The Copywriter Club Podcast

When it comes to getting customers to buy more, it helps to have psychology working for you. So I invited buyer psychologist, Katelyn Bourgoin, to chat with me about the marketing tactics that truly make a difference when it comes to getting customer to open their wallets. This is a great discussion that covers insights like Jobs to Be Done, Trigger Events, and the deep psychology that engages customers and keeps them coming back for more. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: Katelyn’s Newsletter Wallet Opening Words <— Get this! The Milkshake Video Clayton Christensen’s How Will You Measure Your Life? The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground   Transcript: Rob Marsh: Why do people buy the products and services we write about? If you don’t know the answer to that question, you need this episode. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast. Before you can sell the products and services you write about, you need to understand why your customers buy in the first place. This includes marketing concepts like market/message match, jobs to be done, market sophistication, clarifying an offer, finding pain points, and finding under-served markets.  My guest today is buyer psychologist Katelyn Bourgoin. She writes the Why People Buy newsletter and focuses on using science and psychology to sell more of whatever it is that you are writing about. Personally, these are the topics I could talk about for hours. If you want to sell more of the products and services you write about, you’ll definitely want to listen to this entire episode. What Katelyn shares about “trigger moments” is in my opinion one of the most important concepts in marketing that doesn’t get the attention it deserves.  Katelyn and I also talked about making difficult decisions like shutting down a business that isn’t working, or choosing between taking a real job and doing something on your own, and the mindset shifts required to make these decisions. And I grilled Katelyn on the methods she used to grow her newsletter. If you write a newsletter (or want to write a newsletter), her ideas will help you attract new readers faster. Before we get to my interview with Katelyn, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. If you haven’t jumped in to see what the Underground includes, now is the time. It’s guaranteed, which means you can join and if you don’t find the resources you need to grow your business, just let us know and we’ll refund your money. The Underground includes more than 70 different workshops—and accompanying playbooks to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. This week we’re adding another expert workshop all about how to create the perfect for you copywriter website. If your website doesn’t stand out or doesn’t help you land clients, you’ll definitely want to join us. The Playbooks make it easy to find quick solutions to the challenges you face in your business everything from finding clients, conducting sales calls, using A.I., building authority on LinkedIn or YouTube or Pinterest, and dozens of other workshops. You also get dozens of templates including a legal agreement you can use with your clients, monthly coaching, regular copy and funnel critiques, and more. You can learn more and join today by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.  And now, my interview with Katelyn Bourgoin… So Katelyn, welcome to the copywriter club podcast. I’m thrilled to have you here. I’ve been wanting to have you on the show, literally, for like, a year. I’m not sure why it took so long to make the right connections, but thanks to Jordan for helping to make it happen. But since you’re here, tell us your story. I know you’ve got a great story of, you know, some business success and failure, but you have created an amazingly successful newsletter. I love it. It’s one of those that I wait for it to come into my email box, and probably because the topic is the topic that just rings my bell, which is persuasion. So anyway, tell me your story. How did you get here? Katelyn Bourgoin: That’s a long question.  Rob Marsh: It was a terrible question.  Katelyn Bourgoin: No, it’s a great question. I just feel like I’m, you know, I’m always kind of thinking about the best way to share this story, because it’s long and winding as most entrepreneurs are, and like, to your point, things look great today, but there have been a lot of ups and downs to get to this point. And so maybe I’ll share a little bit of the journey before launching the newsletter, which is why we buy so prior to launching the newsletter, if we go all the way back to like 2014 so we’re talking like 11 years ago, I was running a branding agency. I’d actually just sold the sister company, which was a restaurant consulting agency, and I was having this kind of crisis of identity, like I think a lot of folks do, or I was like, I need to stop selling time for money. I want to sell something that scales, something more scalable. And at the time 2014 I was under the impression that the online course and online, you know, creative world was too busy, so I should do something else. Now, this is funny, considering that it’s still an amazing opportunity for anybody who wants to get into that world. And that’s, you know, really what the business is that I run today, 11 years later. So I decided I was going to do something else, and I was going to launch a tech company. Because how hard could that be? Really, really effing hard, Rob. Things did not go as planned. We launched an initial product, got some venture capital funding. Inc Magazine was saying we were building the next LinkedIn for women. Everything looked awesome from the outside. It was not going awesome on the inside. We really understood the customer we were going after. And of course, I was good at marketing and PR, but not so good at building the right product. I built the wrong product, and it wasn’t solving the core pain point that the audience that we decided to go after needed us to solve for them. It was janky. It didn’t work very well. And so we’d have 1000s of people signing up, and they would post, and they kind of create a profile, and they did not stick around. They didn’t really maintain their activity. And so in the last dish effort, I ended up pivoting to more of a think tank model.  But at that point, I was so burned out, and we were out of money, and I was just like, I can’t keep going. And so ended up closing down the company, super sad, licking my wounds, trying to decide, what am I going to be when I grow up? Had to go bankrupt because I’d taken a bunch of personally guaranteed loans in the early days before we raised venture capital and trying to figure out what’s next. And I was really fortunate, because I brought on these great investors, and one of the investors that I brought on had a huge portfolio of companies, and was like, Hey, you weren’t so good on the product side. I was like, Yeah, I know. But you were really good at the marketing side. And we have all of these founders that we support that are building incredible products, and they’re not great at explaining them, getting people excited about them, selling them. Will you work with some of our companies? And I said, Yes, are you gonna pay me? It’s like, I really need money. And yeah. So they’re like, Yeah, you can come on as a consultant, and we’ll pay you to work with these companies. And so I started working with all of these brilliant founders who were building world changing technology, their clients were like Boeing and NASA and Tesla and like they were changing the world. And I would go and I would sit down at their boardroom tables, and I’d ask them the question that we want to know as marketers, which is, tell me about your customers. And I was really surprised that most of them could not give me a straight answer. They would be like, oh, you know, like we target, you know, entrepreneurs, or, we target companies like this, but also kind of like this, or the founders would be fighting about who the target customer is in the session. And one time, a founder looked at me straight in the face and he said, our target customers are B to B, online businesses with anywhere between 10 and 500 employees.  Rob Marsh: Pretty much every business?  Katelyn Bourgoin: Yeah. So I was like, Okay, there’s clearly a problem to be solved here and helping people to better understand their customers. And so I got really nerdy with this problem started, like, hungrily consuming all of the literature that I could. I’m like, why are so many people having this issue where they don’t understand their customers? They don’t understand the demand that customers have.  And that led me to discover Clayton Christensen and Bob Moesta work around jobs to be done, which is kind of a whole other conversation we could get into. And it led me to thinking, I’m going to start an insights agency. I want to build an agency that helps companies understand their customers. Will do customer research on the graph, will feed them insights. They need this information to build successful companies. Well, around this exact same time that I have this big idea like, I want to start generating demand for this. I was doing a lot of consulting work. I was running workshops and training for mostly companies in the innovation space, helping them to better understand their customers. And so I started thinking, okay, I need to start priming people for when I eventually launched the agency. And so I created Why We Buy as a newsletter, basically to build pipeline for a future agency. And that was in 2021 and we’d come through the pandemic. We were figuring out the world again in person. Stuff wasn’t happening. It was mostly still virtual. And I found out that I was pregnant, which was exciting, because we’ve been trying, and so we ended up having a baby. And shortly after, within four months, my husband broke his neck. It was like, Oh, crap, what am I going to do? I’ve got this newborn baby. I am, you know, trying to figure out how to build this business. I’m doing it all by myself. And around that same time, sponsors started reaching out to me, being like, we’d like to pay to promote our stuff in your newsletter. And I was really weirded out by that, because, like, what is that a thing? I didn’t even know about this world. And so initially I started just saying, no, it’s not worth my time for like, 200 bucks to promote your thing.  I eventually ended up having a couple calls with some of these brands and realizing it was a big opportunity, and that there was really an opportunity to build a business around the newsletter. And that’s when I decided to hit pause on the agency idea, and go all in on building a media and education company. And that was the start of what I’ve built today. Rob Marsh: It’s an it’s an amazing story, and it’s got me thinking… but we kind of skimmed over shutting down the business—bankruptcy. Yeah, it was bad, but when people go through that, it’s really bad. How did you deal with the emotional weight of that happening to you and to keep going? And the reason I’m asking this is there are a lot of people who are starting their own businesses that get into that dip and they get stuck, or they struggle and they have to give up and have to quit, or they have to move on to something else. What was the thing that got you through that? Katelyn Bourgoin: It’s a great question. I would say that there were two things that happened at that so, funny enough, after closing out that company, I was trying to decide, what’s next? What am I going to do when I grow up? And I actually had a company that would have been my dream job reach out, offering an executive role in their marketing team, and I was at this crossroads. So it was like, you know, I’ve just had to go bankrupt. I’ve built my own thing. I’ve been an entrepreneur for the last—this was 2018—I’ve been an entrepreneur for a long time. I basically had never had a real job, and I was under the weight of this. Like, you know, do I go and get a job or do I keep going and continue to build a company?  And if I’m honest, the reason that I said no to the job was I felt like an imposter. I was afraid I would not meet their expectations. I didn’t think that I deserved the role that was being offered to me, and so I passed up on it, thinking I’m going to get in there and they’re just going to see that I don’t belong. And that turned out to be the greatest thing ever, because I’ve since gone on to build a company that I really love. I do really feel confident my abilities as a marketer. But it was one of those low points in my life. But the thing that I look at now, and I see it as a bit of a gift, is, once you’ve been that low as an entrepreneur, like once you’ve basically lost everything, the company fails, you go bankrupt. I had a bunch of friends and family who had invested in our round that I had to tell we’ve lost your money. It wasn’t a lot of money, fortunately, but it was enough that it was many, many months of sleepless nights. Once you’ve gone through that, you realize there’s nowhere to go. But that’s the positive about being on the bottom, there’s really nowhere to go but up. And for me, once I identified the problem that I saw these startup founders making, I was like, we made that problem too. We just made it on the other end, like, we also didn’t understand. We understood who we wanted to sell to. I’d bought into the whole idea you have to niche down. You have to be super specific. And we were like, we were going after a very specific persona. They were early stage female entrepreneurs building online businesses. Most of them were in the very early stages. That was a huge mistake for many reasons. You know, early stage entrepreneurs don’t tend to have a lot of money to invest in solutions, which I am now, in retrospect, aware of, but, you know, we’d taken that advice to niche down and to focus on the customer, and I realized that I was so focused on that customer, but I didn’t really deeply understand the problems that that we needed to solve for them and building the right solution. And so that experience my on my own end, and then seeing that rippled out through these other companies, it became really clear to me that we’ve got a lot of people out there building stuff that people don’t want and or they’re building stuff that people do want, there’s doing a terrible job of explaining why they should want it and what it is. And that’s a problem I want to solve. That’s an exciting problem, because you’ve got these great entrepreneurs who are trying to build these world changing solutions that can’t get traction.  So ultimately, I feel like I had to hit that bottom and feel that pain so that I could see that opportunity, because otherwise I never would have seen it. We’d be having a very different conversation today. Had that company been successful.  Rob Marsh: Yeah, we probably wouldn’t be having a conversation at all, because I conversation at all, because I wouldn’t be on your newsletter list. Katelyn Bourgoin: Exactly.  Rob Marsh: Well, let’s talk a little bit about how we figure out the message that matches up to that deeply felt pain point? Because you actually touched on it twice, as we’ve been talking for the last 10 minutes or so. Obviously this is a big problem that a lot of people have. So how does somebody go about—I’m thinking of copywriters, content writers, who are trying to figure out—what is my… how do I match my message to the pain point that I’m working for my clients? But also, every business struggles with this. So how do you advise clients or people to figure that out? Katelyn Bourgoin: That’s a great question. I would say, first of all the answer is that you need to be able to step back from what it is you want to sell and start thinking about what people want to buy. And I think that that takes a real shift for a lot of people, because we often have a motivation that’s personal and selfish around the thing that we’re selling. If you’re you know, for entrepreneurs, our motivation is we want to build this cool internet company where we can work 10 hours a week and make millions of dollars. Our motivation is often coming from a self centered place, and then we try to find a market for that thing. And that’s just not how it works. It’s not effective that way.  So I’d say that the most important step is starting with this is the way that we you know, I’m working on a workshop right now to help people through this whole process. It’ll help them to basically clarify their offer, figure out the painful problems that they’re like, uniquely qualified to solve, and who wants to pay them a lot for that in two hours. And so this, I’m figuring out the exact step by step process, because I went through this in a organic way. But then when I sat down to be like, how do I actually help other people do this?  I figured out there is a specific process, and it starts with first identifying the trigger events that lead people to be interested in an offer like yours in the beginning, in the first place, right? So people don’t just wake up one day and go, oh, I want to buy this, like, B to B CRM software, or like, oh, I want to like, come to Katelyn’s workshop. That’s not the way that the world works. Something happens in their life outside of our visibility that pushes them to realize they’ve got a problem that they need to solve, right? Because if they could do it on their own, if they could just figure out what the next step is, they wouldn’t need us. They wouldn’t need us. They wouldn’t be looking for a solution. They’d already be doing it. So a trigger event happens that makes them move into looking for a solution, because they have a job to be done. Right?  Next step, identify the job to be done. Most people are really bad at this, right? They’re again, they’re creating a solution and then searching for a problem to solve, as opposed to understanding what is the actual thing that people are trying to accomplish? What are the nuanced details around that so that I can create the right solution? So figure out what job it is those prospective customers are trying to get done next. Ask yourself, who are the people that are likely to have that job to be done and willing to pay for a solution because they’re underserved by the existing solutions, or there’s things that are out there, but they’re not right in their use case. So narrow it down. Figure out, like, Who are these potential target markets that have this job to be done?  And then do what I call pain storming, and this is really fun, which is basically, you just go through, you look at those, those potential buyers. Let’s say you narrow down to three potential segments that you might be able to solve problems for. And you look at, what are all of their problems, right? What are the functional problems they have when they’re trying to get the job done? What are the emotional problems that they have? What are the social problems, the things you know, the way that they worry about being perceived when they’re doing it, and what are their kind of risks? And it’s like, you know, a perceived problem thing that they worry is going to happen. And you figure all of that out for those, you know, let’s say, three potential personas, and then you start to look for the overlap, because I bet you there are problems that are overlapping across those different audiences. And in doing that, you can go, Okay, I’ve identified some very painful problems that you know a particular segment of the market has.  Now I can work backwards and figure out an offer that actually solves those problems and the messaging to communicate that to those people, because I think again, it’s like we often go about this backwards. We start with what we want to sell, and then we try to figure out where to sell it. And that’s the reason why so many people are struggling. Rob Marsh: Love that you share that, and it rings true. In fact, listening to you just talk about that process, I hear a lot of Clayton Christensen coming through not just the jobs to be done, but identifying those opportunities where people are underserved is one thing that he talked a lot about in his various books. Can we talk a little bit deeper about jobs to be done? Because I think this is a framework that’s really useful, but also sometimes hard to wrap our brains around, because you’re thinking, Well, of course, the course that I’m selling is teaching people the thing, right? Or the template that I’m selling is helping people get the thing, and that’s not really what jobs to be done, at least that’s only part of the JTB framework. So you talk a little bit about that? Katelyn Bourgoin: Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve been so blessed that I got to connect with Bob Moesta, who was the co-creator of jobs to be done with Clayton Christensen. So if anybody has watched… Google: “jobs to be done, milkshakes” and you will watch a four minute video where Clayton Christensen, who, for anybody who’s listening, Clayton, he’s sadly passed away, but he was considered one of the world’s foremost experts on innovation. The top CEOs of the world would come to him with their problems, and they say, we want to innovate. We want to create solutions. People buy we keep running into problems where we put stuff in the market. Nobody buys it. Why do we keep doing this? How do we stop and he basically with, with the help of Bob and I think two other people, ended up creating the jobs to be done, theory and framework. And when, in the video, he talks about why people buy milkshakes, and he’s explaining, one of his colleagues went out and started interviewing people and asking them why they bought their milkshake. That colleague was Bob Moesta. And so I’ve been fortunate enough to get to spend time with Bob, to have him participate in work shapes that I’ve been hosting. And like, he’s just blown my mind as to understanding the depth of this, but this is where things get tricky.  So for most of us, especially people who I think are in the who are building very malleable products, right? So if you’re building a physical product that’s in the world, you kind of get one opportunity to get that right, right, and then you need to think about all of your marketing and everything. But if you’re building everything. But if you’re building a service business, or you’re building a online tool, or you’re building an online course or community, you can really adjust and modify things. So I think that the jobs to be done method of first understanding why people buy solutions like yours or your thing. So the way that they recommend doing this is by going out and interviewing customers and running what Bob calls a switch interview. And what that basically means is, why did those people if Why did they switch from what they were doing before to buy from you and what they were doing before might have been nothing. You might have been the first thing that they bought, or it could have been they were using this other tool that had been working okay for them, but then stopped working because something in their life changed. And when you understand the real details of the buying journey, that’s where all of the insight can come from to figure out, well, what are people actually trying to get done.  So, funny enough, when I launched the Why We Buy newsletter, it was because I’d zeroed in on the job to be done. Nobody in their right mind, and remember, we were trying to build an insights agency where we would actually go out and conduct this research for our clients. Nobody in their right mind actually wants to do interviews. That is not the job to be done. Nobody wants to do interviews. Nobody wants to do research. Most leaders of companies are allergic to the word research. They don’t want to do it. They don’t want to pay for it. They see it’s often been a huge waste of time. But what they do want is they want to understand why their customers are buying, so they can get more of them right. They want to understand what’s how their buyers are making decision. That’s the job to be done.  Now, there’s a lot of different ways they can do that. They could go out and, you know, hire my theoretical agency that had ever launched, or they could hire us to do research for them. They could run a survey with their with buyers, right? They could do a bunch of AB testing, run ads and try to test different messages and see if some clarity comes into it. The problem with a lot of the other methods for you know deeply understanding how your customers make decisions is that they don’t actually get to the root of it, because a lot of them are by observing customers or by asking customers to answer these kind of short servers, you don’t get the in depth stuff that you can get in an interview.  So when I was thinking about a newsletter, I was like, there’s no way I’m going to write a newsletter on research, because research is a project for most companies, right? It’s not an ongoing job to be done. It’s something that they do once and or they do it on a quarterly basis, or whatever they want to be new. And so if they were to sign up for my newsletter, they might read the first few issues, and then when you know research isn’t a priority for them, maybe they’re not gonna keep reading it. I was like, I want to create something that we’re gonna open every week. So if people want to understand what drives buyer behavior, what are other things other than research that I could theme the newsletter around?  And that’s where the idea for buyer psychology came from. Because I was like, this is another way to understand your buyer’s decision making process. It’s another way to get that job done. And if I can get people to sign up for that newsletter, they’re going to be the kind of people that are probably going to actually be interested in an insights agency that helps them do research. So that’s a long winded answer, but essentially it’s like getting down to the real root of what is the what is below the demand? What job are they trying to get done, taking your solution, thinking out of it. It wasn’t doing research. It wasn’t, you know, running interviews. None of that was what people actually wanted. What they wanted was to understand how their customers make buying decisions so that they could, you know, market smarter.  And so by understanding that I was able to come up with an idea for a newsletter that would, in theory, attract the perfect people for the insights agency I plan to build pre neck break. Rob Marsh: Who knows, if you were to launch that agency now… you’ve got 80,000 people on your list who are ready to buy, right? So… I love talking through that and thinking through that process, especially from the standpoint of the listeners to this podcast, copywriters, content writers, marketers, who are doing a lot of these freelance type things. Oftentimes, we’re selling things like websites or sales pages or emails, and we don’t always recognize that our clients actually don’t need websites, sales pages and emails. I mean, they do, but what they really want is the thing that the website, email and sales page gets them, right? Which is a new customer or revenue or in some cases, it’s psychological benefits like, Oh, my spouse respects me, because they can see that I have a real company, at least online, it looks like I’m doing something real and I think we forget that a lot, and we focus so much in on that deliverable. Katelyn Bourgoin: Yeah, and I think the other thing that we do as marketers, that is that we have to be cautious of. Because I think this is why, when you look at a lot of markets are very saturated, and us as copywriters or marketers are trying to find ways to create a differentiated message. And oftentimes, I think what we do so going back to jobs to be done, the simple way of explaining it is basically the job is the progress that a person is trying to make in a very specific circumstance. So it’s about understanding what is, what is it that they’re trying to achieve? That’s the kind of the job, and then why? Why does achieving that matter? And I think as entrepreneurs, we often will kind of go really heavy into selling. The why, which is off the big rhetoric in marketing, you know, sell the life, sell the life, sell the life with and then our stuff just sounds like everybody else’s. Because, guess what? As humans, we all have the same core goals. We want to survive and we want to thrive, right? We want to make more money, we want to have more time. We want to be more attractive to the other sex.  So if you jump too much into the why, and you focus your message there, then you end up selling sounding like everybody else who’s selling this big dream, this glitzy dream. So I think it’s really important to understand what the job is, because that’ll allow you to differentiate your messaging and make sure that you’re speaking to that. And part of understanding the job, a huge part of it, as you know, in my opinion, and based on what I’ve seen, is it’s about understanding the struggles people have when completing that job. That’s the opportunity in our messaging.  And so as I work on this, this new workshop, and I’m using, it’s very meta, but I’m using my own creation of the workshop as an example in the workshop, because, you know, everybody who will be attending that workshop will have bought that product, so it’ll be very, very relevant to them. But as I work through it, it’s like figuring out what the specific job is that people are coming to that workshop before they’re coming there because they want to design a scalable digital offer that they can build on their own without growing their team to scale their service based marketing business. It’s very specific, right? And so when you think about that, once you kind of, like, wrap your hands around that, it’s like, okay, I know that, that I know what this what the trigger is. It’s about, you know, them struggling with growing their existing service based business, feeling stretched, feeling strained, wanting to offer something that’s more scalable. I know what it is they’re wanting to do. They want to figure out what that offer is. Chances are, get digging into the pain points they’ve already tried. They’ve probably launched things before that didn’t really work. They didn’t know why. And there’s the kind of the key context which is really important, which is that they want to be able to do it on their own without hiring more people.  And so this needs to be something that they can actually when I create a solution for them and I try to sell them that solution, those are always really important things to do. Now I could have my message be, you know, work three hours, like, a week from the beach, and, like, make money while you sleep. That’s a great dream to sell. That’s kind of the why. But that message doesn’t work anymore with people because they’ve seen it too much, and it doesn’t really speak to the real job that they’re trying to get.  So I think it’s really important to balance that kind of like aspirational why messaging with really getting clear on your differentiated value when you understand the job your customers are trying to get done and the nitty gritty details, you can get clear on that. Rob Marsh: That’s an incredibly valuable look into what we all need to be doing with our customers and our clients that we’re attracting to us. I would love to shift our conversation a little bit and talk more about your newsletter. There’s a thing that’s happened around newsletters over the last couple of years where creators are growing, tools have emerged—Beehiiv and Substack and Kit—are creating great tools for, not just growing newsletters, but serving clients. How have you grown your newsletter? Because I think everybody does it a little bit differently. I know you have been on social media and Twitter quite a bit in the past, and showing up in various places, but we talked about how we all start with no one reading our newsletter. How did you go from zero to where you are now? And I think it’s like 80,000 something. Katelyn Bourgoin: So we’re now down to like 63,000. And I’ve been really fortunate. So I’ll share the things that are now available to anybody starting a newsletter. I actually got fairly early access to some of these. So we built from zero to 10,000 based on promoting basically through my social network and through some collaborations with other newsletters. So us promoting them, they promoting us. That was from zero to 10,000 we got there within, I think, probably a year and a half, you know, about 18 months from zero to 10,000 so that was very much like not being super. I think it was like 89,000 but not being super, you know, tactful about it, but what I did do that was smart, and I’ve stopped doing and we’re going to start redoing, was every, um, every Monday, before the newsletter would go out on Tuesday, I would plug, kind of like, tease what the issue was going to be, and I would share a screenshot of, like, some kind of like, unsolicited praise of the newsletter. And that was, I think, the smartest thing that I did, because a reminded people to sign up. So I think a lot of newsletter creators don’t do they don’t remind people to sign up. And it showed that other people were liking the newsletter, and it created this kind of like virtuous flywheel, because then other people would see that post, then we’re reading the newsletter already, and they go, Oh my god, this is my favorite newsletter too. And so I could get more screenshots.  So that was one smart thing that I did in the beginning, but because we had gotten to about 10,000 I was on a call with Nathan Berry from Kit, and I was actually on his podcast, and he told me about some cool things that they were doing over at that. It was then ConvertKit, now Kit to help newsletter operators to grow their list faster. And I was on a different platform at the time, and it’s like, super exciting. And so I moved over to Kit, and I was an early user of a platform called Sparkloop, which Kit has since acquired. And the Sparkloop team, it was this great new like feature, and they were the first to release it. And it was something that a lot of the big newsletter brands had been doing very manually, but spark made it easy, which was after somebody would sign up for my newsletter, they would see a recommendation of three to five newsletters that I also recommended, and they could choose to then, with one click, sign up for those newsletters too. So we got early beta access to this before it was available to the public, which helped us to grow a lot faster than we would have had we not had access to that early. And so we partnered with a number of other newsletters and promote promoted each other, and that made a big difference in our growth.  And then, since then, a lot of the growth it still comes from, you know, plugging the newsletter, consistently doing it. We had been testing different Facebook ads to grow the the audience. It worked, but we didn’t see that those readers became buyers within a window of that made sense. So we kind of scrapped that. We might go back to that and then Sparkloop has a paid partnership program in addition to the organic ones, the organic one is, I promote you. You promote me. Nobody pays. If you want to take advantage of their paid program, you can actually set a rate for I will pay X amount of dollars for every subscriber, and then other newsletters will send you subscribers that’s been hit and miss for us, because there’s definitely some folks out there that think have found ways to game that system and spark group. Of course, had to tamper down on that. But again, when we would look at the purchase behavior from some of those subscribers and it come from the paid campaigns, it just wasn’t making sense to continue to grow through that channel. So we were not doing that right now. Rob Marsh: That’s interesting, that there’s so much power in organic. Obviously what you do when you’re working organically and putting out the content that you know resonates or whatever results in the people who are going to continue following you and buy from you, which I guess that makes a lot of sense, but also makes you just maybe look a little bit of chance at some of the paid tools. I think I need to make sure that the stuff actually brings buyers into into my audience.  Katelyn Bourgoin: Well, I’ve seen a lot of newsletter operators, and I hate to say that’s a lot of folks who have really, kind of like, gotten high on their own supply when it comes to, like these paid subscriber channels. And I suspect that some of them are not doing the evaluation to see. Are these valuable? Are these folks? Because the thing of the way that spark loop works now, other tools are different, but the way that spark loop works is that people are auto enrolled, rather than needing to click to choose which newsletters they want to like they want to subscribe to when they see that pop up, and my assumption is a lot of people don’t even realize they’re signing up for newsletters. A pop up happened. And we’re used to seeing pop ups, not processing them, closing them, or clicking the button that looks like the button to close it without really, like, analyzing it. I know that that’s totally the way that I navigate the Internet, so I think that there’s probably a lot of folks who sign up for a newsletter that they were excited about signing up for and inadvertently end up on a couple more. And of course, the goal is, if you can create a lot of value, you can show people why you should earn a spot in their inbox. They’ll stay subscribed. And we have a very special sequence when we were running this for those people to make sure that if they you know, that they would know how they got there, that they’d have to make it really easy for them to opt out, and that we would provide a lot of value in the welcome sequence that they’d want to stay engaged. And if they didn’t engage with a certain amount of emails within their first I think, like 14 days, meaning that they’d open and click and things like that, we could then auto unenroll, unsubscribe them and not pay for those. So that was not something that spark that initially heads had released, which is why we ended up doing this big culling of subscribers who probably had no idea that they got on our list, and we didn’t do a good job of actually warming them up at the time. So we got better at that over the years.  Rob Marsh: So speaking of that initial welcome sequence, I could be wrong, but I’m thinking you actually offered a secret gift at some point, right where you didn’t promise the gift up front. There was no expectation from anybody who signed up, but it was one of those wow experiences, where, as a subscriber, I’m like, oh, suddenly, you’re giving me something that’s way better than what I even requested when I signed up. Tell me a little bit about that.  Katelyn Bourgoin: So I went into this not really having a name for it, but Chennel Bastilo, who has the newsletter that’s all about growing newsletters, which is called Growth in Reverse. She coined this as being the reverse lead magnet strategy. So I’ll use her language.  It’s a reverse lead magnet. But essentially, my thinking was, you know, being a buyer psychology nerd, one of the fastest ways to build trust with a, you know, with somebody in your audience, is to delight them. And to delight somebody means that it’s something that’s unexpected, right? If we know that we’re going to get some we’re going to get something, then it’s not delightful. It’s just you know what the expectation was fulfilled, and therefore we might be content and satisfy it, but it’s not delightful. Delight is when something happens that you don’t expect. So it’s when they sign up for a lead magnet and it’s so much better than they expected, which is so often not the case, right?  We all have a folder somewhere on our Google Drive that’s full of the lead magnets that, like, were super hyped and really shitty. So people have an expectation that things probably aren’t gonna be that good. If you actually deliver something really good, they’ll be delighted, and you’ll have a great experience. So I thought with, again, knowing that we were investing money, particularly into Spark glue and ads at the time to get this cold audience that didn’t know me, had not signed up because they discovered me on social to kind of create this great experience with them. I was like, How do I delight them at the gate? And that was where the idea came from. And, you know, selfishly, the way, there was a strategy behind this too, because we had then gone back and we ended up creating these journey based welcome sequences.  