Using social media to find clients can be exhausting. Writers tend to focus on the “media” and use it as a broadcast platform that requires post after post and what at least one marketing guru has called “Content Shock”. What if you focused on the “social” part of social media and used it to foster real relationships with prospects and clients? That’s what’s been working for Esai Arasi, our guest for this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast.  Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

Stuff to check out:

Esai’s LinkedIn
Esai’s Instagram
The Business of Expertise
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  Looking for an approach to social media that doesn’t require you to post three times a day or more? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

The old approach to social media was to post content—photos and video with clever captions that invite comments and likes—is hard to keep up with. If you don’t have a team of content creators and algorythm watchers to keep up with the latest thing, you burn out or lose interest or eventually realize that the effort you are putting in is not being rewarded by the leads and clients you are looking for.

Most of us are on social media to get leads. But how’s that working out for you? Most content writers or copywriters posting on Instagram or X/Twitter or LinkedIn are spending a lot of time for very little payoff. And that’s because social media is great at helping foster connections and relationships, but not all that great at selling organically. I’m not saying it can’t be done or that no one’s doing it. Some are. But it’s not easy.

My guest for this week’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is Esai Arasi. And she argues you don’t need to post every day or every week or even every month. Tools like ManyChat help move followers who are interested in what you do from posts to DMs. Using social media to foster relationships you have with previous clients and referal partners is also useful. Those things don’t disappear into the feed after a few minutes. They endure. And switching up your approach to focus on these kinds of behaviors may bring you better results than you’ve been seeing lately.

Stick around as we talk about how to do this.

As usual, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. We’re talking about social media and getting clients to work with you today and it just happens that there are additional resources in The Copywriter Underground designed to help you do both of those things. Workshops on using tools like Pinterest and YouTube to grow your audience and attract clients. Still other workshops on engaging prospects on LinkedIn and other social media platforms so you can build relationships that result in high-paying client work. Not to mention resources to help you land a “real” job if that’s more up your alley. And that’s just the beginning… there are dozens of templates—including a legal document worth hundreds of dollars—ready for you to borrow and use in your own business, three entire courses on selling, writing proposals clients can’t say no to, and building your authority so clients seek you out, not the other way around. Plus dozens of other workshops, monthly coaching, regular copy critiques and more. You can see what it includes at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu

And now, my interview with Esai Arasi…

Esai, welcome back to the podcast. It’s been a little while since we talked on the podcast. You and I have talked offline a few times since then, but catch us up on what’s been going on in your business. I think on the podcast, last time we talked was like 2020. So it’s been a little while.

Esai Arasi: It’s been a while. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me again, Rob. And I’m really excited to catch up on what my growth has been like because when I was last on your podcast, I was still working with you inside the think tank. I was still learning. I was still building all of the systems as we were discussing. And it was I was going through a huge period of change. And I’m really excited today to share the systems I’ve built, the marketing strategies that I’ve tried, what’s working for me, what’s working for my clients, what’s working in social and in marketing right now. And most importantly, as you and I discussed, I’m going to talk about all of this within the framework of Traffic Nurture Conversion. And figuring out where you need to focus, or you can guess the best results where I focus personally. And just and if anybody is interested in, after they listen to the podcast, they want to know where they should focus on. A simple way that they can do that is sending me a DM called audit and take my quiz right in their DMS, which will tell them what is their easy win easy money book in your focus right there.

Rob Marsh: Perfect, okay, so that’s a nice teaser for everything that we’re gonna get to. So last time we talked, you’re building your agency, you have a couple of people who are working with you, helping, and you were knee deep or maybe even shoulders deep in social media and posting content and doing this for a lot of clients on a very regular basis. And I know your thinking has shifted a little bit on that. Tell us about your agency and how that shift has happened over time.

Esai Arasi: Since we have talked now, I have grown to about a six-member team. We still do social media, we still do content, but as you and I were talking about earlier, social media is one piece of an entire strategy. When I think back, I used to think, oh, I have this groundbreaking new hosting framework, which is fantastic and was getting results for clients. And I realized that was just the tip of the iceberg of what was working on what I was implementing for my clients. It was still ahead of its time when we were implementing it, but it took even me Implementing the same framework for multiple clients to really understand why it was working what was happening and again understand that in the context of what was happening in our industry as well so i’m really excited to dive into that.

Rob Marsh: So before we jump into the framework though, the basic understanding for social media, and I’m mostly thinking of Instagram, but this is also true of LinkedIn, probably Twitter, even TikTok, is that you need to be posting content. And if you’re not posting content at least three times a week, you’re not getting seen by the algorithm, you’re not building your audience, all of this stuff. Last time we talked, like that was constant. In fact, we were even saying, you know, she’d be in there every day. And sometimes some people are even saying two or three times a day. And so like this whole idea of producing content is, well, first of all, I think it’s scared off a lot of people who are just like, there’s no way I can produce all of that content. Some people were up for the challenge, and they’re like, okay, I’m all in, and they quickly burn out just because, again, finding new things or new ways to say old things is so hard. And maybe a few people have done it and done it well, and we all look at them and think, wow, I wish I had the stamina. I wish I could do the thing that they do, but I don’t. So I’m just, I quit. I quit social media. I’m not going to do it. And if, and this is very true of me, you know, if people look at The Copywriter Club social media, we don’t post all that often, not on LinkedIn, not on Instagram because yeah, either I’ve burned out or, or it’s just, it feels like such a huge ball to push up the mountain. Obviously that’s become a problem. And so I think the framework and what you’re doing is addressing that kind of a problem, right?

Esai Arasi: Exactly. That’s exactly what it’s addressing because what happens often is when we are faced with a problem or a challenge or somebody tells us that this is the next thing that you need to do for your business, we copywriters and service providers, we have the tendency to immediately go into this implementation.

Rob Marsh: Right.

