TCC Podcast #388: Becoming a Copywriter with Eddie Shleyner

What does it take to become a copywriter? How do you learn the skills you need? What are the best ways to "get in the game' so to speak? In the 388th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, Kira and Rob talk with copywriter Eddie Shleyner about the process of becoming a copywriter—and how he made the jump from literature student to booked-out-copywriter and author of a book about copy. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. Stuff to check out: The Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joe Sugarman 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Eddie's website Full Transcript: Most weeks on the podcast we take some time to dive into a different copywriter’s origin story. Why they became a copywriter. How they made the switch from whatever they were before to what they do now. It’s a process we all go through, and yet, we tend to skip over a lot of the details. We jump from one client to the next, or from this service to that product. We cover a lot of what and don’t go very deep into the how. 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 soon to be book author, Eddie Shleyner. Eddie shared the details of how he learned to write copy, the feedback he got along the way, and the books he found most helpful. And that’s just the beginning. We also talked about sabaticals, burnout and book writing. This is a good one, stay tuned.  But before we get to that, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for long, you’ve no doubt noticed a recurring theme… how do copywriters and content writers find clients TODAY. We recently updated our guide to finding clients… it now includes more than 21 different ideas for finding clients… things you can do today to attract a client—maybe even in the next 24 hours. Some of the other ideas will take a bit longer to bring in clients. But they all work. We’ve either used them ourselves, or know other successful copywriters who have used each one of these ideas. And we want to give you this report for free.  But don’t just download this document and let it die on your hard drive. If that’s your approach, don’t bother. This isn’t a one page pdf that’s easy to ignore. It’s a comprehensive… 36 page mini book… that includes the 4 mistakes you can’t afford to make when looking for clients—if you make them, clients will run away from you—the exact opposite of what you want. I already mentioned it includes more than 21 ways to find clients, as well as several templates or scripts you can use to reach out to clients, and finally it reveals the five things you need to do to improve your odds of landing a client. If you want a copy of this report, visit thecopywriterclub.com/findaclient — find a client is all one word and we’ll send you a copy for free. And with that, let’s go to our interview with Eddie. Kira Hug: All right, Eddie, we want to start with your story. How did you end up as a copywriter? Eddie Shleyner: Oh, well, I guess it was a pretty organic thing for me because I majored in English. I was an English major. I studied literature at U of I, and that's what I wanted to do, I think. I wanted to graduate and write novels and short story anthologies, and obviously that's It's really hard to do right out of college, so I had to get a day job. I got a job in sales, and I was selling software. I was selling computers. It was basically inside sales, but it was trying work for me. I didn't really enjoy it. I think I really wanted to write, and so after about a year in that role, my buddy came home. My roommate came home and he said that his work was looking for a copywriter. And I didn't know what a copywriter was. Actually, I had to look it up. I knew somebody was out there writing these ads, but I didn't know they were called copywriters. So this goes to show how little I knew about this discipline in this profession before getting into it.  But I looked it up and I was like, yeah, sure, I'll try that. And I went in and I think I got the job just on the back of my English degree, because It was a brand new department. They were writing job ads. It was a contract role. I wasn't getting any health insurance. I was making $15 an hour. So it was one of those. And I took the job just because I was like, hey, I can make a living writing. And quickly learned that my worth in that role was based on how many times I can get people to click and how many times I can get people to take an action. And so independently, just kind of doing my research, realized that I was doing something called direct response copywriting. And then I kind of went down the rabbit hole. I got really interested in that profession and that discipline and started consuming as much as I could about it. I started just reading books and watching seminars, listening to podcasts, reading articles. Yeah, whenever I would come into an insight, whenever I would hear a principle or a technique that was really compelling to me, I would try to write about it. And that turned into a very good copy eventually, my blog and my newsletter. And then, you know, it just kind of progressed from there. So I think that that's how I got into copywriting was kind of a slow burn. Rob Marsh: Do you have a novel in your desk drawer that you've been working on in the background, Eddie? Eddie Shleyner: Thanks for asking, man. It's not a novel. It's an anthology of my work, but yeah, there is something that I've been working on, if that's what you're getting at. Rob Marsh: Yeah, we'll wait for that to hit the bestseller list so we can talk about it then. In the meantime, you know, as you were studying, as you're learning, obviously podcast books, whatever, what were like the main sources that you used or that you were there were your go tos that you were pulling this stuff from? I'm asking mostly because I know there are beginners who are listening to the podcast and may want to replicate that, learn and write about these insights and learning ideas. Where'd you go? Eddie Shleyner: Well, the first book I picked up was by Joe Sugarman. It's called The Adweek Copywriting Handbook. And I really wore it out. I mean, it was so overwhelming in its completeness. I just felt like it covered so much. And what was really interesting about that book was when I picked it up and I started reading it, being a literature major and studying English all those years and reading the classics. And I started reading and I was like, man, this sounds like it's like reading air. You know, it was like it was so simple and so plain. I was almost unimpressed at first. I was like, well, you know, is this really the resource that I should be reading? Is this really where I should be gathering information? Because it seems so trite at first, because it was so simple. But I think that was just the first couple pages, and then I realized that this was really just a treasure trove of information about direct response copywriting. And not just that, but it was something to emulate.  It was a writing style that I needed to emulate, and I referred back to it time and time again and copyworked it time and time again so that I can get that so I could get it into me, you know, the type of writing, the tone that he was using and the word choice and just the sentence structure and the simplicity in general. I really wanted to write that way and not the way that I was writing in college. You know, I had an editor that was like, “you write like a fire hose, I need you to write like a nail gun.” And that was Joe Sugarman. Joe Sugarman was so intentional about every word that he used. He was even intentional down to the punctuation marks. He wouldn't use unnecessary commas. He was always trying to save space on the page, make it as simple as possible. And so, yeah, I took a lot away from that, both in the principles and techniques of direct response, but also just in the style and how those guys wrote. Kira Hug: So you shared your lessons. It sounds like you were learning and writing and sharing. Yeah. What was the reason for that initially? I mean, we can look back now and say, that was really smart, because now you've developed this entire resource and website, and you've grown since then. But what was your initial thinking with that? Eddie Shleyner: Well, my initial thinking, I think, was that, you know, I missed writing. This was coming off of an entire writing and literature education, so I missed just the act of sitting down and composing vignettes and these little stories, which is something that I did pretty regularly, I think, in college. And so I think I missed it a lot, and I wanted to have an outlet for that. I wanted to exercise that a little bit. Also, I just thought, hey, if I can write about this clearly and concisely, if I can make it engaging, if I had control of this concept on the page, then that meant that I was ready to use it in my own promotions and my own ads. I think that was probably the driving force. They say millennials want to document everything in their lives. Maybe I just wanted to have some way of documenting all of this effort that I was putting in. I don't know. It's a good question. It's hard to pinpoint exactly why I chose to do that, but somewhere in the intersection of those three things is the answer, I think. Rob Marsh: When you weren't only documenting what you were learning, you know, as part of your blog, you started interviews with other copywriters. Yeah. And there's some really good copywriters that you interviewed for that. Yes. I'm not necessarily putting myself in that category, even though I was part of that, that series. But I am curious, were there lessons that you learned from them as you did those interviews and post those on your website that you look back and think, oh, yeah,