The Best You Can Say Is No?

Tara Lassiter is our guest on the 326th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. After a 12-year career as a model and actress for QVC, Tara shifted into the copywriting space and became an email strategist. Whether you need to up your networking skills, need to make faster decisions, or you want to dabble into the world of TikTok, you’ll find yourself scribbling notes through the entire episode. Why Tara went from model and actress for QVC to email strategist. How is QVC similar to copywriting? Where she found her first copywriting clients. How The Copywriter Accelerator helped her propel her business forward. Do you brag about yourself? Here’s why you should. Dating vs marrying your decisions. How to hone in on what your audience wants to see from you. How to go from overthinking to taking action and accomplishing. Starting on TikTok – where do you begin? Create two versions of yourself… Here’s how. How to get more done with a limited amount of hours. Navigating the challenge of shifting from copywriter to strategist. Why you absolutely need to find a network and how it’ll change your business (and life). How to tap into your current network if you’ve never done it before. The added benefit of creating frameworks and how they help you AND your clients. Being realistic about your time and why setting realistic expectations is vital. How Tara balances being a homeschool mom, business owner, and wife. Is it really about being the breadwinner? The advice she would give to her past self. Listen to the episode below or read the transcript. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Join The Copywriter Accelerator waitlist The Copywriter Think Tank Kira’s website Rob’s website Tara's website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Free month of Brain.FM Episode 157 Episode 269   Full Transcript:   Rob Marsh:  Imagine for a minute selling more than a million dollars worth of a product in about an hour's time. What should you get paid for something like that? What would you learn from that experience, and how could you repeat that with other clients? Our guest for today's episode of the Copywriter Club podcast did exactly that. Copywriter and customer journey strategist, Tara Lassiter, helped sell a million dollars of lotion on QVC and made $100 for her effort. She joined us to share how that experience, along with the Copywriter Accelerator and a great network that she has built around her, helped launch her career as a copywriter. We think you're going to like this episode. Kira Hug:  But first, this podcast is sponsored by the Copywriter Accelerator. Shocking, right? Tara was a member, she's an Accelerator alumni member, so you'll hear a little bit more about the program in this conversation. Before that, it is a five-month coaching and Mastermind program for copywriters who want to build a profitable copywriting business and get closer to the 10K-a-month mark. If you feel like that could be you and you want the support and the systems and the blueprints to help you get there, along with coaching from the two of us and the support of a tight-knit community, we've bundled it all into the Copywriter Accelerator. We know it works because we've been doing it for five years now. So if you have any interest, you can jump onto the waitlist, and we will drop the link to that in the show notes. Tara Lassiter:  It started a long time ago, a little over a decade ago. In my past life, I was a model and an actress. My main client was QVC. There was one particular show, an hour-long show, where I had rubbed lotion all over my body for an hour. At the end of the hour everyone started to cheer. It was because we had sold a million dollars worth of body butter. I started to cheer and cheer and cheer. Then it dawned on me that I had made a hundred bucks in that million-dollar hour. I wasn't jealous or anything, but I was so intrigued. How did they make a million dollars in an hour? So I started to do research on buyer psychology and marketing. It led me to copywriting because I didn't even know what the word was. I understood that there were triggers that were happening within the hour while we were on television that encouraged people to buy. So I started buying copywriting courses and books. I bought John Carlton's... I think it's called Kick-Ass Copywriting in 2014 or something like that. I've just pulled up the receipt. So I've been reading books and doing courses, but modeling was kind of golden handcuffs. I enjoyed it, and I worked with people that I loved. It wasn't a bad gig. It paid well and it was really flexible. I got to travel. So it was really cool. I wasn't able to pursue copywriting until the pandemic shut everything down. Then there were a lot of castings that disappeared, and the ones that were, they would say you need to show proof that you had COVID already. Because before there were vaccines, they wanted to make sure that there was a bit of a bubble. Because I didn't have that, I couldn't work. That gave me time to jump back into the books and into the courses and to say, "All right, well, it's now or never. I'm going to try this out." That's what I really did. I just started going back online, taking courses, reaching out to people that I knew, writing anything. I'd always been the person in the family who wrote cover letters and resumes for everyone, LinkedIn profiles, just anything I could get my hands on to try to start getting some practice. Rob Marsh:  I want to hear more about QVC. I know you do that a bit. I've read Anthony Sullivan's book, You Get What You Pitch For, which is all about his experience at QVC and selling on QVC. Were you just modeling? Did you have speaking parts? What were you doing to sell...? Again, I know you only made a hundred dollars for that hour, but selling a million dollars for the product, even though you said it was a big deal, that feels like a really big deal. So what was the role? Tara Lassiter:  They were experimenting a lot with what models could do because we were basically personalities that the people at home could relate to. I was able to speak sometimes, but a lot of times I was just silent. A lot of what I learned came from behind the scenes because QVC is very particular about who goes on air. They're very particular about their audience. A lot of times the founder of the company was who came to sell their own products. So if I worked for Martha Stewart that day, I worked with Martha Stewart. I would always ask, "What's your favorite book?" You know what I mean? "Can I hear your story, classes, podcasts that you listen to, anything?" I would always try to pick their brains and see what got them to that point. That's really what helped me to understand marketing strategy on a grand scale, because I wasn't content with just being a model. I always wanted to see the journey for the person behind the business, and I got to actually reach out and touch them. It's a small place. It's not like the celebrities are separate from the regular people. So I got to really interact with a lot of cool people and ask questions and go out to dinner and try products before they went on air. So it was a very experimental role. Kira Hug:  So you were in multiple QVC campaigns and promotions, not just that one? Tara Lassiter:  Oh, definitely. I was there for 12 years. I was usually there between 10, 20 hours a week, so 10 or 20 shows for over a decade every week, so I kind of lived there. I spent my 20s there. It's where I grew up. Kira Hug:  Have you written a book about this yet? Tara Lassiter:  No, no. I just read Joe Sugarman's book though. I don't know. Kira Hug:  I feel like this is a book. Tara Lassiter:  You feel like it's a book? Rob Marsh:  There's definitely a book here, for sure. Kira Hug:  In the meantime, the book can be this interview, but that's fascinating. Now I have so many different questions. One is, let's just talk about the triggers. Because you started with that specific promotion for that lotion, what were some of the triggers that contributed to that million-dollar campaign? Tara Lassiter:  Definitely. They used a lot of one-time-only, which would be a price that was only available for a short period of time that now I know is scarcity. There was also lots of bundling going on, so you got a value based on buying groups of products together, and they were able to bake in profit that way. The countdown timers and how many sold in an hour for some social proof and that kind of pressure. So I saw in the end all of those copywriting things that now I'm like, "Oh, yeah, that happens at every webinar." It's essentially a 24-hour webinar that's happening, and then the product just changes every 6, 8, 12 minutes. Essentially, it's just a live webinar that's happening all day and all night. Rob Marsh:  I love that. When I got my start, and especially it was before the internet was huge, so a lot of direct response television is where I would sort of learn it. Of course, QVC is basically hour after hour. Anyway, I love the lessons that you pull from that because it is a sales page an hour, and what they're doing in video echoes a lot of what we do in email sales pages today. So good takeaway. Let's talk about how you then took that, and you said that you read a couple of books. You started really saying, "This is the time." How did you go out, find your first clients, start your own business, what did that look like? Tara Lassiter:  It started out with me just reaching out to my network. People knew... So backtrack a little bit. Once I got a taste of how I could use marketing to make money outside of QVC, I started an Amazon store with my husband,