Esai Arasi: What can I learn? What can I do? Just tell me, just give me a plan, teach me something, and I’m going to go right into it. And we’re built for that. We’re really, really good at that. And that’s why we think anybody tells us you need to create more content, it makes sense for us. We are writers, so we do understand the power of content to scale relationships, to scale visibility, to scale our knowledge and strategy and bring us credibility and authority. We do understand that. But the thing is, So creating content is the second level of strategy. We need to first foundationally understand that what we need is not content. What we need is relationships. And that’s why I tell every single client whether they are selling courses, they’re selling one-on-one offers, they’re selling coaching, or they’re selling down for you. We need to first understand what is it that you need from marketing, and then we can layer whatever platform or strategy fits best, layer that on top of it. Now, the biggest reason everybody says you need to post content and you need to be on social is we need leads. And that’s the thing, right? I need leads. I need more. I need more visibility. So I’m going to get on. I’m going to post on social, right? And you and I talked about this. The last thing social media wants to give you is free reach. Now, every single platform, it’s a death march towards throttling your visibility and throttling your reach. It doesn’t matter what the platform is. All of them are moving that way. And anything you can do, somebody else can do better. I love that song. I tell people that you can’t compete on that because as service providers, we’re not in the business of multimedia. We’re not video photographer video and there are people who can do it really well it props to them but most of us are like you and I we don’t use social media in our personal life we don’t be for the life of us I cannot take a good picture of myself it’s just I have one photo that I use everywhere because by some miracle I look good in it I’m like yep that’s the one I look fine when I’m talking to people but I just look weird when I take photos of myself so just some of us aren’t like that and just we don’t prefer it so The thing that we need to understand is our goal is not content. Our goal is if we want leads, we need to understand what do I need to get more leads. And I tell people, you need to look at your marketing through the lens of traffic. How am I going to get in front of more people who want to buy my stuff? There is a fantastic book that Joanna Wiebe recommended called The Business of Expertise. When I read it, it blew my mind and it just completely flipped the script for me that the more you charge, The market, it now becomes the seller’s market because at the higher level, people need their problems solved a lot more than you need to make money. Now think about it, you are rewrapping, you’re writing somebody’s launch sequence, you’re writing somebody’s sales pitch. They need that sales pitch to be fantastic. And they need that sales pitch to convert like crazy a lot more than you need $5,000. You can make $5,000 doing anything, but their problem is extremely pressing.

So the better you are, the more people are going to want to give you more money. simply because your expertise is now in demand and more valuable. And the more you learn, the more you scale up, the power balance is going to shift more and more and more towards you. Now that’s something as copywriters is very difficult for us to walk. I know it was for me. Like when I started out, I was like happily taking on any clients, anybody who said yes to working with me, I was like, yes, I’ll take on as a client. even whether it’s a good fit, bad fit, I would try to work within them and if anything went wrong, I would take complete responsibility and say, yes, it was my fault, it didn’t work, whatever, and I’ll lower prices and do everything you taught me not to do. So I did that.

Once I started looking at it through the lens of, okay, what do I need? What is my service and what is the problem it’s solving? It then told me where I need to go, right? So the first thing is social media is not the solution to your traffic problem. As service providers, you need to look at where are people already going? to solve the problem that my service solves for them. And if you can be in that case, then you don’t need to be on social media. In 2021, I posted 40 times on LinkedIn. In 2023 I posted maybe 20 times. In 2024 I posted maybe twice or thrice. I didn’t need to because I was already in all of those places where people were recommending me. So you need to layer this strategy. Where is my traffic? Where am I going to get visibility to get in front of people who are already looking to hire? number one. And for us, it looks like either it’s masterminds, it’s maybe it’s strategic referral partners. That’s what I did. I had two or three referral partners that I kept in touch with, who sent me leads. Ry Schwartz recommended me after I went through his program to a few people. I worked with Brenna McGowan in Behind the Launch. So she recommended a few people to me.

Emily Reagan referred a few clients to me. And the second source, biggest source of clients for me are clients I’ve already worked with. They recommended more and more people to me, so I didn’t need to be on social. So this is the one thing, and I’m not saying don’t post on social. Social is important. We’re going to look at all of the pieces of the strategy, but I want everybody to fundamentally move away from thinking in terms of what do i need to do and then think about what is my strategy for getting clients and last time you and i talked rob my strategy was working with copywriters who will then connect me with other clients Then I refer me to clients and that’s how I will grow. That was my traffic. I had zero nurture and my conversion mechanism was a sales call. And now as I grow, I’m slowly moving away towards more organized systems, which is what I’m here to talk about today.

Rob Marsh: Awesome. So I just want to be crystal clear on this because it’s really easy for us to wrap our heads around content because that’s what we do. We’re really good at creating content. We’re really good at writing scripts. We’re really good at captions or stories or all of that stuff. And so that’s the frame that we have taken to social media. Every time we think, Oh, I need to be on social media. Okay, we’ll create content. And what you’re saying is, Yeah, content, but it’s not the purpose isn’t just to be posting content. It’s not to show off your expertise. It’s not to be out there saying stuff. It’s there for the sole purpose of creating a relationship with either a reader or a prospect or a customer or partner of some kind. And if you can do that with three pieces of content instead of 30, all the more power to you.

Esai Arasi: Yes. Write up and you can get away by doing this. Write up almost until you get $100,000 of income, whatever that looks like. When you’re starting out, that’s more than enough. A lot of people who have sent me clients, a lot of them have never actually seen my work. Emily Reagan said that. Her email just landed in my inbox today. She had sent an email saying, skills won’t get you high paying clients. And it’s true. They don’t hire you just for skills. There’s so many other things that you need to build. That’s what content is going to do for you. And we’re going to talk about that in a little bit. At first, you don’t need that. You just need to be strategically known in the right places. So you can be the person who gets clients.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, let’s jump into how we do that because again, it’s really easy to write, you know, the post, the article or whatever, but the place where I know so many copywriters struggle is how do we forge that relationship? How do we, you know, even start the conversation so that, you know, three or four chats later or a few months later or whatever, we are the trusted source. So obviously it starts with that one or two pieces of content or, you know, whatever the initial thing is, but how do we make that switch?

