TCC Podcast #390: Growing an Online Presence with Kieran Drew

Want clients to find you instead of always having to pitch and find them? Then you need to be where they are. And in most cases, that means somewhere online—Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, LinkedIn or in your own newsletter. In the 390th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, Kira and Rob talk with former dentist turned copywriter Kieran Drew about how he took two years to grow an online presence that earns him six figures a year today. This one is worth listening to twice. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. Stuff to check out: The Blockbuster Principle by Michael Simmons (article) The Almanack of Naval Ravakan Poor Charlie's Almanack by Charlie Munger The Status Game by Will Storr Mastery by Robert Greene Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground HypeFury (posting tool) Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: Last week I started off the podcast by talking about the idea of slow and steady growth. This week is a little different. It’s about overnight success. Or rather, what might look like overnight success, but really is a two year effort to build and iterate something that works. Hi, I’m Rob Marsh, one of the founders of The Copywriter Club. And on today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, my co-founder, Kira Hug, and I interviewed copywriter and social media expert and not-so-funny stand up comic Kieran Drew. Kieran is one of those over night success stories. When I first came across him online, he was in the middle of a six-figure launch that surprised even him. And in the year since then, he’s done it twice more. But the back story is less instant recognition and more grind and fail, then grind and fail again until something works.  But before we get to what Kieran shared about launches, growing a newsletter and social media presence and why he gave up a promising career and guaranteed income for something a lot riskier like copywriting, I want to mention again our free report called how to find clients. I recently took a week to rework and revise one of our most popular client finding  resources… this report. it’s completely updated for 2024 and now includes more than 21 different ideas for finding clients… many of them could help you attract a client in the next 24 hours. Wither we’ve used these ourselves, or we know other successful copywriters who have landed good, high-paying clienets with them. I’ve said it before…This isn’t a one page pdf that will get lost in your downloads folder. In fact, if you’re just going to download it to get to it later, don’t bother. It’s too valuable to not get used. But if you’re ready to take action and go after a new client, this report includes the 4 mistakes you can’t afford to make when looking for clients—if you make them, clients will not work with you. It also includes more than 21 ways to find clients, templates for reaching out to clients, and finally the five things you need to do to improve your odds of landing a client. Get your copy now at  thecopywriterclub.com/findaclient. And with that, let’s go to our interview with Kieran. Kira Hug: All right, let's kick off with your story. How did you end up as a copywriter? Yeah, sure. Kieran Drew: Well, first of all, thank you for having me on because I have devoured your podcast. When I first heard of writing and copywriting, I must have listened to like 80 of your episodes because it was a very exciting and scary world, copywriting. Rob Marsh: So you only have 320 to go, it sounds like. Kieran Drew:  I know.I had to start doing the work at one point. It's been a massive help. I got into copywriting while I was a dentist, up until a couple of years ago and when COVID hit. I never really enjoyed my job as a dentist. The pay was pretty good, but unfortunately, I was working six days a week and I sort of lacked that creative fulfillment. And when COVID hit, obviously we couldn't see patients from home. So I had a couple of months and I thought, you know what, let's have a little look at what we could do here.  And I actually decided to be a standup comedian and I started writing jokes in the morning and thankfully no one actually heard my jokes, but what I noticed was those few hours in the morning when I was writing flew by. And that was my first taste of flow. So I started to ask myself, how can we build a writing career from this? And I found blogging. I sucked at all that. I failed for like a year. I built a website that all went terribly. I tried writing on Instagram, Reddit, and it all just failed one bit after another.  And then I met a friend on Twitter and he said, have you ever heard of this thing called copywriting? And until that time I thought copywriting was for lawyers, right? Like the circle with the R. Iit was really cool to realize that you can combine writing with persuasion and psychology. I fell in love. I mean, I sucked at it. I'm still not that great, but I fell in love with it from there. Rob Marsh: So let's talk a little bit about moving away from what you did before. Obviously you’re not entirely happy with your career, even though you're making pretty good money. Let's talk about the mindset a little bit and the shift. Because when you've invested so much time, schooling, effort, energy into something, it feels like there's a lot of tendency to be stuck and to want to remain and to finish. You may not have been happy, but you had invested so much into your career. Talk about that mindset shift and what it took to step away from that into something,  as you describe it, totally unknown. Kieran Drew: Yeah, I mean, the toughest point probably was right at the start when I sort of knew that the career was okay. I wasn't ever, I was never really that mad about it. Like I said, the pay was pretty good, so I never really questioned it, but unfortunately dentistry is not really transferable. So I used to feel really desperate, um, going into work. And I remember listening to podcasts of creative people thinking, Oh God, I'm in the wrong career, but there's literally nothing you can do. And so stupidly, like a bad gambler, my, my plan was to double down. So I started specializing, I took a second job and I thought, look, if you can slog this out for 10, 15 years, at least you have enough money. If you save well and invest, you can at least try to retire early and do something else. And what happened there was, so I started doing okay at dentistry and I remember listening to Seth Godin and he was talking about sunk cost bias. I'd never heard of it before. And I was like, well, here it is. You know, I've spent 10 years on a career, uh, over six figures in training. And I always thought because of that, you know, the first 10 years of your career should dictate the next 50. And when you think about that on paper, it's like, how stupid is that? And, when I realized this, then it actually got a bit harder because every day I drove to work, I was like, you're making a big mistake. You, you become aware of the opportunity cost of time. But the only good part was it was quite exciting to finally go, “you know what? Changing careers is always really overwhelming because you're always focusing on things like expert status.” And I was like, “you know, let's just start by exploring and curiosity. And you're not here to make money. There's no pressure on the result. Let's just get good at a different skill.” And that was really fun. But over time, it's a bit like having a stone in your shoe, Rob, where you think you could ignore it, but the more you walk, the more it annoys you. And I was coming to work and I was like, I really do feel like I'm in the wrong job here.  My plan was to slowly transition. I go down to three days a week at dentistry, start building up the writing career and do that over sort of five years. I'm really risk averse or I used to be anyway. And what actually happened was, my boss texts me the day before I was meant to start a new job three days a week. And he texts me being like, oh, the clinic isn't ready for another month. And we've been waiting nine months to work together. And I was, I remember I was so happy I was in this flat and I was running up and down fist pumping because I was like, yes, I don't have to work for a month. I get to ride for a month.  And when that sort of settled down, I was like, how screwed up is this that you're celebrating so much to do something you love? Maybe this is actually a sign to back out. And I have never been so scared in my life, man. I called my mom, my dad, all my friends being like, “I think I'm going to quit my career here.” And it's way too early. Everyone was just saying, go for it. At the end of the day, you can always go back. This isn't a fatal decision. And then I went to see the boss again. People say I was brave. I had a panic attack outside the practice. I remember I was walking past the door, went to knock, panicked, went to the alleyway, stood in the alleyway for like five minutes. And then when I actually came in, I spent half an hour talking to nurses about jobs I'll never do and materials I'll never use and all that. Eventually when I got into his office, I said, yeah, I'm done. And he said something similar where it's like, oh, you're throwing away 10 years of a career you're only 10 years in. And I was like, precisely, there's never a good time to quit. It's now. Right. So yeah, a scary decision, but in retrospect went really well. Kira Hug: I always wonder when people feel this change of heart, if you know, for you, did you love dentistry in the beginning or do you feel like you just, you started on a path that was really never something you loved or did something change for you over those 10 years? Kieran Drew: We're expected to pick a career before we can pick a car, right? So, I mean, I decided to do dentistry from about 16 years old.