TCC Podcast #348: The Creative Process with Dan Nelken

Dan Nelken is our guest on the 348th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Dan is a copywriter and author of A Self-Help Guide for Copywriters. If you’re a creative, you may have fallen into the inner critic rabbit hole that keeps you in a cycle of stuck. But Dan gives practical and actionable steps to move away from creative burnout and into a process that helps you turn surface-level ideas into substance. Tune into the episode to find out: Dan’s experience in ad school and how it shaped his expertise and portfolio.  The grind that turned into a sustainable copywriting career. How to come up with ideas without letting self-doubt, inner critic, and the feeling of stuck get in the way.  The bucket exercise – how to trick your brain into creating ideas.  What’s the creative process and what tools are useful? The two reasons procrastination is keeping you from total creativity.  Why you should use AI to feel inspired rather than disposable.  How to create a swipe folder system and maximize it.  Do you have a habit of following through?  How to make your emotions work for you. The variety of work copywriters can do and industries they can dive into.  How to keep your business alive without feeling resentful and burned out.  Creativity outside of writing – how do we do it? How Dan’s been able to scale back his client projects by 40%.  Listen to the episode 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 Dan's website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Free month of Brain.FM AI for Creative Entrepreneurs Podcast Full Transcript: Rob Marsh:  Creativity is a big part of your work as a copywriter. Whether you're coming up with new angles for leads and headlines or new ideas for content or new approaches for pitches to prospects who you want to work with, creativity plays a big part in all of that, which begs the question, can creativity be systematized? Can processes and formulas help you be more creative? Those approaches feel a little bit uncreative to me, but our guest for this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is Dan Nelken, and Dan is here to correct that misconception. He shared several details about his creative process that might help make you more creative too. Stick around for this fun conversation. Kira Hug:  But before we all get super creative here, we just want to share something special for you. We call it the P7 Client Attraction Pipeline, which is kind of a mouthful. You can call it P7 for short. This is our client acquisition system designed specifically to help copywriters create a prospecting habit. So we want to make it really easy for you to fit prospecting into your day so it feels natural. And so, not only do we cover prospecting tools you can use, we give you a bunch of pitching templates and we continue to kind of add new templates that work for copywriters. We also give you industry niches, 293 specifically, so you can figure out which niches you could tap, especially if you feel like the space you're working in currently might be slowing down and not hiring. This is where we can be really flexible and explore other niches to find work. And so, we do all of that inside the pipeline and this program along with supporting you with some behavior shifting that can help you really turn this behavior into a habit so it doesn't become the thing that you try one day and then you stop doing. It does work. We've seen copywriters use these tools and these trainings to gain clients, so it's worth exploring if you don't have a client attraction pipeline in your business. And you can find out more information, thecopywriterclub.com/p7 to find out more information about this client acquisition system. Until then, let's kick off our episode with Dan Nelken. Dan Nelken:  Yeah, it was kind of like, I think a lot of wrong turns and dead ends. I didn't grow up being a writer or a creator. I wasn't even the creative one in my family, I would say my two older brothers were. And so I thought, "Okay, I'll play sports and be the dumb jock and that's my job." And then, it wasn't until I was a bit older and when the house was quiet and it was just my mom and I, I think she was really my first audience where I was able to explore my creativity and saw that, hey, I'm funny too. I had soaked up a lot from my brothers and I was just always so quiet in the house, but still, I think by the time I finished high school, I went into psychology, which is what my mom did, and my dad, there was just something missing. And then I thought, well, sports, yeah, I'll go. And I went into sports broadcasting and it was, while I was doing that program, there was a copywriting class for radio and we had to write and produce radio commercials for the school station. I say it was the only class I ever felt seen by a professor, and it's the first time I ever really enjoyed school and just felt I had some natural instincts and obviously from my upbringing and it just fit. I could just say it was the first time I ever felt that and felt seen by a teacher. And so, obviously, it was pretty clear where I was going to go and still I went to finish my psych degree after that, and then I would have business ideas and I came back to like, well, if you have business ideas, I think I was always kind of entrepreneurial. You had to promote them. I went back to this copywriting thing. So it took me quite a while. When I went to the copywriting program in Toronto, I was 27. I started my career at 28 at an ad agency here in Vancouver. So that was... Rob Marsh:  We talk about the copywriting program or the portfolio program that you went through. So this is actually relatively unique. We haven't talk to a lot of agency copywriters and there's obviously so many paths to get into copywriting in portfolio school or ad school, however each school calls it is one of those paths. I'm really curious about your experience there, what you learned and what you came out of that experience with that helped you land a job at an agency. Dan Nelken:  Well, I think that the biggest thing, once you get into these ad schools, I think people would be shocked at how much you push the work. And the basic rule of thumb you'd see from a book that we were all reading back then, and it's still very relevant is that, Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This by Luke Sullivan. And one of the things he says in that book is to write 1 great headline, you have to write 100. And they took that very literally in the schools, and so it would be 100, 200, 300. Think what they really taught us was how to come up with ideas and that's what you'll learn in a portfolio school, where I think for a lot of copywriting disciplines and ways in, they focus on the writing, and this is ideas first, insights first and then write, because when you have those, the writing actually gets easier and the lines can kind of write themselves. So I think it was that, it was pushing us. That's what I got from that. And then, I think it's just thinking big picture because you're often, the goal is to work for big agencies, which often have big brands. And so, you're learning how to think more conceptually and think in terms of campaigns. And so, when you put together a portfolio out of ad school, it's still the same, although obviously now, it's social and more 360 campaigns, but it wasn't just a one-off ad or it wasn't just showing you could write. It's showing you could come up with a big overarching campaign idea and turn that into a series of headlines or ads. So it just helped me, I think, see the bigger picture, which lends itself to working on bigger brands obviously. Kira Hug:  So then, what happened after school at 28 when you went to the portfolio school? What happened next? Dan Nelken:  I got my old job back driving a forklift in the warehouse. Kira Hug:  That's great. Dan Nelken:  That's what I did. And so, I think I knew I was one of a few students who didn't get an internship for, that's a whole other story, so it was unpaid, but I didn't get it. But I knew enough, I knew I was good enough, and I was very determined to get a job. And so, while I was whatever, cruising around the warehouse or tossing garbage into the baler, I was working on my portfolio. And I would send my book to ad agencies that was back in Vancouver, so the school was in Toronto, and I met with one agency who didn't have a spot for me, referred me to this other one. It was called Cossette. One of the biggest ad agency network works here in Canada. And the creative director said, "Well, are you looking for an internship or a job?" And I thought, well, if one of them's paid, I'm going to choose the job. And it was like a 50% pay cut from the warehouse, but that's how I got my start, and I was on a week to week contract. So every Friday I'd be, "Can I come back on Monday?" for a while. And then, I was an art director there who I didn't have a partner, I just sat there in my little cubicle and he had a brief for this McDonald's. They needed a TV spot, radio spot, billboards, and I don't know, maybe at the time, some print. And he is like, he just threw me this brief. He was like, "Oh, you can work on this if you want." And I just went nuts. Probably within two days, I can't even tell you how many ideas I had. And so, he took a bunch of mine, put them up on the wall with theirs. It was another more mid-level creative team presented to the creative director. And I was in the presentation but didn't say a word, and he picked off, he probably picked off about eight concepts. These would be, and we didn't have radio, but it was like TV spot, billboards.