Esai Arasi: Oh, I’m so glad you asked. First of all, I have done a very, detailed training about this inside The Copywriter Underground. As Rob, you know, we broke down the six types of posts every copywriter needs to write. So you can, if you’re an underground member, you can go in there, you can find my older training and you can break that up. You can go through that for in detail, but to answer your question right now for everybody, If you want clients, the most important pieces of content, I tell people there are three types of content that you need to post. Number one, a piece of content that tells your, and I call it your origin story. Like how you became the person and it doesn’t, it’s not your origin story of where you were born and it’s not that like nobody cares about that. It’s an origin story. Like when we watch Superman’s movie, we don’t care about everything else. Like how he was put in. No, we care about how he became Superman. That’s the only story we care about. So clients need to see how did you become the person who can solve my problem. And that’s critically important because that tells me what kind of a problem solver you are right now. And the high-paying clients care about that very, very deeply, because they care not just in that fact that my problem is solved, but what that experience of having my problem solved is. Because I will be more than happy to pay more money for that experience to be better for me. Money is not a problem for me, the problem is. having working with a person was a great thing. That’s post number one.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. So, and just to make this absolutely clear for me, what I’m doing with that post isn’t stuff like, you know, I’ve been writing since the second grade. I went door to door selling my poems to the neighbors. Uh, and you know, I took all of the college courses or whatever. It’s not that it’s basically my personal story about how I, uh, you know, either solve that problem for the client or for myself. You know, I found myself in this problem, so I had to figure out how to, so let’s, let’s take, you know, this example we’re talking about. I needed clients And so I had to create a new lead magnet that was a little bit different from the typical PDF download. And because it was different, it stood out. I got some clients to show you how to solve that problem for yourself, right? That’s the kind of thing. Now, obviously, people listening are going to have a different a different problem that they’re going to solve for their customers or whoever. But it’s not about I’ve been writing for 30 years or whatever. And it’s all about the

Esai Arasi: Yes. And writing about 30 years, they’re only going to care about at the second level. First, they’re going to emotionally decide whether or not they want to work with you. And then they’re going to look for logical reasons of whether you’re good fit. That’s when they’ll need your background and your experience and expertise and all that. To give you an example, like you said, I could either tell my story as, hey, I’m somebody who’s been writing since I was eight. That’s the first time I remember putting pen to paper and writing a story. I’ve been writing since then. I’ve been writing and reading since then. That’s why I love it. And I have a background in marketing and psychology. I was a behavioral change trainer for twice. I can go into all of that, but nobody cares. Or I can tell my story about, hey, when I started a business, I had no connections in this industry and I didn’t know anybody over here. And I was an introvert who did not want to be on social. But unfortunately, social was literally the only way I could keep in touch with everybody who were living multiple thousands of miles away from where I was. So I had to find a way to make social work for me instead of doing what was popular advice. Now, that’s a story my audience deeply cares about because it resonates with them. It resonates with the story of their current struggles as well. So they feel like it’s exactly as you said. And for you, how you started and run The Copywriter Club for your audience in terms of from the perspective of right selling offers is that you want to talk about how in a time where there were already a lot of people teaching copywriting, but there were more direct response and SAS focused and all of it and you realize that like you, you wanted to learn from somebody who had a more relationship focused approach to copy, who spoke to a more nuanced version of copy rather than the brute force direct response version of it. And you wanted to teach systems. You realize that just knowing copy is not enough. A lot of copywriters, really good copywriters, were struggling like I was struggling for this. So then that’s where you started. you created these offers in The Copywriter Club. Again, it’s the most interesting part of your life for me because it relates to me.

Rob Marsh: Okay, good. So that’s the origin story.

Esai Arasi: That’s post number one. Post number two, and you can write multiple, multiple variations of this, it’s called, I call this, for example, content. Now this is where, and I tell people, the biggest mistake you can make as a copywriter is talking about copywriting. Clients don’t care about copywriting. If you go to my social, you would rarely see me talk. Very few hosts of mine will talk specifically about social. I talk about trust, I talk about relationships, I talk about working with clients, about all those things, but that’s the problem I’m solving for your clients. So the second post, it could either be, I call it, what’s your problem, or I call it, for example, content. So this is where you share your expertise, where you share the expertise in terms of specifically the problem your clients are facing. So instead of saying that, hey, a website copyright copy should be based on voice of customer, Nobody cares. Website copy, voice of customer, these are not words your clients are using in their everyday life. Rather, you want to talk about when a potential client lands on your website, when you send them a link or when somebody is referring them and sending them a link, you want them to read your website and feel like, yeah, this is the solution I’ve been looking for all my life. It’s like it’s custom made for me. They need to feel like you are the only person who understands them and their problems. And therefore, it doesn’t matter what you charge. You’re the only person I want to work with. That’s the difference between talking about copywriting with the same thing. I’m still talking about voice of customer, but I’m not talking about it from my perspective. I’m talking about it from client’s perspective. So I call this, for example, content, because you have to give an example that they understand.

Rob Marsh: So ironically, you’re talking about voice of customer using your actual voice of customer, which we’re pretty good at doing for our clients, but we’re really bad at doing for ourselves.

Esai Arasi: Oh my God.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. So yeah, I see this all the time. Copywriters want to talk about copywriting because we love it so much. And it’s great in a group of copywriters, but if your clients are not copywriters, it makes zero sense. And we’ve got to figure out how to talk about these things in the words that our customers use in order to break through.

Esai Arasi: Yes, exactly. And the third type of post, and I tell people these are three posts that should be pinned on your Instagram. These are three posts you should over and over cycle. There are more nuances to it that we go into, but you need to repeat. The third type of post, and again this is something most copywriters like I do it, and I’m sure you don’t do it in email, but you definitely do it on social as well. We don’t tell as the right way on social. Either we go over CLC, because we feel like, OK, fine, this is the promotional post. I have two spots open. Work with me here. Or we pull back and almost passive-aggressively, we just write a random post. But you know what? You can also work with me. Here it is. as like a throwaway right instead of intentionally selling and most of us shy away from selling because we feel like it’s an intrusion it’s a disservice and i and i’ll tell you it’s not you’re supposed to sell i tell people like it’s incredible because shopping is like it’s actually called therapy it’s actually retail therapy people like shopping because it makes them see a better version of who they could be. It helps them see potential solutions to their problems. It helps them see a better future for themselves. And that’s what your sales content should be.

