Copywriters Podcast

Today we’re back at it in the Old Masters Series. We’re going to talk about how to make a fortune during a recession. Now a lot of people think now is the worst time to make a lot of money, but it all depends on your perspective. People who are good at spotting opportunities learn how to adjust the way they look at things depending upon the environment. When the storm clouds of recession and depression show up, they use it to their advantage. Not to take advantage of helpless people, but to recognize the opportunities in the changed circumstances. Bill Benton was such a man. He was 30 years old when the Great Depression hit in 1929, but he didn’t let that get in his way of becoming a millionaire by age 35. He saved companies with his unique ad strategies. And he even bought one for peanuts that later was earning him $2 million a year. Now let’s talk about you. Times are tough and you have to make a choice — do you want to go along with the doom and gloom thinking of the naysayers, or see this as a legitimate opportunity? Now, to be sure, things aren’t easy and right now a lot of people are in such bad shape that they can’t take advantage of opportunities, or create new ones. If that’s you, I understand. But if you even see a glimmer of possibility for building business during hard times, today we’re going to look at someone who did it and see what lessons we can draw from his amazing story — and use today. That person is Bill Benton. He founded his own ad agency just before the great crash of 1929, and emerged very wealthy and powerful, right in the middle of the Great Depression. In an interview Studs Terkel’s great book “Hard Times,” Benton refers to what his friend the economist Beardley Ruml said: “In all catastrophes, there is the potential of benefit.” We’ll look at how you can do that in today’s show. I’ve boiled down what I’ve learned to five principles of how Bill Benton did so well during the Great Depression, and we take a deep dip into each one: They are: 1) Ignore the doom and gloom 2) Feet on the ground, eyes on the future 3) Use the power of great content to multiply the results from advertising 4) Make direct response advertising your foundation, not your skyscape 5) Imagination really is more powerful than knowledge — but first you gotta have the knowledge. Books referenced in the show: The Lives of William Benton, by Sidney Hyman https://www.amazon.com/Lives-William-Benton-Sidney-1970-04-20/dp/B01FELATKU Hard Times, by Studs Terkel https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Times-History-Great-Depression/dp/1565846567Download.

Rocky is an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, and the creator of a program called Platinum Path, where he helps people reinvent their expertise and shift into a high-priced, lifestyle-friendly business model. Over the last 20 years Rocky has helped his clients bring over 100 million dollars in training and info products to the market. He's consulted on over 3000 projects for clients ranging from billion-dollar brands like Pearson, Wiley, and Macmillan, to experts, authors, and entrepreneurs in 7 countries and over a hundred different markets. But he’s accessible. You can hang out with him every day in his free Facebook group, called The Power Persona Project. Rocky talked about how and when personal branding is a plus for a copywriter, and some inside secrets you can use for yourself or your clients. Effective branding requires inner and outer work, Rocky says. He gave some great tips and benchmarks to give you a fuller working understanding about personal branding. Rocky’s Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/powerpersona Download.

