How do you stand out in a sea of copy and content sameness? A USP (unique selling proposition) isn’t enough. Neither is being different. My guest for the 230th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is marketing strategist Louis Grenier, author of the new book, Stand the F*** Out. We talked about what it takes to position your business, find your people, and build a durable brand. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

 

Stuff to check out:

Louis’ book and bonuses
Louis’ book on Amazon
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  The biggest question facing most people who own their own businesses is how do I stand out? How do I position my busines in a way that makes it easy for customers to find me—and more importantly, to know they want to work with me? What can I do to make them care? Those important questions are answered in the new book, Stand the F*** Out by Louis Grenier. And Louis is my guest for today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast.

The topics we cover in our discussion are the kinds of things that help copywriters go from helping clients get the words right to helping clients sell more products, grow their businesses and as the title says: stand out of the crowd. This stuff isn’t easy. It can take years to learn. But if you stick around, the insights Louis shares will shortcut your learning curve

Before we jump into this interview, I want to mention the guest trainings we have lined up in The Copywriter Underground this month one more time… the first one is focused on building connections with prospects and clients on social media without burning out. If you’re like me and struggle to show up on social media consistently, this one will change your approach entirely—and help you find a client. And by the way, a single new client could pay for your Underground membership, for the entire year, two or three times over.

And the second workshop is all about landing a “real” in-house job—either part time or full time. A lot of copywriters want something a bit more stable than the string of clients they get as a freelancer. If that sounds like you, you need to hear the ideas this workshop will include. The presenter for this workshop was a talent placement expert for creatives. She’s helped hundreds of copywriters find so-called real jobs. What she’ll share is critical to know if you’re thinking about applying for these kinds of jobs and want to stand out from the crowd.

Both of these workshops are exclusively available for members of The Copywriter Underground. If you want access to them plus more than 30 templates, 70+ other workshops and trainings, and monthly coaching and copy critiques from me… you can learn more at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. If you’ve been thinking about trying out The Underground, now is the time to do it. The first workshop is tomorrow. Go to thecopywriterclub.com/tcu for more information.

And now, let’s go to our interview with Louis Grenier. 

I like to start by hearing your story, how you got to where you are. You’re a marketing strategist, author of a fantastic book, Stand the F Out. I don’t usually use that word. I do. But it stands out for sure. So tell us how you got here.

Louis Grenier: Bonjour, bonjour. Thank you for having me on. And it feels like I’m part of podcasting royalty. So it’s good to be invited on this podcast, listen to it a few times over the years. And it’s funny how the copywriting discipline is is still thriving despite the fact that they were supposed to be dead a couple of years ago. So it’s good to see that you’re still fighting the good fight. So yeah, to answer your question, it started from a trip in Paris when I was 17. So that was 18 years ago. to visit one of my older brothers. And I saw this book on his shelf that was basically the French version of Influence by Cialdini. But it wasn’t a translation of it. It was like a psychology slash marketing slash behavioral psychology book in French about key facts about human behavior. And I remember reading it. I was a lost mechanical engineering student at the time. And I just loved it so much. And things started to develop from there. I started to connect all the little puzzle pieces that I had misplaced, like the fact that I love being on the internet from a very young age and love hacking stuff on the computer. I loved all things psychology, understanding people. I felt I had the knack for it in some way. It came naturally to me. And all of that came together while I was doing mechanical engineering, realizing that that wasn’t my thing, that marketing, digital marketing at the time was the thing I wanted to do. So that was the start at least.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. I think a lot of marketers have a transition where they want to do something else or maybe not want to, but they’ve been sort of programmed by school or whatever to do. I was ready to go to law school when I started copywriting and kind of fell in love with the whole thing. So, there’s a little bit of serendipity, I think, in a lot of our journeys. So from reading Influence though, you immediately became a marketer or you had a lot of steps along the way?

Louis Grenier: I did. So after that, I quit engineering. I did one year of business school. And at the end of that year, I did an internship for a French car manufacturer in Dublin, Ireland. I was supposed to do that for three months, but I stayed on for like three years with them. So I got full-time employment after a year, I was doing contract stuff for them. And I wanted to get into marketing, but I was still doing basic business-y type stuff, like account management for dealerships across Ireland and stuff. The first opportunity I had to actually apply the knowledge I thought I had about marketing from reading all the books, but doing none of the work, just, you know, theories was for a startup, a mobile marketing startup at the time in Dublin. That’s when I started to work for real in marketing, realizing that all the things I thought I knew about it, or at least most of it was wrong or untrue, or just, I knew nothing really. So it took me a long time to unlearn all of that. I then launched my first marketing agency with 20 grand in savings that I burned through within a year and a half. I burned myself out doing that, but I learned a lot. After that, I joined Hotjar. which is a web analytics startup. It’s not really a startup anymore, more a scale-up. I joined them thanks to a little podcast I had started at the time, which was eight years ago, Everyone Hates Marketers, which I have stopped now, but I met the CEO of Hotjar through that. So Hotjar learned a ton as well for four years, kept the podcast on the side, kept sending emails, started to practice a lot more of what I would call real marketing. and then restarted a business, which is standard F out. And it’s really a combination of all the mistakes I’ve made and all the stuff I’ve learned into a book and a couple of other stuff.

Rob Marsh: We’re definitely going to talk about the book. I’m holding it up as we speak and it’s a fantastic book. Everybody listening should probably have a copy of this on their shelf just as a reference on how to work with clients. But before we get to all of that, you mentioned that when you started out your career, you knew all the theories, you knew all of the stuff to do, but you hadn’t done any of the practice and it was all wrong. Can you give us some examples of that, the wrong stuff, and how you figured it out in your own agency and through the other experiences, what was right.

Louis Grenier: If I had to pick one, I would say that not necessarily something that was purely wrong, but very biased in one way, which was, I thought it’d be much easier than this. Meaning I thought it’d be much, much easier to make people do what you want them to do. You know, like clicking on a link or registering to something, basically making them care about something and how hard, I got punched in the face so many times in that startup, realizing that it’s actually probably one of the hardest things to do is to make people care, make people do something you want them to do. It’s just so, so, so, so, so hard. And we were in an industry that was already dying. Kind of the demand was quite low. And yeah, it was really, really hard. So if I had to pick one, probably the biggest thing, because in my head, I was imagining how it would be and the impact I would have on, you know, all the books I could cite and the research and whatever. But the reality, yeah, was much, much harder than I had anticipated.

Rob Marsh: It’s interesting you say that because I don’t think that that has ever been mentioned on the podcast before and yet this is probably something that every single person who’s been on the podcast or even listened to the podcast has dealt with. It’s almost like an unsaid problem that we have is how do you get people off the couch? to make the phone call, to click on the button, to pull out the credit card. And I mean, that’s why response rates are so low.

Louis Grenier: Like you said, it’s not easy. We are talking about the pain here. I think the answer to that, the solution to it, what I found along the way, what seems to work the best to make people care is to stop trying to make people care and instead understand what they care about already. So where is the demand? Where is the flow? Where is the need going? And channel that. So instead of playing God, thinking that we are smarter, better than you, and we’re gonna make you do something that you don’t know about, like problem unaware. Yeah. I’m rolling my eyes so far back. So… When you do that, it’s easier, but far from being easy. I mean, an example, right? When we talk about percentage, you know, let’s say 200 people join a waiting list for a program, right? So they show intent, they join the waiting list for something that you’re announcing. And then you announce the thing and maybe what, 10% of people would act to like reply and maybe apply, you know? And you’re like, why? I’m sure that if you’re talking to folks outside of the industry, and you ask them, what do you think is going to be the percentage of people applying after they apply to a waiting list? I don’t know, probably 50, 60, 70%, right? But it just doesn’t work that way. So, very humbling.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, incredibly humbling. But there’s a way to overcome that, at least for a certain part of the market, like you said, that has that desire and has in some ways the need. And your book is about a lot of that. And how do you make that connection with the client?

Louis Grenier: Yeah, but it’s still hard, right? You can make it slightly better, but there’s no secret. There’s nothing that will make it unreal. I’ve noticed a few times in my life where the demand is so high, that you’re so much at the right time, the right moment, with the right people, that it’s so easy. Like at Hotjar, when we started out, oh my God, it felt like we had a very bad site. very poorly designed, a 99 cent logo, literally. And the demand was just so high. We felt like we were geniuses, you know. So, you know, when you feel that, you’re like, no, you’re not a genius. You were at the right place, right time. right people, good for you on that, but it doesn’t make you a marketing genius because then you move all of those marketers to maybe an industry that was dying where there’s barely any demand, they will fall on their faces, right? So it’s one of the key things that I talk about in the book is picking the right category, making sure that you pick the right category that’s on demand, not trying to like create a new category, which is very sexy at the minute. leaning on what already exists in people’s head, in the market, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, one of the things that you mention in the book, which I thought was really interesting and I started underlining is when you talk about picking a category, obviously, you’re looking for a category where there is demand. And so there are probably other competitors out there. But at the same time, you’re juxtapositioning yourself against everybody else. So you’re trying to stand out. So you’re basically saying, hey, look for a crowd to be a part of. But also, how do you be the tallest person so you get noticed?

Louis Grenier: Exactly. First, you need to imitate and learn. The process takes years for most people because you need to know the industry, the category, the box you’re in, first of all. You need to know its rules. You need to know… the way people think in there and whatever. And once you know that, once you’ve made the mistakes, you can start challenging it in one dimension. If you start challenging it in too many dimensions, then you lose the box you’re in and people start misunderstanding what you’re up to, right? So it’s really like, it’s a, I always talk about it like as a, almost like a dance, you know, it’s like tango. It’s like, you want to go far, you don’t want to go too far, right? If your box is “marketing podcast”, if you’re like a podcast for copywriters, you don’t want to try to come up with a new term for podcasts, like audio experience for copywriters. You have to explain yourself and you’re losing the demand that is already there. So it’s always a subtle movement inside a box that others are not doing. But it’s not a gimmick. You use the term like being the tallest in the room or something along those lines. It’s not really about being disruptive and challenging the norm for the sake of it. It’s really trying to find a set of ignored struggles, problems that others are not catering well for in that category that you can serve better or differently. And that becomes then a meaningful differentiation. So it’s not like a gimmicky I’m using this orange color everywhere because all the dealers are using blue. It’s really like deeper. It’s true innovation when it comes to like solving unsolved problems, ignored struggles that others are not taking care of very well.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, the term ignored struggles is another thing that I underlined in the book a few times. And in order to find that, you spent a couple of chapters talking about digging for insights and what insights are worth looking at and what insights, you actually call them, I think, poisonous. Poisonous versus juicy. Can we talk a little bit about that? Because this is a huge part of what copywriters, content writers, social media writers are doing is they’re looking for these insights so that they can find that hook, the headline, the thing that stands out, right? Or if they’re working with a brand for that thing that a brand can hang its name on and really differentiate with.

Louis Grenier: One of the other biggest mistakes I’ve done in my career was to listen and learn from folks or sources that could actually lie to you without even knowing, without necessarily doing it on purpose and really leading you to a place that you don’t want to be in. I’m being quite radical in my way of defining what is a good insight, what is juicy insight, what is poisonous insight. I’m being radical in a sense that yes, you could get insight outside of the group I’m going to mention now, but for the sake of safety, for the sake of efficiency, for the sake of just going for it, I think that the only group you should listen to are recent past customers. So recent because recency, making sure people remember. Past because you don’t want people who are thinking about doing something because they will bullshit you, it’s likely. So people don’t know what they’re going to do in the future. There’s no point trying to predict that. And customers, meaning we have proof that they spend resources, whether it’s money, a lot of time, a lot of effort, trying to solve one of the struggles you want to solve for. And it doesn’t have to be folks who you’re talking to directly. It doesn’t have to be folks who bought from you. And that’s the beauty of it. You can learn from folks who’ve bought in your category, in your industry, even if you don’t have a business. And you can scan through online reviews. Review mining is very popular amongst copywriters. You can do interviews, you can be a fly on the wall. There’s many ways to get that. But if you only focus on them and forget about the rest, you, I think, increase the probability that you will get juicy insight, or at least usable insight, by quite a lot.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. And there are a couple of different insight types that we’re looking for when we do this. I think you listed out six or seven of them. I would love to go a little bit deeper on three of them if we can. Sure. Jobs to be done, problems, and triggers. And I’m really excited to talk about triggers, but I want to leave that to last because I think triggers is the one that’s overlooked by almost everybody. 100%, I agree. Because we all focus on problem. And if we take it to the next step, we talk about jobs to be done. But let’s talk a little bit about your thinking around those insights and what we’re looking for there.

Louis Grenier: So my thinking is really a mix up of thinking from others who are much smarter than me, have done research and all of that on behavior and stuff like that. And it’s learning from them and applying, trying to apply their learnings and figuring out that it actually works because that’s the way people think. So it’s definitely not just my thinking, right? I’m only a student of this art we’re into, but I’m glad you’re mentioning triggers. I completely agree. This is the most underused, misunderstood concept, and yet it explains so much. Imagine, you know, let’s say I start to have a back pain, right? A literal back pain. Whenever I try to stand up for too long, it gets sore. I have to sit. It’s a pain. It’s a pain point, right? In the traditional way people would think about, marketers would think about that, it’s a reason to market to you, let’s say, something to solve that, right? I’m not going to go into the products or categories, but there’s so many ways to solve that, right? But I’m not going to do anything unless I have a direction to go to, meaning why I’m going to do this, and unless there is a trigger or several triggers that make me act. And this is where demands start to flow. So I can have a back pain for literally 10, 20, 30 years without doing anything about it. And I’m sure in your life and in folks listening, you can find examples of a literal problem or pain point that you do nothing about. Until I learned that maybe my grandkids is coming to visit me for the first time in a while. And in my head, I’m imagining, well, I’m going to bring them to the park and I’m going to do this. I’m like, oh, yeah, but I can’t do that with my back. OK, better call a physio, right? And that’s understanding those triggers are far more powerful than understanding the pain. The pain is easy to understand, but it doesn’t talk to people as much as I think we believe. And it’s a bit, you know, we push too much of the anxiety part of it, like, you know, like, are you in pain? And are you, you know, like the, in copywriting in particular, like agitating the pain and whatnot. I think if you understand the triggers that start them all, it’s much easier. Just to go through that example one level deeper, how do we use this information, right? If we take this fictional example. Well, when, I would ask myself, okay, when does this trigger tend to happen the most often? I would say during the holidays. Right? Maybe Christmas holidays in particular, Thanksgiving, when we are more likely, that’s when you’re more likely to see your grandkids to visit. So this is when you can then push this type of message instead of saying back pain. Now you say, do you want to enjoy a better time with your kids without worrying about pain in your legs or whatever? Then this is the place to be. And it even informs where to be, right? So now I know what to say around when, when to push for it, which is like highly seasonal likely. But I’m thinking of places where people travel, right? So airports and train stations and other places where there’s a lot of commuting or whatnot, right? Again, I’m just speedboarding here, it doesn’t mean it’s 100% accurate, but thinking of triggers adds flavor and adds depth and context that you’re missing with just the pain. just like a back pain that doesn’t talk to me, doesn’t make me more creative. The trigger makes me think of so many things straight away, right? The when, the where, the with whom, the with what. Those are like real contextual clues that you can use.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. And these, in my opinion, these are the hardest things to find because it takes real conversations with real customers. Like you said, if you start asking people who might purchase, you know, whatever the thing is that you’re saying, they have no idea what the trigger is yet because they haven’t yet made that purchase right there.

Louis Grenier: Exactly.

Rob Marsh: And all of us have tons of things. It’s like, well, someday I’d like to have an iPad or someday I’d like to have whatever the car is or considering purchasing a subscription to that magazine, right? But we haven’t done it. And there’s probably a reason we haven’t done it. Maybe the pain isn’t high enough or maybe the event that makes that thing happen, the trigger hasn’t happened. So, give us just a couple of tips on how to find them, how to uncover them.

Louis Grenier: So you go back to the first insight that I shared, which is if you talk to recent past customers, you will likely find them. So you don’t have to interview people, right? So in copywriting and B2B in particular, B2B copywriting, this is like one of the most popular methods, but you don’t have to do that. So you could literally go to online reviews if your industry is prone to like having people leaving online reviews. And this is where you can start seeing the triggers if you pay close attention. So I have a real example here, right? Which is, I give this example of this toilet scent packet product, which is like you drop that in the toilet before going number two so that it doesn’t smell, right? And I went through Amazon reviews just to see what other triggers, what make people say, I need this now, even though they might struggle with that smell beforehand and whatever, they haven’t really searched for it to search for a solution, right? So for example, there’s this review, this product will work wonderfully for my upcoming cruise. It smells so nice and seems to work great. for my upcoming cruise is a trigger, right? Or at least it’s a contextual cue that tells you that there is a trigger behind it. This person is planning to go on a cruise in close quarters, right? Share a toilet with someone else. And they are thinking of this toilet situation. The problem has always been there. Maybe they’ve struggled with digestive issues all their life. They never bought anything for it specifically, but as soon as We mix the job to be done, which is masking bathroom odors in that case. We mix the problem, which is making sure that maybe the friend you’re going with isn’t smelling anything. with the trigger, the upcoming cruise, you create a chemical reaction, which is where the demands start to flow, right? So another example in the review, easy to use, I’m going to travel soon and it will be super handy in small bases. Again, cruise, travel, when you start, when you look for them, you will find them. But you need to look at many sources, right? If you can’t find them in reviews, if you can’t find them in interviews, if you can’t talk to people like that, there’s plenty of other ways. So I mentioned like be a fly on the wall. So maybe like observing people in their natural habitat. If you’re selling, let’s say, you know, cheap enough product or FMCG, you know, like a very fast moving stuff in supermarkets, you could literally see them buying it and asking them, why did you buy it? What made you buy it? Let me see. I’m just trying to find the fully so we give as much as possible. But it’s really like once you know that that’s what you’re looking for, the when, the where, the with whom, and the with what. So with whom could be like with a friend or whatever when they mention people. With what could be another product, the where, like a place, but it doesn’t have to be a location per se. It could be at your desk and whatnot. You will see them, honestly. That’s what I think. It’s not hidden that much. It’s just that we are never really looking for them that way. Yeah. Makes sense.

Rob Marsh: So, I imagine somebody listening, and I’m actually thinking this as well, although I have some thoughts on how to do it. Somebody might be thinking, okay, that’s easy for a packet that you drop in a toilet, that kind of a product. There’s four or five competitors out there. But what about my industry? I’m a copywriter. If I go on LinkedIn, there are over a million copywriters on LinkedIn. How do I find those jobs to be done, those triggers for something that’s literally a commodity and can be bought anywhere by anyone at almost any price point?

Louis Grenier: Well, I would say good news. First of all, that means there is demand for it. There is money flowing into it. So that’s already, that’s a good thing. I get excited when I hear those questions about, oh, I’m in a saturated industry, crowded market. I’m like, great, that’ll be fun. Because I know I can get data really fast, insight really fast. And I know then we can use a unique positioning to really dive into very specific ignore struggles, because despite what we may think, there’s always ignore struggles appearing, right? AI has just changed a lot of stuff. And as soon as that appeared, that created new struggles for people. So you can be the first, you can be someone looking into the forefront of the industry, A crowded market is not an issue. It’s just, it becomes an issue if you can’t figure out, you know, if you can’t go granular into specific problems you solve, that’s the first thing. And if you can’t pick a category that is niche enough for you to become the only, the only in that very sub, sub, sub, sub category that solved that specific ignored struggle for this specific group of people. So then you really minimize the number of direct competitors while still taking advantage of the demand. Then once you have that part, you you can then build distinctiveness, which is a different concept than differentiation. So we can talk about that. But you mentioned the insights. They will be in front of you, right? The jobs, the struggles, they are easy enough to find. You can look at literally competitors’ websites and look at case studies that they’ve shared. You will find insight that way. They’re not going to be groundbreaking new insight that you’ll be the only one to find. However, you can be the first, the only one to interpret them in a specific way and solve them in a specific way. And as you mentioned earlier, a few minutes ago, very few people care about, think about triggers. And so you just looking at them and understanding people that way, is already, I think, a huge competitive advantage. But on its own, to finish, on its own, a unique positioning might not be enough for you to stand out. You might need also distinctiveness on top, especially in crowded markets.

Rob Marsh: So yeah, let’s talk about then that unique positioning. The concept of USP, unique selling proposition, I think was invented by Ross or Reeves 60 years ago. Yeah, and it’s bullshit. Yeah, well, people still talk about it and I agree with you. I don’t think it works anymore. I actually think there’s a concept there that’s really nice to think about, but the reality is, It’s so easy to copy a unique selling proposition today. Literally, you might have one, but you’re not going to have it in 90 days. Somebody is going to copy it. You can’t be unique like that. So how do we become unique?

Louis Grenier: So the formula, the statement that I’ve put together uses the ingredients that you collect along the way. So the sentence, you need to be able to feel a sentence like that, unlike alternatives. So that could be competitors, there are competitors, there are competitors. my product, my service, my brand, whatever, is the only in that category to solve those ignored struggles. So like a list of the ones you’ve identified and get the job done for this particular segment. So the key is not to find an ignored struggle that others haven’t found or a category that others haven’t claimed. It’s the intersection of all of those things that create a unique positioning. And this is not meant to be customer facing, right? This is not meant to be on your homepage as a headline. It’s meant to really be to give you the clarity and direction to say, okay, we have a unique positioning, niche enough, specific enough, granular enough that gives people a reason to trust us. We become the least risky option, not necessarily the best. That’s another important concept. And that gives us the direction we need to then move on to maybe distinctiveness. So if we are Going through an actual example in the B2B world, I work with a company called the PTDC, which they do fitness training for personal trainers. And their statement, their unique positioning statement could sound something like, unlike just working more or selling out for quick cash, that’s the alternatives. The PTDC is the only online fitness training program. So that’s a sub, sub, sub category, right? That helps you, and now we’re talking about the inner struggle, overcome self-doubts, build a real business, and create a successful career you love as a jacked nerd. That’s the segment. That’s the smallest way they kind of talked about it. And you can see, if you take each of them individually, like online fitness training program, they’re not the only online fitness training program. But if you start mixing with the alternative, the triggers, the triggers are not there, but the struggles, the inner struggles, the job, the segment, that’s when you have an intersection that is quite unique. But it’s not in the same way, it’s not described as a, it’s not like a unique value proposition thing because you cannot genuinely realistically have that because as you said, others are probably using it and others will pick it up and use it as well. So it’s disingenuous this way. Well, the unique positioning statements and the ingredients that it’s using can’t be disingenuous because you have to go granular and the intersection again is something that you can uniquely claim.

Rob Marsh: So like you said, this is a statement then that drives the marketing.

Louis Grenier: Yes.

Rob Marsh: So then the job becomes, okay, how do we go from that statement and start creating assets, offers, branding, messaging that starts to convey that to our audience in a way that they’re going to connect with it and say, oh yeah, this is the product for me.

Louis Grenier: Yeah. So this is really like the very core of any business. You know, I don’t remember who said that. It might be Peter Drucker. I’m going to butcher it, but it’s like, there’s only two functions in business, two functions in a business, the marketing and innovation or something along those lines.

Rob Marsh: Yep.

Louis Grenier: Yep.

Rob Marsh: That’s a Peter Drucker quote. Yeah.

Louis Grenier: Something like that. Something like that, right? So this is the very core of your innovation strategy, your marketing strategy, because it’s how you serve people, how you serve a specific group of people in a way that others don’t. You already, in one single sentence, you have much more clarity and that’s the biggest job to start with, right? As soon as you become more than one, you have more like a team or even for your own sanity, and clarity and relief, having one single sentence that gives you direction is already a big, big win. So the benefit doesn’t have to be monetary or business directly related. It could just be like relief and confidence and clarity. Once you have that, it’s already much better to do marketing and to be creative once you have a bit more confidence, a bit more joy into what you’re doing, a bit more clarity. It changes the game, really, because it removes the noise and stuff. So this on its own, just going through that exercise and having it is already a huge, huge, huge relief for people. That’s what I’ve noticed. But let’s say we have that. So you have the knowledge. That’s the core of your business. You know who you serve, how you serve them, why you serve them, whatnot. Then you can move on to, you mentioned branding, so distinctiveness, which is not the same as differentiation. So differentiation is the ability to solve struggles that others alternatives are ignoring. That’s differentiation. Struggles that people care about, not struggles that people don’t care about. Distinctiveness is being able to stick out in people’s mind for things that don’t necessarily connect directly with what you do. So that’s why I talk about the concept of meaningless assets, meaning you don’t have to create logos and colors and whatnot that connect directly to what you have to say. For example, in the copywriting world, you don’t have to use a a pen as your logo, you don’t have to.

Rob Marsh: If you want to stand out, you probably shouldn’t because half of the industry does.

Louis Grenier: Yeah. So it’s okay. Again, it’s the same concept in differentiation and playing inside the box. You don’t want to challenge too many conventions in the branding side. So if you’re a writer and you want to be known as a writer, a copywriter for B2B SaaS, let’s say, whatever, you do need to make sure that you use some conventions that others recognize of that category and specific brands or else you might lose them. So it’s always, again, this subtle dance and this tango between going far and also staying in your lane in some way. So it’s always recognizing the few places where you can play without going overboard or else people just won’t know at all what you’re up to, what you’re doing and who you are and why you’re here.

Rob Marsh: So would you characterize these usually as design elements or are they like actual parts of the offer, parts of the business? The immediate example that comes to mind is the original iMacs. When Apple innovates and they add color and they kind of create this bubble shape to the iMac, suddenly it’s a computer, but it’s very distinctive. It’s very different. Some people reacted to that negatively. It looks like a toy, which it did, but also that was the thing that made it distinctive, but it didn’t really affect the function of what the Mac did. So, is that distinctiveness versus differentiation?

Louis Grenier: Yeah, so assets, brand assets that are part of your distinctive brand, they are basically what makes your brand uniquely yours. So it could be color, shape, sound, word, even a mascot. And it’s the association of all those things that create a branding experience, that create the memories in people’s brain, right? Which is the core thing. You want to associate certain things about you to specific triggers. So instead of thinking of pain points, if you start to think of how do we associate that with this specific trigger, to go back to the example of the back pain and the kids coming back for holidays, you could think about ways to develop things that people could associate with, my kids are coming back, my grandkids are coming back for the holidays. And this is how you kind of create connections between you, your brand, and people’s brain, so that when the need appears, the demand starts to spark in people’s mind, you come first to mind, or second to mind, or third to mind, or at least you’re there, right? So yeah, faces, colors, phrases, anything that is there to stick to people’s brain, right? So like the speech thing, the facial reconnection part of the brain, the vision, the different bits and bobs that are there to like tickle your brain, tickle your customer’s brain.

Rob Marsh: This is where we start to get into points of view as well. And the things that we talk about, content we create. I know there’s a whole section in the book about point of view. I’ve got mixed feelings when it comes to points of view. I think that there’s a lot of value, particularly with points of view that are related to what you do. But I think there’s a lot of people who talk about your point of view as being your politics. And there’s almost been this trend over the last maybe decade, maybe it’s a little longer, where politics is the point of view. And to me, that becomes really dangerous. Michael Jordan, I think, was really famous for saying, he was asked why he doesn’t talk about politics. or do advertising that’s political. And he famously said, Republicans buy shoes too. And he obviously, from that comment, we can discern that he probably leans left, but he wants everybody to be able to buy his product. So there’s this tension when we talk about sharing points of view. Tell me your approach to this and where we should draw that line.

Louis Grenier: So the line is drawn by sharing things, opinions or signals to the people you seek to serve in order to protect them from the pains, the struggles, the monster, I call it as well. We can talk about that later if you want. That is preventing them from making progress or just doing something, right? So it’s not there to be controversial for the sake of it. It’s not there to stir the pot for the sake of it. It’s not there to be disruptive. It’s there to be distinctive and sending a signal to the people you seek to serve that you’re here for them, right? So I would define a point of view as a collection of consistent messages inserted into everything you do and say, showing the people in your segment you’re committed to protecting them and earning their trust, right? And that creates a sense of coherence and control, right? Meaning we’ve got you, we’re here for you, and that’s why, right? So this is a point of view, like, I don’t know, every time I talk about or share point of views, I think of LinkedIn. It’s just the place where people misunderstand the concept quite a lot by sharing points of view that have nothing to do with your industry or nothing to do with the people you seek to serve. That’s my rule of thumb. Just stay in your lane for the business you have. The point of view should be there to protect your segment. And maybe some others outside of it might disagree, but that’s fine. But you don’t want to be disruptive for the sake of it and sharing stuff that have nothing to do with what you have to say. So that’s kind of the, again, the tension. And as you mentioned that word, I’ve noticed that, yes, a lot of the concepts we’re talking about here There is a tension, there is like a dance, there is subtlety because it’s not black and white. It’s not as easy as just, you know, a five-step formula. There is always subtlety and you need to build your taste and develop your taste towards that, right? Toward all of those concepts, like to try things and see how far you go. Is it too far? Is it not far enough? Yeah. It’s, it’s, there’s always a messy middle.

Rob Marsh: And just to be clear, as you talk about that, politics might be okay, right? Just depending on the product, your audience or whatever. So I’m not saying, hey, never touch that, but what we’re saying is it really needs to relate to the thing that you’re doing or to your audience or to the offer in some way.

Louis Grenier: Yeah, or else you lose yourself.

Rob Marsh: Okay, you mentioned the monster. I think another marketing concept that a lot of people are familiar with is picking an enemy. I think the monster is a little bit different from the concept of picking an enemy, where like Apple goes after IBM and Microsoft or whatever. So let’s talk about what is the monster and how do we develop or create this monster that actually works for our brand?

Louis Grenier: So a monster is a fictional or semi-fictional enemy that represents some of the problems that the people you seek to serve face. And the game is to give a name to some of the inner struggles they are facing. And that helps them to understand what’s going on better. that gives them the sense of control and coherence in the world. As an aside, that’s what religions are here for, right? They give this randomness of the universe and why we’re here. It gives some sort of a sense into it that, oh, it’s because God or multiple Gods are creating all of this instead of just pure random chaos. You know, it’s just you can’t explain it. It’s much more unnerving to think about it this way. So anyway. Pointing the finger at a specific monster that tells you this is why you’re struggling. It’s not your fault. And I’m here. The brand is here for you. It’s kind of the concept behind it. But the biggest mistake I see people make with this concept of enemy or monster is that they sometimes make their segment feel guilty instead of, um, getting them on their side. So for example, like procrastination, like you’re always doing things late. Well, it’s your fault. You need to pick yourself up and do this. So it’s never really like that. It’s always making sure that you get them on your side by instead saying, The way you’re built as a homo sapiens is a result of millions and millions of years of evolution, and it’s just the way you’re built. It’s normal that you’re procrastinating. It’s completely normal behavior. Now I can help you channel that, right? So that changes the entire narrative where you get people on your side, you show that you understand them, you bring empathy into the table, and then you can move them further.

Rob Marsh: So to be clear, in that case, the monster is this evolutionary development of… For example, yeah. Yeah, human kite. Okay. And it’s not my fault.

Louis Grenier: It’s not you per se. I mean, I’m spitballing here, and I’m sure that others might disagree, but… That’s one way to talk about it. So the other mistake I see is that people think enemy equal picking a direct competitor, naming them, shaming them out loud. That’s not it. So a monster is something that is responsible for the struggles or some of the struggles that your people are facing. It doesn’t have to be, and in fact, it’s almost never a direct competitor, unless you’re in incredibly crowded categories where almost everyone have used that direct competitor’s product before, like let’s say you do a new search engine, then I would say it’d be difficult not to pick Google as the monster that’s causing their pain, potentially. So there’s four types. It can be a corporate giant that is so big that it’s creating the the issues that your people are facing. So like an example would be big oil, right? You could point the finger at big oil, the four biggest oil companies in the world are responsible for climate change. The alternative solution. So this is what people use instead of using your category. So for Hotjar, that was a typical thing we did. We pointed the finger at only using traditional web analytics. We didn’t point the finger at Google analytics. We pointed the finger at only using them. And the subtlety is important here. We are not saying we shouldn’t, we didn’t say you shouldn’t use GA. We said you should use GA and Hotjar. And the third type is the culture of the category, right? Like the hustle culture or fast fashion or all of the biggest, you know, the biggest trends and themes that are causing people issues. And the last one, which was part of the example I gave from the procrastination is the monster within. So it’s like the feeling of behavior or something within us that is causing us pain. So those are the four types. So it’s quite in-depth. And again, you need to be subtle about it. You don’t have to talk about it out loud every single time. It could be just something for you to be clear about internally. You don’t have to say it out loud. But I like to use it as a, it’s almost like the Death Star, you know, in Star Wars, it’s so big, everything gravitates around it. And so everything you do and say is kind of there to help people slay that monster. And it, again, gives us clarity, this sense of direction that leans on negativity bias or the way people are, you know, we are just geared towards negativity and it creates this anchor.

Rob Marsh: Should every brand or every personality, everybody who’s trying to stand out, should they have a monster? Or are there still places where that’s not important?

Louis Grenier: You should because I think if you don’t, you run the risk of blaming people and actually going against your audience and not having this empathy that you need to have. But again, it doesn’t have to be written on your homepage. It doesn’t have to be said out loud at all. It could just be an internal compass. I think it simplifies things. I’m a sucker for simplicity and the rule of one in as many things as we can, especially in marketing, right? You’re going to have to pick your battles. You can’t do everything, especially as, let’s say, a solo copywriter. You’re going to have to pick something, go after it. And yes, there could be others and there could be other type of monsters or whatever, but the point is not to pick the perfect one. The point is to pick one and fucking go for it, commit to it with intensity.

Rob Marsh: Okay, so let’s say we’ve done all of this work. We’ve gone through the frameworks, we’ve got our insights, our unique positioning, we’ve created our monster or identified our monster. We know how we’re gonna be unique. Let’s talk a little bit now about how, now that we’ve done that, how do we find our audience? What is the, where basically the tire hits the road?

Louis Grenier: Yeah, so ideally, you would have not spent too much time in the framework, in spreadsheets and stuff like that. Ideally, you start to play with some of the concepts already, test them and see how it feels. But the last stage is what I call continuous reach, which is reaching as many people as we can for as little efforts or resources as possible, right? And it’s really based on pure behavioral psychology and basic psychology on how people remember things and why people think of Google as the first search engine and why some brands are first in their category and whatnot. It’s really using the triggers we mentioned as the source of all of that. So once you understand what makes people act, even if it could be six months before they actually purchase. But like this series of triggers, you can find ways to be there, be at the right time, the right context. And that’s how the concept of triggers gets so, so powerful. Because if you split them into the four contextual elements that I mentioned, so when is this trigger happening, where it’s happening, with whom it’s happening, and with what it’s happening, you almost start to get your marketing plan created for you without thinking too much about it, right? So for example, for my own agency, my first failed agency, I actually looked back at all the notes I had about clients and whatnot. To understand the triggers and to see how differently I would have maybe marketed if I had a bit more brainpower by then, right? So let’s say there was this software company I consulted for and they told me that the French website conversion rate was lower than the American one. They wanted to understand why because I think their boss told them I need to do something about this after the quarterly meeting. So that’s an unexpected event. Let’s say that’s a trigger. You can start thinking, okay, when was that happening? Where? So for example, when it’s like pretty much every quarter. You can start playing with that. But once you really understand the triggers, where to be, when to be, what to say, it becomes quite… Again, it just comes naturally because it talks about the way people experience them, not about the pain points that are completely abstract, right?

Rob Marsh: Yeah, so I’m going to change subjects here just a little bit. You somewhat famously asked Seth Godin on your old podcast, a question that he told you, you’re asking the wrong question. You’re asking like, you know, if you probably phrase this better than me, but you asked him something like, you know, if you were a tech company, same as everybody else, how would you differentiate? your business if you’re building it. And he said, you’re asking the question the wrong way. I’m not necessarily asking the same question, but I wonder if you’ve taken what he said, what he told you how to build, if that’s how you’ve built your consultancy today.

Louis Grenier: So yeah, I’m happy to say, I’m happy to report that all the learnings, all the stuff, all the mistakes I made, the lesson learned and whatever that I’ve compiled into that book is something I try my hardest to apply to every day. So yes, in terms of I think the biggest concept that I’m trying very hard to make sure I’m using when I launch a new product and do stuff is, is there a demand for this? Is there a crowded market already? And can I play inside that? So I’m sending a newsletter. Yeah, everyone does it, but actually no, very few. But like, let’s say I sell, I’m going to start to sell a certification program specifically for marketing business owners. So folks running marketing businesses as a solopreneur, freelancer, consultant, agency owner. certify them on the methodology, give them an exclusivity in terms of the badge and other stuff. So limited, all of that. I think 10 years ago, five years ago even, I would have said, everyone does certification, so I’m not going to do it. Let’s find another way to do this. And I would have completely messed that up by essentially stop myself from using the demand that is already there. If there is certification programs out there that are being run by, let’s say, Donald Miller and StoryBrand, like they do, like the StoryBrand certification stuff, and it’s been running for years, I know, therefore, that there is demand for it. And therefore, this is a box I can be in as a product. And so, yeah, I’m using that entire unique positioning. The only difference, the only inner struggles that I’ve identified that I’m going for to have a unique positioning, all the rest stays the same compared to others, is the fact that this badge is earned. You don’t pay for it, even though you pay to enter, but you need to earn it in order to get certified. Meaning you have to show me that you’ve created actual results for clients using part of the methodology, and I reserve the right to not certify you if I feel you don’t fit with the brand. That’s it. That’s the main difference compared to everyone else. creates more exclusivity, this feeling that the brand is protected and the feeling that people who enter this are not just, you know, they just didn’t pay their way to get a fucking badge on the bottom of their website, right? So that’s unique positioning. Distinctiveness, well, distinctiveness, I can talk about it forever, but behind me, you’re listening to this in audio, but you can see that behind me is Roger, my rooster.

Rob Marsh: Big rooster, big orange rooster.

Louis Grenier: Yeah, this is my mascot with a purple beret, with this look on its face, just this aggressive… It’s just such a funny facial or whatever expression. And that has nothing to do with what I do. directly at least. Yes, it’s a nod to me being French because it’s a rooster and wears a beret, but it’s just a nod. It doesn’t explain it. You’re looking at this, you don’t know that I do marketing, right? And this is why, like, this is the beauty of a distinctive brand because it connects meaningless assets that I’m the only one that can claim in the category. I’m the only one with this, right, in the entire marketing category. So that means when people think of me, they think of the rooster. When they think of the rooster, I want them to think of a couple of things such as, you know, they may maybe feel that their business is stagnating and that it’s the new year, turning the new year and they are stagnating. Their positioning is not where they want it to be. This is where this is a trigger. This is where they can think of me. Right. So I genuinely try to apply the entire framework as much as I can. It’s not easy all the time and things change and it’s not perfect, but I try to. Because it’s all rooted in science. It’s not my point of view, my opinion, this is what you should do and this is my way. I sincerely think that this work is rooted in first principles, meaning things will not change. And so if you pick up that book in 50 years, I really hope that most of it will still be relevant. And that’s, yeah, that’s what I’m probably the proudest of.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I agree. One of the reasons I wanted to have you on the podcast in the first place, Louis, is because I think that this book basically gives the structure for anybody who is doing marketing and copywriters. Oftentimes we think, well, we’re just writing the copy, somebody else is doing all of this work, but a good copywriter is looking for those insights, is helping to develop that unique positioning statement, you know, so many of the things. It feels like a manual that helps marketers just do business. The frameworks, the tools, the practices that are in the book. And so I agree. I think in 50 years, it’ll still hold its value.

Louis Grenier: Thanks, man. That’s really nice of you to hear because I’m looking at your library of books behind me and the fact that you’re saying that behind you, The fact that you’re saying that it’s a good one, that makes me very happy. The last thing I would say on this is that it’s not easy. It’s not meant to be easy, right? It’s difficult to stand out. It takes time, it takes effort, it takes, you know, mistakes and whatever. And it’s normal. Don’t allow those marketers or not marketers to gaslight you, making you believe that There is a secret you don’t know yet that you should follow, that there is all this like an AI tool that is going to change everything and put you out of business. Be very careful with all of those. They are making you feel bad in order to sell stuff to you. So it’s not that easy, but it’s also not that hard and there’s no secrets and you already know everything. You just need to go for it, try, do new things, try again. So yeah, be careful out there, especially in the marketing space where people are trying to sell stuff you don’t need and recreate, reinvent the wheel. So, yeah.

Rob Marsh: Louis, you have a daily newsletter email that you send out. Let’s share where we can join that. I’ve been on your list, I think, for years. It is unique in the stories that you tell. You’re very outspoken. You have your opinions. You will probably offend some of our listeners when they join, but I think if they stick with you long enough, I think they’ll learn a lot. Where can people jump on your list?

Louis Grenier: If you just Google Stand the F*** Out, you’ll find the newsletter, you’ll find the book. Honestly, it’s as simple as that. And the last thing is I’ve put together an offer specifically for folks who have been courageous enough to listen through my French accents and my cursing. So you can get the book, instant access to the book, meaning through Kindle, through like PDF, EPUB. plus a bunch of other little stuff outside of it, like action kits for $9. So that’s it. So it’s cheaper than the Kindle on its own in Amazon, but you’ll get way more. So the link is stfo.link/tcc.

Rob Marsh: Fantastic. I mean, I hope everybody jumps in and gets it, but I will say it’s worth having the physical book to underline, to go through, to have on your bookshelf and next to you just to refer to because it really is how to build a marketing plan for any business and I think will help a lot of copywriters be more strategic about the work they do.

Louis Grenier: Thanks so much, man. Thanks for all the kind words and your support, encouragement, and thanks for being on the list for that long. I know it’s not easy sometimes.

Rob Marsh: It’s a great email. I probably overstated it a little bit, but it is a great email. So thanks, Louis, for sharing so much. I appreciate it.

Louis Grenier: You’re very welcome.

Rob Marsh: Thanks to Louis Grenier for taking some time to sit down with me. You should definitely join his list at everyonehatesmarketers.com. and get a copy of his book, Stand the F Out. As Louis mentioned on the podcast, he has a special offer for anyone who is a listener to the podcast. You can get a PDF or Kindle version of the book, plus a few other bonuses for just $9. The book is a primer for anyone who wants to stand out in a crowded market or for anyone who works with clients and needs to stand out at a crowded market. So get your copy today. 

I really appreciate how deep Louis was willing to go on all of this. Insights, ignored struggles, triggers, distinctiveness, positioning. These are things that don’t always come up when we’re talking about writing copy. But if you add these skills to your writing process, you will stand out from the writers who only think about words. Guys that are calling themselves wordsmiths. 

As we started talking, Louis mentioned the problem of getting people to care about your offer. This is where knowing how to write emotional copy becomes a valuable skill set. We have a masterclass that teaches you how to do that. It’s called the How to Write Emotional Copy Masterclass, and you can learn more about that at thecopyrighterclub.com forward slash emotion. Rather than me telling you what it covers and includes, simply just go to thecopyrightedclub.com/emotion and see for yourself what you get there. 

What makes a good newsletter? How about “unfiltered stories and what we learn from them?” For this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I interviewed business strategist Kristin Kenzy, the writer and strategist behind the Drunk Business Advice newsletter. Kristin’s formula for figuring out what makes a good story for sharing in email or newsletters is gold. As is her “accordion pitch” process. Don’t miss this one. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

 

Stuff to check out:

Kristin’s Newsletter
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  Okay before we get into our interview… long time listeners are probably wondering, what’s up with the new music? For the past five-ish years, we’ve been using a bit of music composed for us by Addison Rice. But after so many years, it just felt like it was time for a change. So the music is different for the new year and we’ll see if we can’t go another five years or so with this new mix.

On top of that, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been hosting the podcast for the past six months without my one-time co-host Kira Hug. Enough people have asked what’s up with that, that it’s probably time to let you all know what’s up. I mentioned this briefly on one of our throwback episodes, but to make sure you don’t miss it…

I wish there was a juicy story here, or a controversy, a messy falling out worthy of the pages of People magazine, but there’s not. Last year Kira told me that after seven years working on The Copywriter Club, that this project just didn’t light her up like it used to, and she was ready for a different kind of challenge. So we worked to slowly move her out of her daily role at The Copywriter Club. Kira’s still officiallly—legally—a partner behind the scenes, but is no longer working on Copywriter Club projects. We’re still friends. There was no drama… just time for a change. 

At the time I considered ending the podcast, but whenever I mentioned ending the podcast to someone I trusted, they all said, “no, you can’t do that… this podcast is too important for writers who want a look into how other people are running their businesses.” And on top of that I really enjoy talking with copywriters and other marketing experts about this thing we all do. It’s still lighting me up and I’ve got some great guests coming in the next few weeks, so hopefully you’ll all stay tuned to see what’s coming next. I’m still committed to our original promise of sharing strategies and ideas you can steal and use in your own business.

Speaking of great guests… my guest today is business strategist and story teller Kristin Kenzy. Kristin writes one of my favorite newsletters, Drunk Business Advice. In it, she combines interesting marketing take-aways with fantastic storytelling that makes me (and thousands of other readers) look forward to it each week. I wanted to talk with Kristin about her approach to finding and writing the stories she shares. The formula she uses to figure out if a story is worth telling is excellent and she walked me through during our interview. We also talked about why writers need to stop journaling and a better way to pitch prospects in person… something Kristin calls “accordian pitching”. It’s good stuff, so stay tuned to hear what she had to share.

Before we jump into this interview, we’ve got some really great guest trainings lined up in The Copywriter Underground this month… one on building connections with prospects and clients without burning out on social media. If you’re like me and struggle to show up on social media consistently, this one will change your approach entirely. And a second training on landing a “real” in-house job—either part time or full time—if you are looking for something a little more stable than freelancing is. Ironicallly, copywriters are bad at telling our own career stories and this workshop will show you what to do if you want to land one of these so-called “real” jobs. Both of these workshops are exclusively available for members of The Copywriter Underground. If you want access to them plus more than 30 templates, 70 other workshops and trainings, and monthly coaching from me, you can learn more at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. If you’ve been thinking about trying out The Underground, this month is the month to do it. Go to thecopywriterclub.com/tcu for more information.