So I call this like a dressing room. Clients should be able, like people love trying on whether or not they buy it, they love it. That’s why women love tying on wedding dresses. They love going shopping. They go with their friends and they all try on whether or not they’re going to buy it because people love it. That’s what your sales post should be. So your sales post shouldn’t just be like, hey, this is what my package is. Yes, you should have that so they can have that information. But it should feel more like they’re trying on your service. There are multiple variations of this. You should talk about, hey, when you hire me for writing your website copy, You are not just a website copy. Here’s what your life will look like. I’m going to take care of this project step by step, every single way, and keep you posted so you don’t have to worry about what’s happening. You’ll get consistent updates. This is a timeline. These are the updates you will get. I will work with your design. Also, this is the end product that I will give you, this wireframe, so you don’t have to fight 10 rounds with the designer. You don’t have to play free between us. I will directly communicate with the designer and I’ll give them a wireframe. that they can use and if you like I can get in touch with the designer ahead of time so I can make sure that what we’re creating is going to come out beautifully and then I work with them and communicate with them directly so it’s all off your plate and it is done while you’re continuously in the loop. Now when you present it like that, now that’s not you selling but that’s showing me what my future, a potential future for me and now that future is irresistible because as somebody who’s currently struggling to write her own website Even as I’m saying it, I’ll be like, oh, I love it. I want that for me. That’s your third.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. So, I mean, that is basically, you know, another copywriting technique. It’s feature pasting, but we’re actually showing the customer what the new version of whatever the thing is, is going to look like. And so we’re painting that future. We’re making it easy for them, helping them see the actual result or the transformation, as opposed to saying, you get a website or you get website copy, or, you know, I’ll, I’ll write your blog post.

Esai Arasi: Exactly. And here’s the thing, Rob. Most people think if I post all of this, I should automatically get clients. But the mistake is that is not going to happen. Social media, at best, is either your nurture or your conversion platform. Social media is not your traffic platform. Social media is not going to take your post and show it to a bunch of ideal clients who are looking to hire. That is not what they want. They would rather people keep posting saying I’m looking for somebody. They’d rather people stay on the platform and keep posting like that because it’s not Upwork. It’s not a marketplace. It’s just a social platform where they want to keep people on. You need to figure out what your underlying strategy is and figure out that where you’re going to get leads, how you’re going to convert them and on what platform. And that’s why I think social is fantastic, even if you don’t post a lot, because social gives you public credibility. If the thing I’m telling you privately in an email matches with the thing that I’m saying publicly on my social, I gain a lot of credibility as a person saying that, yeah, this is what she’s been saying. Like whenever I pitch an SEO project, I link back to a post I made in 2020 about what SEO is. That tells them, even though it’s a very old post, it doesn’t have, it has like maybe 20 likes, it still tells them that she’s been talking about this since 2020. That’s how you create the longevity for your posts as well.

Rob Marsh: Okay, so those are the three, the three kinds of content that we should be posting. How often? I mean, I know you said last year, you only posted a few times on your social media, but you also have, you know, some relationships, you know, a lot of copywriters would be saying, okay, well, I don’t have those relationships that can send me leads, or I don’t have the system already built. So if I’m just starting out with this, or if I’m coming to this and thinking, this is a great idea, maybe I should do a little bit more of this or just what I’ve been doing in the past. How often should I be posting in order to get the momentum going?

Esai Arasi: So if you’re just starting out, I would say, again, social is not where you’re going to get leads. Social is where you need to build credibility because you might not have a portfolio. You might not have results that you can speak to. Like you say, you don’t have people who can vouch for you. Like I didn’t post because I had people pulling for me. I had built enough relationships and credibility. People invited set me messages in my DMs asking me to come speak because they’d heard me speak on The Copywriter Club and a bunch of other places and I didn’t need to, but then I spent three years building that. So if you’re new, I would still say once a week on Instagram or LinkedIn is plenty. Where you need to spend most of your time is, like I said, by building relationships. And if you don’t have any, here’s how you can get started. Number one, and we did an in-depth training about this very recently in the underground as well, the four types of people who can get you clients. Again, if you’re in the underground, go back and watch that training. pull back the curtain and share everything that I’m doing for me and my clients. So that’s working.

And I also shared an actionable guide, which is there for the underground waiting for you. If you’re a member, go check it out. But to those of you, to give you a little bit of a teaser, number one, you start by creating the three types of posts that I said. These are called bottom of the funnel, like bottom of the funnel content. And you speak to people who are directly ready to buy and already looking to solve that problem. You’re not speaking to somebody who doesn’t know what conversion copywriting is. they are not somebody who’s willing to pay $2,000 to write a welcome sequence. You want to speak to somebody who already knows the worth of conversion copywriting, somebody who’s already willing to hire, but then if they’re willing to hire, why haven’t they? Because they haven’t found somebody who matches their values, who matches exactly what is it that they are looking for. Somebody who either understands their industry, understands their need, is a good fit for them, whatever that looks like. So one, you create content like that the three types of post cycle between them. Post once a week, that’s plenty. Post more if you can, definitely. But do that, number one. Number two, you want to look at, find these marketplaces. The person who’s trying to solve this problem, where are they going? The easiest way to find it is, again, where they’re already congregating in big numbers, masterminds, other courses where these people go to learn from their mentors. Those are great places to find them.

