for a future agency. And that was in 2021 and we’d come through the pandemic. We were figuring out the world again in person. Stuff wasn’t happening. It was mostly still virtual. And I found out that I was pregnant, which was exciting, because we’ve been trying, and so we ended up having a baby. And shortly after, within four months, my husband broke his neck. It was like, Oh, crap, what am I going to do? I’ve got this newborn baby. I am, you know, trying to figure out how to build this business. I’m doing it all by myself. And around that same time, sponsors started reaching out to me, being like, we’d like to pay to promote our stuff in your newsletter. And I was really weirded out by that, because, like, what is that a thing? I didn’t even know about this world. And so initially I started just saying, no, it’s not worth my time for like, 200 bucks to promote your thing. 

I eventually ended up having a couple calls with some of these brands and realizing it was a big opportunity, and that there was really an opportunity to build a business around the newsletter. And that’s when I decided to hit pause on the agency idea, and go all in on building a media and education company. And that was the start of what I’ve built today.

Rob Marsh: It’s an it’s an amazing story, and it’s got me thinking… but we kind of skimmed over shutting down the business—bankruptcy. Yeah, it was bad, but when people go through that, it’s really bad. How did you deal with the emotional weight of that happening to you and to keep going? And the reason I’m asking this is there are a lot of people who are starting their own businesses that get into that dip and they get stuck, or they struggle and they have to give up and have to quit, or they have to move on to something else. What was the thing that got you through that?

Katelyn Bourgoin: It’s a great question. I would say that there were two things that happened at that so, funny enough, after closing out that company, I was trying to decide, what’s next? What am I going to do when I grow up? And I actually had a company that would have been my dream job reach out, offering an executive role in their marketing team, and I was at this crossroads. So it was like, you know, I’ve just had to go bankrupt. I’ve built my own thing. I’ve been an entrepreneur for the last—this was 2018—I’ve been an entrepreneur for a long time. I basically had never had a real job, and I was under the weight of this. Like, you know, do I go and get a job or do I keep going and continue to build a company? 

And if I’m honest, the reason that I said no to the job was I felt like an imposter. I was afraid I would not meet their expectations. I didn’t think that I deserved the role that was being offered to me, and so I passed up on it, thinking I’m going to get in there and they’re just going to see that I don’t belong. And that turned out to be the greatest thing ever, because I’ve since gone on to build a company that I really love. I do really feel confident my abilities as a marketer. But it was one of those low points in my life. But the thing that I look at now, and I see it as a bit of a gift, is, once you’ve been that low as an entrepreneur, like once you’ve basically lost everything, the company fails, you go bankrupt. I had a bunch of friends and family who had invested in our round that I had to tell we’ve lost your money. It wasn’t a lot of money, fortunately, but it was enough that it was many, many months of sleepless nights. Once you’ve gone through that, you realize there’s nowhere to go. But that’s the positive about being on the bottom, there’s really nowhere to go but up. And for me, once I identified the problem that I saw these startup founders making, I was like, we made that problem too. We just made it on the other end, like, we also didn’t understand. We understood who we wanted to sell to. I’d bought into the whole idea you have to niche down. You have to be super specific. And we were like, we were going after a very specific persona. They were early stage female entrepreneurs building online businesses. Most of them were in the very early stages. That was a huge mistake for many reasons. You know, early stage entrepreneurs don’t tend to have a lot of money to invest in solutions, which I am now, in retrospect, aware of, but, you know, we’d taken that advice to niche down and to focus on the customer, and I realized that I was so focused on that customer, but I didn’t really deeply understand the problems that that we needed to solve for them and building the right solution. And so that experience my on my own end, and then seeing that rippled out through these other companies, it became really clear to me that we’ve got a lot of people out there building stuff that people don’t want and or they’re building stuff that people do want, there’s doing a terrible job of explaining why they should want it and what it is. And that’s a problem I want to solve. That’s an exciting problem, because you’ve got these great entrepreneurs who are trying to build these world changing solutions that can’t get traction. 

So ultimately, I feel like I had to hit that bottom and feel that pain so that I could see that opportunity, because otherwise I never would have seen it. We’d be having a very different conversation today. Had that company been successful. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, we probably wouldn’t be having a conversation at all, because I conversation at all, because I wouldn’t be

on your newsletter list.

Katelyn Bourgoin: Exactly. 

Rob Marsh: Well, let’s talk a little bit about how we figure out the message that matches up to that deeply felt pain point? Because you actually touched on it twice, as we’ve been talking for the last 10 minutes or so. Obviously this is a big problem that a lot of people have. So how does somebody go about—I’m thinking of copywriters, content writers, who are trying to figure out—what is my… how do I match my message to the pain point that I’m working for my clients? But also, every business struggles with this. So how do you advise clients or people to figure that out?

Katelyn Bourgoin: That’s a great question. I would say, first of all the answer is that you need to be able to step back from what it is you want to sell and start thinking about what people want to buy. And I think that that takes a real shift for a lot of people, because we often have a motivation that’s personal and selfish around the thing that we’re selling. If you’re you know, for entrepreneurs, our motivation is we want to build this cool internet company where we can work 10 hours a week and make millions of dollars. Our motivation is often coming from a self centered place, and then we try to find a market for that thing. And that’s just not how it works. It’s not effective that way. 

So I’d say that the most important step is starting with this is the way that we you know, I’m working on a workshop right now to help people through this whole process. It’ll help them to basically clarify their offer, figure out the painful problems that they’re like, uniquely qualified to solve, and who wants to pay them a lot for that in two hours. And so this, I’m figuring out the exact step by step process, because I went through this in a organic way. But then when I sat down to be like, how do I actually help other people do this? 

I figured out there is a specific process, and it starts with first identifying the trigger events that lead people to be interested in an offer like yours in the beginning, in the first place, right? So people don’t just wake up one day and go, oh, I want to buy this, like, B to B CRM software, or like, oh, I want to like, come to Katelyn’s workshop. That’s not the way that the world works. Something happens in their life outside of our visibility that pushes them to realize they’ve got a problem that they need to solve, right? Because if they could do it on their own, if they could just figure out what the next step is, they wouldn’t need us. They wouldn’t need us. They wouldn’t be looking for a solution. They’d already be doing it. So a trigger event happens that makes them move into looking for a solution, because they have a job to be done. Right? 

Next step, identify the job to be done. Most people are really bad at this, right? They’re again, they’re creating a solution and then searching for a problem to solve, as opposed to understanding what is the actual thing that people are trying to accomplish? What are the nuanced details around that so that I can create the right solution? So figure out what job it is those prospective customers are trying to get done next. Ask yourself, who are the people that are likely to have that job to be done and willing to pay for a solution because they’re underserved by the existing solutions, or there’s things that are out there, but they’re not right in their use case. So narrow it down. Figure out, like, Who are these potential target markets that have this job to be done? 

And then do what I call pain storming, and this is really fun, which is basically, you just go through, you look at those, those potential buyers. Let’s say you narrow down to three potential segments that you might be able to solve problems for. And you look at, what are all of their problems, right? What are the functional problems they have when they’re trying to get the job done? What are the emotional problems that they have? What are the social problems, the things you know, the way that they worry about being perceived when they’re doing it, and what are their kind of risks? And it’s like, you know, a perceived problem thing that they worry is going to happen. And you figure all of that out for those, you know, let’s say, three potential personas, and then you start to look for the overlap, because I bet you there are problems that are overlapping across those different audiences. And in doing that, you can go, Okay, I’ve identified some very painful problems that you know a particular segment of the market has. 

Now I can work backwards and figure out an offer that actually solves those problems and the messaging to communicate that to those people, because I think again, it’s like we often go about this backwards. We start with what we want to sell, and then we try to figure out where to sell it. And that’s the reason why so many people are struggling.

Rob Marsh: Love that you share that, and it rings true. In fact, listening to you just talk about that process, I hear a lot of Clayton Christensen coming through not just the jobs to be done, but identifying those opportunities where people are underserved is one thing that he talked a lot about in his various books. Can we talk a little bit deeper about jobs to be done? Because I think this is a framework that’s really useful, but also sometimes hard to wrap our brains around, because you’re thinking, Well, of course, the course that I’m selling is teaching people the thing, right? Or the template that I’m selling is helping people get the thing, and that’s not really what jobs to be done, at least that’s only part of the JTB framework. So you talk a little bit about that?

Katelyn Bourgoin: Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve been so blessed that I got to connect with Bob Moesta, who was the co-creator of jobs to be done with Clayton Christensen. So if anybody has watched… Google: “jobs to be done, milkshakes” and you will watch a four minute video where Clayton Christensen, who, for anybody who’s listening, Clayton, he’s sadly passed away, but he was considered one of the world’s foremost experts on innovation. The top CEOs of the world would come to him with their problems, and they say, we want to innovate. We want to create solutions. People buy we keep running into problems where we put stuff in the market. Nobody buys it. Why do we keep doing this? How do we stop and he basically with, with the help of Bob and I think two other people, ended up creating the jobs to be done, theory and framework. And when, in the video, he talks about why people buy milkshakes, and he’s explaining, one of his colleagues went out and started interviewing people and asking them why they bought their milkshake. That colleague was Bob Moesta. And so I’ve been fortunate enough to get to spend time with Bob, to have him participate in work shapes that I’ve been hosting. And like, he’s just blown my mind as to understanding the depth of this, but this is where things get tricky. 

So for most of us, especially people who I think are in the who are building very malleable products, right? So if you’re building a physical product that’s in the world, you kind of get one opportunity to get that right, right, and then you need to think about all of your marketing and everything. But if you’re building everything. But if you’re building a service business, or you’re building a online tool, or you’re building an online course or community, you can really adjust and modify things. So I think that the jobs to be done method of first understanding why people buy solutions like yours or your thing. So the way that they recommend doing this is by going out and interviewing customers and running what Bob calls a switch interview. And what that basically means is, why did those people if Why did they switch from what they were doing before to buy from you and what they were doing before might have been nothing. You might have been the first thing that they bought, or it could have been they were using this other tool that had been working okay for them, but then stopped working because something in their life changed. And when you understand the real details of the buying journey, that’s where all of the insight can come from to figure out, well, what are people actually trying to get done. 

So, funny enough, when I launched the Why We Buy newsletter, it was because I’d zeroed in on the job to be done. Nobody in their right mind, and remember, we were trying to build an insights agency where we would actually go out and conduct this research for our clients. Nobody in their right mind actually wants to do interviews. That is not the job to be done. Nobody wants to do interviews. Nobody wants to do research. Most leaders of companies are allergic to the word research. They don’t want to do it. They don’t want to pay for it. They see it’s often been a huge waste of time. But what they do want is they want to understand why their customers are buying, so they can get more of them right. They want to understand what’s how their buyers are making decision. That’s the job to be done. 

Now, there’s a lot of different ways they can do that. They could go out and, you know, hire my theoretical agency that had ever launched, or they could hire us to do research for them. They could run a survey with their with buyers, right? They could do a bunch of AB testing, run ads and try to test different messages and see if some clarity comes into it. The problem with a lot of the other methods for you know deeply understanding how your customers make decisions is that they don’t actually get to the root of it, because a lot of them are by observing customers or by asking customers to answer these kind of short servers, you don’t get the in depth stuff that you can get in an interview. 

So when I was thinking about a newsletter, I was like, there’s no way I’m going to write a newsletter on research, because research is a project for most companies, right? It’s not an ongoing job to be done. It’s something that they do once and or they do it on a quarterly basis, or whatever they want to be new. And so if they were to sign up for my newsletter, they might read the first few issues, and then when you know research isn’t a priority for them, maybe they’re not gonna keep reading it. I was like, I want to create something that we’re gonna open every week. So if people want to understand what drives buyer behavior, what are other things other than research that I could theme the newsletter around? 

And that’s where the idea for buyer psychology came from. Because I was like, this is another way to understand your buyer’s decision making process. It’s another way to get that job done. And if I can get people to sign up for that newsletter, they’re going to be the kind of people that are probably going to actually be interested in an insights agency that helps them do research. So that’s a long winded answer, but essentially it’s like getting down to the real root of what is the what is below the demand? What job are they trying to get done, taking your solution, thinking out of it. It wasn’t doing research. It wasn’t, you know, running interviews. None of that was what people actually wanted. What they wanted was to understand how their customers make buying decisions so that they could, you know, market smarter. 

And so by understanding that I was able to come up with an idea for a newsletter that would, in theory, attract the perfect people for the insights agency I plan to build pre neck break.

Rob Marsh: Who knows, if you were to launch that agency now… you’ve got 80,000 people on your list who are ready to buy, right? So… I love talking through that and thinking through that process, especially from the standpoint of the listeners to this podcast, copywriters, content writers, marketers, who are doing a lot of these freelance type things. Oftentimes, we’re selling things like websites or sales pages or emails, and we don’t always recognize that our clients actually don’t need websites, sales pages and emails. I mean, they do, but what they really want is the thing that the website, email and sales page gets them, right? Which is a new customer or revenue or in some cases, it’s psychological benefits like, Oh, my spouse respects me, because they can see that I have a real company, at least online, it looks like I’m doing something real and I think we forget that a lot, and we focus so much in on that deliverable.

Katelyn Bourgoin: Yeah, and I think the other thing that we do as marketers, that is that we have to be cautious of. Because I think this is why, when you look at a lot of markets are very saturated, and us as copywriters or marketers are trying to find ways to create a differentiated message. And oftentimes, I think what we do so going back to jobs to be done, the simple way of explaining it is basically the job is the progress that a person is trying to make in a very specific circumstance. So it’s about understanding what is, what is it that they’re trying to achieve? That’s the kind of the job, and then why? Why does achieving that matter? And I think as entrepreneurs, we often will kind of go really heavy into selling. The why, which is off the big rhetoric in marketing, you know, sell the life, sell the life, sell the life with and then our stuff just sounds like everybody else’s. Because, guess what? As humans, we all have the same core goals. We want to survive and we want to thrive, right? We want to make more money, we want to have more time. We want to be more attractive to the other sex. 

So if you jump too much into the why, and you focus your message there, then you end up selling sounding like everybody else who’s selling this big dream, this glitzy dream. So I think it’s really important to understand what the job is, because that’ll allow you to differentiate your messaging and make sure that you’re speaking to that. And part of understanding the job, a huge part of it, as you know, in my opinion, and based on what I’ve seen, is it’s about understanding the struggles people have when completing that job. That’s the opportunity in our messaging. 

And so as I work on this, this new workshop, and I’m using, it’s very meta, but I’m using my own creation of the workshop as an example in the workshop, because, you know, everybody who will be attending that workshop will have bought that product, so it’ll be very, very relevant to them. But as I work through it, it’s like figuring out what the specific job is that people are coming to that workshop before they’re coming there because they want to design a scalable digital offer that they can build on their own without growing their team to scale their service based marketing business. It’s very specific, right? And so when you think about that, once you kind of, like, wrap your hands around that, it’s like, okay, I know that, that I know what this what the trigger is. It’s about, you know, them struggling with growing their existing service based business, feeling stretched, feeling strained, wanting to offer something that’s more scalable. I know what it is they’re wanting to do. They want to figure out what that offer is. Chances are, get digging into the pain points they’ve already tried. They’ve probably launched things before that didn’t really work. They didn’t know why. And there’s the kind of the key context which is really important, which is that they want to be able to do it on their own without hiring more people. 

And so this needs to be something that they can actually when I create a solution for them and I try to sell them that solution, those are always really important things to do. Now I could have my message be, you know, work three hours, like, a week from the beach, and, like, make money while you sleep. That’s a great dream to sell. That’s kind of the why. But that message doesn’t work anymore with people because they’ve seen it too much, and it doesn’t really speak to the real job that they’re trying to get. 

So I think it’s really important to balance that kind of like aspirational why messaging with really getting clear on your differentiated value when you understand the job your customers are trying to get done and the nitty gritty details, you can get clear on that.

Rob Marsh: That’s an incredibly valuable look into what we all need to be doing with our customers and our clients that we’re attracting to us. I would love to shift our conversation a little bit and talk more about your newsletter. There’s a thing that’s happened around newsletters over the last couple of years where creators are growing, tools have emerged—Beehiiv and Substack and Kit—are creating great tools for, not just growing newsletters, but serving clients. How have you grown your newsletter? Because I think everybody does it a little bit differently. I know you have been on social media and Twitter quite a bit in the past, and showing up in various places, but we talked about how we all start with no one reading our newsletter. How did you go from zero to where you are now? And I think it’s like 80,000 something.

Katelyn Bourgoin: So we’re now down to like 63,000. And I’ve been really fortunate. So I’ll share the things that are now available to anybody starting a newsletter. I actually got fairly early access to some of these. So we built from zero to 10,000 based on promoting basically through my social network and through some collaborations with other newsletters. So us promoting them, they promoting us. That was from zero to 10,000 we got there within, I think, probably a year and a half, you know, about 18 months from zero to 10,000 so that was very much like not being super. I think it was like 89,000 but not being super, you know, tactful about it, but what I did do that was smart, and I’ve stopped doing and we’re going to start redoing, was every, um, every Monday, before the newsletter would go out on Tuesday, I would plug, kind of like, tease what the issue was going to be, and I would share a screenshot of, like, some kind of like, unsolicited praise of the newsletter. And that was, I think, the smartest thing that I did, because a reminded people to sign up. So I think a lot of newsletter creators don’t do they don’t remind people to sign up. And it showed that other people were liking the newsletter, and it created this kind of like virtuous flywheel, because then other people would see that post, then we’re reading the newsletter already, and they go, Oh my god, this is my favorite newsletter too. And so I could get more screenshots. 

So that was one smart thing that I did in the beginning, but because we had gotten to about 10,000 I was on a call with Nathan Berry from Kit, and I was actually on his podcast, and he told me about some cool things that they were doing over at that. It was then ConvertKit, now Kit to help newsletter operators to grow their list faster. And I was on a different platform at the time, and it’s like, super exciting. And so I moved over to Kit, and I was an early user of a platform called Sparkloop, which Kit has since acquired. And the Sparkloop team, it was this great new like feature, and they were the first to release it. And it was something that a lot of the big newsletter brands had been doing very manually, but spark made it easy, which was after somebody would sign up for my newsletter, they would see a recommendation of three to five newsletters that I also recommended, and they could choose to then, with one click, sign up for those newsletters too. So we got early beta access to this before it was available to the public, which helped us to grow a lot faster than we would have had we not had access to that early. And so we partnered with a number of other newsletters and promote promoted each other, and that made a big difference in our growth. 

And then, since then, a lot of the growth it still comes from, you know, plugging the newsletter, consistently doing it. We had been testing different Facebook ads to grow the the audience. It worked, but we didn’t see that those readers became buyers within a window of that made sense. So we kind of scrapped that. We might go back to that and then Sparkloop has a paid partnership program in addition to the organic ones, the organic one is, I promote you. You promote me. Nobody pays. If you want to take advantage of their paid program, you can actually set a rate for I will pay X amount of dollars for every subscriber, and then other newsletters will send you subscribers that’s been hit and miss for us, because there’s definitely some folks out there that think have found ways to game that system and spark group. Of course, had to tamper down on that. But again, when we would look at the purchase behavior from some of those subscribers and it come from the paid campaigns, it just wasn’t making sense to continue to grow through that channel. So we were not doing that right now.

Rob Marsh: That’s interesting, that there’s so much power in organic. Obviously what you do when you’re working organically and putting out the content that you know resonates or whatever results in the people who are going to continue following you and buy from you, which I guess that makes a lot of sense, but also makes you just maybe look a little bit of chance at some of the paid tools. I think I need to make sure that the stuff actually brings buyers into into my audience. 

Katelyn Bourgoin: Well, I’ve seen a lot of newsletter operators, and I hate to say that’s a lot of folks who have really, kind of like, gotten high on their own supply when it comes to, like these paid subscriber channels. And I suspect that some of them are not doing the evaluation to see. Are these valuable? Are these folks? Because the thing of the way that spark loop works now, other tools are different, but the way that spark loop works is that people are auto enrolled, rather than needing to click to choose which newsletters they want to like they want to subscribe to when they see that pop up, and my assumption is a lot of people don’t even realize they’re signing up for newsletters. A pop up happened. And we’re used to seeing pop ups, not processing them, closing them, or clicking the button that looks like the button to close it without really, like, analyzing it. I know that that’s totally the way that I navigate the Internet, so I think that there’s probably a lot of folks who sign up for a newsletter that they were excited about signing up for and inadvertently end up on a couple more. And of course, the goal is, if you can create a lot of value, you can show people why you should earn a spot in their inbox. They’ll stay subscribed. And we have a very special sequence when we were running this for those people to make sure that if they you know, that they would know how they got there, that they’d have to make it really easy for them to opt out, and that we would provide a lot of value in the welcome sequence that they’d want to stay engaged. And if they didn’t engage with a certain amount of emails within their first I think, like 14 days, meaning that they’d open and click and things like that, we could then auto unenroll, unsubscribe them and not pay for those. So that was not something that spark that initially heads had released, which is why we ended up doing this big culling of subscribers who probably had no idea that they got on our list, and we didn’t do a good job of actually warming them up at the time. So we got better at that over the years. 

Rob Marsh: So speaking of that initial welcome sequence, I could be wrong, but I’m thinking you actually offered a secret gift at some point, right where you didn’t promise the gift up front. There was no expectation from anybody who signed up, but it was one of those wow experiences, where, as a subscriber, I’m like, oh, suddenly, you’re giving me something that’s way better than what I even requested when I signed up. Tell me a little bit about that. 

Katelyn Bourgoin: So I went into this not really having a name for it, but Chennel Bastilo, who has the newsletter that’s all about growing newsletters, which is called Growth in Reverse. She coined this as being the reverse lead magnet strategy. So I’ll use her language. 

It’s a reverse lead magnet. But essentially, my thinking was, you know, being a buyer psychology nerd, one of the fastest ways to build trust with a, you know, with somebody in your audience, is to delight them. And to delight somebody means that it’s something that’s unexpected, right? If we know that we’re going to get some we’re going to get something, then it’s not delightful. It’s just you know what the expectation was fulfilled, and therefore we might be content and satisfy it, but it’s not delightful. Delight is when something happens that you don’t expect. So it’s when they sign up for a lead magnet and it’s so much better than they expected, which is so often not the case, right? 

We all have a folder somewhere on our Google Drive that’s full of the lead magnets that, like, were super hyped and really shitty. So people have an expectation that things probably aren’t gonna be that good. If you actually deliver something really good, they’ll be delighted, and you’ll have a great experience. So I thought with, again, knowing that we were investing money, particularly into Spark glue and ads at the time to get this cold audience that didn’t know me, had not signed up because they discovered me on social to kind of create this great experience with them. I was like, How do I delight them at the gate? And that was where the idea came from. And, you know, selfishly, the way, there was a strategy behind this too, because we had then gone back and we ended up creating these journey based welcome sequences. 

So one of the first things that we’d ask people is like, what’s your current problem? And we would they had two options to pick, and if they depending on which one they picked, we created a really great onboarding for them, each with a surprise gift, each with like, really value packed emails, but also subtly mentioning our too big products. We don’t, it wasn’t aggressive, there was no promotion or anything like that. But that was, you know, part of the goal is, yeah, we want to be able to delight these people and add them. We also want to remind them this is a pain point that you have, and we want to help them to overcome that pain point with the freebie that they didn’t expect to get, and with, you know, a couple of really insightful emails that people love, and then we want to tell them also, there’s a solution to help you with that problem. And we’ve got, like, if you’re interested, so that we kind of revised things from our initial which was just, here’s this one freebie, and then they would just start getting the newsletter to creating this kind of like mini welcome sequence, depending on their pain points. 

Rob Marsh: I love that strategy. When I heard of that, I thought that’s just brilliant. Just the surprise that you get and the trust and immediate liking that it engenders is just a really great tactic. So I guess congrats on inventing that, or discovering it, or, you know…

Katelyn Bourgoin: I’m sure I didn’t invent it… I feel like, should I have anything coined? A great phrase, and I hope the laws will use it.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, it’s a great idea. Okay, so your newsletter is really about persuasion. You know why we buy all these cognitive biases that we have tendencies that you know, I would love just to. Talk a little bit about some of these now, copywriters, content writers, marketers, we’re all familiar with the pretty typical, you know, six or seven of the theinfluence techniques that Cialdini writes about. So, you know, urgency and scarcity and liking and consistency, right? We get these drilled into our heads all the time. But there’s not just seven or six. There are literally hundreds of these, and you read about a different one each week. So I’m curious, like, what are your favorite three or four?

Katelyn Bourgoin: I’ll give you two, and then I might give you a third one. Okay, so I’d say that my favorite that I’ve discovered was what’s known as the pratfall effect, which is as somebody who is a perfectionist and, you know, toils over making mistakes and being seen as uncredible, this was like a huge relief for me. So the pratfall effect is essentially this idea that when we are evaluating a person or a brand, small imperfections can actually make us like and trust that thing more, because we don’t trust perfect, because we know that it’s not real, right? When something seems too good to be true, our spidey senses start tingling, and so as a create the idea, the study that was one of the ones that started to identify this effect in people, was they would have people interview for a job. I think it was like for a job application. But they’d have these interviewers interviewing these people, and they’d have actors go and they were instructed to actually mistakenly spill a bit of coffee on themselves, like at the beginning of the interview. And that, you know, that mistake that they made actually made the interviewers feel ingratiated to them, and made them rank them more highly on characteristics. And this is the important thing, that there’s a caveat for this. If you’re going to be making a mistake, and people will like you for it, it shouldn’t be a mistake that makes you seem uncredible in your expertise. So if you’re a mathematician, and somebody asked you, what’s two plus two, and you say seven, that is not going to initiate this effect. But if you’re a mathematician who’s great at the math stuff, but then, you know, again, you like to be example, you spill a bit of coffee on yourself, or you have, you make kind of a mistake or a typo or something like that, that can actually make people like you more. So pratfall effect is one of my favorites.

Another that’s powerful, and I think not doesn’t get enough credit, is the Fresh Start effect. So as marketers, when we are planning our promotions, one thing that you need to be aware of is the psychological brain of your buyer, and the idea that there are moments, there are these temporal moments in time where we start to think that things that we didn’t believe in the past, or things that we might have been skeptical about, kind of all wash away, and we’re open to making kind of some bigger changes. And these are these fresh start moments. So the mother of all fresh start moments, New Year’s Eve, right? Like, ah, it’s the beginning of a new year. You know, last year I might have been all of these things that didn’t help me achieve my goal, didn’t get me where I want to go. But this year, I’m going to be this completely different person. This year, I’m going to be able to change all of that, right? 

And so when you can put a message in front of somebody, when they’re likely to have experienced one of these fresh starts, they’re going to be way more open to your message. And fresh starts aren’t just that once a year. You know? It can also be Mondays, right? We all enter the new week being like this week will be different. It can be at your birthday. It can be a, you know, the beginning of another quarter. It can be after getting a divorce, like there are so many of these moments that happen in the lives of people, and if you can get your message in front of them at the right time to take advantage of the fresh start, they’re going to be far more open to being receptive to your message. So those are two that I love. 

I’ll give you one more, because it’s kind of aligned with giving a bonus one. And that’s the Peak/End rule. So the way that we remember and experience something basically comes down to two things, what was the peak, and whether that’s good or bad, and how did it end? And so if you want to create a really good memory for your customers, right, you want to make sure that the peak is high and positive, then at the end is positive and high, right? And so they did this interesting study where there was this, this colon exam that they were they were doing, and they’d have people, after they went through it report how, like, you know, how much they you know, what their experience was with one to 1010, being not a pleasant experience, in the least, right? And one

being, yeah, it was okay. And what they noticed was that there was this painful part of the examination, and then it would just end, right? People were ranking it really high on the unpleasant like stage, they’re like, What happens if we do the unpleasant part? Because the unpleasant part has to happen. It’s it’s the peak. It’s unpleasant, but it has to happen. But then, instead of it just being over, we actually kind of did a few other things. So we’d like maybe take their blood pressure, or we’d like do an abdominal exam, or like something beyond that, and then it would end with, like, something more pleasant. Then people actually ranked it not being so bad. So this idea that if you do have to deliver bad news, be careful about how you deliver it. Don’t just end abruptly, try to, like, smooth it out, and ideally have a very positive peak. 

This happened to me the other day. It’s a great example of a mistake that a company is making around us. I went to the a great spa. It’s a beautiful Nordic Spa here in Quebec City, and when you like, you know, you come into the place, they’re very quick to greet you, and it’s lovely, and the service is excellent. And then you go and you have your day at the spa, and there’s these beautiful plunge pools and all these different things. So everybody would have kind of different peaks of their experience. But then at the end, they made this massive mistake, which is the people who are waiting to check out, they serve all of them last they pay more attention to people who are waiting to get in. It doesn’t matter when those people arrive. Some people that are waiting to check out are sitting here and they’re watching all of the like staff ignore them and instead greet the people who just arrived even later than they’ve been waiting. And I thought, this is strange, like we’ve been here longer. There’s kind of the rules of society, which is that you see people as they as they cued in the line. And my mom, she’s kind of less patient than I am. She’s starting to get frustrated. And ultimately, I’m like, I just had a great day at the spa. I’m going to be chilled with this, but yeah, that’s a little bit annoying. And then I went to tag the spa in a picture later that day, and in doing that, I went on their Facebook page, and I saw all of these low reviews, and the common thing they were complaining about was the checkout experience. So it’s like you’ve just created this amazing day for your customers. And their thinking is probably, you know what? Let’s make sure that when they first get here, they feel so welcome and support, it’s going to create a great first experience. But what they don’t realize is that they’re actually hurting themselves way more by creating a bad end experience. And so the peak end rule is one of my favorites, and I think that we should all think about it. If we’re doing anything that is, it’s an experience that we want people to remember positive.

Rob Marsh: As freelancers, anytime we’re handing off a finished project, oftentimes we’re handing somebody a Google Doc, it may even still have correction marks in it, or whatever, you know, compared to the kid glove, or the white glove service that we provide, you know, when we’re doing an onboarding interview. Yeah, so, so many applications there. 

And even when you were talking about the Fresh Start effect earlier, you mentioned understanding trigger events. And trigger events are another opportunity for a fresh start. Anytime that you know a customer or somebody that you’re talking to has one of these experiences where it’s like, wow, I am never doing that again, or I this is the last time I go a week without a client or like, that is the opportunity for a fresh start that’s not triggered by, say, a Monday or a new year, right? 

Katelyn Bourgoin: Yes, yeah, absolutely. I think that being a marketer, and, you know, I write a lot of copy, I don’t know what I would call myself. I would say I feel I lean more into the identification as a marketer than a copywriter, because I feel like there’s so many better copywriters in me. But I think that we get to have the coolest job, which is we basically don’t get to be these very curious like, we just get to examine humans and try to understand them. And I think that getting to do that is cool because, like, ultimately, we all kind of want to understand ourselves too. So the more that you understand other people, the more clarity gives you on yourself. And so I just think we’re very lucky that we get to spend our time thinking about this stuff. Rob Marsh: Yeah, I agree. And how to help people solve their problems, or move from you know, the before to the after, from you know, the problem to the solution. In some ways, it’s a gift to be able to do this thing that we all get to do. 

Katelyn Bourgoin: It absolutely is, and there are so many great products out there and great entrepreneurs out there that they deserve to be better known. They deserve for their work to be recognized. They deserve to get customers that they can help. And so I think that it really sometimes, there’s been periods in my life where, as a marketer, I’ve felt a little bit, I don’t know, I guess, a little bit frustrated, that I don’t feel like I’m making a difference in a meaningful way, right? There’s been times where I’m like, Oh, I just like, help B to B. Software companies sell more software. But like, then when I kind of like, reframe it, and I remember, no, like, those people are selling real solutions that are going to make their individual customers lives a lot better. That might mean that person’s more productive, and I get to hire another team member, and that means they get to go on the big. Peace with their family and their marriage doesn’t break up. But there’s all sorts of positive things that can come from helping people to solve their problems. And I think that sometimes when I get stuck in this, like, it just feels like I’m gonna, you know, that I I think a little bit about, like, should I just, like, get into, like, political marketing, like, I have moments, and then I’m like, No, you’re, you know, as long as you go back to helping people figure out what problem they’re solving and how to solve it better and to promote that and communicate that better, it’s a great day. 

Rob Marsh: This feels like a really good end note. Again, thinking about Peak End, that’s maybe a really good way to finish up here. You have some really cool products, I’ve mentioned them in our email, the wallet opening words is a download that you have, that I’m definitely going to link to in the show notes and share when we share this episode in our email. But if people want to get on your list, and learn more about all of this stuff, the cognitive biases, persuasion, how we get people to actually buy, and do it in a way that’s ethical and serves their needs, Katelyin, where should they go?

Katelyn Bourgoin: They should go to learn whywebuy.com.

Rob Marsh: Perfect. So hopefully we’ll have everybody who’s listening jump in there and can they’ll see why I’ve become such a fan of your work, what you do, 

Katelyn Bourgoin: Thank you for letting me get introduced to your people.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, this has been phenomenal. I appreciate your time. 

Thanks to Katelyn for talking so deeply about the techniques we need to undertand in order to sell more… if you’re listening to this the week it goes live, Katelyn is teaching a buyer breakthrough workshop on Thursday at Noon Eastern Time. If you get on her list, you may be able to sign up for that workshop… go to learnwhywebuy.com.

I also mentioned Wallet Opening Words… this is a PDF full of tactics like the Peak End Effect, the Pratfall Effect, and the Fresh Start Effect that you can put to work in your own writing and sales efforts. In addition to those three, I think there are like 67 more psychological tactics you can use in Wallet Opening Words. I’ve linked to it in the show notes, but if you go to thecopywriterclub.com/wow you can get that resource from Katelyn. I have it. I refer to it often. It’s great and probably belongs on your virtual shelf too.

And of course there are lots of resources around persuasion and psychology in The Copywriter Underground. If you’re a member, you’ll find those resources in the new dashboard. And if you’re not a member, you can fix that now at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

Stuff to check out:

Your Ad Kit (Tara’s Newsletter)
The Successful Ads Club
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: Do you think of Facebook ads as a tool for growing your copywriting business? If not, it might be time to update your thinking. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

This is not the first time we’ve talked about Facebook ads on this podcast. I think I keep coming back to this topic because I see so much potential here—both for our own businesses and for our clients’ products and services. This is the kind of strategic skill that helps set some copywriters apart from most others. When you understand the ins and outs of driving paid traffic to your offers, you become imenselly valuable as a writer. And if you use these skills for your own products and services, you could create an almost endless pipeline of customers ready to pay for your help.

But, for some reason, Facebook ads feels difficult. You’ve probably heard the same stories that I have of a creator who turns on ads and steps away for the weekend, only to wake up Monday morning to bill for thousands of dollars and no leads to show for the ad spend. This is something you probably can’t set it and forget it, at least as you’re gettinng started.

I wanted to understand more about using ads and the analytics we need to pay attention to when we start using them to maximize our experience. So I invited Facebook ad strategist and founder of the Successful Ads Club, Tara Zirker, to walk me through all of this. We talked about how to scale a business with ads on a tiny budget… like $10 a day… what metrics you need to watch, what to test and what you can not bother with and a lot more.

I’ve been on Tara’s list for quite a while and really appreciate her approach for running ads to your business… and yes, this works for service businesses like copywriters and content writers. Tara is about to tell us all how to do that in this interview.

Before we get to my interview with Tara, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. If you haven’t jumped in to see what the Underground includes, now is the time. It’s guaranteed, which means you can join and if you don’t find the resources you need to grow your business, just let us know and we’ll refund your money. But I doubt that will be your experience because The Underground includes more than 70 different workshops—and accompanying playbooks to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. The Playbooks make it easy to find quick solutions to the challenges you face in your business everything from finding clients, conducting sales calls, using A.I., building authority on LinkedIn or YouTube or Pinterest, and dozens of other workshops. You also get dozens of templates including a legal agreement you can use with your clients, monthly coaching, regular copy and funnel critiques, and more. You can learn more and join today by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. 

And now, my interview with Tara Zirker…

Tara, welcome to the podcast. I’m thrilled to have you here, as I was telling you, right before we hit record. But before we get into all of this stuff around Facebook, Facebook ads and your expertise, just tell me how you got to where you are. How did you become the expert in Facebook ads? 

Tara Zirker: Thanks so much, Rob. I’m so happy to be here and talk to your community. And basically, a very long story short is I actually got my start in journalism. So come from the copy world. I actually ended started in editorial, and pretty quickly they must have recognized something, because they asked if I want to take on a couple of advertorial assignments, and that just became my place. I was like, loving it. It was so fun. And I just love seeing the results that you had from writing copy and having your clients get conversions. And so that started to expand pretty quickly, until, you know, I eventually went freelance. Had a full book of business in varying freelance services, everything from blogging, social media to SEO and, you know, just the whole kit and caboodle. 

Developed a small agency, and then I had one client who kind of did a bait and switch. They hired us for social media, and when, you know, day one, they’re like, actually, we need you to run ads. I was like, whoa, whoa. And this was way, way, way back when. I mean, I think Meta had had ads running for just a couple of years, and they had just launched ads for app downloads, and that was what my client was in hospitality, and they had an app. And so we started working on ads for downloads, and pretty soon I got a call from Meta, and we had a lot of budget there, so we’re very well resourced, and got a lot of face time with Meta. This was back when you had Meta’s phone number, you could literally call. 

Rob Marsh: That doesn’t happen any more.

Tara Zirker: So anyways, we got a call from Meta, and they said, you are outperforming everyone in your industry. How are you doing this? And you know, and they wanted to know what tricks, how we were thinking about their features, and how we were using them to outperform our competitors. Well, this was hospitality, and that was kind of a big deal. So I was like, whoa, maybe there’s something here. And I took those same strategies to every single one of our clients. I’m like, Hey, can I run ads for you? I just want to test and see [what we could do], we’re seeing great success signals with one client. I want to test it across several and see how it works and start getting great success for our clients, everything from brick and mortar to service based providers and more. Eventually, online course, creators, coaches, consultants, things like that. 

From there, once I saw the power of ads. I could not look away, I could not turn back. I was like, we’re going all in. So that’s what we did. And now we have had several agencies in the ad space, as well as our training company, which is publicly what we’re most well known for, and absolutely love it. So I know you teach people how to do this. 

Rob Marsh: Obviously you learned it through a lot of trial and error and experience. You have programs that help this. But let’s say somebody wanted to get up to speed really quickly on Facebook, ads running for clients, or maybe for themselves. Is there a shortcut for learning this stuff? Or do you have to have the program?

Tara Zirker: There’s lots of ways to learn. I mean, even Meta. So when we say Meta, of course, we’re talking about Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, the whole family suite of apps. Meta has some great training called Blueprint. You can learn for free. We have a really quick, condensed, accelerated training for people who want to learn how to do their own ads. You know, the thing that I’ve had to learn to get really, really good at Rob and you probably share the same thing being kind of in that educator role is how to take complex things and shorten them, make them very quick, very easy to digest. You know, we teach small business owners how to run ads. Our lessons are 20 minutes a piece. They have to be able to get them up and running. We always say, ads up and running within a couple of hours, results the same day. And that’s because you have to teach very, very quickly. So I could even teach some frameworks that anybody could learn today and be able to start to understand how ads work. 

But it’s honestly so simple, and I think that copywriters, if you’re wanting to run ads for yourself, or maybe you’re thinking you would like to learn a little bit more about ads so you could offer copywriting services, for ads right? For social ads as a niche service, or maybe you want to add ads as an entire skill set. It’s honestly really easy to learn, and it’s getting easier by the day, because the algorithm is so smart at this point that it’s getting harder to mess it up. There’s definitely a few things you can do to mess it up, pretty bad, but it’s getting harder to do that, which is pretty cool. So copywriters have a really cool opportunity, I think, to understand advertising, because you, for the most part, understand the strategy and conversion and ads obviously have to turn into sales, or it’s not worth it. 

And copywriters, I think, are uniquely positioned to really quickly just add a few buttons to their skill set already and start to see success. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that makes total sense. And I’m glad to hear you say that it’s getting easier, because my sense of particularly Facebook ads—using the ad manager and setting up the accounts, and I’ve seen people, you know, set it up and suddenly, over the weekend, you know, they didn’t set the right limits, and suddenly they owe $2,000 its just crazy. So hearing you say, it’s actually getting easier and better is good.

Tara Zirker: It sounds good, right? Because there’s so many of those nightmares that we hear that probably keep a lot of us who ought to be experimenting with ads out of doing this 100% and I will say too. Ads really picked up a terrible reputation with the iOS 14 updates, where the privacy policies of Apple essentially cascaded to all the platforms. But Meta was the hardest hit, and essentially said you can’t do your tracking. That was several years ago, and that reputation continues after iOS 14. The tracking now, I would say, is almost as good as it ever has been, if not better on some accounts and so, yeah, there’s been a change, I think most people now have recognized, okay, that was, like, a short lived scare. But, you know, the iOS 15 updates also impacted email, and I think that starting to roll out, where people are realizing what’s happened over the last couple years with email has been pretty dramatic and traumatic for business owners, and so you do have to adapt. And there’s lots of things that change. You do have to stay on top of it. There are, you know, things that shift quite frequently, but our job is to do that for you, so to make it really simple and easy to run and so that you’re always staying ahead of what’s going on.

But here’s the thing, you just have to have a different mindset about it, because all the platforms change, marketing changes all the time. AI has completely disrupted what will happen in marketing for the next, like, five to 10 years, and it’s it’s changing very quickly, so you may as well learn ads and have a little bit more control over your ability to get your own leads and not have to depend on such rapidly changing social algorithms and things like that. 

Rob Marsh: So before we talk about some of the things we need to have in place before we’re ready to do ads. Can you maybe just give us a minute or two on why ads are a better channel, or at least a complimentary channel to just organic traffic on places like Instagram or Facebook or whatever? Why should we be doing ads? 

Tara Zirker: Absolutely. Once you feel the difference of ads in your business, it’s hard to want to ever do anything organic again, because really, you control the flow, and it is, and I’m not saying you really do need to do the organic things that do impact your business. Need to be consistent. You need to have those disciplines of a business owner in that way. However, ads are kind of the easy button. They’re the shortcut. You can just grow and scale so much quicker and build your leads. 

A great example of this is I have one very, very minor funnel inside of my business. It attracts a very sub niche of business owners, but it monetizes really well. So it’s under the radar. Hardly anyone knows it, unless you see that particular funnel, and I spend $10 a day on that funnel, and it generates about anywhere from seven to 10 leads for me per day. So let’s just say, on average, it’s like 250 to 300 leads per month. And what I always tell people, and when I teach, when I show people this funnel, they’re like, oh my goodness, how do I create one of those? And what I always say is, like, if you can like, oh, and I should say, this took me about three hours to set up originally, that includes writing the content piece of it, and it takes me about 10 minutes or less per month to maintain although, frankly, I haven’t spent more than a couple minutes in like months on this thing. So I always say, if you’re spending more than like 10 minutes a month to generate 250, 300 leads a month, then you should be considering ads, because that is just so easy. There’s nothing to it. It took me a couple of hours to set up this, by the way, was about three or four years ago,

I spend about 10 minutes per month maintaining it at the very most. I mean, every like, once a year or so, I have to spend maybe an hour or so kind of refreshing a few things. So I just think, like, if you can, and that’s a great example of why I say the shortcut, the easy button. It’s like, well, if you’re spending more than $10 and that’s $10 a day, so 300 bucks a month, if you’re spent, you know, you spend probably that much in time and energy, and maybe even a team with your social media. I mean, it’s worth it to have at least as a compliment, ads running so that your organic traffic is staying or, I should say ads are keeping your brand much more top of mind for your organic traffic, and you’re able to monetize that organic traffic as well. I will also say you’re able to control the levers a little bit more. You know, with an organic post, you never know if it’s gonna get, you know, if it’s gonna go viral for you, or if it’s just gonna sit there and do nothing and get, you know, 10 likes or whatever, with, at least with ads. Number one, you’re able to test very, very quickly. And number two, you’re able to, like, just have more consistent results and force meta to work for you. 

Okay, so it’s like a 24/7 sales person that’s just always working for you. It’s how I like to describe it. Yeah, I can, I imagine a lot of people listening to like, whoa, wait a second. You know, 250 leads for $300 that feels. Pretty, pretty good, or 200 leads, whatever that ends up being. 

Rob Marsh: Can I just quickly ask, is that for a product or a service that is for a lead magnet and it builds a very sub niche? 

Tara Zirker: So I want to caveat that and say that is very, very, very niche. The average cost per lead for, let’s just say, unless you have, like, a very niche sort of product or service or something like that, you’re going to pay more that’s like, so optimized. It’s start to finish, you know. And also it’s for a niche that just is underserved. And so it’s a very, very cheap lead that actually monetizes very well on the back end. But it’s also a very small market. It really, I mean, the most I could probably spend on it, it would be, I don’t know, $50, $60, a day. It’s not meant to, like, blow up my business, right? It’s not meant to have a $20,000 a month budget on it, but it works very well for what it is supposed to do. We have, like, a whole metric spreadsheet of how much you should be expecting to spend based on your industry, your niche and your funnel type. And those are three really important things to understand.

And I would say maybe three to $8 is probably more average. So you’re not going to get maybe that many leads, but you’re going to qualify those leads. You’re going to know they’re really high value, and you’re gonna be able to, obviously make offers on the back end of that. 

Rob Marsh: I mean, even hearing you talk about that, though, there’s a lot of help there, because copywriters who want to serve smaller niches or undersized like, there’s really big opportunities out there if you’re willing to step away from finance or coaching, you know, these big niches where there’s a lot of stuff happening and everybody seems to want to flock there. It’s like, find the smaller niche, and there’s a massive opportunity. 

Tara Zirker: Yes, and I would say, I mean, I think that we all will find our our little pocket, you know, whether it be a little bit more broader in the market, or whether you do niche down, but I think that is just a great little nugget for success in general. And what I’ve seen in business is, you know, when you can niche down, and wherever you can find that profitable niche, you can go deep, so much easier, right? So much easier to qualify your ideal client and to get better, higher quality clients too, who, number one, pay more, but number two are easier to work with. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, agreed. Let’s talk about what we need to have in place then, before we can even think about, you know, running ads. Obviously if you don’t have a product or an offer, you shouldn’t be running ads. But what else should we be thinking about so when we do run ads, we hit the ground running, and we maximize our chances for success. 

Tara Zirker: That’s right, the first thing that you need is some sort of entry offer. So let’s just say, if you’re focused on building your list, this could be a, I mean, there’s any number of ways to do this. This could be a training if you wanted to do that, or a video, sales letter. This could also be something like some sort of download or free guide, and I will say that where we see the most success with our members and clients is when what they are offering is very specific. So don’t think General. You know, this is the guide for small business owners who want to hire their next copywriter? No, like that is just way too general. So you want something very niche, specific, if you can, and I will say that things like tools perform better than like ebooks. So if we’re thinking like a checklist or a spreadsheet or a it could be like a formula guide or something like that, but if you can think of it as more of a tool versus like an ebook, you’re going to have a much better chance of success. So anything that kind of is a time saver for your client, is going to be like, very magnetic to that client.

Rob Marsh: Okay, that makes sense. So we definitely want that. What else do we need to make sure that we’re ready to go? 

Tara Zirker: Yeah, so you want some sort of entry level offer, and I will say too. I will say too. And again, it depends on, I would say level of sophistication with how comfortable you are building and optimizing your quote, unquote funnel, but basically the sales process. But there are plenty of service based providers who are taking folks to a very short video sales letter. So it could be oriented around a result, or oriented around mistakes or something like that, and then an application like right under it. And so you’re going to pay more for your leads, but you’re also maybe going to get folks who want your services, like applying right there for your services. 

There’s lots and lots of different funnels, so you’re going to have some sort of entry level.

Will offer that people are excited to get more information, take that next step with you, and then from there, this is where you now. You’re starting to set up your ads, right so you want to think about a lot of folks will mistake boosting posts or running traffic ads as true kind of back end ads. And I will tell you honestly, there is a tiny bit of value in those, but you only want to spend about 10% of your budget there, 80% of your budget you want to be spending on conversion ads. And in order to do conversion ads, you have to install tiny, tiny bit of tech. Little tech that goes on the back end of your website is called a pixel. You’re gonna install a little bit of code, and this is the ad tech that allows meta to talk to your website and say, Okay, we got conversion. Let’s go find more people that look like that conversion. And that is what allows your ads to get better and better and better. A lot of times, people mistake that they’re boosting a post, they’re running traffic ads, and they think I’m running ads. They’re not working. They never would from that strategy. It’s not really a strategy. It’s like meta is really cheap, inexpensive way of advertising that rarely yields results. 

A great example of this, we had one member come in. Her name was Karen. She’s a realtor, and so service based, and she had spent 1600 bucks and had between an ADS budget and a marketing team, and unfortunately that marketing team was doing traffic ads. I said, this is going to both like, delight you and totally like depress you too… so we’re gonna relaunch this. We’re gonna install that pixel. All we’re gonna do is change one button and tell Meta we want this type of person, not just a traffic somebody who will click but not convert. And she, within 72 hours, she had spent 60 bucks. She had 40 leads. And so it’s just knowing the buttons to push and making sure that the tech is set up correctly. And so that’s going to be your next step. You guys set up a tiny, tiny bit of tech, and you’ve got to make sure that everything is going to be able to track, because that is what allows Facebook to really optimize and make sure it’s working as an actual salesperson for your team, not just like you know difference between having a sales conversation, like having a salesperson versus someone who’s like, just holding the sign on the corner and flipping it around like, that’s the difference in how you set up your ads. 

From there, everyone’s most favorite part on this podcast. You’re going to write your copy. There you go. Easy peasy. We probably don’t even have to talk about that very much, but there are a few mistakes with ad copy that we could talk through. You’re gonna write your copy. Design your ads doesn’t have to be crazy. 60% of conversions are still coming from static imagery. So people think, I’ve gotta do these videos, got to be crazy. Yes, you should incorporate some video if you can, but you can start with static images, and most conversions still happen from static and then from there, you’re going to actually build your ad, takes about 10 minutes, and you’re going to launch it.

And the actual hard part is, after the launch, it’s looking at the metrics, it’s knowing which four metrics to look at, what to optimize based on that data, and honestly, depending on your budget. From there, it’s just monitoring your ads, and it doesn’t have to take a lot of time. 

Rob Marsh: I want to come back to the four metrics we need to watch, but you mentioned boosting posts, and you said there is a use case where that makes sense. I’m curious what that is, because I’ve heard the same thing. You know, most boosted posts, it’s a waste of money. Don’t do it. But obviously there’s a reason. So when should we be boosting posts? 

Tara Zirker: That’s right. So you can boost, here’s what I will say. I would definitely endorse this, this strategy, if you’re boosting the top 10% of your content, I think this is content that is, it’s already like, getting a lot of visits, a lot of attention, and maybe you’re noticing and and you would need to decide based on what you’re looking for out of your content. Maybe you’re noticing it’s generating a lot of DMS. Maybe you’re noticing it’s generating a lot of followers. Maybe you’re noticing it generates a lot of clicks to your bio. So whatever it is, whatever those kinds of goals are for you, that’s how I would qualify your top 10% and it also could just be views, and that showing, like audience engagement, and you know, that sort of thing. And then here’s what you can do. You can actually repurpose that content as your ads. Okay, so you can make this really easy on yourself, and you can repurpose that as some of your ad creative that’s going to go to that entry level offer. And then the other.

That you can do is boost it, and then on the back end, you’re retargeting that engagement with your conversion ads, so about 10% of your budget you can spend on that kind of ad, as long as so big caveat here, as long as you’re also retargeting that engagement with those conversion ads, and you’re saying, hey, Facebook, these people are interested. Go find the ones among them that are most likely to convert. And this is what I want them to do next. And that is the power. That’s the strategy right there. 

Rob Marsh: Okay, that makes sense. So let’s talk about the metrics then that we need to be watching. We’re running ads. Maybe we’re putting $10 a day in it, so we’re sort of starting really basic. But what are we watching to make sure that we are actually having an impact on our business, and not just throwing Mark Zuckerberg more of our money? 

Tara Zirker: First and foremost is your cost per result. We’ve got a big metric sheet of how much you should spend depending on your business, your industry, your niche, your funnel time. How much should this cost? Right? So let’s just say, if you’re targeting audience in a very competitive space, you might expect, you’re going to pay a little bit more per result, versus if you’re targeting a less competitive space, you’re going to pay less per result. So cost per result. And there’s lots of ways to kind of get a general, you know, foundation there, but I’ll just give a couple here. So let’s just say, if you are sending folks to some sort of initial opt in, that’s like a free guide or checklist, or maybe it’s like a, you know, whatever it is, I would say anywhere from three to $8 would be a really good range. And from there, I’d have to, like, slice and dice it a little bit more, depending on what that niche was, right? 

But that’s like a good starting range. Let’s just say you’re sending people to book a consultation or recall something like that. That’s gonna be more expensive, that could be anywhere from 60 up to $500 and again, massive range I’d have to slice and dice it to tell you, like, a more specific range. I usually don’t like huge ranges, but let’s just say, you know, if I’m running maybe I’ve got a high ticket service, and it’s for folks in, like, the coaching space. Okay, probably 250 bucks a call, and I would give that range somewhere between 175 and, like, 300 so I’ve got, like, very specific ranges that I want you to be within. 

The next thing that you’re going to look at is your CTR link, click through rate. So CTR link, click through rate. Click through rate on the link. And that is different than another metric that meta has called CTR all all in my mind, is totally junk metric. Rob, you know how, when you write ad copy, or you’re reading an ad and there’s that little more button, yeah? So they would count that as a link click, and we couldn’t care less about that, 

Rob Marsh: So they’re just seeing the rest of the ad, and that’s counting it. Yeah, that’s garbage. 

Tara Zirker: That’s garbage, right? Or maybe they go to your page, so you might be getting followers from it. But we don’t want to, we don’t want to count that. We don’t want to, like pay attention to that in our matrix of how we’re making decisions and spending money, right? So we want CTR link click through rate and not saying, Hey, I only want people who are clicking to the next step that’s really important. We want that above 1% and copywriters everywhere will love this. This is an easy fix. If that is under 1% meaning, for every 1000 folks that see our ad, we want 10 to well we want. We want 10 or more, usually, like one to 1.5% so 10 to 15 people to click to the next step. And if that’s under 1% or wasting money number one and number two, the easy fix is your ad copy and design. And so that’s where you can really go in and start to,

you know, add in hooks, qualify your leads, more things like that. Okay, the next metric we’re looking at is CPM, which is your cost per 1000 impressions. Now, Facebook will do the math for you, but this is the amount that they’re going to be charging to your credit card. If you get one conversion, 10 doesn’t matter, or none, they’re still going to charge you based on your CPM, which is how competitive your ad is against other competitors, and blah, blah, blah, and that they do a big, complicated formula, and they’re saying, Okay, we’re going to charge Rob $30 per 1000 impressions. We’re going to charge Tara um $45 per 1000 impressions, right? So it’s, it’s a big, complicated thing, but we want to see that CPM under $42 if you’re spending more. And again, great news for copywriters. This is like easy to figure out. If it’s more than $42 on a cold audience. It means there is a trigger word in your ad copy, your design, on your landing page, or even in your URL. 

And a great example of this was we had a client spending. Gosh, I think it was like a $70,000 budget. Maybe it was 100, something like that. But over a very short period of time, three weeks, and everything’s going great. The ads are doing awesome. All of a sudden, overnight, the ads went, I think it was from like $3 a lead, which was our target, was under five, to like 13 bucks a lead. I mean, it’s a launch ruining jump. It’s actually like quarters revenue, like worth of revenue ruining jump, right? And clients freaking out. We’re freaking out. We have very short period of time to fix this. And so I start testing ad copy like crazy. Me and my team were just pulling out words because what had happened was the CPM had risen that much. So CPM went from like $30 to like 150 bucks or something. 

So we knew there was a trigger word, and ads have been running just fine for several days, um, but we had to go in and find that trigger word. So, man, we were, I mean, I got so little sleep during these few days. Finally, on the landing page. So I’m testing ad copy. I’m working with my rep, my reps like there’s literally nothing that I can see in the ad on like I don’t see any problem anywhere. And so I’m testing everything I can think of on the landing page. On the very, very bottom, imagine a really long landing page. There’s a call to action, and right under the call to action, in tiny, tiny print, it says, Bring a glass of bubbly and join the class. And I just had the thought, could bubbly be the word? Like it’s a reference, you know, kind of light reference to alcohol, and could that actually be the word. And so I, you know, I write to their team. I say, can you take this one word off of the landing page? And I, you know, they do that. Within an hour, I go, I launch new set of ads. And CPM, 30 bucks cost per lead, 350 and so that is, there’s certain words, and I have a whole list of them. There’s certain words that just make your ads more expensive, and we just call them trigger words. So that’s a great example of how one trigger word can totally wreck your campaign. And also, it’s also a great example if you get into copywriting for clients, the types of things you want to be aware of and really attuned to. And hopefully, you know, good media buyers should be attuned to those too, but not very many people are all the time, and so they just pay a lot more for their ads. We could be a lot less expensive. So, so you want CPM. 

Final thing is your landing page conversion rate, and you’re spending money on ads, you want to make sure your landing page is as optimized as possible. Another great win for copywriters, because you can, you can test this. You can try different headline formulas. You’re seeing if your landing page is converting under the optimal ranges, simply go in and start testing, and for every 100 people that get to that landing page, you’re either going to say, great, that’s working better. Let’s move on to the next test. Or, oops, that’s not working as well. Let’s try something new, and you can get a lot of data very, very, very quickly. 

We did this a couple months ago, I think it was, we had a landing page, kind of embarrassing for me to say, but it was converting at 12% which we never have. 

Rob Marsh: That’s good. 

Tara Zirker: Well, well, it was, it was for leads, though. 

Rob Marsh: Oh, okay, I’m sorry. Okay, so sometimes you want a lead, converting maybe 30% 30 50% 100%. I thought you were talking about sales.

Tara Zirker: You got it, Rob, If it were sales, I’d be like, Yeah, okay. Sadly, it wasn’t. And I was embarrassed, because I was like, man, well, we did rapid fire Landing Page Conversion Rate testing over 72 hours and had up to 28% we probably should have pushed it a little higher, but that was good enough that our ad costs were were stable enough because, you know, if I’m paying let’s just break down the math really simply, $10 to get 1000 impressions, and I have 1% conversion rate. That means I’ve got, I paid $10 to get 10 people to the page. Well, you can see how my costs would be affected if I have one person convert versus three.

So that’s why you’ve got to know these things. Four simple metrics, you’ll be an expert on these if you just pay attention to them for an hour of your life, you will. And copywriters have such a good instinct for what to change, what needs to be tested, but an hour of your life to master these four metrics, and we teach it in, you know, 10 minutes, but really you pay attention for an hour of your life, you will be a master of these four metrics. And these four metrics control the fate of how successful your ads are, which could mean how successful your business is.

Rob Marsh: I imagine this is going to change depending on how long you’ve been running ads. But how often should you be checking those metrics? Is it every day, every week? I tune in every quarter to see that things are still going what does that look like? 

Tara Zirker: Exactly. So when you launch ads, you’re going to be looking at these every day for the first like three to five days. Then you’re going to look at them once a week. If you’re like most new advertisers, you’re going to be looking at them multiple times a day. But it’s unnecessary, I promise. And then, you know, honestly, it depends on what kind of funnel you’re running, but once things are kind of up and running once a month for a couple minutes, and those are the only four things you’re looking at, by the way, you can look at a whole bunch more. To me, there’s a lot of vanity metrics and a lot of like, fluffy things that just make no difference to the bottom line. Those four right there control everything that is successful about your ads. And so, yeah, once, once a month, the funnel I mentioned earlier is a once a month. Look, for me, with our main ad account where we’re driving folks to our successful ads accelerator, that’s a once a week. 

Rob Marsh: How often should we be changing up creative? Obviously, the numbers that we’re looking at are gonna, you know, affect that. But I think one of the things that certainly worries me, and I’m sure worries a lot of other service providers, is the thought that, well, what I don’t want this to become is I need to come up with new creative and be testing new creative every three or four days, or even every couple of weeks. That becomes as hard a job as posting new stuff on social media organically all the time, right? So basically, I’ve just duplicated the difficulty of social media into my ads account. How often do we need to be looking at stuff like that? 

Tara Zirker: Yeah, I just heard a recommendation of, and I was like, Absolutely not, not ever in the million years. Do you need this much? But I heard a recommendation out there, um, of 20 creatives per $1,000 and I was like, I’ve seen, never, would I ever, never. 

Rob Marsh: People talk about, yeah, when you’re launching, you need to have 20 different ad sets, and you need to be sending certain amount of dollar amount until the algorithm figures out which one is the best. And then you’ve got to do you take those two or three and now you’ve got to do 10 different versions of those with different graphics or different copy, you know? 

Tara Zirker: So, yeah, it starts to be like too much to even start to comprehend thing. There’s no way I want to do this. Never, when I would ever… Now, here’s the thing, when you do get up into bigger launch spends and you have a media buyer or an agency that you’re working with, their job is to be doing that level of creative iteration, not, not at Crazy volumes. There’s, there’s a point at which is just, it makes absolutely no sense, like you wouldn’t be able to efficiently test that amount with, you know, properly. So there’s, there’s a certain VA, there’s like a sweet spot of volume for every account. But let’s just put this in small business owner terms. If you are spending $1,000 or less, I mean, a great example. Well, I’ll use both of my accounts actually, one that spends, you know, into the five figures, and one that is like the $300 a month. One that $300 a month one, I’m doing creative update maybe once or twice a year. Very minor. It’s like, I’ll go into Canva, I’ll edit the colors, and I will maybe do a couple of copy variations. I’ll put it back into the algorithm. It rarely requires more testing than that. And that’s where I would say it’s about an hour investment if I’m kind of moving slow in my Canva account, you know, right?

If I am. And this, I do think, is where copywriters, again, have that advantage, because you kind of have a sense of what, oh, that’s working. Well, let’s test this. You kind of have that inner sense and knowing of like, you know, or maybe I want to insert a little more sales psychology into this copy piece, like you don’t have to spend a lot of time there. If on my larger account, or any larger account, I’m, well, let’s just go my larger account, you know, I would say I’m updating creative once a quarter, and it’s not much more honestly than what I just described. Now, when I first got my account to a really great, optimal place, it did take me a little bit more time up front. You know, the first few months I was testing and seeing, like, where’s the right market message fit and what are people really, really glomming on to one of the coolest things I did, and this honestly made all the difference in my copy and my creative ever since was I went through, we have just under 1000 testimonials. I don’t think I had that many at the time, maybe like 100 like testimonial type things. And I went in there, and I saw two things over and over again. So I saw people kept saying effective. I’ve never used that in my marketing. They kept saying effective ads. And they kept saying, you know, I just, I always had such a headache doing ads or these are like, headache free. And I was like, those are two weird things, but I saw enough that I picked up on those signals and I put that in my messaging. I had a great mentor once who said, try not to write anything that your clients didn’t say first, right? And, man, that made all the difference so and that just would never be how I would describe my program to somebody, you know, but we help you create fast, effective ads like that is the key to our whole business, and it came from my clients, directly from their mouths. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that’s a copywriting trick right there that’s so good, really well known. So while we’re talking about testing and different creatives. What is the kind of stuff that we should be testing? And I’m asking this because I know that some people say you should be only testing big Ideas. And then there are a lot of people who get hung up and testing things like a call to action that says, Call click now versus click today, versus click for more and tests that probably don’t actually tell you a whole lot. So how do you think through testing? Do we need to be testing graphics? Do we need to be testing headlines? Any of that? 

Tara Zirker: Yes. Okay, so when we teach creative testing, we always start with copy, actually. So on test, honestly, we want to you can test lots of frameworks, but we also want to test lengths, short, medium long copy and extra long copy right now is trending on meta. There is a theory that meta is indexing based on copy and so, and this gets into a whole different conversation, but think of it like how we used to write blog posts, or how we still write blog post, very SEO rich. So that’s another trick, or another thing that you can be testing. Then we want to test our imagery. Always. Five to 10 images is what we recommend right now, videos and or GIFs. So you can include a mix there. And then we want to be testing headlines. And so the way that we teach testing right now, we have a really cool way of testing that kind of puts it all together and lets the algorithm decide. You can also test them one at a time, and this is the old school way that we used to teach, which I still love, but is a little bit more of a manual effort. So you can let the algorithm kind of do the testing for you, or you can do it yourself. But the most important piece is that you want to test that mix that I just described, and then idea versus idea versus like smaller tweaks. 

So I would say initially, I would just stick to one framework, and then you can test different copy, you know, frameworks, against each other if you want. So one framework and three different lengths, or four different lengths, if you want to go the want to go the extra long way version, and then from there, yes, with maybe you see like, like, we have, for example, one client who just honestly, it’s the same copy that has converted for years for them, and we will test all sorts of things against it, but it’s that one copy that generates almost all of the results. And yes, what we do now is micro testing within that. And so we’ll change up the call to action. We’ll change up the emojis. By the way, I call that styling, and there’s lots of styling, little tips and tricks, but like the green check mark is one of the best emojis that always test incredibly well on meta. So take that and run with it. But there’s just all these little different things you can test, kind of within your winners. So it’s almost like you want to get some big winners, and then from there you can start drilling down, if you want to, optional but optimal, you can start drilling down into the little stuff. Rob Marsh: Let me ask about targeting. So I know if I’ve done a big launch in the past, and I’ve got, you know, several hundred buyers, I can easily upload those and create a lookalike audience. But for a lot of service providers who are maybe working with three or four clients a month, which nets out at maybe 20 a year, you almost have to have five years worth of those clients to create a look alike audience. So how do I as a small business create an audience of ideal prospects to be targeting? 

Tara Zirker: I’m going to tell you the version of my answer that’s relevant right now, and the version that I believe will be relevant in 12 months from now. So right now you can target based on interests, so small business owner as a behavior, let’s say, could be a great one. Maybe you’re targeting parents. You can target all these different parents. Why would you be targeting parents?

Rob Marsh: I suppose there might be a copywriter you know, targeting parent writing type niches or whatever. 

Tara Zirker: You’re targeting businesses. However, if you’re writing for clients and I will say, I think that if you are writing for clients, having at least some basic skill level on ads can be helpful. So you can, you can write specific copy for specific interests and things like that. But basically, small business owner is a behavior. You can target Facebook page admins as an example, so that you wouldn’t have be an admin on a Facebook page unless you have a business or you’re a thought leader of some kind, right? So there’s lots of ways to do targeting that would like specifically call out to your ideal client within the targeting the answer I will give you a year from now, and I I’m anticipating this is where it’s going, is there’s no targeting period, and the algorithm just knows, and your creative will actually be the qualifier and Tell meta where to place those ads. And so we see, and just to give a little more context there, we see that the way the campaign structure is, you know, for many accounts, it still is this way. But for other accounts, they’re noticing top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. Those are kind of traditional how you would think about ads, those are applying less and less. It’s just becoming one big funnel, and the algorithm is going and finding your right person. 

A great example of this Rob is ourselves. I mean, we’re targeting a small business owner spending under 5000 a month in ads, and who wants to really learn how to do it, do it well, and not hire it out yet. Okay? Maybe at some point they will. Maybe they never do. We’ve noticed that our best targeting right now, or some of our best targeting, is broad targeting. I’ll put the ages in, and I’ll put the country that I’m targeting, and that’s it. No interest, no look alikes, no nothing. And Meta is just going out and finding Ito clients for me based on what it knows about me and what it knows I want. So how crazy is that, but that’s where it’s all going.

Rob Marsh: That’s really cool. Do you have to have a history in your meta account for that to work that way?

Tara Zirker: We’ve seen accounts brand new. Start off with broad target and targeting and do really, really well as long as you’re creative. You always do want to have, like you always want to have the geography in there, otherwise, you’re going to get lots of cheap but very random results from all over the world. And that’s not what you want, right? You want qualified leads and customers and things like that. So you always want to put your geography, I will say there could be a use case for age, although it honestly doesn’t matter so much, because meta will figure that out. And if you’re writing for clients, you may want to think about gender, but again, doesn’t matter so much, because Meta will figure it out. They’ll know which ads are more attractive to men versus women. You know, male versus female, that whole thing. So all that targeting is probably going to go away at some point, but for now, it exists. You can use it. It’s not totally necessary. 

Rob Marsh: Interesting. What else should I be asking that I just don’t even have the background, you know, talking about, how do service providers step into this role and become advertisers? 

Tara Zirker: Yeah, well, I think that, you know, there is, there seems to be the type of person, a type of person that does really, really well with ads. And it’s not surprising to me that so many fantastic, what we would call media buyers or agency owners who go into ADS. They come from a copy background. I can’t tell you how many of my colleagues, you know, they just wanted to add on a skill set, or they saw an opportunity, or they just really were attracted to advertising. They’re like, I have this great skill set and copy, and I think I could apply it really well to this, and they usually do great. So there’s a real natural fit. And I think that, like when I think through our members inside of our successful ads accelerator, some of the best ones, honestly, are have copywriting backgrounds. They just get it. They kind of understand what needs to happen at that copy level to create a conversion. 

On the back end. They understand sales psychology. They understand the flow. And so there’s a real, natural fit. So whether you wanted to do it for yourself, which I think is great, to keep that expense small in house, learn the skill set. It’s a skill set that will follow you the rest of your life, from business to business, whatever you do. It’s an amazing skill set. Or maybe you do want to get into writing copy. For ads clients. I mean, that’s a very lucrative niche, niche, or maybe you want to actually build the skill set and run ads yourself or experiment with it. I think there’s lots of approaches, but I do think that copywriters have a real natural fit.

The things that I would be aware of that are shifting trends and stuff is like, how do you bring AI into that? 

Rob Marsh: That was gonna be my next question is, how are you using AI? It for, I mean, obviously meta has got it running in the background, helping to find the right prospects and all of that. How are you using AI in the foreground, you know, in the planning, the strategizing and the writing of the ads? 

Tara Zirker: Yes. I mean, we’re using it heavily, and we still depend on our copywriters. I will say, you know, my, my big opinion is, and I think for all professions that are being touched by AI and it is massively disrupting, right? Is like, I don’t think any of these professions are going away, but they are definitely shedding their skin and what I what I’m seeing is the AI can replace the average almost across the board, and it will enhance the exceptional. And so I think that you that, no matter, you know, if you all marketers are being, you know, very, very like, impacted by AI. And I think that’s where we just have to take our skill set to exceptional. You know, you can’t be good. You have to be great. If you’re great, you need to be excellent. And that is, I think, where the opportunity lies. 

In preparing for this interview, I asked AI its opinion on like, specifically for like, ad copywriters. And I was just, you know, we went through a whole conversation that was really good. But here, and I said, be brutally honest. And it said, Okay, here’s the brutally honest future state snapshot for AI and copywriting, ads and copywriting, excuse me, and I thought this was so good. It says number one, AI is going to write more first drafts. I think that’s across the board, probably already seeing that. Yeah, 100% smart copywriters will edit for tone, angle and conversion. Number two, and this, for me, is where all, all marketing is going. Um, anything that’s impacted by AI, this is 100% where I see my clients wanting, if I’m thinking of like, ad clients, for example, this is where they’re at, and this is where we’ve been moving for a long time. So you know, kind of works out well, but clients want outcomes and not assets. So copywriters will be hired to optimize funnels or drive ROAs, not just write a sales page or write ad copy. And I think right there is all of the value in what’s going to happen and be disrupted over the next five years, like even, you know, even my clients that are heavily using AI themselves.

They want that human, not necessarily analysis, because AI can do the analysis, but they want the like, what are your insights? What are you seeing in other clients? Like that is where all the value is. Number three, it said multi disciplinary thinkers will rise. The copywriter who understands ads plus Email Plus audience journey will be 10x more valuable. When I saw that, I was like, Oh, my goodness, yes, yes, yes. Like, from an agency perspective,

that’s it. If you can understand the entire customer journey and how copy, not as an asset, but as an outcome, is going to impact every place. And if you can look at an analysis, or conduct an analysis with AI and say, This is where you know, this is this is where the market is really interested in our message, this is where we’re losing. This is where we’re losing that we’re losing engagement, right? Like that, right? There is huge. And I think that is the value, at least from my agency’s perspective, my training perspective,

that is where the value is at.

Rob Marsh: I couldn’t agree more. I actually teach a college course on customer journeys and helping you know students see how journeys come together and the various platforms that you know and how they all fit together. And the more I teach that course, the more it strikes me that that is a superpower for marketers, if you can understand even lead scoring and attribution and how it all fits together. It makes a massive, massive difference. 

Tara Zirker: I agree. I think if you skill up or re skill in just any one of those, like what you just said, you know, analytics or attribution or understanding customer journey. I mean, that is where 100% I think that’s where all of the future lies, and not just for copywriters, but everybody in marketing.

I saw a great study by Procter and Gamble, and they did this study kind of establishing what a baseline output is for the average person, like in just like the average worker, yeah, and so and marketing is, for sure, the most. I think it was marketing and sales is going to be the first wave of massive disruption all other industries will follow with AI, except probably some offline, you know, specific, like manual labor industries. But it was very interesting. It showed kind of the baseline is what the baseline always has been. It’s just the average output. And then they showed an entire team and their average output. And here’s what’s crazy. Rob, a person, one person, AI, enhanced employee outperforms an entire team. Oh, wow. So we got to wrap our minds around that. That is, if we want to understand, how do we provide value in this next wave of innovation, which is AI that right there is what we’ve got to wrap our minds around. And how do we become AI enhanced, and what are the skills that companies will be wanting and hiring for? I think you described it so beautifully. It’s that, it’s that attribution. It’s that, you know, being able to, like, score a lead. It’s being able to look at a funnel and say, this is where we’re dropping off. Here’s our tools, and copy is definitely one of the biggest tools to fix it. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I agree. We’re running out of time, but I definitely want to ask a question about, you know, formulas or hooks, or if you had to set up a new account, and it absolutely had to succeed, you know, if, if it doesn’t work, Tara is banished from Facebook ads or whatever, is there a hook or a formula that you would lead off with that you would try first, because, you know, it tends to perform pretty well, or it’s a good starting point to start to build off of?

Tara Zirker: Yeah, anything that is around problem awareness is where I would go. So, and I know I’m like, rusty on all my formulas, but like, problem or pain, the interrupts. So maybe it’s not this, but it’s this, right? And then, like, the invitation, the CTA, that’s where, if I’m like, Oh, if I’m really betting on success and I really need this to to do, well, that’s where I would go. So

you know, if I’m thinking about my customer, for example, sometimes they’re not even aware that traffic might be their issue.

They just know they’re not getting enough sales. But it’s like, is it the offer, or is it the traffic? And so anything that I can do to bring awareness to that problem, like maybe their conversion rate is fine, or obviously, everybody always wants their conversion rate to improve. But the bigger problem is they’re not getting enough eyeballs, and they don’t even understand, like, if one to 3% of your audience converts, well, then I need more audience. And so anything I can do to bring awareness to that issue is really, really helpful. So that’s kind of a little case study there. How I would think through that. 

Rob Marsh: That makes a lot of sense. Again, thinking about copywriters and content writers who may be working with, you know, three to six clients a month, you really don’t need to close that many clients. You know, if you can, if you’re pretty good, you know, you’re closing, say, one out of three or one out of two calls. You don’t need that many leads. And that’s where it seems to me, what you’re talking about, even the $10 a day type ads that drives, you know, if, again, if you were to get 20 leads into your business a month, and you close a third of them, your your business is just fine, and you’re probably making 10k or more a month.

Tara Zirker:  100% I think for any business owner it’s valuable to understand that, but what you just shared is gold, because so many people don’t realize what it takes to actually create a conversion. If it only takes three or four calls, well, then I know, and I only need two or three clients, those numbers just got a lot easier. Yeah, exactly. 

Rob Marsh: Okay. This has been eye opening for me in a lot of ways. I’ve followed you on your list for a long time. I know you do. You know regular trainings, and you’ve got this accelerator. Tell us a little bit about the accelerator, and of course, I’m going to link to it, thecopywriterclub.com/tara, if anybody wants to check it out. But tell us just a little bit about what you guys do in the accelerator? 

Tara Zirker: Yeah, absolutely. So we take clients and we show them how to run ads within a couple of hours, we’re gonna have your ad set up. So big nutshell version is, if you want to run ads, we have six fast and easy levels. They’re 20 to 40 minutes a piece. The unique thing is, everything we do includes one on one coaching, so every time you finish one of those levels, we’re gonna have one of our coaches hop on a call with you and actually audit your work, make sure that everything is set up for your success before you ever spend $1 so your tech is in place, your design is great, you know, like your offer is really top notch, so it is a full like one on one, done with you. Program really affordable, really well priced. And you know this, I would say, is for someone who’s spending less than $5,000 you’re not quite ready to outsource. It will help you do that when you’re ready, but you just want to get these ads set up and working quickly.

Rob Marsh: Would this also work for somebody who wants to create ads for clients? Would this give a baseline for that person as well.

Tara Zirker: 100% we don’t have a specific agency track, but I would say about 20% of our membership is agency owners who’ve gone through a program. Some of them have even hired team members and put them right through the program. And so you’re going to learn the nuts and bolts, what you need to do, set up a client account, and then you’ll have ongoing support. We have so many agency owners who just you’ll have after the program. We have, like, a membership portion on the back end. So every month you get a call, so you’re not in a group call. We do have those. You’re getting an actual call to make sure, like, you know what? Let’s try tweaking this. Or here’s something we’re seeing work on accounts. You could try this on your client account or so. It’s really cool. Very hands on. 

Rob Marsh: And Tara, if somebody’s not quite ready for that, they just want to be on your list. Can they also get on your list there at that same link, or do we need to give them a different link? 

Tara Zirker: You know, if you go to youradkit.com that will get you the anatomy of a perfect ad, and it just kind of walks through what an ad needs to be really successful. And that will get you on our email list.

Rob Marsh: Perfect. I’ll link to both of those in the show notes. I really appreciate you taking the time to walk me through all of this, especially from the service provider standpoint. You know, we see Facebook ads for products so often, and it’s nice to take a look at it from this other direction, where it may benefit so many more of us than currently use Facebook ads, and I used Instagram ads WhatsApp, but so thank you for all of that. I really appreciate it. 

Tara Zirker: Thanks for having me. Great to be with you. 

Rob Marsh:  Thanks to Tara for the masterclass on Facebook ads and the analytics that actually matter, what to watch and look out for. If you found Tara’s insights valuable, make sure you get on her list… I shared a URL during our interview that will take you to The Successful Ads Accelerator: If you want to add Facebook ads to your skill set, and a lot of copywriters would benefit from knowing how to use ads on Facebook and Instagram… you can find out more about Tara’s program at thecopywriterclub.com/tara  You could join Tara’s program and be running an ad for your service in less than two hours. Be sure to check that out at thecopywriterclub.com/tara

I’ve got to admit, I find myself wanting to use Facebook ads but worry that the algorythm changes faster than I can keep up and I’m a bit worried about messing up my ads account.

We’ve used ads in the past and had varying success with them. We’ve filled our programs using ads, but also had the opposite experience and spent more than we could justify, so this kind of discussion is incredibly helpful to me and I hope helpful to you too.

If you’re interested in diving into this a bit deeper, we’ve got a training in The Copywriter Underground called “Engineering Successful Facebook Launches” that will walk you through using Facebook and Instagram ads to launch a product or service. If you’re a member, it’s in the new dashboard. And if you’re not a member, you can fix that now at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

Stuff to check out:

Petter on LinkedIn
PurposeWrite (sign up for a free trial)
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: It’s been three years since ChatGPT launched and changed the world. So what does A.I. mean for copywriting today? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

When OpenA.I. released the first version of ChatGPT to the public, what had been a quiet conversation about artificial intelligence happening mostly behind the scenes suddenly burst into our collective consciousness. Writers and creators in particular were suddenly aware that at least at some level, these large language models could do some of the work we were being hired to do.

Many of us dove into these tools to see what they could do. We launched a short-lived podcast that talked about how A.I. was impacting so many different ways of working, certainly within marketing, but also in many other industries. You can find the 20+ episodes of that podcast on The Copywriter Club website.

Since that time, the dust has settled a bit. The A.I. tools have gotten a bit better. Image creation tools are significantly better. Writing tools have also improved, but it remains true today that the best copywriters seem to be able to use them to get the best outputs… if you want good copy, copy that captures attention and converts readers into buyers, it helps a lot to have a copywriter guide the inputs and rework the outputs you get from the A.I. model of your choice.

Another thing we’ve seen in over the past couple of years is that while tools like ChatGPT and Claude get most of the headlines, lots of other tools have added components of artificial intelligence to improve their products, speed up useage, and make applications more sticky. At the same time we’ve seen the launch of job-specific A.I. tools that do one thing… like writing emails, or writing articles at speeds humans simply can’t match.

So when it comes to A.I., where are we headed next? What tools will we be using to get better results? And how helpful is it to have a user or prompt engineer or copywriter who really knows what they’re doing versus just playing around to see what they can get a model to do?

I asked Petter Magnusson, the developer of PurposeWrite to talk a bit about A.I., the tool he’s built, and also the broader environment of artificial intelligence and where he sees us going from here. And because whatever happens with A.I. will have a big impact on copywriters, this is a topic I may come back to in the coming weeks. This whole industry is fascinating. The speed of change is a bit scary. 

During our conversation, I had a realization. In the past copywriters charged for the things we delivered… the words. Officially we sold blog posts or sales pages or emails or some other copy, but it was the words that clients expected to get. But now that ChatGPT can produce the words pretty much for free, we need to move up the value chain and sell the process, the strategy, the analysis, and the ideas. And bringing that to the A.I. model you use will make the outputs there so much better. Any way… I think this is a discussion you’ll enjoy.

Before we get to my interview with Petter, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. Unless you are hitting the 30 second skip button when you get to this point of the show, you are no doubt familiar with The Copywriter Underground. I talk about it every week. The Underground includes more than 70 different workshops—and accompanying playbooks to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. The Playbooks make it easy to find quick solutions to the challenges you face in your business everything from finding clients, conducting sales calls, using A.I., building authority on LinkedIn or YouTube or Pinterest, and dozens of other workshops. You also get dozens of templates including a legal agreement you can use with your clients, monthly coaching, regular copy and funnel critiques, and more. You can learn more by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

And now, my interview with Petter Magnusson…

Petter, welcome to the podcast. I am really interested in your journey. How did you go from, i think, photographer, content creator, and now you founded an AI company all about writing How did you get here?

Petter Magnusson: First of all, thanks for having me. I’ve been like, to be honest, I have discovered your pod fairly recently, but I have listened in and I really like what you do. So I’m going to be stuck in here for a long time listening.

Rob Marsh: Thank you.

Petter Magnusson: There’s a bunch of episodes. So yeah, it’s so much, so many I want to listen to. So I’m surely going to do that. Yeah, so I have a bit of a weird mixed history. So I started as a, I don’t know if you youll probably You will edit this, you I guess.

Rob Marsh: Of course, well if yeah we can always cut it down or or sometimes we just like to hear the story.

Petter Magnusson: My background is a bit long story, I started out as ah as a programmer, actually, a long time ago. And then I started studying physics and I studied physics engineering. Then I went to Japan for for my work in advanced laser physics kind of thing. And then I stumbled into sales for that laser company doing sales. And that led me into marketing where I became marketing manager for an IT company in Sweden. And we did extremely well. We happened to sell modems at the time that internet exploded. My boss still thinks that I had magic hands or something because he became super rich from that. And and he still thinks I was had a part of it.

So anyway, so I did that. And then I started getting really interested in photography. And… I was having reached some of my life goals, to be honest, at the early 30s. I thought, ah, I want to change direction. So then I just bailed out. I applied for art school in Norway and I got in i as I took a bachelor in in art ah photography. And then I went to to do master’s degree also in Sweden in yeah photo and film. So then I was like a ah photo artist actually exhibiting in galleries and stuff like that. Classic art, you know, career. Until I got a little bit angry with that world in a way, because it’s not as it’s not as free as you may think. You know, I used to think that art is free. But in the art world, to survive, you have to be fairly political. You have to know certain people, you have to network, and you need to make pieces about the right topics if you want to get the scholarships and the exhibitions. And, you know, that might be all fine, but then I saw how people are were adapting to that, and that like goes against everything that art is for me. So that kind of got me, yeah.

Rob Marsh: Yeah.

Petter Magnusson: And then I thought, well, I might as well go commercial. so so So I did that. as so I went into commercial photography and and filmmaking. And now I have a small production company in Stockholm, and we’re doing corporate stuff mostly. So a lot of B2B topics. And that’s when I started to see what what kind of led into PurposeWrite. I have a lot of I see exactly the same. I saw the same happening in visual content as in copywriting, I think.

People come to me and they were like, hey, video is hyped. We want to make a film or or something. And I’m like, OK, great. Why do you want to make a film? And they’re like, it’s hip or something. And I’m like, OK, who’s going to see this film?

I don’t know. Everyone. and i’m like okay you know So I had to start you know the journey with them to like, okay, let’s find out if if you actually should make a film and who should watch it. What is your target audience and you know pain points and and interests and stuff like that. So that was kind of a struggle sometimes to make people understand that, yeah, of course I can just make a film for you, but that will make not make you happy or or the viewers or anyone. so And then we started… producing some text content too, and and especially for ourselves. And I think the trigger point came because I was trying to hire a guy that was not very good at writing, to be honest. Oh, maybe you should edit this out in case he listens to this.

But anyway, ah yeah, I came across that that was going to do some some writing for us. And then I saw the same pattern in text. And I think that’s what triggered me. like Because he would produce content pieces that had no direction, no purpose, no, you know, not thinking about who’s going to read this and why are writing it? And and why are they going to read this? Everything like that. And that got me started that, okay, this is this is exactly the same problem. But and And then at that at that time, AI came along, you know, ChatGPT and everything.

So I started playing with that and put that tool ah to work by kind of turning the process around. Because when you normally when you use ChatGPT, you write a prompt um and that will do something for you. And I could see the same problem there. Like, you know, generic content just exploding on LinkedIn and platforms like that. um I’m mainly talking content now because that’s the the area that I’m familiar with.

But people are are mindlessly prompting stuff and they get something that looks pretty good. I mean, AI writes pretty good. Layout is nice with nice headlines and stuff. So yeah, on the surface, all is always fine, but it’s really horrible. It’s got no no value, you know.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, it lacks so much, just from an emotional connection standpoint.

Petter Magnusson: Yeah, exactly that. And there’s so many problems with it, you know like the emotional standpoint, the story, the style, and again, having a purpose with it, like who are you writing for, everything like that.

And the thing is, i discovered that um you can actually i have AI make pretty good text. But again, hip yeah and this leads me back. Now I’m i’m like floating around in my my thinking bit.

But lead this leads me back to the visual area because I saw the same exactly thing happening there because I’m coming from visual side of things. And I saw the same thing happening there first before I came to the tech side, like imaging, you know, AI imaging.

First you saw it and you thought, wow, this is so cool. It looks amazing. and and and then I’m trying to use it for professional purposes. And then I see, oh, it’s not so easy to direct this thing. i can make something cool. But when I do have a brief and I do have a brand and then an image and a style and a mood board, and it’s extremely hard to make it do what i want because I have a vision for what I want. Yeah, a vision for the result. And that’s when it’s like tricky and I started realizing that, huh, all right, yeah, you need to actually feed this pretty much information to get what you want out of it.

It is possible, though. you know If you give give enough information, you you can get pretty good results. And that’s what I discovered with text, too, that if you have a copywriter mindset, So, you know, sort i mean, first of all, you need to know what kind of information you should put in your prompt. If you ask it to just like generate a LinkedIn article about, like in my case, then selecting a corporate photographer, which could be a topic on our blog, you know, like one of those value bringing articles that are not selling us as a company, but like seemingly neutral guide kind of thing. then that will be totally generic, not helping the customer and not helping us in any way. But yeah, if you start putting in like the good stuff, like who are we writing for, what is actually important to think about, but then you are in a situation where you’re almost writing it yourself. So then the question is, what’s the what’s the purpose here? Yeah, gosh, I’m yeah gosh

Rob Marsh: So how did you go from how did you go from there to wanting to build your own tool ah that’s going to do this? Because, i mean, it’s one thing for a copywriter say, okay, I’m going to you know do the back and forth with Claude or ChatGPT, and I’m going to tweak it or maybe even set up a custom GPT at this point in order to feed it some some ah preliminary data so that it’s giving me you know a particular voice or whatever. But Going from from that to, well, i’m going to actually build a different tool that’s going to do all of this stuff in a different way. That’s a whole other jump.

Petter Magnusson: Exactly, yeah. And I started out exactly like what you say now. I started you know building larger prompts, longer prompts, more complicated, and then into custom GPTs. But then I started running into problems because when when the prompts got longer, like when I started getting to the really good ones, you know when I actually specify the tone and the target audience in detail and and everything like that, I started having problems with the AI cannot, can then and not any longer keep track of what it’s supposed to do. It’s losing stuff when the prompt gets too long.

It’s hard to, it doesn’t know where to focus kind of. come And that’s when I started thinking, wow, I would actually need, and then I know that a lot of people make then than several custom GPTs, like one for this, one to find the target audience and one to do this and that.

And then I thought, huh, I started doing the same. And then I thought, what if I would have a tool that can tie these things together so I can actually do these things together? Step by step. And that is kind of countering the limitations of the of the prompting. so And then I came up with the idea of making it like a traditional, since I’m coming from a programming in background, I started thinking,

A traditional program would actually be pretty good here. you know Step by step, first do this, then ask the user about this information, then go to the LLM and ask that to provide something back. So that’s how it started. So I started making a simple scripting language that can call ChatGPT and Claude. And that is actually all that PurposeWrite is in in a way. It’s a scripting language. And it’s um yeah it’s actually even open. So users can also make their own custom scripts if they want. So it’s kind of custom GPT on steroids, I say. um And the thing is, what happens there is that then you can kind of decide. Now getting, I don’t know how nerdy you want to get here.

Rob Marsh: Well, I’m curious, you know, obviously there are um a hundred writing tools out there now for, you know, mean, so even stepping beyond ChatGPT, which we’ll write, or Claude, which we’ll write, or LeChat, or HuggingFace, or Grok, or, you know, they’ll all do sort of the same thing.

Petter Magnusson: Yes.

Rob Marsh: But your tool, you’ve dialed it in for some, well, I mean, for It’s purposes and it’s even called purpose, right? So I’m not trying to be clever by saying that, but but um what have you done in your tool to make sure that what’s coming out of it is actually meeting the needs of the user?

Petter Magnusson: Right. Yeah. so and And that’s when we get a little bit nerdy now, because what what I do is to to not confuse the AI, is that I call the AI, the aid LLM, ChatGPT or Claude in this case, actually, which is what I’m calling. I call them in in small chunks. And I can decide, yeah okay I’m going to do this techie part. I don’t know if you you can edit this out if you don’t want it. But anyway, there’s something called context window. So every time you write a new prompt, you will also send along everything, the and the whole old conversation.

And sometimes it even warns you, like, hey should you really continue this conversation? Because it’s starting to get very expensive. Because you even if you write short prompts, it’s going to send ah away all the conversation with it. And that can sometimes confuse it. So in this scripting language, you can choose if you want to send along the context or not. So you can make little simple questions. So that ah so this is not really about how writing writing style or anything, but it’s just making it easier for the AI to solve a certain task. So I could like i could scrape a web page, which is why i do it in and one of these guides, or mini apps inside of PurposeWrite, we call guides.

And one is called ArticleWriter. And then you give it a yeah URL. It will scrape that page. And then you can say, please find suitable target audiences. Who do you think I’m trying to talk to on this website? And then it can give you suggestions. And then I will only do that. So that is a small, simple task. And then I can be pretty explicit about that task and give it a pretty pretty advanced prompt for that task because it’s only one task.

If I would mix that into a longer prompt that would do 10 things, it would be too much information. So that is one way that you can like kind of give it a one simple task, do this, and then will perform much better. And the other thing is that so I’m doing that in steps. So first, um if you look at ArticleWriter, you can, of course, yourself say, if you know your target audience, you just write it in in there. Or you can say, please help me analyze what what do you think is the target audience.

And then it will look at the target audience. and Compare that to the, I mean, i’m I’m talking mostly LinkedIn content here. So you are probably trying to sell a service or a product.

Rob Marsh: Well, I mean, copywriters do everything, right? So it can be everything from you know content for LinkedIn, whether that’s for our own businesses or whether we’re helping a client write that kind of an article. But obviously LinkedIn will have a character limit ah where maybe a blog post might be able to go longer or a sales page, which could go on for say 18 or 19 pages, right? Where you know it could it can get very extensive depending on what the product is.

So obviously there’s lots of different contexts as to the kind of copy that we’re writing or to the audience that we’re writing to. um And your tool, as I understand it, is is maybe better for some of those shorter length ones, but does would it also help write a sales page it it you know considerable length?

Petter Magnusson: Yeah, it it can do longer ah stuff, ah absolutely. um The thing is, I have chosen to focus on one area, and this is purely actually a marketing decision because Being a scripting language, I could actually make those scripts do anything. you know like I could probably make a script that helps write a chapter in a book or something. Maybe not the whole book, but at least. you know so but um I have decided that my target audience is people trying to build a personal brand or a company brand on LinkedIn with content.

So just to you know narrow it down, make it easier to place this product But there’s nothing stopping it to do other things. And that’s why I talk about content so much. And this is because this is the target we have now.

Rob Marsh: Yeah that is and and So this is this is interesting. Obviously, a lot of a lot of copywriters are on LinkedIn, are using the tool to you know create interest ah in their services and their thinking. One of the criticisms I hear about ah LinkedIn is that it is full content. AI generated content and that it’s not reflective of true thought leadership. You know, people aren’t actually writing what they’re putting up under their own names. i I’m sure that this is happening with copywriters too, although that boggles my mind that that writers don’t actually write, but you know, um maybe it’s happening. I hope that most of this content that I see, you know, on LinkedIn is actually real, but how does your tool help um pull out actual thought leadership, actual real writing and not not become the writer itself.

Petter Magnusson: Yeah, that is a fine line, actually. And I’m trying to avoid because I could, of course, make a guide that says, so press button, get content.

Rob Marsh: Exactly. Especially if you can if you can just read another website or another post whatever, rewrite it in this voice. AI can do that all day long.

Petter Magnusson: Yeah, exactly. So I mean, I could do that, but I hate that stuff myself. So I’m um trying to to to not do that. And these guides that I do, and I think that that is actually potentially even a weakness of the tool. I’ve heard from some people that, you know,

What I’m doing is I’m asking you to provide for a lot of information to write something. you know Okay, you can I can look at the webpage to find the target audience and the pain points and stuff and background information about the product or services or something, but you still have to choose. you know what pain points you want to address here out of suggestions that you can add yourself. And then it will also, after that, it will come back with areas that it thinks you should provide additional information. So it’s it will not base the whole piece on just that background information. It will say, okay, I found these 10 areas that um you could potentially say something about And then you can write that. in Of course, you can be lazy and say, na not going to do that.

But if you take your time and do that, the piece is going to be so much better. And that, as I said, that is in the same with style and voice and stuff like that. You can specify so much. And that is also, like i was saying, part of the weakness, perhaps, because I’m looking at spying out how people are using the tool. And I see that quite a lot of people are actually bailing out in the process. So that’s something I need to to address, I think. and But I’m not sure if I should go all the way there either to you know meet those requirements, because I think a lot of those people come with the expectation that, oh, it’s a content tool.

It’s one of those, we scraped a thousand LinkedIn posts, and now you just put in your company name and press this button, and you have copies of that content. And if you expect that, and then you you get a million questions about ah tone of voice and and target audience and stuff like that, it’s not what you expect. But that is also what makes it different in the end. So I think it’s a matter of finding our target audience. and know who is Who is this for? and and Yeah. Yeah.

Rob Marsh: I think one of the things that I’ve struggled with with AI is you know that lack of humanness. And the fact that when people find out something is AI, you know if we were having a chat, you and I were having a chat, and i found out that you were a bot AI, suddenly, the value of what we’re talking about is reduced immensely.

In fact, I might even feel cheated that I got the Petterbot instead of the the actual thing. right and so I think one of the challenges that creators like you who are who are coming up with these tools is how do we preserve humanness if we’re using tools that are very unhuman or inhuman ah in in the creation.

And you know the there’s a whole spectrum of criticisms that happen here, you know where, hey, if i can if I can take an artistic style and an AI can create an image in that style and I no longer need the artists to do that anymore, What’s the value of style anymore? right or and And the same thing applies obviously with writing with copy.

And so these are some really big questions around AI that I know people are so are asking them. Clearly they’re being asked, ah but I don’t know that there’s a lot of discussion or a lot of people that are really thinking through like, okay, this is actually something important we ought to be preserving.

Petter Magnusson: it it is yeah It is super important. And and yeah, up ah it it brings ah another thought to to my mind there that I think there will always be a reaction to things like this. you know People are starting to be really, really good at spotting the AI-generated content. And and you’re just like you scroll past it because as soon as you feel you that this is AI.

So that is problem. But I think there will always be a reaction. I’m seeing already now a reaction to this. you know I am connected. I’m hanging around talking a lot about LinkedIn, but that’s my hangout. you know I’m spending a lot of time on LinkedIn. And I’m connected with a bunch of of professional copywriters of of different types. And I can see the reaction happening. A lot of people are are starting to write in a consciously anti-AI way. which actually is a bit dirty, sloppy, or even, or something like that, you know, because AI is writing so good in a way, you know?

Rob Marsh: Formally is, yeah.

Petter Magnusson: Yeah, yeah, it’s it’s nice sentence lengths and and no… grammar problems and and spell errors spelling errors, you know all of that. And that’s where where I see a lot of my copywriter friends are are going ballistic with trying to prove that they’re human. So that’s ah that’s an interesting trend that I kind of like that.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, from somebody who who is a bit of a stickler for for grammar, it’s really painful to see it. But on the flip side, again, we as humans value humanness. And and ah now i’ am I’m not anti-AI at all. I use AI ah every day in my business. And I think it’s an immensely helpful tool. But these are some of the things that i I’ve been thinking about too is, okay, When I write an email to my list and and I’ve yet to use AI to write an email, one exception when I was saying, hey, look what yeah what AI can do in an email couple of years ago.

But should I be putting a tag at the bottom? you know It’s like, hey, this is written only by me. I did not use AI, right? So that people see that. Or, you know, like there maybe there’s an opportunity yeah at some point for somebody develop, you know, a validator where it’s like, hey, yeah, this 100% human written or, you know, this is AI assisted. Or I know i know there are ah tools, you know, GPT zero and those kinds of things that try to establish that, but they’re they’re not great. They’re not great yet.

Petter Magnusson: No, no it’s it’s super easy to trick them. And here i I do feel a little bit dubious about myself because I have i have a guide in PurposeWrite that is called Rewrite.

And that is pretty good at mimicking a lot of these things. So it can trick these AI detection tools. And umm I’m sometimes wondering, like, should I really do this?

Rob Marsh: No, these are good questions. And I mean, at some level, we know this stuff is going on and it’s going to happen. And we’ve we’ve got to embrace AI you know in order to do some things. But also, it would be helpful if, yeah I hate to think that the government needs to do this, but you know if the industry could self-regulate a little bit and just say, hey, um this is where the line really is. And you should really shouldn’t be you know getting too close to this line you know for some of this stuff. But yeah, again, who knows? that It moves so fast, right?

Petter Magnusson: Yeah, it does. And and I think one another conclusion that could be reached is that it doesn’t really matter. you know as As long as the writing is good and I can get some value from it, does it matter if AI helped do it?

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that’s that’s a great question too. And and how far you know does does that go? Obviously, like I said, I use AI in my writing for helping with headlines, for identifying benefits, and it speeds up the process for identifying needs and problems. there There’s so many good things that it can do. And so ah you know where you’re you’ve created this tool too that also writes really well or can help. If I’m writing an article or whatever and I get stuck, I’m not sure where to go or if I need ideas. Like it’s super helpful at at prompting those kinds of things. And so the right mix of machine and brain, human brain can actually elevate where we are if if it’s done right.

Petter Magnusson: Exactly. Yeah, I think so. and And I have actually become less afraid of the creatives losing their job. I mean, yes, creatives are losing jobs at at this moment. And especially, you know, I’m in the photo video business. A lot of photographers are are probably going out of business because of this. But that has happened before. In that business, we’re more used to it than on the text side, actually. For text, this is very new, but it’s happened on the photo side. I can give you an example. When digital cameras came,

You know, the small local newspapers, if they would, like, go to a farmer that had a funny carrot, they would bring a photographer specifically to take a picture of the carrot. And then digital cameras came, and then that photographer was out of the job because the the writing journalist could take that picture of the carrot. So we have seen this before. And, yeah, those low… Yeah, yeah. excuse the word, but low level work that goes and we’ve seen it happen. And that’s maybe what’s happening here too, that yeah, some of the low level work is gone and that we just have to live with that.

Rob Marsh: And It happened with stock photography as well. I mean, i you know I was in the ad agency world when stock photos started coming online. And I remember specifically photographers we worked with that were you know worried about, you know they were they were losing a lot of the typical, we’ll take a photo of this typewriter. Or you know if it if it wasn’t original, if it wasn’t specific to an assignment, suddenly there were 1,000 images out there that we could choose from. And so you’re right. In some ways, there is a stock copy thing that is going on. It’s a little bit different from stock because it’s not always going to be the same. But ah you know AI creates that stock. And so the challenge becomes, how do we as humans or humans using a tool like Purpose Right ah create the stuff that’s original, new, different, and unique, and you know shows off that creativity, that humanness in some way that stock copy no longer does.

Petter Magnusson: Exactly. And that’s where I’m not so afraid. I mean, if you’re operating on ah on a slightly higher level that you’re a bit more strategic and creative, I think you’re still needed. Because if if we go back to images again, it’s really easy to prompt a cool image. But what does that image say? What does it do? Same with the text. um You need to have a vision.

First of all, for where you are going, even if you’re using AI, you need to know which direction you should prompt the AI. and And you need to be able to judge the result also. Something comes out. Is this good? Is this on brand? is it you know And so we we are needed, i think, still. So I’m not that worried. Not yet, at least.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I think what you’re saying is the opportunity is you know an analysis and strategy and figuring out direction. ah And as far as like the the actual operational tactics, we might need to figure that stuff out. But the exact wording or whatever, you know there may be a place for AI to step in and do, like you said, that ah lower level thinking that ah that can be easily replaced.

Petter Magnusson: Yeah. Yeah. and And again, referring back to to the visual side of things, we have seen a shift also there that users want to do stuff themselves. And and I think, again, that’s something that we just have to adapt to um So what we’re doing, it you know we would normally go and film everything for the customers. Now we’re we’re having a new service where we can actually work with the customer to ah think about what is what what should be filmed, what should be said. Then they can actually film it with their iPhone and and send the files for us to editing. So our role becomes different. And the most important part there is the strategic part. Like what should we, why should we film? What should be said? What…

And then who who holds that camera on? And if that camera is a professional camera, it’s not that important, to be honest. And I think it’s a bit the same with text. A lot of simple text, I think the customers can write themselves now. We just have to realize that we’re not going to do that. So they’re going to come to us for the more strategic and and creative stuff. And that’s where we can shine. And yeah and and also on a purely strategic level, help them point you know the stuff that they make themselves, we could probably help them with that.

Take good a good hourly rate, two because that’s what we do. We um we have this um so like social media package. And then we spend quite a lot of time thinking, OK, you want to build your personal brand. Who are you as a copywriter then in this case? you know Who are you on LinkedIn? why Why are you different from the other copywriters? What persona are you going have? When you are on camera, are you going to wear a T-shirt to suit or what is you know ah to be on brand? And that, I think, is super valuable. And we need to realize that for for text too, that that is a job that needs to be done and that we can charge pretty high for um to analyze things and have a strategy.

Rob Marsh: The irony here is from a copywriting standpoint, and this probably is true from a visual standpoint as well, is for the last 100 years or so, we’ve been selling the outcome and giving away the strategy for free in order to get the outcome. So if I sold a content strategy or a blog post or a sales page, that’s what I’m selling. But all of the thinking, the strategy that goes into it ah was happening ah you know kind of kind of for free you know on the back end. And what AI is forcing us to do saying, hey, the words are free, but the strategy, the figuring it out, the approach, the voice, and and putting your your mind power into that, that’s where the real value ah was all along and charging for that. And that’s definitely a shift in the way that we see see the creative business.

Petter Magnusson: Yeah. Wow. that That’s… ah Exactly my thought, but you twisted it in and and a great way. And I agree totally with that. and And now I don’t want to be here promoting Purpose Right all along. But I have been thinking about exactly this problem. So I have made in Purpose Right, I have something called profit sharing. And that is because I’ve been thinking exactly in these lines that how do we handle the situation where the customers want to write some stuff themselves? They know I have ChatGPT, I can write. And and as a copywriter, they’re just going to call you when there’s something really important to to write. you know

And the rest they’re going to make with ChatGPT and it becomes horrible. So… And that’s what I’m thinking that why don’t we, as copywriters, sell analysis? Like, again, who are you? Tonal voice brand, like a different brand for for different services, maybe even because we have a different target audience for different parts of what we’re trying to to communicate. Why don’t we sell that? And in in the case of PurposeRite, make custom guides for the customer. 

So instead of the customer going off to ChatGPT and prompting really badly, we can say, I’ve done the analysis for you. And here are a few custom guides that you can use. you know I know you’re writing you’re writing ah this simple newsletter every Friday. You can actually do that. And I made a custom guide for you for that, which is on brand and and everything is prepared for you. And the cool thing then is that you will, as a copywriter, you get a kickback. So when you make a guide and share with someone and they use it, you get a kickback from that.

So that’s kind of a way of… Yeah, I’m also thinking that staying on top of mind with the customer. So I have on purpose made a lot of the the guide have a lot of description lines. And I’m thinking that people can actually put a little tagline there, like, remember me, Rob, when you want to write the important stuff.

Rob Marsh: Interesting. Yeah, that makes sense. so So that that kind of opens up a broader question. How do you see copywriters using AI in general moving into the future? ah yeah Obviously, it’s going to be doing a lot of writing or writing assisting, but how else can it help us improve the product that we’re we’re providing for our clients?

Petter Magnusson: Yeah, I think that, but most of it we’re already doing. It’s just that it will be better at it. I think the one of the most important things is just analyzing text and massive text. That is so useful to just pour stuff in there and be able to talk to that massive data chunk. So that I think is a super important thing. Save a lot of money because that’s That’s not the fun part of the job either, is it?

Rob Marsh: Yeah, analysis, I mean, yeah well, I mean, it can be fun, you know, when you stumble across those things that it’s like, oh, wait, I, you know, I just discovered something new, but I don’t see that being that different from ai helping me uncover something new, ah you know, and saving 10 or 12 hours of going through, you know, spreadsheets worth of data or whatever, and having it say, hey, have you thought of this?

You know, the, I guess my question will always be, do I trust that the AI is uncovering the stuff that I would uncover, right? Like how do how do we make sure that that analysis bot is better or as good as Rob when he’s, you know, analyzing a spreadsheet? Now, I’m not necessarily saying I’m all that great at and analysis. And so it may ah it’s probably already better. But obviously, you know, in using a tool, you you have to trust the tool.

Petter Magnusson: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and I think There, of course, we are at the point where it is probably, as you say, probably better. as long As soon as you have a lot of data, at least. I mean, if you have a couple of pages, you’re probably better. But as soon as you start getting hundreds of pages or something like that, I don’t think it’s very unusual that a human can keep up with that. in any way. So I think that that’s an important one. And then I actually think it can help with creativity. And this might sound a bit weird, but I do think that it triggers a lot of thoughts. you know And I actually made a ah guide for that in Purpose. I called Idea Expander. And it’s not doing anything advanced at all. It’s just a very simple prompt, basically. You just give it a basic concept, and it will then twist it around and say, or you can think this way on this topic.

And then you can take one of those and branch out from there. And that helps a lot, I think, with just coming up with ideas. So you can, like, I put in simple things, like, you know, It’s important to think of the target audience when you write content. And then it twists that around and comes up with something entirely different. And so that’s how I um have done some of the best content pieces, actually, using that kind of, you know, to to trigger my creativity. Yeah. yeah

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that’s when I’m using AI, that’s basically one of the main purposes that I do too, is that I’m um asking the engine to you know ask me back questions or to help me think about it in different ways or unconventional ways. And ah you know that back and forth between me and and the AI seems to, at least to me, it feels like it’s helping me get to something slightly different or something newer than my own thinking.

Petter Magnusson: Yeah, I think so too. I think we we are ah it’s super interesting with AI, how it operates. I think it gives a clue about ourselves. um’m um I’m of the opinion that we are just AI and the algorithms are very similar. similar Because you know if I look at, ah going back to images, image image generation again, how that actually works inside of an AI. So you you take take a pure noise image, like total random pixels. And then you From there, the AI sees something vague, like, oh, it’s a little bit dark up there. And the prompt was dog. And then it’s going to to change those, like assuming that could be the head, kind of.

This is a very simplified way of describing it. But i I see how that is close to how at least my creativity works. you know It’s really, really hard to sit there with a blank page. But as soon as you write something, that could be the start. you know You see it with an empty page and you’re going to write, oh I’m going to write an essay. Or you just write sun and then, ah, sun, right. And then then you can start. It’s the same as this little blob in the noise in a way. So I think it’s basically the same how we operate. So it will be interesting to see how how quickly we get to AGI, you know, this real

Rob Marsh: Well, that was going to be my next question. As somebody who you know is is operating in the space, working with these models, do you see AGI as a realistic next step? And how quickly do you think we get there if it is realistic?

Petter Magnusson: yeah Yeah, the question of is about the definition also. There’s been some weird definitions floating around. like Some definitions have been financial even, like when when AI can make profits bigger than the certain numbers, it’s AGI, which is really weird in my opinion. But yeah, I’m not sure. i mean, We are already at a level where AI can do many tasks better than most of us. If you look at a lawyer or doctor even, you know AI cannot can do better than most of us on that.

But on the other hand, it’s also completely wrong most of the time. ah like There’s always some hallucination in there. And I’m wondering if you cannot… Yeah, that that seems like a big threshold. like It needs to somehow understand what is realistic and real. And that is not I don’t see that happening. It’s just getting better at what it does, but it’s still stuck in this hallucination world. So yeah, um I don’t know. i’m I’m not a machine learning expert but yeah i

Rob Marsh: Yeah. Yeah, neither am I. On the other hand, humans also glitch and hallucinate and, you know, break down. So maybe, maybe part of being an actual intelligence is sometimes we’re also actually dumb.