And now, let’s go to our interview with Kristin Kenzy. 

Rob Marsh: Welcome to The Copywriter Club Podcast. We always start with your story, but I’ve got to say, I’m hesitating to ask that because you’ve had so many experiences that I’ve read about in your newsletter. We could talk about your story for the entire podcast. So your version of how you got to where you are today, running your own newsletter and the businesses that you’ve been starting.

Kristin Kenzy: Of course. Well, thank you, Rob, for having me. It’s really an honor to jump in here in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, where none of us know what day it is or what’s going on outside or where anything is in the world, to actually be a little centered and talk about writing and talk about business. 

So I’ll answer your question by just looking at the last couple of years, because the last couple of years is when I’ve become a writer. And I have a definition of a writer, right? A writer is someone that actually gets paid to write. So lots of people write. I have written throughout my entire life. A lot of us have written, have published, have done self-exploratory work through writing. But I only became a writer really in the last 18 months. And that is a result of having had 20 years of entrepreneurship experience. So as you mentioned, we can talk a lot about all of those different ventures that I’ve been a part of, but how that switched from being an entrepreneur to being really a writer or an entrepreneurial writer is getting hired by Trends by the Hustle. Trends was the premium subscription of the Hustle newsletter for about five years, and it was an entrepreneurship analytics publication. And they had had many editors, many writers, many analysts over the years, and they needed someone to take it over who actually wasn’t a writer. They wanted someone who viewed the world through the lens of entrepreneurship. 

So with zero editorial background, zero professional writing experience, I stepped into that role simply because they thought that I knew how to talk to that audience. And again, I looked at it as an exercise in clarity, an exercise in taking actual experiences, actual advice, actual data, and communicating it as effectively as possible to an audience that is really looking to be entertained while they’re reading it, but also they need to get something out of it. So that started my entire sort of writing journey, and I was the managing editor there for about a year. Decided to part ways with them just because The hustle and trends had been acquired by HubSpot, which is a big software conglomerate. And journalism and media and corporate America don’t blend super well. And I thought that there was just some cultural nuance there that wasn’t really jiving for me. But in that time, I had just fallen in love with editorial. I had met the coolest people that I’ve ever known before in my entire life, in my entire career, who were our writers and our analysts. The most incredible entrepreneurs who were part of our readership and part of our community. And I just said, this is what I want to do. And I felt that after having 20 years of business experience, I had earned the right to stop doing it and start talking about it and start teaching it. And so I made that big shift. I was, you know, a huge part of my career was in real estate development. And I like to say I retired my hard hat and adopted a laptop as my main business tool and made that shift into editorial. But again, I don’t look at any of this as a writer. I look at it as a person who has had experiences that I think can help others. and or entertain others, hopefully both. And that’s really the platform by which I’ve built my newsletter and all of the other editorial and community aspects of what I’m working on right now.

Rob Marsh: So before we jump into a lot of that stuff, what’s really interesting with what you’ve shared so far is the fact that you weren’t a writer before you became a writer. And there are a lot of people who listen to this podcast who are starting writing businesses or have been writing for a little while. They’re looking for clients. that the challenge of how do I communicate now that I can do this thing, this writing thing. And you obviously did it. I mean, it’s almost counterintuitive where you say, well, I, you know, you, you managed, you know, skating rinks and you’ve like, you mentioned your real estate development stuff that you’ve done and you’ve worked on a cruise ship and all of like these amazing experiences. But it wasn’t writing. And so what was the thing that made you think or even made the hustle think that you were the right person for that job?

Kristin Kenzy: There’s, there’s two things. So what the hustle thought and what I thought, two different things. Um, so I think the hustle really did want someone who could manage the business of their trends publication. I think they were thinking about that because trends was a business within a business. When the hustle was purchased by HubSpot, they relinquished their advertising business. They were, you know, that was how they made money before. And they became a platform for which HubSpot could promote its products and services. Whereas Trends uniquely was not that. Trends was a premium subscription. So they needed to look at Trends as a business plus editorial. So I was responsible for both of those elements, right? I was the managing editor, not the editor-in-chief who was in charge of both the hustle and trends. I was really looking at how can we maximize this business? Who are our readers? What interests them most? And when I say who are our readers, what stage in development are they? Are they people who are questioning going into entrepreneurship, questioning taking that leap and quitting their 9 to 5? Are they experienced entrepreneurs who are looking for operational tactics? Are they investors who are looking to keep their finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the startup world, right? Like, you know, delineating between all of those different user groups and then creating product services, programming, and of course, strong editorial that resonated with them. So I think that that’s really what they were looking at me for. I think that they thought, okay, our writers are strong enough that if our managing editor isn’t the best editor in the world, the business will still thrive as a result of that. So I think that that’s where they were coming from. I don’t think they expected me to step into the editorial side. And I know I didn’t expect myself to step into the editorial side as competently as I ended up doing. That was a huge surprise to everybody. And the thing that I thought I would find most interesting about taking on that role was building relationships with that audience. So I had been a subscriber and member of Trends since its inception, and I was an active part of that community. That’s how they knew me. I actually ran their blockchain subchapter as a volunteer, because at the time I was the COO of a blockchain startup. And so I wanted to like, you know, make sure that we were exploiting all the resources that Trends had to offer in that industry and making sure that we were constantly discovering things and sharing it with the community. So I was very actively involved and I had met some of the coolest people ever. And I was just like, if I could be in a position of authority and looked up to by this incredible community of entrepreneurs and business leaders, That can’t be bad for me at all. There’s no downside to that. And so I was really in it more for the community, the relationships, the connections, and looking at it as a stepping stone to what my next venture might be. And I think that they really wanted someone who could streamline their business operations and make sure that they were maximizing all of their programming and all of the products within the trend suite, not just the editorial.

Rob Marsh: Okay, that all makes sense. So you left there and maybe there was a step in between, but you have started your own newsletter, Drunk Business Advice, which before we started recording, I told you I love it. I think it really stands out in the newsletter space in some really unique ways. Tell us about that. Why start a newsletter and what is your approach?

Kristin Kenzy: So this all happened while I was still with Trends. It’s funny. I had wanted to either start a newsletter or a podcast or both. And it was because I had suddenly been exposed to the world of media. And like I had mentioned, I had just met so many great people. And conversely to the world of tech and the world of real estate that I had come up through, I felt like there was an openness to the relationships I was building. I met, for the first time in my career, really incredible women who wanted to uplift other women. And in a lot of more male-dominated industries, even the women in them kind of want to push women down. And I had experienced a lot of that sort of thing. And so I kind of, not to be too kumbaya about it, was like, Oh, this is just like a fantastic space to be in. And this is how I want my world to look. And so, um, I had started, my initial idea was to start a podcast and a newsletter called business and benevolence. And this was from a, uh, panel that I hosted while I was with trends with people who were really strong business leaders and entrepreneurs, but also either ran nonprofits on the side or had, um, certain like, uh, social or economic missions that were really just benevolent within their businesses. And it was this idea that you can be both and you can be successful at both, right? You don’t have to be, you know, looking just at shareholder management. You can look at stakeholder management and manage both and make the world a better place while also running a super successful and profitable business. And I wanted to explore that a little bit more greatly. And so that was kind of the first idea that I played around with. And then I’ll tell you how drunk business advice, which is so much more suitable to me, by the way, than the benevolence thing, came about. I had been at an event here in New York City that a friend of mine was hosting for entrepreneurs. And she’s someone that I support and I try to go to as many of her events as possible. And I was talking to someone there about his fundraising strategy. He was trying to raise venture capital, but also looking at smaller angel and even like some private equity. And I was talking to him about the strategy and we were having wine and then we were talking about the strategy and then we were having more wine. And then we were talking about the strategy and having even more wine. And I came up with an idea to kind of flip his fundraising strategy on its head by segmenting all of his business units and making them investable assets as individuals rather than the whole company. Not to get into too many details about it, but it was like this whole like completely rethinking how he was going to go out and raise money. And he went and did it. And the next morning I had an editorial meeting with Trends, with all of our writers, and I was like, oh my God, last night this guy took my drunk business advice. And it was the most, like, I can’t believe that he took this advice. And they were like, that needs to be your newsletter. Drunk business advice. And so it started with a name first, and I didn’t really know what I wanted to write about. But as I was workshopping the idea, I initially wanted to look at sort of the key aspects of business operations that get ignored. So I had three tests, the toilet test, the tell me test, and oh my gosh, there was one more. Now I feel like a presidential candidate in a debate for getting the third thing of a policy. So I’ll talk about the first two first and then the third will come back to me. So the toilet test was what’s the toilet of your business, right? What is the thing that if you don’t keep it maintained and running well, the shit will hit the fan, literally. But it’s not a sexy thing to look at. How do you identify that and keep that running? The tell me test was all about communication. And that is, how are you communicating your mission, your values, your structure, your tactics, your policies, not just to your staff, but to your audience? Because there’s usually a strong disconnect between what you want to do and how that’s actually landing on your team and on your audience. And now the third one is still like, leaving me, which is good. It’s good that this has happened because obviously that was not the right structure for drunk business advice. I recorded four podcast episodes initially of drunk business advice, focusing on those topics, and it just didn’t work. There’s a bunch of reasons why it didn’t work. Number one, I suck at podcasts. I—full disclosure—don’t really listen to podcasts. It’s not how I consume media. I’m a reader. And what you’re doing is incredibly difficult. Interviewing people live, editing them, promoting them, all of that stuff I was just not good at. But also, I felt like I was too structured by having these tests, these cutesy little tests. And that’s also my biggest flaw in copywriting is that I tend to be a little too cute with copy and try to find things that are a little too fun and adding structure where structure doesn’t need to be. And so I took a big step back for like probably four or five months to rethink it. And I realized that the essence of drunk business advice is just unfiltered stories and what we learn when we are actually talking to people we care about with a drink in our hand and reliving those experiences and having those experiences reflected back onto us by our friends and the people who are hearing them. And so that’s the direction that I ended up going. It’s far less structured and so far has been working a lot better than trying to be cutesy and offer all these different operational advice elements.

Rob Marsh: I think it’s the stories that resonate so much, at least why I love the newsletter so much. There’s a ton of variety. One of the first newsletters that really resonated with me, I think you were doing a critique of managed care facilities because you were putting, I think, a relative in a managed care facility, which I’ve had a mom go through that and, you know, passed away in a facility and like the criticisms that you were offering through that all hit home, but you were telling it in a way that was so compelling and almost, I mean, the experience is kind of over the top, but it was almost over the top ridiculously bad. But then the next week’s episode may be about your experience managing an ice rink or an experience on a cruise ship. The stories are so different, but they’re always compelling. So let’s talk a little bit about storytelling. And I know you even got, I think, a program where you’re helping business leaders tell their own stories. But how do you approach stories? As you’re thinking about this, oh, this would be a good story, or this is not a good story for the newsletter. What do I need to do to make this story acceptable for the newsletter? Let’s talk about that process a little.

Kristin Kenzy: Sure. So for the first probably 20 to 25 issues, I had no process. I was just publishing. And this is, I guess, one of those unique aspects of coming at this as a non-writer, right? I don’t have any experience in being taught how to write, in storytelling formulas, in any of this stuff. And it’s actually been through working with other people who have that background to provide me with clarity on what it is I’m actually doing so that I can repeat it moving forward. Because that was my biggest problem is when I first started writing drug business advice, people would ask me that question and my answer was, I have no idea. I just write it. It’s like when I was a figure skater, I didn’t know how I did a double axel. I couldn’t break it down for you because it was almost like muscle memory and I would just do it. And that’s how I was initially writing it. But since I’ve started working with actual writers and people who have been giving me feedback on what it is that I’m putting out there, I’ve been able to put a lot more structure around my process. And that’s one of the things that I’m going to be working on with my new Rebel Scribes cohort, the business leaders that are going to be joining me here in January to work on their own storytelling. So, there’s a few things. The first thing that I do, or the big structure, is something that I never knew of, but apparently is pretty common in storytelling, and that’s the, and then, because, and therefore structure. Do you know what I’m talking about when I say that, or should I?

Rob Marsh: Well, I mean, let’s elaborate on it a little bit, just in case somebody listening doesn’t. There’s a few different versions of this framework for, like, how does the story work?

Kristin Kenzy: Absolutely. And so I start with the and then. Most people tell stories this way, just, you know, when they’re talking to their friends or communicating with people on social media. And it’s this sort of anecdotal stream of consciousness way of telling a story. It’s one event happens, then another event happens, then another event happens. It’s not a story, but is a series of events. And so like, as an example, this might be, My boss dismissed my idea in a meeting. And then I started not caring about my job. And then I got called into a performance review. And then I decided I was unhappy, and then I quit. That’s a series of events. And I start with that because that’s how most of us, like, remember things. Remember this event happened, and that event happened, and that event happened. Or in the cases where I’m interviewing subjects for drunk business advice, that’s how they usually relay things to me as well, right? Like, this is the story of what happened. The next step is the because, right? Looking at the why behind that. So after I get the and thens out, and I don’t self-edit myself while I’m trying to do that. I don’t try to self-edit and go, and then, oh, what was the because here? I just get it all down. Then I try to add the becauses. So what this might look like in the previous example is my boss dismissed my idea in a meeting because he was always adamant about appearing to be the smartest guy in the room. Because I realized that I was never going to feel valued at work, I began disconnecting my self-worth with my job performance. Because I was then underperforming, I was called in for a performance review. And during that performance review, it became clear that because my boss was never going to provide me with the validation and the upward mobility I needed, that it was time for me to resign. So now that’s more of a story. And we’re getting through to the why behind the and thens. And then the final thing is the therefore. So that’s the last thing that I do, and that’s typically the drunk business advice. And for those of you who may have read it, I always kind of start, there’s this bubble at the top that has the drunk business advice, and they’re just a few bullet points to kind of entice you into what’s going to come. But the final thing is the therefore. So the therefore in this example might be, You know, therefore, while it’s healthy to find self-worth in other places other than work, work consumes so much of our time and energy that it’s important to recognize the signs of a toxic workplace and make changes before that toxic environment impacts our mental health, our reputation, our career. And that’s like, that’s the final therefore. And then you have something that is worth reading because not only does it take the reader on a journey that they can emotionally relate to, there’s advice there, right? There’s something about a piece of value that they could take away. So I start with my and thens and I just get the anecdote on paper. Then I try to look behind that, come up with the becauses. And then I finally come up with the therefore. What are the main takeaways from this? The things that really matter and that I want them to remember after reading the story.

Rob Marsh: Copywriters will recognize the advice part as the transformation or the result or the thing that we’re driving to that’s going to create that sale or whatever the activity that we need somebody to take. And so it makes sense, not just from a storytelling, situation, but when we’re writing any kind of content, any kind of copy that’s trying to move somebody from where they are now to where they want to be at some point in the future. And I think one of the wonderful things about your newsletter is it’s not always something that we’re aware of that movement because of how it’s coming from your life and your experience. But again, we’re along for the journey the whole time. And when we get there, it’s really satisfying to read.

Kristin Kenzy: That’s really nice of you to say. And I’m glad that that’s coming through. But it is hard. And you had asked how I determine what stories are worthwhile. And it really is that bridge between the and then and the because. Because if there is a because behind the story, and it’s not just a fun anecdote, I started writing one the other day, a story that I have told a million times before about a horrible experience I had at Disney World. And there’s actually a lot of business lessons in it. from a Disney perspective because they just dropped the ball on, they were definitely not the happiest place on earth. And there are just some crazy anecdotes and things that happened there. But as I was putting the story together, I just couldn’t find enough because and therefore in it. It was just to me a series of ridiculous anecdotes. And I might be able to take some of those anecdotes and use some of those for like social media posts or other things. But drunk business advice, as you mentioned, it’s long form narrative. And I need to have really strong becauses and really strong therefores. And I wrote half of it and went, there’s just not enough here. And again, this is a story that I’ve told at dinner parties for years, thinking it’s one of the best stories I have in my back pocket. And it’s really not. It’s just like an outrageous thing that happened in a series of events. but there’s nothing to really draw from it.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, there’s a big, I mean, there are all kinds of different stories, varying lengths or whatever. But when you need a story that fits a purpose, you know, if you’re trying to communicate something specific, like you said, advice or some kind of transformation, there has to be a change. There has to be that thing. You’re right. And so, yeah, there’s a place in the world for anecdotes and funny stories, you know, the give a laugh at the bar or whatever. But for a serious or a weekly newsletter, it’s nice to have a little bit more.

Kristin Kenzy: Absolutely.

Rob Marsh: Okay, so we’ve talked just a little bit about your storytelling approach. One of the things you mentioned to me that got me thinking before we started recording, you sent an email with a couple of ideas of some things we could talk about. One of them was stop journaling. And one of the things that experts have said is if you want stories to tell, you need to be writing them down in the journal and you’ve got to keep this list of your potential stories and you’ve got to be thinking about it. So I’m curious about, your approach. I know you’re not saying don’t write things down or don’t keep a journal, but what do you mean by that idea of stop journaling?

Kristin Kenzy: So I would say there’s a difference between a journal and a second brain. And I am a really strong advocate for keeping a second brain, recording your thoughts, making sure that you have notes written down every time an idea comes to you, every time you remember something, witness something, have a conversation that inspires you. Yes, 100% write that stuff down. So when I say journaling, I say like, OK, it’s like that dear diary at the end of the day. Here’s all the stuff that I did today. possibly here’s how it made me feel. The reason I think people should stop doing that and start writing for an audience is because when you’re writing for an audience, it forces you to find value in your experience that is going to be, you know, value for the audience. I like to say that my favorite quote is from one of my best professional mentors, Frank Sipovitz. He was in charge of the Super Bowl during the blackout. And he was in charge of the Super Bowl for 10 years. Prior to that, he was in charge of the NHL events. And prior to that, he was in charge of Radio City Music Hall. So this guy has been in some of the most crisis, dire situations you could ever imagine. And my favorite quote from him is, learning isn’t linear. You don’t have an experience and immediately learn from it and take those learnings and apply them to your life or whatever it is you’re doing, your profession. Our brains don’t work like that. We don’t look backwards like that. Some of the lessons kind of seep into our subconscious and become like intuitive and things like that. But like intellectually, we typically don’t look at our experiences as lessons. You know, we’re not an after school special, right? Where it’s like, oh, this experience happens and here’s what we learned from it, boys and girls. That’s not how our brains work. But we can trick our brains into doing that if we start writing those experiences down for an audience. and forcing ourselves to extract the lessons because now not only are, you know, they hopefully learning something and we’re providing value to an audience, but now we’ve intellectualized this and brought it up into the forefront of our minds so that we can now use those lessons as we move forward through our lives. And so I would argue that anyone who journals right now or likes to write down their experiences, their thoughts, their feelings, I would encourage them to start doing that for an audience. Whether it’s you’re posting on LinkedIn or any sort of other social media you happen to be on, starting a newsletter, even if you only have 20 subscribers and they’re your friends and family and cousins, right? Even if you have that small of an audience, it’s worth doing just because it’s going to force you to reflect back on your life and extract value from your experiences. So it’s a little bit of a life hack. And I also think that writing for an audience opens up enormous opportunities. Because even if you start small and gain a little bit of traction, staying top of mind for people and constantly bringing people value means that people are going to start reaching out to you for all kinds of things. I mean, I just got a text message this morning from a former colleague who I’ve remained top of mind for and wants to know if I’m interested in a job. Answers probably no on that one, but how many people get text messages like that when you’re not actively putting yourself out there? So I think it’s super valuable for a number of reasons.

Rob Marsh: I think also using writing to an audience, which is a little bit, you know, using writing as a thinking tool to figure out what you’re saying or what you’re thinking in the moment. But there’s a filtering effect that happens there too. You know, there are some regular email writers when their email shows up in my inbox where I think, that story maybe wasn’t that valuable for me as an audience, right? you know, wasn’t what I was expecting from that particular writer, whereas if they were thinking, oh, my writer includes this persona, this kind of person, and so they’re interested in, you know, this topic, or my lessons about, you know, this experience, it feels like that filtering effect could improve a lot of email writers work.

Kristin Kenzy: Oh, completely. Because you are, you’re thinking about who that person is that’s reading it. And it’s also possible to kind of segment that, right? So sending, if you have an audience and you know a little bit about that audience, you can choose to send them different versions of the same lesson in ways that will resonate with them. Or you can just choose to only send them things that you believe are really going to be impactful so that you get that click and you get that open. every time rather than them starting to become disinterested and then just not opening your email when it does contain a little nugget of gold for them. And I think that that’s something that not enough newsletter operators are actually doing right now. I asked this question to a group of newsletter operators the other night, how many segments do you send the same email to? And the answer is usually one. I have my audience segmented based on acquisition method, based on how they’ve responded to various surveys and things that I put out. For instance, entrepreneurs versus nine to fivers with a side hustle versus retirees versus C-suite. I have this information about my audience. Why not segment it? And if I want to in the future, create customized content for those segments. So I do think that that’s something that people should start thinking about at the very top, even before they have a large audience, is how to find out the most you can about them and then segment them. And sometimes you’ll just send the same blast out to everyone, and that might be the case, you know, 90% of the time. But having that information about your audience so that you can customize the message is really important as well.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I remember you sent a subscriber survey to me that I filled out. In fact, that was probably our first email exchange.

Kristin Kenzy: Can we tell people what you told me?

Rob Marsh: Sure. Well, I mean, you’ll have to talk about what was on your survey.

Kristin Kenzy: I just want Rob’s audience to know that he told me to f*** off in that.

Rob Marsh: Sort of, sort of.

Kristin Kenzy: No, it was perfect. It was the best response I ever got from that survey.

Rob Marsh: We have to be clear, the survey itself categorizes each person, so I had to select a couple of things. One of them was my age, and I think The age for millennials said you were in the prime of your game or something. And then the one for my age group, which is just slightly older than millennial, was something about being past, not past the prime of my life, but being at the stage of my life where I could tell people to F off, basically. And so, yeah, I responded back with, I was trying to be funny, I think.

Kristin Kenzy: It was the best response I’ve ever gotten. I love that. And it showed that you actually like paid attention to the content and were engaged with it. And I love seeing stuff like that. And I’m never offended when people use that language with me because I use that language with them.

Rob Marsh: I think this points out to an interesting bit of micro copy as well, where it’s not just about the big long form newsletter. But it’s about all of the other ways that you communicate and a survey can be fun. And so especially if you’re asking people to divulge information about themselves, you ought to make it fun or at least enticing for them in some way so that they’re willing to share. And your survey did that, at least for me.

Kristin Kenzy: Thank you. Thank you. I think it’s important to bring authenticity and personality to every type of communication you have with your audience. And whether it’s a survey, whether it’s a social media post, whether it’s just an email exchange, you know, I get a lot of responses to the newsletters that I send out. And when I respond, I try to be the same person that they expect, right? I try to be fun and, you know, engaging and authentic. And I never set up If I scale to a certain level, I might have to do this, but I usually don’t set up any sort of auto replies, nor do I have at this point an assistant or anyone responding on my behalf, which I know a lot of the bigger publications have to do. I really do try to individually respond to every single thing people send me, because they’ve taken time out of their day to say hello to me, and they deserve an authentic response from me.

Rob Marsh: So when we’re talking about segmenting, have you done this with Drunk Business Advice yet, where you’re sending a different message to certain segments that I may be not seeing, or is this the plan for the future?

Kristin Kenzy: It’s more of a plan for the future. My audience, first of all, isn’t big enough yet, I think, to send those segments, but I guess the point behind this was that start collecting that data early so that you can begin segmenting once your audience gets to that point. The only difference that I have right now in emails that I’ve sent have been to promote Rebel Scribes, my writing cohort. based on people who have either shown engagement, responded to surveys, versus people who might read the newsletter and open the newsletter but are a little bit more passive. And that’s mainly just to reward those who are more engaged with special offers and pre-launches and things like that. It’s not been a like, hey, this is the segment of C-suite, so I’m going to speak to you differently than the segment who are entrepreneurs. I haven’t experimented with that yet, but I plan to in the future.

Rob Marsh: You did do that when you were with Trends, though. I mean, that publication was pretty intense in the way they used data and thought about data.

Kristin Kenzy: We actually did not. The whole time I was there, we definitely didn’t mix our editorial. Our editorial was the same message to everyone. It was a premium subscription. People paid for that. Everyone got the same thing. On the marketing side of things, we did. We segmented our list and did email marketing to try to target the most, what we thought were the best types of Trends members, which were people who were actually operating and actually doing. We found that even though people who were thinking about diving into entrepreneurship were really engaged at the beginning, they typically didn’t renew their subscription. Whereas people who were operators, you know, because if they go a year and they don’t start a business, why are they, you know, and so we were really looking more for operators, people who actually had quite a bit of experience and were looking to either pivot their business, start a new business, open up different operational aspects to their business, and they were looking for different insights. we found them to be far more engaging. And so we did segment our list based on that to try to make sure that we were targeting the right members for more sustainability and less churn overall. But editorially, no, we just sent the same email out to everyone. We probably should have thought more about that actually. But I was new at this back then. So I didn’t even think to like, these are all lessons again, learning’s not linear. And these are all lessons that I’ve learned throughout that process.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. One of the things that you mentioned that we should definitely talk about is related to this, that’s humanizing data. The fact that there is a difference between talking about numbers and knowing numbers or the way that we talk about numbers. And this is a huge problem online, you know, especially in marketing where people are willing to share like top line numbers, but they don’t talk about all of them. you know, the stuff that happens underneath, you know, when we’re talking things like income or revenue or costs and value and all of that stuff. I’m assuming you’ve got maybe a related take on that. What do you think about this whole way that we talk about data?

Kristin Kenzy: I mean, everything is spun. So to answer your question about like sometimes people are gonna like share whatever numbers make them look the best. And if that’s top line revenue and not profitability, then that’s what they’re gonna share. So I don’t know that I have a judgment to make on that because I mean, that’s more their own kind of moral dilemma. When I talk about humanizing data, I’m talking about how when you are either pitching an idea or telling someone about your business and there’s data involved. The quote that I use is like, everyone wants to know your numbers, but no one wants to listen to you talk about your numbers because it’s boring as hell, right? You want to express numbers in a way that makes people able to relate to them. So to give you a couple of examples, and I’m going to credit Carmine Gallo with this as well. He was another mentor of mine. He’s published I think 10 books now, several bestsellers. His latest is The Bezos Blueprint, where he analyzed all of Jeff Bezos’ shareholder letters over the course of the decade or so that he was chairman of Amazon and writing shareholder letters. He talked about Jeff Bezos’ storytelling ability, his ability to simplify complex situations and concepts. And most importantly, his ability to humanize data. So this is a concept that I got from Carmine Gallo in this book. And to give you an example, we might say, by the year 2050, there will be over 850 million tons of plastic in the ocean. What does that mean? It means nothing.

Rob Marsh: It means there’s a lot of plastic in the ocean.

Kristin Kenzy: It means there’s a lot of plastic in the ocean. But what if we rephrase that and we said, by 2050, the weight of all the plastic in the ocean will be greater than the weight of all the fish? That humanizes it. It conceptualizes it. And you can think, well, there’s a lot of fish in the ocean. There’s actually, I think it’s 890 million tons of fish in the ocean. And it’s going to be greater than that of all the fish. Or if we have, I have a few really good ones here. Amazon stores over 3 billion gigabytes of data.

Rob Marsh: I have no idea what a gigabyte is.

Kristin Kenzy: Amazon stores so much data that if you burned it all onto DVDs, the stack would reach the International Space Station twice. So these are examples of how you can take any time you’re writing and I try to do this. My example is figure skating, right? So when I talk about how I injured myself as a figure skater, when a figure skater falls on a jump, it’s eight times their body weight. So what I did is I was like, well, when I was a figure skater, I weighed about 100 pounds. What weighs 800 pounds? And I went through this process of trying to figure out things that weigh 800 pounds, and I figured out that a grand piano weighs about 800 pounds. I’m like, what a visual is that? So now when I talk about that, I say that when I fell on that jump, the force of it was equivalent to a grand piano crashing onto a frozen sidewalk. And that just helps. You can hear the wood splintering, right? You can feel the impact. And you can now understand what an incredible injury I had as a result of that particular fall, right? So I always try to look for ways to take a number and then humanize it or contextualize it in a way that people can understand. And I still don’t know really how many gigabytes of data all these DVDs stacked up to the International Space Station might be, but it instilled a feeling in me of like, that’s an astronomically large number. That’s an incomprehensibly large number. And Amazon stores all of that data. That’s incredible. That’s what I mean when I say humanized data, and I think it’s a really strong exercise that we can all do when we write. Every time a number comes up, just stop yourself. Well, write because you shouldn’t stop yourself while you’re writing. Write everything down. But when you’re going through that because and therefore process in your self-editing, think about more creative ways that you can tell those stories. I’ll tell you what, AI is a fantastic tool for this. Because you can put that number into ChatGPT or Cloud or whatever you use and say, give me 20 examples of this. And then you want to verify and make sure, of course, that those examples are not hallucinated and that those numbers all stack up. But it can definitely help the process when you’re trying to think of creative ways to humanize your data.

Rob Marsh: This is another huge copywriting lesson, and it’s not just numbers and data that we need to contextualize, it’s experiences, right? So, this is just off the top of my head, but if you are writing for, say, a knee supplement, because your knees hurt and you want to sell this and you’re selling it to maybe someone in their 50s or 60s, You can’t just say it stops knee pain. You have to contextualize what that knee pain is, right? Like it’s keeping you from playing tennis or being able to go running or maybe playing with your grandkids or whatever those things are. We have to contextualize this stuff in order to tell a better story and in order to get readers to relate to the stuff that we’re doing. This is key to connecting emotionally with our readers.

Kristin Kenzy: Absolutely. And it’s honestly something that I struggle with in copywriting because while I do think I’m strong editorially and with long form narrative, I lean into the cute with copy and I forget about the emotion behind it. I forget about the why. And luckily I have people in my life that are constantly banging me over the head, reminding me that I need to focus on that whenever I’m writing copy because I think it’s hard. I think it’s really hard.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. One other thing that you mentioned that we should touch on that’s a totally different subject, I think, but it’s accordion pitching. And part of this, again, copywriters, content writers, we’re always pitching for work. Oftentimes we’re pitching for other opportunities. But you said that we need to sort of shut up a little bit and take maybe a different approach.

Kristin Kenzy: Well, I mean, it’s all accordion pitching is, and this is a skill that I learned from a screenwriter friend of mine. And so it’s actually a screenwriting concept, and I’ve never heard of this being applied in business. But an accordion pitch is where you just give a little nugget of information at the top, and then you look for a positive signal to proceed. And then you give a little bit more. And I think what founders specifically, I’m not quite sure about freelancers or copywriters, usually folks are pretty good at nailing their one-liner, right? If somebody asks, what do you do? Or what does your company do? We practice this, we rehearse it. There’s a lot of people that’ll say that your one-liner is, my company solves X for Y using this secret sauce. There’s all kinds of formulas for doing this. And that’s great. What happens when they say, interesting, tell me more. Word vomit. I would say that even in this conversation, I have been guilty of that because I’ve been answering, I think, far too monologuish and not turning this into a conversation. You’re okay with that because you’re a podcast host, but if we were meeting at a dinner party, you’d be like, oh my God, I want this girl to shut up. When is she going to let me show interest or ask a question? And so what an accordion pitch basically does is, and I have, I know that people can’t see, but I have a visual aid for this, which is when somebody asks, what do you do? You open up the accordion just a little bit and you say something like, oh, I write a newsletter called Drunk Business Advice. wow, like, okay, that’s, and then I stop there, right? I write a newsletter called Drunk Business Advice, and if they’re like, yeah, okay, and they change the subject, then I know that they’re not interested in learning more about drunk business advice, and that’s okay, because I’ve given them that opportunity to say no, but if they’re like, oh, wow, what’s drunk business advice? I’ll expand the accordion a little bit more, and I’ll say, well, you know, learning isn’t linear, Our lives are not like afterschool specials. We don’t immediately learn our lessons right after we have our experiences. And what drug business advice does is it dives into those experiences in an unfiltered way to provide valuable lessons in an entertaining way. interesting, tell me more, or they might change the subject at that point or ask a question. But if they say interesting, tell me more, then I open the accordion a little bit more and I say, well, I send it every Thursday. I also have writing workshop and I can go on and on. Right. But the idea is that you will have, you know, three to five to six layers of your story. to be able to communicate in a conversational setting that occurs when people are giving you positive signals that they want to learn more. And also giving them an out and therefore respecting their time. Because nobody wants to be that person at the cocktail party who’s just blabbering on about themselves for an hour, not giving anyone else the opportunity to interject or change the subject. And so that’s accordion pitching.

Rob Marsh: I love this idea because everybody has that first answer, but almost nobody has thought through, okay, if I keep opening the kimono just a little bit more, revealing a little bit more, oftentimes we haven’t thought through like, what are those second, third, fourth level answers? And not just like, what would I say, but how do I make it so intriguing that the next response is tell me more. Every time is to tell me more. And that takes work. Again, copywriters, content writers should be able to figure that out. That’s what we’re supposed to do for our clients. But when we sit down to do it for ourselves, it’s oftentimes a harder task and it takes a lot of thinking through to get that right.

Kristin Kenzy: Totally. You hit such a fantastic point. I can give this advice all day long, but even I am bad at doing it. We all know what we should be doing, but trying to do it for yourself is really challenging. As you’re going through this process, don’t be too hard on yourself because even the people who are touting this as being the best process ever still have a hard time doing it in execution.

Rob Marsh: Well, this is one of the things that we’ve always taught in our programs. It’s oftentimes really good to have somebody that you can reflect this with. It’s like, this is what I wrote. How would you change it? This is what you wrote. This is how I respond to it. So having a business buddy, a writing partner, however you want to call it, somebody that you can reflect that is really helpful.

Kristin Kenzy: It takes practice. You can’t really do this necessarily in front of a mirror. It’s great to have a buddy who’s doing this. And this is one of the things we’re doing in my upcoming cohort is everyone’s going to craft their own accordion pitch and they’re going to have an accountability partner who they’re going to practice the hell out of it with. Because you need to be in that situation when someone’s either showing interest or maybe not showing interest or kind of showing interest. And you need to run through those scenarios and role play it so that when you get to that situation where you’re in front of someone who it matters for, then you operate like it’s by rote, like you don’t even have to think about it.

Rob Marsh: While we’re talking about this idea of having people to work through things, I know you’re interested in learning. You’ve done courses at Harvard. You’re in masterminds. Talk just a little bit about why you’re so invested in those kinds of experiences as opposed to only just reading books or only reading newsletters or what other learning opportunities that we all have.

Kristin Kenzy: And well, we all learn from books. Books are great. Teachers are great. Practice is amazing. But we learn the most by surrounding ourselves with people who care about our goals as much as we do. I mean, it just 10Xs everything. So for instance, I have a mastermind. called Stealth, Stealth Mastermind. And I was launching a landing page for a new product the other day. And I went to my mastermind and I said, shred this. And within 10 minutes, from people that I trust and love and respect, had feedback that completely reshaped that landing page. And, you know, of course you can hire someone to build a landing page for you and you can like go through and watch YouTube videos and read, you know, newsletters and listen to podcasts about all this stuff, but I mean they just within five minutes I had a completely different approach to what I was doing. And having, I think, a relationship with people who you love and trust also motivates you to do more. It’s really difficult when you’re a business owner, especially if you’re a solopreneur or someone who’s really just starting out, to have that accountability and feel like there’s someone looking at you saying, what are you doing today? How far have you gotten? And so I think the communities are really important. And for instance, when I went to Harvard, that was probably my biggest revelation. I was thrilled, obviously, to be going to executive grad school at Harvard. It was the biggest achievement and joy of my life. And I went in thinking, oh, I’m going to get the best education ever. Why wouldn’t I? The education was fine. I mean, it was good. The education was fine. The real value was derived from the relationships that I built with my classmates. And that compounds just every single day. I’m in touch with them, honestly, almost every single day. I’m either texting or on a phone call with one of them. And they make me better people. One last anecdote on this point. I received a response to my last Drunk Business Advice newsletter that was about friendships from a reader who’s really fantastic. And he talked about a Simon Sinek concept, which I had not heard about before, but was something about how friends are not people who are there for you when you’re down. They’re really people who are truly happy for you when you succeed. And when you surround yourself with people who are just as happy about your success as you are, it compounds as well. And I had never thought of it that way. I had always thought people who are the best friends are the ones that are there to rescue you. And that’s true. And you can have those friends. But the ones that celebrate your successes very meaningfully and truthfully are probably the best friends.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that’s a really good way to look at masterminds and cohorts as those friends who are there. And I’ve seen that reflected as well. It seems to be the people who are most engaged and most caring are most excited about everybody else’s success, even when they’re not seeing it, or the same level of success.

Kristin Kenzy: Exactly. And they don’t want to tear you down to their level, right? They want to pump you up.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, exactly. Okay, Kristin, if you could go back to Kristin just starting out in the business world and give her some advice that might help her make progress faster or might help her make more sense of the whole journey in some way, what would you tell her?

Kristin Kenzy: Honestly, what we had just talked about the value of relationships. I was bullied horribly in high school. And so I thought that I could have success or friends, but not both. That was, I sincerely thought that because my friends in high school, anytime I did well, you know, exceeded, whether it was academically or in any of the extracurriculars I did, they weren’t my friends anymore, right? And they would try to bully me and beat me down. And so I sincerely had starting out in my career, this idea that like, well, I can’t make friends with anyone because they are going to inhibit my success. And that couldn’t be further from the truth. And as a result, I threw a wall up. for like 20 years and did not allow myself to have vulnerable and authentic relationships. I did not open myself up to mentorship. I did not open myself up to mentor. I really felt like this was my journey and everyone else was out to get me. And that couldn’t have been further from the truth because looking back, I had many opportunities to build incredibly meaningful relationships with people who I kept at a distance. And so that would be the advice that I give to myself is that life is not high school. Those crazy mean girls in high school are not the same people that you’re going to interact with. Keep your wits about you. Don’t let yourself be taken advantage of, of course, but allow yourself to be in vulnerable relationships because I feel like that would have just not just given me more success, but made life more enjoyable. It would have given me more joy. And I do regret that I didn’t experience a ton of joy early in my career. It was a lot of work and no play. It could have been a lot more play and a lot more fun.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. Interesting. Okay. And great advice because everybody needs more play, more joy. Yeah. So if people have been listening, and I hope everybody who’s listened is thinking, I definitely want to subscribe to Drunk Business Advice. I got to see what Kristin’s sharing with the world. Where should they go?

Kristin Kenzy: Drunkbusinessadvice.com.

Rob Marsh: And let Kristin know you heard about it on the podcast so she can segment you properly because someday who knows if there’ll be a podcast segment.

Kristin Kenzy: Absolutely. And shoot me an email. Once you get my first welcome letter, definitely shoot me an email. I will respond and I’m really excited to meet you.

Rob Marsh: Amazing. Thank you, Kristin, for sharing such great advice. I’m excited to share this with everybody who listens and yeah, let’s keep in touch.

Kristin Kenzy: Thank you, Rob. This has been so much fun. I really appreciate you having me on.

Rob Marsh: Thanks to Kristin Kenzy for taking some time to sit down with me. You should definitely check out her newsletter at drunkbusinessadvice.com. If you join her list, you’re gonna see the survey that I responded to. We talked about that earlier when Kristin mentioned that I told her to F off and you’ll see the context of why I said that to her. And you’ll have a shot at possibly giving her an even better response than I did. I’m not kidding when I say that her newsletter is a favorite and you should definitely check it out. 

Let me make one last plug for The Copywriter Underground before we wrap. You heard Kristin and me talking about the power of masterminds and connections for growing your business and how they lead to all kinds of opportunities that you just don’t get working on your own. If you’re not ready for an expensive mastermind, but you want that kind of support and connection, you need to check out The Copywriter Underground now at thecopyrighterclub.com/tcu. I mentioned all the stuff that includes at the top of the show, so that’s enough. But just trust me, this is the month to join if you want to try it out.

 

In another throwback episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, we’re taking a deeper look at goal setting and a proven process to help you get more done in 2025. Dave Ruel, the author of Done by Noon, walks through his framework for setting goals (or intentions) and making sure they happen—before noon. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

 

Stuff to check out:

Done by Noon by Dave Ruel
4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
Get Dave’s workshop in The Copywriter Underground
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  If you’re listening to this episode as it goes live, today is the final day of 2024. Many of us are looking forward to the new year and new opportunities to grow and get things done.

I’m not a big fan of resolutions. They tend to be good for a few weeks, but after 4 weeks are often forgotten. It’s even a cliche now to mention how full gyms are on February 1 compared to January 1st. The drop off shows how ineffective resolutions can be for most of us.

So what does work? Well, the past year or two I’ve focused more on behaviors rather than goals or resolutions. That is, making time to exercise every morning without a goal to lose weight or compete in a marathon or bench press a certain weight. Making time to do something every day is something I can do. This applies to other goals as well, like time spent reading rather than having a goal to read 24 books a year. By scheduling time to read every day, I can reach the 24 books read without setting a goal. 

So that begs the question, how do you make sure you spend your time on the activities and behaviors that will get you closer to the person you want to be?

A few years ago, we asked something similar of Dave Ruel, the author of Done by Noon. That book is one of my favorites when it comes to getting stuff done. My other favorite takes an almost completely opposite view of time management and getting stuff done and that’s Oliver Burkeman’s 4000 Weeks. I’ll link to both in the shownotes in case you want to check them out.

For today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I went back into the archives to resurrect this mostly forgotten interview with Dave Ruel. And while he does talk about goals, he shares a framework for making sure your schedule includes plenty of time for the behaviors you want to implement into your life. If you’re looking to get more done in 2025, some of his ideas will help.

Before I share what Dave told us, after this interview we realized that we wanted to go deeper with Dave and his system. So we recorded a workshop where he walks through everything what he shares during this interview… at an even deeper level. That workshop is one of the dozens of business focused trainings available right now in The Copywriter Underground. Coming up in January of 2025, we’ll be adding several more, including a workshop for copywriters who want to work either part time or full time with a client. My friend Jessica, who spent 2 decades as a recruiter for a creative talent agency will share why copywriters are so bad at resumes and cover letters and what they need to do differently if they want to land a so-called “real” job. And Esai Arasi will be sharing how to build relationships with prospects at scale, without burning out on social media. Both of these workshops are happening in January and are completely free for Copywriter Underground members. If you want them… along with the time management workshop from Dave Ruel, go to thecopywriterlcub.com/tcu now to join.

And like last week, you’ll hear Kira Hug asking questions on this episode as it is a throwback to 2020 when she and I were co-hosting this podcast. Okay, with that let’s jump in with Dave Ruel as he tells us how he became an entrepreneur focused on sharing better time management strategies…

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Dave Ruel:  I’m going to go back to my days as a fitness athlete. This is pretty much when it all started. So, in the early 2000s, I was an amateur competitive bodybuilder. So, I was very obsessed with everything fitness, bodybuilding, muscle building, you name it. In 2007, I met a guy named Lee Hayward. We were fellow competitors on the regional circuit. So, we’ve known of each other within the local circuit, but I’ve never met Lee in person. I was traveling to his hometown to compete that weekend. So, Lee actually offered me to stay at his house that weekend. We only knew each other little bit, but I never knew what he was doing for a living.

The first morning, he was having coffee. He’s like, “Well, I’m going to do some work. I’m going to answer a couple emails and then I should be done by noon. And then we can go work out.” I was like, “Yeah, it’s nice to be on vacation and have that schedule.” He’s like, “Well, it’s pretty much like the way we operate here.” I was like, “Really? What is it that you do?” He’s like, “Well, I have a bodybuilding website. I make a full living out of it and making six figures a year, working from home. My wife works with me.” I was like, “Well, okay, I need to understand how you do to that.”

So, I quickly treated my passion for fitness to an obsession for business building, started studying direct response marketing, anything that had to do with online marketing. It was very limited at the time, because obviously, that’s in 2007. So, there was not that much going on when it comes to online businesses. Now, everything’s online. If you’re not online, you’re nowhere. But at the time, it was very different. So, I created my first business at that time. It was a website that I was sharing nutrition and cooking tips for bodybuilding and fat loss that was called the Muscle Group. The website is still on. We still sell digital products on that platform. From there, I emerged more on the publishing marketing agency.

So, basically, other coaches and other experts saw what I was doing online. They wanted to do the same thing. So, I was like, “Okay, well you have an audience, I know how to monetize that.” Then we launched an agency that led me to invest in a company called BiOptimizers. So, that’s natural supplements company. We did full turnaround with that company, sold it in 2016. During that time, for me, becoming an entrepreneur, it’s like anything else, going to the gym once doesn’t make you an athlete. I feel the same thing with entrepreneurship. You have to do it in order to understand what it is. In the process, I did obviously all the mistakes in the books that most entrepreneurs make when it comes to managing their time, their energy, their attention.

I build systems around my life in business in order to fix that and mostly inspiring by what I had learned in sports performance. I saw there’s too many weird similarities between both worlds. So, I started adapting that. Yeah. So, in 2016, I had the opportunity after I sold my last business to start coaching entrepreneurs. So, basically, entrepreneurs were coming to meet for the online business stuff that you’re talking about. Okay, I want to build an online business to have the freedom and yada, yada, yada, but what I realized that these entrepreneurs don’t need more tactics or strategies to gain more customers and convert more.

What they needed really was a framework to help them operate as entrepreneurs. I started sharing my systems with them. The results spoke for themselves. This is how Effic was born. We’re going to share these techniques, these systems with everybody. Yeah, now a few years later, we don’t do coaching, but we have certifications now, where we certify basically various business coaches or consultants who want to use that with their clients. We have, obviously, the Effic planner, which is our best-selling tool.