So one of the first things that we’d ask people is like, what’s your current problem? And we would they had two options to pick, and if they depending on which one they picked, we created a really great onboarding for them, each with a surprise gift, each with like, really value packed emails, but also subtly mentioning our too big products. We don’t, it wasn’t aggressive, there was no promotion or anything like that. But that was, you know, part of the goal is, yeah, we want to be able to delight these people and add them. We also want to remind them this is a pain point that you have, and we want to help them to overcome that pain point with the freebie that they didn’t expect to get, and with, you know, a couple of really insightful emails that people love, and then we want to tell them also, there’s a solution to help you with that problem. And we’ve got, like, if you’re interested, so that we kind of revised things from our initial which was just, here’s this one freebie, and then they would just start getting the newsletter to creating this kind of like mini welcome sequence, depending on their pain points.  Rob Marsh: I love that strategy. When I heard of that, I thought that’s just brilliant. Just the surprise that you get and the trust and immediate liking that it engenders is just a really great tactic. So I guess congrats on inventing that, or discovering it, or, you know… Katelyn Bourgoin: I’m sure I didn’t invent it… I feel like, should I have anything coined? A great phrase, and I hope the laws will use it. Rob Marsh: Yeah, it’s a great idea. Okay, so your newsletter is really about persuasion. You know why we buy all these cognitive biases that we have tendencies that you know, I would love just to. Talk a little bit about some of these now, copywriters, content writers, marketers, we’re all familiar with the pretty typical, you know, six or seven of the theinfluence techniques that Cialdini writes about. So, you know, urgency and scarcity and liking and consistency, right? We get these drilled into our heads all the time. But there’s not just seven or six. There are literally hundreds of these, and you read about a different one each week. So I’m curious, like, what are your favorite three or four? Katelyn Bourgoin: I’ll give you two, and then I might give you a third one. Okay, so I’d say that my favorite that I’ve discovered was what’s known as the pratfall effect, which is as somebody who is a perfectionist and, you know, toils over making mistakes and being seen as uncredible, this was like a huge relief for me. So the pratfall effect is essentially this idea that when we are evaluating a person or a brand, small imperfections can actually make us like and trust that thing more, because we don’t trust perfect, because we know that it’s not real, right? When something seems too good to be true, our spidey senses start tingling, and so as a create the idea, the study that was one of the ones that started to identify this effect in people, was they would have people interview for a job. I think it was like for a job application. But they’d have these interviewers interviewing these people, and they’d have actors go and they were instructed to actually mistakenly spill a bit of coffee on themselves, like at the beginning of the interview. And that, you know, that mistake that they made actually made the interviewers feel ingratiated to them, and made them rank them more highly on characteristics. And this is the important thing, that there’s a caveat for this. If you’re going to be making a mistake, and people will like you for it, it shouldn’t be a mistake that makes you seem uncredible in your expertise. So if you’re a mathematician, and somebody asked you, what’s two plus two, and you say seven, that is not going to initiate this effect. But if you’re a mathematician who’s great at the math stuff, but then, you know, again, you like to be example, you spill a bit of coffee on yourself, or you have, you make kind of a mistake or a typo or something like that, that can actually make people like you more. So pratfall effect is one of my favorites. Another that’s powerful, and I think not doesn’t get enough credit, is the Fresh Start effect. So as marketers, when we are planning our promotions, one thing that you need to be aware of is the psychological brain of your buyer, and the idea that there are moments, there are these temporal moments in time where we start to think that things that we didn’t believe in the past, or things that we might have been skeptical about, kind of all wash away, and we’re open to making kind of some bigger changes. And these are these fresh start moments. So the mother of all fresh start moments, New Year’s Eve, right? Like, ah, it’s the beginning of a new year. You know, last year I might have been all of these things that didn’t help me achieve my goal, didn’t get me where I want to go. But this year, I’m going to be this completely different person. This year, I’m going to be able to change all of that, right?  And so when you can put a message in front of somebody, when they’re likely to have experienced one of these fresh starts, they’re going to be way more open to your message. And fresh starts aren’t just that once a year. You know? It can also be Mondays, right? We all enter the new week being like this week will be different. It can be at your birthday. It can be a, you know, the beginning of another quarter. It can be after getting a divorce, like there are so many of these moments that happen in the lives of people, and if you can get your message in front of them at the right time to take advantage of the fresh start, they’re going to be far more open to being receptive to your message. So those are two that I love.  I’ll give you one more, because it’s kind of aligned with giving a bonus one. And that’s the Peak/End rule. So the way that we remember and experience something basically comes down to two things, what was the peak, and whether that’s good or bad, and how did it end? And so if you want to create a really good memory for your customers, right, you want to make sure that the peak is high and positive, then at the end is positive and high, right? And so they did this interesting study where there was this, this colon exam that they were they were doing, and they’d have people, after they went through it report how, like, you know, how much they you know, what their experience was with one to 1010, being not a pleasant experience, in the least, right? And one being, yeah, it was okay. And what they noticed was that there was this painful part of the examination, and then it would just end, right? People were ranking it really high on the unpleasant like stage, they’re like, What happens if we do the unpleasant part? Because the unpleasant part has to happen. It’s it’s the peak. It’s unpleasant, but it has to happen. But then, instead of it just being over, we actually kind of did a few other things. So we’d like maybe take their blood pressure, or we’d like do an abdominal exam, or like something beyond that, and then it would end with, like, something more pleasant. Then people actually ranked it not being so bad. So this idea that if you do have to deliver bad news, be careful about how you deliver it. Don’t just end abruptly, try to, like, smooth it out, and ideally have a very positive peak.  This happened to me the other day. It’s a great example of a mistake that a company is making around us. I went to the a great spa. It’s a beautiful Nordic Spa here in Quebec City, and when you like, you know, you come into the place, they’re very quick to greet you, and it’s lovely, and the service is excellent. And then you go and you have your day at the spa, and there’s these beautiful plunge pools and all these different things. So everybody would have kind of different peaks of their experience. But then at the end, they made this massive mistake, which is the people who are waiting to check out, they serve all of them last they pay more attention to people who are waiting to get in. It doesn’t matter when those people arrive. Some people that are waiting to check out are sitting here and they’re watching all of the like staff ignore them and instead greet the people who just arrived even later than they’ve been waiting. And I thought, this is strange, like we’ve been here longer. There’s kind of the rules of society, which is that you see people as they as they cued in the line. And my mom, she’s kind of less patient than I am. She’s starting to get frustrated. And ultimately, I’m like, I just had a great day at the spa. I’m going to be chilled with this, but yeah, that’s a little bit annoying. And then I went to tag the spa in a picture later that day, and in doing that, I went on their Facebook page, and I saw all of these low reviews, and the common thing they were complaining about was the checkout experience. So it’s like you’ve just created this amazing day for your customers. And their thinking is probably, you know what? Let’s make sure that when they first get here, they feel so welcome and support, it’s going to create a great first experience. But what they don’t realize is that they’re actually hurting themselves way more by creating a bad end experience. And so the peak end rule is one of my favorites, and I think that we should all think about it. If we’re doing anything that is, it’s an experience that we want people to remember positive. Rob Marsh: As freelancers, anytime we’re handing off a finished project, oftentimes we’re handing somebody a Google Doc, it may even still have correction marks in it, or whatever, you know, compared to the kid glove, or the white glove service that we provide, you know, when we’re doing an onboarding interview. Yeah, so, so many applications there.  And even when you were talking about the Fresh Start effect earlier, you mentioned understanding trigger events. And trigger events are another opportunity for a fresh start. Anytime that you know a customer or somebody that you’re talking to has one of these experiences where it’s like, wow, I am never doing that again, or I this is the last time I go a week without a client or like, that is the opportunity for a fresh start that’s not triggered by, say, a Monday or a new year, right?  Katelyn Bourgoin: Yes, yeah, absolutely. I think that being a marketer, and, you know, I write a lot of copy, I don’t know what I would call myself. I would say I feel I lean more into the identification as a marketer than a copywriter, because I feel like there’s so many better copywriters in me. But I think that we get to have the coolest job, which is we basically don’t get to be these very curious like, we just get to examine humans and try to understand them. And I think that getting to do that is cool because, like, ultimately, we all kind of want to understand ourselves too. So the more that you understand other people, the more clarity gives you on yourself. And so I just think we’re very lucky that we get to spend our time thinking about this stuff. Rob Marsh: Yeah, I agree. And how to help people solve their problems, or move from you know, the before to the after, from you know, the problem to the solution. In some ways, it’s a gift to be able to do this thing that we all get to do.  Katelyn Bourgoin: It absolutely is, and there are so many great products out there and great entrepreneurs out there that they deserve to be better known. They deserve for their work to be recognized. They deserve to get customers that they can help. And so I think that it really sometimes, there’s been periods in my life where, as a marketer, I’ve felt a little bit, I don’t know, I guess, a little bit frustrated, that I don’t feel like I’m making a difference in a meaningful way, right? There’s been times where I’m like, Oh, I just like, help B to B. Software companies sell more software. But like, then when I kind of like, reframe it, and I remember, no, like, those people are selling real solutions that are going to make their individual customers lives a lot better. That might mean that person’s more productive, and I get to hire another team member, and that means they get to go on the big. Peace with their family and their marriage doesn’t break up. But there’s all sorts of positive things that can come from helping people to solve their problems. And I think that sometimes when I get stuck in this, like, it just feels like I’m gonna, you know, that I I think a little bit about, like, should I just, like, get into, like, political marketing, like, I have moments, and then I’m like, No, you’re, you know, as long as you go back to helping people figure out what problem they’re solving and how to solve it better and to promote that and communicate that better, it’s a great day.  Rob Marsh: This feels like a really good end note. Again, thinking about Peak End, that’s maybe a really good way to finish up here. You have some really cool products, I’ve mentioned them in our email, the wallet opening words is a download that you have, that I’m definitely going to link to in the show notes and share when we share this episode in our email. But if people want to get on your list, and learn more about all of this stuff, the cognitive biases, persuasion, how we get people to actually buy, and do it in a way that’s ethical and serves their needs, Katelyin, where should they go? Katelyn Bourgoin: They should go to learn whywebuy.com. Rob Marsh: Perfect. So hopefully we’ll have everybody who’s listening jump in there and can they’ll see why I’ve become such a fan of your work, what you do,  Katelyn Bourgoin: Thank you for letting me get introduced to your people. Rob Marsh: Yeah, this has been phenomenal. I appreciate your time.  Thanks to Katelyn for talking so deeply about the techniques we need to undertand in order to sell more… if you’re listening to this the week it goes live, Katelyn is teaching a buyer breakthrough workshop on Thursday at Noon Eastern Time. If you get on her list, you may be able to sign up for that workshop… go to learnwhywebuy.com. I also mentioned Wallet Opening Words… this is a PDF full of tactics like the Peak End Effect, the Pratfall Effect, and the Fresh Start Effect that you can put to work in your own writing and sales efforts. In addition to those three, I think there are like 67 more psychological tactics you can use in Wallet Opening Words. I’ve linked to it in the show notes, but if you go to thecopywriterclub.com/wow you can get that resource from Katelyn. I have it. I refer to it often. It’s great and probably belongs on your virtual shelf too. And of course there are lots of resources around persuasion and psychology in The Copywriter Underground. If you’re a member, you’ll find those resources in the new dashboard. And if you’re not a member, you can fix that now at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

Can copywriters who run a service business attract good clients using Facebook ads? The short answer is “yes”. Facebook Ads Strategist, Tara Zirker, is my guest for this episode The Copywriter Club Podcast, and she explained that not only can they use FB ads to attract clients, they may be able to do it for as little as $10/a day… and that could attract dozens of leads—more than you would need to hit six figures. Want to know how to do it? Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: Your Ad Kit (Tara’s Newsletter) The Successful Ads Club The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground   Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: Do you think of Facebook ads as a tool for growing your copywriting business? If not, it might be time to update your thinking. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast. This is not the first time we’ve talked about Facebook ads on this podcast. I think I keep coming back to this topic because I see so much potential here—both for our own businesses and for our clients’ products and services. This is the kind of strategic skill that helps set some copywriters apart from most others. When you understand the ins and outs of driving paid traffic to your offers, you become imenselly valuable as a writer. And if you use these skills for your own products and services, you could create an almost endless pipeline of customers ready to pay for your help. But, for some reason, Facebook ads feels difficult. You’ve probably heard the same stories that I have of a creator who turns on ads and steps away for the weekend, only to wake up Monday morning to bill for thousands of dollars and no leads to show for the ad spend. This is something you probably can’t set it and forget it, at least as you’re gettinng started. I wanted to understand more about using ads and the analytics we need to pay attention to when we start using them to maximize our experience. So I invited Facebook ad strategist and founder of the Successful Ads Club, Tara Zirker, to walk me through all of this. We talked about how to scale a business with ads on a tiny budget… like $10 a day… what metrics you need to watch, what to test and what you can not bother with and a lot more. I’ve been on Tara’s list for quite a while and really appreciate her approach for running ads to your business… and yes, this works for service businesses like copywriters and content writers. Tara is about to tell us all how to do that in this interview. Before we get to my interview with Tara, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. If you haven’t jumped in to see what the Underground includes, now is the time. It’s guaranteed, which means you can join and if you don’t find the resources you need to grow your business, just let us know and we’ll refund your money. But I doubt that will be your experience because The Underground includes more than 70 different workshops—and accompanying playbooks to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. The Playbooks make it easy to find quick solutions to the challenges you face in your business everything from finding clients, conducting sales calls, using A.I., building authority on LinkedIn or YouTube or Pinterest, and dozens of other workshops. You also get dozens of templates including a legal agreement you can use with your clients, monthly coaching, regular copy and funnel critiques, and more. You can learn more and join today by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.  And now, my interview with Tara Zirker… Tara, welcome to the podcast. I’m thrilled to have you here, as I was telling you, right before we hit record. But before we get into all of this stuff around Facebook, Facebook ads and your expertise, just tell me how you got to where you are. How did you become the expert in Facebook ads?  Tara Zirker: Thanks so much, Rob. I’m so happy to be here and talk to your community. And basically, a very long story short is I actually got my start in journalism. So come from the copy world. I actually ended started in editorial, and pretty quickly they must have recognized something, because they asked if I want to take on a couple of advertorial assignments, and that just became my place. I was like, loving it. It was so fun. And I just love seeing the results that you had from writing copy and having your clients get conversions. And so that started to expand pretty quickly, until, you know, I eventually went freelance. Had a full book of business in varying freelance services, everything from blogging, social media to SEO and, you know, just the whole kit and caboodle.  Developed a small agency, and then I had one client who kind of did a bait and switch. They hired us for social media, and when, you know, day one, they’re like, actually, we need you to run ads. I was like, whoa, whoa. And this was way, way, way back when. I mean, I think Meta had had ads running for just a couple of years, and they had just launched ads for app downloads, and that was what my client was in hospitality, and they had an app. And so we started working on ads for downloads, and pretty soon I got a call from Meta, and we had a lot of budget there, so we’re very well resourced, and got a lot of face time with Meta. This was back when you had Meta’s phone number, you could literally call.  Rob Marsh: That doesn’t happen any more. Tara Zirker: So anyways, we got a call from Meta, and they said, you are outperforming everyone in your industry. How are you doing this? And you know, and they wanted to know what tricks, how we were thinking about their features, and how we were using them to outperform our competitors. Well, this was hospitality, and that was kind of a big deal. So I was like, whoa, maybe there’s something here. And I took those same strategies to every single one of our clients. I’m like, Hey, can I run ads for you? I just want to test and see [what we could do], we’re seeing great success signals with one client. I want to test it across several and see how it works and start getting great success for our clients, everything from brick and mortar to service based providers and more. Eventually, online course, creators, coaches, consultants, things like that.  From there, once I saw the power of ads. I could not look away, I could not turn back. I was like, we’re going all in. So that’s what we did. And now we have had several agencies in the ad space, as well as our training company, which is publicly what we’re most well known for, and absolutely love it. So I know you teach people how to do this.  Rob Marsh: Obviously you learned it through a lot of trial and error and experience. You have programs that help this. But let’s say somebody wanted to get up to speed really quickly on Facebook, ads running for clients, or maybe for themselves. Is there a shortcut for learning this stuff? Or do you have to have the program? Tara Zirker: There’s lots of ways to learn. I mean, even Meta. So when we say Meta, of course, we’re talking about Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, the whole family suite of apps. Meta has some great training called Blueprint. You can learn for free. We have a really quick, condensed, accelerated training for people who want to learn how to do their own ads. You know, the thing that I’ve had to learn to get really, really good at Rob and you probably share the same thing being kind of in that educator role is how to take complex things and shorten them, make them very quick, very easy to digest. You know, we teach small business owners how to run ads. Our lessons are 20 minutes a piece. They have to be able to get them up and running. We always say, ads up and running within a couple of hours, results the same day. And that’s because you have to teach very, very quickly. So I could even teach some frameworks that anybody could learn today and be able to start to understand how ads work.  But it’s honestly so simple, and I think that copywriters, if you’re wanting to run ads for yourself, or maybe you’re thinking you would like to learn a little bit more about ads so you could offer copywriting services, for ads right? For social ads as a niche service, or maybe you want to add ads as an entire skill set. It’s honestly really easy to learn, and it’s getting easier by the day, because the algorithm is so smart at this point that it’s getting harder to mess it up. There’s definitely a few things you can do to mess it up, pretty bad, but it’s getting harder to do that, which is pretty cool. So copywriters have a really cool opportunity, I think, to understand advertising, because you, for the most part, understand the strategy and conversion and ads obviously have to turn into sales, or it’s not worth it.  And copywriters, I think, are uniquely positioned to really quickly just add a few buttons to their skill set already and start to see success.  Rob Marsh: Yeah, that makes total sense. And I’m glad to hear you say that it’s getting easier, because my sense of particularly Facebook ads—using the ad manager and setting up the accounts, and I’ve seen people, you know, set it up and suddenly, over the weekend, you know, they didn’t set the right limits, and suddenly they owe $2,000 its just crazy. So hearing you say, it’s actually getting easier and better is good. Tara Zirker: It sounds good, right? Because there’s so many of those nightmares that we hear that probably keep a lot of us who ought to be experimenting with ads out of doing this 100% and I will say too. Ads really picked up a terrible reputation with the iOS 14 updates, where the privacy policies of Apple essentially cascaded to all the platforms. But Meta was the hardest hit, and essentially said you can’t do your tracking. That was several years ago, and that reputation continues after iOS 14. The tracking now, I would say, is almost as good as it ever has been, if not better on some accounts and so, yeah, there’s been a change, I think most people now have recognized, okay, that was, like, a short lived scare. But, you know, the iOS 15 updates also impacted email, and I think that starting to roll out, where people are realizing what’s happened over the last couple years with email has been pretty dramatic and traumatic for business owners, and so you do have to adapt. And there’s lots of things that change. You do have to stay on top of it. There are, you know, things that shift quite frequently, but our job is to do that for you, so to make it really simple and easy to run and so that you’re always staying ahead of what’s going on. But here’s the thing, you just have to have a different mindset about it, because all the platforms change, marketing changes all the time. AI has completely disrupted what will happen in marketing for the next, like, five to 10 years, and it’s it’s changing very quickly, so you may as well learn ads and have a little bit more control over your ability to get your own leads and not have to depend on such rapidly changing social algorithms and things like that.  Rob Marsh: So before we talk about some of the things we need to have in place before we’re ready to do ads. Can you maybe just give us a minute or two on why ads are a better channel, or at least a complimentary channel to just organic traffic on places like Instagram or Facebook or whatever? Why should we be doing ads?  Tara Zirker: Absolutely. Once you feel the difference of ads in your business, it’s hard to want to ever do anything organic again, because really, you control the flow, and it is, and I’m not saying you really do need to do the organic things that do impact your business. Need to be consistent. You need to have those disciplines of a business owner in that way. However, ads are kind of the easy button. They’re the shortcut. You can just grow and scale so much quicker and build your leads.  A great example of this is I have one very, very minor funnel inside of my business. It attracts a very sub niche of business owners, but it monetizes really well. So it’s under the radar. Hardly anyone knows it, unless you see that particular funnel, and I spend $10 a day on that funnel, and it generates about anywhere from seven to 10 leads for me per day. So let’s just say, on average, it’s like 250 to 300 leads per month. And what I always tell people, and when I teach, when I show people this funnel, they’re like, oh my goodness, how do I create one of those? And what I always say is, like, if you can like, oh, and I should say, this took me about three hours to set up originally, that includes writing the content piece of it, and it takes me about 10 minutes or less per month to maintain although, frankly, I haven’t spent more than a couple minutes in like months on this thing. So I always say, if you’re spending more than like 10 minutes a month to generate 250, 300 leads a month, then you should be considering ads, because that is just so easy. There’s nothing to it. It took me a couple of hours to set up this, by the way, was about three or four years ago, I spend about 10 minutes per month maintaining it at the very most. I mean, every like, once a year or so, I have to spend maybe an hour or so kind of refreshing a few things. So I just think, like, if you can, and that’s a great example of why I say the shortcut, the easy button. It’s like, well, if you’re spending more than $10 and that’s $10 a day, so 300 bucks a month, if you’re spent, you know, you spend probably that much in time and energy, and maybe even a team with your social media. I mean, it’s worth it to have at least as a compliment, ads running so that your organic traffic is staying or, I should say ads are keeping your brand much more top of mind for your organic traffic, and you’re able to monetize that organic traffic as well. I will also say you’re able to control the levers a little bit more. You know, with an organic post, you never know if it’s gonna get, you know, if it’s gonna go viral for you, or if it’s just gonna sit there and do nothing and get, you know, 10 likes or whatever, with, at least with ads. Number one, you’re able to test very, very quickly. And number two, you’re able to, like, just have more consistent results and force meta to work for you.  Okay, so it’s like a 24/7 sales person that’s just always working for you. It’s how I like to describe it. Yeah, I can, I imagine a lot of people listening to like, whoa, wait a second. You know, 250 leads for $300 that feels. Pretty, pretty good, or 200 leads, whatever that ends up being.  Rob Marsh: Can I just quickly ask, is that for a product or a service that is for a lead magnet and it builds a very sub niche?  Tara Zirker: So I want to caveat that and say that is very, very, very niche. The average cost per lead for, let’s just say, unless you have, like, a very niche sort of product or service or something like that, you’re going to pay more that’s like, so optimized. It’s start to finish, you know. And also it’s for a niche that just is underserved. And so it’s a very, very cheap lead that actually monetizes very well on the back end. But it’s also a very small market. It really, I mean, the most I could probably spend on it, it would be, I don’t know, $50, $60, a day. It’s not meant to, like, blow up my business, right? It’s not meant to have a $20,000 a month budget on it, but it works very well for what it is supposed to do. We have, like, a whole metric spreadsheet of how much you should be expecting to spend based on your industry, your niche and your funnel type. And those are three really important things to understand. And I would say maybe three to $8 is probably more average. So you’re not going to get maybe that many leads, but you’re going to qualify those leads. You’re going to know they’re really high value, and you’re gonna be able to, obviously make offers on the back end of that.  Rob Marsh: I mean, even hearing you talk about that, though, there’s a lot of help there, because copywriters who want to serve smaller niches or undersized like, there’s really big opportunities out there if you’re willing to step away from finance or coaching, you know, these big niches where there’s a lot of stuff happening and everybody seems to want to flock there. It’s like, find the smaller niche, and there’s a massive opportunity.  Tara Zirker: Yes, and I would say, I mean, I think that we all will find our our little pocket, you know, whether it be a little bit more broader in the market, or whether you do niche down, but I think that is just a great little nugget for success in general. And what I’ve seen in business is, you know, when you can niche down, and wherever you can find that profitable niche, you can go deep, so much easier, right? So much easier to qualify your ideal client and to get better, higher quality clients too, who, number one, pay more, but number two are easier to work with.  Rob Marsh: Yeah, agreed. Let’s talk about what we need to have in place then, before we can even think about, you know, running ads. Obviously if you don’t have a product or an offer, you shouldn’t be running ads. But what else should we be thinking about so when we do run ads, we hit the ground running, and we maximize our chances for success.  Tara Zirker: That’s right, the first thing that you need is some sort of entry offer. So let’s just say, if you’re focused on building your list, this could be a, I mean, there’s any number of ways to do this. This could be a training if you wanted to do that, or a video, sales letter. This could also be something like some sort of download or free guide, and I will say that where we see the most success with our members and clients is when what they are offering is very specific. So don’t think General. You know, this is the guide for small business owners who want to hire their next copywriter? No, like that is just way too general. So you want something very niche, specific, if you can, and I will say that things like tools perform better than like ebooks. So if we’re thinking like a checklist or a spreadsheet or a it could be like a formula guide or something like that, but if you can think of it as more of a tool versus like an ebook, you’re going to have a much better chance of success. So anything that kind of is a time saver for your client, is going to be like, very magnetic to that client. Rob Marsh: Okay, that makes sense. So we definitely want that. What else do we need to make sure that we’re ready to go?  Tara Zirker: Yeah, so you want some sort of entry level offer, and I will say too. I will say too. And again, it depends on, I would say level of sophistication with how comfortable you are building and optimizing your quote, unquote funnel, but basically the sales process. But there are plenty of service based providers who are taking folks to a very short video sales letter. So it could be oriented around a result, or oriented around mistakes or something like that, and then an application like right under it. And so you’re going to pay more for your leads, but you’re also maybe going to get folks who want your services, like applying right there for your services.  There’s lots and lots of different funnels, so you’re going to have some sort of entry level. Will offer that people are excited to get more information, take that next step with you, and then from there, this is where you now. You’re starting to set up your ads, right so you want to think about a lot of folks will mistake boosting posts or running traffic ads as true kind of back end ads. And I will tell you honestly, there is a tiny bit of value in those, but you only want to spend about 10% of your budget there, 80% of your budget you want to be spending on conversion ads. And in order to do conversion ads, you have to install tiny, tiny bit of tech. Little tech that goes on the back end of your website is called a pixel. You’re gonna install a little bit of code, and this is the ad tech that allows meta to talk to your website and say, Okay, we got conversion. Let’s go find more people that look like that conversion. And that is what allows your ads to get better and better and better. A lot of times, people mistake that they’re boosting a post, they’re running traffic ads, and they think I’m running ads. They’re not working. They never would from that strategy. It’s not really a strategy. It’s like meta is really cheap, inexpensive way of advertising that rarely yields results.  A great example of this, we had one member come in. Her name was Karen. She’s a realtor, and so service based, and she had spent 1600 bucks and had between an ADS budget and a marketing team, and unfortunately that marketing team was doing traffic ads. I said, this is going to both like, delight you and totally like depress you too… so we’re gonna relaunch this. We’re gonna install that pixel. All we’re gonna do is change one button and tell Meta we want this type of person, not just a traffic somebody who will click but not convert. And she, within 72 hours, she had spent 60 bucks. She had 40 leads. And so it’s just knowing the buttons to push and making sure that the tech is set up correctly. And so that’s going to be your next step. You guys set up a tiny, tiny bit of tech, and you’ve got to make sure that everything is going to be able to track, because that is what allows Facebook to really optimize and make sure it’s working as an actual salesperson for your team, not just like you know difference between having a sales conversation, like having a salesperson versus someone who’s like, just holding the sign on the corner and flipping it around like, that’s the difference in how you set up your ads.  From there, everyone’s most favorite part on this podcast. You’re going to write your copy. There you go. Easy peasy. We probably don’t even have to talk about that very much, but there are a few mistakes with ad copy that we could talk through. You’re gonna write your copy. Design your ads doesn’t have to be crazy. 60% of conversions are still coming from static imagery. So people think, I’ve gotta do these videos, got to be crazy. Yes, you should incorporate some video if you can, but you can start with static images, and most conversions still happen from static and then from there, you’re going to actually build your ad, takes about 10 minutes, and you’re going to launch it. And the actual hard part is, after the launch, it’s looking at the metrics, it’s knowing which four metrics to look at, what to optimize based on that data, and honestly, depending on your budget. From there, it’s just monitoring your ads, and it doesn’t have to take a lot of time.  Rob Marsh: I want to come back to the four metrics we need to watch, but you mentioned boosting posts, and you said there is a use case where that makes sense. I’m curious what that is, because I’ve heard the same thing. You know, most boosted posts, it’s a waste of money. Don’t do it. But obviously there’s a reason. So when should we be boosting posts?  Tara Zirker: That’s right. So you can boost, here’s what I will say. I would definitely endorse this, this strategy, if you’re boosting the top 10% of your content, I think this is content that is, it’s already like, getting a lot of visits, a lot of attention, and maybe you’re noticing and and you would need to decide based on what you’re looking for out of your content. Maybe you’re noticing it’s generating a lot of DMS. Maybe you’re noticing it’s generating a lot of followers. Maybe you’re noticing it generates a lot of clicks to your bio. So whatever it is, whatever those kinds of goals are for you, that’s how I would qualify your top 10% and it also could just be views, and that showing, like audience engagement, and you know, that sort of thing. And then here’s what you can do. You can actually repurpose that content as your ads. Okay, so you can make this really easy on yourself, and you can repurpose that as some of your ad creative that’s going to go to that entry level offer. And then the other. That you can do is boost it, and then on the back end, you’re retargeting that engagement with your conversion ads, so about 10% of your budget you can spend on that kind of ad, as long as so big caveat here, as long as you’re also retargeting that engagement with those conversion ads, and you’re saying, hey, Facebook, these people are interested. Go find the ones among them that are most likely to convert. And this is what I want them to do next. And that is the power. That’s the strategy right there.  Rob Marsh: Okay, that makes sense. So let’s talk about the metrics then that we need to be watching. We’re running ads. Maybe we’re putting $10 a day in it, so we’re sort of starting really basic. But what are we watching to make sure that we are actually having an impact on our business, and not just throwing Mark Zuckerberg more of our money?  Tara Zirker: First and foremost is your cost per result. We’ve got a big metric sheet of how much you should spend depending on your business, your industry, your niche, your funnel time. How much should this cost? Right? So let’s just say, if you’re targeting audience in a very competitive space, you might expect, you’re going to pay a little bit more per result, versus if you’re targeting a less competitive space, you’re going to pay less per result. So cost per result. And there’s lots of ways to kind of get a general, you know, foundation there, but I’ll just give a couple here. So let’s just say, if you are sending folks to some sort of initial opt in, that’s like a free guide or checklist, or maybe it’s like a, you know, whatever it is, I would say anywhere from three to $8 would be a really good range. And from there, I’d have to, like, slice and dice it a little bit more, depending on what that niche was, right?  But that’s like a good starting range. Let’s just say you’re sending people to book a consultation or recall something like that. That’s gonna be more expensive, that could be anywhere from 60 up to $500 and again, massive range I’d have to slice and dice it to tell you, like, a more specific range. I usually don’t like huge ranges, but let’s just say, you know, if I’m running maybe I’ve got a high ticket service, and it’s for folks in, like, the coaching space. Okay, probably 250 bucks a call, and I would give that range somewhere between 175 and, like, 300 so I’ve got, like, very specific ranges that I want you to be within.  The next thing that you’re going to look at is your CTR link, click through rate. So CTR link, click through rate. Click through rate on the link. And that is different than another metric that meta has called CTR all all in my mind, is totally junk metric. Rob, you know how, when you write ad copy, or you’re reading an ad and there’s that little more button, yeah? So they would count that as a link click, and we couldn’t care less about that,  Rob Marsh: So they’re just seeing the rest of the ad, and that’s counting it. Yeah, that’s garbage.  