Petter Magnusson: Yeah, exactly. And very stubborn about being right when we’re not.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, yeah there there there could be something to that. Okay, so what’s next for you as you know owner of Purpose Right? like Where do you see this tool going and doing in the future?

Petter Magnusson: Hmm. Yeah, I think what what is happening now is that now the tool is working and I need to start making a lot more guides. And I’m thinking that I should actually cooperate with copywriters on that because I have limited capacity and I’m not the best copywriter, to be honest.

So I need to make… more guides that is doing more stuff, because right now, and to be honest, it’s a bit limited. The guides we have and they take a lot of time to make these guides. It’s a lot of work to, you know, it’s it’s really tricky to make them because, yeah, to get technical a bit. But as the prompts again get longer and so on, it’s hard to balance them.

Like if you have a lot of choices, then you can have situations where one choice is canceling the other. So, and right now I’m the only one that can do this. ah I need to find some people who can actually help me make make guides.

Rob Marsh: Sounds to me, you’re probably talking to the right audience. I have a feeling that you may get a few emails from listeners who are ah eager eager to find out more about that kind of an opportunity. But for copywriters who have resisted using AI for a variety of reasons, you know whether it’s not human enough or it doesn’t feel right or ah you know worries about plagiarism, that kind of stuff, ah it still feels useful to me to be experimenting with these tools. You don’t necessarily need to publish what you’re doing or use it for your clients, although yeah ultimately, you know you may choose to do that. 

Understanding how these engines work, the differences between the different kinds of applications, ah it it’s a little bit you know like refusing to use AI feels a little bit like refusing to pick up a smartphone. Yeah, you can continue on with the flip phone. But the rest of the world is doing some pretty amazing things that you no longer understand. You’re no longer a part of. And yeah, you can you can set down your smartphone, you know, but if you haven’t picked it up in the first place, you don’t know what’s going on.

And I think there’s maybe a metaphor there for how we should be engaging and Purpose Right may be a tool that people start to play around with a little bit on their own. And there is a free option so people can, you know, but play around and and see how the tool works without worrying about having to pay for it at this point.

Petter Magnusson: Exactly. Yeah. And you actually have ChatGPT and Claude in there. so And that is a fun thing also to just try the say prompt same prompt on ChatGPT and Claude and see the difference. They do have a a personality, I would say.

It’s funny because in in in the article writer guide, for example, I’m using ChatGPT for research things like find the target audience from looking at this web page. But then for the actual writing, I think Claude is better.

Rob Marsh: I agree.

Petter Magnusson: But yeah, but they are they are doing a different thing. Like ChatGPT is way too formal and I’m struggling to like loosen up. while While Claude is sometimes the reverse, it’s being, I think it is trained much more on social media posts and stuff because it easily becomes way too, to like TikTok style style basically. And then I have to tell it to calm down, you know, like become a bit more corporate or strict or something. But I think that is easier than having ChatTPT loosen up is more difficult. And then having Claude cool down a bit and and be a bit more strict.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, it’s it’s an interesting challenge. And again, one, if if we’re just prompting and and using the tools, it becomes pretty obvious the differences, especially, I mean, the two big ones are obviously Claude and ChatGPT, but there are, you know, i mean, ah Grok is incredibly sarcastic because it’s trained on that Twitter data, which is a place where so many people are are unkind and very sarcastic. You know, if you’re using Meta or LeChat, ah you’re you’re just going to get a different outcome with each. And so, yeah, like my my takeaway here, I think, is, hey, ah well, there’s really two. One, we need to be playing with these tools. And two, we really need to be upskilling when it comes to strategy, thinking, ah conceptualizing, and those those higher level marketing skills.

Rob Marsh: Because like I said, i you know where the words used to be the thing we sell, the words now free and it’s the thought. that needs to bring the value to the table.

Petter Magnusson: I think that sums it up very well. you know The words are kind of free now. So that that we need to focus on our actual knowledge, and that is to realize that that is actually not putting the words down.

Rob Marsh: Petter, if somebody wants to try Purpose Right or to connect with you, where should they go?

Petter Magnusson: if they want to try PurposeWrite, it’s PurposeWrite.com. And PurposeWrite as in writing then, and not write as in being right. W-R-I-T. E. Most copywriters should be able to figure that one out. And you can write to me on the info at PurposeWrite.com and I will reply. And hopefully I can, yeah, depends on what you ask, hopefully I can answer something reasonable.

Rob Marsh: This has been interesting. I love diving into these tools and seeing, you know, where where we are going and asking some of these questions. So thank you for your time. I appreciate it.

Petter Magnusson: Thank you so much. It’s been really fun. And yeah, I’m amazed. Time just flew by here.

Stuff to check out:

Justin’s Newsletter
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Transcript:

Rob Marsh: What does it take to create and run a truly simple copywriting business? We’re going to talk about that today on The Copywriter Club Podcast.

One of the many reasons that business owners fail at running their businesses is complexity—and by the way, this includes copywriters and content writers who own and run their own businesses too. We can serve so many kinds of clients and do so many kinds of work and even serve a bunch of different niches. And with all those options, we sometimes create a business that has lots of offers, and lots of messages to appeal to lots of different prospects. There are people who make that work, but this kind of complexity burns most of us out. So I invited business consultant and founder of Simple Business, Justin Wise, to talk about what we need to do to build a truly simple business that doesn’t require 60 hours of work a week to keep running.

We cover a lot of ideas or levers in this episode… dailish emails, simple offers, customer journeys, pricing, content creation, sharing content…it all comes down to how you talk about what you do and who you do it for… differently.

Differentiation is one of those things that a lot of copywriters tend to struggle with. We do so many of the same things that seeing what makes you different is really hard, especially when we’re sitting inside our own businesses. Someone once said, you can’t read the label from inside the bottle. That’s so true when applied to your copywriting business. 

Figuring out the thing that makes you different from all of the other writers out there is critical. And if you can do it, you’ll probably not struggle to connect with your ideal clients and land bigger, higher paying projects.

Justin and I also talked about the pressure to be producing all the content, talking about all the things on all the platforms and how none of that leads to a simple business. 

I think you’ll like this discussion that Justin and I had so stick around.

Before we get to my interview with Justin, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. Unless you are hitting the 30 second skip button when you get to this point of the show, you are no doubt familiar with The Copywriter Underground. I talk about it every week. The Underground includes more than 70 different workshops—and accompanying playbooks to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. The Playbooks make it easy to find quick solutions to the challenges you face in your business everything from finding clients, conducting sales calls, using A.I., building authority on LinkedIn or YouTube or Pinterest, and dozens of other workshops. You also get dozens of templates including a legal agreement you can use with your clients, monthly coaching, regular copy and funnel critiques, and more. You can learn more by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

And now, my interview with Justin Wise…

Justin, welcome to The Copywriter Club Podcast. I would love to start just by hearing your story and how you became basically an advisor to literally hundreds of companies that are trying to differentiate and simplify and find an audience and make money. So how did you get here?

Justin Wise: Well, it’s the standard career path that everybody takes, unemployed house painter to pastor to business owner.

Rob Marsh: There you go, you and everyone else.

Justin Wise: It’s pretty typical, but yeah, long story short, I graduated college in 2003 and I had every intent of being in the radio and film industry, radio, TV and film, and went out to Los Angeles, moved there for a summer, and then promptly moved back immediately to Iowa, entertainment industry. That’s where I’m from, Iowa, but the entertainment industry, very quickly it became clear that this was not… this is not a long term career choice that I was interested in and not that it’s bad or wrong, but it just wasn’t for me. And so I kind of went into this identity crisis when I got back, like a lot of college kids do, where you realize, like, oh, the work that I thought I was going to do with my degree is not going to materialize. It’s not going to work. And, you know, I grown up going to church, and this isn’t really a church thing, but had kind of fallen out of that. And then my parents were like, Hey, uh,
you know, it may be a good idea to go to church again. Like you don’t have to go to our church, just go to a church.
So I did. And then, long story short, I liked what they were doing there, and they were up to some cool stuff. And so as I started going and got employed there, and that’s what I had every intent of being. Was a ordained Lutheran pastor, and then we had kids,
and that changes everything. Yeah, it did in more ways than one. But you know, you don’t go into non profit world to make tons of money.
And so the practical realities of having a kiddo and a wife who ideally loved, and obviously still love to this day, who wanted nothing more than to be a stay at home mom, we realized something had to change, because I was making, at the time, my highest salary, and this was after like four pay raises was 30 grand a year. And I don’t care where you live in America, that’s really difficult to live on one salary alone. And my wife was the breadwinner at the time, so I knew something had to change and so that’s where I started experimenting with marketing.

I didn’t know that that’s what I was doing at the church, but that’s exactly what I was doing. And so I ended up helping other churches. And then other business owners, or businesses started paying attention. They’re like, Hey, how’d you do that? I was like, well, I’ll show you. And they’re like, cool, we’ll pay you. I was like, wait, what? You’ll pay me to do this stuff. And so, long story short, that landed some consulting gigs and coaching gigs, and I quickly realized I can make way more doing this than working at the church. Launched my first business in 2014 and Bing, bang, boom. Here we are, 10 years later, doing the same stuff.

Rob Marsh: Amazing. So what were some of those early successes? What were you helping the churches and those early companies do that got you noticed.

Justin Wise: Yeah, so the the reality was like, This was probably 2004, 2005 and social media was still pretty early in its infancy. In fact, I don’t even think Twitter, at the time, was called. Twitter wasn’t around that. So being able to see clearly, like you can have these platforms and put your message on these platforms, and other people who aren’t in your immediate area can see those messages and take action when you ask. So that was really valuable and helpful, obviously, to our church and to other churches, but more importantly, it you know, businesses were were catching on to this. Again, this is in the early days of social and so being able to say to them, Hey, you can like, have a Facebook page, and you can write stuff on the Facebook page, and then more people will come into your business. So if you write the right stuff, and you make an invitation and you make an ask, or people are going to come to your restaurant or to your you know, to your to your spa or to your salon, or more people are going to hire you for coaching, consulting. And so helping people you know drill down into their message as a business, and then helping them communicate what that primary message was in at the time, what was a new medium, and that’s where the opportunity was. And frankly, it still is. It’s just It looks different, but you know those early wins, it sounds crazy, but like the early wins were literally just, hey, we’re on social we got on social media and our your competition is not and and, you know, used to be back in the day, you could just post stuff and like everybody would see it. Everybody who liked your page, or whatever, they would see it.

Now, of course, it’s not the case, but watching people and watching business owners, where it started to click, like this is a new way I can speak to folks. They can hear about our business, and it will grow our you know, our revenue, our leads, our whatever in return, it all kind of revolved around that

Rob Marsh: Makes sense. Obviously, that social media landscape has changed dramatically since those early days. So, and I know we’re going to get into this in a variety of ways, but if you had to do it over, but using today’s social media landscape, do you think you could, you could still succeed? What would have to change from what you were doing back
then?

Justin Wise: Yeah. So, like, the premise is pretty much the same. The main difference in where it kind of came late to the party was an email list, because, like these social media platforms that are rented land, we don’t own them, unless your name is Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or whoever owns LinkedIn, let’s say…

Rob Marsh: Microsoft.

Justin Wise: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You don’t own those platforms. And because you don’t know on those platforms, you don’t own your followers on that platform. And so in the early days, I spent a lot of time and energy building up those platforms and thinking that the platform was the thing, but it actually wasn’t. Because. Because when the restrictions started, when you had to start moving to pay to play, so you make a post, then you have to pay to boost it, or whatever to get more people to see it, then you figured out real quick you didn’t own that audience. And one thing you do on though, is an email list. You own those names. So once they opt into your list and they say, yes, you may send me emails. Those are names that you can carry from platform to platform. That’s an asset, a business asset, that you own. So if I were to start all over again, I would still focus on getting the eyeballs right, whether it be through social media or ads. But the very next step would be moving to an email list, because that’s something that you can control. You have, you know, it’s something that you own. You can move from platform to platform. And there’s no better way, in my opinion, to build a connection with an audience than daily ish emails.

So may I always preface by saying I don’t send daily emails. I send daily ish emails, and that’s simply because I don’t want to write an email every day.

Rob Marsh: Totally understandable.

Justin Wise: But those are people that, and some of them I’ve had relationship with since I started that list back in you know, whatever it was, 2007 2008 and that’s a long time. And those folks, they may not be immediately in the binding pocket for something, a product, service or offering that I have, but if you stay in touch with them, they’re gonna remember and when lightning strikes and they’re ready to go, they go. They can’t think of anybody else that they’d rather work with than you. So that’s about the only change that I think I would make today is focusing, first and foremost, on an email list because of that ownership issue.

Rob Marsh: I agree 100% and this is something that, you know, I’ve been saying for a long time. I found something, though, with copywriters and content writers, that is kind of interesting. There’s a hesitation among so many of them to actually start a list, I think because they only need two or three clients a month in order to make pretty good money. And so building a list of hundreds and hundreds or even, 1000s, if you’re not selling courses, you’re not selling consulting or coaching of some kind, maybe feels like overkill. What would you say to in that situation?

Justin Wise: Well, first and foremost, if you want to run a service based business, 100% meaning a client hires you to do the work or to produce the widget you in exchange for dollars and cents. There are some people on this planet that that is all they want to do, they don’t really want to grow much like you’re saying, two to three clients is going to be just fine. And clients will rotate in, clients will rotate out, but so long as they have those two to three clients, they’re going to be fine. Cool, great. If that is the type of business and model that you’re comfortable running, then yeah, huge email list, and concerted effort into growing that list may not be something that is a wise use of your time.

However, what I would say is, at the very least, even if that is your model, you benefit personally, tremendously by even doing something as simple as a weekly newsletter. And the reason being is, number one, it keeps you, keeps your finger on the pulse of whatever market you’re serving. Number two, it helps you explore your own ideas. This is what I find to be the most valuable part of writing consistently and my, you know, my, uh, my bucket or my the manifestation of that happens to be an email list, but it helps me sharpen and shape my ideas in a way that I don’t know anything else could so if nothing else, it serves you as the writer, to say this actually is helping me get sharper and smarter and brighter, and that inevitably is going to transfer into value for your clients. So that alone is a huge winner. Why? I think, you know, 99% of businesses should fold in some form of newsletter, not to mention the fact that there are going to be people on that list who get used to hearing from you, and they enjoy hearing your thoughts? I hear from people every single week, every time I send a newsletter. Here’s what I want people to see primarily is, again, if you’re if you’re content on saying, hey a couple clients, that’s all I need every month. Great.

But what I would also encourage people to consider, what I would also consider anyone listening this to this to consider is, hey, is there a way for me to add a revenue stream to my service based business in a way that takes what I know and turns it into a product? So it’s not that it has to replace your service based business. It’s not that it has to take up even. A ton of more time, but it is to say, How can I leverage and utilize these skills that I’ve acquired over the years in a way that’s not directly related to pushing buttons and pulling levers? We have tons of folks that we’ve worked with over the years who just know so much about their subject matter world class, they don’t need more skills, but, and they don’t really have a ton of time either. To say, oh, I can spend, you know, a ton of energy and calendar time spinning off this new kind of area of my business, but it is to say taking that knowledge and turning it into profit. And of course, an email list to pull this all together is one of the best ways that I know to say, for instance, hey, you know that I do this service, whether it’s copywriting, whether it’s butchering, baking, candlestick making, it doesn’t matter, but if you that may that might be your thing to hire me for the service, but I can show you how to do it, and here’s what it looks like. That’s where those knowledge based products, those info based products, even if someone hasn’t considered it before, can add that extra revenue stream based on the expertise that they’ve built up over the years implementing that service based side.

Rob Marsh: I’m glad you said that. I think that there’s probably also one more, there’s probably a lot more benefits to it. But if you’re only running the service based business, and you need those three clients every month, it’s really easy to go out to your list of only 100 or 200 people and say, Hey, I have an opening next month. Now’s the time to book and as opposed to having to go out into social media or, you know, pitching clients or whatever. And so it because not everybody is ready to buy at the time that they join your list. Ultimately, that number of people is basically out there waiting to work with you, and if you don’t have them on your list, it’s harder to reach them in some cases, maybe impossible.

Justin Wise: Oh yeah, yeah, there’s just an accessibility that you can’t replicate any other way than with your email list. So if you have a gap in your client roster, if you want to try out a new idea, if you want to get input. I mean, yeah. I mean, the obvious benefits of having a list is you can sell stuff when you want, but there’s, there’s an equal, and sometimes I even think it’s, it’s a bigger benefit of being able to just say, Hey, you’re on this list. I have this idea. What do you think about this idea and not worry about, like, dollars and cents or making an offer, but just to simply say, where are you? Because you’re in my market, where’s your head at when I say this thing, or when I put this idea out into the universe? What is your reaction to it, that in and of itself, is valuable, even if you don’t sell anything outside of your services. So it’s a good discipline, no matter who you are, what type of business you run, to get in the habit of acquiring those email addresses and conversing with the people on your list in one way, shape or form.

Rob Marsh: So when we when you were answering another question earlier about how you got started in marketing and the process that you were going through, the first thing that you said is that you helped people figure out what is the message. And this feels like something you’re still doing today with all of your clients, and it’s really the first step of everything that we do as business people. Copywriters, should know this, but we’re really bad at doing this for ourselves. Let’s talk about that process a little bit.

Justin Wise: Yeah, offers. I mean, when we talk about like one of our mentoring programs is called simple business, and there’s three areas that we focus on, simple offers, simple messaging, simple sales or simple systems, depending on what we’re looking at, and it all starts with the offer, right? The offer is where everything begins. Because if you don’t have something a that people want, and you’d be surprised how many people put offers out there in the world that people don’t actually want. So you have to have to have something that people want, but you also have to have to have something that you enjoy delivering, that you enjoy fulfilling on, that you know is fun and profitable for you to create those two things go hand in hand.

The market has to acknowledge, recognize the value in your offer, but you and as equally as important, you have to enjoy doing it, because if you don’t, it’s not sustainable. And I’m not interested in anything that’s not sustainable, so looking at your offer and getting guardrails in place, testing that messaging out, um. And talking about it with people. We call it a no brainer offer, or sometimes a godfather offer. The reasons might be obvious. You want your offer to be something that’s so good, people can’t refuse it. And so that’s a that’s a process, and it really comes down to saying, Hey, where are your pain points?

There’s three reasons, maybe sometimes four, depending on what day it is. And when you ask me why people buy from you, you make them money, you save them money, you save them time, or you provide some sort of pleasure. Those are the three, sometimes four, reasons why people will buy from you, you make them money, you save them money, you save them time, you provide some sort of pleasure, and you may know that intuitively what your offer is or which one of those boxes it checks, but your audience doesn’t, and so you have to make it really, really clear and plain to them which one of those categories that your offer fits under. And sometimes it’s not always clear. Sometimes it changes. Sometimes you may want to emphasize one over the other. That’s where messaging comes in. And ultimately, if you have an offer that people want to buy, and when I say buy, or when I say interested in what I don’t mean is somebody saying, Yeah, that sounds cool, right, right? Or like your mom saying, Oh, that sounds amazing. No, no. What I mean is people are willing to give you money for it. That’s what it means. That’s what I offer, that people are interested in and are willing to buy doesn’t mean they say they’re willing to buy it. It means they’re buying it. So when you have that and you like doing it and it’s profitable, that’s where messaging comes in, and messaging is like probably one of the most frustrating components when it’s working against you, and it’s one of the most liberating aspects of running a business when it’s working for you, and messaging is just simply how you talk about your offer to the people that you want to have by it, or the people that you want to serve. That’s all messaging is.

And I find so many businesses that have an amazing offer, but because their positioning is weak, or their positioning is is unclear, or their positioning is focused on the wrong things that they suck. Their business suffers. They’re not getting the type of clients that they want. They’re not getting the volume of clients that they want. And it’s not an offer issue, meaning it’s not what they actually produce, it’s how they talk about what they produce. And when you’re in that messaging kind of like, you know, that dark hole of messaging working against you, it is not fun at all. And so one of the first things we’ll do is clean up someone’s messaging, and again, it’s just simply talking about it’s how you talk about your offer. We use something called Marketing milestones.

To do this, marketing milestones. You know, if you think about your call it whatever you want, your ideal client, your ideal avatar. We call it your specific person, the person that pays you the most, the easiest. All right, that’s how we define what a specific person is, or what an ideal client is. It’s the person who pays you the most, the easiest, that person is on a journey in their lives. No matter how what business you have, you have someone that you want to work with. You know, if I were to ask you who’s your favorite client, somebody should come to mind immediately. That’s most likely your specific person. They weren’t always where they’re at now, right? And so we look at marketing milestones to say, what is the path of this person’s journey? It’s the same person. They just go through different levels in their life or their career, and at some point they’re going to meet you, and it’s your job to say, Hey, you’re at level let’s say six, and you want to get to level 10. I’m the guy, or I’m the gal, that gets you from level six, where you’re at now, to level 10. And describing where they’re at now and where they want to get to is a matter of positioning. It’s a matter of messaging. And I would also include pricing, is positioning. So there’s not much difference mechanically between a Toyota and a Lexus, not really. There might be a few bells and whistles, at least from a mechanical standpoint, the difference in the price tag ultimately comes down to positioning. It comes down to messaging, it comes down to pricing, and every business adheres to those same rules, whether we’re aware of it or not. So getting the offer down is important. It’s foundational. You have to do it. But more importantly, it’s figuring out. How do I talk about this in a way that’s unique and different? It’s not it’s not so much what you’re saying. It’s how you’re saying it. In my mind, that’s what positioning really boils down to when it comes to differentiation.

Rob Marsh: How do you do that with your clients? How do you help them find the one thing that makes them the one that people want to work with, or the only one that they want to buy?

Justin Wise: Yeah. So it ultimately comes down to what we believe is that everybody has what I call a difference factor. It’s not something you have to go and create. It’s not something that you have to manufacture. It’s inherent, either in you or your business, and there’s differences, right? So lots of times we work with with people who are one person shops. So what we do is we dig into their specific difference factor as a person, and we have a couple exercises that we walk them through. But ultimately, it’s evident. It’s mostly evident in the people who know, like and trust you already, right? So then we have our clients go out and ask, Hey, what? What do you they ask the people who know, like and trust them already, what do you believe I’m best in the world at? What am I world class at? And we wait for the responses to come in. And so in a lot of ways, it’s, it’s amazing to me how many times I’ve done this. Personally, I’ve done this at least once a year for the last 10 years. And you know, the people that I asked this question to they’re, they’re usually different, and I don’t ask the same people every year.

It’s amazing to me how, how, how clear and close the answers are to one another. So, for instance, I know my difference factor is ideate, create, communicate. So think of big ideas. Create, pull those ideas into reality, and then talk about the what I’m doing as I’m doing it right? So this podcast is a perfect example of that, and I know that if I can do those three things, then I will never have to worry about getting another client ever again in my entire life. But I didn’t just wake up one day with those words in my head. Those are all words and phrases that have been reflected to me throughout the years from the people that I’ve asked to help me define my difference factor.

So if someone’s listening to this, it’s really as simple as going to clients, family members, friends. I’ve had people do this. I gave a talk one time in a pool in Cabo San Lucas. So I’ve had people bring in their phones in the pool and do this exercise right from the pool, and they’re getting answers, you know, within 20 minutes. So it’s not some long, drawn out process, but having a base for that, and if you run a business. So let’s say you have a business with 50 people. We’ve had folks in the manufacturing industry, for instance, do this, and their CEO will do this, not for himself. He didn’t do it for himself. He did it on behalf of the business. It’s the same thing. The answers are a little bit different. It’s the same process, right? So we’ve had roofing companies do this, like I said, manufacturing companies. So it’s not isolated to just people who run, let’s say, a personal brand or a solopreneur. This can really work for any type of business. And those answers, like I said, this is not something you have to manufacture, it’s not something you have to create. It’s it’s in you, it’s already there. You’ve likely been doing it your whole entire life. We just give you the recognition software to go and find what those things are, so you can double, triple, quadruple, down on those items. And when people do that, believe it or not, they make more money.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, it makes sense. So part of this getting people to know and like you is obviously the content that we’re putting out into the world. I mean, we’ve got to show up somewhere so that people can hear your voice or read your thoughts, or, you know, whatever the thing is that we’re sharing. So how do you think about content, not just the creation of it or the ideation part of it, but also the sharing of it, you know, like, how does that all fit together for a business that is trying to stand out?

Justin Wise: So I think, I think 90% of people, well, there’s two ditches, okay, there’s two ditches. There’s the not enough ditch, there’s the too much ditch. When it comes to content, I have to be careful to enunciate my words there when I say that, yeah, there’s, there’s the not enough ditch and the too much ditch. Sometimes I’ll find people who are just, frankly, not doing enough. They’re not creating enough content, they’re not creating any content, in some cases. And you know, the reasons are, aren’t bad or wrong. It’s usually, oh, I’m busy. I’m this, I’m that. Those things all may be true, but you need, in that case, to find time to create some sort. Of the content. But what I find way more often is actually people are creating too much content. And what I mean by that is they feel like this pressure.

Okay, I got to come up with a term for this, but they feel this pressure. Maybe FOMO is the best term for it right now. But this pressure to be on all the platforms all the time, saying all the things to all the people. And I just don’t believe now, at some point in the past that may have been a viable growth strategy. I don’t think you need to do that anymore. The mediums that we’re talking about, the social mediums, by and large, save a few of them, they’re basically all the same. They’re all kind of moving to this, you know, multi modal type content platform where you can put video, audio, text, images. Those are the four ways in which you can create content. By the way you they’re moving to this, this, these platforms can accommodate all of those forms, right? So what I tell people is, pick one platform. It doesn’t matter what you know, you may want to take your audience into consideration.

People are joining these different platforms, and chances are, because of they’re so big, the major platforms, anyway, your audience is going to be on there, right? So whether it’s Instagram or Facebook or or x or LinkedIn or YouTube or whatever, I would say, just pick one, pick one platform. Dominate. Don’t dabble. That’s what I tell our folks, dominate. Don’t dabble. And I find that so many people dabble on these different platforms, and so they feel like they have to be in all these different channels. And you know, think of it like your TV programming. One TV channel is hard enough, but let’s say you’re on five different social media platforms, then you have to say, I gotta program five different channels. That’s way more takes way more energy, way more time, and even if you’re just copying and pasting content that still requires time, that still requires energy.

So I tell people, pick one platform dominate, Don’t dabble. And then it’s all about repurposing baby like I don’t know, I don’t know that I’ve written an original email from scratch in probably close to four, maybe even five years. And I don’t mean that I’m copying and pasting old emails. What I do mean is I’m taking what I know has worked in the past, repurposing it. Because I can guarantee you, the people who were on my list even five years ago, they’re not going to remember. Oh, hey, you sent that email on, you know, September 21 2019 they’re not going to remember that. And if they do, I probably need to get them off my email list, because they’re psychotic. No one’s going to remember that stuff. Same thing with these social media platforms. So we want people repurposing their stuff. So that means you take an email and maybe you make a YouTube script out of it. You take a post from Facebook and you turn it into an email. You take an email and turn it into a thread on X so you’re not creating more content, you’re just simply distributing it and thinking through, how can I take the stuff that I know has worked or that I’ve enjoyed creating and repurpose it a million different ways, because I promise you, the memory, the attention span, is so short anymore that folks aren’t going to remember it, and if they do remember it, it’s probably going to be a good reminder more than anything else.

Limit your platforms, you know, give yourself some grace and freedom to repurpose stuff from the past. I’ve got probably close to 50-60, templates now that I go back to time and time again. So templates are super helpful and focus more on you got to create something, but then the game really is focusing on distribution more than it is creation.

Rob Marsh: And so getting those, those core pieces in place, and then focusing on distribution of those pieces, I know, and I agree with you, the game is distribution, but I think a lot of people still get hung up on the creation, the what do I write? Even if you know they’re copywriters, or you know they can do this for other people, sometimes writing about what we know is is difficult. So how do you think about that? Do you have you it bucketed out like, Hey, these are the three or five things that I always write about, and I’m choosing from one of those, and it’s just applying a different template to that particular idea this day and the next one, or how are you thinking about content that way?

Justin Wise: At its base I’ve had over the last year, kind of this complete transformation and how I think about content, and it comes down to “how to” content versus “why to” content. All right, “how to” content is, how to do this, how to do that, how to underwater basket weave, you know? How to butcher, how to bake, how to candlestick make. And I’ll tell you we are how to-ed out. “How to” content feels like we’re adding value. You know, you’re the adage with content all just add value. Well, when most people think of just add value, what they think of is, oh, then I have to do “how to” content, meaning, step by step. Do this, then do that. Basically you’re giving away the the magician’s secrets, right? And “how to” content is really difficult to produce, at least in most industries, because you got to get your facts straight. You got to get the details right.

I remember one time when I owned a Facebook ads agency, we were hell bent on doing “how to” content. This is before I had my revelation. And some of this, let’s just say, 500 word blog posts we would write would take literal days to produce, because we had to make sure, if we were going to give people this step by step, that it was accurate, because you run into a whole set of problems if it’s not accurate. So my position shift when I discovered “why to” content. So “why to” content focuses on the big picture. It’s for lack of a better term, thought leadership. It’s getting people to ask the why questions. Why should I do this? Why should I do that? If you’ve noticed, even in this conversation, we haven’t really talked much about “how to”, it’s it’s more about “why to” and those those big picture questions, that is what’s resonating with people right now. They need other people to say, forget the how to. There’s a million different how to angles you could take here. What we need to figure out is, why are you doing this, and is this the next best step for you? Why should I do this? Why should I do that so?

But by way of example, I have a client. He is a YouTube guy. He’s a guitar teacher, and he puts out YouTube videos. And when, when he came into the program, he was doing “how to” content, which took a ton of time, so how to play this tab, he’s having to pull all these tabs together and, you know, string out the chords and show people how to do this. Then the other it was very, very um, involved process. And then he switched to “why to” content when he got to this part of the program, and he said, Dude, I don’t know how this is working, but it’s working. My subs are up 50% my subscriptions are up 50% it takes me a third of the time to produce “why to” content as it does “how to” content. And I’m having way more fun making this content. And that’s because he put himself out there, not as just some run of the mill guitar teacher on YouTube, because there’s a million of those. He put himself out there as an expert, and he is an expert like that wasn’t the issue, but he was positioning himself as that expert, and it completely changed the trajectory of his content creation and thereby extension his business.

So I think a lot of people get frustrated with the content creation process, and rightly so, because when they think of content, they think, Oh, this has got to be how to, it’s got to be step by step. And not to mention, you’re essentially giving away the goods. You’re training people to not need you. It’s the old adage of, why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free? We’ve had people in our programs who have started to do this, like with their proposals. So whereas before they would do a proposal for somebody, they would outline what they’re going to do for them, and then they give that person the proposal, and then they do what they’d wait and so what I’m what I’m starting to do with some of these folks is saying, no, that’s valuable information. That’s valuable content, if you will, in the proposal, you’re essentially showing them exactly how to do what it is that you want them to pay them for you to do. You’re showing them how to do that in the proposal.

Instead of making this proposal a “how to” document, what if we made it a “why to” document, and people paid you for the pleasure of going through that process. And I’ve had people now we’ve had probably four or five people do this, and they went from giving away their proposals for free and having a 20% close rate to monetizing that process and going from a 20% close rate to a 70, 80% close rate, and getting paid to do it all along the way. So I know that was a lot, but it really what it comes down to is “how to” content versus “why to” content. Small details, big picture, vastly different ways to create content and put that put it out into the world.

Rob Marsh: I would love to talk about a very specific example of this, just so that it’s absolutely clear. Because I think at one level, it’s pretty easy to see the difference, you know, if you’re blogging, for instance, blogging an article about how to write a blog versus why to write a blog. That’s pretty clear. But when we start talking about, you know, things like coaching, you know, or helping, but copywriters, you know, would be helping their clients to accomplish this wide range. So maybe, if you’ve got an example from somebody that you’ve worked with, something from your business, where we can take a shift from that, how to to the why to can we? Can we maybe talk through an example like that?

Justin Wise: Yeah. So what this ultimately comes down to is, is predicting the future. I learned this from my dear friend Chris Lema. He calls it prediction stories. And in fact, I was just walking through an example with this with one of our clients. And he runs essentially a technology firm, all right. And he comes in, and he and his team basically do an assessment on their systems, their automations, and then they they create a solution to basically unify all those systems into one, you know, kitten caboodle. And he was running into some snags with with content. And so I was like, You’re too buried in the details of like, oh, this nerdy platform that I’ve never heard of is better because it’s has more features than this other nerdy platform that I’ve never heard of. Nobody cares about that stuff.

The Level Nine, level 10 clients that you want to attract, they’re not going to spend time or energy reading that stuff. They don’t care. What they do care about is lost revenue. What they do care about is their team underperforming because they have to do all these manual tasks that their systems should be doing but aren’t because they haven’t been audited since the Cold War. So we’re going to speak to those things, and we’re going to tell the future. So we’re going to say to your level nine client, hey, if you don’t address the automation issue in your business, meaning the inefficient tasks, these these bloated systems that have gotten, you know, so so they’ve creeped into every nook and cranny of your organization, and it’s like just this one big blob of mess, if you don’t address those things.

Let me predict your future of what’s going to happen. You’re going to lose teammates. You’re going to lose good team members because they’re frustrated of the inefficiencies, you’re going to lose clients because your systems aren’t up to date, and you can’t, you know, properly, identify, like, where are our best clients coming from? Who’s spending the most with us, who’s not? Where are their gaps, and so on and so forth, and to read the difference. So we did this real time. I wish I had the example, but I don’t in front of me. We redid it, and what he came in with was entirely different than what he left with. But I know for a fact that what he left with, it was a why two piece. So why you need to address your automations, why you need to address the inefficiencies in your you know your inventory systems, and when, when you speak to a problem at that level, it it speaks to the decision makers in the organization, whoever they may be, because those are the challenges that They’re thinking through, not the how to challenges at level one. So anybody can do this, right? You think of your ideal client, and let’s just take copywriting for instance.

Copywriting is great because you you can leverage someone’s skill to produce, you know, pieces of content that presumably either make the company or make the client more money, or take care of a task that no one on a person’s team is handled to do whatever it doesn’t much matter, but speaking to the why to or the prediction stories or thinking through saying, Okay, if you don’t hire a copywriter, here’s what’s going to happen, or here’s what’s not going to happen. You won’t have regular contact with your email list.

For instance, you won’t have a landing page that is optimized for conversions. So even the traffic that you do get, it’s not going to convert nearly as high as it could, because it’s written like, you know, a fifth grader wrote it, and so on and so forth, or it’s bloated, or whatever. And so when you start thinking through it from that angle, it really does take it really does change the way that you approach content. The how to is for when they’ve already paid you. Yeah, right. Okay, they don’t get the How to until they’ve paid you. And the how to could simply be, you take that off their plate and do it for them. Or the How to could be, you show them how to do it themselves. It doesn’t much matter, but they don’t get the How to up front. But the why two does a really good job of teasing out the problem and showing what happens if they don’t address it.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, as I think about this, it feels to me like going from how to to why. Two moves you from physical or technical problems to psychological problems, and psychological problems are really what drive our behavior. So going back to the guitar guy, you know, I as I’m if I’m trying to learn guitar, of course I want to learn how to play the tab, but the why, you know, if I’m trying to, you know, impress my friends at the party is a much bigger driver for learning. And it’s, yeah, I get how it works. And I think, I mean, I’ve kind of had a mindset shift of my own as you’ve been talking through this, in the content that I need to be creating.

Justin Wise: It is. It’s an ass kicker, that’s for sure. It definitely makes you evaluate, re evaluate, like, Oh, wow. Like I said, I’ve only been recently kind of exploring this idea myself and my content, but I know, like the proof is in the pudding, right? So I am now on 100 and the the 100 and 21st week of my newsletter. So two years, basically over two years, because I do one weekly and the difference. So at the end of every newsletter, I have a survey that just says, basically, what did you think about this newsletter? And I usually get a couple responses every week. But to look at, because you can see it in the data. You can see the ratings. As I’ve focused more on y2 the ratings have gone up and up and up and up and up the responses, I get more responses from people who answer that survey at the end of the newsletter, and the responses are higher. They’re higher rated. So it’s an increase in volume and an increase in rating. And the only change, the only change that I have made in those 120 editions is shifting from how to to why to that’s it.

Rob Marsh: So we were talking about earlier on… when we were talking about emails and why we need to write them. You mentioned that one of the reasons for writing a regular email is that it crystallizes your thinking. I’m really curious about your writing process, your thinking process, how you sit down, when you when you say, Okay, it’s time to ideate. What does that look like for you?

Justin Wise: Do you want my answer today, or do I answer from, let’s say a year ago

Rob Marsh: How about both? How has it changed over time?

Justin Wise: So so the general process has remained the exact same, and the general process is, I use what Anne Lamott calls shitty first draft, right? And that I read that book in college, and it has stuck with me ever since. Bird by Bird is a book, if you want to check it out.

Rob Marsh: It’s a great book. It is a really good every writer should read it at some point. It’s phenomenal.

Justin Wise: It’s so good. There’s, there’s two concepts I took away from that and still use to this day. One is shady for strap. The other is fill an inch. So she has a picture frame on her desk. It’s an inch by an inch. It’s a square, and it’s there to visualize. Like, okay, you can write enough words to fill this square. Like, if you’re stuck, if you are wondering where to start or how to start, just start and fill the square. So I use that, and I use shitty first shot. I get it down and just crank something out. Usually shoot for anywhere between 150 and 200 ish words somewhere in between there, and get it done.

Now, what has changed is I used to then, then I go through and edit. All right, so read it out loud as I’m reading. Read it out loud again. And then when I got to a spot where I was comfortable and confident, you put in the link, she sent me email. So the starting point’s the same. Get the shoe you first drafted and but now what I use I have, I have fallen in love with chat GPT, not in a weird way, but in a way that has, as has only improved my writing. So I have that first draft in there. Now what I’ve done is I’ve trained my chat GPT on six Well, it’d be about six years, six years worth of emails that I’ve written in the past. So I took all those emails that I wrote, I loaded them up into chat GPT, and I said, build a writer’s profile off of the composite of the. Emails so chat, GPT goes through, analyzes the structure, the format, the tone, the style, all that good stuff, and spits out a writer’s profile. I’ve named that writer’s profile affectionately Justin bot.

So he’s a great employee. He never asked for a raise. He never complains, and he works all the time. He’s a really great guy. Anyway, he is trained as close as AI can be trained to talk like me, to write like me. That’s not because I’m just like pulling it out of thin air. It’s literally trained off of all the emails that I wrote for many, many years. So then I will take that, that initial draft, and run it through Justin bot. Justin bot, then cleans up the language a little bit, makes a little punchier, uh, formats it in the way that I like. All these things. Of course, you can tell it to do ahead of time. And then I get my final draft, so that is cut out now I still, most times anyway, I still read it out loud, but it has greatly reduced the amount of editing that I’ve had to do. And so it used to take me about 30 minutes to write a daily email. Now I’ve gotten that down to 10 to 15 minutes, and I think the quality has actually vastly improved, and don’t really see a downside to it, frankly.

So that’s why I asked the question, do you want it a year ago, or do you want it today? But for the most part, it’s the same. I just use AI instead of my own brain.

Rob Marsh: With the couple minutes we have left, I want to ask maybe a question. It’s way too big for a few minutes, but one of the things that you talk about is creating a business that runs itself. And obviously, a lot of the stuff that we’ve been talking about here is part of that, you know, having content that’s attracting people to your newsletter, having readers that you can sell to automatically. What else? What are the other pieces of this business that runs itself? Obviously, that’s that. We’re not talking about somebody who’s necessarily writing copy for a client on a daily basis. But as people start to move into, you know, how do I use my knowledge? How do I sell? You know, the scraps for my business, the templates, the processes, those kinds of things. What are the other pieces?

Justin Wise: The one starting point for this that comes to mind is a story that I read. The name escapes me. Now I can’t remember the book. So this was not a concept that I originated with or that originated with me, rather. But when you when you ask that question, this is the first thing that popped in my head, and I’m learning to just go with that. And it’s the concept of the face, like there was this painter back in the day who was just pumping out content or pumping out paintings rather. So let’s just say if the normal painter in the 1800s or whatever it was, 1700s would produce two works a year. This guy was pumping out like 200 works a year.

Rob Marsh: The James Patterson author, James Patterson approach to art sounds like.

Justin Wise: Yeah. So it’s like, Michael Crichton, I think. Didn’t he die?

Rob Marsh: Yeah, he passed away a couple few years ago.

Justin Wise: But he is still writing books. Well, how is that? How does that happen? It Right. It comes back to this, right? So this painter figured out the reason why people pay me, the reason why patrons come and, you know, commission a painting. What is that thing? And he found out that it was the portrait. So if he did, if he did like a full body painting of somebody. He found that the highest value that he brought to the painting was the portrait or the face. And so what he did was he hired a bunch of painting underlings. I don’t know who would take the portrait, and they would do the whole entire portrait, besides the face. And so once these underlings finished the rest of the painting, this guy would step in, he would do the portrait, and that’s how he’s able to get so many paintings out the door. And when you ask that question, the very first step is to find out, what is your face? What is the portrait? What is the one thing that you do that adds 80% of the value to your business when you spend time thinking about that and defining that and refining that and testing that out, see the reason why most people don’t get to a business that can run itself is because they don’t answer that question. Because when you know the answer to that question, then you know everything else doesn’t matter. I either delete it, or I delegate it, or I just simply stop doing it.

But you can’t do that properly until you know what is the face, what’s the one and only thing that I can do that nobody else in this business currently can do. And once you know that, then you can start to work the other stuff out, right? Then you can say, okay, cool. Well, this thing that I’ve been doing and spending a ton of time and energy in like I’ll give you, for instance, we had a free community for about a year and a half. We ran a free community. And for anybody who’s running a free community, ours was on school. Doesn’t have to be on school. It could be on Facebook groups, whatever. Anybody who’s done that knows how much time and energy it took. And we had a good group of people in there. They were engaged, they responded. What I found was none of them were really converting into clients. And so then we had to have the real tough discussion of saying, Okay, this makes us feel good. Like it makes me feel good when I post something and people respond to it, and they say, Oh, this is really great, but is this contributing to the the goals of this organization? And the hard, cold answer was, No, it’s not. So we killed it. We killed that free community, and people were upset, and we, you know, told us, you know, they wanted a refund. Keep in mind, it was a free group, and so, so that was one thing that had to go bye, bye. And it’s a series of those types of decisions and businesses that, frankly, most people just won’t ever do. And so because they won’t do that, they never get to focus on the thing that they do and that they do better than anybody else in the organization, or preferably the world. So if you want a business that runs itself, you have to identify what that thing is number one, so you don’t cut it out, meaning you don’t chuck it, you hold on to it, and then you can delegate everything else or delete it if it doesn’t need to be done.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, it’s yet another thing for me to think about. So Justin, I appreciate everything you’ve shared today, and like I said, I’ve got some things to fix about why content maybe get a little clearer on my 80% as well. I’m guessing that a lot of people listening though are also having those same kinds of thoughts to them. And so if they want more Justin in their life, or more of your advice, where are the best places to interface with you and to connect with you?

Justin Wise: Easiest place for anybody listening to this, to connect with me is go to getdifferent.co join our newsletter, get different.co and you can read, “why to” content for me every single week?

Rob Marsh: I’ve been on the list for a long time, and appreciate all of the just the ideas and approaches that you’ve shared over time and again. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you onto the podcast, and just thrilled that you had the time to share so much. So thank you. Thanks for you know your your wisdom and advice. I just really appreciate you having you here.

Justin Wise: Hey, man, thanks for the invite.

Rob Marsh: Thanks to Justin for sharing his thoughts about creating a simple business. I’ve linked to Justin’s newsletter in the show notes. That’s probably the best place to jump into his world and learn from his thinking. You might also stumble across some of his posts on LinkedIn or on Twitter.

One of the ideas that Justin mentioned, that I want to emphasize, before you delete this episode from your podcast player, is the concept of dominate. Don’t dabble. Limit your platform, shrink your to do list and repurpose your thinking so that you can really focus on distribution. Distribution in one place. Sharing your one idea over and over is far more powerful than sharing 10 great ideas in a dozen places. This comes down to positioning yourself as an expert, and the more concentrated you are on one or two things, the more that that’s going to resonate with your ideal audience. What Justin shared about “how to” content versus “why to” content is critical to this. Why to content motivates, instead of teaches. It gets people on board with your message and gets them excited about working with you. It might be worth going back and listening to what Justin said about why to content and the impact that that can have on your business, especially the reduction in effort that it requires from you, the business owner, that’s probably enough for today.

Be sure to get on Justin’s list and learn more.

Stuff to check out:

Sam’s LinkedIn
Pop!: Create the Perfect Pitch, Title and Tagline for Anything by Sam Horn
Tongue Fu by Sam Horn
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: Want your copy to get noticed and remembered? There are a couple of simple tricks that will help you do that. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

The ability to help your clients get noticed and remembered is one of the main things they pay you for. And to find clients in the first place, you need to be able to get prospects to notice and remember you. If you can’t do this one thing… you really can’t help them with anything else because they never engage with you.

There are lots of psychological techniques that help people notice you… or help people remember you… or make people want to engage with you. So what are they? I asked communication specialist Sam Horn to walk through some of these techniques.

Sam is the author of the book Pop: Create the Perfect Pitch, Title, and Tagline for Anything. She walked me through a bunch of the tricks she uses to coin new phrases so her readers raise their eyebrows. One of the things you’ll notice as you listen is that Sam uses these techniques as she talks with me… you’ll hear rhymes, juxtapositions, cliches, and patterns that demonstrate exactly what she is sharing as we talk.

The ideas and insights we discuss go well beyond typical persuasion techniques like urgency and scarcity to create a more fun, human, and interesting connection between the ideas you write about and your audience.

This is a different sort of interview… because Sam actually workshops an idea for a presentation I am planning on offering to listeners of this podcast. As she goes through the ideas I share with her, you’ll notice she starts throwing out ideas and insights I might use when I’m ready to share my presentation. It demonstrates the insights she shares—especially her advice to show the shift as we communicate what we sell.

Near the end of the interview, Sam walked me through the questions she asks as she starts writing a book—and she’s written a bunch of them. If you’re thinking of writing a book yourself, some of these questions may be useful for you.

I think you’ll like what Sam has to share.

Before we get to my interview with Sam, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. Unless you are hitting the 30 second skip button when you get to this point of the show, you are no doubt familiar with The Copywriter Underground. I talk about it every week. The Underground includes more than 70 different workshops—and accompanying playbooks to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. The Playbooks make it easy to find quick solutions to the challenges you face in your business everything from finding clients, conducting sales calls, using A.I., building authority on LinkedIn YouTube or Pinterest, and dozens of other workshops. You also get dozens of templates, including a legal agreement you can use with your clients, monthly coaching, regular copy and funnel critiques, and more. You can learn more by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

And now, my interview with Sam Horn…

Sam, welcome to the copywriter club podcast. I would, I mean, I’m thrilled to have you here. You know, author of nine books, everything about language and communication. But before we get into all of that stuff. I would like to know how you got here. How did you become an author, speaker coach, I guess, an intrigue expert, and all of the other things that people have called you. 

Sam Horn: Okay, so how about I’ll go two places with that. Sound good? We’ll, we’ll start with the original origin story. Okay? Because I think our originality is in our origin story. So I grew up in a small town, more horses than people, and I was, like, elected as valedictorian of my class. A small town, big deal, right? So I put together my little graduation speech, and I shared it with my dad, who ran Future Farmers of America for the state of California. And you may know they understood speaking was very important. So I asked for his feedback, and he said, it’s an okay talk. He said, You just didn’t say anything I hadn’t heard before. It was the little bird leaving the nest homily, you know? And I said, But dad, there’s nothing original under the sun. And he says, of course there is. He said, You know what the definition of original is, if we haven’t heard it before. And you know, Rob, I at a very early age, I realized that if I’m going to ask people for their valuable time, mind and dime, it is my responsibility to create and craft something that they haven’t seen or heard before.

Rob Marsh:Okay, so that was origin number one, what’s origin number two. 

Sam Horn: Origin number two. You may know that I helped start and run the Maui Writers Conference. Writers digest said it was the best writers conference in the world, and we did something that was unprecedented at the time. You could jump the chain of command. You could pitch your screenplay to Ron Howard. You could pitch your novel.

People to the head of Simon and Schuster. I mean, that had never been done before. And after the first round, a woman came out with tears in her eyes. And I went over, I said, are you okay? She said, I just saw my dream go down the drain. And I said, what happened? She said, I put my 300-page manuscript on the table. The agent took one look at it and said, I can’t read all that, tell me in 60 seconds what it’s about and why someone would want to read it. And I talked with Bob Loomis, who was senior VP of Random House that night, and I said, Bob, I’m seeing a lot of people’s dreams go down the drain today. What’s going on? And he said, Sam, we’ve seen 1000s of proposals. We make up our mind in the first 60 seconds whether something is commercially viable. And Rob that next day, I stood in the back and I watched the pitch sessions, and I could predict who is getting a deal without hearing a word being said. Guess how 

Rob Marsh: I’ve got to guess that it’s in the look of the face of the person they were pitching—they were interested in something. 

Sam Horn: It gets really specific, the eyebrows. Because see, like, if we’re telling someone our idea, if we’re proposing something, if we’re pitching our book or whatever, if the decision makers eyebrows like, crunch up your eyebrows right now. Don’t you feel confused? Right? Confused, or like I’ve got to look into this deeper, maybe, or I don’t understand exactly. You know what’s going on here. Get you know that happens rarely, however. You know today’s attention span, right? If people don’t get it, they’re gone, right? So if people’s eyebrows are knit, furrowed, crunched up. It means they don’t get it and are confused. People don’t say yes. Now if their eyebrows don’t move, it means they’re unmoved, or they’ve had Botox.

Now, lift your eyebrows, if you would. Ah, do you feel intrigued? Curious? Like you want to know more. You know, I became a woman on a mission. I founded the entry agency. Because if we want other people to care about what we care about, we’ve got to turn info obesity into the eyebrow test. 

Rob Marsh: Okay, so let’s, let’s talk a bit about that, because this is not just so I’m thinking about this in two different ways. Number one, copywriters and content writers are working for clients, and the work that we do has to get the attention of their customers. Whatever we put out there has to get attention, otherwise it doesn’t work. But maybe even more importantly, before that can happen, copywriters and content writers have to get the attention of their prospects and their future clients, and if that doesn’t happen, they never get to write anything. So how do we do it? How do we get attention? 

Sam Horn: Well, as you know, there’s a whole book pop, and my book got your attention on that. So here are a few specific techniques. And by the way, rob your audience is copywriters. I hope they have 10 and paper right now, because we’re going to jump right in and I’m going to share techniques that have helped my clients, you know, get millions in contracts, deals, etc. So grab your pen and paper and…

Rob Marsh: I’m just going to underline that… you mentioned, Pop your book. Before we started recording, I said, I think this is one of the better books the writers ought to be using. It’s not really about writing so much as it’s about how to make your words pop, literally, the title of the book. So if you haven’t got it, we’ll link to it in the show notes. Make sure you pick up a copy. But yeah, let’s talk about some of those ideas. 

Sam Horn: Good. Well, let’s talk about how content writers and copywriters have two bosses, right? First, their decision maker, right, to get their attention and their favorable attention. Oh, I am here. Oh, that’s clever. Oh, yes, that will work. And then it needs to drive business, right? It needs to actually drive traffic to the store or registrations for the whatever. So I’ll give you a quick example of how we do this. Is that I believe, don’t repeat cliches, rearrange cliches, right? So whatever the topic or the product or the demographic is, we can just start writing down what do people know is true about this? What do they believe about this? You can just go to the cliche dictionary and put in what are cliches around this, right? But we’re not content to be common, because George Washington Carver said, when you can do a common thing in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world. 

So see, we take what is known, and our goal is to make it unknown. We take what’s familiar, we want it to be fresh. So Avon is an example they were going to hit. They were having their breast cancer walks, right? And they were looking for a tagline. So if you go to the COVID cliche dictionary and you put in, you know, walks, right? Well, they couldn’t find anything walk, don’t run, on and on. So now you look for cliches. It’s alphabetical order with a keyword that’s alliterative, that starts with the same sound or letter as yours. They came up with a wonderful slogan. Do you know what it is? 

Rob Marsh: I should know what it is. I don’t have it at the top of my head, though.

Sam Horn: It’s good things come to those who walk. Nice, right? You shift off weight. And now, when you’re close to what’s familiar, and you give that little twist, the eyebrows go up, right? You know how Einstein knew he had a good idea?

Rob Marsh: I’m guessing that it made his eyebrows go up.

Sam Horn: He laughed out loud, right? Because I know, when I’m working with clients, you know, I’m taking notes on what they’re saying. I’m inking it when they think it et cetera. And when the dots connect and I get a new entity, it’s like the eyebrows fly up and out comes this, aha, right? This bark of laughter. That means, Eureka, we have found something that’s worth pursuing.

From a psychological standpoint, the newness of the idea of a cliche that’s been changed a little bit. It’s almost like unlocking a puzzle and it clicks in your brain and it makes it stick, which is maybe another part of making sure that we’re memorable. In fact, in a moment I’ll get, I’ll share my formula for turning what’s forgettable into what’s repeatable and retweetable. Sound good?

Rob Marsh: Yes, let’s do it. 

Sam Horn: Let’s go back to your first question about another way we can make something pop—how we can pop out of the pack instead of get lost in the pack, how we can stand out from the crowd instead of get lost in the crowd. 

We’re going to Mary Oliver our life. I bet everyone who is part of your community understands that our life is our lab, right? We constantly have our antenna up and we Mary Oliver. She said, instructions for life, pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it, right? Anytime we’re astonished, oh, isn’t that? I haven’t heard that before. It’s got potential, then we figure out how we can run with it so that it is practical and relevant and functional, going to drive results. So I’ll give you an example.

The University of Hawaii asked me to do a program and conflict resolution, uh, boring, right? And if we’re a bore, snore and unsure, it’s not gonna work. So I turned it into dealing with difficult people without becoming one yourself. Now that’s a good title, because it’s Alliterative. When you put it in a beat, you make it easy to repeat, right? So it’s dealing with difficult people without becoming one yourself. So that is it pretty good title. Here’s the thing, though, you go in and you put into search difficult people, 1000s of people, right? Speaking about that, hundreds of books. So see, it won’t pop out. It’s clever, but it still is not one of a kind. It’s still one of many. Well, I was very fortunate Rob, because at our first break, there was a gentleman in the front row. He didn’t get up to go get a cup of coffee. You know, go outside. He just sat there, gazing off into space. I was curious, and I went over. I said, What are you thinking about? And he said, Sam, I’m a real estate broker. He said, I deal with some very demanding and arrogant people. He said, I’m tired of it. He said, I took this course because I thought you were going to teach us some zingers to fire back at people and put them in their place. He said, that’s not what this is about. And I agreed, this is not about putting people in their place. It’s about putting ourselves in their place so we can respond with compassion instead of contempt. And he was the one who said, I’m a student of martial arts. He said, I’ve studied karate, taekwondo, judo. He said, what you’re talking about is like a verbal form of Kung Fu, isn’t it? Eureka, Tongue Fu, right? Tongue. Fu, an original word I was able to trademark that I’ve been able to merchandise and monetize it. It’s still selling around the world. It’s the one of the top business books in Turkey for 20 years, number three in South Korea, 20 years after it was published, they said it’s changing the patriarchy. 

Now, let’s put it into practice for your community, for everyone watching and listening is like, I hope you have a word bank. If you’re working with the client and they want you to sell a product or a service or a new launch, whatever, just come up with 20 words that you would use when frequently explaining that describing right? That’s your word bank. Now, alphabetize each word. Take a word, run it through the alphabet, changing the sound of the first syllable to match the corresponding letter. So see, let’s take Tongue, Fu, Un Fu, Bun, Fu, Sun. Fu, Done Fu…. So you go, Oh, Fun Fu, that’s how to handle hassles with humor instead of harsh words, Gung Fu, Gong Ho, Kung Fu, there’s a Lung Fu, Run Fu for when Tung Fu doesn’t work. Tongue Su for lawyers. It’s Young Foo for kids. Do you see how, if you take a core word, it’s meaningful to your client, you run it through the alphabet, you can come up with first of their kind words. Maybe can get the domain around it, you know, maybe have a one of a kind campaign about it all for just a little bit of brain work. 

Rob Marsh: I remember the first time I saw Tung Fu and also your title, talking on eggshells, those kinds of unique twists. I mean, immediately I just, I thought, That is freaking brilliant, you know. And it’s one of those things where I’m like, Man, I wish I had come up with that. It’s such a unique idea. But oftentimes, you know, we’re not, we don’t have the luxury of, you know, being in a conference with somebody, you know, talking back forth. Oftentimes, when we’re trying to come up with these ideas, we’re sitting at our desks, and it’s not always easy even, you know, with some of the tools that you’re sharing. Like, you know, alphabetize it or find the cliche Right. Like, so, how do we make ourselves more creative in these office spaces where sometimes the creativity is pulled out of us?

Sam Horn: Okay? Paper and pin right? Okay, put a vertical line down the center right now, because people say, Sam, how does your brain work? I juxtapose everything. Rob, it is the quickest way to make complex ideas crystal clear. Furthermore, my Got Your Attention book was published by Barrett Kohler, who is publisher of the year. A few years ago, Steve presente was the publisher. And I said, Steve, what is your criteria for publishing a book? He said three words, ready? Okay, show the shift. Show the shift. So everyone right now think of something, a campaign. They’re working on a client. They’re working with some type of copy they need to write over on the left, right now, put beliefs and behaviors that sabotage success all right—so put beliefs behaviors that sabotage success. Now over on the right. Put beliefs and behaviors that support success. So it’s sabotage on the left, support on the right. Now also on the left. Put compromise. You know, what are attitudes and actions that compromise our effectiveness? Over on the right? What are attitudes and actions that contribute to our effectiveness. So in a moment, we can do this for a campaign you’re working on, or you’re going to name your book, or something like that. We can play I’ll give you an example of how this works. Is that we just were talking about Tung Fu, so I gave a tongue food workshop for Kaiser Permanente, and I went back three years later as a patient, and when I walked in, the receptionist recognized me, and there wasn’t anyone in the lobby, and she beckoned me over, and she pointed, and her “words to lose words to use” reminder card was still taped to her desk. 

And now here’s the story. She said, Sam, they hired me because I’m the first point of contact. I’m pretty nice, and I never used to understand why people were so mean to me when I was so nice to them. And then I took your workshop, and I realized I was using all those words on the left, you know, well, I’d like to help you, but, well, you should have called earlier. I’m sorry, but I can give you an appointment right now, because you know he’s out, you know, he’s out of the office this week, whatever. So, and then replace it on the right. So what I’m telling everyone, if over on the left you have what doesn’t work and what does when you are writing copy, people read left to right. And furthermore, you know, if it’s long, they’re gone. So if we have a paragraph longer than four lines, people don’t read it. They skip it or skim it right. However, if we put over, you actually put a vertical line right down the center of a website. You put it down, right down the middle of a pitch, and over on the left is like, you know, you may think that did that, did up. Are you struggling with deduct? Did that? You know? Are you tired of deducted? Up, bullet, bullet, bullet, right? Because Rob, they can eyeball it. They don’t have to read it. They can eyeball it. Now we have, yes, that’s exactly what I’m thinking. Yes, that’s how I feel. Yes, I’m dealing with that. Would you like wouldn’t it be wonderful if? And now, here is the preferred behavior. Here is, you know, the solution to the problem, etc. However, here’s the thing. Is that if you write that out, you know, people’s attention span these days, they’re going to start skimming, scanning it, and they don’t. Get the shift right? They don’t get the Yes, that’s true for me. Yes, that’s happening in my life. Yes, that’s a problem for me. And they don’t get the AHA, the immediate gratitude, gratification, right? Of like, yes, I would like that. It’s the opposite of this, yes, that would be wonderful. And it’s, do you see how that framework can be used. I just used it for one example. However, I use it at the end of every chapter in every book, because it summarizes it, it reinforces it. And guess what? Now you have like a business card people put on their refrigerator, and they’re keeping you in sight, in mind, instead of out of sight, out of mind. 

Rob Marsh: This is a technique that should be familiar to copywriters anyway, because we are our very jobs depend on our ability to take somebody from the pain or the problem or, you know, the concern that they have right now, and help them see how the product or service that we’re writing about is going to produce a transformation, a result a better future, right? And so you’re basically saying, draw it out and use it, you know, as part of the brainstorming session, the naming, you know, in the thinking process, as we’re trying to figure out, okay, how do we stand out? 

Sam Horn: Yeah, you see, Rob, I knew that this would resonate with you, because it is part of what you do. And we talked a little bit in advance about infobesity, right? Everybody over on the left put infobesity won’t want, won’t want. Gone right? We can’t earn a living if we’re spewing in obesity. We’re not going to get deals. We’re not going to get results. No, we’re not going to earn our living. Over on the right is the eyebrow test. Okay? If, if, in that first 60 seconds, even someone who is skeptical or busy is now motivated to pay attention. So would you like a specific technique that that your community can use around that? Yes, please. Okay, so juxtapose it over on the left, put infobesity Over on the right. Put eyebrow test over on the left. Put tell, over on the right. Put ask. Now we both believe you give a real life example to show how this works in the real world. Then we unpack it, we reverse engineer it so it’s replicable, correct? Yeah. Okay, so here’s the real life example. I was pitch coach for Springboard enterprises, and they’ve helped female entrepreneurs generate 91 billion in funding and valuation contracts at this point. So Kathleen calendar was one of my clients, and she came to me, Sam, I got good news and bad news. I said, what’s the good news? She said, I’m speaking in front of a room full of inventors and investors at the Paley Center in New York. I said, that’s fantastic. I said, what’s the bad news? She said, I’m going at 230 and I only have 10 minutes. She said, Sam, you can’t say anything in 10 minutes. I said, Kathleen, you don’t have 10 minutes. You have about 60 seconds. 60 seconds. That’s right, they will have heard 16 other it’s 230 in the afternoon. Well, Rob, here is the 62nd opening we came up with that not only one. Kathleen calendar of pharma jet millions in funding. She was business week’s most promising social entrepreneur of that year. So now first perspective, infobesity on the left. Do you know how Kathleen used to introduce what she had invented her business, etc. Ready? I don’t, yeah, tell me. It’s a medical delivery device for subcutaneous inoculations. It’s a what look. Oh, no, those eyebrows, right? She just explained it. She told me what it was. And a lot of times it’s confusing, right? We don’t get it. We’re gone. Now listen to this 62nd opening ready. Did you know there are 1.8 billion vaccinations given every year? Did you know up to a third of those are given with re used needles? Did you know we’re spreading and perpetuating the very diseases we’re trying to prevent. Imagine if there were a painless one use needle for a fraction of the current cost. You don’t have to imagine it. We’re doing it. She’s off and running. Are your eyebrows up? 

Rob Marsh: Yeah. I mean, it almost sounds like the beginning of a TED Talk. 

Sam Horn: Well, hey, I work with a lot of people on their TEDx talks, or South by Southwest talks, the UN talks, or Davis talks. And I cannot tell you, you know, how many people are gone in the first 62nd this talk we’re going to it’s like, yeah, no. So you are right now. Let’s unpack it, because everyone watching, listening. I want you to think right now. In fact, Rob, what is something? Are you giving a presentation in the near future, or you have a campaign, what’s a priority? And we’re going to do this in real time. 

Rob Marsh: I don’t have a formal presentation coming up, but I am actually going to be working on a workshop on AI Artificial Intelligence and how to use it to create custom gpts for writers in their business. So basically, to help some of that repetitive task stuff get done by an AI, as opposed to having to go through that ourselves. Okay, so that was a pretty boring way to talk about my, my upcoming workshop. 

Sam Horn: Yes, well, we’re going to do, we’re going to go over to intrigue. We’re going to go over to eyebrows up, right? So, first, here are the three steps, so that everyone who’s listening and watching can do this for their priority while we’re doing it for your priority. Okay, step number one. What are three? Did you know questions you can ask with startling statistics that get eyebrows up and people are thinking, Where do I find these startling we just, we just Google it, right? It’s like, you know, and we need to put in what are surprising statistics about this demographic, about this product, about this problem. And our goal is, if we’re an expert and it’s like, oh, I didn’t know, is that bad? Oh, I didn’t know it’s getting worse. Oh, I didn’t know that many people being affected. I didn’t know it cost that much. I didn’t know it took that long. Do you see? Oh, right. Now, furthermore, since we’re asking instead of telling, we just turn this into a two way conversation instead of a one way conversation, right? Explaining is one way, you know, no, asking is two way right. 

Step two, use the word imagine. The word imagine pulls people out of their preoccupation, because they’re picturing our point. They are seeing what we’re saying. And when something confusing becomes clear, fact right over on the left, confusing, over on the right, clear. Do you know what people say when something comes confusing becomes crystal clear. I finally understand it now, or I get it. Oh, I see now, really, literally and figuratively, they see it now, right? That’s the power of that word imagine now link it still step two, link the word imagine with three benefits or advantages of what it is you’re recommending or requesting. For example, go back to calendar, you know, Kathleen. Think about her decision makers. What are they worried about? Thinking about? Well, they’re thinking about those reused needles, so we made it one use. They’re thinking about painful inoculations. We made it painless. Most decision makers care about money, so we made it a fraction of the current price. Do you see how, in a world of infobesity, we crafted a one sentence? UVP, unique value. Where people going sounds good. Who wouldn’t want that in one sentence? Right? And plus, there’s continuity, right? Because we’re referencing back what we said in the beginning, third step. Write down these words right now. You don’t have to imagine it. We’re doing it now you come in with your precedence and your evidence to show this isn’t pie in the sky. This isn’t speculative. This is a done deal. Here’s a testimonial from a satisfied client. Here’s some recent a recent article that talks about your company or about this, this new advance, right? 

So you’ve got the three steps. Now, let’s do it for you. All right. All right, okay, so the workshop. What’s your title of the workshop? 

Rob Marsh: I don’t have a title just because, again, I just started thinking about this earlier today, but I would probably say it’s something like how to create a custom GPT for copywriters. 

Sam Horn: Yeah, very basic, right. Okay, so we start there and now, Rob, how about we have an agreement and I do this with all my clients and audiences. If I say something, if it is in alignment with your vision, voice and values, you’re welcome to run with it. If I say something, you think, No. Doesn’t work for me, interrupt me, and we’ll tweak it or toss it, okay?

Rob Marsh: Okay, sounds great. 

Sam Horn: Okay, because I’m gonna jump in with both feet here. So how to something once again? How to what? 

Rob Marsh: How to create a custom GPT for your writing business, or for your copywriting business, for your writing business. 

Sam Horn: Okay, now I know you’re a copywriter, so there are pros and cons of how to right is, the pros, of course, is that people feel they’re going to get taught. And in the old days, a how to book was a business book was, you know, and there’s a promise of deliverables there. Well, in today’s infobesity world, sure, sometimes people don’t want to be taught, right? And how to if they’re low on bandwidth. So let’s see if we can play with that and and let’s use the word surprising, right? Not even seven, seven steps two, which is still prescriptive, still for someone who’s low on bandwidth is feeling like it’s eight o’clock. At night, I just don’t have the energy, but surprising ways, right? Unexpected. Do you see we’ve just up leveled it, we curated the content a little bit. Now we have a creative chat GBT for your business, but let’s put a verb in there. Is this growing? Is this scaling? Is this future proofing, what would be a verb that would pop that

growing is probably good. There’s also probably some ideas just around creativity or coming up with, you know, more options. So and growing kind of lends itself to that kind of an idea too, right?

Okay, all right. Now we’re playing, you know, this is, this is like word chess, right? We’re thinking a couple of moves ahead. So we have one option of using a verb, like growing your business. Now we’re back to what George Washington Carver said. He said, When you can do a common thing in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world. So we go back and you ask yourself, is growing charged enough, right? Is it? Is it got? Because John Carter, out of Harvard, said, You know what the number one prerequisite is for change? 

Rob Marsh: I don’t know what he said, no.

Sam Horn:  A sense of urgency. Okay, so does that have urgency? The word growing, right? Rob Marsh: Yeah, probably not, because growing your business is almost a cliche in itself, right? We’ve heard that now for 20 years. So it’s gonna fade in with everything else that’s out there. 

Sam Horn: Okay, now, by the way, this is why we ink it when we think it. You had a little pop opportunity there, because the cliche is, grow your business. Maybe you would say, flow your business, right? How to flow your business? Right? Now, that’s a LinkedIn blog, right? Because we’re riffing off what. And just like jazz musicians riff off common chords to make uncommon music. You could do that. So that’s an opportunity. Let’s come back here to no surprising ways to create chat, chat gbts. What did you use? Form systems? What? Well,

Rob Marsh: I said a custom GPT to get… 

Sam Horn: Yeah, custom GPT, custom GPT. Okay, is it, I’m just playing, is it a three step custom GPT? What is it?

Rob Marsh: It could be. It really depends on what process we’re trying to automate with the GPT. So it’s, it’s, I mean, it’s pretty easy to do, but you have to understand what it is that you’re building from start to finish. 

Sam Horn: I understand, and I also think we have an opportunity here, because a lot of people in this space, even in the title, we want people to say, I haven’t seen that before. It’s specific enough, if it’s pragmatic enough, it’s intriguing. It got my attention. And even in the title, I already have a little trust in faith that this is going to be an ROI, right? And as you know, numbers matter, right? It’s seven habits. Stephen Covey, you know, it’s four agreements, etc. So if you say surprising ways to create a customized three step chat. GPT, you know, or something like that. Do you see we up level the promise, a little bit in terms of the deliverable, all right. And now, now we’ve switched to to something your business. We need a bottom line. It is to and boy Rob, every day I fight not going over to the dark side, you know, because we know all the gimmicks, right? You know, just for today. Just count, you know, only for you. I try not to do that. I really try to be in integrity, honor, psychology, and do it in a way that I’m not pulling a bait and switch on people, right? So, now we come down to, it’s not just for your business, right? It’s for your business to do what, or for you to do what? Run with that for a second. 

Rob Marsh: Let’s say that we were building a custom GPT for a research process. When you talk about the three questions, the questions might be something like, do you realize, or did you know, the average copywriter spends 20 hours researching before they can even start writing? And then the promise of this GPT might be to reduce that from 20 hours to 10 minutes, right? That almost sounds like too big of a switch to be believable, but it literally can do that kind of a shift. So that kind of a promise. Now you can start to see, oh, now this opens up so much more opportunity for me to spend my time actually writing copy, creating the thing that I want to do, coming up with better ideas, right?

Sam Horn: I love what you’re doing. In fact, you’re already coming up with your three questions. So, did you know the average copywriter… we’re not going to say average copywriter, right? It’s in most copywriters, whatever. Most copywriters spend a minimum of 20 plus hours researching their project, their campaign, or something, right? That, Oh, wow. And now we’re going to go another. Did you know we’re not going to duplicate that? So what is something else that gets my eyebrows up? 

Rob Marsh: So another idea that might be interesting is the importance of the headline. So I think David Ogilvy is famous for saying that 80% of an ad’s punch or power comes from the headline, but most copywriters literally spend no time or only write one headline, right? So there’s a question that I would probably build around that idea where there’s not enough effort going into this one singularly important part of an ad sales letter, email, whatever. 

Sam Horn: That’s excellent, because, see, it’s like pearls on a necklace, right? It doesn’t just say the same thing a different way. It jumps to a whole new aspect, a whole new ROI win of this, right? So for you to say something like, do you know we’re just playing but do you know the majority of copywriters spend less than 60 seconds on their headline, when that can determine whether or not something gets read. I’m getting too long here, but we need to give that teeth, right, right? When that is the most important part of their campaign, or something like that, right? So, how would you craft that sentence with the metric, but the consequence of it,

yeah. I mean, this is the kind of thing that should take us hours to come up with. But, you know, you’re not putting your time on the most important task is really the idea that I want to get to.

Okay, so since this is our first chance to get them, we’re going to say 20 hours, you know, research, you know. Did you know that most copywriters spend seconds on their headline not understanding it can undermine everything they’re trying to do, or something like that, right? We need that consequence now. What’s the third? 

Rob Marsh: I’m not sure exactly how to word this, but I would probably be asking a question around the fact that this is an artificial intelligence tool, and most of us don’t know how to use them to get the results that make them effective or make them usable. So you know, maybe the question is, did you know that you could use an AI tool to do all of this for you in minutes, or to get the kinds of results that it would take us hours to get before something along those lines? And again, I know I’m being too wordy here, too, but that’s the idea we draft and then we craft, right? So now we’re going to save that for the imagine, right? Because that’s when Imagine if you could do all that in seconds. Imagine if you could get better results. So that’s part of our imagine. We’re going to come back to this and and did you know something about, did you know many copywriters are using AI generators ineffectively and inefficiently, you know, and in a way that actually sabotages their success, or something like that, right? 

Okay, so see, boom, boom, boom. Now, imagine if there were a way for you to use AI effectively and efficiently to to reduce your research from 20 hours to and it’s nice to do 20 hours, 20 minutes, you know, or 10 minutes. So it’s alliterative, you know? And the next one was headline, and could generate commercially viable, clever headlines that would never have occurred to you otherwise, or something like that, right? 

Imagine it. That’s what we’re going to cover in our 60 minute workshop, or that’s what I’m going to cover in this Youtube series or something. And look at all that you’ve done in 60 seconds.

Rob Marsh: I really like this process because, like you were saying at the very beginning, everything fades into the background. And it only takes an idea to show up one time before it’s copied endlessly. And so thinking about this stuff over and over, every time you relaunch a product, every time that you show up on stage, it’s almost like you need to go through this process again just to make sure that it still stands out, that it still catches attention. And that it’s not becoming the cliche. All cliches were original once, but by the fifth or sixth or 100th time we see it, now it’s the cliche and and we ignore it again.

Sam Horn: I tell you, we cannot rest on our creative laurels. The good news is it’s an intellectual Disneyland, you know, Katherine Graham said to do what you love and feel that it matters. How could anything be more fun? So see, I take my notebook everywhere with me. I mean, I’m out on a stream trail walk. I got my notebook, you know. And so when, when I hear something that gets my eyebrows up, I write it down, or I record it to capture it in the moment, because they don’t call them fleeting thoughts for nothing. And if we do that, this becomes a skill. And I tell you, for me, it’s permanent employment, because AI cannot do this in and cannot do it in the moment in a unique way that at least give someone a competitive edge. I’ll give you an example. I’m speaking at conscious capitalism, and when I do a book signing, normally, you know, people stand in line and they clutch their book and they don’t talk to each other. And if you talk to a couple people, they leave because it’s going to be too long before we get to them, right? So I always form a little community, and we brainstorm, strategize people’s projects. So here’s a man, it gives me my question is always so you know, what are you excited about achieving this year? So it makes it topical and timely. And so this man said, Well, I’d like to do more paid speaking. I said, Great. I said, What’s your topic? He said, leadership. I said, Uh oh, right. Common topic, 1000s and 1000s. So if he wants to get more paid, speaking on leadership, even if he has a great platform of credentials, there’s still 1000s of people out there. So juxtaposing over on the right is his topic leadership. 

Now I ask another question I ask all my clients. It’s like, what do you do when you’re not working, right? Because if you’re a pilot, if you play pickleball, you know, if you ride horses, if you coach or whatever, he said, I host salons where we do Shakespeare sonnets. Well, that’s interesting, right? Yeah, that’s different, right? So there’s potential there, right? So the way my brain works, because I have integrated all of these processes. So it’s just how I roll these days, I’m thinking, okay, a Shakespeare leadership, Shakespeare leadership. Oh, and I Einstein laugh. I laughed out loud. I mocked up a book cover, and I said, okay, I’m going to show you in the group something, and if you like it, go to GoDaddy right now, because if no one has taken this, you just got yourself a million dollar brand name book title and presentation title, all in seconds. I said, ready, and I showed it to him, and it said to lead or not to lead. Guess what? Rob, no one had that in all these years of speaking and writing about leadership, no one had ever said to lead or not to lead. So the next day, he came back grinning from ear to ear. Got that for 12 bucks, and it’s because we’re using these processes, and it’s not hard work, Rob. It is great fun.

Rob Marsh: We could talk about these techniques all day long. It’d probably be better for people just to buy the book and, you know, to start going through them. But you also started talking about how you’ve made this your career. Can we talk a bit about this with I mean, we’re just talking about this AI workshop. A lot of people are threatened by AI. I’m tempted to think that AI can help with some of this kind of thinking. But what are your thoughts on this, and what we as creatives bring to the table? You know, if I wanted to be the next Sam Horn, you obviously are filling that role, so there’s no need for another Sam Horn. But if Rob Marsh wanted to do some things like what Sam Horn does, helping people come up with ideas, helping people stand out with their messaging, and really tightening it up like that. What do we need to bring to the table so that we’re not replaced by the content bots?

Sam Horn: Okay, so in a moment, we’ll talk about AI, because I understand you’re using it and almost as part, oh, is using it ethically, right? Using it efficiently. So we’ll get to that in a second. However, the answer to the first question is to Rod Laver your career. Now, what are you a tennis player? By any chance, Rob:

Rob Marsh: I wouldn’t call myself a tennis player. I’ve played tennis. I’ve played pickleball. I enjoy tennis. Let’s say that… I wouldn’t call myself a player. 

Sam Horn: Well, you’re a pickleball player, and Rod Laver, as you may know, won the Grand Slam of Tennis twice. So the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open, I had the previledge of working with Rod Laver on Hilton Head Island. So we would put on tennis camps, national tennis camps, and he would be showing someone how to volley, and he would go, it’s like this. People go, flop, flop, flop, flop. He looked at him. Was like, No, it’s like this. You know, crisp, crisp, crisp, crisp, flop, flop. See, it had been so long, Rob since he had gone back and even thought about the mechanics, right? He just thinks, no, you know what? He’s playing tennis, chess. Okay, they’re over there. I’m going to pull him out of position. I’m going to drop it. 

Rob Marsh: You know all that curser of knowledge we forget what it’s like to be new at something. 

Sam Horn: We’re going to remember it because there in lies the key to our organic creativity. So I’m going to ask people when they get an idea, when they come up with a Winning Campaign, when they get a yes to a project that they take a few minutes to reverse engineer it. All right, how did I turn that skeptic into a believer? How did I get that amount of money for that contract right? Because if we start staying alert to our process, and if we codify it so it is replicable, we make shortcuts available to others. So what can AI not do? Ai can’t be in your life where, where you’re reading something and the passage lights you up, and your mind riffs off it and comes up with something in the moment that’s relevant to your audience or your campaign or whatever. And you write about that because you’re first to market with it now, unfortunately, people run with it these days, you know, but you were there first, and at least you can leverage the originality and the creativity and get known for doing it for your clients, because you have developed that muscle and that ability and that way of having your own organic creativity and just feeding it into a machine and letting them do it for us and have cognitive creative decline. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, it makes total sense. Obviously, we have to have the experiences that we bring to the table in order for this to even have a starting point, right?

Sam Horn: It’s so funny you say that because, okay, 60 second story, but it really does have a point. So I just finished a very intensive consult and my son, Andrew called, and he sensed something in my voice, and he said, what’s up, mom? I said, Andrew, I’m so exhausted I don’t know how I’m gonna get on that plane tonight. I’ve got to fly back to DC, back to San Francisco in a couple days for a keynote. I don’t know how I’m going to do it. Well, thank heaven for Andrew, because he said, Mom, there’s something about you I don’t understand. You have your own business. You can do anything you want, and you’re not taking advantage of it. Well, out of the mouths of 20 somethings.

I gave away 90% of what I owned, and I took my business on the road for a year by the water, and I interviewed people, and it ended up being, you know, some days, not a day in the wake book. Here’s the thing. The phrase right now is like, Oh, I couldn’t take time off work, right? Right? Not taking time off work. It’s taking time on life, right? See, I went places. I swam in Walden Pond, you know? I swam with Zach the dolphin. I sailed the Chesapeake Bay, right? All these new experiences. I’m riffing off them. I’m interviewing people. Are you happy? If so? Why? If not, why not? I’m codifying their answers so I have anecdotal evidence. Wrote a book: Someday is Not a Day of the Week, speaking on that. Now, before I went, I announced that at the National Press Club, and three people came up to me afterwards, and one said, Sam, are you sick? Because, see, she was assuming I had to be in my deathbed to do something like,

right? This is that bucket list trip that. I’m on a mission to change people’s mind. The next one said, Sam, is this a midlife crisis? I said, No, it’s midlife clarity and and the third was a big investor from Tiger 21 and he said, Sam, you better not let this story get out, because if your clients and meeting planners find out you’re off the grid, you’re going to be out of sight, out of mind, and you’re going to come back and your business won’t be waiting for you when you’re ready for it. So I had kind of a crisis of conscience. 

I am risking everything I built for the last 30 years. Was this frivolous, right? And what I discovered is, what you and I are talking about is when we intentionally immerse ourselves in an intriguing life, we meet people where we haven’t met before. You know, we are going places we haven’t been before, and we marry all over it. We are coming up with creative observations inside. Epiphanies, and we become known for that, and once again, it’s H, I, human intelligence, and not AI,

Rob Marsh: Once you have that baseline, though, that’s what AI actually can help magnify, because now AI can help us make some of those connections, because it’s so good at looking at massive data, and our brains are really good at focusing on somewhere between one and seven things at a time or whatever. And so when you can marry a wide range of experiences like that and start to use AI to find some of those connections, and then that spurs even more H, I human intelligence as we’re thinking about it. That’s where the power of that tool works with us to produce great work.

Sam Horn: I guess you can tell I’m a little bit on a mission around this. And here’s why, you know, I’ve got a pretty good community on LinkedIn. And I would say 95% of the content on LinkedIn these days is AI generated, yeah, and you know that that lib Jen and made a took millions of books without permission, without attribution and without compensation. They took nine of my books, they just fed it into AI. Thought leaders that I really used to respect are using regurgitated content that does not belong to them, it’s on the backs of other people’s proprietary AI that was not compensated, no respect to copyright law. So you and I both agree that AI can be an efficient tool when used ethically and before we relegate our original thinking to a machine that we become reliant upon so we cannot do it ourselves. You and I are talking about longevity and about the ethics of our trade, and furthermore, the intellectual Disneyland of getting good at this, because it is our sustainability, right? If we rely too much on AI, we are one of many if, if we really want to be doing this five years from now, 10 years from now, and people cannot compete with us because they’ve lost the ability to do this, then, then we are doing it, I believe, for all the right reasons. And I’m a business woman. So I’m not just talking about doing this ethically altruistically, you know. I’m talking about with my business head on and with my individual head on, that we make a commitment. You know, we talk about Rod Laver. Rod Laver spent 1000s of hours working on his fitness and on his strokes, etc. The equivalent in our industry of copywriting, creative content, etc, is that we continue to put in our 10,000 hours. We don’t abdicate it or delegate it.

Rob Marsh: I don’t think that the US Open would be the same if we had two robots hitting tennis balls to each other. It might be kind of fun to watch for a minute or two, but without the back stories, without the effort, you know, without all of the things that go into making those players human, we lose a lot. Well, we only have a few more minutes. I’m actually really curious about your writing process. So as I’ve gone through a couple of your books, it feels to me like you’re a bit of a collector. You’re always collecting quotes and ideas, and then somehow they all come together as a book. When you’re ready to sit down and write, we just talk about how you approach a project like that. How do the ideas for books occur to you? And then how do you go about making them happen?

Sam Horn: Okay, well, two, there are two questions there. One about, how do books occur to me, etc? We’ve all heard pick a lane, right? We understand that, you know, the riches are in the niches, etc. And I understand that I just have elected not to do that, you know what? Because I, quite frankly, I like being more of a renaissance creative, you know. So I write about Tongue Fu. I write about what’s holding you back, about ConZentrate, about Take the bully by the Horns, about Talking on Eggshells, Pop, etc. Because I have elected to move on and explore topics that I think are tangibly useful to us as human beings. When I write about them, they’re not saturated. I don’t read other people’s books on my topic, because I don’t want to wake up at three 3am with a great idea. It’s not my idea, it’s Stephen Covey’s idea, right? So this is organic process. So once I come up with the topic that’s congruent, it lights me up. I feel it’s not saturated. I think that it will add value. Then I Mary Oliver my life. I really like street interviews Rob. I talk with almost all my Uber drivers, and I talk with people and I. Ask questions. In fact, I have a 10 W quiz when I’m going to do a deep dive into a topic, you know? So, let me ask. Let me do it for you again. What are you working on a book right now? A new book? 

Rob Marsh: Oh, I’ve always got like, five or six ideas for books. So, yeah. So, of course, I’m always working on something.

Sam Horn: Okay, so like, what’s one of the working titles or topics of your books? 

Rob Marsh: Let me give you the title that I’ve recently outlined. So I want to help writers build their authority, because again, it’s really hard. You know, when there’s a million copywriters out there, it’s hard to not just capture attention, but to get people to trust you if you don’t have some kind of authority attached to your name or business.

Sam Horn: Excellent. Okay, so this is our topic—trusted writer authority, right? Developing ways, you know, a 10 week, way 10 step seven step, way whatever, to establishing your trusted writer authority. All right. So now, if we were going to do the 10 W quiz that you do everywhere you go, and you’re thinking, well, this waitress isn’t a writer, oh, but she could have a wonderful insight, right? Sure. So the first question is always, what is the definition of this? Because you could interview 10 people and they’re going to give you 10 different answers for what it means to have trusted writer authority, right? Yeah, for sure, that’s number one. So we have clarity around our terms, and it may be very you have yours however you honor other people’s interpretations of it. So you’re bringing them along from the get go, and you’re asking, right? 

All right. Number two is like, so who is a walking, talking role model of this, right? So let’s go to your benchmark. Who do you think is exhibit a shining example of this? 

Rob Marsh: Historically, probably the best is David Ogilvy, who is the one copywriter who’s ever lived that was, you know, on nighttime, you know, television shows, pretty much everybody knew who he was, right? 

Sam Horn: I love that because, see, you already started to unpack it. He did what I call he jumped the genre, right? He wasn’t just an ad guy. He was his business guy, who’s a visionary. He was a thought leader all that, right? And a very elegant and classy guy too, right? 

Okay. So see, you already have in your mind what it took and what your values are. Do you see how one question is like a little war shark test, right? It’s like, okay, I want to jump the genre. I want to be an elegant, classy guy. I want to be a thought leader in my space, right? So do you see one question, who is a benchmark, who’s an exhibit or a poster child of this? Just reveals so much. Now, question three, who is not a role model of this? Who is the opposite of that? Now, who might that be?

Rob Marsh: So this is a starving writer who’s operating at a content farm. They’re working for pennies per word, or even less. They’re struggling because people don’t know who they are. So even if they do reach out to prospects, they get ignored because they’re not familiar.

Sam Horn: See, do you see you hear your copywriting itself, don’t you?

Rob Marsh: For sure? Yeah. I’ve thought quite a bit about, you know what, what needs to go into the book. So some of those answers are maybe coming a little easier for me than somebody who might be thinking through a different idea at the moment. But I totally get how this process leads you to an outcome.

Sam Horn: And look, content and context, right? Because we’re not just coming up with benchmarks, who you can reference throughout the book with attribution. You know, by honoring them, you are context. You’re once again, coming up with values of all the people you could have picked. Here’s the criteria, our ingredients that are meaningful to you. Now we go to who, you know, who does not do this. Now the copy is, once again, we go back to the you know, are you working at a content farm? Are you getting pennies or whatever? Do you struggle to make your copy, you know, land, a deal or something? So see, you’re now. 

The next question is, when is a time you had trusted writer authority? Put me in the scene where you think, yep, that’s what that looks like.

Rob Marsh: So me specifically as the author of this book?

Sam Horn: Yeah, because we’re working on your book. 

Rob Marsh: Okay, so that probably happened in 2018 when we launched our first ever event, invited about 18 other well known copywriters tto come join us on stage. And because they’re there, several of whom were A-list Copywriters, literally making hundreds of 1000s of dollars, maybe even more. And because we’re there on the stage with them, everybody in the audience is saying, You, we recognize. You are part of this illustrious group,

Sam Horn: As the curator of the group, the organizer of the group, right? So it’s definitely, as you said, it’s not just status that you’re one of them. You’re actually the convener of them, right, right? That goes in your book, too, right? Because if you’re talking about, you know, establishing trusted writer authority. And you reference an event where you convened the authorities, boom. That’s instant authority for you, right, as a thought leader in the space, someone respected, etc. 

Now the next question, when is a time you didn’t…

Rob Marsh: I mean, there are a lot a lot of examples of that, but when I have felt frustrated, you know, reaching out cold pitching clients or cold pitching prospects, not clients, because they weren’t becoming clients, you know, worried that I was, you know, going to run out of money before. You know, somebody said, yes, those kinds of experiences, and yeah, there that’s happened, you know, at various times in my career.

Sam Horn: And now see, as you know, for writing to resonate these days, we need to be relatable, and that often means being vulnerable, right? It’s not just all our success stories. And then I did this, and then I did this, it’s like, well, in that time I didn’t get that, that contract I was counting on that time I walked out of the room and I knew the answer was going to be no, right, right? So we can share honestly the times that it did not work out, and then we reverse engineer it. And I realized, you know what, I did most of the talking. And my mom used to say, whoever does the most talking has the most fun, you know. And my goal in a pitch is that they do 70% of the talking, you know, and I do 30% and I did something like that, right? Okay, so it pulls out a real life story. We’re vulnerable and relatable and honest and true and accessible, not just the expert. We’re accessible. People now feel okay, right? If you’re going to go first, then I’m going to do it too. You just gave me permission to be honest, instead of perfect, right? Yeah. So the next question is, Why is it important for us to be a trusted writer authority?

Rob Marsh: Well, it leads to better clients, higher paying projects and more opportunities so that we can have, you know, the things that we want in our lives, whatever that looks like. You know, more time with family, more time to travel, you know, what? Again, to reach our goals. Sam Horn: So I’m sure that you codify that, right? So here are all the benefits. Here are all the advantages here, all the bottom line. ROI, and now, guess what the next question is,

Rob Marsh: I’m not sure I can. Is it going to be something around you know, how do you get there?

Sam Horn: Almost. It’s… why don’t we do that? If we know it’s a career maker, if we know it’s what people want, if we know that it’s important, then why aren’t we doing it? So now just speculate. If people go, I know it’s important, but I can’t do it because I don’t have an MBA. I can’t do it because… whatever. What would be three or four reasons that are the barriers to entry?

Rob Marsh: Number one is always going to be confidence. You know, I don’t believe that I can do it. I’ve never done this before. Another one would be, I don’t have the connections or the network that successful people do. A third one might be, I’m not sure that I know enough about the thing that I’m doing. So because I’m talking to copywriters, content writers, they’re thinking I’m not sure that I know enough about copywriting to be able to lead and say I can get this done for my clients. And closely related to that, even if they have done it, maybe they don’t have, they don’t feel like they have the proof that they can deliver on the promises that they want to make. 

Sam Horn: So see, the book is writing itself, again, isn’t it? You can see a chapter, once again, you codify that, because it’s like you become a docent of your body of work. You say, Well, in my 20 years of working with copywriters from all around the world, from countries like this and this and this, from, you know, multi million dollar copywriters to people just getting started. Do you know what I’ve discovered? Right question, two way conversation reveal right is that here are the seven most frequently given reasons that are barriers to entry, that people think it’s not an option for them, and when you codify it, if you don’t name it, you don’t own it, right? So if this is just in paragraph form, people do not perceive its proprietary and they will either skim or scan it, or they’ll run with it. If it’s your name. The seven reasons why people don’t whatever. At least scrupulous people will honor your name that this is codified proprietary IP, and they will reference you now, and it’s positioning you as an expert, all because you’re reporting back on your discoveries and your anecdotal data, right? Yeah, all right, then you know, when I bet you go to conferences and like, the first question is, so what’s a challenge you’re facing? And it’s like there’s something called the evolution of intimacy, folks. And if the first question is to tell us what’s wrong with our life, that’s like a breach. To me. It’s a breach of trust. It’s a one down. I just put you down. My first question to you was, what’s wrong with you in your life?

Rob Marsh: Nobody likes starting with a failure.

Sam Horn: Exactly. So see now, even in this quiz, we honor that human understanding of honoring people, and we say, so what’s your best pest? Best piece of advice, right? What have you learned if you’re going to give advice to someone starting out in this career, you know, even if you’ve only been in it six months, what is something you’ve learned that’s a non negotiable? So let’s honor their intelligence and their expertise, right? And give them an opportunity to contribute your thoughts. I can see you. You’re about to say something.

Rob Marsh:  So this isn’t necessarily my thinking in the book, but I’m getting this from potential readers and then reflecting that book back inside the book, correct?

Sam Horn: You just said something so important, because, once again, I don’t read other people’s books, right? So when I wrote Tongue Fu, I didn’t read all the books under the sun. On conflict resolution. I interviewed moms, I interviewed lawyers. I was doing so many public workshops at that point. So when people would come in, well, I agree with you, but you don’t work for my boss, you know? And then they tell a story, and then we talk about how we could turn around. And many times they would get back in touch with the success or with what happened, with their permission, I use those stories so you are right. This isn’t a way to generate original content through interviews, where we’re asking people for their best practices, their interpretations. And guess what? Now you look at your book, it’s not a one voice book. It’s not one person sharing your recommendations or success stories. It’s like, you know, it’s a single mom of three kids, you know, it’s the multi million dollar CEO. And it makes the book more relatable, real and one of a kind, because it’s not a one voice book, yeah, yeah.

Rob Marsh: It makes a ton of sense. So is that all of the questions?

Sam Horn: Number number nine and number 10, what do you know that I’m going to do a workshop on this, or I’m writing a book? What is something we could discuss in this book that would really be worthwhile, right? Yeah, and Rob you and I’ve been doing this for a while, it makes my day when someone says, Well, you know what I’m dealing with. Or, you know this happened? Yes, someone was teasing me, and they said, can’t you take a joke? And I It felt so wrong, and I just didn’t know what to say, you know. So ask people, What could we cover in this book that would make it, you know, worthwhile reading? And they will, they’ll give you the answers to the test, won’t they? Right? And now, once again, you’re monitoring your answers. Maybe all the answers are about money, and maybe you’re going to talk more about content or business stuff, but you realize, seems what everyone cares about is money, so I better stack the deck and put that first right. Because if I think I’m going to talk about money in the last third of the book after this. No, no, they just told you that’s not their priority. They won’t wait for the last third of the book.

Rob Marsh: And the final question.

Sam Horn: Final question is, Who do you recommend I interview on this? Okay? And it’s so wonderful, Rob. Because, you know, people say, Well, John Mackey, who is founder of Whole Foods, gave the cover endorsement of my Talking on Eggshells book. So I had interviewed Mickey Agarwal for the book, and I said, Who else do you think would be a great interview? And she said, Well, John Mackey would be great. Well, I interviewed John and he ended up giving the cover endorsement for the book. So, boy, is that a payoff. 

Rob Marsh: That’s fantastic. You. I mean, you’ve given me two workshops in this one interview. Amazingly helpful for me, but also just seeing inside your process and the way you think, the way your brain works. I know I’ve mentioned the book Pop a couple of times. I honestly think that copywriters, content writers, this should be on the shelf, because when you are looking for ideas and how to stand out, just the tools that you give in the book, we’re getting my mind thinking I you know, as I’m reading through the book, I’m hopping online, looking for cliches, for ideas that. I work with things that I’m thinking about, and so we’ll, like I said, We’ll link to it in the show notes. But if somebody wants to follow you, Sam, get you know, in touch with you, or even come and hear you speak someplace, where should they go so that they can get inside your world?

Sam Horn: Well, first, I really hope that we connect on LinkedIn, that’s my life. It’s my lab and and often, at least once or twice a week, I’m on LinkedIn sharing something that just happened in a riff off of it, or a technique. One of my clients just got back in touch and said, Wow, look at how this works. So check me out on LinkedIn. Sam Horn, Intrigue Agency on LinkedIn, and then on my website. You know, we’ve got our clarity weekends where people come and do a deep dive into what they want clarity about, or my coaching or and I do love to speak for groups. So if they’re saying, Wow, we should have her come in and speak to our group, reach out to me. It’d be wonderful to hear from you.

Rob Marsh: Thanks so much, Sam for just sharing so much of your knowledge and your ideas. And I’m really looking forward to sharing this with our audience.

Sam Horn: Thank it’s a joy. Kudos to you for the work you do.

Rob Marsh: Thanks to Sam horn for walking through several of the techniques that she talks about in her book pop. I have links to her book in the show notes, and highly recommend you pick up a copy if you want to get better at attracting and keeping attention. I’m especially grateful that she took real ideas and worked through them a bit. We talk a lot about ideas on this show, but actually working through them live shows a different level of application and helps you, the listeners, see how to apply the insights that she shared on the show. Again, Sam’s book does a lot of this and is worth putting on your shelf.

When it comes to getting attention, there are a couple of workshops inside the copywriter underground on creating hooks and writing great leads that will help you grab attention so you can move your prospects from where they are to where they need to be in order to buy the products and services that you write about. You can find those workshops and playbooks at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. Be sure to check out the links in the show notes, get Sam’s book and connect with her online.

Stuff to check out:

The CopyHour Course
Gary Bencivenga’s Olive Oil Sales Page
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: What’s the best way to learn copywriting? Would it surprise you that handwriting great copy is possibly the most successful technique? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

There must be something like a thousand different courses for copywriters to learn how to write copy. And probably another thousand more that talk about content—as if it’s a separate skill set. And there are probably an additional thousand more free videos in places like YouTube that promise to teach you the skills you need to succeed as a copywriter. With that many choices out there, you would think the world would be crammed full of phenomenally skilled copywriters, but it’s not. This should tell us that not all courses or workshops that promise to teach writers how to write copy and content actually work.

So what does work? Is there a course out there that many copywriters talk about or recommend when it comes to writing engaging sales or conversion copy? And it turns out there is. One course recommended by people like Dan Ferrari, Chris Orzechowski, Elise Savaki, and hundreds of others is called CopyHour. Unlike many other courses, CopyHour focuses on handwriting great copy. Does that really work?

I asked Derek Johanson, the writer who created CopyHour to be my guest for this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast to answer questions like… why does hand-writing teach copy structure and pacing where other methods don’t appear to have the same level of success? 

We talked about the genesis and evolution of the CopyHour program and what it includes… things like writing great offers, writing headlines and bullets, and how Derek has improved the course over time.

Now I want to be upfront about something… I came to this interview as a bit of a skeptic when it comes to hand-writing copy. I’m all in on studying good examples of emails, sales pages, and other good copy. In fact, I have a swipe file with more than 500 different sales pages that I’ve saved to study… those swipes are part of The Copywriter Underground… But handwriting? I wasn’t so sure… I think Derek may have changed my mind. And if you’re a skeptic on this topic, you may want to hear what he says about the science of handwriting and learning. If you’re convinced by the end of this episode that you want to know more, you can go to thecopywriterclub.com/copyhour to find out more about Derek’s course. It’s open for new members the week this episode goes live, so check it out today… thecopywriterclub.com/copyhour

Before we get to my interview with Derek, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. You’ve heard me talk about how we’ve recently rebuilt The Underground dashboard to make finding the ideas and insights you need easier. But as I started recreating this new dashboard, it occurred to me that no one has time to watch more than 70 different workshops—even for those workshops that help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. So I’ve taken more than 30 of those workshops on finding clients, having sales calls, using A.I., building authority on LinkedIn, and dozens of others… and I’ve created playbooks that break down the ideas in the workshops into easy-to-follow steps. Each playbook is 3-5 pages long. You can read through one and implement the ideas in minutes. And then if you want more detail, you can watch the accompanying workshop. Each playbook even includes a checklist so you don’t miss any steps and can ensure you get things done. I’m working on completing playbooks for all of the workshops and training inside The Underground. They should all be ready by the end of April. You can get the first 30 or so right now by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

And now, my interview with Derek Johanson…

Derek, welcome to the podcast. I’m thrilled to have you here. Before we hit record, I was mentioning you know, you’re you’re talked about by everyone. Your program is relatively well known. But before we get into all of that, I’m curious: how did you get from the beginning of your career to where you are now, where you are literally on the lips of so many copywriters around the world?

Derek Johanson: Wow. Do you want the long version or the short version?

Rob Marsh: We’ve got an hour. So you tell me how much time we should use up in your story.

Derek Johanson:  Yeah. So, I mean, I can take you back to the very, beginning, oh, man. I got started online about 1516, years ago. And when I first got started, I was bouncing all around to different countries. Actually, I graduated from UCLA and kind of got out of school and was working in the music industry. I wanted to, I wanted to be in the music industry. I wanted to play music actually. But I’m going to tell you the long version, because I don’t really know how to short version, yeah, we might need more than an app. I don’t know. So I wanted to work in the music industry. And I got out of college, and. And immediately got a job and started working for a small publishing company.

And really had one of those moments where, I read The 4 Hour Work Week, and my brain just got destroyed by the possibility of traveling the world and working. I had traveled quite a bit before that, and I was like, Oh, my God, if I can make that work, I can do this, or if I can make that work, that I’ll be set right. If I can make $1,000 a month and live in Thailand, I will be golden. So that book destroyed my life. And then from there, I worked for about eight or nine months at that company, and I started looking around and looking at my bosses, who were all in their 50s, and nobody seemed happy. And I was like, You know what, this is where I’m headed if I don’t get out of here. So I saved up all my money or saved as much money as I possibly could. I shared a bedroom with my best friend at the time, and I actually had a mattress that whenever our landlord would come over, I had to shove into the closet because we weren’t supposed to have that many people in the house or in the room. So basically, I just saved every dollar I could and I quit, then started traveling.

I went down through Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Argentina, and all along the way, I was working with one of my other friends. We were just trying to figure out how we’re gonna make money as we’re going. So my first foray was into affiliate marketing. So I set up some blogs. I had a blog on acne. I had a blog on dating—just setting up kind of weird, random little websites, and started to actually make some money with those. And what I really didn’t understand at the time is what I was doing, and when I say a little bit of money, I really mean a little bit of money. What I didn’t realize was that I was actually doing copywriting.

And so fast forward a little bit. I came back to the States, and I met a guy in Thailand that I became fast friends with. He had a publishing company or wanted to start a publishing company. We called it dangerous publishing. We were trying to find “how-to” experts in various fields. We had an acting coach. We had a yoga instructor, like he was like a yoga master for yoga instructors, and a few other small clients, some in kind of on the business side, biz, op stuff. And so I traveled to Philadelphia, where he lived at the time. After we met in Thailand, he came back to where he was from, which was Philly. We started working together, building this publishing company. And then about, let’s see. About six months into that, we get a knock on our loft. We had this loft in Philadelphia, and my wife is in the other room right now, and she’s laughing because she was there. And we get a knock on our door in the morning. On a Saturday morning, I hear and then I hear keys jiggling, and our landlord runs into the house—I have problem with landlords. I’m just realizing, as I’m telling you the story—he runs into the apartment and he’s like, “David, where’s my money?” And at that time, I had no idea that there were any problems at all, but it turns out my then-business partner was funneling money from our business bank account into his own personal account to pay down a DUI.

I’m from San Diego. I live in San Diego. I was on the East Coast in Philly, 3000 miles from home, and I was still young at the time, like 24-25 in that range, and decided that this was not somebody that I wanted to be in business with. And so from there, I left that business, I basically dumped all of the money that I had into that business, and then I took a couple of clients that I had or that we had from that business. I started working with them and trying to help them grow and doing all of the online business activities and marketing activities that we’v all heard of. So setting up a blog. I was running Facebook ads, building landing pages, and writing sales pages. I wrote some VSLs and we actually started publishing some books on Kindle with a few different people. And so I realized that I was copywriting, right? Everything that I was doing, I hadn’t really figured that out. Up until that point. I had read some stuff by Carlton. I knew that. I knew what copywriting was, but I didn’t realize that everything I was doing centered around writing and writing copy. So I did that for about six or seven months. I considered it like marketing consulting, and I was working with an actor. Again, he had a business of acting course, and so I was helping him grow. I started to see the amount of money that we were making, I was making for him, and basically, I was running everything for him and not making a ton of money with it. So I was like, Huh, what could I do? How could I start something on my own?

And I knew that I really liked writing. I’d always loved writing, and I really enjoyed the copywriting that I was doing for that client. So what I did was I posted in this forum. It’s called the Dynamite Circlefor entrepreneurs that are trying to travel. And, yeah, sorry, Rob, this is the long, long version.

Rob Marsh: It’s all good. I’m there with you. I remember Dynamite Circle. It was a really big thing not too long ago.

Derek Johanson: Yeah, it’s still going. And so I posted in that forum. You know, I was in the kind of in the copywriting subgroup in there, responding to people talking about things. I was talking about, the Facebook ads that I was running and for that client. And so I eventually stumbled on Gary Halbert, the hands-on experience newsletter. So it was like that hit, you know, Gary Halbert newsletter, and then the title of it was hands-on experience. And in it, he talked about hand copying and handwriting. And so I thought, “Oh, that’s really interesting.” And I started to do it, the handwriting, and I really enjoyed doing it. It just kind of seemed to fire something new in my brain. I always felt very motivated and ready to write after I did it.

But the problem that I had is that I just kind of fell off from doing it. Certain ads that he recommended that we hand copy. Had no idea, like, why it was working. What was the point of all of this? Like the one about the expedition, I can’t even, I don’t know why. I can’t remember because I didn’t really end up hand-copying it all that much because I hated it. So there were little things like that happening. I started to want to hand copy more and realized that was kind of hard. And I was in this copywriting group, and I just kind of pitched a few of the people in it. John McIntyre was in that first group, and I just pitched some people. I said, “Hey, send me $20, and I’ll send you the ads, and I’m going to deliver it via email. I’ll just send it every single day. I’ll send you the ads to hand copy. I’ll set up a little forum, and we can talk about what we liked about the ads, why we thought they converted, and what made them good, right?” And so I set that up like, kind of woke up one morning and just or woke up like very early morning, woke up at like 3 am and was like, I’m gonna write a sales letter for this. And wrote a sales letter for the just basically like an accountability hand copying program, right? And the first time I put that out in the Dynamite Circle, I got 20 people, 20 people paid me 20 bucks. And I was like, maybe there’s something here. And so that first group went through, and everyone was just jazzed, really excited about it. I wasn’t teaching anything in those first, first few versions of copy hour. I was just literally sending ads to people. And everyone seemed to be getting great results. Just, like, wow, this is really cool. Like, I learned XYZ. John McIntyre—I don’t want to exactly put words in his mouth—but I think, literally, that inspired him to start his entire business going through and he became the autoresponder guy before auto responders were really even a thing.

And so from there, I kept my client work, but kept running different versions of CopyHour and just kind of honing and refining and making it better. Eventually, I got to the point where I decided I was just going to start training a little bit, adding in some extra exercises and structure to the entire program, like how to do leads. How do you write a headline? How do you write a lead? What do you think about what comes after the lead, which is the sales argument? How do you write the offer? How do you do bullets? And kind of added in my own flair to it based on personal experiences that I was having. And then from there, I just started adding in extra programs to CopyHour and in 2017 Copy Hour became a full, complete program. Then I quit my client work in 2017. So to get back to the very first question that you asked me is, why are people still talking about it? Handwriting works, number one. And number two, I’ve been working on it for 12 or 13 years now. And when you can iterate on a product for 12 or 13 years—which some people have told me, is a mistake, to keep updating and making things better or making things different—I’ve just continued to do that for 12 years. I’ve actually talked to a couple of different business coaches who said, stop editing this product, stop and focus on new stuff. And I’m like, this could be better. I can do this better. I can teach this better. And I think that’s probably why, 15 years later, people are still talking about it.

Rob Marsh: I want to get into what CopyHour is, but before we do that, I think I saw you mentioned that in your launches last year, you know both, both of your launches for this program were over six figures, which I think in the marketing space right now is a little bit of an anomaly. There are definitely programs out there that are doing well, but I’ve heard so many people talk for the last almost, almost two years now that, you know, course, sales are really hard, you know, and launch numbers are down, and you know, all this stuff’s going on, and yet you still had success, aside from the content of the program. What do you attribute that to? Why are you still able to have these big monster launches when other people are struggling?

Derek Johanson: Okay. That’s a really good question. There are a couple of different things, I think. First of all, let me start with the sales page, right? So after all of this time, I’ve built up some pretty incredible social proof, or testimonials, or whatever you want to call it, where I have various people who have gone through the program, who have gone on to sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of products and not everyone is like CopyHour is the thing that made me sell $200 million, but CopyHour seems to be this launching point, like that launch pad, the starting point for a lot of different copywriters, a lot of different people. So Sam Parr, who sold the hustle for $30 million, ended up creating his own version of CopyHour and tried to call part of it CopyHour, or he said that he called it his CopyHour. But anyway, Sam Parr tried to rip off CopyHour. And it’s out there if you want to look for it. But he went through CopyHour, then sold the hustle for $30 million. here’s Dan Ferrari who went through and he sold, I don’t even know how much he sold…

Rob Marsh: Dan is famous for being Motley Fool’s big copywriter and has sold probably hundreds of millions of of dollars worth of products at this point.

Derek Johanson: Yeah, for sure. And then also, you know, Ian Stanley went through it. Ning Lee, who I think is probably going to do about a million dollars in per. Personal income this year from his copywriting. So I’ve got some of those big, big testimonials we’ve I’ve been around again for like, 12-13, years, so people kind of hear it. And also, I think that depends on what type of course you’re trying to sell as well. So copywriting seems to be still something that people are interested in. Copywriting courses still, still seem to be something that business owners know about. People are still interested in that topic, versus maybe some of the other topics that people might be struggling to sell a little bit. And then also, on top of that, the type of traffic that that I get, I get a lot of word of mouth, which I think, obviously, is I’ve been around for 12-13 years. A lot of people who have copywriting courses have gone through CopyHour. So I’ve trained almost up some. I really sound like I’m bragging or something right now, but I’m just answering the question. So I’ve got that. Then there are some bigger affiliates that, when you have a sales page that has amazing testimonials, frankly, they’re amazing. When you have that page and you have a good affiliate who’s willing to push hard and send hard you can, you can sell quite a bit. And so I think that that that played, played a big factor in, in those big launches. I don’t know if there’s much else that I can think of right now that would say that, and then also, just like the way that I email now, after all these years, I think is the right way to email people, and just giving as much value upfront. We can talk about this later, but just giving as much value upfront, I think, is extremely valuable, and I’ve proved that to myself this past year.

Rob Marsh: Is there a secret to finding good affiliates? And this is maybe a selfish question. I know a lot of copywriters aren’t really out there looking for affiliates, but obviously, you’re building a relationship with somebody, and so that’s something all copywriters need. But do you do anything special in order to connect with the people who are selling your courses?

