TCC Podcast #442: Hand Copying to Learn Writing Skills with Derek Johanson

What's the best way to learn copywriting? Could it be hand-writing sales pages and other great copy from expert copywriters like Mel Martin and Gary Bencivenga? My guest for this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is Derek Johanson, the writer who created CopyHour, a program designed to help you learn to write by hand-copying great copy. We also talked about getting affiliates, mentoring, and a lot more. If you want to improve your copywriting skills, be sure to listen to this episode (and click here to learn about the CopyHour program). Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. Stuff to check out: The CopyHour Course Gary Bencivenga's Olive Oil Sales Page The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: What’s the best way to learn copywriting? Would it surprise you that handwriting great copy is possibly the most successful technique? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast. There must be something like a thousand different courses for copywriters to learn how to write copy. And probably another thousand more that talk about content—as if it’s a separate skill set. And there are probably an additional thousand more free videos in places like YouTube that promise to teach you the skills you need to succeed as a copywriter. With that many choices out there, you would think the world would be crammed full of phenomenally skilled copywriters, but it’s not. This should tell us that not all courses or workshops that promise to teach writers how to write copy and content actually work. So what does work? Is there a course out there that many copywriters talk about or recommend when it comes to writing engaging sales or conversion copy? And it turns out there is. One course recommended by people like Dan Ferrari, Chris Orzechowski, Elise Savaki, and hundreds of others is called CopyHour. Unlike many other courses, CopyHour focuses on handwriting great copy. Does that really work? I asked Derek Johanson, the writer who created CopyHour to be my guest for this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast to answer questions like… why does hand-writing teach copy structure and pacing where other methods don’t appear to have the same level of success?  We talked about the genesis and evolution of the CopyHour program and what it includes… things like writing great offers, writing headlines and bullets, and how Derek has improved the course over time. Now I want to be upfront about something… I came to this interview as a bit of a skeptic when it comes to hand-writing copy. I’m all in on studying good examples of emails, sales pages, and other good copy. In fact, I have a swipe file with more than 500 different sales pages that I’ve saved to study… those swipes are part of The Copywriter Underground… But handwriting? I wasn’t so sure… I think Derek may have changed my mind. And if you’re a skeptic on this topic, you may want to hear what he says about the science of handwriting and learning. If you’re convinced by the end of this episode that you want to know more, you can go to thecopywriterclub.com/copyhour to find out more about Derek’s course. It’s open for new members the week this episode goes live, so check it out today… thecopywriterclub.com/copyhour Before we get to my interview with Derek, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. You’ve heard me talk about how we’ve recently rebuilt The Underground dashboard to make finding the ideas and insights you need easier. But as I started recreating this new dashboard, it occurred to me that no one has time to watch more than 70 different workshops—even for those workshops that help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. So I’ve taken more than 30 of those workshops on finding clients, having sales calls, using A.I., building authority on LinkedIn, and dozens of others… and I’ve created playbooks that break down the ideas in the workshops into easy-to-follow steps. Each playbook is 3-5 pages long. You can read through one and implement the ideas in minutes. And then if you want more detail, you can watch the accompanying workshop. Each playbook even includes a checklist so you don’t miss any steps and can ensure you get things done. I’m working on completing playbooks for all of the workshops and training inside The Underground. They should all be ready by the end of April. You can get the first 30 or so right now by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. And now, my interview with Derek Johanson… Derek, welcome to the podcast. I'm thrilled to have you here. Before we hit record, I was mentioning you know, you're you're talked about by everyone. Your program is relatively well known. But before we get into all of that, I'm curious: how did you get from the beginning of your career to where you are now, where you are literally on the lips of so many copywriters around the world? Derek Johanson: Wow. Do you want the long version or the short version? Rob Marsh: We've got an hour. So you tell me how much time we should use up in your story. Derek Johanson:  Yeah. So, I mean, I can take you back to the very, beginning, oh, man. I got started online about 1516, years ago. And when I first got started, I was bouncing all around to different countries. Actually, I graduated from UCLA and kind of got out of school and was working in the music industry. I wanted to, I wanted to be in the music industry. I wanted to play music actually. But I'm going to tell you the long version, because I don't really know how to short version, yeah, we might need more than an app. I don't know. So I wanted to work in the music industry. And I got out of college, and. And immediately got a job and started working for a small publishing company. And really had one of those moments where, I read The 4 Hour Work Week, and my brain just got destroyed by the possibility of traveling the world and working. I had traveled quite a bit before that, and I was like, Oh, my God, if I can make that work, I can do this, or if I can make that work, that I'll be set right. If I can make $1,000 a month and live in Thailand, I will be golden. So that book destroyed my life. And then from there, I worked for about eight or nine months at that company, and I started looking around and looking at my bosses, who were all in their 50s, and nobody seemed happy. And I was like, You know what, this is where I'm headed if I don't get out of here. So I saved up all my money or saved as much money as I possibly could. I shared a bedroom with my best friend at the time, and I actually had a mattress that whenever our landlord would come over, I had to shove into the closet because we weren't supposed to have that many people in the house or in the room. So basically, I just saved every dollar I could and I quit, then started traveling. I went down through Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Argentina, and all along the way, I was working with one of my other friends. We were just trying to figure out how we're gonna make money as we're going. So my first foray was into affiliate marketing. So I set up some blogs. I had a blog on acne. I had a blog on dating—just setting up kind of weird, random little websites, and started to actually make some money with those. And what I really didn't understand at the time is what I was doing, and when I say a little bit of money, I really mean a little bit of money. What I didn't realize was that I was actually doing copywriting. And so fast forward a little bit. I came back to the States, and I met a guy in Thailand that I became fast friends with. He had a publishing company or wanted to start a publishing company. We called it dangerous publishing. We were trying to find "how-to" experts in various fields. We had an acting coach. We had a yoga instructor, like he was like a yoga master for yoga instructors, and a few other small clients, some in kind of on the business side, biz, op stuff. And so I traveled to Philadelphia, where he lived at the time. After we met in Thailand, he came back to where he was from, which was Philly. We started working together, building this publishing company. And then about, let's see. About six months into that, we get a knock on our loft. We had this loft in Philadelphia, and my wife is in the other room right now, and she's laughing because she was there. And we get a knock on our door in the morning. On a Saturday morning, I hear and then I hear keys jiggling, and our landlord runs into the house—I have problem with landlords. I'm just realizing, as I'm telling you the story—he runs into the apartment and he's like, "David, where's my money?" And at that time, I had no idea that there were any problems at all, but it turns out my then-business partner was funneling money from our business bank account into his own personal account to pay down a DUI. I'm from San Diego. I live in San Diego. I was on the East Coast in Philly, 3000 miles from home, and I was still young at the time, like 24-25 in that range, and decided that this was not somebody that I wanted to be in business with. And so from there, I left that business, I basically dumped all of the money that I had into that business, and then I took a couple of clients that I had or that we had from that business. I started working with them and trying to help them grow and doing all of the online business activities and marketing activities that we'v all heard of. So setting up a blog. I was running Facebook ads, building landing pages, and writing sales pages. I wrote some VSLs and we actually started publishing some books on Kindle with a few different people. And so I realized that I was copywriting, right? Everything that I was doing, I hadn't really figured that out. Up until that point. I had read some stuff by Carlton. I knew that. I knew what copywriting was,