Rob Marsh:  So, we’re definitely going to get into more of that, but I want to go back to the amateur bodybuilding phase of your career as you’re just starting out. I’m guessing that there are a lot of behaviors, a lot of things that you were doing as a bodybuilder that apply to how you ran your businesses or that even run your business today. Will you tell us a little bit about what you learned in that phase of your career that you apply to your business today?

Dave Ruel:  Yeah, a lot of timeless techniques that we have in… It’s not just bodybuilding. It’s really through sports performance in general. The thing that you need to have in order to become a good athlete or a good entrepreneur is discipline. The thing is that when I started training really and didn’t know that I was going to compete or anything like that, I did that just to transform myself, I realized the structure it would give me, the workouts, how to structure my workouts, how to structure my goals, having an understanding, “What do I really want? Do I want to build muscle, burn fat? What do I need to do first?” The foundational work that you set and from there, you start optimizing and optimizing with time.

The thing is that your structure needs to be solid before you actually optimize, right? I see a lot of people do that. The mistake that many gym goers do in the beginning is that they’re going to take all the supplements on the market thinking that it’s going to fast track their results and they don’t have a solid base. Their nutrition is not good. Their programs are not structured properly. They end up going to the gym all the time thinking like, “The more I’m going to lift weights, the longer I’m going to do it, the bigger I’m going to get or the more fat I’m going to lose.” It’s actually the opposite that happens. So, there’s an order to how things need to happen.

Within this structure, you need to have different habits, different routines that make that sustainable. You don’t just want to do that for X amount of time and it’s done. It’s a lifestyle. So, it’s the same thing with entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is very much of a lifestyle. If you approach it as a sport or as something that you have to do in order to perform and do it well and structure it properly, there’s a lot of similarities, right? So, we talked actually quite a bit in the book about load management and the principle of adaptation and periodization, different basics really in sports performance. But if you don’t have that really mastered on a personal level, it’s going to be very hard for you to evolve as an entrepreneur.

Kira Hug:  So, I’m wondering that when you had a moment where you felt like an entrepreneur for the first time and if that was a specific moment or if it was 10 years into your business, because I do think you’re right, it doesn’t happen overnight. A lot of us, even if we’ve been doing it for a while, we still don’t feel like an entrepreneur.

Dave Ruel:  Well, I think nowadays, people call themselves entrepreneurs before they actually accomplished anything. As I said, it’s like an athlete. You don’t call yourself an athlete the first time you play a sport or you step into a gym. You have to do the work and understand. Not everybody is going to be an athlete, just like not everybody’s going to be an entrepreneur. So, it wasn’t a conscious decision for me. Entrepreneur now is the word that everybody uses. I think there’s a lot of hype probably around the word ‘entrepreneur,’ but really, it’s defining what it really is to be an entrepreneur. For me, it was not a conscious decision. There was not a specific moment that define that.

I think it was just a matter of seeing my pattern and seeing how I was operating as a human. I see a lot of similarities between entrepreneurs, right? So, for example, academically, for me, it was a disaster. I was not good at school. Not that I was not smart enough, just because I was totally disengaged and disinterested. I realized that it was not the norm, let’s say, where I grew up. You needed to have a career and a diploma to get the job, et cetera. I realized that a lot of entrepreneurs had very non-typical type of journeys.

So, there’s not a one path, but there’s similarities with behaviors and the way we saw the world and things like that. So, yeah, it’s just realization. Even to this day, I love entrepreneurship. I love the creative side of business, which is in my opinion, probably what the difference between a business owner and an entrepreneur per se. That’s the creative piece that entrepreneurs might have, that others who might be great at business management, but don’t have that spark of craziness.

Rob Marsh:  So, Dave, as you were telling your story, you talked about developing some of these systems and routines that really help you in your business to be done by noon as your book is called. Can you talk to us a little bit about some of those, maybe even the whole theme behind Effic and how we as entrepreneurs and as freelancers can start to use a system like that or that exact system in order to start getting more of our stuff done?

Dave Ruel:  Yeah. So, we can talk about a little bit more in depth about the system. I think we’re going to have a training, Rob, soon, right? I think next month, we have something scheduled for your audience. So, we’re going to go very, very deep on the topic. To go back to Effic itself, so Effic is actually short for two words. The first one is efficiency. So, obviously, it’s achieving something using the least amount of resources. So, as entrepreneurs, we have three main internal resources or resources that we have, internal and external. So, first, our energy, obviously, and also our attention. So, pretty much how we’re going to be putting our energy and attention, how and on what we’re going to be placing our attention.

The other one, our external resource, finite resource is time. So, time is not something that we can really control. We all have 24 hours a day. Time is the same for everybody. It’s just how we operate, how we use our time and energy within that constraint of time where you’re going to be at work. It’s not about working less. It’s really about working right. We glorify working hard or working smart, but working hard is a given. For example, you go at any sport. No one is successful by going how fast on the court or on the ice, if it’s hockey or whatever. You have to work hard. It’s a given.

Then obviously, you have to work smart. You’re not just going to walk around or run around for absolutely no reason. You have to manage that energy and I would say, optimize it in a smart way. I think the key is really understanding to work right, understanding what is the desired result or outcome that you want to produce. Effic is also short for efficacy, which is the ability to produce the desired or intended result or outcome, right? So, based on that, what we try to make entrepreneurs realize, especially in the first step of the methodology, which is the projection phase, it’s understanding, “Okay, well understand where you want to go.” Be very, very clear on what you want to accomplish, right? So, we divide that in two steps.

The first one is to create what we call your big picture, okay? How do you see yourself? How do you see your life? How do you really envision that for your future? What does it look like? So, creating that big picture, it needs to be specific in some ways, but it’s like going on a trip, right? You’re going to go on a trip. You’re going to visualize in your head what you think it looks like, but in reality, it will look different when you get there, but it’s equally as good. It’s just different. So, you’re going to have that general idea of where you want to be, how you want to feel, and what you want to accomplish. From there, we’re going to ask you to look into what’s really ahead of you. So, what are the goals that you can really see become a reality?

We ask you to create goals. It’s called an annual guideline. So, it’s five goals you want to see become a reality within the next 12 months. So, now we’re not talking about projects. We’re talking about outcomes. We’re talking about results here. What do you want to become a reality? It could be you want to net $100,000 a year. It could be that you want to sell X number of copies of your book. It could be that you want to work 20 hours or less per week, right? So, it’s very, very, very clear on where you’re going or your alignment point. The key is that when we talk about alignment is that the goals that you set in the next 12 months should always be aligned with the type of lifestyle and business that you want to operate, right?

I think the problem is that a lot of entrepreneurs think that they want something. But ultimately, it’s what we call ambition appropriation. It’s that you’re going to look at other people. You’re going to look at other entrepreneurs. You’re going to let their definition of success become your definition of success. I think you have to really dive deeper than that in order to understand what you really want.

I feel like it’s a starting point for a lot of entrepreneurs, because they’re going to come to us when they’re going to feel lost, right? They’re not going to do that when things are going great and there’s no problem. They’re going to do that when, “Okay, I really need to help because there’s just too much to do. I don’t know where I am. I’m not even sure it’s what I want. I need really to recalibrate.” So that’s really the first step. We show you to do that in an efficient manner obviously.

Kira Hug:  Can you share some examples of those goals that you’ve set for yourself, just to bring it to life a little bit more, for your own life and your own business?

Dave Ruel:  Yeah, like I said earlier, it could be financial goals. It could be time, because here’s the thing. I think when we go in business, we go for one thing and that thing is freedom. I divide freedom into three categories or three types of freedoms, time freedom, creative freedom, and financial freedom. I feel like always your goals will revolve around these three freedoms, depending on what season of your life you’re in. If it’s early on in your career, more than likely, you’re going to have a little bit more financial goals regarding financial freedom. When you’re going to start working and things are going good in your business, you’re going to realize that you have less time. You’re going to be focusing more into having goals for reclaiming this time, for example.

So, this is when the goal is probably going to be chop 10 hours of my workweek or work less than 20 hours a week or have six-week of vacation a year or something like that, things you want to see become a reality. I think the big thing that I see entrepreneurs do, especially when they recalibrate or realign, is that they’re going to set more creative goals. Meaning, I want this to become a reality. I want to write my new book. I want to create an online course. It’s being very specific on that outcome. Yeah, create my first online course. From there, when you know that that’s indeed the agenda or that’s an outcome that you want to have within the next 12 months, now, you can start setting your 90-day, what we call, bucket. So, your 90-day projects.

Okay, well, if I need to create my first course, probably I need to create that course. I need to create the content of that course. So, we’ll have a bucket that is dedicated to creating the content of the course. Then you were going to realize that “Well, I might need to actually produce that course,” right? So, it might be another bucket. The other one is you’re going to need to market and sell that course. So, that’s going to be another bucket, but you’re going to realize that amongst all that, you’re still going to have all the tasks to perform your business. So, it’s that juggling act of understanding… Rob, we talked about load management. … how much can you carry as far as workload and also how to divide it through the year in order to achieve that goal, right?

The main problem that I see is that people set goals as just project. So, this is the project that I’m going to do. Instead of looking at it as an outcome and understanding, “What do I need to do for this outcome, for this result to happen?” So, it’s not about creating a massive, massive project and then start working on it. It’s really understanding, “What’s the result? What can I do right now with the time, the energy, and the attention that I can dedicate to it this quarter, within the next 90 days to move in the right direction?” Understanding that sometimes it could be the main priority and you’re going to be spending a lot more time and energy and attention on that product, on that project, or something that gets you closer to this result to be achieved.

Sometimes it could be, “I’m going to have one bucket that is more in line with this result. Another one is more in line with this result.” It really depends on your context. In the best case scenario, obviously, it’s A, A, A, B, B, B sequence where okay, well, let’s focus on one and then go to the other one. But again, it depends on your business context and what needs to be done. So, yes, there’s optimum ways to do it, but there’s other ways to do it, too. The key really is understanding, “How much workload can I carry sustainably so this becomes a reality?”

Rob Marsh:  So that’s my next question then, Dave. So, let’s say that I have those goals or those outcomes. I’m pretty clear. I want to make, let’s say, six figures in the year or I want to take the summer off to spend with my kids and travel and not have to worry about work. Maybe there’s some other goals like that. So, I know that. I know that I want to accomplish that stuff, I want to do it.

But when I sit down to work on Monday, my inbox is full of stuff that I’ve got to pay attention to. And then I’ve got to record the podcast. I’ve got to get the podcast posted. And then after that, somebody needs help with some customer service stuff in our membership. We have to get the training for the membership. All of the other stuff just starts to happen. I don’t end up taking the summer off, or I don’t hit that six-figure goal. So, how do we translate from the big goals to actually getting some of this stuff done?

Dave Ruel:  Yeah. Now, we move to the next step, which is the prioritization phase. It’s understanding that out of everything that you said… For most entrepreneurs, all these tasks are on the same big pile, right? So, picture, you have a messy room and everything’s in the middle. It’s a big mount of stuff that you have. That’s usually how entrepreneurs deal with their things. They’re going to prioritize based on what they think is the priority, right? Usually, because since you’re busy, there’s a lot of things going on your business, you’re going to look where there’s fire and you’re going to try to extinguish the fire. And then next thing you know, there’s another fire somewhere else. You’re going to play firefighter all the time.

The problem is that if you prioritize that… That’s why in the book we talked about now, our matrix being glorified. We’re like, “Well, it could be a good tool. But if you want to be more proactive, if you want to have less fires, maybe it’s better to look at your task from a different perspective.” So, the Eisenhower matrix gauges the task based on the importance and urgency. The problem is that entrepreneurs don’t have that native capacity to really say, “Okay, well, this is urgent,” or “This is important.” What I’m going to see as a fire, that’s urgent and important. I’m going to have to extinguish it right now. So, the tool that we use as the impact matrix at Effic is that there’s four types of tests that you’re going to have to work on as an entrepreneur. That’s universal.

We all have these four types of tasks to attend mostly on a daily basis. It’s really how you’re going to be prioritizing these four, some of these tasks that you’re going to have in your schedule. So, number one that we have are the rock. Rob, you’re a big fan of and you’re a trained FranklinCovey professional. As we said before we started recording, the big rock, small rocks, and sand analogy was just the game changer for me when I saw Dr. Covey perform this. Dr. Covey really uses that to show what to prioritize, the important things in life. When I saw him do that, I was like, “Yes, this is definitely the way which you see prioritization,” but also, I saw the way I was actually designing my workouts, designing and operating as an athlete.

You don’t just go to the gym and start doing random dumbbell curls and bench presses and thinking, “You’re going to get that goal.” You need to understand, “Okay, well, that’s the goal. So, first of all, here’s where I want to go. Now, here’s what I want to accomplish short term. Here’s a program that’s going to get me there.” In this program, you have core exercises and then you have different sets. You have different reps and you have different moves, different tempo, et cetera, right? But you need to identify, “What are your main exercises, your foundational pieces?”, and go from there. You don’t do the opposite. This is perfect for me to illustrate, first of all, how to experiment with my workload, because it’s like going to the gym, for example.

You’re going to go to the gym the first time and going to think you can lift 220 pounds on the bench press. And then you’re going to realize that “Well, that’s actually really, really heavy. I thought in my head that I could do it, but there’s no way I’m listing that weight.” So, you’re going to start taking a little bit more weight out of it until you have something that you can manage and you can have a nice set. You do that gradually. Over time and after 90 days, your first program is completed. You’re like, “Okay, well, now I can actually move up in weights. I can add more weight to my load. I can lift more, because I can carry more load, because now I’ve adapted to this workload, right?” You get better and better and better.

A year from now, Rob is a beast benching 400 to 500 pounds in the bench press for reps, but started with barely being able to do 185. You don’t know. So, this is the thing that you have to adapt that workload over time. We use the analogy of buckets, big rocks, small rocks, and sand in order to show you how to actually break down projects into bite-sized pieces. So, understanding what are your milestones, what needs to be accomplished, and then break it down, breaking these milestones into actionable small rocks, bite-sized pieces, right? You could tell me, there’s sand in this bottle, but the problem is that entrepreneurs are great at playing in the sand, right? They’re great at managing all small stuff or taking care of small stuff before the actual real stuff is accomplished.

The sand exists. You just don’t need to overplan the sand. You have one small rock. Well, you’re going to know what the sand is. You can prepare it the day before, that sand. But you don’t have to go with the micro, micro details way in advance. This is how you get lost. This is how perfectionism kicks in and nothing gets accomplished, right? So, it’s a matter of understanding your workload from a work perspective, but also from an energetic perspective, where not all tasks are created equal based on what you’re great at and your natural tendencies and your natural capacities. So, we help you do that or establish that by yes, looking at what tasks are more impactful and what tasks take the most energy.

So, obviously, the rocks, which are always associated with innovation, with growth, they’re going to take a lot more energy for you to perform. That’s perfectly normal. So, you’re going to have to schedule them at a time that allows you to have that energy, to really push through that task. So, in the impact matrix, the second most important task that we have, the second most impactful task is routines. So, routines are tasks that are associated with the proper operational well-being of your company.

So, there’s things that you guys probably do day in and day out without even knowing but you need to do in order for your business to run properly. For example, it could be sharing on social media, interacting with your membership, students, sending emails, for example. Maybe email’s not the right example, but this task that you need to perform, whether it’s a daily, weekly or even monthly or quarterly basis that we’re going to encourage you to start putting into processes. So, listing, okay, “This needs to be done. Here’s what I need to do.”

Social media is a good example. You need to post on social media. Well, guess what? You have a process probably you’re following every day intentionally that can be documented and then made into a procedure, a series of procedures that you can then outsource or automate or even delegate to someone else, right? So, when you look at these tasks that are really associated with the growth of your company, with things that need to happen in order for your company to grow and evolve, this is what we call the power moves. These are the ones that you should prioritize.

The other types of tasks that you’re going to have are one, the reactive tasks. So, they’re the byproducts of your business operations. So, they will come. They’re things you don’t anticipate that you cannot really plan or proactively overplan, because they’re just reactive by nature and they will happen. As much as you prepare, as much as proactivity you bring into your business, there will still be some reactivity. It’s an inevitable thing. So, there’s a way to actually start looking at that and not having your day just filled with reactive tasks. You need to optimize. You need to limit personally, the number of tasks you need to do and then optimize the process, obviously.

The fourth type of task that you’re going to have are responsive tasks, which are tasks associated with communication. In this day and age, obviously, direct messaging, emails, team meetings, Zoom meetings, I mean, you name it, you’re going to have that always in your day. So, there’s a way to actually really optimize the way you operate your responsive tasks and attack them. That’s what we show you as well. So, obviously, it doesn’t happen overnight. There’s obviously constant work and optimization to be done, but the goal is for you to manage these four types of tasks in the most optimum and right way.

So, for a lot of copywriters we work with, it seems like they have the vision, they can set the goals, they understand the concept of the big rocks versus the sand, but I think a lot of us have a hard time figuring out the program and the how behind it, laying that out whether it’s for a workout at the gym or it’s for business. It’s almost hard to just break that down. What would you advise? What could help us figure out the path? I mean, we could work with the teams and coaches that you work with, but what if we’re figuring it out on our own and we can’t see how to get from point A to point B?

Dave Ruel:  So, it’s like anything else, you have to do it in order to get better at it, right? So obviously, if you use the big rocks and the small rocks and that allows you to start creating frameworks for you and depending on what type of copywriter you are. You could be a sales copy, a sales page copywriter, or an email copywriter or you do a little bit of everything. There’s always these frameworks that you’re going to have. There’s always these ordered things that you’re going to be doing, right? So, it’s understanding, for example, when you work for a client, well, I have this part, my bucket that I really need to carry for myself. So, maybe it’s a lot of outlining work, a lot of putting bullets in. And then this may be processes that you have.

So, routines that you’re going to have in order to maybe speed up the process or work on with multiple clients. So, obviously, if you’re a solopreneur and you do everything yourself, well, there’s only so much that you can do; versus if you’re like, “Okay, I have this project.” The goal is to write a sales pitch, for example, but what is your main process to write a sales pitch? It could be a routine or it could be something that is these creative elements that you fill into buckets. The second one, which is going to be more of a routine practice where you’re writing 500 words every morning or it could be having a specific process to fill in the blanks where you send some part of the copy to someone else in order to write different chapters or whatever.

So, again, I’m not a copywriter. So, I wouldn’t know exactly all the steps, but it’s understanding what the nature of the task. So, is it something that needs for me to create, that I need to create, or is it something that is more operational, that is more routine, if you want, within my creative process? Maybe parts of these routine tasks can be outsourced, delegated, outsourced or even automated sometimes now with AI. I know it’s a big trend now in copywriting to have AI assistance. So, yeah, you need to start doing it and then understanding how you operate. There’s no right or wrong. Some people operate at a heavy capacity to create. Some people are going to be more mechanical and have more processes in their lives. So, it really depends.

Rob Marsh:  So, Dave, I heard you twice say, “You need to do it.” For me, this is where the rubber hits the road. I can have the planner. I can have the goals. I can even have the task list. But there’s still something around personal discipline. You still have to show up, not open up social media, or not get lost in reading too much or whatever the things are that can distract us. Talk a little bit about personal discipline and how you learned to be more disciplined in your approach to the things that you do in your business.

Dave Ruel:  Yeah, here’s the thing with discipline or creating habits in your life, it comes down to the small things and then things compound over time. I think if you’re focused on just hacks and things that are going to give you fast results, this is probably a good approach for you or even what we do, because discipline is built over time and through repeated actions over a long period of time. There’s a concept we talked about it on sustainability in the book. You don’t want to just do things once and then it’s all fixed. To have sustainability, there are different things that you’re going to need to do consistently over time. So, it’s understanding that these rituals and these routines and these habits that you’re going to be putting into place will build that discipline.

It goes into as simple, for example, as drinking water in the morning. That’s the most simple habit that you can have that will boost your productivity and mental capacity. Most of us are always dehydrated, especially for a copywriter, where your brain and your creativity is, “There you go, there you go, guys,” but you know that. You know that hydration is ultra-important for the proper functioning of what’s in between your two ears. The problem is that it’s good thing to know it, it’s another thing to do it. Drink big, tall glass of water in the morning, that’s how I did it. Drinking the water for me was not native. It’s not something that I’m going to drink a gallon of water a day. But when you’re bodybuilding, you have to do that. You have to hydrate properly. It’s part of the plan.

So, drinking a big glass of water in the morning and filling up a jug that’s two liters of water in the morning. I’m still carrying that bottle of water when I go off and stuff like that, because that’s going to ensure that I drink my water daily. That’s going to ensure that it’s done, but I didn’t do it once and it was fixed. It was making sure that I was crossing water, check, done. All right. And then you do that. Now, I didn’t even have to check it. It’s built into my habits and my routines. But it’s the same thing with everything that you’re doing, whether it’s your exercise, your meditation if you’re into it, your gratitude, your healthy eating habits, so many things that you can build.

Actually, in the planner, we have a self-care routine that we lay out. It’s more of a self-care, I would say, checklist that you don’t even need to do it like back to back to back routine. It could be something you do daily, and it compounds over time. So, hydration, making sure… You don’t check your clean eating checkbox for three days in a row. Well, hopefully, your entrepreneurial competitive spirit is going to kick in. So, I need to get better with that and understanding that too, understanding how you react to it. So, every week, for example, we have a review process where we ask you to understand what went well in your week and what didn’t go that well.

We have something called this self-awareness scorecard and something very, very simple to do, but it’s going to allow you to introspect and say, “Okay, well, my energy level was two out of five this week. Why did that happen?” Then you’re going to look back and say, “Well, my eating was not that great four days out of the past seven days. I know, I didn’t drink enough water two days a week. Well, maybe I’m going to fix that. What can I do right now what’s in my power that I can just improve next week?” So, you’re going to look at these things.

Over time, these habits, these rituals are going to become second nature. This is how you build discipline over time, right? Next thing you know, it’s not even hard, it’s super easy to do. So, it’s the principle of adaptation. It’s the same thing as, for example, increasing your ability to carry weight or to carry some load. It’s the same thing with habits. You just have to do it over time and it compounds. It’s like saving money.

Kira Hug:  Well, I did not pass my clean eating test today, because I are French fries. It happened.

Dave Ruel:  So, it’s another thing though, Kira. As you said, it happens. You’re not going to be perfect 100% of the time, just to be aware of it. In the book, I talked about more than often, it takes at least two cycles. So, two quarterly cycles in order to start actually having the awareness of, “Where do you stand regarding load management? Where do you stand regarding your habits, et cetera?” Embodying all of that, it does not happen overnight. Guess what? Nobody’s perfect. You’re going to screw up, especially at the beginning. That’s fine.

That’s another part of it is that you don’t want to be… If you keep all the fun out of your life and everything is regimented and so rigid, that’s why people actually don’t adhere to a lot of productivity methodologies. The things are very, very, very strict. One of my friends always say, “Most productivity methodologies are created by single male in their 40s.” It’s so regimented that it doesn’t allow for any flexibility. So, we made sure we built that into what we do.

Rob Marsh:  French fries for everyone.

Kira Hug:  I enjoyed those fries, so I don’t regret it.

Dave Ruel:  That’s something you should put on a T-shirt. I’ll buy it. French fries for everyone.

Kira Hug:  Okay. Because you shared the habit of drinking water, I’m just curious what some of your other habits are, your personal habits, maybe your morning routine too. I know this is in the weeds, but we’re pretty nosy and we like to know what you do.

Dave Ruel:  Yeah, my morning routines change all the time. I’m a dad of two young girls, two years old and seven years old. The thing is that it changes, because yeah, they wake up at different times. Now, it’s more stable, obviously. Seven years later, it’s getting a little more stable. I traded very strict routines. I was more of a routine person when I was in bodybuilding and I had no kids. It was just me and my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time. It was a lot easier to obviously have the flexibility or that back to back sequence. But now, there’s things that I need to do through the day, that I need to do. At the end of the day, it needs to be done. So, there’s five elements, and I covered a little bit about it. Again, I can tell you what they are.

So, first of all, you need to cover hydration. So, one thing I do every single morning when I wake up is hydration, rehydrate, tall glass of water, then fill up my big jug of water. That’s the one thing that I do all the time. Now, from there, I like to as much as possible wake up before the kids. So, I have that little window of time where the house is actually quiet. I can have some introspection and me time. So, there’s two things that I do. So, first of all is gratitude. When you haven’t practice gratitude and I was like that before, it’s a lie, yeah, whatever, gratitude. But truth is gratitude is the greatest remedy or the greatest medicine for anxiety.

At one point, when I was running my second and my third business simultaneously, I started developing anxiety, because I was so, so busy. Here’s a weird thing. I started developing anxiety when I was hearing the Skype message, because obviously, I was facing a workload that I had never faced before. That was a whole period of that adaptation. I knew at the time, my business partner and I had the systems in place in order to face that. So, we were building that as the business was growing. But I remember that every single time we had a meeting, for example. We had just way too many meetings. That’s why we actually build frameworks to have better, more efficient meetings.

I was getting sweaty palms. My heart was racing, because I was future pacing that there will be fires, there will be more things added to my plate. The weird thing is that the trigger was the Skype ring. It was absurd. So, I’m blessed that my wife, Karine, is a psychotherapist. So, I started talking to her about that. She’s like, “Listen, gratitude.” Gratitude is one of the core things that she does out of her practice. She actually has a gratitude journal that she sells in the French speaking market. That’s a best-seller. She’s like, “You know what? You have to list the things that you’re grateful for, list the things that you have that are right there that you have right now that you are grateful for.”

I started doing that. It was not immediate, but it was very fast that I started changing or rewiring the way I was seeing things. Why are you stressed about that? You’re stressed about future events that never even happened, right? So, it teaches you to focus on the present. It teaches you to focus on what you have right now. Because when we’re busy or we’re anxious, we’re going to tend to see things a little bit more negatively. By focusing on the things that you have, hey, I have my two hands, stupid example, easy example, but guess what? Still a miracle. Two hands, 10 fingers, I mean, think about it, but we take that for granted.

Another weird example and I tie it into water is that I can just turn a knob and there’s clean drinking water coming out of the faucet. We take that for granted. Think about how magical that is and how many people in the world don’t have that. It’s not about what they have, what we don’t have. Still, in my opinion, it’s finding magic into random things that you take for granted. When you do that over time, same thing, it compounds and you tend to have a different perspective on life. For me, that really cured my anxiety. That really helped me in the long run. So, I ensure that every day I do that. In the planner, we actually have what we call the reconnection phrase. There’s different tools that’s found in the journal, that you can listen to different gratitudes, things like that.

You can do it in your own journal if you want. But I’m more of an efficient guy. What I do now is just that reconnection phrase. Today, I’m grateful for, fill in the blanks. I keep in mind that. I added the second part too is that I’m a big believer in the frequency of alignment, checkpoints of your alignment, making sure you’re still in the right direction, where you want to be. Reminding yourself on the things that are important whether it’s like outcomes, but also values. When you stay true to your values and align with what you want to accomplish, you can rarely go wrong. So, it’s the habit of doing that daily, the little practice that will make you more disciplined all the time. So, that’s the second thing.

There’s daily exercises. So, obviously, you don’t have to go to the gym and do bench press and deadlift, PRs every day. The key is just to sweat every day. Dedicate 15 minutes to it. If you don’t feel you have time or you don’t have to go, let’s say, to gym or whatever, just sweat every day, right? So, if you have talked to me 10 years ago, I would go to the gym five times a week, but guess what now? Ten years later, I’m a dad. I have different interests.

Now, I’m going to practice different sports. I’m going to go take walks. I’m going to go be active and do something. Just to model sweat every day, for me, that works, right? So, it’s doing that. Once you do it, boom, check, the box is checked. It doesn’t need to be part of the morning routine process as long it’s done that day. So, that’s the third.

Fourth one is meditation. What I mean by meditation is really some you time with your own thoughts, with your environment. Take anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes to do that. Focus on your breathing. Little things that first of all will compound for stress management. Also, slow down the pace sometimes when needed. So, I do that. I try to do it in the morning when I can.

If I don’t have time, let’s say all the kids wake up early or whatever, I’m going to keep a moment during the day to do that. I’m going to sit down, inside or outside when it’s nice. I have a nice leather couch in my office where I just sit down and do that. So, focus on my breathing and let things calm and bounce. I’m not a 15-minute meditation yogi who’s going to go in deep trance every day. That’s not what it’s all about. It’s just reconnecting with yourself.

The last one is the no French fries policy. It’s not true. It’s not true, because I love French fries, but it’s just keeping a clean diet. It’s just like basics. Keep it 90% clean, and you’re going to be fine. That’s the basic rule. So, yeah, but there’s some days where we’re going to order the poutine from the dairy bar.

Rob Marsh:  Clean eating’s over once you have poutine on your plate, that’s for sure. So, Dave, before we run out of time, I want to talk a minute about your book and maybe your planner. When I’m thinking about books about time management and productivity and goal setting, there are a ton of them already out there. We talked about Stephen Covey’s books. Hyrum Smith wrote several about them, the goal setting books by James Clear and BJ Fogg. There’s so many. Dan Kennedy has a great one on time management as well. So, what made you sit down and think, “Hey, what the world needs is another book about how to get stuff done”? What’s a little bit different about your approach?

Dave Ruel:  Yeah, it’s not just about getting stuff done. Really, what I wanted to bring out, let’s say, is more of a guidebook to how to evolve as an entrepreneur. It is very specific for entrepreneurs and obviously solopreneurs, et cetera. Even now, we see people in corporate applying it to their employees. I talk a lot about it. I’m a big fan of introversion, meaning giving more power and more freedom to your employees, so they can create their best work, right? So, it’s not by looking at every single move that they’re doing or micromanaging them that it’s going to happen. So, actually, they do use it quite a bit more. We had trainings with Shoppers Drug Mart, for example, here in Canada and other companies.

But the key is to understand how to operate, an operating manual to how to operate personally as an entrepreneur, right? We make a lot of parallels. We explain it very well in the book. Everything that we’ve built or that is included within this book is inspired by sports performance, so timeless sports performance techniques that we’ve applied to entrepreneurship. Based on that, we applied, like I recently said, concept of workload management, prioritization, and make it all integrated into something coherent. The other thing that I saw is that there’s a lot of methodologies that are collection of hacks, collection of tricks, they’re going to have this, they’re going to have that, but there’s no actual system that involves that.

I became a really big fan of EOS, Traction, Gino Wickman. When we implemented that at BiOptimizers, that looks a lot at what we’re doing. But on a business level, I got a bigger operational level for the business itself. I really love it, because first of all, there was a lot of parallels between with what I was doing and implemented in that methodology, but it’s really a holistic methodology that doesn’t look into one piece of the business. You have to look at your values, understand where you’re going, break down your projects, but also, your health, team health is important. They have that. For me, the health side of it, having a holistic approach.

I talked about work-life harmony in the book, where you hear a lot of people talk about work-life balance and I really hate that word. Work-life balance really implies that we have two competing forces against each other. When you’re an entrepreneur, it doesn’t happen like that. It needs to be integrated. There needs to be some synergy between both. There needs to be some harmony. I illustrate that with the yin and the yang and also like a dance. Sometimes one partner is going to lead. The other time, the other partner is going to lead, but you might not even see it, because the result is beautifully executed. You don’t see any problem. So, this is more the way we look at it.

So, Done By Noon, it’s funny, because I got to talk about the title, but a lot of people think it’s about just working less. When they’re reading the book, you understand it’s not about working less or not working hard. It’s about working right. The key question that we asked regarding time management is, “If you only had before noon in order to do everything that you have to do, how would you structure your days?” That’s considering you’re not waking up 3:00 in the morning obviously. But how would you start? So, there are things you will need to optimize. There are things that you will need to obviously let go of and build better systems overall to make it happen, right? It’s more about that.

When you think about The 4-Hour Workweek, for example, it’s not about working four hours a week. It’s a book about leverage. It was the same thing for us, but we look really into personal self-leadership aspects. So, yeah, it’s going to help you become a better leader, work on yourself. But also, as a result, you’re going to become a better business leader as well. That’s what we really wanted with the book, not just be done by noon and doing nothing. That’s not what it’s all about.

Kira Hug:  That sounds good too. Dave, my last question, for anyone listening that may not have been involved in sports growing up or just may not be as athletic or may just not believe that a system like this could work for them or framework could work for them because they’ve tried so many, what would you say to them, the doubters who are like, ” Everything has failed me.” Why is this different? Why could this work for them, especially if they’re not necessarily a sports person?

Dave Ruel:  The sports analogy obviously is what we used to illustrate what it takes in order to evolve or becoming an athlete. For example, I was never a pro bodybuilder. I love the sport. I was competitive bodybuilder. I did pretty well when I was competing, but I never was a pro. I think the key as well and that’s one thing we talked a lot about in the book is that it’s to develop that self-awareness, develop that self-respect and that self-discipline that everyone needs in order to become a good entrepreneur. It doesn’t matter where you want to build $100-million dollar company or you want to build $100,000 a year company. It does not matter. It’s understanding, first of all, how you operate. We’re all different.

As I said, I think one of the main reasons why people don’t stick to “productivity” approaches or techniques is that it’s so rigid that when they drop something, the whole thing fails. For us, it’s more of a manual to build more self-leadership. We divide self-leadership into self-discipline, as I said, self-awareness and self-respect. So, self-discipline, we talked about it. Self-awareness is the fact of understanding yourself and how you walk. We’re all different. Yes, entrepreneurs have commonalities. A lot of them operate, I wouldn’t say, in a similar fashion, but we all have our own specific context. I’m a dad with two girls. I mean, my co-host, Chris Lopez has five. So, I guess his lifestyle needs to be a lot more structured than mine.

So, the self-awareness of who you are and how you operate in your own context. Also, self-respect is respecting your capacities, respecting your limits, respecting your ambitious, and staying true to what you truly want. So, I think not everybody wants the same thing. It’s very, very important to understand that when you start, because based on that, your reality will be different. Your reality, the way you operate, the type of business you operate, the type of lifestyle you’re going to have is going to be different. I don’t have the answers. You guys don’t have the answers. Only the one who actually wants to work within this framework will know what the result will look like. So, the key is working right.

In my opinion, this is probably a message that we don’t hear enough in the entrepreneurial world, which is always about doing more, getting more done, and glorifying the hustle, things like that. It’s not about checking things off your to-do list as fast as possible. This is not what it’s all about. This is not productivity. Activity is not productivity. For us, we have an efficient philosophy to it, an efficient approach. Yeah, I think that that’s my view on it. That’s the way I see business. So far, it’s worked great for many entrepreneurs.

Rob Marsh:  Dave, we want to thank you for joining us for the podcast. I mentioned before we started recording that we’re sharing your book with everybody on our team, because it gives us the language and the processes to talk about projects together, a common language. So, it’s one of the best productivity/time management/getting things done type of books I’ve ever read. That’s part of why we wanted to bring you on.

So, we’ll definitely link to the book and to the planner on the show notes for anybody that wants to check those out. You’re also coming back for a training for our membership, The Underground, and some of our other programs on April 21st that we’re really looking forward to. So, anybody who wants to catch that can get to know you a little bit better there as well. So, thank you so much for sharing what you know and what you’ve accomplished with our audience.

Dave Ruel:  Thank you, Rob. Really appreciate it. Yeah, I can’t wait for the training in April. Yeah, thank you for the nice words, because you coming from the Covey world and God knows how much I respect and love Dr. Covey’s work, it means a lot. So, thank you very much.

Rob Marsh: And that’s our interview with Dave Ruel. 

Notice that Dave starts with outcomes… what do you want to become? Where do you want to be in three months… or next year? This helps make sure that whatever you do—whether you set goals or simply make time for behaviors in your daily calendar—gets you where you really want to go. I’ve seen a lot of copywriters adopt the goals they see other copywriters setting… because it feels like that’s what you should do, but it’s not reallly what THEY want to do. Running your own business is one of those… that feels like the right thing, but once you get into the reality of what that involves… finding clients, managing projects, filling your pipeline, earning enough to pay yourself a decent salary and so on… Or a goal like hitting six figures which forces you to work more than you really want simply to bring in enough to hit the six figure mark, but also keeps you from doing some of the things you want to do away from work. Knowing the outcomes is critical when you start planning for your next year.

Dave also talked about the big rocks/small rocks framework which helps you ensure you fit in the big important stuff before you use up all your time on less important stuff. At the top of this episode, I mentioned my other favorite time mangement book, 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. Burkeman points out that one of the big problems with the traditional approach to time management is this idea that there are only 3 or 4 big rocks to fit all the other stuff around. The reality is that most of us have a lot more than that. So a big part of managing your time is realizing you can’t manage your time well enough to do everything. There are just too many possibilities. And you have to choose. And once you eliminate some of the possibilities, only then can you really focus on getting that stuff done.

I want to mention the workshop that Dave did for members of The Copywriter Underground again. In this workshop, he breaks down how you figure out your big rocks, how to break them down into goals or behaviors you will focus on for the next few weeks or months. And he also addresses the challenge of personal discipline so this stuff is actually scheduled into your day so it gets done. You can get immediate access to that workshop in The Copywriter Underground at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. There’s also a recording of our process for reviewing last year and setting your goals for the coming year or quarter that dovetails nicely with what Dave is talking about in this interview.

Hopefully this throwback episode is helpful to you as you think about what you accomplished last year and what strides you want to make in 2025. And if I can help you with your goals in any way, please let me know. 

I’ve linked to Dave’s book in the shownotes if you want to check that out. But the workshop is where the real power in this system is. So check both of those out.

Becoming a great copywriter is not easy. But there are things you can do that 99% of other writers will not invest the time to accomplish. In the 427th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, we talked with copywriter Jason Rutkowski about the process of mastering copy, how to find a mentor, and all the effort that goes into the process of becoming great. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

 

Stuff to check out:

Parris’ Book List
The Single Best Way to Get Clients
On Writing Well by William Zinsser
The Brilliance Breakthrough by Eugene Schwartz
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  It’s the holidays and if this year is like most of our past years, that means fewer of our regular listeners are tuning in for the next week or two. So instead of bringing on a new guest you won’t have the opportunity to listen to and learn from, I’ve gone into the archive to uncover an excellent old episode that you probably missed. And if you did hear it back when it aired a few years ago, you might have forgotten it.

But honestly, this is one of our best interviews about mastery and the process of becoming an in-demand copywriter. The guest for this episode is Jason Rutkowski. At the time we interviewed him, Jason was writing for some of the top financial and health clients. So he’s got a lot of great, timeless advice. 

You’ll also hear Kira in this episode. Long time listeners will know Kira is a co-founder of The Copywriter Club and until the middle of this year, my co-host for The Copywriter Club Podcast. Some of you have been asking, where she went? Earlier this year, Kira shared that after seven years of building The Copywriter Club, she was interested in pursuing some other challenges. So while she’s still offically a partner behind the scenes, she hasn’t been actively involved in the podcast and our programs for the past six months. Everything’s fine. There was no messy break-up… and who knows, if the right opportunity presents itself, we may work on something together again. We’ll see.

So, while you’ll hear Kira’s voice, she is still working on other stuff for now.

One more thing before we get to the interview, you’ve heard me talking about The Copywriter Accelerator Fast Track and that in the coming weeks it will be retired forever. This is the proven business building program used by hundreds of copywriters to start and grow their businesses.  Many used it to create six figure businesses. A few have earned seven figures since completing the program. And I know it will work for you too. But time is running out to get the strategies, insights and ideas we share in this business-building program. So go to thecopywriterclub.com/fasttrack now to learn more—and if its a fit for you, join so you can build a successful copywriting business for yourself.

And now, enjoy this throwback interview with Jason Rutkowski.

Hey Jason.

Kira Hug:  Welcome Jason.

Jason Rutkowski:  Hey Kira, hey Rob.

Kira Hug:  How’s it going? Glad you’re here.

Jason Rutkowski:  Oh no, I’m excited. I haven’t done one of these in a while, so I was excited to do it with you.

Rob Marsh:  Definitely took a little time to get our schedules aligned. We’ve been trying to make this happen for a little while, because we know a little bit about you and where you write and we think it’ll be a great conversation, so we’re glad to have you here.

Jason Rutkowski:  Yeah, definitely.

Kira Hug:  All right, so let’s kick this off. Jason, how did you end up as a copywriter?

Jason Rutkowski:  Okay, I’ll give you the quick story about this. I was 19. I just finished my freshman year of college. I got an internship at a normal 9-to-5 job. And I realized I hated it. I was like, oh man. I saw all these people who worked in an office, you know, 30, 40 years; I’m like, is this really going to be my life?

And also at the same exact time, I was on the internet one day and I found an internet marketing forum. And I was like, what’s an internet marketing forum? I don’t know. So I go on it and I see all these guys, like ‘Yeah I just made 200 grand this year, 500 grand this year. I work from home; I’m sitting at my desk all day.’ I’m like what? How is that even possible?

So I started getting really into it. And then I learned about traffic drivers and marketing and product creation and all these things. And I was really confused. And I was like 19, 20 years old. So I heard about copywriting, but I didn’t decide to be a freelance copywriter right away. I was like, you know what I’m going to do, I’m going to create my own products; I’m going to do Google Adwords; and I’m going to drive traffic. I’m going to do the whole thing, like from start to finish.

And I horribly failed. You know, I was going to school full-time, and then I was doing this part-time, and I was just failing and failing. And then after a couple of years of that, I decided, okay this isn’t working. I’m just going to do copywriting because I think this is what I like most. I don’t like doing all this other technical stuff, marketing stuff. I’m just going to do copywriting.

So, from then on out, I just picked a niche. I was like I’ll just write in health. And from then on out I just started growing a business.

Rob Marsh:  So, I’m interested in what some of those failures looked like. What were the products that you were creating and why were they failing?

Jason Rutkowski:  Oh. I mean, the why is a lot of reasons. The products I was creating, I created kind of an … E-books were a big thing back then. Back then you could just write an e-book and like sell it and people would buy it. So I created one for anxiety, which I actually went through a lot in the beginning of my life. And I also created a few for some, like headaches solutions and kind of like different health things.

And I put, I don’t know, these 150, 200-page books together with just some random info, that I thought was good, but then the whole process of, you know I was trying to organic SEO, trying to target the right keyword. I was in college so I had very little money to actually spend on driving traffic, paid traffic. And I was just doing a lot of things wrong.

It was a lot of small marketing things that you don’t know, don’t you know it? Like how to do the SEO right, how to do the traffic right. How to do the delivery right. How to build your list. Like, doing a lot of bad stuff with building my list. A lot of mistakes; it was just like, I was just some teenage kid and I didn’t know what I was doing.

But I did learn a lot, and I also learned through the process that what I really liked doing the most was the copywriting. So I just decided to give up the whole build my own business thing and do the copywriting thing instead.

Rob Marsh:  So what did that look like in the first stages? How did you connect with your first client, and why did you choose the niche that you chose?

Jason Rutkowski:  Oh, back then that was me doing my own stuff. In terms of the freelance copywriting, I started on the freelance websites, which I don’t know if it is a good way to do it anymore. But, you know, it was like these cheap little jobs on like Elance and Guru and … Like, I don’t know if that stuff was even worth it. I mean, I guess it paid me some money, and it gave me some actual samples I could send to people. But I didn’t really get any good long term clients out of that.

I didn’t start getting good long term clients until I decided, and it took me way too long to figure this out, but to actually go to live events, and like talk with people. And actually like start-

Kira Hug:  Wait, what’s that? Talking to people? What’s that?

Jason Rutkowski:  No, I know. I literally spent like my first three years of copywriting trying to do everything from my room. Like cold calling, Edesk, Olance, like cheap little, I mean, I don’t know, I was making still a little money from it. I had like a 9-to-5 office job to support myself, and then I would come home and do this. I wasn’t even close to making enough money to support myself.

So I decided, okay the only way this is going to work is if I start going to live events. So I’m like, okay, what live events should I go to? Which ones are good? You know, what’s some high quality live events I could go to?

And the first one I ever went to was a Clayton Makepeace, like $5,000 seminar. And I did not have $5,000 by the way. But I did have good credit, so I put it on my credit card. And I actually did, actually. One thing I always thank my mom for is she got me a credit card at 18 and she taught me how to use it. And by the time I was in like, my early to mid-20s I had a credit card with like a $25,000 limit on it.

Kira Hug:  What? That’s dangerous.

Jason Rutkowski:  It was completely paid. I know, but I had no debt. Like, it was unused. So I decided to be a little risky and go to this Clayton Makepeace seminar, which ended up being the absolute best decision of my life because I met my mentor Parris Lampropoulos. I met Marcella Allison and I meet Paul Martinez, all at the same conference. We are all very, very good friends to this day.

And then, after that, it was a matter of … I mean, I don’t know; when I talk face to face with people, I feel like all my failures from early in my career gave me a kind of a big foundation to talk about, where it’s like okay, this person clearly has done the studying, has been in the trenches, has done some work. I haven’t had a lot of success, but at least, like this kid just needs a chance. Or this kid, he’s not a newbie. So I trust this guy to some extent.

And then from then on out it was just, kind of going to more conferences, building my freelance career and you know, kind of trying to develop some long term relationships with people and that type of thing. So, that’s how I did it.

Kira Hug:  Okay, this is exciting. So, we’re going to talk about, you know, cubbing with Parris and some of these relationships you’ve built, but it sounds like this first event, this Clayton Makepeace event, was like the first big event that you invested in.

Jason Rutkowski:  Yes.

Kira Hug:  That’s a big deal, and how did you even find the right event and like how did you even get over all of your hesitations and probably your own objects around spending $5,000 on an event that may not pay off?

Jason Rutkowski:  Right.

Kira Hug:  Especially when you’re still figuring that out. And you didn’t know that you would build a relationship with Parris and meet Paul.

Jason Rutkowski:  Sure.

Kira Hug:  What did you have to go through to make that investment?

Jason Rutkowski:  Okay. So, I think the most important thing about going to any event is having a plan. Like, you should have a plan. You should know who’s going to be there, who are you going to talk to, and what you want out of the event, 100%.