But if that’s not the way you can find them, the second place is, who else is solving a similar problem, but not the same problem as you, a similar problem. Again, we go into more detail in this technique in the underground. And a good example is, let’s say you have, one of my clients is a psychiatrist who teaches mothers with postpartum depression and anxiety. So if she wants to reach those mothers, we thought, okay, so how do we reach them? She has a brand new Instagram and it’s not gonna grow on its own. Okay, so if mothers, they have postpartum depression, what are they already doing? Before they go to a psychiatrist, who are they going to go to? Easy answer, they’re going to go to therapists. Now therapists are business owners. They are posting content. They are going to in-person networking events. They have business profiles online in directories and everywhere. Proactively build relationships with them. Therapists who are actively also supporting mothers with postpartum depression or mothers with postpartum or also new moms. So they probably have a lot of new mom stuff. So they are probably consuming new mom content. So there are influencers who post a lot of new mom content. That’s another place where you can post, support those people, build relationships. You don’t have to go after the big creators. Find somebody who has 10,000 followers or 5,000 followers, build them, reply to the emails. You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to build relationships because most people don’t do it. just by the simple fact of posting comments, replying to emails, and being a genuine person, you’ll be surprised at how many relationships you can build.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, there’s like a couple of interesting ways to do this too. You’re talking about, you know, groups where people are congregating and that’s a little bit like fishing with a net, right? Because there’s so many people there and you just kind of scoop out. But there’s also an approach, and maybe there’s a way to do this with social media, where we’re going directly to the businesses. And there are so many businesses out there that are not online in the ways that or that we think about, you know, when we’re talking about, oh, working with coaches or working with SaaS companies, whatever. And I’m talking about the businesses, at least for me, they’re always out by the airport. You know, it’s the small business that makes awnings for people’s backyards. And you don’t see that showing up anywhere. Or it’s, you know, somebody who’s maybe, you know, they’re some kind of industrial something or construction companies or, you know, like there’s all of these companies out there that actually need help doing the stuff that you’re even talking about, right? And so, but those guys, we’re probably not going to find them in a Facebook group or, you know, in a LinkedIn group, right? So some of those, we’re basically fishing with a hook and line, right? We’ve got to go to them directly and approach them and say, Hey, look, here’s the problem that I solved. Now you’re still doing the same approach. You’re still, you know, build it and you can still refer them to your, you know, three posts on Instagram or LinkedIn or wherever that you’re putting this stuff. But Obviously, your approach here is going to depend on the niche that you want to work with. And so you’ve got to be really cognizant of where your customers are, what is it that they’re looking for, and how can you reach out to them.

Esai Arasi: Exactly. And there are lots of people who are not online, even within your industry. Even if your industry is online, sometimes your potential clients are not online.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, your best clients need help doing that stuff, right?

Esai Arasi: Exactly. Like one of my clients, he is a fractional growth executive and he works with VCs and CEOs. who are not online because they are very busy running their own business. But the thing is, instead of trying to brute force into finding these people on social media, an easy way to do it is to build relationships with people around them. So instead of VCs, we started going after people within the VC organization. There are people who are online. who do go to in-person events. The middle management people who go to in-person events, they post on LinkedIn, they comment on each other’s stuff. So we built relationships with them. So while the VC is not on LinkedIn, but when the VC, so the VC is not going to go headhunting. They’re not going to see a LinkedIn post and say, I want to work with you. They’re going to turn to the people they trust and say, okay, who do you know? Right.

Rob Marsh: They’re going to ask their peers and they’re going to ask the team. Yeah, they’re depending on their team to do a lot of that work.

Esai Arasi: Exactly. The CEO is going to turn to the manager, HR, and marketing manager and say, OK, who do you know who does this? Who would be a good fit for us? The key being, who would be a good fit for us? And you need to show up as the person who is a good fit for us. And it’s a fantastic point you brought up. So that is what the traffic portion of this is. You need to find the right traffic source for you. Sometimes, like you said, it’s fishing with the net. You find a good You find a good pool and you sort of throw in a net and reel it. Sometimes it’s about throwing in a fishing rod and just waiting patiently and hook it if you’re looking for the big fish. Sometimes it is going after specific people. It is like driving door to door. You send out cold email, whatever that looks like. So the traffic can be whatever. But the thing is, if you don’t do the nurture pieces, if you don’t have a strong social media and i tell people strong social even more than strong website because you know that i still don’t have a website i built a multiple six figure business and i’ve grown an agency and i worked with some of the best some of the biggest names in the industry despite not having a website, because clients don’t care about that. A website is credibility and trust. And I had another way of earning that, so I didn’t focus on the website. So we need to be clear on these three pieces. Always ask yourself, what am I trying to achieve by building that? And if that is going to serve any of these three pieces. Anything that doesn’t serve to build your traffic, get, nurture your traffic and convert them into clients. We’re going to talk about the conversion piece in a little bit. If it doesn’t fit into these three, it’s not a thing that you need to be doing. And then you also need to look at, is this the best way to get traffic? Is Instagram the best way for me to get traffic? If you said, if the person I’m trying to reach runs a garage door company.

Rob Marsh: So you need a home base where they can double check. They can see that you’ve got the authority, the expertise, but that’s not where you’re going to be building that relationship.

Esai Arasi: No, it’s not. And social, again, one aspect of social is content. Another aspect is relationship. And again, we go into this in detail, but you need to build both professional and personal relationships. And I don’t mean personal as an intimate, but I mean personal as a friendly relationship with your clients as well. So when the professional relationship ends, you can still keep the personal going until they become ready to become a client. Again, so you can pitch to them next because you have a line of communication open.

Rob Marsh: OK, so we’ve been going really deep on traffic. We’ve kind of touched on nurture. Is there some other stuff we should be doing with nurture before we get to the last part of the framework?

Esai Arasi: So for Nurture, it’s about continuously showing like, that’s what I said, that’s where the social piece comes in. Like for Nurture, in the early stages, you just need to show up, people need to know who you are and what you do, and that’ll be enough to get you those data clients. But when you start going after those big clients, Nurture becomes a lot more crucial for you now, because now you need to have those bigger pieces that not only tells clients who you are, but also builds your credibility. That’s when you need to start building case studies. That’s when you need, I’m writing my website now because now I am starting to go after the bigger names in the industry by my own strength. So I need, I’m writing case studies, I’m building websites. So nurture becomes more important. But again, you need to look at what is my strength. You don’t need to do reels. I did one reel, I hated it, and I never did another one again.