We are back with another show in the Old Masters series. Today it’s How I Learned The Secrets of Success in Advertising, by G. Lynn Sumner. Guy Sumner originally published the book in 1952, and it was recently reissued. You can get it on Amazon now. We’ll put a link in the show notes. I only heard about this book from friend of the podcast Don Hauptman. The author Sumner was really an Old Master -- here’s an article about him from the New York Times of May 15, 1940, announcing he was re-elected as president of the Advertising Club of New York. That was 81 years ago! There’s one secret that’s particularly important, as important today as it was when the book was written. It has to do with the one thing that separates ordinary copy from blockbuster copy, and that’s imagination. Sumner has some great ideas about how to develop it, and that’s what we’ll talk about today. A lot of people believe that imagination in advertising is just coming up with some wild and crazy idea… throwing it up against the wall… and then hoping and praying it will stick. The problem is, sometimes it does, but almost all the time, it doesn’t. Let’s talk about how to vastly increase your odds by using your imagination to increase sales. We’ll start with an important question: What is creative thinking? Some creative people truly believe creative thinking is a magic thing you can’t describe, learn or teach. And for them, that may be true. A lot of people who haven’t learned how to think creatively yet think the same thing. So what follows from this is the idea: “Creativity — either you get it, or you don’t.” Guy Sumner doesn’t see it that way, and neither do I. Sumner says, “It is taking known facts, known elements, known functions and arranging them in new patterns.” He admits this is not easy, because it requires focused thinking to do this rearrangement. Now, what about creativity and copy? That’s where Sumner talks about another important quality, imagination. If creativity is the lab where new stuff gets designed, imagination is the art department where it gets put together in the most appealing way. Stated another way, imagination is what you use to make your creativity add value to your copy. Sumner talks about watching his mother make a cake. The flour, sugar and eggs would just sit there in the pan. The flour, sugar and eggs were the creativity. Then, his mom would in that magic ingredient, baking powder. Then, when you put it in the oven, the ingredients would rise and form a delicious cake! Sumner goes on to say that imagination is the “baking powder” of copy. We go on to detail the four steps of feeding the imagination that leads to blockbuster copy ideas. I know from personal experience, and the experiences of my clients, that these are as good today as they were in the 1940s and 1950s, when Sumner was writing about them. Here’s the link to Sumner’s book: How I Learned The Secrets of Success In Advertising: https://www.amazon.com/How-Learned-Secrets-Success-Advertising/dp/0981643213 Download.

We all need a lawyer sometimes. But haven’t you ever thought: “Wouldn’t it be great if there were a lawyer devoted to copywriters and other creative professionals -- not only that, but she put together customizable contracts especially for people like us?” Well I’ve got two pieces of good news for you: There is such a person. Her name is Amy Nesheim. Secondly, she is our special guest today and she will give us some important information about Copywriting and the Law. Amy explains some things you might never find out about otherwise, unless it’s too late: The kind of mistakes copywriters make all the time that puts them at legal risk (so you’ll know not to make them) Do copywriters need to worry about whether their copy is legally compliant? Or is that all on the client’s shoulders? What kind of claims should copywriters worry about in their copy? Do you see anything frequently on sales pages that you think could be problematic? What can a copywriter do to protect themselves from potential liability? What Artful Contracts is, and how copywriters can take advantage of this website. https://artfulcontracts.com/ Download.

Our guest today has a curious connection to copywriting. Though he is not a copywriter or even a traditional entrepreneur by trade, he is one hell of a copywriter anyway. His name is Dickie Bush and he describes himself as a macro investor. I’m not sure what that means but I think it has to do with hedge funds and numbers with lots of commas in them. Dickie caught my eye on Twitter because of an online writing program he has called “Ship30for30,” which gets people from all walks of life to write something every day, for 30 days. It’s a paid program he had to learn how to write copy to sell it. He did, and he told me yesterday he’s getting 10% conversion on his sales page. That’s a skilled copywriter, no matter how you look at it. Dickie is a keen student of, and I would say expert in, growth of all kinds. How people grow, how systems grow, how businesses grow. This of course is very closely related to what we do as copywriters, since a good copywriter will help a business grow tremendously. There’s more, and covered a lot in our freewheeling conversation. Dickie’s online program: https://ship30for30.com Download.

Top copywriter Roy Furr discusses the most underrated copywriting skill - structured thinking. He emphasizes the importance of a solid structure in copywriting to make all elements work effectively. Roy provides valuable tips and resources to improve copy structure and offers insightful ways to enhance coherence and engagement in writing.