So when I went, I was like okay … Here’s what actually happened. So, before the event, I’m like, okay I’m trying to do this freelance copywriting thing; I’m on these freelance websites; I’m making like, no money. I have like, no relationship and no reputation with any of these big names in the industry. I was like, what’s the fastest, best way to both build my reputation, and what’s a better way to get better results, and to increase my skill level?

And I started researching, and I noticed all these top A-list copywriters were trained by other A-list copywriters. So it’s like okay, John Carlton was trained by Gary Halbert and Jim Rutz. Parris was trained by Clayton; Carline Cole was trained by Clayton. David Deutsch was trained by Jim Rutz. It’s like this whole succession of like, mentors and apprentices, and learning from people who are way smarter than you. And I was like okay, that’s what I need.

And this was kind of back in the day, way before communities like, you know kind of like The Copywriter’s Club. Back in the day it was just like, internet marketing forums where it was just like thousands and thousands of people who didn’t know what they were talking about. And like these Facebook groups that don’t know what they’re talking about. And it’s just like, there wasn’t really a lot of high quality places you can really go to. So I was like, okay; I need to find a mentor. I was like okay, I’m in the health niche; who’s like the top health niche mentor that I know, that trains copy cubs? I go, oh, Parris Lampropoulos. And it’s 100% true.

I was like okay, I need to find Parris. How can I contact him? I was like well, he has a LinkedIn and a Facebook; and I’m like, that’s not going to work. You can’t really form a relationship by sending somebody a Facebook message, right? And people try to do this with Parris all the time. They try to send him like, a LinkedIn message, and be like, ‘Hey Parris, can you be my mentor, and you know?’ I was like, that’s not going to work.

So it’s like okay, I’ve got to meet Parris. And I’ve got to meet other people too, but I especially want to meet him. So I was like okay, where is he going to be? And then I was like, who does big copywriting seminars and programs? I’m like, AWAI. Which I was never really a part of. I never really went through AWAI’s training program; I never did any of that stuff.

So I went on their website and they have a live event page. And I went to that, and they’re like oh, in two months Clayton is having this $5,000 seminar. I was like okay that’s interesting; I love Clayton. Who is on the guest list? And then on the guest list was Parris Lampropoulos. I was like, oh perfect; I’ll pay $5,000, and I’ll go to the seminar, right? And I’ll meet him there.

Like here’s the question. One of my goals was to get him to be my mentor. But there’s no way you’re going to do that, just from meeting him at one seminar, right? You’re not just going to talk to somebody at a bar, and be like, ‘Hey want to enter into this five, seven-year relationship with me?’ You know, like that’s not going to work.

So I did what I always tell people to do when they go to seminars. You have to focus on like, making friends, and developing relationships. And getting people to like you. And the best way to do that, in my opinion. And I used to do this, and I still kind of do this to this day, before every seminar I read the book How to Win Friends and Influence People two times. I read it two times. There is this section in the book called ‘Six Ways to Make People Like You.’ And it is like gold. It is like, if you just follow those exact six things, just follow it, like don’t even question it, just follow.

And it’s like simple stuff. It’s like, ‘Talk in terms of the other person’s interests. Make people feel important. Remember their name.’ You know, it’s like ‘Ask them questions about …’ It’s the most basic stuff that people don’t do. Like, most people go to seminars and then they do one of two things. They don’t talk. They’re super shy, which I’m a naturally introverted guy really. They don’t talk. Or if they do talk they talk about themselves. Both things are awful things to do.

But yeah. So read that book and I went there, and I met Marcella and I met Parris and I just really tried to become friends with them, tried to get them to like me. You know, I asked them questions about themselves; they asked me questions about myself, I told them about my career. Yeah really it kind of blossomed from there, and I was able to, Parris gave me his email, which I thought was great. Turns out it was kind of luck of the draw; he was starting a new copywrite group sometime soon.

And from then on out, we did a project together. He liked it, and then he invited me to his group. So that’s how that worked out.

Kira Hug:  I love how strategic you were about this entire process, and I’m so glad I asked about it because I had no idea that you planned it out. I just thought you accidentally bumped into Parris …

Jason Rutkowski:  Oh no.

Kira Hug:  And built a relationship. And even now I’m thinking wow, what a great idea to read that book twice before going to events. Because, I met you recently at an event, hung out, and I really like you, so I feel like you used those steps me on me, and it worked!

Jason Rutkowski:  It’s just stuff you should be doing on a day to day basis, really. I mean, it’s not even stuff like, okay I’m only going to do this at this event.

So, for the people on this podcast, I know Kira and Rob through a Brian Kurtz mastermind group. And you know, Brian talks about this all the time, about becoming interested in other people and talking with them. I mean it’s really basic stuff that a lot of people forget.

Rob Marsh:  I mean, you talk about using this to meet a mentor; have you used the same process to meet clients and connect with clients?

Jason Rutkowski:  Oh definitely. I mean, so another thing you should be doing is finding out what client’s going to be at these events. Like before you even go. And you should be knowing, like, who they are, what their marketing is. You know, what promos are they running, what’s their marketing strategy; how does the funnel look?

To give another example at the Cleveland event we were at for Brian Kurtz’s thing, I went up to this guy, and Paul Martinez introduced me to this guy named Allen and he’s the CEO of a health company called Patriot Health Alliance. And I didn’t know who he was. However, I knew who his company was, because I’ve been following them for like a year and a half.

So he introduces me himself, because Allen’s kind of a low key guy, he doesn’t like speeches or podcasts or anything like that. He goes, ‘My name’s Allen; I’m the CEO of Patriot Health Alliance.’ And I go, ‘Oh, I’ve seen three of your VSLs and eight of your sales letters.’ So like, how’s this thing doing? How’s that thing doing? And he had this look on his face like, how does this guy know all this, right?

Because when most freelance copywriters go up to clients, they don’t even know the basics, man. They barely even know who they are. You know, last year I was at AWAI’s boot camp, which is every October. And Parris forced me to do the … Parris has a booth there for one of his clients and he was like ‘Jason you’ve got to help me. Barnaby’s not,’ because Barnaby wasn’t there that year. He’s like ‘You’ve got to help me do it, Jason! I need some help.’ I was like, ‘Okay Parris.’

And then I’m standing there, at the job fair booth, so it’s a job fair where people come up to you and tell you about themselves. And they would come up to me, they would be like ‘What does your company do? What products does your company sell? Oh, what type of writing do you guys do?’ I was like, how do you guys not know this information? I was like, you’ve got to, like, when I went to my first boot camp years ago, I had like five or six clients where like, I took notes, like before I went. I knew what products they sold. I knew what campaigns they were running. I knew all this information.

And then when you enter into a conversation with these people, you’re like six or seven steps down the line instead of at step one, which who are you and what do you do? You know? You don’t want to be there. So I think that’s a big mistake a lot of people make. And I mean, if you can show clients that like …

Because these people care so deeply about their businesses. When you talk, like Allen, he’s the CEO of a company. Like, his business is his life, you know. He’s spent hundreds of thousands of hours of his time building that business. I mean, if you can talk with him at a deep level about it, and you can show like, you have like a high level of knowledge of his marketing, he’s going to like you. He’s going to be like, ‘Wow this is someone I can actually talk with at a deep level.’ And maybe he starts to like you a little bit, and maybe somewhere down the line, you get, you know.

A lot of times when I meet clients, the only thing I want is their contact info. I don’t ask them for a job right away. Sometimes that happens, but I just want like, ‘Hey man, let’s just like, give me your email, let’s set up a phone call, let’s talk later. Or let’s meet in bar later.’ You know. I just want to be liked enough so I can continue the conversation later. Which should be your main goal really.

Then, stuff blossoms from that. So I think that it’s a big mistake people make, when they go to conferences not knowing what you’re doing, why you’re doing it. Who you’re going to meet. What you want from them. You know, how this relationship’s going to develop. You know, stuff like that.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah that advice to me, that is gold right there. This interview, just for that one thing is worth the hour of time that we’re putting into this.

Kira Hug:  Yeah. We’re done.

Jason Rutkowski:  I don’t want to repeat everything I just said, but it is really important. It’s funny Kira says, you were surprised by how strategic in meeting Parris, but I mean, that’s how you get those results, is by being very strategic, you know. You have to have some goal in mind, and then you have to have some action steps to achieve. And it’s like, if you just start thinking about that way in everything that you do.

A lot of stuff I’m just sitting at my desk and I’m thinking, what should I do? And so, I’m going to go to this conference, what should I do? What do I want? Like, three or four basic questions you could answer to yourself before you do anything. Don’t just go do things without thinking about it. It doesn’t require much, but …

Here’s one thing that I wanted to bring up. I was reading your questions this morning and I thought, I definitely want to tell you this. If you’re a freelance copywriter and you go to a marketing event, what’s great about going to a marketing event is you get to meet other, successful writers. Which is something you don’t usually get to do. Usually you’re sitting at your desk, wherever you live, and you’re just all alone, and that’s it. So like, okay, two or three times a year you’re able to actually talk with people; this is great.

And one thing I used to do, when I was like, I had no success and my skill level was low, and I had no reputation, is I would go up to people like Marcella and I would just ask them questions about, kind of like what you’re doing on this podcast. Like, how did you get started? What was your first job? Like, what steps, what was your biggest obstacle?

What was your first job? What steps, what was your biggest obstacle? What did, same questions. But in a face to face interaction, maybe at a bar or a restaurant, or conversation flows really easily and all the benefits of face to face interaction. I would just, take mental notes and I would go and I would find as many successful freelance copywriters as I could, which would be eight or nine of them at each conference, and I would just ask them the same questions. How did you get started? What was your first jobs? People love telling you their stories, man. Especially, if you’re successful, and you’re and entrepreneur, people love to talk about, ‘Oh man, I was struggling so hard, and then I was homeless for six months,’ everyone wants to tell them that story. But you get to learn so much. You get to see what the thinking is. Just like this podcast. You get to see what the thinking is. Its like, ‘Okay, I should be doing that stuff. I should be doing that.’ Almost like the questions I were to ask myself I learned from these people. Because it’s the same questions they ask themselves. Okay, I’m going to start doing that. You might not get success right away within the first day or two, but if you plan it out, six months from now, 12 months from now, you’re going to be so much farther along than you ever thought was possible.

Kira Hug:  You should’ve recorded those conversations. You could’ve turned it into a podcast.

Jason Rutkowski:  If only.

Kira Hug:  So, I want to ask you about-we’ll kick off and talk about your copy cub experience with Parris because you mentioned him. Did you know the exact moment where Parris leaned in and was like, ‘Oh yeah, I want you to be my copy cub.’ Was there a moment that you had together?

Jason Rutkowski:  Yeah. You know, I really want to send you guys something. The story of how I met Parris and how I him to give me his email address. Because by the way, the funny story about Parris giving me his email-Parris doesn’t carry business cards, because he doesn’t want anyone to talk to him, right? He’s actually an incredibly nice guy. But he doesn’t want people..If you meet him at a … I’m making him sound like he’s the Scrooge or something, he’s not. He’s actually a nice guy. But he doesn’t want people contacting him because too many people contact him, right? He’s at that level where he’s too famous in our industry. So, too many people ask him for stuff.

It was really funny. I was talking with him, and it was Paul Martinez, me, and Parris. And Paul asked Parris a question. And then Parris turns around and there’s a piece of paper on this table that’s behind them, and he writes something down, I’m like, ‘Okay. He’s going to give Paul—it’s a note for Paul.’ because Paul just asked a question, he’s going to write something down and give this thing to Paul. So he writes something down. He folds it up. And then he walks up to me. He hands this thing to me, and he says, ‘I never give this to anybody.’ That’s what he said. He didn’t say anything else. He just said, ‘I never give this to anybody.’ And he handed it to me, and I opened it up and it was his email address. I was like, ‘No way! This is unbelievable!’

Kira Hug:  What!

Jason Rutkowski:  And by the way, when you gave me that, I instantly thought to myself, ‘That $5000 was worth it. This is exactly what I came here for.’ Like I said, my main goal wasn’t to become…

Kira Hug:  Score.

Jason Rutkowski:  My main goal was to become his friend, and have him at least give me his contact info. Which is super hard to get. That was my big, big goal. And that happened at the second day, and I was like, ‘Okay. I can go home now. I don’t even need to stay at this conference anymore.’ Even though it was a great conference.

So what I wanted to send you guys was when I first met Parris-well, let’s rewind. Right before I met Parris and met Marcella, because I was too nervous to go up to Parris, I met Marcella and I asked her the standard … how to win friends and influence people questions. I asked her a bunch of questions about herself. Then, what happens was when you ask people questions about themselves, they ask you question about yourself, and I had a couple of stories that I actually had planned out about my career and myself, and I told one of them to Marcella, and she goes, ‘Wow. That’s actually a great…’ I don’t have time to go into the story right now, because it’s really long. It’s a ten minute story. But she’s like, ‘Wow, that’s actually a really great story.’ She goes, ‘You have to tell that to Parris.’ And then she dragged me over. Marcella always takes full credit for this. Every time I meet Marcella, she goes, ‘I introduced you to Parris! You have to thank me!’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, okay Marcella.’

She dragged me over there, and she’s like, ‘Parris, you have to listen to this kid’s story.’ And I told them the story. When I told it to him, his eyes lit up. Like when you’re surprised, your eyes get really big. And he’s like, ‘who is this guy? Who is this-’ I don’t have time to go into the story, however-

Kira Hug:  You’re teasing the story! You’re teasing it.

Jason Rutkowski:  Here’s the thing. About a year ago, I wrote out the story because Marcella just started her … thing. She needed some content to send to her list of people. I wrote this thing, and I go, ‘Hey, Marcella. You remember this story I told you?’ She was like, ‘Yeah, that’s a great story.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I wrote an article about it.’ I think the title is, The Single Most Important Thing You Could Do At Life Marketing Events. And then I went into this thing about telling a really interesting story about yourself that gets people really excited about you and who you are. And I told the story. And then I taught the lesson that comes after the story, it’s the same thing I’m telling you right now. But I actually wrote out the whole thing. So I’m going to send it to you, and you guys can share it with your people.

Rob Marsh:  Cool, we’ll link to it.

Jason Rutkowski:  What’s great about stories is, it convinces people, ‘Okay, this guy’s marketing now, just copywriting now, just work ethic.’ It instantly communicates all that, but in an exciting, interesting way. You should be really using that when you’re meeting people at marketing conferences. That’s what the article is about. But yeah, it has the whole story in there if you want to read it, the whole thing’s in there.

Rob Marsh:  Cool, we’ll check it out. So, I am a little hesitant to ask this question because I know you can’t answer a whole lot. We’ve talked with Paul, we’ve talked with Marcella, and any time we talk to people who have been Parris’ Cubs, everybody wants to know what the experience is like. I’m guessing you get this from just about everybody that you talk to, who knows that you’re in that relationship. Parris actually shared his book list at our event, so there are some of those kinds of things that I know that he’s willing to share, but will you just tell us a little bit about the experience? The kinds of things that you do with Parris? Without revealing anything that’s super secret, but just what’s that experience like, and what have you taken away from it?

Jason Rutkowski:  Yes, I could give you a general overview. It’s like you said, you got the book list. Parris always has us reading books. We get on these calls that are two, three hours long sometimes. The books in itself, you should read the books, 100%. But they kind of provide a syllabus, where he teaches the lessons through the book. So we read the book, we discuss our notes, and then he starts going very deep into what he thinks about it. What the deeper, psychological lessons are in the book. He throws in a lot of examples from his career, stuff he’s written, he sends us writing examples. The books, I can get more into this about the other stuff too, but the books are kind of a launching pad to other things he wants to talk to us about.

There’s a lot of homework. There’s a lot of writing. There’s a lot of unpaid writing, by the way. There’s paid stuff, but it’s a big time commitment. From the moment he starts to call, like I said, some of these calls are three hours long. It’s constant. It’s constant copywriting. Constant marketing. It’s almost overload. He gets out of the call, and everyone’s extremely exhausted. Course he has his techniques that I can’t talk about. He has proprietary stuff I can’t talk about, but overall, it’s a lot of Parris talking. I don’t know how he does it. When you’re at that level, that Parris is at, he could just go off on one topic for a really, really long time.

But at the end of every call, you feel, man, I learned so much, and then what Parris says, he records the call, and then we have to re-listen to it. If you really want to get all the lessons out of that call, you’re re-listening to it five or six times at least.

Do you have any specific questions, any more about the group?

Kira Hug:  I have a question. For someone who is listening and they’re, ‘Okay, I don’t know Parris, I’m not going to be his copy cub anytime soon,’ for whatever reasons, ‘but I want to do something similar.’ Do they need to read the books? Do they need to find another mentor? Is there a way we could almost hack the system and, of course, you can’t replicate that type of experience that you’re currently having, but what about for people who cannot be a copy cub for whatever reason, how can they take something that you’ve learned and use it?

Jason Rutkowski:  The thing about Parris is he teaches you the lesson and you might understand the lesson intellectually-and the same thing, say you read a book. Say you’re reading a copywriting book. One of the books on those lists. It talks about some headline technique, or it talks about some bullet writing technique, or it talks about some other copy technique. You might understand it intellectually, but if you want to actually understand how to apply the stuff in real life, the absolute best thing you could do is take winning promos, and I could talk about how you actually know how a promo is winning or not, take winning promos in your niche, and start reverse engineering what you’re looking at.

Specifically for the one-so Parris would say, ‘Okay, here’s this super specific bullet writing technique that I came up with. And here’s why I do it.’ Okay, that makes sense. And then what I do, is I pull up five or six winning promos, preferably Parris promos, but it could be any top health copywriter. And I just reverse engineer, I look for instances where that technique is happening over and over, and I write it down. I have a notebook or I have a Word document and I have all these Word documents on my computer, where it’s, ‘this technique.’ And I open up that Word document and it’s just like 20, 25 examples of that technique. And it’s like-this other technique, this headline type, in the health niche there’s three or four stories you can write.

A common story in the health niche is, some person has a problem, they tried a million different things, they came in to the doctor, ‘Doc, I tried all these million different things, didn’t work.’ The doctor is like, ‘Okay, I got this new treatment that no one knows about.’ Do the treatment, ‘Wow, Doc, two weeks later, my thing’s cured, I suffered from this for 20 years and now it’s gone.’ Then people wonder, ‘Well, what’s the technique? How-’ And then you could go into copy. That’s a common health niche story technique.

Well, what I do is I create a Word document. I go find five or six or 10 or 15, 20 examples of that and I just either hand write it or I type it out. And now I have a document where it’s just, ‘Okay, anytime I’m writing health copy,’ I can open up that document. ‘Okay, I want to use this type of story, this type of technique.’ Now I’ve got, 15, 20 examples that I can, not steal the copy, but I can swipe the structure, I can swipe the buildup, how they tease it. It just drills it into your mind. The most important thing is not just realizing what you need to do, but how you can actually do it in your day to day life. There’s so many times where people read the books, and go, ‘Oh yeah, that’s interesting, I understand that intellectually.’ But then, they’re doing the same copywriting now as they did six months ago. That’s because they didn’t drill it into their head of, well, how is this actually used in real life, and how can I structure this so when I’m doing a project I can use this in real life. How’s it going to change the way I write copy.

A lot of people think it’s going to happen automatically, it’s not. Okay, you need to go out of your way. Which is why Parris recommends handwriting promos. A big benefit of that, it drills it in your head of how you’re actually supposed to be doing this at this moment. So, I would recommend that. That was the biggest breakthrough. Really, I used to not do that. When I first started the Parris group, and then I started reading books and reverse engineering things, creating Word documents, finding real life examples. Honestly, I think it made me a lot better.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, I think what you’re talking about here is mastery. When Parris was talking about his book list at our event, he mentioned you don’t just read them once. You read them once just to get a sense of what’s in them, then you go through the second time and you underline, and then you go through the third time and you start taking notes, handwriting what you’ve underlined into a notebook. And then there’s two or three more times you go through it. You’re basically taking that process to everything that you’re doing or seeing. My sense is, Jason, you don’t just want to be a copywriter, you want to be a master of copywriting. I think there’s a really significant difference.

Jason Rutkowski:  Oh, definitely. A part of that’s just my personality. I do it that way because that’s the only way I can imagine myself doing it, you know what I mean? I don’t think of it as I have to put in this hard work, I think of it as, well, this is my career, and the more I do this, the better results I get. Then when I’m sitting with clients or talking with other copywriters, I can speak about things at a higher level. You if you do stuff on a daily basis, if you’re constantly reading promos, reverse engineering promos, reading books, taking notes, even just one or two years down the line, you’re going to be able to sit down with people and just-almost like this, have a huge conversation about the tiniest, littlest thing. When I talk with Paul, Paul Martinez, huge A-list copywriter, that’s what we do when we sit down and we have private one on one conversations. We’ll just talk about one tiny little copywriting thing for 20, 30 minutes. Because we both went through that process of deep diving, studying handwriting, reverse engineering promos, reading books. That just changes the way you think about things.

Rob Marsh:   So, before we leave off this whole idea of what you’re doing with Parris and this self-mastery thing, is there one book or one course that you would say, ‘Hey, if you want to get started on this path, this the book to start with.’ What would that be?

Jason Rutkowski:  This answer is an answer no one ever talks about, and it makes me really mad. It’s actually one of the first books Parris had us read. It’s actually about a topic that so many people ignore. It’s so obvious. At this point, I get a lot of people who want me to critique their copy. ‘Hey, Jason.’ It doesn’t have to be for the health niche, but, ‘Hey Jason, I have my business, can you please, I’m not a copywriter, can you critique my copy.’ And they send me their copy. All of them have this one huge, huge problem that they don’t seem to realize that they have. And it’s not that they don’t understand copywriting, it’s that they don’t understand how to write. Just so many copywriters who cannot write.

So, a book that’s on Parris’ list is, On Writing Well by William Zinsser. I love that book. Another book I would recommend is The Brilliance Breakthrough by Eugene Schwartz, specifically the first eight chapters of it. Listen, when I critique copy, the first thing I critique is how it’s written. Not your power words, or motion or any of that stuff. Just, your sentence doesn’t make sense. Or, this sentence doesn’t connect to that sentence, or it’s too long. Or, you’re bouncing around, or you’re using the wrong thing in the wrong-really basic writing ability that people think, ‘Oh, Jason, I passed 11th grade English class. I don’t need to learn how to write.’ Or even worse, ‘I have an English degree.’ I’m like, ‘Show me something you’ve written. You could’ve been bad, I don’t know, just because you have a bachelor’s degree doesn’t mean you’re good at writing.’ I always tell people, it’s so foundational, people ignore it. Learn how to write. Read those two books. I’ve read On Writing Well and The Brilliance Breakthrough probably, and this is not exaggerated, eight or nine times each with my notes. I re-read the book and re-read my notes.

I spent the first year with Parris just learning how to write. One thing, when Parris critiques my copy, if you haven’t applied the lessons from those two books perfectly? He’s going to chew my ass out. For ten minutes. ‘Jason, we went over this a million times.’ Nothing to do with copywriting. Just with writing sentences.

Kira Hug:  Oh my gosh.

Jason Rutkowski:  It’s so important, and so many people ignore it. Then they come to me with this fake John Carlton copy where they have these 40, 50 words sentences that never end. And none of it makes sense. I’m just, ‘Dude. Forget the copywriting books, man. Start with the writing books. Go through those two books and then go to John Caple’s and Vic Schwab and those books, okay?’ So that’s my recommendation. Learn how to write.

Kira Hug:  That’s incredible advice.

Rob Marsh:  Good stuff.

Kira Hug:  Thank you. That was a PSA.

Jason Rutkowski:  Really, people listening to this, I mean it’s a big thing. If you read those two books, especially multiple times, like I said, The Brilliance Breakthrough, Eugene Schwartz. Brian Kurtz sells it, and On Writing Well, William Zinsser. It should fundamentally change the way you write sentences. It should. If it’s not, maybe you’re already an amazing writer, that’s great. I hope you are. That’s a lot less work. But if you’re like me, which is like most people, you need to really sit down and do it.

Rob Marsh:  And just as far as Brilliance Breakthrough goes, just to add, when you buy that book you get a workbook because there are writing exercises in the book and basically that allows you to run through the workbook. You’re not necessarily writing in the book itself. You can actually practice with it. So it’s a fantastic resource.

Jason Rutkowski:  Totally. I think he sells it for $200. Which people might think, ‘$200 for a book? Wow. I’m never going to pay that.’ Totally worth it. 100%. It’s funny, at the end of the eighth chapter, Eugene Schwartz actually says, ‘I could end the book right here if I wanted to.’ Which is true. Because the most fundamental part is the first eight chapters, and then everything else is supplementary, it’s good stuff. But the first eight chapters, man. It’s stuff about, ‘how to write clearly, how to write simply.’ Simplicity and clarity, two big things people don’t know how to do. The way Eugene Schwartz talks about it in that book is amazing. I love that book so much. Totally worth the $200.

Kira Hug:  So, I want to hear more about your writing process. When you’re sitting down to work on a project, I want to get a glimpse into what’s happening in your office. Where are you starting, clearly you have an incredible resource library and swipe files to pull from, but what is your process look like as you’re moving into a project? Even starting with the research portion.

Jason Rutkowski:  Yeah, research is huge. Becoming a good researcher is just as important as becoming a good writer. I know I just talked about it for 10 minutes, about learning how to write. The thing about copywriting is

Like, I know, I just talked about for 10 minutes about learning how to write. Thing about copywriting is, there are so many things to learn. Right. If you want to do this at a really high level, you have to master like, a hundred different skills. Which is kind of daunting, but also, kind of exciting. And, one of the big skills you need to master is research. So, the question is, what do I research, and how do I do it? That’s going to depend on the niche. It’s going to depend on your product.

You know, in health, the big products are supplements, books, just DVD programs and like, newsletters. Okay? All those products have like, their own research methodology that you’re going to go through. That’s specific to the product in that niche. I would say overall, the best thing you can do … And this is another thing that takes forever to do, but it’s totally worth it is, I would take promos written my Parris and Health Niche, like, ‘Okay Parris, I’m doing a book promo for Bottom line right now.’ I would take a book promo, that Parris did for Bottom line, and I would open it up, and I would read the information. And then, I would say to myself, ‘How did Parris come up with this information?’

You can just ask yourself, ‘How did he do this research?’ And you’ll come up with the most surprising answers. So, one thing I used to do was, Parris wrote a bunch of promos for Bottom line Books. Five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago. Well, those promos, because Parris wrote them, were hugely successful. And that means, millions of people bought those books, or hundreds of thousands of people bought those books. So that means, people have those books. Like, books are eternal. Right? People buy a book and put it on their bookshelf and never look at it. But, that also means, that people sell those books, to this day.

So, you can actually, I would take a Parris promo from 15 years ago. They were from Bottom line, and, the book would be called … I actually have one right here. Oh. Speed Healing Unlimited, Bottom line Speed Healing Unlimited. It’s right by my desk. I went on Amazon. I typed in Bottom line Speed Healing Unlimited, and there’s people that sell this book for like, two dollars. And you can buy it for like, two bucks.

So, I bought the book, I put the book on my desk, I took Parris’ promo, I put the promo on my desk. And, I would open up the promo, and it would say a bullet, or an article. And then, it would say the page number. It’s like, I found this information in this page of this book. I would take the book, and I would open it up to that page, and I would read the page. And I would say to myself, ‘Well, how did Parris come up with this information?’ So, I’m like, reverse engineering his research process. Right?

And you’ll see stuff, like the book would be so boring. It’s the most boring information ever. And Parris turned it into like, amazing … You know, David Deutsche is like good at this too, like this amazing, amazing thing. And, you can do this to this day. Especially with information products. Just reverse engineer the research. Like, find out what the final copy was. I think go back to the source, and then you’ll start realizing, ‘Oh. During my research process, I should think like this, I should do this.’ You know, if I’m reading information, it’s like this. I should think about in this way. I should write this down, and maybe this turns in a piece of copy later.’

And, I would just do stuff like that. I did that for like, seven or eight books. Like, seven or eight promos. And, books are great, because people always keep up … Like I said, people always hold on to books, people … Books last forever. So, if you get some book promotions, written by A list copywriters, and if you could buy the book, or buy the free report. Whatever information product it is. And, you can like reverse engineer it. I mean, that influenced my research process.

So, like I said it’s going to be different depending on what product you’re doing. What niche you’re in. But, a lot of it is, a lot of learned copy is, reverse engineering. And then, it’s going to influence your research process in your own way. Really, because I feel like a lot of people’s processes different. So, specifically if I’m doing like a supplement, you know, I’ll research Google or, I’ll go to scientific articles, I’ll do bunch of random different things. But, all my reverse engineering is influenced by process in some way. You know, Parris always says, ‘I can look at a piece of information, and I see something amazing. And a B list copywriter looks at the same piece of information, and they see something that’s boring. Right?

So, it’s like, I take that amazing thing, and I see the gold nugget in there that other people don’t see, and that’s a big reason for its success. And, that’s a way you can learn to do that by, ‘Well okay. What did Parris see? Okay. Let me go back. Let me see what he saw.’ You know. So, that’s what I recommend.

Rob Marsh:  There’s so much stuff here, that I’m just totally, jonesing over it. This is awesome, so. I’m thinking that there are, you know people may be listening to this, and thinking, ‘Okay. Jason works in the health niche. That’s something I’m really interested in doing myself. You know, in addition to the advice you gave about like, how do you connect with potential clients. What are the things that people can do to break into this niche? You know, what should they be looking at, studying, you know, how do you get your first client, you know, writing for say, a newsletter, or a help supplement?

Jason Rutkowski:  The very first thing is, studying the market. So, you need to get on everybody’s list Everybody’s on the list. For health, I’m just going to name some random companies. You got, New Market Health, you got … And all their companies. Health Sense Media. You got, Dr Gundry Advanced Bio Nutritionals. Nature of City, Patriot Health Alliance. So, you get on everybody’s email list. And what I did is, I created my own Gmail account, just for health. So, I have a Gmail account, that’s just for collecting health emails. Like, chaff and chiving emails. That email has like, 80 thousand emails. I have 80 thousand health emails.

Rob Marsh:  Wow.

Jason Rutkowski:  Because, I’ve been doing it for years. Right? It’s like, years old. So, first process, before even thinking about writing for somebody, is studying the market. If you’re meeting people, if it’s through an email, through LinkedIn, at a marketing conference, through a reference, or recommendation, you should know who you’re talking to, and what you’re talking about. Like, you have to know that stuff. It helps if you have some writing samples, because everyone always asks writing samples, and if you don’t have writing sample, do what I did, rewrite somebody’s copy. Take a control that’s already out there, and rewrite it completely in your own words. Like, this works well for an information product, so it’s like, okay.

Bottom line, it has this promo, and it’s a book, a book promo to sell a book. Ordis Guy has a program that’s like an e-book or free report. And the copies about that information product, well, just buy the information product, and rewrite the copy with your own headline, in your own body copy. You know, using all the lessons you learned from the books, in reverse engineering, and studying the health market. And have, you know, at least two samples just have two samples. Clients just want to see that you can write something.

Also, do the two books I talked about, on how to actually write sentences. And, put a couple samples together. And, I mean that … I always hated, things like, at least for me, like cold emailing, and cold calling people never really worked. Really, I was struggling until I started going to events, and you know, started doing all the things I talked about. About researching people and becoming friends with people. That’s just my process.

I know there are some people out there that have some success with, you know, I know Paul Martinez on his podcast on here, talked about some things he did, that sounded really good, that I never did. So, maybe in terms of contacting people through email or LinkedIn, or online, maybe other people have some better information than me. But, for me it was, you know, get to the point where you know what you’re talking about. Learn how to make people like you, how to become friends with people, form relationships with people. Go to live events and then, grow your copy writing business from there. And you know, deep dive your niche. Deep dive into you’re market, and know what you’re talking about. And, that’s what we’re for me so.

Kira Hug:  What’s clear and all of your responses is that, you are deeply committed to mastery, which Rob mentioned, and that you’re, you do the work you do the work times …

Jason Rutkowski:  A lot.

Kira Hug:  Ten. And, that’s why it will make you the master, compared to a lot of copywriters who will not do the work. And they’re not ready to write copy, and copy books, and read books eight times. My final question for you is, what does the future of copyrighting look like to you?

Jason Rutkowski:  It’s real interesting, because, I spend so much of my time in health, and now finance. And those tend to be the two big niches like, everyone likes to talk about, because that’s where like the most money and most competition is. I know this many niches outside that. But, I find that, it’s kind of niche by niche. You really have to understand how you’re niche operates. And, I’ll give two examples of health and finance. Like, health, I found that, there’s a lot of health companies out there. There’s a lot of like, supplement companies out there, that are like the low eight figure supplement companies that love to hire freelancers, and even maybe high seven figure companies.

Like, love the work of freelancers, they don’t have a big in-house team, and they’re willing to hire people to come in, you know, just for a project or two. And that’s something that’s very unique, and specific to the health niche. And then, another hand, there’s the financial niche, which nowadays tend to be very in-house focused. Like, very like … Especially their Agora divisions. Like, big companies, big in-house teams. Who don’t like working with freelance copywriters, unless you’re high level.

If you’re high level, and by high level, I mean like you really got to know what you’re doing. You really already have to have a reputation, and you have to like, have connections and know people. Unless you’re at that level like, they love their in-house system. The financialist loves like, their in-house teams. And, you know, you move to wherever in Baltimore, Florida, or wherever they’re located. And, like, you worked in their system for two years. And, that’s a very financial niche thing.

But, health thing, they’re just kind of, there are in-house health niche teams, but it’s like … So, it varies like, as you travel through the different niches that exist. The best thing I always tell people do is, like get as much good information as you can. And, the best way to get good information is, well, listen to stuff like this. And also, go to events where you have like, successful entrepreneurs, successful marketers, successful copywriters. Find out what industry they work in, and just like … I’m always the digging up information, and I’m always talking to Ridge Abraham who worked at Agora Financial. You know, Ridge is successful financial copywriter.

I’m always asking him some questions about the niche. Always asking him questions about Agora. I’m always asking some questions. Like, I’m always trying to get a better picture of, you know, how does this niche work? You know. What’s going on? What’s the freelance landscape like? What’s in-house landscape like?  How do these publishers executives make decisions? Like, I’m always just gathering that info. Right?

So, you kind of have to do that in whatever niche you’re in. But, I will say, the freelance niche still exists. You can still have a lot of success with it. I think in health, is a good opportunity. Other niches, I’m not too familiar with like the biz op and internet marketing, that’s really, but, I assume … I know a couple finances that are very successful in that, those type of spaces so. Yeah. Try to get as much good information on whatever niche you’re going to go into as you can.

Rob Marsh:  Lots of opportunity for anyone who’s really willing to put in the work it sounds like.

Jason Rutkowski:  Oh yeah. I mean, you got to stand out. Because, because I was talking to Parris about this the other day, I was on a phone call with him. He’s like, ‘Yeah. You know twenty years ago, there were very little copywriters.’ There’s very little, just in terms of value. And, there is even a smaller amount of A list copywriters, like 20 years ago.’ And he’s like, ‘Now it is. just a ton of copywriters. But, it’s still a very small amount of high level copywriters. There’s a ton of copy, like, there’s thousands of tens of thousands of freelancers and in-house people, that, are not that great. And then, there’s, a smaller amount of people who are at the highest level.

And, really, the amount of work that, you guys keep saying I do a lot of work, and I do, I do that because, like I said, it’s a natural part of me, and I just feel like that’s what I should be doing. But also, if that’s how you become successful. That’s how make more money and that’s how … I mean, because the problem nowadays is, you got to convince people like, ‘Hey. I’m not like these ten thousand other freelancers who, you know, all have the same skill levels. Which, is not that high. They don’t have much of a reputation.’ And, you’ve got to stand out from that. And a big part of that is, well, becoming friends with people, especially through live events, but also knowing what you’re talking about.

Rob Marsh:  You know, who knows if Parris is ever going to do another round of copy cubs, but Jason, if you ever open up for taking cubs, you’ve sold us. Really. We’re ready to sign.

Kira Hug:  Yeah. I’ll be a cub.

Rob Marsh:  You dropped a lot of really going advice.

Jason Rutkowski:  I don’t know man.

Kira Hug:  Yeah. You got two cubs right here. Right here.

Jason Rutkowski:  What’s interesting, I will say this really fast, I know it’s the end of the call but. A big reason a lot of top A listers have copy cubs is, not only because they like to teaching, and Parris really does like teaching. But also, out of necessity. You know, a lot of A listers form very deep relationships with clients. Relationships where it’s like, ‘Hey. I’m essentially going to be running your marketing department. And, I’m going to be getting a cut of the front end and back end. I might be getting some equity deals.’ Like, they set up these big deals, and then, these A listers, its like, ‘Well, I’m running this market department now. But I need all this copy done. And not just the big promos, but the back end stuff, the traffic drivers.’

Kira Hug:  Right.

Jason Rutkowski:  ‘Like are all this, you know, the Google stuff. All this copy.’ And a lot of these A listers, the reason if I’m in copy cub groups is, out of necessity. Right? They need Copy Cubs to, you know, do all this copy that they’re just not capable of doing, because they don’t have the time, or they just don’t have the desire. Because, they want to focus on the big money stuff, they don’t want to focus on the small money stuff.

So, I always tell people get somebody, I don’t care if it’s in-house. I don’t care if it’s a mentor. Preferably, in like a one on one relationship, it doesn’t have to be. But, get somebody who knows what you’re talking about, to train you. Hopefully, they’re at a level where they need some smaller copyrighted work done, and maybe could do some smaller stuff for them. But, go for the highest level person you can man.

I went for Parris Lampropolous. I was able to get that and I was right. It doesn’t have to be Parris. But, it’s such a valuable thing. And, a lot times, a lot of these top guys need smaller copy work done, and a lot times, if you could give ’em, like, ‘Hey. I’m at least at the level where I can do, you know, these emails, or these articles.’ You know. Could be content, could be traffic driving. Like, maybe you can form relationships, and it’s extremely valuable experience.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah. It’s really good advice.

Kira Hug:  Thank you. This has been very grounding. I feel like, it reminds me of how much more I want to learn and how much more there is to learn. So, thank you for sharing so much advice, actual advice. And then, inspiring us too.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah. Thanks Jason.

That’s the end of our interview with Jason. Jason’s process for studying and reverse engineering older promotions to learn how to write great copy is something more of us should be doing. To become great, we need to spend more time studying great copy. But not just to copy the words or read through a particular swipe… to deconstruct what’s going on so we can apply the strategies and tactics to new products and services.

Jason’s practice of creating swipe document with lots of examples of great copy when you come across it. So having a swipe doc with 12 or 15 different examples of strong guarantees that effectively overcome risk aversion or a swipe doc with lots of examples of headlines… even multiple examples of headlines variations on a particular hook and so on.

By becoming a collector of good copy, you teach yourself how to write it and perhaps more importantly, you have lots of examples to refer to when you need to sit down and produce copy for a client. Taking the time to master this stuff before you need to write it makes you a much better writer.

Hopefully you see why I chose to reshare this interview. And now, what will you do to implement these ideas into your writing practice?

Since recording this episode, Jason moved from copywriting about health and investing to actually doing the investing himself. By applying the ideas he was writing about, he found he could make even more money so he doesn’t do a lot of writing any more. But the ideas he shared are still worth gold.

Before I go, I want to remind you again that The Copywriter Accelerator Fast Track program is going away forever. You can still get these business building strategies and ideas to implement in your own business, but only for a few more weeks. After that, this program will never be sold on its own again. Go to thecopywriterclub.com/fasttrack to learn more.

The world is drowning in content—most of it bad. So when a creator is doing something different, something that really stands out and challenges the rest of us to up our game, we pay attention. That’s why Content Strategist Heather Parady is our guest for the 426th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Heather shared her unique approach to content creation and lays out a roadmap for anyone else who wants to up their content game. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

 

Stuff we mentioned to check out:

The Copywriter Accelerator Fast Track
Save the Cat by Blake Snyder
Heather’s Website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  Content is everywhere. Almost every business knows that content is one avenue that helps prospects discover and connect with them. I’m not telling you anything new here, most copywriters work with clients who need this kind of content whether it’s on social media, regular emails, videos, workshop and webinar content. We even use it ourselves.

So when I discover someone who is making cotent that stands out or is even a little bit different, I pay attention. And today’s guest on The Copywriter Club Podcast fits that description.

Hi I’m Rob Marsh and today I’m speaking with Content Strategist, Heather Parady. I’ve been watching Heather’s content for a while now and I am impressed. She connects ideas from interviews and books and all kinds of other sources to create short video content that grabs attention and teaches with a story, almost always gives me something to think about. This is one of my favorite interviews this year and I think you’re not only going to enjoy it, but you’ll have a bunch of takeaways to apply to your own business and content creation.

Before we jump in, as we wrap up the year I need to let you know that The Copywriter Accelerator as it is today is going away forever. This is the proven business building program used by hundreds of copywriters to start and grow their businesses. And I guarantee it will work for you too. But to get the eight modules, eight blueprints, the bonuses and the coaching calls that go along with it… you need to opt in now. And if you decide to join the Accelerator now, you’ll get absolutely free, the program I am working on behind the scenes that will replace it. I don’t even have a name for the new thing, just know that it will be worth it. And if you don’t agree, you’ll get your money back. Go to thecopywriterclub.com/fasttrack for details now.

And with that, let’s go to our interview with Heather Parady.

Heather, welcome to the podcast. I, I’m thrilled to be here. You know, as we were just talking before we started recording, I’m a big fan of yours. I would love to start with your story and how you got to where you are building this list, this following that you have, you know, video producer, all of the things. Yeah. How did you get there?

Heather Parady: Well, first of all, thanks for having me on. I was listening to your show and I’m just really impressed with the quality of guests and the topics and how thorough you guys are and professional. It’s just really, really valuable, valuable show that I look forward to continually listening to now. I was a therapist, you know, I went to school to sit in rooms with people and hear their problems and sort it out. psychology of trying to figure out why we are the way that we are. And I’ve always been kind of like a helper. You know, I think through and through, that’s really who I am. So it’s funny because a lot of people are kind of coming to me for like the media side of stuff. They’re like, video editing and all this stuff. And I’m like, that’s something that I’m learning how to do. It’s not something that I’ve been doing all along. What I’ve been doing all along is sitting with people and reading books on Adler and Carl Jung and stuff like that. So I’m Kind of a mental health therapist turned media person. Short story is, at some point, I really just fell into the world of personal development and the online space. Probably about 10 years ago, and I was just really drawn to this idea that you could create something from nothing and reinvent your life and all the possibilities there. And I really loved the freedom, the idea, which is funny because I work now so hard and so long, so I’m laughing at the whole freedom thing. This idea that you can make your own path especially i was pregnant at the time of my first daughter and really torn with going into the workforce and wanting to be with her and so forth so i’m very reluctantly very reluctantly i. Turn down a whole bunch of therapy jobs and we moved perfect jobs. and cried and talked to hours and hours to my husband, bless his heart, and said, I think I want to build something online and figure out my voice here. It has been so messy, Rob. I started off podcast editing, I started off, I did photography, I managed people’s calendars, I did everything and anything. And what I didn’t know then is skill stacking, how valuable that was, because now, you know, I know a little bit about all the little nuances of online business. And eventually, eventually I ended up in media and video and I just found something that really worked for me and I’ve gone headfirst into it.

Rob Marsh: I’ve followed your videos. I love what you’re doing. And I definitely want to, you know, talk about your whole approach to storytelling and the way you set all of that up. But first, I think you’ve touched on something that, you know, in 420 plus episodes of the podcast, we really haven’t talked a lot about and that is the mental side of marketing. Can we talk just a little bit about that? Because what you bring to this as a therapist, I think makes your voice different from everybody else that I see on YouTube, talking about video and getting yourself in front of people. And the way you’re taking a step back and say, wait a second, there’s, there’s actually some human stuff that has to happen before we even talk camera lighting equipment. Yeah. Yeah. What’s your philosophy there?

Heather Parady: Yeah. I know my tendency is when I came into this conversation as more of a helper and a feeler. I mean, I cry every freaking day, just deeply empathic and stuff. I was thinking, oh man, that’s a weakness in this media space. I have just really doubled down on what a freaking strength it is to have folks who aren’t naturally bent towards media getting into media and really showing the humanity because folks are so burnout with the salesman type vibe and strong calls to action and feeling like they’re being scammed. And there’s looking for somebody who’s human. So, you know, I really would encourage folks to understand that people aren’t looking for highly produced stuff. They’re looking for honest content, honest, honest, honest, even if it’s just your freaking cell phone and it’s bad lighting or whatever. There’s stuff like that stuff’s important and you can work on it, but it’s not what people are looking for. And you said something a minute ago, Rob, you mentioned in over the 400 something episodes, I noticed that when I was listening to your show is like 400 episodes. What a rare rarity nowadays for someone to get that far along in podcasting. And so Reps is the name of the game. I have done hundreds, probably thousands of videos at this point. You can go to my TikTok and scroll to the bottom. It’s humiliating. Some of the first ones I did. Terrible, terrible, terrible. We’re so afraid, though, to look like a beginner to people. We want to come out of the gates looking like Mr. Beast or Brene Brown or whatever your person is. And it doesn’t work like that. You have to be willing to look like a beginner in front of people and own it. And here’s the thing at the end of the day. No one is watching you anyway. We have this illusion that so many people are watching us. I have a pretty good following now, and I put out a lot of content, and to this day, my friends, my family, and all that are like, what do you do? Huh? What? you know, and then they miss so much because people are busy, they’re consumed. And you know, the spotlight effect in psychology, we all think that we have the spotlight on us. And when you kind of get past the insecurity, and you really do want people to pay attention, you realize they weren’t paying attention all along, because it’s really hard to get people to pay attention. It’s very hard. So I know it’s, it’s, um, you’ve probably heard all this before. But also give yourself a lot of grace because we’re the first generation. We’re the first group of people who’ve had to figure out what it means to be a human being online and try to navigate this. It is normal to be nervous. Like you’re putting a camera on your face and putting it in front of strangers. Why wouldn’t you be nervous? That’s normal. It’s a normal thing.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, it’s interesting to think about this. We all have that moment in our lives that it’s frozen in our brains, that moment of shame where something happened. To this day, I don’t think I’ve shared this story with anybody ever. I can remember the moment in fifth grade when Walter Romney and Gerald Gray made fun of a shirt that I was wearing. I probably had worn it to school three or four times in a row because I loved this shirt. And to this day, That feeling of people looking at you and shaming me resonates. And so when you think about getting out in front of people, obviously I’ve overcome that in some way because we do the podcast. I’ve been speaking in advance. That’s not really something that holds me back, but I still worry about that, people making fun of me. And if I have that, like you said, after 400 plus episodes, I can only imagine the person who’s thinking, okay, I have to get out there. I have to do something. I have to do something on Instagram, or I have to be on LinkedIn or wherever. How do I take that first step? Because leaning into overcoming that is not easy. No. I mean, even in my saying it’s not easy, I’m, I think, underestimating the difficulty of how hard that is.