Derek Johanson: I would sell this to you, Rob, if I could. If I had that one magic secret, I would sell it. And I’ve thought a lot about this, because one of the major parts of my business is getting those initial customers into the door. And I always say this, that’s how I pay for traffic. At this point, you have to pay for traffic in some way, shape, or form. The way that I do it is, I pay affiliates. Then once you have those good customers in the door from the affiliates, then on the back of that, you can promote your own stuff, promote other affiliates, and kind of boost that lifetime value. I’m kind of talking against paid ads right now, but like on top of that, you also get upfront money. You’re typically getting paid to get a new customer, which is something that paid traffic doesn’t allow you. So affiliate traffic can be great. It can also not be so great because of the reasons that you’re mentioning where it’s very hard to find people that are good affiliates. The way I’ve done it is not necessarily super replicable, but I go meet people, that’s the way I’ve done it—meet people in person and so, and you meet kind of networkers in person, if possible. Networking is kind of a terrible word that nobody likes, but it really is the truth. So if there are people going to events that you know of, you should probably be going to those events. If I was just starting out now and I didn’t have a family and two very young kids, I would be traveling… Does Brian from Titans have a mastermind coming up?

Rob Marsh: He’s got something coming up in late summer or early fall, and obviously, there are all kinds of content and different events out there.

Derek Johanson: I met Ian Stanley in person, basically after he had gone through CopyHour and we became business partners. At one point, Ian actually bought my business, and I bought it back from him, if you we could talk about that if you want to want a little bit. But so, Ian’s an amazing affiliate. And so it’s really just like getting out there, meeting people in person, developing those relationships, and then you got to kind of get a little bit lucky. You can kind of see from how people run affiliate promotions, who’s good at it too. So like, Justin Goff is great at it. He retired. Obviously, people probably know that. And then Ian is fantastic. I know just through Daniel Throssell‘s never promoted me, but I know through other people that he’s extremely good. And so there are people like that. If you see people doing heavy promotions, and they seem to be having success with it, it’s kind of hard to tell sometimes, but that’s kind of the way that you get yourself in the door, and you start to find people.

Rob Marsh: So let’s talk a little bit about hand copying copy and CopyHour. I have to admit, for a long time, I’ve sort of pushed back against this idea of hand copying, primarily, probably because it just makes my hand hurt, because my hand aches when I when I try it. And I’ve always thought that more important than actually copying the words is the studying of the sales page that you’re doing. But obviously, there’s some science around handwriting and neural connections. So let’s talk about this. Why do you do it? Why did you do it? Why does it work? And obviously, it is working. You’ve got lots of successes from your program.

Derek Johanson: Yeah, so there is some science, and I think it’s probably best to start there, just for people that are, that are listening in, because that is, I mean, it’s much more. There are woo connections. And then there’s the scientific side of it. And the scientific side of it is not, is not directly tied to sales copy itself, but the little science that we do have on handwriting is that it is basically recall. So, handwriting helps with the recall of characters. And recall of language is the science that’s out there. You’re better able to recall what you learn. It’s in a testing situation, and so college students who handwrite their notes tend to do better on tests or do better on tests than people who don’t.

So the way that I’ve thought about it, if we’re speaking from more of a scientific standpoint, is that sales copy is a language, right? Like, you know sales good sales copy, when you read it, you know what it looks like, you know what it feels like. You know how it makes you know how it makes you feel, right? And so my thinking is that when you are hand-copying stuff, you are better able to recall that kind of sales language. It almost kind of flows out of you naturally when you’re when you’re sitting down to write. And I think speed is really important when you’re writing copy. When you are trying to write something right, like, so you’re trying to write a sales letter, and you start typing, you’re writing the headline, and then you get where you get to the point where you want to write the lead, or kind of depends—I typically start with the offer. I’ll write out the offer and then I’ll go back from there.

But say you’re starting out, you’re writing the headline, and then you get to the part where you want to write the lead, and you’re like, “Hmm, what I want to say for this part?” And then you go and check your notes, and now you’re in another document. And you’re away from the actual writing itself. And what I think happens is it just becomes choppy. If you have to constantly reference your notes when you’re writing, you’re just not going to write as well. You’re going to be kind of scattered. It’s gonna hurt your focus when you’re actually in flow, right? So you kind of lose flow whenever you have to go back and reference the things—reference your notes and reference everything else when you’re writing. So hand copying and this is basically just my opinion, but backed by a little bit of science, is that when you hand copy, you are now able to recall things much more quickly, and that helps keep you in the flow for writing, which is, in my opinion, is extremely important. When you’re actually in the act of writing, you are not only in a state of flow, but you’re also in a state of hyper-confidence in what you’re doing. And if you’re not extremely confident in what you’re going to say, how things are going to flow. It takes you out of that kind of subconscious writing and back into your conscious mind. And we can talk about all of that stuff if you want. I can, you know, I can talk about Zen Buddhism and some of these other things, and some other states of states of flow, that that I think come into it, but that’s generally why I think it works. And, I mean, my sales page goes into it, into it a little bit more if you want to, if people want to dive into that, but that’s, that’s generally what I think, what I think is going on with hand copying.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I’ll link to the sales page in the show notes so people can check that out, because the copy there is, it’s a great sales page, and you talk about some of that stuff, but it also feels like there’s something else that’s going on in addition to just like the flow or the writing, like there’s some other learning that starts to happen. And maybe this is separate from the handwriting itself. But as you’re constantly looking at a Gary Halbert sales page or a Bencivenga sales page or a Carlton sales page, right? Like you’re going back and you’re seeing their ideas. You’re almost thinking through the copy the way they’re thinking through, at least the final draft of their copy. And so, you know, even if the hand hurting part, it doesn’t work for you like it doesn’t work for me or hasn’t in the past, there’s still something really valuable about going through that mental exercise.

Derek Johanson: I agree. So are you? Are you a baseball fan at all?

Rob Marsh: A bit. I’ll dip in and out. I live in Salt Lake, so I don’t have a major league team yet, although we’re hoping that we might get the Florida team here. But, yeah, I’ll watch, I’ll watch games from time to time.

Derek Johanson: Nice. Okay, so you know, like when somebody is just on a on a hit streak, oh, yeah, or if you even played baseball yourself, when, when you’re locked in, right? What ends up happening is there these, these things called mirror neurons, which basically, like the studies that they’ve done, are on on monkeys. So if, like, a monkey is watching another monkey use a tool, it will the same neurons that are firing in the monkey that’s using the tool will also fire in the monkey that’s just watching, right? So when you’re using a tool, pen, pencil, whatever, what’s what’s happening is, and then again, this is just kind of just getting out there a little bit. What’s what’s happening is that some of those same neurons that were firing for the copywriter themselves might be firing for you as well. Again, I know that’s kind of that’s kind of out there, but that’s something that I’ve thought about. And then back to the baseball reference. Is whenever a hitter gets on a on a streak they talk about, and I experienced this. I played baseball growing up. You get the bat almost becomes just an extension of your hands. Right. The Bat becomes an extension of your arms, and so and what that does is, when you are in the zone, you’re kind of freed up to think about what the pitcher is thinking. And so you’re thinking about what the pitcher is going to throw. The bat is just like this extension of your arms. It’s like it’s nothing in your hands. It’s like you’re literally just throwing your hand out to hit that ball. That’s how easy it is. And so. I think what’s going on when, if, if it’s not memory and recall, if it’s not getting into flow, it’s being able to when you’re hand copying, you’re kind of in that state where you are thinking along the same lines as what the copywriter himself or herself is thinking as they’re going through it, and it makes sense to me, I and like, literally, like, I have to say all of this with like, this is me just going back and trying to explain what the hell is going on with everyone that goes through the program that’s like, this is the best exercise I’ve ever done. And I have no clue why. I don’t know why this is working. Yeah.

Rob Marsh: I mean, again, I love studying sales pages, and so, you know, as I’m going through and I’m thinking, Oh, that, that line there, it’s not saying, hey, this proves it, but obviously he’s showing proof, right? And, and I think the more you do that, the more you see that, the more it copy almost becomes like Lego bricks that you kind of fit together and like. So, you know, it’s like, okay, yeah, I get headlines subhead, you know, lead, hook proof, introduce the expert, like all of the elements that are typically there. But as you see different copywriters just doing it in different ways. It’s almost like your toolbox just opens up and suddenly there’s way more possibilities than you ever had on your own.

Derek Johanson: for sure. And I think part of it too is like, almost like a synthesis of notes, or like when you people that take notes generally do better remembering things or learning, right? So when you are hand copying, and as long as you’re not doing it, I mean, you can do it mindlessly, but as long as you’re not doing it too mindlessly, I think what’s going on is that you are, you’re slowing down, right? And you’re, you’re better analyzing what it is that you’re you’re doing, and you’re looking at your notes and and, and you’re taking notes essentially on a sales page, whereas if you just try to go through and read it, you can read it, but you can also add in this, this connection here, which is very powerful for stimulating your brain. So oddly, my my uncle, is a like a United States famous, I wouldn’t say, world famous, hand surgeon, which I didn’t know until after I had started copy hour, and he was talking about this connection here between your thumb and your pointer finger stimulates brain activity at a higher level than than not. So like when these two things are together, your brain is at is firing, is activated at a higher level, more neurons are being stimulated when those two things are working together and so that notes slowing down, yada yada, yada. Yeah, it makes sense. Hand copying rocks.

Rob Marsh:  Obviously coffee hour includes more than just, hey, copy this. You’ve added some other elements. What else does it include that helps with that learning and growing, you know, beyond just the handwriting.

Derek Johanson:  Yeah, so it’s, it’s a full training course, and so the you basically just get, kind of my take on on how to write sales pages, and then how I broken copy our down Now is that we focus on the four different sections of a sales page, or a sales letter, and this is kind of all, you know, the four sections are not anything new. I tried not to create, like, new terms for different sections of the sales page, just to eliminate some confusion, like, I know a lot of copywriters like to name, or, you know, gurus like to name every single
thing. You got to come up with your own stuff so you can talk about it. No one else can. Yeah, exactly.
So there’s I, you know, like, basically the program follows five different modules. We start with the offer, then we get, like, so I like to start with the offer, because a lot of times what you can do is you can extract from your product, whatever it is that you’re selling. You extract that that main benefit, and then you kind of put it back up into the headline. Is generally what you want to do, not always, but that’s, you know, good rule of thumb. So start with the offer. I teach how to basically write a good offer, how to come up with with an offer. And then we go into the lead, we go into the sales argument, then into the close and then kind of putting it all together. And and. And, you know, at the end of it, at the end of it, not only have you hand copied all of those different sections. So, like, when I’m talking about the offer, I’m showing you offers. When we’re talking about the lead, I’m showing you leads and how they work. And the there are eight different types of leads that I talk about in copy hour, which is eight different ways to start a sales message. And then, you know, with sales argument, same thing and close, same thing, we’re looking at each individual element of the close and, yeah, at the end of it, you’ve seen all the different versions. You’ve seen all the different pieces of of writing. You’ve hand copied. If you want to hand copy, you don’t have to hand copy, but that’s part of it is you want to do it, and at the end of it, you should have a sales page ready to go, sales letter ready to go.

Rob Marsh: How does this apply to email writing? You know, if I’m listening, I’m thinking, I don’t write sales pages. So I’m not sure that this is helpful. How does this translate to, I guess, not even just email writing, but other kinds of copy, even content that other copywriters might be working on.

Derek Johanson: Yeah, so I’ll start with email. And I do, we do cover email marketing in copy hour, and I have a separate program on on writing email that that I sell as well. It’s called Email Copy hour. But the the idea
genius at naming, aren’t I? So the basically, you can view a lot of different kind of depends on what type of emails you’re sending, but the headline, a lot of the stuff that I talk about with hooks and headlines is going to be your subject line. And then, and actually, you know, we do some, some hand copying of of emails. And so, yeah, you can view your email as, like, just a lead, really like. So I teach you how to write a lead, how to how to have a start. And basically, if you successfully do your lead, people want to read the rest of the message right?

So that rest of the message could just be a click to a sales page, or whatever it is that you’re sending people over to. So or, you know, there are sales pages, and actually one that we look at in the course that you can write an entire abbreviated sales letter with a lead, a sales argument, an offer, a close within the email itself. And so, you know, email can be viewed like an individual email could be viewed as just like an abbreviated part of the structure of the, you know, of a sales letter. And so basically, my idea with copy hour is I’m going to teach you how to write a sales page, sales letter. I’m going to teach you how to write a 10,000 word sales letter, if you really wanted to, although I don’t necessarily recommend it, especially for my type of business, I don’t write giant sales letters. I don’t think you need to. I don’t think you have to. I don’t think people want to read it for my particular business. But I will teach you how to write that giant sales letter if you wanted to, and then you can abbreviate it. You can take what you’ve learned from that overall structure and apply that to any type of sales writing. I don’t think it really works in reverse necessarily, like I think if you start off by writing emails, which is, which is great. I mean, it’s a great way to get your foot in the door. That type of copywriting, I think it’s going to be harder to learn how to go from email to a sales page. And frankly, like sales pages, sales letters are going to get you paid the most anybody that I know that’s pushing towards a million dollars a year is writing sales pages, sales letters, offers, creating offers, that type of thing, and so I think it’s the best thing to start with, even though it might be a little bit more difficult than other types of copy, I think it’s the best place to start. Yeah, same can apply to content and everything like depends on, you know, I don’t teach SEO writing. But any sort of like content that could lead to a sale, or does lead to a sale, is the type of copy that that we talk about.

Rob Marsh: Do you have a favorite sales page out of the course? One that’s like, wow, this is the this is the top. This is the gold standard.

Derek Johanson: I love. Gary Bencivenga’s olive oil letter.

Rob Marsh: So that is my all time favorite as well. I’ve done a breakdown of that letter in my own community, and our membership is it’s just, it’s a work of genius.

Derek Johanson: And yeah, 100%agree. Yeah, I love it, and I love that it’s still running, as far as I can tell. Like, that same letter still going. Yeah, I think it’s, this has a couple minor tweaks over the years, but, yeah, a version still running.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I love that one. It’s fantastic. I’ll link to that for anybody who’s listening, just so you can check it out. It, I mean, it’s got story, it’s got science, it’s it’s so good at selling, it’s really hard to to read that and think, Well, I’m just gonna go to Costco and buy my olive oil after that.

Derek Johanson: yeah, exactly. And then Aaron winter is really good. So he used to work for Motley Fool, and now he’s got kind of his own agency with Dan Ferrari. But Aaron winter stuff is really good. The Trillion Dollar War for your living room from Motley Fool, that’s a giant epic sales letter, but I love that one. Mel Martin has some bangers. I like, I love Mel Martin stuff, just like pure bullets. I don’t really use bullets all that much in my copy, but I love Mel Martins. You know, they’re like, you know, it’s like a direct response, sales space, ad type thing, not, not a sales page, but I love those. And then, you know, like, if Carlton stuff is just wild. You know, a lot of it you can’t use today, but I just love the big, giant, strange, weird ideas. And, yeah, Eugene Schwartz, like Eugene stuff is really cool. Just like, lay down on the ground and cure all of your illness.

Rob Marsh:  yes, rub your stomach and cure cancer or whatever.

Derek Johanson: yeah, yeah, exactly. His stuff was kind of crazy.

Rob Marsh: So talk a little bit about your own approach to email. So as I’ve looked at your email, been on your list, I noticed a lot of stories, a lot of open loops, actually, that you don’t close at the end of your email. Sometimes, you know, multi stage, uh, emails to go on for a few days. Yeah. How do you look at email? And you know what you’re trying to do with your own audience?

Derek Johanson: Yeah. So this is the stuff that I really love to talk about now, especially because I’ve made a big switch in my email approach and also just my business in general. So I have gone from and, you know, actually, this might answer part of the question, that part of the problem that people are having selling courses this day and age is because a lot of the like, I think a lot of the lower level copywriting, freelance copywriting industry has been completely chopped off, partially AI, partially just fear of AI and content farms—
just the market itself.

And so the I made a big switch about a year and a half ago to I just want to talk to I do like talking to copywriters, but I think all copywriters want to start a business, their own business. I know that I did, but I made a switch from talking to specifically freelance copywriters. I want to talk to solopreneur business owners. I want to talk to that audience, because that is who I am. Those are the problems that I’m solving every single day. I haven’t done client work since 2017 so for me to feel good about writing and what I’m doing, I want to talk to the people that want to run the same business that I want to run. And that shift has been awesome for me. I kind of got out of talking to freelancers about what they could do that I did. You know eight years ago, it’s more, hey, I’m running a business right now. Here are the challenges that that I’m overcoming, here’s here’s what I’ve done to solve different problems.

And so that’s kind of the overarching idea of of my emails, is that I do actually week long tutorials. So I hired a business coach end of last year and or beginning of last year, and he helped me come up with a kind of entire system for sending tutorial emails. So all Monday through Friday, my emails are are all interconnected, right? So I teach a topic like, basically a how to topic, some problem that I specifically myself have solved, and, and, and so I string them all together. Monday is typically an open loop about, like, what exactly I’m going to do for the rest of. The week, what I’m going to teach you Tuesday, I show you an example of of what you know, like, what that particular topic is that could be in story format, or it could just be literally, like, some sort of visual example, or a breakdown of, like, of the topic that I’m going to talk about, I should have a topic in mind when I’m telling you this, because it’ll be easier to describe it. And then Wednesday is kind of a step by step. And then Thursday, I’m basically answering some sort of question that’s probably going to arise from trying to implement those steps. And then on Friday, I’m just kind of doing a recap action plan, type email, and I just cycle through those. And I, you know, my whole thing now is a I am only talking about things that I have actually done and and nothing like, here’s how you could do it. Here’s how I not even like, I got rid of some products that I have or like, here’s what I would do. Everything that I do these days is, here’s exactly what I’ve actually done to produce results. Here’s the step-by-step of it. I try to give away literally, as much as I possibly can. Most of the time, people are telling me that, like, the emails that I’m sending are better than a lot of the different courses that they buy, and I’m sending those for free. I’m literally just trying to give away as much as I possibly can. And like people will talk about, Oh, I gotta give away 90% and leave the 10% for paid products. I found that I don’t even know what the heck that means. So for me, I’m like, give it all away and then in my products, I’m gonna just continue to give it all away and see, yeah, I don’t even know where it’s gonna lead, but it’s like, that’s, that’s my that’s my mindset. And since I adopted that mindset, you know, like these, these bigger launches have happened, it’s really just about owning your expertise. And I’ve, I had to hire a coach and a therapist to kind of tell me, like, Hey, dude, you’re an expert. You’ve sold millions of dollars worth of these products. Like, start talking like you’re an expert. A big issue that that I had in the past was that I was just kind of sending little story emails about my life with no real teaching in them. There wasn’t any sort of value. And that’s great for getting attention. That’s great for having people feel like you’re a friend of theirs, building a relationship in that way. But when when it came time to buy stuff, I was finding that people weren’t buying from me as much as I wanted them to buy.

Now, I’ve kind of switched to hey, I’m an expert. I know how to do this stuff. Like, I’ve been doing this for 15 years now. Here are all the different things that I’ve learned. Here’s what’s worked for me, here’s what hasn’t worked for me. And I get a lot less emails from people being like, Oh, I love you, Derek. And I get a lot more sales now. And for me, I’d rather have the sales at the moment as much as I’d like my ego to be stroked like anybody else. It’s like I got two small kids. I live in the most expensive city, one of the most expensive cities in the entire country, and I’m just trying to make money.
Rob Marsh: No reason, no reason that the bank account going up doesn’t stroke your ego as well. So you mentioned the shift in confidence. Talk a little bit about that, like, because this is marketing industry-wide, you know, where we have so many experts who are afraid to show up as experts. I’m sure that I do it. Almost everybody I know does it. Some people realize that they’re they’re not, you know, they’re not doing that. But this is obviously my mindset issue, getting rid of the head trash that says you don’t know what you’re talking about or but how did you get through that? Like, what was the process? You know, or maybe I’m asking you to help me with some therapy here, help me step through this problem myself.

Derek Johanson: Yeah, well, I’ve got three recommendations, two of which I’m hesitant to tell anybody to do. But let’s start with the first one, hire a business coach. So hiring a business coach was a was a big, gigantic step for me, and what that business coach was able to explain to me that no one really. Had talked about before, was was again, what I had said earlier about owning what you actually have done. So write about what you have actually done, not just what sounds good. And so when I’m writing from a place of what I’ve actually done, I am extremely confident. Because how can you not be confident in something that you’ve you’ve already done? I think where a lot of people get into a lot of trouble when they’re they’re writing, and especially kind of writing in this scenario, where you’re writing to other business owners, or where you where you really need to be the expert. It’s not necessarily like if you’re, you know, writing for a company where you’re selling, you know, a workout program, or you’re writing about like some sort of supplement, but when you’re when you’re writing about what you’ve actually done to to to a group of people that are trying to do similar things to you, it just, yeah, I don’t know it sounds so it kind of sounds, not It sounds too simple or something on the surface, but when you when you’re actually writing about things that you’ve actually done, there’s a confidence to that. And it also just kind of, you know, like you just, you feel better about what you’re doing and, and I think that’s a major issue for a lot of of different copywriters, is they don’t really, like feel good about some of the copy that they’re writing, or that they have to write. And, you know, they almost feel like they’re lying, or like an imposter. Like imposter syndrome is huge. I experience imposter syndrome quite often, until I just kind of forgot all that stuff by writing about what I actually do. Because when you’re writing about what you actually do, then how you How could you be an imposter? Right? So there, and there’s, like, some hard work that’s involved with that too, right? Like, you can’t just kind of phone it in. You actually have to be doing things. So like, for example, I was, I was writing about, forget what exactly the topic was, but I wanted to tell people why I thought something worked, like, some some, maybe it’s like some marketing tactic that I had worked like, how does it work? Like, how well does it work, right? Okay, so I was writing about putting just a simple wait list, like, putting up a wait list for a product that you have on your sales page, put, like, a little wait list box up top. And I was like, how does the strategy work? Does this strategy work? Like? And I was like, writing like, yeah, it works extremely well. And then I was like, Well, how do I know it works extremely well? And I was like, I don’t, I don’t really check the numbers on it, like, I’m not checking my my stats religiously on this opt in box, and how it how it directly relates to the ultimate amount of sales that I got. And so instead of saying, Hey, it works really well, I started talking about, how, about how I don’t have close tracking on the things that I do, and kind of owning the fact that, like, I’ve still built up a pretty successful business without honing in on all the different little metrics, whereas, you know, I feel like most people would kind of just make up, like, make up things and not get specific about numbers. And it was like, I’m not getting specific about numbers because I can’t get specific about numbers, so that’s just a small example. So that’s step one.

The two that I have a hard time like recommending to anybody will be therapy. Therapy has helped me immensely. I’m not going to tell somebody to go out and get a therapist, because that just sounds I don’t know, I don’t know that I would hear that well, but a therapist just kind of helps you talk through any of the, any of this shit that’s floating around in your head. That’s helped me a lot, and and then psychedelics, so, mushrooms, so, and I can’t really recommend that to anybody, but mushrooms, basically, just help you understand that everything’s gonna be okay.

Rob Marsh: At the very least, a business coach or a little help from somebody who’s been there. And we’ll, we’ll leave those last two steps if, if it feels right for anybody.

Derek, this is, this is great, I believe, as we’re going live, CopyHour is open for new students, and we’ll link to it in the show notes. And there’ll be a bonus if you obviously, they can search for it online and find it, but if they buy it through the link on our website, there’d be a little bonus for people to consider. But where else should people go to just find out about you be on your list? You know, to hear to be more in your world?

Derek Johanson:  Yeah. So the the easiest thing to do is to go to copyhour.com one word. If you want to dive in and kind of hear about my methodology for writing a sales page, go to copy our.com/framework and that’s a big, long article. I think it’s like things 22 minutes read on exactly how I look at writing a sales page. And you can kind of get your feet wet there, and then, yeah, and then that’s, that’s the best place. I think

Rob Marsh: Amazing. I appreciate you taking the time to talk through this, especially salespage handwriting, you know, it’s, it’s always out there in my brain, I’m thinking, you know, I should do this, and then I do it, and my hand hurts, but like, I get the science maybe this time, maybe, maybe I’ll start writing this week. We’ll see.

Derek Johanson: It doesn’t have to be for the rest of your life type of thing. I think a lot of us get caught up in, in, oh, this has got to be the thing that I do forever, and then that just makes it so daunting. But it’s like select like bursts of time, like 30 to 90 days of concentrated effort has lifelong effects. Like, even from an from an exercise standpoint. Like, I’ve done some programs, or it’s like a 90 day program, and then I’m done, and I might get a little bit fat again, or whatever you want to, you know, say, like, put on some pounds, and if I wanted to get back in shape, I generally, I mean, I’m 40 now, so I don’t know how true this is, but, like, I generally, I generally know that, like, I can get back to a decent place a lot more quickly than than if I hadn’t done that initial uh, 90 day workout program when I was younger. So I think the same thing applies with with this. It’s like, you got to learn. I mean, copywriting like, this is your podcast, right? Like, copywriting is such a foundational piece. It’s, it’s the thing that has enabled all of the income that I’ve made in an online business situation. Being good at copywriting is, like, the number one skill, if you’re good at copywriting or good at coding, like, those are the two things, like, what else is there? You know, like, what else? What else is going to allow you to make a really, really good income? I don’t know. So it because copywriting is sales, right? Sales, salesmanship and print.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, exactly. That’s good advice.

Thanks to Derek for talking about his program, learning copy by handwriting, and how he attracts new customers using affiliates, which seems to be working even over the past couple of years when so many online course sellers have struggled… which may be another reason to check out copy hour by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/copyhour to learn more. A course that continues to sell this well is likely effective at delivering on its promise… helping copywriters get better at what we all do for our clients.

Let’s talk a bit more about the science of handwriting… there aren’t any studies specifically about learning the principles of copywriting when writing things out by hand, but activating the connection between your hand and, specifically, your forefinger and thumb and the brain has a proven impact on learning all kinds of skills. So it’s not too crazy to think it has an oversized impact on learning how to write copy. In addition to the nerves that fire between your hand and brain, when studying a sales page, your brain is also breaking down why the words work the way they do… why they are in the order they are in… and how the words impact your thinking. If you’re going to practice this on your own, make sure that the copy you are hand-copying is effective and actually sells because practicing on bad copy could result in bad writing habits… again, this might be where checking out Copy Hour at thecopywriterclub.com/copyhour will help you become a better writer because you know all of the examples you’ll be handcopying in the course are proven winners.

If Copy Hour isn’t right for you, or if what Derek said about hiring a coach a few minutes ago resonates with you… This is something I help copywriters with in The Copywriter Underground. I can’t help with mushrooms or therapy, but I can help you build a more resilient, successful copywriting business in The Underground. In addition to the coaching, you also have access to more than 70 workshops and playbooks that help you implement the strategies they teach, templates, and accountability as you build your business—that’s in The Copywriter Underground at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

One more thing… Derek mentioned his emails and what people have said about them. He’s right, I’m on his list, and they are very readable. You may want to jump on his list as well, just to see what he’s doing. Again, you can do that at thecopywriterclub.com/copyhour 

All of the stuff I’ve mentioned is linked in the show notes for this episode.

Stuff we mentioned:

Atomic Habits
Emily’s Podcast
Emily’s Instagram
The Authority Framework
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  You’re a copywriter, but you can do other marketing stuff like design or email systems. Is there a need for that? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

As a copywriter, you probably have a hand in all kinds of marketing activities—everything from the overall marketing strategy to brainstorming lead magnets, to creating and posting content, or writing and managing ads, to figuring out which email systems will help increase engagement and purchases… you probably already do a lot of this stuff. What’s more, a lot of clients want smaller, more nimble teams these days, and that means working with people who can do more of the tasks they used to depend on an entire team to get done. Some people taking on these expanded roles call themselves marketing assistants. Whether that title works for you or not isn’t important. What really matters is that there is a growing need for writers of all kinds to take on this larger, more inclusive role and contribute more, often using A.I. to bring it all together.

My guest for this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is Emily Reagan. Emily started out offering marketing support especially related to Facebook ads, but she expanded beyond that to include copywriting and other marketing services. And she’s spent the past couple of years helping others do the same thing. We talked about the importance of adding additional marketing services to your copywriting business to make yourself more valuable—maybe even indispensable—for your clients. It’s yet another way to stand out from all the other writers out there who don’t offer clients anything extra.

While we talked, Emily also shared a lot of details about her business—she works with clients and helps other writers grow their marketing skills. As she tells it, her business grew serendipitously… going from one thing to the next as it made sense. It’s not exactly a path that others can follow, but it is a strategy for finding your own path to the work you love doing. I think you’re going to like this discussion.

As usual, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. You’ve heard me talk about how we’ve recently rebuilt The Underground dashboard to make it easier to find the ideas and insights you need. But as I started recreating this new dashboard, it occurred to me that no one has time to watch more than 70 different workshops—even for those workshops that help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. So I’ve taken more than 30 of those workshops on finding clients, having sales calls, using A.I., building authority on LinkedIn, and dozens of others… and I’ve created playbooks that break down the ideas in the workshops into easy-to-follow steps. Each playbook is 3-5 pages long. You can read through one and implement the ideas in minutes. And then if you want more detail, you can watch the accompanying workshop. Each playbook even includes a checklist so you don’t miss any steps and can make sure you get things done. I’m working on completing playbooks for all of the workshops and training inside The Underground. They should all be ready by the end of April. You can get the first 30 or so right now by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

And now, my interview with Emily Reagan…

Hey Emily, welcome to the podcast. And let’s, let’s just start out by saying this is a long time coming. The last time we saw each other, it’s like five years ago. And I don’t know why we haven’t had you on sooner than the now, but I’m glad you’re here now that you’re here. Yeah, tell us. Tell us your story. How did you become a copywriter?

Emily Reagan: Yeah, it’s been five years in the making. The last time you and I were together was right when the pandemic was happening in 2020, so it’s a completely different time. And my business has changed a lot since I showed up to your conference in real life. But you know how business owners, especially the online ones, are running around like crazy, trying to wear all the hats, do all the things, and keep all the marketing and all the gardens happy? I am the person who started training the marketing assistant to help within that marketing department. It started because I was a military wife for 20 years, had this hodgepodge of journalism and PR jobs, and was just lucky to find a job only to move a year or two later. And it kind of all came together beautifully in the online space, and then I just started teaching my friends how to do it.

So when I went to your conference, I wasn’t officially calling myself a copywriter, but I was still finding myself doing that work. Had I known about it back in 2007 when I was freelancing my first press releases, I would have just gone all into Copyright. Marketing, but I didn’t know what I didn’t know. So yeah, now I train virtual assistants to be in the marketing department, because marketing, it’s more fun, it’s creative, it’s flexible, it pays more. And that’s where I’m happy. I
love that, and I’m really glad we started here because so many copywriters in The Copywriter Club. People who listen to this podcast start out as VAs, and they come to that realization, wait a second, I’m doing way more here than just being an assistant.

And the cream always rises. I mean, “Assistant” never would have appealed to me, so I’ve really struggled with my own marketing. I’m like, do I use the title: virtual assistant? Because that’s the SEO word, but it’s so much more. And I think the term virtual assistant is just really getting kind of dumbed down. When I get into my Kia Carnival, and I see the little button for a virtual assistant, I’m thinking of AI. And so this job title has evolved since I even started, you know, training people four years ago, and that’s why I kind of went all in with the idea of a marketing assistant, because there’s just so many options online, and then you start adding different skills like copy or customer service or podcasting content marketing, and you’ve just created a whole different type of unique specialization for yourself. So it’s really fun to see how it all comes together online.

Rob Marsh: So let’s talk about being a marketing assistant. You just kind of listed off a bunch of the things that they might do. But let’s, let’s go a little bit deeper with this idea, because I really like it. I think that there’s space maybe for a lot of people who have been vas, but they feel like they’re doing more, but maybe they’re not ready yet to call themselves a copywriter or a designer or a CMO or whatever the next thing is, there’s kind of the space out there. So how do you define that marketing assistant?

Emily Reagan: Yeah, and especially getting confusing when you see AI can help. You’re seeing things being delegated and outsourced overseas for super cheap. So you know, all businesses have six main departments. We have operations, customer service, HR, finances, you know, accounting, product development, and then we have marketing and sales. And so this marketing, I think, where a lot of business owners get it wrong is they’re trying to find a virtual assistant to do everything and save their business by Thursday and launch and video edit, you know. And so, really drilling down into what department I am in and what kind of results I am going after? A lot of us hold ourselves back, thinking we need a four-year marketing degree, and those kinds of days are a little bit over.

Rob Marsh: So, if I wanted to maybe step into that newer role, do I need to know how to write copy and also use Canva and edit video for the person that I might be working with in order to get things onto reels or YouTube? What are the things that I need in my skill wheelhouse in order to be able to, you know, start calling myself a marketing assistant?

Emily Reagan: I think you need to combine, like, complimentary skills, for sure. And what’s interesting is, in my course, I am teaching, I say, I, you know, I’m teaching you how to grow an audience online and help your clients sell to that audience, right? And so we’re nurturing, and we’re selling, we’re converting. And so that’s kind of the role of the marketing assistant, is, which channels are we driving traffic? Like, how are we nurturing them? How are you getting them on the list? Which algorithms like, like, what? Right? So that’s a little bit of the game. But in my course, I teach the tech, I teach the strategy, and I’m always saying and complimenting you.

The next thing is copy. You have to learn how to sell with words. So I think anytime you can add copy to a specific or niche or even general marketing, you know, service, you are going to be sitting pretty. You’ll you’ll have, you know, more career flexibility. You know, easier retention with clients because clients really want that long-term help. I mean, I don’t know about you, but in the online space, I’m seeing a lot of teams simplifying, streamlining, and condensing. We don’t all want 20 employees in our business anymore. We’re looking more at profits. The online space is changing. So if we can find someone who can offer a little bit higher value, you know, they can also, you know, charge more too. So it’s figuring out, what is the right way to add copy in there. And I think copy is a must. That’s something I preach. And, like I said, when I was starting, I didn’t know it was a thing. I kind of fell into it, and it started with, like, Okay, well, I need to whip out this thank you page; my client gave me nothing, and it’s holding me back; I’ll just take care of it. So that’s kind of how it started with me. Or, like, blogging, or, you know, Pinterest. How do I get the click on these, you know, simple Pinterest pins I’m making?

Rob Marsh: You just said something that really like, rings a bell, and it’s that I’ll just take care of it. It’s as if they’re the person who is right for this kind of title or role is the person who cares about the business of the person they’re working for. Is that right?

Emily Reagan: Okay, so we’re finding how we can, like, fit our copy words into marketing systems. So like, if you’re already naturally doing that and thinking in terms of strategy or what comes next, and you’re enjoying it, and the client is asking you, that’s such an opportunity to, you know, level up into the next role. Like I said, assistants are leveling up to specialists to marketing managers and strategists. I don’t know about you, but I know a lot of copywriters do way more than just copy. They’re coming in and now advising on the strategy of the funnel or the launch or the webinar, and so those are opportunities to start wearing that you know are dubbing yourself like the higher title that you might not feel ready for because you’re already actually doing it you just you know might not recognize that. That makes
sense. So you were saying when we met each other at the conference in San Diego, you were kind of struggling with how to call yourself, or what to call yourself, how to make that shift. So what was the thing that, like, snapped for you, that that you know, like, changed everything you’re like, Oh, I see now what I really am or where I can make that contribution.

I’m going to tell this story in reverse and spoiler alert. It ends with you, but it starts with you. I actually went on to do a hodgepodge of skills and enjoyed it. I like variety. I have this crazy skill set, and one of the jobs I’ve worked with a lot of high-end copywriters and marketers, some of them, you will know that I will never mention their names on this podcast, and I found myself in this role as an ads manager, combining my unique skill set, I’m doing the tech the audience. I’m doing the copy, and I’m doing a little bit of the design. Am I going to do a perfectly produced Facebook ad? No, at some point, like, I will hire out the specialist. So let me just throw that out there. And I’m like, chuckling because the ads are going live, and everyone’s like, this guy is so great. His copy is so good. I’m studying it, and I’m like, It’s me, it’s me, it’s not him. And I’m, you know, it’s going great, and then all of a sudden, the funnel breaks, it doesn’t work, and who gets thrown under the bus? It’s me, the ads manager. There’s only so much in my control if the button’s not working, the landing page isn’t loading, and the tech isn’t delivering what it said I got I got hosed.

And so I found myself at this moment with a very high-end funnel expert who everyone would know if I said his name, just staring me down, and he looked at me and he said, Are you a copywriter? Because they’re doing like a funnel audit, and I’m just like fudge. I quivered. I went silent. And I regret that moment to my day, and I should have reflected back to the fact that if you’re doing copy, you are a copywriter, and just own it. And you and I had that conversation in the bar in San Diego where I told you, I don’t know why I’m here at this at this conference with all these copywriters. I look at you and your experience and everything you know with advertising and marketing, and you know your method for writing copy, and I don’t bring that to the table, but I bring something else, right? And at that bar, I told you, hey, I don’t feel like a copywriter, and you just like, anointed me one right then and there.

And so it’s permission to call yourself that. And, you know, take responsibility for what you do bring to the table and own that. And I’m just putting it out there for your listeners, like I buffed it, even after you annoyed at me, I got fired. Long, long story short, they needed to fire me. They had no right to run ads to a broken funnel, right? So I think about that moment that was really pivotal for me to own my experience and what I bring to the table that will never happen again. And I have since done ads for other people. Like, right now I’m doing, I’m actually working with an ads manager, but, like, I know enough about copy messaging and how it should work, where now I’m, like, managing it as a CMO, and we’re doing great. Like, it had nothing to do with that one-time client experience. I did ads for another client, like in January, and we did great there, too. So I don’t know, I don’t know if that made sense, but it was just like a fun story that kind of brings it all together. And it’s really about like positioning yourself as an expert, but really feeling it and believing it.

Rob Marsh: Thanks for sharing that. I forgot that conversation. I remember hanging out with you at the bar, but I totally spaced that, that that had even happened. I was in a fog, and that whole week was kind of crazy. But yeah, so I guess if anybody’s listening and they’re thinking, and wait a second, maybe I’m ready to step up, you and I together, we can knight them right now and say, look, if you’re writing copy, you’re a copywriter. If you’re writing copy for yourself… if you’re writing it for just one client… if you’re a VA or you’re doing something else, but you’re still helping them with that stuff, lean into that and grow that experience. And, you know, do the things that you need to do in order to really step into that role.
Emily Reagan: Yeah, I’ll go, don’t be shy. Offer that support to your clients. At some point it’s a fuzzy line, right? Like, when are you going out of scope? When are you doing too much? But I think it’s easy to flex it with the clients you have now. Build the confidence, build the competence. We know about that loop. You just have to insert yourself into that. And there’s so much to be said with just the job title. I mean, I coach a lot of my students with the job title, so it’s so funny that I got stuck on it too. You know, thinking about all of the talented copywriters we had there, I remember Justin Blackman staying on the stage, on the stage, saying he got this huge contract, and even he was scared. And I was like, wow, if Justin’s scared, I can be too. And I still add value to my clients. They need help. They have a hard time finding someone who can do marketing. It’s hard to find fractional good marketers right now, and so feeling good about what I bring to the table is really key, and being able to partner with them ongoing and long term, I’m fitting a void that a lot of freelancers don’t do.
Rob Marsh: So while we’re still talking about this, how, let’s say that there are skills that somebody’s thinking, Okay, I have been writing copy, but I don’t know enough about marketing or some of this other stuff. How would you recommend they go about adding these kinds of skills so that they’re actually practitioners of them, and they’re not just, you know, reading a book or taking a course?
Emily Reagan: Oh, that’s a good question. Obviously, we all feel good if we take a course or we learn from someone ahead of us, right? Like, that’s like the fastest track for doing anything. But I would just be really intentional with how you combine things like, you know, an obvious one for a skill stack for copywriters, learning funnels. You know, clients need help. They want somebody who understands marketing strategy, the automations, how we can be really strategic and personal right now, especially with these conversations that are happening. So if you can offer a combination of at least the strategy and the copy, it could be that we hire out the tech, but if you enjoy the tech, like sometimes my brain enjoys shutting down a little bit, and doing some of that can be very black and white. I think funnels are an obvious low-hanging fruit, like easy money on the table whenever you can get involved. How is the world adapting with launching? And how can you stay in the forefront? I don’t know about you. I’m seeing a lot of people doing more evergreen or less live, launching more ongoing containers. Like less pressure to launch. I think automation is a big one. Figuring out, like many chat funnels right now are huge or any kind of bot assistance, so like combining them in the right way, I like to use my current clients for practice. And you can always obviously practice on your own business. I think that’s the safest place to do it.
Rob Marsh: So another thing that occurs to me while we’re talking about this is obviously the copywriting world is changing as well, and a lot of copywriters are struggling to find work. Maybe it’s AI, maybe it’s the economy, but there’s this sneaking suspicion, and it may not be wrong that at least some of that lower-level copywriting work is gone and maybe gone forever. Thanks again to AI, and so there’s probably an opportunity here for even copywriters or content creators to expand their skill sets into maybe they wouldn’t call themselves a marketing assistant, but it’s more of a marketer CMO type thing by adding these other skill sets so you’re not just writing email and sending off a doc with copy in it, but you’re also loading that into an ESP, or setting up the welcome sequence, or the abandoned cart sequence, or helping the clients identify the missing pieces where money’s kind of leaking out of their business. And more of us need to be doing that in order to ensure that there’s work in the future.

Emily Reagan: Yeah, or taking it to the next step. I was thinking of a brand voice person I worked with—a client, and she gave us all of these amazing messaging points, and then what we need help taking it to the next step. And so I know that she has since pivoted and added, like, building the AI copywriter to go with it, with my brand voice, and so like making it that full package, just a higher value, we would have paid probably $10,000 for that instead of the five, because now I have something I can turn around and give to my team. Who I pay. I do pay for lower-level tasks for some of that. But here’s what’s never going away, like the data analysis, somebody to sit down and have the oversight. Copywriters are so good at being strategic with surveys. You know, before we hit record, I was talking about Brittany McBean, and I got a chance to see her brain working in a launch for my course. The way she analyzed the survey data just blew my mind. I’d never seen that. And that’s the kind of stuff that my little AI copywriter can’t do at her level. And what I we ultimately need is that final messaging right? And that’s what copywriters do so well, they do the market research. This is why I always get hesitant to call myself one, because I like to come in with, like, the final product and, like, make decisions, but that final messaging stamp is just getting noisier and harder to stand out. I mean, you have a lot of good podcasts here on the show talking about, like, how to write the hook, but we need the people to, like, oversee them and make sure it’s actually moving the business forward right like businesses are kind of struggling right now on the online space. So we got to stand out. We’ve got to convert even better than before.
Rob Marsh: Okay, so let’s talk about how your business changed. Then, you know, from where we were five years ago, and kind of in that struggle giving yourself permission today, your business is really different. Yeah, I have
always kind of had my like, mutually exclusive things, like, I do the client work. I’m still a practitioner. I enjoy it. It keeps me relevant. So I have some client work, I’ve just had to be very intentional and strategic about who I say yes to, which is always the freelance like boundary and like problem we get into, like, which clients do we say yes to? So I have kind of streamlined that. And I basically work like CMO projects over there, or ads, like something that can be like high level one time, on and off.

Emily Reagan: I found myself doing a lot of quiz funnels, you know, I worked with Chanti Zak, and I took her course, and I was able to do that. For a lot of the work, I partnered with a copywriter. I was actually doing a lot of the tech, and then the ads, and so that’s kind of where ads kind of fell into my lap, and it’s really fun to watch what copywriters turn in. And I’ve always learned that way back when my clients called me their VA, I can remember them hiring copywriters and me just eating it up because I was the one making the changes, like going into the landing page and like, oh, they that makes sense. So I never had actually taken a copywriting course, which is why I felt like an imposter back in 2019, so I kind of found a way to marry my knack for writing and copywriting and design and build these funnels. And then I started teaching people how to do the work, too, because it’s been so empowering for somebody like me. There are a lot of over-educated, underemployed military spouses or women who had a baby break, or people transitioning to staying at home or making a change in their careers. And I just realized, like, you don’t need a marketing degree in this day and age if I can teach you how the algorithms work and what business owners are trying to do so we can give you the whole picture. You can learn how to do this and start with a couple of services. So there’s like two parts of my business now, and it’s pretty wild to go from behind the scenes to the face of my business, which is slightly uncomfortable, but you know, when you know you’re helping other people, you’ll, you’ll do it and, yeah, what do you want to talk about in there? Because there’s, like, so many little side conversations.

Rob Marsh:  You’ve got a lot of different moving pieces as well. I think you’ve got a community. You’ve got a podcast of your own. Yeah? I mean, in addition to, you know, copywriting, you’re doing PR, and, you know, a lot of the moving pieces in the background for your clients. So there’s almost not even a title for all of the things that you’re doing.

Emily Reagan: When somebody was like, what do you do? Because I always lean into my PR experience. I knew how to write a press release and get it printed in a Podunk paper, word by word, like, that’s, that’s what I knew how to do. And that press release turned into media kits, which turned into me looking at Google Analytics, which turned into Pinterest, which turned into blogging, which turned into landing pages and funnels. So it was like, not a like, a linear thing at all. So I do, I have done some pitching and like, use the skill set over there. Ads are really easy. It’s like, you kind of want to go where, like, it’s easy and natural for you, and you almost feel kind of bad about it, because it comes so natural, you know?

Rob Marsh: But there’s, like, a trade-off with that too. Oftentimes, when something comes naturally to us, we don’t price it properly because we were like, Oh, this is easy. Like, this isn’t work, and so it must not be valuable. And so we end up staying in those lower roles even though we’re doing this higher level work.

Emily Reagan: Yeah, I think the more teams I work on, the more I see a what a hot mess. A lot of people are. They look very successful online. I mean, all of us are struggling. So even the most organized person who might look intimidating might not be creative and need your skill, and vice versa, if you’re one of those integrator organized, you know, EOS people like somebody needs the talent you have out there. And I agree it’s like really easy to undervalue your work, but isn’t that the goal to find what you’re most passionate about? What you’re good at? And what you love? What people are paying you for? I always struggled, what do I call myself? And I was kind of joking with my teammate, and I was like, I’m a unicorn. And it turns out there is such a thing as a full-stack unicorn marketer. I didn’t even know that. I was just kind of combining my PR with this, like, new world of online business, I discovered and dubbed myself a unicorn, and then it kind of became a thing, and that is part of my branding now, which is funny, because I’m very much Sporty Spice and not a sparkly unicorn girl, but it is the essence of what we’re all trying to do, like find that sweet spot for us. We all come from unique backgrounds and experiences. And I will never forget Chanti telling me that one of her first blogs she wrote was in podiatry like that was her passion? And you, you know, you’re like a health nut. You’re really into, like, a little plantar fasciitis protection like that could be like the dream business, writing content and copy for, I don’t know, that type of doctor, podiatrists.

Rob Marsh: It’s interesting… this kind of skill stacking, and how we all put it together. We’ve always called it finding your X-Factor when we’ve taught these workshops in our programs.It is the way there. We’ve said this a whole bunch of times, but like, there are over 750,000 copywriters on LinkedIn. There are over a million content writers on LinkedIn, if you add content strategists or social media strategists, there’s 2 million more of those, right? So standing out in that crowd is really hard. But when you start doing this kind of skill stacking where you’re matching this thing that you like and that thing you like, it’s pretty easy—once you have four or five things you’re combining in unique ways—to be the number one in that combination. So you don’t have to be the very best copywriter and compete with those millions, but you do have to be the very best copywriter who works in your niche, who brings to the table your three or four skills, and writes in the voice, or can mimic the voice, right? And you combine these four or five things together, that’s your X Factor, and that’s basically what you’re you’re helping your clients do as well.

Emily Reagan: And then you add in SEO, and you’re really golden.

Rob Marsh: Exactly, or AI, or whatever, yeah. The more you add in, the more unique you become.

Emily Reagan: I was reading, is it James clears book? I’m so bad at quoting people, but he talked about Atomic Habits, right? That’s James Clear, yeah? He talked about combining his masters and like, a way to stand out. Like, if you can’t compete with Michael Phelps in Olympic swimming, like, create your own create your own field. And he talked about how you combine his major in a unique way, which just made him special. Like, that’s exactly what we’re doing. You change the playing field that you’re on. When you do that, I will tell you that a lot of copywriters don’t, and because I’m implementing a lot of the work, they don’t understand design UX. How many times have I been like, if that headline doesn’t fit, or your Facebook headline doesn’t fit, because there are only so many characters, and then SEO is a big one, like, that’s never going to go away, and especially with AI like skimming everything? So right off the bat, those would be two things, but I’ll tell you this, I think I appreciate copy more as I run my team, I’m going to throw my team under the bus when I see their responses sometimes in emails and customer engagement, even if they’re just set or sending out an email as a reminder to attend an event, I see the lack of copy, knowledge and messaging in their writing, and that drives me crazy as a business owner, and I will never hire someone again who doesn’t know how to write. And I don’t I mean beyond grammar, like the copy of reminding people, why are we showing up to this happy hour for the work group? And it’s not because we are shooting the breeze and we just like to hang out and take it easy. No, like, there’s a deeper mission impact and like, reason, they’re in this community, and we’re meeting up, and all of that was lacking from these little I’m going to call them piddly, like, internal communication. And for me, that’s eye-opening. Some clients just won’t get it, but the clients who do, I mean, they’re keepers. They’re keepers.
Rob Marsh: Well, I think more and more the clients who don’t get it, they’re using content farms or AI or whatever like they never were looking for that higher level stuff. But the keeper clients need humans more than ever, and they value that, and they will keep you, and they will pay well for that. And that’s why that messaging, I think, is just so important to bring to the table. So you’re talking to copywriters, marketers, marketing assistants all the time. Where do you see the biggest opportunities in online marketing today?

Emily Reagan: Oh, definitely. AI and  finding a way to combine it and be more efficient. Even whether it’s in your own work, streamlining your own work so you’re not trading as much time or being able to do it in that deliverable, like we talked about with that other brand voice person I was working with, and then the AI can go into even more automations, like I was thinking about how I used to manually listen to my clients, Facebook, live, transcribe it. I’m that old, transcribe it, then create blogs from that. I mean, that was like a full day experience. I learned her business so deeply, but now I can do all of that so quickly and just deliver such a better quality. And I think, and I think AI is really where it’s going. And I don’t mean that in a way to scare people, because I do have people in my work group who are like, Oh, my God, AI is replacing me. And like, it’s really not, if you can just add it into what you’re doing. And honestly, if I have somebody I’m interviewing for my team and I know they’re using AI, I trust them more. You know, they’re not going to be like, just sending me this giant invoice of all these dumb man hours. There’s this, like something, when someone’s ahead of it and incorporating it, it shows that they’re, like, on the forefront, cutting edge, that they’re thinking about my business like, there’s a lot of trust that goes into that.

Rob Marsh: There’s also an opportunity here that I think a lot of us are missing, and that is, you know, even when a copywriter or a content writer gets feedback from the client that says, Oh, we’re using AI to create that now, well, somebody at their business still has to be using the ai, ai to do that, right? And so why them instead of you? And I think sometimes we’re afraid of having that conversation with the client saying, okay, I get it. We can use AI for that. Let me handle that. Obviously, it’s we’re not gonna be charging 20 hours for the project anymore. It’s only gonna take us an hour. But that also opens up the other hours we were working for them to do more, right, even if using AI or to bring more ideas to the table or things that they weren’t able to get to. And I just think sometimes we’re as as freelancers or contract workers, we’re afraid to have that conversation because, well, sometimes it actually is going to end up in less work for us.

Emily Reagan: Yeah, I think it’s also music to the client’s ears. And I know, you know, kind of thinking about that fractional role, what we’re missing is the oversight, the consistency and branding, and messaging like it can feel so disjointed you get all these other people doing it. So I think that when you pitch yourself to the client, you kind of show that, like quality will actually improve. And yeah, I think sometimes a lot of people are afraid, but I know from all the business owners I’ve worked with, the ones that I’ve coached, or they’ve turned around and hired, are unicorns. They all want somebody to just take the reins and get it out of their brain and, like, start, you know, spinning those plates. And so offer it. Don’t be afraid to offer it.

Rob Marsh: While we’re on that topic, let’s talk about finding clients because a lot of people are struggling with that right now for a variety of different reasons. You see a lot of clients, a lot of requests for copywriters, content writers come through your group. I know what are people looking for, and why does it feel so hard to connect with clients today? This would probably be a two-hour discussion.

Emily Reagan:  Oh, my goodness.  Okay, I want to start with we’ve had over 3,000 jobs that we’ve shared with my little work group, and I like to check the data. I was looking at the top. What are people asking? And granted, like, this isn’t like a clean data set, right? It’s people coming from marketing assistance, but the number one thing they want help with is email marketing. Like, that’s just not going away. So I think if you can offer services, or especially for somebody new, that people actually want and need, is just the best way to get your foot in the door. I feel like I see a lot of service providers who get really rigid about what they do and what they don’t do, and such a double-edged sword, you know, but when you’re getting started, it’s like, you gotta, like, fit the market demand. Like, what do people actually need? And maybe get really good at that and build off of that.

The other three, I didn’t have the data right in front of me, but social media came high up there. And I know that social from, I don’t know, a few years ago, you could just kind of post whatever and not really have any intention. But social media gets a bad rep. But you add an AI, and it’s not that hard to take a concept, sales, email, create tons of, you know, social posts off of that. So I think that would also be like a good starting service to go in there and again, meet where the demand is right. What are you seeing with the client work? I think that there is a lot of new people, if I’m in a rift for a second, starting businesses, who don’t have any right to start a business, who got sold into a dream that I just do this one digital revenue stream, and I’m going to. Be rich, and they’re not thinking about what it takes and cost to run a business, and it takes, it does take time. It takes human capital. And so they do this initial like, oh, start with very little, and then they’re not thinking about the long term, like, who they hire first, what they actually need. How do they actually sell? And so I think we are kind of recovering a little bit from that as service providers and seeing the aftermath. On the flip side, I’m just going to keep going, Rob, I was seeing a lot of this Freelancer culture, of people who didn’t make it in corporate, who didn’t really cut it, who thought it would be easy to just start this type of business over here, and they’re kind of doing us dirty too, because they’re not delivering, they’re ghosting, they’re turning in bad work or Yeah. And so it’s like we’re kind of getting, getting it from two sides. And I think it’s really hard for us right now. Just like to pick out the good clients and the good work and not let everything else, plus AI, get us down.
Rob Marsh: I think if somebody could invent the quality signal thing that is able to show clients that, yes, this copywriter is really good, and that one is one you maybe shouldn’t like, that person would be a billionaire overnight. You know, this is like to be able to communicate that you do good work, that you deliver on deadlines, that you do what you say, that you stick to, you stick to the proposal, or to the scope of the project, that you know you’re helping your client solve real problems. Like, I mean, I don’t want to call them a unicorn because there’s more than a handful of people who do that, but also, you’re probably in the top 20% of copywriters if you can do that stuff.

Emily Reagan: It’s the soft skills, 100% how you show up, how you make the client feel. What does that look like? How you communicate. It’s the soft skills that make the difference. I have a couple of people in my work group who want to niche into copywriting, and they’re a couple of them have been a little bit whiny. I hope they don’t listen to this episode, but I want to tell them, like, if you want to be hired for these services, like, you have to demonstrate that you’re good at this. And this doesn’t mean your portfolio has all the writing you’ve ever done, but it starts with your own business. And if you don’t look like a professional or somebody I can trust, like, why is anyone going to hire you to do like that sales page that you really want to charge $10,000 for. And so I think that is hard, is I don’t see people putting effort into their own business and their own marketing so that we do trust you with everything else going on.

Rob Marsh: This is such a weird ethic, like you. I mean, I think I saw, saw the start, you know, as the pandemic was going on, a lot of people had to stay home, like, hey, this stay-home thing is pretty sweet. I’m gonna, I’m gonna do a job that’s like that. And so immediately it’s like, oh, copywriter, you know, I can write. I learned how to write in second grade. You know, I can, I can do this thing. And they jumped, I mean, I’m kind of repeating what you’re saying earlier. They jumped in without the marketing knowledge without having gone through, you know, any of the formulas, or trying to teach themselves anything. They just put up the shingle and said, yeah, I can write. Obviously, a small percentage of them do and can, but writing is like any other skill, and you have to know the formulas and the frameworks. You have to know how to get somebody from where they are to where they need to go. You’ve got to be able to talk about transitions and transformation and results and all of those things. I’m preaching to you, hopefully people listening that this is helpful, but if you can do those things, then, yeah, you’re, you’re probably going to be okay. I hope somebody listening just feels good that, like, Okay, I am. I’m in the top 10% like, I’m doing well, and I can charge for that because I do that, I put that effort, and I do the research, and it’s not just like delivering fast copy. I think that’s really the difference maker.

Emily Reagan: Yeah, and then it’s just a matter of laddering up from the clients you have to clients that can afford to pay more, who have bigger problems to solve and leveraging, you know, one client to move on to the next. And, I mean, it is, it’s work that, I mean, that’s really what it you know, it’s like, it doesn’t happen by itself. People don’t find you when you’re at home, or even if you have a great website, like, you still have to put in the reps and do the work.

Referrals have always been huge for me. I was fortunate to start at a time when I didn’t need a website. There wasn’t enough of me to go around. I booked out really quickly. But I see a lot of people that think like, if I just turn on the light, I’m open for business. Clients will come. Or if I’m just good, the work will come to me, but there is this level of, I don’t want to say self-promotion, but like visibility, that you have to do. Yeah, never just start a freelance business and hide behind the keyboard, and clients land in your lap. I mean, if you’re transitioning from a career where you already have those connections, it will be more easy for you. But a lot of us are not. And so putting in the work after you do the course, or after you build your website and write beautiful copy, I think that’s really hard, is the client marketing acquisition system, like, how do you get those leads? And a lot of us, I know in my community, we don’t all want to be dancing on Tiktok to get clients. I’m never onna say never. But like, no, that’s not my style. So it’s like, it there is a level of content marketing, like building the right high authority, you know, assets that show you as an expert. It’s a little bit of the outreach, it’s the strategic partnerships, but it’s, it’s the stupid networking, right? People have to know who you are. And I know in the copywriter circle, all the business owners, and this happened with the VAs, they’re like, Who are you working with? Who do you love? And they’re just whispering and tossing names around in boxer, and that’s like, the goal is, like, how do you get your name in that conversation?
Rob Marsh: Okay, so how do you grow your list? What are you doing to attract subscribers? I’m asking this a little bit selfishly, because obviously I want to steal all of your ideas for list building, but I think you’ve done some pretty unique things.

Emily Reagan: Yeah, One of the first things I did starting my business, because I knew how important it was, right, like I got to grow the audience, was I did that quiz. I did Chanti’s quiz course (Note: there is a short workshop about creating quizzes inside The Copywriter Underground), and built a quiz. It does need refinement now, yeah, but what I loved about quizzes, and what I found with my client work, was the cost per lead was really low. And, you know, there have to be levels of you have to go back and fix the messaging and just refine it, because it can attract a lot of people by, like, really narrowing it down. The quiz is really great. At one point, I was running a quiz for a client. We were getting 25-cent leads, and her quiz, we just left that ad on, is doing so well. Now, on the flip side, she’s not selling well at the end, but like, that’s on her, right? Like, that’s not me. It’s gonna point that out. But yeah, that quiz is working well.

How do I grow my list? You know what? I feel like a black kettle saying this. I really like blogging. I really like SEO. I play a good SEO game. One of the first things I did when I started being visible in my business was blogging and like, trying to really, like, dominate my industry and be a key person of influence, not necessarily that influencer that you know, you know, self-promoting Instagram influencer, but just really trying to show that I’m a leader in this space and people can come to me. So blogging has been good ads. I will always stand by ads is like the fastest way to do it. I think it’s harder. After working with copywriters, it’s hard to attract people who are sophisticated and know there’s going to be an order bump, and an upsell, and a sales sequence. And so it’s trickier, I think, for you as a copywriter. But, yeah, I don’t know. I’m just gonna fizzle out on that question. What should I do?

Rob Marsh: Well, I wanna, I wanna, actually, to go back to the idea of blogging, because you’re not the first person I’ve heard from this, although I think blogging has changed in some ways that are pretty significant since, you know, 2008 when it, you know, was really maybe at the high point when conversations actually happened on blogs and comment sections and all that and that. That still isn’t really happening, but I’m seeing a lot of people blog less on their own home pages, which you should probably still be doing because of SEO and because AI reads all of that stuff and, you know, puts that into their engines, that’s still good. But a lot of those blog posts are showing up as Facebook posts or as LinkedIn posts. Everybody goes to LinkedIn, but I’m actually, I think the algorithm in Facebook is starting to serve more and more content to people in the feed over what they used to prioritize, groups, conversations and that kind of stuff. So are you just blogging on your site, or are you sharing those posts in other ways as well?

Emily Reagan: I try to share them, but definitely blogging on my site to increase my domain authority. Like, that’s working really well. Sometimes I get my friends to do guest blogs too. Like, I want to keep the content going there. I know with, like, AI and, you know, ChatGPT, it’s a little different. Now, things are changing. I’m not the best SEO person to talk about that, but, you know, I have a blog on niches for virtual assistants, and this is my top blog, and I get a couple of 1000 every month, people just looking for, like, where do I go? And I mean, I wrote that sucker a while ago. I’ve had to go back and fix it, optimize it, monetize it. But that’s doing really well. Another funny thing is, I think my CM client right now, because I asked him, how did he find me? And he said, Google. And that’s amazing. I’ve also had somebody find me through ChatGPT because it asked, like, who are the fractional marketers that I should hire? And my name popped in, that’s because I have a strong online presence, right? And dancing on Tik-Tok. No, just kidding, but yeah, I think that the SEO one is one, if I were telling any freelance business owner or service providers, like, got a couple of core Cornerstone articles up just to demonstrate your authority and, like, thought leadership on it, on a thing or two, like, related to your service?

Rob Marsh: This is another thing, everybody listening should go try this. They should go ask chat GPT or clot, or whichever LLM you use, and say, I want to hire a copywriter or a content writer in this niche. Who would you recommend? Don’t, don’t put in your name, but put in your niche, and it’ll be really interesting, what you see. I tested that and was really happy, you know, I said, Hey, if I want to learn about copywriting or creating a copywriting business, who should I go? And it gave me four people that it recommended, one of whom was me. And I was like, Oh, amazing, awesome. We did something right. Now obviously, AI is scanning the Internet all the time, and new content comes up, and in order to keep that current I’m gonna have to continue producing content. But like you’re saying, if somebody’s not doing that on their own blog or, you know, out in the world somewhere where it can get captured, and it may not be getting captured on Facebook or LinkedIn the way that it does on your blog or, you know, in other places. So even if you’re posting there, you should probably copy all of that into your own website as well.

Emily Reagan: Yeah, if I, if I had it more together, if I had my marketing assistant doing more, I would definitely rewrite everything for medium. I would do the LinkedIn article game. Like, oh, man, oh, wait, I have a business win. Let me pop over there. Yeah, but let me tell you how I got in Business Insider. So I was stalking out, using my PR skills, my news jacking skills, I was like, stalking out the articles. And I’m like, they’re really playing a heavy SEO game. So this, like, I want you to steal this. They’re playing a heavy SEO game. You know, they’re drowning in content. Like every newspaper editor, magazine editor, and online publication, they need content, right? That’s the name of the game. So I pitched myself based on keywords alone, and said, like, you’re already doing this. This is why this is the next step. This is why your audience needs this. Basically, there were some virtual assistant articles, and I could tell they were old, but I could tell by looking at the slug that it was a keyword game. So I pitched it, and they’re like, great. Can you write it? We’ll pay you $300. Great! I would have done it for free. And it was shameless self-promotion. I was telling my story. They paid me to do it, and I’m like, what good credibility, having my own byline. That made me hot and sweaty. I couldn’t wait to tell my journalism professor. All I did was promote myself. That was the dream there, but that was me just being savvy with, like, okay, PR SEO my own writing over here, and that has helped a lot, too. But obviously, you can play the whole PR game after that and, like, use your as-seen-in feature things. But that was my first big media get, and, yeah, and it was just understanding marketing
and then, and I mean, even if you didn’t go on to do more, like being able to leverage Business Insider should be open all kinds of other doors for additional PR, and they did ask me to do more. I was waiting for my divorce to be over, and they’re like, will you write this article? I was like, Sure, let me get a final degree first, and then we can take that to the next level. But yeah, I was paying attention to what kind of articles they are publishing right now. And they are into how people are making money online, like it was a good fit for me, and it can fit for other people too, but going to the right beat reporter, the right editor with the right pitch, it was key. And, you know, and if it didn’t work, I didn’t die. I wasn’t gonna die if I got rejected.
Rob Marsh: So okay, this is a really, another really important principle, because this goes across the board. When we’re pitching clients, or whatever it is, rejection is so difficult to deal with. And obviously, if you’ve got tons of clients coming in, you’re not really dealing with rejection, but a lot of copywriters are, and because of that were afraid to take that step forward.

Emily Reagan: Yeah, I’m thinking about the pitches I’m getting right now. I get pitched out the wazoo for copy help the cold ones, you know, usually people in Eastern Europe, but they always start their pitch with hope you’re doing well, and then they’re making that, like classic mistake of assuming I’m looking for help instead of just engaging, and they want to immediately offer me an audit, and they’re immediately like, you’re doing your LinkedIn all wrong, and your YouTube sucks, and your Instagram isn’t growing, and it just makes me feel like, S, H, I T, and I don’t want to read, I don’t want to watch, you know? And so I was just thinking that they should feel rejected like they did. They did do it poorly. But you know, if they were coming from a different place, and I was like, hey, like, not right now, I actually don’t need this help right now, maybe it wouldn’t sting so much, but I don’t. Obviously, I don’t even respond. But when I think it’s hard, when you do put a lot of effort into those but if you’re doing it well and you’re not doing making those mistakes like you can’t feel bad if somebody doesn’t need help at that time.

Rob Marsh: The other thing that kills me is the pitches without doing any research. So this, in the last week, this is a true story. I’ve had two different pitches from two different people at two different companies, saying, Hey, I love what you’re doing at the copywriter club, we would love to help you launch a podcast. Get your first four episodes up and live and create some social media content around that. And I’m just like, huh, how much do you love what I’m doing? If you don’t realize my number one way of showing up in the world is a podcast that’s been going on now for eight years. Do you even know who I am? Yeah. So my response back to both of them was, hey name, why don’t you Google The Copywriter Club and then get back to me? And of course, they don’t ever get back to me. If you’re going to pitch, at least know something about the company you’re pitching, the person you’re pitching. Like you said, don’t assume anything. Don’t assume they need help, that you like you’re trying to establish a relationship, a friendship, even, and that pays off six months from now or a year from now. And if you’re looking for it to pay off on Thursday, you just, you’re not going to hit right? There’s just no way it’s going to work. Or very, very often it’s not going to work. So every once in a while you’ll get lucky and that maybe that one is going to keep you going, you know, with this crazy pitch style, but most of the time it doesn’t work.

Emily Reagan: Oh my gosh, yeah, I have heard that. Like, the work we do now affects our freelance business three months from now. Think Brittany McBean told me that. But I’m like, Yeah, I see that. Like, I went into a little bit of a closet in July in my business, and then, like, I paid the price because I wasn’t doing X, Y, Z. I think about those pitches, I think what people do wrong is assume that I need the work. I get a lot, by the way, for people who are like, I’m a virtual assistant, I’ll come work for you. I’m like, if I am going to hire anyone, it’s going to be someone from my program, 100% but if we just looked at that person that were want to work with, like, as a friend, as a connection. I’m well connected. I would probably refer you, like, 10,000 times more than I actually need copywriting help her right now. And so I think, but they, I think they just get the big, like, saucer eyes and think, like, oh, you know, she’s just gonna hire me. And like, she’s, she’s my sucker. And they’re not really thinking about it as like a network expand, expansion moment.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, for sure. Networks are everything. Relationships are everything, and especially when you’re not showing up in the office or you don’t, you’re not connecting with people in real life, like you have to be doing this offline.

Emily Reagan: Yeah, for sure. I feel like we should talk about, I don’t know. I’m kind of bouncing backward, but something I am seeing in the online space is a lot of like launch agencies who offered the big ticket, 30k 50k projects, like not doing as well right now. And so I was just thinking about, well, if I were new and I was trying to get copy clients, I think, Oh, what am I trying to say here? I would just start with some of those projects that are smaller, that you can get a quick win and maybe impress them and kind of let go of the ego. Like, that’s got to be really hard if you’ve been in charge of these, you know, big website overhauls and sales pages and whatnot. But like, it can be really advantageous to go in in a different capacity and help somebody for that connection. And I see that all the time with, like, our email tech specialist, they’re like, I only do VIP days. And like, how many of us actually know? Like, I need a VIP day to fix my Active Campaign. So I have to have had to coach people in my group, like maybe for this well-connected client who just needs someone for three hours to do XYZ, you kind of acquiesce a little bit and offer a package that fits her knees. Guess who’s getting all the referrals. Now I’m thinking of Janelle in my workgroup. Janelle because she went in and helped somebody while connected, do something small. And so I’m thinking about those outreaches. Maybe they should be something a little smaller, a little more tangible, less daunting, so we can build that trust.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, getting the first win, and then being able to leverage that, I think, is is, especially if you’re starting out, you you have to do that. You have to get that first win. And yeah, leading with a big project or leading with big promises and nothing to back it up is a great way to get ignored.

Emily Reagan: What do you tell your copywriters when they’re working for big names and they’re not allowed to tell anybody? Because to me, the second I hear like, oh, Sally was in Jordan Gill’s business, and she. Helped her make millions. I’m like, I want to hire Sally, but like, how do we do that as copywriters?

Rob Marsh: So there are two things. One that I would say is, you can talk about any case study or any client anonymously. So you know, you can always say, Hey, there’s this expert in this space. Some people will get it who it is, but most people won’t, right? But also, when you’re talking to somebody one one-on-one, I think in that situation, it’s okay to say, hey, look, I will tell you who the client is, but I’m, you know, I’ve agreed not to talk about them publicly or whatever, so you can’t share that. So the clients know one on one, it’s like, oh, yeah, I did help someone at that level, you know, make that that big thing. It’s, it’s funny.

I think it was the second TCC IRL that we did. We were in Brooklyn, and Ramit Sethi came to the party. And I’m like, this is awesome. I’ve watched what he’s done for a long time. He wasn’t part of our event, and he certainly wasn’t there to endorse us, but he had friends there, and we’re just like, yeah, come and I asked him if I could get a picture with him, and he’s like, yeah, no problem. But you have to promise me you’re not going to use that, you know, like to say you’ve worked for me. Like, I’m like, I’m not going to, you know, I’m, this is totally ethical. I just want a picture with this guy that I’ve really admired or whatever. I’ve never used that picture anywhere. It’s still sitting on my hard drive. It’s that stuff. You have to honor your word to people. But there are times when you can talk about things that are, you know, maybe shouldn’t be disclosed, you know, publicly, or that kind of a thing. So I would just say, be, be super careful about it. Obviously, if you tell somebody that you’re not gonna, you know, publicize it, don’t. On the other hand, I would put in your contract and only take it out if they insist the right to talk about the project, work that you do in your own marketing. Like, that’s just should be part of all of our standard contracts. It’s like, Hey, you have all the rights of the work. Everything that I deliver is yours, entirely yours, but I reserve the right to talk about the creation process, you know, the thinking that I did, even the deliverables that I delivered. And if they say they want me to do that, and honestly, okay, I’ll do that, but that’s in that’s in my contract. And I because I want to be able to talk about how I help people, how I solve their problems.

Emily Reagan:  That makes me want to hire anyone. It’s that social proof that testimonial. I’ve done this work for so and so, and the selling is like 90% done for me. When I hear that from a copywriter.

Rob Marsh: We’re almost out of time. Emily, but where do you where do you see your business going in the future? This is what’s next for you, is really the question?

Emily Reagan:  You know, sometimes I’m like, Wait, am I just competing with Upwork? I’m like, no, no, I’m different, like having an existential crisis. There. I am really putting a lot of my effort into my membership, because that’s where I’m having the most fun and enjoyment and just trying to be more aligned. I think for the last eight years, I’ve really been just like grinding and hustling, like I kind of talked about my divorce. I could see it coming, and I knew I needed to get some ducks in a row to be able to feed my babies, and I knew I couldn’t count on the military paycheck. So I’ve been really hustling, and in that season of, probably burnout, just to be honest, like, I think I’m too, like, numb to like, admit I was probably in burnout, but I’m just trying to be really smart about that. I am trying not to do all of the things. And so I think, though, I think my membership is really what I’m focusing on this year, and just helping them up level and their own businesses. A lot of us service providers are introverts. We don’t sell well, we don’t put ourselves out there. We don’t do the visibility we need to. So I’ve been doing some things under the surface to help them with an assessment and what to focus on, and accountability, and pushing my $47 membership to be something more higher end. So I’m in that transition right now and then figuring out, how can I not live launch and still make money? Because that was exhausting last year, going through a divorce and trying to launch a course and pay for the operating expenses of my business. Now, I’m probably telling you too much right now, but I think it’s kind of insightful, because we all go through these evolutions of like, what, what’s our actual capacity? What do we love doing? And where is the money just kind of flowing, right? So I am about to rebrand my podcast. I think my new cover title will come out next week, and really leaning into the marketing freelancer, I have a top 1.5% podcast, which is crazy. That’s awesome. Yours probably is too. But it’s such like a niche audience, it feels really good, because sometimes we’re like, Oh, I’ll never be that or that. And it’s actually doing really well. So really like leaning boldly into. To this little area I’ve carved out. I mean, it started as a VA, and then I said unicorn VA, and then I said marketing assistant. And so now we’re in that next evolution of the marketing freelancer.

Rob Marsh: If somebody wants to connect to you, get on your list. Where should they go?

Emily Reagan: Yes, I have a couple of things. One, find my podcast, or you can connect with me on Instagram, and it’s Emily Reagan PR to that in the show notes, as always, thank you. I added PR because in the beginning, I started with PR services, and Emily Reagan was taken and I’ve just, like, left it and not cared about it. But honestly, if anyone’s listening to this and they’re interested in hiring a marketing assistant, referring a marketing assistant to their client. The best way to help me is to go to hireaunicorn.com. Share that. This a way for me to take a job and share it with my community and help a lot of email tech specialists, marketing assistants, and marketing managers get work, and that is really what lights me up. Like helping people make money online on their own terms, using their skills, getting paid.

Rob Marsh: Thanks, Emily for sharing so much about expanding our influence as copywriters into other marketing services. Be sure to check her out at Emily Reagan pr.com she’s Emily Reagan PR on Instagram as well, and I’ve included links in the show notes to her podcast, so that you can click through and hear my episode on her show, which should be available in the next couple of weeks.

At one point during the interview, we were talking about how to differentiate from the millions of other copywriters and content writers out there. Specifically, I mentioned that your unique combination of skills, experience, deliverables, industry, clients, pricing, and voice is a big part of how you stand out and how you become the number one person who does the thing that you do. I call this your X Factor. Putting all of that together can be a bit of a challenge, so I’ve put together a couple of resources to help you do it. If you go to the copywriter club.com, forward, slash authority, you’ll find a short workshop that steps through how you create your own authority so potential clients can trust you and hire you. That workshop is free.

When you visit the page, you’ll also have the opportunity to add on bonus bundle of additional workshops that will help you through the process of figuring out your X Factor and how to share it with the world. That bundle is just $17, and it will help you determine where to show up and the audience that wants to hear what you have to offer. Before today, these workshops were only available to members who paid $1,000 a month to join the copywriter think tank, but you get them for just $17 today, and because no one really needs another workshop to watch even at two times speed, 2x speed, I’ve created a playbook for the authority bonus bundle that walks you through the strategies in the workshop, step by step, so you can apply them in your business immediately. It may be the best value that we’ve ever offered. Be sure to check out thecopywriterclub.com/authority and then get the bonus bundle.

And, of course, all of those resources are also available inside The Copywriter Underground, along with templates, the legal contract, and more than 70 other workshops and playbooks, monthly coaching. You get all of that at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

Stuff to check out:

Allison’s Website
Allison’s Podcast: Holy F
Allison’s Instagram
Get her freebie: Ghostwriter Gold
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  When you think of ghostwriting, do you think of books? If so, you’re thinking small. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

We’ve talked with several copywriters, from time to time, over the past eight years, who have talked about ghostwriting. Most of those episodes focused on large projects like ghostwriting books—the in-depth process for writing a book and connecting with the kinds of clients who need help from someone who can write their book. But ghostwriting is more than that. Ghostwriting includes any project where a writer steps into the shoes of their client to write something in their name. It can be blog posts, articles published online, emails, webinar scripts, and more. 

When you look beyond the book world, the opportunity for ghostwriters is huge. Landing these clients isn’t dramatically different from the way that you find, pitch, and close regular clients… though there are differences. Usually, as a ghostwriter, you’re not writing for lower-level employees. Rather, you’re writing for founders, CEOs, and other high-level thinkers, so your work needs to be able to reflect that. In fact, your pitches may need to include ideas and insights that a client can use to show up as a thought leader in their business and niche. Landing work with ghost-writing clients means you need to show up and be recognized at this higher level.

My guest for this week is Allison Evelyn, that’s her professional name— she mostly goes by Ally. Ally’s been on the podcast before when we talked about an earlier version of her business. Over the past four or five years, the kind of work she does and the kinds of clients she works with have changed quite a bit. When we recorded that earlier episode, Ally was a member of The Copywriter Think Tank. She also taught several workshops about day rates and the kind of work copywriters can get done on those kinds of projects (one of those workshops is in The Copywriter Underground today). With all the changes she’s seen in her business and her personal life, I was excited to catch up with Ally and learn more about her role as a ghostwriter for some prominent online voices. I wish we could talk about a few of them by name, but as a ghostwriter, you usually need to stay behind the scenes so your clients can shine.

Even if you’re not interested in ghostwriting for clients, a lot of what Ally shares in this interview about working with clients applies to the normal back and forth with all clients, and if you put her suggestions to work in your business, I promise, you’ll be more successful. Make sure you take notes as you listen to this one.

As usual, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. No matter what kind of copywriting business you want for yourself, The Underground is packed with resources to show up as a business owner—not just a freelancer, find clients, and solve big problems that clients are happy to pay big money to get off their plates. From copywriting and business templates to get you started (including a legal document and a proven onboarding process) to workshops to help you build your authority, attract clients, create products and services your clients want to buy, and more—The Underground is like a starter-kit for your business… or a complete business-in-a-box that you can plug into your own business and hit play. As questions come up, you have access to our private Slack community, monthly group coaching, and regular feedback on your copy. I’ve been inside a lot of memberships, and The Underground is the best value for content writers and copywriters I’ve ever seen. You can learn more at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu

And now, my interview with Allison Evelyn…

Rob Marsh: Ally, welcome back to the podcast. You were here Well, see, it’s been a long time—episode 172, and we were talking about launching, I think you were launching your first program, but a lot has happened since, not just like work-wise, personally, years have passed. Catch us up. What’s going on in your copywriting life?

Allison Evelyn: Yes, so dearest listener, we were just talking about how before, when we talked, and then I was a panelist at The Copywriter Club In Real Life, which was wild because it was early 2020. At the time. I was a New Yorker. I was living in New York. I was power walking in Adidas. I was launching programs and having memberships and doing day rates. And then. Since I have moved on in life, moved to Arizona. I am now in cowgirl boots all the time. I line dance. I met a man. We got married just at the time this airs, it’ll be about five months ago that we got married, and I am now, after being in the tech world for a while, gone back to my roots of ghost writing. And so that’s what we’re gonna dive into today, and I’m really excited about it. 

But I do think it’s almost apt that I’ve gone back to my roots of ghostwriting because now, at this point, on the day of our conversation, I have been a California-born native of the Bay Area. I have bicycled the beaches living in SoCal, I power walked in New York City. I road triped the country for eight months alone with my cat and all these other states. And now I’m living this Arizona country dancer life. I think all of our experiences channel into what we’re meant to do and what we’re meant to do, and how we show up as copywriters and ghostwriters. And part of mine has been being many different people, even as me, let alone ghostwriting for other people,

Rob Marsh: I don’t think this is an uncommon thing for copywriters. Obviously, we come from a wide range of backgrounds, and oftentimes we’ve lived two or three lives, or we’ve had two or three different careers or whatever, as we come to it. So it’s interesting that you mention that as an intro to ghostwriting because ghostwriting involves basically stepping into the boots of another person, another person’s life, and telling the story or talking as if you’re them. So, let’s talk about how you get started. We’ll talk about ghostwriting books in a minute, but, and that’s what most people think about, when they think of a ghostwriter, they’re thinking, oh, right, I’ll write a book. But there are so many ways to do this. I mentioned before we started recording. I used to ghostwrite blog posts for a CEO. So let’s talk about ghostwriting across the board. You know? What does it involve? And how do we get started? That’s a really big question. 

Allison Evelyn: Yes, absolutely. And I would guess there’s quite a number of people listening who are currently more identifying as copywriters or content creators. And this morning, I was rooting down. I really wanted to feel really prepared and just hunkered before this conversation. So I had this, like, coffee and I was like, coffee shop, and I was writing through, okay? What is the difference between copywriting and ghostwriting? And I think what it boils down to is, at least in my spirit, when I’m copywriting, or ghostwriting, copywriting is like, you’re helping create this brand. You’re capturing the essence, but you’re often helping to build it right? You’re helping determine if there’s an almond pancake batter company, like, are they a sassy one, or are they more organic based right? You’re helping create and determine the story. 

But a ghostwriter is like this real person or an organization or group, but most often, right, an individual who you’re already working with a voice like a real, living, breathing person who has an essence, and rather than creating it, you’re often helping to understand and extract who is that actual person? Because, as we know and we will talk about, a lot of people we know do not write how they talk like the real person they are is one way, and when we’re ghostwriting, some of the resistance we’re going to face and some of the pushback methods I’m going to talk about is helping people actually be who they are and tell like the real stories of who they are. But I think a lot of us were getting started, if we’ve been in copywriting, you know, we think of, okay, we’re, we’re creating a voice, we’re, we’re creating a persona. And then ghostwriting, you’re kind of shifting into a lot more question asking and going, Okay, who is this person? What am I pulling out? 

For me, my own journey, I’m going to be honest, I became a ghost writer and did not know it, because I didn’t know the term. And to your point, I thought ghostwriting was for books only. So when people asked, Hey, could you come and write this article for me? A magazine asked for me to put forward an article and do a layout. Can you write that? For me? I didn’t know that was ghostwriting. I still thought that was just content creation. 

So, just a shout-out. Some of you could be ghostwriters, and you don’t actually know it or haven’t realized it, and for getting into it, I think a lot of it is like naturally, when we’re working with people on copywriting projects, or we’re creating content. Some of it is just offering and putting it out there. Hey, do you have articles coming up? Have you done video scripts? Like, we start putting things out that are just more personal, that are from the person. Hey, I’ve been working on social media. Hey, I’ve been working on a landing page. Or I’ve been working on ABC. But what about emails in your voice? What about articles from you? What things are building your thought leadership that I could ghostwrite for you and capture your voice? Because I think we would be shocked. I mean, Rob, you won’t be shocked, but a lot of us might be shocked. How many people it terrifies them to write in their own voice. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, for sure. As I’m thinking about this, there’s a really crucial distinction between creating content and creating content in another person’s voice. But also, there’s a thing that I and some clients certainly deal with—when I hire somebody to write in my voice, the few times that I’ve done it, even though what I get back is really good, it doesn’t always sound to me, like me. I know I have really frustrated a couple of copywriters who have written things for me and I’ll go in and I’ll change it to make it sound more like something I wrote. So maybe this is not a common thing, but possibly it is. I’m guessing that the questions or the way you get to know your clients helps you overcome that. So can we talk a little bit about that? Let’s say we’ve been hired to ghost some content. How do you ensure that you’re actually capturing their voice and not your voice? 

Allison Evelyn: Yes, this is hands down. I’ve been doing this for over a decade now, and the number one question you nailed it is this very tentative, cautious voice that says, hey, because they don’t want to offend you, or they’re trying to be careful, or they’ve been scarred, and they say, how are you going to sound like me? Though? Like, yeah, how are you going to get my voice? And so often, I’m sure, Rob, you’ve seen it. A lot of our listeners have experienced this in similar ways or other ways. This is the most personal thing, right? Our voice, our words. Hiring someone to do an accountant job or bookkeeping, there’s even a designer like designers, yes, there’s personal, but it’s another level of emotion that goes into these are my words. This is who I am. 

It’s a very identity-based thing that they’re hiring for. And there is a lot of fear. There’s so much there’s so much fear, for certain, because as humans, we care so much about perception, right and how people are perceiving us and understanding us. I once did well, ironically, ghostwriting for a public speaker, because she was amazed with public speaking, but she really questioned herself when it came to writing. And she said, The reason public speaking is the number one fear in the world is because, at a biological level, you are standing on a stage with all your organs exposed, which sounds so your aorta and your spleen there’s like all your organs are exposed. And based on how people perceive you, when they think of you, you’re all vulnerable. You can be killed. And I think a lot of us are that way with writing, of how I’m perceived, what are people going to think? And is a biological fear.
So when people ask this on repeat, I’m definitely not frustrated or offended or over the question. My heart just goes, oh, oh, this like, yeah, they’re just scared. So what I tell them is this, and then I’ll share some exact methods I use. Because, as we talked about, I just do some weird things and some funky things I don’t know. I don’t think they’re typical for a long time. I mean, before I was in The Copywriter Mastermind, I didn’t go to copywriter school, so I feel like I just did weird, scrappy things that ended up working. So what I always tell people is, I start with, “hey, I want you to know I’m not here to be me. I’m here to obsess on exactly who you are and how you sound when we talk about feedback. I cannot be offended. I want to know what’s you is you, the real, genuine you” and I share some of the things I do to help capture it, but I really emphasize to them, “I am not here to be offended.” And then I ask honestly, like, “Are there reasons you’re nervous? Are there concerns you want to share with me?” Because I cannot even put into a number count. How many people have shared, they hired someone and sounded nothing like them. They took their LinkedIn profile and, you know, tweaked it. They, you know, didn’t sound like them. And when they tried to give feedback, the person got mad at them. You know, all story after story of like, scarring. And so I just really encourage anyone who’s listening and you’re interested in being a ghostwriter or growing in your ghostwriting capacity, you are the consultant. You’re the authority here, and you get to ask questions and lead the conversation. And like, with like, a true, sincere, full heart of like, hear their fear, ask things back to them. Let’s find out what’s going on, like, dive into it. Because a lot of people have had experiences that were rough and it didn’t sound like them or the person was offended. 

For some things that I do to obsess and get into their mind. So one, I’m obsessed with tangents. I usually plan for the first call to be 90 minutes, because the first 45 minutes is usually the person telling their story, and it’s a story they’ve grown very comfortable with. They probably tell it all the time. It’s familiar. It might not even sound like them anymore. It could be them from a few years ago. I went into this, and then this is my journey, and here’s _____. So I let them get it out of their system. Honestly, I’m just we’re getting it out of the system. It’s like clockwork, about 40 to 45 minutes. Then I can start the real dive into their voice. 

Once we get that 45 minutes in, I’m like, “Oh my gosh. Hold up. You mentioned this,” and I often try to point to things that at first might be a bit of a quote tangent. So let’s say you were writing for someone who is a health practitioner and they work with women who are pregnant or that they’re a doula, something like that. I don’t first go into, I don’t want to go so deep only on their actual expertise, like for an article, I want to start asking them side questions, because what happens is, we are, if we’re being interviewed, we’re naturally going into this more formal way of speaking, like, I’m sure, the way each of us talk on a formal interview, especially if we were younger, and we’re being protective of our voice. It is not the way we talk to our friends and family. 

Rob Marsh: More than that, I think sometimes we hold back because we’re afraid to get vulnerable, or afraid to make ourselves look less than competent, or say something that might make people question our expertise. There’s all kinds of reasons, I think that somebody would hold back. 

Allison Evelyn: Yes, exactly. There are so many reasons. And as a ghostwriter, some of those things are going to start to come out, or naturally will come out, because you’re going to be tapping into things that are emotional, especially to get the stories and the thing that the person actually does want, right? The client wants to be real. They want to be themselves. But it’s often a little harder not what they expect to get there. Because if they’re used to, you know, being interviewed, or they want to put their story across, they’re not always seeing themselves and let’s, like, it’s still, it’s at the classic, you know, inside the jar or the peanut butter jar, you can’t see the label, right? If you’re the peanut butter, you’re tucked in the jar. You can’t see that you’re, like, the crunchy cinnamon. You just know your peanut butter. So we’re helping them see that they’re crunchy cinnamon. And so I love to put, like, go out in these tangents a little bit I need to, like, get them out of their typical elevator pitch, their typical story mind. So they mentioned, like, North Carolina, and they’re like, oh, you know when I was there, that’s when we transitioned, and we live by the beach. You’re like, Oh, one second, you live North Carolina by the beach. Tell me. Like, were you a surfer? Like I just throw in these questions. And they’re like, Oh my gosh. I actually always wanted to be like, and their real voice will start coming out, and you have a record, it’s great. So you’re getting in their real voice. 

We need to just break it up, because we’ll come back to their industry. We’re gonna come back to the article, back to the book, we’re gonna come back to the things we’re writing about. But we need to, we need to loosen up. We need to, like, get a break, to release their real voice. 

I’m almost seeing it like, you know, glow sticks. So I got married five months ago… we had glow sticks for all the kids, which, of course, the adults also ended up picking up and wearing naturally with 17 kids at our wedding. And so glow sticks everywhere. You have to break it to get it to light up, but it’s with love, right? You’re breaking it with love, so we need to break it up. So get them talking about different things. And that is so much of my favorite part of what gets used in the ghostwriting process because now you’re writing an article or the book, right? Or the email that is from that person, from that expert. And we get to drop in these nuggets that are really them, of like, you know, if you want to be healthy, the way I always wanted to be a surfer when I lived in North Carolina. And we only get those. We break them out of, like, their the usual spiel, which I sounds derogatory, but it just true. We really do tend to get comfortable in certain spiels in our stories. So one, I get them on tangents. 

I love to get voice memos or to talk to people while they are walking. This is so game-changing. There is so much power in walking. And you talk to this person, you get the interview. You go, Hey, I’m working a few things. I’m gonna follow up with some questions, and I want you to do something that’s gonna sound weird. I would like you to do a voice memo while you are walking. And I think when we are on a computer, or we’re in front of someone at a coffee shop, we’re in, we’re in this more formal interview mode. I think there are studies on this, but even just in personal experience, I think a lot of us can relate. Where do a lot of us have the best conversations, the most raw, honest ones? To me, it’s in the car, because you have two people who are looking forward. Relationship experts will say, especially for men, there is a freedom to be more open and vulnerable when we don’t have someone staring us in the face.

Rob Marsh: I hadn’t thought of that. That’s probably true. 

Allison Evelyn: Yeah, there’s something just… your eyes can wander. You’re looking at open space, if you’re collecting your thoughts or you need to pause, because a lot of us, if we’re telling stories, we need to pause for a moment, and we feel awkward if someone’s just staring at us in front of us, but if we’re walking, if we’re driving, there’s an openness. And I believe the environment dictates a lot of how we feel. So if we want to be open, what’s a great way to do that is an environment outside that’s open. So I love sending questions, a few core questions, like, tell me about a time when… and give some specific story examples and then tell them to go on a walk. I know it’ll be weird. I call it out, I acknowledge everything I believe in over communicating with my clients and for why I’m asking them to do things. Like, I want to get you out of the house. I want to get you off of your computer. I want to get you away from it and just share word vomit. Don’t overthink it, because the more someone is walking and talking and others staring at dogs, and then they run into their neighbor like you are going to get a more real and real version of who that person is. To capture their voice.

Rob Marsh: This is probably the wrong time to ask this question, maybe a little bit backward, or maybe I should have started here. But before we go too much farther in this whole process, it occurs to me that there are a lot of companies that buy content and they’re producing content, or they’re hiring copywriters to write content from their company perspective that really ought to be doing more ghostwriting from the founder perspective, or maybe from, you know, some other team member who’s you’re part of the face of the company. When you’re ghostwriting, or you’re working with clients. Do you wait for clients to realize that? Or is there some conversation that you have with a company that that you’re saying, hey, look, rather than looking at this blog post from the company perspective. I actually think this should be coming from the CEO. And if it’s, if it’s that discussion, what does that discussion sound like?

Allison Evelyn: Yes, absolutely. And the next kind of methods I can share about that I’ll go into are, if you don’t have that control, because there’s a lot of people, if it’s personal, right, you can ask them to take a walk. You can ask some people, as you to your point where sometimes it could be the CEO. You’re working with a big company. You don’t always have a certain level of access to someone to dive in and the time. So there are definitely things we can do to still capture their voice to sound like them. So just want to make that note, yes, that is a I have that conversation all the time, all the time I remember, like last year alone, I should have just started doing a little tally on my wall, like in chalk or something, of the amount of times I go, Hey, I and this is kind of my language for talking to people is I love that we’re going to talk about this piece I love, we’re going to channel this I love. This is your mission. Can I be really honest with you? I think that’s probably one of my go to phrases, because it’s probably surprising if people say no. I think most people want you to be honest with them, right?

Rob Marsh: Yeah, can I be honest with you? No, actually, I would like you to continue lying to me. Not. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard that answer yet 

Allison Evelyn: Exactly. Or, like, No, I want to be in denial. Or, No, I don’t want to face insert, so can be honest with you? I’ve never had someone say no yet. So yes, I’m like, I’d like to share something, and it might be different. So I always do a little context. I do a little lead in, because there are certain things, if we just slap on someone, they might react. So I think it’s important if it’s something that maybe they’ve maybe they have written as the company for a long time. I mean, there was a company I talked to about this, and they had literally 30 years. They had written third person Wow as the company. So, you know, we also are mindful of, where we’re coming into, what’s the context. And so if it’s something new, something that could trigger defensiveness or fear our but, and I’ll, I mean, I almost always hear the same thing, so I will definitely share. What I the objection I always hear, and it’s funny, because we always end up ghostwriting as them after we, you know, go through a few more questions, and they sit with it usually is, is like, Hey, I, you know, give that context, I’m going to share something that might feel a little bit different. Am I feel uncomfortable, and I’m going to tell you why I think this is going to be a huge important thing for your business. Um, but I think it’s going to be something really amazing, even if it’s a little uncomfortable at first, and they’re like, okay, okay, you know, you’re you’re gearing up a little bit. I think uncomfortable is a good world word, because it’s not bad, it’s not terrible, it’s just uncomfortable for a lot of people to have a voice, or if it’s a marketing person going, I don’t know if the CEO will want that, you know, just uncomfortable. And then I want to, you know, third person is this general company. It’s a general mass. It’s not somewhere speaking to and I’ll be so direct if it’s the CEO who’s separate, or often, is the person on the call even going, you are the leader. People want to name. They want a face. They want someone they can talk to. And I’ll give examples of companies that I know they can relate to. I will give them hey, this person from this company. Think about email from this company. Like humans. We want a face. We want a name. We want someone to hear from. We want something personal—especially in this world of AI and mass numbers and volume. And oftentimes, when it’s the CEO or the founder, it is really them that a lot of people first found out about the company, or it’s why they’re drawn to the company. 

And so I call it out, and it almost always makes them uncomfortable. They usually are like, no, no, I don’t want to make it about me. So hey, like it’s you, like, your voice, your story, your perspective. It means something. It creates the human experience, the human touch. And that is the objection I get, is the number one objection I hear when you are pushing back and challenging. Let’s make this first-person ghostwriting, not this third-person ominous. I will say blob. That sounds like a sad, negative connotation, an ominous blob of a company right where you don’t know anybody. It’s like a massive thing. The thing is, they don’t usually want to make it about themselves. So many times I have heard CEOs founders say, no, no, I must be about the team. It’s about the heart. It’s about the mission. I don’t want to plaster my face on everything. I don’t want to make it about me. And often what I’ll tell them is whether or not they like it. It does come down to them. It is often about them, like whether they’re a known CEO or less known like the founder, their story like that is what people care about. I think about charity water. Anyone listening? Rob, if you know Charity Water?

Rob Marsh: Yeah, it’s a great charity. I mean, if you’re looking for a charity to donate to, it’s at the top. It’s an amazing charity.

Allison Evelyn: Yes, it’s so good. The reason I think so many of us even know about charity water and have a heart for them is his name’s Scott Harrison. He is so open with his story. Like, when I think of Charity Water, I see his face. I think of Scott. I think of their YouTube ads. It was one of the few full-length, very long YouTube ads I have ever watched. Was Scott telling his story of being a club promoter and being in this nightlife and like living this wild, you know, light, he goes into all the details, and then his transformation, and then going around the world and seeing this need, and there, that story is what got my heart into charity water. But honestly, if they had just stayed corporate, yeah, that did good in the world, it would not hit the same it just wouldn’t. And so I think going back to you have ownership as a ghostwriter, as a copywriter, you know you’re an expert, you are being paid to lead someone like you are being paid not to be dominated by this person’s voice. You are being paid and invested in to host this voice and give your insights and to be honest with people even if they find it at first, even it’s uncomfortable, it’s like, if you were hiring a financial advisor and you were throwing money at something that they see, is going to like be a poor reason for insert a, b and c. You want them to be honest. You want them to tell you, hey, I really don’t think you should do this. Here’s why it’s a good thing to lead people. And so I have that conversation a lot of saying, Your voice matters, your story is what’s going to draw people in. Why you founded this company, who you are, your experience. I know it’s uncomfortable, but already it is actually about or from you a lot. And so can you let us try telling that story? Are you open to letting us try it this way? So I think there’s a lot of that kind of language I implement to soften it.

Rob Marsh: That makes sense. As you’re talking, I’m thinking about the companies with CEOs that really stand out, like they’re in the lead, you know, companies like, you know, Apple and Steve Jobs, right? Or Amazon, Jeff Bezos, for better or worse. You know, Elon Musk’s companies like people who are and and as I’m thinking through this idea of, should a company have ghosted content or plain content, it seems like those companies that don’t that are maybe more generic, the IBM’s and Hewlett Packard’s or whatever, their founders have moved on, and so it feels like it’s really natural, if we’re working with founders, people who are running their own companies, they’ve started it like it should be their voice. There’s probably an argument for those other companies where the founders moved on, that there should be another voice, you know, a leader that personalizes that brand. But I mean, this isn’t even really a question, is, I’m just kind of working through this in my brain, like, who should you know, who are the great clients for somebody who wants to go strike content? And again, if you’ve got a founder, it’s like a no-brainer,

Allison Evelyn: Absolutely, and especially, I mean, a founder is a great person because, as a founder, they have a lot else on their plate, even just if we go logistically, not even skill set wise, but logistically, a founder has a vision. They are hiring. They’re running the teams like we know that ghostwriting, good, impactful content and words, it takes a lot of time, whether that is an article, whether that’s an ebook, whether it’s a full-length book, a founder who’s running, even if it’s a tiny company or really large company, they don’t have that space and bandwidth, and oftentimes the skill set is different, right? A lot of my people who are founders, they’re visionaries, in the sense of, like, the big picture, they’re directing people. They’re directing teams and writing there is vision. And also we are detail-oriented. We are sitting there googling synonyms or using Cloud AI for, like, what is the perfect word for this one headline? Like, it’s a deep focus work. So I think it’s a great fit for ghostwriters for people who are founders of companies.

Rob Marsh: Another thing that occurs to me—the difference between copywriting and ghostwriting is the emphasis on stories, so regular content, you can say the thing or tell the thing. Obviously, that’s not the best practice with copywriting, but it happens a lot in the content world with ghostwriting. Really, the way to personalize is, I mean, the whole reason to even have a ghostwriter is to pull out these stories. So, you know, can we talk a little bit about what you do to get people’s stories out and tell their stories in unique ways? 

Allison Evelyn: Yes, I am such a story addict. I’m sure a lot of us are. Of us, we’re gathered here. You know, wherever you are in the world, and whether you’re doing dishes or you’re driving or walking, you’re probably nodding because, as writers, we are storytellers. I am the person who I’m with at coffee shops and in my work, and then sometimes I’ll pop up my headphones because there are great conversations going on around me. And I am, I’m taking it all in. I’m absorbing. I’m making notes. So I did a lot of my road trips, since I was road tripping alone for over six months, I would go to these random spots and sit outside and I just have, I have notes on notes in my phone of stories, right that we’re capturing. And I think there are different ways to capture stories, for ghostwriting, right for their content, whatever the format is, in different ways. 

So let’s say it’s someone you don’t have as much access to, or you have more limited time. I love going deep into just all of their presence on the Internet. And that doesn’t have to be new. In fact, I think there’s a lot of beauty of going farther back, so going deep back through someone’s social media channels, going way deep back in their Instagram, where they might have even been in another company or lived another life, that’s actually really great content, because you can see their background, get these stories, or all These things you can drop and pop into their content, and they will be mind blown. I’m telling you, they will go, how did you even know that about me? Oh, my gosh. Like, yes, this is actually about my life. Because they will be so shocked on how well you’ve gotten to know them in ways they didn’t, wouldn’t, they wouldn’t even think to tell you, because you go back five years and you see, oh, like they were a kickboxing instructor. And you’re like, going back to the classes they used to teach, and now you can reference in their ghostwriting, like, Oh, I’m going to blank. 

You know, it’s funny. I used to go to this boxing gym back in Detroit. And they’re like, how did you even know that? And. You, it’s all going back through. Also, if they’ve been on YouTube, if they’ve been on podcasts, you know, anything you can do to get their voice? I will literally just play my client’s YouTube videos while I’m writing as them, just because I hear their voices. So the more that I hear their voice and their words, it just fills my brain with them, and then I’ll make notes on phrases I notice tend to repeat, on words they tend to say. So, for example, there’s someone I was ghostwriting as, and she has a podcast, and I noticed that when she talks about memory, she always says whenever I was blank, so I would write that down. So then I read her email and go, you know, whenever I was blank and like those, like capturing the exact phrases people use that honestly, y’all they probably don’t even know that they use. Like they probably don’t even know they say certain things. I have a client who is from the north of Ireland, and it’s so fun to get to go straight as her because my family’s from Ireland. So I am half channeling, tapping into my own family and my aunts. And things I naturally notice from, you know, going back and forth to Ireland my whole life, certain very Irish phrases. So she will say certain things, like the way she says like, she will insert like, like, oh, like, Oh, my, oh, my blank or oh, this, like, she has these very certain phrases she uses. And I write them down, and then I put them through her copy, and I remember the voice memo I got from her one day when she said, this is, I did not know I said these things are unique. Oh, she has a very global audience. I go, Oh, yeah, they’re very you, and they’re very Irish. She goes, Are they really and, like, first of all, what you just said was very Irish, yes, like, it is. So I think any things you can do to take notes and really analyze the patterns of how people speak makes a big difference, plus they are very specific, tangible references to things in their life.

Rob Marsh: So as you’re working with these clients and ghost writing for them, are you bringing them ideas to write about, saying, Hey, I you know I noticed this about you, or notice this about the market? Everybody’s talking about this thing, I think we should address it. Or are you letting them dictate what you’re writing, and you’re just contextualizing it to their voice.

Allison Evelyn: What I would say tends to happen is people have a general idea of what they think they’re going to talk about, and there is sort of this co-creating that ends up happening because they might come in and say, Hi, I am launching this. I need emails, articles, you know, ghostwritten on this topic, and or, you know, with this book, I see talking about this. But then as you start talking to them, as you start really getting to the heart of what they want to say, what’s going on so very often, a different, at least a semi-different, story starts to come out. Like themes start to come forward, like there’s something they keep bringing up, like you start to see where it actually ends up going and going, okay, actually, I know you’re saying you want to talk about this, but it sounds like this is coming up a lot. Look at these questions. 

Because, let’s say it’s someone who has a community, like an app, and you go through that app and you see that these members are all talking about one thing. You’re like, hey, but this is a big question. So why don’t we address that? And we can kind of merge it with, you know, you’re launching this thing, but let’s like, speak to the real question going on. AI is a great example, right? Ai, like any major technology in the history of our world, flipped all these people in its head. So if I was taught doing a business launch, and I’m launching something on pricing my programs, and all of these people are fresh to AI coming out and are freaking out that what is going to happen to business are robots are taking over the world, because that was the number one phrase I heard when I was deep in with tech clients and apps, are robots taking over the world. And if we don’t mention that, it seems almost a little odd, and we can still talk about the launch. So like, Hey, we’re launching this program. You’re going to talk about articles and articles, you’re gonna talk about your business perspective. But like, I know you have thoughts in AI, I know you said this in your private, you know, consulting calls in your group membership, like, why don’t we tap into that? So I think there is, like, this element of kind of co-creating with the person, where you’re bringing ideas and you’re bringing things forward and, you know, kind of going off of like, what their intention is. Because, in my experience, people aren’t usually showing up with no vision, right? Especially like a founder or someone like that. They usually have some goal they’re working towards, like some intention. They’re not usually purely going, I have no idea what to say. I just need words in the world. Yeah.

Rob Marsh: I know you like tangents, so I’m going to tangent here on AI for a second. Since you mentioned, you mentioned both tangents and AI. So do you use AI at all in your process for ghosting? And I mean, the reason I ask is obviously like, if I hired you to write for me, you could take a bunch of podcast episodes or some of the trainings that I’ve done in the copywriter underground. You plug those transcripts into AI and have it identify, like a lot of those quirky things that I say, maybe it’s some of the things I hate that I say, you know, as I listen back to myself. But obviously, when you tell people sometimes things, they say, they go, Oh, I don’t like them, but it’s you. I see my transcripts, and I know how often I say dumb little phrases as fillers, and it drives me crazy. But do you use AI like that at all? Or are you all in on it’s you’re a human. I’m a human. We’re human created.

Allison Evelyn: I see I had this metaphor come out of my mouth recently. I don’t remember where, somewhere virtual coffee shop, not sure. But my sort of metaphor that came out for AI was, it’s like the mannequin in a shop. So you’re walking, you’re walking in the mall. It’s like, you know, it’s high school. You have an idea for, you know, like, oh, I want to wear something to insert event. And you see a mannequin, and someone took the mannequin and sort of said, Oh, you could wear it like this. Here’s an idea. But if you walk in and really just take the outfit one, it might not even fit you, like it might be. I mean, I could be for someone who’s six foot one and I am five foot five, like that is not going to work, um, or there might be elements that aren’t quite right, or like that, that that is I love the skirt, but like that’s not really my favorite color. I’d wear it in this color. And so I see AI as this great way to prompt suggestions. And I don’t use it as much. I know people who use it a lot more, more than me. I’m sure less I really use it at times… I just use it. My wording is, it gets my juices flowing. It’s kind of like the mannequin I see the mannequin I see the outfit. I’m like, Oh, I hadn’t thought about polka dots with stripes. Oh, maybe I could combine other patterns. And then I it gets my brain thinking, so with AI certain things, I mean, honestly, I use it so much for synonyms, or if there’s a phrase I keep somehow saying the same, like word strategies, like, Oh, what are other ways if I’m trying to talk about strategies that I you know, and like getting those sort of ideas. I think sometimes, if you’re trying to get a really basic framework, just to map out, like format. So for example, I remember one time I used it because I was mapping out a webinar for someone. I was writing everything out for them in their voice, and I’m like, Okay, I know I need to have a webinar. I also know I tend to go over on slides. I’m like, at 30 slides. Only give me 30 slides. 30 slides. We’re gonna break into a story at the beginning. We’re gonna talk about five things, and then we are gonna need to wrap it up with a call to action. And what AI did is it just mapped it out in terms of, like, literally, like, Okay, you probably want about five slides for the story, this many slides for this. And honestly, I just saved myself, you know, 30 to 40 minutes of mapping something out that’s really not when my brain needs to go like, the client has hired me because they want me to extract their voice and do that, and that’s not really, there’s nothing they’re gaining from it. If AI did that formatting, or if I did sort of like, I think about going to the doctor’s office, how long do you see the doctor in an appointment? 

Rob Marsh: Not actually that long.

Allison Evelyn: Unfortunately, only a couple of minutes, right?

It’s pretty sure, because they know the doctor has such an expertise that they just need them in the room for when they need them. Someone else checks you in, right? Someone else checks your insurance. Someone else takes your vitals, like, all these steps. So I think AI is like, my vitals, taker of like, okay, maybe it maps this out, gets my juices flowing with like, oh man. These headlines are sounding ratchet in my brain. Let me try some new things, or give me some synonyms, or, like, just some prompts. But then when I’m bringing out the stories and I’m getting their quirks, I’m going in, um, at this point, like, you know, I really instill most it’s me and my brain, because I feel like the way we are gonna pull it out and bring it in is, you know, AI, yes, is a tool, but we are like a human with insight. We’re talking to someone, we’re hearing their real voice. We have all these stories in our brain, right? I’ve spent hours listening to them on YouTube. I’ve been combing their Instagram, all these like facets that are. Coming together in my mind, of like, how to plug in the stories and use their voice, and then, like you said, I think that’s a great idea. Actually, I have not done that brilliant. Take the scram chip, the transcripts, what are the common phrases that get repeated, and then go in and plug some of those in? Perfect. That would be a great way to use it. But I think we can be a writer and really own being unique, and it doesn’t take away to use AI if it’s used as a tool, and we don’t have to be downcast and downtrodden of like, AI is taking over. It’s like, oh no. It’s like the internet. It’s like Google Docs. Like, I could use a typewriter and print it out and white it out, but I’m really doing it in vain, like, when I can just type it on Google Docs. I also do own a typewriter side note, but that’s for fun.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. Well, now I got questions about typewriters, but I want to talk about ghost writing. So I know you have started to switch from writing smaller projects like blog posts or other things for your clients, and you are now moving into ghost writing books, which, again, is what most of us, before you know chatting today, usually think about ghost writing as. So can you talk a little bit about that switch from short form to long form? And you know what other things we ought to be thinking about as we reach out to this kind of a client?