I don’t know how controversial what we say on Copywriters Podcast is, because I don’t have much data or gut feel on the subject, one way or the other. But I think I can say with great certainty something that nearly everyone would agree on. And that is this: The single hardest part of writing copy is getting started. The terror of the blank page. Where do you start, anyway? I mean, after you’ve done all your customer research, your product research… after you’ve written all your bullets… after you’ve brainstormed and schemed and planned… you’ve got to finally grab the beast by its lapels and get started. And you know what’s really hard about getting started? Finding your hook. Now, I can’t do that for you here today. But what I can do is offer some guidance and a few trampolines to get you going. I’ll give you three specific ways to create a hook… and tell you about the one way too many people default to, way too often, that really doesn’t work. So here’s the deal. Whatever you say in the beginning of your copy has a hugely disproportionate impact. It’s not just copy, really. It’s any communication. What you say or write at the start sets the tone, frames the conversation, prepares your reader or your listener for what’s next. People have these unspoken, often even unheard, questions in their mind. Not only “What’s this about?” but “Does this have anything to do with me?” and “Can I trust the person who’s saying this to me?” Whatever answers to those questions pop up will determine the frame of mind in which your prospect will hear or read what comes next. Again, this usually happens below the threshold of conscious thought. And ultimately, we’re talking about the level and quality of their engagement. Is it open, curious, receptive? Or is it skeptical, cautious, even bordering on hostile? Your hook -- your headline and the words that come right after your headline -- will determine that. Because your hook is what starts everything off. When you start right, you’ve got a shot. Start wrong, and you’ve pretty much blown it. We’ll start with the one thing a lot of people do that they shouldn’t, because it kills their chances. And then we’ll go onto three other things that give you a much better shot. Download.

So, I’ll start with this question: If you had the most powerful persuasion method ever developed at your fingertips and you didn’t use it to persuade yourself to live the life you really want -- what’s up with that? I saw a quote on Twitter that said: The problem with the rat race is if you win, you’re still a rat. It’s a real problem for a lot of us. Not the rat race so much as trying to fit in and do what we perceive everyone else thinks of as “normal” -- as opposed to going for what you really want. Now, to be sure, you’ve still got to make a living and if you’re the breadwinner in a household, provide for others. But I think it’s tragic if you believe you have to torture yourself to do it. One way to stack the odds a little more in your favor is to take the tools of copywriting and turn them on yourself. Use copy skills to “sell” yourself on getting what you want. That’s what today’s show is about. Now, a quick note: This is not a sermon about the Law of Attraction. Too many people put way too much focus on the first part -- “Attract” -- and don’t pay enough respect to the second part of the word, which is, after all, “action.” You have to do more than just think about something to make it so. But… you can use copywriting combined with taking action to make things so you might not have thought possible before. The premise - figure out what you want - maybe you’ve been afraid to dream this big - maybe you were willing to do this before, but you didn’t know how - The two biggest problems with most goals getting achieved are - lack of motivation on your part to take the action you need to take to achieve the goal - lack of belief that it’s possible, that it makes sense, that it’s the right thing to do - What we’re going to talk about today takes aim at solving both of these problems -- getting these obstacles out of the way - we’ll use the copywriting techniques of creating compelling benefits to help you with your motivation - we’ll use the copywriting technique of reason-why to help get those doubts and lack of belief out of the way - So the idea is very simple, and it’s familiar to everyone who writes copy. Take what you’re going for and turn it into benefits, like - bullet points - stories - slice of life scenarios (“imagine what it’s like when you have a personal tattoo artist who will show up at your house with the press of a button,” for example) - Then, come up with one or more reasons-why - why what you want is important and necessary - why there’s every reason you can have what you want - why now is the right time for you to get/learn/develop these new things - Now, in what you’ve created, you have the two missing elements that most goal programs are lacking. - Next step is to write yourself a VISION SALES LETTER - For four reasons - to really sell yourself on getting what you want - to get motivated to get started on it - to actually get started - to keep going To recap, two reasons this could work better than anything you’ve tried before 1. It harnesses your imagination in a very powerful and unique way, with all the benefit statement -- unique because the benefits are vivid and specific 2. It convinces you to “buy” (meaning: “buy in”) to your goals and vision with a level of confidence that’s rare or nonexistent among other forms of goal-setting. So we look at three ways of using this Dream Bigger technique today: 1) in copywriting 2) in your business as a whole 3) in all of your lifeDownload.