Heather Parady: This has been helpful for me is redefining what normal is and being very, very intentional with being friends with content creators. Because when you’re friends with other content creators, then it becomes the normal thing to do to put out content. When you’re out, I was just taking my girl to school the other day and one of the other moms is like, So I heard he put out stuff online and I’m just like, Oh my God, this is, and I just, yeah. And it’s just so, I don’t want to say embarrassing. It’s just awkward because people don’t understand and they don’t get it out in like the regular world. And so if that’s your measure, if that’s your normal, if those are the only people you associate with, I’m not saying cut people out. They’re not a content creator by any means, but be intentional with putting those people in your life because not only are they going to encourage you and give you feedback and all that, you’re, you start to retrain your brain. on what’s normal. And if you look at the mind, you can adjust its narrative through repetition. Neuroplasticity is a very real thing, but it takes time. And so that’s interesting. And another thing I wanted to comment on that you mentioned is, I know my experience and folks I’ve worked with, it’s not usually the stranger we’re nervous about. It’s the people we know that we’re nervous about. And I don’t know if you follow Lewis Howells, he had an incredible clip with Jen Sierra, I believe was her name. And she made this comment that when people are negative or critical of you stepping out and doing your thing, you’re killing off the person that they loved. And so they’ve had this narrative of you for so long. And when you step into something else, they get defensive and weird over it because they’re like, but I’ve always liked Rob. What’s Rob doing? Where’s old Rob going? And they don’t understand that the new Rob is just an upgrade. And so that’s where the panic and the making fun of and the weirdness stuff because they feel like they’re losing something.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. definitely see that. And that struggle is very real. I, you know, my heart goes out to people who are just starting the podcast or just starting to get out there. So let’s, let’s talk about some of those realities, because again, I think you’ve nailed storytelling in ways that, you know, maybe other people aren’t doing it quite the same way. What’s your approach when you sit down to create a video, you know, to tell a story, to make a point, I think you follow a bit of a formula in most of your videos, which is amazing and I think makes it so consumable. Can we talk through your process a little bit?

Heather Parady: Yeah. So again, I’ve made a million that were horrible. What changed the game for me was when I decided to add creative restriction to my videos, meaning I got mad one day, Rob, and I said, you know, all my videos aren’t working and I’m doing what Gary V told me to do. I’m being consistent. I put out hundreds of stuff. Why is this not working? And so I got mad. I said, I’m just going to sit in this chair and I’m not going to get up until one of these things work. I’m going to figure out my format. I’m going to sit in this chair. And so that creative restriction was so important because sometimes when we approach a white piece of paper or board or whatever. there’s so many opportunities, we just get kind of overwhelmed. So if you can say, hey, there’s a creative restriction, I’m going to do this in 15 seconds, or I’m going to only sit here or whatever that is, it actually makes you more creative. So right now, that’s kind of the origin of where that began. My brain kind of works and connections all the time. I’m always thinking like, oh, that reminds me of this. And this reminds me of that. And so that’s a natural tendency of mine. And so I would say, you know, paying attention to your natural tendency is really important because coming up with ideas a lot, um, it’s, I don’t want to say it’s hard, but it’s a disciplined process. And if it’s something that you’re going uphill with, you’re making it harder. My brain’s always making connections. Like I listened to a lot of podcasts, read a lot of books. It’s annoying how much I listened to. So I, document stuff daily. I have a spreadsheet that’s called Real Ideas, and it has hundreds of data points on it of, hey, I listened to this episode with Rob, and he was interviewing this copywriter, and they said this 10 minutes in, they made this comment, and I’ll just leave it. And that’s been really hard for me too, because I feel like I have to be doing something all the time and making all the time. But learning that sometimes you’ll get an idea, and that’s for three months from now, and it’s not for tomorrow. And letting things breathe has been challenging for me. But I’ll wrap this up. So I put everything in a spreadsheet. And then I have a pretty disciplined writing routine where usually all day Friday, I’m writing. And I’ve been trying to implement one hour every morning to writing too. where I go and I just script. So used to I would spend a lot more of my time on the back end of a video like editing and so forth. Now I try to spend way more time at the front end organizing and writing. Yeah.

Rob Marsh: What is the formula? Again, it feels like you’re usually mixing in a clip from somebody. Obviously, you’re tying the ideas together as you were just explaining. But when you sit down, you start out with the idea and think, OK, what are all of the things that I’ve seen, you know, or the things on my list that are related to, say, curiosity? Do I have a story about curiosity? Do I have a quote about curiosity? Do I fill in the blanks? Um, is it that formulaic or is it more, more organic?

Heather Parady: And it just kind of is a story you’re telling what I’m looking for bridges. So if I heard I was doing some research on Morgan Whelan yesterday, because I’m trying to do a reel on American or the voice, the voice has some ideas to do some things with that. So I’ll just listen to a lot of podcasts, whatever, I’ll put a whole bunch of clips down. And then I’ll just naturally instinctively, I’ll be like, that reminds me of when I read this in this book, or I’ll ask myself, is there a bridge here? And if there’s not, I leave it alone. So I’m not looking for topic first, I’m looking for bridges first. And so if I usually have two, then I kind of put it in a separate file where I’m like, okay, these two ideas, but it’s not until I have three, where these three things tie together, that they’re actually getting to me actually writing a script on it. One thing that I’ve been really conscious of lately is not just trying to tie things together, because Rob talked about anxiety and Matt talked about anxiety and Paul talked about anxiety. Let’s make a video about it. But what’s the twist that I learned something on or we’re taking them somewhere a little bit different? So maybe we had all these ideas, but is there something that I’m adding to the conversation here as opposed to regurgitating content that’s already out there? And that’s actually really hard to do because I don’t always have a conclusion. And I was just whining to my creator friends the other day, I’m really torn at times between keeping a consistent schedule and then also like maintaining the integrity of my work that I’m actually convicted about what I’m saying and I’m not just putting a reel together to get something out. And that’s really hard for me to gauge.

Rob Marsh: That was actually going to be my next question. And because if you’re letting that stuff happen naturally, but you have a video that’s got to drop on Friday, like in some there’s almost got to be like a forcing function that starts to make those connections for you. How do you make that happen?

Heather Parady: I’m really in the middle of a big, deep reflection right now about that because I don’t know the answer to it. And it’s weird because sometimes I’ve put out videos and I’m like, eh, and they work really well. And so you might think of that as a success, but not to get too airy fairy weird on you. Like, you know, I left my work as a therapist to make content and the heartbeat is still there where I really feel like I’ve been placed on this earth to work with people and to help people. And I have to really ask myself a lot, like just because something popped, does that mean it worked? Or is this something that I genuinely believe added to society? And I don’t know the answer to that, Rob. I’m really, I didn’t put out one reel this week. I had several films that I was editing them and I’m like, I don’t know if I feel this. Like, I don’t know if this is what I want to say. Um, And you can’t get too caught up in that sometimes. I would say if you’re at the beginning stages as a content creator, it’s important to just get stuff out because you’re finding your voice. I always tell people you find your voice.

Rob Marsh: Something’s better than nothing at that point.

Heather Parady: Exactly. But at some point, you know, when you know you’re going to do it, you’re not struggling with consistency. You’re kind of past those beginner blocks. At some point I’m like, what am I really wanting to say here? And I’m wrestling with it. I don’t have a better answer than that.

Rob Marsh: Okay, so let’s say that we have the edited video. We’re confident this is the thing we’re going to say this week. How do you come up with the hook then when you’re throwing it up on social media, you’re putting it on Instagram, wherever it goes, so that you actually get the initial attention on this idea that you want to share with the world?

Heather Parady: Yeah, I start backwards. I don’t start with the hook. I start with the takeaway. A lot of folks teach you to start with the hook, and I think that is clickbaity and the sexy, fun thing to do. What’s harder is starting with the takeaway. If you read Save the Cat, it’s a screenwriting book. I really love looking at these other disciplines, like the way that they approach things, even though I’m not a screenwriter, but you know, him talking about the log line at the beginning, like you figure out what is the thing that is interesting and kind of the main point. So I try to start there of like, okay, if I’m going to be talking about, I might, you know, say, oh, Lady Gaga says blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what’s the point of the video? The point of the video may be, do you know that magic is, you know, hidden in space and we don’t give ourselves enough breathing room and space to really allow magic in our lives or whatever. That’s so wordy. And so the same way you would critique a hook, I would kind of go to the end, the log line and figure out or the takeaway and figure out How can I really distill this down into one simple sentence? Because also, you know, with morality and making content. you know, really work. It needs to be shareable. It needs to be recommendable. And so you’re not going to say to your friend, like, hey, go check out this video that started with Lady Gaga. But you might say, hey, there’s this video on the importance of taking breaks or whatever. Like, I’m helping you share what the video is about by understanding the end at the beginning. So if I understand the end, then I go to the front to the hook. And I think, A, am I setting up a promise that will be delivered? So if I say that I’m going to share this idea, am I really sharing this idea, if that makes sense? Is there a payoff? So yes or no on that. Then I think about the order of the words. I feel so weird talking to you about this because I know you’re a copywriter and y’all are like the boss at this kind of stuff. But really, I write out every single word and I think, is there any words I can take out? And then how can I move the most interesting, global, globally appealing thing at the very beginning? So if Lady Gaga is that thing, because people are interested in what Lady Gaga said, I’m not going to say Lady Gaga seven words in. I’m going to try to move Lady Gaga to one, two or three, the very beginning, because you know that scroll. So, you know, if people ask the question, have you ever thought of, you know, that’s terrible.

Rob Marsh: Right. Five seconds in. Yeah, you’ve moved on.

Heather Parady: Right. Lady Gaga tripped and fell. This is what happened. You know what I mean? Like I’m putting that at the very beginning. So that’s high level. And then from there, I’m also working on hooks in throughout the video. So you’re not just hooking them at the beginning, but you’re also like kind of opening and closing loops throughout. And I haven’t really nailed that yet. That’s what I’m working on now.

Rob Marsh: What’s your thinking around length of videos? Because, you know, the world is full of three-hour podcasts now, you know, the Chris Williamson’s of the world, Diary of CEO, you know, where you have these really in-depth conversations and there may be 10 or 12 really good takeaways from them. On the other hand, your videos are at least what I’ve seen are very short, but there’s always something that clicks, right? The, the way that you’ve thought it through, it always feels like I’m getting, it might just be a scoop of, of content as opposed to an entire feast, but it, it always hits. So yeah, thinking on, on length, you know, are you, are you always thinking I’m trying to keep this to six minutes or under 10 minutes, or does it just take what it takes?

Heather Parady: Yeah. Well, thanks for saying that, because that’s my goal. I am a very spiritual, deep thinker, like I want to have a cup of coffee and sit with you for three hours and talk about something. So it’s wild that I’ve really leaned heavy into short form content because the stigma behind it and the reality of it is that it’s really just playing to our dopamine and our short attention spans and not really, quote, helping humanity. But if we think about being, you know, healers and whatever in this world, we have to figure out how do we bring our message into the context of what’s going on. And right now, short form video is it. And so I’ve made it a personal challenge to make deep, short content. because it doesn’t seem like that would work, right? And so I want to be an entry drug for people where they may have not thought about this stuff. And then they go look up Stephen Barlett, they go and look up Lewis Howells, and they, you know, consume content that’s changed my life. So yeah, I want to make it as short as possible because that’s what I’m trying to serve. Just from a tactical standpoint, I have 90 seconds on Instagram. If I want to put it on YouTube, that’s 60 seconds. So the shorter, the better. One thing I am working on, though, is not jump cutting so much where I don’t allow something to breathe for a moment because I just refuse to believe that we can’t sit in a moment of silence with short form. Now, I don’t think We can abuse that, but I think there is space if we are good at our story and convicted that energetically, I believe people scrolling Instagram can pause for a minute and think, I do. I think we’re really don’t give ourselves enough credit.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I don’t disagree with that. Maybe the algorithm would, but I agree. In fact, I see you doing that on your unlisted videos, which I love. Talk about the thought process that’s there. And just so that anybody who’s listening might not know, the unlisted videos, you only share with people on your email list. You don’t post them anywhere. So the only way to get them is to be on your list. And they feel even more deeply personal. Yeah. So yeah. Tell me, you know, what’s, what’s the thought process there.

Heather Parady: I really, really love when creators can just shoot it to me straight and talk like a human. That’s the content I really love. Like, and I’ve, I’ve gotten a lot of questions from people and I was trying to think about what’s the best way to answer Obviously I want to help everybody, but I can’t just sit there in DMs with people and talk and stuff. So this would be a good way to answer one question from one person and everybody hear it. And then also to kind of show what I’m not, you know, failing at or sorting through. Like I have somebody this, this week, they were asking me about how do you, how do you approach sound design to hypnotize an audience? And I literally was like, I don’t do anything with sound design. Like what are you talking about? My hope is just to take the mystery out of it and to humanize it a little bit. It is a little vulnerable at times because you want to appear polished. You want to appear like you have everything together. You want people to respect your work. But if we think about our own human behavior, usually when someone can show you the stuff that they’re struggling with, you end up respecting them all the more. And so why don’t we apply that to our own work? And so Unlist is just a test with that. I’m so glad to hear that you’re enjoying it.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I think the thing that I like most about it is I see the polished videos, and they’re amazing. They’re great. That’s the first thing that attracted me to watching what you do. But seeing the unlisted videos, like you said, they’re more vulnerable. But it feels like I’m getting a little bit of a peek inside your brain in how you’re actually piecing ideas together. rather than having gone through your three connection step, it’s like you’re taking a question and thinking through as you record. And I’m guessing it’s actually more thought out than that, but it feels, again, very natural.

Heather Parady: I don’t script them out. Sometimes I’ll put a couple of bullet points just because I’m ADD and don’t want to get off topic. But for the most part, those are just real honest responses.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. Like I said, I think I’m going to steal that idea. I think it’s brilliant and a really good way to make a connection with an audience.

Heather Parady: I hope so.

Rob Marsh: Thank you. Yeah. You mentioned the way that you spend Friday’s writing and try to put an hour of writing in every day, but a lot of your time I think is thinking and strategy. Will you just talk about your approach there to creating that time in your day so that you have, you can actually create the content when you sit down and start to write?

Heather Parady: Man, it is, it’s, It’s imperfect. I think I’m reevaluating my strategy. I know I am on a weekly basis. I try every Sunday to put 30 minutes to an hour aside and just look at the week and figure out what worked, what didn’t. Because, you know, I’m running a business too. And I have kids and I have personal projects. I’m working on a short film. It’s like freaking endless, you know, which I’ll sit here and complain about it, but I sign myself up for everything. I love it. I’m geeky. I have ClickUp. I use ClickUp, even if I’m just the only one on the team. I use ClickUp to organize everything. It’s pulled up right now. I review the day in the morning and at the end. And again, that’s just my energetic makeup. Some people are not that way. I literally stress my husband out when he looks at what I have. He just does not operate in that way. He operates in a different way and that’s fine. I think what we have to be mindful of is being hyper aware of our gift, our disposition, and then being responsible to it. Because some people are like, oh man, I’ve got to get up at 4.30 and use ClickUp and blah, blah, blah. No, you don’t. What you need to do is be responsible with the way that you were created and be honest with yourself. Am I really being faithful with what has been given to me, you know, and it’s totally imperfect. I don’t know if I’m answering your question, but that’s my thought around that.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. And where are you, like, what are the big, uh, stores of information where you get your inspiration? I know you mentioned you’ve got a group of creators surrounding you. Obviously you’re a big time reader, you know, watching other videos, but, uh, you know, when you think about what people call, you know, Renaissance time or CEO time or, you know, thinking time, you know, what are your go-tos?

Heather Parady: for the videos or for like my life?

Rob Marsh: I think all of it because it feels like they’re kind of connected.

Heather Parady: Yeah. Lately I’ve been, um, it’s funny you’re bringing this up because I, I’ve actually been challenging myself in that way. I’ve spent, you know, the past 10 years reading hundreds of personal development books, hundreds of hours of podcasts. I mean, I, I’m just, it’s disgusting how much I’ve consumed. But lately, I’ve been kind of questioning myself. I’m like, I think you’re in a comfort zone, Heather, where you’re listening to the same types of content. Why don’t you start exploring other things that you don’t know as much about? I’m very comfortable with kind of the psychology, personal development space and so forth. I understand certain lingo and words and concepts and the way they link, which is a strength because it makes it easier to make these connections. But I also haven’t really been pushing myself where exploring things I’ve never heard of before or whatever and being a student again. And honestly, you know, this is an excuse, but it comes down to time because being a beginner again, you know, you’ve got to be messy out loud. I mean, I drive a lot. Yesterday I was on the road for five hours, so I listen to back-to-back podcasts. I read every morning. I usually have a YouTube video up playing. I’m talking about like, it is disgusting how much I listen to and consume. But I also, too, from my own mindset, I didn’t come from a family that was super positive and, you know, exposed to this stuff. So I’m still rewiring my own mindset. and battling my own demons and trying to figure out how to be a better person myself. So I listen to that stuff for content, but I also listen to it because I need it.

Rob Marsh: This morning, I was thinking about something similar, the way that I consume content, the things that I read, and the way that I’m thinking about it. And it feels like I read in shorter chunks now. I think in shorter chunks. And as I was, again, pondering it this morning, I was wondering, has that changed over time because I’m getting older? Or is it changing because the way media has evolved in the last decade and a half? has forced me to do that. Is my thinking literally changing because the media is changing as opposed to the way that I would consume it? I don’t know that it’s deep, but it sort of got me thinking because I’m like, okay, which one’s better? And do I need to force myself into longer reads or do I need to force myself, like you’re saying, into things that don’t feel familiar and challenging? I mean, this isn’t even really a question. I actually started a course in something that’s very, very different from anything I’ve ever studied before two days ago. And literally as I opened up the first lesson, the thought came to me is this is too hard. You should just quit now, right? And so anyway, maybe this is me throwing a lot of things at you as a therapist, a content therapist. What are your thoughts on?

Heather Parady: I love this. I love this thought. I love this idea. Contemplation. That’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about. Richard Rohr talks a lot about this, just sitting with something and you know, it’s just kind of that meditative, that meditative state where you just kind of mull over something just for a while, like even a thought, even a sentence. And I feel you on this sense of, you know, I’d have done a lot of challenges and you know, I’m, I’m driven AF and type A where I’m like, I’m going to read 25 pages a day. And I’m going to, you know, I put metrics on stuff, which is cool and helpful at the beginning, I think. But at some point you’re just reading through pages to check a box as opposed to really sitting with something and consuming it. Um, but I’m also asking myself a lot, like, why are you in such a rush? Where’s the rush coming from? Because I’m in a rush all the time. And I don’t know why. I think it is a cultural thing. Like we, we’ve, we’re, we’re breeding that in our society. There’s something just, we collectively, it’s a collective weight, not just an individual one. And also it is an individual one, because there’s pressure that if Heather doesn’t produce a reel today and get that out and email her list and then have five discovery calls with the client and also make her family a homemade meal. And also, you know what I’m saying? Like it’s just this, this, this. Am I failing in these areas? Am I being all that I can be? And I don’t hate that message because it saved my life in a lot of ways. But I also feel like when am I ever going to evolve from that and think a little deeper? And that goes back to this idea that we were talking about earlier is as a creator, do I really have something to say? And it’s normal for us to not always have something to say. How can we have a revelation every day? And that’s what I feel like as creators, we’ve kind of I have felt the pressure of like, oh man, you’re going to have to sit in deep constantly to talk about, but I don’t give myself time to actually wrestle with anything. You know what I’m saying?

Rob Marsh: Yeah. And as you say that, that might be part of the reason that I am always reading and consuming and listening because I feel like I want that new idea. It’s almost like I get that there’s a dopamine hit for, you know, when you’re scrolling through the, the, the feed on Instagram or whatever, but there’s almost a deeper dopamine hit. If you can learn something new, if somebody can connect something for you to sort of have that, Oh, wow, wait a second. I hadn’t thought about that. And, and so maybe one of the reasons that we try to consume so much is that we’re, we’re actually looking for that deeper thing that we’re not getting from the scroll.

Heather Parady: Man, you’re just dropping some nuggets, man.

Rob Marsh: I don’t know.

Heather Parady: No, I’m going to be thinking about that. I haven’t thought about it in that way before, but I think you’re right.

Rob Marsh: We’ll have to have a part two or maybe once we figured this thing out. Let’s go back to the videos because one thing I noticed about your videos, not a lot of calls to action. Uh, so what, what is it all leading to? Like, what’s the purpose and, you know, is there a connection between what your, the content you’re putting out and how your business grows on the back end?

Heather Parady: Yeah, it’s wild. Um, I meant to say a bunch of stuff that. We can just probably upset a lot of people, but this is just my experience and my conviction. I believe with all of my heart that when we show up as creators, more full, more alive, more convicted, more lit up, then people are going to ask, how can I hire you? I don’t know what you do, but can I hire you? Because those are the emails that I get literally emails. I don’t know what you do, but can I work with you? Which is wild. And I’m not saying that is like a marketing strategy by any means, but I think we’re like somebody messaged me the other day. I was like, how do I get the conversion? And I’m like, you don’t get a conversion. You convert stuff because people are drawn to your work. So I’m not saying I’ll never have a CTA or whatever, but my intention right now is to add as much value to people and trust that when you are just constantly in a state of giving value, giving value, and that’s what you’re consumed by, people see you as a person of value and want to work with you. So I’m not worried about it. I’m not worried about it.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. I mean, it’s sort of scary to, to, to be putting stuff out there and not draw that line from point A to point B saying, this is how you work with me. This is because, again, like, especially when, when content is so time consuming, to not have that line to the dollar is, it’s an act of faith in a really big way.

Heather Parady: It is, but also too, when you try it out and you let go of that and you give yourself six months to stop making it a commercial. Hit me up and tell me what kind of results you got. It’s scary at first because we want to put the blame of our content and our stuff not working because we didn’t use the right technique or hack versus taking the responsibility that we’re not getting the conversions because people don’t believe us.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. So what are you building then on your business? I know you recently had a program where you were walking people through the storytelling and the art of video creation, but what else are you building?

Heather Parady: Yeah. So for the last five years, I’ve been fractional COO, been working on kind of operational side to people’s digital businesses. So what my brain works is I’m very, very creative, but I’m also very organized and I kind of like a, kind of a sidekick for people who are all over the place and have a very unique skillset, by the way. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I’ve done a lot of like testing and human design and all a bunch of weird stuff. And it all points to the same thing. And I’m good at it. And we recently closed that recently as in this fall, I closed the agency side of that down because I decided to go all in on creation. And so I’m just now doing consulting and coaching with folks and I’ll have cohorts and programs and things like that coming out. But, um, I just kind of took a little leap. I took a little leap and it’s scary, but it’s working out so far.

Rob Marsh: One other thing I noticed that you do not shy away from at all is talking about spirituality and even touching on religion occasionally, which I think is very rare in the marketing world. Thoughts on that? Should we be doing more of that?

Heather Parady: It’s terrifying. It’s terrifying. I don’t want to talk about it because I am so annoyed with religious people and I’ve been so hurt. And I feel squeamish and sick to my stomach when people bring it up to me sometimes, because I just had a lot of abuse in the church. And when I was a little girl, I wanted to be a minister. That’s what I always wanted to do. that went south, that’s when I went into therapy because I was like, oh, well, therapy is another way to do ministry without the church. And then when I left all that, I’ve really found kind of media as quote, my ministry. And I’ve had to really learn that this has nothing to do with people’s crap. This has to do with something else working on your behalf and our creator, however you want to word that. And so just really restoring my own faith in that regard. And I’ve been kind of working with this policy that if you’re nervous to talk about it, it’s probably something you should look at because fear usually sits very strategically in your life. It’s not random that some people are afraid to talk about relationships. It’s not random that you’re afraid to show your arm that was twisted in a car accident or talk about infidelity or There’s a reason we’re terrified around certain topics. I’m not saying you should build a brand around everything, but why am I scared to talk about that? You know, where’s the growth opportunity in that? And so I’m not going to do it forever. I don’t think, who knows, but right now I’m scared to talk about spirituality because it’s so personal to me and I’ve been so hurt in it, but it’s also one of the most real and honest things I can do. So people have been nice so far. I’ve gotten a few not so nice things, but I can handle it.

Rob Marsh: How do you deal with the not so nice?

Heather Parady: I put it on the website. I put it on my website.

Rob Marsh: The untestimonials? Is that what you’re talking about? Yeah. So that’s something else. I love that. When I saw that page, I’m like, this is brilliant.

Heather Parady: Yeah. I’ve had a lot of, you know, I do, I work with creators, so I’m on these coaching, whatever the hell, I don’t even know what I am, a coach, a consultant, whatever. I might steal what you said earlier, a content therapist. That’s literally what I am. But you know, they’ll sit there and they’ll be like, oh my God, you know, they’re just so afraid to get that one comment. They will not post something, even though they say they want to, they won’t do it because they’re like, oh my God, what happens when somebody says something? So for years, I’ve been telling people not to worry about it. It’s not a big deal. We all do it, the whole speech. And after a while, I’m like, I really want to make an example of this and show you what people have said to me. And here’s the interesting twist to it. Most of them are right. Most of what people say to me, not the mean ones, like you’re going to go to hell. I’m going to go to hell. But if they’re like, Hey, you’re too hyper. Hey, you mispronounce words. Hey, you’re so, I can’t understand what you’re saying. Cause your accent, like they’re right. And actually, if you look at the light and the dark, they’re pointing to the shadow, the dark side to my personality and my skillset. But when you flip it to the light side, that is why people are attracted to me folks. Some folks love my energy. They love that I mispronounce words and I leave it in the video because it shows that I’m human. Other people are like, forget her. Other people are like, yes and amen. So what people point out in you as a negative can be why other people fall in love with you. So. I like that page. I need to update it. I got some more to add.

Rob Marsh: When I stumbled across that, again, I was like, oh, everybody should have an untestimonials page just because it is so revealing about not necessarily the things that you do, but the audience that you’re repelling and pushing away. And I think it just points an arrow and says, if you think like this, yeah, you’re not going to like what I am, but everybody who doesn’t think like that is going to love it.

Heather Parady: Yes, exactly.

Rob Marsh: So if you could go back in time, you know, Heather, just starting out, maybe on her content journey, she’s just, you know, stopped being a therapist and could give her some advice that might help her make more traction or do something differently or do something better. What would you say to her?

Heather Parady: A lot. A lot. Um, I think what’s coming for me right now is stop feeling guilt for what you really want. I had a lot of guilt to say that I wanted to be a creator because it sounded very immature in my head. It sounded irresponsible. It sounded, um, egotistical. There was a lot of like judgment around it where I’m like, are people going to think that I’m this, this, this, this, because I want to put out content online and start a podcast and do these things. So I would go to her and really encourage her to let go of the shame around what I really wanted from an emotional standpoint. Um, from a technical standpoint, I don’t, hmm. Hmm. If I can be honest, I would tell her to not interview people or discuss topics that you really weren’t passionate about. I know that sounds weird, but I put out a lot of content that I thought might work or that I felt obligated to do for a variety of reasons. And I’ve really come to terms with like the most powerful content is the content that is a hill you would die on and that moves me. Like I’ve asked myself that a lot, you know, like, am I moved by this personally? Like, is this, you know, you need that feeling that you get like, yeah, I’m not saying that every time I’m like, hallelujah, this is great. But like, does it stir something in you? Is it something that you really deeply believe? Or are you just throwing, I don’t know if I can cuss on your podcast, but just throwing poopoo on the fan. and seeing if it works. You know what I mean? And Colin and Samir talked about this on our show the other day. Phenomenal podcast. They were saying that the ideation process is really being eliminated from creators where it used to, we would go to a board and stir creativity and come up with new ideas and then put it into a formula. And now we kind of put a formula first and then try to put ideas into that. So we’re starting with, is this going to work versus pure ideation? And think about sucking the life out of your work by going formula first, then trying to come up with an idea.

Rob Marsh: I think it’s even worse than that. I think we look at what other people in our niche or our industry are doing, and we think we need to mimic that. So we don’t even start with the formula and go to our own ideas. We’re starting with the formula and going to their ideas.

Heather Parady: Yeah, man. Isn’t that wild? Isn’t it wild?

Rob Marsh: And that’s probably why so much content is so bad.

Heather Parady: Yeah. And that’s another reason why I try to separate content from business and stuff, because I don’t need my content to perform, you know, and I don’t know your experience. A lot of the people I’ve worked with, most of their business doesn’t come from content anyway. It comes from word of mouth. And so I think we put too much stock on stuff, but if I’m not putting pressure on my content to make something, I can be a little more free with it.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. You’ve got me thinking about the content that I create and how do I go deeper with it? How do I make sure that, like you said, it’s the stuff that resonates with me and I’m not wasting time with all of that other stuff. There’s a lot of things to contemplate when I sit down to think about all of this stuff.

Heather Parady: Yeah. Isn’t it fun now?

Rob Marsh: Yeah. I mean, it’s fun, but it can also be a little bit scary, right? Because I’m not thinking at that moment, like, how do I get the next client or, you know, how are we getting the next conversion? It’s, it’s like you said, it’s stuff that won’t pay off maybe for six months or a year.

Heather Parady: Yeah. And that’s why I’m spiritual, man. Cause I don’t think I can do this life or this work without having a spiritual bent. Because if I think about everything just logically black and white linear, then panic sets in because then I’m in control and I have to make everything work. Now I’m responsible and I have to be faithful with what I’ve been given. Can’t you tell I grew up in church to the language I’m using? But at some point, I don’t know how to move through this world without understanding that when I get to the very edge of the cliff and I’ve gone as far as I possibly can go, that that one extra inch, something’s going to catch me.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. Final question for you. And we’ve, we’ve kind of talked about this for 47 minutes, but for that person who is thinking about, okay, I am going to get serious about creating content, the right kind of content that resonates with me as a creator. What initial advice do you have for them just to help them get started?

Heather Parady: This is super left turned from what we’ve been doing, but this came up for me so strong whenever you said that. So I’m going to trust it. intentional fun as much as you can with it and ask yourself, how can I make this fun? How can I breathe life into this? My energy in my videos, I’m fully convinced is really the key for them resonating with people or not. Yeah, the concepts are important. And I’m not talking about an extroversion, introversion type thing. I’m talking about, you can feel somebody’s presence if they’re happy, if they’re sad, if they’re just doing this. And so you can come to the whatever with a perfect script. But if your mind is not there and you’re thinking about something else, your energy is off. Mastering your energy and trying to figure out how to have fun is so important. And it sounds silly and cheesy. The girl who does the Excel spreadsheets, she has a million plus followers. You know, she does jumping jacks and stuff like that. Tony Robbins talks about that, and it sounds weird and crazy.

Rob Marsh: But if you look at her page is so nuts, it’s so nuts to me. It’s such a disconnect, but it works.

Heather Parady: It works. It works. And people, again, are drawn to the energy. So learning energy management, I think, is just as important as you learning any tactical video editing stuff.

Rob Marsh: I think that’s great advice. Just add something else to learn and do. Exactly. Exactly. Yet another thing on the checklist.

Heather Parady: Slip, right. Video edit. Have perfect energy. No problem.

Rob Marsh: Heather, if somebody wants to follow you, see the stuff that you’re doing, both publicly and also unlisted videos, all of the stuff, where should they go?

Heather Parady: Heather Paroady pretty much everywhere. I’m not on LinkedIn much just because I’m not corporate-y and those people make me nervous. But Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, heatherparody.com.

Rob Marsh: I’ll link to everything in the show notes. I think that you’re one of those people who honestly almost every creator should be following. I just love the way you think. I love the way that you put your content together. So thanks for your time today. I appreciate it.

Heather Parady: Well, this just freaking made my day. Thank you, Rob. I appreciate it.

Rob Marsh: Thanks to Heather Parody for sharing how she thinks about and sits with and creates her content. I love her idea of looking for bridges as opposed to content topics when she’s looking for content ideas and then combining those bridges with a twist that she adds that makes the whole thing different as opposed to more of the same. There are so many people on social media who should be doing this instead of adding to our collective content shock. 

Also, her suggestion for moving interesting ideas and recognizable names to the very first five words of your hook so that you immediately catch attention is a copywriting superpower. Far too many copywriters have a tendency to clear their throats and take a bit of time to get around to the point that they need to make instead of starting with big ideas and big promises. If you want to do more of that, the big promise, the getting attention early on, watch some of Heather’s work. it’s going to inspire you. And this is a lesson I’m going to have to take to heart myself. 

And I have to say, I really like Heather’s unpublished videos. Now we talked a little bit about this in the podcast. Those are the videos that aren’t available to everyone. They’re only available to her active email subscribers. This is a genius idea for a couple of reasons. First, if what gets shared in an unlisted video is valuable, it’s helpful to your listeners. And so they have a reason to want more, but more than that, The vulnerability that Heather brings to her unlisted videos forges a tighter connection between her and her audience. And if either of those two things are appealing to members of her audience, and clearly they are, they have yet another reason to stick around and get more. So it basically makes subscribers stickier. Of course, you can do that with publicly available videos too, but there’s something magic about having access to insider content, content that not everybody can see or even know about. If you’re not on the list, you just don’t get it. 

Okay. Be sure to check out Heather at heatherparady.com. Her last name is P-A-R-A-D-Y. You’ll find links to her just about everywhere that she is, but on her website, you’re going to find a link to the behind the scenes videos and to her podcast. And of course you can see her content on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube, wherever video content is shown. She is worth following and learning from. 

 

Wondering how copywriters could be using Facebook and Instagram ads to grow their business? Our guest for the 425th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie. Kwadwo had to reinvent his business during the pandemic. And today he helps businesses grow with ads on Meta. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

 

Stuff to check out:

The Accelerator FastTrack
The Art of Online Business Podcast
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

 

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: Facebook ads. Copywriters write them. Some copywriters run them. All of us see and click on them. And yet, most of us don’t have a deep understanding of how to use them for our clients or our own businesses. It’s not a skill you can easily pick up by listening to a podcast, but we can get a deeper understanding of them with the help of an expert.

Hi I’m Rob Marsh and on today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, my guest is Facebook Ads Manager Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie. Kwadwo’s business collapsed during the pandemic and he had to create an entirely new means for supporting his family. So he began a business helping others use Facebook to promote their products.  

That’s not all we talked about. Kwadwo talked about the value of learning a new language and how that can change your perspective on the world. And the challenges of starting over. I think you’re going to like this episode.

Before we get to that… I’ve been telling you about The Copywriter Accelerator FastTrack— that’s our business foundations program used by more than 350 copywriters to start, build and scale their own writing business. Graduates include six-figure writers like Justin Blackman, Kirsty Fanton, Michal Eisik, Dani Paige, Krystal Church and hundreds of others.

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And now, let’s go to our interview with Kwadwo…

Kwadwo welcome to the podcast. I’m excited. First of all, as I said, as we were starting to chat just to meet you, but also to have you on to tell us your story, how you became a Facebook ads manager, a strategy partner, host of a very popular podcast. How did you get here?

Kwadwo: Let’s go back to when I was sitting in Beijing, China, the capital of China, with my wife at a Mediterranean restaurant. And we were enjoying our hummus and naan and we’re sitting and we’re overlooking like a popular shopping strip. And so we’re chatting and just relating about China life because I’ve lived there for 12 years. And the next thing that happened was It’s very typical for me, but my wife had never experienced before. And so a couple of tables down, there’s two Russian girls. They had spotted me, and they had started giggling like they saw somebody famous. And the thing is, I was famous, and I’ll go into that in a moment. they made their way over to the table and, you know, say, excuse me, introduce themselves and wanted to take a selfie with me. So I introduced them to my wife and then did the selfie thing and they went away. And my wife was like, wow, you weren’t joking. Like this happens. People recognize you as the elementary Chinese guy. And elementary Chinese was my prior business that got decimated by the pandemic where I taught Mandarin Chinese. 

I’m going to go into the story a little bit, but I taught Mandarin Chinese to expats, expatriates, people who are not Chinese, but living and working professionally in China. And that was going quite well. I have this desire now as a Facebook ad manager, and I’m skipping forward, but we’ll get back to that previous business and what happened and why I’m not doing that anymore. But I have the desire to help people run their ads profitably and not make the mistakes that I made back then that got me famous for that previous business, but did not fill up my courses with a bunch of students who were the right fit for me to serve. 

And so here’s what happened. I was basically on the Hollywood B-lister level of fame. Conservatively, three out of ten people, expats, in China would recognize me on the street. And that happened because one timing, it’s some sort of success that usually has to do with like luck and chance. And so one was timing. I was showing ads at a time in China, a market that’s walled off. So like all of the good social media, you know, the YouTubes, the Pinterest, the Twitters, X now, Facebook and Instagram, you can’t access in China without a VPN, virtual private network that helps you tunnel under what they call the great firewall of China to keep out all the Western influence. And so I was showing Facebook ads for that business in China and getting my funny videos about speaking Chinese were showing up for super cheap all over everyone, at least the expats, like iPhones and Android devices. And that grew my Instagram account. I don’t know, 27, almost 30,000 folks like back in 2017, 2018, which is not a huge account, but decent. And lots of people knew me, but because Instagram is all about showing your ads. And this is why I say, constantly do not boost your post. Instagram loves it. I know you’ve seen it on your Instagram, right? This post is reaching more people than usual. Let’s go ahead and show it to more. Hit that boost button now. And it’s like, don’t do it. Don’t do it. They want to show your post to people who like to interact. But if only all of our Instagram followers or even 80% of them, 70% I’ll take that turned into customers. What happened was is since I have two kids and my wife and I like to speak foreign languages to our kids, I was speaking Mandarin to them. Their nanny in China was speaking Mandarin to them. My wife speaks fluent Spanish. 

We decided to take a vacation to Mexico and it happens to be on January 13th, 2020. And so a couple of weeks after that, people start looking at us sideways and saying, uh, where did you say you came from again? And we’re like, uh, we’ve been out of China for 14 days. We’re good to go. And then we were quarantining in Mexico. We extended our Airbnb into like a three month long-term stay because why not? It’s Mexico, chips and guac everywhere. A bit less so during the quarantine and then China shut down their border. So. And I think they gave us seven days to fly back. And well, who wants to buy one-way tickets with less than seven day notice for four people? And because my business was incorporated in China at the time, teaching Chinese, and our visas were tied to that business, we ended up not being able to return to China, having to get our cell phones, hop on FaceTime, because we’re Apple users, and get rid of everything in our apartment when our apartment lease was up. And so imagine four, four bedrooms of stuff, some good friends going over there and we got reunited with six luggages later on. And that was how the previous business ended. And the current, I guess the genesis of the current business where I, I coach and help with funnel strategy for online course creators and I run their Facebook and Instagram ads. That’s how that started.

Rob Marsh: That is nuts. Just the being locked out of your home, your place, everything. That’s crazy.

Kwadwo: Yeah. I think it technically was a midlife crisis. Hopefully I live longer than the half life that I had lived up to that point.

Rob Marsh: It might be your first midlife crisis. I hope to never have one nearly as bad as that. Before we talk about, you know, Facebook and the things you’re doing in your business, let’s talk about learning languages. So I am, I am one of those people who I love to travel, love to travel. Yes. But. I am also terrible in that I cannot speak another language fluently. I know a little bit of Spanish. I can read a little bit of French if I’m really focused on it, a little bit of Italian. But yeah, I don’t know. All my kids speak French. My youngest daughter speaks a little bit of Spanish. She’s not all the way there yet, but my wife speaks French fluently. She also happens to speak Italian and Spanish. So I’m surrounded by it, but I’m that awful American who’s never bothered to go out and learn the language. Let’s talk about why, why this is such an important skill set for some of us who, certainly if we love to travel, but why it can add other things, even if we’re not traveling.

Kwadwo: Okay. First of all, we got to dispel the guilt. Awful American. It’s something that people will say from other countries. I don’t feel that awful about it actually. The context is important though. We’re born in the US, like many people would say, like the most powerful country in the world. And in the States, the context, you don’t necessarily need to learn another language. It’s not like we’re in Europe. And so like I just say, don’t beat yourself up about it, but it’s cool that you want to learn another language. So language learning, huh?

Rob Marsh: Yeah, let’s, let’s, why? I mean, what, what does that add to? I mean, again, it’s really easy to see why we should maybe learn things about copywriting or learn things about marketing or business skills. Why language?

Kwadwo: I always go like this, I hold my hands together with my fingers kind of interlocked. I think people do this when they talk about the word synergy, but one hand is language and one hand is culture. And language cannot be separated from culture and culture is always carried through language via communication. And so what happens when we start to venture out and well, one of the benefits, and learn language is we’re learning other cultures. And the way I like to see it is that we are beginning to pick up a new lens by which we can view the world. And it’s usually a lens that we didn’t grow up with. And the amazing thing about it is it’s challenging. It allows us to see ourselves the way other folks from other countries and cultures see ourselves, it allows us to begin to rub up against concepts that we’ve never been exposed to or challenged by, especially if they differ from our own, in a disturbing way, the more the better, because it just, I believe, makes us better people. When we go through struggling feeling vulnerable, learning a language, having to make the mistakes, having to be seen as somebody that’s a learner, you know, like it’s hard to be an expert when you’re stumbling through a foreign language, even within like a subject matter that you’re normally very well versed at in your native language. Like all these things change how you see the world in a better way. And I thoroughly believe like if, more folks took on the task or the challenge or the fun or the joy even of learning a foreign language, that the world would be a better place because there’d be a heck of a lot more understanding.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, we could use a little more understanding in the world today, I think. Yeah. So this is maybe an odd question, but a lot of times we think about that second language. Speakers of a second language are at some kind of a disadvantage because they don’t know the proper way to conjugate the verbs, or maybe they mix up certainly gendered words within the romantic languages, that kind of thing. But what are some of the advantages that new speakers of a language might have that people who already speak it don’t?

Kwadwo: When you speak or are learning a foreign language, people will listen to you because you’re struggling with the language. And so for a moment, if you approach it right, you have more attention than you normally would because you’re this anomaly. Anomaly. Anomaly! And also… when you speak correctly, as in you set up a new conversation, you, I, I love just apologizing and saying, look, I don’t know how to say this a fancy way, but I need this, or I think this, and I’m sorry if this offends you, but I don’t have a way to doctor it up. And people are like, Oh, thank you for saying that. But then you can speak very, um, directly to folks. And I think that is a benefit of learning a language. Another very obvious benefit is if you’re learning a language from a people group where nobody really looks like you, then you also get the added benefit of being special and getting to meet basically whoever you want. That’s something I taught when I was in China is using the fact that If you’re a non-Asian learner, then you don’t really look anything similar to what somebody would see in China, and you can use that to your advantage to meet some of the best people and have the coolest novel conversations.

Rob Marsh: As much as I love thinking and talking about this, language isn’t really why you’re here on this podcast, where we do talk about a lot of words, but your new business is all about Facebook, Facebook ads, helping clients get exposure. There are a lot of copywriters who would love to be more involved in writing ads and solving these kinds of problems for their clients. Tell us how you basically got connected in with Rick and what you’ve learned and done since.

Kwadwo: Sure. When it comes to Facebook ads, I feel like copywriters are at an advantage and I can say that myself because as a Facebook ad manager, I believe the ad copy is the most important thing to converting somebody who’s out there and face on Facebook and Instagram into somebody who becomes a lead for the business and ultimately somebody who can be served by the business. Um, I rely heavily on really good ad copy and as somebody who, I openly say this, I am not well-versed when it comes to the written word. I think copywriters are at an advantage and here’s how a copywriter can best serve your clients if they’re running Facebook ads. You’re already good at taking your client’s voice and putting that in written form in an engaging way. Wonderful. If you specialize in conversion copywriting or you could call yourself a sales page strategist or you’re decent at writing those emails that are designed to sell, then you also know a thing or 18 about taking somebody’s voice, their expertise, but also combining that with your research or their research on who they serve so that you can make sure the writing communicates how somebody can solve their problems and tying that in with like the ideal customer’s ideal outcome, right?

So when it comes to Facebook ads, it’s not that much different. Sure, there’s a structure or, you know, three or four that really work well for Facebook ads, but a lot of it comes down to the top three lines of Facebook ad copy. And those are those ones that peek out above the, um, inside of the Facebook feed or Instagram feed above the visual that you’re using. And lots of people call those the hook. And if you can get good at writing hooks, which I like to break down just as speaking to someone’s frustration in a different way or kind of outlining in a intriguing way, the possibility, that’s wrapped up in downloading this lead magnet, then you can pretty much master having good Facebook ads because the right people will see that hook and be intrigued and then expand the ad copy, read the rest of the well-written research words and head on over to the landing page, which you’ve had a hand in writing as a copywriter and you’re off to the races.