Tara Zirker: That’s garbage, right? Or maybe they go to your page, so you might be getting followers from it. But we don’t want to, we don’t want to count that. We don’t want to, like pay attention to that in our matrix of how we’re making decisions and spending money, right? So we want CTR link click through rate and not saying, Hey, I only want people who are clicking to the next step that’s really important. We want that above 1% and copywriters everywhere will love this. This is an easy fix. If that is under 1% meaning, for every 1000 folks that see our ad, we want 10 to well we want. We want 10 or more, usually, like one to 1.5% so 10 to 15 people to click to the next step. And if that’s under 1% or wasting money number one and number two, the easy fix is your ad copy and design. And so that’s where you can really go in and start to, you know, add in hooks, qualify your leads, more things like that. Okay, the next metric we’re looking at is CPM, which is your cost per 1000 impressions. Now, Facebook will do the math for you, but this is the amount that they’re going to be charging to your credit card. If you get one conversion, 10 doesn’t matter, or none, they’re still going to charge you based on your CPM, which is how competitive your ad is against other competitors, and blah, blah, blah, and that they do a big, complicated formula, and they’re saying, Okay, we’re going to charge Rob $30 per 1000 impressions. We’re going to charge Tara um $45 per 1000 impressions, right? So it’s, it’s a big, complicated thing, but we want to see that CPM under $42 if you’re spending more. And again, great news for copywriters. This is like easy to figure out. If it’s more than $42 on a cold audience. It means there is a trigger word in your ad copy, your design, on your landing page, or even in your URL.  And a great example of this was we had a client spending. Gosh, I think it was like a $70,000 budget. Maybe it was 100, something like that. But over a very short period of time, three weeks, and everything’s going great. The ads are doing awesome. All of a sudden, overnight, the ads went, I think it was from like $3 a lead, which was our target, was under five, to like 13 bucks a lead. I mean, it’s a launch ruining jump. It’s actually like quarters revenue, like worth of revenue ruining jump, right? And clients freaking out. We’re freaking out. We have very short period of time to fix this. And so I start testing ad copy like crazy. Me and my team were just pulling out words because what had happened was the CPM had risen that much. So CPM went from like $30 to like 150 bucks or something.  So we knew there was a trigger word, and ads have been running just fine for several days, um, but we had to go in and find that trigger word. So, man, we were, I mean, I got so little sleep during these few days. Finally, on the landing page. So I’m testing ad copy. I’m working with my rep, my reps like there’s literally nothing that I can see in the ad on like I don’t see any problem anywhere. And so I’m testing everything I can think of on the landing page. On the very, very bottom, imagine a really long landing page. There’s a call to action, and right under the call to action, in tiny, tiny print, it says, Bring a glass of bubbly and join the class. And I just had the thought, could bubbly be the word? Like it’s a reference, you know, kind of light reference to alcohol, and could that actually be the word. And so I, you know, I write to their team. I say, can you take this one word off of the landing page? And I, you know, they do that. Within an hour, I go, I launch new set of ads. And CPM, 30 bucks cost per lead, 350 and so that is, there’s certain words, and I have a whole list of them. There’s certain words that just make your ads more expensive, and we just call them trigger words. So that’s a great example of how one trigger word can totally wreck your campaign. And also, it’s also a great example if you get into copywriting for clients, the types of things you want to be aware of and really attuned to. And hopefully, you know, good media buyers should be attuned to those too, but not very many people are all the time, and so they just pay a lot more for their ads. We could be a lot less expensive. So, so you want CPM.  Final thing is your landing page conversion rate, and you’re spending money on ads, you want to make sure your landing page is as optimized as possible. Another great win for copywriters, because you can, you can test this. You can try different headline formulas. You’re seeing if your landing page is converting under the optimal ranges, simply go in and start testing, and for every 100 people that get to that landing page, you’re either going to say, great, that’s working better. Let’s move on to the next test. Or, oops, that’s not working as well. Let’s try something new, and you can get a lot of data very, very, very quickly.  We did this a couple months ago, I think it was, we had a landing page, kind of embarrassing for me to say, but it was converting at 12% which we never have.  Rob Marsh: That’s good.  Tara Zirker: Well, well, it was, it was for leads, though.  Rob Marsh: Oh, okay, I’m sorry. Okay, so sometimes you want a lead, converting maybe 30% 30 50% 100%. I thought you were talking about sales. Tara Zirker: You got it, Rob, If it were sales, I’d be like, Yeah, okay. Sadly, it wasn’t. And I was embarrassed, because I was like, man, well, we did rapid fire Landing Page Conversion Rate testing over 72 hours and had up to 28% we probably should have pushed it a little higher, but that was good enough that our ad costs were were stable enough because, you know, if I’m paying let’s just break down the math really simply, $10 to get 1000 impressions, and I have 1% conversion rate. That means I’ve got, I paid $10 to get 10 people to the page. Well, you can see how my costs would be affected if I have one person convert versus three. So that’s why you’ve got to know these things. Four simple metrics, you’ll be an expert on these if you just pay attention to them for an hour of your life, you will. And copywriters have such a good instinct for what to change, what needs to be tested, but an hour of your life to master these four metrics, and we teach it in, you know, 10 minutes, but really you pay attention for an hour of your life, you will be a master of these four metrics. And these four metrics control the fate of how successful your ads are, which could mean how successful your business is. Rob Marsh: I imagine this is going to change depending on how long you’ve been running ads. But how often should you be checking those metrics? Is it every day, every week? I tune in every quarter to see that things are still going what does that look like?  Tara Zirker: Exactly. So when you launch ads, you’re going to be looking at these every day for the first like three to five days. Then you’re going to look at them once a week. If you’re like most new advertisers, you’re going to be looking at them multiple times a day. But it’s unnecessary, I promise. And then, you know, honestly, it depends on what kind of funnel you’re running, but once things are kind of up and running once a month for a couple minutes, and those are the only four things you’re looking at, by the way, you can look at a whole bunch more. To me, there’s a lot of vanity metrics and a lot of like, fluffy things that just make no difference to the bottom line. Those four right there control everything that is successful about your ads. And so, yeah, once, once a month, the funnel I mentioned earlier is a once a month. Look, for me, with our main ad account where we’re driving folks to our successful ads accelerator, that’s a once a week.  Rob Marsh: How often should we be changing up creative? Obviously, the numbers that we’re looking at are gonna, you know, affect that. But I think one of the things that certainly worries me, and I’m sure worries a lot of other service providers, is the thought that, well, what I don’t want this to become is I need to come up with new creative and be testing new creative every three or four days, or even every couple of weeks. That becomes as hard a job as posting new stuff on social media organically all the time, right? So basically, I’ve just duplicated the difficulty of social media into my ads account. How often do we need to be looking at stuff like that?  Tara Zirker: Yeah, I just heard a recommendation of, and I was like, Absolutely not, not ever in the million years. Do you need this much? But I heard a recommendation out there, um, of 20 creatives per $1,000 and I was like, I’ve seen, never, would I ever, never.  Rob Marsh: People talk about, yeah, when you’re launching, you need to have 20 different ad sets, and you need to be sending certain amount of dollar amount until the algorithm figures out which one is the best. And then you’ve got to do you take those two or three and now you’ve got to do 10 different versions of those with different graphics or different copy, you know?  Tara Zirker: So, yeah, it starts to be like too much to even start to comprehend thing. There’s no way I want to do this. Never, when I would ever… Now, here’s the thing, when you do get up into bigger launch spends and you have a media buyer or an agency that you’re working with, their job is to be doing that level of creative iteration, not, not at Crazy volumes. There’s, there’s a point at which is just, it makes absolutely no sense, like you wouldn’t be able to efficiently test that amount with, you know, properly. So there’s, there’s a certain VA, there’s like a sweet spot of volume for every account. But let’s just put this in small business owner terms. If you are spending $1,000 or less, I mean, a great example. Well, I’ll use both of my accounts actually, one that spends, you know, into the five figures, and one that is like the $300 a month. One that $300 a month one, I’m doing creative update maybe once or twice a year. Very minor. It’s like, I’ll go into Canva, I’ll edit the colors, and I will maybe do a couple of copy variations. I’ll put it back into the algorithm. It rarely requires more testing than that. And that’s where I would say it’s about an hour investment if I’m kind of moving slow in my Canva account, you know, right? If I am. And this, I do think, is where copywriters, again, have that advantage, because you kind of have a sense of what, oh, that’s working. Well, let’s test this. You kind of have that inner sense and knowing of like, you know, or maybe I want to insert a little more sales psychology into this copy piece, like you don’t have to spend a lot of time there. If on my larger account, or any larger account, I’m, well, let’s just go my larger account, you know, I would say I’m updating creative once a quarter, and it’s not much more honestly than what I just described. Now, when I first got my account to a really great, optimal place, it did take me a little bit more time up front. You know, the first few months I was testing and seeing, like, where’s the right market message fit and what are people really, really glomming on to one of the coolest things I did, and this honestly made all the difference in my copy and my creative ever since was I went through, we have just under 1000 testimonials. I don’t think I had that many at the time, maybe like 100 like testimonial type things. And I went in there, and I saw two things over and over again. So I saw people kept saying effective. I’ve never used that in my marketing. They kept saying effective ads. And they kept saying, you know, I just, I always had such a headache doing ads or these are like, headache free. And I was like, those are two weird things, but I saw enough that I picked up on those signals and I put that in my messaging. I had a great mentor once who said, try not to write anything that your clients didn’t say first, right? And, man, that made all the difference so and that just would never be how I would describe my program to somebody, you know, but we help you create fast, effective ads like that is the key to our whole business, and it came from my clients, directly from their mouths.  Rob Marsh: Yeah, that’s a copywriting trick right there that’s so good, really well known. So while we’re talking about testing and different creatives. What is the kind of stuff that we should be testing? And I’m asking this because I know that some people say you should be only testing big Ideas. And then there are a lot of people who get hung up and testing things like a call to action that says, Call click now versus click today, versus click for more and tests that probably don’t actually tell you a whole lot. So how do you think through testing? Do we need to be testing graphics? Do we need to be testing headlines? Any of that?  Tara Zirker: Yes. Okay, so when we teach creative testing, we always start with copy, actually. So on test, honestly, we want to you can test lots of frameworks, but we also want to test lengths, short, medium long copy and extra long copy right now is trending on meta. There is a theory that meta is indexing based on copy and so, and this gets into a whole different conversation, but think of it like how we used to write blog posts, or how we still write blog post, very SEO rich. So that’s another trick, or another thing that you can be testing. Then we want to test our imagery. Always. Five to 10 images is what we recommend right now, videos and or GIFs. So you can include a mix there. And then we want to be testing headlines. And so the way that we teach testing right now, we have a really cool way of testing that kind of puts it all together and lets the algorithm decide. You can also test them one at a time, and this is the old school way that we used to teach, which I still love, but is a little bit more of a manual effort. So you can let the algorithm kind of do the testing for you, or you can do it yourself. But the most important piece is that you want to test that mix that I just described, and then idea versus idea versus like smaller tweaks.  So I would say initially, I would just stick to one framework, and then you can test different copy, you know, frameworks, against each other if you want. So one framework and three different lengths, or four different lengths, if you want to go the want to go the extra long way version, and then from there, yes, with maybe you see like, like, we have, for example, one client who just honestly, it’s the same copy that has converted for years for them, and we will test all sorts of things against it, but it’s that one copy that generates almost all of the results. And yes, what we do now is micro testing within that. And so we’ll change up the call to action. We’ll change up the emojis. By the way, I call that styling, and there’s lots of styling, little tips and tricks, but like the green check mark is one of the best emojis that always test incredibly well on meta. So take that and run with it. But there’s just all these little different things you can test, kind of within your winners. So it’s almost like you want to get some big winners, and then from there you can start drilling down, if you want to, optional but optimal, you can start drilling down into the little stuff. Rob Marsh: Let me ask about targeting. So I know if I’ve done a big launch in the past, and I’ve got, you know, several hundred buyers, I can easily upload those and create a lookalike audience. But for a lot of service providers who are maybe working with three or four clients a month, which nets out at maybe 20 a year, you almost have to have five years worth of those clients to create a look alike audience. So how do I as a small business create an audience of ideal prospects to be targeting?  Tara Zirker: I’m going to tell you the version of my answer that’s relevant right now, and the version that I believe will be relevant in 12 months from now. So right now you can target based on interests, so small business owner as a behavior, let’s say, could be a great one. Maybe you’re targeting parents. You can target all these different parents. Why would you be targeting parents? Rob Marsh: I suppose there might be a copywriter you know, targeting parent writing type niches or whatever.  Tara Zirker: You’re targeting businesses. However, if you’re writing for clients and I will say, I think that if you are writing for clients, having at least some basic skill level on ads can be helpful. So you can, you can write specific copy for specific interests and things like that. But basically, small business owner is a behavior. You can target Facebook page admins as an example, so that you wouldn’t have be an admin on a Facebook page unless you have a business or you’re a thought leader of some kind, right? So there’s lots of ways to do targeting that would like specifically call out to your ideal client within the targeting the answer I will give you a year from now, and I I’m anticipating this is where it’s going, is there’s no targeting period, and the algorithm just knows, and your creative will actually be the qualifier and Tell meta where to place those ads. And so we see, and just to give a little more context there, we see that the way the campaign structure is, you know, for many accounts, it still is this way. But for other accounts, they’re noticing top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. Those are kind of traditional how you would think about ads, those are applying less and less. It’s just becoming one big funnel, and the algorithm is going and finding your right person.  A great example of this Rob is ourselves. I mean, we’re targeting a small business owner spending under 5000 a month in ads, and who wants to really learn how to do it, do it well, and not hire it out yet. Okay? Maybe at some point they will. Maybe they never do. We’ve noticed that our best targeting right now, or some of our best targeting, is broad targeting. I’ll put the ages in, and I’ll put the country that I’m targeting, and that’s it. No interest, no look alikes, no nothing. And Meta is just going out and finding Ito clients for me based on what it knows about me and what it knows I want. So how crazy is that, but that’s where it’s all going. Rob Marsh: That’s really cool. Do you have to have a history in your meta account for that to work that way? Tara Zirker: We’ve seen accounts brand new. Start off with broad target and targeting and do really, really well as long as you’re creative. You always do want to have, like you always want to have the geography in there, otherwise, you’re going to get lots of cheap but very random results from all over the world. And that’s not what you want, right? You want qualified leads and customers and things like that. So you always want to put your geography, I will say there could be a use case for age, although it honestly doesn’t matter so much, because meta will figure that out. And if you’re writing for clients, you may want to think about gender, but again, doesn’t matter so much, because Meta will figure it out. They’ll know which ads are more attractive to men versus women. You know, male versus female, that whole thing. So all that targeting is probably going to go away at some point, but for now, it exists. You can use it. It’s not totally necessary.  Rob Marsh: Interesting. What else should I be asking that I just don’t even have the background, you know, talking about, how do service providers step into this role and become advertisers?  Tara Zirker: Yeah, well, I think that, you know, there is, there seems to be the type of person, a type of person that does really, really well with ads. And it’s not surprising to me that so many fantastic, what we would call media buyers or agency owners who go into ADS. They come from a copy background. I can’t tell you how many of my colleagues, you know, they just wanted to add on a skill set, or they saw an opportunity, or they just really were attracted to advertising. They’re like, I have this great skill set and copy, and I think I could apply it really well to this, and they usually do great. So there’s a real natural fit. And I think that, like when I think through our members inside of our successful ads accelerator, some of the best ones, honestly, are have copywriting backgrounds. They just get it. They kind of understand what needs to happen at that copy level to create a conversion.  On the back end. They understand sales psychology. They understand the flow. And so there’s a real, natural fit. So whether you wanted to do it for yourself, which I think is great, to keep that expense small in house, learn the skill set. It’s a skill set that will follow you the rest of your life, from business to business, whatever you do. It’s an amazing skill set. Or maybe you do want to get into writing copy. For ads clients. I mean, that’s a very lucrative niche, niche, or maybe you want to actually build the skill set and run ads yourself or experiment with it. I think there’s lots of approaches, but I do think that copywriters have a real natural fit. The things that I would be aware of that are shifting trends and stuff is like, how do you bring AI into that?  Rob Marsh: That was gonna be my next question is, how are you using AI? It for, I mean, obviously meta has got it running in the background, helping to find the right prospects and all of that. How are you using AI in the foreground, you know, in the planning, the strategizing and the writing of the ads?  Tara Zirker: Yes. I mean, we’re using it heavily, and we still depend on our copywriters. I will say, you know, my, my big opinion is, and I think for all professions that are being touched by AI and it is massively disrupting, right? Is like, I don’t think any of these professions are going away, but they are definitely shedding their skin and what I what I’m seeing is the AI can replace the average almost across the board, and it will enhance the exceptional. And so I think that you that, no matter, you know, if you all marketers are being, you know, very, very like, impacted by AI. And I think that’s where we just have to take our skill set to exceptional. You know, you can’t be good. You have to be great. If you’re great, you need to be excellent. And that is, I think, where the opportunity lies.  In preparing for this interview, I asked AI its opinion on like, specifically for like, ad copywriters. And I was just, you know, we went through a whole conversation that was really good. But here, and I said, be brutally honest. And it said, Okay, here’s the brutally honest future state snapshot for AI and copywriting, ads and copywriting, excuse me, and I thought this was so good. It says number one, AI is going to write more first drafts. I think that’s across the board, probably already seeing that. Yeah, 100% smart copywriters will edit for tone, angle and conversion. Number two, and this, for me, is where all, all marketing is going. Um, anything that’s impacted by AI, this is 100% where I see my clients wanting, if I’m thinking of like, ad clients, for example, this is where they’re at, and this is where we’ve been moving for a long time. So you know, kind of works out well, but clients want outcomes and not assets. So copywriters will be hired to optimize funnels or drive ROAs, not just write a sales page or write ad copy. And I think right there is all of the value in what’s going to happen and be disrupted over the next five years, like even, you know, even my clients that are heavily using AI themselves. They want that human, not necessarily analysis, because AI can do the analysis, but they want the like, what are your insights? What are you seeing in other clients? Like that is where all the value is. Number three, it said multi disciplinary thinkers will rise. The copywriter who understands ads plus Email Plus audience journey will be 10x more valuable. When I saw that, I was like, Oh, my goodness, yes, yes, yes. Like, from an agency perspective, that’s it. If you can understand the entire customer journey and how copy, not as an asset, but as an outcome, is going to impact every place. And if you can look at an analysis, or conduct an analysis with AI and say, This is where you know, this is this is where the market is really interested in our message, this is where we’re losing. This is where we’re losing that we’re losing engagement, right? Like that, right? There is huge. And I think that is the value, at least from my agency’s perspective, my training perspective, that is where the value is at. Rob Marsh: I couldn’t agree more. I actually teach a college course on customer journeys and helping you know students see how journeys come together and the various platforms that you know and how they all fit together. And the more I teach that course, the more it strikes me that that is a superpower for marketers, if you can understand even lead scoring and attribution and how it all fits together. It makes a massive, massive difference.  Tara Zirker: I agree. I think if you skill up or re skill in just any one of those, like what you just said, you know, analytics or attribution or understanding customer journey. I mean, that is where 100% I think that’s where all of the future lies, and not just for copywriters, but everybody in marketing. I saw a great study by Procter and Gamble, and they did this study kind of establishing what a baseline output is for the average person, like in just like the average worker, yeah, and so and marketing is, for sure, the most. I think it was marketing and sales is going to be the first wave of massive disruption all other industries will follow with AI, except probably some offline, you know, specific, like manual labor industries. But it was very interesting. It showed kind of the baseline is what the baseline always has been. It’s just the average output. And then they showed an entire team and their average output. And here’s what’s crazy. Rob, a person, one person, AI, enhanced employee outperforms an entire team. Oh, wow. So we got to wrap our minds around that. That is, if we want to understand, how do we provide value in this next wave of innovation, which is AI that right there is what we’ve got to wrap our minds around. And how do we become AI enhanced, and what are the skills that companies will be wanting and hiring for? I think you described it so beautifully. It’s that, it’s that attribution. It’s that, you know, being able to, like, score a lead. It’s being able to look at a funnel and say, this is where we’re dropping off. Here’s our tools, and copy is definitely one of the biggest tools to fix it.  Rob Marsh: Yeah, I agree. We’re running out of time, but I definitely want to ask a question about, you know, formulas or hooks, or if you had to set up a new account, and it absolutely had to succeed, you know, if, if it doesn’t work, Tara is banished from Facebook ads or whatever, is there a hook or a formula that you would lead off with that you would try first, because, you know, it tends to perform pretty well, or it’s a good starting point to start to build off of? Tara Zirker: Yeah, anything that is around problem awareness is where I would go. So, and I know I’m like, rusty on all my formulas, but like, problem or pain, the interrupts. So maybe it’s not this, but it’s this, right? And then, like, the invitation, the CTA, that’s where, if I’m like, Oh, if I’m really betting on success and I really need this to to do, well, that’s where I would go. So you know, if I’m thinking about my customer, for example, sometimes they’re not even aware that traffic might be their issue. They just know they’re not getting enough sales. But it’s like, is it the offer, or is it the traffic? And so anything that I can do to bring awareness to that problem, like maybe their conversion rate is fine, or obviously, everybody always wants their conversion rate to improve. But the bigger problem is they’re not getting enough eyeballs, and they don’t even understand, like, if one to 3% of your audience converts, well, then I need more audience. And so anything I can do to bring awareness to that issue is really, really helpful. So that’s kind of a little case study there. How I would think through that.  Rob Marsh: That makes a lot of sense. Again, thinking about copywriters and content writers who may be working with, you know, three to six clients a month, you really don’t need to close that many clients. You know, if you can, if you’re pretty good, you know, you’re closing, say, one out of three or one out of two calls. You don’t need that many leads. And that’s where it seems to me, what you’re talking about, even the $10 a day type ads that drives, you know, if, again, if you were to get 20 leads into your business a month, and you close a third of them, your your business is just fine, and you’re probably making 10k or more a month. Tara Zirker:  100% I think for any business owner it’s valuable to understand that, but what you just shared is gold, because so many people don’t realize what it takes to actually create a conversion. If it only takes three or four calls, well, then I know, and I only need two or three clients, those numbers just got a lot easier. Yeah, exactly.  Rob Marsh: Okay. This has been eye opening for me in a lot of ways. I’ve followed you on your list for a long time. I know you do. You know regular trainings, and you’ve got this accelerator. Tell us a little bit about the accelerator, and of course, I’m going to link to it, thecopywriterclub.com/tara, if anybody wants to check it out. But tell us just a little bit about what you guys do in the accelerator?  Tara Zirker: Yeah, absolutely. So we take clients and we show them how to run ads within a couple of hours, we’re gonna have your ad set up. So big nutshell version is, if you want to run ads, we have six fast and easy levels. They’re 20 to 40 minutes a piece. The unique thing is, everything we do includes one on one coaching, so every time you finish one of those levels, we’re gonna have one of our coaches hop on a call with you and actually audit your work, make sure that everything is set up for your success before you ever spend $1 so your tech is in place, your design is great, you know, like your offer is really top notch, so it is a full like one on one, done with you. Program really affordable, really well priced. And you know this, I would say, is for someone who’s spending less than $5,000 you’re not quite ready to outsource. It will help you do that when you’re ready, but you just want to get these ads set up and working quickly. Rob Marsh: Would this also work for somebody who wants to create ads for clients? Would this give a baseline for that person as well. Tara Zirker: 100% we don’t have a specific agency track, but I would say about 20% of our membership is agency owners who’ve gone through a program. Some of them have even hired team members and put them right through the program. And so you’re going to learn the nuts and bolts, what you need to do, set up a client account, and then you’ll have ongoing support. We have so many agency owners who just you’ll have after the program. We have, like, a membership portion on the back end. So every month you get a call, so you’re not in a group call. We do have those. You’re getting an actual call to make sure, like, you know what? Let’s try tweaking this. Or here’s something we’re seeing work on accounts. You could try this on your client account or so. It’s really cool. Very hands on.  Rob Marsh: And Tara, if somebody’s not quite ready for that, they just want to be on your list. Can they also get on your list there at that same link, or do we need to give them a different link?  Tara Zirker: You know, if you go to youradkit.com that will get you the anatomy of a perfect ad, and it just kind of walks through what an ad needs to be really successful. And that will get you on our email list. Rob Marsh: Perfect. I’ll link to both of those in the show notes. I really appreciate you taking the time to walk me through all of this, especially from the service provider standpoint. You know, we see Facebook ads for products so often, and it’s nice to take a look at it from this other direction, where it may benefit so many more of us than currently use Facebook ads, and I used Instagram ads WhatsApp, but so thank you for all of that. I really appreciate it.  Tara Zirker: Thanks for having me. Great to be with you.  Rob Marsh:  Thanks to Tara for the masterclass on Facebook ads and the analytics that actually matter, what to watch and look out for. If you found Tara’s insights valuable, make sure you get on her list… I shared a URL during our interview that will take you to The Successful Ads Accelerator: If you want to add Facebook ads to your skill set, and a lot of copywriters would benefit from knowing how to use ads on Facebook and Instagram… you can find out more about Tara’s program at thecopywriterclub.com/tara  You could join Tara’s program and be running an ad for your service in less than two hours. Be sure to check that out at thecopywriterclub.com/tara I’ve got to admit, I find myself wanting to use Facebook ads but worry that the algorythm changes faster than I can keep up and I’m a bit worried about messing up my ads account. We’ve used ads in the past and had varying success with them. We’ve filled our programs using ads, but also had the opposite experience and spent more than we could justify, so this kind of discussion is incredibly helpful to me and I hope helpful to you too. If you’re interested in diving into this a bit deeper, we’ve got a training in The Copywriter Underground called “Engineering Successful Facebook Launches” that will walk you through using Facebook and Instagram ads to launch a product or service. If you’re a member, it’s in the new dashboard. And if you’re not a member, you can fix that now at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

In a world where A.I. can write all of the words for free, what is a copywriter to do? What tools should they adopt and how should they approach artificial intelligence? I invited Petter Magnusson, the creator of PurposeWrite, to join me on The Copywriter Club Podcast to discuss these questions and talk through how copywriters can use tools like his to serve our clients better. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: Petter on LinkedIn PurposeWrite (sign up for a free trial) The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: It’s been three years since ChatGPT launched and changed the world. So what does A.I. mean for copywriting today? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast. When OpenA.I. released the first version of ChatGPT to the public, what had been a quiet conversation about artificial intelligence happening mostly behind the scenes suddenly burst into our collective consciousness. Writers and creators in particular were suddenly aware that at least at some level, these large language models could do some of the work we were being hired to do. Many of us dove into these tools to see what they could do. We launched a short-lived podcast that talked about how A.I. was impacting so many different ways of working, certainly within marketing, but also in many other industries. You can find the 20+ episodes of that podcast on The Copywriter Club website. Since that time, the dust has settled a bit. The A.I. tools have gotten a bit better. Image creation tools are significantly better. Writing tools have also improved, but it remains true today that the best copywriters seem to be able to use them to get the best outputs… if you want good copy, copy that captures attention and converts readers into buyers, it helps a lot to have a copywriter guide the inputs and rework the outputs you get from the A.I. model of your choice. Another thing we’ve seen in over the past couple of years is that while tools like ChatGPT and Claude get most of the headlines, lots of other tools have added components of artificial intelligence to improve their products, speed up useage, and make applications more sticky. At the same time we’ve seen the launch of job-specific A.I. tools that do one thing… like writing emails, or writing articles at speeds humans simply can’t match. So when it comes to A.I., where are we headed next? What tools will we be using to get better results? And how helpful is it to have a user or prompt engineer or copywriter who really knows what they’re doing versus just playing around to see what they can get a model to do? I asked Petter Magnusson, the developer of PurposeWrite to talk a bit about A.I., the tool he’s built, and also the broader environment of artificial intelligence and where he sees us going from here. And because whatever happens with A.I. will have a big impact on copywriters, this is a topic I may come back to in the coming weeks. This whole industry is fascinating. The speed of change is a bit scary.  