Allison Evelyn: Yes, absolutely. I think what’s really interesting is we can get so used to the worlds we’re in that we aren’t thinking about other possibilities. Or if there’s certain walls we keep coming against, I have found in my journey in entrepreneurship and in career and honestly in life, like if there’s some wall I keep coming up against, there’s a time to sort of step back and go, Okay, is there some reason? Is there something that needs to change? And for me, and I will be so curious on, like, how many people listening feel this way? I realized one of my walls and one one factor that could be a sign you’re a fit to go into pursuing ghost writing books or like longer formats, is if it feels like you’re almost cutting your clients off. And what I mean by that is, I get so deep with my clients. I mean, I’m in their worlds. I know about their lives and their kids, and how their pets are doing? We’re holding up our cats to each other, like on Zoom and our cats are chatting. And, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a we’re so deep in it with each other. And, you know, doing a sales page, doing emails, doing these launches, right? We have a more limited time. And I think I reached this point of, I love writing as people, I love serving them, but I feel like it’s so short, and I keep almost cutting them off, you know, like a therapist where, you know, the person really started opening up, and they’re like, ah, we really got to cut this time, because this is a short session, and this is all, you know, this is the bandwidth I have. And so I think what started to hit me was, oh my gosh. It’s because I meant to write longer form. I love getting into people’s worlds. I love spending hours creeping on them. I always tell my clients this line, I will say, you cannot send me too much. So I’ll say, Send me your brand guides. Send me the past videos of you, send me articles you’ve written, send me your favorite emails. Send me the data on your emails and I perform like I am a high input person. I want to see it all. I want to take it all in. I want to observe it. And so it started to click. Oh my gosh, because of the book you have this opportunity, you’re actually supposed to go that deep. You’re supposed to know you can’t know too much about them, like you are capturing them and embodying them in this really deeper format. And so that was something that really started to hit me, like, Why do I feel like I’m constantly having to cut things and end things so short, and it’s not feeling right, and like something’s feeling off. So I think that was a big one. And then second, I always love to do these check ins of, what am I personally really passionate about? Like, what do I obsess on in my free time? Like, what are the things I’m going into? What are the things I’m looking at? And I started finding myself going, okay, you know, I spent a lot of years deep in so many memberships and courses, and I was like, really, like, in so many areas of my life, and it was amazing, but I kind of moved into this place of, I, I’m, I’m, at core, a book lover. I’m sure, as writers, almost all of us are right. I, I have always had such an obsession. There was, like, a rule at our dinner table that you can’t have books because it was that severe, like we’d be sneaking books under the table of like, like, just obsessed with books, writing books from a young age. All was, they’re always stories about, like, orphaned animals that were trying to find parents, or this is, this is so dark. But I just found this story I wrote in fourth grade, and it was called alone. In the forest of doom, and it was this girl who had been kidnapped and thrown in a force to die.

Rob Marsh: Yikes. And there’s your brain. Yeah, a young brain. You need therapy.

Allison Evelyn: Oh we love therapy. It’ll be my next session of like, hey, if there’s anyone else who wrote dark stories as a child, please, uh, my Instagram, and I’ll be in the show notes, hit me up. We can talk. Um, yes, yes. This character was thrown into the forest, and she used to survive and, like, fight her way out, like, make it back to her family. And at the end, like, the mom is saying all these words to her of love and how much they missed her, and they just want her to be safe. And it’s so wild, because an adult I can see now, oh, that was, that was definitely stuff. My mom said to me that I was, that’s what I was doing right, as a young writer, and a ghost writer was like taking cues from the world around me, but when you think about the things you love. Like, I’ve gone back into my love of reading all the time. I’m an English Lit degree. You know, that was like when I studied. And I think there was a period where I was a lot more deep in memberships and courses and learning in that way. But who am I actually? What do I actually? What am I currently drawn to? And in the last few years, it’s books like my I’m constantly referencing some book I’m highlighting. I’m sending copies to people I have, you know, like The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer. And so I think sometimes, if we’re feeling this confusion on, what am I supposed to be pursuing, what are, what should I be doing? Part of it is like, what are, what are you naturally drawn to? And so when I think about how much books have changed my life, that is a big one of, oh, I think that’s actually when I want to pursue writing, because I believe in the power of books. Like, when I’m talking about ghost reading someone’s book, I’m not selling someone. I’m not selling someone trying to convince them of something to like, some way to use me, or like, pay me I legitimately am, like, with my whole heart, every ventricle and aorta is going your story would change lives, and if you do not tell it, there’s all these people that would be so impacted. So it’s really easy, I think, when you believe in the power of something to naturally, want to do it and pour into it, and that would be kind of my I guess, final tidbit on book ghost writing and something that really signaled to me that that was something I was meant to pivot into. And someone listening might feel this way. I have realized the level I analyze books is wild, like I’m highlighting and partially it’s for the information, right? Partially it’s for, oh, that’s a great thing, but partially I’m going, that’s a great phrase, Oh, I see they did a story, they started halfway through the story, then they did a flashback, like, I’m analyzing how they told the story, how they set up the book, like how they structure their books, how they how they structure their book covers, like, all of those are things I am constantly I naturally love. And so if you know someone listening, is the same that also could be a signal of something that could be a great fit because you’re already studying it. You don’t even know it.

Rob Marsh: As I think about the process of writing a book for someone else, there’s probably a couple of different kinds of books people are looking for, you know, memoirs, you know, telling their story. There’s probably educational books. It’s like, you know, the seven things about starting a SaaS business kind of a thing. Maybe there’s a combination between the two. So as you’re entering into this, how are you thinking about how you’re helping clients identify the book that they need to write? So again, somebody may say, I need to, you know, I want to have a book. I’ve got some great stories, but there’s got to be some kind of a goal for the book. You know, am I just telling these stories to entertain my kids and my grandkids, or am I telling these stories in order to bring customers into my business? Because those are two really different books with probably very different structures, and you need to be telling stories in different ways, right? So, how are you thinking about that kind of stuff as you approach these kinds of projects?

Allison Evelyn: Absolutely. Well, I mean, first is like, the call to action is always or what’s the heart, what’s the intent for? What the purpose is, is this a founder of a tech company who is going, Okay, I want to be established as a thought leader and be known for blank topic because I run a company where we do blank is it going to be their new sort of business card where they go to conference or speak at conferences, and they want to have this tangible, real life thing that people can hold and read and learn about them from and become the trusted expert? Right? And exactly, there’s a whole genre of book writing that is people who are older that want to have a memoir to pass on to their family and have that legacy. So I think that’s at the heart first, is absolutely going okay, what is the intention for the book and what’s the vision? Because that could change a lot. So for example, if it’s more educational and my I write my own, you know, fiction, I’m writing my own books that are fiction nonfiction, that is my voice, and that’s the way I get to have an outlet, and I get to be me, and I get to fully write someone else’s book. That’s also a joy, because I know there are people who go straight fiction. So for me, ghost writing, non fiction being my pivot. Ghost writing non fiction for study thought leaders, memoirs, and especially spaces in you know, tech, health and faith based Christian books, is okay? Is it to educate and show up as a thought leader? Because then it’s what one idea that immediately comes to me that you know, for my mindset and approaches, is this meant to be one book, or is this like a series you see doing so right from the get go, I want to know, is this more of a series, or is this more of a one off? Because if it’s a series, there might be, you know, like they, if they are teaching on something, we can go in with the mindset of, like, we’re going to talk about these three or four main audiences they have, and break it down so educational, I want to question first, if we’re going to do a series and then break it up that way, and also, how is it being used? So is this a book that has been especially for thought leaders and for education. Is this to be sold and to truly be an author and to have income, or is this something where you’re using it in part of a funnel and for credibility? Because it’s for a funnel and credibility, this is a lot more likely to be done as some sort of freebie, especially if it’s a could be a full size book, but probably like a shorter book, because there are more and more books coming out, right, that are more, you know, like 100 pages. It’s like a shorter version book, that’s top of funnel, something to bring to conferences. So really understanding how is it being used? Is it the end goal, just the book itself, or is it, just, as you said, is it a funnel into someone’s business, into someone’s, you know, expertise, credibility, that that sort of piece, I think when it comes to other sorts of like non fiction, I think my my heart, is definitely this sort of, you know, Inspiration and teaching something. And it might not be directly a memoir, but it’s like a sneaky memoir, because it’s going to be through storytelling. It’s going to be, you know, tapping into their own background, and I think a lot of it is helping them, the client, figure out what the topic is. Because a lot of times, just like mentioned before, people might come and say, Oh, I really want to write a book and I want to tell a story, or I want to share this part, but as you actually talk to them and work through them, like your new theme emerges. So I think if there’s education, if there’s a funnel, that’s easier to find the purpose sometimes, because naturally, if you, you know, lead a software business, and you run a certain type of software, you kind of know your call to action, you see your funnel. And then there’s more openness with a non fiction that’s more inspiring, or a memoir, like with a with a faith based book, or without a wellness book or, you know, so, you know, that is an experience where you’re kind of working with them a little bit more of like, what’s the story we want to tell? Why? And then helping them figure out what that story is, and then mapping it from there, as I think you can map a bit of the table of contents, but that’s really something that you’re gonna do in the process of ghost writing the book. As their stories come out, as the themes emerge, as they say that one line where you’re like, stop, stop. What did you just say? That’s a quote. That’s a quote. Hold up. Okay, we need that in there. So a lot of that ghost writing process is like extracting things from them figuring out their story, because that’s why someone hasbeen  hired to ghost write a book that’s a whole other beast to do that and create that.

Rob Marsh: Is there any last advice or big things that you want to share with people who might be thinking about ghost writing? 

Allison Evelyn: Yes, so there is a big one, and I shared it with this about Rob beforehand, because it was just so big on my heart. And what I want to say and make sure people know listening, is that whether you’re a copywriter or content creator, you’re a ghost writer, especially if you’re going into ghost writing as a writer, where we know we’re already behind screens, we’re in separate rooms. Times we’re not always seen, especially as a ghost writer, right, where someone else’s name is on it, unless you are co authoring, which can happen, right, where you can co author and your name is also in, you know, sort of the credits, or the, you know, the byline. But a lot of times, as a ghost writer, right, it is a true ghost writing is your name is not there. It is the other person. And what I want to highlight and make sure is known, because this is something I did not realize I struggled with. You know, 10 years ago, eight years ago, is that when you’re ghost ring for someone else, it’s not that their voice matters and yours does not. Your voice still matters. You as a person like you are created like so special, right? Each person, right, is created so wonderfully and uniquely, and all of our voices matter. And when we go through someone else, I have found, at least in my own experience, there was times where it was so easy for me to go, oh, they matter, and their story is this, and then I was like, I Shrunk myself because I thought I had to shrink my value as a person, for someone else to be lifted up. But that’s not what ghost writing is, right? Like ghost writing is Hold up. What a joy and a gift that I have, the joy, the excitement, the skill set to highlight someone else’s story, to draw it out of them, to tap into who they are, for even them to see more of who they are. I have people cry all the time when I read, when they’re like, reading the first thing I’ve written as them, because they go, Whoa, is that me? I’m like, yeah. And they’re like, did I say that? And like, Yes, you did. They’re like, what? Sometimes they need a day or two. Because they’re like, oh my gosh, I can’t say that. That’s too bold. I’m like, But you did say it, and they go, what? But it’s like the sweetest gift, right? You get to give someone, you get to showcase and highlight their story. And you have like that is a special place. Your place matters. It is not smaller. They are not bigger than you, even if they have more visibility in that way. And for example, I’m excited that I’m writing my own books, and then I’m also ghostwriting books, right? Like I get to have my voice. I don’t need to shrink or not say anything just because I’m a ghost writer. But even if you don’t write your own things publicly, I just really want to make sure, because I know we have so many writers that are so used to elevating other people, lifting them up, making sure they’re seeing that they love every word said that, then they feel smaller, and then they don’t push back, and they forget they have an authority and ownership role that really matters. And so you matter as a writer, as a ghost writer, you are not smaller than anybody else, and I really want you to know that.

Rob Marsh: Ally, if somebody wants to connect with you or even hop on your list, or listen to your relaunched podcast, which should be coming out any day now, if it’s not already out, where should they go? 

Allison Evelyn: Its so wild to say that I am relaunching my podcast, but by the time this airs, it will be launched. So dear listener you are. I’m just so excited, because obviously being on podcasts, I love podcasts, and it’s another way I use my voice and I highlight other people’s stories. Once a ghostwriter, always someone who highlights stories. So you can do a few things. One, you can go to my Instagram or my website, which are Allison Evelyn. So I go by Ally, but I’ve had my URL for so long, I’m sticking with it for now, the full allisonevelyn.com, and also on my Instagram, where you can DM me. It’s me. I don’t have someone else in there, robot assistant or otherwise, that is me and my DM so say hi. 

Tell me if you write dark stories, I have a freebie that we’re gonna list that’s gonna be in the show notes. It also be on my website, and it is I’m so excited to share this, because it’s something I wish I’d had many years ago when I was working as a ghost writer, even years in, this would have been great to have, and it’s my five like favorite ghost writing methods that truly will have clients just loving the work, like making it impactful, capturing the voice, just building on what we discussed today. And we’re gonna have a special script in there as well, and it’s a script for helping push back against clients when they read your words and they freak out, they’re too vulnerable. 

So I know that can feel scary to push back. So I wanted to give you a script because I have used it many times, and it has given such confidence that I don’t even think about it anymore. It’s not even scary. So I’ll have that script in there, and then my podcast, now relaunched, is called Holy f, and it’s the podcast that makes you say Holy f, and the F stands for father, freedom and faith, and it’s telling stories, personal, global, from history, from the Bible, all these places that are telling amazing, jaw dropping stories that are so God, you cannot make them up. So I’m really excited for that. It’s going to be a place to reignite faith, hope, belief, because a lot of us are, we’re facing a lot of doubt, and we face a lot of things that we don’t know are possible, and so many arenas of just different topics that we can feel really downtrodden on. And so I wanted to create a place to tell stories that gave hope. We need good news in the world and things that are exciting. So you can also check it out there. But Rob, it’s been so fun to talk. I love getting to discuss stories and telling people stories, and I am so appreciative to have been here.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, it’s been amazing. Ali, thanks for coming back, and we’ll have all the links in the show notes, and who knows, maybe in three or four years, we’ll have you back again.

Thanks, to Allie for walking us through the ins and outs of ghost writing for clients, and especially for sharing the mental shifts that we need to make in order to move from the typical client to one that needs help with Thought Leadership and ghost writing. 

As a ghost writer, it’s less about creating the voice or story for a brand or business, and more about magnifying the voice of an already existing person and helping them show up in the world in a bigger way. So many business leaders need this kind of help, and if Ally’s story and advice resonated with you, you may want to consider ghost writing as a service in your own business. 

A couple of other resources that might help you as you step into the role of a ghost writer are workshops and playbooks that are inside the copywriter underground. These are workshops about creating your own intellectual property, finding your X Factor, that’s the thing that makes you different and better than other copywriters. And there’s a workshop about writing thought leadership. I know you probably don’t have a lot of time to watch workshops and add these skills to your skill set, which is why we are adding playbooks for each of the workshops inside The Underground. 

Of course, you can watch the workshops for the in depth training, or you can use the three to four page playbook that pulls the most important concepts out of each of the workshops and gives you a step by step plan for things like finding your X Factor, creating your own intellectual property and writing thought leadership. These are plans that you can use immediately to accomplish more in your business, starting today. And if you’re interested in that, check out thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. 

Stuff to check out:

Ross’ Website
The Client Studio
How to Write Like a MoFo
10 Energizing Hook Frames
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  How do you go from copywriter or content writer to problem solver and irresistible offer maker for your clients? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

A lot of copywriters jump into client work with both feet, they find some success and create a business that makes money, but also find that it takes a lot of time they may have been hoping to use for non-work activities. Spending time with family. Having lunch with a friend. Or taking in a movie in the middle of the day. Serving clients is time-intensive whether you’re doing research, writing copy, managing the client relationship, or looking for and pitching your next client. And of course, there’s the bookkeeping and marketing and the other basic office stuff that takes up time. It’s pretty common that copywriters tell me they want to change up their business a bit so they have more time for the personal things they want to fit into their days. But the constant stream of client work makes it hard to fit in the other options like products for your niche or templatized services ready to buy off the shelf and easy to fulfill on.

And once you have an offer you want to make… how do you test whether it will work with your audience? How do you find the problems you can solve or the gains your potential clients want to get? On this episode you’re going to hear about a process that can help with that validation and how you identify not just the problem, but the kind of client you want to work with on these non-copy products.

My guest for this week is Ross O’Lochlainn. I met Ross a few years ago when he came to our Copywriter Club in Real Life Event in Brooklyn. Since then, Ross has built a pretty unique business where he works a few hours a day helping his clients solve big problems. Then he spends his free time training in Brazilian Ju Jitsu and spending time with his wife. Ross is a copywriter but he does far more than just write copy. He’s become an expert in client attraction, moving customers into high-paid coaching opportunities and like I said a moment ago, solving big marketing problems. From the outside, it appears to be a great business model, so I wanted to see how Ross built that business and what we can learn from his approach.

As we talked Ross also shared the idea that having a product is not enough. Having a lead magnet is not enough. There’s some alchemy to making the elements work together to generate a “lead with intent”. The intent here makes a ton of difference. Finding “perfect fit” prospects to join your email isn’t easy. And Ross shares how he does it. Oh, and we talk about A.I. in this one too.

You’ll want to listen to this episode right up to the closing credits. It’s a good one.

As usual, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. This episode is all about creating a business that works for you and provides you with the time you need for the life you want to live. And The Underground is packed with resources to help you gain confidence and help your clients solve big problems like Ross does. From templates to get you started (including a legal document and a proven onboarding process) to workshops to help you build your authority, attract clients, create products and services your clients want to buy and more—The Underground is like a starter-kit for your business… or a complete business-in-a-box that you can almost plug and play. As questions come up, you also have access to monthly group coaching and regular feedback on your copy. I’ve been inside a lot of memberships, and The Underground is the best value for content writers and copywriters I’ve ever seen. You can learn more at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu

Ross, welcome to the podcast. It’s been a while since we talked in person. It was 2019, one of our live events. Catch me up on what’s going on and and how did you become—you’re so many things. I mean, copywriter, coach, mentor for so many. How did you get here?

Ross O’Lochlainn:  Yeah, it has been a while. We were just chatting about that before we hit record. um There was obviously a whole global disruption in between the live events that I haven’t really gone back to live events and since. Part of that is the last while here has been kind of building out my own little world of conversion engineering and just like growing our coaching program and helping folks, you know, want to grow their online, online businesses. That’s kind of the destination of kind of where we’re at. As you said, part of that is, you know, helping my clients who are in the education and coaching space.

And like I had them with, how would you describe it? Like it’s part creative director, part conversion consultant, part coach, it’s very much, hey, here’s a system that works. Obviously, you have to show up and be yourself for your marketing to resonate with the right people, right? Like you have to be your authentic self.

No system, I think, is perfectly like a paint inside the colors blueprint. So how do we take the principles of what we know is going to work, from all the data I’ve seen with my clients over the years being like a director of marketing and and CMO for people, like there’s clearly certain ways to offer coaching and programs and courses that work and other ways that don’t.

So how do we make that work for you? And with anyone that’s offering those sorts of services, there is kind of a, well, what’s the system and then how do I make it my own? and I think that’s really the magic that we kind of look to add for folks.

And how I ended up here is quite interestingly, I would say the exact process that I help people through right now. Right. Like you’ve all kind of got your own unique experience and strengths and skills and whatnot. And my story is—I used to be an engineer. I come from a long family of engineers and I kind of ended up in engineering because I have a math brain.

I enjoyed physics and chemistry. And when I was in secondary school—high school in the States—and you know the career counselors kind of just, oh, you’re good at that? Well, you should be an engineer because that’s the minimized risk option where you’ll definitely have career prospects.

And I kind of ended up in engineering just by default. Like my dad’s an engineer, of uncles and cousins. I then got a job at Intel and it was very obvious to me that I was not happy in a very corporate structured engineering environment, which with retrospect was very… um obvious because growing up I was also an artist. I was the guy who was hanging out with the the artists and the musicians and I used to draw and I loved like painting and but graphic design and and and all of the visual elements of that and and and writing for I would say writing sake like telling stories like the art side of things was always very meaningful to me and engineering had had none of that and and so i i was firmly in the world of not doing any business or marketing of any of that sort until i bumped into Ramit Sethi and Tim Ferris actually and they kind of back in and what was it 2010 2011 they were like running the game and everyone was talking about them and and whatnot. And they opened my eyes to the world of online marketing, digital marketing, what it could be.

Then because I was a writer, even though I didn’t identify as a writer, I had the ability, clearly, because when I was in engineering classes, I was not the guy that was showing up to do extra hours in the lab. I was the guy that would barely show up to the lab. But then when it was a crew project and it was time to write the report, I would see what the guys had written. was like, God, engineers of the worst. Let me rewrite that, guys. And I would contribute in that sense.

I knew I could write. And then I learned that copywriting was earning money online with words, it was such a rabbit hole. And then a massive, I would say, and negative limiting belief journey of well, can I be a marketer? I didn’t go to university to be a marketer and all that kind of career transition, mental junk you go through when you’re first getting into freelancing.

And then the wide world of copywriting opened up and I started to gradually see over time that my unique ability is partly the engineer’s brain, right? Like seeing the big picture and, and the systems and how it works, but also understanding like humans and psychology and how people feel and talking to them and then writing and and including like, you know, expression of what you think is resonant and meaningful to others in order to get them to take action. And that’s that’s kind of, you can see the picture clearly, right? Like when you look back, but you know, where we kind of ended up was finding the path between what I definitely didn’t want.

And then what I did want, and then bumbling into all manner of, I would say, obstacles and, you know, little moments that I also didn’t want, like getting into the launch game. Like everyone kind of fetishizes the launch game in the copywriting space until you’re in it. And then you’re like, screw this. This is exhausting. Right. And realizing that’s not what I want. yeah. so yeah so that’s kind of the the the shorthand version of my entire life story and how we ended up with like being the part creative director system designer and then helping people kind of implement it and and make it their own one as they figure out their own

Rob Marsh: I love that you mentioned the dealing with the head trash around, you know, as you’re getting started out, how do you how do you be credible? How do you even know that you’re capable? And, you know, working through that, that’s something I think a lot of us struggle, even beyond the first couple of clients, you know, or as we switch niches sometimes, or as we add products, or we move on from one thing to the next, like it it feels like there’s a whole new set of head trash that we’ve got to get through that. Talk to me a little bit about how that went for you and how do you overcome that? Or what’s that process for working through those negative feedback things that keep us from moving forward?

Ross O’Lochlainn: It’s a really good question. I’m a big fan of Dan Sullivan. and I will share one of his ideas, which I now use as like my default way to think through this, which I didn’t have for many years, but which I now use as a really good guide because I look at all the capabilities I’ve built over time and it all followed this pattern. And the idea is what he calls the four Cs.

What he describes is entrepreneurs or anyone who’s trying to grow and develop, like what they all want is confidence. Like I want to feel confident that I can go do that thing. And what that really means is risk has been minimized. I can go do that and not feel exposed that I’m going to be paying some massive consequence socially, financially, emotionally…. that if it goes wrong, I’m screwed, right? Like that’s like none of us wants to feel insecure and not confident when we do a thing, but you can’t start at confidence, unfortunately, right? You have to go through that. That’s the fourth C in a series because to be confident, you have to have a capability, right? But you can’t, you don’t start with a capability, right? 

That means you need to put yourself in a situation where you don’t have the capability and you’re trying to build it. And that requires courage, which is the third C. And then even then, courage is hard to muster because it’s easy to not do the scary thing.

And so it all starts with a commitment. So you have to start with the commitment that I will build this capability and then you can make that commitment to yourself or publicly. ah And then from that commitment, you’ll draw the courage, which will put yourself in situations in order to to say, I am going to suck at this.

There’s no two ways about it. There’s no way you can build a capability without being incapable. Like it is by definition what is required. And It’s only after you’ve got the capability that you can be confident and then do it repeatedly. And so what I now do is I push myself at least once a year to say, well, what is the capability that I don’t have that I’m going to make a commitment to myself and others that I am going to go and acquire? Because I feel like if you’re able to take yourself through that process, it builds a different type of confidence. and that confidence is in your general capability.

Now I have such a marketing capability and that’s not me like blowing smoke and trying to pump my own ego, but because I have developed such a core skillset, like if there’s something I can’t do in marketing, I’m very confident I would be able to figure it out because I have all these adjacent skills that I can just go,

So how do YouTube ads work? Why do I know about ads that I can just retool to find the principles of how the nuance over here works? Which would be very different to me building a capability in skiing where I have no reference experience.

Rob Marsh:  Great.

Ross O’Lochlainn: You know what I mean? But I think at the macro level, if you look at your history of how you have managed to build capabilities over time, like most of us have a very strong track record of taking something on and being able to figure it out and then go do the thing.

And I think it just comes back to what is the commitment you’re making to yourself and do you want it enough? Because if you want it enough, then working through the fear with some courage is not an option. You have to do it, right? When I made this wish to be freelancing, I lost my job and my employment. And I was like, okay, well, I guess I have to make it work now.

Right? Like there’s no going back. I was in Canada at the time and I lost my working visa and I was like, okay, well, I literally cannot get a job in this country. I can’t be employed by anyone here. So I guess I’m going to have to figure out a way to make money with freelancing and charge clients in the States or Ireland or whatever. Right?

And if Immigration Canada is listening, that’s totally a story for marketing reasons. But point being, once there’s a commitment made that there’s no going back, then it’s just about acknowledging that you are going to bump into beliefs and fears and all sorts of negative self-talk, which are useful from a risk management perspective, but not useful from a big picture winning perspective. You know what I mean? Risks are there to be aware of and to be managed.

I don’t think it’s useful to see risk and then not move forward. Like fear should be a signpost to act cautiously, not to turn around and go the other way. You know what I mean?

Rob Marsh: Yeah. So working through that, how did you find your first client? Very first client. Well, what did that look like?

Ross O’Lochlainn: Oh yeah. Yeah. So I got my first client through Ramit Sethi’s Earn 1K program. And I, at the time, had started to learn some marketing, some Google ads at my company that I was working for, convinced them to buy me at Perry Marshall’s course, Perry Marshall Google ads course.

And then I had a client, my cousin actually, here locally in Montreal. He was running a residential electrician company. And I knew he was running Google ads. And I was like, Hey man, I think I could, I learned some of these cool, like tactical strategic tips from this crazy dude, Perry Marshall. Like, can I apply them for you? I’ll only charge you $20 an hour.

And he’s like, sure. And I did like five hours of work for him and I got a hundred bucks. And that was just mind blowing to me that I was able to charge for money on the side while working a full-time job because I had never done any official freelancing like that. Thinking back, I had done odd jobs as a kid, like you know clearing gardens and newspaper deliveries, but I had never done something like, what is a skill that I have that I can identify and sell to someone else and package?

And that was my first client. And then very quickly, I found another two or three people because I did a good job with him. He says, you know anyone else that needs Google Ads? And got a few more jobs, but yeah, just remembering that, and that was the first freelance client I got for sure.

Rob Marsh:  And that’s a little different from where you’re at today. What does your business look like today? Obviously, you’re not doing Google ads. Well, maybe you are doing some Google ads for your own business, but you’re not doing it for clients anymore. What does it look like?

Ross O’Lochlainn: Yeah, we do have clients that run Google Ads. I’m not the one doing it for them. So yeah, I kind of moved from a done-for-you services um approach, and then I kind of evolved into copywriting, not just Google Ads, but then I copywrite and offer and USP design.

And then I did a full-on done-for-you service for a number of clients who are just paid on results. And that was awesome. But that was very much an agency model that I really didn’t like.

But I did figure out a system that I found to be very effective with how to sell online courses and coaching programs without the launch model. And then I started my own coaching program, which is very much a done-with-you service. It’s not a… Hey, here’s the course and go do it. And it’s not like a mastermind where it’s a bunch of talking. It’s more, come on in. Ross would be your creative strategic director. Help you figure out what your growth project is. Give you the strategy. And then you’re going to collaborate on the messaging, the execution, like campaign design, the ad funnels, like all that stuff. And it’s very much done in a and a group format with calls and a community kind of forum access.

And then some hybrid kind of one-to-one where I meet with clients like every six to eight weeks and we figure out what the next project is. And then they go and ship that and we kind of do the execution in a group format where other people in the group can also kind of peer over their shoulder and give them input and they can do the same.

And yeah, folks come in and they work like for a year, a year or year or more. We have clients that are worth it now for like three or four years and they’re continuing. But it is very much, here’s a job, go and do it. And then we’ll interpret the data, see what the next marketing growth project is. And we just like to repeat that cycle over and over so they can hit the growth goals that they’re looking for.

Rob Marsh:  And you’re obviously charging more than $100 for the project.

Ross O’Lochlainn: Yes, yes, yes. So yeah, the fees we charge for the year, like and it ranges on the level of program and the type of client. and But like it’s anywhere from in our low-level program, people will pay like five grand a year up to a higher-level program, which is like 18, 20 grand for the year. And then there’s private clients who want a little more access, and then they’re obviously going to pay more than that is again.

But it is very much in that kind of ballpark of… Yeah, working with us for a year and it being around 18, 20 grand for the most part.

Rob Marsh:  So you do some pretty interesting things, I think, to get people into your wheelhouse. Before we started recording, I was telling you how much I admired the Black Friday special that you ran this last year where you were offering like five different programs for $200. And I was hovering over the buy button about 10 different times, messing with your page analytics as I kept pulling it up and reading through it. But you know obviously you’re doing you’ve got these kinds of programs as well at that entry level. I think some of them, How to Write Like a Mofo, Creative Studio, tell us about some of these programs.

Ross O’Lochlainn: Yeah. So I, I run a model that I’ve kind of developed for myself and and looked, like I’ve been in a lot of coaching programs, other people’s coaching programs. I’d been in like strategic coaches. I mentioned with Dan Sullivan, I found a way that I like to do things. and I call it the creative mofo model. Creative mofo being a creative motherf***er. Motherf***er not in the crude sense, but in the formidable, remarkable, like he’s a bad mofo, right? He is. He makes some creative stuff.

Like that’s the kind of aspirational outcome that I want for myself, but also from other people, right? Like it’s very much like he’s got something to say and like he’s got a way of doing things. And I find you can do that when you overlap your, I would say, artistic expression with your commercial production, right? like you It’s not just about slinging products. It’s about like, what is your, what have you got to say about this? I don’t mean art in the sense of, like pretty pictures. It’s more in the sense of like what’s real and meaningful and resonant about your profession and how you do things and what is the emotional reality and think if you can tie that into your work, it just instantly gives it a unique selling proposition. And most of the clients I work with, they don’t have that. And that’s often the reason why their stuff isn’t and is it working as well as they would like.

All of the products you mentioned are all born in what I call the client studio, where I am the creator for my own business. I look at my clients almost as a studio. They are the environment in which I’m going to create and they’re giving me the raw materials like their obstacles and their problems through which I create. These are my paints and my canvas. So I’m very much looking at like, well, what do they need? And then how do I use that as inspiration to create things the way I want to create them?

And so, how to write like a mofo was born out of the observation that a lot of my clients had big email lists, but they were not mailing regularly. And for me, like, the more you mail, the more you make, right? Like it’s an irrefutable law of marketing that the higher the email frequency, there’s just all sorts of downstream revenue and profile and branding benefits, but they were avoiding it because of reasons.

And so I was like, I’m going to solve this problem, right? And it was less about like, how do you write and I don’t know how to write an email. How do you write a good copy email? like It was far more about their relationship with the creative process. right like They were judging themselves or they didn’t have a good enough ideas to write about they’re writing about stuff that they’re not energized by.

And like I have a process and a system for the creative process through a lot of my experience with music production and also free writing and my time at Intel, actually, funnily enough. And I was like, I’m going to teach this system. And I created it for them. But the success of it, it also then led to a very obviously successful front end product where I could just sell that training. Now, it was created for the people in my coaching program.

And so I’m creating it as a training internally. But when you package things correctly, it’s very easy to then turn those individual trainings that are born out of the content curriculum in your coaching program and turn them into front-end products that you can advertise or that you can use to create customers. Like someone like yourself, you’re on my email list, right? You may purchase one thing here or there, and then that starts the cycle of, oh, that was really good.

I’ll check out another thing. And then you know six months later, you’re like, you know maybe Ross can help me with this problem I’ve got. I should look at his coaching program, right? And so I don’t sell the courses or the courses you see me sell. I’m less offering those as a means to generate revenue, if that makes sense. like I’m not selling courses to make money. like I’m not going to shake my fist or turn my nose up at the revenue they generate, but they’re very much a means to like… bring people in my audience closer into my world and center so that they want to step into my studio itself, right? And actually work with me and collaborate with me in there because that’s the place that all the solutions and the strategies and the products that you’re seeing are born from.

It’s me co-creating that stuff by working in the trenches with my people like week after week and seeing, oh, wow, like they were really interested in how I use workshop tickets to create customers and turn those into products. I should turn that into a training and then sell that externally. Does that make sense?

Rob Marsh:  That makes total sense. Yeah. And as you’re talking about it, ah obviously you’ve done a lot around offer development, but this is one part of creating a killer offer. It’s not enough to have a webinar or a workshop. Obviously there’s a lot of other stuff that goes into an offer. So how do you think about offers as you sit down, think ah either this thing that I have would make a good offer or part of a good offer, or I need to create a new offer. What’s your process that you go through for that?

Ross O’Lochlainn: This is a really good question. The word offer—so I’m going to dissect what we mean by offer so my answer will make sense.

Because you hear a lot like, you have to have one offer. And I’m like, you can’t grow a business with one offer. You can certainly have one primary product and you want to have a good offer for your primary product and you don’t want to have like a gazillion primary products because then you just confuse yourself.

But like a lead magnet is an offer. A webinar is an offer. Those are free offers. Or you can do a paid workshop, which is an offer. And so you want to have many offers. But what you don’t want to have is overhead around managing all of these things and not being clear about how you use these how you promote these things in order to achieve your big objectives like my big objective is i’ve got one primary product which is called the chamber and i just want 43 people in it that’s it so everything i’m doing is intended to bring people into the chamber and that’s like when it’s full it’s it’s full we’re at like 30 right now right so the the way I think about it is an offer is a combination of a promise, a product, and a proposition. The promise being like, what do I get out of this? The product being like, well, what is it and how does it work?

And then the proposition is like the terms. What’s the deal? Is it free? Is there a guarantee? Do I have to pay? How long is it going to take? the terms of the exchange. And so for most people, what they don’t have is one primary product within the compelling expression of the offer for why they would want to join that.

And that’s usually down to the fact that the promise isn’t clear, right? Like, what do I get out of joining your program? and that’s one of the main things I help a lot of people with. And that’s usually about making it concrete and specific. Like if I join this thing, what outcome will I get in what timeframe and in what sense? Like what will and will not happen when I’m in that future state? Like, am I going to have to sell on the phone?

Am I going to have to use launches or do I not want that? Will you help me get to 20K a month without using a sales call funnel? Like that’s a clear promise. That’s a clear promise And so once you’ve got the main thing defined, then I’m always looking for, well, what are the smaller offers I can make that are like small things along the way? Like, for example, maybe you want to be more consistent with your writing because you know, if I just wrote more, I would make more money, right? And so what you’re looking for and what you’re thinking about is, man, if I could just get three emails a day, sorry, three emails a week out, like things would be so much better. like that’s ah That’s a great observation for someone who’s helping that type of client to see and say, I can create a mini training on that or a product on that that might be part of my larger program, but where I solve one discrete problem that is part of the overall problem set.

Like if you’re If you’re helping a group of clients, it’s often going to be a problem set that you’re solving across time, not just one individual problem. And so I’m always looking for what are my people needing help with? Where are they falling down? And how are they thinking about the problem? And then if I can create a product to solve that, does it generate interest with the other people in my group? Because if I’m solving a problem with you, Rob, for example, and I mentioned it to everyone else in the group and no one is interested in it, like if it’s not even interesting in passing the people in my studio, the chances of it going to be competing to people who are like that outside the studio low.

But if there’s interest in it, then I’ll offer it externally to my email list and… If it does a good job of creating customers and then those customers turn into clients, then I know I’ve got a promotional tool in order to generate more interest from my email list or I’ve got something I can advertise, right? Like the big lead magnet that’s been very successful for me is like a template for an offer doc that I help people use to sell without like sales calls and launches.

That worked very well on paid traffic, not because I’m some sort of genius who’s like, I’m going to knock this paid traffic funnel out of the park, but because the people in my studio, it’s what I help them with day in and day out. And when I gave this training on how to create these offer docs on my email list, people lapped it up and then a large and large number, well, a large percentage, relatively speaking, and of them came in and wanted to become a client in the program.

So that gave me tons of insight to be like, this is an offer I should advertise externally. Like if it’s working to convert people in my audience into customers and clients, the chances of it working to code traffic is much higher. But I think where people fall down is that it’s too much guessing and not enough like observation of what people are already asking for that you can then promote, if that makes sense.

Rob Marsh:  Makes total sense. I imagine there may be some people listening thinking, oh, I’d like to do this. I’m going to create my first offer, but I don’t have a group to test it with. Where would you recommend they start sharing that offer to get the feedback that says yes or no, this is a great product?

Ross O’Lochlainn: Yeah, totally. So how like the client studio model is one that I’ve mentioned. And there’s kind of two parts to it. The first is like a studio is like a space, right? Like it’s the group where you have people and they can hang out.

But it’s also a more of an abstract concept where you use your clients as a studio? And so you don’t need a group to start applying the principle of observing a client that you would like to work with or have more of and asking what is the problem that is frustrating them that they would like a solution to, or what is a problem that they would like be excited to solve or a pain they’d be excited to turn into again?

And how can I have that one person solve that one thing? I think people in the, when they’re trying to get their first offer out, they kind of look at the, after picture of people who’ve been in the game for a long time and think they need to replicate that.

Like, for example, you could look at me and go, oh, he has all these courses and trainings. That’s what I need to create. But they don’t see that all those started with me, even though I have a group, getting on a call with one person and going, so Rob, like you should be writing more emails. Why are you not writing more emails? What’s the obstacles you’re experiencing? And then like co-creating that with one person and getting the process, like working with just simple Google Docs and some instructions.

And then taking those Google Docs and going to someone else and say, you have the same problem. Do you want to solve this? So try this. I have this process. Does this work for you? Because all of these offers and whatnot, they’re just productized processes. And then they may be packaged as a course or a video training to get leverage.

But at the end of the day, it’s a solution. It’s a solution that someone who wants to solve the problem will find compelling. And you got to just start with ah who’s the person?

What’s the problem? Can I solve the problem? And do I have a documented, repeatable process that I could share with someone else so that they could also solve the problem with or without me?

And I think that’s the easiest place to start is… asking which clients would I like to replicate or which clients would I like in a group and and starting that process by just engaging with an individual.

Rob Marsh:  And then as we do that, we’ve got our offer where you know we know that it’s been tested. We’re putting it out there. We’re even writing the authentic emails that we touched base on. Is that enough to get conversions on autopilot? Or do I need to be thinking through other things, other pieces of marketing or places that I need to be showing up or doing in order for this to become you know the stream of leads that then allows me to make additional offers or move people up funnel, all all of that.

Ross O’Lochlainn: How I tend to think about it is I want to know why personally, and for anyone that I think wants to shortcut the route to success, you want to work from the market and offer back, right? So a lot of people want to generate the leads first and then figure out the offer. and that can work, but I think what’s more useful is if you’re figuring out the individual and the offer and just getting that validated and then looking to build the audience around that.

If you want what we call automatic conversions, like you, you need to be definitely getting a stream of new leads coming in that you can make the offer to. Now, most of my sales don’t come from my new leads. like we had 18 people join one of our programs like last week. like When you look at when those people joined my email list, like I just sent five emails to my list. I sent them a doc and we had 18 people join.

And some of those people were in my world for like a week. They had just opted into an email funnel like seven to 10 days ago. um Some people were on my list for two years, right? And so when they came on my list, I don’t really care. I’m more interested in how many of them buy and are they going to continue to pay me. Like my automatic revenue isn’t coming from new core sales. It’s coming from a recurring revenue within the programs that I’m getting people coming coming into So, if you want people to be buying like ah a training automatically, like yeah you can run a cold traffic funnel and that’s great. But my perception is the big asset is, are you getting emails? Are you getting email addresses that you can nurture over time and make offers to over time so they can buy whenever you’re ready or whenever they’re ready, I should say. And i that comes down to Who are you looking for and what are they interested in so that they are going to have a level of intent to solve the problem that your main offer solves?

Right. So if the offer is, for example, I had people write more frequently so they can make more money, like maybe the lead magnet then needs to be, you know, appealing to that psychology of like, how do I sit down and actually build a writing habit?

If that’s your primary offer. Oftentimes, people will generate leads, but they don’t because the lead magnet they’re using doesn’t signal intent to solve the problem that you solve in your main program. So having the offer is definitely not going to be enough for automatic conversions.

But when I’m thinking about automatic conversions, it’s more, how can I get some sales for my new leads to pay for all the lead gen that I want to do so that I’ve actually got an audience that I can make offers to over time, right? Like that, that’s really the win is having two groups, like your internal client group and a group of people that are kind of in your email following and because then you’ve got the ability to make offers and collect more data. But the mistake I think a lot of people make is generating leads without an intent, if that makes sense.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, totally makes sense. That also has me thinking about then the nurturing process. You know, as you you get all these people on your list, are you thinking about the program the next program that you’re going to be selling? Are you thinking about the things that brought them to the list in the first place? Or are you just waking up thinking, I’ve got to get out an email today and these are the three ideas that I have?

Ross O’Lochlainn: Yeah, so like the way I think about nurturing, I think about even misinterpreting the concept of nurturing, right? like they think when it comes to nurturing, it’s about getting people who are small fish into your world and then making small offers to them, hoping that they’ll be ready for the big offer. Like I’m not, I think that’s a flawed mistake.

I think what you want to be doing is getting perfect fit people for your main program to come into your email list. And then the purpose of what you’re doing with your emails and offers is demonstrating your capability and character so that they see you as someone who can help them now. right like i’m I’m looking for advanced… people who have already in the game of, you know, having a program and whatnot, and they have some emails and an asset, and they’re just looking for a way that works better for them.

I’m not looking to get someone who hasn’t got a course or coaching program ever, and then show them how to launch a course and coaching program so that they can then use my main system. It’s too many, it’s too many steps.

So that’s the first thing when it comes to it is making sure that the people you’re putting in are the sort your list or the sort of people that will hire you and can hire you or your program or course like today, not they need to transform in order to be buyers. Then once I have that, I’m assuming those people are in my audience, right? And so, of course, my audience is not going to 100% be full of those people.

But the reality is 80% of my email list is never going to give me a penny. I’m not trying to speak to everyone on my email list. What I’m doing is I’m looking at the people who are in my studio And I’m looking at what they’re dealing with.

And I’m talking about what I’m doing with them. And what I’m offering to my email list are the solutions I’m creating for them, right? Because if I am constantly talking about the context that they’re in and creating solutions for the context that they’re in by definition, it’s going to appeal to the contexts of people who are in that same context outside the paid space, if that makes sense, right? Like if someone is at a million dollars and they’re sick of selling on the phone, as an example, and they’re looking for a way to solve that, and I solve that solution, and then I say, here’s how to get off the phone without dropping your revenue before me below a million dollars,

Anyone that’s in my email audience that wants that same thing, like will go, oh my God, that’s perfect. Right. And so like when you were saying like, oh, I saw Ross’s offer, it was so compelling.

Like the reason for that is because it’s been created in the forge of working along people like you and it’s addressing the problems that someone like you who’s running a business like you do, face, right? It just seems so tight and relevant that the desire is quite high. But if someone’s like a brand noob, like they’re to look at my stuff and go, ah, this doesn’t really seem what I’m looking for. And that’s and that’s by design. So what I am talking about today is just directly informed by talking about what’s happening inside the studio and the solutions I’m creating for those people.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, definitely makes sense. I want to change the conversation just a little bit. You mentioned the names of several mentors. Dan Sullivan was one, a few of the people you worked with early on, Ramit Sethi and ah others. How do you look at mentorship for yourself? Now, I mean, you’re already, you’re a mentor for other business owners, for copywriters, for offer owners, but how do you sharpen your own skills and choose who to work with next?

Ross O’Lochlainn: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So I think paying for access and help from the people who are already asked where you want to be is just one of the biggest life hacks ever and like Kevin Rogers was a guy I worked with for years. He’s awesome. Through Kevin Rogers, I found Dean Jackson. ah Kevin gave me the advice many years ago. Very relevant for copywriters, right? Would you get into the copywriting game? You’re surrounded by people who are able to make ideas compelling and feel like you’ve got massive FOMO, that you’re not engaging with this idea, right?

The issue is that it’s actually quite distracting. And there’s so many different ways of making it work that like if you try to do them all, you kind of end up Frankensteining it. And so he gave me the advice. He’s like, pick one person and make that person your guy. And for Kevin, he chose John Carlton. And if you look at Kevin’s copy and how he speaks and whatnot, very influenced by John and like he doesn’t hide that.

He’s obviously got his own very distinct and amazing voice. And so for me, I picked Dean Jackson. Dean Jackson’s my guy. He’s the master at which I am eternally and looking to refine my ideas against. I’ve been to, I don’t know how many of these breakthrough blueprints in Toronto, in Florida—for people who don’t know Dean, he does like a three-day come and I’ll strategize with you across his core philosophy, which is called the A-Profit Activators—and he does like amazing small three-day small room events with like eight to 12 people.

And I’ve been to 10 of those in Florida, Toronto, London, and Australia… Where else? There’s probably more, but… I will never stop learning from Dean and Dean will always be like a mentor to me. And I then dimensionalize my understanding of Dean. So another guy that you, if you look at him and and you compare his work to Dean, you can see Dean’s fingerprints all over it is a guy called Taki Moore, who’s huge in the coaching space.

And she he’s like 10 years ahead of me. And then Dean is like 10 years ahead of Taki. And as soon as I kind of discovered Tacky’s world and I was moving into the coaching space, I was like, I got to get a guy in this guy’s world.

How do I understand Dean’s stuff better through how Taki applies it? And Taki’s got a superpower of being able to take ideas and and and clarify them and simplify them and then make them actionable. And once I got into his world and saw how he did that with Dean’s stuff, it gave me a whole understanding and appreciation of Dean’s philosophies and then how I can modify and take those principles and and and do the same.

And so I think going deep on someone that you know is really able to steer you towards the future that you want to go to. I think that Dean calls it the buy and hold strategy, right? Like I will always be in Dean’s world.

And similarly, like I’ve been in Strategic Coach for many, many years. Similarly, because Dan Sullivan’s world has had a huge influence on Dean. Dan is Dean’s mentor. And I’m like, well, it’s good enough for Dean, it’s good enough for me. So I spent four years there. I’ll go back. I still use their concepts to this day. And so like, this is very much stuff that you have to feel.

I feel like if you’re trying to pick your person, like whose stuff just feels right to you. And that like, you get a sense of like, this is the person who’s clearly a master that i can understand I can spend time with and go deep with because I feel like the breath is important, I would say in developing your skill, but it’s not as important as as depth for my my personal experience and and finding the few people that you can go deep with and then finding different dimensions for that ah is super important. And then looking for other people who resonate with that, like my current coach, I did not discover him through Dean.

But looking at how he shows up and the strategies he teaches, they’re very complementary with all the stuff I’ve learned through Dean. And so I’m like, yes, this guy’s exactly where I want to be in five years. i want to spend more time learning what he does and how he makes it work from him so I can absorb and make it my own as well, but also get his guidance and help on on that front.

Rob Marsh:  Two things I’m taking away from what you’re saying here. One is this is a very deliberate process and it’s not the kind of thing where you just hop on somebody’s list and you’re all in. Like you’re really thinking about, you’re starting to apply, you’re testing things out as you move into somebody’s world. But the second piece that is really obvious as you start talking about the different ah people that you’ve connected with is the relationships that open up when you get into somebody’s world, whether it’s in their programs or whether it’s other people who are participating or even just, you know, talking about them. Those relationships are pretty critical when it comes to building skills and new things in your business.

Ross O’Lochlainn: For sure. Like you could say it’s deliberate. It’s also like the decision to choose Dean was deliberate. I don’t want to say Ross has this perfectly defined mentorship strategy. I’ve never even thought of it right from the perspective until you asked me the question.

Buy and hold would be how I articulate it and seeing what I’ve seen. But I think the, the, the, and the Yes, finding the right people is huge. And once you find the right people and you’re clear about what you want, then it becomes more obvious what is and is not the right decision and which person is and is not the right person to engage with. Right.

I think that. There’s a difference between this is a good idea and pursuing this is going to get me where I want to go. And I would say the part that I was clear on is like where am I trying to get to and what kind of marketing do I want to do and what beliefs do I have about what it should and should not be done, that I’m very clear on.

And then when you’re kind of operating from that frame, then the choices kind of become… more obvious where it’s not like a deliberate map out, but looking back, you can see, oh yeah, that’s why I went through those things. Those were the obvious steps because I was clear later on what I was trying to create, if that makes sense.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Another topic shift, AI. Obviously changing marketing and copywriting in really big ways. I actually had a call with somebody this morning who was ah talking about how scared she was about the future with AI and and even you know recent things that have been happening. How are you looking at AI and using it in your business?

Ross O’Lochlainn: I’ve been using AI, and A little before the curve, like obviously you blew up with ChatGPT, right? I had kind of experimented with it. Prior to the explosion of ChatGPT, I was actually using AI much more for like images, like tools like mid-journey. like I was just fascinated that it could create these two like these images.

So now it’s just like so standard. So it’s funny how quickly people’s expectations of what’s normal change. But… but the use of AI is something that I have strong opinions about. I think it’s going to only be a massive benefit for most humans.

I think there are a lot of negative consequences. from a societal tyrannical AI detection and censorship level. But also I will say, and again, I don’t want to get into a politics discussion. Like what I, what I didn’t have on my bingo card was like AI being used by the Doge crew to go in and analyze massive data sets to reveal whole bunch of like, corruption right like i think the narrative was very much going to be ai would be used to oppress people and then the first major societal shift is looking at to like read through these massive omnibus bills so politicians can’t hide stuff in there like all this hide stuff in volumes of information problem and that was used to hide corruption it’s kind of gone now and so i i have no idea how it’s going to play out in the macro, but I think there’s a lot of fear mongering around it.

And what I’ve observed is there’s so many benefits also, right? And so it’s certainly going to be transformational, but like, is it all going to be roses? Like, I don’t think so.

Now, my overarching perception on this is that what’s happening now in like thought work and copywriting and and and and creative work is the same thing that happened to automobile manufacturing in the seventies and the sixties, when they started bringing in these robots, right? Like humans have not been replaced from the manufacturing process, but what was clearly illustrated was like the value of a human is not like picking something up and putting it over here and pressing a button. Like a robot can do that way better and way faster and way more efficiently.

And I think what people are starting to see in the creative space is that the typing of the words is not actually the value and the creation of the pixels is not actually the value, right?

And I think what we’re going to start seeing is very much but what does it mean to be human? And how do you need to use these tools for your own benefit?

Personally speaking, I don’t use AI to do my writing, but I use it in my writing. I’m not trying to get AI to write the ad or the page, although occasionally I can, you just write me a paragraph description here for this low value thing I’m giving to my wife backstage in a project plan or whatever. But personally for our marketing, I’ve put a 100% human guarantee on everything that we do. Meaning if you ever see a digital video of me or an image that looks photo realistic, or if you see words from me, that is always going to be me. I’m never going to use AI to create a sock puppet image of myself or a video of myself where it wasn’t actually me there.

And if you see the words in an email, like a human wrote those words or at least… Like, you know, there might be a couple of sentences in there that were generated by AI, but the whole thing wasn’t like, write me an email and boom, I send it. Because I feel like we’re going to enter, and we’ve already started to enter a world where people are just not going to be able to trust digital media anymore.

And the two principles of all marketing is trustability, right? Like just like your email copy doesn’t matter if your deliverability sucks, your videos and all this other stuff doesn’t matter what the content of it is. If the person doesn’t trust, this is actually a real human trying to communicate with me. And so that’s why I put the 100% human guarantee on it because I’m like, if people start to feel like this is just some robo churned out thing and I’m not stepping into the real world, like they’re going to tune it out. So that’s why I kind of went in that direction. But at the same time, I just started using OpenAZI, the ChatGBT Pro, $200 month version that a new thing called deep research where it spends 20 minutes researching a topic. That thing is incredible. Like I don’t think thought workers can go back to the way it was. What has happened is a thought calculator, like a calculator to help you do thought work has been invented.

And just like engineers can never go back to the back chair to calculators, a life without calculators and spreadsheets, like you’re just not going to be able to operate without it at a certain level, but  having worked with a lot of clients, right? I’m also very clear that clients do not want to do the work themselves. They don’t even know what they want.

So to think that this is going to be like, the client is not going to have someone to take responsibility of outcomes who can then run the robot is just like, that’s just devoid from the reality of what clients want and operate. So I feel like it’s on everyone to integrate it into your process,

But I am emphasizing that you should treat it as a creativity and quality enhancer, not as a cost reduction technology. Like I think I’m in the video game industry, you’re seeing a lot of software companies trying to use AI and generative AI as cost reduction. And it’s just a lot of pushback on it because it’s just leading to shittier quality products.

And I think I think what will… Who will succeed will be the individuals who enhance their output and creativity for the benefit of the audience, not the benefit of their pocket, if that makes sense.

Rob Marsh: I love your idea of the 100% human created. going to borrow that. I think that one of the real opportunities, i already think it’s emerging now, but ah one of the real opportunities in the world of AI is going to be that humanness and the trust that you’re actually talking to a real person and not to a machine.

There’s going to be, I think, additional value added to those kinds of relationships that we haven’t had in the past because, you know, the poor quality discussions, you know, with say a ah call center or whatever, they were still human to human, maybe backed up by scripts or whatever else. That’s no longer the case. And I think that the future is going to be ah ah a big chunk of the future will be written around how we actually have real relationships with real people.

Ross O’Lochlainn: Totally. Totally. My human guarantee was born out of the fact that there was a guy that I was following and he was at the bleeding edge of all this stuff. And and and he was expressing and showing how the AI tools work. And he had these videos on his Twitter. And they were like small little one, two minute talking head videos. And I would watch them regularly. And I quite enjoyed them.

And then he revealed that for the last six months, that actually hasn’t been me. That’s been ah that’s been an AI. I kind of trained the bot. And then it’s just been doing it And I felt i said like such an idiot.

I felt duped.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, snookered, right?

Ross O’Lochlainn: Yeah, and then I haven’t watched one of his videos since. And I was like, holy shit, like that’s how people are going to feel. And then I incorrectly predicted that AI was going to be a huge controversy in the recent political election.

And it wasn’t quite used as deceptive as it was because I don’t think it was currently at the quality where it is, it’s not totally indistinguishable. But it was used, there were a couple of political ads where it was like parody and they were using the other person’s voice. But what I also observed was how many people on both sides were making false claims that the other side had generated images. Like you were seeing the Trump crowd going, look, the Kamala crowds are fake. And then you looked into it and they were real.

They wanted to project their reality onto it. And when they wanted to discount it as not real, like, and probably a scam, they were very easy to do that. And I think that’s why, like, if I think about what can I trust, like, I will always trust people the the Joe Rogan podcast being published on the verified Joe Rogan podcast channel on Spotify or the or the and the, like if something is published on CNN’s official channel, like I trust that they are putting live reporters on there. So like verified sources, you’re going to be able to assume and trust, yeah, that’s that’s that’s a real world a real world human. But all these cold sources, untrusted sources, like you’re just not going to be able to believe anything. Or do it with a massive grain of salt.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, we already see both sides of so many issues have their own set of facts and it’s so hard to verify what’s real, what’s not. So I think that that’s going to be a huge opportunity.

Ross O’Lochlainn: Totally. A hundred percent. And I think what you will also see is you are going to see an emergent technology of AI where, where you will be able to verify that it is not influenced by either political side. And then, you’d be able to like get it to go, hey, can you actually genuinely fact check this for me? Right. Like not one of the political style fact checking, but can you spend 10 minutes just researching multiple sources and come back and report on the biases of this piece? And like, I would never spend the time to do that. Like part of the reason marketers as well get away with like, propaganda and whatnot is because they rely on the sensational headline, but they’ve kind of like tweaked it. And then like the detail is in below, but people don’t spend the time digging through the information because they just, they don’t, they don’t care enough.

But when you have a tool like this, that will do the digging and you don’t have to invest the time, I think it will start to reveal the truth of things much more. And I think you’re going to see that play out in politics, but also in marketing, right? I don’t want to be staring too much into politics. I see a big overlap in marketing and politics all the time. 

Rob Marsh:  I think there’s a huge opportunity for identifying the truth or the falsity in claims and marketing with AI.

Ross O’Lochlainn: Sure. A hundred percent. And so I think what you’ll start to see as we see the second order of this play out, like you’re ah you’re already seeing it now, right? Where like Google ads are slowly going away because we’re all searching in chat GPT, right? And so now how do you get your product found in that environment should you be relying on Google searches? Like I even find myself now asking, GPT, can you find me good, well-reviewed products now that I’ve kind of done my research with you and I kind of know what I’m looking for? like Can you go find products?

And so I think what you’re going to start seeing is total transparency from a business perspective. like If you want to be found and… and and Like if people are going to have the robot saying, could you like research Rob’s mastermind for me? Like it’s now upon you to not only have an amazing product, but to make sure that should someone want to research it, that they are deployed their bot in this case, that it’s out there.

Rob Marsh: It’s out there.

Ross O’Lochlainn: Right. And I think that’s, I think that’s good in some ways. I think privacy and whatnot will take a further hit. But I think for sure you know, the people who are worth working with would be, it’d be much more obvious for sure.

Rob Marsh:  Fingers crossed and that it’s that and not the total opposite. where we may still be at a crossroads here.

Ross O’Lochlainn:  Yes.

Rob Marsh:  Ross, this has been awesome. Just getting a look inside your business and the way that you look at marketing and doing this for your clients. If somebody has been listening and they’re like, okay, I’ve got to know more about Ross. I’ve got to get into his world. I know you’ve got a couple of different things that might appeal to our listeners. right ah yeah the How to write like a mofo, lead refinery, you know a couple of things. Where should people go to get into your world?

Ross O’Lochlainn: Yeah. So I’ll send a link through. There’s one tool I think because I know there’s a lot of writers listening to this. If you’re interested—How to Write like a MoFo—I have a tool. A big part of that is like, how do you engage your writing with high energy? Because I find that most of the time people don’t do the writing because it’s a very emotionally painful experience because they’re not energized by the idea that they’re writing about.

So I have a tool called 10 Energizing and Entertaining Hook Frames, which is a technique I’ve got for how do you come up with base ideas from your life and then turn those into things that are energizing for you to talk about.

I’ll send that link through to you. You can check the show notes for it and Apart from that, if you’re interested in the idea of the client studio, ah you could go to conversionengineering.co/client-studio. And that’ll give you a look there. If you’re looking for opt-in to download and watch a video about it. I will send through a link for that as well.

And that will kind of give you a guide about how the model works and a kind of a walkthrough video of it. But those would be the best places to check it out. ah The website is conversionengineering.co, but if you want to, check out how to write like a mofo, check out the hook frame tool, and if you want to check out the client studio, I’ll give a link for that to download the guide and the walkthrough.

Rob Marsh:  We’ll have both of them linked in the show notes. I’ve watched that video and it’s a great walkthrough. Like it’s one of the things that’s kind of said, yep, I’ve got to pay more attention to what Ross is doing. So yeah, check that out. If what we’ve been talking about today appeals to you. Thanks again, Ross, for your time. I really appreciate it. I’m looking forward to sharing this with our audience.

Ross O’Lochlainn: My pleasure, Rob. Yeah, it was a pleasure. It was a jam. Thank you.

Rob Marsh:  Thanks to Ross for explaining how his business works. It’s a model that I think a lot of copywriters could use to work on bigger problems with the clients in their niche—though the kinds of clients you need to attract have to be able to do the work you strategize with them or pay you a high amount to get it done for them.

I want to point out that what Ross shared about how he got his first client is a process that still works today… and even if you have worked with a client or two, is worth trying out if you’re struggling to land your own clients right now. He bought a course and learned a skill then looked for a prospect in his warm network—a friend who needed the help of someone with the skill he was learning. After offering to help his friend, he leveraged that project win into several more clients. Each new client was an opportunity for another win and a new case study or testimonial or referral to leverage to land yet another client. There’s no magic here, just learning, applying skills to solve a problem, then using that to find the next opportunity. If you’ve struggled to find clients recently, this process will almost certainly work for you. You could do this with social media ads, email sequences, webinar creation, and so many other skills that clients need help with. All of these are copy problems, but clients aren’t always looking for copywriters to fix them. They’re looking for ad specialists, or webinar specialists or email specialists. If you position yourself as fixing a problem, it will help you connect with the clients you can help the most.

What Ross shared about his mentors rings true with me. Finding a coach or mentor who you resonates with is important. Have they built what you want to build? Have they done the thing you want to do? Have they helped others do what they say they can do? If you answer those questions with a yes and you resonate with the person, then find a way into their world. At first it may be enough to join their email list or listen to their podcast or watch their Youtube channel, but ultimately you should join one of their paid programs—like a membership—so you can interface directly with the mentor you’ve chosen. Show up. Do the work. Finish the course. Ask questions about the content. And let the mentor get to know you as you learn from them. As Ross said, you do this by feel, but in order to feel who you can go deep with, requires showing up and opting in.

Of course you can do that with Ross or with dozens of the other experts we’ve had on the podcast. And of course, if you resonate with what you hear on this podcast, you should check out our membership, The Copywriter Underground, where you can build relationships with the other members and me. I’d love to see you inside. Check out thecopywriterclub.com/tcu for more information.

Stuff to check out:

Esai’s LinkedIn
Esai’s Instagram
The Business of Expertise
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  Looking for an approach to social media that doesn’t require you to post three times a day or more? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

The old approach to social media was to post content—photos and video with clever captions that invite comments and likes—is hard to keep up with. If you don’t have a team of content creators and algorythm watchers to keep up with the latest thing, you burn out or lose interest or eventually realize that the effort you are putting in is not being rewarded by the leads and clients you are looking for.

Most of us are on social media to get leads. But how’s that working out for you? Most content writers or copywriters posting on Instagram or X/Twitter or LinkedIn are spending a lot of time for very little payoff. And that’s because social media is great at helping foster connections and relationships, but not all that great at selling organically. I’m not saying it can’t be done or that no one’s doing it. Some are. But it’s not easy.

My guest for this week’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is Esai Arasi. And she argues you don’t need to post every day or every week or even every month. Tools like ManyChat help move followers who are interested in what you do from posts to DMs. Using social media to foster relationships you have with previous clients and referal partners is also useful. Those things don’t disappear into the feed after a few minutes. They endure. And switching up your approach to focus on these kinds of behaviors may bring you better results than you’ve been seeing lately.

Stick around as we talk about how to do this.

As usual, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. We’re talking about social media and getting clients to work with you today and it just happens that there are additional resources in The Copywriter Underground designed to help you do both of those things. Workshops on using tools like Pinterest and YouTube to grow your audience and attract clients. Still other workshops on engaging prospects on LinkedIn and other social media platforms so you can build relationships that result in high-paying client work. Not to mention resources to help you land a “real” job if that’s more up your alley. And that’s just the beginning… there are dozens of templates—including a legal document worth hundreds of dollars—ready for you to borrow and use in your own business, three entire courses on selling, writing proposals clients can’t say no to, and building your authority so clients seek you out, not the other way around. Plus dozens of other workshops, monthly coaching, regular copy critiques and more. You can see what it includes at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu

And now, my interview with Esai Arasi…

Esai, welcome back to the podcast. It’s been a little while since we talked on the podcast. You and I have talked offline a few times since then, but catch us up on what’s been going on in your business. I think on the podcast, last time we talked was like 2020. So it’s been a little while.

Esai Arasi: It’s been a while. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me again, Rob. And I’m really excited to catch up on what my growth has been like because when I was last on your podcast, I was still working with you inside the think tank. I was still learning. I was still building all of the systems as we were discussing. And it was I was going through a huge period of change. And I’m really excited today to share the systems I’ve built, the marketing strategies that I’ve tried, what’s working for me, what’s working for my clients, what’s working in social and in marketing right now. And most importantly, as you and I discussed, I’m going to talk about all of this within the framework of Traffic Nurture Conversion. And figuring out where you need to focus, or you can guess the best results where I focus personally. And just and if anybody is interested in, after they listen to the podcast, they want to know where they should focus on. A simple way that they can do that is sending me a DM called audit and take my quiz right in their DMS, which will tell them what is their easy win easy money book in your focus right there.

Rob Marsh: Perfect, okay, so that’s a nice teaser for everything that we’re gonna get to. So last time we talked, you’re building your agency, you have a couple of people who are working with you, helping, and you were knee deep or maybe even shoulders deep in social media and posting content and doing this for a lot of clients on a very regular basis. And I know your thinking has shifted a little bit on that. Tell us about your agency and how that shift has happened over time.

Esai Arasi: Since we have talked now, I have grown to about a six-member team. We still do social media, we still do content, but as you and I were talking about earlier, social media is one piece of an entire strategy. When I think back, I used to think, oh, I have this groundbreaking new hosting framework, which is fantastic and was getting results for clients. And I realized that was just the tip of the iceberg of what was working on what I was implementing for my clients. It was still ahead of its time when we were implementing it, but it took even me Implementing the same framework for multiple clients to really understand why it was working what was happening and again understand that in the context of what was happening in our industry as well so i’m really excited to dive into that.

Rob Marsh: So before we jump into the framework though, the basic understanding for social media, and I’m mostly thinking of Instagram, but this is also true of LinkedIn, probably Twitter, even TikTok, is that you need to be posting content. And if you’re not posting content at least three times a week, you’re not getting seen by the algorithm, you’re not building your audience, all of this stuff. Last time we talked, like that was constant. In fact, we were even saying, you know, she’d be in there every day. And sometimes some people are even saying two or three times a day. And so like this whole idea of producing content is, well, first of all, I think it’s scared off a lot of people who are just like, there’s no way I can produce all of that content. Some people were up for the challenge, and they’re like, okay, I’m all in, and they quickly burn out just because, again, finding new things or new ways to say old things is so hard. And maybe a few people have done it and done it well, and we all look at them and think, wow, I wish I had the stamina. I wish I could do the thing that they do, but I don’t. So I’m just, I quit. I quit social media. I’m not going to do it. And if, and this is very true of me, you know, if people look at The Copywriter Club social media, we don’t post all that often, not on LinkedIn, not on Instagram because yeah, either I’ve burned out or, or it’s just, it feels like such a huge ball to push up the mountain. Obviously that’s become a problem. And so I think the framework and what you’re doing is addressing that kind of a problem, right?

Esai Arasi: Exactly. That’s exactly what it’s addressing because what happens often is when we are faced with a problem or a challenge or somebody tells us that this is the next thing that you need to do for your business, we copywriters and service providers, we have the tendency to immediately go into this implementation.

Rob Marsh: Right.

Esai Arasi: What can I learn? What can I do? Just tell me, just give me a plan, teach me something, and I’m going to go right into it. And we’re built for that. We’re really, really good at that. And that’s why we think anybody tells us you need to create more content, it makes sense for us. We are writers, so we do understand the power of content to scale relationships, to scale visibility, to scale our knowledge and strategy and bring us credibility and authority. We do understand that. But the thing is, So creating content is the second level of strategy. We need to first foundationally understand that what we need is not content. What we need is relationships. And that’s why I tell every single client whether they are selling courses, they’re selling one-on-one offers, they’re selling coaching, or they’re selling down for you. We need to first understand what is it that you need from marketing, and then we can layer whatever platform or strategy fits best, layer that on top of it. Now, the biggest reason everybody says you need to post content and you need to be on social is we need leads. And that’s the thing, right? I need leads. I need more. I need more visibility. So I’m going to get on. I’m going to post on social, right? And you and I talked about this. The last thing social media wants to give you is free reach. Now, every single platform, it’s a death march towards throttling your visibility and throttling your reach. It doesn’t matter what the platform is. All of them are moving that way. And anything you can do, somebody else can do better. I love that song. I tell people that you can’t compete on that because as service providers, we’re not in the business of multimedia. We’re not video photographer video and there are people who can do it really well it props to them but most of us are like you and I we don’t use social media in our personal life we don’t be for the life of us I cannot take a good picture of myself it’s just I have one photo that I use everywhere because by some miracle I look good in it I’m like yep that’s the one I look fine when I’m talking to people but I just look weird when I take photos of myself so just some of us aren’t like that and just we don’t prefer it so The thing that we need to understand is our goal is not content. Our goal is if we want leads, we need to understand what do I need to get more leads. And I tell people, you need to look at your marketing through the lens of traffic. How am I going to get in front of more people who want to buy my stuff? There is a fantastic book that Joanna Wiebe recommended called The Business of Expertise. When I read it, it blew my mind and it just completely flipped the script for me that the more you charge, The market, it now becomes the seller’s market because at the higher level, people need their problems solved a lot more than you need to make money. Now think about it, you are rewrapping, you’re writing somebody’s launch sequence, you’re writing somebody’s sales pitch. They need that sales pitch to be fantastic. And they need that sales pitch to convert like crazy a lot more than you need $5,000. You can make $5,000 doing anything, but their problem is extremely pressing.

So the better you are, the more people are going to want to give you more money. simply because your expertise is now in demand and more valuable. And the more you learn, the more you scale up, the power balance is going to shift more and more and more towards you. Now that’s something as copywriters is very difficult for us to walk. I know it was for me. Like when I started out, I was like happily taking on any clients, anybody who said yes to working with me, I was like, yes, I’ll take on as a client. even whether it’s a good fit, bad fit, I would try to work within them and if anything went wrong, I would take complete responsibility and say, yes, it was my fault, it didn’t work, whatever, and I’ll lower prices and do everything you taught me not to do. So I did that.

Once I started looking at it through the lens of, okay, what do I need? What is my service and what is the problem it’s solving? It then told me where I need to go, right? So the first thing is social media is not the solution to your traffic problem. As service providers, you need to look at where are people already going? to solve the problem that my service solves for them. And if you can be in that case, then you don’t need to be on social media. In 2021, I posted 40 times on LinkedIn. In 2023 I posted maybe 20 times. In 2024 I posted maybe twice or thrice. I didn’t need to because I was already in all of those places where people were recommending me. So you need to layer this strategy. Where is my traffic? Where am I going to get visibility to get in front of people who are already looking to hire? number one. And for us, it looks like either it’s masterminds, it’s maybe it’s strategic referral partners. That’s what I did. I had two or three referral partners that I kept in touch with, who sent me leads. Ry Schwartz recommended me after I went through his program to a few people. I worked with Brenna McGowan in Behind the Launch. So she recommended a few people to me.

Emily Reagan referred a few clients to me. And the second source, biggest source of clients for me are clients I’ve already worked with. They recommended more and more people to me, so I didn’t need to be on social. So this is the one thing, and I’m not saying don’t post on social. Social is important. We’re going to look at all of the pieces of the strategy, but I want everybody to fundamentally move away from thinking in terms of what do i need to do and then think about what is my strategy for getting clients and last time you and i talked rob my strategy was working with copywriters who will then connect me with other clients Then I refer me to clients and that’s how I will grow. That was my traffic. I had zero nurture and my conversion mechanism was a sales call. And now as I grow, I’m slowly moving away towards more organized systems, which is what I’m here to talk about today.

Rob Marsh: Awesome. So I just want to be crystal clear on this because it’s really easy for us to wrap our heads around content because that’s what we do. We’re really good at creating content. We’re really good at writing scripts. We’re really good at captions or stories or all of that stuff. And so that’s the frame that we have taken to social media. Every time we think, Oh, I need to be on social media. Okay, we’ll create content. And what you’re saying is, Yeah, content, but it’s not the purpose isn’t just to be posting content. It’s not to show off your expertise. It’s not to be out there saying stuff. It’s there for the sole purpose of creating a relationship with either a reader or a prospect or a customer or partner of some kind. And if you can do that with three pieces of content instead of 30, all the more power to you.

Esai Arasi: Yes. Write up and you can get away by doing this. Write up almost until you get $100,000 of income, whatever that looks like. When you’re starting out, that’s more than enough. A lot of people who have sent me clients, a lot of them have never actually seen my work. Emily Reagan said that. Her email just landed in my inbox today. She had sent an email saying, skills won’t get you high paying clients. And it’s true. They don’t hire you just for skills. There’s so many other things that you need to build. That’s what content is going to do for you. And we’re going to talk about that in a little bit. At first, you don’t need that. You just need to be strategically known in the right places. So you can be the person who gets clients.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, let’s jump into how we do that because again, it’s really easy to write, you know, the post, the article or whatever, but the place where I know so many copywriters struggle is how do we forge that relationship? How do we, you know, even start the conversation so that, you know, three or four chats later or a few months later or whatever, we are the trusted source. So obviously it starts with that one or two pieces of content or, you know, whatever the initial thing is, but how do we make that switch?

Esai Arasi: Oh, I’m so glad you asked. First of all, I have done a very, detailed training about this inside The Copywriter Underground. As Rob, you know, we broke down the six types of posts every copywriter needs to write. So you can, if you’re an underground member, you can go in there, you can find my older training and you can break that up. You can go through that for in detail, but to answer your question right now for everybody, If you want clients, the most important pieces of content, I tell people there are three types of content that you need to post. Number one, a piece of content that tells your, and I call it your origin story. Like how you became the person and it doesn’t, it’s not your origin story of where you were born and it’s not that like nobody cares about that. It’s an origin story. Like when we watch Superman’s movie, we don’t care about everything else. Like how he was put in. No, we care about how he became Superman. That’s the only story we care about. So clients need to see how did you become the person who can solve my problem. And that’s critically important because that tells me what kind of a problem solver you are right now. And the high-paying clients care about that very, very deeply, because they care not just in that fact that my problem is solved, but what that experience of having my problem solved is. Because I will be more than happy to pay more money for that experience to be better for me. Money is not a problem for me, the problem is. having working with a person was a great thing. That’s post number one.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. So, and just to make this absolutely clear for me, what I’m doing with that post isn’t stuff like, you know, I’ve been writing since the second grade. I went door to door selling my poems to the neighbors. Uh, and you know, I took all of the college courses or whatever. It’s not that it’s basically my personal story about how I, uh, you know, either solve that problem for the client or for myself. You know, I found myself in this problem, so I had to figure out how to, so let’s, let’s take, you know, this example we’re talking about. I needed clients And so I had to create a new lead magnet that was a little bit different from the typical PDF download. And because it was different, it stood out. I got some clients to show you how to solve that problem for yourself, right? That’s the kind of thing. Now, obviously, people listening are going to have a different a different problem that they’re going to solve for their customers or whoever. But it’s not about I’ve been writing for 30 years or whatever. And it’s all about the

Esai Arasi: Yes. And writing about 30 years, they’re only going to care about at the second level. First, they’re going to emotionally decide whether or not they want to work with you. And then they’re going to look for logical reasons of whether you’re good fit. That’s when they’ll need your background and your experience and expertise and all that. To give you an example, like you said, I could either tell my story as, hey, I’m somebody who’s been writing since I was eight. That’s the first time I remember putting pen to paper and writing a story. I’ve been writing since then. I’ve been writing and reading since then. That’s why I love it. And I have a background in marketing and psychology. I was a behavioral change trainer for twice. I can go into all of that, but nobody cares. Or I can tell my story about, hey, when I started a business, I had no connections in this industry and I didn’t know anybody over here. And I was an introvert who did not want to be on social. But unfortunately, social was literally the only way I could keep in touch with everybody who were living multiple thousands of miles away from where I was. So I had to find a way to make social work for me instead of doing what was popular advice. Now, that’s a story my audience deeply cares about because it resonates with them. It resonates with the story of their current struggles as well. So they feel like it’s exactly as you said. And for you, how you started and run The Copywriter Club for your audience in terms of from the perspective of right selling offers is that you want to talk about how in a time where there were already a lot of people teaching copywriting, but there were more direct response and SAS focused and all of it and you realize that like you, you wanted to learn from somebody who had a more relationship focused approach to copy, who spoke to a more nuanced version of copy rather than the brute force direct response version of it. And you wanted to teach systems. You realize that just knowing copy is not enough. A lot of copywriters, really good copywriters, were struggling like I was struggling for this. So then that’s where you started. you created these offers in The Copywriter Club. Again, it’s the most interesting part of your life for me because it relates to me.

Rob Marsh: Okay, good. So that’s the origin story.

Esai Arasi: That’s post number one. Post number two, and you can write multiple, multiple variations of this, it’s called, I call this, for example, content. Now this is where, and I tell people, the biggest mistake you can make as a copywriter is talking about copywriting. Clients don’t care about copywriting. If you go to my social, you would rarely see me talk. Very few hosts of mine will talk specifically about social. I talk about trust, I talk about relationships, I talk about working with clients, about all those things, but that’s the problem I’m solving for your clients. So the second post, it could either be, I call it, what’s your problem, or I call it, for example, content. So this is where you share your expertise, where you share the expertise in terms of specifically the problem your clients are facing. So instead of saying that, hey, a website copyright copy should be based on voice of customer, Nobody cares. Website copy, voice of customer, these are not words your clients are using in their everyday life. Rather, you want to talk about when a potential client lands on your website, when you send them a link or when somebody is referring them and sending them a link, you want them to read your website and feel like, yeah, this is the solution I’ve been looking for all my life. It’s like it’s custom made for me. They need to feel like you are the only person who understands them and their problems. And therefore, it doesn’t matter what you charge. You’re the only person I want to work with. That’s the difference between talking about copywriting with the same thing. I’m still talking about voice of customer, but I’m not talking about it from my perspective. I’m talking about it from client’s perspective. So I call this, for example, content, because you have to give an example that they understand.

Rob Marsh: So ironically, you’re talking about voice of customer using your actual voice of customer, which we’re pretty good at doing for our clients, but we’re really bad at doing for ourselves.

Esai Arasi: Oh my God.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. So yeah, I see this all the time. Copywriters want to talk about copywriting because we love it so much. And it’s great in a group of copywriters, but if your clients are not copywriters, it makes zero sense. And we’ve got to figure out how to talk about these things in the words that our customers use in order to break through.

Esai Arasi: Yes, exactly. And the third type of post, and I tell people these are three posts that should be pinned on your Instagram. These are three posts you should over and over cycle. There are more nuances to it that we go into, but you need to repeat. The third type of post, and again this is something most copywriters like I do it, and I’m sure you don’t do it in email, but you definitely do it on social as well. We don’t tell as the right way on social. Either we go over CLC, because we feel like, OK, fine, this is the promotional post. I have two spots open. Work with me here. Or we pull back and almost passive-aggressively, we just write a random post. But you know what? You can also work with me. Here it is. as like a throwaway right instead of intentionally selling and most of us shy away from selling because we feel like it’s an intrusion it’s a disservice and i and i’ll tell you it’s not you’re supposed to sell i tell people like it’s incredible because shopping is like it’s actually called therapy it’s actually retail therapy people like shopping because it makes them see a better version of who they could be. It helps them see potential solutions to their problems. It helps them see a better future for themselves. And that’s what your sales content should be.

So I call this like a dressing room. Clients should be able, like people love trying on whether or not they buy it, they love it. That’s why women love tying on wedding dresses. They love going shopping. They go with their friends and they all try on whether or not they’re going to buy it because people love it. That’s what your sales post should be. So your sales post shouldn’t just be like, hey, this is what my package is. Yes, you should have that so they can have that information. But it should feel more like they’re trying on your service. There are multiple variations of this. You should talk about, hey, when you hire me for writing your website copy, You are not just a website copy. Here’s what your life will look like. I’m going to take care of this project step by step, every single way, and keep you posted so you don’t have to worry about what’s happening. You’ll get consistent updates. This is a timeline. These are the updates you will get. I will work with your design. Also, this is the end product that I will give you, this wireframe, so you don’t have to fight 10 rounds with the designer. You don’t have to play free between us. I will directly communicate with the designer and I’ll give them a wireframe. that they can use and if you like I can get in touch with the designer ahead of time so I can make sure that what we’re creating is going to come out beautifully and then I work with them and communicate with them directly so it’s all off your plate and it is done while you’re continuously in the loop. Now when you present it like that, now that’s not you selling but that’s showing me what my future, a potential future for me and now that future is irresistible because as somebody who’s currently struggling to write her own website Even as I’m saying it, I’ll be like, oh, I love it. I want that for me. That’s your third.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. So, I mean, that is basically, you know, another copywriting technique. It’s feature pasting, but we’re actually showing the customer what the new version of whatever the thing is, is going to look like. And so we’re painting that future. We’re making it easy for them, helping them see the actual result or the transformation, as opposed to saying, you get a website or you get website copy, or, you know, I’ll, I’ll write your blog post.

Esai Arasi: Exactly. And here’s the thing, Rob. Most people think if I post all of this, I should automatically get clients. But the mistake is that is not going to happen. Social media, at best, is either your nurture or your conversion platform. Social media is not your traffic platform. Social media is not going to take your post and show it to a bunch of ideal clients who are looking to hire. That is not what they want. They would rather people keep posting saying I’m looking for somebody. They’d rather people stay on the platform and keep posting like that because it’s not Upwork. It’s not a marketplace. It’s just a social platform where they want to keep people on. You need to figure out what your underlying strategy is and figure out that where you’re going to get leads, how you’re going to convert them and on what platform. And that’s why I think social is fantastic, even if you don’t post a lot, because social gives you public credibility. If the thing I’m telling you privately in an email matches with the thing that I’m saying publicly on my social, I gain a lot of credibility as a person saying that, yeah, this is what she’s been saying. Like whenever I pitch an SEO project, I link back to a post I made in 2020 about what SEO is. That tells them, even though it’s a very old post, it doesn’t have, it has like maybe 20 likes, it still tells them that she’s been talking about this since 2020. That’s how you create the longevity for your posts as well.

Rob Marsh: Okay, so those are the three, the three kinds of content that we should be posting. How often? I mean, I know you said last year, you only posted a few times on your social media, but you also have, you know, some relationships, you know, a lot of copywriters would be saying, okay, well, I don’t have those relationships that can send me leads, or I don’t have the system already built. So if I’m just starting out with this, or if I’m coming to this and thinking, this is a great idea, maybe I should do a little bit more of this or just what I’ve been doing in the past. How often should I be posting in order to get the momentum going?

Esai Arasi: So if you’re just starting out, I would say, again, social is not where you’re going to get leads. Social is where you need to build credibility because you might not have a portfolio. You might not have results that you can speak to. Like you say, you don’t have people who can vouch for you. Like I didn’t post because I had people pulling for me. I had built enough relationships and credibility. People invited set me messages in my DMs asking me to come speak because they’d heard me speak on The Copywriter Club and a bunch of other places and I didn’t need to, but then I spent three years building that. So if you’re new, I would still say once a week on Instagram or LinkedIn is plenty. Where you need to spend most of your time is, like I said, by building relationships. And if you don’t have any, here’s how you can get started. Number one, and we did an in-depth training about this very recently in the underground as well, the four types of people who can get you clients. Again, if you’re in the underground, go back and watch that training. pull back the curtain and share everything that I’m doing for me and my clients. So that’s working.

And I also shared an actionable guide, which is there for the underground waiting for you. If you’re a member, go check it out. But to those of you, to give you a little bit of a teaser, number one, you start by creating the three types of posts that I said. These are called bottom of the funnel, like bottom of the funnel content. And you speak to people who are directly ready to buy and already looking to solve that problem. You’re not speaking to somebody who doesn’t know what conversion copywriting is. they are not somebody who’s willing to pay $2,000 to write a welcome sequence. You want to speak to somebody who already knows the worth of conversion copywriting, somebody who’s already willing to hire, but then if they’re willing to hire, why haven’t they? Because they haven’t found somebody who matches their values, who matches exactly what is it that they are looking for. Somebody who either understands their industry, understands their need, is a good fit for them, whatever that looks like. So one, you create content like that the three types of post cycle between them. Post once a week, that’s plenty. Post more if you can, definitely. But do that, number one. Number two, you want to look at, find these marketplaces. The person who’s trying to solve this problem, where are they going? The easiest way to find it is, again, where they’re already congregating in big numbers, masterminds, other courses where these people go to learn from their mentors. Those are great places to find them.

But if that’s not the way you can find them, the second place is, who else is solving a similar problem, but not the same problem as you, a similar problem. Again, we go into more detail in this technique in the underground. And a good example is, let’s say you have, one of my clients is a psychiatrist who teaches mothers with postpartum depression and anxiety. So if she wants to reach those mothers, we thought, okay, so how do we reach them? She has a brand new Instagram and it’s not gonna grow on its own. Okay, so if mothers, they have postpartum depression, what are they already doing? Before they go to a psychiatrist, who are they going to go to? Easy answer, they’re going to go to therapists. Now therapists are business owners. They are posting content. They are going to in-person networking events. They have business profiles online in directories and everywhere. Proactively build relationships with them. Therapists who are actively also supporting mothers with postpartum depression or mothers with postpartum or also new moms. So they probably have a lot of new mom stuff. So they are probably consuming new mom content. So there are influencers who post a lot of new mom content. That’s another place where you can post, support those people, build relationships. You don’t have to go after the big creators. Find somebody who has 10,000 followers or 5,000 followers, build them, reply to the emails. You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to build relationships because most people don’t do it. just by the simple fact of posting comments, replying to emails, and being a genuine person, you’ll be surprised at how many relationships you can build.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, there’s like a couple of interesting ways to do this too. You’re talking about, you know, groups where people are congregating and that’s a little bit like fishing with a net, right? Because there’s so many people there and you just kind of scoop out. But there’s also an approach, and maybe there’s a way to do this with social media, where we’re going directly to the businesses. And there are so many businesses out there that are not online in the ways that or that we think about, you know, when we’re talking about, oh, working with coaches or working with SaaS companies, whatever. And I’m talking about the businesses, at least for me, they’re always out by the airport. You know, it’s the small business that makes awnings for people’s backyards. And you don’t see that showing up anywhere. Or it’s, you know, somebody who’s maybe, you know, they’re some kind of industrial something or construction companies or, you know, like there’s all of these companies out there that actually need help doing the stuff that you’re even talking about, right? And so, but those guys, we’re probably not going to find them in a Facebook group or, you know, in a LinkedIn group, right? So some of those, we’re basically fishing with a hook and line, right? We’ve got to go to them directly and approach them and say, Hey, look, here’s the problem that I solved. Now you’re still doing the same approach. You’re still, you know, build it and you can still refer them to your, you know, three posts on Instagram or LinkedIn or wherever that you’re putting this stuff. But Obviously, your approach here is going to depend on the niche that you want to work with. And so you’ve got to be really cognizant of where your customers are, what is it that they’re looking for, and how can you reach out to them.

Esai Arasi: Exactly. And there are lots of people who are not online, even within your industry. Even if your industry is online, sometimes your potential clients are not online.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, your best clients need help doing that stuff, right?

Esai Arasi: Exactly. Like one of my clients, he is a fractional growth executive and he works with VCs and CEOs. who are not online because they are very busy running their own business. But the thing is, instead of trying to brute force into finding these people on social media, an easy way to do it is to build relationships with people around them. So instead of VCs, we started going after people within the VC organization. There are people who are online. who do go to in-person events. The middle management people who go to in-person events, they post on LinkedIn, they comment on each other’s stuff. So we built relationships with them. So while the VC is not on LinkedIn, but when the VC, so the VC is not going to go headhunting. They’re not going to see a LinkedIn post and say, I want to work with you. They’re going to turn to the people they trust and say, okay, who do you know? Right.

Rob Marsh: They’re going to ask their peers and they’re going to ask the team. Yeah, they’re depending on their team to do a lot of that work.

Esai Arasi: Exactly. The CEO is going to turn to the manager, HR, and marketing manager and say, OK, who do you know who does this? Who would be a good fit for us? The key being, who would be a good fit for us? And you need to show up as the person who is a good fit for us. And it’s a fantastic point you brought up. So that is what the traffic portion of this is. You need to find the right traffic source for you. Sometimes, like you said, it’s fishing with the net. You find a good You find a good pool and you sort of throw in a net and reel it. Sometimes it’s about throwing in a fishing rod and just waiting patiently and hook it if you’re looking for the big fish. Sometimes it is going after specific people. It is like driving door to door. You send out cold email, whatever that looks like. So the traffic can be whatever. But the thing is, if you don’t do the nurture pieces, if you don’t have a strong social media and i tell people strong social even more than strong website because you know that i still don’t have a website i built a multiple six figure business and i’ve grown an agency and i worked with some of the best some of the biggest names in the industry despite not having a website, because clients don’t care about that. A website is credibility and trust. And I had another way of earning that, so I didn’t focus on the website. So we need to be clear on these three pieces. Always ask yourself, what am I trying to achieve by building that? And if that is going to serve any of these three pieces. Anything that doesn’t serve to build your traffic, get, nurture your traffic and convert them into clients. We’re going to talk about the conversion piece in a little bit. If it doesn’t fit into these three, it’s not a thing that you need to be doing. And then you also need to look at, is this the best way to get traffic? Is Instagram the best way for me to get traffic? If you said, if the person I’m trying to reach runs a garage door company.

Rob Marsh: So you need a home base where they can double check. They can see that you’ve got the authority, the expertise, but that’s not where you’re going to be building that relationship.

Esai Arasi: No, it’s not. And social, again, one aspect of social is content. Another aspect is relationship. And again, we go into this in detail, but you need to build both professional and personal relationships. And I don’t mean personal as an intimate, but I mean personal as a friendly relationship with your clients as well. So when the professional relationship ends, you can still keep the personal going until they become ready to become a client. Again, so you can pitch to them next because you have a line of communication open.

Rob Marsh: OK, so we’ve been going really deep on traffic. We’ve kind of touched on nurture. Is there some other stuff we should be doing with nurture before we get to the last part of the framework?

Esai Arasi: So for Nurture, it’s about continuously showing like, that’s what I said, that’s where the social piece comes in. Like for Nurture, in the early stages, you just need to show up, people need to know who you are and what you do, and that’ll be enough to get you those data clients. But when you start going after those big clients, Nurture becomes a lot more crucial for you now, because now you need to have those bigger pieces that not only tells clients who you are, but also builds your credibility. That’s when you need to start building case studies. That’s when you need, I’m writing my website now because now I am starting to go after the bigger names in the industry by my own strength. So I need, I’m writing case studies, I’m building websites. So nurture becomes more important. But again, you need to look at what is my strength. You don’t need to do reels. I did one reel, I hated it, and I never did another one again.

Rob Marsh: Reels kill me.

Esai Arasi: Yeah.Talking head reels, sharing clips of things, sure. But dancing. Add mad libs, no, not my thing. I don’t want to do it, not because it doesn’t work, it works, not for me. So you need to be clear on what is it that fits you well, and that’s sustainable, and you need to do that. But the most important thing is find a way that’s sustainable for you, or you will burn out, you will stop, and you won’t do it again, and then it will constantly feel like you’re starting from zero every single time because you haven’t built a sustainable practice field.

Rob Marsh: Okay, so then the last step really is how do we convert these people, you know, relationships into customers?

Esai Arasi: A lot of this, Rob, and I have to give this to you, a lot of this is stuff that I learned from you as we worked together, because until then, I hadn’t really understood what systems and processes inside a business could look like. And I didn’t realize why they were that important either, because the way that I was doing it was whatever it was working. Because again, at that point, I was working with two clients, and that was it. As soon as I started growing, I realized how critical those pieces were. And a lot of this is stuff that I learned inside The Copywriter Club.

The communication systems that we need to build, the proposal and the follow-up sequence and all of those things that we want to build. Those are those become more and more crucial as you as you look to grow and as you especially as you look to work with better and better clients your conversion mechanism. It has to match. what it feels like for the clients to work with you. Your conversion mechanism, the higher you, the higher and the more you charge, your conversion mechanism has to be more reliant on your skills, your credibility and your past results. For me, for, and for a large, large part of, for a lot of the copywriters, our conversion mechanisms are sales calls. And we think, yes, DM me, get on a sales call with me, and we leave it at that.

But which is fine when we’re getting started because the clients we’re working with are smaller level clients as well. So they were happy to get on a call because they wanted to negotiate, write the price down, and they were happy to spend 40 minutes talking to you if it means they could get like a $200 discount on the service that they want to pay for. But the higher clients that you want to work with, that’s not going to cut it any. Then you need, you need, the one resource that I really love is that business in a box, which has all of the pieces that you could implement, like your proposals, your email sequences, your onboarding forms, your offboarding, all of it. These pieces become extremely critical. I’ve had clients tell me that multiple times that your onboarding is like chef’s kiss. Like multiple times I hear that from my clients and I always think back to my time at The Copywriters Club when I was, when you were mentoring me that that’s like four years, five years later, it is still having a huge impact in the way that clients work with me.

So your conversion mechanism, you need to say, even if it is a sales call, you need to understand that not everybody will want to jump on a 40 minute sales call with you. So you need to have those pieces built. We talked about case studies as a nurture mechanism a little bit as well. But now you need to intentionally think about what your bottom of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, funnel conversion content looks like. You don’t need to write a weekly blog post, but you do need to write content that tells your best that speaks. It’s like a dog whistle to your ideal client that this is this person gets my problem and this is their way of solving the problem is perfect fit for me. That’s extremely crucial. Now, that’s another thing you recently talked about that as well. The USB unique selling point is no longer enough to have, it’s no longer enough to have your framework, you need to have this, you need to have your way, your point of view, your of looking at a problem and your point of view of why it’s a problem and your point of view of how you solve it, that’s critical as well. So the more money you want to charge, the more you want to look at those, you want to build, invest in and build those pieces.

So you’re starting to convert more clients. And the worst thing in all of this is Rob, as I see my clients and I talk to people and sometimes I like a lot of times I do it as well, is that when we don’t intentionally build these pieces, we feel like we’re not getting leads. But often in so many rooms, especially if you’ve been a part of any of the accelerator programs, I know Rob you’re so intentional about building a community and making sure people have a solid relationship within people as well. I know that people have come to me and said, so and so said so many amazing things about you. And I wasn’t even in the room. But that person said that because how intentionally you make sure, whether it’s the accelerator or the think tank, how intentionally you made sure we all knew each other, knew how to support each other, knew what we did, and you built a referral network for us without even really meaning to do that. So there are so many times we have leads, there are people talking about what we do and how we solve a problem in the rooms, but because we don’t have these pieces in place, often leads drop off and we feel like We feel like we’re burning out because we’re doing the wrong things instead of doing the easy things to get clients.

Rob Marsh: So these conversion pieces don’t live on social media. They’re either in your funnel or on your website or part of your onboarding process or your vetting slash discovery call process, however that’s structured. This stuff lives outside of it. the relationships that we built on social media or in the DMs or wherever that starts to happen, because people find the one or two pieces of content that we’ve posted, that leads to these areas where we can now get them into, some people would call them like indoctrination sequences. Really, it’s just a way for people to get to know you better and how you solve the exact problem that they have. That’s happening, not on Facebook, not on social media. somewhere else.

Esai Arasi: Exactly. And we touched on this a little bit, Rob, like right now we’re in the third phase of social media. We talked about social 1.0 was when social media needed more users. So it asked everybody to sign up and refer your friends and import your contacts.

Rob Marsh: And it showed everything that your friends were posting, right? Like, yeah, it was amazing because you could actually see what everybody was up to.

Esai Arasi: felt like you were in touch like it felt it was it was like a cat being in camp and was so amazing and then came social 2.0 where now the platforms needed more content to keep all of the users happy and satisfied and keep using the app so anybody who created content there’s so many users you would have seen that they grew so quickly and now they’ve completely stalled out because they were riding the algorithm wave where it gave them a lot of free content.

Rob Marsh: We saw that with The Copywriter Club groups, which were immensely popular because there was content going in there. Obviously, Facebook has changed the algorithm. If I post something in a group of thousands of people, only a couple hundred people will see it now. It wasn’t that way four or five years ago.

Esai Arasi: No, it was not. And now Facebook recently announced that Facebook lives will be deleted after 30 days. And you’ll have up to 90 days to download the video. Because they don’t want to store the video. They have tons of content now. They don’t want to keep your content. Now these lives, your Facebook groups were a way for you to save all of this valuable training that people can visit and revisit and learn from you. Now it’s no longer an option. So platforms no longer care about you. That being said, another interesting way that people are now, like I said, this is social 3.0 where people social, they don’t care about users. They don’t even show you in your Facebook feed, 90% of the content feed is either ads or from random accounts that you don’t even follow, which they think you would like. And they keep showing it in your, in your feed. That’s going to starting to happen more and more, but. how users are now behaving more and more.

And not a lot of people are doing it. Very few people are doing it right now. And you can be ahead of the curve by implementing it right away. A lot of content now needs to be native first. I used to say that, yes, case studies should live off of social. You should get people to download your case study, download the PDF, and forward the PDF to each other and all of that. Now, the last case study project that we did, we also converted that into a case study carousel that can live on their social. Because now people don’t want to click and go to a page and download it. They don’t want to do that because most people now use the internet on their phones. So they would prefer to have the content natively in the app so I can click it, I can tag somebody that I know, I can quickly share it with them. Because again, platforms have made it super easy to do all of those things. So it’s much easier for me to do it that way than for me to enter my name and email and all of that stuff. That was why the quiz that I told you, now my quiz that I’ve built, I’ve built it inside Instagram. It doesn’t even have a webpage. at all. It only lives inside Instagram natively because one, it’s super easy for me to collect name and email and do the whole quiz in there. It’s also very, very easy for the users from somebody coming to my profile to take that natively because sending DMs on Instagram is easy, whereas clicking it, opening it, scrolling and typing, that’s a little bit harder.

So we need to be more savvy in the way that we leverage these platforms. So we don’t become slaves to them, but we understand what’s working and what’s not. And we use the best parts of social and the best part of all of these platforms and make it work for us. and fit our lifestyle and our requirement and then make that a more sustainable practice than try to put everything. So for new copywriters, that is good news for you. You don’t need to create like, and I am a perfect example, you don’t need to create even, you don’t even probably need a website right at the start. If you can build those intentional relationship, a website is good. I might be the exception. I don’t tell people that website brings a lot of credibility to how that you should have it. But again, Don’t let that stop you. Put everything on your social and start with what you have because the key thing here is to build relationships and build that trust. That is the asset and I tell people like funnels decay, social media posts lose their visibility and reach, even SEO blog posts, Pinterest pins, they lose traffic over time. The one thing that doesn’t ever lose its potency and continues to grow and grow over time is relationships.

Rob Marsh: As long as you’re contributing to it or interacting, keeping them up. I don’t want to minimize this at all because there’s definitely work involved in maintaining a relationship. Obviously, relationships come and go and sometimes you go through a period where you may not talk to or share anything with somebody for a few months. things right back up. But if you are looking at relationships to develop work for your business, you do need to put some work into nurturing those. And that’s not, you know, by posting content. It’s not even, you know, the stuff that we’ve talked about through this framework. It’s not about the traffic nurture conversion. It’s really just about, like, how do I keep showing up as the friend, as this trusted resource? When I see something that’s helpful, do I keep sharing, you know, and doing that over and over, and that’s what produces results.

Esai Arasi: Exactly. And if you post the right type of content, you can continue to be friendly and be like a human being in the DMs, while your content will tell them, hey, this is what I do, here’s how you can refer me, here’s how you can work with me, here are my best fit clients, and you can keep educating your referral partners. A lot of us get bad reference from the people we like, and we can’t say no because it was sent to us by somebody we really like and respect. So we work with bad fit clients for keynotes. I’ve done that. Every copywriter has done that. But the way to circumvent that, like you said, Rob, is to keep the relationship alive and to educate your partners. And again, an easier way to do that, these relationships at scale, is again, creating more content. but nurture resonant content, rather than going for reach. Make sure your pieces of content are built for the right people, for the right reasons, rather than for the algorithm, and keep the relationships alive. Keep lines of communication open, and the content will do its magic of nurture and conversion, and tell people, hey, this is what she writes about, and here’s our best fit client, and as soon as I submit it, Somebody asked me for a client I know who to refer to because his content has been educating me all this while. Well, you’ve been keeping in touch with me maybe once a week or once a month.

Rob Marsh: Okay, so this is all really helpful. So as we were talking, you mentioned a few mentors that you’ve had over time, you know, by name, people that you’ve worked with and created relationships with. And I also know that you’ve invested a lot in, you know, courses and improving your skill set and even for your team, the people that are working with you to make sure that they’re up to date in the skills. Will you just share your thoughts about courses and mentors and where the value has been for you in your business?

Esai Arasi: Thank you for asking this, Rob, because I think this investment has been the single biggest needle mover in my business that has made the biggest difference. And I’ll tell you, your different seasons in life, you have different needs. When I was absolutely starting out, what I needed was courses. The very first course that I remember investing in was a YouTube for Bosses by Sunny Lenarduzzi. She was fantastic. I mean, I was watching YouTube videos by a bunch of other people. Again, it goes to resonance, I was also watching a bunch of men, Sean Cannell and a lot of other people, but I never felt the pull to buy any of their courses, even though they’re selling heavily. But as soon as I saw Sunny Lenarduzzi’s courses, she really spoke to me, the way she approached it.

Rob Marsh: Sunny’s really approachable. She’s a great personality.

Esai Arasi: She’s fantastic. And I loved her approach. I loved her reasons for why she’s the same thing as me. She didn’t want to burn out and that’s how she built her YouTube as a sales engine. So it was easy for me to invest in her stuff. And I have been very lucky in the mentors and people that I’ve invested my money in because Sunny has literally sent her a DM and she’s asking about a course that she was an affiliate for and she’s literally told me, no, that’s not the right fit for your own life. I’ve been very lucky in mentors like that. So that was the first one. So when you are absolutely starting out, invest in courses that build your skill. You need to be first good at what you are doing. That’s absolutely fundamental. And I tell service providers this all the time. The easiest way to build your business and just get more clients is to be ridiculously good at what you do. That’s the first thing I invested in. Be so good that people can’t help but talk about you wherever you are. And you know, we’ve done that as well. Good movies, good books, good people that we have, good doctors. We go out of our way to tell people about them, good hairdressers. People go out of the way to recommend them because it gives them social currency. So be ridiculously good and invest in courses and skills that do that.

Again, more importantly, the courses that you do invest in, implement. show up for calls, show up for courses. A lot of my needs early came through by me showing up and like implementing. And I couldn’t tell you like I was in a, there are so many times I’ve had one on one coaching from Rye Schwartz and Phil Povis for like every week for like an hour because nobody would show up for that call. And i was like i can’t believe i’m getting this is like such a steal but because i was showing up week after week and i was doing the work of demonstrating my skill i got a lot of leads from right. Because he’s he saw that i understood what he was teaching i was implementing that so when anybody said can somebody do this for me i was a no brainer answer because i learned from him. But once you have done that, the second place I highly recommend investing in mentors. I invested, as you know, Rob, like I invested in the think tank.

One call with you was an easy yes. for me, even though at that time, and I’ve told you this before, like at that time, I didn’t have the money for this. I had just taken a huge hit in the business and I had just hired two people, but I intentionally made the decision to join the think tank and continue to say no to bad fit clients because I believed in the first call where I got on a call with you. I still believe this conversation because you listened to everything that I had to say. And you said that you could easily see me ask me what my goal was. I was very hesitant here. I said $100,000. You could say, you said that I was lowballing it and you could easily see me getting $200,000 to $50,000 easily just based on everything that I had shared. To me, that was like mind boggling. $100,000 at that time was like my, oh my God, I can’t believe I’m earning this much kind of money. You’ve made me believe in bigger things. A lot of times when you’re trying to grow, yes, you need systems. And I tell people this also.

In the masterminds, no matter what level you’re implementing, the conversations are all the same. How do I get more traffic? How do I nurture this traffic? How do I get my offers to convert? How do I get more people to buy? How do I get this client to sign this proposal? They have ghosted me. The conversations are all the same. It’s just the scale at which they happen are different. And I tell them that courses can give you a framework thing, do this, which are great for learning skill. But when you want to learn business, you don’t want a course saying, do this. You want a mentor who can listen to you and say, okay, here, okay, this is who you are. So for you, I would personally recommend this, which is why I love the fact that every year, every time you launch, you run the accelerator as a live call program. Even though the content is more or less the same, you could easily just sell it as prepackaged lessons. I love that you run it as like courses because every time you customize it for each person and you make sure that every single person gets that individual attention to them and their business and you do it so so well, so efficiently, it like boggles my mind every time I hear that. So I would recommend working with mentors at that point. For me, that has been huge because there’s no way I could have learned from courses what I learned from the individual attention that I got.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I mean, thanks for sharing that. I found something very similar, you know, as I’ve worked with the various mentors who I still refer to and think of as mentors and can reach out to for help. There’s so many generous people in the marketing world and the copywriting world who are willing to help. Uh, the best way to get in front of them, of course, is to, you know, join the program or, you know, buy a course, but those are relationships also worth, you know, uh, nurturing and building and maintaining for all of the reasons you just said. So, so thanks for that. Okay. Uh, sorry, we’re out of time, but, um, share one more time where we can find the quiz in order to go through and figure out, you know, what is the stage that we’re at, what we should be looking at, uh, and how we get in touch with you.

Esai Arasi: Absolutely. So my most favorite place to hang out is LinkedIn. You’ll find the link, I’ll give you the link, that’ll be at the show notes. But to take my quiz, find me on Instagram at socialcatalyst, that’s catalyst with a K, and DM me, for the audit. It’ll be there in my profile as well. It’ll be easy to find. I only have one picture that I use across all social, so you’ll be able to find me easily. And again, my name is not that common. So either search for SI or search for socialcatalyst. That’s where you’ll find me and send me a DM. So you can take the quiz right at the DMs.

Rob Marsh: And we’ll link to it in the show notes just in case somebody doesn’t know how to spell your name or can’t find you on that initial search so the people will know exactly where to go. Thanks, Esai, for everything that you’ve shared and reframing for me how I think about social media and what it’s for and how often I have to do it. And yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing how this all builds business for myself and for those who are listening. So thanks again.

Esai Arasi: Thank you for having me, Rob.

Rob Marsh: Thanks to Esai for the update on what’s working on social media and how we can be more effective in using this tool to connect with our audience.

Esai mentioned a couple of workshops in The Copywriter Underground about the six types of content you should post on social media when you’re ready to post and the kinds of clients you should be writing for. To get those workshops and everything else The Underground includes, visit thecopywriterclub.com/tcu

I want to go back to something we were talking about early on in this episode and that’s your origin story. We were talking about this in the context of your social media. But it’s often the thing you include on your About Page. There is a popular idea out there that your About Page isn’t about you, but it’s really about your client. Of course, that’s true… mostly. Yes, the content on your About Page needs to resonate with your prospects. They need to see themselves in your story there. But that doesn’t mean it’s not also about you. You do need to tell your story there because people want to work with the people they like and know. So yes, write that story about them, but also include enough about you so they can get to know and like you.

What Esai shared about selling—this is one of the kinds of social posts you should be sharing—the approach where you are solving a problem for a client and taking that concern off their plate and showing them what their future looks like is worth repeating. I’ve said this dozens of times on this podcast, but your #1 role as a copywriter or content writer isn’t writing. It’s problem solving. Often that problem requires copy or content, but not always. And a professional looks for the big problems to solve, not just for a copy assignment. This is a big part of how copywriters need to be selling themselves in the future. A.I. can write content. But it doesn’t always have the context to solve a problem like you do.

Hopefully you found what Esai shared valuable and helpful as you look for a better way to engage prospects and clients on social media.

Stuff to check out:

Matt’s newsletter
Matt’s LinkedIn
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  Want to land a real job as a copywriter or content writer? It’s not easy. But help is on the way. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

Most of the listeners to this podcast are freelancers or contract writers. If you’re like them, you generally work on projects or retainers for a variety of clients. And you’re good at it. But some writers crave the stability that comes with a regular job—either part-time or full-time—with an actual employer paying wages and maybe even providing benefits.

A handful of freelancers I’ve worked with over the years have dipped their toes into the corporate world to work primarily for a single client, or for those who are looking for part-time jobs, have landed work that provides some security and regular income to go along with the unpredictabilty of freelancing. 

But finding those jobs isn’t easy. They’re out there for sure, but within hours of a copywriting or content writing job posting on LinkedIn or any other job board, the hiring managers receive hundreds of applications. Getting found in that slush pile isn’t easy—even for the very best writers.

Recently in The Copywriter Underground, I invited a friend of mine who worked for decades as a job placement specialist for creatives, to share her best advice for copywriters looking for “real” jobs. That training is inside The Underground now. When I announced we would be hosting that training, another copywriter, Matt Snyder, reached out to offer his advice. Matt is the Head Copywriter at a digital agency and works with a team of five or six writers. He hires a lot. And he sees a ton of applications, resumés and other creative attempts to get his attention. So when he offered, I suggested we record our discussion and share it here on the podcast.

That’s what this episode is. Now, I know I said this is about getting hired to real job with a company. But everything Matt shares is applicable to getting hired by freelance clients as well. I think every copywriter, every content writer, and every freelancer writer who listens to this episode will get a lot from what Matt has to say. So stay tuned.

As usual, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. We’re talking about getting work today, so I should probably mention the resources available in The Underground that will help you do that. Starting with the workshop with my friend, Jessica, the placement specialist. Her advice will make a difference if you’re applying for what we tend to refer to as “real” jobs. We also have workshops from experts like Laura Belgray who shares how you can stop waiting in line and “duck under” the velvet ropes holding you back. And Parris Lampropoulos who shared the exact pitch he used to get his first five clients, then how he went on to double his income every year for the next five years—do the math, that’s a lot. There’s also our in-house training about ways to find clients and an entire course on sales. Plus dozens of other workshops, templates, copy critiques, monthly coaching, and more. Learn more at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

And now, my interview with Matt Snyder…

Matt, Welcome to the podcast. I was checking our back episodes because I swear we’ve had you on the podcast before and turns out we haven’t. So we should have probably had you before, but I’m glad that we’ve waited because what we’re going to talk about today kind of came out of a lot of things that have happened since the last time you and I were even on a call together. So this should be pretty good. But let’s start with your story. How did you even become a copywriter?

Matt Snyder: Um, great question. Uh, I feel like I’ve lived many lives, so it’s kind of hard to turn it down. But, um, I, I always like to say my love affair with writing online or publishing anything online started with a Zynga account, like way back.

Rob Marsh: That’s a long time ago.