But I feel like copywriters are a big advantage when it comes to running Facebook ads. How I got into Facebook ads. Did you ask that to Rob? Yes. Yes, for sure. Okay. So, um, when my previous business failed, I needed a job. And since I had been involved in an online business that was successful, I just couldn’t pivot it. I taught a method of learning language via social interaction. And during the pandemic, people were trying not to interact socially. And I couldn’t pivot to just teaching Chinese to everyone around the world who was learning Chinese. And so I had paid for a mastermind that I was a part of. and that I saw good growth because of the strategies I learned from. And so it was that very mastermind, a really good guy named Rick Mulready, the owner of it, who had offered me a job coaching inside of that mastermind when I had nothing else going for me because my business had failed. And that was in the fall of 2020. And at that same time, I had picked up another part-time job inside of a Facebook and Instagram ads agency managing Facebook and Instagram ads. Because again, I was familiar with running my ads incorrectly for my previous business, and I was familiar with the online space. And so I held those two jobs and then leveraged the strengths I’d built and the skill sets I built from those two jobs into doing the same exact thing for clients now.

Rob Marsh: So before we started talking, and I definitely want to talk all things Facebook ads, but before we started talking, you mentioned that one of the things you’ve noticed is that copywriters do not use ads, Facebook, Instagram, or anywhere, with maybe a few exceptions. but they don’t use ads to build their own business to find clients. Uh, and my first response to that is, well, maybe it’s because we don’t know how to do it, which I’m not sure is true because we oftentimes we’re helping our clients do this stuff. So like walk us through why you think more of us should be doing this for our businesses, what the opportunity is and how we should get started.

Kwadwo: Sure. And the disclaimer is that it could just be the niche and the people that I’ve been blessed to meet with haven’t been running Facebook ads. I do actually have a client who is a copywriter and has a very successful direct-to-offer, self-liquidating offer funnel. I think that Facebook ads is a very worthwhile pursuit. if there is already a profitable offer being sold. And one big mistake that people make is they think that We just need more eyeballs on our offer and that will make it sell. So we’re going to run Facebook ads to it. And I always say like Jesus saves Facebook ads do not.

The offer needs to be profitable first. And if we have like a profitable launch mechanism or if like we’re routinely selling to our email list and offers the program, the membership, the coaching service is just selling like hotcakes, so to speak. And we can just do some simple number crunching and look at the revenue and then look at the number of leads that it took us to get that revenue and establish an amount of profit per that lead. Then we can start to play with Facebook ads because Facebook ads have a cost to them. And the name of the game is, as long as the profit is quite a bit higher than the cost, then let’s go ahead and add that Facebook and Instagram ad fuel to the fire. But it takes a bit, a bit of time in a spreadsheet just to look at those numbers. But I believe that time is well spent. And for many of us, we could grow quicker. If we turned on Facebook ads sooner, once our offers, our programs, our coaching, our courses, our memberships are profitable.

Rob Marsh: So as you talk about that, it seems like, okay, it definitely makes sense for digital type projects or products, memberships, courses, that kind of stuff. What about services? Can copywriters profit? I mean, you know, most of the services that we offer, copywriters are charging, I don’t know, anywhere from say $500 to multiple thousands, sometimes even tens of thousands of dollars. So you don’t need that many leads to get, you know, a couple of clients doing that to be profitable. But also, I don’t see services being sold through ads on Instagram, Facebook very often. And you’re right. Maybe it’s just the people that I follow, the people that I see. I’m not seeing that out there. But what about that?

Kwadwo: Well, it’s a service. So naturally, to show an ad to a service that’s multiple thousands of dollars and expect somebody to buy that, well, we’re not going to run ads to a sales page because that would never, ever, ever work. But here’s the thing. If you’re a service provider, I’m a service provider, right? A lot of my referrals are coming from a certain place. And so it’s my responsibility just to look at the funnel that either I’ve purposefully put in place, but many times there’s an organic funnel there that I just haven’t quite discovered yet. And this is where I don’t 100% preach Facebook ads.

For example, if somebody, let’s say is in masterminds and they realize that a lot of their leads are coming from there, well then join more masterminds. Like if you’re being a guest on podcasts and you’ve done the tracking, IE maybe made a podcast specific lead magnet, you know, that only is given out when you’re on podcasts and that’s, it’s connected to your email. CRM so to speak and people are tagged as having come from another podcast and you can see leads coming in because of your guest podcast speaking opportunities and then you can track like every quarter you’re looking at revenue and seeing if there’s like a podcast tag Associated with any of those clients will then lean into being a guest on a podcast where Facebook ads though does wonders is for the copywriter the service provider that also has other things to sell well, that’s a a really easy thing to do with Facebook ads because I’ve had the privilege of meeting copywriters who have thousands and thousands and thousands of people either visiting their website a month or in followers on Instagram. And the algorithm just doesn’t give that reach. Um, but specifically for like a service provider funnel, if I’m looking and tracking the numbers, then I want to know what action, how many actions am I doing that gets a discovery call and what percentage of discovery calls am I closing? And if I happen to be in a situation where I have a decent social media following or a decent readership on my website and ads can help that initial interaction where somebody might get onto my email list and then I send an email, a sales email or a sales email sequence that results in discovery calls. That’s kind of where ads fits in for a service provider.

Rob Marsh: That makes sense. So I’m a copywriter. I’m listening to the podcast. I’m listening to you, Kwejo, talk about all this stuff. And I’m thinking, all right, I at least want to give this a try. I’ve got some stuff that I can offer. Maybe I’ve got a template pack or something. Or maybe I just want to attract some attention to my podcast or to something else that I’m doing. Maybe I can do some retargeting afterwards, whatever. How do I get started? What are some of the steps short of you know, calling up you and say, Hey, fix this stuff for me.

Kwadwo: So where do I start? Sure. Start with the messaging. That’s usually the part that’s the hardest. But luckily, if you’re active on Instagram, then you already know what messaging is working. And if you’re not sure, you can dive into it like this by going to your Instagram reels, because those are pretty popular right now. But if you’re if carousels are your jam then look at your Instagram stats and you’ll be looking for the posts Let’s say over the past six months that have the most reach or that are reaching the most amounts of unique accounts and when you look on a reel and you go into the stats setting, there’s like a little pie, a circle chart, and I think it has like blue and purple on it. And so when you find a reel, one easy way is just to look at your Instagram feed and look at the reels that have the most plays, right? But then dive into those and look at the stats to see which one of those is reaching the most new accounts. You’ve kind of looked and discovered a reel where Instagram has decided because the engagement is good that the algorithm will push that reel out to new people. All right, so that’s step one. Now you’re going to start to focus on once you find five of those reels, look for the commonalities in what you’re saying. They all might be talking about the same thing, if you’re lucky, or maybe they’re talking about, you know, two or three things. Then look at what you’re writing in the caption of those reels, because it’s not just the content of the reel. It’s also, you know, the amount of time that people spend reading the caption and what they happen to do after they read the caption.

Meta, you know, the owner of Facebook and Instagram tracks all of that stuff. So you’re just reverse engineering because success leaves clues and start with that. It could be as easy as taking a popular reel that’s lined or that’s well aligned with a lead magnet and running that reel as the visual for your ad and then looking at the copy from that reel and adding that into your ad copy And then just remembering that this just comes down to testing. So like if I have one piece of ad copy on a reel that’s been doing well, I’m just going to look at that top section of the ad copy and see if I can rework it a little bit. The first one or two sentences to speak to a couple of different frustrations or to tease a couple of very, you know, attractive outcomes. And then I put it into ad manager and here’s where most people, Stop. And it’s, it’s leaving money on the table in the form of you could be paying too high for a sale or too high for a lead, but just test, take three different pieces of ad copy and pair them with the same visual. Give it five days. Give it a week. See which one comes out on top, so to speak. And then now you’ve got a great piece of ad copy. Come up with some other graphics or some visuals. Put those with the same ad copy. Let those run for another week. See what’s working.

And if you keep being faithful to that process, then you’ll end up with hopefully a handful of ads. Three is what I usually like to go for that are working for you and that Yes, it’s simplified. Yes, meta seems to offer up at every turn chances to make mistakes in running ads. But if you stick to those concepts of look organically for what’s working, use the copywriter skills, I wish I had those skills personally, to make some variations of the written word that’s already working, and then just go through the basic testing process, you’ll be surprised at what you can achieve in a decent lead cost for the right kind of person downloading your lead magnet. and even coming into your launch or just decent costs for folks that are buying your email template. I have a client that her SLO funnel, her funnel direct to offer $37 offer for email templates that sell. It does very well, you know, because people need that and selling is serving. So test right so that you can serve more people.

Rob Marsh: So I think everybody knows this. You mentioned it. Meta owns both Facebook and Instagram. What are the differences between the two platforms as far as audience and the different things that we should be doing on them? Or is there no difference?

Kwadwo: From my ads perspective, I don’t see a big difference. I like to let the algorithm decide where it’s going to show the ad, and then I work from there. And here’s what I mean. Meta collects 52,000, I believe is what you can Google, data points on every user. And they have been doing so for over a decade. So what that means is they know me and you, like they know you, Rob, better than you know yourself.

Rob Marsh: They know us better than we know ourselves.

Kwadwo: Yeah, it’s nuts. 52,000. It’s way beyond what you like, what you don’t like, what you watch, what you don’t watch. Like they know like how much time you spend on a post. If you slow down, like how much are you slowing down? You know, like what are you doing seven posts later? Like what makes you exit the platform? And can they, they, they know so much. Right. And so I, I honestly don’t worry about different, but like leave that to the social media growth strategists, like about how you should definitely show up on Instagram versus Facebook. But as long as you have a presence there and, and for those of you with small Facebook and Instagram accounts, even if you don’t, you can just rely on the algorithm to find the best people for you.

And from there we can tweak, you know, like if we see for some reason that like Lots of your leads are coming from Facebook and not Instagram. Well, maybe you can post more to Instagram or we can just stop showing ads on the Instagram platform and your lead costs will come down because we’re focusing the algorithm over there on Facebook. It’s more of a, it’s less of a, how should I show up differently on Facebook and Instagram and more of a, what am I going to do with the data about where my leads are coming from?

Rob Marsh: Makes sense. So let’s say again, I’m a copywriter and I want to break into this. I want to do more Facebook ad writing. Okay. What are some of the steps that I want to do, you know, short of taking all of the courses and figuring out how to do all the backend Facebook stuff? How do I get in front of a person like you, Kwaijo, and say, hey, you know, we should be working together or here’s some of the stuff that I can help you do? like find me or yeah, well you are somebody that does what you do basically a Facebook strategist ad strategist that kind of thing.

Kwadwo: I say go with who you know. I’ve heard too many times and this is just me speaking from the heart like I would love for lots of people to come work with me but not everybody knows me but you probably know via your client or one of your clients Facebook ad manager with a repute with a good reputation go to them because a lot of this comes down to trust as soon as you involve like your hard-earned money going into Facebook ads and There, you just want to be able to not have to have as little anxiety as possible. So by going with somebody, you know, who has a proven track record, that’s going to happen. Also though, educate yourself. There’s a lot of free content out there on the internet. There’s content on my podcast that talks about like good fundamentals for running Facebook ads too many times. I have a new client who says, somebody ran my ads and I just didn’t understand their reports.

They would send me a report every two weeks. I didn’t really know what they’re doing. And when I say, well, why? Well, okay, so let’s hold the Facebook ad manager accountable to give me metrics So I know what’s really working what’s not working, but then also as the business owner I want to learn the basics of Facebook ads That way you pay the ignorant tax in advance with your time and your research rather than paying it later Because of a lack of results or lack of accountability on the ad managers part. That’s what I would say Would you like a simple ad formula that a copywriter could use to best serve their client if their client’s like, hey, we’re going to do ads. Help me write some ad copy.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, let’s hear it. I mean, obviously, if I’m going to pitch you as a writer or pitch another Facebook ad specialist that I know, I want to send you something that shows off my ability. So if you’ve got a couple of formulas that help, let’s do it.

Kwadwo: Take an ad and let’s demystify it. It’s just like other copies. So you got to have a good hook, right? And following that hook is probably time. Let’s say that your hook skews towards the negative side of the coin, meaning it focuses on a frustration in a non-triggering way because we don’t want to trigger people. Like right after that, it’s probably time to empathize a quick bit. you know, um, so that somebody feels like you’re not just calling them out, but you’ve been there too, or other clients that the person frequently serves have been in that exact same situation. And that’s where you transition to say, well, that’s why we created this solution and then download it. Right? So your download link goes there. And then under that for the, logical reader, if you will, who has gone through the hook and the empathy part. Let’s call it the emotional part. And this has to sound really, really familiar to a copywriter. But after that, you know, you might have a one or two or three very simple bullet points. I like to make sure that if it’s a feature, it’s also a benefit, but talking about a lead magnet. And then again, I like to end an ad with a bit of hope, you know, as much negativity as we see, like, let’s give some hope that you can do this. And if you just follow, I’ve given a very general framework, but if you just follow that, that’s a good place to start for ads.

Rob Marsh: Let me throw some letters at that. That sounds like problem, empathize, solve, hope, PESH. It’s very similar to the PAS framework, but yeah. So I like the addition of hope because ultimately we’re selling solutions, but without hope, nobody gets to the solution portion. So it’s a really important addition. Agreed. Okay. So you mentioned one of the things we need to educate ourselves on are these metrics that make a difference. And there are a ton of metrics, a lot of stuff that really doesn’t matter, but it seems important. Things like views, that kind of stuff. What should we be looking for? What are the top maybe three or four metrics that we just have to pay attention to?

Kwadwo: All right. Cost per result, that’s the most important one. If it’s a lead campaign, cost per lead. If it’s a sales campaign, cost per sell. Now hopefully on the back end, we’re doing the math. So if I know that I’m bringing in $3 leads for a launch, hopefully I also know how much those leads over the past launches have been worth to me. So then I can say, ah, Launch leads are worth $15 to me. I’m only paying $3 a lead. Let’s go. And bonus points if I know that launch lead, cold traffic launch leads are worth $15 versus warm traffic launch leads, but I won’t get into the weeds. We want to know how much profit we can have, right? Same thing for cost per sale. Now the next metric that I’m looking at if I’m troubleshooting my ads is what’s called link click through rate and some people, you may have heard the term like outbound link click-through rate.

I’m going to consider those the same and that would be the percentage of people that have viewed your ad that have also clicked on a link to go to wherever you’re sending them. The lead magnet opt-in page, the sales page, the registration page. the book a call consultation page what have you and the numbers you’re looking for here is 1% or above and you’re good to go 1% is good like 1.25% it’s great 0.75% link click-through rate horrible so think like hockey stick or like a logarithmic curve and You’ll be fine. So 1% or above Now you’re starting to get into more of a nuance, but let’s say you have ads that are running and your ads aren’t performing as well.

Well, I would ask, did you have multiple ad copy versions? Did you have multiple visuals? And if not, this is where you want to test because people, we, we’re just inundated with a bunch of media and so if I’ve seen your ad before and I see it again and I see it too many times I’m probably like I’ve seen this before and I just filter it out and keep scrolling on my doom scroll right and so just by changing up the way an ad looks by adding in another visual taking a graphic doing something as simple as picking another background color then like you don’t get filtered out as easily and it looks fresh and a higher percentage of people will click on that ad. And so the last metric I’ll mention here, because we’re just going to keep it simple, right, is keep an eye on the frequency column. So we started off with cost per result, we went to link click-through rate, and now we’re looking at frequency. Just keep an eye on that frequency column and make sure that people aren’t seeing your ad too often. And if they are, then add some new ad creative in there.

Rob Marsh: And you should… What’s a good number for that? So, you know, is it like And it’s been a long time since I looked at this, so I can’t remember if it’s by week or how it measures, but is it three times a day, three times a week, five times a month, what is a good number?

Kwadwo: Okay, so in that frequency column, you’ll see a number, and it could be one, it could be 1.7, but that number is the number of times that somebody in the audience you’re targeting has seen an ad within the timeframe that you have selected inside of Meta Ad Manager. So if I select, last month, and then I see a three, that means on average, within the audience that I’m targeting, somebody has seen an ad three times. So if I see a one, that means only one time.

If you’re showing ads to cold traffic, which I define as people who have yet to enter or encounter your business ecosphere, they haven’t visited your website yet, they don’t follow you on Facebook or Instagram, they’re not on your email list for sure, they haven’t watched any of your videos, then one to two is a decent frequency. If I’m showing ads for a launch, which we’ve definitely seen this year, 2024, at the time of recording this video, that you’ve really got to make sure you’re showing ads to your warm audiences. Maybe I can tolerate a frequency up to four. But in general, lower frequency is better. I can tolerate a frequency up to four for warm audiences, but I’m always thinking I need more ad creative. I need more ad copy variations because for sure your ads are going to work better at a frequency of like two than four because of that whole, I’ve seen this before thing. And you don’t want, you want as few people to think they’ve seen this before as possible. And so always show up prepared with extra graphics, you know, text on pictures, maybe even like a picture of yourself.

Just try different visuals. Not every test, and I want to kind of set this expectation, not every test goes well, you know. In fact, most tests don’t work. That’s the name of the ads management game. But if you are faithful to the test, you will encounter that one out of 20 tests or that 1 out of 20 graphics that works better than the other 19, in which case you’ve got yourself a winner and better results. And if you can keep going to find the 1 out of 50 that works better than the other 49, then guaranteed, just because statistics, then your ads are going to work better. So that’s what I would say.

Rob Marsh: It feels like all three of those are indicators that you need new ad ideas, right? If your click-through rates are going down, you need some other thing that’s gonna get attention. If they’re seeing the ads too often, then you need more ads. If the cost has gone up, you probably need more creative. So in my brain, it feels like these are all moving towards the same kind of a thing. Okay, how are you keeping everything fresh? How are you getting more people to respond, which is the name of the game.

Kwadwo: I mean, that’s why people hire an ad manager, right? Like, because there comes a point on your success to like, or on your journey to business success, where like, because you’ve hit a certain revenue, and you’re doing certain types of things in your business where it doesn’t make sense, because your time is more valuable than spending it looking inside an ad manager all day long.

Rob Marsh: So yeah, that makes sense. Anything else I should be asking about Facebook ads, Instagram ads that I just don’t even have the background to know about that you think, man, it’d be great if everybody knew this?

Kwadwo: It would be great if the listener understands as a copywriter that the ad is just, I know they get it, the ad is just the top of the funnel. Right. Let’s look at the landing page. Let’s make sure the landing page conversion rates are on point Otherwise, we’re going to change how the landing page is being presented change add copy there I personally speaking to Speaking from the viewpoint of a service provider would say like if you’re a copywriter and listening which I know many of you are then The moment you can add value to not just the Facebook and Instagram ad, but to the landing page, obviously you’re probably already adding value to the sales page and the email and look at the funnel as a whole and even be able to jump into a spreadsheet, which I’ve gotten used to, but I didn’t like it in the beginning and be able to say, okay, like these are the crucial conversion steps. This is where it should be. Here’s what we can tweak to get that opt in page conversion rate higher or that sales page conversion rate higher. You’re so valuable to your client and you’re able to make sure that like you’re duly compensated, but you also can sleep well knowing that you’re helping somebody very significantly serve more of the people who they were meant to serve with like their passion or their skill. Like it’s great. And so dig on in, dive on in, help with all those conversion steps.

Rob Marsh: With a few minutes that we have remaining, I would love to dive into some of the challenges that you faced in basically switching over your business, not just shutting down the business that failed for all kinds of crazy reasons, but then moving into a job and then taking over at least some portions of the business for Rick. Maybe I don’t know, but maybe you’ve got the entire business or it’s just the podcast. I don’t know. Yeah, I’ll clarify that. I’ll tell you some challenges too.

Kwadwo: Yeah, please. I am the host of The Art of Online Business Podcast and this was a podcast owned by Rick Mulready. He was the host for the longest and I worked with him and it made point at a point where it made sense at a point where he was transitioning to he’s doing great things in the AI space. helping the same online course creators, coaches, and membership owners use AI so they can increase their impact and reduce their overwhelm. Still the same thing, the guy is brilliant, but when he was moving in that direction, it just became clear that the podcast wasn’t going to serve his business the same way it had. And so, me having worked with him and known him over the years, I decided I would acquire it. And I did, and I became the host. Big challenge here because lots of the listeners were used to Rick and I am no Rick. That guy is a genius. He really knows how to think. I’m a thinker too but his unique way of looking at businesses and doing the coaching thing and helping them generate more revenue and he’s done that for like 12, 13 years I think. from meta and Facebook ads back before it was called meta and then into coaching online course creators and beyond. So I had to be comfortable with myself and who I was. I had to navigate. It was a challenge kind of bridging the gap between how Rick delivered value and being true to how I would deliver value. And finding my own voice, but easing the listener into my own voice over the past year, that’s been a challenge. Let’s just talk about like whenever there’s a transition. there’s going to be an exodus of certain folks because they might not like me as much as they like him. So seeing the numbers and still showing up, and then seeing the numbers of more people coming because they like me. So that was a challenge. When I had to shift businesses, or even from a business to a job, and then to a business again. The biggest challenge was my identity. And so me accepting a new identity or realizing I was more than this previous identity I’d built up as the Chinese guy, the elementary Chinese guy who taught Chinese, that was so hard, Rob.

Rob Marsh: Especially if you’re famous and being recognized in restaurants everywhere. Right. Yeah.

Kwadwo: And so here I am in a country where I didn’t speak Spanish. So I was in Mexico in the middle of the pandemic, trying my hardest to figure out how I could just get back to China. Cause I was trying to speak on stages there and host events, you know, um, and nobody here knew me as an elementary Chinese guy. It wasn’t like it was helping my business at all. And I’m like wanting that past me. But having to realize, and I’m a Christian, so for me, a lot of the process was just crying in prayer. But having to realize that I am not that previous identity. I am Kwadwo, and I have value outside of just this little part of me that happened to be famous in China. And so to kind of like There was a point where I just had to leave that behind. As much as I wanted to go back, and as much as I wanted to have that kind of business and that kind of, you know, a little bit of fame, I had to look forward and say, all right, well, where are we going here? What is the new identity? Who am I now? And and take these brave steps. And they were painful, honestly. It was very painful. Lots of tears and crying, and so much support from my wife. She’s raising two kids. We got stuck out with a nine-month-old and a three-year-old. So she’s going through her own battles, right? But she’s not earning the money. I am. And I had a lot of support from her at that time. And that was a very, very big challenge. But here I am. I’ve made it and I’m doing okay by the grace of God.

Rob Marsh: Forward, ever forward, right? Speaking of ever forward, and you mentioned that Rick’s been looking into AI, but where do you see AI impacting Facebook ads, Instagram ads, the stuff that we’re doing there? Obviously, in the back end, Facebook is doing all kinds of stuff that is finding audience and they’re applying AI in ways that we can’t even see. But on the front end, the stuff that we can see, where is that all going?

Kwadwo: I believe it is going towards a place of simpler ads management, where the AI does a lot more and the ads manager does less. I frequently talk about Ads management, kind of like a Latin dance. Since I’m down here in Mexico, I think of salsa and bachata and merengue, you know, tango. It takes two to tango, right? And the person managing the ads, be that somebody hired or yourself, is the lead and the algorithm will follow, right? But it’s going towards a point, because I can see the changes daily. Meta is always rolling out new features. And anyone who’s looked inside of Meta Ad Manager can see that they’re rolling out a lot more suggestions, or they’re taking away certain methods of targeting in favor of letting the algorithm Figure it out for you, you know, whereas you used to really want to test years ago a bunch of detailed Audiences and break everything out into a bunch of ad sets like now frequently the best ad sets that are working are these big ones with like Two to five million people in it and just a broad wide open ad set where you only tell it the country the algorithm tell tell the country and maybe the gender and the age range and it just Finds everything else out for you we’re seeing a lot of new like what they call advantage plus creative where it’s like we do spend our time. Graphic designers are still important, but meta can do like eight different kinds of things to the, to the image at its whim based on what it sees people responding to, you know? And so definitely there’s this trend towards letting the algorithm do more for the ad. And so I see that as, kind of leveling the playing field, you know, over the upcoming years, it should hopefully, uh, get easier for somebody to hop into ad manager right now. It’s still a minefield of mistakes waiting to happen because you, you just have to test things and know what does what. And, um, but yeah, that’s where I see AI going right now. I feel like there’s a stigma to AI. And so we definitely bring our expertise. And I say we, me as an ad manager, you as a copywriter, we bring our expertise to that. But I feel like eventually AI will get to the point where it does do a better job than we can do at writing, provided we do a great job of feeding it with results from the research that we’re doing. I don’t know when AI figures out how to do the kind of research that’s necessary to produce good ad copy. But it can’t be, it can’t be far. It can’t be far down the line. Not like in this year right now where they’re developing like, you know, GPTs or let’s call them AI agents that specialize at one task and you can call on it to do one thing specifically. Well, it can’t be that many more years before you have like the agents working together and communicating with each other. And then after that, at a certain point when they start communicating in a way that we can’t just peer into the code and figure out what they’re saying, We’ve got the matrix.

Rob Marsh: So yeah, hopefully it’s the result is us all sitting on beaches and enjoying drinks with umbrellas in them rather than hooked up to life support and providing the energy to the matrix. Yeah.

Kwadwo: You know, when Henry Ford came out with the Model T and that started to become super popular, let’s just say motorized vehicles. I mean, he was laughed and ridiculed at. People had plenty of arguments, so they say, at least in the books, as to like, why would you do this over a horse? And well, now horses are mainly like ridden in sport. You know, it’s like an equestrianism. It’s an art form. And so I wonder if that’s where it’s going with AI, where there will still be value for somebody who’s riding themselves, producing out of only their own creativity, But for the business world and everything else, it’s like, we’re going to use AI, but we appreciate the artists who still come up with their own writing.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I think authenticity is one of those make or break things with AI. Once it can fake authenticity, we might be in trouble. But until then, there’s a need for a lot of creators still. So we’ll see. So Kwadwo, this has been really interesting, fascinating for me. If people want to be part of your world, and they should, your podcast is excellent, the ideas that you share. Oftentimes, you know, bite size or can be consumed very quickly. Where should they go and how do they get on your list? All of those things.

Kwadwo: So my podcast is The Art of Online Business and we’re serving online course creators and to an extent service providers who just want to level up their income, say from mid four figure months to high six figure years. And you’re going to be on the podcast too. And so I teach on Facebook ads there, but I’m also inviting folks with a wealth of knowledge like yourself to speak every week. And so that’s The Art of Online Business on Apple podcasts, we have a decent and growing presence on YouTube. And look, if you’re wanting meta Facebook and Instagram ads help, but you’re at the point where you want to manage it yourself, I do one on one coaching, I find that that is serving more and more people who know that their business is ready for ads, but they haven’t quite hit that revenue point in the business where they can hire out ads management. The perfect solution is coach with me for a month and I’ll show you everything I know to run your ads so that at the end of that time you’re running your ads, you know how to do the testing, you know the things because you had like unlimited access to me while we were coaching, you know the things to do and how to troubleshoot all the various issues that can show up. And that is a good way to go forward.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. That sounds like a really good solution for a lot of people, especially if you’re just starting out and trying to figure this stuff out. Cool. Well, I’ll give you that link. Yeah. We’ll link to it in the show notes. Thank you for your time, Kwadwo. Really appreciate it. And looking forward to talking to you again on your podcast in the near future. Thanks, Rob. Thanks for sharing so much about Facebook ads and reels and how we can use them more effectively for both our clients and in our own businesses, knowing what works and what doesn’t work when you should use Facebook ads. And when you absolutely shouldn’t, this stuff is important and it’s so easy to get caught up in what other business owners are doing. Things like Facebook ads and copying them rather than taking the time to figure out what’s going to work for your business. Knowing the numbers, which actions lead to discussions with prospects and how those convert. We all need to be tracking this stuff. And if ads fit into that flow in your business, you should definitely be using them. Given how much data Facebook has about each of us, this is a goldmine just waiting to be used to connect you with the people that you can help. Maybe my favorite part of this interview is quite Kwadwo’s story and how he had to find a new identity in both his business and his personal life after his old business crashed or in the pandemic. And sometimes you just need to reinvent what you’re doing and it’s never easy. You just need to push through, keep on going until what you’re doing succeeds. If you’d like my help as you push through and reinvent your business, go to the copyrighted club.com forward slash fast track. and sign up for that program while it’s still available. And if you wanna connect with Kwadwo or follow him and learn more about using Facebook and Instagram ads to grow your business, there are a few places that you can go. He hosts the Art of Online Business podcast and we’ll link to that in the show notes. And if you visit his Instagram page, you’ll find a link there in his bio to get his short email series, Seven Biggest Facebook Ad Mistakes That Kill Results. It’s a great place to start with him. Be sure to look for him on YouTube as well. 

 

A lot of copywriters need a way to attract prospects… but more than that, they need to do it in a way that immediately communicates that they’re the expert—an advisor clients can trust. In the 424th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I spoke with copywriter Meg Kendall about creating an industry report that does this perfectly. If you want to stand out from all the other copywriters who depend on lead magnets and social posts to get clients, you need to listen to this episode. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

 

Stuff to check out:

Meg’s Website
The Copywriter Accelerator Fast Track
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  One of the biggest challenges copywriters face… actually it’s not just copywriters, it’s freelancers of every kind… one of the big challenges we all face is getting noticed. But more than that, getting noticed in a way that builds trust with the clients you want to work with.

Just about everyone has a lead magnet… or an email list… or content on social media… all with the intent of making a connection to prospects and potential clients. If you don’t have those you should. They’re table stakes for creating a successful business.

But because everyone has them, you have to do more than these to stand out. One way to stand out is to write an eye-opening industry report that immediately sets you up as the expert in the field. It’s more than a download, it’s a shortcut to interviewing potential clients, establishing relationships with them, and demonstrating your ability.

Hi I’m Rob Marsh and on today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, my guest is copywriter Meg Kendall. Meg followed this exact path to connect with several potential clients in her niche. She’ll be sharing exactly how she did it in this interview. 

Before we get to that… you’ve heard of The Copywriter Accelerator program. That’s our business foundations program used by more than 350 copywriters to start, build and scale their own writing business. Graduates include six-figure writers like Justin Blackman, Kirsty Fanton, Michal Eisik, Dani Paige, Krystal Church, and today’s podcast guest, Meg Kendall.

We no longer run that program live… the only way to get the business changing strategies and proven ideas we share in The Accelerator is with the Fast Track edition. And as I mentioned on this show last week, even that will be going away sometime in the new year.  So if you’ve been thinking of joining the accelerator, time is running out. What will replace it? It’s too soon to reveal the details but if you join the accelerator fast track before we launch this new program, you’ll get early access to both the accelerator and the new program. Until then, you get all of the content, the 8 modules and blueprints and several bonuses that are included in The Accelerator Fast Track. And when we launch the new program sometime next year, you’ll get that updated program too. Don’t wait to work on your business so when the new year is here you have a steady flow of clients and a signature service you’re proud to offer them. Visit thecopywriterclub.com/fasttrack to learn more today.

And now, let’s go to our interview with Meg Kendall.

Hey Meg, welcome to The Copywriter Club Podcast. Let’s start with your story. I’ve been watching you build your business now for a couple of years. I think it’s a good one.

Meg Kendall: All right. Yeah. I feel like my story is kind of similar to a lot of other copywriters and that it’s very winding and maybe a lot of the backstory is fairly irrelevant to what I do now. So I had a fairly long career in hospitality. I worked as a server and a bartender for about 10 years, and it was pretty hard to leave. At some points, I wasn’t sure I would ever leave. And then I finally broke out, and that was via going back to school for the millionth time, it feels like. Really, it was the fourth time that I finally got my undergraduate degree, and that was in botany. And I lean on that a lot today because most of my clients are… 

So I work in climate tech, so they’re all very focused on the science behind climate change. just like very technical topics, et cetera, stuff like that. So they love that I have a botany degree. From there, I moved to New York city for a job, completely irrelevant to botany. I moved there as the technical term is an orientation and mobility specialist, but nobody knows what that is. So I’ll tell you, I was a travel instructor for visually impaired students in the Bronx and New York city. So that was a really interesting time period of my life. And I’m only telling it because it’s relevant to switching my way to copywriting. 

Yeah, so I was in New York City. So many big changes in such a short amount of time. I moved to New York City with my husband, left that 10-year-long hospitality career, became pregnant with my now two-and-a-half-year-old daughter pretty much like a week after we got to New York City, which wasn’t in the plan, but was a happy accident. Yeah, really, really hated my job in the Bronx. It’s just, they didn’t paint an accurate picture of what the job was going to be like. And I found that out pretty quickly, but I was there at this job and I was pregnant and I had great health insurance and I couldn’t leave my nice health insurance job in New York City to go bartend pregnant in New York city. Right. So all that’s going on. 

And so two years past that I do this, like I’m, you know, I’m crying in the hallways at my job. It’s sad, but it’s fine. Like I’m getting through it. And then I have Charlie and I’m like, how do I get out of this? How do I get back to my roots and get back to doing something that I love doing and, like, never have to go back to this place again? It’s funny because I didn’t think about it while – I did think about it while I was pregnant, but I didn’t try to actively work my way out of it. And it wasn’t until Charlie was born that I was like, oh, I can’t go back there. Like, I just can’t do it. It’s not going to happen. So I remember that once upon a time I was going to earn an English degree, but everyone’s an English degree major, but everyone scared me out of it because there’s no way you can make a living as a writer. Like you’ll have to, you know, you know, the same old trope. No one thinks you can make any money writing for a living. I’m sure most of the people listening to this podcast have heard that same cliche throughout their careers. 

I found myself in someone’s marketing funnel. I think it was The Comprehensive Copywriting Academy. And that’s how I discovered copywriting. I didn’t even know what it was. And I just really went all in on it immediately with my little five-day-old baby. And yeah, took it from there. And things have snowballed since then. I think when I first learned of you guys, I was learning like, oh, it’s a good idea to niche. Now, I think it was you that told me. I was like, I’m going to niche down to B2B SaaS. And you were like, that’s not niching. I was like, OK. Yeah, I guess you’re right. Because I was so new to everything. I didn’t really have any concept of the scope and what was possible and just how far niched you could get. And yeah, I came, I’d always wanted to work in sustainability, but I think I had the same, the same problem with sustainability as I did with writing. Like I’m like, either you work in a job that you love and you don’t make any money or you can make money and work, work in a job that you don’t love very much. So I’d always, I’d never achieved a job in sustainability. And then through copywriting, I discovered climate tech, which marries these two worlds of lbeing able to have a lucrative career working with like fancy technologies that are moving the world forward, but also doing something good for the world and the world of sustainability. So it seemed like a pretty perfect match right away.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. I want to go back to you being a bartender. I was a bartender before I started copywriting. Not for 10 years. I did it for maybe a year and a half, two years or so. But were there things that you take from that experience of working with people daily, trying to keep them happy, that basically translates to copywriting today?

Meg Kendall: Absolutely. So I think a lot of things, one thing being the obvious, like you’re behind the bar and people drink and they spill you their life secrets. I feel like you do get that sort of inside look at human psychology and you’re exposed to so many different people and so many different perspectives and so many different attitudes and you sort of get kind of an intuition for what makes people tick and how people are going to react to different things. So I think that’s one aspect of it. But the other aspect that I think affected me more is the hustle ability. Anyone that bartended through COVID knows how terrible that was. Not to promote the hustle and the grind because I don’t agree with that at all, but doing it for a short amount of time in your life I think does give you a little bit of grit and teach you stuff. And I think I translated that over into my writing career more than anything, like just doing the work.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. I think I took something similar. Uh, there’s, you know, there’s all kinds of ways to approach bartending or any work really, but there’s obviously there’s a time when hustle matters and obviously you can’t hustle 24 hours a day, seven days a week for your entire career. But there may be some really intense times where, you know, for a few months, maybe even for a few years, you require hustle. And I think, you know, while we’re mentioning it, because you talked about how, you know, you basically quit your job as soon as you had a child. Having a child is in a lot of ways, a 24 hour hustle, maybe not work, but it puts the rest of your life into a hustle mode in a lot of ways.

Meg Kendall: Yeah, absolutely. So I don’t want to frame that wrong. I didn’t quit my job right away. So I dived into copywriting for my 12 weeks of maternity leave because New York City is fantastic and those kinds of regards. I got maternity leave and so did my husband. But I did go back to work and I built up my copywriting career on the side. So that looked like

Rob Marsh: Even more hustle though, right? You’ve got to work hard while you’re working. You’ve got to take care of an infant.

Meg Kendall: Yeah, that’s not easy. Yeah, exactly. So it took me about six months back at my job before I could cut back down to part-time. And then another year after that, I was able to quit.

Rob Marsh: Okay, so let’s talk about how you found those first couple of clients. This is always a challenge for copywriters, especially as they start to move into a niche. I know you started a little bit broad before you really decided on climate tech and some of the things that you’re doing today. But how did you connect with people in order to get work?

Meg Kendall: Okay, so the first few articles I wrote, I was baiting people on Reddit. I was asking people if they had something that they wanted someone to write about and that I would write it for free. I know people don’t recommend that, but I was so new and I had no history or portfolio. And I knew I wanted to write for tech, but I didn’t know. I just didn’t know how to come up with a topic for myself that someone would want. And I wrote two articles for free. And those were my first portfolio pieces. And then from there, I went to Upwork, landed my first website copywriting job there, a pretty decent one. I think it was like they paid me like $1,700 to write their entire website, which to me, that seems really low now, but at the time I was like, this is great. I was so excited. I actually took the sales call in my office at my job in the Bronx school and took it way in the morning and locked my office door and then landed the client and was jumping up and down like, yes, I did it because I was so excited to get out of that job. Yeah, so first two articles are free. Then I landed a client on Upwork and then my next client I landed through LinkedIn.

Rob Marsh: And then obviously you started to move towards climate tech. I know you were in the accelerator and we talk a lot about niching and that kind of stuff, but what was the thought process there beyond the fact that you have this degree in botany?

Meg Kendall: For moving into climate tech? Yeah. So I really wanted to be involved in the world of sustainability and like doing the best that we can against the problem that is climate change. And then the tech aspect came, I think part of it’s a little bit nostalgic because my dad, when I was younger, he was a really gigantic tech nerd. And I know that he would be so flabbergasted and amazed at how far things have come today. So it just seemed like a really nice, like collision of worlds. So that’s what made me stick with it.

Rob Marsh: Cool. So one of the things that you’ve done that I think is really smart, and maybe this idea came while you were in the accelerator or shortly afterwards, but you wrote an industry report and used that to launch an email list. So talk about that, the thinking, what you did and why.

Meg Kendall: Yeah, the industry report is definitely one of the best things that I’ve done for my business. I did get the idea while I was in the accelerator. I think it came directly from you guys. I was like, that’s a good idea. I’m going to do that. But I didn’t do it by myself. So I had been friends with another girl in the climate tech freelancing space. Okay, so let me back up. I’d been trying to work on this industry report, right? Months are passing and I’m making a little bit of progress, but not that much. And I’m like, oh my God, how am I ever going to get this thing done? And then a girl that I had just had one coffee chat with earlier on in my career, I had reached out to her like, hey, just trying to make friends in the space. Are you up for a coffee chat? Et cetera, et cetera. It was a friendly call and that was that. And then a couple of months later, she reached out to me like, Hey, how’s freelancing going? I’m just feeling like I’d really love to have someone to work on some kind of marketing initiative with. I’m just looking for something fresh to do with my business. Things are getting kind of lonely and stale essentially. I was like, it’s so funny that you should ask because I’ve been trying to write this industry report for climate tech to further my business and help people in the climate tech space, but I’m just not making any headway on it. I was like, let’s do it together. And that’s what we did. We did it together. I mean, there’s so much that came off of that, but we built an email list and it’s spawned an entire business between the two of us. So yeah, the industry report really changed everything for me.

Rob Marsh: Go a little deeper into what the industry report was, because I think, you know, as we think about this stuff, you know, we’re always looking for the thing, right? And there’s a lot of advice out there. You want to keep it simple. You want like a one page checklist or, you know, I mean, there’s so many different ways to do this, but an industry report, I don’t hear that very often. And so, yeah. What went into that?

Meg Kendall: So we reached out to so many people, mainly marketers of climate tech companies, and asked them to chat with us. An industry report is so smart because you get to position yourself as an expert in the space, but also you get to talk to these people that you want to be your clients one-to-one and understand what challenges they’re facing and what they’re looking for and what outcomes they’re trying to achieve. So, yeah, we just reached out to people simply on LinkedIn, like, hey, we’re working on this industry report. We’re hoping for it to be a really valuable piece of content to bolster the climate tech industry as a whole. Would you be willing to chat with us about, like, the challenges that you’re seeing? What do you think is working in the space? Like, where are you getting your leads? That kind of thing. And we had a really good response rate. I’d say it was probably 50-50, but people that didn’t respond or people that were like, sure. Yeah, definitely. We’ll chat. Cause I don’t know. I feel like in climate tech, most people are pretty willing to help. Like we have a common goal, right? So everyone wants to be helpful towards that goal. Yeah. So we’d get people on these calls and ask them about their challenges. What have you seen that’s working? I just listed these things off already, but people were more than willing to talk. And a lot of it too, is they wanted to be featured in this report because it makes them look good. So it was pretty easy, you know, and you’re not just making an ask. You’ve also had something of value to offer them.

Rob Marsh: And do you give them a copy of their part when it’s done? Obviously you used it as a lead magnet as well.

Meg Kendall: Yeah, I did. So how we did it is we, after we did write the report, we’d send them the snippet that we included them in so they could like approve their quote and like get context for how we featured them. So they’d sign off on that. And then we were like, okay, when everything’s finalized, well, you’ll be the first one to get the report. We’d be happy if you shared it with your network. And most of them were very happy to share it with their network because, you know, they were in it.

Rob Marsh: And what were the results? Did you see clients immediately from that or how has that played out in your business?

Meg Kendall: The clients have definitely been a long game. We saw a bunch of, we got a lot of traction for it and we built an email list from, we still have a pretty small email list. We’re floating at like, we’re getting close to 400, but it’s still pretty small. But more than half of that was from that initial industry report. And we’re still getting people trickling in from that industry report today. And honestly, it’s funny. So we didn’t get many clients immediately, but we had a lot of great conversations and it was great for our own voice of customer research. But in the second half of this year, we’ve gotten more people reaching out to us because of that industry report than we ever did at the very beginning. So I would say it was a slow burn, but it’s definitely paid off for us in spades.

Rob Marsh: And I know you say your list is only 400, but a list of 400 potential clients is actually a massive list. You couldn’t serve 10% of them if they all said yes immediately, right?

Meg Kendall: Yeah, that’s true. And it’s so funny because at the beginning we were watching it like, wow, is this really happening? Because we didn’t know if it would flop or if it would work or what. And when we got to 100, we celebrated. And I think we both bought ourselves a coffee from our shared account or something like that. But now we’re like, oh, 400, it just feels so small because we haven’t been growing as fast as we want to. But in hindsight, it’s a lot of people for us, at least at this stage.

Rob Marsh: And do you have plans to do another one in the future or to renew it for the new year? Anything like that?

Meg Kendall: So originally our plan was to do one every year. I think our current plan is to sort of refresh the one that we already have and just update it for 2025. We did have plans. So I did tell you briefly that we’re expanding our audience to include corporates. And part of our plans for that did include doing a new report aimed at that audience. But I think it’s going to have to be more of a mid-year kind of thing because we’re a little, we’re treading water right now.

Rob Marsh: So yeah, let’s mention that because I think we were talking about that offline before we started recording. So just so everybody has context on that, the climate tech world that you had been serving is mostly startups. And there’s some challenges with that that are leading to the expansion of your niche. So talk through that a little bit.

Meg Kendall: Yeah, so climate tech is a fantastic space to be in, but it is startups. And then everyone knows that tech is going through kind of a funding downfall right now. And climate tech was immune to that for a while, but they are no longer. They’re not quite as down as the tech industry as a whole, but there’s still they’re down and they’re down and you can feel it. And yeah, so we’re trying to move away from only working with all these like pre-seed and seed companies and moving I think now we’re setting a standard. We only work with companies that have raised a series A, but also our interests are leading us to work with corporates as well. So we’d like to work with companies that have sustainability initiatives, and we’d like to help them with their sustainability reporting.

Rob Marsh: And obviously more established companies have more money to spend. They have marketing departments that you can connect with. So there are a different set of challenges, but it’s not necessarily moving away from the thing that you love, but expanding the potential clients you can help.

Meg Kendall: Exactly. Yep.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. Okay. So you briefly mentioned the coffee chat and the person that you have become a business partner with. Talk a little bit more about the development of that relationship.

Meg Kendall: Yeah. Yeah. So we just had that brief coffee chat. It’s so funny because just recently, we were like, who reached out to who? And we both remembered it the opposite way. She was like, I think I reached out to you. And I was like, I don’t think so. So we had to scroll back in our chats and see what the truth was. And we were both kind of right. I engaged her and then she was like, do you want to have a coffee chat? Anyway, so that’s how the marketing report came to be. We worked on it together for… It took a while. I want to say it took us a couple months because we were balancing our client work on top of that. And we launched it in January of this year. And we didn’t really know what we’re like, what do we do now? Do we keep working as like, co freelancers? Do we start a podcast? Like, what’s our next thing? What do we do with this? Like, do we make an umbrella brand? And we really went back and forth on it for a long time, because we were both very passionate about our flexible schedules and being able to take a long lunch break and not being beholden to someone else’s schedule and taking a vacation when you want to and not feeling stressed about it. So we stayed freelancers for a long time, but then we decided to like, hey, let’s do this thing because we’ve been working together side by side for so long and we know we get along really well and we share the same values and neither one of us is going to be like, oh, why aren’t you working right now? That kind of thing. So we just decided it would work and we went all in and now we have this shared Climate Hub LLC business. And yeah, we’re totally in it.

Rob Marsh: And how do you break up what you do? Obviously, you’re a copywriter. Is she also doing writing? Is she doing design work? Like, how does that work?