Rob Marsh: Reels kill me.

Esai Arasi: Yeah.Talking head reels, sharing clips of things, sure. But dancing. Add mad libs, no, not my thing. I don’t want to do it, not because it doesn’t work, it works, not for me. So you need to be clear on what is it that fits you well, and that’s sustainable, and you need to do that. But the most important thing is find a way that’s sustainable for you, or you will burn out, you will stop, and you won’t do it again, and then it will constantly feel like you’re starting from zero every single time because you haven’t built a sustainable practice field.

Rob Marsh: Okay, so then the last step really is how do we convert these people, you know, relationships into customers?

Esai Arasi: A lot of this, Rob, and I have to give this to you, a lot of this is stuff that I learned from you as we worked together, because until then, I hadn’t really understood what systems and processes inside a business could look like. And I didn’t realize why they were that important either, because the way that I was doing it was whatever it was working. Because again, at that point, I was working with two clients, and that was it. As soon as I started growing, I realized how critical those pieces were. And a lot of this is stuff that I learned inside The Copywriter Club.

The communication systems that we need to build, the proposal and the follow-up sequence and all of those things that we want to build. Those are those become more and more crucial as you as you look to grow and as you especially as you look to work with better and better clients your conversion mechanism. It has to match. what it feels like for the clients to work with you. Your conversion mechanism, the higher you, the higher and the more you charge, your conversion mechanism has to be more reliant on your skills, your credibility and your past results. For me, for, and for a large, large part of, for a lot of the copywriters, our conversion mechanisms are sales calls. And we think, yes, DM me, get on a sales call with me, and we leave it at that.

But which is fine when we’re getting started because the clients we’re working with are smaller level clients as well. So they were happy to get on a call because they wanted to negotiate, write the price down, and they were happy to spend 40 minutes talking to you if it means they could get like a $200 discount on the service that they want to pay for. But the higher clients that you want to work with, that’s not going to cut it any. Then you need, you need, the one resource that I really love is that business in a box, which has all of the pieces that you could implement, like your proposals, your email sequences, your onboarding forms, your offboarding, all of it. These pieces become extremely critical. I’ve had clients tell me that multiple times that your onboarding is like chef’s kiss. Like multiple times I hear that from my clients and I always think back to my time at The Copywriters Club when I was, when you were mentoring me that that’s like four years, five years later, it is still having a huge impact in the way that clients work with me.

So your conversion mechanism, you need to say, even if it is a sales call, you need to understand that not everybody will want to jump on a 40 minute sales call with you. So you need to have those pieces built. We talked about case studies as a nurture mechanism a little bit as well. But now you need to intentionally think about what your bottom of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, funnel conversion content looks like. You don’t need to write a weekly blog post, but you do need to write content that tells your best that speaks. It’s like a dog whistle to your ideal client that this is this person gets my problem and this is their way of solving the problem is perfect fit for me. That’s extremely crucial. Now, that’s another thing you recently talked about that as well. The USB unique selling point is no longer enough to have, it’s no longer enough to have your framework, you need to have this, you need to have your way, your point of view, your of looking at a problem and your point of view of why it’s a problem and your point of view of how you solve it, that’s critical as well. So the more money you want to charge, the more you want to look at those, you want to build, invest in and build those pieces.

So you’re starting to convert more clients. And the worst thing in all of this is Rob, as I see my clients and I talk to people and sometimes I like a lot of times I do it as well, is that when we don’t intentionally build these pieces, we feel like we’re not getting leads. But often in so many rooms, especially if you’ve been a part of any of the accelerator programs, I know Rob you’re so intentional about building a community and making sure people have a solid relationship within people as well. I know that people have come to me and said, so and so said so many amazing things about you. And I wasn’t even in the room. But that person said that because how intentionally you make sure, whether it’s the accelerator or the think tank, how intentionally you made sure we all knew each other, knew how to support each other, knew what we did, and you built a referral network for us without even really meaning to do that. So there are so many times we have leads, there are people talking about what we do and how we solve a problem in the rooms, but because we don’t have these pieces in place, often leads drop off and we feel like We feel like we’re burning out because we’re doing the wrong things instead of doing the easy things to get clients.

Rob Marsh: So these conversion pieces don’t live on social media. They’re either in your funnel or on your website or part of your onboarding process or your vetting slash discovery call process, however that’s structured. This stuff lives outside of it. the relationships that we built on social media or in the DMs or wherever that starts to happen, because people find the one or two pieces of content that we’ve posted, that leads to these areas where we can now get them into, some people would call them like indoctrination sequences. Really, it’s just a way for people to get to know you better and how you solve the exact problem that they have. That’s happening, not on Facebook, not on social media. somewhere else.

Esai Arasi: Exactly. And we touched on this a little bit, Rob, like right now we’re in the third phase of social media. We talked about social 1.0 was when social media needed more users. So it asked everybody to sign up and refer your friends and import your contacts.

Rob Marsh: And it showed everything that your friends were posting, right? Like, yeah, it was amazing because you could actually see what everybody was up to.

Esai Arasi: felt like you were in touch like it felt it was it was like a cat being in camp and was so amazing and then came social 2.0 where now the platforms needed more content to keep all of the users happy and satisfied and keep using the app so anybody who created content there’s so many users you would have seen that they grew so quickly and now they’ve completely stalled out because they were riding the algorithm wave where it gave them a lot of free content.

Rob Marsh: We saw that with The Copywriter Club groups, which were immensely popular because there was content going in there. Obviously, Facebook has changed the algorithm. If I post something in a group of thousands of people, only a couple hundred people will see it now. It wasn’t that way four or five years ago.