Matt Snyder: Yeah. Way back in like 2003. So, Um, like right when I got into college, I was like, I’m real. I, I kind of was dabbling into journaling and I thought that this online medium was going to be kind of cool. Um, so that was like, I think blog spot was maybe starting. And so I just started publishing stuff on Zynga and it was ridiculous. I don’t even bother looking cause I don’t even remember what my account was or anything. Um, it was, it was ridiculous, but I just, I feel like a lot of trial and error started there, but that’s kind of when I realized that like, I was, I kind of had a knack for writing. And then, um, a lot of my professors in school were like, Hey, you’re pretty good at writing. And I was like, great, but I didn’t want to go that route. Uh, I was like, I’m gonna go into ministry. That’s why I went to school for undergrad, um, left. And, uh, decided that, you know, I wanted to do mission work, didn’t know where I want to go. So I kind of did this, this, uh, year long mission trip adventure thing. And they gave everybody a blog, uh, posts or like a blog to, to document their journey on or whatever, and their thoughts. And so I did that and, uh, it kind of took off. And even the, the organization was like, Hey, you’re, you’re pretty good at this. So when you come back, do you want to work for us? and kind of help us market the programs. And I was like, sure. So that’s what I did. When I got back, I mean, it was great because when I was away, that’s when the market collapsed in 2008. And so I got back and I kind of had a weird job. But I’m a self-taught marketer and that’s kind of what I did. I just read every book, talked to everybody I could, and it was just trial and error. And so I kind of fell in love with marketing that way. Did a lot of blog writing, content writing. Um, and yeah, just learning in and out of, uh, stuff for nonprofits, but then on the side, I started freelancing and I was like, I think I’m going to help other people do the same thing. And so I did content writing, uh, SEO development stuff, started writing for websites, mostly nonprofits, um, dabbled in and out over the years. I’ve been traveling a lot. And then, uh, lived a life, got married, had, you know, a lot of stuff. And then I got a job at a church, this was after grad school, got a job at a church as a communications director. And all that was great. I thought I wanted to go back into church ministry. I’d been out for a while. I ended up being like, I got to get out of this. It just wasn’t, it wasn’t for me. Um, nothing against that environment or that world for anybody, but, uh, I started freelancing on the side full-time and then, uh, or mostly full-time and kind of pivoted into the freelance email marketing. Got into that world. I got connected with y’all at The Copywriter Club. Um, I joined The Accelerator program. Because I was like, I’m going to take my business seriously. And it really helped me take off, which is great. So yeah, I really pivoted hard into copyright. I can tell you the, not the date exactly, but I can tell you exactly where I was when I was like, I’m going to go hard into copyrighting full time. Uh, my wife and I took a trip to Tulum. I think this was like in 2006, 2016, 2017, something like that. And I was sitting on a rooftop of this place we were staying in Tulum overlooking the jungle. And I was journaling. I was like, I really want to pursue copywriting full time and talk to my wife about it. And she was just like, sounds great. Go for it. So. No, we didn’t have kids. We had a dog. We didn’t have a mortgage at that time. So it wasn’t a big deal. And so there was just a lot of freedom to take risks. And I did it. And I mean, I’ve done well myself. So yeah, freelance. Y’all really helped me set me up for success with my freelance business, which I kind of stopped viewing as a freelance business and just as a business. Which is a great mental shift, by the way, for anybody listening. And then I ended up, an agency slid into my DMs one day. Grace Baldwin, who’s an alum of my Accelerator program and Copywriter Club stuff, she connected this person with me and said, Matt might be interested in this job. And so my DMs got on call with them. It was the end of 2021, I think. And it’s that time of year, it’s Q4, business slows down and it’s like, you kind of get bored. And I was kind of stressed about, you know, will my retainer clients renew for another year kind of thing.

Rob Marsh: Right.

Matt Snyder: And, uh, I was like, you know what, I’ll give it six months and see, I had, I had to like, what’s supposed to be a 15 minute call with this agency Homestead, uh, studios actually where I work now. And, uh, I was like, that 15 minute call turned into, um, an hour. And then I just really jived with the partners that I was on the call with and I was like, I’ll give it six months. And so we’re over three years later, I’m still there. So it worked out well, I went from being just an email copywriter, writing on you know, six, seven, eight accounts to now I’m the director of copy and oversee the entire copy department across the whole agency. So, uh, it’s, it’s a lot of fun to have a whole team, um, get to really help people grow, not just their craft and their skill, but grow as professionals with people. And it’s, it’s just so much fun. We work with a lot of cool brands and, uh, yeah, I like a lot, but anyway, that’s, that’s kind of how I became a copywriter and how I got to where I am.

Rob Marsh: Uh, So we’re definitely going to jump into the agency stuff. But I’d like to go back to, you know, when you went all in on copywriting is about the same time that, you know, you were taking your business more seriously and really figuring stuff out. How did you connect with your first clients? What did that look like? And what were you doing? Because you did okay. Like, I know there was, there was a, it took a little time to get moving. But once it started, like you seem to have some pretty good success.

Matt Snyder: Yeah, I think I’m trying to figure out how I got my first clients. My first client client when I was freelancing, like full time was an old college friend. He had he had a cybersecurity business and he needed a content writer. And so at that time, I’ll just say yes to everything. That was kind of like my ethos. Just say yes to everything. I really wanted to do email marketing exclusively, but I was like, I’ll just take anything that comes my way. And so I did. And he connected me with other people. It kind of snowballed from there. I realized that If you do really good work and you’re just dedicated to it and you communicate well, referrals just come in naturally. And so he referred some people to me and then I just headhunted a few others through connections. I was really involved with the nonprofit world, especially here in Atlanta. And so I had some connections there that got me involved. And I got a referral from another, it was just really like my pipeline at first was just word of mouth. Um, I didn’t do much cold pitching. In fact, I had really poor success with cold pitching. Um, and my best, my best, uh, MO was, was word of mouth. And so I ended up, uh, turning one of my former employers into a retainer client, which was a fantastic, uh, face. I highly recommend that Avenue if you can, if you can get away with it. Um, but yeah, I’d say word of mouth is kind of how I really got my pipeline filled up at first and just saying yes to everything. And then it was through that, that I realized email marketing was pretty much my shit life. That was what I was really good at. Um, I could go into accounts, audit them. It was just like second nature to me, figure out what people needed to do, um, to, to be profitable or successful or fundraise, whatever they need to do. Yeah. So. That’s kind of, I don’t know if that answers your question, but yeah.

Rob Marsh: No, that answers it perfectly. And then when you got to the agency, to Homestead Studios, you were introduced by a friend. So, you know, again, relationships networking helped facilitate that. But what did you do on that call with the partners? You said you really vibed with them. Like, what’s the secret of that?

Matt Snyder: Be yourself. I think this was what was interesting to me about that conversation is. He asked me in the dm. It was just on twitter when it was still twitter, I’m not active on that platform anymore, but it was Jacob. You can go online and figure out who he is. He’s awesome. He DMed me and was like, hey, are you interested in a full-time job with our agency? He said, you’ve been recommended to us by Grace. I can’t remember what it was exactly. And I just said, no, I’m not interested. But because I’m playing hard to get. Yeah, no, I was like, I’m not really that interested. But I said, I will always take a call and make a new connection. I was like, I’m happy to meet with you. And so he’s like, great, let’s do it. And so he’s like, just a 15-minute call. We’ll just take your break. And I was like, great. And so it was supposed to be just me and Jacob. It ended up being me, Jacob, and Kelly, who’s also a partner at the agency. And I didn’t know who she was from Adam. But it ended up just being… I had nothing to lose in that conversation. They came to me And that kind of really put the ball in my court, more than anything, and in my favor. And so I asked them questions about the agency. They asked me questions about my experience. I hadn’t sent them a portfolio or anything. I didn’t apply for anything. So he’s like, do you have any copy that we can just look at? And I was like, well, I know I did this website for this nonprofit agency. And so let me pull it up. So I pulled it up in Google and showed him everything. And I went to the website. I was like, this is what this looks like. And he’s like, they sat there on the call and read through some of the stuff. He’s like, great. And I said, you know, I just did this sales sequence for this client. And so I pulled it up, they read through it. I just did the sales page for this coach. So I pulled that up and I was like, it’s just copy. It’s not even been designed yet because it was an active client. And they read through it and he’s like, that’s great. You seem to know, you know, what you’re doing. I’m like, yeah, thanks. And then, um, he said, you know, we’ll get back in touch with you, you know, that kind of thing. And so they emailed me within the hour, uh, an offer letter and I was like, God, I don’t even know if I want to do this. And so that’s when I really had to think about it. But I think that the secret to that whole thing was not that I was playing hard to get, it was just that. I approached that whole thing as just like a networking call and I don’t know, I wasn’t desperate. There was that and I felt the freedom to just be 100% me and be really honest about my shortcomings and my mistakes and how I could add value maybe, but I was just like, this is kind of it. I feel like that helped stand on the call. It was also an interesting era for the agency. Homestead at that point had just started within the previous four months. Their retention side of the agency, they were mainly just acquisition-focused on unpaid social. And so they were trying to build out their email team. And so when I came on, it was me, one other copywriter, and two designers, and Jacob and Kelly. That was it. And so we were lean, and we were taking on clients left and right. It just, yeah, it was ripe for explosion. So it was just a good time. I don’t know. Dudos to Grace, always. I always thank her so much because it was such a good connection.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, Grace is an amazing human being, a great copywriter as well. Before we go any farther, though, let’s talk about the agency because people think different things when they think agency. You know, some people will have in mind, you know, Mad Men, you know, Ogilvy, you know, these big creative boards, presentations, you know, that kind of thing. You guys are a little different from that. Tell us, you know, what’s the work you do and what does working at your agency look like all day long?

Matt Snyder: Oh yeah, it’s a good question and yeah, a good distinction to make. I like to tell people, when friends ask about where I work and I say I work for a marketing agency, they think Mad Men and I think they think a big branding house or something where it’s like, Yeah. Madden NS. Yeah. You’re, you’re standing in a boardroom.

Rob Marsh: You look just like Jon Hamm. You’ve got the square jaw.

Matt Snyder: Yeah, exactly. And for us, it’s nothing like that. Like, you know, we’re, we’re a gross marketing agency. Like we specialize in acquisition and retention services for mostly D to C brands, like direct consumer brands. Um, some, some B to B stuff we’ve dabbled in, but D to C is our wheelhouse. And mostly it’s like brands that are doing anywhere from like one to a hundred million dollars in revenue a year. So it’s like, Uh, it’s kind of I mean, you know, there’s a big difference between a 1 million dollar brand and even a 10 million dollar brand or 20 million dollar brand so when you hit that 100 million rev mark, it’s What you’re doing for them is very different than what you would do for a 1 million dollar brand But anyway, it’s like brands like hexclad we work. These are on our website. So i’m not like giving up but like Thanks Cloud is one of our biggest accounts in the past. T-Rex, Grubly Farms, Veggie Casely, The Woobles, Dose, Pink Friday, Mail, which is a Mickey Minaj’s brand. We worked with a lot of really cool ones, a lot of good small brands too that deserve mentions. But we mainly just Do again, acquisition and retention. So paid social. So ads, landing pages, UGC type stuff, and then retention services. So mostly email and SMX. And we do a lot of content strategy across all those areas. A lot of consulting with brands. They might have… We add value to like, you should change this on your website. You should do that. We don’t do websites, but we give a lot of good pointers. I’m sorry, when I came on, I think we were maybe towing like 30, 40 people across the whole agency. We’re 100% remote, spread out across the US, North America. We have people in Europe, we have people in Asia, Southeast Asia. I mean, it’s like, we have people that travel all the time. So it’s like, Japan’s the hotspot this year. Everyone’s going to Japan this year for some reason.

Rob Marsh: I’m jealous. Japan is on my list. I’d love to go.

Matt Snyder: Same. I’m like, why, why would I not? But yeah, we’re, we’re over 70 employees now. Um, last year we went on a big growth spurt, um, which was challenging in its own right. But like, it’s, it’s been really good. We’ve built out some solid teams. Um, so pretty, pretty enjoyable, but like our goal, um, is not to be the biggest agency. It’s to be the best agency. And we had rather go a lot deeper, uh, with fewer clients and do higher quality work than just, you know, make a buck and do a bunch of rush jobs. Um, and I think that, that kind of focus and that goal, you know, it translates into our commitment to development, like really like hiring top notch employees, but like nurturing those people, nurturing their growth, um, and figuring out like, you know, what do you want to do? Where do you want to be in five, 10 years? Um, and I always, I always tell people, you know, when I’m hiring for my team, for the copy team, like I’m under no impression. that people are going to be at this agency for their entire career. Most people don’t go to an agency and be like, I want to work at an agency my whole life. Unless you’re at Ogilvy or one of those big places. But it’s like, what do you want to do after this? I want to make sure that when you come in here, you’re getting equipped for what you’re going to do after. So when you come into Homestead and you spend time here, you’re like, I really love who I worked with. I love the clients, like just had a wonderful experience. They prepare me for what came next and they were supportive the entire way. Um, that’s what I want to hear. So, um, anyway, we’re, yeah, we’re, we’re, we’re a strange agency in some ways, but like, I honestly, it’s the best job I’ve ever had. Um, it’s the best agency I’ve ever worked out cause it’s the only one I’ve ever worked out, but like, it’s, it definitely flies in the face of, uh, those agency rumors, people are like, they’re horrible, you know, and you’re overworked and underpaid and underappreciated and homes, we, but no, that’s not our MO at all. And I think a lot of our, our employees would attest to that. So.

Rob Marsh: That’s good. So you went from being a copywriter to now you’re the copy chief or you’re managing other copywriters. How did you do that?

Matt Snyder: I don’t know. No, I think, um, showing that I could do work number one. Um, you know, when I, so yeah, when I started, I was one of two copywriters that was just doing emails and I think I was on like six accounts and then, uh, we hit a rough spell. We had to, uh, let people go. And so then I was the only copywriter and I was writing for, I remember one, one month I was writing for 18 accounts. By the way, that’s not sustainable. Yeah, that’s nuts. That’s crazy. Yeah, everybody knew it. And so there was a lot of grace. Our CEO was writing copy and sending it to me for review. Everybody was pulling their weight. We had to do what we had to do. And then we finally were able to hire more people and grow. And so I think the longevity of my time being there and showing that I could crank out the copy went a long way. And it was a good copy. It wasn’t half-assed. But then that helped. And then as our team grew, I kind of became, I don’t want to say a shepherd of sorts. A mentor? A mentor, yeah. Our next copycat, she was solid. She is solid. And I will sing her praises all day long. But I didn’t really feel like… I felt like a co-worker to her, a lot of our senior team, because we’re all in the trenches at the same time. But then it got to the point where we needed to hire, we needed to have a lead copywriter to kind of manage, be the bridge between the leadership team and the copy team and just kind of managing their day-to-day. And so I think the reason I got promoted into that role was just because of my leadership background from previous life experiences and just my natural, not candor with the team, that’s the wrong word, rapport with the team, maybe. Um, that’s the word poppy right here. Um, yeah, my national report as a team, I think it really helped. And so that kind of evolved. And then over time, like our, as our team kept growing, like I got, uh, taps to help with recruiting and hiring, um, mainly just getting to sit on our interviews and have a say. Um, cause our, again, like our, our head of staff now she’s phenomenal and she could pick a diamond out of the rough. And so yeah, then last year, they’re like, hey, we’re growing and we need your help on the paid side of the agency. Because my focus was purely on the retention side. And so they promoted me up into the director role. And so they’re like, yeah, now everything that is copy related agency, it’s yours. Um, so that’s pretty crazy. Um, so that’s how I kind of got into that role. But again, I think it goes back to, um, that leadership experience. No, it’s more than just copy. Like, I think there’s a tendency in a lot of workplaces where it’s like, just because your best employee does the best job and can do X, Y, Z, um, doesn’t mean they’re actually going to be the best manager or leader for a team. And so I, in a lot of ways, like, My senior copywriters, uh, that I get to work with, uh, I think they’re better writers than I am, um, by a long shot. Um, and I, I mean, Joe Bailey, you know, I’ll name them like they’re fantastically talented, um, writers in. Can write me right circles around me. Um, but like, I do bring a certain leadership ability to the table that I think helps with the whole of the team. And so. Yeah, it’s just showing up every day, doing the work, being committed, not being a prude about it. I think a lot of it’s just added to that value of growing there.

Rob Marsh: So this interview is happening because I sent out an email a month and a half or two ago talking about a workshop that we were doing in the underground. And it was about how copywriters can find full-time or even part-time jobs working with in-house type clients. So, you know, businesses that might have a creative team, or maybe they don’t have a creative team, but they’re working with freelancers on a part-time or full-time basis. Agencies like the one that you’re in. And you responded back basically saying, I got a lot to say about this. We’re hiring a couple of copywriters right now, and I gotta tell you some stuff. And unfortunately, we weren’t able to get you on that same training that we did in the underground, but we’ve got you here now, and I can share some of the stuff that Jessica, my friend who did that interview, what she shared, but you’ve got thoughts about how you get hired as a copywriter in I mean, your agency specifically, but would also be applicable to all kinds of different businesses. So let’s talk about some of that. What are you seeing? What are you seeing that people are doing wrong? And maybe let’s start with wrong so we can end on a positive, you know, what should be doing it right. But what are you seeing that’s just you’re pulling your hair out over?

Matt Snyder: Oh man, um, that’s, that’s a great question.

Rob Marsh: And I know, I know we could, we can be kind of brutal here. Uh, I know you’re not picking on any one person, but there’s some stuff that’s going on that, that we really ought to call out.

Matt Snyder: Yeah. I mean, I knew we were going to talk about this, so I kind of wrote down some ideas, things to touch on. And I think before this call we were talking, I’m like, I mean, I, I could sound really mean, like, but there are, there are, There are people who apply for copywriting roles that have no business applying for a copywriting role. And it’s kind of maddening. To give some context, We just, we opened up a role on a Friday morning. I think it was, uh, our most recent one, which we’re about to put out an offer for, I believe. Um, so don’t apply, but put it on a Friday morning. By the end of the day, I had 98 applications, uh, in my queue. And then I was like, great, I’m going to go over those on, on Monday. Well, it was an okay weekend. So Tuesday I logged in, I like 170 some. And then by the end of the day, we had over 200. I think we ended up with like 206. Um, and I, I dm’d our HR guy. I was like, please take it down. Um, there’s no way I can keep up. I was like going through these applications left and right. And I’m like, I’ve just seen my queue get longer. I was like, there’s. Yeah, this is crazy. So know that when you apply for a job, especially in today’s market, that’s what I’m seeing as the hiring manager. And it’s like, I have a lot to go through. And so to stand out and say 206, a stack of 206 applications, I feel like I have something to say.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. Well, and it’s not just your agency. I see this anytime I see a copywriter job on LinkedIn and you click through to see, you know, what are they looking for? Whatever. Almost always it’s like 180 people applied, you know, see where you stand or how you compare or whatever. So this isn’t just you guys. This is literally every copywriting job in the world right now.

Matt Snyder: Yeah, no, I have, I have a family member who’s appointed for jobs and she’s like, look, like the job market is awful right now. I’m like, no, it really is. I said, and I told her, I explained what just happened now. Like we just got tutored some applications. She goes, I, I believe it. She said, I feel like I’m just throwing my name out and saying a prayer. I’m like, I mean, that’s basically what you’re doing. Um, but so some context, like what I’m looking for when I hire a copywriter, um, at Homestead, um, you know, it’s, it’s not just somebody that can do the job and then clock out at the end of the day. Like I’m looking for a member of my team. Like if I wanted somebody to just write an email or an ad, I would hire a freelancer, but we kind of, we don’t try to hire freelancers. We try to hire full-time employees. Um, so we’re, and we’re not looking for somebody who just wants to work here for six months and then leave. We’re looking for somebody who wants to help build and help grow. And so I’m, I’m looking for, for someone with long-term potential because I know how things operate once they get into the agency. And it’s like, we really do focus on development. Um, not just hard skills, but soft skills and then life skills, um, and a lot of different ways. So it’s like, we’re, we’re 70 some people, but we’re really tight knit and we have a very unique culture or it’s just specific. I mean, it’s just good to us. And so when I’m hiring a new copywriter, I’m looking for someone that’s honestly self-aware and empathetic, that checks their ego at the door. One of the most important things is that they need to be teachable, curious folks, eager to grow, and that eagerness has to come through, like that desire to learn.

Rob Marsh: So let me stop you there, because as we go through this list, how do you know if somebody is eager to grow? It’s one thing to show up on a call and act humble, but then show up with an ego. So what are the filters that you’re using to even, and especially because you’re looking at resumes and cover letters, you’re not even talking to people at this point, right? So how do you filter that?

Matt Snyder: One of the biggest helps for me, and this is this is awful, and you’re listening and you do this. If it works for you, great, but it doesn’t work for getting my attention, that’s for sure. But people who send cold emails to blanket agency lists. um that’s a surefire way to get on my do not hire list um and it sounds awful but like number one those emails usually go to my spam but also when you’re spamming my team and they’re like hey why am i getting a message from this guy i might just ignore it like and they’re offensive because they’re trying to get your attention And so they just say really stupid things like, I’m going to throw a brick at your window. Okay, well, that no, like fired before you’re hired. Like it’s stuff like that. Like, um, I, I don’t want to categorize the type of person that typically sends those emails, but they’re usually male and they usually like to flaunt their successes. Um, and there, there’s no air of, uh, humility about what they write or how they present themselves. So that does come across in their copy pretty well. And I think we all know the brands that are really good about, um, you know, executing on that ethos and mentality. So to me, it really comes through in your copy, um, in the way you answer your application questions, especially, um, maybe in the way, like you answer some of the questions, like every single question I have in our application, I have for a reason, like they’re intentional. um, and there to reveal something. I think one of the most, the most telling ones for me is like we have, um, I think I wrote it down somewhere so I wouldn’t forget, but like, uh, why do you think you’d be a good fit for Homestead and for this role? Um, it says a lot about somebody if they can answer that well, just because it’s like, if you know enough about our agency and how we operate and how we function and the clients we serve, like you will answer that question with like a phenomenal, like finesse. Um, but if you just are applying for a job and you just hope that you’re going to get like an interview that comes through to, um, we just interviewed somebody who, uh, she was so hungry to like her, her application questions were very short and brief. We’re talking like one sentence answers to all of them, which doesn’t sound like an easy way to stand out, but they were. Oh, good. And I was like, this is exactly what I’m looking for. But one of the things she mentioned was. how eager she was to learn from our team specifically. And she mentioned people. And I’m like, that shows somebody who’s aware of what of our team and what’s happening. And they clearly follow us like, and I knew they followed us online. And so that that kind of stops it out. So it’s like, if if you can get yourself out of the way enough, the way you present yourself to like, show that, hey, I’m interested in helping you become the best version of you or whatever it is. It’s like copyrighted one on one, like, make sure you’re talking to your audience. And say what you know they want to hear or need to hear. And I don’t feel like enough copywriters approach job applications with that mentality. It’s like you’re writing a pitch, you’re writing a sales letter to me for you. use those same tactics that you would for a sales letter in your application. We had a girl, we also interviewed her. She was awesome. Her cover letter was written like an email. It was awesome because she knows how we write emails and that’s what we’re hiring for, that email copywriter position. And she gave us different concepts and different ideas with it. It was very creative and it stood out amongst the staff and I was like, this is awesome. I don’t know if I answered any of your question. I kind of went off on a rabbit trail, but, um, yeah, I think it comes, it comes off in your copy. If you’re, if you’re humble and you don’t have an ego and if you’re curious, like it, it’s just evident, um, across the pool of your portfolio and application.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, so obviously breaking through is huge here because, you know, if you’re one of 207 people and you’re just sending a resume in the typical, you know, I’m a match for the job because of X, Y, and Z, you know, I’ve looked forward to talking, whatever. You may be the greatest copywriter in the world, but it’s so easy to get lost in there. In some ways, that’s making you, as the copy chief, or the hiring manager, whoever, do the work of trying to figure out, is this person really as good as they say? Hearing it is, you know, the cover letter written as an email that your agency would send out. So they’re clearly aware of the work that you do. That stuff stands out. What if, uh, what if somebody sent you a box with a shoe in it that said, uh, I just want to get a shoe in the door or foot in the door, you know, that, which, which is, I think Luke Sullivan writes about this in, uh, Hey Whipple, that he had a closet full of shoes, uh, because of that. But does that stuff stand out too? Or like, what do you, when it comes to big ideas, what are you looking for?

Matt Snyder: I would, I would, that would be alarming to me because I want to know how they got my address. Uh, you know, we don’t, we don’t have a, like a headquarters, so it’s not, I’m never going to get a package that you send to me. Like when clients want to send us stuff, we give them a spreadsheet with our address on it, but they ask. But I think, yeah, stuff like that goes a long way. The people who stood out the most with this last round were people who had engaged with me regularly on LinkedIn. or via email previously, like had a bit of an interest in the role. We had people who had applied for a previous position last year. They applied again and sent me an email, hey, I applied for this again. And I was like, oh, I recognize you. So the DMs and the emails that are genuine and kind and not that templated, like, you know, I wish this email was a brick. Literally came through today, by the way. Uh, I think those, those stand out the most. And I, I personally, like, I recognize, I try to engage with every single person who, who emails me, who DMs me, who leaves a comment on my LinkedIn post or, you know, my newsletters or replies to my newsletter emails. Um, I try very diligently to respond to every single one. So if you’re engaging with me, you can better believe that I’m going to recognize your name and I’m going to recognize genuine engagement. And I try to reward that with my time. So I think that in today’s online world, that really does go a long way. And those same people who DM me and email me, they genuinely know what’s happening with our business. They know the clients we’re working with. They they make make mentions of it. Uh, they’re like, yeah, I saw this email that just went out for this brand I hope you guys are still working with them. That was awesome Uh stuff like that that really does carry weight it carries volume. So um, you you mentioned something about uh Kind of doing work beforehand and making sure that they’re a good fit. That was one of the tips I wrote down. I think if people pre-vet themselves for the positions, it saves me time and it saves them time.

Rob Marsh: What do you mean by that? Pre-vet. Pre-vet. Like, yeah, I’ve never written copy before, so maybe this isn’t a fit for me yet or… That could definitely be one of them.

Matt Snyder: I think, again, emailing or DMing or the hiring manager or even agency, like, I have questions about position before I apply. Who can I ask those questions to? I had several people do that, um, this last round. And there were a few that I was like, you’re just one person. Sue is But not like if anybody’s hiring and they need to senior copywriter, let me know because I will send you her her details but um, she was overqualified for the role. And I was like, look, you have an amazing portfolio. Like you have a great work history. You clearly know what you’re doing. You’re overqualified for the position we’re hiring for because we’re not hiring a senior writer. Uh, we’re not hiring a junior writer. We’re hiring a mid-level writer. And so if you are wanting to work with us, like we can’t pay you, um, what you’re worth. And so like, I, you know, later in the year or some other time, if we’re hiring a senior role, um, please say your name and hat, but it’s going to be evident. And so I think being able to ask those questions like, hey, before I buy, I just want to make sure like, what’s the salary band for this? Or like, what’s the expectations? Like, is this a mid-level role? Is this a senior role? What am I going to be writing and working on? That starts the conversation already. And so that helps you pre-vet yourself and know whether you want to put in the time to answer the application questions, piece together a portfolio, that kind of thing. I had a guy email me yesterday. He was like, Hey, I want to be a junior copywriter. I’ve admired your agency for a long time. We’ll love, like, I know you, who you are because of your work online. And, um, I know Homestead because of their influence and place in the DTC world. We’d love to work with you, but I want to work as a junior writer. Um, and I was like, well, he was a solid fit for a junior role. We’re not hiring for a junior writer. So like, you know, keep your eye on the website, like, uh, in our careers page. Like if we’re hiring, you need to throw your name in the hat. Um, it’s something that like goes a long way to prevent yourself, make sure that you’re going to be a good fit for the role. If you have questions, um, I had people apply that. It’s like, you’re a technical writer or like you should be writing case studies. Uh, you write long form content. These are short, quippy emails for e-com brands. You’re not going to like, do you pull that off really well? Great. In my experience, I’ve seen those kinds of writers struggle to adapt. And in this situation that we’re hiring now, we need somebody that can hit the ground running quickly. I don’t have time to like, train you how to write an e-mail. And yeah, clarity is king, brevity is key. So yeah, it’s the pre-vetting beforehand to make sure that you’re going to be a good fit for the position. It can go a long way.

Rob Marsh: What else should people be thinking through? So one of the things that came up in the training we did in the underground, Jessica suggested that every single role that you apply for, you should probably be rewriting your resume so that it is objectively aimed at what’s required for that position. And while that is a total pain in the butt, Uh, it’s, it goes a long way because, uh, you’re not seeing the generic stuff on your resume. You’re seeing things that apply directly to, you know, this particular position sucks if you’re doing this 30 or 40 times, but like if the key is to break through, you know, that kind of, or, or, you know, the generic, uh, cover letter is kind of the same thing. Um, so what else are you looking for?

Matt Snyder: Yeah, that’s definitely one of them. I look at resumes and when I’m looking, I don’t care if you send me a generic resume. I care about your cover letter and I care about your portfolio and I care how you answer the application questions. That’s how you’re going to get through to me. Your resume is great. It’s a great snapshot of your history. I always ask for a link to your LinkedIn. Um, again, I’m very active there, so, um, I will go to your LinkedIn and I’ll look at your work history. I’ll look at your posts. I’ll see what you’re talking about. I’ll see how you present yourself. So that, that matters to me. Your resume is great. It’s just a snapshot of your work history. I think some, some businesses, you know, it matters more than others in ours. I’m like, I like to know where you’ve been and what you’ve worked on. I think that’s important, but I want to see the work that you’ve produced. So your portfolio, um, carries more weight to me than your, Somebody looked at my resume, and I’ve worked at Blockbuster, I’ve worked at Ministries, I’ve worked at Brewster Coffee for five years. My work history is all over the map. It’s like someone’s like, you’re doing what you’re doing now? It’s like, yeah, I know, right? So I take your resume with a grain of salt. I take your portfolio and the rest of those things with a lot more weight. So when it comes to your application, again, I think I mentioned this earlier, but I put a lot of thought into the questions that I ask. They are all there for a reason. Ask about AI tools, preferred writing style, why you’d be a good fit for us, the latter demonstrating your awareness of the business and what we’re actively working on. um Writing style is kind of a tell too. I’ve had a lot of people who with journalism backgrounds that again are used to like long-form content writing They’re like apa style. I’m like, that’s not what i’m asking um, and it’s more than i’ve framed the question more than just preferred writing style, but it’s like That’s i’m interested. That’s the way you interpret it, but that’s not what I meant

Rob Marsh: That’s a really good strain or sifter for the right person if they answer that way.

Matt Snyder: It really is. It’s such a big tell. If they ask for your cover letter, a resume, and a portfolio and you don’t include it in your application, It’s an immediate no for me. Like, especially like, you’re applying for a copywriting role, you’re applying for a creative position to not include a creative portfolio demonstrating your ability. Like, man, you’re off the rocker. Like, I gotta see this. Like, I gotta see what you’re made of.

Rob Marsh: I recently saw a post on LinkedIn where they were so, they were that specific. It was for a direct response agency. And one of the things they said, you know, it’s like, you know, send in your cover letter, your resume or whatever. And then they even went and said, if you do not include a cover letter, you will not be considered, which like it should go without saying, but clearly people don’t follow instructions.

Matt Snyder: Yeah, I mean, that cover letter is your elevator pitch. So like, that cover letter could be the same thing you send to me via email to vet yourself out for the position. Like, I mean, it’s not, don’t make it difficult, but like, include it. It goes, like, it helps me interpret what I see before I see it. so i think that’s that’s huge i think um here’s a uh daniel drossel has like the anti cover letter um strategy course thing like that that would be worth looking into i don’t know anything about it but like apparently it gets results so um there you go shout out daniel um also great email lists to be subscribed to so that’s important. I check for errors. Um, especially if you are like, I’m a copywriter and you send me stuff that has grammatical errors or mistakes or spelling mistakes. Guys, put your best foot forward. Um, I think another thing is important. Don’t insult the hiring team or the business when you’re answering the questions. So it’s not funny. Give an example of that. Yeah, it’s not a place to air your grievances about the way an industry operates, for example, or that that question is being asked in the first place. I had somebody like, why are you wasting my time with this question? You should be asking this instead. And I was like, declined. It’s funny. Come on, man.

Rob Marsh: Have you had anybody reach out? It’s like, if you had me, your website wouldn’t be so bad or your response rates would be 10 times what they are. That comes back to what we were talking about, the lack of humility. But that seems really offensive. I mean, for me, it’s like, hey, I can see your website isn’t performing. How can you see that? You have no idea what my back end looks like. I get those all the time. Yeah, that’s okay.

Matt Snyder: Yeah, I’ve had those.

Rob Marsh: I’m not the only one.

Matt Snyder: I’ve had people put ultimatums in their application, like, I’ll send you my portfolio if you give me an interview. I was like, no. You’re not going to do that either, dude. I will say, guys tend to be the bigger offenders than women out there. So take that information as you will. But dudes, you need to straighten it up. But I think application, yeah, resumes are great. Cover letters are really important. Answering all those application questions is super important. Also, Don’t answer your application questions using AI. It is very obvious when you do. Last year we were hiring, we hired two roles, a junior role and a mid-level copywriter role. And I had both rounds. I had people answering, like, I was like, describe your experience with copywriting or just describe your preferred writing style. I can’t remember what it was exactly. I removed the question. But I had probably 15 or 20 applications that gave me the exact same response. Exact same response. Did it have the rocket emoji in it? No, no emoji. But I was like, can you just show some like effort at least um and change these a little bit and i had one person that did it was the same point just rewritten but same as everybody else like it’s an instant no for me um i want you to show that you can think critically and uh think like how you would think i don’t care how chat gbt would think or quad or deep seek or whatever it is like i don’t know how you’d think like One person in this last round, they answered the AI question like, yeah, I use AI tools. I used it for this. And this is why I used it. And this is how I used it. And this is how I changed it. And I’m like. That sounds awesome. Like it wasn’t, it wasn’t like copy paste. One person had copy and pasted chat. GBT said blank. I was like, wow, come on. Um, so, so don’t do that stuff. And then, um, I, I’ve noticed a lot of people too, like, you know, talking about boosting conversion of the websites and stuff. A lot of this, this is maybe a red flag for, for some freelancers, even pitching anybody for anything. Um boasting about the result that they can get client um, I would caution people about doing that to uh, hotly because it’s like I didn’t want to see receipts I want to see the client testimonials I want to see the LinkedIn recommendations. I want to see the screenshots from their Klaviyo accounts or MailChimp accounts or whatever it is or Shopify store. Like I want you to prove to me that your copy really did make that conversion. Um, otherwise I can’t, I have no reason to believe it. Um, cause I don’t know you from Adam. So bring your receipts. I had somebody was like, I did this for this person. I did this for that person. I did this for them. And I’m like, I don’t know if I should believe you, because you’re also the same type of person who sends blanket blasts to just lists you don’t know who’s on it. And so, yeah, I think be cautious of boasting your success. Please boast your success, but there’s a difference between confidence and cockiness, and one’s off-putting and the other’s not. And a good copywriter ought to be able to thread that needle. Yeah, absolutely. Um, I think, I think it’s really important. We talk about portfolios. Um, cause I’ve mentioned this lots, but like, if your application doesn’t include a link to your portfolio, it’s a hard pass for me, brother. Um, I think something that a lot of copywriters that have applied this last round that overlooked is their portfolios were not easy to access or navigate. Um, there are websites that you are just for copy portfolios. So those are fine. They’re clunky. Some of them, I don’t even remember the names of them. Um, I don’t tip. I don’t even have a portfolio. Uh, but I would make one if I, if I was applying for a job, but like, make sure they’re easy to access and navigate. And then if you have to password protect it because of client NDAs or whatever, I totally understand that. But like, make sure you give your password with your application. And then also make sure that password is correct. So I had several people this last round who did not give me a password or they gave me an incorrect password. I was like, ah, detail. You overlooked that. Sure, it was a great portfolio, but you’re out. Um, and again, I had 206 applications to go through. I’m like, surely it was somebody else’s link to their portfolio. Um, I think, you know, Google docs work fine. I did Google, uh, folder drive, whatever. Um, that works fine. Most people come to me that way. Um, a notion database with tags, uh, has someone sent me a notion database. Um, Did that look good? I know it’s easy to put together. The tags were really helpful because I was able to be like, okay, emails, boom. Ads, cool. Landing pages, even better. And so it was like they knew what they were applying for. They curated that portfolio, it was clear. They knew they’d be writing ads, emails, landing pages, and text. And so that’s what they included in their portfolio to me. And I was like, this is money. They got an interview, by the way. um and then uh figma figma board was probably one of the best ones i saw recently uh they had just big old figma file it took forever to load but once it loaded i was like this person’s sick Uh, they did get an interview. Um, and they are awesome Canada, by the way. Um, but there are categories too, like ads, landing pages, emails, they did websites, they did, they did a sales pages. They had, I mean, they had, it was everything portfolio, but like, I could get to where I needed to go, um, to see what I needed to see. That was, that was great. But I think, yeah, if you’re putting together a portfolio, make sure it’s specific to the role you’re applying for. The number of people who, yeah, they want, they just want to work at Homestead or they just want an agency job or whatever it is. And they send me, like, long form content pieces. I’m like, I mean, number one, I don’t know if Claude or chat GBT wrote that, but also, you know, it’s just in a Google doc. Um, I want to see it on a website. I want to see it live. Um, and I want to see the kind of content that you’re going to be writing for me. So, uh, please include that stuff in your portfolio of whatever you’re applying for. Make sure that it’s there. If you don’t have. e-com ads or stuff like that. I accept spec work as long as you tell me that it’s spec work. I’ve had people apply to spec work and it’s top tier spec work. Even more, if you look at our portfolio on the website, like, oh, they wrote for Hexslide or they do emails for the Woobles or whoever it is. And then you spec work a piece of for that client. Like I can then see if you really have what it takes to write for us and our clients because I’m that voice. Um, so that’s, that’s huge. And even if you’re, um, you have content in your portfolio that matches the type of whatever you’ll be writing for that, that, uh, agency, um, it’s still to go a long way back. Hey, I did this for this brand. It’s pretty cool. I think too, I love to see designed content. Um, A lot of people send over just Google Docs with their copy. That’s fine. We write our copy in Google Docs. We send it to Design. Design drops it in Figma. We send clients the final product to review, copy and design. And so it’s like, If you have a design piece versus just a copy content piece, it’s kind of a hidden tell. I can tell that you can work with the design team to get your ideas from concepts to like reality. And so I prefer to see portfolios with fully designed pieces. I tend to favor those more. Do without what you will, audience. But I think that really says a lot. Yeah, we talked about curating content to the position. Yeah. I mean, those are just some, um, some thoughts with portfolios, but portfolios huge, uh, for a copyrighted role. Like if you don’t have one, don’t bother. Like just don’t bother applying.

Rob Marsh: That’s, yeah, that’s important. So a couple of things are slightly different kinds of questions. We’ve talked about junior level, mid-level and senior level copywriters. How do you guys break those into different bands? I know this differs a little bit from place to place or, you know, agency to agency, but there’s some pretty good break points, I think, for this. So what are you looking at for each level as far as experience and capabilities go?

Matt Snyder: Yeah, I think we have… So at Homestead, we spent a lot of time, our leadership team, developing role progressions. So if you enter Homestead as a junior copywriter, you know what your responsibilities are, you know what your… These are your main tasks, the main deliverables we want you to hit. These are your milestones, your growth opportunities. And so if you want to then become like, we have, we do junior, copy one, copy two, which those are mid-level, and then senior copywriter, lead copywriter, head of copy or direct of copy, whatever I do. And so if you want to move from the junior to copy one, you know what you have to do to get there. And yeah, it goes a little bit beyond your job description, but it’s like showing that initiative. Um, I tend to work with the team. So it’s like I make those kind of growth milestones, like your goals. So those are things we work on. Um, and you know how long you have to be in that position to qualify for a move up and what you have to do. So they, it kind of does that with each role as they, they progress at Homestead.

Rob Marsh: So if you’re, if you’re hiring for a junior copywriter, is that a pure beginner or what kind of experience are you looking for there?

Matt Snyder: Kind of a pure beginner. I’m looking for somebody that has copy chops. That’s what I like to say. They have the ability to write well and they also demonstrate a desire to learn, to be curious. We just interviewed somebody who That came off the screen. I mean like it was just so obvious like they wanted to learn and grow and they said I want to learn this, I want to learn that, I want to learn this, I want to be able to do this. And I was like okay, you know what you need to do, you know what you’re capable of now, like you know where you want to go, like that’s so helpful to me. Because I’m like I can kind of guide that and push you in the right direction. Um, it’s the people who come to me that are like, I know it all. I’m like, I want one. I’m going to hire you. Um, so a junior writer though, as somebody who’s hunger hungry, they’re teachable. They know they need to grow. Um, when we hire them as a junior writer, it’s like, you’re, you’re starting out with just emails and SNS. Like that’s it. And like the, the big piece for me there is like, I’m going to teach you not how to just write emails and SMS really, really well, our Homestead way, but I’m also going to teach you how to do content strategy. So you learn to master content strategy like that first year, writing emails and SMS, and you start dabbling into other areas like building out ads, learning how interpersonal connections, communicating well with clients, contributing to internal projects, you start to move up and expand your skills. As you move into copy one and copy two, your contributions kind of expand. So you’re not just writing emails and SMS and doing content strategy. You’re doing that and you’re helping the pay team with landing pages. And you might be contributing to ad copy. And so you do that. There’s a lot of other details at play, but like growth milestones. And then when you move into a senior role, it’s like you’re working obviously on bigger accounts. You’re working on fewer accounts, but with a lot more depth. And so these might not just be like a million-dollar brand a year in revenue. They’re like $50,000, $75,000, $100 million in revenue a year. They’re a big account. And so you have less clients on your plate so you can do even better work. That’s more focused. And you’re controlling the narrative across paid, landing pages, email. You’re helping the whole team with the whole funnel.

Rob Marsh: It sounds like you’re doing more strategy work at the highest level.

Matt Snyder: Yeah, yeah. We have one of our seniors, she’s very involved with audits and helping with pitching new business and she’s really good at deep diving. One of the things I’m really bullish on is having people identify Like, what do you want to learn? What do you want to be good at? Like, if there’s a specialty or a niche and the coffee space and, and our industry, especially that you want to get good at, we’re going to pour resources into cultivating those skills for you because they’re going to be a benefit to us as an agency. And so like, we, we have a team that’s just, we have some really good researchers. We have people that are really, really great with creative strategy and developing like Um, you know, customer persona and doing customer research and building a really well thought out customer avatar and, uh, buyer journeys. I mean, it’s somebody’s clients were like, this is just crazy what you guys are pulling off. It’s like, it’s because we taught, we help our team learn how to do this stuff so that they can add the value back to you. So it’s like when I, somebody comes into the junior, I’m looking for potential.

Rob Marsh: And at the mid-level then, are you looking for, obviously they’ve been doing some of this, but are you looking at time? Like I’ve been doing this for three years, or are you looking at like, now I have examples of landing pages in addition to the emails and maybe some other, you know, some of the stuff that your mid-level person is working on?

Matt Snyder: I’m looking at time. I’m looking at, yeah, the portfolio. Like if, if you’re at the mid level, like you’re going to be doing a lot of emails and a lot of landing pages. I need to know that you have a, not a broader understanding of the industry, e-commerce especially than just email. Um, and so like the people who I, who we’ve been interviewing, uh, diligently in the last week, it’s like they have a portfolio that supports that and they have experienced that support. So like, I, like we’re talking about two to three years experience, five to six, probably, probably two to three. Um, a junior, like if you have like a year of experience, I’ll, I’ll look at you. Um, but if, yeah, if you have like six months. Probably not a mid-level copywriter. Yeah, but a mid-level writer. Yeah. You’ve got like two or three years underneath your belt. Um, but yeah, one of the ones we’re talking about right now, she has had experience helping grow a B2C brand in all aspects. So she’s touched copy and all the areas of my. That is useful to me because you are going to be able to not just execute well on those deliverables. You can empathize with the client. You kind of know their pain points and where their focus is at certain periods of time. So I look at that stuff. And then for seniors, I personally prefer to promote from within. So I will hire a senior if it comes down to it. we have some really, really good riders, mid-level riders right now that deserve to be seniors. And so I would rather promote from within into a senior role than hire a senior. That makes sense.

Rob Marsh: Well, thanks, Matt, for sharing all of this. It feels like, you know, we’ve kind of opened up the secret door on hiring in some ways. Hopefully it’s enlightened a few people and we can improve, you know, if we’re applying for those kinds of in-house roles or even part-time roles. If people want to connect with you, I know you’re really big on connection and follow up, that kind of thing. Would you say LinkedIn is the best place?

Matt Snyder: LinkedIn is probably the best spot to connect with me. Matthew Snyder on LinkedIn. You can also have a newsletter. It’s free. It’s always going to be free. It’s called the Copy Minimalist, copyminimalist.com. I have like, you can sign up, you get access to my swipe file. I add to it every Friday. There’s hundreds of examples in there. You can also like on that same website, you can get a playbook I made about just some principles that I follow when I’m writing copy to keep it simple and short. So yeah, LinkedIn is the best place. You can also email me. My email is on LinkedIn. You can DM me on LinkedIn if you want to meet and have a call. I’m happy to do it. I’m always happy to connect. So yeah, just don’t be strangers. I’m an open book. I will share anything. So this is great. Awesome. Thanks. Thanks for being here. I appreciate everything you’ve shared. Absolutely, man. Thanks for having me.

Rob Marsh: Thanks to Matt Snyder for sharing his thoughts about getting hired as a copywriter.
Did you notice that Matt mentioned many of his writers are better than he is? That’s the mark of an agency or a company that hires A players. They want to work with people who are better than they are. They want to bring in new people who add new skills and add to the collective skill set. And if you want to be part of a group like that, you need to bring new skills and new ideas and show off how you’re going to elevate that group too. Not just show up and write the thing that your boss hands you. 

Matt was pretty brutal in his assessment of the people who should not be applying for copywriting jobs. And this is true of pitching for work as well. You have to be able to deliver. There are table stakes. Even at the entry level, you need to show that you can write, you understand grammar and spelling, and can be trusted to get those right. And if you’re not there yet, practice before you flood the inbox of a hiring manager or a client that you want to work with. The job market is tough right now, but if you follow what Matt shared, it will be a lot better for you than those who didn’t listen to this episode all the way through. 

And if you want even more help related to finding a real job as a copywriter or a content writer, jump into The Copywriter Underground where there are additional resources to help you do that. And there are even more resources for freelance writers looking for high-paying clients, so everyone should visit thecopywriterclub.com/tcu to learn more now.

Stuff to check out:

Svet’s LinkedIn
Svet’s Facebook
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  If you applied for 200 different projects or jobs, each time sending a new cover letter with your pitch, I imagine you would learn a thing or two about what works and what doesn’t work in the application process. That’s what Svet Dimitrov, my guest on this episode of the podcast, did. But that’s not even the reason I asked Svet to join me on the podcast.

I heard another copywriter talking about how Svet is one of the best VSL copywriters in the world today—VSLs are video sales letters and they’re different from regular sales letters because you can’t afford to lose your viewer’s attention ever. We talk about that in this episode and what you can do to improve your own VSL writing skills. If you want to write VSLs, don’t skip this episode.

We also talked about Svet’s contrarian advice that copywriters—especially copywriters who are just starting out—should not have a website. Obviously, that’s not the way most of us think. Websites are there to build credibility and help clients see the various ways we can help them. But Svet argues, and I think I agree, that there is a better approach that connects personally with your prospects. You may want to stick around to here what Svet does.

As you might expect, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. I’ve completely rebuilt the content vault to make it more useable and useful and in the process I’ve added more than 70 differnt  workshops to it. And there are even more coming.  Workshops taught by expert copywriters like Parris Lampropoulos, Joanna Weibe, Stefan Georgi, Jack Forde, Chanti Zak, Laura Belgray and dozens of others. And it’s not just copywriters, we’ve got marketing experts teaching how to build funnels, how to market using tools like Linkedin and Pinterest, how to put yourself in the right mindset to succeed and so much more. And that’s just the workshops. There are dozens of templates, a community of like-minded writers holding each other accountable, and monthly coaching with me. It’s time you joined us inside. Learn more at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu

And now, my interview with Svet Dimitrov…

Svet, I’m thrilled to be able to chat with you. I’d love to start just by hearing how you got where you are. How did you become a copywriter? Before we started recording, I mentioned that I’ve heard your name because people have said you are one of the best VSL copywriters in the world right now. So how’d you get there?

Svet Dimitrov: Thank you first for inviting me, Rob. It’s a pleasure to be here. And yeah, my story goes back, I would say, probably Probably by the time I was doing my master’s degree actually, I was really struggling. That was 2009-2010 to finish my master’s thesis. And I did read, so this was in the era when you couldn’t find a lot of stuff on Google. So I had to sift through a ton of pages, I think I went to like the 10th page of Google, which probably nobody goes there these days, just to find, just to do research. But I think that’s when I really started to understand that research is really important. I appreciate it, love the game, although I was struggling to find a good way to express my thoughts in my master thesis. And I think I sift through like maybe 10 physical books. Then I mentioned research on Google. I think I probably went through more than 100 PDFs that I found online and all that stuff. 

And it was kind of a crazy couple of months just doing research and research and not getting anywhere, which was frustrating. But then there was this mindset shift that I said, hey, if I’m going to say, hey, I can’t do it, I won’t be able to do it, right? But when I said, hey, I need to do it and I will do it, things started to get better. Um, so after I finished my master’s degree, I started applying. It was actually in European policies and politics. So I started applying for different positions in the European Union related to politics, management and all that stuff. And I couldn’t land any, and I probably sent like more than a hundred different applications. Most of those applications were not only consisting of a CV, but also a cover letter. 

So I wrote a ton of cover letters. And later, like years later, I realized that has helped me a lot to master my skills in writing and also in persuasion, because when you’re writing a cover letter, you have to convince the other party to hire you, right? So I realized that that has helped me a lot, but I needed a few years to really understand that I was not cut out to be an employee for first of all the European Union’s different institutions. And I also realized that writing all those cover letters and stuff was really helpful to put in the reps, because I was probably writing every single day. I was changing stuff here and there. Obviously, I wasn’t writing a completely new cover letter, but I was constantly trying to change and see how it’s going. 

And then a few years later, I had an office job which was not related to what I was studying, and I didn’t enjoy it at all, so I quit it after a week and a half. And since I had some money saved, and just like a month before I quit my job, I actually met a Chinese girl at a hotel while I was traveling with my family doing a European trip. And I met a Chinese girl and I chatted with her a lot and then she invited me to go to China. Long story short, a few months after that I went to China and I really enjoyed it there. And I was like, hey, maybe I can start learning some Chinese and find a job in China. I still wasn’t 100% certain I was going to do a freelance career, and I had no idea what copywriting was. But since I’ve already studied and learned English and then French, I was like, maybe I can start studying some Chinese. 

Obviously, I wouldn’t master Chinese because it’s a completely different, much harder language. But still it would help me to land a job and a few months after that I landed unpaid internship although it was. It was a full-time job, I would say, in China. And while I didn’t enjoy it very much when I went there, because I realized it was very, very different from what it was supposed to be, I enjoyed living there. I enjoyed connecting with the people. And there’s a saying in Bulgaria that one year abroad is like two years at home. Well, I would say that when you go to China or probably another country in Asia, since they’re so much different from, let’s say, Europe, Western Europe and the US, I would say that one year in China is like three or four years at home. 

So I spent only three months, but it felt like a year or more. So when I came back, I was like, I definitely don’t want to find a job, but since I had so many different experiences and impressions from China, I decided to create a website to write about like a travel blog, although I was also writing about lifestyle, healthy living, healthy eating. And since I knew that I wouldn’t be able to support myself with a new website, a new blog, I also started looking for content writing jobs first. But I use my website as a portfolio. Obviously, it’s not a necessity nowadays to have a website. And I would probably even advise people not to create a website at first. This is my experience, and I used that, and I think it actually played quite well. And I started lending a few jobs here and there about content writing, and then, I’d say a year and a half later, I started exploring copywriting and I realized it’s not just like copy and pasting words on a google document is completely different and it requires a lot of persuasion. Most of the time it’s much better paid than writing articles for other companies. That’s the short story in like five minutes.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, how you shifted over. So let’s go back to just the experience of writing these hundreds of cover letters. I’d love to know what you learned from that experience or what tips you have for writing a good cover letter. And the reason I ask this is there’s been over the last few months, a little bit of a move for some copywriters to try to find a real job, either a part-time job or a full-time job, so that they have some steady income as the economy’s been a little less predictable, things like AI and some of the layoffs that have happened over the last couple of years. So, uh, but they’re struggling. They’re struggling to find those jobs just as much as they’re struggling to find freelance work. It’s hard to make those connections. So what did you learn from that experience that really helped you sell yourself when you were reaching out with cover letters to resumés?

Svet Dimitrov: Well, I would say that I learned how to get to the point as quickly as possible. So in the first one or two paragraphs, I would try to grab their attention and then also try to share what are my biggest strengths and why they should hire me. Obviously, I wrote very, very bad cover letters at first. And some of them were starting with a very weird question and some of them were like trying to express my wealth of vocabulary, which I think is something that you should never do when you’re writing copy, unless you’re writing for, let’s say, Harvard Professors for example probably they would appreciate flexing your vocabulary. 

But I think, yeah, definitely, I learned that I have to be very succinct and concise and straight to the goal, straight to the point when I am writing a cover letter. And it’s probably the same with copywriting, when you’re writing an email or even a VSL, which is a very long postal time, or at least 1500 words or more, which is probably longer than most cover letters anyway. You have to go straight to the middle of the action. That’s how I actually was able to land an internship. It’s called an elite VSO internship with Fran Reirengil. Probably you’ve heard of him. You’ve been in the game for very long. He’s one of the best VSO writers in the world and one of the It was a very elaborate process to hire those co-copywriters for his internship because it’s free but you have to pass through different phases. And one of them was to hand copy a whole VSL, which was 8,000 words and it took me like 14 hours. 

And the second thing or part of that phase was also writing a cover letter, which had to be between 750 to 1500 words. And yeah, that cover letter was I used a lot of storytelling and I got straight to the point in the middle of the action. So that’s what I learned from writing so many cover letters. So yeah, that’s a good tip for beginner copywriters, but I would say for most copywriters, because I would see sometimes even Those copywriters that are a little bit, let’s say, old school or that have come from a different generation, they would rely on different, I would say, they are not accounting the changing environment of the new generation where we have, I would say, lower attention span. So sometimes they will start with a paragraph or two about just kind of like fluff. And I think it’s better to just go straight to the point, grab the attention, grab them by the eyeballs, and then move on.

Rob Marsh: So a quick follow up on that, you mentioned stories and I think that a lot of cover letters in particular, as I think about the structure for them, you know, usually saying, hey, I want this job and here’s all the reasons that I should get the job and you list out your qualifications and if you’re doing it Well, you’re trying to match the qualifications in the job description, but almost never have I thought through that that’s a great place for a story. So are you telling your story or are you weaving this in a framework that made it into a story in some way? It feels like you’re doing something a little bit different from what most people do.

Svet Dimitrov: Yeah especially for this one that because i’m very very very proud of those i was the only non-native copywriter that landed or kind of got hired for that internship and fran also told me i had the best cover letter out of all the three that were the last the last three three people that got accepted. So I used my own story and then tried to tie it in with the VSL that I had hand copied. And it was a very beautiful transition because it made a lot of sense. For example, I haven’t shared this with a lot of people, but I have a physical problem with my gut, where the esophagus or the food tube is very narrow before it goes to the stomach. And this means that when I eat very solid food, for example, bread or meat or something fatty, it can get stuck in the esophagus. And I had to go to the hospital every, quite a while actually, I went to the hospital last week to do this, they insert a tube, and there’s also a balloon that has to be pumped so it makes the esophagus wider so I can swallow better. 

I call this process deep throating because it goes really, really deep, like 20 inches deep. And I used that story because I was copying a cover of the video sales letter about the product so it tied in very beautifully with that story. And the first line of that cover letter was that. I was puking every single night for three months, which is a true story. I was 11 years old. So I didn’t say, hey, this will be a story about, well, I just started, I was puking every single month. So it’s like, what the hell is going on? This is a cover letter and he’s talking about puking. This is how I grabbed his attention and then I tied that in with the VSO as well, because I was talking about the deep throating and then ED and all that stuff. And then I mentioned that I can tie in different elements, which is very helpful not only for VSOs, but also for emails, for example.

Rob Marsh: I’m glad I asked that because what you are doing is a massive pattern interruption from all of the other kinds of cover letters that would be out there. And so I think that this is one of those ideas that anybody who’s listening and thinks, yeah, I am going to apply for a real job, you know, in air quotes. to use stories or to do something different so that the hiring person, the creative director, whoever it is, will actually notice you. And then at that point, you can at least have a conversation where you can talk about your skill set and hopefully make that personal connection. So you also mentioned, and I want to follow up on this before I forget, that you don’t actually recommend that a lot of copywriters start with a website. Why not? I mean, I know there are lots of places where you can connect with people without a website, but a website tends to be a really good place to share success stories, build trust, that kind of stuff. So why do you think that it’s not necessary, at least at the beginning?

Svet Dimitrov: Because it’s a waste of time in the beginning, I would say, because you can just open a Google document, you can create your own portfolio. You can even add some design elements, maybe on Canva and then try and transfer those to Google Doc or just create your portfolio on Canva. But both of those applications, I would say, are free and they don’t require any crazy amount of no knowledge compared to when a website because if you’re creating your own website and if you’re using let’s say a wordpress.com sub domain, then it wouldn’t be a very, very, very good website. If you’re creating that on Wix, for example, it’s going to be an ugly website. So if you want to create an eye-catching website, you’re going to spend a lot of time. You’re probably going to invest some money into buying a domain. You’re going to invest some money into a designer. And it’s going to take you hours. Instead, you can just go create a Google Doc. You can add those images of people saying Google stuff about you. You can be a little bit more creative. You can even have a cover letter. in front of your portfolio. This is how I usually do it. And I’m not even sharing my website anymore. I’m now rearranging the website. 

I’m probably going to share it anyway soon. But this took me like four or five years. I haven’t updated my website and I haven’t shared it anywhere. And people that have paid me five figures for VSLs and for other copy projects have never asked for a website. They just want to see a Google document. And what I would do is I would just write like, I don’t know, like a few paragraphs, something like, hey, and I would try to personalize it. Hey, Mark, below you, you’re going to find my most recent portfolio. But before that, I want to share a few benefits of working with me. And if I really like the person or if I really like the opportunity that’s presented to me, I would probably even have a cover letter in a way that I would probably touch upon things that I have found on his or her profile. 

For example, I kind of created a very, very short cover letter in front of the portfolio for a person that wanted to do a rev share project with me. And he really appreciated it. He was like, oh, my God, nobody has done this before. And it took me like five to ten minutes. You just go to their profile, you just do some research. That’s what we are, what that’s what that’s what Coca-Cola operators are for. Right. So you do research, you try to find something that you have in common, maybe, or just something that can draw the attention and say, OK, this guy went to my website or went to my social media or whatever. and include that before the portfolio and then you just and you can even do that with most prospects you’re speaking to because you have that as a Google Doc, and then you create a copy, then you change the name, then you change some of the benefits. Maybe if it’s a person, for example, if most of my clients are in the US, and I always say that I’m based in Europe, which means that I am like 7 to 10 hours ahead of them, which means that they’re going to get their copy in the morning much, much earlier. 

So that’s kind of a benefit if they are based in Asia and would try to come up with something different but these are like very small things that add a lot of. value to your portfolio because they would just expect a Google Doc with one or two samples, but then they get a lot more. Sometimes I would even include a picture of me doing something crazy because it adds this element. And sometimes I would even shoot a short, long video which would talk about my experience and I would probably just open the Google Doc and just go through it and say, hey, this is me. But then they would also see my face and it would be a very cool experience.

Rob Marsh: I really like this idea. I mean, in some ways it is a website, but it’s not, you know, the typical website, right? But what you’re really doing here that I think makes the difference is you’re personalizing this message or this site that you’re creating with a Google Doc to the person you’re talking to every single time. And even though it may be based on a template, the communication is one to one which is not the typical website experience this feels unique in some way that I think is your really big advantage.

Svet Dimitrov: And it’s one hundred percent free it just takes  very little time and also money but if you are, as you said, I actually didn’t even think about that if you send them to website is not gonna be that personal obviously, and this is very very unique and then you cannot even just talk to that google doc to make it a little bit more humorous and spicy in a way so people are like oh this guy has a sense of humor this is great.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. No, I mean, you mentioned doing it with Google Docs. I can imagine people could do the same thing with a Notion template. There may be two or three different kinds of ways to do this, but it’s a great idea. Virtually free, like you said, and personal. Yeah, this is definitely something I think, especially with beginning copywriters, but even experienced copywriters can use this kind of an idea to their advantage.

Svet Dimitrov: Yeah exactly, I actually started using one with a little bit more experience because I think I got even more confident in a way that I can use that. I also see sometimes when they’re hiring for a senior copywriting position, they always want to see a long video. And even if they don’t ask for it, I would sometimes still shoot a long video and find some stuff that makes sense. Sometimes I would just try to provide some free value in advance even, and say, hey, I imagined this and that, or I checked your website and here’s what I found that can be fixed very, very quickly or something. So these two things, something very personal in whatever you’re using, whether it’s Canva, whether it’s Google Doc or Notion, as you mentioned, probably Notion is even sexier in a way than Google Docs. And then if you even include a long video, then it’s like, oh, my God, you’re going so much. You’re doing so much more than the average person who is applying. So it sets you apart. 

And I think people are saying that competition is getting fiercer and fiercer these days. And it kind of is true that there are more people that are calling themselves copywriters or that are still copywriters. But at the same time, they’re getting so lazy with AI, they’re just sending irrelevant stuff, and sometimes they would even make a small mistake in the outreach, they would sometimes spell my name because sometimes I have hired junior copywriters and content writers for some of my own projects. They would spell my name Sven or whatever, something, which is probably sometimes like an auto-correction maybe? But still, that doesn’t make sense when it’s like, hey Sven, and it’s like, okay, come on.

Rob Marsh: That should be the first thing you catch is the person’s name. But we’ve all seen the email that goes out even with the first name block without names. Stuff like that. So you started writing copy… how did you become so well known for VSLs and writing in the health niche? How did you move in that direction?

Svet Dimitrov: Well, maybe I could start with the second part of this question, how I started with the heavy health management. And probably it would make a lot of sense because as I said, I had this health issue with my esophagus and to curb the I wouldn’t say it’s pain, but it’s a lot of the discomfort and happens most of the time when I’m stressed and especially when I’m eating sunny food. So I had to learn to eat more slowly, which is actually better for your health. And anyway, I’m going to enjoy the food more. But I also started eating in a much more healthy way as well. Like I would avoid sugar. I would eat a lot of fruit and veggies and lean meat and all that stuff. So it kind of makes sense because I’m also very active physically or used to be a little bit more now that I have a very young daughter, it’s a little bit harder to find that time to go out and do a workout every day. But before that, I was very active. I was working out almost every single day for at least 10 to 15 minutes, sometimes twice a day, and eating in a healthy way. So it just made sense to be arriving in the health niche. I know a lot of people say it’s the most competitive niche right now, and it probably is. But at the same time, if you’re good, there’s always this hunger for the best of the best, right? And it doesn’t matter if it is getting better and better. People say that I will. Replace copywriters and I say. Copywriters who can use a i will replace other copywriters this is this is so i am always saying to begin with you have to learn. Or you have to master co-op writing very, very quickly, or at least master the fundamentals, and then start using AI. And you wouldn’t have any trouble finding work. But if you’re a beginner and your English is not great, or your co-op is not great, you’d have to work much, much harder than it used to be before. But once you get to a certain level and you start using AI, you won’t have any problems. You will actually be having probably more work than ever. So I think I lost my train of thought.

Rob Marsh: I was talking about… Yeah, I think as far as connecting with, you know, health clients in the health space.

Svet Dimitrov: Yeah, this is one of the reasons why I started then. I had… Yeah, I had one guy who was running an agency got referred to me and the first He was mostly active in the health space and I wrote a few ads for Facebook and a few landing pages for some of his health clients. And I actually really, really enjoyed it because I was already writing a lot of content for my website. As I mentioned, it was not only about travel, but also healthy living, healthy lifestyle. And the health niche is very specific in a way because you have to do a lot more research and they have to support every single claim of yours with very credible sources. Otherwise, you would get into a lot of trouble. You cannot be saying this would increase your testosterone levels by 25% unless you have prove from a credible source like the national center of biology or whatever it’s called, or Harvard University or some university, it doesn’t matter what university, it has to be from a university or from a very credible source. And I think that’s where my love for research, which materialized probably as i mentioned during my master’s degree around fifteen sixteen years ago really kicked in because right now i’m actually doing another health project which involves a ton of research and i’m actually even having a little bit of a hard time because i was i did probably like 30 hours of research this month just on a project that is not even certain But I kind of enjoyed it a lot because it just got me back to my roots, just like going, exploring like the first, at least the first two pages on Google, which nobody goes to the second page anyway. And yeah, health, as I said, even when I was writing content for my website when I was quoting something I would always look for a credible source and nowadays I’m also the co-op chief for a Brazilian DR company. And the copywriters who write all the vsl so we say hey where did you get that idea from you have to like have the source you have to have the source we need the source i have to see the source i have to double check if it’s true the fd and fdc are more. Stringent than ever these days so every single claim we have it has to be substantiated otherwise you will get into trouble.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, the laws around that in Europe and the U.S., the law in the U.S. is called DSHEA. Yeah, there’s all kinds of rules there about not saying that something cures or mitigates a disease. You know, there’s limits. You can talk about ingredients, you can talk about the research that’s been done on ingredients, but just because something includes an ingredient doesn’t mean that the thing can do what the ingredient does. So writing in this space can be a little tricky, and it’s good to know or to have writers who understand this kind of stuff. How important is showing that kind of knowledge to a copy chief or to a company that’s hiring writers? Or is that the kind of thing that they say, well, we can train you on that. We’d rather have you be a persuasive writer.

Svet Dimitrov: I would say the second part being a more persuasive writer is more important, but the ability to combine those two and also to really know how to do research well and really know to distinguish between a thing That’s really worth researching more and more. It’s gonna really help you and I think I’ve probably got a little bit rusty in the last few months because as I said, I spent so much time on research. But I finally started digging some gold and I think I actually had an email to my address this morning that’s—if you remember the ad by David Ogilvy—about Roll Royce, sixty miles per hour is the only thing you hear is the clock or something? Yeah, the ticking of the clock. Yeah. So he said that he spent, or he at least could claim that he spent, I think like three weeks digging through different papers to find that kind of exact quote from somewhere. And this was the most successful ad of Rolls-Royce, I think, all over the years. 

So it pays off to do a lot of research. But sometimes you can get lost in a lot of research. So I’m not saying I’m the best researcher in the world, but knowing how to do research, how to do it somewhat fast and how to especially find the best big ideas. Because the big ideas are what really sells and make a promo go to seven figures or even eight figures is the big idea that nobody has found. And this big idea has actually to be. It doesn’t have to be completely new or alien, but it has to have this And I remember this when I was part of Copy Accelerator and we had a live event in Tampa. And Stefan had a presentation saying that this new idea or new mechanism has to be 10% different. Because people have to have heard of it in a way, but it has to be a new Just just a little bit otherwise if it’s very very new nobody’s gonna believe that right.

Rob Marsh: Yeah people are looking for things that are familiar but different enough that they notice them if it’s too familiar they don’t notice but if it’s not familiar enough it’s seen as strange and weird and we push those things away. Yeah, exactly. So let’s talk about writing VSLs, this thing that you do mostly now. How is it different from sales pages? What are some of the things that we need to consider in addition to finding that big idea as we start to structure a VSL? And just in case anybody doesn’t know what a VSL is, video sales letter. So it’s really a sales message in a video format. Yes.

Svet Dimitrov: Well I would say the big idea of the mechanism which are a little bit different but let’s let’s say they are there the same for the sake of this argument so the big idea of mechanism are kind of. Like when you’re looking for them whether it’s a sales a sales letter or text sales letter or vsl you are probably have the same approach but when you are writing a vsl. It’s kind of different, it’s harder in a way, because with TSLs or the text sales letters, you have the headline, and then you have subheadline, bullets, and all that stuff. And people can skip and skim, and then they can stop and see, oh, okay, this sounds interesting. 

With a VSL, Most of the time, you can’t skip ahead. So it has to flow much, much better. Obviously, the sales letter has to also flow very, very well. But with VSL, if you lose the reader for just a couple of seconds, they’re just going to leave and that’s going to be it. With the text sales letter, it’s a bit different, obviously. If you lose the reader a few times, even with your subheads or the bullets or the primitive design, they’re still gonna leave. But the VSL has to flow very, very, very well, especially in the first part, the lead. The good thing about VSL is that the headline is not that important as with a text sales editor, because with text sales editor, you have to grab their attention A headline that is a very sometimes it’s very elaborate there’s like a few lines of the main headline there and there’s the sub headline and there’s something else with a vsl it’s usually a very short headline but then you have to be. You have to be very very persuasive in that lead in the first i would say at least. 30 seconds, maybe even five to 10 seconds, and then the next 30 seconds, so they really want to pay attention to the rest of the VSL.

Rob Marsh: And I know there’s a lot of training and books about how to write great leads. Do you have a favorite as far as what you’d like to start with, or is that determined entirely by the research, the idea that you come up with?

Svet Dimitrov: I would say it’s more it more depends on on what the research and what the market is and I would most of the time when somebody hires me to either write leads or a whole vsl i would ask whether they want a particular kind of leads or they want me to send my ideas for example last year. A person who is very well known in the help me to write a few days and ask them and I sent him a few ideas I think like four or five ideas for leads. with the Loom video and said, hey, I have these four ideas or five ideas, which do you like the best? So because he wanted to like just two leads and he said, OK, go with this one and this one. And that’s how I wrote those leads. So I would usually prepare a few more than they are asking for, at least the ideas. And sometimes if it’s like a new client. Probably and especially if the lead is not very, very long, I would probably deliver at least another lead, or maybe, for example, a new health client hired me recently to write three Facebook ads, and I delivered four, just to make sure I’m over-delivering, but also not over-delivering by a crazy amount. Because if they hire you to write two leads and you deliver one more lead, that’s kind of too much. If it’s like a short phase book and you deliver one more, that’s fine, I would say. So there has to be a fine line between over delivering and then delivering way too much that the person can then abuse you in a way.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. Yeah. You open yourself up to when you start breaking those boundaries. Yeah. There is a fine line between over delivering and and, you know, giving up basically everything that you’ve got. So yeah, I agree.

Svet Dimitrov: And so but that said, I think with leads, I would say the most or the ones that I really enjoy writing are the ones that I actually that you mentioned this so-called pattern indeed interrupts, where you would say, for example, there’s a story that I shared about my deep throat experience was a kind of a pattern interrupt. So I think those perform very, very well. Sometimes it will be like, take a look at this weird object or something that’s completely not related to, let’s say, the health niche or the Pro pro pro pro state neutral doesn’t matter it has to be something completely alien to what the market has heard of. I think those always like almost always convert very very well of course you have to like it’s not only the lead the offer has to be good. But if you can do a great, great job with the lead, and the offer is good, I think that’s a win-win situation.

Rob Marsh: I really appreciate what you’re sharing about the fact that a VSL has to flow in a way that a normal sales letter doesn’t. As I’m thinking through this idea, a lot of copywriters, you know, we get caught up in features and, you know, mentioning, you know, the bullet points in a sales letter. And I hadn’t really considered how much that would get in the way of a video sales letter and how much more important a through line, a story that you can weave the entire time. So as I’m thinking about some of the best VSLs that I’m that I’ve seen, they really it’s almost like one story after another story after another story. It’s, you know, open loop. almost don’t close the loop before you start the next story to close the loop. And so it’s in some ways like dialing up the persuasion, almost every paragraph.

Svet Dimitrov: Yeah, I actually didn’t think that the VSL has to flow that much, but I recently read it somewhere and it makes so much more sense because I actually enjoyed it. I thought before I started writing VSLs that they’re so much more difficult to write. But then when I started writing, I guess it was more a more natural process that it has to flow better. And every single sentence has to flow with the other one. That’s why it’s really important to read the copy out loud a few times, because that’s where you spot those weird transitions or clunky flow. and you can fix it if you don’t read it out loud there’s a very high chance at least some of those paragraphs or sentences wouldn’t flow that much and if you don’t like rereading or listening to your voice you can just copy and paste the whole vsl into an app and it can read it out for you maybe Probably it’s even better because you hear it from another person or it doesn’t matter if it’s like AI voice or not. But it’s really helpful to hear it. And actually I think that’s also when I was doing my bachelor’s degree and my master’s degree because a lot of my exams were oral and I have to present them and talk, I would always, when I was studying the course materials, I would always read it out loud and it would help me a lot more to memorize it.

Rob Marsh: Okay, we’ve mentioned AI a couple of times. How are you using AI in your business? And I know you’re probably not just saying, hey, chat GPT, write me an intro or whatever. Have you set up various agents to help you, you know, or these super prompts that you’re feeding into it all the time or examples of your work? Like how do you use AI to get good copy or at least good ideas out of the system?

Svet Dimitrov: Yeah, that’s a great question actually, I just shared on my Facebook just a few hours ago that I was using AI probably since 2010, but it wasn’t there—it wasn’t Chat GPT or Claude, but it was google chat on translate because we will translate also kind of fall on fire and. Before I started getting into freelancing and copywriting I was doing a lot of translations. And when you just copy and paste a lot of text into Google Translate, especially back then, 15 years ago, it would give you a very, very bad translation. But if you copy and paste just sentence by sentence, it would give you a much better translation. So my point is that right now it’s similar. Obviously, AI is much more advanced. And even the first version of ChatGPT or Gemini or Cloud would give you a much better result with a very bad prompt. The more elaborate your prompt is, the better it will be. If you can provide it with a very good brief, it will give you a much better output and result. But what I found is, let’s say if you give a prompt to whatever you’re using and say hey can you write me this video even if it’s the biggest. Brief that you can imagine if you say right the whole video or the whole sales letter. It’s not it’s not going to create a great video but if you do it section by section and you give it great examples that say hey this is a great lead from. 

Whatever this this has grossed eight eight eight million dollars you can follow this lead closely just change whatever. it’s going to give you a very, very, very good first draft. And then you have to just edit it very, very slightly. And if you do it section by section by section, it’s going to give you a great output. Obviously, the more elaborate and your own prompt is the better. But in my experience, if you do it, just do it by parts. And I also saw a post or actually a video of David Garfield, he was also mentioned that he was using the same approach. He would just do it section by section, and the result would be 10 times better. 

So this is kind of my approach. I also use it for research. Though I found that using AI for research can be great, but it also can be a double-edged sword because it will give you, especially for the health, naturally it will give you sources that don’t exist, so you have to double-check them. Sometimes it will give you, sorry for that, it would give you ideas that are great but there’s no claim that there’s no source for those claims so you have to be really vigilant about those sources and claims. And you have to be very, like, it can give you a lot of ideas very, very quickly. And I have found some great ideas. But then I would see an idea and I would go to Google and do my own research. And then I would use AI again to distinguish between what is the strongest, strongest idea, for example. But I wouldn’t ever rely 100% right now on AI just to give me ideas. It can give me ideas, I would then consider them, do my own research, and then start writing.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that makes sense. So I want to ask you a different kind of question here. There is a belief, and it’s probably true, that it’s very difficult to make a living as a copywriter as a non-native speaker. And, you know, there are a couple of exceptions to that rule. You are one of them. What advice would you have? Well, I guess, I mean, you’ve proved that you can survive because you’ve done very well as somebody who didn’t start out speaking English. But what is what advice do you have to those who maybe are English as a second language? They want to be copywriters. They want to be able to connect with clients with good work, high paying work. How can they go about developing these skills like you have in order to succeed?

Svet Dimitrov: That’s a great question. And I think I get this question almost every single day by somebody following me on social media.

Rob Marsh: That’s interesting. Yeah.

Svet Dimitrov: Yeah. Well, probably not every day, but at least a couple of times per week, because obviously they can see I’m not a non-native speaker of English. and they would see that I’m somewhat successful. Obviously, I can be a lot more successful and I strive to be successful every single day, at least by 1% as James Clear writes in his book. But yeah, I think the most important thing is to really practice copywriting every single day. It doesn’t have to be a lot of time at the beginning, but if you say, I’m going to write just twice per week. It could be more time, let’s say two hours per week during the weekend. You could write for 10 minutes every single day, which would be less than two hours. It would be probably 70 minutes, right? But it would be better because you would be practicing your craft every day. 

So I advise that people devote, let’s say, that doesn’t have to be a time frame. It could be like 300 words, 400 words, 500 words, even less every single day. And once they see it’s getting easier and easier, they can ramp up that either the time they spend on writing or the number of words. So I would say, Practicing every single day is the most important thing. The second most important or their kind of equal is to read good copy or read any kind of copy every single day. Obviously, the better the copy, the better. And then the third thing, and probably the most important if you want to grow really fast is to hire a coach or a mentor who would help you go there. I think that’s, I actually don’t think, I believe that’s what helped me really increase my income by maybe like six or seven times between twenty twenty and twenty twenty three. And now probably even more in the last few years is when I started investing in courses in my masterminds. As I mentioned I was part of Copy Accelerator for a few years and meeting those people who are more experienced than you, you will learn more about copywriting—how to write better copy, but also because those people are successful and the people you surround yourself with are very very important. Factor in your success because if you’re just around people who are struggling to get there or haven’t done it. you will also struggle obviously you can’t surround yourself only with people that are super successful because if there’s a very big difference between their level and your level you will probably get demotivated in a way so there’s like there should be people that are a little bit lower at a lower level than you, but also people at a much higher level, so we have this incentive to just become better and better and better. So I’d say, just to sum up, write every day, read every day, and write every day, or write, or hire a mentor so we don’t write in a vacuum.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I asked about non native speakers, but all three of those things apply to native speakers as well. If you want to copywriting, you should be doing all three of these things. So there’s, there’s not, there’s not a secret sauce to any of this. It’s put in the work, put in the reps, get feedback and do it all over again.

Svet Dimitrov: Yeah, so for non-native speakers, I would say that they shouldn’t like, for example, with me, it was very different because I came from an academic background. I had my master’s degree. I did a lot of research. I was trying to impress people with my vocabulary. And when I started my travel blog, and my travel and lifestyle blog, I would try to flex my vocabulary, which I think was working against me when I switched from content writing, which is probably fine, but still, you don’t have to learn English at a superb level, you have to understand the nuances, but you have to write really basic copy. It’s better to write very, very basic copy at first, no less, say, a thousand words or less, than to have a very rich like a very rich vocabulary but then you want to be trying to sound very very weird and not conversational so for example probably. You want a lot of people on this. while listening to this podcast episode would recognize Evaldo from Brazil, Evaldo Albuquerque, I think it’s.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, he’s the one exception most people mention when they say, oh, anybody can make it if Evaldo can make it.

Svet Dimitrov: And yeah, the idea is like, especially because Fran told me, because he’s a friend with Evaldo, his English was like five words, like 10, 15 years ago. So the thing that really helped him write a very good copy was his limited level of English, because he would have a very limited amount of words to use, and he had to make the best use of them. And I think there’s a lot to be said that where you write very common conversational copy, most of the time it would work, where sometimes people would just write this very long sentences very long leads that are like this first sentence is like twenty five words or fifty words or whatever life i’ve seen very different cases. This is gonna work most of the time against them because the market most of the time is not. Sophisticated at all so we have to write at the very basic level between the fifth and sixth grade sometimes even lower. So every single job jane or john can understand.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. This has been great learning from you. I’ve got a couple of ideas, especially around the personalized website. I just think there’s such a great idea there to share. So I appreciate you sharing all of this stuff, Svet. If people want to follow you and see what you’re up to, where’s the best place to go?

Svet Dimitrov: I would say they would follow me on Facebook. Maybe they can also go to my website, copywriting.com, and I have a few links there that they can follow me on social media. But if they type my name, Svetoslav Dimitrov, or Svet Dimitrov on most social media, most active on Facebook and X, You and I actually connected on LinkedIn. I kind of quit LinkedIn, but I’m still checking, but I’m not going to be posting because I just don’t see the value in it right now. Maybe I will come back later with a better strategy. But yeah, these are the most the places that I’m most active on.

Rob Marsh: I’ll link to those in the show notes for this episode so that people can connect with you easily. And yeah, I appreciate you sharing everything that you have. This has been a fun conversation. So thanks, Sven.

Svet Dimitrov: Yeah, it was my pleasure, Rob. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Rob Marsh: Thanks to Svet for sharing his story and his path to becoming a successful copywriter. As we were talking, Svet mentioned that he doesn’t have a website. Obviously, that was a big part of the initial part of our conversation. His old website doesn’t talk about his current business at all, and he doesn’t refer people there. And he instead uses landing pages customized specifically to each prospect that he’s vetting in his discovery process. 

Naturally, I wanted to know more about this. We talked a bit about it here, but to see what he’s sharing with his clients. Can’t really do that on a podcast. So this thing that I’m calling the no website website, I asked Svet after we finished recording, if he would share this idea, this no website website with me. And he sent me a couple of examples to look at. It’s so simple. And I think the no website website idea is one that more copywriters could benefit from using, especially copywriters who are just starting out or who are doing a lot of pitching and want to personalize what their prospects are seeing on their website. So I asked Svet if he would share that exact template that he uses and walk through a couple of examples for the members of The Copywriter Underground. 

Like I said, this idea is simple, but the real power of the No Website website is that no one else is doing it. So it stands out, which is a huge part of getting clients to pay attention to you. If you want to see how to use this No Website website strategy to land clients, jump into The Copywriter Underground before March 12th, and you’ll see what Svet does and how you can use this strategy to land your own six-figure clients. You can learn more at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

Stuff to check out:

Lewis’ Website
The Olive Ad Breakdown
The Silk Cut ad
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  Copywriters seem to revere old books by Eugene Schwartz and Vic Schwab. But what about old ads? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

If you’ve been a copywriter for more than a few weeks, you’ve probably heard other more experienced copywriters mention books like Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz, How to Write an Advertisement by Victor Schwab or Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples. They make up a large part of the official cannon of copywriting. In fact, David Ogilvy once said no one should be allowed to write a single word of copy until they had finished reading Caple’s book seven times. Of course there are new books that ought to be added… books by Joe Sugarman, Ann Handley and Matthew Dix. 

In addition to books, there are a lot of copywriters who like to study old sales pages. They create swipe files full of them. I do this. My swipe file has more than 1,000 differnent sales pages I’ve collected over the last decade. Some copywriters even suggest you hand write sales pages as part of your learning. I don’t go that far, but I think you can learn a lot by studying the persuasion techniques that copywriters have used in their work.

But what about ads? One page with an image, headline, and a few lines of copy? 

Are they worth studying? And what can we learn from them?

My guest on this episode is Lewis Folkard. Lewis has made a bit of a name for himself by picking old print ads from advertising award books, analyzing them, and writing about why they are effective or not. Lewis’ breakdowns are more than interesting reading, they’re mini-lessons on copywriting, attention-getting and persuasion. He told me why he does it and how it’s impacted his business in this interview. Stick around to hear what he had to say.

As you might expect, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. I’ve mentioned that I’ve been rebuilding the content vault and adding a ton of additional workshops to it. Workshops taught be expert copywriters like Parris Lampropoulos, Joanna Weibe, Stefan Georgi, Jack Forde, Chanti Zak, Laura Belgray and dozens of others. And it’s not just copywriters, we’ve got marketing experts teaching how to build funnels, how to market using tools like Linkedin and Pinterest, how to put yourself in the right mindset to succeed and so much more. And that’s just the workshops. There are dozens of templates, a community of like-minded writers holding each other accountable, and monthly coaching with me. It’s time you joined us inside. Learn more at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu

And now, my interview with Lewis Folkard…

Lewis, welcome to the podcast. I would love to hear your story and how you became a copywriter.

Lewis Folkard: Okay, well, I mean, I guess a lot of copywriters say very similar things in the sense that I feel like I’ve always had an interest in people and communications. I mean, some of the earlier nonfiction books that I read were kind of about human psychology and communications. I think there was a How to Win Friends and Influence People and another one by Brian Tracy, I believe. But I was young and just always enjoyed learning about how the human mind works and how we can kind of translate that or how not to say how we can, but how that translates into behavior. But yeah, a career into marketing to copywriting and marketing started. Uh, I guess alongside uni, uh, I graduated with a degree in materials engineering and had every intention of following that path. Um, and. I don’t know, really, I don’t know how or what the, the kind of compelling idea was to, to leave and to start marketing, but it kind of happened. And of course, when it had a small business online selling vintage jewelry and yeah, I sort of helped him out as best I could. and end up discovering copywriting and haven’t really looked back since, to be fair. It’s sort of scratched itches that I didn’t realize I had. I’ve kind of always been more sort of mathsy, so to speak. Numbers, binary answers, right or wrong, you know, this either works or it doesn’t. And heading into copywriting in this kind of world was like, well, actually two opposing ideas can both be true. Uh, and it’s kind of challenged me in ways that I never really understood, but I really enjoy those kinds of challenges. There’s obviously loads of paradoxes in human behavior, especially consumer behavior. So.

Rob Marsh: A lot of copywriters come from different backgrounds. You’re the first person I’ve talked to. It doesn’t mean you’re the first copywriter that’s had a materials engineering background, but that is a big jump. Engineering to selling jewelry is your first client, but marketing, copywriting. Are there skills that you learned in materials engineering as an engineer that are directly applicable to what you do as a copywriter? That’s a good question.

Lewis Folkard: I think a lot of materials engineering is like looking at components that have broken and you then have to kind of find out why they’ve broken and how you can not help. So they don’t break in the future, basically. Um, so reverse engineering. those kind of concepts, I think have always stuck with me. That’s something that kind of pulled me into that in the first place. Um, and it’s definitely something I do now, especially with like rewriting old ads and sort of looking at how they work. Um, it’s kind of sort of leaned into that a lot more and understanding how some of the best performing pieces of copy work it’s, and help me sort of reverse engineer and apply those to my own pieces, I guess.

Rob Marsh: So you started working for your friend, selling vintage jewelry. How did you turn that now into a business? You got the first thing done, probably for not a lot of money, I’m guessing. How do you leverage a free project into now lending clients and doing the kind of work that you want to do?

Lewis Folkard: Uh, okay. So, well, I, I kind of did it on the side. So I did follow the materials engineering path for probably around six months after graduating. Uh, and I was sort of doing this on the side and helping out in the evenings as best I could. And yeah, he’s running ads on, on Facebook and Instagram. And I sort of wanted to find out, how can I help these ads perform better? As probably no surprise, first client, you’re a bit like a deer in headlights. You don’t know what’s going on and everything. And yeah, that’s where I ended up finding copywriting, in particular, Joe Sugarman’s copywriting handbook. And yeah, I sort of stuck at the job for a little while. And I guess it’s kind of the case of a lot of things. When you go on to a path that you’re kind of in control of, you’re like your own sort of freelancer. You’re in charge of what you earn, effectively. it seemed a lot more kind of fulfilling and inspiring and exciting. So I ended up leaving that job. It wasn’t because I didn’t like the job, but it was just, it was more stimulating doing my own thing. And yeah, I remember the first day that I sort of left and woke up and was like, well, what do I do today? Kind of thinking like, how is this going to work? How am I going to get money from this kind of thing? And yeah, I ended up, I actually led into, again, at the ads that I still look at now, Um, it was like, well, I need to kind of keep learning. I’m, I’m certainly no, no copywriter at the minute and just get reading books. And then I sort of found old pieces of direct mail and sort of thought, Oh, that technique looks familiar. I’ve seen that somewhere else. And that kind of spurred on the idea to, well, why don’t I sort of look at these in more detail and throw myself into the shoes of these copywriters and see why they’re saying and doing what they’re doing to effectively help me do the same thing. Um, and yeah, it’s a practice that I’ve continued to do since.

Rob Marsh: And were you cold pitching clients? Were you reaching out to friends and family? I mean, this is really the big challenge for a lot of copywriters. How do you find the clients?

Lewis Folkard: I was in some ways fortunate and in some ways unfortunate. There was a couple of local networking events that I went to. I met a few people. And a few months after that, nothing directly happened immediately after that. that, um, that event and then COVID happened and everybody started to look to move things online. And I was sort of positioning myself as like a, an ads copywriter. And when everyone was sort of like, well, I need to find someone who can help me bring my business online. And I happened to be there with a few touch points. I met a few other people, um, and a local agency. And that sort of gave me the first level of experience I needed. And it’s kind of grown from there really few agencies and yeah.

Rob Marsh: How does that work working with the agencies? Again, this is something that we talk about a lot in our programs that agencies can be great clients. Obviously, you make the connection, but what does the workflow feel like? Are you asking them for work from time to time? Are they just dropping things in your lap? What is that whole process?

Lewis Folkard: I mean, it does depend on the agency. Different agencies run it differently. The one that I worked with the closest was that, okay, we’d had projects come through and do you want to work on it? Yes or no. And then a brief came through and that was basically how it worked. So I kind of got to miss out on all the onboarding, which in some ways was nice, but I feel like that experience could have been helpful at the start because there’s lots to learn like later on, but it was also handy that I could just kind of get given a brief, do the work and get paid for it. And at the start, I just needed to get experience under my belt and learn the ropes really. And that definitely helped.

Rob Marsh: So your first project was free. As you moved into agencies, help me understand how your income has grown over time.

Lewis Folkard: I mean, I do less work for agencies now. I definitely do more independent. But that’s just, I guess, having kind of roots in one place and being able to kind of build more of a foundation to build a business from. At the start, I was kind of naive to how. I thought it’d be a lot easier than what it was, put it that way. And that was definitely a wake up call. Again, that first day was thinking, oh, right. Okay. I don’t have anything to do today. I also don’t have any money coming in. How am I going to do this? And you, I did cold pitch as well. I tried a lot of things and you certainly expose weaknesses when you’re, when you’re cold pitching, because it needs to be, it’s a very difficult thing to do. Um, and especially with no experience, I’d, I’d, I’d love to look back on some of those early emails to see what they look like now. Um, and yeah, just kind of building a base and. Agencies have been really helpful as like a, an extra, an extra step up. So when things have been tough, they’re like another, another source of income basically. So, yeah.

Rob Marsh: be helpful. So one of the ways that you got on my radar is your newsletter and the breakdowns that you do there. It might be interesting to do a breakdown of some of those earlier pitches that you were sending out. You break down old ads and basically talk about what works, what doesn’t work, and your thinking around them. I would love to hear the origin of how that came about, why you started sharing those thoughts, and then maybe we can talk a little bit about the process of actually breaking down ads to understand how they’re working or not working.

Lewis Folkard: No, of course. So yeah, it started off very, very early when I had very little copywriting experience. It was like, well, a lot of copywriters sort of preach writing or rewriting old direct mail pieces. And I did that. But I really wanted to sort of throw myself in it further, I guess, and to really understand like, well, what does this line actually do? It’s all well and good writing and having a similar style to, say, Gary Halbert or Richard Foster. But you kind of need to understand the why behind it as well as that. So yeah, with a little bit of sort of copywriting books, again, Joe Sugarman’s copywriting handbook was definitely the one that taught me a lot of these different techniques that are going on. And I started to spot them in other pieces and I’m thinking, oh, I could actually look at that. I had a leaflet come through the door and thought, oh, they’re saying that because that does that, for example. And just even basic things of like, well, we’ve had 8,000 reviews. Well, that actually performs a function that’s not there just for the sake of it. And obviously when you’re new, you don’t realize these things. And I sort of pieced it all together and it’s kind of developed from there really.

Rob Marsh: So maybe we can take a look at it. I don’t know if a specific example comes to mind, but let’s walk through that process with an ad. And do you start at the top and look at the headline, how the images work together? Let’s kind of go through the process.

Lewis Folkard: Yeah, so I think it was probably three years ago, I met a copywriter, a well-known copywriter over here, Lawrence Bloom, and he was in a lot of the annuals that I get the ads from. So that was a great touch point for me. But I have probably close to 40 old advertising annuals stored away that I literally flick through and think, oh, that one actually looks quite interesting, that one grabs my attention. And that is the first thing that I do is find one that grabs my attention and then I sort try and dissect it. Uh, and I probably got enough, enough, enough ads in those books to last me the next 10 years, I reckon. Um, but there’s no like immediate or performance based things. It’s, it’s done more from like a creative point of light. Well, sometimes the timing could be right. You might see this ad and think today it doesn’t do much for me, but in two weeks time, when you’re working on a similar brief, it could be like a stepping stone to something that helps you. And these breakdowns now serve more of a function of that. of like, well, these are inspiration. There’s nothing necessarily that these are the best performing ones. These are ones that are obviously somewhat respectable because they’re in the annuals themselves, but it’s more as like a creative stepping stone, I guess is the best way to put it.

Rob Marsh: So do you have a favorite ad that as you’ve gone through these, you’re like, wow, this, this one is just tops.

Lewis Folkard: Oh, the one I always mention is Richard Foster did one for Sainsbury’s, which is a supermarket over here. And he did it for an olive of all things. And It’s just the cadence and the rhythm of how he writes was just something so meaningless and olive. And it flowed so well like a story. And I thought, you know, if someone could do this for an olive, well, what can they do with something that’s actually genuinely quite exciting? Yeah. It’s definitely one that stands out.

Rob Marsh: And then you do the breakdowns, but obviously you’re learning from them. At some point you started sharing these as well.

Lewis Folkard: Yeah, that was a mere coincidence. I think I just thought, you know, I’ll just post it on LinkedIn as again, desperate for work at the very start. I think I looked at a smoothie bottle first was how it started and was like, well, they had about six or seven lines of copy on that. And I thought, well, each line or each sentence had like a function that at least it looked like to me. And I shared it online and it did. for relative speaking, it did quite well. It went quite far. And I thought, well, why don’t I try these with another one? And that was way before I got these annuals as well. And the annuals sort of just ignited that excitement for it and I’ve carried on looking at them.

Rob Marsh: Obviously, you’ve been sharing them, not just on LinkedIn, but you started an email list. How has that grown? And what’s the impact that that’s had on your business?

Lewis Folkard: Uh, it’s, it’s still growing for sure. Um, it’s something that I’ve, I’ve kind of done for the selfish that sounds for my own interests, um, than for generating business. It’s more than I want to help, help excite other creatives and see, you know, like the work. That’s come before us has helped shape and more of the industry that we work in. And I don’t want to kind of lose sight of that. Um, Yeah, this is like we as humans haven’t changed that much and the drivers behind these ads are still relevant today. They still tick the same kind of evolutionary desires and tap into those. And I just want to create a way of showing, you know, all these things have come before us. They’re not useless. I think many other industries like film, music, they all look back to see what’s come before them and to learn from. those that have, again, shaped and molded their industry, whereas in marketing, we’re very quick to dismiss, I think, like looking for the next silver bullet. And I think it’s important to look back to see what’s come before us.

Rob Marsh: As you’ve done that, have you compiled a list or you’ve got like, hey, these are the persuasion techniques or the headline techniques, the hooks that seem to be working. Have you kind of figured out like, okay, these are the formulas and maybe you start there or is it just really more of just kind of an artistic exercise?

Lewis Folkard: I mean, this is probably more the engineering side, the math side of it. I have a very large spreadsheet of all the books and ads that I’ve looked at, and I’ve kind of segmented them all out into different techniques. Okay, this is for headlines. Is this for boosting credibility? Is this for, you know, like smoothing transition between a headline to the first line of the copy? I’ve got that and I use that and I often refer back to that to kind of get the ball rolling. But yeah, the first ads, the first ones I look at are more just a gut instinct. And then I sort of look to dig more because there’s normally more going on than what meets the eye initially. And I guess that’s what makes a good ad a good ad, is that we don’t realize that it’s sort of a sales pitch that doesn’t feel like a sales pitch. And I yeah first first is always got feeling where this is interesting and I’m like well why is it interesting and then I sort of start probing and looking back at other ads and techniques and they’re always like stepping stones they just keep building out so yeah the documents that plan these end up getting quite long and it’s quite difficult to cut out what what doesn’t go in and what does go in again it’s the same as all copywriting is in that sense. So yeah, there’s a big extensive spreadsheet that maybe, I don’t know, I might turn into something that’s actually useful, but it’s just my eyes only and it’s quite a mess, but it works.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I’m curious. I’d love to see it. But I wonder, what are the techniques that you see happening over and over and over that are just clearly like, these are the table stakes, the basics that every ad really ought to have?

Lewis Folkard: That is a good question. I mean, there’s normally some form of storytelling, and it’s kind of the old cliche that story sells. But how those stories come across they differ between the ads. And some of them again, some of the ones I look at, I guess, for the listeners, like, are not always copy heavy. Sometimes they are just an image in the headline. Sometimes they are copy, or very heavy body copy. And I guess there’s something that we can use for our longer forms of writing, because you know, the images, our brains process images a lot faster than what they do words. And a long piece of copy isn’t usually just words, there is normally some kind of imagery that goes with it or media. I like to look at visual metaphors. So I’ve tried to include those in longer form pieces of copy where I can. But obviously you like, you can’t overcomplicate it too much and sort of throw too much to the reader. So how you present that is normally a bit of a challenge. But yeah, I’d say a lot of the ads I’ve looked at have some kind of visual metaphor. They do a lot of work by pulling in symbols from other areas. One that comes to mind, I actually wrote a post for LinkedIn yesterday. that’s coming in the next few weeks. And it was just a picture of a happy baby for cow and gate baby food. I’m not sure if you guys have that over, over the pond.

Rob Marsh: At least I’m not familiar with that brand, but baby food for sure.

Lewis Folkard: Yeah. And it was just a means of having, having a picture of a happy baby on the front with like, it was the red and was very slight symbolic of the brand between a cow and the gate in the imagery. It was like a dad holding, holding a baby in the field. And Happy Baby does a lot of work without us really thinking about it. There’s so much that goes on sort of subconsciously that helps us process and evokes a lot of emotion without really having to say anything at all. And we can use those same techniques in our copy to deliver more pack for less punch, I guess.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I think that’s a really important point. I have a ton of old advertising annuals as well, from the 80s and 90s. And as I look through them, oftentimes just for inspiration or just to put myself maybe in a more creative mind, one of the things that I have realized is so much of the work back then was in this golden age of magazines, when visuals were really important, copy was sort of shrinking in ads. And the challenge for a lot of copywriters is, We’re hired to write words, not necessarily ads. Most magazines, so many magazines are defunct now, and that kind of art has shrunk. It’s still there in places. But as far as applying these kinds of ideas into blog posts or emails or so much of the content that we’re asked to create today as a copywriter, what do you see is the best way to do that?

Lewis Folkard: I remember reading a book probably a couple of years ago by Orlando Wood. And it was sort of discussed—the different ways that different sides of the brain have kind of dominated in different sort of phases of history and how that kind of looks in art. And something that we see a lot today is kind of a quote, kind of left brain society, so to speak, is that everything is very short term and kind of spoon fed that a lot of the better ads from way back when where they sort of trusted the reader to figure them out a bit more. And I feel like that applies to all copywriting is that we make it too simple and too obvious. It’s kind of a sign of the times, I guess, in some ways, but we can just put more trust into our reader to figure out what we mean. We don’t have to state every little detail, we can let their minds figure things out. And our brains generally enjoy doing that as well. And so if those positive associations come from thinking and solving a sort of a problem, so to speak, then those associations sort of stick with who they’re getting them from. And that helps come to mind sooner, which then helps advertising and copywriting in the future. So there’s like a long-term effect of letting our reader do a bit of work, basically.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I really like that. I’ve noticed you’ve mentioned that a few times. In fact, I’ve got a swipe file where I’ve collected what I call puzzle ads. It’s where you’re basically forced to complete the connection between the headline or the image. One series that I remember, you’re probably too young to remember these live, they probably are in your annuals, is Silk Cut Cigarettes, which was a brand in the UK. had an outdoor campaign where there was always some combination between a sharp object and this purple, this beautiful purple silk. And I remember seeing them all over Scotland when I was there in the 80s. And I just kind of fell in love with these ads that were just, it was intended to make your brain have to think about what was being advertised because it was not clear. And as the campaign builds, obviously every time you see this purple silk with a pair of scissors or a knife or something, you started to see the silk cut and it’s the kind of, it stuck with me. And there are other campaigns that do something similar. Absolute Vodka in the 90s ran, they’re basically puzzle ads where you kind of had to figure out what was the bottle and what was the connection to the thing.

Lewis Folkard: I think I’ve seen one, it was like an x-ray bottle, wasn’t it? Yeah, there’s all kinds, right?

Rob Marsh: So they would have one that would say like, Absolute Manhattan, and it would be a photograph looking down at New York City and Central Park. was shaped as an absolute bottle. And which, you know, it’s not, but you would look at it like, oh, a familiar image, tweaked a little bit to, you know, advertise this cool brand. So that’s a little harder to pull off in a blog post or in an email, but there are probably ways to create these kinds of puzzles and connections and help our readers think a little bit so that, you know, like you said, they’re spending a little mental energy and it makes the work more memorable and more effective.

Lewis Folkard: It’s definitely a tough balance to get right. Because if you make it look too complex, then no one’s going to even bother attempting it. But if you make it too simple, it’s kind of insulting that it’s just boring and not entertaining and engaging to look at. And if we’re putting ourselves in front of all these people in all these different ways, the least we can do is make it somewhat enjoyable to like to read. And yeah, there’s obviously loads of different ways that we can do it. And I just they always put a smile on my face, seeing something that, you know, just the two or three seconds of thought, you think, ah, it’s normally the product, but then like completes the message as well, is kind of the missing piece. But that’s, again, it’s a sign, again, of more left brain advertising is that there’s no kind of thought, it’s, you need to be able to prove it, and there’s too many reasons for something not to work, whereas more right brain, which is more like sort of dialogue based, and there wasn’t much about the product in a product ad, for example. Um, that was something that, you know, you trusted the reader to fill out the archive. The actual answer to this is the brand of advertising here, whereas now it seems too risky, but yeah.

Rob Marsh: So if you, as you’ve spent so much time looking at these ads, dissecting them, trying to figure out what works, how has that impacted the work that you do for your clients? It’s really helped me sell work, um, for one. So how, how does that work?

Lewis Folkard: For example, if I’ve written a website, it’s a lot easier for me to justify each line because I know what techniques I’m using here and why that’s being used on this page here and this position on this page. And obviously everything should earn its right, but it’s sometimes difficult to kind of justify everything. But these, having the techniques and seeing it in different formats have really helped. They’ve also helped me critique other people’s work. So in different sort of like groups that I’m in, if we’re sharing different pieces of work, it’s easy to sort of pinpoint and say, well, have you thought about doing this technique to add credibility here instead of the one you’ve used, for example. So there’s different ways like that and obviously then I feel like a lot of the creative decisions that we use, like obviously we have constraints to work with this undeniably some science behind what we do or a lot of science but there is a little bit of wiggle room for some creative work and a lot of these decisions that we make come from our unconscious and the more that we can kind of draw attention to those in different ways, whether we study, whether we write them, we then kind of give us a conscious, that ability to kind of use them in our work. And they come out sometimes naturally, or sometimes we have to kind of like actually apply them and go back and intentionally insert them sometimes. And it depends what we’re working with, but it has helped for sure.

Rob Marsh: So I’d love to shift our conversation a little bit and just hear more about how you work. What does your typical day look like when you get up and start thinking about a project or working on a project? How does that all come together? Okay.

Lewis Folkard: So for the last three, three years or so. Um, I have just been living out of a backpack, traveling the world with my girlfriend. So my days do vary quite a bit. Uh, I usually, depending on which side of the world or my clients have always stayed in, in the UK. So sometimes that involves me working in the evening. Sometimes it involves me working in the mornings, depending on where I am. Um, but yeah, I normally keep my evenings aside where I can. I tend to prefer to work in the mornings and just sort of do the, to eat the big frog first, I think is the saying goes and to do the heaviest, most kind of demanding task and then save emails and calls for afternoons as best I can.

Rob Marsh: And I mean, traveling and working is a challenge. It’s one of those things. I think a lot of people who work for themselves think, oh, I can do this so that I can travel. A lot of us don’t travel. It’s something that I’ve done with my family a bit. Talk about some more of the challenges of that because it’s not just as easy as saying, well, I’m going to work late or I’m going to work early. In my experience, my family and I, we lived in Europe for seven or eight months while I was working. The balance between everybody else wanting to go do something, me having to get work done, it was not an easy thing to strike.

Lewis Folkard: I know it’s yeah, it’s definitely posed its challenges. I’ve quite enjoyed working from different places and seeing how different places kind of inspire different trails of thought. Yeah, it’s been interesting to observe how people act in different places and scenarios. And it’s definitely granted me that opportunity. But the lack of routine has been very challenging. So sometimes it’s a matter of squeezing work into an evening if I’ve got a flight and I’m changing time zones, for example, I know I’m not gonna be able to do much the next few days. And just settling into that took a little bit of time. But it’s been exciting, but it is definitely difficult. And yeah, trying to find times where You have to sort of think on tap rather than like plan when you’re going to have your times and you don’t know when that’s going to be. If you’ve got an hour before a flight, okay, well, it’s what can I do that’s not too demanding here and saving and it forces you to sort of manage your time a lot better, I think is the best way to put it. What are your favorite places where you’ve been? Probably Thailand, I think takes the top, the top draw. And why is that? The food, the beaches, the people. It’s just, yeah, it’s lovely. Good coffee shops. And there’s always good places to work. So, I think that takes the biscuit. But I’m back home now. 

Rob Marsh: And when I reached out to you, I know you were in Australia. And what are some of the other places that you’ve been?

Lewis Folkard: So we did, I guess, Mexico, Columbia, we’ve been in and around Southeast Asia from like Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia. That’s amazing. Yeah, Australia, we’ve done obviously a lot of places in Europe as well. It’s a lot closer for us.

Rob Marsh: And were you carrying your annuals with you or how are you finding the images? I’ve got a suitcase packed full of them. Yeah, exactly. That’s heavy stuff.

Lewis Folkard: That was a lot of preparation. So I took enough pictures of the annuals before I went and I’ve got an album that’s got close to a thousand pictures of different ads in there that I kind of pull from. And when I need to find another one for the next newsletter or however many in advance I’m doing, I’ll just go through and see, okay, this one’s really taken my fancy here. But yeah, I had to really think about what information I was going to need because I can’t just flick back through them books and find the bits. So there’s a lot of note-taking that goes involved into that, but I’ve got them with me now.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. So now that you’re back home, at least temporarily, are you looking at your business differently? Do you do anything differently because you’re in the home base or is it more of the same?

Lewis Folkard: I mean, I’ve only been back about a month, um, but I definitely have the. The desire to, it’s one I, I can do the same thing. I can follow a fixed routine, which is nice. And I can actually go and meet some of these clients in person, which I’ve not been able to do. So I’m hoping it’s going to have a positive impact in that sense that, you know, I can solidify the relationship a bit better than what I can via email and video call. And also just the kind of to go out and speak to local people and attend more in-person events that I’ve not been able to do. Um, so there’s. It’s happening slowly. Um, but again, I’ve only been back a few weeks to kind of make the most of that.

Rob Marsh: So where do you see your business going from, from now and, you know, in the coming years?

Lewis Folkard: I would like just to keep doing what I’m doing really, I really enjoy and ever since I started it, I’ve enjoyed it and I still enjoy it to this day. Obviously it’d be, I mean to say work fewer hours, I don’t know. I think the best thing about being a freelancer is that you can pick and choose how and when you want to work. If you want to do more, you can. If you want to do less, you can. Obviously, it comes with its risks and challenges, of course, but I’m really content with how things are and don’t want to change too much, really, as naive as that sounds.

Rob Marsh: That makes sense. So if you could go back in time, you know, to Lewis, who is maybe, you know, just coming out of uni, materials engineering, you know, working on that first client, what kind of advice would you give him in order to help him make progress or do things differently, you know, have success faster or something like that?

Lewis Folkard: It’s all kind of come in waves. I think I would tell myself that when things are good, they probably won’t stay this way. If you’ve got lots of projects coming through all at once, there’s going to be periods where these projects do not continue, even if you think they’re going to continue. So keep planting seeds for the future and don’t put that off. Just keep doing that consistently. That’s been a lesson that’s been quite difficult over the years, and especially when I’ve been other parts of the world. sort of really relying on people finding me via online somewhere or another, is just to keep going. Don’t stop with planting seeds because you need to keep nurturing them as you go along.

Rob Marsh: Obviously what you’re posting on LinkedIn, that’s planting seeds. What other ways do you plant seeds in order to connect with clients?

Lewis Folkard: I’m in a few different groups of copywriters and business owners that I now attend to as well. They were online, but I’m now able to go out and see them in person. I mean, just doing things that I quite enjoy doing, and you never know who you meet or who that person knows. There’s been a lot of relationships and clients that have come from sort of word of mouth referrals that very, very slim off chances. And now I kind of have this idea, you know, well, you never know who you’re going to meet and who you’re going to talk to is just to try and spike up conversations in day to day. If I’m out in coffee shops, you never know who that person might know. And that’s proved pretty, pretty positive.

Rob Marsh: So, yeah, that’s, I think, a really critical piece of advice that I think a lot of people need to hear over and over and over. is these relationships matter. Striking up conversations matters. Creating friendships matters. And I know a lot of people shy away from networking, the concept that you’re out there looking for work or asking for work. But when it comes right down to it, people work with the people they like and the people that they know. And the more we can get out there, the better it is for all of our businesses.

Lewis Folkard: 100%. And yeah, it’s been, again, a tough lesson to learn over the months, over the years that, you know, you really don’t know who you’re talking to. And sometimes the least expecting ones can be the ones that provide the most, whether it’s on LinkedIn, whether it’s in person, you know, you just have these conversations and there are opportunities to learn about people as well, which obviously is a very big part of what we do. And yeah, if you kind of see it as a game and a bit of fun, you can Have a good time doing it.

Rob Marsh: And I do. Any other advice that you would offer copywriters looking to grow their businesses and do some of the things that you’re doing?

Lewis Folkard: Again, plant the seeds and just be consistent that these things, I was naive thinking, you know, within six months I’ll have all these clients and all these different things to do. And it takes a lot longer than what you think you’re going to take. I don’t want to dishearten people, but the reality is that, yeah, these things do take time and anything that comes quickly normally goes quickly. So if it’s a slow builder, you’re normally in a safer position in the long run. So prepare for the future and yeah, just keep, keep planting those seeds.

Rob Marsh: Amazing. Lewis, if people want to see your creative breakdowns, be on your list or find wherever it is that you’re posting, where should they go? So my website is lewisfolkard.co.uk.