Meg Kendall: Yeah. At first, it made sense to us because I was more doing brand messaging and website copywriting, and she is more of a long-form content writer. I will say our skills really overlap quite a lot, which is textbook from what we’ve been reading in our business books, what you’re not supposed to do when you seek out a founder for a company. We’re aware of this and we know it’s maybe an issue, but we’re working it out. Yeah, we actually just had a consulting call with someone recently about how we need to really define our roles and how it doesn’t feel like it matters now, but it will as the company grows. Yeah, I think I lost the thread there a little bit.

Rob Marsh: I think that’s exactly right. I think there are opportunities for partnerships all over the place. And the way we structure them is pretty unique. I mean, sometimes it’s a full on partnership where you’re creating a business together. Other times, it’s a working relationship. And so it’s just interesting to see how yours has moved from that casual acquaintance to now you two are building a business together that could do some really amazing things with climate focused copy.

Meg Kendall: Yeah, it’s exciting. We’re really excited about it right now. We joke because it’s right now it is still just the two of us. We’ve dabbled in working with freelancers, but the idea obviously is to build a team, subcontractors to begin. But we’re definitely early stages.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about the kinds of projects that you do. What is the way that you engage businesses? What’s the typical project look like? How much are you charging? All of that stuff.

Meg Kendall: Yeah, so this is in flux. I feel like it’s always in flux, but the bulk of our work currently is content marketing. So we work with climate technology companies. A lot of them are software, but also more hard technologies to like direct. Lots of climate technologies, but usually we work with them on a lead magnet, such as a white paper, and then engage them to make blogs and social media content based off of that, which is called a hub and spoke model. That’s our main offer, I would say, but we also work with climate tech companies on their brand messaging and positioning website, copywriting, that sort of thing.

Rob Marsh: And when you engage, you mentioned, you know, you started working for free. Obviously you’re not doing that anymore. What’s the typical price point for you guys?

Meg Kendall: Yeah. So our minimum engagement start at $2,500 a month, which I actively think, I think that should be higher, honestly, at this point, but just this climate tech winter that we’re going through, we’re holding it steady for now. Um, but yeah, lead magnet starts at 2,500 on the low end and then, content starts at 750 at the low end, because it’s pretty technical content. So we engage with subject matter experts. And yeah, so lots of interviewing, lots of research goes into the piece. They take a while.

Rob Marsh: Yes. Not your typical blog post. I’ll read three other blog posts and rewrite something similar. There’s a lot of work that goes into it. For sure. Okay, so we talked about how you got your initial clients built up this client list or potential client list with the industry reports. Is that where most clients are coming from now? Or how does that engagement start so that you can go from, okay, they’re on my list, they’re interested in us, they know us, but now we want to actually start work.

Meg Kendall: Yeah, so it’s a mix. I’d say we get a fair amount from the newsletter. It’s funny because some weeks, so we send out the newsletter every week, and some weeks we’re like, why are we doing this? Because it’s work. But then the next week, we’ll get someone that’s like, I love your newsletter, and we’re looking for storytelling. Can you guys help? And we’re like, oh, OK, it is worth it. But it’s easy to forget week to week when you have a couple of quiet weeks. So yeah, I’d say it’s probably a pretty It’s a pretty even split between people that are nurtured on our email list and people that just find us inbound on LinkedIn. So that’s where most of our leads come from, I would say. We do do some outbounds, not a lot, we should do more. We should do a lot more than we do. And we get probably a small amount from our outbound as well.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, amazing. Okay, you’ve also developed a few frameworks. I know the frameworks may be changing as you are switching from, or as you’re enlarging your niche just a little bit. But I love frameworks. I love them partly because they demonstrate different things about a business, but they also set us apart from other copywriters, content writers in the space. So you’ve got a couple of them. Talk a little bit about how you came to develop. I guess the first one you built was the pedal framework. And then you’ve got four C’s and you’re working on yet another framework for this newer audience. But let’s talk a little bit about your thinking there.

Meg Kendall: Yeah, so I love the frameworks because it makes it so much easier to talk about what you do, and it makes it feel like you own a process, which I think clients really like because it makes it clear to them like, okay, hey, she’s done this before. She has a way for doing the thing that she does, and she knows that it will get results. The first framework I came up with was Petal. Yeah, it was very on brand for my individual branding. I came up with it. I went through Justin Blackman‘s brand voice special. I don’t know if that’s the right name for his signature brand voice program, which is a great program. I’d recommend it to anyone. I came up with it during that. to outline the way I approach voice, which was relevant to my brand messaging guides that I was offering at the time, which I still offer. I just don’t talk about the framework as much. I think it’s a little pedal’s just a little too frilly, I think, for my climate tech people today. Maybe not. That’s just the gut feeling I have about it. So I don’t talk about it as much, but I can. So pedal. Let’s see, what did it stand for? OK, so P was for pattern ease for emotion. T is for tone. A is for atmosphere and L is for language, as in like the brand language that you use to talk about things. So I’d go through each of those letters to sort of develop a brand voice and tone and like develop a brand language framework for my clients. And that’s what they would work within for their materials. So they could sound unique and resonate with their audience and all those nice things that we want our copy to do.

Rob Marsh: And then you also have the four C’s, which I think is the one that’s on your website today. And at least I find it there now. Yeah.

Meg Kendall: Yeah. I think they’re both on my website. The 4C Copy Canopy is a more general phased approach. I still use this approach. I just don’t talk about it in the same way. Actually, I think now my approach is a five-phase approach. The 4C Copy Canopy, the first C is Collect. That’s an audit of the client’s current atmosphere to see what’s working on the website. What does the brand voice sound like? How’s their positioning working? How does it fit in with the larger market? That’s collect and then phase two is cultivate. That’s where we go in and define the key messages. Their messaging pillars, we dial into the strategy and then figure out how to match those messages to each of their ideal customer personas. Phase three is compose and that’s where we develop and document the brand language system using the pedal framework, which is below it on my website, which I already talked about. Then phase four is communicate, which I say is how you get visible with your voice and message in the market and sort of bring that to scale so people can hear what you have to say.

Rob Marsh: I think what I really like about your approach here is the way that you’re using two kinds of frameworks. So the four Cs is more of a process framework, whereas the pedal framework is a little bit more of an idea framework or about the thing that you do. And you’ve put them together in a way that totally makes sense. is so different from the way everybody else talks about their business, even though what you do isn’t all that different from other copywriters. You do research, you do writing, you present to the client, you make changes, whatever. Like literally doing the same work, but the way you’re talking about it is totally unique to you.

Meg Kendall: Yeah, exactly. It’s really a marketing tool in itself and it makes you sound unique and clients find it impressive, I think.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I mean, that’s actually my next question. And clients find it impressive. How do you use them as you’re bringing clients on board? Do you talk about them before, you know, on a discovery call? You know, do you work it into a proposal? Like, where does it show up in your process?

Meg Kendall: I typically, I briefly mentioned it in a discovery call, I could probably use it more there. But mostly, I’d say it shines in my proposals. I reference, like, this is how I do it and this is why it works. And it looks nice in the proposal, too. So I’d say that’s where I get the most mileage out of it.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that makes sense. And like I said, it shows you off in a way that’s very unique to what other copywriters are doing. Let’s talk about where your business is going in the future. I know the tech world’s seen a little bit of a slowdown, so you guys are expanding, but what does the business look like next year, hopefully even two or three years down the line?

Meg Kendall: Yeah, so we love talking about this because it’s what we’re so excited about right now. We’re in the middle of a website refresh right now. I think hopefully it’ll be live by the time this episode goes live.

Rob Marsh: Fingers crossed.

Meg Kendall: Yeah. Fingers crossed. Yeah. Okay. So right now we’ve got our eyes set on continuing on in climate tech because we love it. It’s our zone of genius and the people in it are so fantastic. And I swear all my clients are the smartest people I’ve ever talked to. So we love that, but we’ve got our eyes set on expanding to corporates that are doing good sustainability work, or at least doing their darndest at doing good sustainability work because it is hard work. And we’d like to help those companies with their sustainability reporting. And that is so that’s more than just like a fully impact report, right? Because it’s this is going to become a compliance issue. Companies are going to have to start reporting on their sustainability. This is more relevant in Europe than it is in the U.S. today, but hopefully it will become relevant in the U.S. more than it is today. So for us, that looks like really understanding the regulatory frameworks and standards that these companies are having to report to. So that’s something that we’re both working on in our our very limited free time is credentials and these different kinds of sustainable finance credentials, accounting, all that kind of thing. Yes. So that’s our nearish short, nearish medium term goal is to help corporates with their sustainability reporting and helping them achieve compliance, but also using those reports, not as just like a data driven checklist, but as a narrative driven marketing asset. so that they get the best of both worlds. And then long term, we’d also like to bring sustainability consultants into the fold under the Climate Hub umbrella and help those companies that are doing their sustainability reporting actually reduce their emissions too. So our positioning would be like, Hey, we’ll help you report on this. We’ll help you use the support in your marketing initiatives. And while your stakeholders, as long as you’re actually doing the work, we don’t want to fluffify it. That’s our big thing. You don’t want to tell a story that isn’t right, but we want to tell a story that is accurate and still makes you look good. And then also our additional value add would be like, not only can we help you report on this and make it make you look good, but we’ll also actually help you reduce your emissions and make a tangible impact on improving the world for everybody’s futures.

Rob Marsh: That’s amazing. I love that it goes beyond just writing where you’re trying to help implement best practices, help share the story. Too many copywriters, I think, just get hung up on just doing the words like this is all I do is I just write the article or I just write the website and they don’t go the extra step to help clients implement whether it’s sales strategy, climate strategy, whatever. So I love that you guys are doing that.

Meg Kendall: Yeah, we’re really excited about it because we’ve obviously what we do right now. I feel like we’re doing good for the world, but I feel like with the direction that we’re going and we can do much more good than we are today.

Rob Marsh: So let me ask you maybe a strange question. A lot of copywriters, you know, we’re working alone in our offices or at the kitchen table or wherever we, you know, the coffee shop, wherever. What are some things that we can do to make our own businesses just a little bit more climate friendly?

Meg Kendall: Oh, good question. Well, we have writers at home at their desk have such a light impact to begin with.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I know. That’s kind of my initial thought is, well, maybe I can’t do anything other than turn off the lights and work in the dark.

Meg Kendall: Yeah, I mean, all of us could be doing so much more. So there’s like, I’m not sure if you’re maybe some of our listeners aren’t familiar with everyone, AI is all the rage, right? And it’s a very powerful tool. But my goodness is the energy consumption of AI, such insanity. And now that it’s replaced people’s Google searching, I’m not good at keeping statistics off the top of my head. But it’s something like one Google or one AI prompt is equivalent to some ridiculous amount of water used. Don’t quote me. Look it up for yourselves. But the energy use is insane. So I think the best thing people could do with their online businesses is probably being mindful of their AI use. Not to say not to use it. I use it. I think it’s a very powerful tool and it makes me more efficient and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I’m a big fan. Things like that. And people talk about this a lot… the carbon footprint of your website, that’s something you can think about. But again, I don’t want to shame anyone’s personal actions because there are so many bigger fish to fry out there when it comes to the climate crisis. But yeah, all of us could be doing more. Have a vegetarian day, et cetera.

Rob Marsh: There you go. Vegetarian day is maybe where I’ll start. Less meat today. We’ll see. So as you were answering some of these other questions, you mentioned a couple of different programs that you’ve invested in. And this is something that I admire about you is that you’re always looking to learn and to improve. I mentioned you were in our accelerator, you were in the think tank for a while. What’s your philosophy there? And why do you do that?

Meg Kendall: It’s obsessive. It’s a good question. My husband would probably like to know as well, too. I think that it’s important to always be learning and there’s always things you can improve on. And quite frankly, I get bored if I’m not working on something new or learning some kind of new skill. And I just think it’s I don’t know, maybe I’m a bit of a personal development freak. I just think it’s good practice and it keeps me from getting sad, I think. So, yeah, maybe it’s a tick. But yeah, it’s so nice to meet other people that are also investing in these courses because they have the same, not the same values, but the same yearning for more, I guess is how I would put it simply. So yeah, it’s just a great way to meet people and keep your mind sharp and keep doing better in the world.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I mean, I’ve talked about this maybe 100 times on the podcast, but this has always been a game changer for me. I’ve almost always been in some kind of a mastermind. I still invest in programs and try to learn from things. I was on a call yesterday with somebody that I met in a mastermind that both of us were not in that particular mastermind anymore. We were sharing, oh, who are you learning from right now? Or what’s the thing that you’re working on? And having those kinds of relationships This isn’t even a question. I’m just confirming what you said. It’s a total game changer for business.

Meg Kendall: It really is. It makes such a difference. It makes things less lonely and it gives you a sort of a sense of accountability too. Like right now I’m eager for another, like we’re ready for another business coach. You know, like someone that knows more than we do. That would be great. Any day now. But yeah, yeah. I’m a continual learner and investor and yeah, I can’t help myself.

Rob Marsh: It’s a good place to be. You mentioned the impact of AI, but let’s talk a little bit about how you’re using AI in your business to help you make more progress or to do things faster. What are your two or three favorite tools and what are you using them for?

Meg Kendall: I use chat GPT the most. Someone just introduced me to perplexity and I cannot believe that I didn’t know about it. I mean, I don’t know that much about it yet, so I don’t have that much to say. I just saw someone quickly show me on a screen and I was like, that’s amazing. That’s a cool tool. It’s a really good tool. So I plan on investigating that more, but mostly I’ve just used chat GPT and Claude. I used to be way more wowed by Claude than I am by ChatGPT. But in the recent weeks and months, I am seriously impressed by the output from ChatGPT. like to a point where I’m a little scared and nervous because just in the last year, it just seems to me like it’s improved. So maybe I’ve gotten better at prompting and like feeding it better context, but the stuff that it puts out these days, I’m just really wowed. Okay. But to answer your question on how I use it. So honestly, for most of my clients, I have a giant conversation ongoing and ChatGPT for each of my clients that understands their brand voice and has been fed like all the content that I’ve previously written for it. And it helps me outline, you know, sometimes it helps me build out full sections because it’s trained very well on my writing and all of their background. And it’s an incredible tool. It terrifies me every day.

Rob Marsh: All of them seem to be getting better. And yeah, it’s good to use them. They definitely move our businesses forward. Good to be aware of the changes as well so we can stay ahead of them just a little bit.

Meg Kendall: Yeah, I will say I had sort of written it off for a while there. Like I dabbled and explored when it was, you know, for such a rage and I was like, I just don’t really see how it’s that. I don’t know. It didn’t excite me, but over the last few months I’ve been using it again and I really am impressed by the improvements I’ve seen.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, same. So we also briefly skipped over this, but you basically launched your business with a newborn. I think your child is a couple of years older now, but you’ve done all of this as a mom of a very young child, high demands. How did you balance your time? How did you find the time to even work on your business with all of that going on in your personal life?

Meg Kendall: Yeah, so I think about this, and then I think of other moms that have multiples, and I’m like, how do they do that? But I’m sure you just adapt as your life changes, and that’s just how it goes. But to answer your question, let’s see. So I’m very lucky in that my husband – well, lucky, it’s a double-edged sword. My husband and I have opposite schedules. So he is a manager at a cocktail bar, so he works evenings, which means that he can be with Charlie while I work during the day. My day usually gets cut off by three or so. So that helps a lot because we don’t have to pay for daycare or anything like that. I don’t know what we would do if our schedules were not opposite. Beyond that, I wake up very early and I make sure that I get my exercise and my breakfast in before anyone else wakes up. It’s not really a time management thing. It is though. It’s like a mental management thing, which makes me able to handle my time much better. This is thanks to my business partner. I’m also a recent Cal Newport fangirl.

Rob Marsh: Okay.

Meg Kendall: I finished his deep workbook and just listened to a really long podcast from him on, uh, the Huberman lab. And I am actually, I’ve got his planner right here, his time blocker planner. And I will say that has made a big difference in the way I approach my day. I feel so much more accountable and I get so much more done. And it’s just like, there’s when you take the guesswork out of your schedule, it really, it really changes things. So I would say that’s a recent development, but it helps me a lot because my day really is short and I had to fit it all in before I switched to, two and a half year old duty at three o’clock.

Rob Marsh: So let me ask you about that, because it’s one thing to buy a planner. It’s one thing to say, I’m going to do all of this stuff. And it’s another thing to have the discipline to do it. Now, obviously, there are a few forcing factors in our lives that, you know, force discipline. The mortgage payments do or, you know, I do have to do child care at three o’clock. And so therefore it has to be done by three. Some of that stuff helps. But how else do you find you adding discipline into the various things that you do so that you make sure it gets done. Instead of picking up the phone to scroll and suddenly it’s 30 minutes later and the only thing you have accomplished is that you’re angry about the election or whatever.

Meg Kendall: That’s exactly what that accomplishes too.

Rob Marsh: I know. Me too. I’m speaking from experience here.

Meg Kendall: Oh my goodness. Yeah. So the phone thing is actually a recent huge focus of mine. I’m really trying to tackle that addiction. I haven’t completely broken it. Everyone has it, right? But I will say I’m markedly better over the past few weeks. As for how to maintain the discipline, I’m not sure. I just think I do think that I lean – I’m pretty good at having it in the first place. I don’t know if I have a secret answer to it. I think that I beat myself up if I don’t do the things that I tell myself I’m going to do and then I don’t like how I feel when that happens. Not that I’m perfect. I do end up beating myself up about things quite often but I think – I mean that’s my best motivator. I’m like I can either do this and feel good at the end of the day or I can not do the thing I told myself I would do today and then be really hateful of myself in the evening. And no one wants to do that. So that’s my driver.

Rob Marsh: Being aware of that feeling, I guess, it is a good way to maintain that discipline for sure.

Meg Kendall: Yeah, I think I relate it to exercise. So someone told me this a long time ago. I’ve been a pretty regular yoga practitioner for most of my life. And something someone said to me once is like, you may not want to go to yoga class, but how many times have you ever left yoga class and regretted it? And so that’s how I view my workouts in the morning when I don’t want to get out of bed. And that’s how I view my work, too. I’m like, I’m not going to be mad that I finished this thing that I set out to do today.

Rob Marsh: I’m exactly the same way with running. In fact,  I run four or five times a week. I actually don’t like running, which is a little ironic because that’s the thing. I do it because it’s easy. It’s quick. You know, I can get out in 10 minutes or whatever. But I love having run like the actual running part. I hate it. I hate it until maybe the fourth mile when maybe you get a little bit of that, you know, kick in of the runner’s high or whatever. But I love the feeling when I’m done—that I have run.

Meg Kendall: Yep, exactly. It gives you such a feeling of accomplishment. I can’t agree with you that running is easy because I hate running.

Rob Marsh: I don’t think it’s easy to run. I think it’s an easy exercise. So the other thing I love doing is getting on my bike. But by the time I put on my kit and check the tires and you have the light on the bike and it’s cold or what, you know, it’s just so much easier to go for a run.

Meg Kendall: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

Rob Marsh: So Meg, if you could go back and talk to, you know, Meg, I don’t know, 2018, you know, as you started exploring and thinking about copywriting, or maybe it’s a little closer to 2020, what advice would you give her in order to help her, I don’t know, make more progress more quickly or, you know, have an easier time of it? What do you think you would tell her?

Meg Kendall: I think one of the things I would tell myself is to get over your fear of networking. because I’m still not great at it and it’s still not my favorite thing to do. I love it while it’s happening. When I’m in conversation with someone, I’m like, this is great. This is why I scheduled all these coffee chats for this week, but I dread the time leading up to them. When I was an early freelancer, I was like, am I going to be able to do this? I’m not a super social person. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make the connections that I need to do. I would think I would go back and encourage myself to get over it and do it anyway, which I did eventually, but I would have wished that I did it sooner.

Rob Marsh: Takes a little bit of time sometimes just to figure it all out. Okay, Meg, if somebody wants to find you, follow you, maybe check out your industry report, get on your list, all of those things, where should they go?

Meg Kendall: Yeah. So you can find everything that I do at theclimatehub.co. And you can reach me via email at megattheclimatehub.co, or you can find me on LinkedIn, which is my only active social platform.

Rob Marsh: Amazing. Thank you so much. I appreciate your time.

Meg Kendall: Yeah, thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure.

Rob Marsh: Thanks to Meg for sharing so much about her business, creating an industry report, partnerships, frameworks, and so much more. If you want to connect with Meg, you can find her at megcadmell.com. She has her information about her business, everything that she’s doing there. You might also see her popping up on social media occasionally. We’ll see how that all goes. 

I really like this idea of industry reports as a way to generate almost instant credibility with your ideal clients. In fact, we like it so much that we have a couple of our own industry reports for copywriters and content writers. One of those is our pricing survey where we ask more than 500 copywriters about the projects that they work on and how much they charge for each of them. You can find that report broken down into three different articles on the blog at thecopywriterclub.com if you want to check it out. There’s also an opt-in there on those articles if you want to download a free PDF that has all of the information that we gathered for that report if you want to keep it handy when you’re trying to figure out prices on various projects that you might be working on. 

We also created an in-depth 32-page report on how to find clients. One writer that we shared it with said that it was more helpful than a course that he had taken on the same topic. Each of the ideas in the report have been proven successful by other copywriters that we know personally, and if you decide to get your own copy, I’m certain that several of the ideas will work for you. Several of them work for me, so I know they work. You can find that report at thecopywriterclub.com/findaclient. Find a client’s all one word. Forward slash find a client. It’s free, so be sure to check it out. 

But getting back to my point about building credibility with industry reports, it takes work to put them together. A good report is something that you can’t just write in one afternoon. You need to gather information and hopefully talk to several experts in your industry in order to produce one. You’re looking for trends and new ideas and insights that you can share. But if you do that work, these kinds of downloads tend to be far more valuable than an ordinary lead magnet, and they will help you attract clients to your business. got a report that you’ve produced. I’d love to see it. So send it to me when you have a moment. 

 

For the 423rd episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, we’re checking in on the progress A.I. has made over the past year with Jon Gillham, founder of Originality.AI. We talked about how originality helps protect writers from false accusations of plagiarism and checks facts (unlike ChatGPT and Gemini), plus some of the risks that A.I. poses to the world of content creation. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

Stuff to check out:

Get the AI Bullet Writing Prompt
Originality.AI
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

 

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  Almost two years ago, we realized that A.I. was not just a new idea that copywriters and content writers needed to pay attention to, rather it was a game-changing technology that would impact almost everything writers do. The number of new tools and features that include use A.I. to deliver their benefits is in the thousands. That’s a big part of why we launched the A.I. for Creative Entrepreneurs Podcast last year. You can find more than 20 conversations about A.I. on that podcast.

But as A.I. has become almost commonplace, we stepped away from doing so many interviews about artificial intelligence and just how it is changing our industry. But I’m thinking it’s about time we checked in on how the tech has changed over the past few months and what copywriters should be using it for… if they aren’t already doing it.

Hi I’m Rob Marsh and on today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, my guest is Jon Gillham, the founder of Originality.AI. This tool is the most accurate A.I. detector available today. What’s more in addition to checking for content created by A.I., it’s a fact checker—something tools like Gemini and ChatGPT have struggled with, it checks for plagiarism, and will help protect you against clients and others who might claim your writing isn’t original. We talked about how they do it and the risks A.I. continues to pose for writers on this episode, so stay tuned.

Before we get to that… last summer we ran the last ever live cohort of The Copywriter Accelerator program. Since then, the only way to get the business building insights and strategies that we shared with more than 350 copywriters over the past seven years was to join the Fast Track version of the accelerator at thecopywriterclub.com/fasttrack. But I’ve been working on an updated version of that program and it too will go away soon. So if you’ve been thinking of joining the accelerator, time is running out. What’s coming next? It’s too soon to reveal what I’ve been working on, but if you join the accelerator fast track before we launch it, you’ll get early access to the new program, absolutely free. Until then, you get all of the content, the 8 modules and blueprints and several bonuses that are included in The Accelerator Fast Track. And when we launch the new program sometime next year, you’ll get that updated program too. Don’t wait to work on your business so when the new year is here you have a steady flow of clients and a signature service you’re proud to offer them. Visit thecopywriterclub.com/fasttrack to learn more today.

And now, let’s go to our interview with Jon Gillham.

Hey, John, welcome to The Copywriter Club Podcast. We’d like to start with your story. So how did you become the founder of Originality AI, and I guess also the co-founder of AdBank and Motion Invest and Content Refined? You’ve done a lot of this company starting thing.

Jon Gillham: Yeah, it’s been a journey. Yeah, so my background was as a mechanical engineer, did that in school, and then I always knew that I wanted to get back to my hometown and started some sort of online projects. A lot of those projects all had sort of a central theme around creating content that would rank in Google, get traffic, and monetize that, whether that was an e-commerce site, a software business. And then at one point, we built up some extra capacity within the team that I had of writers that we were working with, and then started selling at extra capacity. So built up a content marketing agency, sold it, and then had seen the wave of generative AI coming. look to build a solution to try and help provide transparency between writers and agencies and, and clients. And that’s where originality came from.

Rob Marsh: So as far as most people’s experience with AI, it really started about two years ago when, you know, ChatGPT went live and suddenly everybody was like, oh my gosh, this is not what we were expecting, or it’s come along a lot faster. But you’ve been doing this a lot longer than that. Tell us, you know, basically, how did you get interested in AI and get started with creating these kinds of tools?

Jon Gillham: Yeah, so I totally agree. I think a lot of people sort of assume everything on the internet that predated Chat GPT was human generated. But the reality is that there was other tools that predated Chat GPT. Specifically, there’s the GPT-3 that got released by OpenAI in 2020, and then sort of from GPT-2 2020, and then From that, there were many writing tools that were built off the back of it, so tools like jasper.ai. And we were, at one point, one of the heaviest users of Jasper, where we had a writing service where we transparently used AI content, but stalled that content for a lot less than the human-generated content in another part of the content agency. And so that was where we really started to see that the efficiency lift that came from using AI and then, you know, who who gets to capture that efficiency if is it, you know, the writer that copies and pastes out of chat to BT that then displaces a writer that did hard work on their own. And that was sort of where, where we first started playing with AI. And then yeah, using it extensively within our content marketing agency.

Rob Marsh: So before we go really deep on AI and the stuff that you’ve done, I’m interested, as a founder, as a co-founder, just what are some of the biggest challenges that you have faced as you’ve started your businesses? Again, we’re talking to an audience of people who are running their own businesses, most of them. So I’m just curious how you’ve been able to succeed where so many others tend to fail.

Jon Gillham: I mean, there’s certainly failures in there. So they’re not all successes. So I think the common theme is when we’re solving it, the common themes on when there’s success is probably two core things. One, that resolving a problem that is meaningful and adding sort of significant value by helping to solve whatever that problem is, is one. And the second piece is when there’s been a really good team around that project, when the co-founders on it are great, when the initial hires are really, really good. Those are probably the two key things that have seemingly been the common traits when the projects have gone well, and there’s certainly projects that haven’t gone well, lots of failures in there as well.

Rob Marsh: Interesting you say that. I worked at a startup a decade or two ago. the CEO that came in to run it. It was a fun environment, really great place to work. We had a successful exit, sold off to HP. And I remember the CEO saying, if you’re lucky, you get to have an experience like this sometime in your career where you put together a great team, you’ve got a great product, you have this great experience. And then he said, and then you spend the rest of your life trying to replicate that at the next company or the company after. And there’s a lot of truth to that.

Jon Gillham: There’s a lot of truth. In a lot of our weekly meetings at the All Hands right now, we’re saying, like, you know, these are currently the good old days. So, like, enjoy them because we’re going to be looking back at this, like, hopefully we will be fortunate to be lucky enough to be looking back at these days as the good old days, because it is a lot of fun right now. And I think, yeah, I certainly echo what he was saying in terms of, yeah, it doesn’t, a lot of things need to go right to line up with sort of a, all the pieces to be in that sort of like a scaling stage of a company.

Rob Marsh: Okay, so let’s talk about Originality AI and this tool that you have built. Basically, my understanding of it is, you know, as I’ve scanned through and checked it out, it does a few different things. You know, checking to see if there’s plagiarism, if some content was written by AI, some additional things as well. To me, this seems incredibly useful for a couple of different audiences. One, I teach a college class at one of the colleges here. I’m always using AI checkers. As I see submissions coming in from students, I’m like, that’s suspicious. Let’s run it through the checker. But obviously businesses hiring content writers, copywriters want to see that their stuff’s original. Problem is sometimes the checkers don’t work the way they’re supposed to. So tell us about originality AI and the problems that you’ve been solving with it.

Jon Gillham: Yeah, so the problem we started out to solve and being from the world that we were in within content marketing is a content, a final step in the content quality check. So kind of a final QA, QC on a piece of content. And so historically that might mean readability, readability check, plagiarism check. Okay, we’re good to go to publish it. Now that means Checking for if it’s been generated by AI or not, and we’ll get into some of the challenges around that. Plagiarized, if it is or isn’t. I mean, no one plagiarizes anymore when you can just get AI to write it for you. And then fact checking. So we have a fact checker built in because that’s sort of a new an increase in heightened sensitivity around fact checking with the prevalence of generative AI content and hallucinations. And then some of the standard readability checks, grammar, and spelling checks. And so we aim to be that complete content quality QA QC step so that somebody can be really confident. We say hit publish with integrity, where they can take a piece of content, make sure it meets all the requirements, and then hits publish. Some of the challenges we talked about, AI detectors are highly accurate, but not perfect. And so the same way that the weather is meant to use AI and it gets it right a lot of the time, but also gets it wrong to some extent. AI detectors are similar, where they’re a classifier that aims to try and predict whether or not it thinks this piece of content is AI generated or human generated, and then it makes its best prediction, gets it right, calls AI, in our case, if it’s just sort of a straight chat GPT output 99% of the time, but it will get, it’ll call human content AI one to 3% of the time, which works in certain settings, doesn’t work in other settings, academia being one where really it’s impossible to apply sort of an academic disciplinary action with a false positive rate above 0%.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. It strikes me too that there’s certainly, because of the way AI is trained on human writing, at least originally now, I think there’s more AI training data in the actual database, but the way it was trained, there’ve got to be one to 3% of humans that write the way AI is right anyway. They’re boring writers, or they have the cadence that we tend to see get picked up, or they use those same cliches that we tend to see a lot of. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense to me that those writers are going to come up as AI because well, AI has been trained to look for this stuff.

Jon Gillham: Yeah. I mean, so it really produces a very, by definition, it’s like all this data has gone into it all in this massive training set. And then it ends up producing, I mean, you can ask it to produce this sort of range of outcomes of like, hey, write write a Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in the style of Dave Chappelle, right? That’s gonna be a pretty unique piece of content that doesn’t look like typical AI content. But there’s certainly some ticks to AI content that we feel like we can pick up on. But yeah, there are definitely some people that have a style that is very similar to sort of the base style of most LLMs. And it can be extra frustrating for them because they end up getting false positives at a higher rate than somebody else might.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. So are you saying that, you know, if I have AI write something and I try to spice it up by saying, you know, write like Dave Chappelle or, you know, make this humorous or silly or something like that, originality is still can pick that up at 99 to 100%. It can still tell that it’s written by an AI.

Jon Gillham: Yeah, so that’s the big difference between a sort of a human’s ability to detect AI and like an AI’s ability to detect AI. Human’s ability, we can get fooled very easily. We have sort of a couple cognitive biases that are working against us. We have an overconfidence bias, and then we have a pattern recognition bias. So if you ask a room who’s an above average driver, 80% of the room puts up their puts up their hand. And, you know, the stock market and casinos are sort of built off of this sort of humans capability to think that they see patterns when they actually don’t. And so in all studies, the sort of humans ability to detect AI is like 50 to 60% accurate. And it gets worse when you apply these sort of prompts that make the content more unique than this than the straight sort of like, recognizable chat GPT kind of content. Whereas AI detectors are picking up a lot more signals than what humans are capable of identifying. And its accuracy stays very high in 99% for even the most sort of challenging prompts for a human to try and identify.

Rob Marsh: So how do you solve that problem? What does your tech do that’s not being used by everybody else?

Jon Gillham: Yeah, so other detectors have in all benchmarks were the most accurate, but there’s other detectors that are close. The sort of unsettling thing in whatever AI system exists in the world, it faces some of the same challenges, where if you ask Chachapiti or the makers of Chachapiti and say, why did it respond like that? They struggle to answer. They can talk about the training data, they can talk about the training method, but they can’t say why it responded like that. And in a similar way, our detector is picking up on patterns that we don’t No. We understand how we trained it. We understand the efficacy test that we put it through. We understand the benchmark test that we put it through. But we can’t say this piece of content was identified as AI for these reasons. And I wish we could, but that’s just not how AI works.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, so this is part of the black box trouble that leads some of us to think that maybe AI is doing stuff in the background that we’re not even aware of and will someday take over the world.

Jon Gillham: Exactly. It is an unsettling experience to create something and not understand exactly how it works.

Rob Marsh: Are there other challenges around then AI generated content and identifying it that we haven’t chatted through or hit on?

Jon Gillham: I think some other challenges related to AI content is around, I think, a lot of a lot of editors used to sort of use the quality of the content as a tell on whether or not they needed to go deeper on fact checking, usually sort of like factually accurate information was also well written information. And what the sort of the challenge that generative AI is produced is that that that sort of trigger for this, this does not feel like a very well researched topic. and article is no longer the same problem. Whereas now, really, really well-written, grammatically correct written AI-generated content, it can also be very factually wrong through hallucinations and having just made stuff up, but convincingly so. And so I think that the capability to to the level of intensity that needs to be applied down to fact-checking of all content because where generative AI has sort of poisoned the content is, it becomes harder to understand in today’s sort of environment with generative AI.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. So some examples of that might be if you’re, well, you could be writing, say a paper for school or something where you’re saying, Hey, give me 10 sources for this particular kind of an idea or a scientific study or something like that. Or if you’re writing content for a client, you might be looking for, you know, five real life examples of this particular marketing thing that happened, you know, that, and then the LLM will just hallucinate two of the five. It’ll just make it up. Sounds real, but they’re not. So how do you guys fix that? Because it seems like you’re using an LLM that’s making stuff up. How do you make sure that it can tell that it’s making stuff up?

Jon Gillham: Yeah, so we… AI can… There are very few settings, very few times where an AI or an LLM can achieve the level of sort of perfection that is needed in a lot of environments where you need sort of a 99.99% sort of accuracy rate. And fact-checking is no different. But what LLMs are great at is going out and assisting humans in that process. And so we created a fact checking aid that goes out, looks at a piece of content, identifies all the facts in that piece of content, and then goes out to the web and trusted sources, pulls in a bunch of information, And then makes a judgment on whether or not that statement is actually potentially true or potentially false, and then provides a bunch of sources that human editor can go to and and and investigate further. And so it’s access sort of a. Back check me that provides its judgment but it’s judgment will be wrong cuz i get it wrong and the ones that first use the problem but it produces a lot of efficiency for an editor that is already gonna do that process where they need to take a piece of content identify a fact. Go out. source and try and understand what is what is the truth, and and what is sort of the truth that they’re that they’re within the context of the of that article, and then share it, it can produce some pretty sort of what feels like some pretty magical answers at times where An article might say the boiling temperature of water is 90 degrees Celsius when everyone’s like, no, of course it’s 100 degrees Celsius, but it will call it true if the context of that article is mountain climbing at a certain elevation. So it’s like, given the context of this article, this fact that water boils at 90 degrees Celsius at this elevation is true. And it can feel like a magical response where it’s like, you understood the context of this entire article, the elevation that was mentioned above, or even the base camp or the camp that was mentioned, and then it references the elevation and then provides the right answer. So that can feel like a pretty cool

Rob Marsh: Eight in the fashion process but it does get things wrong at times sure so yeah it would it would identify maybe outlying situations that we wouldn’t necessarily be thinking of off the top of our head that are true. and it could pull some of that stuff in. So let me give you maybe, this is probably a ridiculous example, and I’m obviously asking you to maybe predict how it would figure this out, but I’m assuming you’ve heard the very famous quote that’s all over the internet that is, you can’t trust everything you’ve read on the internet by Abraham Lincoln. So if you were to try to source that, obviously there are literally thousands of pages that have that on the web. Would the AI pick that up as false or would it, because it can identify all of these sources out there, do you think it would not be able to identify that? Which again, it’s ridiculous because as humans, we all know that it’s a ridiculous quote, but I’m curious about that.

Jon Gillham: I think I think it would it would answer it as potentially some I’m guessing on how to answer it. I think the the sort of So I think it would struggle with that because it depends on the context of that statement. The statement that you just made, if you worded it as a common statement is, and then what you just said was factually true, that that is potentially a common statement that is shared all over the internet, attributed to Abraham Lincoln. But then I think so I think they like true or false binary classification, it would struggle with that because in certain in certain settings that is a true statement like what you said was true, that is a common statement that is shared on the internet. but where it would really shine is in the sort of description of why it made that judgment, where I think it would do a really good job because there is such a rich history of that, that there would be a really good explanation to say that this is used as an, you know, they would word it better than I could, but it’s like, this is used as an example of how you can’t trust the internet, depends on how this would be used. So I think it would provide a pretty useful explanation I’m not sure how it, whether or not, I think I’ve read a very accurate and helpful answer, but I don’t know how it, whether it would be true or false because it was, I think there’d be cases where that statement could be made and it’d be a true statement depending on what came before it.

Rob Marsh: That makes sense. I think this is maybe one of the areas where AI still really struggles or LLM struggle. And that is context shifting, you know, where things are one way in 80% of contexts, but in 20% of contexts, it’s different. And as humans, we’re really good at reading the context and changing the meanings and the machines just aren’t quite there yet.

Jon Gillham: Yeah, agreed.

Rob Marsh: OK, so that’s fact checking. And then it also checks for readability. These are tools we’re pretty familiar with because Grammarly has been around for a decade, tools like Hemingway, that kind of thing. Are you doing anything different, or is it sort of similar to what those tools are doing?

Jon Gillham: Sort of similar. One thing that’s different is we try and sort of look at, We try and apply sort of, there’s a level of science to sort of content that sometimes gets applied, sometimes doesn’t get applied. In the case of readability, if you were to sort of search before, you know, what is the optimal readability score to write for the internet? And it depends on, again, kind of your audience comes first. But when we looked at it, there’s this really clear distribution using a few specific scores around top ranking articles in Google. And it did not coincide with sort of the prevailing wisdom of like right in an eighth grade level, period. But what we’ve been able to see is like these scores, these certain scoring mechanisms, the flush concave reading ease, matches up to a really nice normal distribution around certain score ranges that exist in the top 20 results within Google. So if you’re trying to create content that will rank on the internet, you should rank you should try and aim to create content that has a readability score within this range, because that’s what the rest of the top ranking articles do. Now, obviously, there’s outliers, if you’re writing for, you know, intense medical sort of then sure, if you’re writing for children, sure. But that’s what we’re doing that’s different is sort of, instead of just providing sort of a non-data backed recommendation on a reading score, we have built our tool specifically for people that are publishing content on the web, and then we have sort of identified the best tests to use for the readability score, and then the best scoring range to be in where say we sort of break it down by distribution. So like is it one standard deviation, two standard deviations away from the average?

Rob Marsh: That’s really cool. And so does that do that by topic or do you have to tell it the audience? Like how does that identify?

Jon Gillham: Yeah. So it’s general, so it’s, it’s across all the topics that we looked at. And so we we provide the graph and and sort of we provide that range. And then you can pick what what your audience on whether you should be on the sort of upper end of that range or the lower end of that range, it’s unlikely you should be way off that that range on the readability score, unless you have a really strong reason to, if you’re trying to rank your if your primary audience is to The primary objective of that piece of content is to rank on Google and get traffic. We provide this range from six to nine, and based on your audience, you can adjust within that range that you think you should be.

Rob Marsh: Okay, yeah, like I said, that feels really incredibly useful actually, especially for a writer who is writing across different niches or industries, you know, maybe addressing different audiences. Does the tool also then make suggestions? Like here’s how you can dumb it down or smart it up as part of that?

Jon Gillham: So it will identify sentence by sentence, which parts make it challenging to read. So which parts have made it sort of, if it’s like, Parts of the writing that are at a very high level, it will identify those parts. If so, it can provide guidance on dumbing it down, making it easier to read, cleaning it up. It provides guidance on that on a sentence-by-sentence level. It doesn’t provide guidance in the other direction.

Rob Marsh: Okay. Yeah. And so it’s not actually rewriting, which seems like it would defeat the purpose of having this be an AI checker in the first place.

Jon Gillham: We’re wrestling with that topic because the same thing on grammar and spelling where we have some users that would love a sort of a fix all issues button, but then it will trigger the AI detection. And then, so we’re wrestling with that, because maybe there’s a use case there. But we got to really figure out how we don’t confuse users. Because, yeah, I think them clicking inside of an AI detection tool, a button that says fix all issues, and then it detects as AI, which would potentially be a confusing user experience.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that seems to be one of the triggers for a human writer is that there are actually some errors in it. I mean, that’s certainly something I see with my students in the class that I teach. And maybe this is where those 50% human misidentifications start happening. But if I see a couple of grammatical errors, I’m like, oh, OK, yeah, this is clearly human written instead of AI.

Jon Gillham: Unless they added that to the prompt.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Please add three misspellings so that Rob Marsh doesn’t figure this out. Yeah. So what else is a tool doer? What’s the next evolution going to be?

Jon Gillham: We want to help publishers publish content and be as successful as possible by publishing that content. So trying to help them understand that the content will perform well within Google. So we have some interesting take on sort of content optimization. We have that in the works, which we’re really excited about on sort of current method around content optimization tools. I don’t know if you’re familiar with them like Surfer SEO or Market Muse or ClearScope. They look at the top 20 results and then do this sort of like, I’ll call it like dumb math and just sort of say, these are the keywords that you should include. I think there’s a smarter way to do that. And we’re testing that. And we’re excited for what’s going to come with that. And then any job that a copy editor does. So we try and sort of be that tool to help copy editors do their job far more efficiently and effective. One of those jobs that they do is need to make sure that a piece of content meets the editorial guidelines of a company. And so whether that’s always spelling this word a certain way, that might not be sort of the standard that standard sort of spelling, every sentence being or every paragraph being no more than three sentences, you know, whatever those editorial guidelines for company might be active voice, passive voice, whatever, you know, all that all that kind of stuff, trying to provide this sort of editorial guideline compliance component, where so an editor can sort of put in a piece of content, click a button in our tool, and then understand exactly how that piece of content matches up against each of the things that they need to check for AI plagiarism, fact checking, grammar, spelling, readability, editorial compliance with their company’s guidelines. And then ultimately, is it going to perform well in Google, since that’s a lot of what our users are using it for. So that’s, that’s what’s coming.

Rob Marsh: So I see a copy editor might want to use that basically to do 90% of their job, and then they can take the output and do a quick read through. It could save themselves a lot of time. I suppose a writer could do that as well to reduce the need for as much of a copy editor, or a client may be interested in doing that on the client side just to double check everything.

Jon Gillham: Yeah, we see a lot. So we see that the whole value, like we’re building it for the copy editor, but we’re seeing that whole value chain from the writer using it up front to make sure it sort of meets those requirements, because they know what they’re being judged against. And then the end client using it as well to say, am I ultimately getting content that meets my expectations? And so a lot of AI has caused a lot of problems in the world. in the world of writers. And one of the biggest problems has been the sort of lack of trust that has bubbled up around what they have done, they haven’t done, and what the expectations are on writers. And so we’re trying to be a tool that provides transparency between, from the client to the, you know, whoever’s in the middle, editor, agency, et cetera, to the writer that’s gonna get paid fairly for their work. So yeah, generative AI has definitely created a lot of challenges. Writers being a big, facing more of those challenges than probably any other industry. And hopefully we’re AI on sort of the good Terminator as opposed to the bad Terminator in this battle.

Rob Marsh: So, you’re kind of hinting at it, but one of the challenges that a lot of writers have had is they write something, they submit it to the client, the client runs it through an AI checker, it gets a false positive. The writer, you know, is, hey, I wrote this whole thing. So, you know, the trust is gone there. In order to fix that, is this something, would you recommend copywriters, content writers should have the tool or would I recommend this to my clients? You guys ought to get originality, get AI, run it through that because that will show you that it’s my copy.

Jon Gillham: What’s the dynamic there? First, false positives happen. We know that, especially at the volume that we’re running content through, and we understand how much it sucks when a writer gets falsely accused. It’s really tricky right now. So we’ve had, I’ll share a couple quick quick asides, but we had a writer writing for originality. We obviously use our own tool. And they swore up and down that they had not used AI. We then we have a so we have a free Chrome extension that lets people visualize the creation of a document.

Rob Marsh: And so it takes I can follow it can follow the change, the change tracking in a Google document.

Jon Gillham: Yes. So behind that change tracking, there’s a ton of data, there’s character by character, your metadata inside of a Google document. And then what our free Chrome extension does is it pulls that out, and then can create recreate the writing experience writing process. And if you see this sort of like, cut and paste minute cut and paste 1000 words, do one writing session 15 minutes per 1000 word article, And it hits it 100% on probability for being AI detected. I’m pretty confident that that was AI detected. So in our case, we had a writer. And when they swore that they hadn’t used AI, went into the Chrome extension, and then ultimately admitted that they had used AI. and so where they wouldn’t we coach them up on it and maybe still work with them and they don’t. So what do I recommend writers do is to use create the document in a Google document use a free Chrome extension like ours that will show the creation process. And then use a tool like Originality to know if they’re going to have a challenge, if it is going to be a false positive, they can show the client that they truly created that content themselves, and they can get fairly paid for it. The sort of The world I fear for writers is a world where there is zero protection against other people using AI. And I think there’s, you know, there’s a lot of really world-class writers, but AI can’t write the equivalent of now. There’s a lot of writers that it can do a lot better job at writing than it can write a lot better than I can. It can write a lot better than some writers that I’ve hired in the past. And those individuals are extremely at risk of their job being replaced. And based on the sort of the progress of AI, I think most writers are going to be at risk of their job being replaced by AI if there isn’t any kind of effective defense against saying what is human and what is AI.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, so maybe leaving the world of writing in AI, I don’t know if you’ve got thoughts on this, but where do you see AI going just more broadly? A lot of people, I mean, writers, obviously there’s a little bit of a threat there to our livelihoods, especially if we’re writing at the bottom half of that writing scale. We don’t have an original voice of our own that’s really difficult to copy or that we’re not able to write for our clients and their voices. Obviously, there’s risk there, but what about beyond writing? Do you see AI as a threat to the human race? Where are we at?

