TCC Podcast #336: Research, Writing, and His Go-to Lead with John Forde

John Forde is a direct-response copywriter and co-author of the book, Great Leads and the person behind the long-running newsletter called the Copywriter’s Roundtable. John shared his process for getting started with research and copy and the lessons he’s learned from his 23-year copywriting career. Here’s how the episode goes: John’s approach to research – how much do you really need to get started? What does it mean for your copy to be invisible? Do you need to invest in another copywriting formula? How often do you need to check in with your writing process and method? The difference between divergent and convergent thinking and how to use each in copywriting. Why the warm-up is essential to writing your best copy. The benefits of reverse engineering outlines in different copywriting assets. How speed can benefit your copy and emulate positive energy. John’s process for feeding his brain from morning to night. How fiction books can help you develop a better sense of empathy. The 6 leads John teaches in his book. What makes a great lead? Info product vs. a wise product – what makes one better than the other? The discipline that comes with writing a weekly newsletter for over 20 years. His view on the future of copywriting and the lifestyle of copywriters. Hit that play button or check out the transcript below! The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: The Copywriter Think Tank Kira’s website Rob’s website John's website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Free month of Brain.FM Full Transcript: Rob Marsh:  If you've been listening to the Copywriter Club podcast for very long, you know that we love talking to copywriters, content creators, and marketers at all stages of business, from beginners to seasoned experts. Today's guest fits very comfortably in the latter group. John Forde is the co-author of the book Great Leads, along with Michael Masterson, and the man behind the long-running weekly email called The Copywriter's Roundtable. He's also the author of dozens, maybe even hundreds, of high performing sales promotions in the financial newsletter industry. John shared his process for getting started with research and copy, how divergent and convergent thinking helps him come up with new ideas, the lessons that he learned as a copywriter, especially as he was just starting out, along with a lot more. Stick around, because this interview is a good one. Kira Hug:  But before we get to the interview, this podcast is sponsored by The Copywriter Think Tank. That is our mastermind for copywriters and other marketers who want to figure out the next thing in their businesses. That could be anything from creating a new product to launching a podcast or a video channel. Maybe it's creating a product company or building an agency. Maybe you just want to be the best copywriter in your niche. Maybe you just want to hang out with us in real life at one of the upcoming retreats that we're so excited about. Regardless, you can check out more information copywriterthinktank.com to find out more and to apply today. Rob Marsh:  Okay. Let's kick our episode off with John. And as we do, just a quick note that John's neighbor decided to mow his lawn about halfway through the interview. It's not too bad, but we do apologize for any of the background noise that you might hear. Don't let that stop you from listening though, because this is a really good interview packed with lots of ideas you can implement in your business. John Forde:  I guess, just like any story you ask a copywriter to tell, it can be long versions and short versions. So, I'll try to come somewhere in the middle. When I was in school, I was studying... What I wanted to study was English lit. I was talked out of that by my mother who has a degree in English literature and a master's degree in English literature and she worried about my employability. Rob Marsh:  Yeah. John Forde:  So I started taking marketing courses because they were there. To be honest, the teachers were great, but I learned nothing. I retained nothing from those marketing courses, at least not consciously. Maybe in the subconscious, I don't know. But when I got out of school, I wanted to find some way to do writing that still involved making money, not starving. In the time that I didn't know what I wanted to do, I went to a graduate program in Annapolis, St. John's University. It's really just a great books program. And not especially marketable, but I just felt like that would be very interesting to me, so I took that. Well, I ended up seeing a job posting there for an internship at Agora Publishing. At the time they were very, very small, maybe 25, 30 employees total across the company. I went, I got the internship. I was being paid $15 a day to write editorial stuff. I met Bill Bonner and at one point he said, "Why don't you come over and sit in my office?" We had big open offices. "Come over and sit where I am and I'll teach you how to do writing or something." He didn't really have a plan and Agora didn't really have copywriters then, except for Bill and one other person who did it part-time. This is where I'm shortening the story. It involves getting business cards, not knowing what to put in the business card. I put a copywriter on there because I knew Bill was a copywriter and I thought, "Oh well." And I just wanted to have business cards because I'd never had them before. And when they came, Bill saw the box of business cards and he said, "Business cards. What do you need these for?" And I said, "Bill, to be honest, I'd never had them before. I want to hand them out maybe at a happy hour or something like that." And he said, "All right, well that's respectable I guess. But what did you put on there for a job title?" And I said, "Copywriter." And he said, "All right, I can teach you to do that." And that's how I started writing copy. He would write a promotion and he would fill in the broad strokes and he'd hand it to me and he'd say, "Fill in the rest. Fill in these blanks." Gradually got to do more and more of the writing, and there it went. And Agora famously expanded and Bill decided that they needed to have a copywriting training program. He and Mark Ford, who has a similar last name but we're not related, came in and he and Bill put that together. I helped them run that and it just expanded. That became a core of the Agora copywriting training until people all spun off and started finding their own ways to train, which were also very effective. Then it became the foundation of the AWAI training program. That was that. Rob Marsh:  With those beginnings, you have probably... Well, between you and Bill and Mark, you probably have helped train more copywriters than anyone else in the world, I've got to believe. John Forde:  I've never counted, but I think a lot. Yeah. A lot. Rob Marsh:  You got to be in the top three maybe. John Forde:  We did copy training things every year and brought in people from all around the world really, because Agora's trying to... has offices and affiliates and things like that in different countries. And I did that for maybe 15 years, 18 years. Yeah, I don't think I could begin to count. But of course now Agora has multiple affiliates inside of it and each one has their own copy pod, copy training setup. So, they do it all on their own... They do all that training too. I mean, there are lots of people now who are in the Agora business that have been doing it for less time than I have and I read their stuff and learn from them all the time. Rob Marsh:  Yeah, it's a training powerhouse. As you think back to what you were learning from Bill, as you were starting out, can you just share some of those... the first critical lessons that really got you started from... So many of us do the English thing, and who knows what we're going to do when we grow up, but we have a pretty good writing foundation. But that's a very different thing from writing promotional type stuff. So what are some of those first couple of skills that Bill was teaching you that you were able to put to use as you were growing your career? John Forde:  Well, Bill is a fascinating person. He's very interested in ideas. He's a history buff. He reads a lot and is a very good writer outside of writing copy as well as writing copy. But the writing that he does for himself is different from the writing that we do in copy, because we're trying to get that instant response, instant effect. We have to keep it very lean and he does do the things where he gets more descriptive and writes longer and all those other things. One of the things that I learned early on I guess was just that, that the kind of writing that people think of when they think of writing is not necessarily the same as when you write copy. Because writing for fine literature or something like that is something where you want to look at the writing and go, "Boy, that's really good writing." But when you're looking at copy, you don't want to be thinking about the writing style at all. That should be invisible. This is the famous Ogilvy where one side says, "That's a really great ad," and the other one says, "That's a really great product." And he says, "We write the second kind of ad." That's one thing, is that you have to learn how to write in a way that is so good it disappears. Which is why I think a lot of people look at copy and they think, "Oh, I could do that." Because it's so lean and it looks so simple. But then when you get into it, you realize it's very hard to find that path that goes through and resists doing all those tangents and things. I think something else particularly with Bill is that the way he taught,