During our conversation, I had a realization. In the past copywriters charged for the things we delivered… the words. Officially we sold blog posts or sales pages or emails or some other copy, but it was the words that clients expected to get. But now that ChatGPT can produce the words pretty much for free, we need to move up the value chain and sell the process, the strategy, the analysis, and the ideas. And bringing that to the A.I. model you use will make the outputs there so much better. Any way… I think this is a discussion you’ll enjoy. Before we get to my interview with Petter, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. Unless you are hitting the 30 second skip button when you get to this point of the show, you are no doubt familiar with The Copywriter Underground. I talk about it every week. The Underground includes more than 70 different workshops—and accompanying playbooks to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. The Playbooks make it easy to find quick solutions to the challenges you face in your business everything from finding clients, conducting sales calls, using A.I., building authority on LinkedIn or YouTube or Pinterest, and dozens of other workshops. You also get dozens of templates including a legal agreement you can use with your clients, monthly coaching, regular copy and funnel critiques, and more. You can learn more by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. And now, my interview with Petter Magnusson… Petter, welcome to the podcast. I am really interested in your journey. How did you go from, i think, photographer, content creator, and now you founded an AI company all about writing How did you get here? Petter Magnusson: First of all, thanks for having me. I’ve been like, to be honest, I have discovered your pod fairly recently, but I have listened in and I really like what you do. So I’m going to be stuck in here for a long time listening. Rob Marsh: Thank you. Petter Magnusson: There’s a bunch of episodes. So yeah, it’s so much, so many I want to listen to. So I’m surely going to do that. Yeah, so I have a bit of a weird mixed history. So I started as a, I don’t know if you youll probably You will edit this, you I guess. Rob Marsh: Of course, well if yeah we can always cut it down or or sometimes we just like to hear the story. Petter Magnusson: My background is a bit long story, I started out as ah as a programmer, actually, a long time ago. And then I started studying physics and I studied physics engineering. Then I went to Japan for for my work in advanced laser physics kind of thing. And then I stumbled into sales for that laser company doing sales. And that led me into marketing where I became marketing manager for an IT company in Sweden. And we did extremely well. We happened to sell modems at the time that internet exploded. My boss still thinks that I had magic hands or something because he became super rich from that. And and he still thinks I was had a part of it. So anyway, so I did that. And then I started getting really interested in photography. And… I was having reached some of my life goals, to be honest, at the early 30s. I thought, ah, I want to change direction. So then I just bailed out. I applied for art school in Norway and I got in i as I took a bachelor in in art ah photography. And then I went to to do master’s degree also in Sweden in yeah photo and film. So then I was like a ah photo artist actually exhibiting in galleries and stuff like that. Classic art, you know, career. Until I got a little bit angry with that world in a way, because it’s not as it’s not as free as you may think. You know, I used to think that art is free. But in the art world, to survive, you have to be fairly political. You have to know certain people, you have to network, and you need to make pieces about the right topics if you want to get the scholarships and the exhibitions. And, you know, that might be all fine, but then I saw how people are were adapting to that, and that like goes against everything that art is for me. So that kind of got me, yeah. Rob Marsh: Yeah. Petter Magnusson: And then I thought, well, I might as well go commercial. so so So I did that. as so I went into commercial photography and and filmmaking. And now I have a small production company in Stockholm, and we’re doing corporate stuff mostly. So a lot of B2B topics. And that’s when I started to see what what kind of led into PurposeWrite. I have a lot of I see exactly the same. I saw the same happening in visual content as in copywriting, I think. People come to me and they were like, hey, video is hyped. We want to make a film or or something. And I’m like, OK, great. Why do you want to make a film? And they’re like, it’s hip or something. And I’m like, OK, who’s going to see this film? I don’t know. Everyone. and i’m like okay you know So I had to start you know the journey with them to like, okay, let’s find out if if you actually should make a film and who should watch it. What is your target audience and you know pain points and and interests and stuff like that. So that was kind of a struggle sometimes to make people understand that, yeah, of course I can just make a film for you, but that will make not make you happy or or the viewers or anyone. so And then we started… producing some text content too, and and especially for ourselves. And I think the trigger point came because I was trying to hire a guy that was not very good at writing, to be honest. Oh, maybe you should edit this out in case he listens to this. But anyway, ah yeah, I came across that that was going to do some some writing for us. And then I saw the same pattern in text. And I think that’s what triggered me. like Because he would produce content pieces that had no direction, no purpose, no, you know, not thinking about who’s going to read this and why are writing it? And and why are they going to read this? Everything like that. And that got me started that, okay, this is this is exactly the same problem. But and And then at that at that time, AI came along, you know, ChatGPT and everything. So I started playing with that and put that tool ah to work by kind of turning the process around. Because when you normally when you use ChatGPT, you write a prompt um and that will do something for you. And I could see the same problem there. Like, you know, generic content just exploding on LinkedIn and platforms like that. um I’m mainly talking content now because that’s the the area that I’m familiar with. But people are are mindlessly prompting stuff and they get something that looks pretty good. I mean, AI writes pretty good. Layout is nice with nice headlines and stuff. So yeah, on the surface, all is always fine, but it’s really horrible. It’s got no no value, you know. Rob Marsh: Yeah, it lacks so much, just from an emotional connection standpoint. Petter Magnusson: Yeah, exactly that. And there’s so many problems with it, you know like the emotional standpoint, the story, the style, and again, having a purpose with it, like who are you writing for, everything like that. And the thing is, i discovered that um you can actually i have AI make pretty good text. But again, hip yeah and this leads me back. Now I’m i’m like floating around in my my thinking bit. But lead this leads me back to the visual area because I saw the same exactly thing happening there because I’m coming from visual side of things. And I saw the same thing happening there first before I came to the tech side, like imaging, you know, AI imaging. First you saw it and you thought, wow, this is so cool. It looks amazing. and and and then I’m trying to use it for professional purposes. And then I see, oh, it’s not so easy to direct this thing. i can make something cool. But when I do have a brief and I do have a brand and then an image and a style and a mood board, and it’s extremely hard to make it do what i want because I have a vision for what I want. Yeah, a vision for the result. And that’s when it’s like tricky and I started realizing that, huh, all right, yeah, you need to actually feed this pretty much information to get what you want out of it. It is possible, though. you know If you give give enough information, you you can get pretty good results. And that’s what I discovered with text, too, that if you have a copywriter mindset, So, you know, sort i mean, first of all, you need to know what kind of information you should put in your prompt. If you ask it to just like generate a LinkedIn article about, like in my case, then selecting a corporate photographer, which could be a topic on our blog, you know, like one of those value bringing articles that are not selling us as a company, but like seemingly neutral guide kind of thing. then that will be totally generic, not helping the customer and not helping us in any way. But yeah, if you start putting in like the good stuff, like who are we writing for, what is actually important to think about, but then you are in a situation where you’re almost writing it yourself. So then the question is, what’s the what’s the purpose here? Yeah, gosh, I’m yeah gosh Rob Marsh: So how did you go from how did you go from there to wanting to build your own tool ah that’s going to do this? Because, i mean, it’s one thing for a copywriter say, okay, I’m going to you know do the back and forth with Claude or ChatGPT, and I’m going to tweak it or maybe even set up a custom GPT at this point in order to feed it some some ah preliminary data so that it’s giving me you know a particular voice or whatever. But Going from from that to, well, i’m going to actually build a different tool that’s going to do all of this stuff in a different way. That’s a whole other jump. Petter Magnusson: Exactly, yeah. And I started out exactly like what you say now. I started you know building larger prompts, longer prompts, more complicated, and then into custom GPTs. But then I started running into problems because when when the prompts got longer, like when I started getting to the really good ones, you know when I actually specify the tone and the target audience in detail and and everything like that, I started having problems with the AI cannot, can then and not any longer keep track of what it’s supposed to do. It’s losing stuff when the prompt gets too long. It’s hard to, it doesn’t know where to focus kind of. come And that’s when I started thinking, wow, I would actually need, and then I know that a lot of people make then than several custom GPTs, like one for this, one to find the target audience and one to do this and that. And then I thought, huh, I started doing the same. And then I thought, what if I would have a tool that can tie these things together so I can actually do these things together? Step by step. And that is kind of countering the limitations of the of the prompting. so And then I came up with the idea of making it like a traditional, since I’m coming from a programming in background, I started thinking, A traditional program would actually be pretty good here. you know Step by step, first do this, then ask the user about this information, then go to the LLM and ask that to provide something back. So that’s how it started. So I started making a simple scripting language that can call ChatGPT and Claude. And that is actually all that PurposeWrite is in in a way. It’s a scripting language. And it’s um yeah it’s actually even open. So users can also make their own custom scripts if they want. So it’s kind of custom GPT on steroids, I say. um And the thing is, what happens there is that then you can kind of decide. Now getting, I don’t know how nerdy you want to get here. Rob Marsh: Well, I’m curious, you know, obviously there are um a hundred writing tools out there now for, you know, mean, so even stepping beyond ChatGPT, which we’ll write, or Claude, which we’ll write, or LeChat, or HuggingFace, or Grok, or, you know, they’ll all do sort of the same thing. Petter Magnusson: Yes. Rob Marsh: But your tool, you’ve dialed it in for some, well, I mean, for It’s purposes and it’s even called purpose, right? So I’m not trying to be clever by saying that, but but um what have you done in your tool to make sure that what’s coming out of it is actually meeting the needs of the user? Petter Magnusson: Right. Yeah. so and And that’s when we get a little bit nerdy now, because what what I do is to to not confuse the AI, is that I call the AI, the aid LLM, ChatGPT or Claude in this case, actually, which is what I’m calling. I call them in in small chunks. And I can decide, yeah okay I’m going to do this techie part. I don’t know if you you can edit this out if you don’t want it. But anyway, there’s something called context window. So every time you write a new prompt, you will also send along everything, the and the whole old conversation. And sometimes it even warns you, like, hey should you really continue this conversation? Because it’s starting to get very expensive. Because you even if you write short prompts, it’s going to send ah away all the conversation with it. And that can sometimes confuse it. So in this scripting language, you can choose if you want to send along the context or not. So you can make little simple questions. So that ah so this is not really about how writing writing style or anything, but it’s just making it easier for the AI to solve a certain task. So I could like i could scrape a web page, which is why i do it in and one of these guides, or mini apps inside of PurposeWrite, we call guides. And one is called ArticleWriter. And then you give it a yeah URL. It will scrape that page. And then you can say, please find suitable target audiences. Who do you think I’m trying to talk to on this website? And then it can give you suggestions. And then I will only do that. So that is a small, simple task. And then I can be pretty explicit about that task and give it a pretty pretty advanced prompt for that task because it’s only one task. If I would mix that into a longer prompt that would do 10 things, it would be too much information. So that is one way that you can like kind of give it a one simple task, do this, and then will perform much better. And the other thing is that so I’m doing that in steps. So first, um if you look at ArticleWriter, you can, of course, yourself say, if you know your target audience, you just write it in in there. Or you can say, please help me analyze what what do you think is the target audience. And then it will look at the target audience. and Compare that to the, I mean, i’m I’m talking mostly LinkedIn content here. So you are probably trying to sell a service or a product. Rob Marsh: Well, I mean, copywriters do everything, right? So it can be everything from you know content for LinkedIn, whether that’s for our own businesses or whether we’re helping a client write that kind of an article. But obviously LinkedIn will have a character limit ah where maybe a blog post might be able to go longer or a sales page, which could go on for say 18 or 19 pages, right? Where you know it could it can get very extensive depending on what the product is. So obviously there’s lots of different contexts as to the kind of copy that we’re writing or to the audience that we’re writing to. um And your tool, as I understand it, is is maybe better for some of those shorter length ones, but does would it also help write a sales page it it you know considerable length? Petter Magnusson: Yeah, it it can do longer ah stuff, ah absolutely. um The thing is, I have chosen to focus on one area, and this is purely actually a marketing decision because Being a scripting language, I could actually make those scripts do anything. you know like I could probably make a script that helps write a chapter in a book or something. Maybe not the whole book, but at least. you know so but um I have decided that my target audience is people trying to build a personal brand or a company brand on LinkedIn with content. So just to you know narrow it down, make it easier to place this product But there’s nothing stopping it to do other things. And that’s why I talk about content so much. And this is because this is the target we have now. Rob Marsh: Yeah that is and and So this is this is interesting. Obviously, a lot of a lot of copywriters are on LinkedIn, are using the tool to you know create interest ah in their services and their thinking. One of the criticisms I hear about ah LinkedIn is that it is full content. AI generated content and that it’s not reflective of true thought leadership. You know, people aren’t actually writing what they’re putting up under their own names. i I’m sure that this is happening with copywriters too, although that boggles my mind that that writers don’t actually write, but you know, um maybe it’s happening. I hope that most of this content that I see, you know, on LinkedIn is actually real, but how does your tool help um pull out actual thought leadership, actual real writing and not not become the writer itself. Petter Magnusson: Yeah, that is a fine line, actually. And I’m trying to avoid because I could, of course, make a guide that says, so press button, get content. Rob Marsh: Exactly. Especially if you can if you can just read another website or another post whatever, rewrite it in this voice. AI can do that all day long. Petter Magnusson: Yeah, exactly. So I mean, I could do that, but I hate that stuff myself. So I’m um trying to to to not do that. And these guides that I do, and I think that that is actually potentially even a weakness of the tool. I’ve heard from some people that, you know, What I’m doing is I’m asking you to provide for a lot of information to write something. you know Okay, you can I can look at the webpage to find the target audience and the pain points and stuff and background information about the product or services or something, but you still have to choose. you know what pain points you want to address here out of suggestions that you can add yourself. And then it will also, after that, it will come back with areas that it thinks you should provide additional information. So it’s it will not base the whole piece on just that background information. It will say, okay, I found these 10 areas that um you could potentially say something about And then you can write that. in Of course, you can be lazy and say, na not going to do that. But if you take your time and do that, the piece is going to be so much better. And that, as I said, that is in the same with style and voice and stuff like that. You can specify so much. And that is also, like i was saying, part of the weakness, perhaps, because I’m looking at spying out how people are using the tool. And I see that quite a lot of people are actually bailing out in the process. So that’s something I need to to address, I think. and But I’m not sure if I should go all the way there either to you know meet those requirements, because I think a lot of those people come with the expectation that, oh, it’s a content tool. It’s one of those, we scraped a thousand LinkedIn posts, and now you just put in your company name and press this button, and you have copies of that content. And if you expect that, and then you you get a million questions about ah tone of voice and and target audience and stuff like that, it’s not what you expect. But that is also what makes it different in the end. So I think it’s a matter of finding our target audience. and know who is Who is this for? and and Yeah. Yeah. Rob Marsh: I think one of the things that I’ve struggled with with AI is you know that lack of humanness. And the fact that when people find out something is AI, you know if we were having a chat, you and I were having a chat, and i found out that you were a bot AI, suddenly, the value of what we’re talking about is reduced immensely. In fact, I might even feel cheated that I got the Petterbot instead of the the actual thing. right and so I think one of the challenges that creators like you who are who are coming up with these tools is how do we preserve humanness if we’re using tools that are very unhuman or inhuman ah in in the creation. And you know the there’s a whole spectrum of criticisms that happen here, you know where, hey, if i can if I can take an artistic style and an AI can create an image in that style and I no longer need the artists to do that anymore, What’s the value of style anymore? right or and And the same thing applies obviously with writing with copy. And so these are some really big questions around AI that I know people are so are asking them. Clearly they’re being asked, ah but I don’t know that there’s a lot of discussion or a lot of people that are really thinking through like, okay, this is actually something important we ought to be preserving. Petter Magnusson: it it is yeah It is super important. And and yeah, up ah it it brings ah another thought to to my mind there that I think there will always be a reaction to things like this. you know People are starting to be really, really good at spotting the AI-generated content. And and you’re just like you scroll past it because as soon as you feel you that this is AI. So that is problem. But I think there will always be a reaction. I’m seeing already now a reaction to this. you know I am connected. I’m hanging around talking a lot about LinkedIn, but that’s my hangout. you know I’m spending a lot of time on LinkedIn. And I’m connected with a bunch of of professional copywriters of of different types. And I can see the reaction happening. A lot of people are are starting to write in a consciously anti-AI way. which actually is a bit dirty, sloppy, or even, or something like that, you know, because AI is writing so good in a way, you know? Rob Marsh: Formally is, yeah. Petter Magnusson: Yeah, yeah, it’s it’s nice sentence lengths and and no… grammar problems and and spell errors spelling errors, you know all of that. And that’s where where I see a lot of my copywriter friends are are going ballistic with trying to prove that they’re human. So that’s ah that’s an interesting trend that I kind of like that. Rob Marsh: Yeah, from somebody who who is a bit of a stickler for for grammar, it’s really painful to see it. But on the flip side, again, we as humans value humanness. And and ah now i’ am I’m not anti-AI at all. I use AI ah every day in my business. And I think it’s an immensely helpful tool. But these are some of the things that i I’ve been thinking about too is, okay, When I write an email to my list and and I’ve yet to use AI to write an email, one exception when I was saying, hey, look what yeah what AI can do in an email couple of years ago. But should I be putting a tag at the bottom? you know It’s like, hey, this is written only by me. I did not use AI, right? So that people see that. Or, you know, like there maybe there’s an opportunity yeah at some point for somebody develop, you know, a validator where it’s like, hey, yeah, this 100% human written or, you know, this is AI assisted. Or I know i know there are ah tools, you know, GPT zero and those kinds of things that try to establish that, but they’re they’re not great. They’re not great yet. Petter Magnusson: No, no it’s it’s super easy to trick them. And here i I do feel a little bit dubious about myself because I have i have a guide in PurposeWrite that is called Rewrite. And that is pretty good at mimicking a lot of these things. So it can trick these AI detection tools. And umm I’m sometimes wondering, like, should I really do this? Rob Marsh: No, these are good questions. And I mean, at some level, we know this stuff is going on and it’s going to happen. And we’ve we’ve got to embrace AI you know in order to do some things. But also, it would be helpful if, yeah I hate to think that the government needs to do this, but you know if the industry could self-regulate a little bit and just say, hey, um this is where the line really is. And you should really shouldn’t be you know getting too close to this line you know for some of this stuff. But yeah, again, who knows? that It moves so fast, right? Petter Magnusson: Yeah, it does. And and I think one another conclusion that could be reached is that it doesn’t really matter. you know as As long as the writing is good and I can get some value from it, does it matter if AI helped do it? Rob Marsh: Yeah, that’s that’s a great question too. And and how far you know does does that go? Obviously, like I said, I use AI in my writing for helping with headlines, for identifying benefits, and it speeds up the process for identifying needs and problems. there There’s so many good things that it can do. And so ah you know where you’re you’ve created this tool too that also writes really well or can help. If I’m writing an article or whatever and I get stuck, I’m not sure where to go or if I need ideas. Like it’s super helpful at at prompting those kinds of things. And so the right mix of machine and brain, human brain can actually elevate where we are if if it’s done right. Petter Magnusson: Exactly. Yeah, I think so. and And I have actually become less afraid of the creatives losing their job. I mean, yes, creatives are losing jobs at at this moment. And especially, you know, I’m in the photo video business. A lot of photographers are are probably going out of business because of this. But that has happened before. In that business, we’re more used to it than on the text side, actually. For text, this is very new, but it’s happened on the photo side. I can give you an example. When digital cameras came, You know, the small local newspapers, if they would, like, go to a farmer that had a funny carrot, they would bring a photographer specifically to take a picture of the carrot. And then digital cameras came, and then that photographer was out of the job because the the writing journalist could take that picture of the carrot. So we have seen this before. And, yeah, those low… Yeah, yeah. excuse the word, but low level work that goes and we’ve seen it happen. And that’s maybe what’s happening here too, that yeah, some of the low level work is gone and that we just have to live with that. Rob Marsh: And It happened with stock photography as well. I mean, i you know I was in the ad agency world when stock photos started coming online. And I remember specifically photographers we worked with that were you know worried about, you know they were they were losing a lot of the typical, we’ll take a photo of this typewriter. Or you know if it if it wasn’t original, if it wasn’t specific to an assignment, suddenly there were 1,000 images out there that we could choose from. And so you’re right. In some ways, there is a stock copy thing that is going on. It’s a little bit different from stock because it’s not always going to be the same. But ah you know AI creates that stock. And so the challenge becomes, how do we as humans or humans using a tool like Purpose Right ah create the stuff that’s original, new, different, and unique, and you know shows off that creativity, that humanness in some way that stock copy no longer does. Petter Magnusson: Exactly. And that’s where I’m not so afraid. I mean, if you’re operating on ah on a slightly higher level that you’re a bit more strategic and creative, I think you’re still needed. Because if if we go back to images again, it’s really easy to prompt a cool image. But what does that image say? What does it do? Same with the text. um You need to have a vision. First of all, for where you are going, even if you’re using AI, you need to know which direction you should prompt the AI. and And you need to be able to judge the result also. Something comes out. Is this good? Is this on brand? is it you know And so we we are needed, i think, still. So I’m not that worried. Not yet, at least. Rob Marsh: Yeah, I think what you’re saying is the opportunity is you know an analysis and strategy and figuring out direction. ah And as far as like the the actual operational tactics, we might need to figure that stuff out. But the exact wording or whatever, you know there may be a place for AI to step in and do, like you said, that ah lower level thinking that ah that can be easily replaced. Petter Magnusson: Yeah. Yeah. and And again, referring back to to the visual side of things, we have seen a shift also there that users want to do stuff themselves. And and I think, again, that’s something that we just have to adapt to um So what we’re doing, it you know we would normally go and film everything for the customers. Now we’re we’re having a new service where we can actually work with the customer to ah think about what is what what should be filmed, what should be said. Then they can actually film it with their iPhone and and send the files for us to editing. So our role becomes different. And the most important part there is the strategic part. Like what should we, why should we film? What should be said? What… And then who who holds that camera on? And if that camera is a professional camera, it’s not that important, to be honest. And I think it’s a bit the same with text. A lot of simple text, I think the customers can write themselves now. We just have to realize that we’re not going to do that. So they’re going to come to us for the more strategic and and creative stuff. And that’s where we can shine. And yeah and and also on a purely strategic level, help them point you know the stuff that they make themselves, we could probably help them with that. Take good a good hourly rate, two because that’s what we do. We um we have this um so like social media package. And then we spend quite a lot of time thinking, OK, you want to build your personal brand. Who are you as a copywriter then in this case? you know Who are you on LinkedIn? why Why are you different from the other copywriters? What persona are you going have? When you are on camera, are you going to wear a T-shirt to suit or what is you know ah to be on brand? And that, I think, is super valuable. And we need to realize that for for text too, that that is a job that needs to be done and that we can charge pretty high for um to analyze things and have a strategy. Rob Marsh: The irony here is from a copywriting standpoint, and this probably is true from a visual standpoint as well, is for the last 100 years or so, we’ve been selling the outcome and giving away the strategy for free in order to get the outcome. So if I sold a content strategy or a blog post or a sales page, that’s what I’m selling. But all of the thinking, the strategy that goes into it ah was happening ah you know kind of kind of for free you know on the back end. And what AI is forcing us to do saying, hey, the words are free, but the strategy, the figuring it out, the approach, the voice, and and putting your your mind power into that, that’s where the real value ah was all along and charging for that. And that’s definitely a shift in the way that we see see the creative business. Petter Magnusson: Yeah. Wow. that That’s… ah Exactly my thought, but you twisted it in and and a great way. And I agree totally with that. and And now I don’t want to be here promoting Purpose Right all along. But I have been thinking about exactly this problem. So I have made in Purpose Right, I have something called profit sharing. And that is because I’ve been thinking exactly in these lines that how do we handle the situation where the customers want to write some stuff themselves? They know I have ChatGPT, I can write. And and as a copywriter, they’re just going to call you when there’s something really important to to write. you know And the rest they’re going to make with ChatGPT and it becomes horrible. So… And that’s what I’m thinking that why don’t we, as copywriters, sell analysis? Like, again, who are you? Tonal voice brand, like a different brand for for different services, maybe even because we have a different target audience for different parts of what we’re trying to to communicate. Why don’t we sell that? And in in the case of PurposeRite, make custom guides for the customer.  So instead of the customer going off to ChatGPT and prompting really badly, we can say, I’ve done the analysis for you. And here are a few custom guides that you can use. you know I know you’re writing you’re writing ah this simple newsletter every Friday. You can actually do that. And I made a custom guide for you for that, which is on brand and and everything is prepared for you. And the cool thing then is that you will, as a copywriter, you get a kickback. So when you make a guide and share with someone and they use it, you get a kickback from that. So that’s kind of a way of… Yeah, I’m also thinking that staying on top of mind with the customer. So I have on purpose made a lot of the the guide have a lot of description lines. And I’m thinking that people can actually put a little tagline there, like, remember me, Rob, when you want to write the important stuff. Rob Marsh: Interesting. Yeah, that makes sense. so So that that kind of opens up a broader question. How do you see copywriters using AI in general moving into the future? ah yeah Obviously, it’s going to be doing a lot of writing or writing assisting, but how else can it help us improve the product that we’re we’re providing for our clients? Petter Magnusson: Yeah, I think that, but most of it we’re already doing. It’s just that it will be better at it. I think the one of the most important things is just analyzing text and massive text. That is so useful to just pour stuff in there and be able to talk to that massive data chunk. So that I think is a super important thing. Save a lot of money because that’s That’s not the fun part of the job either, is it? Rob Marsh: Yeah, analysis, I mean, yeah well, I mean, it can be fun, you know, when you stumble across those things that it’s like, oh, wait, I, you know, I just discovered something new, but I don’t see that being that different from ai helping me uncover something new, ah you know, and saving 10 or 12 hours of going through, you know, spreadsheets worth of data or whatever, and having it say, hey, have you thought of this? You know, the, I guess my question will always be, do I trust that the AI is uncovering the stuff that I would uncover, right? Like how do how do we make sure that that analysis bot is better or as good as Rob when he’s, you know, analyzing a spreadsheet? Now, I’m not necessarily saying I’m all that great at and analysis. And so it may ah it’s probably already better. But obviously, you know, in using a tool, you you have to trust the tool. Petter Magnusson: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and I think There, of course, we are at the point where it is probably, as you say, probably better. as long As soon as you have a lot of data, at least. I mean, if you have a couple of pages, you’re probably better. But as soon as you start getting hundreds of pages or something like that, I don’t think it’s very unusual that a human can keep up with that. in any way. So I think that that’s an important one. And then I actually think it can help with creativity. And this might sound a bit weird, but I do think that it triggers a lot of thoughts. you know And I actually made a ah guide for that in Purpose. I called Idea Expander. And it’s not doing anything advanced at all. It’s just a very simple prompt, basically. You just give it a basic concept, and it will then twist it around and say, or you can think this way on this topic. And then you can take one of those and branch out from there. And that helps a lot, I think, with just coming up with ideas. So you can, like, I put in simple things, like, you know, It’s important to think of the target audience when you write content. And then it twists that around and comes up with something entirely different. And so that’s how I um have done some of the best content pieces, actually, using that kind of, you know, to to trigger my creativity. Yeah. yeah Rob Marsh: Yeah, that’s when I’m using AI, that’s basically one of the main purposes that I do too, is that I’m um asking the engine to you know ask me back questions or to help me think about it in different ways or unconventional ways. And ah you know that back and forth between me and and the AI seems to, at least to me, it feels like it’s helping me get to something slightly different or something newer than my own thinking. Petter Magnusson: Yeah, I think so too. I think we we are ah it’s super interesting with AI, how it operates. I think it gives a clue about ourselves. um’m um I’m of the opinion that we are just AI and the algorithms are very similar. similar Because you know if I look at, ah going back to images, image image generation again, how that actually works inside of an AI. So you you take take a pure noise image, like total random pixels. And then you From there, the AI sees something vague, like, oh, it’s a little bit dark up there. And the prompt was dog. And then it’s going to to change those, like assuming that could be the head, kind of. This is a very simplified way of describing it. But i I see how that is close to how at least my creativity works. you know It’s really, really hard to sit there with a blank page. But as soon as you write something, that could be the start. you know You see it with an empty page and you’re going to write, oh I’m going to write an essay. Or you just write sun and then, ah, sun, right. And then then you can start. It’s the same as this little blob in the noise in a way. So I think it’s basically the same how we operate. So it will be interesting to see how how quickly we get to AGI, you know, this real Rob Marsh: Well, that was going to be my next question. As somebody who you know is is operating in the space, working with these models, do you see AGI as a realistic next step? And how quickly do you think we get there if it is realistic? Petter Magnusson: yeah Yeah, the question of is about the definition also. There’s been some weird definitions floating around. like Some definitions have been financial even, like when when AI can make profits bigger than the certain numbers, it’s AGI, which is really weird in my opinion. But yeah, I’m not sure. i mean, We are already at a level where AI can do many tasks better than most of us. If you look at a lawyer or doctor even, you know AI cannot can do better than most of us on that. But on the other hand, it’s also completely wrong most of the time. ah like There’s always some hallucination in there. And I’m wondering if you cannot… Yeah, that that seems like a big threshold. like It needs to somehow understand what is realistic and real. And that is not I don’t see that happening. It’s just getting better at what it does, but it’s still stuck in this hallucination world. So yeah, um I don’t know. i’m I’m not a machine learning expert but yeah i Rob Marsh: Yeah. Yeah, neither am I. On the other hand, humans also glitch and hallucinate and, you know, break down. So maybe, maybe part of being an actual intelligence is sometimes we’re also actually dumb. Petter Magnusson: Yeah, exactly. And very stubborn about being right when we’re not. Rob Marsh: Yeah, yeah there there there could be something to that. Okay, so what’s next for you as you know owner of Purpose Right? like Where do you see this tool going and doing in the future? Petter Magnusson: Hmm. Yeah, I think what what is happening now is that now the tool is working and I need to start making a lot more guides. And I’m thinking that I should actually cooperate with copywriters on that because I have limited capacity and I’m not the best copywriter, to be honest. So I need to make… more guides that is doing more stuff, because right now, and to be honest, it’s a bit limited. The guides we have and they take a lot of time to make these guides. It’s a lot of work to, you know, it’s it’s really tricky to make them because, yeah, to get technical a bit. But as the prompts again get longer and so on, it’s hard to balance them. Like if you have a lot of choices, then you can have situations where one choice is canceling the other. So, and right now I’m the only one that can do this. ah I need to find some people who can actually help me make make guides. Rob Marsh: Sounds to me, you’re probably talking to the right audience. I have a feeling that you may get a few emails from listeners who are ah eager eager to find out more about that kind of an opportunity. But for copywriters who have resisted using AI for a variety of reasons, you know whether it’s not human enough or it doesn’t feel right or ah you know worries about plagiarism, that kind of stuff, ah it still feels useful to me to be experimenting with these tools. You don’t necessarily need to publish what you’re doing or use it for your clients, although yeah ultimately, you know you may choose to do that.  Understanding how these engines work, the differences between the different kinds of applications, ah it it’s a little bit you know like refusing to use AI feels a little bit like refusing to pick up a smartphone. Yeah, you can continue on with the flip phone. But the rest of the world is doing some pretty amazing things that you no longer understand. You’re no longer a part of. And yeah, you can you can set down your smartphone, you know, but if you haven’t picked it up in the first place, you don’t know what’s going on. And I think there’s maybe a metaphor there for how we should be engaging and Purpose Right may be a tool that people start to play around with a little bit on their own. And there is a free option so people can, you know, but play around and and see how the tool works without worrying about having to pay for it at this point. Petter Magnusson: Exactly. Yeah. And you actually have ChatGPT and Claude in there. so And that is a fun thing also to just try the say prompt same prompt on ChatGPT and Claude and see the difference. They do have a a personality, I would say. It’s funny because in in in the article writer guide, for example, I’m using ChatGPT for research things like find the target audience from looking at this web page. But then for the actual writing, I think Claude is better. Rob Marsh: I agree. Petter Magnusson: But yeah, but they are they are doing a different thing. Like ChatGPT is way too formal and I’m struggling to like loosen up. while While Claude is sometimes the reverse, it’s being, I think it is trained much more on social media posts and stuff because it easily becomes way too, to like TikTok style style basically. And then I have to tell it to calm down, you know, like become a bit more corporate or strict or something. But I think that is easier than having ChatTPT loosen up is more difficult. And then having Claude cool down a bit and and be a bit more strict. Rob Marsh: Yeah, it’s it’s an interesting challenge. And again, one, if if we’re just prompting and and using the tools, it becomes pretty obvious the differences, especially, I mean, the two big ones are obviously Claude and ChatGPT, but there are, you know, i mean, ah Grok is incredibly sarcastic because it’s trained on that Twitter data, which is a place where so many people are are unkind and very sarcastic. You know, if you’re using Meta or LeChat, ah you’re you’re just going to get a different outcome with each. And so, yeah, like my my takeaway here, I think, is, hey, ah well, there’s really two. One, we need to be playing with these tools. And two, we really need to be upskilling when it comes to strategy, thinking, ah conceptualizing, and those those higher level marketing skills. Rob Marsh: Because like I said, i you know where the words used to be the thing we sell, the words now free and it’s the thought. that needs to bring the value to the table. Petter Magnusson: I think that sums it up very well. you know The words are kind of free now. So that that we need to focus on our actual knowledge, and that is to realize that that is actually not putting the words down. Rob Marsh: Petter, if somebody wants to try Purpose Right or to connect with you, where should they go? Petter Magnusson: if they want to try PurposeWrite, it’s PurposeWrite.com. And PurposeWrite as in writing then, and not write as in being right. W-R-I-T. E. Most copywriters should be able to figure that one out. And you can write to me on the info at PurposeWrite.com and I will reply. And hopefully I can, yeah, depends on what you ask, hopefully I can answer something reasonable. Rob Marsh: This has been interesting. I love diving into these tools and seeing, you know, where where we are going and asking some of these questions. So thank you for your time. I appreciate it. Petter Magnusson: Thank you so much. It’s been really fun. And yeah, I’m amazed. Time just flew by here.

Justin Wise, a business consultant and founder of Simple Business, shares his insights on creating simplicity in entrepreneurship. He discusses the dangers of complexity that lead to burnout and emphasizes the need for differentiation. Justin highlights the value of understanding your unique strengths and the importance of effective content strategy focused on 'why' instead of 'how.' He also explores how AI can enhance writing processes and offers essential tips for building a self-sustaining business through focused content and streamlined efforts.

