TCC Podcast #159: 4 Ways to Work as a Copywriter with Matt Hall

Copywriter Matt Hall joins us in the studio for the 159th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Matt is a member of The Copywriter Think Tank and has a ton of experience as a copywriter and agency owner. He's worked in-house, as an agency employee, and has started his own agency—twice. Here's what we talked about: •  the high school experience that made him want to know everything •  how he decides what he needs to learn next—without the stress of keeping up •  getting permission to be different and not live up to other’s expectations •  the system he uses to stay up-to-date on his favorite topics •  why he made the shift from eternal student to content writer and strategist •  working with a variety of clients •  why he likes to do a lot of different kinds of work •  the different roles a copywriter can choose (and why to do each one) •  his biggest struggle as a business owner •  his $30K month and the work he had to deliver •  the challenge and benefit of working with a spouse •  his system for managing all the house-hold stuff so work gets done •  the practice that keeps him from having a scarcity mindset •  how he attracts clients to his freelance business •  his thoughts about the trends in conversion copy and design This is a good discussion you definitely don't want to miss. To hear it, click the play button below or subscribe with your favorite podcast app. You'll find a full transcript below.   The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Kajabi Rob Braddock The Dunning Krueger Effect Prerna Malik Linda Perry Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground   Full Transcript:   Rob:   What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes, and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That's what Kira and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Kira:   You're invited to join the club for Episode 159 as we chat with copywriter and all-around renaissance man, Matt Hall, about how he became a copywriter, different roles copywriters can take on and how they all compare, conversion design, what it is and how copywriters should think about conversion, and what Matt has done to bring business in the door for his agency. Welcome, Matt. Matt:   Hi. Really happy to be here. Kira:   Yeah. Great to have you. I have this huge smile on my face and I don't know if it's the cold Chinese food I'm eating or if it's just ... I'm so excited to hang out with you. So let's kick this off with your story. How did you end up as a renaissance man/conversion, optimization socialist/copywriter/many other things? Matt:   All of the things. I'm hoping more of a jack of all trades rather than a master of none. But it started back in high school and I overheard a conversation when I was like, 14. And some of my classmates were talking about one of our friends saying, ‘She is so interesting. She can talk about literally anything, like your car's dashboard and she knows about it.’ And something about the idea of being able to engage with somebody over literally any topic at any given time and actually know what you're talking about really connected with me. And that stuck with me, even when I was an undergrad, I did a master's in English with the focus on professional writing, but I got ... I built my own minor. It was a combination of graph design and PR and building documents with tech and just combining a whole bunch of things. I ended up having something like 200 credits when they finally kicked me out school and said, ‘You got to graduate, dude. It's time to go.’ And then I went and got a Master's in American studies which is another field that's like combining a few different fields. American studies lives on the edge of English but also history and a little bit of psychology or whatever you want to do. So I've always been really interested and gravitated towards the kind of work where you can apply knowledge and experience from a lot of different areas and put it together towards making a project even more successful than it could have been maybe if you had one singular focus. So now that I'm doing copywriting/web development/CRO/UX, all the stuff put together, it turned out to be a really ... a great way for me to bring my passions to life, keep my work interesting. And also, I think bring a better experience to my clients and the people I work with. Rob:   So before we jump into how you made the switch to copywriter from student, can you talk just a little bit about, you have a framework for learning. How do you decide what you want to learn next or how you take what you're learning and you apply it to become the renaissance person and jack of all trades so that that information becomes useful and whatever it is that you're doing for clients or for business building, whatever the thing is? Matt:   I'm naturally a really neurotic person. And the idea of FOMO, of academic FOMO drives me crazy. So if there's something that I don't know, like if somebody is using a framework that I'm not familiar with, or somebody references a book. Just yesterday, I came across an acronym I had never heard of. And I go into not quite panic mode, but like, ‘Hey, what is this? What does this mean? Am I missing something? Are people going to talk about something that I need to know?’ I’ve been kind of channeling that anxiety into something productive by constantly diving in and just learning something new. I think we live in this incredible period in human history where you're like one Google search away from learning literally anything you need to. So the only thing holding…if anybody is listening to this podcast, the only thing holding them back is just a little bit of effort on their part. There's no information that we don't have access to, usually for free, that we can just find a little bit of work and something about that inspires me. I think that there's ... A big part of my identity is the idea that we should be continuously learning and growing and improving throughout life. Money comes and goes but the things you learn, even in the book you got for a dollar can stick with you your entire life. So I've always seen it as just an investment in my ability to do more, to be more effective at serving other people because I can connect with them in different ways. And I think that just drives my interest in trying to learn something new. And of course, there's courses, there's YouTube videos, there's so many different ways we can learn things nowadays. I think you just have to know yourself and know how you learn best and then run with that. Kira:   Yeah. The idea of being a renaissance man or woman has always been attractive to me and I wanted to be that person, but I also feel like the idea that really stresses me out, because even as you're talking through this, I feel stressed because it's so hard to keep up with everything today. So what advice would you give to us if we want to be that person that knows everything? And we are curious, how to do it in a way that doesn't exhaust ourselves and is sustainable because I feel like when I'm on that track and I'm in renaissance mode, I end up burning out and then I just have to go a week ... multiple weeks where I just don't do anything or think about anything because I'm so burned out from overlearning. Clearly, I'm not doing this right. So how do you do it in a way that's healthy? You alluded to the fact that it's ... there's a dark side to it too. So more of us can do it in a way that is effective and yet, we don't burn out. Matt:   Yeah. That's a great question. And I think the first thing I'd want to say is this isn't for everybody. There are people out there ... There's Joanna Wiebe who's known for being an excellent conversion copywriter. She invented the field. A classic example, I will never be Joanna Wiebe because there's not one thing that I'm leaning into so hard and so far that my entire identity is going to be based around that. And that works for her. I think what you have to do is figure out what kind of person you are. And Kira, this might not work for you, right? And that's okay. I think that we don't always have to be ... We don't have to live up to other people's terms or identities, which I think is one of the wonderful things about the gigantic community we can be a part of. There's room for everybody. There's room for everybody to be themselves and be a little bit different. So let's start with that. Number two, my ... A lot of the things that I do, I have developed systems, RSS readers, Feedly for example. I use Feedly like crazy. I just have all my websites dumped in there and then I'll just look through all these different feeds. So what I do is instead of looking at just entertainment or just Reddit or whatever, I'll have a lot of preselected topics that I'm interested in that I can then keep on top of. So it's probably not the healthiest thing because it's like that typical social media distraction. I'm just creating custom social media feeds, little custom echo chambers that I've ... where I've chosen what the content is going to be. Put those all together so that when I'm bored, I'm scrolling through something that's productive rather than just dumb news. I actually don't really watch the news. I 100% don't watch the news on TV, CNN or Fox or any of those channels. I stay away from that because that's just like brain-numbing. It's just meant to get you angry and outraged and whatever. I can't even watch John Oliver clips anymore because it just ... I know what it's doing. I know it's meant to just to get me angry but it's not really meant to get me to think. So instead, I choose what media I consume through these feeds and then probably spend ... too much time-consuming at all.