Lewis Folkard: That’s L-E-W-I-S-F-O-L-K-A-R-D.co.uk. And yeah, the newsletter was on there as well if you wish to sign up to that. If not, I’ve got all the past ones on my blog for you to look through. So they’re all there.

Rob Marsh: We’ll link to it in the show notes. We’ll also link to the olive, the breakdown that you have of the olive thing. I remember when that one came out and you’re right, it’s interesting. If a copywriter can wax poetic about a single olive, you know that they can write. So we’ll link to that so that people can find it. I really appreciate you taking some time this morning to talk to me. 

Lewis Folkard: Perfect. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. 

Rob Marsh: Thanks, Lewis. 

Thanks to Lewis Folkard for sharing his story, details about his newsletter, and how he breaks down older ads. 

Breakdowns are tremendously useful. Seeing how other copywriters think about copy, copy written by them or even by others, that helps us see techniques so that we can find them in other copy that we read later or even copy that we write ourselves. In fact, having an experienced copywriter look at your work and make suggestions about how to improve it is perhaps the best way to see things that you miss and ultimately it makes you a better writer. Lewis mentioned that we as humans haven’t changed all that much over the past centuries, let alone decades. So we can learn a lot by looking back at what has come before. 

And Lewis didn’t mention this, but one of the reasons that I like to look back at old ads is that it puts me in a different frame of mind for thinking about headlines and hooks. There’s something about studying clever ideas that helps you flex your own clever muscle and can make your headlines more intriguing. These kinds of reviews are something that we do a lot of in The Copywriter Underground. 

I even broke down one of my all-time favorite sales pages by Gary Bencevenga, showing how Gary uses more than a dozen different persuasion techniques. I think there’s 18 or 19 of them that he uses in a single sales page. I’ve also broken down web pages, sales pages, social media posts, emails for different members of The Copywriter Underground. You can see them all inside The Copywriter Underground. 

If you’re not already a member, you can jump in at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. 

Stuff to check out:

SmartBlogger
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  Would you be willing to work for free—for two full years—in exchange for a simple favor? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

You already know this but succeeding as a content writer or a copywriter is not easy. And building a reputation when you’re just starting out is a huge challenge. But what if you knew that you needed to earn six figures a year, beginning on the day you launch your business. No time to ramp up. No time to figure out client acquisition. No time to create and test the products and services you offer. You have no choice but to succeed at a high-level from day one.

What would you do?

That’s the challenge Content Strategist and founder of SmartBlogger, Jon Morrow, faced. But he did it. He succeeded in creating a six-figure business from day one. Jon shares how he did it and why it was necessary in the first few minutes of our interview. And once you hear what he says, you may find yourself without an excuse for accomplishing big things in your business. Because if Jon can do it with the limitations he faced, you can almost certainly do it even if the world is conspiring against you.

I didn’t expect this when we set up the interview, but what Jon shares about how he uses A.I. in his business, to write sales letters, create courses, and run his businesses will either frighten you or inspire you to step up your writing game. His approach is impressive.

As you listen to this episode, ask yourself these questions: What are you willing to give up in order to get what you really want? How are you diversifying and changing your business in the face of A.I.? What can you do differently to make sure your approach to email actually makes money for your business or your clients? And what can you do to create more connection and community with the people you want to work with?

But before we get to all that, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. we’ve been rebuilding our content vault and adding a ton of additional workshops to it. These new workshops are jammed full of practical ideas for building your writing business, creating new products like VIP days, lead magnets and more, getting attention and building your authority, showing up on social media with the right content to attract your ideal clients and lots more. The more templates and training we add to The Underground, the more I realize there is a crazy amount of valuable resources, in addition to monthly coaching and regular copy critiques ready for you to use. And you can get immediate access for less than you spend on a dinner out with your family. Learn more at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

And now, my interview with Jon Morrow…

Jon, welcome to the podcast. As I mentioned just before we started recording, you’ve been on my list for a long time to have as a guest. I think I’ve followed you or known of you for close to 15, maybe even more years than that. We’d like to start with your story. So I’m guessing that there might be one or two people in our audience who don’t know who you are. So tell us how you got to where you are.

Jon Morrow: So yeah, my story has many chapters. So the thing about me that’s unusual is that I have muscular dystrophy and I can’t really move any part of my body except my face. I use Dragon, naturally speaking to type. I have people that take care of me around the clock. Despite that, I mean, I’ve built several successful businesses. I’ve written tons and tons of copies. And it hasn’t really held me back at all. So that’s the first piece that if you’re listening to the audio, you wouldn’t be able to hear me being nervous probably, except for my voice is a little scratchy. That’s one of the symptoms. But yeah, that’s a big part of my life. And then my career really got started when I went to work with a blog called CopyBlogger. That used to be huge. When I left Copyblogger, it was 35 million pages a month. A lot of the best writers in the world worked there. And I started out as a writer, eventually worked as an editor. and then started also learning and mastering copy while I was there. My first mentor was Brian Clark. My mentor after that was Neil Patel for a little while. After that, Frank Kern for a little while. I’ve worked with a lot of people and really been blessed to learn from the best of the best.

Rob Marsh: One of the things that I love about your story is how you actually launched your own business. You know, as copywriters, we’re always thinking about offers and how to sell them. And you made an offer to Brian Clark at Copyblogger that to me is off the charts valuable for him. Would you mind just sharing that story? Because I think a lot of people don’t get started. They have excuses, you know, all of the reasons why they can’t do something. Obviously, that doesn’t work here, you know, if you’ve succeeded, obviously, you know, excuses aren’t enough, but you did something pretty original that made Brian take you on and then really launched your career.

Jon Morrow: Yes, I was in the bad spot where I was dependent on Medicaid to pay my medical bills. It was about at the time 150 grand a year of medical bills that they were paying. But the limitation was they limited your income. You have to be in poverty to receive the service. So I couldn’t earn more than $800 a month. So I had to figure out a way out of that trap. What it meant was I couldn’t gradually scale up my income. I had to go from $800 a month and then immediately flip to $600 a month. And how do you do that? So I made a brand new deal that I would work with them and edit, hopefully, full-time for two years. And at the end of it, I would ask him for a favor, and he did not say no. And that was the deal. And the favor that I asked was that I wanted to email all of the subscribers to Copyblogger and tell them I was launching an agency and to endorse it. And that was it. That’s all I wanted for two years of work. And Brian did it. It was the only time he ever endorsed anyone. And I had my 500 clients overnight. I literally couldn’t help everyone who was coming to me.

Rob Marsh: Did you know you were going to make that request when you started, you know, the two years? Or was it, hey, there’s just this favor I’m going to ask later?

Jon Morrow: I didn’t know. Yeah.

Rob Marsh: That, yeah, to me, that story is, I mean, in one instance, it’s great faith in your ability to, you know, figure something out and just knowing that you had the time to do it, but also in having Brian there to make good on that promise, which, yeah, I mean, sending you out to the entire client list of Copyblogger, I can’t think of a writer who wouldn’t want that kind of a thing.

Jon Morrow: Yeah. And I mean, I guess there was, he had enough confidence in me to say, okay, I accept the deal. And I had enough trust in him because he always, everyone around him—he treated them well. So it wasn’t, I wasn’t really worried about, is he going to screw me over? because he never screwed anybody over. Everyone around him was happy to work with him. And because of that, we made a deal. And it really, one thing I would point out to anyone who’s just getting started, do you know that your reputation is infinitely more valuable than getting paid on a contract? I’m not saying you shouldn’t do both, but if you had to choose between accelerating your reputation and accelerating your bank account, choose your reputation over that.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, really, really good advice. Did you launch SmartBlogger? Did you launch that at that time or had that been already going while you were writing for Brian?

Jon Morrow: So, the order was I worked for Brian, then I did consulting and agency work for about a year. And I worked for him until he was one of my clients from my email. I helped Neil launch a blog called Kissmetrics. And we went from zero to a quarter million views a month in 16 days. And when I did that, I just looked at myself and I was like, why do you do this for other people and not yourself? You’re obviously going to do it. So I launched Smartblogger. Neil promoted it. Brian promoted it. And I had 13,000 email subscribers before I even started the business.

Rob Marsh: Wow. Again, reputation and relationships. Yeah. So what does your business look like today?

Jon Morrow: So, it’s been through several stages. For a long time, it was my only business, and it grew up to 16 employees at its peak. There is a murder there. And we monetized by teaching classes on freelance writing of all types. And we had 70,000 or more students go through our programs. And it was the dominant writing brand and still is today. for a long time. Nowadays freelance writing is changing because of AI. And because of that, I’ve diversified into other businesses, other offers. Now I work a lot with course creators because I’ve made over $15 million from selling out on courses. So that’s another business that I have. I’m also an active investor. But SmartBlogger still exists. Now we have four employees. And it’s really just passive income for me at this point. Everything is automated.

Rob Marsh: The other businesses are less passive. That’s where you’re spending all of your time. Yeah. So you mentioned that AI has changed the writing business. How are you seeing the biggest impacts? And just to set the stage, obviously, a lot of people freaked out when ChatGPT came online. Writing is over. And then maybe it kind of transitioned a little bit to you’re not going to lose your job. but you might lose your job to, or AI won’t take your job, but somebody using AI will take your job. Maybe it’s not even that, but there’s been so much just disruption happening, and I think scaring people out of the industry. At the same time, maybe bringing in people from the industry who are using AI. How have you seen it change the various businesses that you work in?

Jon Morrow: The biggest impact has been on search. SmartBlogger for years got four to six million visitors per year from Google. And a lot of those were what’s called information inquiries, like how to become a freelance writer. We rank for that. We rank for how to get freelance writing clients, stuff like that. What’s changed is two things. Now there are what Google calls AI overviews, where they just answer the question with AI, and then they have all the links underneath. So that cut everyone’s traffic on informational queries by 30 to 60%. The other big change is Google search is dying. Now, people are going to change everything and typing in their question. Now, they’re going to perplexity and typing in their question. And so, it’s affected search the most. In terms of creating content or creating copy, One great writer can now do the job of a hundred writers. And what that means is if you’re really good at what you do, and if you know how to use AI, you get rich and you take all the jobs out of the marketplace. With AI now, I mean, it used to take me, I don’t know, 20 hours to put together a really good sales letter. Now it takes me 30 minutes to an hour. The productivity increase is massive and that’s driving down costs and also What it means is, if I were a freelance copywriter, and I’m not, I could now do 20 times more contracts than I could before. So if you’re at the top of respect and a push for burnout, it’s a gold mine. If you’re a beginner, it makes it harder than ever before to get started.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that’s what I’ve seen happening in the people that I talk to as well. The people who’ve embraced it and have been using it are getting better and better at using it as well. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but those who don’t have the skills to even ask ChatGPT or whatever the tool is, you know, what they need to get out of it, They have a hard time knowing if the copy’s good or that they’re asking for the right stuff, that they’re prompting in a way that actually creates something that’s valuable.

Jon Morrow: Right now, the one thing AI doesn’t have is taste. It can’t tell the difference between good copy and bad copy. If you’re using AI, the most important thing to know is the difference between good copy and bad copy. That’s step number one. Step number two is to get really good at prompt engineering. My prompt is not writing a sales summary. My prompt is first generating a copywriting page, then feeding that copywriting page into a series of six prompts that are on average about 300 words each. Okay? It goes a hell of a way. And if you really want to have examples of every section of the sales letter, The next step beyond that is an agent that can do it all for you. And that’s what I’m building now, is AI agents.

Rob Marsh: So are you primarily just using ChatGPT and the actual tools? Or are there writing, editing tools that you’re also using that harness AI as part of how they function?

Jon Morrow: No, I use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini for different things. But no, I’m at the stage now where I connect to the APIs of those tools and I’m creating workflows and really code for software to do things. That’s the highest level of AI. So if you combine a master-level copywriter with an AI engineer, that’s very hard to do. Very, very hard.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s the maximum or the best combination in the people that I’m seeing use it in the copywriting world as well. So beyond the way that you’re using AI to create things like sales pages, has it impacted the work that you do, say, with course creation or any of the content that you’re producing for the world?

Jon Morrow: Everything is AI assisted. Every piece of content, every course, it’s all AI assisted. We’ve come up with classes where I’ll have a human interviewing me on the topic for about three hours. Then we get the transcript for the assembly AI. And then we use that transcript to where I have a project manager that can generate the entire course off of that three-hour transcript. And I don’t do anything. My involvement is a three hour interview.

Rob Marsh: And the project manager is AI or is human?

Jon Morrow: Human.

Rob Marsh: Okay.

Jon Morrow: Yeah.

Rob Marsh: That’s not a bad workflow for creating a course that then can generate plenty of money. Tens of thousands of dollars, maybe more.

Jon Morrow: I’ve been seven figures on courses like that. So over the past two years, every course has been generated that way, that I’ve done, and every problem upgraded has been from AI. And I’ve made no ends meet.

Rob Marsh: So it seems like somebody listening might think, oh, cool. I can just use AI to generate a course, but you’re actually starting with your brain and the stuff that’s in there, decades of experience. So, you know, obviously it’s not, it’s not really an AI course. It’s a Jon course augmented and made possible using AI tools. Is that correct?

Jon Morrow: Yeah. My project manager. He has been doing instructional design for five years. So he knows the difference between a good lesson and a bad lesson, a good homework assignment and a bad homework assignment. And he’s shaping that all the way through.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that’s amazing. So before we started talking, you mentioned something that’s really intriguing to me, and I want to make sure that we get to this really quickly, or before we run out of time. And that is, you said that you’ve gotten really good at maximizing the lifetime value in emails. And this is yet another challenge that’s maybe even gotten harder for people using AI, because AI is not great at maximizing lifetime value. Talk to us about that. What’s your process for making sure that email makes money?

Jon Morrow: I call it funnel stacking. So I’ve worked with a lot of seven figure businesses and I’ve noticed they almost never do enough with email. Let me give you SmartBlogger as an example. When someone subscribes by downloading our lead magnet, and by the way, we have over a thousand people a week, can be up to 2,000 people a week, who download our lead magnet and subscribe. So that’s a lot of leads. Yeah. We have An initial offer and follow up next with content, introducing them to the business. And then we, the next week we have another funnel. The next week, another funnel. They get four, um, multiple offers in a row. over 30 days, mixed with content. With that process, we tripled the cost of ad spend, for example, in profit. We did it three times more or less. And then what we do, every week, we have a promotion. for either a low-ticket offer or a mid-ticket offer. And we do one every single week. All of those are automated. So the way it works is through what’s called broadcast triggering. So we’ll send a broadcast offering free content, okay? When they click the link, it triggers an automation. And it starts the funnel. All of our funnels are evergreen. So when they click the link, it puts them into the funnel. And everything happens automatically, all the way to park racing. So what that means is, if we send out to rebroadcast emails. We may get 3,000 people to enter that automation. Now what happens is if they don’t enter the automation, then we send out content for the remainder of the week. then the next week it starts over. So it’s taking people and segmenting them by interest on a weekly basis and they get to see a new problem. every single week. The compounding effect of that over a year is like a 50x increase in LTD. It’s absolutely enormous. And because you’re sentimental, it doesn’t burn out the list. Ever. You can do it forever.

Rob Marsh: So let me make sure that I understand it. So you’re sending out, after those first four sequences, you send out, or however many sequences it is, you’re sending out a broadcast that is informational in nature, but it has a link, or it basically gets them interested in a product that you give them an opportunity to. If they click that link, they’ll drop into a sales funnel for that. And if they don’t click that link, You’re not continually sending them messages, selling them stuff. You’re just sending them two or three more emails that week with other information. And then you do it again the following week with an opportunity to drop into a sales funnel.

Jon Morrow: Exactly.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. This is really similar to something that my friend Todd Brown has talked about. And I think that it’s one of those ideas. And like you said, it’s game changing. I hadn’t heard 50X. That’s an amazing number. But I’ve heard some pretty nice results from doing this kind of stuff. And I like the way you talk about it, broadcast triggering.

Jon Morrow: Yeah, it’s definitely an advanced tactic. But anyone that does it, There are two problems that plague a lot of businesses. One is a low LTV, and the second one is inconsistent income. They do launches twice a year, something like that, and it’s feast and famine. This has the benefit of literally delivering daily revenue. off of existing subscribers. So if for some reason my ad account got shut down, or we got banned from Google search, we would still make money from all of the subscribers that are still on the list. So the value is massive. I can predict my quarterly revenue with a 10% margin error just based on existing subscribers.

Rob Marsh: What is the content need on the front end? So, you know, the reason I’m asking this is I imagine somebody who’s listening saying, well, that’s easy for Jon. He’s got 15 plus years of content that he can send people to. How often are you creating new content in order to send either the daily email or the stuff that you’re sending people, you’re directing them to in order to drop them into a sales sequence?

Jon Morrow: I created content for years, I still create some. But for example, let’s say you put up a YouTube video on funnel stacking. Let’s say I was doing a YouTube video on that. Then what I might do is email my list about that YouTube video. Anyone who clicks the link gets moved into an automation to sell them a course or a service on funnel stack. So it’s literally, and then I might circle around. So that’s one asset is a video. Later, I might do a challenge, a 30 day challenge where we map out your funnel stack. That’s another email I could send and something I could sell. Later, I might take everything I’ve done and write a book with AI called Bubble Stacker. Now that’s another quick wire I can sell. Now I have three different bubbles off of one piece of content that can be used throughout the year.

Rob Marsh: And how often are you reinventing that or thinking, okay, here’s the next offer. Is this something you’re thinking, I’m going to do one of those, you know, one piece of content, three or four offers every month? Is it every couple of months? How do you think about that?

Jon Morrow: I repeat offers, but change the broadcast email at once every quarter. And nobody notices. It’s just a different broadcast email on the planet, but all of the funnel is the same. So it gets repeated once a quarter.

Rob Marsh: That’s interesting. Okay. Well, this is definitely an idea worth stealing, especially if people have products to sell, but maybe more importantly, it’s an opportunity for copywriters to step up as strategists for their clients and help them build these kinds of funnels, these kinds of opportunities for the clients.

Jon Morrow: Yeah, the more, the better you can get at optimizing people. What most copywriters do is they create one funnel and they send people to it and they expect a positive ROI based on that one funnel. That is a mistake. In really big business, when you get to seven, eight figures, you’re almost never making money on the first funnel. You’re always doing a series of funnels. And for people who do have the luxury of breaking even or making money on the first funnel, they don’t realize if they stack career movement bubbles with email sequences and automations behind that. They might literally triple the revenue overnight.

Rob Marsh: Is this something that you’re, so you mentioned that you work with course creators. Is this a big part of what you do with them to help them sell more or is that different? Yeah, I do two things.

Jon Morrow: I consult. on strategy around funnels and marketing calendars and monitoring strategy. I also did this as a service every now and again. And I just charge like 10% of the extra revenue that we make the client. And I do that every now and again too.

Rob Marsh: So there’s another can’t say no offer free work from Jon that results in a nice outcome at the end, assuming that everything goes well.

Jon Morrow: Yeah. I mean, I mostly do that with businesses where I expect to earn them two to three million a year extra by doing it. And so 10% is just fine.

Rob Marsh: That’s pretty meaningful. Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. So a lot of people in the course world have said that the last year or two has been a little bit crazy. It’s harder to sell courses. It’s harder to sell through webinars, all of the things. Have you seen that? And if you have, how have you been helping course creators overcome that?

Jon Morrow: There is a deficit of trust. If you are not trusted, it’s much harder. If you are trusted, nothing has changed. So it really becomes a question of how can we make people trusted? And what that means is nurturing is way more important than ever before. By email, by retargeting, the days of expecting to have no social media buttons and not getting rid of their emails to nurture, those days are over. you have to be nurturing and building trust and authority with your audience to make seven figures, eight figures for sure.

Rob Marsh: One of the things that you also mentioned earlier as we were chatting that I’d love to get your thoughts on, you mentioned that you had worked with Neil Patel and Frank Kern, obviously Brian Clark. Talk about what you learned from these personalities. Some people might call them gurus or experts. How did they impact the way you think and the stuff that you do?

Jon Morrow: Brian taught me that writing a good copy is not a creative exercise, which a lot of people would disagree with. But he said it’s really, almost like, paint by numbers. You have to have all the components. And maybe there’s a little bit of creativity in the order you put those components in. But otherwise, it’s about having everything in place someone needs to make a purchase. It’s not about being clever. It’s not about having brilliant players. None of that matters at all. In fact, it probably hurts you. It’s about really paving the way for a purchase decision. And to do that is a mechanical process, not a creative one. That was a huge answer. But Neil, I learned about delegation. Neil was a master of doing nothing. Of getting smart people around him to do everything. It really just taught me about the value of leverage of all kinds. So those were, I mean, they’re way more lessons than it was, but those are the two big ones. I think so.

Rob Marsh: I think a lot of people now look at you as the expert. You know, what are the things that you are trying to teach the world or the people that you’re trying to have the biggest impact with? What are the lessons that you’re passing on?

Jon Morrow: The big lesson I’m trying to pass on now is that everyone is worried about AI, but there are certain things that are not going to change. Um, an old Brainian nursing home is not where the one-eyed robot lives. It doesn’t matter if it’s better. It doesn’t matter if it’s cheaper. She’s going to want the human being. When people learn, they don’t want the most intelligent teacher. They want a teacher they can identify with. The thing that’s not going to change is human connection. And even our loss is going to become more valuable than ever before. Because people are going to thirst to learn from another human being. Rather than omnipotent AI. They’re going to thirst to talk to another human being when they’re deciding whether or not to buy. And so putting ourselves in a position where we are trusted and have a connection with millions of people that is about you that’s not going away. Not in this episode. Maybe never. As long as humans are around. And so, I find myself talking a lot more about immersion, about brand, and about really building trusted connections. And all of the other formal optimizations, stacking, AI to accelerate sales leaders. All of that is flashy, but everyone’s going to do that. It’s not a competitive advantage. On the other hand, if you have a million people to love you, to respect you. That’s not something other competitors can just create overnight. So, the power of love is really what I spend a lot of time trying to push.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, it’s more good advice for anyone, which kind of leads into my next question. So let’s say that you lost everything today. You no longer have the businesses that you have. You don’t even have the relationships you have. You had to start over. What would you do? Would you do the same thing? Would you do something different? And again, the reason I’m asking, you know, earlier we were talking about AI making it so difficult for copywriters, content writers to break in now. It’s become immensely more challenging. What would you do to overcome that?

Jon Morrow: So where I’ve also lost my skills. if I was starting over or do I still learn less skills?

Rob Marsh: Well, let’s say that you have the skills that you had, you know, as you started writing. So, you know, you’re basically a beginner, but you, you maybe haven’t figured out the whole, uh, broadcast trigger stack, that kind of stuff.

Jon Morrow: I would build an audience on Facebook, which catches a lot of people off guard. But there’s an enormous advantage to Facebook that everyone overlooks. On Facebook, you can send a friend request to just about anyone. So what I would do is I would start writing things for free for people with a lot of friends, people who already had big brands. And when I asked, what do I want to be paid, I would say nothing, just bring me on Facebook. That’s all I would ask for. Now that sounds ridiculous, but then I would go to all of their friends, and I would bring them. And just say, hey, it’s great to meet you. You know, how do you know Rob? By the way, I just wrote this weird thing for it. Do you know anyone who did that type of writing? And I would keep doing that until I had thousands of friends and so many people who had started to trust me because I was friends with people they respected on Facebook. And that’s how I would start getting work. And the reason why they would pay me is not because of the best copy. It would be because of the trust that they’ve gotten from the employer and endorsements of just being a friend with someone. That’s what I would do.

Rob Marsh: I want to see somebody do this. I mean, it goes back to the same idea you started with. It’s all about relationships and making sure that those are really solid before you do anything else.

Jon Morrow: Yeah, next week, I’m actually going to, we’re teaching this. I’m launching it to my list—I believe Facebook is the best platform to get started. Now, do you want to stay there? No. But in this story, you could get to six figures within a website with just Facebook posts, friends, and DMs. I’m sure you could.

Rob Marsh: What are some other thoughts or ideas in addition to that, things that you might do in order to, you know, maybe it’s launched the first course or, you know, create the first information product or, you know, however the next step is to grow the business?

Jon Morrow: For information products, the first big hurdle is proof. So what I would do is I would sit down and I would say, What are the things I have done in my life that other people would love to replicate? And I would start there. Then once I have a list of those, I would say, what visual proof do I have that I accomplished this? It could be a screenshot. It could be, let’s say you’re a mountain climbing instructor. It could be a first review on the top of Mount Everest. That’s visual proof. So I would connect my accomplishments with my visual proof. Then if I were a beginner, I would make this offer. I would teach you how to do this for, let’s say, $1,000. And here’s the deal. I really need testimonials. So if you do every step, if you do every homework assignment, and you give me your honest review at the end, I will give you back. your full tuition of $1,000 at the end. If you miss one full month assignment, you don’t get it. Okay? And I would do that for that testimonial. Then I would want the next version not offering people their money back. That’s how it gets started.

Rob Marsh: I love that idea too. It’s a no loss for the person creating the product because either they get paid or they get the testimonial which they can leverage into getting paid again. So yeah, it’s really, really great advice. So John, last question for you. If you could go back in time and just give yourself some advice that would help speed up the process or make things easier for you as you were starting out as a copywriter or content writer, what would you say?

Jon Morrow: I would tell myself to think even bigger. Yeah.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. I mean, what do you mean by that? Because you thought pretty big. It feels like you were thinking pretty big.

Jon Morrow: One of my regrets is staying in a small market of freelance writers for a decade and never branching out. into anything bigger. I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. And at the same time, I know that if I’d gone to a bigger market, I’d be a hundred times richer than I am today. My choice of market, it wasn’t a waste. But I have monotonically underperformed my potential. Even though I made dividends, I’d probably be worth, I don’t know, a couple hundred million, maybe a billion dollars by now if I just chose a different market. That was my biggest mistake.

Rob Marsh: And obviously you’ve got the skills you could make work in any market. So, so taking that anywhere else you go. I want to, I want to thank you for your time, Jon. I’ve admired you just the way you overcome obstacles, how hard you work, the way you’ve built teams, as I’ve watched sort of from the sidelines. It’s, it’s one of those experiences where, you know, sometimes I’m thinking, ah, I wish I’d thought of that, or I wish I’d done that. Jon got there first. And so I find the advice that you’re sharing and just your experience incredibly valuable for me personally, and hopefully for our audience as well. So thank you for that.

Jon Morrow: Thank you for having me. I’m honored.

Rob Marsh: Thanks to Jon Morrow for walking through his business, what he’s built, what he’s building for the future. I’m inspired by John’s work and what he’s accomplished in the face of some pretty big challenges. 

Now, I have to admit, Jon’s advice about building an audience on Facebook was a bit of a surprise to me. Obviously, we’ve got a very large free group on Facebook, The Copywriter Club, but over the past year or so, we found that getting traction on posts in the group is getting harder and harder. Jon’s approach of connecting with prospects, then connecting with their friends and making an offer is really interesting to me. And given that it’s so different from the hundreds of pitch emails showing up in our inboxes right now, I think it just might work. It may work even better than I imagined, thanks to the implied endorsement that you get with their friends who you refer to in your friend request. If you try this tactic, I want to hear from you about how well it works. Email me at rob@thecopywriterclub dot com and let me know how it goes. 

And if you’re looking for other ideas on how to connect with your ideal prospects and pitch them for work, there are close to a dozen workshops inside The Copywriter Underground that will help. You can try The Underground right now, watch those workshops, try out the ideas that we share there, and if you like what you see and you want to stick around to use the templates, training, community, and coaching, no problem. And if it’s not for you, that’s also not a problem. Just let us know within seven days and you’ll get every penny back. There’s no risk. So why not check out thecopyrighterclub.com/tcu now. 

Stuff to check out:

Erica’s Website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  What to get noticed? Want to stand out? Want clients to find you instead of the other way around? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

A lot of the conversations on this podcast focus on the problem of getting noticed… standing out from the crowd of a million other writers—many of whom are willing to work for a lot less than you, some of whom, though hopefully not many, are simply better writers than you. There are lots of ways to do it… posting content on social media platforms, showing up at events, creating podcasts and video channels on still more platforms, building an email list… the many ways of getting noticed goes on and on.

And yet… many of us, maybe most of us, still struggle to break though.

There’s some unfairness in the idea that the most successful copywriters aren’t necessarily the very best writers or persuaders… they’re often the best at getting and keeping the attention of the clients they want to work with.

So how do you become the writer who gets the attention and the clients.

Often it comes down to creating content that is positioned to attract your clients on the platforms where they spend their time. And to share the best ideas for creating that content, my guest on today’s episode is Erica Schneider. We talked about a lot of ideas and insights to try in your own business—everthing from the mindset shift you need to make related to your personal brand and how to think differently about content in the age of growing competition and A.I. to Erica’s favorite hook frameworks and how to use them and why you absolutely need an email list even if you don’t plan to ever send an email. This is all good stuff so I hope you’ll stick around to hear it…

But before we get to all that, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. I’ve spent the few weeks rebuilding our content vault and adding a lot of additional training to it. New workshops include how to add a VIP day to your services, how to create a new offer, how to get more done, how to do research, how to develop your own frameworks, how to conduct discovery calls, how to get more referrals, how to build an email list, how to create a launch sequence and dozens more. The more we add the more I think we really need to raise the price because there is a crazy amount of helpful templates, workshops, and even monthly coaching in The Underground. But for now you can still get in for less than you spend on a dinner out with your family. Learn more at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

And now, my interview with Erica Schneider…

I’d love to get started just by hearing your story and how you got to where you are now as a coach, content maestro in some ways. You are an authority builder for so many people. You’re doing a lot of things. So how did you get here?

Erica Schneider: I am doing a lot of things. So I was the head of content at a B2B marketing agency. for four and a half years. I started there as a contract editor, then managing editor, then head of content. And I have loved writing my entire life, but I never knew how to make money from it until 2018, which is when I kind of stumbled into the content marketing world. And so I am a self-taught marketer. never went to school for marketing, never studied like copywriting, content writing, any of that stuff. I learned everything on the job. Um, but I also sort of always wanted to be a teacher. So growing up, I wanted to either teach or write or one of those two things, but I just didn’t know how to do it. Um, and so while I was head of content, which I was loving, uh, I realized as, uh, through the effort of building a personal brand that I was sort of teaching at scale. just by sharing content every day. And my audience was asking me, hey, you know, could you help me with this thing or that thing? Got my wheels turning, like maybe there’s a way that I could actually go out and teach people and make money for it and write and teach other people how to write. And so that was a couple of years ago that I had that aha moment. The creator economy luckily is booming and I hopped on board. So that’s sort of the short version of it.

Rob Marsh: Before we jump into all the things that you’re doing now, there are a lot of people who would love that career track, you know, getting into content to head of content. And I think it’s not as easy today as perhaps it was, say, 10 years ago or in 2018 when you started. Let’s talk a little bit about how people could do that today if they wanted to follow in your footsteps.

Erica Schneider: Yeah, so with AI especially, it’s getting easier and easier to create basic content, right? I don’t think AI is fantastic yet even when it’s well prompted. The best thing that you can do as you become a writer or an editor is to think why is this piece of content that I am tasked to work on even existing in the world? Just start asking yourself that question all the time. Um, when you start to dig into the purpose behind content, you start to force yourself to think a little bit more like a strategist. And when you understand how content actually affects audiences and potential buyers and clients in the real world, You can start to link that back to the decisions that your clients or the companies that you’re working with are making and form your own opinions on whether or not you think it’ll work or why. strategist mindset of, well, hold on a second. Why are we even doing this? What’s the purpose of this? What’s the goal of this? What kind of play is this? It just forces you to gain those skills that are necessary to either climb up the ladder internally or leave and help to serve people externally. I know a lot of people that They skip the whole, I’m going to work in-house thing and they just become freelancers, but then they get stuck there as well. And again, a lot of people are really worried about AI. And so my retort to that is always think strategically. AI is a fantastic brainstormer back and forth, but it shouldn’t ever be the thing that clients or companies make decisions based on. It should be based on human input.

Rob Marsh: And if you do that, it seems like occasionally you’re going to come across content where the answer, as you think about why is this existing in the world? The answer is going to be, it shouldn’t exist in the world. A lot of times, yeah. Yeah. Well, and that seems to be an opportunity then to say, okay, so what would I do differently? Where you’re stepping, like you said, into that strategist role where you’re helping either your client or your employer improve what they’re doing. And you’re not just there as a writer, but you’re actually solving a real life problem.

Erica Schneider: Exactly. Like, I think that there was a time when companies were just all following the same playbook, right? Like HubSpot created the, the SEO, you know, inbound play and everyone was just cranking out, you know, four to 20 blog posts a week and putting it on their site. And everyone needed a bunch of writers for that. That is starting to not work as well. Um, especially since AI can do that too. So like the whole, the whole, you know, trend, the whole, uh, setting is changing. And so again, like instead of just thinking, I’m going to write this because the client said yes, I want to write this. You can do that if you need the money, but just ask yourself, zoom out. Are they running an old play? Are they running a new play? What have I seen that’s working? What have I seen that’s not? And just familiarize yourself with marketing in general instead of just blogs or so to speak.

Rob Marsh: So also as head of content, it’s not just about strategy. What other skills would you encourage content writers or copywriters to develop in order to step into a role like that?

Erica Schneider: So absolutely. It’s definitely not just strategy. So self-editing is probably the best skill that you can develop as a writer because generally you’re going to send it to an editor. And that editor is going to have a lot of questions for you, if they’re a good editor. Otherwise, they’ll just make changes and not tell you anything. I luckily had good editors that asked me questions and forced me to think hard. Like, why do you make this decision? Do you believe that this should really go here or there? Why did you choose this style of introducing whatever? And so if you start to ask yourself those questions, then you can get ahead of it. My favorite thing that writers did when I was an editor was an editor, which also was part of my role as head of content was to review all the pieces. They would come to me explaining certain decisions that they made before I had to ask them. That was huge. Like immediately if a writer did that, I knew that they were critically thinking about the work as opposed to just doing the work. So tell your editor, like leave comments on your document. Hey, I put this here because reason. I think that this example fits here because whatever, but I also think it could fit there. And so I’m letting you know, let’s talk about it. Make it a collaborative effort where you’re kind of leading the charge and making it easier for an editor to understand your choices as opposed to just sort of shipping it and saying, here you go. Again, it all comes down to like the strategic developmental viewpoint of why does this piece exist? And then within the piece, why does this exist in this order? Why have I made these choices?

Rob Marsh: That makes sense. So you were head of content and then it was time to do something different and move on. Let’s talk about that part of your story.

Erica Schneider: Yeah. So, um, I got challenged by the founder CEO of the agency while I was still there to create a personal brand. I was very anti personal brand. I didn’t like the idea of having to be in public like that. I thought that I was more of a, a shy person. Turns out that I actually quite enjoy it, but I didn’t think I would. So. It took me a while to get into it, but I did get into it. And there’s something about sharing what you know online in a way that is actually helping people that just completely captivated me. And so I made a course, that’s how I got into this. Normally people start by doing one-to-one services, which is generally, I actually think that’s probably smarter. I got lucky because I built a pretty big audience before I launched anything. And then I collaborated with people that had even bigger audiences. But you need a huge amount of volume if you’re going to do the course route. So generally, I say do one-to-one first, build that up, have some recurring revenue, and then try courses. But I did it backwards. So I made a course on writing hooks online, and it did extremely well. We had a really fantastic launch, $60,000 in a week, which was crazy. And since then, I’ve made three more courses. I’ve run several cohorts. I’ve got a one-to-one offer now. And I also have a community, so I’m doing all the things. Which one of those do you want to dig into?

Rob Marsh: I want to talk about all of them, but before I do that, though, it’s really a rare thing, I think, for an agency owner or even a creative director to encourage their people to develop a personal brand. Oftentimes, the focus is on creating the agency brand and leading that way. So, you know, was there something different about this creative director that made him want it?

Erica Schneider: His name is Tom Watley, and he’s just a fantastic human. He’s a really good guy. And he understood, years ago, the power of a personal brand. He knew that it was going to be good for the people that work for him and for the agency. His mantra was always, I want people to leave better than they came here. And he genuinely means it. And I certainly did. And having an online reputation where people feel that you are credible, they know of you, and they like learning from you, makes it way easier to either change jobs or start your own thing. So I think he knew that, but as a byproduct of that, he’s just a smart marketer and he understood that if someone was out there having success with their personal brand, and it said head of content at Grizzle, in the headline, that was going to drive traffic. And it did. It did. Within a year, we were getting tons of leads from my personal brand. And then people were trying to poach me. And I was able to turn those people into clients. And it was fun. It was exciting. So I think he just had the foresight to not be afraid of it, I suppose.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I think that’s a really smart approach. Obviously, if you’ve got five, 10 people in your agency, in your company who are building these brands, like you said, the byline is always reading, you know, whatever the company name is, clearly that company is doing something amazing.

Erica Schneider: Yeah.

Rob Marsh: 100%, yeah. So how did you get started then? Because like you said, you built a huge following as you had this paycheck. You weren’t depending on income from that. And I think this is maybe one of those things that stops people from doing it. Because like, oh, do I do work? Do I start posting stuff on LinkedIn? How do I make that balance happen? How did you make it work?

Erica Schneider: Yeah, so I would say start slowly. it can become all consuming. And there is a fine line between how much time you spend on there and it can absolutely cut into your work. So I started slowly, but I did have early luck. And I think, again, like you said, it was easier back then. I didn’t start until 2022, but I still think that was easier than now, 2025. So within my first few posts on LinkedIn, they were doing well. And I never really had those like cricket moments. So again, I don’t know if that was luck or good writing or what, but I was lucky there. Not so lucky on Twitter. Before Twitter became X, I spent a year desperately clawing for an audience there and it just wasn’t happening. And then slowly, I can’t remember the specific details, but just like slowly over time, I grew a really big audience on Twitter, which I’ve since kind of, abandoned because the app has gone a little bit nuts. But my recommendation is to start slow and not worry about results. Just get used to pressing post and publish and getting yourself out there. Your voice is something that you develop over time. Your boldness is something you develop over time. And the relationships obviously take time. So don’t expect it all to work right away, but also don’t force yourself to be on there seven days a week, even five days a week. one or two times a week, you know? And also the most important thing you can do at the beginning and throughout is go connect with people and leave comments on their posts and just get used to having conversations there because it really feels bad if you’re posting and you’re getting nothing. It feels horrible. But if you go and comment and have conversations in the comments with other people, at least you’re talking to people, right? And then if you hit connect on LinkedIn anyway, it’s the only platform, I think, where they automatically follow you back. So if they accept it, then they’re a new follower. And for however amount of time, I don’t know, their algorithm changes all the time, but I believe new followers see your content before older followers, like it’s boosted to them. So you connect with people, they’ll start to see it. And you’re having conversations with people and slowly over time, you log in and you recognize faces as opposed to just scrolling a feed with nobody in it. But again, it takes time, right? It takes time. I would say just try to find your community. Yeah.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. So finding community is the challenge, but part of that is writing about the things that are going to appeal to the right community. So can we talk just a little bit about what are some of the things that we really ought to be focused in on when we sit down to write that first post or the third post or the seventh post early on?

Erica Schneider: Yeah, I would say the easiest mentality is write about what you know, write about what you love. So if you’re out there trying to become known for something that you don’t love, uh, you’re going to absolutely hate your time there because you’re not going to want to talk about it. Um, writing about, you know, gets rid of the blank page syndrome of like, you know, what version of myself do I have to present today or who’s going to even care type thing. Just write about what you know. So when I got there, for example, I was writing about writing and editing. That’s what I know and what I love. So I went in with my experiences and said, I’m a head of content. I think one of the first posts I wrote on LinkedIn was, I reviewed 44 content writer applications yesterday, and only two made the cut. Here’s what those two did well. That was my first hook. And it performed very well because it was a relevant topic that people wanted to hear about. And that was just in my experience. I then went on to just be like, you know, I was editing blogs last week and these are the 10 changes that I made. Or, you know, here’s how I got into my career as a head of content person. Just tell people that are a few steps behind you what you would have wanted to hear when you were in their position.

Rob Marsh: So you’re basically documenting your journey for everybody else. That’s certainly an easy way to create content.

Erica Schneider: Such an easy way to create. I think it’s the easiest way to start documenting your journey. As you get more experienced and you are trying to get clients, you then need to make sure that you’re speaking to the problems that they have, poking the pain, offering your solution, all of that stuff. But I think that that’s not going to get as much engagement at first. It’s going to feel a little bit harder to crack that egg, so to speak. Whereas if you get on there and you tell people who you are and you talk about your journey. It’s much easier to make connections, at least with peers at first anyway.

Rob Marsh: What about the challenge of always having to come up with something new? How often can you basically repeat content or reorder, re-edit, rework content, and basically be telling the same thing over and over? All the time. So this is maybe, this is, I think, one of the big secrets that a lot of people don’t think about.

Erica Schneider: Yeah. Like I rarely write brand new things. I am, constantly diving into a subject either from a deeper angle or from a zoomed out angle. So the way that I like to think about regenerating or repurposing content is you have an idea, And then you have to ask yourself questions about this idea. So say that the idea is editing is important. Okay, why is editing important? Answer that question. Okay, what happens if people don’t edit? Answer that question. What are the lies that people tell themselves about editing? What are the truths? Whatever it is, ask yourself a series of questions. And each answer to that question is going to give you a different point of view that you have on the thing. And each one of those things is a post idea. So you go through those and you start to cycle through them. And then as you post, pay attention to signals. So if somebody replies, well, I edit this way, what do you think about that? Your answer is another post idea. And it’s all under the topic of editing is important, right? So I’m not creating any new brilliant ideas here. I’m just telling you my point of view based on my experience over and over again in different ways. I do that all the time.

Rob Marsh: And part of your experience here led to the development of your hooks course, which I’ve been in. I bought it, I think, when it first launched.

Erica Schneider: Fantastic.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I went through. And the thing that’s nice is if you have a piece of content or something that you want to say, you basically can apply the various hooks the way you would open up a Swiss Army knife, right? It’s like, well, this one, I’m gonna use the scissors. And this one, I’m gonna use the magnifying glass. This one, I’m gonna use the tweezers. and you can basically take the same content over and over. So can we just talk a little bit about hooks, what works, maybe some hooks that don’t work, what we should be ignoring when it comes to getting people interested in our content.

Erica Schneider: I love the Swiss Army knife thing. That’s a really good way to put it. I’m going to noodle on that. Maybe I’ll write about that metaphor. That’s a good one. There you go. Link me so I can like the place. Of course, yeah. People love to hate hooks, but regardless of who you are, you need a strong first line in order to hook people in. So love them or hate them, you need them. Every first line is a hook, whether you view it as a hook or not. Why does a hook matter on social? Because people only see on mobile one line, on desktop they see four lines, and then they have to click see more. That’s a choice that they have to make. So you have to get them invested in the content in order for them to care about reading the content. So the best way to do that is to open a loop or peak curiosity. That’s like the easiest, that’s the easiest principle. So saying something like, yesterday I learned this one thing and it’s changed everything about how I think about this thing. Like, you can’t not read that. You have to know what that person is going to say. So there’s principles such as opening a loop, peaking curiosity. But then you guys dive deeper into the specifics. So you don’t want to just say, here’s this thing that I learned yesterday. You want to get specific so that your audience understands that this is for me, right? So here’s what I learned about, you know, working with solopreneurs yesterday, like this one thing made me realize that all solopreneurs are suffering from this thing, right? So the more specific that you can get, the more that you are signaling to your audience that this is either for you or not for you. Another way is to add your credibility into it. So a hook can be more than one line, right? So you can say, after working with hundreds of solopreneurs, I noticed that this tends to happen, but it wasn’t until last week when I was working with a new one that it really made sense, whatever it is. And then you’re showing people you’ve worked with. I’m implying I’ve worked with a lot of people. I’ve got the credibility and I’m still working with them today. This isn’t a thing from 10 years ago. I’m still practicing, right? You’re signaling to people your expertise with specificity. So tons of principles that I could dive into there. Basically, you want to focus on the principles and then there’s frameworks as well that we could dive into.

Rob Marsh: I want to ask you about some of the frameworks, but just to be really clear about this, there’s a couple of things that have to happen. The hook has to have a payoff. Otherwise, people will get wise to it eventually. It’s like, oh, they always promise something and I never get anything. It’s that one weird trick problem, I think, that was so popular so long ago. But do you, when you sit down with a piece of content, do you have your list of, you know, 70 plus whatever hooks that you’re like, Oh, I want to use it this one. Or is it so internalized now that it’s just, it’s coming out of your head naturally?

Erica Schneider: It’s internalized now. Yeah. I haven’t looked at a framework in years to be honest, but I did look at them a lot when I first started. So I think that everybody can benefit from frameworks. I don’t think anyone’s above them or templates if you prefer that phrase. I just think frameworks give you a little bit more room to play. Um, I really do think that they help you because it’s a copywriting framework, right? Like you want to take people through a journey. S-C-Q-A, situation, challenge, question, answer. These are things you practice them over and over again. But it’s like learning a sport, right? You’re not going to ask your coach, hey, how exactly do I dribble the ball again? Where do I start? You just dribble the ball. It’s the same thing with copywriting. Once you’ve done a bunch of framework writing, then it’s just internalized. Yeah.

Rob Marsh: So let’s talk about a couple of your favorite frameworks.

Erica Schneider: OK, so SCQA. This works for blogs, and it works for social posts. It works for every writer. It’s my favorite framework in the world. You present a situation. Then you present the challenge that the situation faces, brings up. Then you ask a question. And that’s just a nice way to get people to be like, OK, I’m still paying attention. And then you answer the question right away. So for example, most B2B teams suffer from checkbox marketing. That would be a situation. So I am presenting a situation from my worldview. It doesn’t have to be a fact, but it’s my bold point of view. And then I say the challenge that that presents them. So this leaves them wasting time, creating blogs that are never going to bring in revenue, whatever. That’s the challenge. Then you ask a question. So what, so, so, Hey, what are you going to do about it? And then the answer, the answer is, ditch the playbook, do this instead, colon, whatever. So just made them up out of thin air, but that would be that framework. Then there’s PAS, problem agitate solution. So you present, this is the classic one, you present the problem, and then you agitate the problem, and then you give a solution, so problem, you’re never going to earn what you want unless you raise your rates. But you can’t raise your rates because you’re scared to, right? So you’re twisting the knife of it. And then it’s like, stop trying to whatever, do this instead, type of thing. Those are my two favorite, and then there’s one more in the course, I think it’s TAS, Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis. It’s very similar, but just a little bit spikier with your thesis, for example. So editing is not a cutting exercise, it’s a value-adding exercise, but then the antithesis to that is that, but everybody follows the advice that you need to be cutting 30% of everything you write, and then the synthesis is, Like, forget everything you think you know and just think about editing this way. Something like that.

Rob Marsh: All makes sense. So as you see people using, and I know you take people through your course sharing this, obviously those are the three big ones. Have you seen people using them in interesting or different ways? You’re just like, wow, I wish I’d thought of that. Or that’s really different.

Erica Schneider: There’s tons of ways that you can mix and match them. I mean, that’s such an interesting question. I think that… Potentially, people are playing with a lot more sarcasm lately, at least on my feed. And so there’s a lot of like, they’ll start with something that you think is real, and then it turns out that what you just said is real is a total joke and the opposite thing of what you should do. But they don’t reveal that until later on when you get into it. I’m struggling to think of an example now, but Jen Allen Knuth, she’s like a sales superstar. I follow her and I read all of her posts and she does a lot of that. She actually wrote a really interesting hook once about nunchucks, but I can’t remember the specifics on here.

Rob Marsh: That’s good. We can all use the search feature in LinkedIn and find it. As I’m thinking also about hooks and all of that that goes on in the feed, at what point does a visual help or hurt? Obviously, if you’re doing this on Instagram, it’s almost visual first. On LinkedIn, Twitter, it’s probably text first, but there’s still a lot of visual stuff that can happen. So how do you balance visuals with the writing?

Erica Schneider: Totally. I think of visuals like, for example, a carousel where you’re going to have like a headline. So I think of visuals more as have a headline as opposed to a hook. So for example, if I was doing a carousel on hooks, one that I’ve done before is like how to stop the scroll parentheses without sounding cringey. And that’s what I would call a classic hook, but I don’t use those as my hooks personally. Because when I see something that reads like a headline on LinkedIn, I’m assuming that it’s kind of a templated hook that might not give me valuable information personally. So I’m happy to use those as headlines in carousels that accompany my hook, but I want my hook to be more interesting than that. So I remember that the hook that I actually used for that carousel in the text version of the post was, are you worried about sounding like an asshole on LinkedIn? And that was the hook, which was basically, I think I followed the PAS. That was the problem. You’re worried about sounding like an asshole. And then I agitated and went on. But then obviously, I’m hooking them with that, and I’m hooking them with the carousel headline that’s telling you exactly what you’re going to get. So that’s a fun way to kind of use both in the same thing. But I also think images are fantastic for further explaining something, like a process that you’re trying to explain. So if you have one of those tables where you’re comparing things on one side to the other, or you have like good versus bad examples. Those are just fantastic supporting elements. Selfies, we could debate about that all day.

Rob Marsh: Well, that’s a great question because I’ve seen people recommend you do selfies on LinkedIn, but I have to admit, I don’t love seeing them. I especially don’t love posting them of myself.

Erica Schneider: Yeah, it’s a personal thing. So I think that if you are comfortable with it and your audience gravitates towards it, then you should totally do it. I am not comfortable with taking selfies or posting them, so I don’t do it. But that’s I’ve done it like maybe five times. That’s just me. I get away with it because I like to be very playful with my words. Some people who are not really creative writers, they feel like if they post a selfie of themselves, that’s their way of kind of communicating, hey, this is me. This is my personality. I’m a real person, which can be a very good thing to do if you aren’t necessarily able to bring people into your world. Or again, if you are a good writer, but your audience is also the selfie type of person. So it just depends. If you don’t want to do it, you certainly do not have to do it.

Rob Marsh: It also feels like if you have created a brand where your face is part of that brand, you’re easily recognized, then you should be doing more of it. So, Gary Vee, if you saw content without Gary Vee in it, it doesn’t feel very Gary Vee. It’s all about him, right? And that’s maybe not the way all of us should go. In fact, it’s probably the way most of us shouldn’t go, but it certainly works for Gary Vee. Exactly. Exactly. Okay, so again, talking about this personal brand and building it for ourselves, obviously there’s this content portion where we’re throwing stuff up online for people to see. What other elements do we need to be thinking about in order to, I don’t know, is it driving them to a homepage? Is it driving them to other content, maybe a book or a podcast? How do you think about these other elements that contribute to your personal brand?

Erica Schneider: Yeah, so I would say at first, I wouldn’t worry about that too much. If you’re brand new, it’s too stressful to try to get people to DM you something or go click on something. You are first and foremost trying to build a community and build relationships. As soon as you feel comfortable that you’ve got a little bit of a community around you, that’s when you want to get those people and then anyone else who joins your world off of social, which is always going to be rented land and onto somewhere that is owned land. So even if you don’t plan on starting a newsletter that you send out like once a week, I still highly recommend that you start an email list and get people onto it via a lead magnet. of some sort. Like I have an educational email course that I’ve just put out for a new program that I do. I’ve done other lead magnets where you get like my editing library and then you join the email list. And again, it’s not something that where you have to send emails right away, but then you have those emails. So you have the option to do that later. And that’s so, so, so important because you just never know when social is going to blow up and you’re going to lose your role. We’re watching it right now.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, three days after TikTok shut down briefly, shut back on, I think they’ve got a 75-day window to figure something out and it’s going to turn off again. There are a lot of people who are losing millions of followers if they don’t have their own land.

Erica Schneider: Yeah, and I grew my audience on Twitter to 50,000, 51,000, and I haven’t really posted in there in a few months because it’s all changed, right? And so I’m happy that before I left, I was able to get at least a fraction of that onto an email list. So yes, I think that absolutely you should get them onto an email list. So how do you do that? Well, all of your posts should have standalone value, first and foremost. Amanda Natividad coined the phrase zero-click content. And I truly believe that everything should have zero-click value. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t give them a place to go. So I still post links every once in a while if I want you to go sign up for something or get on a wait list. But the other way around that is the DM, DM me feature. Just the past two days, I realized, hey, Erica, you haven’t asked someone to DM you about something in about a month. Why don’t you go ahead and do it? Past two posts, I’ve written posts with standalone value. And then at the end, I’ve said, if you’re interested to learn more, DM me this word. So DM me full stack and let’s talk about it. And what do you know? It works. I got like 10 DMs and I’m having conversations that are leading to discovery calls just because of doing that. And so if those people don’t end up buying, then I will say, hey, by the way, you should take this free email course because it’ll at least help you get started. And then I have them on my list. And then I can interact with them and nurture them over and over again there in a place where I know that they’re at least going to see what I’m sending to them.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I love that. One of the things I noticed about you is obviously you’re driving them to a list, but you waited a long time to launch a website. I mean, what was the hold up there that made it not important?

Erica Schneider: Well, I actually spent a lot of time with people who said, you don’t ever need a website. So I was hearing that from people and I was still making money without one. So in my mind, I felt like, well, this is working without one. And if I’m going to do one, I can’t do it myself. negative design skills, like less than zero. Anything I touch is just terrible. So I knew I was going to have to hire somebody to do it. And I was very protective of my revenue. I didn’t want to hire people for a while. That’s something that I feel like a lot of new entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs face. And I guess the advice for that is hire people sooner than you think you do. Please get help. You don’t need to suffer. I think I got to the point where I was on enough podcasts and things like this where people would say, where should people go? My answer was always, just go to LinkedIn. And that felt really silly because then I’m not capturing anyone. And you can learn about me on LinkedIn, but you can’t see all the things. And I have all the things, I have courses, I’ve got group coaching, I’ve got one-to-one. And unless you really dig through my about section on LinkedIn, which I don’t think a lot of people really read those, then you’re not gonna know. So it just felt like it was time, it was three years, I had all these media appearances, I had all these things that I wanted people to be able to read and just see. So it was time, I wish I had done it a year earlier.

Rob Marsh: And the flip side, of course, though, is that when you did launch, it is dialed in. I mean, your messaging is dialed in, the brand, it looks fantastic. You nailed it. It looks like you got everything right. And that usually doesn’t happen if you launch the website week one.

Erica Schneider: I agree. I totally agree. It’s the same reason why I think that you should spend some time figuring out your voice, your style, you know, your offer, all of that stuff. If you, if we’re talking to soul openers here, just people who want to teach, like, how are you, like, what are you going to do when you spend time on, on the social platform before you then try to get people onto a list where you talk even deeper about something. Um, so spend some time, don’t try to get people onto a list for at least a couple months. And then once you hit that moment where you’re like, this feels good, I think I’m in my, I think I’m in my groove, get people onto a list.

Rob Marsh: So as you went through your own website development process, talk a little bit about your thinking there. We’ll definitely link to it in the show notes, because like I said, it’s a really great website. The first time I saw it, I thought, ooh, I want to copy that. What template is that? That is so good. Not that I would. That’s the kind of reaction I think you want from designers when people look at it. It’s like, wow, I wish I had that. How did you get there?

Erica Schneider: Let’s shout out to Emily Court. She’s the one who designed it. I got there because she was someone who I had networked with a bunch on LinkedIn. She changed her offer from copywriting to design a few months before. I knew that she was looking for people to design for, and obviously I paid her, but I think she charged me less than she would have charged now because she was kind of getting into it. And in exchange, you know, I said, I’ll give you testimony and get you more clients. So that’s always a fun way to do that. And so she just had a fantastic process. We had a call. She asked me a bunch of questions. The first thing I said to her was, I’m terrible at design. I have no idea what I want. I just know that I don’t want pink. That’s what I said to her. Because all of her stuff is pink. And I was like, I know you love pink, but I don’t want pink. So she sent me the process. She sent me a bunch of mood boards with colors, and yes, no, yes, no. And then I wrote the copy. We went back and forth on the copy a little bit together. And she asked me questions again. Do you want stock images? No. Do you want stock video? No. Do you want this? Sure. It was just a lot of like, back and forth, back and forth, to be honest.

Rob Marsh: Then it worked.

Erica Schneider: It did. I got inspiration from other people. So whose websites did I look at? I looked at Devin Reed’s website, but now he’s since redundant. I think his looks really good. He’s my friend. Who else? I can’t remember off the top of my head, but I looked at a bunch of websites.

Rob Marsh: for help. Well, like I said, I’ll link to your site in the show notes because it’s fantastic design. And I mean, that’s where you can see all of your stuff as well. But let’s talk about some of the other courses that you’ve designed and developed. One is AI focused. In fact, a lot of the stuff that you’ve done in all of your courses, I think, is there’s a lot of focus on AI because it’s such a huge part of content creation. But yeah, as you expanded your course offerings, why did you go into the areas that you did?

Erica Schneider: Yeah, so the first one was hooks because people were literally asking me, hey, you write great hooks. Can you help me write great hooks? And I said, yes, of course I can. Also, all the products that I’ve researched on hooks seem to just kind of give templates and that’s not my vibe. So I’ll do something different. The next course was a course that was in my head for years. While I was still head of content, I was thinking about creating an editing course, because I just was geeking out on editing. And so the next course I released was Content Editing 101. And just to preface, Hooks was not AI at first. And then I teamed up with Rob Lennon, who did the rest of my courses with me. And it just turns out that because AI is a thing, people absolutely love the idea of being able to play with what they just learned right away. So it makes it like a fun, learn, do, play style. And the interactiveness of putting in an idea and getting it back in the frameworks that you just learned in the course. is really cool. So that’s the style that we do in all of our courses. So that’s how Hooks is. With content editing, same thing. Teach the principles, learn the principles, do it yourself in a workbook, go play with AI, ask it to edit your content, see what it says. Uh, the next course I did is called long to short and that’s targeted at people who write like a thousand plus words all the time for themselves and like in a newsletter. And then they just don’t know how to turn that into social content. So it helps you kind of ask yourself those questions that I was referencing in the beginning. You know, what happens if people don’t do this? What happens if they do? What happens if this, all of those things and it’s AI-ified as well. So it helps you repurpose your content. The most recent one is the one that I’m most excited about because this is, less of a principle based where you learn and then you go play. And it’s called Launch Content Playbook. And this one’s actually more of like an AI product where you put in your offer, whether it’s your landing page or you answer questions manually, and it gives you back in a spreadsheet, 60 days of launch content with hooks and the plays and the psychological principles behind why they work. done for you in 10 minutes. It’s crazy, it’s absolutely crazy.

Rob Marsh: You built an agent to create that, is that right?

Erica Schneider: Yeah, so I didn’t, I built nothing. I am not good at behind the scenes of AI. Rob built it. I did all the principles that it’s based on. So we still stayed in our lane. So I wrote all the principles, the stages of launches, every play, like I created all of that stuff. And then Rob trained agents to you answer questions in a form, it does a bunch of things in make.com and the automation thing behind the scenes, and then you get an email with your results.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, it’s amazing. It’s very cool.

Erica Schneider: It’s really cool. It’s very, very cool.

Rob Marsh: And then, of course, you also offer coaching.

Erica Schneider: Yeah. So last April, so we’re in January right now, so I think it was nine months ago, I finally figured out my offer, which is called content sparring. And before that, I wasn’t entirely sure how I wanted to work with people one-to-one. Did I want to work with teams? Did I want to work with solopreneurs? Was it going to be editing asynchronous? Was it going to be just kind of like teaching synchronous? And I came up with the idea of content sparring with the help of my partner now Nick Bennett on something else we do together through his program. He does an offer design program and he helped me realize I don’t have to pick between who I serve. I just have to solve a very specific problem that is niched down. Um, and then tell them very simply, this is how we work together. That’s a really simple version of what he does, but basically content sparring is for seasoned solopreneurs or founders who want to get their work live, edited and co-create with somebody once a week. Very simple. So you show up to calls with writing. We read it out loud. I ask you questions. We make it better. That’s the offer.

Rob Marsh: One of the things I love about hearing all of the offers, the courses, everything is that, I mean, again, you started out, I think you said as like a junior content creator, right? And so for people who are starting out and say, what is my future? What are the potentials? you’ve obviously grown several different opportunities for yourself. And part of that, I’m sure, is because you’re super capable and willing to put in the time to do it. But also, if people have the skills they put in the time like you did, there’s a huge opportunity here still for content, even in the world of AI and competition with the content farms and all of that stuff going on.

Erica Schneider: 100% there is a huge opportunity right now to take the skills that you have, figure out what your superpower is. My superpower is live editing. Like that’s something that’s always been there. I absolutely love talking things through with people. Um, whatever your superpower is, is there a big enough market for it? Um, and then figuring out, okay, how do I go out and find these people? And generally the best way to do that, the way that I did it, is to build a reputation online. The people, you will start conversations, you’ll start to network, and it all happens. I mean, again, it’s not gonna happen right away, but it all happens for me. It all happened within a year.

Rob Marsh: We keep coming back to this idea of relationships. So I want to dive in a little bit more on this because it’s one thing to create content. It’s even one thing to reply with comments or DMs, but it’s a little bit different to start to create a real relationship or a friendship, you know, that can develop into a content or into a client type situation. So what are your best strategies for taking it from, Hey, nice article or great idea to, I want, I got to work with this person.

Erica Schneider: I’m so glad you asked me that because this is like the dark part of it. And by dark, I don’t mean like scary. I mean like the less talked about.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, nobody talks about it. We want to protect our secrets, right? Because otherwise, everybody will take our clients.

Erica Schneider: Sure, yeah, sure. That’s part of it. I think also, though, you can’t see it as well. It’s one of those amorphous things that just kind of happens. And so it’s harder to explain. I didn’t do any of it on purpose. Luckily, like I said, I think I thought that I was more of an introvert than I was when I first started. But luckily, people reached out to me at first, so I didn’t have to do the reaching out. I had built enough of a reputation that after a few months of posting consistently, people were reaching out and asking me if I wanted to hop on a call. My advice is when people start to do that at first, just say yes to all of it. Just see what’s going on. It doesn’t mean that you should get stuck giving free advice all day. But you don’t know what’s going to come from those calls. That’s how I met Rob Lennon. He DMed me. because he kept leaving comments on Twitter with like dad jokes on my posts. And then he finally DM me and was like, I hope I’m not bothering you with all these dad jokes. And I was like, no, it’s hilarious. And we talked back and forth for a few days. And then we decided to hop on a call. He must’ve asked me, hey, do you want to actually meet? Like, let’s say hi. And I said, sure. So just talk to people, like be human. I know it’s weird because it’s all online, but if someone came up to you and started to talk to you, hopefully you would talk back, right? Like it’s just, you know, have conversations. Um, I, so it wasn’t frameworked at first. Uh, now I try to intentionally hop on like coffee chats with people at least a few times a month just to say hi. Um, just to get to know you better because you never know. Do you have services you could offer me? Do I have services I could offer you? Is there a collaboration opportunity here? Do you have clients that might be perfect for me and vice versa? And so the more that you just say hi to people, the more that you’re top of mind and they remember you for things. I’m in Slack communities now with people that have introduced me to tons of other people and we all refer each other all the time to things, all because I hopped on phone calls and said hi. So it’s like the most underrated yet probably the most valuable thing you can do is just say hi to a lot of people.

Rob Marsh: I’m glad you shared that example of Rob too, because posting dad jokes to certain people is going to be, wow, this guy’s weird. But because he’s doing something different, it’s going to stand out from the typical comment that is, hey, you’re right, Erica, great idea, you know, whatever. So it’s an opportunity to stand out in a different way. Now, obviously Rob’s not going to connect with every single person with that strategy. There’s some people it’s going to turn off. The right people, the people he wants to connect with will likely connect through that way if that’s part of Rob’s personality.

Erica Schneider: Totally. And it was when Rob and I were at a similar place, we were both starting from zero. We met each other kind of towards the beginning. And so it’s a lot easier to try to meet people who are at the same stage as you because I’m not as likely to hop on a call with a stranger now as I am to hop on a call with someone that I’ve been interacting with. for a few months who we have mutual friends and this and that, just because I’ve been doing this for so long and I get DM spam all the time. And so I don’t love the whole advice of just comment, be the first person to comment on a big creator, DM them and they’re not gonna see it or be as interested as someone who’s more at your speed, on your level. You’ll get there eventually if you wanna talk to these bigger creators, so to speak, but I wouldn’t start there.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I mean, at that point, these conversations almost move out of comment sections or DMs and into events or various other channels where people are hanging out in a slightly different way.

Erica Schneider: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. It moves on to, it moves on to networking for sure.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, exactly. So Erica, if you could go back and just, you know, give some advice to you just starting out, you know, that would help you make progress faster, do something different or avoid some kind of a mistake, regret, you know, cringe moment, whatever that is. What would you say to yourself?

Erica Schneider: I would say I think that the biggest thing I hear from people that are just starting is I don’t have anything unique to say. Everything has been said before and there’s nothing special about me. And the way that I’ve been framing this recently is think about music. every song in the world has been written, right? Like all the great songs, there’s classics, you know, everything is basically a different version of the same chords. Like you’re not creating a new instrument. Right. And yet every day there are up in rising quote unquote stars, right? There’s new people coming out there and doing interesting things that sounds different, that resonates with you in that moment for whatever reason. And so, All you have to do is go out there and be yourself because you are inherently unique. And like I said, start with the experiences, share what you know. If I could go back in time, I think I did do a lot of that, but I was confused between sharing experiences and sharing personal things because I thought you had to share personal things. And there was one time that I said something about going on a vacation And I won’t get into details, it was taken the wrong way. And I got a lot of troll comments. And I almost quit after that, because I was like, this place is weird. It’s terrible. This was on LinkedIn, not even Twitter. And I wish I had just trusted myself that I didn’t need to do that. And so I think that your gut is something you should listen to, like follow it. If you don’t want to post selfies, don’t post selfies. If you don’t want to share personal stories, don’t share personal stories. If you do, great. But there are no rules. There are best practices, but that doesn’t matter. Like they’re not a rule. So do whatever you feel comfortable with. And you are absolutely somebody that people want to hear from because you’ve lived a life. So just talk about it.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, my takeaway here is don’t let anything stop you. Just go out and do it, experiment, try and see what works.

Erica Schneider: Yeah, if you want to.

Rob Marsh: And of course, if you don’t.

Erica Schneider: If you don’t, then don’t. Just don’t if you don’t want to.

Rob Marsh: That’s right. There are other ways to connect with clients, but there are so many things that come out of building your personal brand, building authority online that don’t happen in other ways as easily, being invited to speak, being invited on podcasts. Those kinds of things tend to naturally fall out of an online personality, whereas you’ve got to work a little harder to make that stuff happen offline.

Erica Schneider: Totally. Yes. I’ve never had to pitch myself to a podcast.

Rob Marsh: So, well, except for this one.

Erica Schneider: Except for this one.

Rob Marsh: Obviously, I asked you to come on just because I admire what you do. And in fact, I would love to share your email, your resources with our listeners. Where can people go to find you, Erica, if they want to learn more?

Erica Schneider: Yeah, so the best place to go is erikaschneider.me, which is the website that I finally have. And the thing that I’m most excited about where I’m putting most of my attention at the moment is called Full Stack Solopreneur. So when you go to that website, you’ll see a tab that says group coaching. And I’m really excited about this new program. It’s just two months old, and there’s 60 people in there. And we’re helping Solopreneurs refine or define their offer, learn how to drive traffic to it with content, and then sell like a human so that they can actually get people to give them money. And it’s working, and it’s fun. And if that sounds like you, I’d love for you to join.

Rob Marsh: Amazing. Thanks, Erika, for sharing so much about content, editing, growing a brand. I really appreciate it.

Erica Schneider: Thanks for having me.

Rob Marsh: Thanks to Erica for sharing so much about content strategy and creation hooks and frameworks and what she’s created in her own business. I’ll link to her website in the show notes that you can jump on her list. And of course, you can probably find her on LinkedIn where she’s still pretty active. 

We didn’t talk about this, but I think a big part of Erica’s success is consistency. Showing up day after day in the same places, talking about the same things in slightly different ways. Her clients saw her and came to trust her through the content that she was sharing over and over. Now, you don’t have to do it every single day. In fact, Erica mentioned that once or twice a week is probably enough, but showing up consistently is a big part of success. And if you want to be the writer who clients find instead of ignore, you need to build processes and systems to help you do that. 

This is something that I can help you with inside the Copywriter Underground. And if you’re interested in that kind of accountability and training, visit thecopywriterclub.com/tcu and join now. 

Stuff to check out:

Jason’s Info Product Webinar
One to Many (Jason’s book)
Jason’s website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  A few years ago I attended several mastermind events hosted by one of my mentors, Brian Kurtz. The were fantastic events. Each of these events featured several speakers sharing the strategies they use to succeed in whatever they were doing. One guest might share direct mail packages they used to sellout their services while another speaker might share copywriting techniques and yet another would walk through how to set up a research survey then share how they determine which answers are worth paying attention to and which answers could be ignored. I always walked away from these events buzzing with ideas to try. 

At one of these events, Brian invited Jason Fladlien to speak. Jason is pretty well known in the online world as the expert who created the highest-ever selling webinar… he sold something like 60 million dollars worth of services on a single webinar.  He has personally written hundreds of webinars that have sold millions of dollars in courses, services, products and more. I used what Jason taught at that event to write our best-ever selling webinar.

So it makes sense that Jason has been on my list of future potential guests for a long time. And we were finally able to get an interview with Jason. We definitely talked about webinars and what it takes to make them work—especially today when we’re hearing that webinars don’t work as well as they used to. Jason does a pretty good job of busting that myth.

But that’s not all. Jason shares how he created his very first information product. It’s not as easy to do today as it was when Jason first started, but if you want to sell courses and other products, what Jason shares in this episode will definitely help you get started. I don’t think its an exageration to call this episode a masterclass in creating and selling your own products. There are a lot of copywriting insights here as well.

But before we get to all that, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. I’ve spent the last week rebuilding our content vault and adding a lot of additional training to it. New workshops include how to add a VIP day to your services, how to create a new offer, how to get more done, how to do research, how to develop your own frameworks, how to conduct discovery calls, how to get more referrals, how to build an email list, how to create a launch sequence and dozens more. The more we add the more I think we really need to raise the price because there is a crazy amount of helpful templates, workshops, and even monthly coaching in The Underground. You can learn more at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

And now, my interview with Jason Fladlien…

Unfortunately, as we started recording this interview, we had some technical difficulties and we lost the first five, six minutes of the interview where Jason introduces himself and talks a little bit about how he got started as a copywriter and how he created an information product from scratch and started selling it for, I think, $7. He was originally creating content for just a couple of dollars per article when he started out and needed to learn copywriting in order to sell his services. So we’re going to join the interview as I ask Jason how he became a copywriter, how he got good at the process of writing and where that took his business.

Jason Fladlien: Yeah, I mean, because back then all the copywriters that tell you how to write copy, they would give you this very long convoluted process that involved a tremendous amount of research, which I get. If you’re going to write for Agora back then when they were printing stuff and putting it in the mail, and there was lots of money on the line, you should do that. But we are at this cross section of the new internet where I found very quickly, and this is what changed my life, is I didn’t have to have to write world-class copy. I had to have an interesting offer that I could just write very quick, formulaic copy around, and that’s what I did. I create a lot of info products because that’s where I created that first one and it sold well, Rob. It was like, let me just repeat the process. Let me create these cheap little ebooks, $7, $17, $27, make them very simple, solve problems because I could publish them fast. All of them needed a sales letter. So let me come up with a formula to write these sales letters. 

So here’s what I did. It was brilliant. I went and I found every good sales letter I could find and categorize them. I said, okay, what kind of headlines do they all use? Can I fit them in a category? Turns out 80% of them could fit into one of four categories of a headline. So when I sat to write it, Headline, I wrote one of four headlines. That was it. Leads, there were about five ways I saw repetitively that were used to open up a sales letter. Great. Bullet points, I found there were about five different structures of bullet points that I could use when I wrote bullet points. Guarantees, so I isolated these key variables and then I found the structure. I didn’t copy it. Here’s a lead as old as time, Rob. I’m sure you’re familiar with this. If you’re looking to X, Y, and Z, then this will be the most interesting letter that you’ll ever read. Here’s why. Halbert made that very popular. To this day, people will still use that as a lead. The important thing isn’t the words that are used, it’s the structure behind it. If-then statement, it’s the linking of the two. It’s calling out something very exciting that’s in their mind right now that they’re so desperate for, and then dramatizing it to say, to open up the idea that you have a solution for it. And that’s a good strong lead. So it was less the specific words, which is what a lot of copywriters are focusing on. It was more the structure underneath it. I isolated that, and then I would assemble them together like blocks. And that’s how I wrote a lot of my copy. And what was really cool, Rob, is along the way, you become unconscious about this. So I could recite phrases by memory after a while of doing it enough. 

Guarantees that I would use over and over again after a while and I really got good at it was like Whether it’s 29 minutes from now or 29 days from now on a 30-day guarantee, right? If you want your money back you get every penny. So the word penny was used because it diminished the cost associated with it. If you said dollar… dollar seemed bigger than penny, right? You get every penny promptly and quietly returned to you. So I was like, okay, no fuss. So I could memorize these because I would use them so often and then I can think and copy. And I didn’t have to like create so much as pull it out with a swipe file inside of my head and stitch them and assemble them together. And that was a game changer for me. And so then people would want me to write copy for them because they would read the copy I wrote for myself. And they say, can you do for me what you just did for yourself? And I’m like, if the, if the, Jack’s big enough. Of course I can. That’s how I really got to copy.

Rob Marsh: How long did that process take? In my head, I’m seeing copywriters who buy the book, a book, and they’re like, oh, here’s the formula in the book. I’m just going to apply that across the board. And it usually doesn’t work because they’re not thinking there yet.

Jason Fladlien: It only works if the context fits the formula. That’s the challenge, right? So like, you know, and I still remember most of this today, even though this is now 16 years ago. The most tried and true headline that you could always use is how to do insert something incredible. In certain specific time without big things that normally would get in the way. So that structure, it’s still one of the best ways to write a headline to this very day. How to do something they desperately desire in a certain specific amount of time without normal obstacles that would prevent or stop them from getting the thing that they want. That covers like all the bases. Now, you could dress that up, you could play with it, but at the end, what does it have? It has a promise in the headline, it has a timeframe associated with it because one of the strongest appeals is instant gratification. There are very few things that are more persuasive than instant results, right? And then it also starts to attack the objections. because the number one reason somebody won’t buy something is because they don’t believe either you or they don’t believe they will get the value out of what you promise. So we do all that economically in a single headline. Now, if we can add proof to it, even better, right? And sometimes the proof itself, I noticed is the whole headline. So you know, the old school headline, like, you know, 65 miles an hour, the loudest sound is the clicking of the ticking of the clock, right?

Rob Marsh: Yep, yep.

Jason Fladlien: The structure of that is that’s a proof headline. If you have compelling enough proof, then that should be your whole headline. And that’s how you should run with it. And so if you don’t have proof, A, you shouldn’t be writing a sales letter, period. I mean, why sell a product that hasn’t proven itself? That’s stupid. It’s like, hey, let’s cut down this tree with a blunt axe, right? Or a butter knife. Let’s cut down the tree with a butter knife. I’m going to be the strongest person in the world. I’m going to work. But there’s proof, and then there’s an insane amount of proof, or proof is the unique mechanism, if you will. If you have this unique amount of proof and you don’t articulate it immediately because you’re following some formula that doesn’t include that, then you’re limiting your capabilities. But at the same time, if your proof is so dang good, you don’t want those other things to get in the way of it. then you don’t need to make a claim. You don’t need to handle an objection because you can just use the strongest dominant appeal of what that offer is. If I could look at any offer and say, okay, I could write a headline one of these four ways, all four of those cover every context and then I’m just guessing. After a while, I get better at guessing. I think for this particular offer, this type of headline is going to be the one that works the best. I didn’t have a formula. I had like four options at each step of the process, and I could pick and choose and apply them based on what I thought made sense. The other thing too, Rob, that people weren’t aware of in 2008, I mean, they still pretend like this doesn’t exist. I could change a headline in two seconds. If it didn’t work, I clickety-clack, clickety-clack, and it’s changed. Again, the old dogs of copywriting from years past, they were going to write an ad, it was six weeks before they could do anything about it. So a lot of people were using these old paradigms in these new emerging markets.

Rob Marsh: So as your business developed then, obviously you were doing all of these digital products. You were also writing copy when it made sense for other people. And what was the balance there? And when did you, because, and I’m making some assumptions here just from hearing you speak, but at some point you basically built an agency and went in with your clients, you know, webinars and all kinds of different marketing materials. So how did that all come together?

Jason Fladlien: Well, what was cool is, you know, it’s so funny, like. It’s hard to make a lot of money just purely as a copywriter, it’s incredibly there’s an upper limit. Yeah, time really is like a Clayton Makepiece can sometimes break through it, that type of talent and still be like a pure copywriter with royalties and arrangements. But those are so incredibly rare. There’s something Gary Benzavinga said that I really liked. I had a client once and he bought the Only 500 seminar or whatever it was that Benzavinga did. It was a $5,000 product. He bought it and he shipped it to me because I was writing copy for him. He bought it just so I could study it. I’m studying it. I was doing this stuff already without even realizing it. Gary Benzavinga tells this story. He was working with a client on an anti-aging product. And he goes to the client and says, Hey, listen, if we had a bonus, uh, where I, we went out and found like 50 women that were like 50 years old, but looked like they were 25. We interviewed them and we created a bonus around them. This could increase the copy. And Benzavinga was given this as an example of, Hey, if you don’t have the necessary ingredients to sell the thing, don’t just say I’m a copyright or I can’t do anything about it. Right. Like, your job is to make the client money. While copywriting is the primary way you do that, if you can give yourself an unfair advantage, why wouldn’t you? And so most copywriters only rely on the copy. I’m just trying to stack the deck as much in my favor as possible. And so when I can write copy for myself, I can control more elements. When I partner with people, what we’re trying to do is I’m trying to find clients with proof that’s underutilized because all I got to do is pull the proof out and that’s it. But what I also discovered is if I can take copy and speak it, Not just write it. That’s an extra skill. There’s no doubt about it. But the return on that skill is so much more valuable than just putting it in a written word. And so I started to notice this, that if I could take copywriting concepts, develop them into presentations, then I could make a tremendous amount more money. And if also copy generally doesn’t add value, it sells something that adds value. So if I could churn copy and blend it into something that was simultaneously valuable as an advertisement, make the ad valuable in and of itself, regardless of whether they bought it or not, then I could have the opportunity to grow and create a brand. and then have the opportunity also to sell all at the same time, which, you know, that’s what I wanted to do. And so the webinar was the best vehicle for that because I could train for 45 minutes. Then I could sell for the remainder of the time and it’s a hybrid model. It’s not pure advertising. Nobody likes advertising. It’s not pure content because that doesn’t really make money very effectively. It’s a blend of content and advertising. By putting those two things together, that’s how I really started to crush it. Webinars were the thing that I found most often for the type of business I ran. There was nothing that could make more money and that’s even true to this very day. But because Rob, I love to work in all kinds of environments. I love to learn how to sell and communicate in all different atmospheres for myself, for clients, as partners, as a publisher, as a spokesperson, I’ve done it all. Each one of those slightly different versions of copy allows me then to infuse that in all of my copy. And that way, I don’t, there’s, There’s a million copywriters that are better than me because they focus on just the copy. I recognize that copy is an element in the whole campaign. I try to get good at all of the elements of the campaign, good enough. Then when you combine them together, it’s multiplicative.

Rob Marsh: That’s actually a really interesting takeaway. I doubt there are a million copywriters better than you, but there might be a couple of hundred, maybe a couple of thousand. But the idea of solving problems as opposed to writing copy is huge. It’s something that we’ve taught for years. But for whatever reasons, I think the same thing is true of designers. Designers get into design because they like to make things look nice. They’re not really there, most of them. This is not categorically true, but they’re not really there because, hey, I’m a designer because I want to make people buy stuff. And I think a lot of writers maybe approach it the same way. It’s like, yeah, I’m really good at writing. And so I’m just going to write good stuff as opposed to I’m here to sell. And I really appreciate your approach here where it’s if I can get good at every step of the process. Now, yeah, I’m a copywriter, but I’m a problem solver. I’m a revenue generator. I’m a sales, you know, system for your business.

Jason Fladlien: I mean, like, it’s good practice to read all your copy after you write it. And we’ve all been told to do that. Read it out loud. Read it to somebody else. Have somebody else read it to you. But it’s like, if I take that same time and just figure out how to add a new bonus to the offer, I’ll probably convert better. My copy won’t be as clean. I didn’t run it through Grammarly. I didn’t try to get it down to a third grade level because that would take another 50 hours, right? I went out there and said, how do I make a better guarantee? And so we use double your money back guarantees. Very rare thing that almost nobody uses in this business. I spend more time on how do I make a better than money back guarantee than how do we use power words in certain verbs in our copy to you know, grease the chute, if you will. All of those are cool things that a lot of copywriters are really good at that I’m not very good at. I’m not even necessarily very good at making sure there’s a tremendous amount of benefits, like, you know, a Eugene Schwartz style copy where, you know, there’s a benefit every three words, right? Like, I probably use too many features and not enough benefits because I’m speed writing that part of the copy. I’m good enough at it. But I’m then saying, how do we make a guarantee that’s better than money back guarantee? How do we do a dramatic demonstration in the copy itself so people can’t forget about it? How do we be different than the last 15 letters that they’ve read? And I find that those are better leverage points to create higher converting copy than most of the mechanics that are related to the copy itself. I’ll give you another one, Rob. It’s better to write two sales letters selling the same product than to try to make one sales letter sell the whole product. So it’s like, I can write a sales letter that focuses purely on the positive aspect of it, and then I could write another sales letter that sells to the negative aspect of it. And why not? It doesn’t cost any more if you’re the one writing it. It’s let me hit this angle for this audience and let me hit this other angle for this other audience, as opposed to trying to write the one sales letter that rules all like, you know, the ring from Lord of the Rings. There’s so much more flexibility than I think people recognize. And so these are some of the principles that were very revolutionary in my day when I was writing copy that I was able to take, run with, develop, you know, some of the most powerful marketing campaigns in our industry that we’ve ever seen as a result of that.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I mean, I think you’re known for having the highest ever collecting webinar. Is it 50 million?

Jason Fladlien: No, it’s higher than that. 57.9 million, yeah. Yeah, and that’s a great example too, Rob, is if I wanna cook a good meal, I want the best ingredients. And so before we launched that product, the first thing that I did was I got a beta test of clients to run through the system. and then had them agree that I could document all of the results and share them with anybody whenever I wanted to. And we got the results captured in a third party system that there was no funny business that you could do to it. So it was completely authentic. And then when I rolled that campaign out and go, here was our 18 beta tests. I’ll show you all of them. I’m not going to handpick them. I’m going to show you everything, the good, the bad and the ugly. It’s all going on right now. If you want to know exactly how well the system is performing, here you go. It’s right there in front of you. Right now, that was intentionally set up like, by the way, Rob, if it didn’t work. then we don’t launch. We save a lot of time and headache, right? If it kind of worked so-so, we adjust it. We go back and we do a beta test again and we adjust it. But in that case, it worked right away and it worked better than I anticipated it working, so we immediately rushed it out to the market. And now the market is seeing the story unfold in real time. And what’s more exciting than being part of history being made and buying to be part of that history being made? Those were the results of me learning these dynamics. Now, copy’s at the center of it, because how do you communicate your value in a way that your audience can understand that and know that it’s right for them? That’s copy. But it’s so much more organic in this day and age than it ever has been in the past. Now, the purest copy education you could ever learn still comes from the old greats. I think more about Claude Hopkins, and how he would solve a problem than I do with any modern marketer that you can name. But that’s for high level strategy. It’s very little of it is then directly translatable into something that you could like, you know, specifically implement, because you read it over here, you got to do some critical thinking, which is very rare in this day and age.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, all too rare. So let’s talk a little bit about webinars. You’re known as the best webinar guy out there. I know people pay tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars just to get you to write the webinar or present their webinar for them. You’ve got this down. And we’re in a time, you know, the last two years where a lot of people are saying webinars just don’t perform the way they used to. And there’s a little bit of truth to that. But I also know there are webinars out there that are performing just fine. So let’s talk through this. Like for anybody who’s out there writing webinars, selling through webinars, and it’s not going as well as it used to, what do we need to be doing differently?

Jason Fladlien: First, let’s understand where the sentiment comes from. Anything, eventually somebody’s going to say it’s dead. Blank is dead.

Rob Marsh: Email’s dead. Marketing’s dead. Facebook’s dead.

Jason Fladlien: AI will be dead. Here’s what they mean. Here’s what they want. They want to be able to do it half-assed and get a good result. And every new emerging media, if you get there on the trend, then that happens. So like in the old infomercial days, like I heard John Carlton always tell this story, like at first it was free because people had dead air time. So you could do anything and it would make you money. And then there was this golden era where you didn’t have to produce it and you didn’t have to spend hundreds of thousand dollars on infomercials, any of that stuff, right? And it all worked. And so, When people say webinars are dead, what they mean is you can no longer show up, half-ass it, not have a good webinar, follow some old-school script where you’re useful but incomplete, you do some of that stupid nonsense, right? That won’t work because there’s too much supply. There’s too many webinars out there for people to pick from, and so therefore, they’re going to be choosier on the webinars that they want to go with. So no longer can you sleepwalk through a webinar and expect it to do very well. However, all the biggest names in the industry still use webinars. All of the biggest impacts, a webinar is at the center of it. And it’s just a pure fact. I mean, it’s like, But so you have to do it properly, which means you have to be better at it than you used to be. Now, if you’re better at it than you used to be, you’re going to make more money than you used to be able to make, because it’s easier to reach people on the Internet than it ever was before. If you have a good offer, you can scale it 10 times as much. You know, Rob, I’m running an event right now. I didn’t realize I double booked. So I had to sneak out here. And this is a $35,000 per person event. And my business partner is on stage right now interviewing Sean Clark, who’s the CEO of High Level. High Level is a billion dollar valuated company that started six years ago. And so my business partner is downstairs, interviewing a billion dollar company. That was unheard of 10 years ago. You couldn’t come out and make a billion dollar valuation in six years. So if you do it right, the prize is bigger than ever, but you have to be more technically effective with it than you used to be able to. The good news is it’s the same amount of work. It’s always the same amount of work as it ever was. It’s just people don’t ever want to do the work because it’s tough at first and it’s challenging at first. A webinar is very hard to do initially because you have to be A, a good public speaker, which scares the bejesus out of most people. B, you have to be a good coach. So regardless of whether you sell or not, you have to know how to educate and train. And not a lot of people can do that. And then C, you have to know how to sell. which is a separate and distinct skill from everything else. And then D, this is less a problem now, but you’ve got to have the technical stuff all in place. You’ve got to have some sort of funnel with a reg page, a thank you page, an order checkout page, a sequence of emails that go out that glue the whole thing together. So there’s a lot of moving parts in a webinar. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so profitable is because it orchestrates all of these things together in a very beautiful way. So it’s tough. There’s no doubt about it. A webinar is a very hard thing to do. So here’s what most people need to do that they don’t like to hear from me. But this is how I did it. And it’s still true in 2025. First webinar I ever did was not to sell anything to anybody. In fact, the first webinar I ever did is I went to my email list, and these were clients. Most of them had bought these $7, $10, $12 e-books from me. I said, hey, I’m going to create a new product, but I’m going to do it live on a webinar because I want to test out this technology. I’ve never done a webinar before. If you show up, I’ll give you the product for free. If you don’t show up, then you’ll have to buy the product from me later. So 17 people come, that’s it. A measly 17 people, but hey, if you change 17 people’s lives, that’s pretty good actually. So I got on and I trained for like four and a half hours. So now I have four and a half hours of webinar experience under my belt in a low risk, no risk environment. There was no risk. Worst case scenario, people got a free product. Whoops, right? And they liked it. Good. I go back to my audience and say, hey, listen, you didn’t show up. I’m gonna sell this product for 27 bucks or whatever. I’ll give you a second chance. Buy it for $17 for the next 48 hours. And then it converted like crazy. It blew my mind that the thing that the people wouldn’t show up to for free the day before they now are willing to pay for. The conversion rate was really high on that. But here’s what’s cool. I’ve now got a really positive experience in a low-risk environment of doing a webinar. So the next time I do a webinar is I say, hey, listen, I got this training that I do on this. It was copywriting, believe it or not. I had published a book called Three Hour Ad. And the premise was you can write good enough copy in three hours or less from start to finish. That was the whole hook.

Rob Marsh: I like it. I’m ready to buy.

Jason Fladlien: Yeah, and it was a 12-step process, basically. So I said, you know, these are the five types of headlines that I write. These are the five types of leads that I choose from. These are the five types of bullet points, blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada. So I said, hey, listen, you guys like this product. Many of you bought it and thought it was a really good product. I’m going to teach you the same thing that’s in that $17 e-book, but instead of doing it in an e-book, I’m going to do it over a series of webinars. 12 webinars, one per step seemed very logical to me. If you want to buy, it’s $197. I’m going to take a small audience through it. And I sold that thing out. And by the way, up until that time, Rob, I had never sold anything for more than $47. This is a big ticket for me back then. And so I trained for 12 weeks, one hour, two hours per week. So by the time that that course was finished, I had been now 24 hours on webinars, plus the four hours from the previous training, 28 hours of webinar experience in a single month. Okay. I’m good at training and people like it. And I’ve gotten the technical stuff down. So the next thing that I do is I say, hey, listen, that class went really well. So let me do a webinar to sell the next series of webinars because it’s very logical. Hey, did you like this one webinar we did? Yeah, it was awesome. Want to do it 12 more times or eight more times or nine more times or however many more times? Yes, of course. Sell it for 200 bucks. And so that was the next thing that I did. But see this gradual stair-step approach? Rob, most people want to go out there and they want to do the whiz-bang fancy sales pitch to cold audience webinar from day one. That’s like fighting the black belt in your first day in karate. That’s insane. You ain’t ready for that yet. And so no wonder they inevitably fail. Get your reps in first. Use webinars. Use portions of the webinars. And then once you get positive results from that, add in the next layers on top of that, and you’ll get there faster doing it that way, actually. And so by the time I was now selling, using webinars to sell things that were not other webinars, I had probably put in 40 real-world hours with real people in real environments on webinars before I ever even took the step of what most people want to jump to immediately.

Rob Marsh: When you sit down to write a webinar, what are the first steps? What are the things you’re lining up? And I should mention, you’ve got an entire book on this, one too many. Everybody who uses webinars to sell or writes them for clients ought to have it on their shelf. It walks through templates and all kinds of the stuff that you’re talking about here. But what are the things that you’re like, okay, I’ve got to have this stuff in front of me. And first thing I’m starting with is, is it offer, is it headline, is it promises, is it call to action? Where do you go?

Jason Fladlien: 80% of the time it starts with the offer. So the first slide I usually will write is what I call the call to action slide. And it goes like this. If I had only one slide to sell, what would that slide look like? And so that slide lists every single deliverable that they get. It lists the guarantee. If there’s a guarantee, it lists the price. It lists the call to action. If I have a really cool proof element that I could put on that slide as well, I do that. And now I know everything that I have. And that’s the one slide. So then I say, OK, each deliverable now that needs its own slide. So then I start building out those slides as well. And typically a deliverable will use you need about three to four slides to really sell each deliverable. So. Let’s say, for example, one of the products that I sell on a webinar is how to create info products. So I do a webinar.

Rob Marsh: It’s a really good webinar, by the way. Anybody should get on your list and look for that product because the way you stack the offer, in my opinion, is top notch. I mean, you’re the best at it, for sure. Thank you.

Jason Fladlien: Yeah, so it’s for a product we call Product E-Class, and it’s only 500 bucks. It’s a great lead gen of paid clients. It’s a mid-ticket offer, and we can convert very high on that webinar. One of the deliverables for Product D-Class, there’s a lot of them. Let me think of the one that would be the best as an example there, because God, I do some really fancy stuff with these offers that is a little bit advanced, but I’ll give you a really basic one. One of them is like 101 product ideas. One of the reasons we include that as a deliverable is because years ago on a webinar, I would get the objection, well, Jason, what if I don’t know what to create an info product on? And instead of just, you know, saying, Hey, well, you’re going to be able to find out young buck, right? It was like, I just give them a bonus. You’re going to create an info product on one of these. And so I have a deliverable that not only has these really good, uh, different types of products that are like winners that you could easily twist into your own unique version. I then show you how to take those, combine those together and create even new things that are in demand. And it gives you such a high degree of confidence that no matter what, you’re going to have a killer product idea. And so that’s a deliverable. And so I will write out two or three or so slides that will sell the value of that. Here’s what it is. Here’s why it’s awesome. Here’s what life will be like once you use this. That’s typically the formula, right? Then I try to eliminate as much of that as I possibly can, so maybe I get it down to one or two slides. Then do I have proof that can show how cool it is? In that case, I have an animated GIF of me scrolling through the product and they say, wow, I want that. You build out a deliverable like that. Another deliverable I do, this is a conditional bonus, is a really powerful way of making an offer. is I say, hey, you know, my consulting time, by the way, is $3,500 an hour. That’s not a made up price anchor. That’s like people. Far more people pay me that than I can even take on at this point, right? My calendar is fully booked for the time I allow for that as a consult, consulting. One of the bonuses I offer for Product D class is a half an hour of consulting with me. That’s a legit retail value of $1,750 on a $500 product. It’s stupid. It doesn’t make any sense. Now, here’s the catch. It’s conditional. And I let them know it’s conditional. I say, once you use these strategies and you sell $10,000 of an info product, then you get to book a call with me. I’m happy to do that half hour. Rob, worst case scenario, I get another testimonial that I can use in my marketing, right? But that’s a great bonus. So I know that that’s one of the deliverables. So I’m going to write a couple of slides around that deliverable. And then I have another bonus where I give them three resale rights to products that I’ve already created. And that kills the objection. What’s the objection? What if I don’t have a product by the time I take your class? Well, you’ll have three. Yeah, they’re not yours, but you still have them. And so that you when you start adding these up for a $500 product, it’s stupid. It’s like only an idiot wouldn’t buy it at that price point, right? So that’s where we start. So I build out those offers, I all of those slides, and I might have 15 or 20 or 30 slides just on the deliverables. I also do a better than money back guarantee. So I basically say, hey, listen, all you have to do is document your progress twice a day for 60 days straight. And if you don’t make twice your money back on this course, I will pay you twice your money back. So I have to build that out over a couple of slides. And yeah, this is just completely insane at this point in time.

But now I have my offer, my whole offer section, that’s all built out. And that’s where I will start on a webinar. And then what’s cool is when I create the content section, which is what I’ll create next, a big part of that is how do I set up the offer? Like, what are things that I can do to then get people excited about what this offer is? Now, everything I just talked about was deliverables as bonuses. Those are free stuff. The actual thing that they get is they get, I think it’s six or eight weeks of training recorded one one session per week, where we focus on strategy. So I have eight different ways that I can make money with with info products, eight unique separate models, and they get all eight of those models, or all six of them, I think it’s six at this point. So that’s the core offer. And that I’m like, how do I set that up? How do I use what’s in the content to set up what’s in the offer? And so that’s when I’ll create the content next. What I try to do, Rob, there is I have a paradigm shift. The number one thing I think about in a webinar, in the content portion of it, is what’s the biggest excuse that would stop somebody from doing this? And how do I destroy that excuse so they no longer have it? And so with info products, the biggest excuse they have is I’m never going to get it done. It’s going to take too long. It’s going to be too hard. I’m not an expert. I’m not qualified in order to do it. I don’t know how to drive traffic to it. It’s impossible. I mean, that’s the attitude coming in. They’re like, God, I want it. I wish I had it. I would be so happy. Oh, my God, my world be so good. But this is the excuse.

Rob Marsh: Well, and there’s probably a bunch of people who have tried it and failed because it’s not the easiest thing to do. Right. So yeah.

Jason Fladlien: So my paradigm on that webinar is you’re going to create a product in one sitting. That solves one problem with one solution, and you’re going to sell it at a stupid low price. That’s it. So you will get it done. Is it perfect? Hell, no, it’s not perfect. Are you going to retire from it? Nope, you’re not going to retire from it. But look at all of these amazing things that you can do. So one of the examples I give in that webinar is I show, hey, here’s a book on Amazon. It’s like 270 pages that I read that I bought and I read and it’s like 10 bucks. I said, now, let me let me tell you, there was one page in that book that changed everything for me. And I show that page in the book. I said, Now, let me ask you a question, because that page had like a four step process. If I took that one page, and then took each step and only wrote a page per step, and then wrote one page for the introduction and one page for the conclusion. The result is a six-page e-book. And we sold it for half the price of a 354-page regular book. So regular books, 10 bucks on Amazon, 354 pages. My model would take that same book, make it six pages, sell it for five bucks. And then I asked the audience a question, what do you think people would prefer? The six-page $5 book or the 350-page $10 book?

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I mean, almost everybody wants to start at least with the six page intro, right?

Jason Fladlien: What’s easier to sell? Six pages or 350 pages? What’s easier to create? What’s easier to call out to people? Because the 350 pages is a broad mass market appeal. The six pages, as you can point it at some very narrow audience very specifically and cut through the noise, right? Now, this takes about 15 minutes to explain, because this is a concept that I want to make sure everybody in the world can understand 100 percent. clarity and certainty. So I got to create content around that. So a majority of that webinar is proving that one point. This is where less is more. This is where the right type of research, knowing how to shape and communicate products in a specific fashion designed to sell them in this context. This is how anybody who knows this strategy can be successful with it. And you don’t have to be an expert, and you don’t have to take six months, and you don’t have to do all these complicated things, and you’re gonna sell it incredibly cheaply because you’re new. And people can believe that. People can understand that. People can accept that. And then you’ve got to remember, now here’s the transition to the pitch. Once you do this, then you can take all these other models that I know about info products. Because I can show you 100, because I’ve sold over $100 million worth of them. I can show you all the other strategies. But you’ve got to start with the first brick. And then you can add the bricks to it. And then you get this bonus. And you get that bonus. And you get this bonus. And you get that bonus. And you get a double your money back guarantee. And people are like, if I’m ever even thinking about doing anything in the info product space, I’d be a complete moron if I didn’t buy this offer. And that’s how the whole thing is kind of structured. And then once you have the content, then you write the intro and you write the transition for it. Those are the, yeah, I write the intro last because how do I know what to introduce until I’ve created it? And then the transition is what’s the easiest way to shift them from learning something to wanting to own the thing that you’re selling them. And so then those are the, uh, the other two pieces we connect together.

Rob Marsh: So I’m going to try to link to that webinar in the show notes for this episode. I’ve watched it a couple of times. Like I said, I think the way you stack everything there is just so good. It’s a masterclass on webinars, which then you also have, you know, you do the same thing with webinars and you’ve got several products where you do the same kind of thing. So I’ll definitely link to it because, again, I think a lot of copywriters could learn a lot about webinars just watching it. And of course, they probably ought to buy the product, too. especially if they want their own digital products. I want to ask you about AI and how AI is changing what we’re doing, particularly with webinars in the sales space. Or is it changing? Is it something that you’re paying attention to? What are you doing differently now that AI is becoming a big part of marketing, really?

Jason Fladlien: Yeah, I’m very nervous on how people are using AI in their webinars right now. Because if you ask it, write a webinar like Jason Fladlin, it’ll get about 70% of it right. 20% of it, it will deviate in a non important way. And then 10% of it, it will be disastrous if you implement it, okay? I just got back from France, Rob. We went there for 21 days. We rented a Peugeot, which is like, you know, some European vehicle. And over in Europe, you don’t know if a car takes diesel or it takes gas. Like, you just don’t know, right? And to make matters worse, I’ve driven Teslas for 10 years, so I was telling my wife, I’m like, I haven’t pumped gas in a decade. I was nervous because I hadn’t pumped gas before and now we’re in a foreign country. And she said, I know, I’ll just ask Chad GPT. And Chad GPT tells her that this Peugeot takes diesel. And I go, I know it doesn’t because I opened it up and I showed her, see, this thing takes gas. And if we would have listened to stupid Chad GPT, we would have put diesel in a gas vehicle. And same thing with chess right now. If you try to have ChatGPT play chess, it will make up rules that don’t exist, and it will move pieces that don’t exist. So a lot of people are thinking, cheap bastards that they are, hey, I’m not going to buy Jason’s stuff. I’m just going to use ChatGPT. that will lose you more money than paying right now for what I’m doing. So now here’s how we’ve been able to help clients use AI to write better webinars. It’s not a widespread approach. It’s a scattershot narrow approach.

So we only train it on my material. We don’t allow it to deviate from my material. And we do it at a hyper-granular level. So we teach it a technique that might take up five slides. And so it’s a lot of preparation. To create a little GPT or a little agent on the thing, that outputs may be something that adds two minutes to your webinar, but we know then with absolute certainty that it’s doing things right, because we make its scope so very small that it can’t deviate outside of that scope. And as of now, that’s the only way that we can control the quality of the output. And so what I did, Rob, and this has taken me about 40 hours now, I sat down and created, fill in the blanks, for all of these micro slices of a webinar. I went through all of my best webinars and anytime I saw any technique that I use that could be fill in the blanks, I could create a structure around it, I wrote the structure. Then we created three examples and three different niches on how to apply the structure and then train the AI on that. And then now the AI for that one technique or that one tactic can do it incredibly well, better than most human beings can do it, with rare exception, and faster, of course. And that’s what we’re doing it. So if you actually dissect a webinar and you try to reconstruct it, there might be 86, 96, 106 different little GPTs that you could build it around. And that’s how we’re doing it. Because damn it, there’s too much money not to do it right. And so I’ll give you I’ll give you an example. I’m doing this at the top of my head. So I might get this slightly wrong. But one of the intros that I create in webinars goes along this way. Well, maybe I maybe I have a fill in the blank that I can show you here. Yeah, let me just pull up one. I’m sure I could find one. I’ll give you an example. Because what I’m learning now is, the more I can give people the things that they can use with the least amount of ways that they could screw it up.

Rob Marsh: That’s just, that’s just offer 101, right? Like, how do I make this easy for you to get the result you need?

Jason Fladlien: Yeah, but it’s like, God, yeah, if I let them kind of even think for themselves, like even my clients until they get to a certain point, man, it just doesn’t. They kind of mess it up a lot of times. So let me let me find one of these intros. I’ll give you an example, OK? And this is the fill in the blanks. So this is a good way to start a webinar. You say to them, I stand today before you with a tall task, a challenge, a great duty that I feel obligated to do my absolute best at. Now, if I can meet this challenge, then I will insert accomplishment here and insert another accomplishment here. Plus, I’ll finally be able to put an end to your insert problem here and insert other problem here. So you can insert specific results here. My goal here today, my job, my duty then is to present to you the very best insert type of information on insert topics so you can insert benefits here and so I can insert your own benefits as a presenter. I come to you today with a message more timely than ever, more important than ever, more impactful than ever, yet a message that is more neglected and overlooked than ever and a message most people are unfairly resistant to even though it holds the key to insert solution that they desperately desire here.

That’s a GPT that we can put in place that if people follow, we’ll give them the first three minutes of their webinar, maybe, or two, or four. But it comes from an intro that I’ve done very successfully in a webinar in the past, where if you just listen to the hook of it, I stand today before you with a tall task, a challenge, a great duty that I feel obligated to do my absolute best at. It’s dramatic immediately. There’s poetry. And there’s meter and there’s rhythm on how the words are delivered, which is kind of important, right? And then, you know, I start to add these things. And if I can meet this challenge, then I will be able to say that I blah, blah, blah. And I will be able to feel proud about how I was able to help you. And it’s like, oh my God, now it’s your selfish best interest. So a lot of people, when they do a webinar, they screw it up. They never tell the audience why they’re doing the webinar. It’s insane to me, Rob, right? Because if you don’t speak it out loud, then at least subconsciously there’s going to be resistance.

What’s the catch? What’s the angle? Why is this guy, out of the goodness of his own heart, training me? So many webinars miss that. So there’s a lot of ways you can address that. The best way is selfishness. Hey, I’m doing this webinar because it’s gonna make me a bunch of money. There’s not a better reason why that I’ve ever found than that, right? Oh, yeah, you’re gonna benefit too, but this is selfish for me. But you don’t care because it’s so good for you that it doesn’t matter, right? And so like, I baked that in so people could have a reason why for it. Here’s how it benefits me as a presenter, not just here’s how it benefits you as an attendee. I address an objection immediately in the beginning of the webinar, which is always important, because I say in this one, I say, yet a message that is more neglected and overlooked than ever, a message most people are unfairly resistant toward. I’m already bringing up their excuse. Now, a lot of people that do webinars are afraid to do that. But what I found is if you can immediately as fast as possible, put them in the state of like, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get through to you because you cling to your problem as if it has value, right? The better you and the quicker you can do that, the better you’re likely to sell to somebody. The more direct you can be about the reasons why they won’t buy from you at the end, the more they will end up buying from you at the end. And so we dig that in there. Yeah, so that’s how that works. But again, that’s two or three minutes of a webinar. Now, I’ll give you another one. So this is during the pain section of the introduction of the webinar, because immediately in the first three minutes, I like to challenge all of their misconceptions.

So here’s a piece of copy that we’re putting into AI that will do that. It goes like this. Before diving in, let’s clear up some misconceptions that keep insert audience with problem. Misconception number one, insert excuse. Tell why it’s not a valid excuse. Then say, we’ll discuss more of this later. That’s an open loop, right? Misconception number two, put the excuse in there, explain. and why it’s not a valid excuse, and then say, once I show you the specifics, this will completely change the game for you. That’s a second open loop, right? Then misconception number three, put that excuse in there, explain why it’s not a valid excuse, and then say, by focusing on what I’ll show you, then this will become insert benefit here, instead of disadvantage that you currently think it is. Now, we’ve opened three loops, we’ve addressed the problem, we promised a solution to it, we haven’t told what that solution is. And AI will be really good at knowing what the excuses are. Now, here’s how we are using it currently. We say, give me 12 excuses or 15 or 20 excuses that this audience might have. And then we manually pick the three or four that we think are the legitimate actual excuses. So instead of me having to really think hard about the excuses, I get a pick of 20. This is no different than how I rate bullet points, Rob, and most copywriters. All right, 200 bullet points or 50 bullet points, and then I’ll throw away 30 or 40 of them and I’ll keep five or 10 that are really good. Or maybe I’ll combine a couple together. So it’s like, you know, give me 27 excuses that people that are in this specific niche might have, and then I will pick the three or four or five. out of it, and that’s how we’re using that. And then again, that’s another two minutes of the webinar. Here’s what people want, Rob, and it almost never works. They want to feed a script in, they want AI to spit out the whole webinar for them.

Rob Marsh: And they would have the AI deliver it if they could as well.

Jason Fladlien: And that would be very sad. Or happy for me, because I will make a sale that you will lose, but sad for you, it’s not there yet. Could it be there one day? I don’t know. I do know it’s not there yet. But if I can get it to give me two minutes here, two minutes here, two minutes here, two minutes there, and that cuts my writing time in half, and I can outsource some of this now that I was having trouble outsourcing it with before, that’s where the win is for now. And that’s how we’re using AI. And to me, that’s very exciting. It’s also exciting too, because my clients, they don’t have a lot of confidence in themselves. Most of them don’t. So if a robot tells them it’s okay, then all of a sudden they can move forward with it. So that’s the other way we’re using AI. Well, the AI… Permission. Yeah, it’s permission, right? It’s psychological. It’s not actual, right?

Rob Marsh: Same reason people get certifications. It’s literally permission to do the thing that you probably already know how to do.

Jason Fladlien: They can blame the bot if it doesn’t work instead of themselves. Right. Exactly.

Rob Marsh: Exactly. Well, Jason, we’re out of time. And at three thousand dollars an hour, I’m not sure I can pull you away from your other clients. You know, keep talking about all this stuff. I just want to encourage anybody who’s been listening and intrigued by what you’ve shared to jump on your list. You write about all of this stuff almost daily. Maybe it’s daily. It shows up in my inbox a lot. So And beyond that, you even talk about things like your personal operating system, the prosperity algorithms and other stuff so they can learn from you. But where’s the number one place that they should be going to connect with you and where you’re sharing with your audience right now?

Jason Fladlien: Yeah, we’re building Instagram. So, I did all this stuff without any social media. So, follow me on Instagram. It’s just at Jason Fladlien and definitely get the book One to Many. It’s on Amazon.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, fantastic book. I’ve got it on the shelf behind me and every time I sit down to work on a webinar, I pull it out. There’s just so much good information in there that I’m sure I’m screwing up that extra 30% like the AI is, but it’s worth having.

Jason Fladlien: It’s better to have a webinar out there than no webinar at all, right? Exactly.

Rob Marsh: Thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it, Jason.

Jason Fladlien: All right, thanks, Rob.

Rob Marsh: Thanks Jason Fladlin for walking through webinars and creating digital products, as well as sharing his process for learning copywriting. If you listened to the throwback episode with Jason Rutkowski that we published last month at the end of December 2024, you probably picked up on some similarities between how both Jasons broke down the elements of copy into reusable blocks that could be pieced together like a Lego model. Having 10 to 12 go-to headline formulas and another 10 hooks that you can reuse and blocks for guarantees and calls to action and proof elements, authority building, overcoming objections. When you have all of these, assembling a sales page or a sales email or a webinar becomes so much easier. You just take one block and mix it with the next. And the very best way to get all of those is to read copy, break it down into its components, and create your own swipe file of copy blocks. That takes a lot of work. You heard Jason Fladlin say that it took him about eight months of constant work. But once you know them, they’re always there at your fingertips to use on every new assignment that you take on. This is something that I’ve been thinking about working on myself. I’ve got several folders full of these kinds of examples, but adding some structured swipe file study time to my own day may help me improve even more, and I invite you to do that as well.

I mentioned that we would like to link to a couple of Jason’s webinars in the show notes for this episode of the podcast. I’ve done that, but links change from time to time. So hopefully these will still be working if you listen a few weeks or even a few months after today’s episode goes live. Those webinars, those sales pages are really worth watching and checking out and even studying, even if you have no intention of buying the products that Jason mentions. Jason is a master seller. You’re going to learn from watching him or listening to what he has to say. But more than that, notice at what point in the webinar you go from, I’m just watching this to learn to, actually, maybe I should buy this product. Because if you understand how Jason makes this happen, you’re going to be a better copywriter. So check out those links in the show notes, then set aside some time to watch the webinars. I’m not an affiliate for any of these programs. I’m simply sharing because when you see someone selling this effectively, it’s worth paying extra attention to.