Want your copy to stand out and get notice? Communication Specialist Sam Horn is my guest for the 443rd episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Sam talks about how to take “regular” ideas and make them “pop”. If you want to get noticed by potential clients, or want to help your clients get noticed by their customers, this episode is for you. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. Stuff to check out: Sam’s LinkedIn Pop!: Create the Perfect Pitch, Title and Tagline for Anything by Sam Horn Tongue Fu by Sam Horn The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: Want your copy to get noticed and remembered? There are a couple of simple tricks that will help you do that. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast. The ability to help your clients get noticed and remembered is one of the main things they pay you for. And to find clients in the first place, you need to be able to get prospects to notice and remember you. If you can’t do this one thing… you really can’t help them with anything else because they never engage with you. There are lots of psychological techniques that help people notice you… or help people remember you… or make people want to engage with you. So what are they? I asked communication specialist Sam Horn to walk through some of these techniques. Sam is the author of the book Pop: Create the Perfect Pitch, Title, and Tagline for Anything. She walked me through a bunch of the tricks she uses to coin new phrases so her readers raise their eyebrows. One of the things you’ll notice as you listen is that Sam uses these techniques as she talks with me… you’ll hear rhymes, juxtapositions, cliches, and patterns that demonstrate exactly what she is sharing as we talk. The ideas and insights we discuss go well beyond typical persuasion techniques like urgency and scarcity to create a more fun, human, and interesting connection between the ideas you write about and your audience. This is a different sort of interview… because Sam actually workshops an idea for a presentation I am planning on offering to listeners of this podcast. As she goes through the ideas I share with her, you’ll notice she starts throwing out ideas and insights I might use when I’m ready to share my presentation. It demonstrates the insights she shares—especially her advice to show the shift as we communicate what we sell. Near the end of the interview, Sam walked me through the questions she asks as she starts writing a book—and she’s written a bunch of them. If you’re thinking of writing a book yourself, some of these questions may be useful for you. I think you’ll like what Sam has to share. Before we get to my interview with Sam, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. Unless you are hitting the 30 second skip button when you get to this point of the show, you are no doubt familiar with The Copywriter Underground. I talk about it every week. The Underground includes more than 70 different workshops—and accompanying playbooks to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. The Playbooks make it easy to find quick solutions to the challenges you face in your business everything from finding clients, conducting sales calls, using A.I., building authority on LinkedIn YouTube or Pinterest, and dozens of other workshops. You also get dozens of templates, including a legal agreement you can use with your clients, monthly coaching, regular copy and funnel critiques, and more. You can learn more by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. And now, my interview with Sam Horn… Sam, welcome to the copywriter club podcast. I would, I mean, I’m thrilled to have you here. You know, author of nine books, everything about language and communication. But before we get into all of that stuff. I would like to know how you got here. How did you become an author, speaker coach, I guess, an intrigue expert, and all of the other things that people have called you.  Sam Horn: Okay, so how about I’ll go two places with that. Sound good? We’ll, we’ll start with the original origin story. Okay? Because I think our originality is in our origin story. So I grew up in a small town, more horses than people, and I was, like, elected as valedictorian of my class. A small town, big deal, right? So I put together my little graduation speech, and I shared it with my dad, who ran Future Farmers of America for the state of California. And you may know they understood speaking was very important. So I asked for his feedback, and he said, it’s an okay talk. He said, You just didn’t say anything I hadn’t heard before. It was the little bird leaving the nest homily, you know? And I said, But dad, there’s nothing original under the sun. And he says, of course there is. He said, You know what the definition of original is, if we haven’t heard it before. And you know, Rob, I at a very early age, I realized that if I’m going to ask people for their valuable time, mind and dime, it is my responsibility to create and craft something that they haven’t seen or heard before. Rob Marsh:Okay, so that was origin number one, what’s origin number two.  Sam Horn: Origin number two. You may know that I helped start and run the Maui Writers Conference. Writers digest said it was the best writers conference in the world, and we did something that was unprecedented at the time. You could jump the chain of command. You could pitch your screenplay to Ron Howard. You could pitch your novel. People to the head of Simon and Schuster. I mean, that had never been done before. And after the first round, a woman came out with tears in her eyes. And I went over, I said, are you okay? She said, I just saw my dream go down the drain. And I said, what happened? She said, I put my 300-page manuscript on the table. The agent took one look at it and said, I can’t read all that, tell me in 60 seconds what it’s about and why someone would want to read it. And I talked with Bob Loomis, who was senior VP of Random House that night, and I said, Bob, I’m seeing a lot of people’s dreams go down the drain today. What’s going on? And he said, Sam, we’ve seen 1000s of proposals. We make up our mind in the first 60 seconds whether something is commercially viable. And Rob that next day, I stood in the back and I watched the pitch sessions, and I could predict who is getting a deal without hearing a word being said. Guess how  Rob Marsh: I’ve got to guess that it’s in the look of the face of the person they were pitching—they were interested in something.  Sam Horn: It gets really specific, the eyebrows. Because see, like, if we’re telling someone our idea, if we’re proposing something, if we’re pitching our book or whatever, if the decision makers eyebrows like, crunch up your eyebrows right now. Don’t you feel confused? Right? Confused, or like I’ve got to look into this deeper, maybe, or I don’t understand exactly. You know what’s going on here. Get you know that happens rarely, however. You know today’s attention span, right? If people don’t get it, they’re gone, right? So if people’s eyebrows are knit, furrowed, crunched up. It means they don’t get it and are confused. People don’t say yes. Now if their eyebrows don’t move, it means they’re unmoved, or they’ve had Botox. Now, lift your eyebrows, if you would. Ah, do you feel intrigued? Curious? Like you want to know more. You know, I became a woman on a mission. I founded the entry agency. Because if we want other people to care about what we care about, we’ve got to turn info obesity into the eyebrow test.  Rob Marsh: Okay, so let’s, let’s talk a bit about that, because this is not just so I’m thinking about this in two different ways. Number one, copywriters and content writers are working for clients, and the work that we do has to get the attention of their customers. Whatever we put out there has to get attention, otherwise it doesn’t work. But maybe even more importantly, before that can happen, copywriters and content writers have to get the attention of their prospects and their future clients, and if that doesn’t happen, they never get to write anything. So how do we do it? How do we get attention?  Sam Horn: Well, as you know, there’s a whole book pop, and my book got your attention on that. So here are a few specific techniques. And by the way, rob your audience is copywriters. I hope they have 10 and paper right now, because we’re going to jump right in and I’m going to share techniques that have helped my clients, you know, get millions in contracts, deals, etc. So grab your pen and paper and… Rob Marsh: I’m just going to underline that… you mentioned, Pop your book. Before we started recording, I said, I think this is one of the better books the writers ought to be using. It’s not really about writing so much as it’s about how to make your words pop, literally, the title of the book. So if you haven’t got it, we’ll link to it in the show notes. Make sure you pick up a copy. But yeah, let’s talk about some of those ideas.  Sam Horn: Good. Well, let’s talk about how content writers and copywriters have two bosses, right? First, their decision maker, right, to get their attention and their favorable attention. Oh, I am here. Oh, that’s clever. Oh, yes, that will work. And then it needs to drive business, right? It needs to actually drive traffic to the store or registrations for the whatever. So I’ll give you a quick example of how we do this. Is that I believe, don’t repeat cliches, rearrange cliches, right? So whatever the topic or the product or the demographic is, we can just start writing down what do people know is true about this? What do they believe about this? You can just go to the cliche dictionary and put in what are cliches around this, right? But we’re not content to be common, because George Washington Carver said, when you can do a common thing in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.  So see, we take what is known, and our goal is to make it unknown. We take what’s familiar, we want it to be fresh. So Avon is an example they were going to hit. They were having their breast cancer walks, right? And they were looking for a tagline. So if you go to the COVID cliche dictionary and you put in, you know, walks, right? Well, they couldn’t find anything walk, don’t run, on and on. So now you look for cliches. It’s alphabetical order with a keyword that’s alliterative, that starts with the same sound or letter as yours. They came up with a wonderful slogan. Do you know what it is?  Rob Marsh: I should know what it is. I don’t have it at the top of my head, though. Sam Horn: It’s good things come to those who walk. Nice, right? You shift off weight. And now, when you’re close to what’s familiar, and you give that little twist, the eyebrows go up, right? You know how Einstein knew he had a good idea? Rob Marsh: I’m guessing that it made his eyebrows go up. Sam Horn: He laughed out loud, right? Because I know, when I’m working with clients, you know, I’m taking notes on what they’re saying. I’m inking it when they think it et cetera. And when the dots connect and I get a new entity, it’s like the eyebrows fly up and out comes this, aha, right? This bark of laughter. That means, Eureka, we have found something that’s worth pursuing. From a psychological standpoint, the newness of the idea of a cliche that’s been changed a little bit. It’s almost like unlocking a puzzle and it clicks in your brain and it makes it stick, which is maybe another part of making sure that we’re memorable. In fact, in a moment I’ll get, I’ll share my formula for turning what’s forgettable into what’s repeatable and retweetable. Sound good? Rob Marsh: Yes, let’s do it.  Sam Horn: Let’s go back to your first question about another way we can make something pop—how we can pop out of the pack instead of get lost in the pack, how we can stand out from the crowd instead of get lost in the crowd.  We’re going to Mary Oliver our life. I bet everyone who is part of your community understands that our life is our lab, right? We constantly have our antenna up and we Mary Oliver. She said, instructions for life, pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it, right? Anytime we’re astonished, oh, isn’t that? I haven’t heard that before. It’s got potential, then we figure out how we can run with it so that it is practical and relevant and functional, going to drive results. So I’ll give you an example. The University of Hawaii asked me to do a program and conflict resolution, uh, boring, right? And if we’re a bore, snore and unsure, it’s not gonna work. So I turned it into dealing with difficult people without becoming one yourself. Now that’s a good title, because it’s Alliterative. When you put it in a beat, you make it easy to repeat, right? So it’s dealing with difficult people without becoming one yourself. So that is it pretty good title. Here’s the thing, though, you go in and you put into search difficult people, 1000s of people, right? Speaking about that, hundreds of books. So see, it won’t pop out. It’s clever, but it still is not one of a kind. It’s still one of many. Well, I was very fortunate Rob, because at our first break, there was a gentleman in the front row. He didn’t get up to go get a cup of coffee. You know, go outside. He just sat there, gazing off into space. I was curious, and I went over. I said, What are you thinking about? And he said, Sam, I’m a real estate broker. He said, I deal with some very demanding and arrogant people. He said, I’m tired of it. He said, I took this course because I thought you were going to teach us some zingers to fire back at people and put them in their place. He said, that’s not what this is about. And I agreed, this is not about putting people in their place. It’s about putting ourselves in their place so we can respond with compassion instead of contempt. And he was the one who said, I’m a student of martial arts. He said, I’ve studied karate, taekwondo, judo. He said, what you’re talking about is like a verbal form of Kung Fu, isn’t it? Eureka, Tongue Fu, right? Tongue. Fu, an original word I was able to trademark that I’ve been able to merchandise and monetize it. It’s still selling around the world. It’s the one of the top business books in Turkey for 20 years, number three in South Korea, 20 years after it was published, they said it’s changing the patriarchy.  Now, let’s put it into practice for your community, for everyone watching and listening is like, I hope you have a word bank. If you’re working with the client and they want you to sell a product or a service or a new launch, whatever, just come up with 20 words that you would use when frequently explaining that describing right? That’s your word bank. Now, alphabetize each word. Take a word, run it through the alphabet, changing the sound of the first syllable to match the corresponding letter. So see, let’s take Tongue, Fu, Un Fu, Bun, Fu, Sun. Fu, Done Fu…. So you go, Oh, Fun Fu, that’s how to handle hassles with humor instead of harsh words, Gung Fu, Gong Ho, Kung Fu, there’s a Lung Fu, Run Fu for when Tung Fu doesn’t work. Tongue Su for lawyers. It’s Young Foo for kids. Do you see how, if you take a core word, it’s meaningful to your client, you run it through the alphabet, you can come up with first of their kind words. Maybe can get the domain around it, you know, maybe have a one of a kind campaign about it all for just a little bit of brain work.  Rob Marsh: I remember the first time I saw Tung Fu and also your title, talking on eggshells, those kinds of unique twists. I mean, immediately I just, I thought, That is freaking brilliant, you know. And it’s one of those things where I’m like, Man, I wish I had come up with that. It’s such a unique idea. But oftentimes, you know, we’re not, we don’t have the luxury of, you know, being in a conference with somebody, you know, talking back forth. Oftentimes, when we’re trying to come up with these ideas, we’re sitting at our desks, and it’s not always easy even, you know, with some of the tools that you’re sharing. Like, you know, alphabetize it or find the cliche Right. Like, so, how do we make ourselves more creative in these office spaces where sometimes the creativity is pulled out of us? Sam Horn: Okay? Paper and pin right? Okay, put a vertical line down the center right now, because people say, Sam, how does your brain work? I juxtapose everything. Rob, it is the quickest way to make complex ideas crystal clear. Furthermore, my Got Your Attention book was published by Barrett Kohler, who is publisher of the year. A few years ago, Steve presente was the publisher. And I said, Steve, what is your criteria for publishing a book? He said three words, ready? Okay, show the shift. Show the shift. So everyone right now think of something, a campaign. They’re working on a client. They’re working with some type of copy they need to write over on the left, right now, put beliefs and behaviors that sabotage success all right—so put beliefs behaviors that sabotage success. Now over on the right. Put beliefs and behaviors that support success. So it’s sabotage on the left, support on the right. Now also on the left. Put compromise. You know, what are attitudes and actions that compromise our effectiveness? Over on the right? What are attitudes and actions that contribute to our effectiveness. So in a moment, we can do this for a campaign you’re working on, or you’re going to name your book, or something like that. We can play I’ll give you an example of how this works. Is that we just were talking about Tung Fu, so I gave a tongue food workshop for Kaiser Permanente, and I went back three years later as a patient, and when I walked in, the receptionist recognized me, and there wasn’t anyone in the lobby, and she beckoned me over, and she pointed, and her “words to lose words to use” reminder card was still taped to her desk.  And now here’s the story. She said, Sam, they hired me because I’m the first point of contact. I’m pretty nice, and I never used to understand why people were so mean to me when I was so nice to them. And then I took your workshop, and I realized I was using all those words on the left, you know, well, I’d like to help you, but, well, you should have called earlier. I’m sorry, but I can give you an appointment right now, because you know he’s out, you know, he’s out of the office this week, whatever. So, and then replace it on the right. So what I’m telling everyone, if over on the left you have what doesn’t work and what does when you are writing copy, people read left to right. And furthermore, you know, if it’s long, they’re gone. So if we have a paragraph longer than four lines, people don’t read it. They skip it or skim it right. However, if we put over, you actually put a vertical line right down the center of a website. You put it down, right down the middle of a pitch, and over on the left is like, you know, you may think that did that, did up. Are you struggling with deduct? Did that? You know? Are you tired of deducted? Up, bullet, bullet, bullet, right? Because Rob, they can eyeball it. They don’t have to read it. They can eyeball it. Now we have, yes, that’s exactly what I’m thinking. Yes, that’s how I feel. Yes, I’m dealing with that. Would you like wouldn’t it be wonderful if? And now, here is the preferred behavior. Here is, you know, the solution to the problem, etc. However, here’s the thing. Is that if you write that out, you know, people’s attention span these days, they’re going to start skimming, scanning it, and they don’t. Get the shift right? They don’t get the Yes, that’s true for me. Yes, that’s happening in my life. Yes, that’s a problem for me. And they don’t get the AHA, the immediate gratitude, gratification, right? Of like, yes, I would like that. It’s the opposite of this, yes, that would be wonderful. And it’s, do you see how that framework can be used. I just used it for one example. However, I use it at the end of every chapter in every book, because it summarizes it, it reinforces it. And guess what? Now you have like a business card people put on their refrigerator, and they’re keeping you in sight, in mind, instead of out of sight, out of mind.  Rob Marsh: This is a technique that should be familiar to copywriters anyway, because we are our very jobs depend on our ability to take somebody from the pain or the problem or, you know, the concern that they have right now, and help them see how the product or service that we’re writing about is going to produce a transformation, a result a better future, right? And so you’re basically saying, draw it out and use it, you know, as part of the brainstorming session, the naming, you know, in the thinking process, as we’re trying to figure out, okay, how do we stand out?  Sam Horn: Yeah, you see, Rob, I knew that this would resonate with you, because it is part of what you do. And we talked a little bit in advance about infobesity, right? Everybody over on the left put infobesity won’t want, won’t want. Gone right? We can’t earn a living if we’re spewing in obesity. We’re not going to get deals. We’re not going to get results. No, we’re not going to earn our living. Over on the right is the eyebrow test. Okay? If, if, in that first 60 seconds, even someone who is skeptical or busy is now motivated to pay attention. So would you like a specific technique that that your community can use around that? Yes, please. Okay, so juxtapose it over on the left, put infobesity Over on the right. Put eyebrow test over on the left. Put tell, over on the right. Put ask. Now we both believe you give a real life example to show how this works in the real world. Then we unpack it, we reverse engineer it so it’s replicable, correct? Yeah. Okay, so here’s the real life example. I was pitch coach for Springboard enterprises, and they’ve helped female entrepreneurs generate 91 billion in funding and valuation contracts at this point. So Kathleen calendar was one of my clients, and she came to me, Sam, I got good news and bad news. I said, what’s the good news? She said, I’m speaking in front of a room full of inventors and investors at the Paley Center in New York. I said, that’s fantastic. I said, what’s the bad news? She said, I’m going at 230 and I only have 10 minutes. She said, Sam, you can’t say anything in 10 minutes. I said, Kathleen, you don’t have 10 minutes. You have about 60 seconds. 60 seconds. That’s right, they will have heard 16 other it’s 230 in the afternoon. Well, Rob, here is the 62nd opening we came up with that not only one. Kathleen calendar of pharma jet millions in funding. She was business week’s most promising social entrepreneur of that year. So now first perspective, infobesity on the left. Do you know how Kathleen used to introduce what she had invented her business, etc. Ready? I don’t, yeah, tell me. It’s a medical delivery device for subcutaneous inoculations. It’s a what look. Oh, no, those eyebrows, right? She just explained it. She told me what it was. And a lot of times it’s confusing, right? We don’t get it. We’re gone. Now listen to this 62nd opening ready. Did you know there are 1.8 billion vaccinations given every year? Did you know up to a third of those are given with re used needles? Did you know we’re spreading and perpetuating the very diseases we’re trying to prevent. Imagine if there were a painless one use needle for a fraction of the current cost. You don’t have to imagine it. We’re doing it. She’s off and running. Are your eyebrows up?  Rob Marsh: Yeah. I mean, it almost sounds like the beginning of a TED Talk.  Sam Horn: Well, hey, I work with a lot of people on their TEDx talks, or South by Southwest talks, the UN talks, or Davis talks. And I cannot tell you, you know, how many people are gone in the first 62nd this talk we’re going to it’s like, yeah, no. So you are right now. Let’s unpack it, because everyone watching, listening. I want you to think right now. In fact, Rob, what is something? Are you giving a presentation in the near future, or you have a campaign, what’s a priority? And we’re going to do this in real time.  Rob Marsh: I don’t have a formal presentation coming up, but I am actually going to be working on a workshop on AI Artificial Intelligence and how to use it to create custom gpts for writers in their business. So basically, to help some of that repetitive task stuff get done by an AI, as opposed to having to go through that ourselves. Okay, so that was a pretty boring way to talk about my, my upcoming workshop.  Sam Horn: Yes, well, we’re going to do, we’re going to go over to intrigue. We’re going to go over to eyebrows up, right? So, first, here are the three steps, so that everyone who’s listening and watching can do this for their priority while we’re doing it for your priority. Okay, step number one. What are three? Did you know questions you can ask with startling statistics that get eyebrows up and people are thinking, Where do I find these startling we just, we just Google it, right? It’s like, you know, and we need to put in what are surprising statistics about this demographic, about this product, about this problem. And our goal is, if we’re an expert and it’s like, oh, I didn’t know, is that bad? Oh, I didn’t know it’s getting worse. Oh, I didn’t know that many people being affected. I didn’t know it cost that much. I didn’t know it took that long. Do you see? Oh, right. Now, furthermore, since we’re asking instead of telling, we just turn this into a two way conversation instead of a one way conversation, right? Explaining is one way, you know, no, asking is two way right.  Step two, use the word imagine. The word imagine pulls people out of their preoccupation, because they’re picturing our point. They are seeing what we’re saying. And when something confusing becomes clear, fact right over on the left, confusing, over on the right, clear. Do you know what people say when something comes confusing becomes crystal clear. I finally understand it now, or I get it. Oh, I see now, really, literally and figuratively, they see it now, right? That’s the power of that word imagine now link it still step two, link the word imagine with three benefits or advantages of what it is you’re recommending or requesting. For example, go back to calendar, you know, Kathleen. Think about her decision makers. What are they worried about? Thinking about? Well, they’re thinking about those reused needles, so we made it one use. They’re thinking about painful inoculations. We made it painless. Most decision makers care about money, so we made it a fraction of the current price. Do you see how, in a world of infobesity, we crafted a one sentence? UVP, unique value. Where people going sounds good. Who wouldn’t want that in one sentence? Right? And plus, there’s continuity, right? Because we’re referencing back what we said in the beginning, third step. Write down these words right now. You don’t have to imagine it. We’re doing it now you come in with your precedence and your evidence to show this isn’t pie in the sky. This isn’t speculative. This is a done deal. Here’s a testimonial from a satisfied client. Here’s some recent a recent article that talks about your company or about this, this new advance, right?  So you’ve got the three steps. Now, let’s do it for you. All right. All right, okay, so the workshop. What’s your title of the workshop?  Rob Marsh: I don’t have a title just because, again, I just started thinking about this earlier today, but I would probably say it’s something like how to create a custom GPT for copywriters.  Sam Horn: Yeah, very basic, right. Okay, so we start there and now, Rob, how about we have an agreement and I do this with all my clients and audiences. If I say something, if it is in alignment with your vision, voice and values, you’re welcome to run with it. If I say something, you think, No. Doesn’t work for me, interrupt me, and we’ll tweak it or toss it, okay? Rob Marsh: Okay, sounds great.  Sam Horn: Okay, because I’m gonna jump in with both feet here. So how to something once again? How to what?  Rob Marsh: How to create a custom GPT for your writing business, or for your copywriting business, for your writing business.  Sam Horn: Okay, now I know you’re a copywriter, so there are pros and cons of how to right is, the pros, of course, is that people feel they’re going to get taught. And in the old days, a how to book was a business book was, you know, and there’s a promise of deliverables there. Well, in today’s infobesity world, sure, sometimes people don’t want to be taught, right? And how to if they’re low on bandwidth. So let’s see if we can play with that and and let’s use the word surprising, right? Not even seven, seven steps two, which is still prescriptive, still for someone who’s low on bandwidth is feeling like it’s eight o’clock. At night, I just don’t have the energy, but surprising ways, right? Unexpected. Do you see we’ve just up leveled it, we curated the content a little bit. Now we have a creative chat GBT for your business, but let’s put a verb in there. Is this growing? Is this scaling? Is this future proofing, what would be a verb that would pop that growing is probably good. There’s also probably some ideas just around creativity or coming up with, you know, more options. So and growing kind of lends itself to that kind of an idea too, right? Okay, all right. Now we’re playing, you know, this is, this is like word chess, right? We’re thinking a couple of moves ahead. So we have one option of using a verb, like growing your business. Now we’re back to what George Washington Carver said. He said, When you can do a common thing in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world. So we go back and you ask yourself, is growing charged enough, right? Is it? Is it got? Because John Carter, out of Harvard, said, You know what the number one prerequisite is for change?  Rob Marsh: I don’t know what he said, no. Sam Horn:  A sense of urgency. Okay, so does that have urgency? The word growing, right? Rob Marsh: Yeah, probably not, because growing your business is almost a cliche in itself, right? We’ve heard that now for 20 years. So it’s gonna fade in with everything else that’s out there.  Sam Horn: Okay, now, by the way, this is why we ink it when we think it. You had a little pop opportunity there, because the cliche is, grow your business. Maybe you would say, flow your business, right? How to flow your business? Right? Now, that’s a LinkedIn blog, right? Because we’re riffing off what. And just like jazz musicians riff off common chords to make uncommon music. You could do that. So that’s an opportunity. Let’s come back here to no surprising ways to create chat, chat gbts. What did you use? Form systems? What? Well, Rob Marsh: I said a custom GPT to get…  Sam Horn: Yeah, custom GPT, custom GPT. Okay, is it, I’m just playing, is it a three step custom GPT? What is it? Rob Marsh: It could be. It really depends on what process we’re trying to automate with the GPT. So it’s, it’s, I mean, it’s pretty easy to do, but you have to understand what it is that you’re building from start to finish.  Sam Horn: I understand, and I also think we have an opportunity here, because a lot of people in this space, even in the title, we want people to say, I haven’t seen that before. It’s specific enough, if it’s pragmatic enough, it’s intriguing. It got my attention. And even in the title, I already have a little trust in faith that this is going to be an ROI, right? And as you know, numbers matter, right? It’s seven habits. Stephen Covey, you know, it’s four agreements, etc. So if you say surprising ways to create a customized three step chat. GPT, you know, or something like that. Do you see we up level the promise, a little bit in terms of the deliverable, all right. And now, now we’ve switched to to something your business. We need a bottom line. It is to and boy Rob, every day I fight not going over to the dark side, you know, because we know all the gimmicks, right? You know, just for today. Just count, you know, only for you. I try not to do that. I really try to be in integrity, honor, psychology, and do it in a way that I’m not pulling a bait and switch on people, right? So, now we come down to, it’s not just for your business, right? It’s for your business to do what, or for you to do what? Run with that for a second.  Rob Marsh: Let’s say that we were building a custom GPT for a research process. When you talk about the three questions, the questions might be something like, do you realize, or did you know, the average copywriter spends 20 hours researching before they can even start writing? And then the promise of this GPT might be to reduce that from 20 hours to 10 minutes, right? That almost sounds like too big of a switch to be believable, but it literally can do that kind of a shift. So that kind of a promise. Now you can start to see, oh, now this opens up so much more opportunity for me to spend my time actually writing copy, creating the thing that I want to do, coming up with better ideas, right? Sam Horn: I love what you’re doing. In fact, you’re already coming up with your three questions. So, did you know the average copywriter… we’re not going to say average copywriter, right? It’s in most copywriters, whatever. Most copywriters spend a minimum of 20 plus hours researching their project, their campaign, or something, right? That, Oh, wow. And now we’re going to go another. Did you know we’re not going to duplicate that? So what is something else that gets my eyebrows up?  Rob Marsh: So another idea that might be interesting is the importance of the headline. So I think David Ogilvy is famous for saying that 80% of an ad’s punch or power comes from the headline, but most copywriters literally spend no time or only write one headline, right? So there’s a question that I would probably build around that idea where there’s not enough effort going into this one singularly important part of an ad sales letter, email, whatever.  Sam Horn: That’s excellent, because, see, it’s like pearls on a necklace, right? It doesn’t just say the same thing a different way. It jumps to a whole new aspect, a whole new ROI win of this, right? So for you to say something like, do you know we’re just playing but do you know the majority of copywriters spend less than 60 seconds on their headline, when that can determine whether or not something gets read. I’m getting too long here, but we need to give that teeth, right, right? When that is the most important part of their campaign, or something like that, right? So, how would you craft that sentence with the metric, but the consequence of it, yeah. I mean, this is the kind of thing that should take us hours to come up with. But, you know, you’re not putting your time on the most important task is really the idea that I want to get to. Okay, so since this is our first chance to get them, we’re going to say 20 hours, you know, research, you know. Did you know that most copywriters spend seconds on their headline not understanding it can undermine everything they’re trying to do, or something like that, right? We need that consequence now. What’s the third?  Rob Marsh: I’m not sure exactly how to word this, but I would probably be asking a question around the fact that this is an artificial intelligence tool, and most of us don’t know how to use them to get the results that make them effective or make them usable. So you know, maybe the question is, did you know that you could use an AI tool to do all of this for you in minutes, or to get the kinds of results that it would take us hours to get before something along those lines? And again, I know I’m being too wordy here, too, but that’s the idea we draft and then we craft, right? So now we’re going to save that for the imagine, right? Because that’s when Imagine if you could do all that in seconds. Imagine if you could get better results. So that’s part of our imagine. We’re going to come back to this and and did you know something about, did you know many copywriters are using AI generators ineffectively and inefficiently, you know, and in a way that actually sabotages their success, or something like that, right?  Okay, so see, boom, boom, boom. Now, imagine if there were a way for you to use AI effectively and efficiently to to reduce your research from 20 hours to and it’s nice to do 20 hours, 20 minutes, you know, or 10 minutes. So it’s alliterative, you know? And the next one was headline, and could generate commercially viable, clever headlines that would never have occurred to you otherwise, or something like that, right?  Imagine it. That’s what we’re going to cover in our 60 minute workshop, or that’s what I’m going to cover in this Youtube series or something. And look at all that you’ve done in 60 seconds. Rob Marsh: I really like this process because, like you were saying at the very beginning, everything fades into the background. And it only takes an idea to show up one time before it’s copied endlessly. And so thinking about this stuff over and over, every time you relaunch a product, every time that you show up on stage, it’s almost like you need to go through this process again just to make sure that it still stands out, that it still catches attention. And that it’s not becoming the cliche. All cliches were original once, but by the fifth or sixth or 100th time we see it, now it’s the cliche and and we ignore it again. Sam Horn: I tell you, we cannot rest on our creative laurels. The good news is it’s an intellectual Disneyland, you know, Katherine Graham said to do what you love and feel that it matters. How could anything be more fun? So see, I take my notebook everywhere with me. I mean, I’m out on a stream trail walk. I got my notebook, you know. And so when, when I hear something that gets my eyebrows up, I write it down, or I record it to capture it in the moment, because they don’t call them fleeting thoughts for nothing. And if we do that, this becomes a skill. And I tell you, for me, it’s permanent employment, because AI cannot do this in and cannot do it in the moment in a unique way that at least give someone a competitive edge. I’ll give you an example. I’m speaking at conscious capitalism, and when I do a book signing, normally, you know, people stand in line and they clutch their book and they don’t talk to each other. And if you talk to a couple people, they leave because it’s going to be too long before we get to them, right? So I always form a little community, and we brainstorm, strategize people’s projects. So here’s a man, it gives me my question is always so you know, what are you excited about achieving this year? So it makes it topical and timely. And so this man said, Well, I’d like to do more paid speaking. I said, Great. I said, What’s your topic? He said, leadership. I said, Uh oh, right. Common topic, 1000s and 1000s. So if he wants to get more paid, speaking on leadership, even if he has a great platform of credentials, there’s still 1000s of people out there. So juxtaposing over on the right is his topic leadership.  Now I ask another question I ask all my clients. It’s like, what do you do when you’re not working, right? Because if you’re a pilot, if you play pickleball, you know, if you ride horses, if you coach or whatever, he said, I host salons where we do Shakespeare sonnets. Well, that’s interesting, right? Yeah, that’s different, right? So there’s potential there, right? So the way my brain works, because I have integrated all of these processes. So it’s just how I roll these days, I’m thinking, okay, a Shakespeare leadership, Shakespeare leadership. Oh, and I Einstein laugh. I laughed out loud. I mocked up a book cover, and I said, okay, I’m going to show you in the group something, and if you like it, go to GoDaddy right now, because if no one has taken this, you just got yourself a million dollar brand name book title and presentation title, all in seconds. I said, ready, and I showed it to him, and it said to lead or not to lead. Guess what? Rob, no one had that in all these years of speaking and writing about leadership, no one had ever said to lead or not to lead. So the next day, he came back grinning from ear to ear. Got that for 12 bucks, and it’s because we’re using these processes, and it’s not hard work, Rob. It is great fun. Rob Marsh: We could talk about these techniques all day long. It’d probably be better for people just to buy the book and, you know, to start going through them. But you also started talking about how you’ve made this your career. Can we talk a bit about this with I mean, we’re just talking about this AI workshop. A lot of people are threatened by AI. I’m tempted to think that AI can help with some of this kind of thinking. But what are your thoughts on this, and what we as creatives bring to the table? You know, if I wanted to be the next Sam Horn, you obviously are filling that role, so there’s no need for another Sam Horn. But if Rob Marsh wanted to do some things like what Sam Horn does, helping people come up with ideas, helping people stand out with their messaging, and really tightening it up like that. What do we need to bring to the table so that we’re not replaced by the content bots? Sam Horn: Okay, so in a moment, we’ll talk about AI, because I understand you’re using it and almost as part, oh, is using it ethically, right? Using it efficiently. So we’ll get to that in a second. However, the answer to the first question is to Rod Laver your career. Now, what are you a tennis player? By any chance, Rob: Rob Marsh: I wouldn’t call myself a tennis player. I’ve played tennis. I’ve played pickleball. I enjoy tennis. Let’s say that… I wouldn’t call myself a player.  Sam Horn: Well, you’re a pickleball player, and Rod Laver, as you may know, won the Grand Slam of Tennis twice. So the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open, I had the previledge of working with Rod Laver on Hilton Head Island. So we would put on tennis camps, national tennis camps, and he would be showing someone how to volley, and he would go, it’s like this. People go, flop, flop, flop, flop. He looked at him. Was like, No, it’s like this. You know, crisp, crisp, crisp, crisp, flop, flop. See, it had been so long, Rob since he had gone back and even thought about the mechanics, right? He just thinks, no, you know what? He’s playing tennis, chess. Okay, they’re over there. I’m going to pull him out of position. I’m going to drop it.  Rob Marsh: You know all that curser of knowledge we forget what it’s like to be new at something.  Sam Horn: We’re going to remember it because there in lies the key to our organic creativity. So I’m going to ask people when they get an idea, when they come up with a Winning Campaign, when they get a yes to a project that they take a few minutes to reverse engineer it. All right, how did I turn that skeptic into a believer? How did I get that amount of money for that contract right? Because if we start staying alert to our process, and if we codify it so it is replicable, we make shortcuts available to others. So what can AI not do? Ai can’t be in your life where, where you’re reading something and the passage lights you up, and your mind riffs off it and comes up with something in the moment that’s relevant to your audience or your campaign or whatever. And you write about that because you’re first to market with it now, unfortunately, people run with it these days, you know, but you were there first, and at least you can leverage the originality and the creativity and get known for doing it for your clients, because you have developed that muscle and that ability and that way of having your own organic creativity and just feeding it into a machine and letting them do it for us and have cognitive creative decline.  