TCC Podcast #96: From DJ to Financial Copywriter with Ridge Abraham

For the 96th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, Kira and Rob talk with copywriter Ridge Abraham. Ridge recently left full time employment with The Agora and now works freelance for financial clients and is taking on clients in other fields as well. You’ll want to listen to this one if only to get all of the books Ridge recommends as we talked. In this wide ranging interview we talked about: •  how Ridge went from Los Angeles DJ to financial copywriter •  how his very first mailed promotion pulled $7 million •  how he uses swipe copy without stealing ideas •  his writing process •  the projects he works on today—since he left Agora full time •  how he structures his compensation for the projects he takes •  what he does to connect to potential clients •  how he keeps his skills sharp today •  his thoughts about mentorship and why it is so important •  what he’s learned from his famous dad—Jay Abraham •  the “unbelievable” mistake he sees a lot of other copywriters make •  the failures he’s experienced and how to know when to give up •  several ideas to try if you want to write in the financial niche We also asked Ridge about what he thinks will happen to copywriting in the future and he turned the question back on us, so we shared our thoughts as well. To hear this one, visit iTunes, Stitcher, or download it on your favorite podcast app. Or you can simply click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:   Agora Financial Great Leads Influence Made to Stick Money Map Stansbury Research The Oxford Club Cremes and Lotions Steal Like an Artist A Technique for Producing Ideas Joe Schriefer Abbey Woodcock Ian Stanley Gary Bencivenga Jay Abraham The Dip Chanti Zak Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity Full Transcript:   Kira:   What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work. That's what Rob and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Rob:   You're invited to join the club for episode 96 as we chat with copywriter Ridge Abraham about his path into financial copywriting, what he did to generate seven million dollars with the first campaign he ever wrote, why he's so hard to find online, and the most important lessons he learned from his famous dad. Kira:   Ridge, welcome. Ridge:   Thank you guys. Thanks for having me. Rob:   It's really good to have you. Kira:   We were joking before we started recording about how Ridge is the hardest person to find online. We had to scour the internet to find you. Ridge:   That way you guys can't ask me those trick questions. Kira:   I know. Ridge:  It's even been easier to find Paris Lampropolous online, than it is to find me, which is saying something because he hides. I think he's got a bigger body of work than me, I don't know. Kira:   So let's kick this off with your story and how you ended up as a financial copywriter. Ridge:   Okay. So it's actually a pretty funny story. So, like I was telling you guys, I went to school for music. I was really into music production, songwriting. I was DJing. I was living in LA, and I really want to play shows. I wanted to travel and do stuff like that, and it is tough right out of college. If you want to be like an entrepreneur in the music business, it's very difficult to make it and you're often times broke. So I was working this internship at ... It was like a subsidiary of Hans Zimmer Music for Film studio, and I hated it. I was the intern that every day I would just go and get people lunch. I was just like the gopher. Worst job ever, miserable. I was really like, okay, I need to figure something else out. So I was listening to a lot of entrepreneurial podcast and one of them was John Lee Dumas, Entrepreneur on Fire, and I heard this episode with Kevin Rogers. And so I'm listening, I'm like, okay. He's talking about copy sheets. He's talking about copywriting. I'm like, okay, this sounds pretty cool. That's interesting. So anyways, I hear that and then a couple days later, and as we were talking about my dad's involved in direct response, someone from Agora, Ryan McGrath had come to meet with my dad at my house, I was living back at my parents' house at this time, and so he comes to my house and my dad's not there. And so I'm like, “How's it going?" We're talking, and he tells me he's a copywriter, I'm like, "Oh, yeah. I just heard all this stuff about Kevin Rogers podcast." We started dicing it out, and then he's like, "Wow. You really know this stuff. So maybe come out to Baltimore and check it out." I honestly had no clue what Agora was. I didn't know anything about financial copywriting. When I first went out there I seriously thought I was writing articles on finance. I had clue was Agora was. I didn't know anything about