Esai Arasi: No, it was not. And now Facebook recently announced that Facebook lives will be deleted after 30 days. And you’ll have up to 90 days to download the video. Because they don’t want to store the video. They have tons of content now. They don’t want to keep your content. Now these lives, your Facebook groups were a way for you to save all of this valuable training that people can visit and revisit and learn from you. Now it’s no longer an option. So platforms no longer care about you. That being said, another interesting way that people are now, like I said, this is social 3.0 where people social, they don’t care about users. They don’t even show you in your Facebook feed, 90% of the content feed is either ads or from random accounts that you don’t even follow, which they think you would like. And they keep showing it in your, in your feed. That’s going to starting to happen more and more, but. how users are now behaving more and more.

And not a lot of people are doing it. Very few people are doing it right now. And you can be ahead of the curve by implementing it right away. A lot of content now needs to be native first. I used to say that, yes, case studies should live off of social. You should get people to download your case study, download the PDF, and forward the PDF to each other and all of that. Now, the last case study project that we did, we also converted that into a case study carousel that can live on their social. Because now people don’t want to click and go to a page and download it. They don’t want to do that because most people now use the internet on their phones. So they would prefer to have the content natively in the app so I can click it, I can tag somebody that I know, I can quickly share it with them. Because again, platforms have made it super easy to do all of those things. So it’s much easier for me to do it that way than for me to enter my name and email and all of that stuff. That was why the quiz that I told you, now my quiz that I’ve built, I’ve built it inside Instagram. It doesn’t even have a webpage. at all. It only lives inside Instagram natively because one, it’s super easy for me to collect name and email and do the whole quiz in there. It’s also very, very easy for the users from somebody coming to my profile to take that natively because sending DMs on Instagram is easy, whereas clicking it, opening it, scrolling and typing, that’s a little bit harder.

So we need to be more savvy in the way that we leverage these platforms. So we don’t become slaves to them, but we understand what’s working and what’s not. And we use the best parts of social and the best part of all of these platforms and make it work for us. and fit our lifestyle and our requirement and then make that a more sustainable practice than try to put everything. So for new copywriters, that is good news for you. You don’t need to create like, and I am a perfect example, you don’t need to create even, you don’t even probably need a website right at the start. If you can build those intentional relationship, a website is good. I might be the exception. I don’t tell people that website brings a lot of credibility to how that you should have it. But again, Don’t let that stop you. Put everything on your social and start with what you have because the key thing here is to build relationships and build that trust. That is the asset and I tell people like funnels decay, social media posts lose their visibility and reach, even SEO blog posts, Pinterest pins, they lose traffic over time. The one thing that doesn’t ever lose its potency and continues to grow and grow over time is relationships.

Rob Marsh: As long as you’re contributing to it or interacting, keeping them up. I don’t want to minimize this at all because there’s definitely work involved in maintaining a relationship. Obviously, relationships come and go and sometimes you go through a period where you may not talk to or share anything with somebody for a few months. things right back up. But if you are looking at relationships to develop work for your business, you do need to put some work into nurturing those. And that’s not, you know, by posting content. It’s not even, you know, the stuff that we’ve talked about through this framework. It’s not about the traffic nurture conversion. It’s really just about, like, how do I keep showing up as the friend, as this trusted resource? When I see something that’s helpful, do I keep sharing, you know, and doing that over and over, and that’s what produces results.

Esai Arasi: Exactly. And if you post the right type of content, you can continue to be friendly and be like a human being in the DMs, while your content will tell them, hey, this is what I do, here’s how you can refer me, here’s how you can work with me, here are my best fit clients, and you can keep educating your referral partners. A lot of us get bad reference from the people we like, and we can’t say no because it was sent to us by somebody we really like and respect. So we work with bad fit clients for keynotes. I’ve done that. Every copywriter has done that. But the way to circumvent that, like you said, Rob, is to keep the relationship alive and to educate your partners. And again, an easier way to do that, these relationships at scale, is again, creating more content. but nurture resonant content, rather than going for reach. Make sure your pieces of content are built for the right people, for the right reasons, rather than for the algorithm, and keep the relationships alive. Keep lines of communication open, and the content will do its magic of nurture and conversion, and tell people, hey, this is what she writes about, and here’s our best fit client, and as soon as I submit it, Somebody asked me for a client I know who to refer to because his content has been educating me all this while. Well, you’ve been keeping in touch with me maybe once a week or once a month.

Rob Marsh: Okay, so this is all really helpful. So as we were talking, you mentioned a few mentors that you’ve had over time, you know, by name, people that you’ve worked with and created relationships with. And I also know that you’ve invested a lot in, you know, courses and improving your skill set and even for your team, the people that are working with you to make sure that they’re up to date in the skills. Will you just share your thoughts about courses and mentors and where the value has been for you in your business?

Esai Arasi: Thank you for asking this, Rob, because I think this investment has been the single biggest needle mover in my business that has made the biggest difference. And I’ll tell you, your different seasons in life, you have different needs. When I was absolutely starting out, what I needed was courses. The very first course that I remember investing in was a YouTube for Bosses by Sunny Lenarduzzi. She was fantastic. I mean, I was watching YouTube videos by a bunch of other people. Again, it goes to resonance, I was also watching a bunch of men, Sean Cannell and a lot of other people, but I never felt the pull to buy any of their courses, even though they’re selling heavily. But as soon as I saw Sunny Lenarduzzi’s courses, she really spoke to me, the way she approached it.

Rob Marsh: Sunny’s really approachable. She’s a great personality.

Esai Arasi: She’s fantastic. And I loved her approach. I loved her reasons for why she’s the same thing as me. She didn’t want to burn out and that’s how she built her YouTube as a sales engine. So it was easy for me to invest in her stuff. And I have been very lucky in the mentors and people that I’ve invested my money in because Sunny has literally sent her a DM and she’s asking about a course that she was an affiliate for and she’s literally told me, no, that’s not the right fit for your own life. I’ve been very lucky in mentors like that. So that was the first one. So when you are absolutely starting out, invest in courses that build your skill. You need to be first good at what you are doing. That’s absolutely fundamental. And I tell service providers this all the time. The easiest way to build your business and just get more clients is to be ridiculously good at what you do. That’s the first thing I invested in. Be so good that people can’t help but talk about you wherever you are. And you know, we’ve done that as well. Good movies, good books, good people that we have, good doctors. We go out of our way to tell people about them, good hairdressers. People go out of the way to recommend them because it gives them social currency. So be ridiculously good and invest in courses and skills that do that.