Rob Marsh: Yeah, it makes total sense. Obviously, we have to have the experiences that we bring to the table in order for this to even have a starting point, right? Sam Horn: It’s so funny you say that because, okay, 60 second story, but it really does have a point. So I just finished a very intensive consult and my son, Andrew called, and he sensed something in my voice, and he said, what’s up, mom? I said, Andrew, I’m so exhausted I don’t know how I’m gonna get on that plane tonight. I’ve got to fly back to DC, back to San Francisco in a couple days for a keynote. I don’t know how I’m going to do it. Well, thank heaven for Andrew, because he said, Mom, there’s something about you I don’t understand. You have your own business. You can do anything you want, and you’re not taking advantage of it. Well, out of the mouths of 20 somethings. I gave away 90% of what I owned, and I took my business on the road for a year by the water, and I interviewed people, and it ended up being, you know, some days, not a day in the wake book. Here’s the thing. The phrase right now is like, Oh, I couldn’t take time off work, right? Right? Not taking time off work. It’s taking time on life, right? See, I went places. I swam in Walden Pond, you know? I swam with Zach the dolphin. I sailed the Chesapeake Bay, right? All these new experiences. I’m riffing off them. I’m interviewing people. Are you happy? If so? Why? If not, why not? I’m codifying their answers so I have anecdotal evidence. Wrote a book: Someday is Not a Day of the Week, speaking on that. Now, before I went, I announced that at the National Press Club, and three people came up to me afterwards, and one said, Sam, are you sick? Because, see, she was assuming I had to be in my deathbed to do something like, right? This is that bucket list trip that. I’m on a mission to change people’s mind. The next one said, Sam, is this a midlife crisis? I said, No, it’s midlife clarity and and the third was a big investor from Tiger 21 and he said, Sam, you better not let this story get out, because if your clients and meeting planners find out you’re off the grid, you’re going to be out of sight, out of mind, and you’re going to come back and your business won’t be waiting for you when you’re ready for it. So I had kind of a crisis of conscience.  I am risking everything I built for the last 30 years. Was this frivolous, right? And what I discovered is, what you and I are talking about is when we intentionally immerse ourselves in an intriguing life, we meet people where we haven’t met before. You know, we are going places we haven’t been before, and we marry all over it. We are coming up with creative observations inside. Epiphanies, and we become known for that, and once again, it’s H, I, human intelligence, and not AI, Rob Marsh: Once you have that baseline, though, that’s what AI actually can help magnify, because now AI can help us make some of those connections, because it’s so good at looking at massive data, and our brains are really good at focusing on somewhere between one and seven things at a time or whatever. And so when you can marry a wide range of experiences like that and start to use AI to find some of those connections, and then that spurs even more H, I human intelligence as we’re thinking about it. That’s where the power of that tool works with us to produce great work. Sam Horn: I guess you can tell I’m a little bit on a mission around this. And here’s why, you know, I’ve got a pretty good community on LinkedIn. And I would say 95% of the content on LinkedIn these days is AI generated, yeah, and you know that that lib Jen and made a took millions of books without permission, without attribution and without compensation. They took nine of my books, they just fed it into AI. Thought leaders that I really used to respect are using regurgitated content that does not belong to them, it’s on the backs of other people’s proprietary AI that was not compensated, no respect to copyright law. So you and I both agree that AI can be an efficient tool when used ethically and before we relegate our original thinking to a machine that we become reliant upon so we cannot do it ourselves. You and I are talking about longevity and about the ethics of our trade, and furthermore, the intellectual Disneyland of getting good at this, because it is our sustainability, right? If we rely too much on AI, we are one of many if, if we really want to be doing this five years from now, 10 years from now, and people cannot compete with us because they’ve lost the ability to do this, then, then we are doing it, I believe, for all the right reasons. And I’m a business woman. So I’m not just talking about doing this ethically altruistically, you know. I’m talking about with my business head on and with my individual head on, that we make a commitment. You know, we talk about Rod Laver. Rod Laver spent 1000s of hours working on his fitness and on his strokes, etc. The equivalent in our industry of copywriting, creative content, etc, is that we continue to put in our 10,000 hours. We don’t abdicate it or delegate it. Rob Marsh: I don’t think that the US Open would be the same if we had two robots hitting tennis balls to each other. It might be kind of fun to watch for a minute or two, but without the back stories, without the effort, you know, without all of the things that go into making those players human, we lose a lot. Well, we only have a few more minutes. I’m actually really curious about your writing process. So as I’ve gone through a couple of your books, it feels to me like you’re a bit of a collector. You’re always collecting quotes and ideas, and then somehow they all come together as a book. When you’re ready to sit down and write, we just talk about how you approach a project like that. How do the ideas for books occur to you? And then how do you go about making them happen? Sam Horn: Okay, well, two, there are two questions there. One about, how do books occur to me, etc? We’ve all heard pick a lane, right? We understand that, you know, the riches are in the niches, etc. And I understand that I just have elected not to do that, you know what? Because I, quite frankly, I like being more of a renaissance creative, you know. So I write about Tongue Fu. I write about what’s holding you back, about ConZentrate, about Take the bully by the Horns, about Talking on Eggshells, Pop, etc. Because I have elected to move on and explore topics that I think are tangibly useful to us as human beings. When I write about them, they’re not saturated. I don’t read other people’s books on my topic, because I don’t want to wake up at three 3am with a great idea. It’s not my idea, it’s Stephen Covey’s idea, right? So this is organic process. So once I come up with the topic that’s congruent, it lights me up. I feel it’s not saturated. I think that it will add value. Then I Mary Oliver my life. I really like street interviews Rob. I talk with almost all my Uber drivers, and I talk with people and I. Ask questions. In fact, I have a 10 W quiz when I’m going to do a deep dive into a topic, you know? So, let me ask. Let me do it for you again. What are you working on a book right now? A new book?  Rob Marsh: Oh, I’ve always got like, five or six ideas for books. So, yeah. So, of course, I’m always working on something. Sam Horn: Okay, so like, what’s one of the working titles or topics of your books?  Rob Marsh: Let me give you the title that I’ve recently outlined. So I want to help writers build their authority, because again, it’s really hard. You know, when there’s a million copywriters out there, it’s hard to not just capture attention, but to get people to trust you if you don’t have some kind of authority attached to your name or business. Sam Horn: Excellent. Okay, so this is our topic—trusted writer authority, right? Developing ways, you know, a 10 week, way 10 step seven step, way whatever, to establishing your trusted writer authority. All right. So now, if we were going to do the 10 W quiz that you do everywhere you go, and you’re thinking, well, this waitress isn’t a writer, oh, but she could have a wonderful insight, right? Sure. So the first question is always, what is the definition of this? Because you could interview 10 people and they’re going to give you 10 different answers for what it means to have trusted writer authority, right? Yeah, for sure, that’s number one. So we have clarity around our terms, and it may be very you have yours however you honor other people’s interpretations of it. So you’re bringing them along from the get go, and you’re asking, right?  All right. Number two is like, so who is a walking, talking role model of this, right? So let’s go to your benchmark. Who do you think is exhibit a shining example of this?  Rob Marsh: Historically, probably the best is David Ogilvy, who is the one copywriter who’s ever lived that was, you know, on nighttime, you know, television shows, pretty much everybody knew who he was, right?  Sam Horn: I love that because, see, you already started to unpack it. He did what I call he jumped the genre, right? He wasn’t just an ad guy. He was his business guy, who’s a visionary. He was a thought leader all that, right? And a very elegant and classy guy too, right?  Okay. So see, you already have in your mind what it took and what your values are. Do you see how one question is like a little war shark test, right? It’s like, okay, I want to jump the genre. I want to be an elegant, classy guy. I want to be a thought leader in my space, right? So do you see one question, who is a benchmark, who’s an exhibit or a poster child of this? Just reveals so much. Now, question three, who is not a role model of this? Who is the opposite of that? Now, who might that be? Rob Marsh: So this is a starving writer who’s operating at a content farm. They’re working for pennies per word, or even less. They’re struggling because people don’t know who they are. So even if they do reach out to prospects, they get ignored because they’re not familiar. Sam Horn: See, do you see you hear your copywriting itself, don’t you? Rob Marsh: For sure? Yeah. I’ve thought quite a bit about, you know what, what needs to go into the book. So some of those answers are maybe coming a little easier for me than somebody who might be thinking through a different idea at the moment. But I totally get how this process leads you to an outcome. Sam Horn: And look, content and context, right? Because we’re not just coming up with benchmarks, who you can reference throughout the book with attribution. You know, by honoring them, you are context. You’re once again, coming up with values of all the people you could have picked. Here’s the criteria, our ingredients that are meaningful to you. Now we go to who, you know, who does not do this. Now the copy is, once again, we go back to the you know, are you working at a content farm? Are you getting pennies or whatever? Do you struggle to make your copy, you know, land, a deal or something? So see, you’re now.  The next question is, when is a time you had trusted writer authority? Put me in the scene where you think, yep, that’s what that looks like. Rob Marsh: So me specifically as the author of this book? Sam Horn: Yeah, because we’re working on your book.  Rob Marsh: Okay, so that probably happened in 2018 when we launched our first ever event, invited about 18 other well known copywriters tto come join us on stage. And because they’re there, several of whom were A-list Copywriters, literally making hundreds of 1000s of dollars, maybe even more. And because we’re there on the stage with them, everybody in the audience is saying, You, we recognize. You are part of this illustrious group, Sam Horn: As the curator of the group, the organizer of the group, right? So it’s definitely, as you said, it’s not just status that you’re one of them. You’re actually the convener of them, right, right? That goes in your book, too, right? Because if you’re talking about, you know, establishing trusted writer authority. And you reference an event where you convened the authorities, boom. That’s instant authority for you, right, as a thought leader in the space, someone respected, etc.  Now the next question, when is a time you didn’t… Rob Marsh: I mean, there are a lot a lot of examples of that, but when I have felt frustrated, you know, reaching out cold pitching clients or cold pitching prospects, not clients, because they weren’t becoming clients, you know, worried that I was, you know, going to run out of money before. You know, somebody said, yes, those kinds of experiences, and yeah, there that’s happened, you know, at various times in my career. Sam Horn: And now see, as you know, for writing to resonate these days, we need to be relatable, and that often means being vulnerable, right? It’s not just all our success stories. And then I did this, and then I did this, it’s like, well, in that time I didn’t get that, that contract I was counting on that time I walked out of the room and I knew the answer was going to be no, right, right? So we can share honestly the times that it did not work out, and then we reverse engineer it. And I realized, you know what, I did most of the talking. And my mom used to say, whoever does the most talking has the most fun, you know. And my goal in a pitch is that they do 70% of the talking, you know, and I do 30% and I did something like that, right? Okay, so it pulls out a real life story. We’re vulnerable and relatable and honest and true and accessible, not just the expert. We’re accessible. People now feel okay, right? If you’re going to go first, then I’m going to do it too. You just gave me permission to be honest, instead of perfect, right? Yeah. So the next question is, Why is it important for us to be a trusted writer authority? Rob Marsh: Well, it leads to better clients, higher paying projects and more opportunities so that we can have, you know, the things that we want in our lives, whatever that looks like. You know, more time with family, more time to travel, you know, what? Again, to reach our goals. Sam Horn: So I’m sure that you codify that, right? So here are all the benefits. Here are all the advantages here, all the bottom line. ROI, and now, guess what the next question is, Rob Marsh: I’m not sure I can. Is it going to be something around you know, how do you get there? Sam Horn: Almost. It’s… why don’t we do that? If we know it’s a career maker, if we know it’s what people want, if we know that it’s important, then why aren’t we doing it? So now just speculate. If people go, I know it’s important, but I can’t do it because I don’t have an MBA. I can’t do it because… whatever. What would be three or four reasons that are the barriers to entry? Rob Marsh: Number one is always going to be confidence. You know, I don’t believe that I can do it. I’ve never done this before. Another one would be, I don’t have the connections or the network that successful people do. A third one might be, I’m not sure that I know enough about the thing that I’m doing. So because I’m talking to copywriters, content writers, they’re thinking I’m not sure that I know enough about copywriting to be able to lead and say I can get this done for my clients. And closely related to that, even if they have done it, maybe they don’t have, they don’t feel like they have the proof that they can deliver on the promises that they want to make.  Sam Horn: So see, the book is writing itself, again, isn’t it? You can see a chapter, once again, you codify that, because it’s like you become a docent of your body of work. You say, Well, in my 20 years of working with copywriters from all around the world, from countries like this and this and this, from, you know, multi million dollar copywriters to people just getting started. Do you know what I’ve discovered? Right question, two way conversation reveal right is that here are the seven most frequently given reasons that are barriers to entry, that people think it’s not an option for them, and when you codify it, if you don’t name it, you don’t own it, right? So if this is just in paragraph form, people do not perceive its proprietary and they will either skim or scan it, or they’ll run with it. If it’s your name. The seven reasons why people don’t whatever. At least scrupulous people will honor your name that this is codified proprietary IP, and they will reference you now, and it’s positioning you as an expert, all because you’re reporting back on your discoveries and your anecdotal data, right? Yeah, all right, then you know, when I bet you go to conferences and like, the first question is, so what’s a challenge you’re facing? And it’s like there’s something called the evolution of intimacy, folks. And if the first question is to tell us what’s wrong with our life, that’s like a breach. To me. It’s a breach of trust. It’s a one down. I just put you down. My first question to you was, what’s wrong with you in your life? Rob Marsh: Nobody likes starting with a failure. Sam Horn: Exactly. So see now, even in this quiz, we honor that human understanding of honoring people, and we say, so what’s your best pest? Best piece of advice, right? What have you learned if you’re going to give advice to someone starting out in this career, you know, even if you’ve only been in it six months, what is something you’ve learned that’s a non negotiable? So let’s honor their intelligence and their expertise, right? And give them an opportunity to contribute your thoughts. I can see you. You’re about to say something. Rob Marsh:  So this isn’t necessarily my thinking in the book, but I’m getting this from potential readers and then reflecting that book back inside the book, correct? Sam Horn: You just said something so important, because, once again, I don’t read other people’s books, right? So when I wrote Tongue Fu, I didn’t read all the books under the sun. On conflict resolution. I interviewed moms, I interviewed lawyers. I was doing so many public workshops at that point. So when people would come in, well, I agree with you, but you don’t work for my boss, you know? And then they tell a story, and then we talk about how we could turn around. And many times they would get back in touch with the success or with what happened, with their permission, I use those stories so you are right. This isn’t a way to generate original content through interviews, where we’re asking people for their best practices, their interpretations. And guess what? Now you look at your book, it’s not a one voice book. It’s not one person sharing your recommendations or success stories. It’s like, you know, it’s a single mom of three kids, you know, it’s the multi million dollar CEO. And it makes the book more relatable, real and one of a kind, because it’s not a one voice book, yeah, yeah. Rob Marsh: It makes a ton of sense. So is that all of the questions? Sam Horn: Number number nine and number 10, what do you know that I’m going to do a workshop on this, or I’m writing a book? What is something we could discuss in this book that would really be worthwhile, right? Yeah, and Rob you and I’ve been doing this for a while, it makes my day when someone says, Well, you know what I’m dealing with. Or, you know this happened? Yes, someone was teasing me, and they said, can’t you take a joke? And I It felt so wrong, and I just didn’t know what to say, you know. So ask people, What could we cover in this book that would make it, you know, worthwhile reading? And they will, they’ll give you the answers to the test, won’t they? Right? And now, once again, you’re monitoring your answers. Maybe all the answers are about money, and maybe you’re going to talk more about content or business stuff, but you realize, seems what everyone cares about is money, so I better stack the deck and put that first right. Because if I think I’m going to talk about money in the last third of the book after this. No, no, they just told you that’s not their priority. They won’t wait for the last third of the book. Rob Marsh: And the final question. Sam Horn: Final question is, Who do you recommend I interview on this? Okay? And it’s so wonderful, Rob. Because, you know, people say, Well, John Mackey, who is founder of Whole Foods, gave the cover endorsement of my Talking on Eggshells book. So I had interviewed Mickey Agarwal for the book, and I said, Who else do you think would be a great interview? And she said, Well, John Mackey would be great. Well, I interviewed John and he ended up giving the cover endorsement for the book. So, boy, is that a payoff.  Rob Marsh: That’s fantastic. You. I mean, you’ve given me two workshops in this one interview. Amazingly helpful for me, but also just seeing inside your process and the way you think, the way your brain works. I know I’ve mentioned the book Pop a couple of times. I honestly think that copywriters, content writers, this should be on the shelf, because when you are looking for ideas and how to stand out, just the tools that you give in the book, we’re getting my mind thinking I you know, as I’m reading through the book, I’m hopping online, looking for cliches, for ideas that. I work with things that I’m thinking about, and so we’ll, like I said, We’ll link to it in the show notes. But if somebody wants to follow you, Sam, get you know, in touch with you, or even come and hear you speak someplace, where should they go so that they can get inside your world? Sam Horn: Well, first, I really hope that we connect on LinkedIn, that’s my life. It’s my lab and and often, at least once or twice a week, I’m on LinkedIn sharing something that just happened in a riff off of it, or a technique. One of my clients just got back in touch and said, Wow, look at how this works. So check me out on LinkedIn. Sam Horn, Intrigue Agency on LinkedIn, and then on my website. You know, we’ve got our clarity weekends where people come and do a deep dive into what they want clarity about, or my coaching or and I do love to speak for groups. So if they’re saying, Wow, we should have her come in and speak to our group, reach out to me. It’d be wonderful to hear from you. Rob Marsh: Thanks so much, Sam for just sharing so much of your knowledge and your ideas. And I’m really looking forward to sharing this with our audience. Sam Horn: Thank it’s a joy. Kudos to you for the work you do. Rob Marsh: Thanks to Sam horn for walking through several of the techniques that she talks about in her book pop. I have links to her book in the show notes, and highly recommend you pick up a copy if you want to get better at attracting and keeping attention. I’m especially grateful that she took real ideas and worked through them a bit. We talk a lot about ideas on this show, but actually working through them live shows a different level of application and helps you, the listeners, see how to apply the insights that she shared on the show. Again, Sam’s book does a lot of this and is worth putting on your shelf. When it comes to getting attention, there are a couple of workshops inside the copywriter underground on creating hooks and writing great leads that will help you grab attention so you can move your prospects from where they are to where they need to be in order to buy the products and services that you write about. You can find those workshops and playbooks at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. Be sure to check out the links in the show notes, get Sam’s book and connect with her online.

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, but I didn’t realize that everything I was doing centered around writing and writing copy. So I did that for about six or seven months. I considered it like marketing consulting, and I was working with an actor. Again, he had a business of acting course, and so I was helping him grow. I started to see the amount of money that we were making, I was making for him, and basically, I was running everything for him and not making a ton of money with it. So I was like, Huh, what could I do? How could I start something on my own? And I knew that I really liked writing. I’d always loved writing, and I really enjoyed the copywriting that I was doing for that client. So what I did was I posted in this forum. It’s called the Dynamite Circlefor entrepreneurs that are trying to travel. And, yeah, sorry, Rob, this is the long, long version. Rob Marsh: It’s all good. I’m there with you. I remember Dynamite Circle. It was a really big thing not too long ago. Derek Johanson: Yeah, it’s still going. And so I posted in that forum. You know, I was in the kind of in the copywriting subgroup in there, responding to people talking about things. I was talking about, the Facebook ads that I was running and for that client. And so I eventually stumbled on Gary Halbert, the hands-on experience newsletter. So it was like that hit, you know, Gary Halbert newsletter, and then the title of it was hands-on experience. And in it, he talked about hand copying and handwriting. And so I thought, “Oh, that’s really interesting.” And I started to do it, the handwriting, and I really enjoyed doing it. It just kind of seemed to fire something new in my brain. I always felt very motivated and ready to write after I did it. But the problem that I had is that I just kind of fell off from doing it. Certain ads that he recommended that we hand copy. Had no idea, like, why it was working. What was the point of all of this? Like the one about the expedition, I can’t even, I don’t know why. I can’t remember because I didn’t really end up hand-copying it all that much because I hated it. So there were little things like that happening. I started to want to hand copy more and realized that was kind of hard. And I was in this copywriting group, and I just kind of pitched a few of the people in it. John McIntyre was in that first group, and I just pitched some people. I said, “Hey, send me $20, and I’ll send you the ads, and I’m going to deliver it via email. I’ll just send it every single day. I’ll send you the ads to hand copy. I’ll set up a little forum, and we can talk about what we liked about the ads, why we thought they converted, and what made them good, right?” And so I set that up like, kind of woke up one morning and just or woke up like very early morning, woke up at like 3 am and was like, I’m gonna write a sales letter for this. And wrote a sales letter for the just basically like an accountability hand copying program, right? And the first time I put that out in the Dynamite Circle, I got 20 people, 20 people paid me 20 bucks. And I was like, maybe there’s something here. And so that first group went through, and everyone was just jazzed, really excited about it. I wasn’t teaching anything in those first, first few versions of copy hour. I was just literally sending ads to people. And everyone seemed to be getting great results. Just, like, wow, this is really cool. Like, I learned XYZ. John McIntyre—I don’t want to exactly put words in his mouth—but I think, literally, that inspired him to start his entire business going through and he became the autoresponder guy before auto responders were really even a thing. And so from there, I kept my client work, but kept running different versions of CopyHour and just kind of honing and refining and making it better. Eventually, I got to the point where I decided I was just going to start training a little bit, adding in some extra exercises and structure to the entire program, like how to do leads. How do you write a headline? How do you write a lead? What do you think about what comes after the lead, which is the sales argument? How do you write the offer? How do you do bullets? And kind of added in my own flair to it based on personal experiences that I was having. And then from there, I just started adding in extra programs to CopyHour and in 2017 Copy Hour became a full, complete program. Then I quit my client work in 2017. So to get back to the very first question that you asked me is, why are people still talking about it? Handwriting works, number one. And number two, I’ve been working on it for 12 or 13 years now. And when you can iterate on a product for 12 or 13 years—which some people have told me, is a mistake, to keep updating and making things better or making things different—I’ve just continued to do that for 12 years. I’ve actually talked to a couple of different business coaches who said, stop editing this product, stop and focus on new stuff. And I’m like, this could be better. I can do this better. I can teach this better. And I think that’s probably why, 15 years later, people are still talking about it. Rob Marsh: I want to get into what CopyHour is, but before we do that, I think I saw you mentioned that in your launches last year, you know both, both of your launches for this program were over six figures, which I think in the marketing space right now is a little bit of an anomaly. There are definitely programs out there that are doing well, but I’ve heard so many people talk for the last almost, almost two years now that, you know, course, sales are really hard, you know, and launch numbers are down, and you know, all this stuff’s going on, and yet you still had success, aside from the content of the program. What do you attribute that to? Why are you still able to have these big monster launches when other people are struggling? Derek Johanson: Okay. That’s a really good question. There are a couple of different things, I think. First of all, let me start with the sales page, right? So after all of this time, I’ve built up some pretty incredible social proof, or testimonials, or whatever you want to call it, where I have various people who have gone through the program, who have gone on to sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of products and not everyone is like CopyHour is the thing that made me sell $200 million, but CopyHour seems to be this launching point, like that launch pad, the starting point for a lot of different copywriters, a lot of different people. So Sam Parr, who sold the hustle for $30 million, ended up creating his own version of CopyHour and tried to call part of it CopyHour, or he said that he called it his CopyHour. But anyway, Sam Parr tried to rip off CopyHour. And it’s out there if you want to look for it. But he went through CopyHour, then sold the hustle for $30 million. here’s Dan Ferrari who went through and he sold, I don’t even know how much he sold… Rob Marsh: Dan is famous for being Motley Fool’s big copywriter and has sold probably hundreds of millions of of dollars worth of products at this point. Derek Johanson: Yeah, for sure. And then also, you know, Ian Stanley went through it. Ning Lee, who I think is probably going to do about a million dollars in per. Personal income this year from his copywriting. So I’ve got some of those big, big testimonials we’ve I’ve been around again for like, 12-13, years, so people kind of hear it. And also, I think that depends on what type of course you’re trying to sell as well. So copywriting seems to be still something that people are interested in. Copywriting courses still, still seem to be something that business owners know about. People are still interested in that topic, versus maybe some of the other topics that people might be struggling to sell a little bit. And then also, on top of that, the type of traffic that that I get, I get a lot of word of mouth, which I think, obviously, is I’ve been around for 12-13 years. A lot of people who have copywriting courses have gone through CopyHour. So I’ve trained almost up some. I really sound like I’m bragging or something right now, but I’m just answering the question. So I’ve got that. Then there are some bigger affiliates that, when you have a sales page that has amazing testimonials, frankly, they’re amazing. When you have that page and you have a good affiliate who’s willing to push hard and send hard you can, you can sell quite a bit. And so I think that that that played, played a big factor in, in those big launches. I don’t know if there’s much else that I can think of right now that would say that, and then also, just like the way that I email now, after all these years, I think is the right way to email people, and just giving as much value upfront. We can talk about this later, but just giving as much value upfront, I think, is extremely valuable, and I’ve proved that to myself this past year. Rob Marsh: Is there a secret to finding good affiliates? And this is maybe a selfish question. I know a lot of copywriters aren’t really out there looking for affiliates, but obviously, you’re building a relationship with somebody, and so that’s something all copywriters need. But do you do anything special in order to connect with the people who are selling your courses? Derek Johanson: I would sell this to you, Rob, if I could. If I had that one magic secret, I would sell it. And I’ve thought a lot about this, because one of the major parts of my business is getting those initial customers into the door. And I always say this, that’s how I pay for traffic. At this point, you have to pay for traffic in some way, shape, or form. The way that I do it is, I pay affiliates. Then once you have those good customers in the door from the affiliates, then on the back of that, you can promote your own stuff, promote other affiliates, and kind of boost that lifetime value. I’m kind of talking against paid ads right now, but like on top of that, you also get upfront money. You’re typically getting paid to get a new customer, which is something that paid traffic doesn’t allow you. So affiliate traffic can be great. It can also not be so great because of the reasons that you’re mentioning where it’s very hard to find people that are good affiliates. The way I’ve done it is not necessarily super replicable, but I go meet people, that’s the way I’ve done it—meet people in person and so, and you meet kind of networkers in person, if possible. Networking is kind of a terrible word that nobody likes, but it really is the truth. So if there are people going to events that you know of, you should probably be going to those events. If I was just starting out now and I didn’t have a family and two very young kids, I would be traveling… Does Brian from Titans have a mastermind coming up? Rob Marsh: He’s got something coming up in late summer or early fall, and obviously, there are all kinds of content and different events out there. Derek Johanson: I met Ian Stanley in person, basically after he had gone through CopyHour and we became business partners. At one point, Ian actually bought my business, and I bought it back from him, if you we could talk about that if you want to want a little bit. But so, Ian’s an amazing affiliate. And so it’s really just like getting out there, meeting people in person, developing those relationships, and then you got to kind of get a little bit lucky. You can kind of see from how people run affiliate promotions, who’s good at it too. So like, Justin Goff is great at it. He retired. Obviously, people probably know that. And then Ian is fantastic. I know just through Daniel Throssell‘s never promoted me, but I know through other people that he’s extremely good. And so there are people like that. If you see people doing heavy promotions, and they seem to be having success with it, it’s kind of hard to tell sometimes, but that’s kind of the way that you get yourself in the door, and you start to find people. Rob Marsh: So let’s talk a little bit about hand copying copy and CopyHour. I have to admit, for a long time, I’ve sort of pushed back against this idea of hand copying, primarily, probably because it just makes my hand hurt, because my hand aches when I when I try it. And I’ve always thought that more important than actually copying the words is the studying of the sales page that you’re doing. But obviously, there’s some science around handwriting and neural connections. So let’s talk about this. Why do you do it? Why did you do it? Why does it work? And obviously, it is working. You’ve got lots of successes from your program. Derek Johanson: Yeah, so there is some science, and I think it’s probably best to start there, just for people that are, that are listening in, because that is, I mean, it’s much more. There are woo connections. And then there’s the scientific side of it. And the scientific side of it is not, is not directly tied to sales copy itself, but the little science that we do have on handwriting is that it is basically recall. So, handwriting helps with the recall of characters. And recall of language is the science that’s out there. You’re better able to recall what you learn. It’s in a testing situation, and so college students who handwrite their notes tend to do better on tests or do better on tests than people who don’t. So the way that I’ve thought about it, if we’re speaking from more of a scientific standpoint, is that sales copy is a language, right? Like, you know sales good sales copy, when you read it, you know what it looks like, you know what it feels like. You know how it makes you know how it makes you feel, right? And so my thinking is that when you are hand-copying stuff, you are better able to recall that kind of sales language. It almost kind of flows out of you naturally when you’re when you’re sitting down to write. And I think speed is really important when you’re writing copy. When you are trying to write something right, like, so you’re trying to write a sales letter, and you start typing, you’re writing the headline, and then you get where you get to the point where you want to write the lead, or kind of depends—I typically start with the offer. I’ll write out the offer and then I’ll go back from there. But say you’re starting out, you’re writing the headline, and then you get to the part where you want to write the lead, and you’re like, “Hmm, what I want to say for this part?” And then you go and check your notes, and now you’re in another document. And you’re away from the actual writing itself. And what I think happens is it just becomes choppy. If you have to constantly reference your notes when you’re writing, you’re just not going to write as well. You’re going to be kind of scattered. It’s gonna hurt your focus when you’re actually in flow, right? So you kind of lose flow whenever you have to go back and reference the things—reference your notes and reference everything else when you’re writing. So hand copying and this is basically just my opinion, but backed by a little bit of science, is that when you hand copy, you are now able to recall things much more quickly, and that helps keep you in the flow for writing, which is, in my opinion, is extremely important. When you’re actually in the act of writing, you are not only in a state of flow, but you’re also in a state of hyper-confidence in what you’re doing. And if you’re not extremely confident in what you’re going to say, how things are going to flow. It takes you out of that kind of subconscious writing and back into your conscious mind. And we can talk about all of that stuff if you want. I can, you know, I can talk about Zen Buddhism and some of these other things, and some other states of states of flow, that that I think come into it, but that’s generally why I think it works. And, I mean, my sales page goes into it, into it a little bit more if you want to, if people want to dive into that, but that’s, that’s generally what I think, what I think is going on with hand copying. Rob Marsh: Yeah, I’ll link to the sales page in the show notes so people can check that out, because the copy there is, it’s a great sales page, and you talk about some of that stuff, but it also feels like there’s something else that’s going on in addition to just like the flow or the writing, like there’s some other learning that starts to happen. And maybe this is separate from the handwriting itself. But as you’re constantly looking at a Gary Halbert sales page or a Bencivenga sales page or a Carlton sales page, right? Like you’re going back and you’re seeing their ideas. You’re almost thinking through the copy the way they’re thinking through, at least the final draft of their copy. And so, you know, even if the hand hurting part, it doesn’t work for you like it doesn’t work for me or hasn’t in the past, there’s still something really valuable about going through that mental exercise. Derek Johanson: I agree. So are you? Are you a baseball fan at all? Rob Marsh: A bit. I’ll dip in and out. I live in Salt Lake, so I don’t have a major league team yet, although we’re hoping that we might get the Florida team here. But, yeah, I’ll watch, I’ll watch games from time to time. Derek Johanson: Nice. Okay, so you know, like when somebody is just on a on a hit streak, oh, yeah, or if you even played baseball yourself, when, when you’re locked in, right? What ends up happening is there these, these things called mirror neurons, which basically, like the studies that they’ve done, are on on monkeys. So if, like, a monkey is watching another monkey use a tool, it will the same neurons that are firing in the monkey that’s using the tool will also fire in the monkey that’s just watching, right? So when you’re using a tool, pen, pencil, whatever, what’s what’s happening is, and then again, this is just kind of just getting out there a little bit. What’s what’s happening is that some of those same neurons that were firing for the copywriter themselves might be firing for you as well. Again, I know that’s kind of that’s kind of out there, but that’s something that I’ve thought about. And then back to the baseball reference. Is whenever a hitter gets on a on a streak they talk about, and I experienced this. I played baseball growing up. You get the bat almost becomes just an extension of your hands. Right. The Bat becomes an extension of your arms, and so and what that does is, when you are in the zone, you’re kind of freed up to think about what the pitcher is thinking. And so you’re thinking about what the pitcher is going to throw. The bat is just like this extension of your arms. It’s like it’s nothing in your hands. It’s like you’re literally just throwing your hand out to hit that ball. That’s how easy it is. And so. I think what’s going on when, if, if it’s not memory and recall, if it’s not getting into flow, it’s being able to when you’re hand copying, you’re kind of in that state where you are thinking along the same lines as what the copywriter himself or herself is thinking as they’re going through it, and it makes sense to me, I and like, literally, like, I have to say all of this with like, this is me just going back and trying to explain what the hell is going on with everyone that goes through the program that’s like, this is the best exercise I’ve ever done. And I have no clue why. I don’t know why this is working. Yeah. Rob Marsh: I mean, again, I love studying sales pages, and so, you know, as I’m going through and I’m thinking, Oh, that, that line there, it’s not saying, hey, this proves it, but obviously he’s showing proof, right? And, and I think the more you do that, the more you see that, the more it copy almost becomes like Lego bricks that you kind of fit together and like. So, you know, it’s like, okay, yeah, I get headlines subhead, you know, lead, hook proof, introduce the expert, like all of the elements that are typically there. But as you see different copywriters just doing it in different ways. It’s almost like your toolbox just opens up and suddenly there’s way more possibilities than you ever had on your own. Derek Johanson: for sure. And I think part of it too is like, almost like a synthesis of notes, or like when you people that take notes generally do better remembering things or learning, right? So when you are hand copying, and as long as you’re not doing it, I mean, you can do it mindlessly, but as long as you’re not doing it too mindlessly, I think what’s going on is that you are, you’re slowing down, right? And you’re, you’re better analyzing what it is that you’re you’re doing, and you’re looking at your notes and and, and you’re taking notes essentially on a sales page, whereas if you just try to go through and read it, you can read it, but you can also add in this, this connection here, which is very powerful for stimulating your brain. So oddly, my my uncle, is a like a United States famous, I wouldn’t say, world famous, hand surgeon, which I didn’t know until after I had started copy hour, and he was talking about this connection here between your thumb and your pointer finger stimulates brain activity at a higher level than than not. So like when these two things are together, your brain is at is firing, is activated at a higher level, more neurons are being stimulated when those two things are working together and so that notes slowing down, yada yada, yada. Yeah, it makes sense. Hand copying rocks. Rob Marsh:  Obviously coffee hour includes more than just, hey, copy this. You’ve added some other elements. What else does it include that helps with that learning and growing, you know, beyond just the handwriting. Derek Johanson:  Yeah, so it’s, it’s a full training course, and so the you basically just get, kind of my take on on how to write sales pages, and then how I broken copy our down Now is that we focus on the four different sections of a sales page, or a sales letter, and this is kind of all, you know, the four sections are not anything new. I tried not to create, like, new terms for different sections of the sales page, just to eliminate some confusion, like, I know a lot of copywriters like to name, or, you know, gurus like to name every single thing. You got to come up with your own stuff so you can talk about it. No one else can. Yeah, exactly. So there’s I, you know, like, basically the program follows five different modules. We start with the offer, then we get, like, so I like to start with the offer, because a lot of times what you can do is you can extract from your product, whatever it is that you’re selling. You extract that that main benefit, and then you kind of put it back up into the headline. Is generally what you want to do, not always, but that’s, you know, good rule of thumb. So start with the offer. I teach how to basically write a good offer, how to come up with with an offer. And then we go into the lead, we go into the sales argument, then into the close and then kind of putting it all together. And and. And, you know, at the end of it, at the end of it, not only have you hand copied all of those different sections. So, like, when I’m talking about the offer, I’m showing you offers. When we’re talking about the lead, I’m showing you leads and how they work. And the there are eight different types of leads that I talk about in copy hour, which is eight different ways to start a sales message. And then, you know, with sales argument, same thing and close, same thing, we’re looking at each individual element of the close and, yeah, at the end of it, you’ve seen all the different versions. You’ve seen all the different pieces of of writing. You’ve hand copied. If you want to hand copy, you don’t have to hand copy, but that’s part of it is you want to do it, and at the end of it, you should have a sales page ready to go, sales letter ready to go. Rob Marsh: How does this apply to email writing? You know, if I’m listening, I’m thinking, I don’t write sales pages. So I’m not sure that this is helpful. How does this translate to, I guess, not even just email writing, but other kinds of copy, even content that other copywriters might be working on. Derek Johanson: Yeah, so I’ll start with email. And I do, we do cover email marketing in copy hour, and I have a separate program on on writing email that that I sell as well. It’s called Email Copy hour. But the the idea genius at naming, aren’t I? So the basically, you can view a lot of different kind of depends on what type of emails you’re sending, but the headline, a lot of the stuff that I talk about with hooks and headlines is going to be your subject line. And then, and actually, you know, we do some, some hand copying of of emails. And so, yeah, you can view your email as, like, just a lead, really like. So I teach you how to write a lead, how to how to have a start. And basically, if you successfully do your lead, people want to read the rest of the message right? So that rest of the message could just be a click to a sales page, or whatever it is that you’re sending people over to. So or, you know, there are sales pages, and actually one that we look at in the course that you can write an entire abbreviated sales letter with a lead, a sales argument, an offer, a close within the email itself. And so, you know, email can be viewed like an individual email could be viewed as just like an abbreviated part of the structure of the, you know, of a sales letter. And so basically, my idea with copy hour is I’m going to teach you how to write a sales page, sales letter. I’m going to teach you how to write a 10,000 word sales letter, if you really wanted to, although I don’t necessarily recommend it, especially for my type of business, I don’t write giant sales letters. I don’t think you need to. I don’t think you have to. I don’t think people want to read it for my particular business. But I will teach you how to write that giant sales letter if you wanted to, and then you can abbreviate it. You can take what you’ve learned from that overall structure and apply that to any type of sales writing. I don’t think it really works in reverse necessarily, like I think if you start off by writing emails, which is, which is great. I mean, it’s a great way to get your foot in the door. That type of copywriting, I think it’s going to be harder to learn how to go from email to a sales page. And frankly, like sales pages, sales letters are going to get you paid the most anybody that I know that’s pushing towards a million dollars a year is writing sales pages, sales letters, offers, creating offers, that type of thing, and so I think it’s the best thing to start with, even though it might be a little bit more difficult than other types of copy, I think it’s the best place to start. Yeah, same can apply to content and everything like depends on, you know, I don’t teach SEO writing. But any sort of like content that could lead to a sale, or does lead to a sale, is the type of copy that that we talk about. Rob Marsh: Do you have a favorite sales page out of the course? One that’s like, wow, this is the this is the top. This is the gold standard. Derek Johanson: I love. Gary Bencivenga’s olive oil letter. Rob Marsh: So that is my all time favorite as well. I’ve done a breakdown of that letter in my own community, and our membership is it’s just, it’s a work of genius. Derek Johanson: And yeah, 100%agree. Yeah, I love it, and I love that it’s still running, as far as I can tell. Like, that same letter still going. Yeah, I think it’s, this has a couple minor tweaks over the years, but, yeah, a version still running. Rob Marsh: Yeah, I love that one. It’s fantastic. I’ll link to that for anybody who’s listening, just so you can check it out. It, I mean, it’s got story, it’s got science, it’s it’s so good at selling, it’s really hard to to read that and think, Well, I’m just gonna go to Costco and buy my olive oil after that. Derek Johanson: yeah, exactly. And then Aaron winter is really good. So he used to work for Motley Fool, and now he’s got kind of his own agency with Dan Ferrari. But Aaron winter stuff is really good. The Trillion Dollar War for your living room from Motley Fool, that’s a giant epic sales letter, but I love that one. Mel Martin has some bangers. I like, I love Mel Martin stuff, just like pure bullets. I don’t really use bullets all that much in my copy, but I love Mel Martins. You know, they’re like, you know, it’s like a direct response, sales space, ad type thing, not, not a sales page, but I love those. And then, you know, like, if Carlton stuff is just wild. You know, a lot of it you can’t use today, but I just love the big, giant, strange, weird ideas. And, yeah, Eugene Schwartz, like Eugene stuff is really cool. Just like, lay down on the ground and cure all of your illness. Rob Marsh:  yes, rub your stomach and cure cancer or whatever. Derek Johanson: yeah, yeah, exactly. His stuff was kind of crazy. Rob Marsh: So talk a little bit about your own approach to email. So as I’ve looked at your email, been on your list, I noticed a lot of stories, a lot of open loops, actually, that you don’t close at the end of your email. Sometimes, you know, multi stage, uh, emails to go on for a few days. Yeah. How do you look at email? And you know what you’re trying to do with your own audience? Derek Johanson: Yeah. So this is the stuff that I really love to talk about now, especially because I’ve made a big switch in my email approach and also just my business in general. So I have gone from and, you know, actually, this might answer part of the question, that part of the problem that people are having selling courses this day and age is because a lot of the like, I think a lot of the lower level copywriting, freelance copywriting industry has been completely chopped off, partially AI, partially just fear of AI and content farms— just the market itself. And so the I made a big switch about a year and a half ago to I just want to talk to I do like talking to copywriters, but I think all copywriters want to start a business, their own business. I know that I did, but I made a switch from talking to specifically freelance copywriters. I want to talk to solopreneur business owners. I want to talk to that audience, because that is who I am. Those are the problems that I’m solving every single day. I haven’t done client work since 2017 so for me to feel good about writing and what I’m doing, I want to talk to the people that want to run the same business that I want to run. And that shift has been awesome for me. I kind of got out of talking to freelancers about what they could do that I did. You know eight years ago, it’s more, hey, I’m running a business right now. Here are the challenges that that I’m overcoming, here’s here’s what I’ve done to solve different problems. And so that’s kind of the overarching idea of of my emails, is that I do actually week long tutorials. So I hired a business coach end of last year and or beginning of last year, and he helped me come up with a kind of entire system for sending tutorial emails. So all Monday through Friday, my emails are are all interconnected, right? So I teach a topic like, basically a how to topic, some problem that I specifically myself have solved, and, and, and so I string them all together. Monday is typically an open loop about, like, what exactly I’m going to do for the rest of. The week, what I’m going to teach you Tuesday, I show you an example of of what you know, like, what that particular topic is that could be in story format, or it could just be literally, like, some sort of visual example, or a breakdown of, like, of the topic that I’m going to talk about, I should have a topic in mind when I’m telling you this, because it’ll be easier to describe it. And then Wednesday is kind of a step by step. And then Thursday, I’m basically answering some sort of question that’s probably going to arise from trying to implement those steps. And then on Friday, I’m just kind of doing a recap action plan, type email, and I just cycle through those. And I, you know, my whole thing now is a I am only talking about things that I have actually done and and nothing like, here’s how you could do it. Here’s how I not even like, I got rid of some products that I have or like, here’s what I would do. Everything that I do these days is, here’s exactly what I’ve actually done to produce results. Here’s the step-by-step of it. I try to give away literally, as much as I possibly can. Most of the time, people are telling me that, like, the emails that I’m sending are better than a lot of the different courses that they buy, and I’m sending those for free. I’m literally just trying to give away as much as I possibly can. And like people will talk about, Oh, I gotta give away 90% and leave the 10% for paid products. I found that I don’t even know what the heck that means. So for me, I’m like, give it all away and then in my products, I’m gonna just continue to give it all away and see, yeah, I don’t even know where it’s gonna lead, but it’s like, that’s, that’s my that’s my mindset. And since I adopted that mindset, you know, like these, these bigger launches have happened, it’s really just about owning your expertise. And I’ve, I had to hire a coach and a therapist to kind of tell me, like, Hey, dude, you’re an expert. You’ve sold millions of dollars worth of these products. Like, start talking like you’re an expert. A big issue that that I had in the past was that I was just kind of sending little story emails about my life with no real teaching in them. There wasn’t any sort of value. And that’s great for getting attention. That’s great for having people feel like you’re a friend of theirs, building a relationship in that way. But when when it came time to buy stuff, I was finding that people weren’t buying from me as much as I wanted them to buy. Now, I’ve kind of switched to hey, I’m an expert. I know how to do this stuff. Like, I’ve been doing this for 15 years now. Here are all the different things that I’ve learned. Here’s what’s worked for me, here’s what hasn’t worked for me. And I get a lot less emails from people being like, Oh, I love you, Derek. And I get a lot more sales now. And for me, I’d rather have the sales at the moment as much as I’d like my ego to be stroked like anybody else. It’s like I got two small kids. I live in the most expensive city, one of the most expensive cities in the entire country, and I’m just trying to make money. Rob Marsh: No reason, no reason that the bank account going up doesn’t stroke your ego as well. So you mentioned the shift in confidence. Talk a little bit about that, like, because this is marketing industry-wide, you know, where we have so many experts who are afraid to show up as experts. I’m sure that I do it. Almost everybody I know does it. Some people realize that they’re they’re not, you know, they’re not doing that. But this is obviously my mindset issue, getting rid of the head trash that says you don’t know what you’re talking about or but how did you get through that? Like, what was the process? You know, or maybe I’m asking you to help me with some therapy here, help me step through this problem myself. Derek Johanson: Yeah, well, I’ve got three recommendations, two of which I’m hesitant to tell anybody to do. But let’s start with the first one, hire a business coach. So hiring a business coach was a was a big, gigantic step for me, and what that business coach was able to explain to me that no one really. Had talked about before, was was again, what I had said earlier about owning what you actually have done. So write about what you have actually done, not just what sounds good. And so when I’m writing from a place of what I’ve actually done, I am extremely confident. Because how can you not be confident in something that you’ve you’ve already done? I think where a lot of people get into a lot of trouble when they’re they’re writing, and especially kind of writing in this scenario, where you’re writing to other business owners, or where you where you really need to be the expert. It’s not necessarily like if you’re, you know, writing for a company where you’re selling, you know, a workout program, or you’re writing about like some sort of supplement, but when you’re when you’re writing about what you’ve actually done to to to a group of people that are trying to do similar things to you, it just, yeah, I don’t know it sounds so it kind of sounds, not It sounds too simple or something on the surface, but when you when you’re actually writing about things that you’ve actually done, there’s a confidence to that. And it also just kind of, you know, like you just, you feel better about what you’re doing and, and I think that’s a major issue for a lot of of different copywriters, is they don’t really, like feel good about some of the copy that they’re writing, or that they have to write. And, you know, they almost feel like they’re lying, or like an imposter. Like imposter syndrome is huge. I experience imposter syndrome quite often, until I just kind of forgot all that stuff by writing about what I actually do. Because when you’re writing about what you actually do, then how you How could you be an imposter? Right? So there, and there’s, like, some hard work that’s involved with that too, right? Like, you can’t just kind of phone it in. You actually have to be doing things. So like, for example, I was, I was writing about, forget what exactly the topic was, but I wanted to tell people why I thought something worked, like, some some, maybe it’s like some marketing tactic that I had worked like, how does it work? Like, how well does it work, right? Okay, so I was writing about putting just a simple wait list, like, putting up a wait list for a product that you have on your sales page, put, like, a little wait list box up top. And I was like, how does the strategy work? Does this strategy work? Like? And I was like, writing like, yeah, it works extremely well. And then I was like, Well, how do I know it works extremely well? And I was like, I don’t, I don’t really check the numbers on it, like, I’m not checking my my stats religiously on this opt in box, and how it how it directly relates to the ultimate amount of sales that I got. And so instead of saying, Hey, it works really well, I started talking about, how, about how I don’t have close tracking on the things that I do, and kind of owning the fact that, like, I’ve still built up a pretty successful business without honing in on all the different little metrics, whereas, you know, I feel like most people would kind of just make up, like, make up things and not get specific about numbers. And it was like, I’m not getting specific about numbers because I can’t get specific about numbers, so that’s just a small example. So that’s step one. The two that I have a hard time like recommending to anybody will be therapy. Therapy has helped me immensely. I’m not going to tell somebody to go out and get a therapist, because that just sounds I don’t know, I don’t know that I would hear that well, but a therapist just kind of helps you talk through any of the, any of this shit that’s floating around in your head. That’s helped me a lot, and and then psychedelics, so, mushrooms, so, and I can’t really recommend that to anybody, but mushrooms, basically, just help you understand that everything’s gonna be okay. Rob Marsh: At the very least, a business coach or a little help from somebody who’s been there. And we’ll, we’ll leave those last two steps if, if it feels right for anybody. Derek, this is, this is great, I believe, as we’re going live, CopyHour is open for new students, and we’ll link to it in the show notes. And there’ll be a bonus if you obviously, they can search for it online and find it, but if they buy it through the link on our website, there’d be a little bonus for people to consider. But where else should people go to just find out about you be on your list? You know, to hear to be more in your world? Derek Johanson:  Yeah. So the the easiest thing to do is to go to copyhour.com one word. If you want to dive in and kind of hear about my methodology for writing a sales page, go to copy our.com/framework and that’s a big, long article. I think it’s like things 22 minutes read on exactly how I look at writing a sales page. And you can kind of get your feet wet there, and then, yeah, and then that’s, that’s the best place. I think Rob Marsh: Amazing. I appreciate you taking the time to talk through this, especially salespage handwriting, you know, it’s, it’s always out there in my brain, I’m thinking, you know, I should do this, and then I do it, and my hand hurts, but like, I get the science maybe this time, maybe, maybe I’ll start writing this week. We’ll see. Derek Johanson: It doesn’t have to be for the rest of your life type of thing. I think a lot of us get caught up in, in, oh, this has got to be the thing that I do forever, and then that just makes it so daunting. But it’s like select like bursts of time, like 30 to 90 days of concentrated effort has lifelong effects. Like, even from an from an exercise standpoint. Like, I’ve done some programs, or it’s like a 90 day program, and then I’m done, and I might get a little bit fat again, or whatever you want to, you know, say, like, put on some pounds, and if I wanted to get back in shape, I generally, I mean, I’m 40 now, so I don’t know how true this is, but, like, I generally, I generally know that, like, I can get back to a decent place a lot more quickly than than if I hadn’t done that initial uh, 90 day workout program when I was younger. So I think the same thing applies with with this. It’s like, you got to learn. I mean, copywriting like, this is your podcast, right? Like, copywriting is such a foundational piece. It’s, it’s the thing that has enabled all of the income that I’ve made in an online business situation. Being good at copywriting is, like, the number one skill, if you’re good at copywriting or good at coding, like, those are the two things, like, what else is there? You know, like, what else? What else is going to allow you to make a really, really good income? I don’t know. So it because copywriting is sales, right? Sales, salesmanship and print. Rob Marsh: Yeah, exactly. That’s good advice. Thanks to Derek for talking about his program, learning copy by handwriting, and how he attracts new customers using affiliates, which seems to be working even over the past couple of years when so many online course sellers have struggled… which may be another reason to check out copy hour by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/copyhour to learn more. A course that continues to sell this well is likely effective at delivering on its promise… helping copywriters get better at what we all do for our clients. Let’s talk a bit more about the science of handwriting… there aren’t any studies specifically about learning the principles of copywriting when writing things out by hand, but activating the connection between your hand and, specifically, your forefinger and thumb and the brain has a proven impact on learning all kinds of skills. So it’s not too crazy to think it has an oversized impact on learning how to write copy. In addition to the nerves that fire between your hand and brain, when studying a sales page, your brain is also breaking down why the words work the way they do… why they are in the order they are in… and how the words impact your thinking. If you’re going to practice this on your own, make sure that the copy you are hand-copying is effective and actually sells because practicing on bad copy could result in bad writing habits… again, this might be where checking out Copy Hour at thecopywriterclub.com/copyhour will help you become a better writer because you know all of the examples you’ll be handcopying in the course are proven winners. If Copy Hour isn’t right for you, or if what Derek said about hiring a coach a few minutes ago resonates with you… This is something I help copywriters with in The Copywriter Underground. I can’t help with mushrooms or therapy, but I can help you build a more resilient, successful copywriting business in The Underground. In addition to the coaching, you also have access to more than 70 workshops and playbooks that help you implement the strategies they teach, templates, and accountability as you build your business—that’s in The Copywriter Underground at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. One more thing… Derek mentioned his emails and what people have said about them. He’s right, I’m on his list, and they are very readable. You may want to jump on his list as well, just to see what he’s doing. Again, you can do that at thecopywriterclub.com/copyhour  All of the stuff I’ve mentioned is linked in the show notes for this episode.

Yes, you write. But when it comes to marketing, you can do a lot more than that. Today, clients are looking for help from specialists like copywriters who bring more to the table. In this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I spoke with Emily Reagan about how writers can offer additional services and expertise to their clients. Emily helps virtual assistants step up into a more helpful role as Marketing Assistants, and it’s something we think more copywriters need to consider. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff we mentioned: Atomic Habits Emily’s Podcast Emily’s Instagram The Authority Framework The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground   Full Transcript: Rob Marsh:  You’re a copywriter, but you can do other marketing stuff like design or email systems. Is there a need for that? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast. As a copywriter, you probably have a hand in all kinds of marketing activities—everything from the overall marketing strategy to brainstorming lead magnets, to creating and posting content, or writing and managing ads, to figuring out which email systems will help increase engagement and purchases… you probably already do a lot of this stuff. What’s more, a lot of clients want smaller, more nimble teams these days, and that means working with people who can do more of the tasks they used to depend on an entire team to get done. Some people taking on these expanded roles call themselves marketing assistants. Whether that title works for you or not isn’t important. What really matters is that there is a growing need for writers of all kinds to take on this larger, more inclusive role and contribute more, often using A.I. to bring it all together. My guest for this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is Emily Reagan. Emily started out offering marketing support especially related to Facebook ads, but she expanded beyond that to include copywriting and other marketing services. And she’s spent the past couple of years helping others do the same thing. We talked about the importance of adding additional marketing services to your copywriting business to make yourself more valuable—maybe even indispensable—for your clients. It’s yet another way to stand out from all the other writers out there who don’t offer clients anything extra. While we talked, Emily also shared a lot of details about her business—she works with clients and helps other writers grow their marketing skills. As she tells it, her business grew serendipitously… going from one thing to the next as it made sense. It’s not exactly a path that others can follow, but it is a strategy for finding your own path to the work you love doing. I think you’re going to like this discussion. As usual, 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 it easier to find the ideas and insights you need. 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 make sure 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 Emily Reagan… Hey Emily, welcome to the podcast. And let’s, let’s just start out by saying this is a long time coming. The last time we saw each other, it’s like five years ago. And I don’t know why we haven’t had you on sooner than the now, but I’m glad you’re here now that you’re here. Yeah, tell us. Tell us your story. How did you become a copywriter? Emily Reagan: Yeah, it’s been five years in the making. The last time you and I were together was right when the pandemic was happening in 2020, so it’s a completely different time. And my business has changed a lot since I showed up to your conference in real life. But you know how business owners, especially the online ones, are running around like crazy, trying to wear all the hats, do all the things, and keep all the marketing and all the gardens happy? I am the person who started training the marketing assistant to help within that marketing department. It started because I was a military wife for 20 years, had this hodgepodge of journalism and PR jobs, and was just lucky to find a job only to move a year or two later. And it kind of all came together beautifully in the online space, and then I just started teaching my friends how to do it. So when I went to your conference, I wasn’t officially calling myself a copywriter, but I was still finding myself doing that work. Had I known about it back in 2007 when I was freelancing my first press releases, I would have just gone all into Copyright. Marketing, but I didn’t know what I didn’t know. So yeah, now I train virtual assistants to be in the marketing department, because marketing, it’s more fun, it’s creative, it’s flexible, it pays more. And that’s where I’m happy. I love that, and I’m really glad we started here because so many copywriters in The Copywriter Club. People who listen to this podcast start out as VAs, and they come to that realization, wait a second, I’m doing way more here than just being an assistant. And the cream always rises. I mean, “Assistant” never would have appealed to me, so I’ve really struggled with my own marketing. I’m like, do I use the title: virtual assistant? Because that’s the SEO word, but it’s so much more. And I think the term virtual assistant is just really getting kind of dumbed down. When I get into my Kia Carnival, and I see the little button for a virtual assistant, I’m thinking of AI. And so this job title has evolved since I even started, you know, training people four years ago, and that’s why I kind of went all in with the idea of a marketing assistant, because there’s just so many options online, and then you start adding different skills like copy or customer service or podcasting content marketing, and you’ve just created a whole different type of unique specialization for yourself. So it’s really fun to see how it all comes together online. Rob Marsh: So let’s talk about being a marketing assistant. You just kind of listed off a bunch of the things that they might do. But let’s, let’s go a little bit deeper with this idea, because I really like it. I think that there’s space maybe for a lot of people who have been vas, but they feel like they’re doing more, but maybe they’re not ready yet to call themselves a copywriter or a designer or a CMO or whatever the next thing is, there’s kind of the space out there. So how do you define that marketing assistant? Emily Reagan: Yeah, and especially getting confusing when you see AI can help. You’re seeing things being delegated and outsourced overseas for super cheap. So you know, all businesses have six main departments. We have operations, customer service, HR, finances, you know, accounting, product development, and then we have marketing and sales. And so this marketing, I think, where a lot of business owners get it wrong is they’re trying to find a virtual assistant to do everything and save their business by Thursday and launch and video edit, you know. And so, really drilling down into what department I am in and what kind of results I am going after? A lot of us hold ourselves back, thinking we need a four-year marketing degree, and those kinds of days are a little bit over. Rob Marsh: So, if I wanted to maybe step into that newer role, do I need to know how to write copy and also use Canva and edit video for the person that I might be working with in order to get things onto reels or YouTube? What are the things that I need in my skill wheelhouse in order to be able to, you know, start calling myself a marketing assistant? Emily Reagan: I think you need to combine, like, complimentary skills, for sure. And what’s interesting is, in my course, I am teaching, I say, I, you know, I’m teaching you how to grow an audience online and help your clients sell to that audience, right? And so we’re nurturing, and we’re selling, we’re converting. And so that’s kind of the role of the marketing assistant, is, which channels are we driving traffic? Like, how are we nurturing them? How are you getting them on the list? Which algorithms like, like, what? Right? So that’s a little bit of the game. But in my course, I teach the tech, I teach the strategy, and I’m always saying and complimenting you. The next thing is copy. You have to learn how to sell with words. So I think anytime you can add copy to a specific or niche or even general marketing, you know, service, you are going to be sitting pretty. You’ll you’ll have, you know, more career flexibility. You know, easier retention with clients because clients really want that long-term help. I mean, I don’t know about you, but in the online space, I’m seeing a lot of teams simplifying, streamlining, and condensing. We don’t all want 20 employees in our business anymore. We’re looking more at profits. The online space is changing. So if we can find someone who can offer a little bit higher value, you know, they can also, you know, charge more too. So it’s figuring out, what is the right way to add copy in there. And I think copy is a must. That’s something I preach. And, like I said, when I was starting, I didn’t know it was a thing. I kind of fell into it, and it started with, like, Okay, well, I need to whip out this thank you page; my client gave me nothing, and it’s holding me back; I’ll just take care of it. So that’s kind of how it started with me. Or, like, blogging, or, you know, Pinterest. How do I get the click on these, you know, simple Pinterest pins I’m making? Rob Marsh: You just said something that really like, rings a bell, and it’s that I’ll just take care of it. It’s as if they’re the person who is right for this kind of title or role is the person who cares about the business of the person they’re working for. Is that right? Emily Reagan: Okay, so we’re finding how we can, like, fit our copy words into marketing systems. So like, if you’re already naturally doing that and thinking in terms of strategy or what comes next, and you’re enjoying it, and the client is asking you, that’s such an opportunity to, you know, level up into the next role. Like I said, assistants are leveling up to specialists to marketing managers and strategists. I don’t know about you, but I know a lot of copywriters do way more than just copy. They’re coming in and now advising on the strategy of the funnel or the launch or the webinar, and so those are opportunities to start wearing that you know are dubbing yourself like the higher title that you might not feel ready for because you’re already actually doing it you just you know might not recognize that. That makes sense. So you were saying when we met each other at the conference in San Diego, you were kind of struggling with how to call yourself, or what to call yourself, how to make that shift. So what was the thing that, like, snapped for you, that that you know, like, changed everything you’re like, Oh, I see now what I really am or where I can make that contribution. I’m going to tell this story in reverse and spoiler alert. It ends with you, but it starts with you. I actually went on to do a hodgepodge of skills and enjoyed it. I like variety. I have this crazy skill set, and one of the jobs I’ve worked with a lot of high-end copywriters and marketers, some of them, you will know that I will never mention their names on this podcast, and I found myself in this role as an ads manager, combining my unique skill set, I’m doing the tech the audience. I’m doing the copy, and I’m doing a little bit of the design. Am I going to do a perfectly produced Facebook ad? No, at some point, like, I will hire out the specialist. So let me just throw that out there. And I’m like, chuckling because the ads are going live, and everyone’s like, this guy is so great. His copy is so good. I’m studying it, and I’m like, It’s me, it’s me, it’s not him. And I’m, you know, it’s going great, and then all of a sudden, the funnel breaks, it doesn’t work, and who gets thrown under the bus? It’s me, the ads manager. There’s only so much in my control if the button’s not working, the landing page isn’t loading, and the tech isn’t delivering what it said I got I got hosed. And so I found myself at this moment with a very high-end funnel expert who everyone would know if I said his name, just staring me down, and he looked at me and he said, Are you a copywriter? Because they’re doing like a funnel audit, and I’m just like fudge. I quivered. I went silent. And I regret that moment to my day, and I should have reflected back to the fact that if you’re doing copy, you are a copywriter, and just own it. And you and I had that conversation in the bar in San Diego where I told you, I don’t know why I’m here at this at this conference with all these copywriters. I look at you and your experience and everything you know with advertising and marketing, and you know your method for writing copy, and I don’t bring that to the table, but I bring something else, right? And at that bar, I told you, hey, I don’t feel like a copywriter, and you just like, anointed me one right then and there. And so it’s permission to call yourself that. And, you know, take responsibility for what you do bring to the table and own that. And I’m just putting it out there for your listeners, like I buffed it, even after you annoyed at me, I got fired. Long, long story short, they needed to fire me. They had no right to run ads to a broken funnel, right? So I think about that moment that was really pivotal for me to own my experience and what I bring to the table that will never happen again. And I have since done ads for other people. Like, right now I’m doing, I’m actually working with an ads manager, but, like, I know enough about copy messaging and how it should work, where now I’m, like, managing it as a CMO, and we’re doing great. Like, it had nothing to do with that one-time client experience. I did ads for another client, like in January, and we did great there, too. So I don’t know, I don’t know if that made sense, but it was just like a fun story that kind of brings it all together. And it’s really about like positioning yourself as an expert, but really feeling it and believing it. Rob Marsh: Thanks for sharing that. I forgot that conversation. I remember hanging out with you at the bar, but I totally spaced that, that that had even happened. I was in a fog, and that whole week was kind of crazy. But yeah, so I guess if anybody’s listening and they’re thinking, and wait a second, maybe I’m ready to step up, you and I together, we can knight them right now and say, look, if you’re writing copy, you’re a copywriter. If you’re writing copy for yourself… if you’re writing it for just one client… if you’re a VA or you’re doing something else, but you’re still helping them with that stuff, lean into that and grow that experience. And, you know, do the things that you need to do in order to really step into that role. Emily Reagan: Yeah, I’ll go, don’t be shy. Offer that support to your clients. At some point it’s a fuzzy line, right? Like, when are you going out of scope? When are you doing too much? But I think it’s easy to flex it with the clients you have now. Build the confidence, build the competence. We know about that loop. You just have to insert yourself into that. And there’s so much to be said with just the job title. I mean, I coach a lot of my students with the job title, so it’s so funny that I got stuck on it too. You know, thinking about all of the talented copywriters we had there, I remember Justin Blackman staying on the stage, on the stage, saying he got this huge contract, and even he was scared. And I was like, wow, if Justin’s scared, I can be too. And I still add value to my clients. They need help. They have a hard time finding someone who can do marketing. It’s hard to find fractional good marketers right now, and so feeling good about what I bring to the table is really key, and being able to partner with them ongoing and long term, I’m fitting a void that a lot of freelancers don’t do. Rob Marsh: So while we’re still talking about this, how, let’s say that there are skills that somebody’s thinking, Okay, I have been writing copy, but I don’t know enough about marketing or some of this other stuff. How would you recommend they go about adding these kinds of skills so that they’re actually practitioners of them, and they’re not just, you know, reading a book or taking a course? Emily Reagan: Oh, that’s a good question. Obviously, we all feel good if we take a course or we learn from someone ahead of us, right? Like, that’s like the fastest track for doing anything. But I would just be really intentional with how you combine things like, you know, an obvious one for a skill stack for copywriters, learning funnels. You know, clients need help. They want somebody who understands marketing strategy, the automations, how we can be really strategic and personal right now, especially with these conversations that are happening. So if you can offer a combination of at least the strategy and the copy, it could be that we hire out the tech, but if you enjoy the tech, like sometimes my brain enjoys shutting down a little bit, and doing some of that can be very black and white. I think funnels are an obvious low-hanging fruit, like easy money on the table whenever you can get involved. How is the world adapting with launching? And how can you stay in the forefront? I don’t know about you. I’m seeing a lot of people doing more evergreen or less live, launching more ongoing containers. Like less pressure to launch. I think automation is a big one. Figuring out, like many chat funnels right now are huge or any kind of bot assistance, so like combining them in the right way, I like to use my current clients for practice. And you can always obviously practice on your own business. I think that’s the safest place to do it. Rob Marsh: So another thing that occurs to me while we’re talking about this is obviously the copywriting world is changing as well, and a lot of copywriters are struggling to find work. Maybe it’s AI, maybe it’s the economy, but there’s this sneaking suspicion, and it may not be wrong that at least some of that lower-level copywriting work is gone and maybe gone forever. Thanks again to AI, and so there’s probably an opportunity here for even copywriters or content creators to expand their skill sets into maybe they wouldn’t call themselves a marketing assistant, but it’s more of a marketer CMO type thing by adding these other skill sets so you’re not just writing email and sending off a doc with copy in it, but you’re also loading that into an ESP, or setting up the welcome sequence, or the abandoned cart sequence, or helping the clients identify the missing pieces where money’s kind of leaking out of their business. And more of us need to be doing that in order to ensure that there’s work in the future. Emily Reagan: Yeah, or taking it to the next step. I was thinking of a brand voice person I worked with—a client, and she gave us all of these amazing messaging points, and then what we need help taking it to the next step. And so I know that she has since pivoted and added, like, building the AI copywriter to go with it, with my brand voice, and so like making it that full package, just a higher value, we would have paid probably $10,000 for that instead of the five, because now I have something I can turn around and give to my team. Who I pay. I do pay for lower-level tasks for some of that. But here’s what’s never going away, like the data analysis, somebody to sit down and have the oversight. Copywriters are so good at being strategic with surveys. You know, before we hit record, I was talking about Brittany McBean, and I got a chance to see her brain working in a launch for my course. The way she analyzed the survey data just blew my mind. I’d never seen that. And that’s the kind of stuff that my little AI copywriter can’t do at her level. And what I we ultimately need is that final messaging right? And that’s what copywriters do so well, they do the market research. This is why I always get hesitant to call myself one, because I like to come in with, like, the final product and, like, make decisions, but that final messaging stamp is just getting noisier and harder to stand out. I mean, you have a lot of good podcasts here on the show talking about, like, how to write the hook, but we need the people to, like, oversee them and make sure it’s actually moving the business forward right like businesses are kind of struggling right now on the online space. So we got to stand out. We’ve got to convert even better than before. Rob Marsh: Okay, so let’s talk about how your business changed. Then, you know, from where we were five years ago, and kind of in that struggle giving yourself permission today, your business is really different. Yeah, I have always kind of had my like, mutually exclusive things, like, I do the client work. I’m still a practitioner. I enjoy it. It keeps me relevant. So I have some client work, I’ve just had to be very intentional and strategic about who I say yes to, which is always the freelance like boundary and like problem we get into, like, which clients do we say yes to? So I have kind of streamlined that. And I basically work like CMO projects over there, or ads, like something that can be like high level one time, on and off. Emily Reagan: I found myself doing a lot of quiz funnels, you know, I worked with Chanti Zak, and I took her course, and I was able to do that. For a lot of the work, I partnered with a copywriter. I was actually doing a lot of the tech, and then the ads, and so that’s kind of where ads kind of fell into my lap, and it’s really fun to watch what copywriters turn in. And I’ve always learned that way back when my clients called me their VA, I can remember them hiring copywriters and me just eating it up because I was the one making the changes, like going into the landing page and like, oh, they that makes sense. So I never had actually taken a copywriting course, which is why I felt like an imposter back in 2019, so I kind of found a way to marry my knack for writing and copywriting and design and build these funnels. And then I started teaching people how to do the work, too, because it’s been so empowering for somebody like me. There are a lot of over-educated, underemployed military spouses or women who had a baby break, or people transitioning to staying at home or making a change in their careers. And I just realized, like, you don’t need a marketing degree in this day and age if I can teach you how the algorithms work and what business owners are trying to do so we can give you the whole picture. You can learn how to do this and start with a couple of services. So there’s like two parts of my business now, and it’s pretty wild to go from behind the scenes to the face of my business, which is slightly uncomfortable, but you know, when you know you’re helping other people, you’ll, you’ll do it and, yeah, what do you want to talk about in there? Because there’s, like, so many little side conversations. Rob Marsh:  You’ve got a lot of different moving pieces as well. I think you’ve got a community. You’ve got a podcast of your own. Yeah? I mean, in addition to, you know, copywriting, you’re doing PR, and, you know, a lot of the moving pieces in the background for your clients. So there’s almost not even a title for all of the things that you’re doing. Emily Reagan: When somebody was like, what do you do? Because I always lean into my PR experience. I knew how to write a press release and get it printed in a Podunk paper, word by word, like, that’s, that’s what I knew how to do. And that press release turned into media kits, which turned into me looking at Google Analytics, which turned into Pinterest, which turned into blogging, which turned into landing pages and funnels. So it was like, not a like, a linear thing at all. So I do, I have done some pitching and like, use the skill set over there. Ads are really easy. It’s like, you kind of want to go where, like, it’s easy and natural for you, and you almost feel kind of bad about it, because it comes so natural, you know? Rob Marsh: But there’s, like, a trade-off with that too. Oftentimes, when something comes naturally to us, we don’t price it properly because we were like, Oh, this is easy. Like, this isn’t work, and so it must not be valuable. And so we end up staying in those lower roles even though we’re doing this higher level work. Emily Reagan: Yeah, I think the more teams I work on, the more I see a what a hot mess. A lot of people are. They look very successful online. I mean, all of us are struggling. So even the most organized person who might look intimidating might not be creative and need your skill, and vice versa, if you’re one of those integrator organized, you know, EOS people like somebody needs the talent you have out there. And I agree it’s like really easy to undervalue your work, but isn’t that the goal to find what you’re most passionate about? What you’re good at? And what you love? What people are paying you for? I always struggled, what do I call myself? And I was kind of joking with my teammate, and I was like, I’m a unicorn. And it turns out there is such a thing as a full-stack unicorn marketer. I didn’t even know that. I was just kind of combining my PR with this, like, new world of online business, I discovered and dubbed myself a unicorn, and then it kind of became a thing, and that is part of my branding now, which is funny, because I’m very much Sporty Spice and not a sparkly unicorn girl, but it is the essence of what we’re all trying to do, like find that sweet spot for us. We all come from unique backgrounds and experiences. And I will never forget Chanti telling me that one of her first blogs she wrote was in podiatry like that was her passion? And you, you know, you’re like a health nut. You’re really into, like, a little plantar fasciitis protection like that could be like the dream business, writing content and copy for, I don’t know, that type of doctor, podiatrists. Rob Marsh: It’s interesting… this kind of skill stacking, and how we all put it together. We’ve always called it finding your X-Factor when we’ve taught these workshops in our programs.It is the way there. We’ve said this a whole bunch of times, but like, there are over 750,000 copywriters on LinkedIn. There are over a million content writers on LinkedIn, if you add content strategists or social media strategists, there’s 2 million more of those, right? So standing out in that crowd is really hard. But when you start doing this kind of skill stacking where you’re matching this thing that you like and that thing you like, it’s pretty easy—once you have four or five things you’re combining in unique ways—to be the number one in that combination. So you don’t have to be the very best copywriter and compete with those millions, but you do have to be the very best copywriter who works in your niche, who brings to the table your three or four skills, and writes in the voice, or can mimic the voice, right? And you combine these four or five things together, that’s your X Factor, and that’s basically what you’re you’re helping your clients do as well. Emily Reagan: And then you add in SEO, and you’re really golden. Rob Marsh: Exactly, or AI, or whatever, yeah. The more you add in, the more unique you become. Emily Reagan: I was reading, is it James clears book? I’m so bad at quoting people, but he talked about Atomic Habits, right? That’s James Clear, yeah? He talked about combining his masters and like, a way to stand out. Like, if you can’t compete with Michael Phelps in Olympic swimming, like, create your own create your own field. And he talked about how you combine his major in a unique way, which just made him special. Like, that’s exactly what we’re doing. You change the playing field that you’re on. When you do that, I will tell you that a lot of copywriters don’t, and because I’m implementing a lot of the work, they don’t understand design UX. How many times have I been like, if that headline doesn’t fit, or your Facebook headline doesn’t fit, because there are only so many characters, and then SEO is a big one, like, that’s never going to go away, and especially with AI like skimming everything? So right off the bat, those would be two things, but I’ll tell you this, I think I appreciate copy more as I run my team, I’m going to throw my team under the bus when I see their responses sometimes in emails and customer engagement, even if they’re just set or sending out an email as a reminder to attend an event, I see the lack of copy, knowledge and messaging in their writing, and that drives me crazy as a business owner, and I will never hire someone again who doesn’t know how to write. And I don’t I mean beyond grammar, like the copy of reminding people, why are we showing up to this happy hour for the work group? And it’s not because we are shooting the breeze and we just like to hang out and take it easy. No, like, there’s a deeper mission impact and like, reason, they’re in this community, and we’re meeting up, and all of that was lacking from these little I’m going to call them piddly, like, internal communication. And for me, that’s eye-opening. Some clients just won’t get it, but the clients who do, I mean, they’re keepers. They’re keepers. Rob Marsh: Well, I think more and more the clients who don’t get it, they’re using content farms or AI or whatever like they never were looking for that higher level stuff. But the keeper clients need humans more than ever, and they value that, and they will keep you, and they will pay well for that. And that’s why that messaging, I think, is just so important to bring to the table. So you’re talking to copywriters, marketers, marketing assistants all the time. Where do you see the biggest opportunities in online marketing today? Emily Reagan: Oh, definitely. AI and  finding a way to combine it and be more efficient. Even whether it’s in your own work, streamlining your own work so you’re not trading as much time or being able to do it in that deliverable, like we talked about with that other brand voice person I was working with, and then the AI can go into even more automations, like I was thinking about how I used to manually listen to my clients, Facebook, live, transcribe it. I’m that old, transcribe it, then create blogs from that. I mean, that was like a full day experience. I learned her business so deeply, but now I can do all of that so quickly and just deliver such a better quality. And I think, and I think AI is really where it’s going. And I don’t mean that in a way to scare people, because I do have people in my work group who are like, Oh, my God, AI is replacing me. And like, it’s really not, if you can just add it into what you’re doing. And honestly, if I have somebody I’m interviewing for my team and I know they’re using AI, I trust them more. You know, they’re not going to be like, just sending me this giant invoice of all these dumb man hours. There’s this, like something, when someone’s ahead of it and incorporating it, it shows that they’re, like, on the forefront, cutting edge, that they’re thinking about my business like, there’s a lot of trust that goes into that. Rob Marsh: There’s also an opportunity here that I think a lot of us are missing, and that is, you know, even when a copywriter or a content writer gets feedback from the client that says, Oh, we’re using AI to create that now, well, somebody at their business still has to be using the ai, ai to do that, right? And so why them instead of you? And I think sometimes we’re afraid of having that conversation with the client saying, okay, I get it. We can use AI for that. Let me handle that. Obviously, it’s we’re not gonna be charging 20 hours for the project anymore. It’s only gonna take us an hour. But that also opens up the other hours we were working for them to do more, right, even if using AI or to bring more ideas to the table or things that they weren’t able to get to. And I just think sometimes we’re as as freelancers or contract workers, we’re afraid to have that conversation because, well, sometimes it actually is going to end up in less work for us. Emily Reagan: Yeah, I think it’s also music to the client’s ears. And I know, you know, kind of thinking about that fractional role, what we’re missing is the oversight, the consistency and branding, and messaging like it can feel so disjointed you get all these other people doing it. So I think that when you pitch yourself to the client, you kind of show that, like quality will actually improve. And yeah, I think sometimes a lot of people are afraid, but I know from all the business owners I’ve worked with, the ones that I’ve coached, or they’ve turned around and hired, are unicorns. They all want somebody to just take the reins and get it out of their brain and, like, start, you know, spinning those plates. And so offer it. Don’t be afraid to offer it. Rob Marsh: While we’re on that topic, let’s talk about finding clients because a lot of people are struggling with that right now for a variety of different reasons. You see a lot of clients, a lot of requests for copywriters, content writers come through your group. I know what are people looking for, and why does it feel so hard to connect with clients today? This would probably be a two-hour discussion. Emily Reagan:  Oh, my goodness.  Okay, I want to start with we’ve had over 3,000 jobs that we’ve shared with my little work group, and I like to check the data. I was looking at the top. What are people asking? And granted, like, this isn’t like a clean data set, right? It’s people coming from marketing assistance, but the number one thing they want help with is email marketing. Like, that’s just not going away. So I think if you can offer services, or especially for somebody new, that people actually want and need, is just the best way to get your foot in the door. I feel like I see a lot of service providers who get really rigid about what they do and what they don’t do, and such a double-edged sword, you know, but when you’re getting started, it’s like, you gotta, like, fit the market demand. Like, what do people actually need? And maybe get really good at that and build off of that. The other three, I didn’t have the data right in front of me, but social media came high up there. And I know that social from, I don’t know, a few years ago, you could just kind of post whatever and not really have any intention. But social media gets a bad rep. But you add an AI, and it’s not that hard to take a concept, sales, email, create tons of, you know, social posts off of that. So I think that would also be like a good starting service to go in there and again, meet where the demand is right. What are you seeing with the client work? I think that there is a lot of new people, if I’m in a rift for a second, starting businesses, who don’t have any right to start a business, who got sold into a dream that I just do this one digital revenue stream, and I’m going to. Be rich, and they’re not thinking about what it takes and cost to run a business, and it takes, it does take time. It takes human capital. And so they do this initial like, oh, start with very little, and then they’re not thinking about the long term, like, who they hire first, what they actually need. How do they actually sell? And so I think we are kind of recovering a little bit from that as service providers and seeing the aftermath. On the flip side, I’m just going to keep going, Rob, I was seeing a lot of this Freelancer culture, of people who didn’t make it in corporate, who didn’t really cut it, who thought it would be easy to just start this type of business over here, and they’re kind of doing us dirty too, because they’re not delivering, they’re ghosting, they’re turning in bad work or Yeah. And so it’s like we’re kind of getting, getting it from two sides. And I think it’s really hard for us right now. Just like to pick out the good clients and the good work and not let everything else, plus AI, get us down. Rob Marsh: I think if somebody could invent the quality signal thing that is able to show clients that, yes, this copywriter is really good, and that one is one you maybe shouldn’t like, that person would be a billionaire overnight. You know, this is like to be able to communicate that you do good work, that you deliver on deadlines, that you do what you say, that you stick to, you stick to the proposal, or to the scope of the project, that you know you’re helping your client solve real problems. Like, I mean, I don’t want to call them a unicorn because there’s more than a handful of people who do that, but also, you’re probably in the top 20% of copywriters if you can do that stuff. Emily Reagan: It’s the soft skills, 100% how you show up, how you make the client feel. What does that look like? How you communicate. It’s the soft skills that make the difference. I have a couple of people in my work group who want to niche into copywriting, and they’re a couple of them have been a little bit whiny. I hope they don’t listen to this episode, but I want to tell them, like, if you want to be hired for these services, like, you have to demonstrate that you’re good at this. And this doesn’t mean your portfolio has all the writing you’ve ever done, but it starts with your own business. And if you don’t look like a professional or somebody I can trust, like, why is anyone going to hire you to do like that sales page that you really want to charge $10,000 for. And so I think that is hard, is I don’t see people putting effort into their own business and their own marketing so that we do trust you with everything else going on. Rob Marsh: This is such a weird ethic, like you. I mean, I think I saw, saw the start, you know, as the pandemic was going on, a lot of people had to stay home, like, hey, this stay-home thing is pretty sweet. I’m gonna, I’m gonna do a job that’s like that. And so immediately it’s like, oh, copywriter, you know, I can write. I learned how to write in second grade. You know, I can, I can do this thing. And they jumped, I mean, I’m kind of repeating what you’re saying earlier. They jumped in without the marketing knowledge without having gone through, you know, any of the formulas, or trying to teach themselves anything. They just put up the shingle and said, yeah, I can write. Obviously, a small percentage of them do and can, but writing is like any other skill, and you have to know the formulas and the frameworks. You have to know how to get somebody from where they are to where they need to go. You’ve got to be able to talk about transitions and transformation and results and all of those things. I’m preaching to you, hopefully people listening that this is helpful, but if you can do those things, then, yeah, you’re, you’re probably going to be okay. I hope somebody listening just feels good that, like, Okay, I am. I’m in the top 10% like, I’m doing well, and I can charge for that because I do that, I put that effort, and I do the research, and it’s not just like delivering fast copy. I think that’s really the difference maker. Emily Reagan: Yeah, and then it’s just a matter of laddering up from the clients you have to clients that can afford to pay more, who have bigger problems to solve and leveraging, you know, one client to move on to the next. And, I mean, it is, it’s work that, I mean, that’s really what it you know, it’s like, it doesn’t happen by itself. People don’t find you when you’re at home, or even if you have a great website, like, you still have to put in the reps and do the work. Referrals have always been huge for me. I was fortunate to start at a time when I didn’t need a website. There wasn’t enough of me to go around. I booked out really quickly. But I see a lot of people that think like, if I just turn on the light, I’m open for business. Clients will come. Or if I’m just good, the work will come to me, but there is this level of, I don’t want to say self-promotion, but like visibility, that you have to do. Yeah, never just start a freelance business and hide behind the keyboard, and clients land in your lap. I mean, if you’re transitioning from a career where you already have those connections, it will be more easy for you. But a lot of us are not. And so putting in the work after you do the course, or after you build your website and write beautiful copy, I think that’s really hard, is the client marketing acquisition system, like, how do you get those leads? And a lot of us, I know in my community, we don’t all want to be dancing on Tiktok to get clients. I’m never onna say never. But like, no, that’s not my style. So it’s like, it there is a level of content marketing, like building the right high authority, you know, assets that show you as an expert. It’s a little bit of the outreach, it’s the strategic partnerships, but it’s, it’s the stupid networking, right? People have to know who you are. And I know in the copywriter circle, all the business owners, and this happened with the VAs, they’re like, Who are you working with? Who do you love? And they’re just whispering and tossing names around in boxer, and that’s like, the goal is, like, how do you get your name in that conversation? Rob Marsh: Okay, so how do you grow your list? What are you doing to attract subscribers? I’m asking this a little bit selfishly, because obviously I want to steal all of your ideas for list building, but I think you’ve done some pretty unique things. Emily Reagan: Yeah, One of the first things I did starting my business, because I knew how important it was, right, like I got to grow the audience, was I did that quiz. I did Chanti’s quiz course (Note: there is a short workshop about creating quizzes inside The Copywriter Underground), and built a quiz. It does need refinement now, yeah, but what I loved about quizzes, and what I found with my client work, was the cost per lead was really low. And, you know, there have to be levels of you have to go back and fix the messaging and just refine it, because it can attract a lot of people by, like, really narrowing it down. The quiz is really great. At one point, I was running a quiz for a client. We were getting 25-cent leads, and her quiz, we just left that ad on, is doing so well. Now, on the flip side, she’s not selling well at the end, but like, that’s on her, right? Like, that’s not me. It’s gonna point that out. But yeah, that quiz is working well. How do I grow my list? You know what? I feel like a black kettle saying this. I really like blogging. I really like SEO. I play a good SEO game. One of the first things I did when I started being visible in my business was blogging and like, trying to really, like, dominate my industry and be a key person of influence, not necessarily that influencer that you know, you know, self-promoting Instagram influencer, but just really trying to show that I’m a leader in this space and people can come to me. So blogging has been good ads. I will always stand by ads is like the fastest way to do it. I think it’s harder. After working with copywriters, it’s hard to attract people who are sophisticated and know there’s going to be an order bump, and an upsell, and a sales sequence. And so it’s trickier, I think, for you as a copywriter. But, yeah, I don’t know. I’m just gonna fizzle out on that question. What should I do? Rob Marsh: Well, I wanna, I wanna, actually, to go back to the idea of blogging, because you’re not the first person I’ve heard from this, although I think blogging has changed in some ways that are pretty significant since, you know, 2008 when it, you know, was really maybe at the high point when conversations actually happened on blogs and comment sections and all that and that. That still isn’t really happening, but I’m seeing a lot of people blog less on their own home pages, which you should probably still be doing because of SEO and because AI reads all of that stuff and, you know, puts that into their engines, that’s still good. But a lot of those blog posts are showing up as Facebook posts or as LinkedIn posts. Everybody goes to LinkedIn, but I’m actually, I think the algorithm in Facebook is starting to serve more and more content to people in the feed over what they used to prioritize, groups, conversations and that kind of stuff. So are you just blogging on your site, or are you sharing those posts in other ways as well? Emily Reagan: I try to share them, but definitely blogging on my site to increase my domain authority. Like, that’s working really well. Sometimes I get my friends to do guest blogs too. Like, I want to keep the content going there. I know with, like, AI and, you know, ChatGPT, it’s a little different. Now, things are changing. I’m not the best SEO person to talk about that, but, you know, I have a blog on niches for virtual assistants, and this is my top blog, and I get a couple of 1000 every month, people just looking for, like, where do I go? And I mean, I wrote that sucker a while ago. I’ve had to go back and fix it, optimize it, monetize it. But that’s doing really well. Another funny thing is, I think my CM client right now, because I asked him, how did he find me? And he said, Google. And that’s amazing. I’ve also had somebody find me through ChatGPT because it asked, like, who are the fractional marketers that I should hire? And my name popped in, that’s because I have a strong online presence, right? And dancing on Tik-Tok. No, just kidding, but yeah, I think that the SEO one is one, if I were telling any freelance business owner or service providers, like, got a couple of core Cornerstone articles up just to demonstrate your authority and, like, thought leadership on it, on a thing or two, like, related to your service? Rob Marsh: This is another thing, everybody listening should go try this. They should go ask chat GPT or clot, or whichever LLM you use, and say, I want to hire a copywriter or a content writer in this niche. Who would you recommend? Don’t, don’t put in your name, but put in your niche, and it’ll be really interesting, what you see. I tested that and was really happy, you know, I said, Hey, if I want to learn about copywriting or creating a copywriting business, who should I go? And it gave me four people that it recommended, one of whom was me. And I was like, Oh, amazing, awesome. We did something right. Now obviously, AI is scanning the Internet all the time, and new content comes up, and in order to keep that current I’m gonna have to continue producing content. But like you’re saying, if somebody’s not doing that on their own blog or, you know, out in the world somewhere where it can get captured, and it may not be getting captured on Facebook or LinkedIn the way that it does on your blog or, you know, in other places. So even if you’re posting there, you should probably copy all of that into your own website as well. Emily Reagan: Yeah, if I, if I had it more together, if I had my marketing assistant doing more, I would definitely rewrite everything for medium. I would do the LinkedIn article game. Like, oh, man, oh, wait, I have a business win. Let me pop over there. Yeah, but let me tell you how I got in Business Insider. So I was stalking out, using my PR skills, my news jacking skills, I was like, stalking out the articles. And I’m like, they’re really playing a heavy SEO game. So this, like, I want you to steal this. They’re playing a heavy SEO game. You know, they’re drowning in content. Like every newspaper editor, magazine editor, and online publication, they need content, right? That’s the name of the game. So I pitched myself based on keywords alone, and said, like, you’re already doing this. This is why this is the next step. This is why your audience needs this. Basically, there were some virtual assistant articles, and I could tell they were old, but I could tell by looking at the slug that it was a keyword game. So I pitched it, and they’re like, great. Can you write it? We’ll pay you $300. Great! I would have done it for free. And it was shameless self-promotion. I was telling my story. They paid me to do it, and I’m like, what good credibility, having my own byline. That made me hot and sweaty. I couldn’t wait to tell my journalism professor. All I did was promote myself. That was the dream there, but that was me just being savvy with, like, okay, PR SEO my own writing over here, and that has helped a lot, too. But obviously, you can play the whole PR game after that and, like, use your as-seen-in feature things. But that was my first big media get, and, yeah, and it was just understanding marketing and then, and I mean, even if you didn’t go on to do more, like being able to leverage Business Insider should be open all kinds of other doors for additional PR, and they did ask me to do more. I was waiting for my divorce to be over, and they’re like, will you write this article? I was like, Sure, let me get a final degree first, and then we can take that to the next level. But yeah, I was paying attention to what kind of articles they are publishing right now. And they are into how people are making money online, like it was a good fit for me, and it can fit for other people too, but going to the right beat reporter, the right editor with the right pitch, it was key. And, you know, and if it didn’t work, I didn’t die. I wasn’t gonna die if I got rejected. Rob Marsh: So okay, this is a really, another really important principle, because this goes across the board. When we’re pitching clients, or whatever it is, rejection is so difficult to deal with. And obviously, if you’ve got tons of clients coming in, you’re not really dealing with rejection, but a lot of copywriters are, and because of that were afraid to take that step forward. Emily Reagan: Yeah, I’m thinking about the pitches I’m getting right now. I get pitched out the wazoo for copy help the cold ones, you know, usually people in Eastern Europe, but they always start their pitch with hope you’re doing well, and then they’re making that, like classic mistake of assuming I’m looking for help instead of just engaging, and they want to immediately offer me an audit, and they’re immediately like, you’re doing your LinkedIn all wrong, and your YouTube sucks, and your Instagram isn’t growing, and it just makes me feel like, S, H, I T, and I don’t want to read, I don’t want to watch, you know? And so I was just thinking that they should feel rejected like they did. They did do it poorly. But you know, if they were coming from a different place, and I was like, hey, like, not right now, I actually don’t need this help right now, maybe it wouldn’t sting so much, but I don’t. Obviously, I don’t even respond. But when I think it’s hard, when you do put a lot of effort into those but if you’re doing it well and you’re not doing making those mistakes like you can’t feel bad if somebody doesn’t need help at that time. Rob Marsh: The other thing that kills me is the pitches without doing any research. So this, in the last week, this is a true story. I’ve had two different pitches from two different people at two different companies, saying, Hey, I love what you’re doing at the copywriter club, we would love to help you launch a podcast. Get your first four episodes up and live and create some social media content around that. And I’m just like, huh, how much do you love what I’m doing? If you don’t realize my number one way of showing up in the world is a podcast that’s been going on now for eight years. Do you even know who I am? Yeah. So my response back to both of them was, hey name, why don’t you Google The Copywriter Club and then get back to me? And of course, they don’t ever get back to me. If you’re going to pitch, at least know something about the company you’re pitching, the person you’re pitching. Like you said, don’t assume anything. Don’t assume they need help, that you like you’re trying to establish a relationship, a friendship, even, and that pays off six months from now or a year from now. And if you’re looking for it to pay off on Thursday, you just, you’re not going to hit right? There’s just no way it’s going to work. Or very, very often it’s not going to work. So every once in a while you’ll get lucky and that maybe that one is going to keep you going, you know, with this crazy pitch style, but most of the time it doesn’t work. Emily Reagan: Oh my gosh, yeah, I have heard that. Like, the work we do now affects our freelance business three months from now. Think Brittany McBean told me that. But I’m like, Yeah, I see that. Like, I went into a little bit of a closet in July in my business, and then, like, I paid the price because I wasn’t doing X, Y, Z. I think about those pitches, I think what people do wrong is assume that I need the work. I get a lot, by the way, for people who are like, I’m a virtual assistant, I’ll come work for you. I’m like, if I am going to hire anyone, it’s going to be someone from my program, 100% but if we just looked at that person that were want to work with, like, as a friend, as a connection. I’m well connected. I would probably refer you, like, 10,000 times more than I actually need copywriting help her right now. And so I think, but they, I think they just get the big, like, saucer eyes and think, like, oh, you know, she’s just gonna hire me. And like, she’s, she’s my sucker. And they’re not really thinking about it as like a network expand, expansion moment. Rob Marsh: Yeah, for sure. Networks are everything. Relationships are everything, and especially when you’re not showing up in the office or you don’t, you’re not connecting with people in real life, like you have to be doing this offline. Emily Reagan: Yeah, for sure. I feel like we should talk about, I don’t know. I’m kind of bouncing backward, but something I am seeing in the online space is a lot of like launch agencies who offered the big ticket, 30k 50k projects, like not doing as well right now. And so I was just thinking about, well, if I were new and I was trying to get copy clients, I think, Oh, what am I trying to say here? I would just start with some of those projects that are smaller, that you can get a quick win and maybe impress them and kind of let go of the ego. Like, that’s got to be really hard if you’ve been in charge of these, you know, big website overhauls and sales pages and whatnot. But like, it can be really advantageous to go in in a different capacity and help somebody for that connection. And I see that all the time with, like, our email tech specialist, they’re like, I only do VIP days. And like, how many of us actually know? Like, I need a VIP day to fix my Active Campaign. So I have to have had to coach people in my group, like maybe for this well-connected client who just needs someone for three hours to do XYZ, you kind of acquiesce a little bit and offer a package that fits her knees. Guess who’s getting all the referrals. Now I’m thinking of Janelle in my workgroup. Janelle because she went in and helped somebody while connected, do something small. And so I’m thinking about those outreaches. Maybe they should be something a little smaller, a little more tangible, less daunting, so we can build that trust. Rob Marsh: Yeah, getting the first win, and then being able to leverage that, I think, is is, especially if you’re starting out, you you have to do that. You have to get that first win. And yeah, leading with a big project or leading with big promises and nothing to back it up is a great way to get ignored. Emily Reagan: What do you tell your copywriters when they’re working for big names and they’re not allowed to tell anybody? Because to me, the second I hear like, oh, Sally was in Jordan Gill’s business, and she. Helped her make millions. I’m like, I want to hire Sally, but like, how do we do that as copywriters? Rob Marsh: So there are two things. One that I would say is, you can talk about any case study or any client anonymously. So you know, you can always say, Hey, there’s this expert in this space. Some people will get it who it is, but most people won’t, right? But also, when you’re talking to somebody one one-on-one, I think in that situation, it’s okay to say, hey, look, I will tell you who the client is, but I’m, you know, I’ve agreed not to talk about them publicly or whatever, so you can’t share that. So the clients know one on one, it’s like, oh, yeah, I did help someone at that level, you know, make that that big thing. It’s, it’s funny. I think it was the second TCC IRL that we did. We were in Brooklyn, and Ramit Sethi came to the party. And I’m like, this is awesome. I’ve watched what he’s done for a long time. He wasn’t part of our event, and he certainly wasn’t there to endorse us, but he had friends there, and we’re just like, yeah, come and I asked him if I could get a picture with him, and he’s like, yeah, no problem. But you have to promise me you’re not going to use that, you know, like to say you’ve worked for me. Like, I’m like, I’m not going to, you know, I’m, this is totally ethical. I just want a picture with this guy that I’ve really admired or whatever. I’ve never used that picture anywhere. It’s still sitting on my hard drive. It’s that stuff. You have to honor your word to people. But there are times when you can talk about things that are, you know, maybe shouldn’t be disclosed, you know, publicly, or that kind of a thing. So I would just say, be, be super careful about it. Obviously, if you tell somebody that you’re not gonna, you know, publicize it, don’t. On the other hand, I would put in your contract and only take it out if they insist the right to talk about the project, work that you do in your own marketing. Like, that’s just should be part of all of our standard contracts. It’s like, Hey, you have all the rights of the work. Everything that I deliver is yours, entirely yours, but I reserve the right to talk about the creation process, you know, the thinking that I did, even the deliverables that I delivered. And if they say they want me to do that, and honestly, okay, I’ll do that, but that’s in that’s in my contract. And I because I want to be able to talk about how I help people, how I solve their problems. Emily Reagan:  That makes me want to hire anyone. It’s that social proof that testimonial. I’ve done this work for so and so, and the selling is like 90% done for me. When I hear that from a copywriter. Rob Marsh: We’re almost out of time. Emily, but where do you where do you see your business going in the future? This is what’s next for you, is really the question? Emily Reagan:  You know, sometimes I’m like, Wait, am I just competing with Upwork? I’m like, no, no, I’m different, like having an existential crisis. There. I am really putting a lot of my effort into my membership, because that’s where I’m having the most fun and enjoyment and just trying to be more aligned. I think for the last eight years, I’ve really been just like grinding and hustling, like I kind of talked about my divorce. I could see it coming, and I knew I needed to get some ducks in a row to be able to feed my babies, and I knew I couldn’t count on the military paycheck. So I’ve been really hustling, and in that season of, probably burnout, just to be honest, like, I think I’m too, like, numb to like, admit I was probably in burnout, but I’m just trying to be really smart about that. I am trying not to do all of the things. And so I think, though, I think my membership is really what I’m focusing on this year, and just helping them up level and their own businesses. A lot of us service providers are introverts. We don’t sell well, we don’t put ourselves out there. We don’t do the visibility we need to. So I’ve been doing some things under the surface to help them with an assessment and what to focus on, and accountability, and pushing my $47 membership to be something more higher end. So I’m in that transition right now and then figuring out, how can I not live launch and still make money? Because that was exhausting last year, going through a divorce and trying to launch a course and pay for the operating expenses of my business. Now, I’m probably telling you too much right now, but I think it’s kind of insightful, because we all go through these evolutions of like, what, what’s our actual capacity? What do we love doing? And where is the money just kind of flowing, right? So I am about to rebrand my podcast. I think my new cover title will come out next week, and really leaning into the marketing freelancer, I have a top 1.5% podcast, which is crazy. That’s awesome. Yours probably is too. But it’s such like a niche audience, it feels really good, because sometimes we’re like, Oh, I’ll never be that or that. And it’s actually doing really well. So really like leaning boldly into. To this little area I’ve carved out. I mean, it started as a VA, and then I said unicorn VA, and then I said marketing assistant. And so now we’re in that next evolution of the marketing freelancer. Rob Marsh: If somebody wants to connect to you, get on your list. Where should they go? Emily Reagan: Yes, I have a couple of things. One, find my podcast, or you can connect with me on Instagram, and it’s Emily Reagan PR to that in the show notes, as always, thank you. I added PR because in the beginning, I started with PR services, and Emily Reagan was taken and I’ve just, like, left it and not cared about it. But honestly, if anyone’s listening to this and they’re interested in hiring a marketing assistant, referring a marketing assistant to their client. The best way to help me is to go to hireaunicorn.com. Share that. This a way for me to take a job and share it with my community and help a lot of email tech specialists, marketing assistants, and marketing managers get work, and that is really what lights me up. Like helping people make money online on their own terms, using their skills, getting paid. Rob Marsh: Thanks, Emily for sharing so much about expanding our influence as copywriters into other marketing services. Be sure to check her out at Emily Reagan pr.com she’s Emily Reagan PR on Instagram as well, and I’ve included links in the show notes to her podcast, so that you can click through and hear my episode on her show, which should be available in the next couple of weeks. At one point during the interview, we were talking about how to differentiate from the millions of other copywriters and content writers out there. Specifically, I mentioned that your unique combination of skills, experience, deliverables, industry, clients, pricing, and voice is a big part of how you stand out and how you become the number one person who does the thing that you do. I call this your X Factor. Putting all of that together can be a bit of a challenge, so I’ve put together a couple of resources to help you do it. If you go to the copywriter club.com, forward, slash authority, you’ll find a short workshop that steps through how you create your own authority so potential clients can trust you and hire you. That workshop is free. When you visit the page, you’ll also have the opportunity to add on bonus bundle of additional workshops that will help you through the process of figuring out your X Factor and how to share it with the world. That bundle is just $17, and it will help you determine where to show up and the audience that wants to hear what you have to offer. Before today, these workshops were only available to members who paid $1,000 a month to join the copywriter think tank, but you get them for just $17 today, and because no one really needs another workshop to watch even at two times speed, 2x speed, I’ve created a playbook for the authority bonus bundle that walks you through the strategies in the workshop, step by step, so you can apply them in your business immediately. It may be the best value that we’ve ever offered. Be sure to check out thecopywriterclub.com/authority and then get the bonus bundle. And, of course, all of those resources are also available inside The Copywriter Underground, along with templates, the legal contract, and more than 70 other workshops and playbooks, monthly coaching. You get all of that at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.  

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