One more thing, Jason’s book called One to Many is an easy way to learn the basic format for webinars that actually work. He shares some of those copy blocks that I mentioned a couple of moments ago in the book. So you can be sure to check that out as well. It’s also linked in the show notes.

Stuff to check out:

Jude’s Book (audio)
Get The Questions
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  A couple of months ago, I scheduled a catch-up call with my friend Jude Charles. Jude has been a guest on the podcast and a speaker at several of our TCCIRL live events. But we hadn’t talked in several months so we hopped on Zoom to catch up on what we were both doing. During our catch-up, our discussion got personal and a bit vulnerable and we shared some of the things we were working on and working through. And we both realized we probably should have been recording the call because there are probably a few people who could benefit from the insights we were sharing.

Some of the questions that came up included… What lights you up in your day-to-day life? Or in your work? Who are you showing up for? Who are you making a difference for with your work? And what do you do each day that requires courage? 

It was too late to hit record on that discussion, but we scheduled a time to revisit some of these ideas and this time we did hit record. That’s what you’ll hear if you continue to listen in on this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. This discussion is a bit different from the typical interview we usually share, but I think you’re going to like the change in topic and tone—at least for this episode so keep listening.

But first, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. You’ve heard me talk about the monthly trainings—the next one happens this week and is all about how to land a “real job” for a client where you are their PT or FT copywriter. That’s happening tomorrow on the day this episode goes live. And of course it will be recorded and shared in The Underground training vault along with dozens of other trainings on building your authority and audience, on launch strategy, on building an email list, on research, on creating new products and services and so much more. To get your hands on all that training for less than you’ll spend on a single night out with your spouse or partner, visit thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

And now, let’s go to our discussion with Jude Charles. 

Welcome back to the podcast. You’ve been here before. You know the drill. You were on episode number 217, where you talked about the demonstration of proof. And then you came back for an ensemble episode, if I remember right, 279, where you were chatting a little bit about burnout with a couple of other people and just kind of talking about how copywriters can deal with that. You and I reconnected a couple of months ago and we were just chatting and I think it was, we were chatting. I can’t remember which one of us said this, but we were like, we should be recording this. Cause it was a really, really good discussion. And so I’m thrilled to have you back. So we normally start out with your story, but since we’ve done that before, just kind of catch us up. What’s been going on this last year or two?

Jude Charles: Yeah. So I, Ironically, I think I’ve been going through a process of reinvention, maybe for the last, it feels like the last five years, it’s probably been less than that. It started at TCC IRL, where we’ve talked about it. I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about it online, but offline, we’ve talked about how you challenged me to get on stage and to share my expertise and what I had to offer. I was scared out of my mind the first time I did it. It was back in 2019. I remember I had been to TCC IRL the first year, which was only about 50 people. And then I came back the next year and it was much bigger than I was expecting. But yeah, I remember just almost like walking away from that and saying, you know what, I can’t do this. Because I went to tech check the rehearsal. And I remember looking at the room and I’m just like, I can’t speak in front of all these people. Like, this is crazy. But I pushed past my comfort zone and did it. And that’s what started this journey that’s what I feel like has been a process of reinvention for the last five years, where I have been on over 150 podcasts as a guest. speaking and sharing and sharing my purpose, which I believe is to lead and empower entrepreneurs to have relentless courage, but also sharing just my own journey vulnerably about my experiences going beyond business. And so in the last two years, I have been contemplating this transition that I’d kind of put out in the atmosphere that I would walk away from video production. But I think in 2014, not 2014, 2024, what was of wild for me is that it was the year that I received the most messages from people that basically told me how I, through my voice, I changed their life. And I don’t know if I shared this with you, I had to have when we were talking last, because I think it had happened already, but I got this one email from a lady back in November, and it started with this line that immediately caught my attention. It was a very long email, and I wasn’t gonna read it at first, but it was this line at the beginning that said, my father died a week after walking me down the aisle.

Rob Marsh: That’s a great line. That is a really, really good hook. Sad, sad as well.

Jude Charles: Right, and she’s not a copywriter, I was just like, wait, where is this going? Because it’s in response to an email that I send out that you probably remember is the email that I talk about right before my 30th birthday, I went to Colombia, the country of Colombia, and got lost pretty much. And so at the end of the email, I asked readers, what did you do for your last birthday? And so she starts that way. And it’s like, wait, she’s not answering the question, but she’s going on this long journey. And ultimately, what she shared with me is that, She lost her dad back in 2010, right after she got married. And then most recently, she lost her uncle, which is her dad’s brother. And in losing her dad’s brother, she felt like she was losing this connection to her dad. And she was spending time remembering her dad. He used to wear this hat called Life is Good. And she was like, his whole life, he never wore a hat. But just about a month before he passed away, he started wearing this hat, and on the hat it said, life is good. She couldn’t figure out why he was wearing this hat. But in losing her uncle, thinking about her dad, she decided she needed to hear a calm voice. And so she looked up my name on the podcast app. 

Now, I don’t have a podcast, but like I mentioned, I’ve been on over 150 podcasts. And she’s obviously heard me on maybe one or two, and so she looked it up, and what she decided to click on was a podcast I did recently that’s not in her industry. She sells draperies and blinds, window blinds, right? But she clicked on a podcast that I think was called something like How to Grow Your Etsy Business or something like that. And she listens to this hour-long podcast, but in the last two minutes of this podcast, the podcast host asks me, hey, what books are you reading right now? And I share with her, you know, two books that I’m reading. And then she’s like, I want to send you this book. And I think you’ll really love it. The book is called Life is Good. And it’s behind the brand that is Life is Good. And it was all this lady needed that went to go listen to this podcast to feel a deep connection with her dad again. 

And Rob, as I read this email, I started crying because I think to myself how I downplay sometimes. about the idea of me getting on podcasts and sharing and talking and doing all these things. And of course, I get on and talk about storytelling and what I’ve done in the last 18 years. But then there are people who need, in a dire moment, they need something different. They need something deeper. And what are the odds that this lady clicks on something that is not in her industry, that she finds an answer to her problem that has nothing to do with video production or storytelling, which is what I do, but it’s exactly what she needed. 

And so this year, you asked me what I’ve been up to this last year is like figuring all of that out because the process of reinvention is not just about how do I grow in this industry that I’m in or how do I scale the business to this big thing? It’s like, how do you grow you? Right? And I know that’s the conversation we started and that’s what I’ve been thinking, even as I, every year I take two months off, June and December, I’m just coming off of my December break. And it’s a lot of what I spent time thinking about because when I did my analysis, I realized there were 16 different messages I got last year that I didn’t, I didn’t tally it up in the beginning. I wasn’t really paying attention to it in the beginning, but after going through the analysis and realizing, wait, I’m living out my purpose in a much different way than I expected. So that’s what I’ve been up to. That’s so interesting.

Rob Marsh: I want to ask you about, well, I want to go back basically to that first couple of talks, podcasts, whatever, because it’s really interesting to me that that was so hard for you because you’re the guy who’s behind the camera, forcing other people to step up and tell their stories. You’ve been doing that for years. Years, yep. And as soon as the tables are turned, it’s a struggle. Talk a little bit about that and the realization of how hard it is to put yourself, I mean, I’m guessing you found a new bit of compassion or empathy for the people that you’re talking to on the other side because now you’re not just the one telling them to do it. You’re the one that’s gone through that process yourself and you know how hard it is.

Jude Charles: Yeah, it was a 13-year process that I had my head down before I ever decided I was going to get on stage and talk about what I do, or not even just being on stage. It’s just public speaking in general. I had never really done public speaking before that. Other than doing presentations to clients, I had never taken the time to say, hey, this is my expertise. I’m going to share it with a wide audience and just see how it goes. I’d never uploaded YouTube videos or anything like that. Even though I had social media, I wasn’t promoting my business on social media. I was just putting up random pictures, random videos. 

And so, yeah, having gone through that first year, I’ll say, one, being on stage at TCC IRL gave me the courage, because it wasn’t just that I did it. That was cool. It was what people had to say after that really surprised me. They came up. I remember telling the skydiving story, and I started with that. I can’t remember her name, but there was someone that came up to me. She was one of the first people that came up to me after I got off stage, and she was just like, thank you for your vulnerability. She was like, I had no idea who you were, but in the first five minutes you told me this story, and she’s like, I feel like I know you now. 

And then another year at TCC, because I’ve spoken multiple years, I remember when I talked about burnout, there was another woman who came up and she was just like, I didn’t know what I was going through until you started sharing your story. And now I realize the symptoms, and I can go get help. It was never easy to tell these stories or to get on stage or to get on podcasts. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know if it would work. What was most surprising is what people would take away from what I was sharing that in theory I knew was like, oh, this is something that was powerful for me, but I didn’t know it would be powerful for others. I think It was, I didn’t understand, like you mentioned, the empathy that, I didn’t understand what my clients are going through when they would be afraid of how they look on camera, or they would be afraid of how they sound even. A lot of people don’t like the way their voice sounds. 

Because I’ve wanted to get better at public speaking, every podcast I’ve ever been on, I go back and listen to. and now I get it. I’m like, what was I saying there? Why was I saying, or why do I sound like that? There are times I see myself on camera and I’m just like, I must have been tired that day. It hasn’t been easy, but I look at it as, it’s still not easy. Even getting on this podcast this morning, it’s still not easy. But I look at it as an opportunity to just be human, to forget everything else and just be human and have this one-on-one connection. I think about, I literally replay in my mind what is my purpose and it’s to lead and empower entrepreneurs to have relentless courage. And if I walk away just having given you more courage today, Rob, that’s all that matters. It doesn’t matter how I sound. It doesn’t matter if I’m getting the words out right. It just matters that I share what I have.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. I mean, this is tactical, but I struggled with the same thing. I mean, I’ve done the podcast now. We’re closing in on 470 episodes. There’s a bunch of unnumbered episodes beyond what we have. I go back. I listen to every one of them as we go through the edit process and I hear myself talk. I hate it. 450 plus episodes later, I still hate it. It’s not because I don’t like my voice. I’m fine with my voice, the way that I sound. It’s that even after doing this literally for 500 hours, I still sometimes stumble to get a question. I pause, like I’m doing right now. As I’m thinking, I say, um and all that stuff. And it just kills me to listen to it. And yet, I will say, I’m really proud of the fact that for seven and a half years, almost eight years, maybe eight years, I’ll have to add it all up, since 2017, January 1st, we have released at least one podcast episode every single week, never missed, which has been, I mean, it’s a great run, right? And I’ve heard like you from a lot of people who say this podcast is the thing that got them started on copywriting or taught them that they had permission to raise their prices or help them understand that something was even a niche. And so like you, I feel a responsibility in a lot of ways to keep showing up even though there are plenty of days when I sit down and I think the last thing I want to do today is edit a podcast, listen to my own voice, stumbling to ask a question. I just think we need a lot more of this from everybody. It’s probably not a podcast for most people. Maybe it’s a book or maybe it’s, you know, regularly posting something different, outstanding, whatever, wherever it is that people post. Or maybe it’s just calling up a friend and having it, you know, talking with them, somebody that you haven’t talked with in a few weeks, right? There’s so many ways that this shows up.

Jude Charles: What was it for you though that, like, yes, you mentioned you’ve done this pretty much at this point, 500 hours, 500 episodes, but what was it for you that was like, If I don’t show up, this person won’t get what they need. I’m asking specifically that thing because I think to your point of it’s hard on certain days where it’s just like, I don’t really want to do this. I don’t really want to write another email. I don’t want to get on stage and speak. What was it that shifted for you or that reminds you? Because for me, that story of this woman and life is good is now anchored. That’s my anchor point now. What was it for you? Was there a moment that got you?

Rob Marsh: There are two things. One is a moment, but the first thing is the habit. Because I have done it for so long, every single week, the habit is there. It’s on my calendar, it’s in the back of my head. If I don’t have podcast guests scheduled a few weeks out, I start thinking who can I talk to that would bring something of value, talk about something a little bit differently. or have a different kind of conversation. So that’s always there. So the habit kind of forces it to happen. But there are times when I’ve thought, okay, well, maybe now is the time to quit. So a couple of weeks ago, I addressed on the podcast that Kira is no longer actively participating in the business. And when she just made that decision, that was an opportunity to say, well, maybe now is the time to pull the plug and do something different. And I had a conversation with Linda Perry, my friend. You know Linda well, I believe. Yep. She’s been on the podcast four times, five times. An awesome individual. And as we were talking, she just said, you can’t stop this because too many people need this podcast, the information, the ideas, the connection. 

She didn’t necessarily say why, but I think a big part of that is copywriting and content writing and even marketing to some extent is a very lonely venture, especially those of us that are freelancing. Most of us don’t see another adult other than maybe our spouse the entire day, unless we happen to go grocery shopping or maybe you run out for your coffee or whatever it is. And so this connection that happens through a podcast and being able to have a discussion with you, it’s not just about you and me. But there are ultimately 5,000 to 7,000 people who are going to be listening to this over the next couple of weeks. And hopefully, they get something from that that makes them think a little bit less about, oh, I’m in on this all by myself. No, there’s an army of people doing this too. We just don’t have a great way of connecting with each other except for the Facebook groups and podcasting. 

I’ve mentioned this a couple of times. Podcasting is really personal because unlike every other kind of media in the world, television, magazines, books, billboards, whatever, all of that stuff happens outside of our heads. But because most of us listen to podcasts with headphones, the discussion actually happens inside between our ears. And so it’s very personal. It happens where we do our deepest thinking. And so the ability to bring great ideas or insights or things that people haven’t tried, or even conversations like this, and have it be inside your brain is just, I mean, for me, it’s really gratifying that I’m able to hopefully do that for people. And I’m not patting myself on the back here. I mean, I know there’s some value to a lot of the stuff that we share, but if I didn’t do it, I’m sure somebody else would do it, maybe in a different way. And so it’s not really about me, but it’s about this opportunity to have these kinds of conversations.

Jude Charles: I’d argue it’s not about you though, because I would not… So my journey of speaking and putting myself out there, stepping out of the shadows, that’s what I call it. When I made a conscious decision in 2019 to step out of the shadows, that started with you. And It started because I started listening to the podcast. The only reason I knew about TCC IRL, even though I’m not a copywriter, is because I had been thinking about, okay, what’s next? I had been in business 13 years at that point and I’m, it’s like, okay, I’ve been doing this a long time. I know it’s not my end game. So what’s next? How do I shift this? How do I go to something different? And listening to the podcast for me was really powerful because it showed me what was possible out there. 

But then coming to TCC IRL, and being, transparently, being one of the only few black people there, you can sit in a room and feel lost or feel invisible. and it was just you having a conversation with me saying, hey, I think you should be on stage. You never heard me speak before, but it was just like, you should be on stage. Just getting to know a little bit about what I had been doing, you’re like, you should be on stage and you challenged me because I wasn’t looking for that opportunity. That’s why I say I think some of it has to do with you because I think between you and Kira, you guys have an ability to see things in other people that they can’t see. You guys have been in copywriting for so long, doing great work that you understand the industries so deeply, and still having a student-like mentality, but what you bring, no one else can bring that. Are there other copywriting podcasts? Absolutely. Are there other copywriting resources? Absolutely. 

But truthfully, for me, I haven’t listened to any others or been a part of any other community other than TCC. And I think that has a lot to do with you. It has a lot to do with Kira. So I’d argue that because even for myself, like I mentioned, I downplayed a lot of just, oh, I just get on here and share storytelling. And maybe I share a little bit about who I am, but it’s not that deep. And I’m realizing it is. Because like you mentioned, not only copywriting, marketing is a very lonely world. Entrepreneurship is lonely. And you have to be, you have to make a conscious effort to say that no, I’m not gonna, I’m gonna seek help in whatever way you seek help, whether it’s watching YouTube videos, going to conferences, listening to podcasts. But then I’m actually gonna pay attention to what people are saying and do something about how I’m feeling. Entrepreneurship to me is spiritual. It’s a spiritual journey of stepping out on faith, of finding the thing that feeds your soul, and that happens through the connection we have with people. And I wouldn’t be where I am today. I know you don’t take any credit for where I am today, but I wouldn’t, I genuinely would not be here had it not been for you in New York looking at me and saying, no, you should be on stage.

Rob Marsh: It’s interesting you say that too, because I’m not sure, like you’re right. I did not know you. We had never had a conversation before that day and you were sitting there. Uh, but there was just like this, it was an idea. It’s a thought where it was just like, you need to talk to Jude and say he belongs on stage. Like, and so whether you want to look at that spiritually or whether that was just an idea that, you know, came to me because you happened to be there when I was thinking about what we do next year or next time or whatever. I don’t know how to assign the blame there, but I think you’re probably right. It probably is a spiritual thing. And maybe that was the thing you needed to hear at that time. And I just happened to be the vehicle for it. And I think that that’s why I wanted to have this discussion and record it because I think there’s so many people out there listening that are just waiting for that person to say, it’s time for you to do this. It’s time for you to take the next step. And because we’re all alone, it’s hard to get that person into our lives. to hear that voice.

Jude Charles: Sometimes people have already said it, but we’re not paying attention to it. I still had to make a conscious decision. After you said what you said, I think what my words to you were is I’ll think about it because I had never done it, but I still had to go back home and make a conscious decision. Am I going to do this? Rob has challenged me, but am I going to accept the challenge? Even like I said, I’ve looked at the last year, just what people have been saying. It’s like, okay, what do I do differently now that people have shared this with me? It’s easy. As we’re growing, we’re ambitious entrepreneurs and we want to make more money and all these things. It’s easy to focus so much on what’s missing that you miss what’s actually there.

Rob Marsh: Yeah.

Jude Charles: and what’s there are the strengths that you already have, the messages that you have received from people but you downplayed and like, oh, that thing you just told me I was good at that, oh, that’s nothing, so what, right? I’m not sure what you saw in me that day in 2018, I think it was. I don’t know what you saw, but I know I had to say, okay, he sees something I may not even know what it is. He may not know what it is, but I can nurture this. I can decide I’m gonna do this and figure it out. And I showed up authentically on stage. For those who probably don’t know, when I showed up to TCCIRL 2019, I wore a black cape.

Rob Marsh: By the way, we have that presentation inside the underground if anybody ever wants to check it out. And it’s a great presentation.

Jude Charles: Yes, but it was intimidating. It was intimidating because I am a filmmaker showing up in a room with copywriters, marketers and copywriters. It’s like, what is this guy doing here? I showed up authentically and people loved it and you guys kept inviting me back and so I kept wearing the black cape, but I still had to accept the call. As people think about how do I reinvent myself, it’s the top of the year, I probably didn’t meet my goals last year or I don’t like the way last year went. How do I reinvent myself? 

You got to think about, I think I think about two things often. How do you strengthen your strengths, number one, and number two, what have people shared with you? Message, whether it’s a DM, whether it is an email like I talked about, whether it’s whatever, what have people shared with you? that you’re downplaying, that is probably one of your strengths that you should lean more into. I never had the idea of speaking on stage or talking. I came to TCCIRA that first year because I was like, maybe I can combine copywriting with video. That’s all I was thinking. I was just thinking, how do I grow the business? I was never thinking about, how do I grow me? And going through that journey of speaking more often and now receiving these messages years later is just like, I’ve realized this whole entire time, the process of reinvention has been about growing me, and not just growing the business. 

Yeah, it’s great to make money and all those things, and I’ve done that, but I also needed to grow, and I needed to pay attention to what people were saying to me. It’s not my intention to go through like, oh, this is a spiritual journey, but maybe it really is. You are not some random person that is just here to exist and take up space, right? You’re here to fulfill a purpose, whatever that purpose may be. It may not be necessarily serving clients, but it may be, like you did for me, just sharing something, nudging me to say, I think you should be on stage, and it completely transformed my life. That to me is that spiritual journey that I don’t know how to define it other than you have to answer the call and the call has probably already been put out there.

Rob Marsh: That’s a really good point because most of us have that negative voice in our head, maybe all of us, so we’re always discounting what other people say, especially the good stuff. Of course, we’re magnifying any of the bad stuff that happens. you know, we’re unworthy or we don’t know enough, or there’s somebody out there that’s better at doing this thing. And so that’s always happening. And you even said, maybe that was happening a little bit after I extended the invitation, you sort of had to come over that kind of head trash and be willing to step out. But it’s one thing to say it, you know, oh yeah, you’ve got to take the next step or listen to the person or whatever. But let’s talk about what were the concrete things that you did as you started thinking through this because you didn’t just show up with a presentation. Rob extends an invitation and I know exactly what I’m going to talk about. So how did you get, and it’s not even really to that first presentation, it’s really to where you are today. What are some of those steps that you went through to figure out, okay, this is the next piece. This is the next part that I’m going to fit in here or that I’m going to stretch and reach out for?

Jude Charles: It’s a great question. If I think back to that first presentation I did with TCC IRL, I thought a lot about just what had I already done that I could talk about and how did it tie to copywriting? That was kind of my first thought. But before I even got there, I think Of course, there’s a question of, could I do this? Could I do it? Not just, okay, Rob has given me the opportunity, but could I really do it? I think that question I kept asking over and over, even, like I said, that day that I came to rehearsal to do the mic check, and seeing how big the room is, again, I’m asking myself, could I really do this? I think that question kept coming up for me, because I hadn’t really done it before. Um, what does this mean to do it? Like, what are the opportunities here? You know, I’ve, I’ve always been a risk taker. And I think that part helped me in, like I said, I’ve been an, at that point I was in business 13 years and I know even starting the business, I started the business very young. I was 17 years old. but it was me just kind of being naive, and I think that having that naive spirit helped me to continue to say, well, what’s the worst that could happen? Like, I know I’m gonna be scared. I’m going to, I was very worried about stumbling over my words and not coming off clearly, but I was like, what’s the worst that could happen? 

I could go to this event. I live in Florida, so I had to fly to New York, go to this event, look like an idiot on stage and I’ll never do it again, at least I tried. I think that’s the process that I went through in my mind was at least I tried. There’s a lot of things I tried that didn’t work out. This one happened to work out and I think I had to think through what am I going to do to make it work out. There’s a lot of things I’m not good at and I usually try to find ways to fortify what I’m not good at. A specific example is that when I was really scared to speak at TCC IRL on the day that we did mic check, I really was going through my brain on what I could say to you and Kira to say that I’m not going to do this. Like I really was thinking of all the lies that I could say. And then I really don’t remember, and I’ve been trying to remember how did this idea come up in my head, but I had an idea that I would just record my entire talk. I had written it out. 

So I was like, I’ll record it. And I recorded it on my phone, and then I put on headphones as I went to sleep, and I allowed it to play on repeat. What that did for me was gave me the confidence to speak the next day, because I was just so worried about messing up. So I was like, if I’m so worried about messing up, what can I do to not mess up? I could rehearse it for sure, and I started doing that, but I was like, I’m still not feeling it. So it was like, let me just record it, put it in my phone, let it play on repeat. I had never done that before. Other than playing music when I go to sleep sometimes, I’ve never done where I’m listening to myself give a talk over and over. I don’t know. I don’t know if I saw it on TV or something. I don’t know how I came up with the idea, but I did that and that’s what gave me the courage. Those are the practical steps. I’ve always kind of been a risk taker since I was young, but also I know the things I’m not good at. What can I do to make it easier for me to not necessarily be good at it, but at least get through it? I think that’s kind of what I went through.

Rob Marsh: So as you came off stage immediately, you’ve done the thing. You probably feel pretty good because there was, I think there was a standing ovation. There was, yeah. And people start giving you the feedback. Was your initial thought, good, that’s over, go back to what I’m doing? Or was it like a high and it’s like, I’m going to chase this thing? It was a high.

Jude Charles: It was a complete high. When I walked off stage, I’ll never forget that. I walked off stage and I breathed a very big sigh of relief like, damn, that’s done now. It was a sigh of relief, but it was also like, oh, I actually did good. Because like you mentioned, there was a standing ovation and I wasn’t expecting that. There were jokes that I had in my talk that I wasn’t sure if people were going to laugh. It all went well. But it was a high, not necessarily just getting off stage, it was the high that came after there was a line of people that came to talk to me. Because I think when I spoke, there was a break right after. And there was a line of people coming to talk to me. and it was what they shared of what they took away that I wasn’t expecting them to take away. I thought it was the tips that they were going to take away, but then something else happened that actually you don’t know about. Parris Lampropoulos was right after me, after the break. We had a lunch break and Parris was speaking right after. I remember, I think I’d hung around just because I was taking everything in. Everybody else went to lunch, but I was still sitting in the room just digesting what just happened, everybody that came and said something to me. I was watching Parris prepare for his talk. Parris was doing something that I’d never seen any speaker do. He was going around.

Rob Marsh: I think I know what you’re going to say because I was in the room and I was also, it was one of those things where it was like, wait a second, what is he doing?

Jude Charles: He was walking around touching every chair. And I was like, I’ve never seen this before. But I walked up to him and I asked him. And I was just like, I see you touching every chair, what are you doing? And he ended up telling me, he was just like, his whole idea is about owning the room. He learned it from his mentor, his speaking mentor, own the room. But then he also shared something else with me that I use now. Because I haven’t done the touch the chair thing. That’s very spiritual too, but I haven’t done that. But he gave me another tip that was, he was like, find someone in the front of the room. He was like, it can be very intimidating speaking to a big room of people. I wish he would have told me this before I spoke. But he was like, find the person at the beginning, at the front of the room, the beginning of your talk. And he was like, just look at that person, lock eyes with them the whole time. And he was like, locking eyes with that person owns the room too. Because you forget about everybody else that’s in the room and you’re just talking to one person. And he was like, find that person. And so I’ve been doing that ever since, at least when I get on stage. And when I’m giving stories, there’s stories that are sometimes difficult to share, like when I lost my dad or things like that. And there’s parts in the story where I really lock in, because I’m like, I can’t look around the room. This is too difficult. I need to focus. And so I focus on the person. So I think it was the high, but truthfully, I think it was that, because at that point, I was watching a master. Parris was not only a master in copywriting, but then I’m watching a master who speaks, and he gave a great talk too when I watched it after. It was like, oh, this can be something fun. And so I think it was definitely the high, but it wasn’t just the high of being on stage, it was the high of impact. And it was the high of, if I do this right, if I master this, I unlock something completely different in myself that I didn’t even know I needed to unlock.

Rob Marsh: Your advice or Parris’s advice to find that one person to lock in with, I think is also good advice for podcasts. I think a lot of people are hesitant to go on podcasts because they’re thinking a couple hundred, a couple thousand, maybe a million people will hear me make a fool of myself. And the reality is we’re locked on talking to the guest or to the host, right? And you only have to talk to that one person. And it’s not about the hundreds of listeners who might stumble across whatever it is that you share or talk about. Obviously, you want to show up for a podcast prepared with some notes about what you want to share, or at least an idea of what you’re going to be talking about. so that you don’t make a complete fool of yourself. But you know, when you pitch podcasts, I’m not talking about you specifically Jude, but like all of us, it’s really a one-on-one conversation that then we as audience members get to listen in on and learn from. And so I think that same approach works not just for speaking on stage, but for almost any conversation that we have.

Jude Charles: Yes, it takes this grand idea, this grand thing, or at least something that in our mind we’re making big deal, and it really boils it down to this is how simple it could be. It’s like finding clarity and constraints. I talked about earlier how it’s easy to focus so much on what’s missing that you miss what’s there. And sometimes we can get held back thinking about what holds you back, the things that you’re trying to get to this point in your future, in your life, but you’re so focused on what’s holding you back. That very thing might be the thing to help you move forward. The best time I can think and strategize and write and all these things is when I’m locked in an airplane, in the air, and I can’t do anything else. No Wi-Fi. and I can’t do anything else. And that’s when the best ideas come to me. It’s a constraint. I think it’s the same like you’re talking about with being on a podcast. There’s this constraint. Yes, there might be thousands, hundreds of thousands of people listening or who might hear this, but it’s just me and you right now. And if I just focus on that and even in recording this, we didn’t have much conversation early on because you knew Last time we talked, we needed to record this. Let’s just jump into it. Because of that constraint of time, we’re now having this conversation. I had no idea where it would go, what we would talk about. I didn’t even remember the Parris story until we started talking about it, but that’s that clarity that comes from, yes, I have this thing that is, quote, unquote, holding me back, but what if I looked at that constraint as an elevation instead of a limitation, right? This is the thing to elevate me to the next level, not to hold me back. I try to remind myself of that all the time. The only limitation you have is the one that you create. And I think it’s easy to discount, it’s easy to downplay, it’s easy to give up and say, no, I shouldn’t do that. I’d rather take the risk, try and keep trying. I’ve tried things that at first didn’t feel good. I’m thinking about something. I transitioned to, it wasn’t a complete transition, but I decided to go into a niche. where I would do documentary series for interior designers. So I had been doing documentaries for just entrepreneurs, any type of entrepreneur, as long as they were running a high-level business and they wanted to tell their story, I would do their docu-series. But then I kind of fell into this niche of interior designers, and I remember giving a talk, or going to give a talk once, and I had just decided I’m going all in on this industry, and I had reached out to over 200 interior designers. Cold email. And some of them who had known me, because I’d been on interior design podcasts, some that didn’t. But in their own way, over 200 people that I spoke to, some that I got on calls with, I think maybe about 70 people I got on calls with out of that 200. And in their own way, each one told me no. Or not now, right? And then I remember going to an event in Orlando And I was walking through the hotel before I was speaking at this event. It’s an interior design focused event. I’m speaking at the event. And I remember walking through the hallways and I’m seeing faces and I’m seeing names and they’re saying hi to me. And over and over, it’s these people that have told me no. And immediately I get hit with a wave of rejection because I’m like, It’s one thing to get no through a Zoom call. It’s one thing to get no one at a time. Now I’m having to see their faces. I’m being met with this wave of rejection and I’m like, I got to get out of here. And I had to go back to my room, and I literally, probably almost the same kind of process that I took myself through with, I didn’t record myself, but the same process I took myself through with TCC IRL, I just had to go back to my room and figure out what’s really happening here, because it’s never happened to me before. And I remember, Thinking, going back and thinking about my why, which is to lead and empower entrepreneurs to have relentless courage. And I remember there was a year at TCC IRL, I think it was 2022, the last one, that I was going through burnout and I really didn’t want to be there. Not because I didn’t like TCC IRL, but I was tired.

Rob Marsh: Right.

Jude Charles: And I did accept the invitation, but I was just so tired, still going through burnout. But I remember writing on my watch band. I have an Apple watch and one of my bands are white. And I remember writing something to the effect of, I’m showing up for the one who’s afraid of being in the room right now. And I took myself through that same thought process when I gave this talk in 2023 at the interior design event. And I did my Jenga presentation that I did at TCC IRL. And I remember there was a woman in the room who, one of my last pieces is courage. So I, for those who don’t know, I do a Jenga exercise. where I throw out these pieces and on the pieces, there are words written on the pieces. And one of my last words is courage. And I usually leave that for that one person. I just feel like in the room, they need it most. And I try to figure out who that is, because I have conversations in advance and I try to figure out who’s that person that just needs it most. The year at TCCIRL, gosh, your name just escaped me, but there was the one I went- Was it Robin? Robin, yes, Robin Crump. I wanted her to speak or get on stage and start speaking, so I gave her the courage piece. But there was a woman at this interior design event who was crying the entire time, uncontrollably crying. And I didn’t wanna bring attention to it, so I didn’t throw her the piece, but I went and handed her the piece right after. And she came up to me and she was just like, I don’t know how you knew I needed this. And she was like, this year has just been so hard, and listening to you talk about what you’ve gone through, I needed that courage, I needed this piece. And she was like, I’m gonna put it on my desk, and it’s gonna be my reminder to just have courage every time it gets hard. And I remember thinking after that, I got hit with all this wave of rejection, but luckily I looked back at what is my why? Why am I here? Show up for that one person. And she was the one that needed it most. And that’s… There’s this, I can focus on so much on what’s missing that I miss what’s there, and I would have missed the opportunity to help that one person that, not the whole room, but that one that needed it most. My process of reinvention has been that, just focusing on the one. Not the 10 different people, not the 10 different things I need to do. What’s the one thing? If I do that, it will mean the world. It will mean more than money. It will mean more than anything selfish that I could think of. It would just mean that that one person got impacted. I try to think in terms of that, that constraint is what I give myself and that’s what gives me the clarity to keep showing up and to keep reinventing myself. Yeah, and so I think, yeah, we drill down into the one, we drill down into that thing and that’s what keeps us going.

Rob Marsh: That’s one of the questions that you asked me last time we talked a couple of months ago, is you asked me, who am I showing up for? And I think this is a really good question to ask ourselves anytime. Obviously, there are answers like, well, I’m doing this for my family. I’m providing, you know, those, but in some ways, those are the easy answers. Yeah, because yeah, everybody has to earn a living, at least to some level. And yes, you have to care for the people who you’ve brought into the world or that you’ve partnered with in some way. But there are a lot of other people out there, too, that we should be showing up for or that we could be showing up for and make a massive difference. And I guess this is sort of leading into my question. You do a retreat, like you said, twice a year where you just go and think. I want to know a little bit more about the process and some of the questions that you’re asking yourself. Now, I’m not saying everybody should do a month off twice a year, although that sure sounds nice. I think my wife would kill me if I disappeared for that long. But there is a place for this kind of self-reflection where you can go deep and say, not just who am I showing up for, but how do I reinvent? What are the next steps? And how do you identify those questions and then what are the steps?

Jude Charles: The questions, I’ll start with that. The questions I ask myself, this is a long list, but a lot of it stems around what worked and what didn’t work. What do I wanna start doing? What do I wanna stop doing? I do it, I first started, when I first started this, it was 2013, and I used to do it every November, December. I would take those two months off. And it would work out because business would be slow in that time, it’s the holidays, and I knew I needed that break. After burnout in 2020, I started doing it June and December because it gives me five months of working and one month off. It gives me that cadence. So five months working, one month off, five months working, one month off. And I love it because instead of trying to plan out the whole year, I just focus on the next five months, that next block of five months. And I… When I go on, so June is a bit more of a slowdown, I don’t completely unplug, it’s just I slow down, I don’t do as much work. December is where I completely unplug. And I sit and ask myself those questions of like, what worked, what didn’t work? How did I grow personally? What business and personal challenges did I have? And asking myself those questions, it’s not a one day thing. I think about it, I give some answers, and then I come back to it. and asking myself those questions, it really challenges me to call myself out on BS and to celebrate the wins that I’ve had too. It’s easy to focus so much on what’s wrong or what happened that’s bad because maybe you didn’t meet your goals, but you got to celebrate what happened that was good too. Last year, something that I celebrated is pushing through So when I first decided to go all in on this interior design focused docu-series offering, it was 2023. And like I mentioned, it didn’t go as great as I thought it would go. Well, 2024, I stuck out with it, continued to pitch and find a way to make it work. And I did four interior design focused docu-series last year. And I celebrated that because I started with zero and started with thinking it was going to be a lot easier than what it ended up being. But each and every one that I did in 2024 were amazing projects. Even the last one that I did, I ended up loving that one the most, but they were amazing projects. So I celebrated that. I celebrated how much I grew spiritually, that I did go deeper into my faith and how I how I responded to challenging situations that I felt like I wasn’t responding well to. So I celebrate those things. And then I find the gaps. What do I want to do better? What’s not working? One of the questions that I love, and this came later, it didn’t come at the beginning when I started doing this, but maybe in the last two years, there’s a question I ask myself. So there’s the 80-20 rule, basically that 20% of your input will give you the 80% of results that you’re looking for. But then I found, and I can’t remember how I found it, but I found this idea that what is the 20% of the 20%? What’s that?

Rob Marsh: That’s something Perry Marshall talks about this a lot. The 20% of the 20%.

Jude Charles: Right. And that extra 20%, I did the calculations on it and I realized it’s not really an extra 20. It’s when you put it together, it’s 24%, right? It’s just an extra 4%. But what was, what is that? that really got you what you were looking for? And that question is the game changer for me. I didn’t always notice it. Last year, I took a break from podcasting as a guest, but podcasting has been the biggest difference maker in me, not just my business. In my business, I can definitely account to, at this point, I think maybe about $600,000 worth of business because I started guest podcasting. In me, it’s made a bigger difference. I wouldn’t know that had I not slown down to ask myself the question, to really dig deep, to really look at numbers, to really look at, okay, these are all the messages I got. Why does this matter? All these things. It’s so easy to just keep going and trying to reach the goal, but you need to slow down to speed up. You need to slow down and ask yourself these questions, go really deep, figure out if there’s things that didn’t work, why didn’t it work? What’s the real route? Something I learned last year about myself, I started putting too much pressure on certain goals that I wouldn’t even reach the goal at all because I’m putting so much pressure on it. Instead of focusing on what’s the next thing I need to do to reach the goal, not just the pressure, but What’s the next thing? So for example, if I wanted to close a certain amount of clients, it’s not, oh, I gotta close the client, I gotta close the client. How do I set up the one-on-one to have breakfast with them so we have a deeper conversation, right? And that was something I was messing up last year. I definitely don’t recommend two months for every person. I need two months. So that’s why you gotta figure out what you need, but I do recommend at least three weeks. The first week is usually, it takes a while to decompress and to really slow down. Trying to get all of the bad vibes out of your life, yeah. Exactly. So that first week is difficult. Second week, you’re kind of getting into, you’re starting to feel relaxed. At least for me, I don’t always feel as relaxed the second, but that third week is where it really hits. I’m like, okay, this feels good. So I always recommend at least three weeks consecutively. and one of those three weeks by yourself. I know it’s challenging when you have a spouse and kids, but that time by yourself where you’re not, there’s no noise, you’re really learning to think, what do you think? Because obviously social media and TV and YouTube and all these things, I have to ask myself, okay, I get it. I may believe in certain things that people talk about, but what does Jude think? And why does Jude think that? And do I need to challenge the way that I think? Am I being loyal to an old version of Jude that no longer serves me? I am constantly asking myself, how do I grow? How do I push myself? These questions, there’s a whole list, and I can share it, but that’s what gets me to open up and to really, to just be able to flow. I wouldn’t be able to do it without the breaks.

Rob Marsh: Tactically, do you go into this thing, you turn off Netflix, you don’t take any books with you? Is it true silence, only letting your thoughts do it all? Or are you thinking, actually, I want to do some thinking around some questions that is in a particular book or a podcast that I heard. How does that all come together?

Jude Charles: Complete technology, what’s the word I’m looking for? I turn off all technology. Is it going to diet? Yeah, pretty much, right? A technology diet where even for my phone, I don’t look at my phone. Only time I might look at it is in the morning to check in and let people know I’m alive. I don’t look at my phone, I don’t watch TV, I don’t listen to anything. I do have physical books that I take with me. So sometimes I’ll go to a cabin for a week, and I love doing that because it’s in the wilderness, it’s completely quiet, unless you’re hearing nature. But every digital thing is completely turned off. And again, part of that is because it’s overstimulation for me. I’m trying to decompress and destimulate, and I don’t want to have any kind of influence. And so, yeah, the books that I take are books that I read every year. So, like, the one thing is a book that I read every year. There’s a book called Detours that I read every year now. It wasn’t always the case, but I read that now. And there were books that changed my life. Like, the one thing really, really changed my life. Another book is, gosh, I can’t remember the name of it. There’s another book, but there’s like, there might be two or three books that I take with me. And I remind myself of like, why did this change my life? Or what is it something new that I can learn from this book? And then it’s just the assessment. So it’s the assessment, it’s the books, and that’s it. And a lot of sleep, a lot of quiet time. and a lot of walking in nature. Even if I don’t go away to a cabin, I try to take long walks, so two, three hour walks. I think best when I walk, so I walk daily now, and I exercise a few times a week, but I like to, my best thinking comes from when I walk, so I like to walk a lot when I’m on sabbatical. This last sabbatical was a bit challenging, because there was a family member that passed away. And I thought a lot about legacy and what that means. He was 90 years old, and he left an amazing legacy. And I tried to think a lot about, well, how am I living my legacy now? So that’s the practical. It’s a lot of thinking. It’s a lot of internal thinking and some people are afraid to sit with themselves because it’s deep internal work. But honestly, I would not have grown the business where it’s grown to had I not done this deep internal work. It’s the most important work I’ve ever done in my life that will help me be a great person, not just a great entrepreneur, but a great person.

Rob Marsh: As a podcaster, I hesitate to say we need to turn off the podcasts and pull out the earbuds and all of that. Certainly true of all of the other podcasts that are out there, but you’re right. If there’s always a book going on, I mean, going back to what I said about, you know, that consuming information internally, if you’ve always got headphones on, whether it’s music or books or podcasts, or you’re always watching Netflix, or you’re always engaging on TikTok or Twitter or whatever, it’s hard to hear your own voice at all. And we’re just inundated with everybody else’s voice. And not only that, it’s usually not uplifting. It’s usually not the kind of stuff that helps us grow. It’s information Twinkies that we’re consuming because it tastes good and it feels good, but it doesn’t leave us feeling good ultimately long term.

Jude Charles: Yeah, it doesn’t leave us feeling good. It leaves us feeling empty. And we try to fill that emptiness with noise. And I’m trying to fill it with, I don’t know exactly what I would call it, but just what feeds me, not just the noise, but the transformation that I’m seeking. Am I growing? Am I truly growing? And not growing financially, not growing because I have more things, Has my thinking changed? Has it evolved? Something else I had to ask myself is, with this last election, do I really know where I live? It was really eye-opening to me to pay attention to everything that was going on with the election. It’s not about sides or anything like that, it’s just understanding people. And I don’t think I really understood people. I mean, to some degree, yes, because I’m in marketing and I understand human psychology, but I think that’s shifting. And I think it’s evolving in a much different way than we’ve ever anticipated, not just because of the election, but I think because of social media, because of artificial intelligence. And I had to look at, okay, what role do I play in that? How am I gonna go deeper with understanding people? It’s not just about what I think and trying to force them to think what I think. Why do they think the way that they think? Where is that coming from? And understanding people, it’s probably the reason I love storytelling, is storytelling is what truly helps you understand people and their worldview. But yeah, it’s so much deeper, and it’s probably deeper than most people are wanting to go and think about. But to me, that is the gift of life, is to go that deep and to transform so you can help others transform.

Rob Marsh: So we’ve pretty much been answering this question for the last hour, but with a minute or two that we have remaining, Jude, who are you showing up for in 2025?

Jude Charles:  I’m showing up for the person who is tired, who is unsure about what the next step of their life is, who feels exhausted by life and needs courage to step into the calling that they have been called to step into. I’m showing up for that person. To lead and empower them to have relentless courage. Every word of my purpose is very intentional. To lead means that I’m guiding you on this journey. To empower you means that you have it, you hold it. So I’m gonna guide you. It’s not just me telling you what to do or me just trying to get you to think what I think, but I’m empowering you to have it, to obtain it so that after I’ve left you, you can continue to have it. Relentless courage, relentless means it’s unwavering, you don’t stop no matter what gets in the way. And then courage is obviously to be bold and to step into it. That’s what I’m showing up for, is to lead and empower entrepreneurs to have relentless courage so that they can do whatever it is that they wanna do, not just what I think they should do. What do you wanna do? And go out there and do it. It’s a pretty good mission.

Rob Marsh: If somebody wants to follow you or connect with you, I know we’ve shared your book in the past, your emails, which are always insightful. They’re almost never short. It’s not the candy that a lot of emails are, including some of mine, but they’re thought out deep. Where should people go if they want that kind of thinking from you?

Jude Charles: So I’ll share the, I didn’t plan on this, but I’ll have it ready by the time this goes live. I’ll share the questions that I asked on my break. If you go to juicecharles.co forward slash TCC, I’ll have that download for you, and it’ll give you the questions to ask yourself to go deeper, to understand how do you reinvent yourself, how do you, How do you find out what value do I have or who do I want to become? JuCharles.co forward slash TCC. And then if you’re inclined to join the newsletter, that’ll give you the opportunity to join the newsletter too, but JuCharles.co forward slash TCC. And that’s how to find me, connect with me and go deeper.

Rob Marsh: I’m already on your list, but I’m definitely gonna go download the questions. So thanks Jude for taking the time to really have a different kind of conversation than what we typically do here on, at least on this podcast. So thank you so much for sharing so much about yourself.

Jude Charles: Thank you for having me back, man. It was a great conversation, and I don’t often get to share these kind of things, so it was good to dive deep into it. Yeah, if there’s one last message I want to leave everyone with, the only limitation you have is the one that you create. That’s great.

Rob Marsh: Great way to end. I will always be grateful that you came to that first TCC IRL, because, well, I got a friend out of it. So yeah, it’s great. Thank you so much. Thank you, Rob. for getting so personal with me on what it means to show up in your business and how to think about what’s next. Jude collected the questions that he asks himself each time that he takes a month off to think. And you can get on that list. You can get that list of questions at judecharles.co/tcc. 

Those questions will give you something to think about in your own business, regardless of whether you take off an entire month to do it. and they’ll possibly help you discover what’s next for you. Jude is obviously very deliberate in his process and there’s a lot that we can learn from him, so download those questions now. There’s a similar list of questions to ask yourself about your business in The Copywriter Underground. It’s part of our quarterly or annual planning process training that we’ve conducted in the past. A recording of that process is available right now in the Underground, so if you’re a member you can check those out now, and if you’re not a member, You can fix that by going to thecopyrighterclub.com/tcu and signing up. You’ll get that training plus more than 30 templates and dozens of other workshops and trainings to help you grow your copywriting or content writing business. 

Obviously this whole episode is about courage, the courage to show up for yourself, for your clients, for your audience, for your family, and for others. But the thing about courage is you don’t get courage and then act courageously. Courage is acquired in the doing. You move forward and you gain courage as you go. So you can’t afford to wait for courage to tell you that you’re ready for whatever it is that you’re waiting to do. Get started and the courage is going to follow.

Stuff to check out:

Louis’ book and bonuses
Louis’ book on Amazon
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  The biggest question facing most people who own their own businesses is how do I stand out? How do I position my busines in a way that makes it easy for customers to find me—and more importantly, to know they want to work with me? What can I do to make them care? Those important questions are answered in the new book, Stand the F*** Out by Louis Grenier. And Louis is my guest for today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast.

The topics we cover in our discussion are the kinds of things that help copywriters go from helping clients get the words right to helping clients sell more products, grow their businesses and as the title says: stand out of the crowd. This stuff isn’t easy. It can take years to learn. But if you stick around, the insights Louis shares will shortcut your learning curve

Before we jump into this interview, I want to mention the guest trainings we have lined up in The Copywriter Underground this month one more time… the first one is focused on building connections with prospects and clients on social media without burning out. If you’re like me and struggle to show up on social media consistently, this one will change your approach entirely—and help you find a client. And by the way, a single new client could pay for your Underground membership, for the entire year, two or three times over.

And the second workshop is all about landing a “real” in-house job—either part time or full time. A lot of copywriters want something a bit more stable than the string of clients they get as a freelancer. If that sounds like you, you need to hear the ideas this workshop will include. The presenter for this workshop was a talent placement expert for creatives. She’s helped hundreds of copywriters find so-called real jobs. What she’ll share is critical to know if you’re thinking about applying for these kinds of jobs and want to stand out from the crowd.

Both of these workshops are exclusively available for members of The Copywriter Underground. If you want access to them plus more than 30 templates, 70+ other workshops and trainings, and monthly coaching and copy critiques from me… you can learn more at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. If you’ve been thinking about trying out The Underground, now is the time to do it. The first workshop is tomorrow. Go to thecopywriterclub.com/tcu for more information.

And now, let’s go to our interview with Louis Grenier. 

I like to start by hearing your story, how you got to where you are. You’re a marketing strategist, author of a fantastic book, Stand the F Out. I don’t usually use that word. I do. But it stands out for sure. So tell us how you got here.

Louis Grenier: Bonjour, bonjour. Thank you for having me on. And it feels like I’m part of podcasting royalty. So it’s good to be invited on this podcast, listen to it a few times over the years. And it’s funny how the copywriting discipline is is still thriving despite the fact that they were supposed to be dead a couple of years ago. So it’s good to see that you’re still fighting the good fight. So yeah, to answer your question, it started from a trip in Paris when I was 17. So that was 18 years ago. to visit one of my older brothers. And I saw this book on his shelf that was basically the French version of Influence by Cialdini. But it wasn’t a translation of it. It was like a psychology slash marketing slash behavioral psychology book in French about key facts about human behavior. And I remember reading it. I was a lost mechanical engineering student at the time. And I just loved it so much. And things started to develop from there. I started to connect all the little puzzle pieces that I had misplaced, like the fact that I love being on the internet from a very young age and love hacking stuff on the computer. I loved all things psychology, understanding people. I felt I had the knack for it in some way. It came naturally to me. And all of that came together while I was doing mechanical engineering, realizing that that wasn’t my thing, that marketing, digital marketing at the time was the thing I wanted to do. So that was the start at least.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. I think a lot of marketers have a transition where they want to do something else or maybe not want to, but they’ve been sort of programmed by school or whatever to do. I was ready to go to law school when I started copywriting and kind of fell in love with the whole thing. So, there’s a little bit of serendipity, I think, in a lot of our journeys. So from reading Influence though, you immediately became a marketer or you had a lot of steps along the way?

Louis Grenier: I did. So after that, I quit engineering. I did one year of business school. And at the end of that year, I did an internship for a French car manufacturer in Dublin, Ireland. I was supposed to do that for three months, but I stayed on for like three years with them. So I got full-time employment after a year, I was doing contract stuff for them. And I wanted to get into marketing, but I was still doing basic business-y type stuff, like account management for dealerships across Ireland and stuff. The first opportunity I had to actually apply the knowledge I thought I had about marketing from reading all the books, but doing none of the work, just, you know, theories was for a startup, a mobile marketing startup at the time in Dublin. That’s when I started to work for real in marketing, realizing that all the things I thought I knew about it, or at least most of it was wrong or untrue, or just, I knew nothing really. So it took me a long time to unlearn all of that. I then launched my first marketing agency with 20 grand in savings that I burned through within a year and a half. I burned myself out doing that, but I learned a lot. After that, I joined Hotjar. which is a web analytics startup. It’s not really a startup anymore, more a scale-up. I joined them thanks to a little podcast I had started at the time, which was eight years ago, Everyone Hates Marketers, which I have stopped now, but I met the CEO of Hotjar through that. So Hotjar learned a ton as well for four years, kept the podcast on the side, kept sending emails, started to practice a lot more of what I would call real marketing. and then restarted a business, which is standard F out. And it’s really a combination of all the mistakes I’ve made and all the stuff I’ve learned into a book and a couple of other stuff.

Rob Marsh: We’re definitely going to talk about the book. I’m holding it up as we speak and it’s a fantastic book. Everybody listening should probably have a copy of this on their shelf just as a reference on how to work with clients. But before we get to all of that, you mentioned that when you started out your career, you knew all the theories, you knew all of the stuff to do, but you hadn’t done any of the practice and it was all wrong. Can you give us some examples of that, the wrong stuff, and how you figured it out in your own agency and through the other experiences, what was right.

Louis Grenier: If I had to pick one, I would say that not necessarily something that was purely wrong, but very biased in one way, which was, I thought it’d be much easier than this. Meaning I thought it’d be much, much easier to make people do what you want them to do. You know, like clicking on a link or registering to something, basically making them care about something and how hard, I got punched in the face so many times in that startup, realizing that it’s actually probably one of the hardest things to do is to make people care, make people do something you want them to do. It’s just so, so, so, so, so hard. And we were in an industry that was already dying. Kind of the demand was quite low. And yeah, it was really, really hard. So if I had to pick one, probably the biggest thing, because in my head, I was imagining how it would be and the impact I would have on, you know, all the books I could cite and the research and whatever. But the reality, yeah, was much, much harder than I had anticipated.

Rob Marsh: It’s interesting you say that because I don’t think that that has ever been mentioned on the podcast before and yet this is probably something that every single person who’s been on the podcast or even listened to the podcast has dealt with. It’s almost like an unsaid problem that we have is how do you get people off the couch? to make the phone call, to click on the button, to pull out the credit card. And I mean, that’s why response rates are so low.

Louis Grenier: Like you said, it’s not easy. We are talking about the pain here. I think the answer to that, the solution to it, what I found along the way, what seems to work the best to make people care is to stop trying to make people care and instead understand what they care about already. So where is the demand? Where is the flow? Where is the need going? And channel that. So instead of playing God, thinking that we are smarter, better than you, and we’re gonna make you do something that you don’t know about, like problem unaware. Yeah. I’m rolling my eyes so far back. So… When you do that, it’s easier, but far from being easy. I mean, an example, right? When we talk about percentage, you know, let’s say 200 people join a waiting list for a program, right? So they show intent, they join the waiting list for something that you’re announcing. And then you announce the thing and maybe what, 10% of people would act to like reply and maybe apply, you know? And you’re like, why? I’m sure that if you’re talking to folks outside of the industry, and you ask them, what do you think is going to be the percentage of people applying after they apply to a waiting list? I don’t know, probably 50, 60, 70%, right? But it just doesn’t work that way. So, very humbling.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, incredibly humbling. But there’s a way to overcome that, at least for a certain part of the market, like you said, that has that desire and has in some ways the need. And your book is about a lot of that. And how do you make that connection with the client?

Louis Grenier: Yeah, but it’s still hard, right? You can make it slightly better, but there’s no secret. There’s nothing that will make it unreal. I’ve noticed a few times in my life where the demand is so high, that you’re so much at the right time, the right moment, with the right people, that it’s so easy. Like at Hotjar, when we started out, oh my God, it felt like we had a very bad site. very poorly designed, a 99 cent logo, literally. And the demand was just so high. We felt like we were geniuses, you know. So, you know, when you feel that, you’re like, no, you’re not a genius. You were at the right place, right time. right people, good for you on that, but it doesn’t make you a marketing genius because then you move all of those marketers to maybe an industry that was dying where there’s barely any demand, they will fall on their faces, right? So it’s one of the key things that I talk about in the book is picking the right category, making sure that you pick the right category that’s on demand, not trying to like create a new category, which is very sexy at the minute. leaning on what already exists in people’s head, in the market, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, one of the things that you mention in the book, which I thought was really interesting and I started underlining is when you talk about picking a category, obviously, you’re looking for a category where there is demand. And so there are probably other competitors out there. But at the same time, you’re juxtapositioning yourself against everybody else. So you’re trying to stand out. So you’re basically saying, hey, look for a crowd to be a part of. But also, how do you be the tallest person so you get noticed?

Louis Grenier: Exactly. First, you need to imitate and learn. The process takes years for most people because you need to know the industry, the category, the box you’re in, first of all. You need to know its rules. You need to know… the way people think in there and whatever. And once you know that, once you’ve made the mistakes, you can start challenging it in one dimension. If you start challenging it in too many dimensions, then you lose the box you’re in and people start misunderstanding what you’re up to, right? So it’s really like, it’s a, I always talk about it like as a, almost like a dance, you know, it’s like tango. It’s like, you want to go far, you don’t want to go too far, right? If your box is “marketing podcast”, if you’re like a podcast for copywriters, you don’t want to try to come up with a new term for podcasts, like audio experience for copywriters. You have to explain yourself and you’re losing the demand that is already there. So it’s always a subtle movement inside a box that others are not doing. But it’s not a gimmick. You use the term like being the tallest in the room or something along those lines. It’s not really about being disruptive and challenging the norm for the sake of it. It’s really trying to find a set of ignored struggles, problems that others are not catering well for in that category that you can serve better or differently. And that becomes then a meaningful differentiation. So it’s not like a gimmicky I’m using this orange color everywhere because all the dealers are using blue. It’s really like deeper. It’s true innovation when it comes to like solving unsolved problems, ignored struggles that others are not taking care of very well.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, the term ignored struggles is another thing that I underlined in the book a few times. And in order to find that, you spent a couple of chapters talking about digging for insights and what insights are worth looking at and what insights, you actually call them, I think, poisonous. Poisonous versus juicy. Can we talk a little bit about that? Because this is a huge part of what copywriters, content writers, social media writers are doing is they’re looking for these insights so that they can find that hook, the headline, the thing that stands out, right? Or if they’re working with a brand for that thing that a brand can hang its name on and really differentiate with.

Louis Grenier: One of the other biggest mistakes I’ve done in my career was to listen and learn from folks or sources that could actually lie to you without even knowing, without necessarily doing it on purpose and really leading you to a place that you don’t want to be in. I’m being quite radical in my way of defining what is a good insight, what is juicy insight, what is poisonous insight. I’m being radical in a sense that yes, you could get insight outside of the group I’m going to mention now, but for the sake of safety, for the sake of efficiency, for the sake of just going for it, I think that the only group you should listen to are recent past customers. So recent because recency, making sure people remember. Past because you don’t want people who are thinking about doing something because they will bullshit you, it’s likely. So people don’t know what they’re going to do in the future. There’s no point trying to predict that. And customers, meaning we have proof that they spend resources, whether it’s money, a lot of time, a lot of effort, trying to solve one of the struggles you want to solve for. And it doesn’t have to be folks who you’re talking to directly. It doesn’t have to be folks who bought from you. And that’s the beauty of it. You can learn from folks who’ve bought in your category, in your industry, even if you don’t have a business. And you can scan through online reviews. Review mining is very popular amongst copywriters. You can do interviews, you can be a fly on the wall. There’s many ways to get that. But if you only focus on them and forget about the rest, you, I think, increase the probability that you will get juicy insight, or at least usable insight, by quite a lot.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. And there are a couple of different insight types that we’re looking for when we do this. I think you listed out six or seven of them. I would love to go a little bit deeper on three of them if we can. Sure. Jobs to be done, problems, and triggers. And I’m really excited to talk about triggers, but I want to leave that to last because I think triggers is the one that’s overlooked by almost everybody. 100%, I agree. Because we all focus on problem. And if we take it to the next step, we talk about jobs to be done. But let’s talk a little bit about your thinking around those insights and what we’re looking for there.

Louis Grenier: So my thinking is really a mix up of thinking from others who are much smarter than me, have done research and all of that on behavior and stuff like that. And it’s learning from them and applying, trying to apply their learnings and figuring out that it actually works because that’s the way people think. So it’s definitely not just my thinking, right? I’m only a student of this art we’re into, but I’m glad you’re mentioning triggers. I completely agree. This is the most underused, misunderstood concept, and yet it explains so much. Imagine, you know, let’s say I start to have a back pain, right? A literal back pain. Whenever I try to stand up for too long, it gets sore. I have to sit. It’s a pain. It’s a pain point, right? In the traditional way people would think about, marketers would think about that, it’s a reason to market to you, let’s say, something to solve that, right? I’m not going to go into the products or categories, but there’s so many ways to solve that, right? But I’m not going to do anything unless I have a direction to go to, meaning why I’m going to do this, and unless there is a trigger or several triggers that make me act. And this is where demands start to flow. So I can have a back pain for literally 10, 20, 30 years without doing anything about it. And I’m sure in your life and in folks listening, you can find examples of a literal problem or pain point that you do nothing about. Until I learned that maybe my grandkids is coming to visit me for the first time in a while. And in my head, I’m imagining, well, I’m going to bring them to the park and I’m going to do this. I’m like, oh, yeah, but I can’t do that with my back. OK, better call a physio, right? And that’s understanding those triggers are far more powerful than understanding the pain. The pain is easy to understand, but it doesn’t talk to people as much as I think we believe. And it’s a bit, you know, we push too much of the anxiety part of it, like, you know, like, are you in pain? And are you, you know, like the, in copywriting in particular, like agitating the pain and whatnot. I think if you understand the triggers that start them all, it’s much easier. Just to go through that example one level deeper, how do we use this information, right? If we take this fictional example. Well, when, I would ask myself, okay, when does this trigger tend to happen the most often? I would say during the holidays. Right? Maybe Christmas holidays in particular, Thanksgiving, when we are more likely, that’s when you’re more likely to see your grandkids to visit. So this is when you can then push this type of message instead of saying back pain. Now you say, do you want to enjoy a better time with your kids without worrying about pain in your legs or whatever? Then this is the place to be. And it even informs where to be, right? So now I know what to say around when, when to push for it, which is like highly seasonal likely. But I’m thinking of places where people travel, right? So airports and train stations and other places where there’s a lot of commuting or whatnot, right? Again, I’m just speedboarding here, it doesn’t mean it’s 100% accurate, but thinking of triggers adds flavor and adds depth and context that you’re missing with just the pain. just like a back pain that doesn’t talk to me, doesn’t make me more creative. The trigger makes me think of so many things straight away, right? The when, the where, the with whom, the with what. Those are like real contextual clues that you can use.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. And these, in my opinion, these are the hardest things to find because it takes real conversations with real customers. Like you said, if you start asking people who might purchase, you know, whatever the thing is that you’re saying, they have no idea what the trigger is yet because they haven’t yet made that purchase right there.

Louis Grenier: Exactly.

Rob Marsh: And all of us have tons of things. It’s like, well, someday I’d like to have an iPad or someday I’d like to have whatever the car is or considering purchasing a subscription to that magazine, right? But we haven’t done it. And there’s probably a reason we haven’t done it. Maybe the pain isn’t high enough or maybe the event that makes that thing happen, the trigger hasn’t happened. So, give us just a couple of tips on how to find them, how to uncover them.

Louis Grenier: So you go back to the first insight that I shared, which is if you talk to recent past customers, you will likely find them. So you don’t have to interview people, right? So in copywriting and B2B in particular, B2B copywriting, this is like one of the most popular methods, but you don’t have to do that. So you could literally go to online reviews if your industry is prone to like having people leaving online reviews. And this is where you can start seeing the triggers if you pay close attention. So I have a real example here, right? Which is, I give this example of this toilet scent packet product, which is like you drop that in the toilet before going number two so that it doesn’t smell, right? And I went through Amazon reviews just to see what other triggers, what make people say, I need this now, even though they might struggle with that smell beforehand and whatever, they haven’t really searched for it to search for a solution, right? So for example, there’s this review, this product will work wonderfully for my upcoming cruise. It smells so nice and seems to work great. for my upcoming cruise is a trigger, right? Or at least it’s a contextual cue that tells you that there is a trigger behind it. This person is planning to go on a cruise in close quarters, right? Share a toilet with someone else. And they are thinking of this toilet situation. The problem has always been there. Maybe they’ve struggled with digestive issues all their life. They never bought anything for it specifically, but as soon as We mix the job to be done, which is masking bathroom odors in that case. We mix the problem, which is making sure that maybe the friend you’re going with isn’t smelling anything. with the trigger, the upcoming cruise, you create a chemical reaction, which is where the demands start to flow, right? So another example in the review, easy to use, I’m going to travel soon and it will be super handy in small bases. Again, cruise, travel, when you start, when you look for them, you will find them. But you need to look at many sources, right? If you can’t find them in reviews, if you can’t find them in interviews, if you can’t talk to people like that, there’s plenty of other ways. So I mentioned like be a fly on the wall. So maybe like observing people in their natural habitat. If you’re selling, let’s say, you know, cheap enough product or FMCG, you know, like a very fast moving stuff in supermarkets, you could literally see them buying it and asking them, why did you buy it? What made you buy it? Let me see. I’m just trying to find the fully so we give as much as possible. But it’s really like once you know that that’s what you’re looking for, the when, the where, the with whom, and the with what. So with whom could be like with a friend or whatever when they mention people. With what could be another product, the where, like a place, but it doesn’t have to be a location per se. It could be at your desk and whatnot. You will see them, honestly. That’s what I think. It’s not hidden that much. It’s just that we are never really looking for them that way. Yeah. Makes sense.

Rob Marsh: So, I imagine somebody listening, and I’m actually thinking this as well, although I have some thoughts on how to do it. Somebody might be thinking, okay, that’s easy for a packet that you drop in a toilet, that kind of a product. There’s four or five competitors out there. But what about my industry? I’m a copywriter. If I go on LinkedIn, there are over a million copywriters on LinkedIn. How do I find those jobs to be done, those triggers for something that’s literally a commodity and can be bought anywhere by anyone at almost any price point?

Louis Grenier: Well, I would say good news. First of all, that means there is demand for it. There is money flowing into it. So that’s already, that’s a good thing. I get excited when I hear those questions about, oh, I’m in a saturated industry, crowded market. I’m like, great, that’ll be fun. Because I know I can get data really fast, insight really fast. And I know then we can use a unique positioning to really dive into very specific ignore struggles, because despite what we may think, there’s always ignore struggles appearing, right? AI has just changed a lot of stuff. And as soon as that appeared, that created new struggles for people. So you can be the first, you can be someone looking into the forefront of the industry, A crowded market is not an issue. It’s just, it becomes an issue if you can’t figure out, you know, if you can’t go granular into specific problems you solve, that’s the first thing. And if you can’t pick a category that is niche enough for you to become the only, the only in that very sub, sub, sub, sub category that solved that specific ignored struggle for this specific group of people. So then you really minimize the number of direct competitors while still taking advantage of the demand. Then once you have that part, you you can then build distinctiveness, which is a different concept than differentiation. So we can talk about that. But you mentioned the insights. They will be in front of you, right? The jobs, the struggles, they are easy enough to find. You can look at literally competitors’ websites and look at case studies that they’ve shared. You will find insight that way. They’re not going to be groundbreaking new insight that you’ll be the only one to find. However, you can be the first, the only one to interpret them in a specific way and solve them in a specific way. And as you mentioned earlier, a few minutes ago, very few people care about, think about triggers. And so you just looking at them and understanding people that way, is already, I think, a huge competitive advantage. But on its own, to finish, on its own, a unique positioning might not be enough for you to stand out. You might need also distinctiveness on top, especially in crowded markets.

Rob Marsh: So yeah, let’s talk about then that unique positioning. The concept of USP, unique selling proposition, I think was invented by Ross or Reeves 60 years ago. Yeah, and it’s bullshit. Yeah, well, people still talk about it and I agree with you. I don’t think it works anymore. I actually think there’s a concept there that’s really nice to think about, but the reality is, It’s so easy to copy a unique selling proposition today. Literally, you might have one, but you’re not going to have it in 90 days. Somebody is going to copy it. You can’t be unique like that. So how do we become unique?

Louis Grenier: So the formula, the statement that I’ve put together uses the ingredients that you collect along the way. So the sentence, you need to be able to feel a sentence like that, unlike alternatives. So that could be competitors, there are competitors, there are competitors. my product, my service, my brand, whatever, is the only in that category to solve those ignored struggles. So like a list of the ones you’ve identified and get the job done for this particular segment. So the key is not to find an ignored struggle that others haven’t found or a category that others haven’t claimed. It’s the intersection of all of those things that create a unique positioning. And this is not meant to be customer facing, right? This is not meant to be on your homepage as a headline. It’s meant to really be to give you the clarity and direction to say, okay, we have a unique positioning, niche enough, specific enough, granular enough that gives people a reason to trust us. We become the least risky option, not necessarily the best. That’s another important concept. And that gives us the direction we need to then move on to maybe distinctiveness. So if we are Going through an actual example in the B2B world, I work with a company called the PTDC, which they do fitness training for personal trainers. And their statement, their unique positioning statement could sound something like, unlike just working more or selling out for quick cash, that’s the alternatives. The PTDC is the only online fitness training program. So that’s a sub, sub, sub category, right? That helps you, and now we’re talking about the inner struggle, overcome self-doubts, build a real business, and create a successful career you love as a jacked nerd. That’s the segment. That’s the smallest way they kind of talked about it. And you can see, if you take each of them individually, like online fitness training program, they’re not the only online fitness training program. But if you start mixing with the alternative, the triggers, the triggers are not there, but the struggles, the inner struggles, the job, the segment, that’s when you have an intersection that is quite unique. But it’s not in the same way, it’s not described as a, it’s not like a unique value proposition thing because you cannot genuinely realistically have that because as you said, others are probably using it and others will pick it up and use it as well. So it’s disingenuous this way. Well, the unique positioning statements and the ingredients that it’s using can’t be disingenuous because you have to go granular and the intersection again is something that you can uniquely claim.

Rob Marsh: So like you said, this is a statement then that drives the marketing.

Louis Grenier: Yes.

Rob Marsh: So then the job becomes, okay, how do we go from that statement and start creating assets, offers, branding, messaging that starts to convey that to our audience in a way that they’re going to connect with it and say, oh yeah, this is the product for me.

Louis Grenier: Yeah. So this is really like the very core of any business. You know, I don’t remember who said that. It might be Peter Drucker. I’m going to butcher it, but it’s like, there’s only two functions in business, two functions in a business, the marketing and innovation or something along those lines.

Rob Marsh: Yep.

Louis Grenier: Yep.

Rob Marsh: That’s a Peter Drucker quote. Yeah.

Louis Grenier: Something like that. Something like that, right? So this is the very core of your innovation strategy, your marketing strategy, because it’s how you serve people, how you serve a specific group of people in a way that others don’t. You already, in one single sentence, you have much more clarity and that’s the biggest job to start with, right? As soon as you become more than one, you have more like a team or even for your own sanity, and clarity and relief, having one single sentence that gives you direction is already a big, big win. So the benefit doesn’t have to be monetary or business directly related. It could just be like relief and confidence and clarity. Once you have that, it’s already much better to do marketing and to be creative once you have a bit more confidence, a bit more joy into what you’re doing, a bit more clarity. It changes the game, really, because it removes the noise and stuff. So this on its own, just going through that exercise and having it is already a huge, huge, huge relief for people. That’s what I’ve noticed. But let’s say we have that. So you have the knowledge. That’s the core of your business. You know who you serve, how you serve them, why you serve them, whatnot. Then you can move on to, you mentioned branding, so distinctiveness, which is not the same as differentiation. So differentiation is the ability to solve struggles that others alternatives are ignoring. That’s differentiation. Struggles that people care about, not struggles that people don’t care about. Distinctiveness is being able to stick out in people’s mind for things that don’t necessarily connect directly with what you do. So that’s why I talk about the concept of meaningless assets, meaning you don’t have to create logos and colors and whatnot that connect directly to what you have to say. For example, in the copywriting world, you don’t have to use a a pen as your logo, you don’t have to.

Rob Marsh: If you want to stand out, you probably shouldn’t because half of the industry does.

Louis Grenier: Yeah. So it’s okay. Again, it’s the same concept in differentiation and playing inside the box. You don’t want to challenge too many conventions in the branding side. So if you’re a writer and you want to be known as a writer, a copywriter for B2B SaaS, let’s say, whatever, you do need to make sure that you use some conventions that others recognize of that category and specific brands or else you might lose them. So it’s always, again, this subtle dance and this tango between going far and also staying in your lane in some way. So it’s always recognizing the few places where you can play without going overboard or else people just won’t know at all what you’re up to, what you’re doing and who you are and why you’re here.

Rob Marsh: So would you characterize these usually as design elements or are they like actual parts of the offer, parts of the business? The immediate example that comes to mind is the original iMacs. When Apple innovates and they add color and they kind of create this bubble shape to the iMac, suddenly it’s a computer, but it’s very distinctive. It’s very different. Some people reacted to that negatively. It looks like a toy, which it did, but also that was the thing that made it distinctive, but it didn’t really affect the function of what the Mac did. So, is that distinctiveness versus differentiation?

Louis Grenier: Yeah, so assets, brand assets that are part of your distinctive brand, they are basically what makes your brand uniquely yours. So it could be color, shape, sound, word, even a mascot. And it’s the association of all those things that create a branding experience, that create the memories in people’s brain, right? Which is the core thing. You want to associate certain things about you to specific triggers. So instead of thinking of pain points, if you start to think of how do we associate that with this specific trigger, to go back to the example of the back pain and the kids coming back for holidays, you could think about ways to develop things that people could associate with, my kids are coming back, my grandkids are coming back for the holidays. And this is how you kind of create connections between you, your brand, and people’s brain, so that when the need appears, the demand starts to spark in people’s mind, you come first to mind, or second to mind, or third to mind, or at least you’re there, right? So yeah, faces, colors, phrases, anything that is there to stick to people’s brain, right? So like the speech thing, the facial reconnection part of the brain, the vision, the different bits and bobs that are there to like tickle your brain, tickle your customer’s brain.

Rob Marsh: This is where we start to get into points of view as well. And the things that we talk about, content we create. I know there’s a whole section in the book about point of view. I’ve got mixed feelings when it comes to points of view. I think that there’s a lot of value, particularly with points of view that are related to what you do. But I think there’s a lot of people who talk about your point of view as being your politics. And there’s almost been this trend over the last maybe decade, maybe it’s a little longer, where politics is the point of view. And to me, that becomes really dangerous. Michael Jordan, I think, was really famous for saying, he was asked why he doesn’t talk about politics. or do advertising that’s political. And he famously said, Republicans buy shoes too. And he obviously, from that comment, we can discern that he probably leans left, but he wants everybody to be able to buy his product. So there’s this tension when we talk about sharing points of view. Tell me your approach to this and where we should draw that line.

Louis Grenier: So the line is drawn by sharing things, opinions or signals to the people you seek to serve in order to protect them from the pains, the struggles, the monster, I call it as well. We can talk about that later if you want. That is preventing them from making progress or just doing something, right? So it’s not there to be controversial for the sake of it. It’s not there to stir the pot for the sake of it. It’s not there to be disruptive. It’s there to be distinctive and sending a signal to the people you seek to serve that you’re here for them, right? So I would define a point of view as a collection of consistent messages inserted into everything you do and say, showing the people in your segment you’re committed to protecting them and earning their trust, right? And that creates a sense of coherence and control, right? Meaning we’ve got you, we’re here for you, and that’s why, right? So this is a point of view, like, I don’t know, every time I talk about or share point of views, I think of LinkedIn. It’s just the place where people misunderstand the concept quite a lot by sharing points of view that have nothing to do with your industry or nothing to do with the people you seek to serve. That’s my rule of thumb. Just stay in your lane for the business you have. The point of view should be there to protect your segment. And maybe some others outside of it might disagree, but that’s fine. But you don’t want to be disruptive for the sake of it and sharing stuff that have nothing to do with what you have to say. So that’s kind of the, again, the tension. And as you mentioned that word, I’ve noticed that, yes, a lot of the concepts we’re talking about here There is a tension, there is like a dance, there is subtlety because it’s not black and white. It’s not as easy as just, you know, a five-step formula. There is always subtlety and you need to build your taste and develop your taste towards that, right? Toward all of those concepts, like to try things and see how far you go. Is it too far? Is it not far enough? Yeah. It’s, it’s, there’s always a messy middle.

Rob Marsh: And just to be clear, as you talk about that, politics might be okay, right? Just depending on the product, your audience or whatever. So I’m not saying, hey, never touch that, but what we’re saying is it really needs to relate to the thing that you’re doing or to your audience or to the offer in some way.

Louis Grenier: Yeah, or else you lose yourself.

Rob Marsh: Okay, you mentioned the monster. I think another marketing concept that a lot of people are familiar with is picking an enemy. I think the monster is a little bit different from the concept of picking an enemy, where like Apple goes after IBM and Microsoft or whatever. So let’s talk about what is the monster and how do we develop or create this monster that actually works for our brand?

Louis Grenier: So a monster is a fictional or semi-fictional enemy that represents some of the problems that the people you seek to serve face. And the game is to give a name to some of the inner struggles they are facing. And that helps them to understand what’s going on better. that gives them the sense of control and coherence in the world. As an aside, that’s what religions are here for, right? They give this randomness of the universe and why we’re here. It gives some sort of a sense into it that, oh, it’s because God or multiple Gods are creating all of this instead of just pure random chaos. You know, it’s just you can’t explain it. It’s much more unnerving to think about it this way. So anyway. Pointing the finger at a specific monster that tells you this is why you’re struggling. It’s not your fault. And I’m here. The brand is here for you. It’s kind of the concept behind it. But the biggest mistake I see people make with this concept of enemy or monster is that they sometimes make their segment feel guilty instead of, um, getting them on their side. So for example, like procrastination, like you’re always doing things late. Well, it’s your fault. You need to pick yourself up and do this. So it’s never really like that. It’s always making sure that you get them on your side by instead saying, The way you’re built as a homo sapiens is a result of millions and millions of years of evolution, and it’s just the way you’re built. It’s normal that you’re procrastinating. It’s completely normal behavior. Now I can help you channel that, right? So that changes the entire narrative where you get people on your side, you show that you understand them, you bring empathy into the table, and then you can move them further.

Rob Marsh: So to be clear, in that case, the monster is this evolutionary development of… For example, yeah. Yeah, human kite. Okay. And it’s not my fault.

Louis Grenier: It’s not you per se. I mean, I’m spitballing here, and I’m sure that others might disagree, but… That’s one way to talk about it. So the other mistake I see is that people think enemy equal picking a direct competitor, naming them, shaming them out loud. That’s not it. So a monster is something that is responsible for the struggles or some of the struggles that your people are facing. It doesn’t have to be, and in fact, it’s almost never a direct competitor, unless you’re in incredibly crowded categories where almost everyone have used that direct competitor’s product before, like let’s say you do a new search engine, then I would say it’d be difficult not to pick Google as the monster that’s causing their pain, potentially. So there’s four types. It can be a corporate giant that is so big that it’s creating the the issues that your people are facing. So like an example would be big oil, right? You could point the finger at big oil, the four biggest oil companies in the world are responsible for climate change. The alternative solution. So this is what people use instead of using your category. So for Hotjar, that was a typical thing we did. We pointed the finger at only using traditional web analytics. We didn’t point the finger at Google analytics. We pointed the finger at only using them. And the subtlety is important here. We are not saying we shouldn’t, we didn’t say you shouldn’t use GA. We said you should use GA and Hotjar. And the third type is the culture of the category, right? Like the hustle culture or fast fashion or all of the biggest, you know, the biggest trends and themes that are causing people issues. And the last one, which was part of the example I gave from the procrastination is the monster within. So it’s like the feeling of behavior or something within us that is causing us pain. So those are the four types. So it’s quite in-depth. And again, you need to be subtle about it. You don’t have to talk about it out loud every single time. It could be just something for you to be clear about internally. You don’t have to say it out loud. But I like to use it as a, it’s almost like the Death Star, you know, in Star Wars, it’s so big, everything gravitates around it. And so everything you do and say is kind of there to help people slay that monster. And it, again, gives us clarity, this sense of direction that leans on negativity bias or the way people are, you know, we are just geared towards negativity and it creates this anchor.

Rob Marsh: Should every brand or every personality, everybody who’s trying to stand out, should they have a monster? Or are there still places where that’s not important?

Louis Grenier: You should because I think if you don’t, you run the risk of blaming people and actually going against your audience and not having this empathy that you need to have. But again, it doesn’t have to be written on your homepage. It doesn’t have to be said out loud at all. It could just be an internal compass. I think it simplifies things. I’m a sucker for simplicity and the rule of one in as many things as we can, especially in marketing, right? You’re going to have to pick your battles. You can’t do everything, especially as, let’s say, a solo copywriter. You’re going to have to pick something, go after it. And yes, there could be others and there could be other type of monsters or whatever, but the point is not to pick the perfect one. The point is to pick one and fucking go for it, commit to it with intensity.

Rob Marsh: Okay, so let’s say we’ve done all of this work. We’ve gone through the frameworks, we’ve got our insights, our unique positioning, we’ve created our monster or identified our monster. We know how we’re gonna be unique. Let’s talk a little bit now about how, now that we’ve done that, how do we find our audience? What is the, where basically the tire hits the road?

Louis Grenier: Yeah, so ideally, you would have not spent too much time in the framework, in spreadsheets and stuff like that. Ideally, you start to play with some of the concepts already, test them and see how it feels. But the last stage is what I call continuous reach, which is reaching as many people as we can for as little efforts or resources as possible, right? And it’s really based on pure behavioral psychology and basic psychology on how people remember things and why people think of Google as the first search engine and why some brands are first in their category and whatnot. It’s really using the triggers we mentioned as the source of all of that. So once you understand what makes people act, even if it could be six months before they actually purchase. But like this series of triggers, you can find ways to be there, be at the right time, the right context. And that’s how the concept of triggers gets so, so powerful. Because if you split them into the four contextual elements that I mentioned, so when is this trigger happening, where it’s happening, with whom it’s happening, and with what it’s happening, you almost start to get your marketing plan created for you without thinking too much about it, right? So for example, for my own agency, my first failed agency, I actually looked back at all the notes I had about clients and whatnot. To understand the triggers and to see how differently I would have maybe marketed if I had a bit more brainpower by then, right? So let’s say there was this software company I consulted for and they told me that the French website conversion rate was lower than the American one. They wanted to understand why because I think their boss told them I need to do something about this after the quarterly meeting. So that’s an unexpected event. Let’s say that’s a trigger. You can start thinking, okay, when was that happening? Where? So for example, when it’s like pretty much every quarter. You can start playing with that. But once you really understand the triggers, where to be, when to be, what to say, it becomes quite… Again, it just comes naturally because it talks about the way people experience them, not about the pain points that are completely abstract, right?

Rob Marsh: Yeah, so I’m going to change subjects here just a little bit. You somewhat famously asked Seth Godin on your old podcast, a question that he told you, you’re asking the wrong question. You’re asking like, you know, if you probably phrase this better than me, but you asked him something like, you know, if you were a tech company, same as everybody else, how would you differentiate? your business if you’re building it. And he said, you’re asking the question the wrong way. I’m not necessarily asking the same question, but I wonder if you’ve taken what he said, what he told you how to build, if that’s how you’ve built your consultancy today.

Louis Grenier: So yeah, I’m happy to say, I’m happy to report that all the learnings, all the stuff, all the mistakes I made, the lesson learned and whatever that I’ve compiled into that book is something I try my hardest to apply to every day. So yes, in terms of I think the biggest concept that I’m trying very hard to make sure I’m using when I launch a new product and do stuff is, is there a demand for this? Is there a crowded market already? And can I play inside that? So I’m sending a newsletter. Yeah, everyone does it, but actually no, very few. But like, let’s say I sell, I’m going to start to sell a certification program specifically for marketing business owners. So folks running marketing businesses as a solopreneur, freelancer, consultant, agency owner. certify them on the methodology, give them an exclusivity in terms of the badge and other stuff. So limited, all of that. I think 10 years ago, five years ago even, I would have said, everyone does certification, so I’m not going to do it. Let’s find another way to do this. And I would have completely messed that up by essentially stop myself from using the demand that is already there. If there is certification programs out there that are being run by, let’s say, Donald Miller and StoryBrand, like they do, like the StoryBrand certification stuff, and it’s been running for years, I know, therefore, that there is demand for it. And therefore, this is a box I can be in as a product. And so, yeah, I’m using that entire unique positioning. The only difference, the only inner struggles that I’ve identified that I’m going for to have a unique positioning, all the rest stays the same compared to others, is the fact that this badge is earned. You don’t pay for it, even though you pay to enter, but you need to earn it in order to get certified. Meaning you have to show me that you’ve created actual results for clients using part of the methodology, and I reserve the right to not certify you if I feel you don’t fit with the brand. That’s it. That’s the main difference compared to everyone else. creates more exclusivity, this feeling that the brand is protected and the feeling that people who enter this are not just, you know, they just didn’t pay their way to get a fucking badge on the bottom of their website, right? So that’s unique positioning. Distinctiveness, well, distinctiveness, I can talk about it forever, but behind me, you’re listening to this in audio, but you can see that behind me is Roger, my rooster.

Rob Marsh: Big rooster, big orange rooster.

Louis Grenier: Yeah, this is my mascot with a purple beret, with this look on its face, just this aggressive… It’s just such a funny facial or whatever expression. And that has nothing to do with what I do. directly at least. Yes, it’s a nod to me being French because it’s a rooster and wears a beret, but it’s just a nod. It doesn’t explain it. You’re looking at this, you don’t know that I do marketing, right? And this is why, like, this is the beauty of a distinctive brand because it connects meaningless assets that I’m the only one that can claim in the category. I’m the only one with this, right, in the entire marketing category. So that means when people think of me, they think of the rooster. When they think of the rooster, I want them to think of a couple of things such as, you know, they may maybe feel that their business is stagnating and that it’s the new year, turning the new year and they are stagnating. Their positioning is not where they want it to be. This is where this is a trigger. This is where they can think of me. Right. So I genuinely try to apply the entire framework as much as I can. It’s not easy all the time and things change and it’s not perfect, but I try to. Because it’s all rooted in science. It’s not my point of view, my opinion, this is what you should do and this is my way. I sincerely think that this work is rooted in first principles, meaning things will not change. And so if you pick up that book in 50 years, I really hope that most of it will still be relevant. And that’s, yeah, that’s what I’m probably the proudest of.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I agree. One of the reasons I wanted to have you on the podcast in the first place, Louis, is because I think that this book basically gives the structure for anybody who is doing marketing and copywriters. Oftentimes we think, well, we’re just writing the copy, somebody else is doing all of this work, but a good copywriter is looking for those insights, is helping to develop that unique positioning statement, you know, so many of the things. It feels like a manual that helps marketers just do business. The frameworks, the tools, the practices that are in the book. And so I agree. I think in 50 years, it’ll still hold its value.

Louis Grenier: Thanks, man. That’s really nice of you to hear because I’m looking at your library of books behind me and the fact that you’re saying that behind you, The fact that you’re saying that it’s a good one, that makes me very happy. The last thing I would say on this is that it’s not easy. It’s not meant to be easy, right? It’s difficult to stand out. It takes time, it takes effort, it takes, you know, mistakes and whatever. And it’s normal. Don’t allow those marketers or not marketers to gaslight you, making you believe that There is a secret you don’t know yet that you should follow, that there is all this like an AI tool that is going to change everything and put you out of business. Be very careful with all of those. They are making you feel bad in order to sell stuff to you. So it’s not that easy, but it’s also not that hard and there’s no secrets and you already know everything. You just need to go for it, try, do new things, try again. So yeah, be careful out there, especially in the marketing space where people are trying to sell stuff you don’t need and recreate, reinvent the wheel. So, yeah.

Rob Marsh: Louis, you have a daily newsletter email that you send out. Let’s share where we can join that. I’ve been on your list, I think, for years. It is unique in the stories that you tell. You’re very outspoken. You have your opinions. You will probably offend some of our listeners when they join, but I think if they stick with you long enough, I think they’ll learn a lot. Where can people jump on your list?

Louis Grenier: If you just Google Stand the F*** Out, you’ll find the newsletter, you’ll find the book. Honestly, it’s as simple as that. And the last thing is I’ve put together an offer specifically for folks who have been courageous enough to listen through my French accents and my cursing. So you can get the book, instant access to the book, meaning through Kindle, through like PDF, EPUB. plus a bunch of other little stuff outside of it, like action kits for $9. So that’s it. So it’s cheaper than the Kindle on its own in Amazon, but you’ll get way more. So the link is stfo.link/tcc.

Rob Marsh: Fantastic. I mean, I hope everybody jumps in and gets it, but I will say it’s worth having the physical book to underline, to go through, to have on your bookshelf and next to you just to refer to because it really is how to build a marketing plan for any business and I think will help a lot of copywriters be more strategic about the work they do.

Louis Grenier: Thanks so much, man. Thanks for all the kind words and your support, encouragement, and thanks for being on the list for that long. I know it’s not easy sometimes.

Rob Marsh: It’s a great email. I probably overstated it a little bit, but it is a great email. So thanks, Louis, for sharing so much. I appreciate it.

Louis Grenier: You’re very welcome.

Rob Marsh: Thanks to Louis Grenier for taking some time to sit down with me. You should definitely join his list at everyonehatesmarketers.com. and get a copy of his book, Stand the F Out. As Louis mentioned on the podcast, he has a special offer for anyone who is a listener to the podcast. You can get a PDF or Kindle version of the book, plus a few other bonuses for just $9. The book is a primer for anyone who wants to stand out in a crowded market or for anyone who works with clients and needs to stand out at a crowded market. So get your copy today. 

I really appreciate how deep Louis was willing to go on all of this. Insights, ignored struggles, triggers, distinctiveness, positioning. These are things that don’t always come up when we’re talking about writing copy. But if you add these skills to your writing process, you will stand out from the writers who only think about words. Guys that are calling themselves wordsmiths. 

As we started talking, Louis mentioned the problem of getting people to care about your offer. This is where knowing how to write emotional copy becomes a valuable skill set. We have a masterclass that teaches you how to do that. It’s called the How to Write Emotional Copy Masterclass, and you can learn more about that at thecopyrighterclub.com forward slash emotion. Rather than me telling you what it covers and includes, simply just go to thecopyrightedclub.com/emotion and see for yourself what you get there. 

Stuff to check out:

Kristin’s Newsletter
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  Okay before we get into our interview… long time listeners are probably wondering, what’s up with the new music? For the past five-ish years, we’ve been using a bit of music composed for us by Addison Rice. But after so many years, it just felt like it was time for a change. So the music is different for the new year and we’ll see if we can’t go another five years or so with this new mix.

On top of that, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been hosting the podcast for the past six months without my one-time co-host Kira Hug. Enough people have asked what’s up with that, that it’s probably time to let you all know what’s up. I mentioned this briefly on one of our throwback episodes, but to make sure you don’t miss it…

I wish there was a juicy story here, or a controversy, a messy falling out worthy of the pages of People magazine, but there’s not. Last year Kira told me that after seven years working on The Copywriter Club, that this project just didn’t light her up like it used to, and she was ready for a different kind of challenge. So we worked to slowly move her out of her daily role at The Copywriter Club. Kira’s still officiallly—legally—a partner behind the scenes, but is no longer working on Copywriter Club projects. We’re still friends. There was no drama… just time for a change. 

At the time I considered ending the podcast, but whenever I mentioned ending the podcast to someone I trusted, they all said, “no, you can’t do that… this podcast is too important for writers who want a look into how other people are running their businesses.” And on top of that I really enjoy talking with copywriters and other marketing experts about this thing we all do. It’s still lighting me up and I’ve got some great guests coming in the next few weeks, so hopefully you’ll all stay tuned to see what’s coming next. I’m still committed to our original promise of sharing strategies and ideas you can steal and use in your own business.

Speaking of great guests… my guest today is business strategist and story teller Kristin Kenzy. Kristin writes one of my favorite newsletters, Drunk Business Advice. In it, she combines interesting marketing take-aways with fantastic storytelling that makes me (and thousands of other readers) look forward to it each week. I wanted to talk with Kristin about her approach to finding and writing the stories she shares. The formula she uses to figure out if a story is worth telling is excellent and she walked me through during our interview. We also talked about why writers need to stop journaling and a better way to pitch prospects in person… something Kristin calls “accordian pitching”. It’s good stuff, so stay tuned to hear what she had to share.

Before we jump into this interview, we’ve got some really great guest trainings lined up in The Copywriter Underground this month… one on building connections with prospects and clients without burning out on social media. If you’re like me and struggle to show up on social media consistently, this one will change your approach entirely. And a second training on landing a “real” in-house job—either part time or full time—if you are looking for something a little more stable than freelancing is. Ironicallly, copywriters are bad at telling our own career stories and this workshop will show you what to do if you want to land one of these so-called “real” jobs. Both of these workshops are exclusively available for members of The Copywriter Underground. If you want access to them plus more than 30 templates, 70 other workshops and trainings, and monthly coaching from me, you can learn more at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. If you’ve been thinking about trying out The Underground, this month is the month to do it. Go to thecopywriterclub.com/tcu for more information.

And now, let’s go to our interview with Kristin Kenzy. 

Rob Marsh: Welcome to The Copywriter Club Podcast. We always start with your story, but I’ve got to say, I’m hesitating to ask that because you’ve had so many experiences that I’ve read about in your newsletter. We could talk about your story for the entire podcast. So your version of how you got to where you are today, running your own newsletter and the businesses that you’ve been starting.

Kristin Kenzy: Of course. Well, thank you, Rob, for having me. It’s really an honor to jump in here in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, where none of us know what day it is or what’s going on outside or where anything is in the world, to actually be a little centered and talk about writing and talk about business. 

So I’ll answer your question by just looking at the last couple of years, because the last couple of years is when I’ve become a writer. And I have a definition of a writer, right? A writer is someone that actually gets paid to write. So lots of people write. I have written throughout my entire life. A lot of us have written, have published, have done self-exploratory work through writing. But I only became a writer really in the last 18 months. And that is a result of having had 20 years of entrepreneurship experience. So as you mentioned, we can talk a lot about all of those different ventures that I’ve been a part of, but how that switched from being an entrepreneur to being really a writer or an entrepreneurial writer is getting hired by Trends by the Hustle. Trends was the premium subscription of the Hustle newsletter for about five years, and it was an entrepreneurship analytics publication. And they had had many editors, many writers, many analysts over the years, and they needed someone to take it over who actually wasn’t a writer. They wanted someone who viewed the world through the lens of entrepreneurship. 

So with zero editorial background, zero professional writing experience, I stepped into that role simply because they thought that I knew how to talk to that audience. And again, I looked at it as an exercise in clarity, an exercise in taking actual experiences, actual advice, actual data, and communicating it as effectively as possible to an audience that is really looking to be entertained while they’re reading it, but also they need to get something out of it. So that started my entire sort of writing journey, and I was the managing editor there for about a year. Decided to part ways with them just because The hustle and trends had been acquired by HubSpot, which is a big software conglomerate. And journalism and media and corporate America don’t blend super well. And I thought that there was just some cultural nuance there that wasn’t really jiving for me. But in that time, I had just fallen in love with editorial. I had met the coolest people that I’ve ever known before in my entire life, in my entire career, who were our writers and our analysts. The most incredible entrepreneurs who were part of our readership and part of our community. And I just said, this is what I want to do. And I felt that after having 20 years of business experience, I had earned the right to stop doing it and start talking about it and start teaching it. And so I made that big shift. I was, you know, a huge part of my career was in real estate development. And I like to say I retired my hard hat and adopted a laptop as my main business tool and made that shift into editorial. But again, I don’t look at any of this as a writer. I look at it as a person who has had experiences that I think can help others. and or entertain others, hopefully both. And that’s really the platform by which I’ve built my newsletter and all of the other editorial and community aspects of what I’m working on right now.

Rob Marsh: So before we jump into a lot of that stuff, what’s really interesting with what you’ve shared so far is the fact that you weren’t a writer before you became a writer. And there are a lot of people who listen to this podcast who are starting writing businesses or have been writing for a little while. They’re looking for clients. that the challenge of how do I communicate now that I can do this thing, this writing thing. And you obviously did it. I mean, it’s almost counterintuitive where you say, well, I, you know, you, you managed, you know, skating rinks and you’ve like, you mentioned your real estate development stuff that you’ve done and you’ve worked on a cruise ship and all of like these amazing experiences. But it wasn’t writing. And so what was the thing that made you think or even made the hustle think that you were the right person for that job?

Kristin Kenzy: There’s, there’s two things. So what the hustle thought and what I thought, two different things. Um, so I think the hustle really did want someone who could manage the business of their trends publication. I think they were thinking about that because trends was a business within a business. When the hustle was purchased by HubSpot, they relinquished their advertising business. They were, you know, that was how they made money before. And they became a platform for which HubSpot could promote its products and services. Whereas Trends uniquely was not that. Trends was a premium subscription. So they needed to look at Trends as a business plus editorial. So I was responsible for both of those elements, right? I was the managing editor, not the editor-in-chief who was in charge of both the hustle and trends. I was really looking at how can we maximize this business? Who are our readers? What interests them most? And when I say who are our readers, what stage in development are they? Are they people who are questioning going into entrepreneurship, questioning taking that leap and quitting their 9 to 5? Are they experienced entrepreneurs who are looking for operational tactics? Are they investors who are looking to keep their finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the startup world, right? Like, you know, delineating between all of those different user groups and then creating product services, programming, and of course, strong editorial that resonated with them. So I think that that’s really what they were looking at me for. I think that they thought, okay, our writers are strong enough that if our managing editor isn’t the best editor in the world, the business will still thrive as a result of that. So I think that that’s where they were coming from. I don’t think they expected me to step into the editorial side. And I know I didn’t expect myself to step into the editorial side as competently as I ended up doing. That was a huge surprise to everybody. And the thing that I thought I would find most interesting about taking on that role was building relationships with that audience. So I had been a subscriber and member of Trends since its inception, and I was an active part of that community. That’s how they knew me. I actually ran their blockchain subchapter as a volunteer, because at the time I was the COO of a blockchain startup. And so I wanted to like, you know, make sure that we were exploiting all the resources that Trends had to offer in that industry and making sure that we were constantly discovering things and sharing it with the community. So I was very actively involved and I had met some of the coolest people ever. And I was just like, if I could be in a position of authority and looked up to by this incredible community of entrepreneurs and business leaders, That can’t be bad for me at all. There’s no downside to that. And so I was really in it more for the community, the relationships, the connections, and looking at it as a stepping stone to what my next venture might be. And I think that they really wanted someone who could streamline their business operations and make sure that they were maximizing all of their programming and all of the products within the trend suite, not just the editorial.

Rob Marsh: Okay, that all makes sense. So you left there and maybe there was a step in between, but you have started your own newsletter, Drunk Business Advice, which before we started recording, I told you I love it. I think it really stands out in the newsletter space in some really unique ways. Tell us about that. Why start a newsletter and what is your approach?

Kristin Kenzy: So this all happened while I was still with Trends. It’s funny. I had wanted to either start a newsletter or a podcast or both. And it was because I had suddenly been exposed to the world of media. And like I had mentioned, I had just met so many great people. And conversely to the world of tech and the world of real estate that I had come up through, I felt like there was an openness to the relationships I was building. I met, for the first time in my career, really incredible women who wanted to uplift other women. And in a lot of more male-dominated industries, even the women in them kind of want to push women down. And I had experienced a lot of that sort of thing. And so I kind of, not to be too kumbaya about it, was like, Oh, this is just like a fantastic space to be in. And this is how I want my world to look. And so, um, I had started, my initial idea was to start a podcast and a newsletter called business and benevolence. And this was from a, uh, panel that I hosted while I was with trends with people who were really strong business leaders and entrepreneurs, but also either ran nonprofits on the side or had, um, certain like, uh, social or economic missions that were really just benevolent within their businesses. And it was this idea that you can be both and you can be successful at both, right? You don’t have to be, you know, looking just at shareholder management. You can look at stakeholder management and manage both and make the world a better place while also running a super successful and profitable business. And I wanted to explore that a little bit more greatly. And so that was kind of the first idea that I played around with. And then I’ll tell you how drunk business advice, which is so much more suitable to me, by the way, than the benevolence thing, came about. I had been at an event here in New York City that a friend of mine was hosting for entrepreneurs. And she’s someone that I support and I try to go to as many of her events as possible. And I was talking to someone there about his fundraising strategy. He was trying to raise venture capital, but also looking at smaller angel and even like some private equity. And I was talking to him about the strategy and we were having wine and then we were talking about the strategy and then we were having more wine. And then we were talking about the strategy and having even more wine. And I came up with an idea to kind of flip his fundraising strategy on its head by segmenting all of his business units and making them investable assets as individuals rather than the whole company. Not to get into too many details about it, but it was like this whole like completely rethinking how he was going to go out and raise money. And he went and did it. And the next morning I had an editorial meeting with Trends, with all of our writers, and I was like, oh my God, last night this guy took my drunk business advice. And it was the most, like, I can’t believe that he took this advice. And they were like, that needs to be your newsletter. Drunk business advice. And so it started with a name first, and I didn’t really know what I wanted to write about. But as I was workshopping the idea, I initially wanted to look at sort of the key aspects of business operations that get ignored. So I had three tests, the toilet test, the tell me test, and oh my gosh, there was one more. Now I feel like a presidential candidate in a debate for getting the third thing of a policy. So I’ll talk about the first two first and then the third will come back to me. So the toilet test was what’s the toilet of your business, right? What is the thing that if you don’t keep it maintained and running well, the shit will hit the fan, literally. But it’s not a sexy thing to look at. How do you identify that and keep that running? The tell me test was all about communication. And that is, how are you communicating your mission, your values, your structure, your tactics, your policies, not just to your staff, but to your audience? Because there’s usually a strong disconnect between what you want to do and how that’s actually landing on your team and on your audience. And now the third one is still like, leaving me, which is good. It’s good that this has happened because obviously that was not the right structure for drunk business advice. I recorded four podcast episodes initially of drunk business advice, focusing on those topics, and it just didn’t work. There’s a bunch of reasons why it didn’t work. Number one, I suck at podcasts. I—full disclosure—don’t really listen to podcasts. It’s not how I consume media. I’m a reader. And what you’re doing is incredibly difficult. Interviewing people live, editing them, promoting them, all of that stuff I was just not good at. But also, I felt like I was too structured by having these tests, these cutesy little tests. And that’s also my biggest flaw in copywriting is that I tend to be a little too cute with copy and try to find things that are a little too fun and adding structure where structure doesn’t need to be. And so I took a big step back for like probably four or five months to rethink it. And I realized that the essence of drunk business advice is just unfiltered stories and what we learn when we are actually talking to people we care about with a drink in our hand and reliving those experiences and having those experiences reflected back onto us by our friends and the people who are hearing them. And so that’s the direction that I ended up going. It’s far less structured and so far has been working a lot better than trying to be cutesy and offer all these different operational advice elements.

Rob Marsh: I think it’s the stories that resonate so much, at least why I love the newsletter so much. There’s a ton of variety. One of the first newsletters that really resonated with me, I think you were doing a critique of managed care facilities because you were putting, I think, a relative in a managed care facility, which I’ve had a mom go through that and, you know, passed away in a facility and like the criticisms that you were offering through that all hit home, but you were telling it in a way that was so compelling and almost, I mean, the experience is kind of over the top, but it was almost over the top ridiculously bad. But then the next week’s episode may be about your experience managing an ice rink or an experience on a cruise ship. The stories are so different, but they’re always compelling. So let’s talk a little bit about storytelling. And I know you even got, I think, a program where you’re helping business leaders tell their own stories. But how do you approach stories? As you’re thinking about this, oh, this would be a good story, or this is not a good story for the newsletter. What do I need to do to make this story acceptable for the newsletter? Let’s talk about that process a little.

Kristin Kenzy: Sure. So for the first probably 20 to 25 issues, I had no process. I was just publishing. And this is, I guess, one of those unique aspects of coming at this as a non-writer, right? I don’t have any experience in being taught how to write, in storytelling formulas, in any of this stuff. And it’s actually been through working with other people who have that background to provide me with clarity on what it is I’m actually doing so that I can repeat it moving forward. Because that was my biggest problem is when I first started writing drug business advice, people would ask me that question and my answer was, I have no idea. I just write it. It’s like when I was a figure skater, I didn’t know how I did a double axel. I couldn’t break it down for you because it was almost like muscle memory and I would just do it. And that’s how I was initially writing it. But since I’ve started working with actual writers and people who have been giving me feedback on what it is that I’m putting out there, I’ve been able to put a lot more structure around my process. And that’s one of the things that I’m going to be working on with my new Rebel Scribes cohort, the business leaders that are going to be joining me here in January to work on their own storytelling. So, there’s a few things. The first thing that I do, or the big structure, is something that I never knew of, but apparently is pretty common in storytelling, and that’s the, and then, because, and therefore structure. Do you know what I’m talking about when I say that, or should I?

Rob Marsh: Well, I mean, let’s elaborate on it a little bit, just in case somebody listening doesn’t. There’s a few different versions of this framework for, like, how does the story work?

Kristin Kenzy: Absolutely. And so I start with the and then. Most people tell stories this way, just, you know, when they’re talking to their friends or communicating with people on social media. And it’s this sort of anecdotal stream of consciousness way of telling a story. It’s one event happens, then another event happens, then another event happens. It’s not a story, but is a series of events. And so like, as an example, this might be, My boss dismissed my idea in a meeting. And then I started not caring about my job. And then I got called into a performance review. And then I decided I was unhappy, and then I quit. That’s a series of events. And I start with that because that’s how most of us, like, remember things. Remember this event happened, and that event happened, and that event happened. Or in the cases where I’m interviewing subjects for drunk business advice, that’s how they usually relay things to me as well, right? Like, this is the story of what happened. The next step is the because, right? Looking at the why behind that. So after I get the and thens out, and I don’t self-edit myself while I’m trying to do that. I don’t try to self-edit and go, and then, oh, what was the because here? I just get it all down. Then I try to add the becauses. So what this might look like in the previous example is my boss dismissed my idea in a meeting because he was always adamant about appearing to be the smartest guy in the room. Because I realized that I was never going to feel valued at work, I began disconnecting my self-worth with my job performance. Because I was then underperforming, I was called in for a performance review. And during that performance review, it became clear that because my boss was never going to provide me with the validation and the upward mobility I needed, that it was time for me to resign. So now that’s more of a story. And we’re getting through to the why behind the and thens. And then the final thing is the therefore. So that’s the last thing that I do, and that’s typically the drunk business advice. And for those of you who may have read it, I always kind of start, there’s this bubble at the top that has the drunk business advice, and they’re just a few bullet points to kind of entice you into what’s going to come. But the final thing is the therefore. So the therefore in this example might be, You know, therefore, while it’s healthy to find self-worth in other places other than work, work consumes so much of our time and energy that it’s important to recognize the signs of a toxic workplace and make changes before that toxic environment impacts our mental health, our reputation, our career. And that’s like, that’s the final therefore. And then you have something that is worth reading because not only does it take the reader on a journey that they can emotionally relate to, there’s advice there, right? There’s something about a piece of value that they could take away. So I start with my and thens and I just get the anecdote on paper. Then I try to look behind that, come up with the becauses. And then I finally come up with the therefore. What are the main takeaways from this? The things that really matter and that I want them to remember after reading the story.

Rob Marsh: Copywriters will recognize the advice part as the transformation or the result or the thing that we’re driving to that’s going to create that sale or whatever the activity that we need somebody to take. And so it makes sense, not just from a storytelling, situation, but when we’re writing any kind of content, any kind of copy that’s trying to move somebody from where they are now to where they want to be at some point in the future. And I think one of the wonderful things about your newsletter is it’s not always something that we’re aware of that movement because of how it’s coming from your life and your experience. But again, we’re along for the journey the whole time. And when we get there, it’s really satisfying to read.

Kristin Kenzy: That’s really nice of you to say. And I’m glad that that’s coming through. But it is hard. And you had asked how I determine what stories are worthwhile. And it really is that bridge between the and then and the because. Because if there is a because behind the story, and it’s not just a fun anecdote, I started writing one the other day, a story that I have told a million times before about a horrible experience I had at Disney World. And there’s actually a lot of business lessons in it. from a Disney perspective because they just dropped the ball on, they were definitely not the happiest place on earth. And there are just some crazy anecdotes and things that happened there. But as I was putting the story together, I just couldn’t find enough because and therefore in it. It was just to me a series of ridiculous anecdotes. And I might be able to take some of those anecdotes and use some of those for like social media posts or other things. But drunk business advice, as you mentioned, it’s long form narrative. And I need to have really strong becauses and really strong therefores. And I wrote half of it and went, there’s just not enough here. And again, this is a story that I’ve told at dinner parties for years, thinking it’s one of the best stories I have in my back pocket. And it’s really not. It’s just like an outrageous thing that happened in a series of events. but there’s nothing to really draw from it.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, there’s a big, I mean, there are all kinds of different stories, varying lengths or whatever. But when you need a story that fits a purpose, you know, if you’re trying to communicate something specific, like you said, advice or some kind of transformation, there has to be a change. There has to be that thing. You’re right. And so, yeah, there’s a place in the world for anecdotes and funny stories, you know, the give a laugh at the bar or whatever. But for a serious or a weekly newsletter, it’s nice to have a little bit more.

Kristin Kenzy: Absolutely.

Rob Marsh: Okay, so we’ve talked just a little bit about your storytelling approach. One of the things you mentioned to me that got me thinking before we started recording, you sent an email with a couple of ideas of some things we could talk about. One of them was stop journaling. And one of the things that experts have said is if you want stories to tell, you need to be writing them down in the journal and you’ve got to keep this list of your potential stories and you’ve got to be thinking about it. So I’m curious about, your approach. I know you’re not saying don’t write things down or don’t keep a journal, but what do you mean by that idea of stop journaling?

Kristin Kenzy: So I would say there’s a difference between a journal and a second brain. And I am a really strong advocate for keeping a second brain, recording your thoughts, making sure that you have notes written down every time an idea comes to you, every time you remember something, witness something, have a conversation that inspires you. Yes, 100% write that stuff down. So when I say journaling, I say like, OK, it’s like that dear diary at the end of the day. Here’s all the stuff that I did today. possibly here’s how it made me feel. The reason I think people should stop doing that and start writing for an audience is because when you’re writing for an audience, it forces you to find value in your experience that is going to be, you know, value for the audience. I like to say that my favorite quote is from one of my best professional mentors, Frank Sipovitz. He was in charge of the Super Bowl during the blackout. And he was in charge of the Super Bowl for 10 years. Prior to that, he was in charge of the NHL events. And prior to that, he was in charge of Radio City Music Hall. So this guy has been in some of the most crisis, dire situations you could ever imagine. And my favorite quote from him is, learning isn’t linear. You don’t have an experience and immediately learn from it and take those learnings and apply them to your life or whatever it is you’re doing, your profession. Our brains don’t work like that. We don’t look backwards like that. Some of the lessons kind of seep into our subconscious and become like intuitive and things like that. But like intellectually, we typically don’t look at our experiences as lessons. You know, we’re not an after school special, right? Where it’s like, oh, this experience happens and here’s what we learned from it, boys and girls. That’s not how our brains work. But we can trick our brains into doing that if we start writing those experiences down for an audience. and forcing ourselves to extract the lessons because now not only are, you know, they hopefully learning something and we’re providing value to an audience, but now we’ve intellectualized this and brought it up into the forefront of our minds so that we can now use those lessons as we move forward through our lives. And so I would argue that anyone who journals right now or likes to write down their experiences, their thoughts, their feelings, I would encourage them to start doing that for an audience. Whether it’s you’re posting on LinkedIn or any sort of other social media you happen to be on, starting a newsletter, even if you only have 20 subscribers and they’re your friends and family and cousins, right? Even if you have that small of an audience, it’s worth doing just because it’s going to force you to reflect back on your life and extract value from your experiences. So it’s a little bit of a life hack. And I also think that writing for an audience opens up enormous opportunities. Because even if you start small and gain a little bit of traction, staying top of mind for people and constantly bringing people value means that people are going to start reaching out to you for all kinds of things. I mean, I just got a text message this morning from a former colleague who I’ve remained top of mind for and wants to know if I’m interested in a job. Answers probably no on that one, but how many people get text messages like that when you’re not actively putting yourself out there? So I think it’s super valuable for a number of reasons.

Rob Marsh: I think also using writing to an audience, which is a little bit, you know, using writing as a thinking tool to figure out what you’re saying or what you’re thinking in the moment. But there’s a filtering effect that happens there too. You know, there are some regular email writers when their email shows up in my inbox where I think, that story maybe wasn’t that valuable for me as an audience, right? you know, wasn’t what I was expecting from that particular writer, whereas if they were thinking, oh, my writer includes this persona, this kind of person, and so they’re interested in, you know, this topic, or my lessons about, you know, this experience, it feels like that filtering effect could improve a lot of email writers work.