Again, more importantly, the courses that you do invest in, implement. show up for calls, show up for courses. A lot of my needs early came through by me showing up and like implementing. And I couldn’t tell you like I was in a, there are so many times I’ve had one on one coaching from Rye Schwartz and Phil Povis for like every week for like an hour because nobody would show up for that call. And i was like i can’t believe i’m getting this is like such a steal but because i was showing up week after week and i was doing the work of demonstrating my skill i got a lot of leads from right. Because he’s he saw that i understood what he was teaching i was implementing that so when anybody said can somebody do this for me i was a no brainer answer because i learned from him. But once you have done that, the second place I highly recommend investing in mentors. I invested, as you know, Rob, like I invested in the think tank.

One call with you was an easy yes. for me, even though at that time, and I’ve told you this before, like at that time, I didn’t have the money for this. I had just taken a huge hit in the business and I had just hired two people, but I intentionally made the decision to join the think tank and continue to say no to bad fit clients because I believed in the first call where I got on a call with you. I still believe this conversation because you listened to everything that I had to say. And you said that you could easily see me ask me what my goal was. I was very hesitant here. I said $100,000. You could say, you said that I was lowballing it and you could easily see me getting $200,000 to $50,000 easily just based on everything that I had shared. To me, that was like mind boggling. $100,000 at that time was like my, oh my God, I can’t believe I’m earning this much kind of money. You’ve made me believe in bigger things. A lot of times when you’re trying to grow, yes, you need systems. And I tell people this also.

In the masterminds, no matter what level you’re implementing, the conversations are all the same. How do I get more traffic? How do I nurture this traffic? How do I get my offers to convert? How do I get more people to buy? How do I get this client to sign this proposal? They have ghosted me. The conversations are all the same. It’s just the scale at which they happen are different. And I tell them that courses can give you a framework thing, do this, which are great for learning skill. But when you want to learn business, you don’t want a course saying, do this. You want a mentor who can listen to you and say, okay, here, okay, this is who you are. So for you, I would personally recommend this, which is why I love the fact that every year, every time you launch, you run the accelerator as a live call program. Even though the content is more or less the same, you could easily just sell it as prepackaged lessons. I love that you run it as like courses because every time you customize it for each person and you make sure that every single person gets that individual attention to them and their business and you do it so so well, so efficiently, it like boggles my mind every time I hear that. So I would recommend working with mentors at that point. For me, that has been huge because there’s no way I could have learned from courses what I learned from the individual attention that I got.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I mean, thanks for sharing that. I found something very similar, you know, as I’ve worked with the various mentors who I still refer to and think of as mentors and can reach out to for help. There’s so many generous people in the marketing world and the copywriting world who are willing to help. Uh, the best way to get in front of them, of course, is to, you know, join the program or, you know, buy a course, but those are relationships also worth, you know, uh, nurturing and building and maintaining for all of the reasons you just said. So, so thanks for that. Okay. Uh, sorry, we’re out of time, but, um, share one more time where we can find the quiz in order to go through and figure out, you know, what is the stage that we’re at, what we should be looking at, uh, and how we get in touch with you.

Esai Arasi: Absolutely. So my most favorite place to hang out is LinkedIn. You’ll find the link, I’ll give you the link, that’ll be at the show notes. But to take my quiz, find me on Instagram at socialcatalyst, that’s catalyst with a K, and DM me, for the audit. It’ll be there in my profile as well. It’ll be easy to find. I only have one picture that I use across all social, so you’ll be able to find me easily. And again, my name is not that common. So either search for SI or search for socialcatalyst. That’s where you’ll find me and send me a DM. So you can take the quiz right at the DMs.

Rob Marsh: And we’ll link to it in the show notes just in case somebody doesn’t know how to spell your name or can’t find you on that initial search so the people will know exactly where to go. Thanks, Esai, for everything that you’ve shared and reframing for me how I think about social media and what it’s for and how often I have to do it. And yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing how this all builds business for myself and for those who are listening. So thanks again.

Esai Arasi: Thank you for having me, Rob.

Rob Marsh: Thanks to Esai for the update on what’s working on social media and how we can be more effective in using this tool to connect with our audience.

Esai mentioned a couple of workshops in The Copywriter Underground about the six types of content you should post on social media when you’re ready to post and the kinds of clients you should be writing for. To get those workshops and everything else The Underground includes, visit thecopywriterclub.com/tcu

I want to go back to something we were talking about early on in this episode and that’s your origin story. We were talking about this in the context of your social media. But it’s often the thing you include on your About Page. There is a popular idea out there that your About Page isn’t about you, but it’s really about your client. Of course, that’s true… mostly. Yes, the content on your About Page needs to resonate with your prospects. They need to see themselves in your story there. But that doesn’t mean it’s not also about you. You do need to tell your story there because people want to work with the people they like and know. So yes, write that story about them, but also include enough about you so they can get to know and like you.

What Esai shared about selling—this is one of the kinds of social posts you should be sharing—the approach where you are solving a problem for a client and taking that concern off their plate and showing them what their future looks like is worth repeating. I’ve said this dozens of times on this podcast, but your #1 role as a copywriter or content writer isn’t writing. It’s problem solving. Often that problem requires copy or content, but not always. And a professional looks for the big problems to solve, not just for a copy assignment. This is a big part of how copywriters need to be selling themselves in the future. A.I. can write content. But it doesn’t always have the context to solve a problem like you do.

Hopefully you found what Esai shared valuable and helpful as you look for a better way to engage prospects and clients on social media.