direct response. So I went and checked it out and I wanted so badly to get out of LA and just to do anything else with my life that wasn't music at the time, that I took the job to go to Baltimore, and then I kind of landed myself in this DR, financial copywriting world. I was like, Oh, this is pretty sweet. Rob:   It's crazy that you didn't know anything about copywriting, and yet you get hired as a copywriter. How's that work? Ridge:   Well, I think I read some copy before I went to Agora, and then I just think I had a lot of good questions. I've always been a pretty naturally curious person, and my mentor at Agora Ryan McGrath, I met with him and I met with Joe Schriefer when I went out there, and a couple of the other copywriters too. I think just being interested in it, like reading the promos and going through them, and just asking analytical questions about why certain things were certain ways in the structure of them. When I first got out there I seriously got out there I seriously had no clue what I was doing. It was just like, "Oh, hey, writing. Okay. Cool." Rob:   Can you tell us about those first few days. What was the learning process? What did they put you through? How did you get your feet underneath you so you could write your first promotion? Ridge:   So when I first got there, it's crazy. Agora Financial has grown so much in the past two, three years. When I first got out there, I think it was right around when they were doing 50 million a year, and they're still a relatively small company so there was only four or five ... maybe with all the remote copywriters, maybe up to eight copywriters. Now they have 30, 40, something like that. But when I first got there, I was mentoring under Ryan McGrath and he would send me this whole regime of what I should be doing. So he would give me books. I remember I read Great Leads, Influence, Make it Stick, couple books like that. Then he would give me all the best financial promos to hand write. So I was handwriting one of the money net promos, some of the Stansberry promos, Oxford Club, I had a lot of those. So we'd do that. And I would read a lot of the 4Ps, and some of the AWI materials, but it was just kind of like he would just give me stuff, like assignments due every week, and then it wasn't until about three months in or so that I actually started working on my first promo. And it was writing some traffic drivers email lift notes, some space ads. Kira:   So Ridge, I want to hear more about your time in music and the music industry, so were you a DJ, or were a singer or songwriter? What type of music did you play? Ridge:   So I got really into hip hop when I was like 15, 16. I loved old school hip hop. So stuff like New York hip hop, West Coast hip hop, so I was always making a lot of hip hop beat. When I went to college I started DJing. I had vinyl turntables, and I would scratch and do all that. And then somewhere along the way kind of more like techno. House music got big, and so then I got more into that. So I started producing a lot of techno and what you'd call deep house nowadays. It's kind of like the unz unz type music. And so I did that for a few years, and yeah. I played a good amount of shows, still do around LA. There's a couple big festivals that I've played, so it's been really fun. Rob:   Did you have a DJ name? Ridge:   Yes. It's ... Me and my buddy we DJ under the name Creams and Lotions. Rob:   Nice. Kira:   So Ridge, what was your biggest takeaway from your time? You're still DJing, but when you were heavily in that world, and it sounds like trying to build a career there, what was your biggest takeaway from your experience in the music industry that you've pulled into your career as a copywriter? Ridge:   I think, honestly, the biggest thing you can take away just is swiping. Anything you do you can model it off something else and get it done so much quicker. I think any time you're looking at a blank page you're just trying to envision what's in front of you. I think it's though, but when you have some sort of structure that you can layout for something beforehand, it makes it so much easier and you can move so much faster. Any promo I've ever written, just having another promo to model it all off of, that makes it just happen way more fluidly. Rob:   So when you talk about swiping like that, tell us how that works because there's sort of two schools, people who say, "do not copy," and I suppose that there's a limit where copying bad, but swiping idea or patterns or structure, is good. How do you walk that line so that you're not taking somebody else's promotion and claiming that it's your own, but you're actually reusing strategy or tactics in a new way? Ridge:   I think a really good book to read on this is Steal like an Artist. If you just go through there,