As we’re recording this in December, one of my heroes died just a few days ago. The great test pilot Chuck Yeager. The whole idea, and the book and movie, called “The Right Stuff” was pretty much inspired by him… his courage… his innovations… his incredible skill. Here’s something from an obituary of sorts in the New York Times. “In his memoir, General Yeager said he was annoyed when people asked him if he had the right stuff, since he felt it implied a talent he was born with. “ ‘ All I know is I worked my tail off learning how to fly, and worked hard at it all the way,’ he wrote [in his memoir]. ‘The secret to my success was that somehow I managed to live to fly another day.’ ” It sounds folksy and simple-minded, doesn’t it? Don’t let it fool you. What he said there was profound. The Chuck Yeager story brought to mind a book called “Mastery” by George Leonard. One of my all-time favorites. It’s not about copywriting, but Leonard was a very good and successful magazine writer and author, among many other things, and he knew a lot about mastery. Today I want to take a few tidbits from his book, which are gold nuggets in their own right, and talk about how to use them to get really good, and stay really good, at writing copy. So one thing to understand about Mastery, as George Leonard saw it and as I see it, too, is that it’s not a destination. It’s not like you’re a not-master and then one day you’ve achieved mastery, and you can go about your business drinking scotch or going fishing or climbing at the climbing gym. Mastery is a way of doing things and is more of a path than a destination. Once you get on the path of mastery, you should never be done. It’s an evolving thing. It’s true that there are people who are masters in life, but it doesn’t mean they’re done practicing or done learning. Or done growing or improving. It’s just an ongoing thing, and to a lot of people, that’s a surprise. But it’s true. George Leonard was on this path. He taught aikido at his own dojo in Mill Valley California -- he died about 10 years ago after a long life. But 20 years ago, when I recorded my first copywriting product, one of my students had been an aikido student of George’s. In the book, he had a chapter called “Pitfalls Along the Path.” He listed 13. I’ve combined a few of them and left a few of them out, as I’ve reshaped them for copywriting. So this is only a few ideas from one chapter of his book, combined with a lot of stuff about getting good at copywriting. I’d urge you to get this book and read it more than once: Mastery, by George Leonard. It has made a huge difference for me in my life. But on today’s show, we talk about six roadblocks that could keep you from getting where you want to go. A book well worth getting and reading -- more than once: Mastery, by George Leonard https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01ND0X91YDownload.

I saw this article on the Slate.com website: “Whatever Happened to the National Enquirer?” For years, the Enquirer was a go-to resource for many copywriters, including me. Quoting from the article: “For decades, the Enquirers’s circulation was in the millions.” But in recent times, the article says, quoting journalist Lloyd Grove, “its circulation consistently plunged, year after year.” Grove blames the Internet for the Enquirer’s death spiral. It couldn’t speed up to adjust to the rhythm of the Internet, among other things. There’s a lot of political intrigue behind what happened, too. What’s most interesting to me, though, is the Enquirer before its fall. What I learned from it back in the day… and how those lessons apply so powerfully to copywriting, even today. One reason I liked the Enquirer so much was because they published a story about me. The headline for that story was particularly interesting. They quoted me saying something I never actually said: “I owe my success to the Enquirer… says leading ad exec!” Personally, I didn’t get all that upset that they twisted the story that way. But my mother did. “You don’t owe your success to them -- you owe it me!” she bellowed. Thankfully, Mom got over it. Besides the fact that they gave me nice press coverage, the main reason I liked the Enquirer so much was because of their approach to writing, and we’ll get into that in a minute. But I want to say something else first. One really great thing about the Enquirer, back in the day, was that reading it let you take the temperature, so to speak, of the popular culture. I stopped reading it a few years ago because the content changed. First, it became too political, in a really nasty way. Second, they stopped doing what was known in-house as “aspirational stories” -- anything positive or inspiring. They used to do that a lot, but they hardly do that at all anymore. It stopped being fun to read. So today’s show is about the National Enquirer of days gone by -- lessons that are still valid and valuable for copywriters today. I organized this show into three parts: 1. National Enquirer Headlines - a unique approach, that made stories all but irresistible to read 2. How National Enquirer stories were put together - using a time-tested method that I’ve never heard any other experienced copywriter talk about 3. Four National Enquirer writing secrets at the most basic level - these are easy to do, and very powerful, but most people don’t use them most of the time. Download.