Kristin Kenzy: Oh, completely. Because you are, you’re thinking about who that person is that’s reading it. And it’s also possible to kind of segment that, right? So sending, if you have an audience and you know a little bit about that audience, you can choose to send them different versions of the same lesson in ways that will resonate with them. Or you can just choose to only send them things that you believe are really going to be impactful so that you get that click and you get that open. every time rather than them starting to become disinterested and then just not opening your email when it does contain a little nugget of gold for them. And I think that that’s something that not enough newsletter operators are actually doing right now. I asked this question to a group of newsletter operators the other night, how many segments do you send the same email to? And the answer is usually one. I have my audience segmented based on acquisition method, based on how they’ve responded to various surveys and things that I put out. For instance, entrepreneurs versus nine to fivers with a side hustle versus retirees versus C-suite. I have this information about my audience. Why not segment it? And if I want to in the future, create customized content for those segments. So I do think that that’s something that people should start thinking about at the very top, even before they have a large audience, is how to find out the most you can about them and then segment them. And sometimes you’ll just send the same blast out to everyone, and that might be the case, you know, 90% of the time. But having that information about your audience so that you can customize the message is really important as well.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I remember you sent a subscriber survey to me that I filled out. In fact, that was probably our first email exchange.

Kristin Kenzy: Can we tell people what you told me?

Rob Marsh: Sure. Well, I mean, you’ll have to talk about what was on your survey.

Kristin Kenzy: I just want Rob’s audience to know that he told me to f*** off in that.

Rob Marsh: Sort of, sort of.

Kristin Kenzy: No, it was perfect. It was the best response I ever got from that survey.

Rob Marsh: We have to be clear, the survey itself categorizes each person, so I had to select a couple of things. One of them was my age, and I think The age for millennials said you were in the prime of your game or something. And then the one for my age group, which is just slightly older than millennial, was something about being past, not past the prime of my life, but being at the stage of my life where I could tell people to F off, basically. And so, yeah, I responded back with, I was trying to be funny, I think.

Kristin Kenzy: It was the best response I’ve ever gotten. I love that. And it showed that you actually like paid attention to the content and were engaged with it. And I love seeing stuff like that. And I’m never offended when people use that language with me because I use that language with them.

Rob Marsh: I think this points out to an interesting bit of micro copy as well, where it’s not just about the big long form newsletter. But it’s about all of the other ways that you communicate and a survey can be fun. And so especially if you’re asking people to divulge information about themselves, you ought to make it fun or at least enticing for them in some way so that they’re willing to share. And your survey did that, at least for me.

Kristin Kenzy: Thank you. Thank you. I think it’s important to bring authenticity and personality to every type of communication you have with your audience. And whether it’s a survey, whether it’s a social media post, whether it’s just an email exchange, you know, I get a lot of responses to the newsletters that I send out. And when I respond, I try to be the same person that they expect, right? I try to be fun and, you know, engaging and authentic. And I never set up If I scale to a certain level, I might have to do this, but I usually don’t set up any sort of auto replies, nor do I have at this point an assistant or anyone responding on my behalf, which I know a lot of the bigger publications have to do. I really do try to individually respond to every single thing people send me, because they’ve taken time out of their day to say hello to me, and they deserve an authentic response from me.

Rob Marsh: So when we’re talking about segmenting, have you done this with Drunk Business Advice yet, where you’re sending a different message to certain segments that I may be not seeing, or is this the plan for the future?

Kristin Kenzy: It’s more of a plan for the future. My audience, first of all, isn’t big enough yet, I think, to send those segments, but I guess the point behind this was that start collecting that data early so that you can begin segmenting once your audience gets to that point. The only difference that I have right now in emails that I’ve sent have been to promote Rebel Scribes, my writing cohort. based on people who have either shown engagement, responded to surveys, versus people who might read the newsletter and open the newsletter but are a little bit more passive. And that’s mainly just to reward those who are more engaged with special offers and pre-launches and things like that. It’s not been a like, hey, this is the segment of C-suite, so I’m going to speak to you differently than the segment who are entrepreneurs. I haven’t experimented with that yet, but I plan to in the future.

Rob Marsh: You did do that when you were with Trends, though. I mean, that publication was pretty intense in the way they used data and thought about data.

Kristin Kenzy: We actually did not. The whole time I was there, we definitely didn’t mix our editorial. Our editorial was the same message to everyone. It was a premium subscription. People paid for that. Everyone got the same thing. On the marketing side of things, we did. We segmented our list and did email marketing to try to target the most, what we thought were the best types of Trends members, which were people who were actually operating and actually doing. We found that even though people who were thinking about diving into entrepreneurship were really engaged at the beginning, they typically didn’t renew their subscription. Whereas people who were operators, you know, because if they go a year and they don’t start a business, why are they, you know, and so we were really looking more for operators, people who actually had quite a bit of experience and were looking to either pivot their business, start a new business, open up different operational aspects to their business, and they were looking for different insights. we found them to be far more engaging. And so we did segment our list based on that to try to make sure that we were targeting the right members for more sustainability and less churn overall. But editorially, no, we just sent the same email out to everyone. We probably should have thought more about that actually. But I was new at this back then. So I didn’t even think to like, these are all lessons again, learning’s not linear. And these are all lessons that I’ve learned throughout that process.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. One of the things that you mentioned that we should definitely talk about is related to this, that’s humanizing data. The fact that there is a difference between talking about numbers and knowing numbers or the way that we talk about numbers. And this is a huge problem online, you know, especially in marketing where people are willing to share like top line numbers, but they don’t talk about all of them. you know, the stuff that happens underneath, you know, when we’re talking things like income or revenue or costs and value and all of that stuff. I’m assuming you’ve got maybe a related take on that. What do you think about this whole way that we talk about data?

Kristin Kenzy: I mean, everything is spun. So to answer your question about like sometimes people are gonna like share whatever numbers make them look the best. And if that’s top line revenue and not profitability, then that’s what they’re gonna share. So I don’t know that I have a judgment to make on that because I mean, that’s more their own kind of moral dilemma. When I talk about humanizing data, I’m talking about how when you are either pitching an idea or telling someone about your business and there’s data involved. The quote that I use is like, everyone wants to know your numbers, but no one wants to listen to you talk about your numbers because it’s boring as hell, right? You want to express numbers in a way that makes people able to relate to them. So to give you a couple of examples, and I’m going to credit Carmine Gallo with this as well. He was another mentor of mine. He’s published I think 10 books now, several bestsellers. His latest is The Bezos Blueprint, where he analyzed all of Jeff Bezos’ shareholder letters over the course of the decade or so that he was chairman of Amazon and writing shareholder letters. He talked about Jeff Bezos’ storytelling ability, his ability to simplify complex situations and concepts. And most importantly, his ability to humanize data. So this is a concept that I got from Carmine Gallo in this book. And to give you an example, we might say, by the year 2050, there will be over 850 million tons of plastic in the ocean. What does that mean? It means nothing.

Rob Marsh: It means there’s a lot of plastic in the ocean.

Kristin Kenzy: It means there’s a lot of plastic in the ocean. But what if we rephrase that and we said, by 2050, the weight of all the plastic in the ocean will be greater than the weight of all the fish? That humanizes it. It conceptualizes it. And you can think, well, there’s a lot of fish in the ocean. There’s actually, I think it’s 890 million tons of fish in the ocean. And it’s going to be greater than that of all the fish. Or if we have, I have a few really good ones here. Amazon stores over 3 billion gigabytes of data.

Rob Marsh: I have no idea what a gigabyte is.

Kristin Kenzy: Amazon stores so much data that if you burned it all onto DVDs, the stack would reach the International Space Station twice. So these are examples of how you can take any time you’re writing and I try to do this. My example is figure skating, right? So when I talk about how I injured myself as a figure skater, when a figure skater falls on a jump, it’s eight times their body weight. So what I did is I was like, well, when I was a figure skater, I weighed about 100 pounds. What weighs 800 pounds? And I went through this process of trying to figure out things that weigh 800 pounds, and I figured out that a grand piano weighs about 800 pounds. I’m like, what a visual is that? So now when I talk about that, I say that when I fell on that jump, the force of it was equivalent to a grand piano crashing onto a frozen sidewalk. And that just helps. You can hear the wood splintering, right? You can feel the impact. And you can now understand what an incredible injury I had as a result of that particular fall, right? So I always try to look for ways to take a number and then humanize it or contextualize it in a way that people can understand. And I still don’t know really how many gigabytes of data all these DVDs stacked up to the International Space Station might be, but it instilled a feeling in me of like, that’s an astronomically large number. That’s an incomprehensibly large number. And Amazon stores all of that data. That’s incredible. That’s what I mean when I say humanized data, and I think it’s a really strong exercise that we can all do when we write. Every time a number comes up, just stop yourself. Well, write because you shouldn’t stop yourself while you’re writing. Write everything down. But when you’re going through that because and therefore process in your self-editing, think about more creative ways that you can tell those stories. I’ll tell you what, AI is a fantastic tool for this. Because you can put that number into ChatGPT or Cloud or whatever you use and say, give me 20 examples of this. And then you want to verify and make sure, of course, that those examples are not hallucinated and that those numbers all stack up. But it can definitely help the process when you’re trying to think of creative ways to humanize your data.

Rob Marsh: This is another huge copywriting lesson, and it’s not just numbers and data that we need to contextualize, it’s experiences, right? So, this is just off the top of my head, but if you are writing for, say, a knee supplement, because your knees hurt and you want to sell this and you’re selling it to maybe someone in their 50s or 60s, You can’t just say it stops knee pain. You have to contextualize what that knee pain is, right? Like it’s keeping you from playing tennis or being able to go running or maybe playing with your grandkids or whatever those things are. We have to contextualize this stuff in order to tell a better story and in order to get readers to relate to the stuff that we’re doing. This is key to connecting emotionally with our readers.

Kristin Kenzy: Absolutely. And it’s honestly something that I struggle with in copywriting because while I do think I’m strong editorially and with long form narrative, I lean into the cute with copy and I forget about the emotion behind it. I forget about the why. And luckily I have people in my life that are constantly banging me over the head, reminding me that I need to focus on that whenever I’m writing copy because I think it’s hard. I think it’s really hard.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. One other thing that you mentioned that we should touch on that’s a totally different subject, I think, but it’s accordion pitching. And part of this, again, copywriters, content writers, we’re always pitching for work. Oftentimes we’re pitching for other opportunities. But you said that we need to sort of shut up a little bit and take maybe a different approach.

Kristin Kenzy: Well, I mean, it’s all accordion pitching is, and this is a skill that I learned from a screenwriter friend of mine. And so it’s actually a screenwriting concept, and I’ve never heard of this being applied in business. But an accordion pitch is where you just give a little nugget of information at the top, and then you look for a positive signal to proceed. And then you give a little bit more. And I think what founders specifically, I’m not quite sure about freelancers or copywriters, usually folks are pretty good at nailing their one-liner, right? If somebody asks, what do you do? Or what does your company do? We practice this, we rehearse it. There’s a lot of people that’ll say that your one-liner is, my company solves X for Y using this secret sauce. There’s all kinds of formulas for doing this. And that’s great. What happens when they say, interesting, tell me more. Word vomit. I would say that even in this conversation, I have been guilty of that because I’ve been answering, I think, far too monologuish and not turning this into a conversation. You’re okay with that because you’re a podcast host, but if we were meeting at a dinner party, you’d be like, oh my God, I want this girl to shut up. When is she going to let me show interest or ask a question? And so what an accordion pitch basically does is, and I have, I know that people can’t see, but I have a visual aid for this, which is when somebody asks, what do you do? You open up the accordion just a little bit and you say something like, oh, I write a newsletter called Drunk Business Advice. wow, like, okay, that’s, and then I stop there, right? I write a newsletter called Drunk Business Advice, and if they’re like, yeah, okay, and they change the subject, then I know that they’re not interested in learning more about drunk business advice, and that’s okay, because I’ve given them that opportunity to say no, but if they’re like, oh, wow, what’s drunk business advice? I’ll expand the accordion a little bit more, and I’ll say, well, you know, learning isn’t linear, Our lives are not like afterschool specials. We don’t immediately learn our lessons right after we have our experiences. And what drug business advice does is it dives into those experiences in an unfiltered way to provide valuable lessons in an entertaining way. interesting, tell me more, or they might change the subject at that point or ask a question. But if they say interesting, tell me more, then I open the accordion a little bit more and I say, well, I send it every Thursday. I also have writing workshop and I can go on and on. Right. But the idea is that you will have, you know, three to five to six layers of your story. to be able to communicate in a conversational setting that occurs when people are giving you positive signals that they want to learn more. And also giving them an out and therefore respecting their time. Because nobody wants to be that person at the cocktail party who’s just blabbering on about themselves for an hour, not giving anyone else the opportunity to interject or change the subject. And so that’s accordion pitching.

Rob Marsh: I love this idea because everybody has that first answer, but almost nobody has thought through, okay, if I keep opening the kimono just a little bit more, revealing a little bit more, oftentimes we haven’t thought through like, what are those second, third, fourth level answers? And not just like, what would I say, but how do I make it so intriguing that the next response is tell me more. Every time is to tell me more. And that takes work. Again, copywriters, content writers should be able to figure that out. That’s what we’re supposed to do for our clients. But when we sit down to do it for ourselves, it’s oftentimes a harder task and it takes a lot of thinking through to get that right.

Kristin Kenzy: Totally. You hit such a fantastic point. I can give this advice all day long, but even I am bad at doing it. We all know what we should be doing, but trying to do it for yourself is really challenging. As you’re going through this process, don’t be too hard on yourself because even the people who are touting this as being the best process ever still have a hard time doing it in execution.

Rob Marsh: Well, this is one of the things that we’ve always taught in our programs. It’s oftentimes really good to have somebody that you can reflect this with. It’s like, this is what I wrote. How would you change it? This is what you wrote. This is how I respond to it. So having a business buddy, a writing partner, however you want to call it, somebody that you can reflect that is really helpful.

Kristin Kenzy: It takes practice. You can’t really do this necessarily in front of a mirror. It’s great to have a buddy who’s doing this. And this is one of the things we’re doing in my upcoming cohort is everyone’s going to craft their own accordion pitch and they’re going to have an accountability partner who they’re going to practice the hell out of it with. Because you need to be in that situation when someone’s either showing interest or maybe not showing interest or kind of showing interest. And you need to run through those scenarios and role play it so that when you get to that situation where you’re in front of someone who it matters for, then you operate like it’s by rote, like you don’t even have to think about it.

Rob Marsh: While we’re talking about this idea of having people to work through things, I know you’re interested in learning. You’ve done courses at Harvard. You’re in masterminds. Talk just a little bit about why you’re so invested in those kinds of experiences as opposed to only just reading books or only reading newsletters or what other learning opportunities that we all have.

Kristin Kenzy: And well, we all learn from books. Books are great. Teachers are great. Practice is amazing. But we learn the most by surrounding ourselves with people who care about our goals as much as we do. I mean, it just 10Xs everything. So for instance, I have a mastermind. called Stealth, Stealth Mastermind. And I was launching a landing page for a new product the other day. And I went to my mastermind and I said, shred this. And within 10 minutes, from people that I trust and love and respect, had feedback that completely reshaped that landing page. And, you know, of course you can hire someone to build a landing page for you and you can like go through and watch YouTube videos and read, you know, newsletters and listen to podcasts about all this stuff, but I mean they just within five minutes I had a completely different approach to what I was doing. And having, I think, a relationship with people who you love and trust also motivates you to do more. It’s really difficult when you’re a business owner, especially if you’re a solopreneur or someone who’s really just starting out, to have that accountability and feel like there’s someone looking at you saying, what are you doing today? How far have you gotten? And so I think the communities are really important. And for instance, when I went to Harvard, that was probably my biggest revelation. I was thrilled, obviously, to be going to executive grad school at Harvard. It was the biggest achievement and joy of my life. And I went in thinking, oh, I’m going to get the best education ever. Why wouldn’t I? The education was fine. I mean, it was good. The education was fine. The real value was derived from the relationships that I built with my classmates. And that compounds just every single day. I’m in touch with them, honestly, almost every single day. I’m either texting or on a phone call with one of them. And they make me better people. One last anecdote on this point. I received a response to my last Drunk Business Advice newsletter that was about friendships from a reader who’s really fantastic. And he talked about a Simon Sinek concept, which I had not heard about before, but was something about how friends are not people who are there for you when you’re down. They’re really people who are truly happy for you when you succeed. And when you surround yourself with people who are just as happy about your success as you are, it compounds as well. And I had never thought of it that way. I had always thought people who are the best friends are the ones that are there to rescue you. And that’s true. And you can have those friends. But the ones that celebrate your successes very meaningfully and truthfully are probably the best friends.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that’s a really good way to look at masterminds and cohorts as those friends who are there. And I’ve seen that reflected as well. It seems to be the people who are most engaged and most caring are most excited about everybody else’s success, even when they’re not seeing it, or the same level of success.

Kristin Kenzy: Exactly. And they don’t want to tear you down to their level, right? They want to pump you up.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, exactly. Okay, Kristin, if you could go back to Kristin just starting out in the business world and give her some advice that might help her make progress faster or might help her make more sense of the whole journey in some way, what would you tell her?

Kristin Kenzy: Honestly, what we had just talked about the value of relationships. I was bullied horribly in high school. And so I thought that I could have success or friends, but not both. That was, I sincerely thought that because my friends in high school, anytime I did well, you know, exceeded, whether it was academically or in any of the extracurriculars I did, they weren’t my friends anymore, right? And they would try to bully me and beat me down. And so I sincerely had starting out in my career, this idea that like, well, I can’t make friends with anyone because they are going to inhibit my success. And that couldn’t be further from the truth. And as a result, I threw a wall up. for like 20 years and did not allow myself to have vulnerable and authentic relationships. I did not open myself up to mentorship. I did not open myself up to mentor. I really felt like this was my journey and everyone else was out to get me. And that couldn’t have been further from the truth because looking back, I had many opportunities to build incredibly meaningful relationships with people who I kept at a distance. And so that would be the advice that I give to myself is that life is not high school. Those crazy mean girls in high school are not the same people that you’re going to interact with. Keep your wits about you. Don’t let yourself be taken advantage of, of course, but allow yourself to be in vulnerable relationships because I feel like that would have just not just given me more success, but made life more enjoyable. It would have given me more joy. And I do regret that I didn’t experience a ton of joy early in my career. It was a lot of work and no play. It could have been a lot more play and a lot more fun.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. Interesting. Okay. And great advice because everybody needs more play, more joy. Yeah. So if people have been listening, and I hope everybody who’s listened is thinking, I definitely want to subscribe to Drunk Business Advice. I got to see what Kristin’s sharing with the world. Where should they go?

Kristin Kenzy: Drunkbusinessadvice.com.

Rob Marsh: And let Kristin know you heard about it on the podcast so she can segment you properly because someday who knows if there’ll be a podcast segment.

Kristin Kenzy: Absolutely. And shoot me an email. Once you get my first welcome letter, definitely shoot me an email. I will respond and I’m really excited to meet you.

Rob Marsh: Amazing. Thank you, Kristin, for sharing such great advice. I’m excited to share this with everybody who listens and yeah, let’s keep in touch.

Kristin Kenzy: Thank you, Rob. This has been so much fun. I really appreciate you having me on.

Rob Marsh: Thanks to Kristin Kenzy for taking some time to sit down with me. You should definitely check out her newsletter at drunkbusinessadvice.com. If you join her list, you’re gonna see the survey that I responded to. We talked about that earlier when Kristin mentioned that I told her to F off and you’ll see the context of why I said that to her. And you’ll have a shot at possibly giving her an even better response than I did. I’m not kidding when I say that her newsletter is a favorite and you should definitely check it out. 

Let me make one last plug for The Copywriter Underground before we wrap. You heard Kristin and me talking about the power of masterminds and connections for growing your business and how they lead to all kinds of opportunities that you just don’t get working on your own. If you’re not ready for an expensive mastermind, but you want that kind of support and connection, you need to check out The Copywriter Underground now at thecopyrighterclub.com/tcu. I mentioned all the stuff that includes at the top of the show, so that’s enough. But just trust me, this is the month to join if you want to try it out.

Stuff to check out:

Done by Noon by Dave Ruel
4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
Get Dave’s workshop in The Copywriter Underground
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  If you’re listening to this episode as it goes live, today is the final day of 2024. Many of us are looking forward to the new year and new opportunities to grow and get things done.

I’m not a big fan of resolutions. They tend to be good for a few weeks, but after 4 weeks are often forgotten. It’s even a cliche now to mention how full gyms are on February 1 compared to January 1st. The drop off shows how ineffective resolutions can be for most of us.

So what does work? Well, the past year or two I’ve focused more on behaviors rather than goals or resolutions. That is, making time to exercise every morning without a goal to lose weight or compete in a marathon or bench press a certain weight. Making time to do something every day is something I can do. This applies to other goals as well, like time spent reading rather than having a goal to read 24 books a year. By scheduling time to read every day, I can reach the 24 books read without setting a goal. 

So that begs the question, how do you make sure you spend your time on the activities and behaviors that will get you closer to the person you want to be?

A few years ago, we asked something similar of Dave Ruel, the author of Done by Noon. That book is one of my favorites when it comes to getting stuff done. My other favorite takes an almost completely opposite view of time management and getting stuff done and that’s Oliver Burkeman’s 4000 Weeks. I’ll link to both in the shownotes in case you want to check them out.

For today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I went back into the archives to resurrect this mostly forgotten interview with Dave Ruel. And while he does talk about goals, he shares a framework for making sure your schedule includes plenty of time for the behaviors you want to implement into your life. If you’re looking to get more done in 2025, some of his ideas will help.

Before I share what Dave told us, after this interview we realized that we wanted to go deeper with Dave and his system. So we recorded a workshop where he walks through everything what he shares during this interview… at an even deeper level. That workshop is one of the dozens of business focused trainings available right now in The Copywriter Underground. Coming up in January of 2025, we’ll be adding several more, including a workshop for copywriters who want to work either part time or full time with a client. My friend Jessica, who spent 2 decades as a recruiter for a creative talent agency will share why copywriters are so bad at resumes and cover letters and what they need to do differently if they want to land a so-called “real” job. And Esai Arasi will be sharing how to build relationships with prospects at scale, without burning out on social media. Both of these workshops are happening in January and are completely free for Copywriter Underground members. If you want them… along with the time management workshop from Dave Ruel, go to thecopywriterlcub.com/tcu now to join.

And like last week, you’ll hear Kira Hug asking questions on this episode as it is a throwback to 2020 when she and I were co-hosting this podcast. Okay, with that let’s jump in with Dave Ruel as he tells us how he became an entrepreneur focused on sharing better time management strategies…

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Dave Ruel:  I’m going to go back to my days as a fitness athlete. This is pretty much when it all started. So, in the early 2000s, I was an amateur competitive bodybuilder. So, I was very obsessed with everything fitness, bodybuilding, muscle building, you name it. In 2007, I met a guy named Lee Hayward. We were fellow competitors on the regional circuit. So, we’ve known of each other within the local circuit, but I’ve never met Lee in person. I was traveling to his hometown to compete that weekend. So, Lee actually offered me to stay at his house that weekend. We only knew each other little bit, but I never knew what he was doing for a living.

The first morning, he was having coffee. He’s like, “Well, I’m going to do some work. I’m going to answer a couple emails and then I should be done by noon. And then we can go work out.” I was like, “Yeah, it’s nice to be on vacation and have that schedule.” He’s like, “Well, it’s pretty much like the way we operate here.” I was like, “Really? What is it that you do?” He’s like, “Well, I have a bodybuilding website. I make a full living out of it and making six figures a year, working from home. My wife works with me.” I was like, “Well, okay, I need to understand how you do to that.”

So, I quickly treated my passion for fitness to an obsession for business building, started studying direct response marketing, anything that had to do with online marketing. It was very limited at the time, because obviously, that’s in 2007. So, there was not that much going on when it comes to online businesses. Now, everything’s online. If you’re not online, you’re nowhere. But at the time, it was very different. So, I created my first business at that time. It was a website that I was sharing nutrition and cooking tips for bodybuilding and fat loss that was called the Muscle Group. The website is still on. We still sell digital products on that platform. From there, I emerged more on the publishing marketing agency.

So, basically, other coaches and other experts saw what I was doing online. They wanted to do the same thing. So, I was like, “Okay, well you have an audience, I know how to monetize that.” Then we launched an agency that led me to invest in a company called BiOptimizers. So, that’s natural supplements company. We did full turnaround with that company, sold it in 2016. During that time, for me, becoming an entrepreneur, it’s like anything else, going to the gym once doesn’t make you an athlete. I feel the same thing with entrepreneurship. You have to do it in order to understand what it is. In the process, I did obviously all the mistakes in the books that most entrepreneurs make when it comes to managing their time, their energy, their attention.

I build systems around my life in business in order to fix that and mostly inspiring by what I had learned in sports performance. I saw there’s too many weird similarities between both worlds. So, I started adapting that. Yeah. So, in 2016, I had the opportunity after I sold my last business to start coaching entrepreneurs. So, basically, entrepreneurs were coming to meet for the online business stuff that you’re talking about. Okay, I want to build an online business to have the freedom and yada, yada, yada, but what I realized that these entrepreneurs don’t need more tactics or strategies to gain more customers and convert more.

What they needed really was a framework to help them operate as entrepreneurs. I started sharing my systems with them. The results spoke for themselves. This is how Effic was born. We’re going to share these techniques, these systems with everybody. Yeah, now a few years later, we don’t do coaching, but we have certifications now, where we certify basically various business coaches or consultants who want to use that with their clients. We have, obviously, the Effic planner, which is our best-selling tool.

Rob Marsh:  So, we’re definitely going to get into more of that, but I want to go back to the amateur bodybuilding phase of your career as you’re just starting out. I’m guessing that there are a lot of behaviors, a lot of things that you were doing as a bodybuilder that apply to how you ran your businesses or that even run your business today. Will you tell us a little bit about what you learned in that phase of your career that you apply to your business today?

Dave Ruel:  Yeah, a lot of timeless techniques that we have in… It’s not just bodybuilding. It’s really through sports performance in general. The thing that you need to have in order to become a good athlete or a good entrepreneur is discipline. The thing is that when I started training really and didn’t know that I was going to compete or anything like that, I did that just to transform myself, I realized the structure it would give me, the workouts, how to structure my workouts, how to structure my goals, having an understanding, “What do I really want? Do I want to build muscle, burn fat? What do I need to do first?” The foundational work that you set and from there, you start optimizing and optimizing with time.

The thing is that your structure needs to be solid before you actually optimize, right? I see a lot of people do that. The mistake that many gym goers do in the beginning is that they’re going to take all the supplements on the market thinking that it’s going to fast track their results and they don’t have a solid base. Their nutrition is not good. Their programs are not structured properly. They end up going to the gym all the time thinking like, “The more I’m going to lift weights, the longer I’m going to do it, the bigger I’m going to get or the more fat I’m going to lose.” It’s actually the opposite that happens. So, there’s an order to how things need to happen.

Within this structure, you need to have different habits, different routines that make that sustainable. You don’t just want to do that for X amount of time and it’s done. It’s a lifestyle. So, it’s the same thing with entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is very much of a lifestyle. If you approach it as a sport or as something that you have to do in order to perform and do it well and structure it properly, there’s a lot of similarities, right? So, we talked actually quite a bit in the book about load management and the principle of adaptation and periodization, different basics really in sports performance. But if you don’t have that really mastered on a personal level, it’s going to be very hard for you to evolve as an entrepreneur.

Kira Hug:  So, I’m wondering that when you had a moment where you felt like an entrepreneur for the first time and if that was a specific moment or if it was 10 years into your business, because I do think you’re right, it doesn’t happen overnight. A lot of us, even if we’ve been doing it for a while, we still don’t feel like an entrepreneur.

Dave Ruel:  Well, I think nowadays, people call themselves entrepreneurs before they actually accomplished anything. As I said, it’s like an athlete. You don’t call yourself an athlete the first time you play a sport or you step into a gym. You have to do the work and understand. Not everybody is going to be an athlete, just like not everybody’s going to be an entrepreneur. So, it wasn’t a conscious decision for me. Entrepreneur now is the word that everybody uses. I think there’s a lot of hype probably around the word ‘entrepreneur,’ but really, it’s defining what it really is to be an entrepreneur. For me, it was not a conscious decision. There was not a specific moment that define that.

I think it was just a matter of seeing my pattern and seeing how I was operating as a human. I see a lot of similarities between entrepreneurs, right? So, for example, academically, for me, it was a disaster. I was not good at school. Not that I was not smart enough, just because I was totally disengaged and disinterested. I realized that it was not the norm, let’s say, where I grew up. You needed to have a career and a diploma to get the job, et cetera. I realized that a lot of entrepreneurs had very non-typical type of journeys.

So, there’s not a one path, but there’s similarities with behaviors and the way we saw the world and things like that. So, yeah, it’s just realization. Even to this day, I love entrepreneurship. I love the creative side of business, which is in my opinion, probably what the difference between a business owner and an entrepreneur per se. That’s the creative piece that entrepreneurs might have, that others who might be great at business management, but don’t have that spark of craziness.

Rob Marsh:  So, Dave, as you were telling your story, you talked about developing some of these systems and routines that really help you in your business to be done by noon as your book is called. Can you talk to us a little bit about some of those, maybe even the whole theme behind Effic and how we as entrepreneurs and as freelancers can start to use a system like that or that exact system in order to start getting more of our stuff done?

Dave Ruel:  Yeah. So, we can talk about a little bit more in depth about the system. I think we’re going to have a training, Rob, soon, right? I think next month, we have something scheduled for your audience. So, we’re going to go very, very deep on the topic. To go back to Effic itself, so Effic is actually short for two words. The first one is efficiency. So, obviously, it’s achieving something using the least amount of resources. So, as entrepreneurs, we have three main internal resources or resources that we have, internal and external. So, first, our energy, obviously, and also our attention. So, pretty much how we’re going to be putting our energy and attention, how and on what we’re going to be placing our attention.

The other one, our external resource, finite resource is time. So, time is not something that we can really control. We all have 24 hours a day. Time is the same for everybody. It’s just how we operate, how we use our time and energy within that constraint of time where you’re going to be at work. It’s not about working less. It’s really about working right. We glorify working hard or working smart, but working hard is a given. For example, you go at any sport. No one is successful by going how fast on the court or on the ice, if it’s hockey or whatever. You have to work hard. It’s a given.

Then obviously, you have to work smart. You’re not just going to walk around or run around for absolutely no reason. You have to manage that energy and I would say, optimize it in a smart way. I think the key is really understanding to work right, understanding what is the desired result or outcome that you want to produce. Effic is also short for efficacy, which is the ability to produce the desired or intended result or outcome, right? So, based on that, what we try to make entrepreneurs realize, especially in the first step of the methodology, which is the projection phase, it’s understanding, “Okay, well understand where you want to go.” Be very, very clear on what you want to accomplish, right? So, we divide that in two steps.

The first one is to create what we call your big picture, okay? How do you see yourself? How do you see your life? How do you really envision that for your future? What does it look like? So, creating that big picture, it needs to be specific in some ways, but it’s like going on a trip, right? You’re going to go on a trip. You’re going to visualize in your head what you think it looks like, but in reality, it will look different when you get there, but it’s equally as good. It’s just different. So, you’re going to have that general idea of where you want to be, how you want to feel, and what you want to accomplish. From there, we’re going to ask you to look into what’s really ahead of you. So, what are the goals that you can really see become a reality?

We ask you to create goals. It’s called an annual guideline. So, it’s five goals you want to see become a reality within the next 12 months. So, now we’re not talking about projects. We’re talking about outcomes. We’re talking about results here. What do you want to become a reality? It could be you want to net $100,000 a year. It could be that you want to sell X number of copies of your book. It could be that you want to work 20 hours or less per week, right? So, it’s very, very, very clear on where you’re going or your alignment point. The key is that when we talk about alignment is that the goals that you set in the next 12 months should always be aligned with the type of lifestyle and business that you want to operate, right?

I think the problem is that a lot of entrepreneurs think that they want something. But ultimately, it’s what we call ambition appropriation. It’s that you’re going to look at other people. You’re going to look at other entrepreneurs. You’re going to let their definition of success become your definition of success. I think you have to really dive deeper than that in order to understand what you really want.

I feel like it’s a starting point for a lot of entrepreneurs, because they’re going to come to us when they’re going to feel lost, right? They’re not going to do that when things are going great and there’s no problem. They’re going to do that when, “Okay, I really need to help because there’s just too much to do. I don’t know where I am. I’m not even sure it’s what I want. I need really to recalibrate.” So that’s really the first step. We show you to do that in an efficient manner obviously.

Kira Hug:  Can you share some examples of those goals that you’ve set for yourself, just to bring it to life a little bit more, for your own life and your own business?

Dave Ruel:  Yeah, like I said earlier, it could be financial goals. It could be time, because here’s the thing. I think when we go in business, we go for one thing and that thing is freedom. I divide freedom into three categories or three types of freedoms, time freedom, creative freedom, and financial freedom. I feel like always your goals will revolve around these three freedoms, depending on what season of your life you’re in. If it’s early on in your career, more than likely, you’re going to have a little bit more financial goals regarding financial freedom. When you’re going to start working and things are going good in your business, you’re going to realize that you have less time. You’re going to be focusing more into having goals for reclaiming this time, for example.

So, this is when the goal is probably going to be chop 10 hours of my workweek or work less than 20 hours a week or have six-week of vacation a year or something like that, things you want to see become a reality. I think the big thing that I see entrepreneurs do, especially when they recalibrate or realign, is that they’re going to set more creative goals. Meaning, I want this to become a reality. I want to write my new book. I want to create an online course. It’s being very specific on that outcome. Yeah, create my first online course. From there, when you know that that’s indeed the agenda or that’s an outcome that you want to have within the next 12 months, now, you can start setting your 90-day, what we call, bucket. So, your 90-day projects.

Okay, well, if I need to create my first course, probably I need to create that course. I need to create the content of that course. So, we’ll have a bucket that is dedicated to creating the content of the course. Then you were going to realize that “Well, I might need to actually produce that course,” right? So, it might be another bucket. The other one is you’re going to need to market and sell that course. So, that’s going to be another bucket, but you’re going to realize that amongst all that, you’re still going to have all the tasks to perform your business. So, it’s that juggling act of understanding… Rob, we talked about load management. … how much can you carry as far as workload and also how to divide it through the year in order to achieve that goal, right?

The main problem that I see is that people set goals as just project. So, this is the project that I’m going to do. Instead of looking at it as an outcome and understanding, “What do I need to do for this outcome, for this result to happen?” So, it’s not about creating a massive, massive project and then start working on it. It’s really understanding, “What’s the result? What can I do right now with the time, the energy, and the attention that I can dedicate to it this quarter, within the next 90 days to move in the right direction?” Understanding that sometimes it could be the main priority and you’re going to be spending a lot more time and energy and attention on that product, on that project, or something that gets you closer to this result to be achieved.

Sometimes it could be, “I’m going to have one bucket that is more in line with this result. Another one is more in line with this result.” It really depends on your context. In the best case scenario, obviously, it’s A, A, A, B, B, B sequence where okay, well, let’s focus on one and then go to the other one. But again, it depends on your business context and what needs to be done. So, yes, there’s optimum ways to do it, but there’s other ways to do it, too. The key really is understanding, “How much workload can I carry sustainably so this becomes a reality?”

Rob Marsh:  So that’s my next question then, Dave. So, let’s say that I have those goals or those outcomes. I’m pretty clear. I want to make, let’s say, six figures in the year or I want to take the summer off to spend with my kids and travel and not have to worry about work. Maybe there’s some other goals like that. So, I know that. I know that I want to accomplish that stuff, I want to do it.

But when I sit down to work on Monday, my inbox is full of stuff that I’ve got to pay attention to. And then I’ve got to record the podcast. I’ve got to get the podcast posted. And then after that, somebody needs help with some customer service stuff in our membership. We have to get the training for the membership. All of the other stuff just starts to happen. I don’t end up taking the summer off, or I don’t hit that six-figure goal. So, how do we translate from the big goals to actually getting some of this stuff done?

Dave Ruel:  Yeah. Now, we move to the next step, which is the prioritization phase. It’s understanding that out of everything that you said… For most entrepreneurs, all these tasks are on the same big pile, right? So, picture, you have a messy room and everything’s in the middle. It’s a big mount of stuff that you have. That’s usually how entrepreneurs deal with their things. They’re going to prioritize based on what they think is the priority, right? Usually, because since you’re busy, there’s a lot of things going on your business, you’re going to look where there’s fire and you’re going to try to extinguish the fire. And then next thing you know, there’s another fire somewhere else. You’re going to play firefighter all the time.

The problem is that if you prioritize that… That’s why in the book we talked about now, our matrix being glorified. We’re like, “Well, it could be a good tool. But if you want to be more proactive, if you want to have less fires, maybe it’s better to look at your task from a different perspective.” So, the Eisenhower matrix gauges the task based on the importance and urgency. The problem is that entrepreneurs don’t have that native capacity to really say, “Okay, well, this is urgent,” or “This is important.” What I’m going to see as a fire, that’s urgent and important. I’m going to have to extinguish it right now. So, the tool that we use as the impact matrix at Effic is that there’s four types of tests that you’re going to have to work on as an entrepreneur. That’s universal.

We all have these four types of tasks to attend mostly on a daily basis. It’s really how you’re going to be prioritizing these four, some of these tasks that you’re going to have in your schedule. So, number one that we have are the rock. Rob, you’re a big fan of and you’re a trained FranklinCovey professional. As we said before we started recording, the big rock, small rocks, and sand analogy was just the game changer for me when I saw Dr. Covey perform this. Dr. Covey really uses that to show what to prioritize, the important things in life. When I saw him do that, I was like, “Yes, this is definitely the way which you see prioritization,” but also, I saw the way I was actually designing my workouts, designing and operating as an athlete.

You don’t just go to the gym and start doing random dumbbell curls and bench presses and thinking, “You’re going to get that goal.” You need to understand, “Okay, well, that’s the goal. So, first of all, here’s where I want to go. Now, here’s what I want to accomplish short term. Here’s a program that’s going to get me there.” In this program, you have core exercises and then you have different sets. You have different reps and you have different moves, different tempo, et cetera, right? But you need to identify, “What are your main exercises, your foundational pieces?”, and go from there. You don’t do the opposite. This is perfect for me to illustrate, first of all, how to experiment with my workload, because it’s like going to the gym, for example.

You’re going to go to the gym the first time and going to think you can lift 220 pounds on the bench press. And then you’re going to realize that “Well, that’s actually really, really heavy. I thought in my head that I could do it, but there’s no way I’m listing that weight.” So, you’re going to start taking a little bit more weight out of it until you have something that you can manage and you can have a nice set. You do that gradually. Over time and after 90 days, your first program is completed. You’re like, “Okay, well, now I can actually move up in weights. I can add more weight to my load. I can lift more, because I can carry more load, because now I’ve adapted to this workload, right?” You get better and better and better.

A year from now, Rob is a beast benching 400 to 500 pounds in the bench press for reps, but started with barely being able to do 185. You don’t know. So, this is the thing that you have to adapt that workload over time. We use the analogy of buckets, big rocks, small rocks, and sand in order to show you how to actually break down projects into bite-sized pieces. So, understanding what are your milestones, what needs to be accomplished, and then break it down, breaking these milestones into actionable small rocks, bite-sized pieces, right? You could tell me, there’s sand in this bottle, but the problem is that entrepreneurs are great at playing in the sand, right? They’re great at managing all small stuff or taking care of small stuff before the actual real stuff is accomplished.

The sand exists. You just don’t need to overplan the sand. You have one small rock. Well, you’re going to know what the sand is. You can prepare it the day before, that sand. But you don’t have to go with the micro, micro details way in advance. This is how you get lost. This is how perfectionism kicks in and nothing gets accomplished, right? So, it’s a matter of understanding your workload from a work perspective, but also from an energetic perspective, where not all tasks are created equal based on what you’re great at and your natural tendencies and your natural capacities. So, we help you do that or establish that by yes, looking at what tasks are more impactful and what tasks take the most energy.

So, obviously, the rocks, which are always associated with innovation, with growth, they’re going to take a lot more energy for you to perform. That’s perfectly normal. So, you’re going to have to schedule them at a time that allows you to have that energy, to really push through that task. So, in the impact matrix, the second most important task that we have, the second most impactful task is routines. So, routines are tasks that are associated with the proper operational well-being of your company.

So, there’s things that you guys probably do day in and day out without even knowing but you need to do in order for your business to run properly. For example, it could be sharing on social media, interacting with your membership, students, sending emails, for example. Maybe email’s not the right example, but this task that you need to perform, whether it’s a daily, weekly or even monthly or quarterly basis that we’re going to encourage you to start putting into processes. So, listing, okay, “This needs to be done. Here’s what I need to do.”

Social media is a good example. You need to post on social media. Well, guess what? You have a process probably you’re following every day intentionally that can be documented and then made into a procedure, a series of procedures that you can then outsource or automate or even delegate to someone else, right? So, when you look at these tasks that are really associated with the growth of your company, with things that need to happen in order for your company to grow and evolve, this is what we call the power moves. These are the ones that you should prioritize.

The other types of tasks that you’re going to have are one, the reactive tasks. So, they’re the byproducts of your business operations. So, they will come. They’re things you don’t anticipate that you cannot really plan or proactively overplan, because they’re just reactive by nature and they will happen. As much as you prepare, as much as proactivity you bring into your business, there will still be some reactivity. It’s an inevitable thing. So, there’s a way to actually start looking at that and not having your day just filled with reactive tasks. You need to optimize. You need to limit personally, the number of tasks you need to do and then optimize the process, obviously.

The fourth type of task that you’re going to have are responsive tasks, which are tasks associated with communication. In this day and age, obviously, direct messaging, emails, team meetings, Zoom meetings, I mean, you name it, you’re going to have that always in your day. So, there’s a way to actually really optimize the way you operate your responsive tasks and attack them. That’s what we show you as well. So, obviously, it doesn’t happen overnight. There’s obviously constant work and optimization to be done, but the goal is for you to manage these four types of tasks in the most optimum and right way.

So, for a lot of copywriters we work with, it seems like they have the vision, they can set the goals, they understand the concept of the big rocks versus the sand, but I think a lot of us have a hard time figuring out the program and the how behind it, laying that out whether it’s for a workout at the gym or it’s for business. It’s almost hard to just break that down. What would you advise? What could help us figure out the path? I mean, we could work with the teams and coaches that you work with, but what if we’re figuring it out on our own and we can’t see how to get from point A to point B?

Dave Ruel:  So, it’s like anything else, you have to do it in order to get better at it, right? So obviously, if you use the big rocks and the small rocks and that allows you to start creating frameworks for you and depending on what type of copywriter you are. You could be a sales copy, a sales page copywriter, or an email copywriter or you do a little bit of everything. There’s always these frameworks that you’re going to have. There’s always these ordered things that you’re going to be doing, right? So, it’s understanding, for example, when you work for a client, well, I have this part, my bucket that I really need to carry for myself. So, maybe it’s a lot of outlining work, a lot of putting bullets in. And then this may be processes that you have.

So, routines that you’re going to have in order to maybe speed up the process or work on with multiple clients. So, obviously, if you’re a solopreneur and you do everything yourself, well, there’s only so much that you can do; versus if you’re like, “Okay, I have this project.” The goal is to write a sales pitch, for example, but what is your main process to write a sales pitch? It could be a routine or it could be something that is these creative elements that you fill into buckets. The second one, which is going to be more of a routine practice where you’re writing 500 words every morning or it could be having a specific process to fill in the blanks where you send some part of the copy to someone else in order to write different chapters or whatever.

So, again, I’m not a copywriter. So, I wouldn’t know exactly all the steps, but it’s understanding what the nature of the task. So, is it something that needs for me to create, that I need to create, or is it something that is more operational, that is more routine, if you want, within my creative process? Maybe parts of these routine tasks can be outsourced, delegated, outsourced or even automated sometimes now with AI. I know it’s a big trend now in copywriting to have AI assistance. So, yeah, you need to start doing it and then understanding how you operate. There’s no right or wrong. Some people operate at a heavy capacity to create. Some people are going to be more mechanical and have more processes in their lives. So, it really depends.

Rob Marsh:  So, Dave, I heard you twice say, “You need to do it.” For me, this is where the rubber hits the road. I can have the planner. I can have the goals. I can even have the task list. But there’s still something around personal discipline. You still have to show up, not open up social media, or not get lost in reading too much or whatever the things are that can distract us. Talk a little bit about personal discipline and how you learned to be more disciplined in your approach to the things that you do in your business.

Dave Ruel:  Yeah, here’s the thing with discipline or creating habits in your life, it comes down to the small things and then things compound over time. I think if you’re focused on just hacks and things that are going to give you fast results, this is probably a good approach for you or even what we do, because discipline is built over time and through repeated actions over a long period of time. There’s a concept we talked about it on sustainability in the book. You don’t want to just do things once and then it’s all fixed. To have sustainability, there are different things that you’re going to need to do consistently over time. So, it’s understanding that these rituals and these routines and these habits that you’re going to be putting into place will build that discipline.

It goes into as simple, for example, as drinking water in the morning. That’s the most simple habit that you can have that will boost your productivity and mental capacity. Most of us are always dehydrated, especially for a copywriter, where your brain and your creativity is, “There you go, there you go, guys,” but you know that. You know that hydration is ultra-important for the proper functioning of what’s in between your two ears. The problem is that it’s good thing to know it, it’s another thing to do it. Drink big, tall glass of water in the morning, that’s how I did it. Drinking the water for me was not native. It’s not something that I’m going to drink a gallon of water a day. But when you’re bodybuilding, you have to do that. You have to hydrate properly. It’s part of the plan.

So, drinking a big glass of water in the morning and filling up a jug that’s two liters of water in the morning. I’m still carrying that bottle of water when I go off and stuff like that, because that’s going to ensure that I drink my water daily. That’s going to ensure that it’s done, but I didn’t do it once and it was fixed. It was making sure that I was crossing water, check, done. All right. And then you do that. Now, I didn’t even have to check it. It’s built into my habits and my routines. But it’s the same thing with everything that you’re doing, whether it’s your exercise, your meditation if you’re into it, your gratitude, your healthy eating habits, so many things that you can build.

Actually, in the planner, we have a self-care routine that we lay out. It’s more of a self-care, I would say, checklist that you don’t even need to do it like back to back to back routine. It could be something you do daily, and it compounds over time. So, hydration, making sure… You don’t check your clean eating checkbox for three days in a row. Well, hopefully, your entrepreneurial competitive spirit is going to kick in. So, I need to get better with that and understanding that too, understanding how you react to it. So, every week, for example, we have a review process where we ask you to understand what went well in your week and what didn’t go that well.

We have something called this self-awareness scorecard and something very, very simple to do, but it’s going to allow you to introspect and say, “Okay, well, my energy level was two out of five this week. Why did that happen?” Then you’re going to look back and say, “Well, my eating was not that great four days out of the past seven days. I know, I didn’t drink enough water two days a week. Well, maybe I’m going to fix that. What can I do right now what’s in my power that I can just improve next week?” So, you’re going to look at these things.

Over time, these habits, these rituals are going to become second nature. This is how you build discipline over time, right? Next thing you know, it’s not even hard, it’s super easy to do. So, it’s the principle of adaptation. It’s the same thing as, for example, increasing your ability to carry weight or to carry some load. It’s the same thing with habits. You just have to do it over time and it compounds. It’s like saving money.

Kira Hug:  Well, I did not pass my clean eating test today, because I are French fries. It happened.

Dave Ruel:  So, it’s another thing though, Kira. As you said, it happens. You’re not going to be perfect 100% of the time, just to be aware of it. In the book, I talked about more than often, it takes at least two cycles. So, two quarterly cycles in order to start actually having the awareness of, “Where do you stand regarding load management? Where do you stand regarding your habits, et cetera?” Embodying all of that, it does not happen overnight. Guess what? Nobody’s perfect. You’re going to screw up, especially at the beginning. That’s fine.

That’s another part of it is that you don’t want to be… If you keep all the fun out of your life and everything is regimented and so rigid, that’s why people actually don’t adhere to a lot of productivity methodologies. The things are very, very, very strict. One of my friends always say, “Most productivity methodologies are created by single male in their 40s.” It’s so regimented that it doesn’t allow for any flexibility. So, we made sure we built that into what we do.

Rob Marsh:  French fries for everyone.

Kira Hug:  I enjoyed those fries, so I don’t regret it.

Dave Ruel:  That’s something you should put on a T-shirt. I’ll buy it. French fries for everyone.

Kira Hug:  Okay. Because you shared the habit of drinking water, I’m just curious what some of your other habits are, your personal habits, maybe your morning routine too. I know this is in the weeds, but we’re pretty nosy and we like to know what you do.

Dave Ruel:  Yeah, my morning routines change all the time. I’m a dad of two young girls, two years old and seven years old. The thing is that it changes, because yeah, they wake up at different times. Now, it’s more stable, obviously. Seven years later, it’s getting a little more stable. I traded very strict routines. I was more of a routine person when I was in bodybuilding and I had no kids. It was just me and my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time. It was a lot easier to obviously have the flexibility or that back to back sequence. But now, there’s things that I need to do through the day, that I need to do. At the end of the day, it needs to be done. So, there’s five elements, and I covered a little bit about it. Again, I can tell you what they are.

So, first of all, you need to cover hydration. So, one thing I do every single morning when I wake up is hydration, rehydrate, tall glass of water, then fill up my big jug of water. That’s the one thing that I do all the time. Now, from there, I like to as much as possible wake up before the kids. So, I have that little window of time where the house is actually quiet. I can have some introspection and me time. So, there’s two things that I do. So, first of all is gratitude. When you haven’t practice gratitude and I was like that before, it’s a lie, yeah, whatever, gratitude. But truth is gratitude is the greatest remedy or the greatest medicine for anxiety.

At one point, when I was running my second and my third business simultaneously, I started developing anxiety, because I was so, so busy. Here’s a weird thing. I started developing anxiety when I was hearing the Skype message, because obviously, I was facing a workload that I had never faced before. That was a whole period of that adaptation. I knew at the time, my business partner and I had the systems in place in order to face that. So, we were building that as the business was growing. But I remember that every single time we had a meeting, for example. We had just way too many meetings. That’s why we actually build frameworks to have better, more efficient meetings.

I was getting sweaty palms. My heart was racing, because I was future pacing that there will be fires, there will be more things added to my plate. The weird thing is that the trigger was the Skype ring. It was absurd. So, I’m blessed that my wife, Karine, is a psychotherapist. So, I started talking to her about that. She’s like, “Listen, gratitude.” Gratitude is one of the core things that she does out of her practice. She actually has a gratitude journal that she sells in the French speaking market. That’s a best-seller. She’s like, “You know what? You have to list the things that you’re grateful for, list the things that you have that are right there that you have right now that you are grateful for.”

I started doing that. It was not immediate, but it was very fast that I started changing or rewiring the way I was seeing things. Why are you stressed about that? You’re stressed about future events that never even happened, right? So, it teaches you to focus on the present. It teaches you to focus on what you have right now. Because when we’re busy or we’re anxious, we’re going to tend to see things a little bit more negatively. By focusing on the things that you have, hey, I have my two hands, stupid example, easy example, but guess what? Still a miracle. Two hands, 10 fingers, I mean, think about it, but we take that for granted.

Another weird example and I tie it into water is that I can just turn a knob and there’s clean drinking water coming out of the faucet. We take that for granted. Think about how magical that is and how many people in the world don’t have that. It’s not about what they have, what we don’t have. Still, in my opinion, it’s finding magic into random things that you take for granted. When you do that over time, same thing, it compounds and you tend to have a different perspective on life. For me, that really cured my anxiety. That really helped me in the long run. So, I ensure that every day I do that. In the planner, we actually have what we call the reconnection phrase. There’s different tools that’s found in the journal, that you can listen to different gratitudes, things like that.

You can do it in your own journal if you want. But I’m more of an efficient guy. What I do now is just that reconnection phrase. Today, I’m grateful for, fill in the blanks. I keep in mind that. I added the second part too is that I’m a big believer in the frequency of alignment, checkpoints of your alignment, making sure you’re still in the right direction, where you want to be. Reminding yourself on the things that are important whether it’s like outcomes, but also values. When you stay true to your values and align with what you want to accomplish, you can rarely go wrong. So, it’s the habit of doing that daily, the little practice that will make you more disciplined all the time. So, that’s the second thing.

There’s daily exercises. So, obviously, you don’t have to go to the gym and do bench press and deadlift, PRs every day. The key is just to sweat every day. Dedicate 15 minutes to it. If you don’t feel you have time or you don’t have to go, let’s say, to gym or whatever, just sweat every day, right? So, if you have talked to me 10 years ago, I would go to the gym five times a week, but guess what now? Ten years later, I’m a dad. I have different interests.

Now, I’m going to practice different sports. I’m going to go take walks. I’m going to go be active and do something. Just to model sweat every day, for me, that works, right? So, it’s doing that. Once you do it, boom, check, the box is checked. It doesn’t need to be part of the morning routine process as long it’s done that day. So, that’s the third.

Fourth one is meditation. What I mean by meditation is really some you time with your own thoughts, with your environment. Take anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes to do that. Focus on your breathing. Little things that first of all will compound for stress management. Also, slow down the pace sometimes when needed. So, I do that. I try to do it in the morning when I can.

If I don’t have time, let’s say all the kids wake up early or whatever, I’m going to keep a moment during the day to do that. I’m going to sit down, inside or outside when it’s nice. I have a nice leather couch in my office where I just sit down and do that. So, focus on my breathing and let things calm and bounce. I’m not a 15-minute meditation yogi who’s going to go in deep trance every day. That’s not what it’s all about. It’s just reconnecting with yourself.

The last one is the no French fries policy. It’s not true. It’s not true, because I love French fries, but it’s just keeping a clean diet. It’s just like basics. Keep it 90% clean, and you’re going to be fine. That’s the basic rule. So, yeah, but there’s some days where we’re going to order the poutine from the dairy bar.

Rob Marsh:  Clean eating’s over once you have poutine on your plate, that’s for sure. So, Dave, before we run out of time, I want to talk a minute about your book and maybe your planner. When I’m thinking about books about time management and productivity and goal setting, there are a ton of them already out there. We talked about Stephen Covey’s books. Hyrum Smith wrote several about them, the goal setting books by James Clear and BJ Fogg. There’s so many. Dan Kennedy has a great one on time management as well. So, what made you sit down and think, “Hey, what the world needs is another book about how to get stuff done”? What’s a little bit different about your approach?

Dave Ruel:  Yeah, it’s not just about getting stuff done. Really, what I wanted to bring out, let’s say, is more of a guidebook to how to evolve as an entrepreneur. It is very specific for entrepreneurs and obviously solopreneurs, et cetera. Even now, we see people in corporate applying it to their employees. I talk a lot about it. I’m a big fan of introversion, meaning giving more power and more freedom to your employees, so they can create their best work, right? So, it’s not by looking at every single move that they’re doing or micromanaging them that it’s going to happen. So, actually, they do use it quite a bit more. We had trainings with Shoppers Drug Mart, for example, here in Canada and other companies.

But the key is to understand how to operate, an operating manual to how to operate personally as an entrepreneur, right? We make a lot of parallels. We explain it very well in the book. Everything that we’ve built or that is included within this book is inspired by sports performance, so timeless sports performance techniques that we’ve applied to entrepreneurship. Based on that, we applied, like I recently said, concept of workload management, prioritization, and make it all integrated into something coherent. The other thing that I saw is that there’s a lot of methodologies that are collection of hacks, collection of tricks, they’re going to have this, they’re going to have that, but there’s no actual system that involves that.

I became a really big fan of EOS, Traction, Gino Wickman. When we implemented that at BiOptimizers, that looks a lot at what we’re doing. But on a business level, I got a bigger operational level for the business itself. I really love it, because first of all, there was a lot of parallels between with what I was doing and implemented in that methodology, but it’s really a holistic methodology that doesn’t look into one piece of the business. You have to look at your values, understand where you’re going, break down your projects, but also, your health, team health is important. They have that. For me, the health side of it, having a holistic approach.

I talked about work-life harmony in the book, where you hear a lot of people talk about work-life balance and I really hate that word. Work-life balance really implies that we have two competing forces against each other. When you’re an entrepreneur, it doesn’t happen like that. It needs to be integrated. There needs to be some synergy between both. There needs to be some harmony. I illustrate that with the yin and the yang and also like a dance. Sometimes one partner is going to lead. The other time, the other partner is going to lead, but you might not even see it, because the result is beautifully executed. You don’t see any problem. So, this is more the way we look at it.

So, Done By Noon, it’s funny, because I got to talk about the title, but a lot of people think it’s about just working less. When they’re reading the book, you understand it’s not about working less or not working hard. It’s about working right. The key question that we asked regarding time management is, “If you only had before noon in order to do everything that you have to do, how would you structure your days?” That’s considering you’re not waking up 3:00 in the morning obviously. But how would you start? So, there are things you will need to optimize. There are things that you will need to obviously let go of and build better systems overall to make it happen, right? It’s more about that.

When you think about The 4-Hour Workweek, for example, it’s not about working four hours a week. It’s a book about leverage. It was the same thing for us, but we look really into personal self-leadership aspects. So, yeah, it’s going to help you become a better leader, work on yourself. But also, as a result, you’re going to become a better business leader as well. That’s what we really wanted with the book, not just be done by noon and doing nothing. That’s not what it’s all about.

Kira Hug:  That sounds good too. Dave, my last question, for anyone listening that may not have been involved in sports growing up or just may not be as athletic or may just not believe that a system like this could work for them or framework could work for them because they’ve tried so many, what would you say to them, the doubters who are like, ” Everything has failed me.” Why is this different? Why could this work for them, especially if they’re not necessarily a sports person?

Dave Ruel:  The sports analogy obviously is what we used to illustrate what it takes in order to evolve or becoming an athlete. For example, I was never a pro bodybuilder. I love the sport. I was competitive bodybuilder. I did pretty well when I was competing, but I never was a pro. I think the key as well and that’s one thing we talked a lot about in the book is that it’s to develop that self-awareness, develop that self-respect and that self-discipline that everyone needs in order to become a good entrepreneur. It doesn’t matter where you want to build $100-million dollar company or you want to build $100,000 a year company. It does not matter. It’s understanding, first of all, how you operate. We’re all different.

As I said, I think one of the main reasons why people don’t stick to “productivity” approaches or techniques is that it’s so rigid that when they drop something, the whole thing fails. For us, it’s more of a manual to build more self-leadership. We divide self-leadership into self-discipline, as I said, self-awareness and self-respect. So, self-discipline, we talked about it. Self-awareness is the fact of understanding yourself and how you walk. We’re all different. Yes, entrepreneurs have commonalities. A lot of them operate, I wouldn’t say, in a similar fashion, but we all have our own specific context. I’m a dad with two girls. I mean, my co-host, Chris Lopez has five. So, I guess his lifestyle needs to be a lot more structured than mine.

So, the self-awareness of who you are and how you operate in your own context. Also, self-respect is respecting your capacities, respecting your limits, respecting your ambitious, and staying true to what you truly want. So, I think not everybody wants the same thing. It’s very, very important to understand that when you start, because based on that, your reality will be different. Your reality, the way you operate, the type of business you operate, the type of lifestyle you’re going to have is going to be different. I don’t have the answers. You guys don’t have the answers. Only the one who actually wants to work within this framework will know what the result will look like. So, the key is working right.

In my opinion, this is probably a message that we don’t hear enough in the entrepreneurial world, which is always about doing more, getting more done, and glorifying the hustle, things like that. It’s not about checking things off your to-do list as fast as possible. This is not what it’s all about. This is not productivity. Activity is not productivity. For us, we have an efficient philosophy to it, an efficient approach. Yeah, I think that that’s my view on it. That’s the way I see business. So far, it’s worked great for many entrepreneurs.

Rob Marsh:  Dave, we want to thank you for joining us for the podcast. I mentioned before we started recording that we’re sharing your book with everybody on our team, because it gives us the language and the processes to talk about projects together, a common language. So, it’s one of the best productivity/time management/getting things done type of books I’ve ever read. That’s part of why we wanted to bring you on.

So, we’ll definitely link to the book and to the planner on the show notes for anybody that wants to check those out. You’re also coming back for a training for our membership, The Underground, and some of our other programs on April 21st that we’re really looking forward to. So, anybody who wants to catch that can get to know you a little bit better there as well. So, thank you so much for sharing what you know and what you’ve accomplished with our audience.

Dave Ruel:  Thank you, Rob. Really appreciate it. Yeah, I can’t wait for the training in April. Yeah, thank you for the nice words, because you coming from the Covey world and God knows how much I respect and love Dr. Covey’s work, it means a lot. So, thank you very much.

Rob Marsh: And that’s our interview with Dave Ruel. 

Notice that Dave starts with outcomes… what do you want to become? Where do you want to be in three months… or next year? This helps make sure that whatever you do—whether you set goals or simply make time for behaviors in your daily calendar—gets you where you really want to go. I’ve seen a lot of copywriters adopt the goals they see other copywriters setting… because it feels like that’s what you should do, but it’s not reallly what THEY want to do. Running your own business is one of those… that feels like the right thing, but once you get into the reality of what that involves… finding clients, managing projects, filling your pipeline, earning enough to pay yourself a decent salary and so on… Or a goal like hitting six figures which forces you to work more than you really want simply to bring in enough to hit the six figure mark, but also keeps you from doing some of the things you want to do away from work. Knowing the outcomes is critical when you start planning for your next year.

Dave also talked about the big rocks/small rocks framework which helps you ensure you fit in the big important stuff before you use up all your time on less important stuff. At the top of this episode, I mentioned my other favorite time mangement book, 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. Burkeman points out that one of the big problems with the traditional approach to time management is this idea that there are only 3 or 4 big rocks to fit all the other stuff around. The reality is that most of us have a lot more than that. So a big part of managing your time is realizing you can’t manage your time well enough to do everything. There are just too many possibilities. And you have to choose. And once you eliminate some of the possibilities, only then can you really focus on getting that stuff done.

I want to mention the workshop that Dave did for members of The Copywriter Underground again. In this workshop, he breaks down how you figure out your big rocks, how to break them down into goals or behaviors you will focus on for the next few weeks or months. And he also addresses the challenge of personal discipline so this stuff is actually scheduled into your day so it gets done. You can get immediate access to that workshop in The Copywriter Underground at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. There’s also a recording of our process for reviewing last year and setting your goals for the coming year or quarter that dovetails nicely with what Dave is talking about in this interview.

Hopefully this throwback episode is helpful to you as you think about what you accomplished last year and what strides you want to make in 2025. And if I can help you with your goals in any way, please let me know. 

I’ve linked to Dave’s book in the shownotes if you want to check that out. But the workshop is where the real power in this system is. So check both of those out.

Stuff to check out:

Parris’ Book List
The Single Best Way to Get Clients
On Writing Well by William Zinsser
The Brilliance Breakthrough by Eugene Schwartz
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  It’s the holidays and if this year is like most of our past years, that means fewer of our regular listeners are tuning in for the next week or two. So instead of bringing on a new guest you won’t have the opportunity to listen to and learn from, I’ve gone into the archive to uncover an excellent old episode that you probably missed. And if you did hear it back when it aired a few years ago, you might have forgotten it.

But honestly, this is one of our best interviews about mastery and the process of becoming an in-demand copywriter. The guest for this episode is Jason Rutkowski. At the time we interviewed him, Jason was writing for some of the top financial and health clients. So he’s got a lot of great, timeless advice. 

You’ll also hear Kira in this episode. Long time listeners will know Kira is a co-founder of The Copywriter Club and until the middle of this year, my co-host for The Copywriter Club Podcast. Some of you have been asking, where she went? Earlier this year, Kira shared that after seven years of building The Copywriter Club, she was interested in pursuing some other challenges. So while she’s still offically a partner behind the scenes, she hasn’t been actively involved in the podcast and our programs for the past six months. Everything’s fine. There was no messy break-up… and who knows, if the right opportunity presents itself, we may work on something together again. We’ll see.

So, while you’ll hear Kira’s voice, she is still working on other stuff for now.

One more thing before we get to the interview, you’ve heard me talking about The Copywriter Accelerator Fast Track and that in the coming weeks it will be retired forever. This is the proven business building program used by hundreds of copywriters to start and grow their businesses.  Many used it to create six figure businesses. A few have earned seven figures since completing the program. And I know it will work for you too. But time is running out to get the strategies, insights and ideas we share in this business-building program. So go to thecopywriterclub.com/fasttrack now to learn more—and if its a fit for you, join so you can build a successful copywriting business for yourself.

And now, enjoy this throwback interview with Jason Rutkowski.

Hey Jason.

Kira Hug:  Welcome Jason.

Jason Rutkowski:  Hey Kira, hey Rob.

Kira Hug:  How’s it going? Glad you’re here.

Jason Rutkowski:  Oh no, I’m excited. I haven’t done one of these in a while, so I was excited to do it with you.

Rob Marsh:  Definitely took a little time to get our schedules aligned. We’ve been trying to make this happen for a little while, because we know a little bit about you and where you write and we think it’ll be a great conversation, so we’re glad to have you here.

Jason Rutkowski:  Yeah, definitely.

Kira Hug:  All right, so let’s kick this off. Jason, how did you end up as a copywriter?

Jason Rutkowski:  Okay, I’ll give you the quick story about this. I was 19. I just finished my freshman year of college. I got an internship at a normal 9-to-5 job. And I realized I hated it. I was like, oh man. I saw all these people who worked in an office, you know, 30, 40 years; I’m like, is this really going to be my life?

And also at the same exact time, I was on the internet one day and I found an internet marketing forum. And I was like, what’s an internet marketing forum? I don’t know. So I go on it and I see all these guys, like ‘Yeah I just made 200 grand this year, 500 grand this year. I work from home; I’m sitting at my desk all day.’ I’m like what? How is that even possible?

So I started getting really into it. And then I learned about traffic drivers and marketing and product creation and all these things. And I was really confused. And I was like 19, 20 years old. So I heard about copywriting, but I didn’t decide to be a freelance copywriter right away. I was like, you know what I’m going to do, I’m going to create my own products; I’m going to do Google Adwords; and I’m going to drive traffic. I’m going to do the whole thing, like from start to finish.

And I horribly failed. You know, I was going to school full-time, and then I was doing this part-time, and I was just failing and failing. And then after a couple of years of that, I decided, okay this isn’t working. I’m just going to do copywriting because I think this is what I like most. I don’t like doing all this other technical stuff, marketing stuff. I’m just going to do copywriting.

So, from then on out, I just picked a niche. I was like I’ll just write in health. And from then on out I just started growing a business.

Rob Marsh:  So, I’m interested in what some of those failures looked like. What were the products that you were creating and why were they failing?

Jason Rutkowski:  Oh. I mean, the why is a lot of reasons. The products I was creating, I created kind of an … E-books were a big thing back then. Back then you could just write an e-book and like sell it and people would buy it. So I created one for anxiety, which I actually went through a lot in the beginning of my life. And I also created a few for some, like headaches solutions and kind of like different health things.

And I put, I don’t know, these 150, 200-page books together with just some random info, that I thought was good, but then the whole process of, you know I was trying to organic SEO, trying to target the right keyword. I was in college so I had very little money to actually spend on driving traffic, paid traffic. And I was just doing a lot of things wrong.

It was a lot of small marketing things that you don’t know, don’t you know it? Like how to do the SEO right, how to do the traffic right. How to do the delivery right. How to build your list. Like, doing a lot of bad stuff with building my list. A lot of mistakes; it was just like, I was just some teenage kid and I didn’t know what I was doing.

But I did learn a lot, and I also learned through the process that what I really liked doing the most was the copywriting. So I just decided to give up the whole build my own business thing and do the copywriting thing instead.

Rob Marsh:  So what did that look like in the first stages? How did you connect with your first client, and why did you choose the niche that you chose?

Jason Rutkowski:  Oh, back then that was me doing my own stuff. In terms of the freelance copywriting, I started on the freelance websites, which I don’t know if it is a good way to do it anymore. But, you know, it was like these cheap little jobs on like Elance and Guru and … Like, I don’t know if that stuff was even worth it. I mean, I guess it paid me some money, and it gave me some actual samples I could send to people. But I didn’t really get any good long term clients out of that.

I didn’t start getting good long term clients until I decided, and it took me way too long to figure this out, but to actually go to live events, and like talk with people. And actually like start-

Kira Hug:  Wait, what’s that? Talking to people? What’s that?

Jason Rutkowski:  No, I know. I literally spent like my first three years of copywriting trying to do everything from my room. Like cold calling, Edesk, Olance, like cheap little, I mean, I don’t know, I was making still a little money from it. I had like a 9-to-5 office job to support myself, and then I would come home and do this. I wasn’t even close to making enough money to support myself.

So I decided, okay the only way this is going to work is if I start going to live events. So I’m like, okay, what live events should I go to? Which ones are good? You know, what’s some high quality live events I could go to?

And the first one I ever went to was a Clayton Makepeace, like $5,000 seminar. And I did not have $5,000 by the way. But I did have good credit, so I put it on my credit card. And I actually did, actually. One thing I always thank my mom for is she got me a credit card at 18 and she taught me how to use it. And by the time I was in like, my early to mid-20s I had a credit card with like a $25,000 limit on it.

Kira Hug:  What? That’s dangerous.

Jason Rutkowski:  It was completely paid. I know, but I had no debt. Like, it was unused. So I decided to be a little risky and go to this Clayton Makepeace seminar, which ended up being the absolute best decision of my life because I met my mentor Parris Lampropoulos. I met Marcella Allison and I meet Paul Martinez, all at the same conference. We are all very, very good friends to this day.

And then, after that, it was a matter of … I mean, I don’t know; when I talk face to face with people, I feel like all my failures from early in my career gave me a kind of a big foundation to talk about, where it’s like okay, this person clearly has done the studying, has been in the trenches, has done some work. I haven’t had a lot of success, but at least, like this kid just needs a chance. Or this kid, he’s not a newbie. So I trust this guy to some extent.

And then from then on out it was just, kind of going to more conferences, building my freelance career and you know, kind of trying to develop some long term relationships with people and that type of thing. So, that’s how I did it.

Kira Hug:  Okay, this is exciting. So, we’re going to talk about, you know, cubbing with Parris and some of these relationships you’ve built, but it sounds like this first event, this Clayton Makepeace event, was like the first big event that you invested in.

Jason Rutkowski:  Yes.

Kira Hug:  That’s a big deal, and how did you even find the right event and like how did you even get over all of your hesitations and probably your own objects around spending $5,000 on an event that may not pay off?

Jason Rutkowski:  Right.

Kira Hug:  Especially when you’re still figuring that out. And you didn’t know that you would build a relationship with Parris and meet Paul.

Jason Rutkowski:  Sure.

Kira Hug:  What did you have to go through to make that investment?

Jason Rutkowski:  Okay. So, I think the most important thing about going to any event is having a plan. Like, you should have a plan. You should know who’s going to be there, who are you going to talk to, and what you want out of the event, 100%.

So when I went, I was like okay … Here’s what actually happened. So, before the event, I’m like, okay I’m trying to do this freelance copywriting thing; I’m on these freelance websites; I’m making like, no money. I have like, no relationship and no reputation with any of these big names in the industry. I was like, what’s the fastest, best way to both build my reputation, and what’s a better way to get better results, and to increase my skill level?

And I started researching, and I noticed all these top A-list copywriters were trained by other A-list copywriters. So it’s like okay, John Carlton was trained by Gary Halbert and Jim Rutz. Parris was trained by Clayton; Carline Cole was trained by Clayton. David Deutsch was trained by Jim Rutz. It’s like this whole succession of like, mentors and apprentices, and learning from people who are way smarter than you. And I was like okay, that’s what I need.

And this was kind of back in the day, way before communities like, you know kind of like The Copywriter’s Club. Back in the day it was just like, internet marketing forums where it was just like thousands and thousands of people who didn’t know what they were talking about. And like these Facebook groups that don’t know what they’re talking about. And it’s just like, there wasn’t really a lot of high quality places you can really go to. So I was like, okay; I need to find a mentor. I was like okay, I’m in the health niche; who’s like the top health niche mentor that I know, that trains copy cubs? I go, oh, Parris Lampropoulos. And it’s 100% true.

I was like okay, I need to find Parris. How can I contact him? I was like well, he has a LinkedIn and a Facebook; and I’m like, that’s not going to work. You can’t really form a relationship by sending somebody a Facebook message, right? And people try to do this with Parris all the time. They try to send him like, a LinkedIn message, and be like, ‘Hey Parris, can you be my mentor, and you know?’ I was like, that’s not going to work.

So it’s like okay, I’ve got to meet Parris. And I’ve got to meet other people too, but I especially want to meet him. So I was like okay, where is he going to be? And then I was like, who does big copywriting seminars and programs? I’m like, AWAI. Which I was never really a part of. I never really went through AWAI’s training program; I never did any of that stuff.

So I went on their website and they have a live event page. And I went to that, and they’re like oh, in two months Clayton is having this $5,000 seminar. I was like okay that’s interesting; I love Clayton. Who is on the guest list? And then on the guest list was Parris Lampropoulos. I was like, oh perfect; I’ll pay $5,000, and I’ll go to the seminar, right? And I’ll meet him there.

Like here’s the question. One of my goals was to get him to be my mentor. But there’s no way you’re going to do that, just from meeting him at one seminar, right? You’re not just going to talk to somebody at a bar, and be like, ‘Hey want to enter into this five, seven-year relationship with me?’ You know, like that’s not going to work.

So I did what I always tell people to do when they go to seminars. You have to focus on like, making friends, and developing relationships. And getting people to like you. And the best way to do that, in my opinion. And I used to do this, and I still kind of do this to this day, before every seminar I read the book How to Win Friends and Influence People two times. I read it two times. There is this section in the book called ‘Six Ways to Make People Like You.’ And it is like gold. It is like, if you just follow those exact six things, just follow it, like don’t even question it, just follow.

And it’s like simple stuff. It’s like, ‘Talk in terms of the other person’s interests. Make people feel important. Remember their name.’ You know, it’s like ‘Ask them questions about …’ It’s the most basic stuff that people don’t do. Like, most people go to seminars and then they do one of two things. They don’t talk. They’re super shy, which I’m a naturally introverted guy really. They don’t talk. Or if they do talk they talk about themselves. Both things are awful things to do.

But yeah. So read that book and I went there, and I met Marcella and I met Parris and I just really tried to become friends with them, tried to get them to like me. You know, I asked them questions about themselves; they asked me questions about myself, I told them about my career. Yeah really it kind of blossomed from there, and I was able to, Parris gave me his email, which I thought was great. Turns out it was kind of luck of the draw; he was starting a new copywrite group sometime soon.

And from then on out, we did a project together. He liked it, and then he invited me to his group. So that’s how that worked out.

Kira Hug:  I love how strategic you were about this entire process, and I’m so glad I asked about it because I had no idea that you planned it out. I just thought you accidentally bumped into Parris …

Jason Rutkowski:  Oh no.

Kira Hug:  And built a relationship. And even now I’m thinking wow, what a great idea to read that book twice before going to events. Because, I met you recently at an event, hung out, and I really like you, so I feel like you used those steps me on me, and it worked!

Jason Rutkowski:  It’s just stuff you should be doing on a day to day basis, really. I mean, it’s not even stuff like, okay I’m only going to do this at this event.

So, for the people on this podcast, I know Kira and Rob through a Brian Kurtz mastermind group. And you know, Brian talks about this all the time, about becoming interested in other people and talking with them. I mean it’s really basic stuff that a lot of people forget.

Rob Marsh:  I mean, you talk about using this to meet a mentor; have you used the same process to meet clients and connect with clients?

Jason Rutkowski:  Oh definitely. I mean, so another thing you should be doing is finding out what client’s going to be at these events. Like before you even go. And you should be knowing, like, who they are, what their marketing is. You know, what promos are they running, what’s their marketing strategy; how does the funnel look?

To give another example at the Cleveland event we were at for Brian Kurtz’s thing, I went up to this guy, and Paul Martinez introduced me to this guy named Allen and he’s the CEO of a health company called Patriot Health Alliance. And I didn’t know who he was. However, I knew who his company was, because I’ve been following them for like a year and a half.

So he introduces me himself, because Allen’s kind of a low key guy, he doesn’t like speeches or podcasts or anything like that. He goes, ‘My name’s Allen; I’m the CEO of Patriot Health Alliance.’ And I go, ‘Oh, I’ve seen three of your VSLs and eight of your sales letters.’ So like, how’s this thing doing? How’s that thing doing? And he had this look on his face like, how does this guy know all this, right?

Because when most freelance copywriters go up to clients, they don’t even know the basics, man. They barely even know who they are. You know, last year I was at AWAI’s boot camp, which is every October. And Parris forced me to do the … Parris has a booth there for one of his clients and he was like ‘Jason you’ve got to help me. Barnaby’s not,’ because Barnaby wasn’t there that year. He’s like ‘You’ve got to help me do it, Jason! I need some help.’ I was like, ‘Okay Parris.’

And then I’m standing there, at the job fair booth, so it’s a job fair where people come up to you and tell you about themselves. And they would come up to me, they would be like ‘What does your company do? What products does your company sell? Oh, what type of writing do you guys do?’ I was like, how do you guys not know this information? I was like, you’ve got to, like, when I went to my first boot camp years ago, I had like five or six clients where like, I took notes, like before I went. I knew what products they sold. I knew what campaigns they were running. I knew all this information.

And then when you enter into a conversation with these people, you’re like six or seven steps down the line instead of at step one, which who are you and what do you do? You know? You don’t want to be there. So I think that’s a big mistake a lot of people make. And I mean, if you can show clients that like …

Because these people care so deeply about their businesses. When you talk, like Allen, he’s the CEO of a company. Like, his business is his life, you know. He’s spent hundreds of thousands of hours of his time building that business. I mean, if you can talk with him at a deep level about it, and you can show like, you have like a high level of knowledge of his marketing, he’s going to like you. He’s going to be like, ‘Wow this is someone I can actually talk with at a deep level.’ And maybe he starts to like you a little bit, and maybe somewhere down the line, you get, you know.

A lot of times when I meet clients, the only thing I want is their contact info. I don’t ask them for a job right away. Sometimes that happens, but I just want like, ‘Hey man, let’s just like, give me your email, let’s set up a phone call, let’s talk later. Or let’s meet in bar later.’ You know. I just want to be liked enough so I can continue the conversation later. Which should be your main goal really.

Then, stuff blossoms from that. So I think that it’s a big mistake people make, when they go to conferences not knowing what you’re doing, why you’re doing it. Who you’re going to meet. What you want from them. You know, how this relationship’s going to develop. You know, stuff like that.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah that advice to me, that is gold right there. This interview, just for that one thing is worth the hour of time that we’re putting into this.

Kira Hug:  Yeah. We’re done.

Jason Rutkowski:  I don’t want to repeat everything I just said, but it is really important. It’s funny Kira says, you were surprised by how strategic in meeting Parris, but I mean, that’s how you get those results, is by being very strategic, you know. You have to have some goal in mind, and then you have to have some action steps to achieve. And it’s like, if you just start thinking about that way in everything that you do.

A lot of stuff I’m just sitting at my desk and I’m thinking, what should I do? And so, I’m going to go to this conference, what should I do? What do I want? Like, three or four basic questions you could answer to yourself before you do anything. Don’t just go do things without thinking about it. It doesn’t require much, but …

Here’s one thing that I wanted to bring up. I was reading your questions this morning and I thought, I definitely want to tell you this. If you’re a freelance copywriter and you go to a marketing event, what’s great about going to a marketing event is you get to meet other, successful writers. Which is something you don’t usually get to do. Usually you’re sitting at your desk, wherever you live, and you’re just all alone, and that’s it. So like, okay, two or three times a year you’re able to actually talk with people; this is great.

And one thing I used to do, when I was like, I had no success and my skill level was low, and I had no reputation, is I would go up to people like Marcella and I would just ask them questions about, kind of like what you’re doing on this podcast. Like, how did you get started? What was your first job? Like, what steps, what was your biggest obstacle?

What was your first job? What steps, what was your biggest obstacle? What did, same questions. But in a face to face interaction, maybe at a bar or a restaurant, or conversation flows really easily and all the benefits of face to face interaction. I would just, take mental notes and I would go and I would find as many successful freelance copywriters as I could, which would be eight or nine of them at each conference, and I would just ask them the same questions. How did you get started? What was your first jobs? People love telling you their stories, man. Especially, if you’re successful, and you’re and entrepreneur, people love to talk about, ‘Oh man, I was struggling so hard, and then I was homeless for six months,’ everyone wants to tell them that story. But you get to learn so much. You get to see what the thinking is. Just like this podcast. You get to see what the thinking is. Its like, ‘Okay, I should be doing that stuff. I should be doing that.’ Almost like the questions I were to ask myself I learned from these people. Because it’s the same questions they ask themselves. Okay, I’m going to start doing that. You might not get success right away within the first day or two, but if you plan it out, six months from now, 12 months from now, you’re going to be so much farther along than you ever thought was possible.

Kira Hug:  You should’ve recorded those conversations. You could’ve turned it into a podcast.

Jason Rutkowski:  If only.

Kira Hug:  So, I want to ask you about-we’ll kick off and talk about your copy cub experience with Parris because you mentioned him. Did you know the exact moment where Parris leaned in and was like, ‘Oh yeah, I want you to be my copy cub.’ Was there a moment that you had together?

Jason Rutkowski:  Yeah. You know, I really want to send you guys something. The story of how I met Parris and how I him to give me his email address. Because by the way, the funny story about Parris giving me his email-Parris doesn’t carry business cards, because he doesn’t want anyone to talk to him, right? He’s actually an incredibly nice guy. But he doesn’t want people..If you meet him at a … I’m making him sound like he’s the Scrooge or something, he’s not. He’s actually a nice guy. But he doesn’t want people contacting him because too many people contact him, right? He’s at that level where he’s too famous in our industry. So, too many people ask him for stuff.

It was really funny. I was talking with him, and it was Paul Martinez, me, and Parris. And Paul asked Parris a question. And then Parris turns around and there’s a piece of paper on this table that’s behind them, and he writes something down, I’m like, ‘Okay. He’s going to give Paul—it’s a note for Paul.’ because Paul just asked a question, he’s going to write something down and give this thing to Paul. So he writes something down. He folds it up. And then he walks up to me. He hands this thing to me, and he says, ‘I never give this to anybody.’ That’s what he said. He didn’t say anything else. He just said, ‘I never give this to anybody.’ And he handed it to me, and I opened it up and it was his email address. I was like, ‘No way! This is unbelievable!’

Kira Hug:  What!

Jason Rutkowski:  And by the way, when you gave me that, I instantly thought to myself, ‘That $5000 was worth it. This is exactly what I came here for.’ Like I said, my main goal wasn’t to become…

Kira Hug:  Score.

Jason Rutkowski:  My main goal was to become his friend, and have him at least give me his contact info. Which is super hard to get. That was my big, big goal. And that happened at the second day, and I was like, ‘Okay. I can go home now. I don’t even need to stay at this conference anymore.’ Even though it was a great conference.

So what I wanted to send you guys was when I first met Parris-well, let’s rewind. Right before I met Parris and met Marcella, because I was too nervous to go up to Parris, I met Marcella and I asked her the standard … how to win friends and influence people questions. I asked her a bunch of questions about herself. Then, what happens was when you ask people questions about themselves, they ask you question about yourself, and I had a couple of stories that I actually had planned out about my career and myself, and I told one of them to Marcella, and she goes, ‘Wow. That’s actually a great…’ I don’t have time to go into the story right now, because it’s really long. It’s a ten minute story. But she’s like, ‘Wow, that’s actually a really great story.’ She goes, ‘You have to tell that to Parris.’ And then she dragged me over. Marcella always takes full credit for this. Every time I meet Marcella, she goes, ‘I introduced you to Parris! You have to thank me!’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, okay Marcella.’

She dragged me over there, and she’s like, ‘Parris, you have to listen to this kid’s story.’ And I told them the story. When I told it to him, his eyes lit up. Like when you’re surprised, your eyes get really big. And he’s like, ‘who is this guy? Who is this-’ I don’t have time to go into the story, however-

Kira Hug:  You’re teasing the story! You’re teasing it.

Jason Rutkowski:  Here’s the thing. About a year ago, I wrote out the story because Marcella just started her … thing. She needed some content to send to her list of people. I wrote this thing, and I go, ‘Hey, Marcella. You remember this story I told you?’ She was like, ‘Yeah, that’s a great story.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I wrote an article about it.’ I think the title is, The Single Most Important Thing You Could Do At Life Marketing Events. And then I went into this thing about telling a really interesting story about yourself that gets people really excited about you and who you are. And I told the story. And then I taught the lesson that comes after the story, it’s the same thing I’m telling you right now. But I actually wrote out the whole thing. So I’m going to send it to you, and you guys can share it with your people.

Rob Marsh:  Cool, we’ll link to it.

Jason Rutkowski:  What’s great about stories is, it convinces people, ‘Okay, this guy’s marketing now, just copywriting now, just work ethic.’ It instantly communicates all that, but in an exciting, interesting way. You should be really using that when you’re meeting people at marketing conferences. That’s what the article is about. But yeah, it has the whole story in there if you want to read it, the whole thing’s in there.

Rob Marsh:  Cool, we’ll check it out. So, I am a little hesitant to ask this question because I know you can’t answer a whole lot. We’ve talked with Paul, we’ve talked with Marcella, and any time we talk to people who have been Parris’ Cubs, everybody wants to know what the experience is like. I’m guessing you get this from just about everybody that you talk to, who knows that you’re in that relationship. Parris actually shared his book list at our event, so there are some of those kinds of things that I know that he’s willing to share, but will you just tell us a little bit about the experience? The kinds of things that you do with Parris? Without revealing anything that’s super secret, but just what’s that experience like, and what have you taken away from it?

Jason Rutkowski:  Yes, I could give you a general overview. It’s like you said, you got the book list. Parris always has us reading books. We get on these calls that are two, three hours long sometimes. The books in itself, you should read the books, 100%. But they kind of provide a syllabus, where he teaches the lessons through the book. So we read the book, we discuss our notes, and then he starts going very deep into what he thinks about it. What the deeper, psychological lessons are in the book. He throws in a lot of examples from his career, stuff he’s written, he sends us writing examples. The books, I can get more into this about the other stuff too, but the books are kind of a launching pad to other things he wants to talk to us about.

There’s a lot of homework. There’s a lot of writing. There’s a lot of unpaid writing, by the way. There’s paid stuff, but it’s a big time commitment. From the moment he starts to call, like I said, some of these calls are three hours long. It’s constant. It’s constant copywriting. Constant marketing. It’s almost overload. He gets out of the call, and everyone’s extremely exhausted. Course he has his techniques that I can’t talk about. He has proprietary stuff I can’t talk about, but overall, it’s a lot of Parris talking. I don’t know how he does it. When you’re at that level, that Parris is at, he could just go off on one topic for a really, really long time.

But at the end of every call, you feel, man, I learned so much, and then what Parris says, he records the call, and then we have to re-listen to it. If you really want to get all the lessons out of that call, you’re re-listening to it five or six times at least.

Do you have any specific questions, any more about the group?

Kira Hug:  I have a question. For someone who is listening and they’re, ‘Okay, I don’t know Parris, I’m not going to be his copy cub anytime soon,’ for whatever reasons, ‘but I want to do something similar.’ Do they need to read the books? Do they need to find another mentor? Is there a way we could almost hack the system and, of course, you can’t replicate that type of experience that you’re currently having, but what about for people who cannot be a copy cub for whatever reason, how can they take something that you’ve learned and use it?

Jason Rutkowski:  The thing about Parris is he teaches you the lesson and you might understand the lesson intellectually-and the same thing, say you read a book. Say you’re reading a copywriting book. One of the books on those lists. It talks about some headline technique, or it talks about some bullet writing technique, or it talks about some other copy technique. You might understand it intellectually, but if you want to actually understand how to apply the stuff in real life, the absolute best thing you could do is take winning promos, and I could talk about how you actually know how a promo is winning or not, take winning promos in your niche, and start reverse engineering what you’re looking at.

Specifically for the one-so Parris would say, ‘Okay, here’s this super specific bullet writing technique that I came up with. And here’s why I do it.’ Okay, that makes sense. And then what I do, is I pull up five or six winning promos, preferably Parris promos, but it could be any top health copywriter. And I just reverse engineer, I look for instances where that technique is happening over and over, and I write it down. I have a notebook or I have a Word document and I have all these Word documents on my computer, where it’s, ‘this technique.’ And I open up that Word document and it’s just like 20, 25 examples of that technique. And it’s like-this other technique, this headline type, in the health niche there’s three or four stories you can write.

A common story in the health niche is, some person has a problem, they tried a million different things, they came in to the doctor, ‘Doc, I tried all these million different things, didn’t work.’ The doctor is like, ‘Okay, I got this new treatment that no one knows about.’ Do the treatment, ‘Wow, Doc, two weeks later, my thing’s cured, I suffered from this for 20 years and now it’s gone.’ Then people wonder, ‘Well, what’s the technique? How-’ And then you could go into copy. That’s a common health niche story technique.

Well, what I do is I create a Word document. I go find five or six or 10 or 15, 20 examples of that and I just either hand write it or I type it out. And now I have a document where it’s just, ‘Okay, anytime I’m writing health copy,’ I can open up that document. ‘Okay, I want to use this type of story, this type of technique.’ Now I’ve got, 15, 20 examples that I can, not steal the copy, but I can swipe the structure, I can swipe the buildup, how they tease it. It just drills it into your mind. The most important thing is not just realizing what you need to do, but how you can actually do it in your day to day life. There’s so many times where people read the books, and go, ‘Oh yeah, that’s interesting, I understand that intellectually.’ But then, they’re doing the same copywriting now as they did six months ago. That’s because they didn’t drill it into their head of, well, how is this actually used in real life, and how can I structure this so when I’m doing a project I can use this in real life. How’s it going to change the way I write copy.

A lot of people think it’s going to happen automatically, it’s not. Okay, you need to go out of your way. Which is why Parris recommends handwriting promos. A big benefit of that, it drills it in your head of how you’re actually supposed to be doing this at this moment. So, I would recommend that. That was the biggest breakthrough. Really, I used to not do that. When I first started the Parris group, and then I started reading books and reverse engineering things, creating Word documents, finding real life examples. Honestly, I think it made me a lot better.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, I think what you’re talking about here is mastery. When Parris was talking about his book list at our event, he mentioned you don’t just read them once. You read them once just to get a sense of what’s in them, then you go through the second time and you underline, and then you go through the third time and you start taking notes, handwriting what you’ve underlined into a notebook. And then there’s two or three more times you go through it. You’re basically taking that process to everything that you’re doing or seeing. My sense is, Jason, you don’t just want to be a copywriter, you want to be a master of copywriting. I think there’s a really significant difference.

Jason Rutkowski:  Oh, definitely. A part of that’s just my personality. I do it that way because that’s the only way I can imagine myself doing it, you know what I mean? I don’t think of it as I have to put in this hard work, I think of it as, well, this is my career, and the more I do this, the better results I get. Then when I’m sitting with clients or talking with other copywriters, I can speak about things at a higher level. You if you do stuff on a daily basis, if you’re constantly reading promos, reverse engineering promos, reading books, taking notes, even just one or two years down the line, you’re going to be able to sit down with people and just-almost like this, have a huge conversation about the tiniest, littlest thing. When I talk with Paul, Paul Martinez, huge A-list copywriter, that’s what we do when we sit down and we have private one on one conversations. We’ll just talk about one tiny little copywriting thing for 20, 30 minutes. Because we both went through that process of deep diving, studying handwriting, reverse engineering promos, reading books. That just changes the way you think about things.

Rob Marsh:   So, before we leave off this whole idea of what you’re doing with Parris and this self-mastery thing, is there one book or one course that you would say, ‘Hey, if you want to get started on this path, this the book to start with.’ What would that be?

Jason Rutkowski:  This answer is an answer no one ever talks about, and it makes me really mad. It’s actually one of the first books Parris had us read. It’s actually about a topic that so many people ignore. It’s so obvious. At this point, I get a lot of people who want me to critique their copy. ‘Hey, Jason.’ It doesn’t have to be for the health niche, but, ‘Hey Jason, I have my business, can you please, I’m not a copywriter, can you critique my copy.’ And they send me their copy. All of them have this one huge, huge problem that they don’t seem to realize that they have. And it’s not that they don’t understand copywriting, it’s that they don’t understand how to write. Just so many copywriters who cannot write.

So, a book that’s on Parris’ list is, On Writing Well by William Zinsser. I love that book. Another book I would recommend is The Brilliance Breakthrough by Eugene Schwartz, specifically the first eight chapters of it. Listen, when I critique copy, the first thing I critique is how it’s written. Not your power words, or motion or any of that stuff. Just, your sentence doesn’t make sense. Or, this sentence doesn’t connect to that sentence, or it’s too long. Or, you’re bouncing around, or you’re using the wrong thing in the wrong-really basic writing ability that people think, ‘Oh, Jason, I passed 11th grade English class. I don’t need to learn how to write.’ Or even worse, ‘I have an English degree.’ I’m like, ‘Show me something you’ve written. You could’ve been bad, I don’t know, just because you have a bachelor’s degree doesn’t mean you’re good at writing.’ I always tell people, it’s so foundational, people ignore it. Learn how to write. Read those two books. I’ve read On Writing Well and The Brilliance Breakthrough probably, and this is not exaggerated, eight or nine times each with my notes. I re-read the book and re-read my notes.

I spent the first year with Parris just learning how to write. One thing, when Parris critiques my copy, if you haven’t applied the lessons from those two books perfectly? He’s going to chew my ass out. For ten minutes. ‘Jason, we went over this a million times.’ Nothing to do with copywriting. Just with writing sentences.

Kira Hug:  Oh my gosh.

Jason Rutkowski:  It’s so important, and so many people ignore it. Then they come to me with this fake John Carlton copy where they have these 40, 50 words sentences that never end. And none of it makes sense. I’m just, ‘Dude. Forget the copywriting books, man. Start with the writing books. Go through those two books and then go to John Caple’s and Vic Schwab and those books, okay?’ So that’s my recommendation. Learn how to write.

Kira Hug:  That’s incredible advice.

Rob Marsh:  Good stuff.

Kira Hug:  Thank you. That was a PSA.

Jason Rutkowski:  Really, people listening to this, I mean it’s a big thing. If you read those two books, especially multiple times, like I said, The Brilliance Breakthrough, Eugene Schwartz. Brian Kurtz sells it, and On Writing Well, William Zinsser. It should fundamentally change the way you write sentences. It should. If it’s not, maybe you’re already an amazing writer, that’s great. I hope you are. That’s a lot less work. But if you’re like me, which is like most people, you need to really sit down and do it.

Rob Marsh:  And just as far as Brilliance Breakthrough goes, just to add, when you buy that book you get a workbook because there are writing exercises in the book and basically that allows you to run through the workbook. You’re not necessarily writing in the book itself. You can actually practice with it. So it’s a fantastic resource.

Jason Rutkowski:  Totally. I think he sells it for $200. Which people might think, ‘$200 for a book? Wow. I’m never going to pay that.’ Totally worth it. 100%. It’s funny, at the end of the eighth chapter, Eugene Schwartz actually says, ‘I could end the book right here if I wanted to.’ Which is true. Because the most fundamental part is the first eight chapters, and then everything else is supplementary, it’s good stuff. But the first eight chapters, man. It’s stuff about, ‘how to write clearly, how to write simply.’ Simplicity and clarity, two big things people don’t know how to do. The way Eugene Schwartz talks about it in that book is amazing. I love that book so much. Totally worth the $200.

Kira Hug:  So, I want to hear more about your writing process. When you’re sitting down to work on a project, I want to get a glimpse into what’s happening in your office. Where are you starting, clearly you have an incredible resource library and swipe files to pull from, but what is your process look like as you’re moving into a project? Even starting with the research portion.

Jason Rutkowski:  Yeah, research is huge. Becoming a good researcher is just as important as becoming a good writer. I know I just talked about it for 10 minutes, about learning how to write. The thing about copywriting is

Like, I know, I just talked about for 10 minutes about learning how to write. Thing about copywriting is, there are so many things to learn. Right. If you want to do this at a really high level, you have to master like, a hundred different skills. Which is kind of daunting, but also, kind of exciting. And, one of the big skills you need to master is research. So, the question is, what do I research, and how do I do it? That’s going to depend on the niche. It’s going to depend on your product.

You know, in health, the big products are supplements, books, just DVD programs and like, newsletters. Okay? All those products have like, their own research methodology that you’re going to go through. That’s specific to the product in that niche. I would say overall, the best thing you can do … And this is another thing that takes forever to do, but it’s totally worth it is, I would take promos written my Parris and Health Niche, like, ‘Okay Parris, I’m doing a book promo for Bottom line right now.’ I would take a book promo, that Parris did for Bottom line, and I would open it up, and I would read the information. And then, I would say to myself, ‘How did Parris come up with this information?’

You can just ask yourself, ‘How did he do this research?’ And you’ll come up with the most surprising answers. So, one thing I used to do was, Parris wrote a bunch of promos for Bottom line Books. Five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago. Well, those promos, because Parris wrote them, were hugely successful. And that means, millions of people bought those books, or hundreds of thousands of people bought those books. So that means, people have those books. Like, books are eternal. Right? People buy a book and put it on their bookshelf and never look at it. But, that also means, that people sell those books, to this day.

So, you can actually, I would take a Parris promo from 15 years ago. They were from Bottom line, and, the book would be called … I actually have one right here. Oh. Speed Healing Unlimited, Bottom line Speed Healing Unlimited. It’s right by my desk. I went on Amazon. I typed in Bottom line Speed Healing Unlimited, and there’s people that sell this book for like, two dollars. And you can buy it for like, two bucks.

So, I bought the book, I put the book on my desk, I took Parris’ promo, I put the promo on my desk. And, I would open up the promo, and it would say a bullet, or an article. And then, it would say the page number. It’s like, I found this information in this page of this book. I would take the book, and I would open it up to that page, and I would read the page. And I would say to myself, ‘Well, how did Parris come up with this information?’ So, I’m like, reverse engineering his research process. Right?

And you’ll see stuff, like the book would be so boring. It’s the most boring information ever. And Parris turned it into like, amazing … You know, David Deutsche is like good at this too, like this amazing, amazing thing. And, you can do this to this day. Especially with information products. Just reverse engineer the research. Like, find out what the final copy was. I think go back to the source, and then you’ll start realizing, ‘Oh. During my research process, I should think like this, I should do this.’ You know, if I’m reading information, it’s like this. I should think about in this way. I should write this down, and maybe this turns in a piece of copy later.’

And, I would just do stuff like that. I did that for like, seven or eight books. Like, seven or eight promos. And, books are great, because people always keep up … Like I said, people always hold on to books, people … Books last forever. So, if you get some book promotions, written by A list copywriters, and if you could buy the book, or buy the free report. Whatever information product it is. And, you can like reverse engineer it. I mean, that influenced my research process.

So, like I said it’s going to be different depending on what product you’re doing. What niche you’re in. But, a lot of it is, a lot of learned copy is, reverse engineering. And then, it’s going to influence your research process in your own way. Really, because I feel like a lot of people’s processes different. So, specifically if I’m doing like a supplement, you know, I’ll research Google or, I’ll go to scientific articles, I’ll do bunch of random different things. But, all my reverse engineering is influenced by process in some way. You know, Parris always says, ‘I can look at a piece of information, and I see something amazing. And a B list copywriter looks at the same piece of information, and they see something that’s boring. Right?

So, it’s like, I take that amazing thing, and I see the gold nugget in there that other people don’t see, and that’s a big reason for its success. And, that’s a way you can learn to do that by, ‘Well okay. What did Parris see? Okay. Let me go back. Let me see what he saw.’ You know. So, that’s what I recommend.

Rob Marsh:  There’s so much stuff here, that I’m just totally, jonesing over it. This is awesome, so. I’m thinking that there are, you know people may be listening to this, and thinking, ‘Okay. Jason works in the health niche. That’s something I’m really interested in doing myself. You know, in addition to the advice you gave about like, how do you connect with potential clients. What are the things that people can do to break into this niche? You know, what should they be looking at, studying, you know, how do you get your first client, you know, writing for say, a newsletter, or a help supplement?

Jason Rutkowski:  The very first thing is, studying the market. So, you need to get on everybody’s list Everybody’s on the list. For health, I’m just going to name some random companies. You got, New Market Health, you got … And all their companies. Health Sense Media. You got, Dr Gundry Advanced Bio Nutritionals. Nature of City, Patriot Health Alliance. So, you get on everybody’s email list. And what I did is, I created my own Gmail account, just for health. So, I have a Gmail account, that’s just for collecting health emails. Like, chaff and chiving emails. That email has like, 80 thousand emails. I have 80 thousand health emails.

Rob Marsh:  Wow.

Jason Rutkowski:  Because, I’ve been doing it for years. Right? It’s like, years old. So, first process, before even thinking about writing for somebody, is studying the market. If you’re meeting people, if it’s through an email, through LinkedIn, at a marketing conference, through a reference, or recommendation, you should know who you’re talking to, and what you’re talking about. Like, you have to know that stuff. It helps if you have some writing samples, because everyone always asks writing samples, and if you don’t have writing sample, do what I did, rewrite somebody’s copy. Take a control that’s already out there, and rewrite it completely in your own words. Like, this works well for an information product, so it’s like, okay.

Bottom line, it has this promo, and it’s a book, a book promo to sell a book. Ordis Guy has a program that’s like an e-book or free report. And the copies about that information product, well, just buy the information product, and rewrite the copy with your own headline, in your own body copy. You know, using all the lessons you learned from the books, in reverse engineering, and studying the health market. And have, you know, at least two samples just have two samples. Clients just want to see that you can write something.

Also, do the two books I talked about, on how to actually write sentences. And, put a couple samples together. And, I mean that … I always hated, things like, at least for me, like cold emailing, and cold calling people never really worked. Really, I was struggling until I started going to events, and you know, started doing all the things I talked about. About researching people and becoming friends with people. That’s just my process.

I know there are some people out there that have some success with, you know, I know Paul Martinez on his podcast on here, talked about some things he did, that sounded really good, that I never did. So, maybe in terms of contacting people through email or LinkedIn, or online, maybe other people have some better information than me. But, for me it was, you know, get to the point where you know what you’re talking about. Learn how to make people like you, how to become friends with people, form relationships with people. Go to live events and then, grow your copy writing business from there. And you know, deep dive your niche. Deep dive into you’re market, and know what you’re talking about. And, that’s what we’re for me so.

Kira Hug:  What’s clear and all of your responses is that, you are deeply committed to mastery, which Rob mentioned, and that you’re, you do the work you do the work times …

Jason Rutkowski:  A lot.

Kira Hug:  Ten. And, that’s why it will make you the master, compared to a lot of copywriters who will not do the work. And they’re not ready to write copy, and copy books, and read books eight times. My final question for you is, what does the future of copyrighting look like to you?

Jason Rutkowski:  It’s real interesting, because, I spend so much of my time in health, and now finance. And those tend to be the two big niches like, everyone likes to talk about, because that’s where like the most money and most competition is. I know this many niches outside that. But, I find that, it’s kind of niche by niche. You really have to understand how you’re niche operates. And, I’ll give two examples of health and finance. Like, health, I found that, there’s a lot of health companies out there. There’s a lot of like, supplement companies out there, that are like the low eight figure supplement companies that love to hire freelancers, and even maybe high seven figure companies.

Like, love the work of freelancers, they don’t have a big in-house team, and they’re willing to hire people to come in, you know, just for a project or two. And that’s something that’s very unique, and specific to the health niche. And then, another hand, there’s the financial niche, which nowadays tend to be very in-house focused. Like, very like … Especially their Agora divisions. Like, big companies, big in-house teams. Who don’t like working with freelance copywriters, unless you’re high level.

If you’re high level, and by high level, I mean like you really got to know what you’re doing. You really already have to have a reputation, and you have to like, have connections and know people. Unless you’re at that level like, they love their in-house system. The financialist loves like, their in-house teams. And, you know, you move to wherever in Baltimore, Florida, or wherever they’re located. And, like, you worked in their system for two years. And, that’s a very financial niche thing.

But, health thing, they’re just kind of, there are in-house health niche teams, but it’s like … So, it varies like, as you travel through the different niches that exist. The best thing I always tell people do is, like get as much good information as you can. And, the best way to get good information is, well, listen to stuff like this. And also, go to events where you have like, successful entrepreneurs, successful marketers, successful copywriters. Find out what industry they work in, and just like … I’m always the digging up information, and I’m always talking to Ridge Abraham who worked at Agora Financial. You know, Ridge is successful financial copywriter.

I’m always asking him some questions about the niche. Always asking him questions about Agora. I’m always asking some questions. Like, I’m always trying to get a better picture of, you know, how does this niche work? You know. What’s going on? What’s the freelance landscape like? What’s in-house landscape like?  How do these publishers executives make decisions? Like, I’m always just gathering that info. Right?

So, you kind of have to do that in whatever niche you’re in. But, I will say, the freelance niche still exists. You can still have a lot of success with it. I think in health, is a good opportunity. Other niches, I’m not too familiar with like the biz op and internet marketing, that’s really, but, I assume … I know a couple finances that are very successful in that, those type of spaces so. Yeah. Try to get as much good information on whatever niche you’re going to go into as you can.

Rob Marsh:  Lots of opportunity for anyone who’s really willing to put in the work it sounds like.

Jason Rutkowski:  Oh yeah. I mean, you got to stand out. Because, because I was talking to Parris about this the other day, I was on a phone call with him. He’s like, ‘Yeah. You know twenty years ago, there were very little copywriters.’ There’s very little, just in terms of value. And, there is even a smaller amount of A list copywriters, like 20 years ago.’ And he’s like, ‘Now it is. just a ton of copywriters. But, it’s still a very small amount of high level copywriters. There’s a ton of copy, like, there’s thousands of tens of thousands of freelancers and in-house people, that, are not that great. And then, there’s, a smaller amount of people who are at the highest level.

And, really, the amount of work that, you guys keep saying I do a lot of work, and I do, I do that because, like I said, it’s a natural part of me, and I just feel like that’s what I should be doing. But also, if that’s how you become successful. That’s how make more money and that’s how … I mean, because the problem nowadays is, you got to convince people like, ‘Hey. I’m not like these ten thousand other freelancers who, you know, all have the same skill levels. Which, is not that high. They don’t have much of a reputation.’ And, you’ve got to stand out from that. And a big part of that is, well, becoming friends with people, especially through live events, but also knowing what you’re talking about.

Rob Marsh:  You know, who knows if Parris is ever going to do another round of copy cubs, but Jason, if you ever open up for taking cubs, you’ve sold us. Really. We’re ready to sign.

Kira Hug:  Yeah. I’ll be a cub.

Rob Marsh:  You dropped a lot of really going advice.

Jason Rutkowski:  I don’t know man.

Kira Hug:  Yeah. You got two cubs right here. Right here.

Jason Rutkowski:  What’s interesting, I will say this really fast, I know it’s the end of the call but. A big reason a lot of top A listers have copy cubs is, not only because they like to teaching, and Parris really does like teaching. But also, out of necessity. You know, a lot of A listers form very deep relationships with clients. Relationships where it’s like, ‘Hey. I’m essentially going to be running your marketing department. And, I’m going to be getting a cut of the front end and back end. I might be getting some equity deals.’ Like, they set up these big deals, and then, these A listers, its like, ‘Well, I’m running this market department now. But I need all this copy done. And not just the big promos, but the back end stuff, the traffic drivers.’

Kira Hug:  Right.

Jason Rutkowski:  ‘Like are all this, you know, the Google stuff. All this copy.’ And a lot of these A listers, the reason if I’m in copy cub groups is, out of necessity. Right? They need Copy Cubs to, you know, do all this copy that they’re just not capable of doing, because they don’t have the time, or they just don’t have the desire. Because, they want to focus on the big money stuff, they don’t want to focus on the small money stuff.

So, I always tell people get somebody, I don’t care if it’s in-house. I don’t care if it’s a mentor. Preferably, in like a one on one relationship, it doesn’t have to be. But, get somebody who knows what you’re talking about, to train you. Hopefully, they’re at a level where they need some smaller copyrighted work done, and maybe could do some smaller stuff for them. But, go for the highest level person you can man.

I went for Parris Lampropolous. I was able to get that and I was right. It doesn’t have to be Parris. But, it’s such a valuable thing. And, a lot times, a lot of these top guys need smaller copy work done, and a lot times, if you could give ’em, like, ‘Hey. I’m at least at the level where I can do, you know, these emails, or these articles.’ You know. Could be content, could be traffic driving. Like, maybe you can form relationships, and it’s extremely valuable experience.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah. It’s really good advice.

Kira Hug:  Thank you. This has been very grounding. I feel like, it reminds me of how much more I want to learn and how much more there is to learn. So, thank you for sharing so much advice, actual advice. And then, inspiring us too.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah. Thanks Jason.

That’s the end of our interview with Jason. Jason’s process for studying and reverse engineering older promotions to learn how to write great copy is something more of us should be doing. To become great, we need to spend more time studying great copy. But not just to copy the words or read through a particular swipe… to deconstruct what’s going on so we can apply the strategies and tactics to new products and services.

Jason’s practice of creating swipe document with lots of examples of great copy when you come across it. So having a swipe doc with 12 or 15 different examples of strong guarantees that effectively overcome risk aversion or a swipe doc with lots of examples of headlines… even multiple examples of headlines variations on a particular hook and so on.

By becoming a collector of good copy, you teach yourself how to write it and perhaps more importantly, you have lots of examples to refer to when you need to sit down and produce copy for a client. Taking the time to master this stuff before you need to write it makes you a much better writer.

Hopefully you see why I chose to reshare this interview. And now, what will you do to implement these ideas into your writing practice?

Since recording this episode, Jason moved from copywriting about health and investing to actually doing the investing himself. By applying the ideas he was writing about, he found he could make even more money so he doesn’t do a lot of writing any more. But the ideas he shared are still worth gold.

Before I go, I want to remind you again that The Copywriter Accelerator Fast Track program is going away forever. You can still get these business building strategies and ideas to implement in your own business, but only for a few more weeks. After that, this program will never be sold on its own again. Go to thecopywriterclub.com/fasttrack to learn more.

Stuff we mentioned to check out:

The Copywriter Accelerator Fast Track
Save the Cat by Blake Snyder
Heather’s Website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground