Copywriters Podcast

Kevin Rogers, an A-List copywriter and successful stand-up comedian, shares a 10-step process for quickly drafting a sales page. He combines his experiences from both fields to provide valuable insights. The episode covers topics such as starting the first draft, benefits of printed books in copywriting, breaking down big problems, and the six amplifiers for a successful pitch.

I’m going to tell you three words that can help you charge higher prices than you’re charging now — even higher prices than your competitors. Those words are “emotional risk displacement.” To be honest, I have NO idea of what they mean… but… our guest today does. He’s back! I’m talking about our returning champion, John Williamson. Today, he’s going to talk about Unique Selling Propositions and charging higher prices. And, if we’re lucky, he’ll tell us what “emotional risk displacement” means — since those three words CAN put more money in our respective pockets. John is coming to us from an undisclosed location on the side of a mountain in Scotland. Over the last 30 years, he has generated millions of dollars in sales for himself and his clients with his own special brand of unique selling propositions. He says, “A great Unique Selling Proposition will enable you to steal the attention and win the sales. “Including ‘financial risk reversal’ in your USP will win you even more sales. “But, you can take the process of USP development even further by embedding ‘emotional risk displacement’ in your USP … AND win all of those extra sales at HIGHER PRICES.” On today’s show, we talk about how it’s possible to charge higher prices than your competitors … and STILL get the business. John discusses: • Why increasing prices is paradoxically the first thing you should figure out how to do if you want to increase sales. • Why most people could care less about a money-back guarantee … and what they would prefer you gave them instead. • How to determine the optimum price you should charge to maximize both revenue and profit. • Why even rich people like a bargain and how you can give them what they really want without lowering prices by even a dime. • How to completely eliminate discount requests and have people pay full price with a big fat smile on their faces. • Why you should tell people what your ‘pricing philosophy’ is upfront, before you tell them anything about your product or service. • Why you should NEVER rely on your accountant or CPA to tell you what you should be charging. John’s Facebook Group is “Attention Bandits.”: https://www.facebook.com/groups/attentionbanditsDownload.

By popular demand, we’re back with the always surprising John Williamson today. He’s going to talk about a serious problem every business faces, and some ready-made solutions to this problem. John is coming to us from an undisclosed location on the side of a mountain in Scotland. Over the last 30 years he has generated millions of dollars in sales for himself and his clients with his own special brand of unique selling propositions. The problem, of course, is getting and keeping the attention of customers. In a way that leads to sales, and repeat sales after that. John says, “Right at the heart of your attention getting should be your brand.” A lot of us direct marketers don’t pay a whole lot of attention to branding these days, but John argues that we should. All the time. But not just any kind of brand. One that pulls its weight in getting attention and adding new customers. How do you do that, and how to you make it pay off if you don’t have a huge budget to establish this brand in the way a big corporation will try to do? John discusses: • Why ‘branding bravery’ is the only way to win the war for attention. • How any business – no matter how boring the industry is - can be decommoditized through branding. • Why trying to come up with a brand name you love is almost impossible (and if you do love your brand name it’s … probably … not … very … (gulp!) … good. • How to make your brand stick in someone’s mind like it’s been tattooed on their brain from their very first exposure to your business. • How to use a linguistic shortcuts to get you people to resonate with your brand by relating it to a story they already have in their head. • How to give your brand ‘conversational currency’ (… so that - incredibly - other businesses prefer to promote your business over their own business!). • The specific 5 words people will say to you over and over again, that will let you know your branding is working. John’s Facebook Group is “Attention Bandits.” : https://www.facebook.com/groups/attentionbanditsDownload.

People start out writing copy all kinds of different ways. But how many times have you heard, “It all started with beer?” I’m not talking about drinking a beer. I’m talking about brewing your own beer! That’s how our guest today, Billy Broas, got started in online marketing: He launched a website for his fellow home beer brewers. That was in 2010. His online course sales from the site got to the point where Billy was able to leave his job and become an entrepreneur. He hired me as a copywriting mentor in 2015, and his since gone on to do great things helping people launch online courses. Especially the new wave of instruction called cohort-based courses. Now, course creators are very often not copywriters, which makes sense. But Billy is, and, as a teacher, he needed to find ways to get some important copywriting concepts across to them quickly and meaningfully. On today’s show, we talked about what I consider a brilliant construct to do just that, called The 5 Lightbulbs, today. Billy told us how he came up with The 5 Lightbulbs construct, and what it is. As it turns out, it worked just as well back in the day — like 100 years ago — as it does today. In other words, it’s kind of universal. Bill walked us through Old Master Max Sackheim’s famous ad, written in 1919, with the well-known headline “Do You Make These Mistakes In English?”, to show how it follows the 5 Lightbulbs formula to a tee. But in 2022, it’s a very flexible formula, for copywriters and non-copywriters alike. Billy told us about: - How non-copywriters use it to organize a sales letter - How marketers use it to sequence emails in a sales campaign - How teams use it as a common language, or a shorthand Bill also offered Copywriters Podcast listeners a free 5 Lightbulbs worksheet, to audit any marketing message, available at https://5lightbulbs.com Download.

Just like Tom Hanks knows how to make movies, Kevin Rogers knows how to navigate comedy. Really. He spent years as a professional stand-up comedian, sharing the stage with other great comics like Chris Rock, Billy Gardell, and many others. You may be more familiar with Kevin as a superstar copywriter and copywriting educator, which is how he spends most of his working time now. He has created Copy Chief, a community-based forum and training center for copywriters. This was after he had reached the top echelon of pro copywriters himself. Kevin’s also the Amazon best-selling author of The 60-Second Sales Hook, where he shows how to use a proven joke formula to create a powerful marketing hook. Kevin has many, many more credits to his name. But as you can see by now, Kevin is the perfect person to come on the show to talk about an increasingly high-wire act for copywriters, and really anyone in business who has a sense of humor: What you can get away with, and what should you avoid at all costs, when it comes to using jokes in the era of ‘woke.’ Kevin has gotten back to doing standup on a limited basis, and as for the copy he writes, he says he doesn’t use a lot of humor there to begin with. Comedy, therefore, is still very much a part of his life — just not part of his copy. When Kevin coaches or does presentations, though, his funny side continues to shine through. However, he’s aware of what’s going on throughout the copywriting world, and in today’s show he talks about specific examples of, as he puts it, “people who I think are using humor wisely” in their own copy. If there’s anyone who can guide you and your jokes through the land-mine-strewn fields of cultural correctness that we all have to navigate these days, it’s Kevin. You’ll really appreciate his perspective and spot-on suggestion on how to keep your sense of humor without losing out to the woke crowd. A couple resources to get more from Kevin: - https://copychief.com - his podcast: http://copychief.com/ccr Download.

These days, more and more people from more and more backgrounds are thinking about writing sales copy, or actually doing it. The main reason is the number of online business has exploded. This is due in part to all the people who spent so much time at home during the pandemic. But there are other reasons as well. One important one is, a lot of people who didn’t like to buy online in the past will only buy online now, if they possibly can. So, a much bigger market. Anyone who didn’t start out their career as a copywriter knows that it takes some adjustments. Writing copy is hardly like writing term papers at school or even writing weak-kneed prose at advertising agencies. Copy is muscular, and it has a job to do — it has to sell something. Today I thought we could take a look at what people from six specific backgrounds need to know and, just as important, need to change about their thinking in order to write copy that works. I asked myself the question, what are the most common categories of people I’ve either mentored, or critiqued copy for, or done copywriting and marketing consulting for? And what showed up as the most important change they needed to make to become more successful with their copy? The categories are: Entrepreneurs… Sales Pros… Licensed Professionals, like doctors and lawyers… Experts in their respective fields… Software developers… and journalists and content creators. People from each category bring a lot to the table… but they all have similar things, within the category, that are holding them back. So I thought deeply about what those things are. Don’t worry if you’re not in one of these categories and never were. There’s some fun and some insights for you anyway. Because at least until maybe recently, very few people grew up wanting to become a copywriter. In most families, kids didn’t even know what copywriters were… and neither did their parents. So, it’s never too late to find out what changes you need to make, from where you stand now, to become really good at writing copy. You’ll find some good first steps in today’s show. Download.

We are back with the unconventional and immensely creative marketer, John Williamson. Last week he went in-depth on his powerful technique called Emotional Lockpicking™, and we asked him to join us again, which he agreed to do. John lives in an undisclosed location on the side of a mountain in Scotland. Over the last 30 years he has generated millions of dollars in sales for himself and his clients with his own special brand of unique selling propositions. He’s also come up with some very interesting ideas about elevator pitches, unique selling propositions, and even how to close a deal with a stuffed tortoise. I find his ideas fascinating and he’ll share some more of them with us today. One of John’s favorite quotes is: “All things being equal, people buy on price. Which is why your number-one job as an entrepreneur is to ensure that ‘things’ aren’t equal.” Probably related to that idea is a speech he has given over 250 times called “How to Charge Higher Prices Than Your Competitors… and STILL Win the Business.” On the show, John reminds us again that for a marketer today, the most truly scarce commodity is… attention. Not only is less and less of it available, but it’s becoming more and more expensive for a business to get the attention of their prospects, if they can get it at all. Lucky for us, John has spent years developing unusual and unusually profitable techniques to do that. Sometimes at a surprisingly low cost. Among the things he talks about are: • How to rope in the attention of the very best customers in the market… weeks, months, and even years before your competitors even know who these customers are. • The elevator pitch that turns into an earworm they can’t get out of your head. John explains how to put one of these together, and how it’s been used to get business in the course of a seven-floor elevator ride! • How he has created out-of-the box USPs that seem to break all the rules, but also punch right through the ceiling on sales records!Download.

Here at Copywriters Podcast, we pride ourselves on having unconventional guests with unique marketing ideas, but our guest today, John Williamson, really takes “unconventional” to a whole new level. John lives in an undisclosed location on the side of a mountain in Scotland. Over the last 30 years he has generated millions of dollars in sales for himself and his clients with his own special brand of unique selling propositions. He’s also come up with an innovative copywriting concept he calls “Emotional Lockpicking.” I find it fascinating and he’ll share it with us today. Plus, he has loads of other money-making ideas I promise you haven’t heard anywhere else before. One of John’s favorite quotes is: “All things being equal, people buy on price. Which is why your number-one job as an entrepreneur is to ensure that ‘things’ aren’t equal.” Probably related to that idea is a speech he has given over 250 times called “How to Charge Higher Prices Than Your Competitors… and STILL Win the Business.” On the show, John reminds us that for a marketer today, the most truly scarce commodity is… attention. Not only is less and less of it available, but it’s becoming more and more expensive for a business to get the attention of their prospects, if they can get it at all. Lucky for us, John has spent years developing unusual and unusually profitable techniques to do that. Sometimes at a surprisingly low cost. Among the things he talks about are: • How to rope in the attention of the very best customers in the market… weeks, months, and even years before your competitors even know who these customers are. This is possible with one of John’s most prized inventions, Emotional Lockpicking. • The elevator pitch that turns into an earworm they can’t get out of your head. John explains how to put one of these together, and how it’s been used to get business in the course of a seven-floor elevator ride! • An amazing one- or two-word addition to your copy using a method John has refined and perfected. The method is called “egoic labels” and just these one or two words have seriously boosted response rates for copy in many industries.Download.

Our guest today is famous in digital marketing circles as an online advertising expert. His name is Justin Brooke and I’m so happy he can join us. Justin is the founder of Adskills, a great training company for online advertising. He’s also a super-experienced media buyer, having spent more than $10 million for lead generation as well as eCommerce campaigns. While Justin could give us super-valuable information on a lot of things, there’s one topic he knows a lot about where I’ve found it’s really hard to find any other expert who is also a good teacher. Justin is both – that is, an expert, and a really good teacher, and that topic is advertorials. It’s great that we get to talk to him about that today. Here’s what we ask him in today’s show: 1. For people who don't know -- What are advertorials, and how are they useful in marketing? 2. How did you get into writing, and teaching about, advertorials? 3. What are the key differences between an advertorial and... - content/articles - sales letters/ads? 4. Could you give us an example of a successful advertorial? 5. What are some mistakes people make when they try to do advertorials, but mess up instead? 6. What are some of your best go-to tips to creating successful advertorials? 7. If someone wants to learn more about advertorials, what would you recommend? AdSkills.comDownload.

In just about every copywriter’s life, there comes a time when you ask yourself, “Why on God’s green Earth are all my clients making money hand over fist, day after day, month after month — and I just get paid just once?” It’s a fair question because, more often than not, as copywriters, we end up essentially inventing our clients’ businesses. With our copy. With our ideas. With our expert guidance. To create a money machine. Our guest today has a solution to this problem copywriters have. His name is Jason Moffatt, and his nickname is “profit Moffatt” for a reason. He’s figured out how to do profitable deals, both for his clients and for himself. He started his copywriting career reading books and courses while waiting in his spy van during private investigation stakeouts. After 17 years in Internet Marketing, Jason teaches digital marketers and copywriters how to get their slice of the pie by acquiring significant equity chunks on any project they work on. He spends most of his time on Hawaii’s famous island of Maui, playing guitar and helping fellow entrepreneurs and copywriters get paid far better. We started out talking about what Jason calls “The Inception,” which is his term for the great opportunity right under the nose of most copywriters. But there are a few changes you need to make to your mindset to see the opportunity, and take advantage of it. Jason explained that clearly and in useful detail. Most copywriters have a million-dollar talent that most of them are unaware of, and Jason talks about how to recognize it and how to leverage it in your business negotiations. Also, why even though you have other talents of great value, your ability to write copy that converts is disproportionately valuable to a prospective business partner. Jason then talked about some first steps, but probably the most important one is selecting the right partners for an equity deal, and keeping your distance from the ones who are highly unlikely to work out. He had some great info on finding partners, negotiating terms... and sealing the deal. For more, here’s Jason’s course on getting equity deals: https://equity5000.com/davidDownload.