Jon Gillham: I would have answered differently probably two years ago or a year and a half ago. What we have seen is our detection. When we first launched, we thought GPT-4 would come out and we would no longer be able to detect content and that would be it. And we’re just enjoy the last few years of humanity before AI takes over. We all become paperclips. Yeah. Yeah. But what we have seen out of LLMs is that there has been this plateauing around intelligence. If we look at the leap from GPT-3 to 4 to kind of now, it’s, you know, this could age really poorly. But what we’re seeing is this plateauing around the capability of tools. And then we’re seeing this closing in the gap of our detection is better now than it has ever been, despite there being far more advanced models. And so my sort of And we’re seeing all of these open source models sort of closing in on the closed source models. 

And the way that what’s sort of what’s happening now is like, additional additional features are getting added. So it’s like the brain is already there. And sort of the analogy that I like to use right now is like, a spreadsheet is a pretty simple piece of technology. But the world would shut down if no one was allowed to use a spreadsheet for a day. Because it is sort of so pervasive into so many pieces of business operations. And I think it’s going to be similar-ish trend where I think there’s going to be a lot of people that do get displaced. Developers, writers, graphic artists are all at risk. I think it’s going to be hopefully a a force for sort of expansion of GDP, and then the creation of additional jobs and, and companies that used to need 20 people now need five people. And therefore, there’s, you know, five more, five more companies or more companies. So I think I’m optimistic. But I do think there will be disruption along the way.

Rob Marsh: I mean, disruption is not new. It happens every few decades, certainly every century or two. So this may just be the next big disruption. But until that really gets underway, tools like this are really helpful in protecting the things that we do as writers. So John, if people want to check out, well, first of all, the Chrome extension, is it also called Originality? Or is there a different name for it?

Jon Gillham: Yeah, so if you search originality.ai Chrome extension, it’s available.

Rob Marsh: Okay. And then obviously, originality.ai, where else can people go to connect with you or to find out more about, you know, how you think about this whole problem?

Jon Gillham: Yeah, happy to connect with anyone, anyone that’s sort of facing challenges around false positives. We’re always eager to sort of help guide people through that challenge. You can connect with me at John, J-O-N at originality.ai, or find me on LinkedIn.

Rob Marsh: Awesome. I appreciate your time and just talking through all of the stuff that is going on here because yeah, it is a challenge and there’s so many cool tools that can make this easier and better. So thank you for that.

Jon Gillham: Thanks Rob. Thanks for having me.

Rob Marsh: Thanks to John for helping me understand a bit more about the latest changes that we’re seeing in the world of artificial intelligence. You should definitely check out originality.ai at originality.ai. Obviously, AI has presented a challenge for writers over the past couple of years. We’ve seen a lot of clients shift their content plans to using more AI tools instead of content writers, and that has not always resulted in better content or copy. Many of them have changed back since then. There are, however, copywriters who are doing some pretty amazing things with AI. 

So what’s the difference? Well, they’re putting in the time to learn and use the tools. Originality, like I said, is definitely worth checking out, but it’s not the only tool you should be trying. You should be trying tools like Clod and ChatGPT and LeChat and writing tools like Writetoon. You should be using the AI features that are in tools like Notion and Hemingway and even Google Docs. This stuff is important. And if you want to be a copywriter or a content writer for more than the next year or two, you really do need to know how to use these tools. If you haven’t gotten started already, you can get my AI bullet writing prompt completely free at thecopywriterclub.com/aiwriter. 

It’s a pretty in-depth prompt that will help you write pretty amazing bullets, headlines, and subheads for your emails, for your subject lines, for your sales pages, however you want to use it. You can get that again at thecopywriterclub.com/AIwriter. 

 

Starting and growing a copywriting business isn’t easy. So when we find a writer who seems to have figured it out, it’s worth taking a closer look to see what’s going on. So for the 422nd episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I asked Megan Smyth to share more about her business and podcast and how she’s gotten so many things right as she’s grown. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

 

Stuff to check out:

The Copywriter Accelerator Fast Track
Megan’s website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

 

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  One of the things I love most about what I do at The Copywriter Club is the opportunity I have to see copywriters grow in so many different ways. They get better at writing. They build and develop amazing businesses that support the lifestyle they want—sometimes that’s something as dramatic as a full-time, six-figure business and other times it’s a part-time gig that helps pay some of the bills. And for copywriters who already have a business, it’s fun to watch them change and update the way they market themselves, create products, and find their ideal clients. Honestly, it’s a big part of why I do what I do.

Hi I’m Rob Marsh and on today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I talked with copywriter and launch consultant, Megan Smyth. As you’ll hear during this interview, Megan is one of those copywriters who has made big changes to her business over the past couple of years. Megan’s a pre-med student turned copywriter and the business she’s created will inspire anyone who is just starting out or is ready to make a change—heck, I’m inspired by the progress she’s made. So stick around and listen to what Megan has to share about how she did it.

Just a quick note… on this episode, we’ll mention The Copywriter Accelerator program that helped jump start Megan’s business and brand creation. That program is no longer available—at least in the format that Megan participated. However, we’ve taken all of the content, the 8 modules and blueprints and several bonuses and repurposed them into what we’ve called The Accelerator Fast Track. This version is designed to help you get results even faster. If, as you listen to us discuss that program, you are interested in how it might help you and your business, simply visit thecopywriterclub.com/fasttrack to learn more.

And now, let’s go to our interview with Megan Smyth.

Megan, welcome to the podcast. Tell us how you got started. How’d you become a copywriter, a course creator, now doing some coaching as well? You’ve come a long way.

Megan Smyth: Yeah, doing all the things. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. I’m very excited to be here. It’s an honor to be on this show. It’s one of the very first podcasts I started listening to on this journey. So, you know, if we’re talking about how I got started, very first copywriting and business podcast I ever listened to was yours. And I’ve learned so much from you and Kira. But yeah, so to kick it back, I did not grow up dreaming of being a copywriter. I’ve yet to meet anyone that even knows what that was at a young age. My plan was to be a doctor. So I studied pre-med in university, and I realized about halfway through that something was just not right. I was enjoying it, but not as much as my friends around me in the program. And I was sort of on this fast track to success. It seemed like I had it all figured out. I was in this great program. I was applying for early admission to med school and all these things. And there was just this voice in the back of my head that was like, this is not it. Something’s not right. And so when all of my friends in the program were writing the MCAT over the summer, I took the summer off and I booked a one-way ticket to Thailand. And that was sort of my escape plan. Rather than tell everyone that I was having these doubts, I just left the country for three months. Just ran away from my problems, which is what you do at 19 years old. And I was just not sure what I wanted to do. I thought med school might not be it, but I wasn’t sure what the other options were. And so I thought I would use this time to do some soul searching. I went to Bali. I did the whole thing. And I realized on that trip, what I really wanted to do was travel. That was a big motivator for me. I wanted the freedom to be able to work wherever I wanted to see the world and meet new people and have new experiences. And so I started looking for a career that would allow me to do that and stumbled into copywriting because I’ve always loved writing. And I just really fell in love with it from the beginning. I loved the sales aspect of it and the psychology aspect of understanding how people think and why they make decisions. And I started copywriting while I was still in university. And then I, you know, had a couple of clients on the side. I left my day job pretty immediately after graduating, which I don’t recommend. Just don’t head first into the whole thing. The same year I graduated, I was like, I’m going all in on this business. I launched a website as you do and waited for clients to just magically find me. They did not. And then in January, the next year I joined The Copywriter Accelerator and that is when things started to take off for me.

Rob Marsh: So when you first launched, obviously this was before the accelerator or whatever, how did you get your first couple of clients? I mean, how did you even have the guts to say, I’m a copywriter, not knowing anything about it?

Megan Smyth: Yeah, well, I didn’t. That’s a great question. So I applied for this job that I randomly found while browsing the web for things to do online, how to make money online. And someone had posted this job, and she was looking for actually a blog writer. And so that was how I started. And she was, at the time, yes, she was running a blog, but she was also running launches for her. She was a coach. And so slowly over time, I was watching her launch, and I had ideas and suggestions for how she could get more people in this program. And so she sort of brought me into that world of launching. And I ended up working with a seven-figure coach as my first client, just sort of out of the blue. I was 19 years old, I had no experience. And so there was a bit of luck involved, but I had the guts to apply to this job. And I basically said in my application, I have no experience, I have no qualifications, but I am willing to work so hard and I think I could do this. I think I could make a difference in your company.” And she took a chance on me and to this day I’m very grateful for that. That sort of got my foot in the door and I just sort of gained experience as I went.

Rob Marsh: I love that you had the guts to go for it because most of us, especially 19, 20 years old, most of us would be like, Oh, well, you know, I’m not qualified. And I think more, even more women than men, oftentimes we back up and, and aren’t willing to step forward and say, well, I might not be qualified, but I’m willing to give it a go. So I love that approach.

Megan Smyth: Yeah. Thank you. I was just going to say that I think a big contributing factor was, you know, I almost didn’t apply for that job, but I, in the back of my head, I remembered reading the stats somewhere that, you know, men will apply for jobs if they only meet something like 40% of the qualification criteria, whereas women don’t apply unless they have a hundred percent of those things checked off. And I just thought, screw that. I am not going to contribute to that. I’m going to apply. Cause the worst case scenario is they say no. And, you know, I tried to put myself out there and it worked out.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, it’s amazing. And it’s probably should be one of the big takeaways from this episode. We’re only a couple of minutes in and go for it is the lesson there. So you got into the copywriter accelerator and then you started to make some changes to your business. Talk about that and the thought process that went into deciding where you were going to focus your time, the kinds of clients you were going to serve, the kinds of services that you wanted to offer.

Megan Smyth: Yeah, so by the time I joined The Copywriter Accelerator, I had been writing copy for over a year at that point, and I felt like I was getting really good at that side of things, but I still wasn’t really treating it as a business. It was really hard to get out of that side hustle mindset when it had been a side hustle, you know, when I was in school, and then I had a day job working in medical research at the hospital all day, and it was hard to transition just my mindset around that. Now I suddenly had full-time hours that I could give to my business, but I had no idea what to spend that time on. And so, you know, in the accelerator, we learned all the different aspects of running a business. And that was when I started to really think through like, what is my marketing strategy going to be? How am I positioning myself? What is my branding? All of these things that sound like really basic, but you know, again, I was 20 years old and I had planned to work in the medical field. I had no idea what I was doing in business. It was all new to me. And I just, I loved it. I just kind of soaked up everything from Yunkira like a little sponge. I was like, how could I get the most possible out of this experience?

Rob Marsh: Yeah. And, and then you’ve now you’ve launched a lot of stuff. So who did you ultimately decide to serve and what kinds of services did you launch with as you came out of the program?

Megan Smyth: Yeah, so when I initially was in the program, we played around with niching. I was, like I mentioned, I started, my very first client was a coach and I loved working with female business coaches. And so I did a lot of work in that space, but towards the end of the accelerator and, you know, in the years that followed, I actually changed my target audience, actually widened my niche, which I think is less common. Everyone talks about, you know, go as narrow as possible. And for me, working with just female coaches felt like a bit like putting myself in a box. And so I widened to what I now call, you know, purpose-driven brands. So women who just really want to make an impact, whether that is in the coaching space and serving people that way, whether it’s, you know, sustainability focused, they just have this sense of impact and, you know, positive change that they want to create in the world. And my job is to, you know, give voice to that brand and help them amplify that impact.

Rob Marsh: So are you still doing launch copy or does it run the whole gamut?

Megan Smyth: It runs the gamut. I would say I specialize in launch and sales copy. So I call myself a sales copywriter. It is mostly launches and evergreen funnel copy. However, there is a fair amount of brand messaging involved in that because a lot of times people come to me for one thing and they end up realizing they do need clarity on their overall brand positioning as well. And so I really become like a long-term partner for my clients, like through launches, but also, you know, through their brand evolution and, and all of that. So I do work on a variety of projects, but specialty is sales.

Rob Marsh: It feels to me like you bring a lot of marketing strategy into it as well. I mean, even as you talk about how you engage with your clients, you know, where you’ve got to figure out, okay, what are the missing pieces? What do they need? So what’s your approach there as you, you know, as you sign up a client, how do you bring strategy to the initial call so that you’re actually helping them do more than just write copy?

Megan Smyth: Yeah, so I realized pretty early on that great copy is useless without a strategy behind it, as much as that pains me. But my very first projects, I would write, let’s say, sales page copy or emails or something like that. But without that strategy, the clients either weren’t seeing results or they weren’t implementing them in a certain way. I had all these ideas to share on how they could potentially improve that strategy. And so strategy is a part of the conversation from day one. I don’t do any copy projects that don’t involve the strategy piece. It’s just like a non-negotiable for me that I’m going to be involved on that side of things as well. And so I transitioned, I would say right outside the accelerator around that time was when I started doing consulting as well. And so now that’s sort of like the baseline for me is I will either do just consulting, just the strategy, and they can hand it off to another copywriter. or I will do both, but I will not do copywriting without the strategy.

Rob Marsh: So what does a project look like then? As a client shows up at your door, you know, I want to work with you, Megan. I’ve got, you know, I’ve got to launch a product or I’ve got, you know, some other need. Step us through how that looks from your standpoint and how you would engage a client.

Megan Smyth: Yeah. Great question. So as soon as they inquire, I’ve got sort of a pre-call nurture sequence that takes people through like a little bit of what my process is and what makes me different, you know, testimonials, that sort of thing. So that we’re kind of set up going into that call. We’re on the same page. And then we get on a call and I kind of put on my, my old doctor’s hat and I try and diagnose what the real issue is that they’re coming with me. I’m not trying to like pitch them on a certain service. I’d like to go into those calls with an open mind and really figure out what they need to get the results that they are looking for. So for example, I just had a I just booked a project with these two business partners who are launching a product in the new year and they came to me wanting funnel strategy and copywriting, but they weren’t even sure which copywriting assets they needed. They weren’t sure if they need a new sales page, no email funnel, all of that thing. And so I walked them through the process of what that would look like in terms of research and strategy. And like I said, I always start with that. And so we have now signed on for that like base launch consulting package. And once we map out what their funnel is going to look like, then we enter phase two, which is copywriting.

Rob Marsh: And when you’re mapping for somebody, are you doing that before you start the project? Is it a paid service? Is it part of your research process to basically put together that whole strategy map for them?

Megan Smyth: Yeah, so the way that I structure it is the strategy is sort of a separate package. Like this is our baseline package. We’re gonna do launch consulting. We’re gonna map out that strategy together. That is the paid package. And then copywriting is like an additional service on top of that.

Rob Marsh: Okay, cool. And then what? Then what happens? How does the project go?

Megan Smyth: Yeah, so after the copywriting phase, essentially, they will take the copy and implement it. And I am there sort of as their partner throughout that, you know, to answer questions, to help them, you know, connect with a designer or whoever else they need on that project. And once they launch it from there, then we’ll do a debrief to gather all the data, analyze it, and continue to optimize for next time. The goal for me when I’m working on projects like this, whether it’s a live launch or a funnel, is to create something that is not just going to generate sales once, but to create a system that they can use over and over again in their business and set them up for long-term success.

Rob Marsh: You’re creating assets basically for them that they can use long-term. Okay, so I want to ask about money. When you first started out writing those first few blog posts, about what were you charging per project?

Megan Smyth: Oh, $20 an hour or something like that. Yeah.

Rob Marsh: Okay. All right. Fair for a 19-year-old college graduate.

Megan Smyth: It felt like a ton of money at the time. I was like, I have made it. I have arrived. And I will also say, I’m Canadian, and so $20 US was more than I was making, I think, at my hospital research job at the time. I was like, this is amazing.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. All I have to do is just fill in the 40 hours and I could be rich. Okay. So compare that to what you would charge on a project today. How has that changed?

Megan Smyth: The minimum project price for the consulting alone on a launch project is 3000 US. So yeah.

Rob Marsh: So big changes.

Megan Smyth: Not even in the same, yeah.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. And I mean, now you have the potential to make more than a doctor would make in some cases.

Megan Smyth: I do. It’s funny you say that. My goal since starting my copywriting business has been to make more money than I would have as a doctor. I was going to be a trauma surgeon, so setting a high bar there, but working half the hours or less. That’s the goal.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. Fewer gunshots to attend to. Well, you’re a cannibalist. There probably aren’t very many of those, but fewer car crashes to attend to, more words, more money.

Megan Smyth: Yeah, exactly.

Rob Marsh: Okay. Well, you’ve also added some other things to your business besides just the copywriting projects. So you have a course that I think is going to become a membership at the beginning of the year. Talk about that. I think as I was going through your site and seeing all the things you’ve added since the last time you and I were able to chat, you’ve got like the Firestarter framework. And so, yeah, I want to hear all about this.

Megan Smyth: Yeah. Okay. So where to start? Well, I’ll start with the course sales liberation. So you mentioned that what I do for my clients is I like to create sales assets that I can use over and over again. And so I have put that framework into a course for people to do the same in their business because that’s what I did in my own business was create these revenue generating assets. And it’s, I think, you know, a missed opportunity for a lot of service providers, especially they were asking me like, how are you growing your sales this much while working fewer hours? I only work like part-time hours, but I am able to make a full-time income. And so obviously people were like, how are you doing this? And I started sharing more about that. I was like, well, instead of, you know, creating fresh content every week, like I’m not a big social media person. I don’t want to be posting every day or engaging every day. And so I started thinking, how could I create that same leverage in my own business that I create for my clients? And so that’s where the Firestarter framework came from. And part of that framework is creating those long-term assets. And that’s what I built my course around to help people do as well.

Rob Marsh: So talk about some of those assets that you’ve built that attract those clients.

Megan Smyth: Yeah, so it’s different in every business. In my own business, it’s different for the copywriting side and the course side. So in the copywriting side, I have things, like I mentioned, my pre-call email sequence. That does a lot of the heavy lifting for me. Everything from my inquiry form on, it’s very structured to do the selling for me so that my job is easy when I get on sales calls. It doesn’t require a ton of time. writing these emails from scratch for every new lead. They have, you know, the inquiry form qualifies them. Then they go through this email sequence that sort of positions our call for success. Like I mentioned, testimonials, it walks them through the process, frequently asked questions, all the things that would normally come up on calls, that all takes place in an automated email sequence. So by the time we get on a call, they are pretty much ready to go. Very few questions. And then, you know, the proposal, contract invoice, that’s all automated and templatized. It’s all got a nice automated system for it. And then once they are clients, I of course have a process like for retention and referrals and all of those things. So a lot of different systems going on in my business. And then in terms of assets, like on the course site, it’s a sales page and an email funnel and that’s it. It’s simple.

Rob Marsh: So, and when you launched your course, did you have a big list? How did you promote the course in order to bring people in?

Megan Smyth: No, I did not have a big list at all. I want to say like less than 200 people, like very small email list at the time. I did promote it on email a little bit on Instagram, not so much. I think the key was having written so many other launches, I knew what I was doing on the email marketing front and so I had very high conversions on the emails that I was sending. It was a two-week launch sequence and I had a freebie going out before that. I sent out a free email sequence for two weeks and that was just very educational, very value packed. It started lining up, you know, overcoming objections and all those things. So that was sort of my prelaunch runway. And then another two weeks of sales emails and that was it. I essentially sold it only on email.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. Through to your 200 person list and you basically fill your course. That’s awesome. That’s yeah, that’s amazing. And, and since then you’re now thinking about turning the course into a membership. What’s the thinking there?

Megan Smyth: Yeah, group coaching. So I realized that people were, you know, they were getting great results from the course, but so much of it is meant to be customized. It’s very much like choose your own adventure course. It’s not like, you know, here’s what I did and here’s the exact template you have to follow. There are lots of templates for you to choose from, but as I mentioned, every business is different and I wanted to get people, you know, the flexibility and also the space to ask questions and say, look, how does this apply to my business? What do I do in this instance? and that sort of thing, not to mention all of the mindset drama that comes up when we talk about sales and selling ourselves and marketing our business and all the resistance around that. And so I really came to the conclusion that people would be better served through a group coaching program and to have access to that community and to that support. And so we are relaunching in the new year with that coaching element added.

Rob Marsh: So we can pop on your email list and be ready for that in a bunch of weeks when that comes around.

Megan Smyth: Yeah, exactly. You can watch if you’re just curious what that email sequence looks like. It had like a 40% conversion rate from the freebie to the paid course. So if you just want to watch someone, I personally as a copywriter like to watch other people’s launches and see what they’re doing in their emails. I do the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. So if you just want to come spy on me, that’s cool too.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. Well, I’ll be hopping on your list to make sure that I’m part of that launch when you’re ready to go. Okay. So you’ve got serving your clients, you’ve got the course that’s becoming group coaching. What else is going on in your business?

Megan Smyth: Great question. What isn’t going on? I feel like there’s always so many things happening, but I would say the group program is my main focus at the moment. I am taking on fewer copywriting projects to make space for that because I do have a one-on-one coaching upgrade. and I have one-on-one coaching clients at the moment as well. And so I want to make sure I’m serving everyone to the highest capability and not taking on too many different things. So I am stepping back from copywriting, have very few projects that I take on on that side to focus more on the coaching side of the business at the moment. And I would say that’s where my my number one priority is. I’ve also got a podcast. I’ve got a lot of other things going on. And so I want to make sure that I’m not spreading myself too thin and that I’m prioritizing serving the people who are already in my space.

Rob Marsh: Now, let’s talk about your podcast. I’ve listened to a couple of episodes as you’re out there. Why did you decide to launch a podcast? And it’s not really a podcast about copywriting. It’s more about this broader marketing world, basically serving the clients that you have. So yeah, talk a little bit about that.

Megan Smyth: Yeah. So the purpose behind the podcast was I was having a lot of one-on-one conversations, both with like coaching and consulting clients and just with friends in the online business space. Some were copywriters, others were, you know, designers, photographers, coaches, all kinds of different niches. And there were so many conversations that we had where, you know, people, the general consensus was, and these were all women. Um, but the, because as we talked about something that was like, you know, difficult or challenging, it was going on in our business. And someone would say to me, like, Oh my gosh, I’m so glad you said that. I felt the same way, but I’ve never heard anyone say that before. Or like, I’m so glad you brought that up. I’ve been going through the exact same thing. And I just thought, why are we not having these conversations out in the open? Because entrepreneurship can be a really lonely journey, especially in the online space. And so I wanted to create a space for people to have those open and honest conversations about the good times and the bad times. you know, the challenges and how we overcome them. I’m a very honest and blunt person. And so I wanted to kind of challenge people to talk about that stuff, like, you know, the money issue, and, you know, what you do in a slow season, and all of these things that I felt like weren’t being talked about. and to have those hard conversations. And so that was the original purpose behind the podcast. And it’s grown and evolved from there, but I would say it’s not a ton of educational content. It is more so people being honest and sharing their stories and knowing that we’re all on this ride together.

Rob Marsh: I think part of what I like about your podcast is how it dovetails with the branding on your website, which also feels like, maybe it’s not meant to attract men so much, but it feels like kind of a girls group, like welcome to, like let me put my arms around you and be part of this club that I have. And so, you know, it fits, I mean, again, the kinds of conversations that you’re trying to have fits with that vibe in a really big way. I’m guessing that was intentional.

Megan Smyth: Yeah, absolutely. The podcast is called Blaze, and that comes from the word trailblaze. I feel like we were all sold this idea of there being one right way to do business. In the coaching industry, especially, people are like, I have this blueprint here. Take it and follow it. This is how you do things. You have to do this. You have to do that. posts on social media. You have to grow your email list. You have to do this and you should do that.” And I was really tired of that. And I just wanted to give people the opportunity to share their stories. Because like I said, I was having these one-on-one conversations and the understanding that I was getting was like, there is no one right way to build a business or to do that. You can do things your own way. You can do them differently. And here is this incredible community of women to show you what is possible.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I endorse that a hundred percent. Obviously you went through our program, which is all about, you know, figuring out your way to do the thing that you want to do. But there’s way too many people out there selling the blueprint or the way. And so I think that’s probably why even me listening to your podcast really resonated, you know, some of that messaging there.

Megan Smyth: Yeah, for sure. That’s my messaging around selling as well is that so many people I talk to, they hate selling themselves, absolutely dread it. When I did market research before launching my course, that was the number one word that came up. I would say, when you think about marketing your business or selling yourself, what comes up for you? Everyone was saying dread. I was like, this is a conversation we need to change because I do believe there is a sales and marketing strategy out there for everyone. And it might take some work to find it. You might have to do some experimentation. But how can we find a way to make this work for you? Because if you don’t enjoy it long term, that’s not going to work for you and your business. And so we want to find a way that feels fun and sustainable. And there are so many different ways that can look. And so I love being able to showcase that on the podcast as well.

Rob Marsh: I think, yeah, looking for things that you dread is a great way also to find problems to solve for clients, right? If they dread it or, I mean, and it’s not just a copywriter thing. I mean, I dread doing the books. I dread taxes. I dread, like, I hate even opening up the bank account. I just want to know there’s money in there. Like, I avoid all of that stuff. And so, yeah, like identifying those kinds of problems that people dread is probably a copywriting, not really a secret, a great thing to look for when we’re looking for problems.

Megan Smyth: Absolutely. Yeah. Bookkeeping was the first thing I outsourced to. I feel like on that one.

Rob Marsh: Okay. Well, let’s talk a little bit about your brand, because it’s very different again from what you started out with. And I kind of already said what at least it feels like to me, but when you went to, you know, create this visual look for your website and the messaging on your website, uh, what was the process and what were you trying to convey?

Megan Smyth: Yeah. Okay. So I’ll start with what I was trying to convey and then I’ll walk you through kind of how we brought that to life. But the, the sort of vision for the brand was when I started my business and even before that, you know, just growing up, um, and watching the business space, like as a little girl, I would watch dragon’s den, which is basically our Canadian shark tank for American listeners. I would watch these business conversations and pitches. And it was a very like male centric environment, at least back then there was one female dragon on the panel and she was always being interrupted and spoken over. And it was just like a very male environment. And so that was what I grew up watching. And I, as a little girl, internalized that and I never even considered business as a career path, like never had entrepreneurship in my future. was not on my mind at all until, like I said, university and much, much later. And even then when I came into this space, there was a bit of the old pushy sales tactics as well. It was very old school boys club kind of vibe. And I wanted to shake that up a bit through copywriting and through this conversation around sales and the way that the sales industry is going in the online space. I think we’ve seen that shift in recent years from the pushy tactics don’t work anymore. No one wants that. in their own business. It’s not working on consumers either. And so I was like, let’s change that conversation. And so I had this vision in my head of Like I said, that old school vibe, the boys club, and the visual concept that I worked with a messaging strategist and a designer. The messaging strategist is one of my friends from The Accelerator, so I can thank you for that connection. We worked together to come up with this visual concept of a woman walks into this bar, this old school bar in Edinburgh, Scotland. That was the pitch she gave me. It’s very specific. She walks into this bar. Yeah. And she’s the only woman in the room. And she walks in and she goes up to the bar and she orders a scotch neat. And everyone just kind of sits up and takes notice. And it’s like, this is her place now too. And the fact that she’s there kind of opens the door to other women to be there as well. And so that was a very high concept pitch for this. And thankfully, I had a very talented designer who took that and turned it into beautiful visuals as well.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. And then as far as the messaging that goes along with that, I’m assuming you wrote the messaging. Yes. Maybe I’m wrong about that. I don’t know. And so what is the thing that you’re communicating there that’s backed up with the visual?

Megan Smyth: Yeah, so same thing in the visual. Some of the pitch concepts from that messaging that I worked on, like I said, I did write the website copy myself, but I had a lot of help from my friend from the Accelerator, Kristen of Cursor and Ink. We can give her a shout out. She worked with me on the strategy behind the messaging. And so some of that did make its way right from the strategy document onto the website and homepage, especially the concept I just mentioned of the woman in the bar. I think that is still a line on one of my website pages. And, you know, just this vibe of like shaking things up and, you know, burning the old sales playbook and writing our own rules, that’s really heavily featured in the messaging. All the fire imagery that’s, you know, out now on the podcast and the course is just kind of this common thread throughout of, you know, we’re here to make some noise and make some change as well.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I think before we started recording, I mentioned that when I saw your website, saw all the things that you were doing, it just was one of those things where I’ve got to have Megan come on the show because I wish I could take people back in time and show them where you were, you know, three and a half, four years ago, you know, before you started in the accelerator and then what you’ve done since because I think it’s amazing and I admire a lot of the the work that you’ve put into creating that business and the way that you’re showing up in the world is, I just think it’s phenomenal.

Megan Smyth: Thank you. That means a lot.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. Okay. So all of this is set up so that you can work part time, so you can travel. So how’s that working out? How many hours do you work and what are you doing with the rest of your time?

Megan Smyth: Great question. What am I doing? I’m chilling a lot. I am learning very slowly. I realized recently that I came to the conclusion, you know, I never learned how to relax like in my entire life. I’ve always worked multiple jobs at a time, like all through school and everything. And I am slowly but surely carving out more time for just relaxing and for hobbies, time with family and friends, getting outside, all of the things. But I would say I work anywhere from 10 to 25 hours a week, maybe 30 max, depending on what I have going on on that season. If it’s busier with client work, launching the course obviously takes extra time, things like that. But I have been able to travel a lot and to really enjoy the places that I visited. That was my big thing is I didn’t want to be in these beautiful places and be stuck indoors on my laptop. I wanted to get out and explore and I’m so grateful I’ve been able to do that.

Rob Marsh: So what are some of your favorite places you’ve been able to travel to?

Megan Smyth: I would say, okay, so I was in Greece for two months earlier this year and the entire time was just like an absolute dream. Total bucket list destination. I timed it right with the time zone difference between Canada and the US and Greece because I got to go out all day and spend all day exploring and wandering through olive groves and exploring ancient ruins and then in the early evening, I would come on and have a couple of calls, do a couple of hours of work, and then just kind of wind down in the evening and just enjoy my time. And that slower European pace of living was just so good. And I’m so excited to get back there.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. I’ve been to Greece. It was a long time ago. It was basically backpacking as a student with one of my friends, like I said, a long time ago. It’s definitely one of the places I need to get back to.

Megan Smyth: Yeah.

Rob Marsh: So beautiful. So in order to make all this happen, do you have a team that supports you? You mentioned you outsource your bookkeeping. Is there anybody else that you’ve got that is helping you run all of this stuff?

Megan Smyth: Yes. I do outsource. Actually, my bookkeeper is my sister. She was my very first hire. I have outsourced quite a bit to her. She started out just doing the books and she’s become my complete operations manager. She handles all of the system side. She’s very organization minded. To have her brain on that is so helpful for me. We’re opposites. I’m the visionary, creative, And she’s like, let’s bring that back to earth. Like we’re going to make a plan. We’re going to make a strategy and do all the things. And so she really is like my right hand woman and I could not do this without her. And so she’s become more and more involved in the company. And then I also have VA who does podcast editing and helps with a few other like marketing admin tasks. And so no, it is not just me.

Rob Marsh: Amazing. So what’s next in your business? I know you’re, you’re launching the group coaching. Anything else that’s coming up to be excited about?

Megan Smyth: I would say that is the main focus. Like I said, at the moment, I am just beyond excited to launch this program again. I’m really excited about the workshop I’m hosting, going into that launch as well. I know the purpose of a workshop or a webinar is to launch the course. It’s part of the launch, but I’m honestly just really excited for the workshop aspect and to deliver free value there, whether or not people buy the course, because the workshop is centered on what we just talked about. that’s creating a full-time income on part-time hours. And whether that’s because people want to travel like me or they just want more time with their family or to focus on their health or whatever it is, I’m really excited to share kind of behind the scenes of how I’ve done that and how I’m helping my clients do that as well.

Rob Marsh: So since you’ve ended up on a very different path than the one you thought you were going to be on when you first went to university, What advice would you give to teenager you, maybe 20-something you, that would make a difference in the pathway that you’ve chosen?

Megan Smyth: Yeah, I would say stop worrying about what everyone else wants. do your own thing. And that kind of is the message, like I said, of my brand and the podcast and all that as well. But back then I was so caught up in I think other people’s ideas of success, hence studying medicine. That was very much an idea that was kind of planted in me from other people. It was like this idea of what a successful career and life would look like. And it took a lot of time and I think introspection to think, well, what do I think a successful life looks like? And it turns out it wasn’t med school. It was completely different than that. Turns out all I wanted to do was, you know, be creative and travel and, you know, help more women make more money in their businesses. And that’s my dream. And your dream doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s. So I would just say to trust yourself. Stop worrying about what other people think.

Rob Marsh: I, again, I wholeheartedly agree. If I had done what I thought I was going to be doing back in college, I’d be an attorney. I would probably hate my job. I mean, I think I would have probably been a decent attorney, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun. So yeah, as I look back, I’m like, yeah, serendipity, you know, play around, have fun, let things happen and see if the path just ends up being a little different.

Megan Smyth: Another way to say that would be to follow the fun. What genuinely lights you up and what do you have fun doing? Because I think a lot of people assume those have to be separate things. They’re like, I can’t have fun doing the thing that’s going to make a living. That’s for hobbies. I’m like, I think there is a way to make that happen. I’ve created it. You and Kira have created it. So follow the fun in both your life and your business.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, for sure. I feel like that might be a pretty good place to end. Megan, for sharing so much about your business and what’s going on. Like I said, I’m just I’m amazed at what you’ve built. I shouldn’t be amazed because obviously you’re so good at this stuff anyway that it would have happened no matter what. But just having the back row seat and watching you do all of this stuff has been a lot of fun for me. So, yeah, good. Good job. And thanks for sharing so much.

Megan Smyth: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Definitely would not be where I am now without you guys and The Accelerator.

Rob Marsh: You’re nice for saying that. Thank you. Thanks to Megan Smythe for sharing how she got started and the business that she built. You can find her on her website, megansmythe.com, which we’ll link to in the show notes. Her podcast is called Blaze and you can find that on Spotify and other podcast platforms. Be sure to jump on her list so that you can watch her launch for her group coaching that we talked about during the show. So yeah, if you join the list, you can check out what she’s offering there.

Before we sign off, I just want to repeat one of the ideas that we talked about early on this show, and that’s the willingness to go for it. Megan had it, and a lot of successful copywriters do, but too many copywriters hold back and wait for client work to find them. or they wait for opportunities to come their way, and that just doesn’t happen enough to make it a viable strategy for success. You have to put yourself out there, you have to try new things, you have to take risks, and it might require you to do a few things that make you uncomfortable, make you step outside of your comfort zone. If you’re not willing and able to do that, you’re going to struggle to make things work as a copywriter.

So this is me encouraging you to put yourself out there, pitch podcasts that you want to speak on, write for publications that can get you in front of your ideal clients, create and send that pitch to the client or to the event manager, to the podcast host that you want to connect with, go for it. 

 

What does it take to create a course that delivers on its promise and ensures that students get through all of the material? On the 421st episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, copywriter and course corrector, Maya Stojkovich, shares her COURSE framework for creating and fixing the programs experts sell in order to get results. There’s a ton of crossover with copywriting sales messages, so grab your headphones and let’s get to it. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

 

Stuff to check out:

The Course Corrector
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

 

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: Why are so many course creators failing when it comes to selling their courses? Or worse, they do sell their courses or memberships or workshops, but the people who buy them don’t finish them. I’ve certainly bought my share of courses with the full intention that I was going to complete the training and the assignments, and they’re still waiting there months… sometimes years later. What’s up with that?

Hi I’m Rob Marsh and on today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I talked with copywriter and course corrector, Maya Stojkovich. Maya is one half of the partership behind the Course Corrector—a program designed to help course creators fix the things that keep course buyers from finishing the work and getting the result they want. The other half of this partnership is Linda Perry who has been on the podcast several times before. On this episode, Maya shared the formula for making sure a course will deliver the promised result and keep students engaged. And smart copywriters will notice some big similarities between what she shared and what we often put into a winning sales message. So stay tuned.

Just a quick plug… this episode is sponsored by The Copywriter Underground… the only membership for copywriters focused on helping you build your business skills—the skills that help you attract clients, create services they want to buy, price them effectively, and run a business that’s fully booked and profitable. Does it reallly make a difference? Yes it does. Members tell us its the best investment they’ve ever made in themselves. The training resources, templates, critiques and community are game changers. And you can find out more… even try it risk free for thirty days at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu

And now, let’s go to our interview with Maya Stojkovich.

Hey, Maya, welcome to The Copywriter Club Podcast. Let’s start with how you got to where you are. How did you become a copywriter, a teacher, and now a course corrector?

Maya Stojkovich: Yeah, absolutely. And thank you so much for having me on. I’m so excited. That is a wonderful question. How I got here, I’d say, is a pretty non-traditional route. Everything about it seemed traditional at first. I went to college. I got an English degree. I actually started off working in politics and that’s what I really thought I wanted to do. And then I ultimately recognized that it wasn’t the life for me. And so I actually ended up coming home and I was trying to reassess and, you know, I got the chance to actually join the Accelerator, and that was the first course I ever took. And I sat there and was like, this is really something. But there was a piece that was missing. I wasn’t fully engaged, but I also like to blame that on being 20 and 21 and not really knowing who I am at that age. And I continued to learn. I took so many courses. That full year, I was just taking course after course. I actually ended up becoming a certified mindset coach. And that really helped shape the rest of my career path. I actually settled down into marketing for a while, and then I up and moved, and I ended up being a paralegal, a teacher, an education programs coordinator. And it seems all over the place, but now sitting where I am as one half of the course corrector, I recognized that my entire path was just setting me up to become this course strategist, to actually dive into the courses that I had taken prior and say, you know, what can I take from this and actually apply it to courses everywhere?

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I love that. And obviously, all of the things that you’ve done have, you know, created, gotten you where you are. That’s the way paths work, right?

Maya Stojkovich: Right.

Rob Marsh: All of us. But of all of those positions, did you have a favorite and some big takeaways from being a teacher, mindset coach, paralegal? I don’t know.

Maya Stojkovich: Yeah, I know, right? So many. I would say that the most impactful was actually the education programs coordinator. I got to learn what it took to craft this beautiful narrative. I taught environmental sciences to third and fifth graders. So it’s a tough audience, but I got to craft this beautiful narrative with these programs about salt marshes, about like forests, about, you know, fiddler crabs. And I had to make it exciting for these kids. I had to get them interested and be like, here’s why you should care. And here’s why this matters. It is applicable to you in your lives as small children. And it was just this beautiful process, and it gave me so much information about teaching in and of itself that I now have the ability to apply it to courses.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that definitely makes sense. That basically is what you’re doing now. So let’s talk about what you’re doing now. We’ll come back to maybe your experience with some of those courses that you were taking earlier. Tell us about the course corrector and what it is, what you guys do. You’re working with Linda, obviously. I have immense respect for Linda. I think she’s been on the podcast four times maybe over the last seven years, whatever. So absolutely love her to death. But what are you guys doing in the course corrector?

Maya Stojkovich: Yeah, absolutely. So the course corrector is, as it sounds, I’m one half of it. I do work with Linda Perry. She is also, fun fact, my mother. Which a lot of people go, what’s it like working with your mom? And I absolutely love it. We have very similar brains, but we work completely differently. And I like to say we go on our separate caves when we work and come back together and always find the same conclusion. But what we really do is we dive into courses. And so what sets us apart is that we don’t actually always work on the course creation process. While we welcome a bunch of course creators and can help them create their courses, I like to say as preventative measure, so they don’t actually bump up into issues in the long run. We work with established course creators who have a course, and their course has gone awry somewhere, and they’re not quite sure why. Maybe they have an idea. They can say, maybe my engagement isn’t great, my completion rates are down, you know, I’ve looked at the numbers, or maybe something isn’t translating. And they have an idea, but it’s that big why that becomes the mystery. And what we do is we actually have a six-point framework. It’s called COURSE, unironically. And we dive into a course and we actually look at it holistically and we pull apart the pieces that aren’t working and actually help create this transformation for course creators that it’s just hard to do by themselves because they know their material, they know their course, they created it. And sometimes you just need that second or third pair of eyes and so we provide that.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. I love what you guys are doing, especially as an owner of several courses. And I realize how difficult it can be, especially what you have it set up to then take a step back and say, OK, wait, do we have the right promise here, you know, and and doing all of the things. So can we actually step through the course framework and talk about each of the steps that you guys go through?

Maya Stojkovich: Yes, I would absolutely love to. So We start with C, which is clear, identifiable goals. So we’re going to look at your course and we’re going to say, hey, do you have a clear goal? And usually it’s that one goal for the course taker. So you’re delivering something, you’re promising a transformation. What does that look like? I also always love to mention, hey, you are in your course yourself. Please have some goals for yourself for your course. That’s always so important because so many people always get focused on the course taker. And I’m like, put yourself in your course, which that also shows up later. And then we have

Rob Marsh: Oh, wait, let me let me stop you right. Let me so I want to ask about that. Because that’s actually really interesting. I mean, I would normally be thinking, okay, yeah, the big promise, and we’ve got to make sure that we deliver on this transformation. When you say we should have goals for ourselves. What do you mean by that? Are you talking about financial goals, enrollment goals? Or is it more tied to the course content itself?

Maya Stojkovich: I think it can be all, every, both. I really don’t think it’s exclusive. I often find that with overarching course goals, you’re really going to focus on engagement, how many people you want in your course, money, you know, what you’re bringing in. And so that tends to be the focus. But can you focus on what do I want to get out of my course content-wise? Absolutely. That can be a goal.

Rob Marsh: And maybe there’s also some relationships that you’re developing with the students in a course. You know, there may be some things we can build goals around there, too. OK.

Maya Stojkovich: OK, so O. Which is outcomes and pathways for success, which I this is my favorite part of our course framework because I love pathways. I think they’re just the key to success for any course out there. Yeah. So that’s O.

Rob Marsh: So, and so how should we be thinking about pathways? Is it simply, uh, you know, if I’m going to draw this out, I’m thinking, okay, module one leads to module two that, I mean, that seems kind of basic. Is there more to it than that? Uh, as far as like how the ideas string together?

Maya Stojkovich: Absolutely. So I think that so many people look at pathways and they go, okay, I have a, B, C. I know where all these points are. I know what they lead to. And then it’s this great transformation. But really looking at a pathway, it’s not just that you actually have to create a pathway really intentionally because. If you don’t look at every element of the pathway and it’s like A and then you have like point one, point two, everything that goes in and under A to get to B and then to get to C, you have to be very clear and very intentional of the content you’re putting in, how you’re creating this pathway, the story that you’re crafting through your course. Otherwise, people might fall off. People might start going down a different path. I really love the image of when creating a pathway, you are leading your course taker, so you’re the first, you got your little backpack on, your lamp, you’re guiding them through this really dark, scary forest, but you know the way, and they’re trusting you to lead them, and so you don’t want them going down and veering left when they’re supposed to go right. So you want to really be intentional about how do you get from point A to point B to point C to point D to actually deliver that end result. So there’s just a little bit more nuance in there.

Rob Marsh: It feels like partly we’re talking about a framework, but it’s a little bit bigger than just having a framework to step through.

Maya Stojkovich: Yeah, absolutely. And this is where course goals become so important because you have to be very clear on those goals to actually create this narrative, that story, this pathway.

Rob Marsh: Okay. You.

Maya Stojkovich: Yeah, you, which is your unique course proposition. We look at how you are in your course, how you’re showing up, as well as just what makes your course stand out in this very saturated market. You know, everybody has a course. This isn’t new. Everyone knows it. But what makes yours unique and different in this market, in your niche? How do you separate yourself and sell yourself, really? It’s very fun to help course creators figure this out because oftentimes it actually ends up being themselves, which they don’t even know. They’re just kind of compiling this course and they’re like, huh, this is really interesting. Lots of information. I’m like, yeah, but is it unique? And they’re like, well, I don’t know. And I’m like, where are you in your course? And then they go, oh, it’s this really big light bulb moment for them. But it doesn’t always have to be, right? We have a boot camp and it’s our eight-week program. And what we do with ours is it’s not necessarily us that makes it unique, it’s this transformation we’re bringing. So how do you just make your course stand out in this market?

Rob Marsh: Okay. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Andmaybe  I’m putting you on the spot here, but you kind of just said like what your unique transformation is as far as what you deliver. Some of the other courses that you’ve gone through, like for instance, I think you’ve worked with Justin Blackman. We’ve talked to Justin a ton on the podcast as well. What would you say is unique about his course?

Maya Stojkovich: Oh, I mean, it’s him. I know, this is what I told you. It ends up usually being people themselves. But it also is what he’s delivering. It’s how he delivers his voice branding voice guides, right? It’s about his delivering because people love learning from Justin, and I get why he is amazing at what he does. But he also delivers something so unique and just twists it a little bit. It doesn’t have to be very dramatic, right? You don’t need to be five million steps ahead of everyone else. You just need to have one little twist that makes you unique, and that’s what he has, and that’s why it makes his courses so exceptional.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Okay, next step is R.

Maya Stojkovich: Realistic milestones and action steps. And so this leads from pathways. You’re really going to need to have those milestones, those action steps. They have to be, you know, relevant, realistic. Applicable. And you want to have them as that support. This is also really going to help. So it’s going to help with E, which is engagement. It’s like a little heads up. But this really helps keep your course takers engaged. And when you actually implement those milestones and those action steps, you’re keeping your course takers on that path. So it’s incredibly important.

Rob Marsh: So let’s give some examples of what milestones could be. So for instance, in our accelerator course, we have blueprints that we step through so that people can complete those. They turn them in. Does that count as a milestone or as action steps or is it beyond that?

Maya Stojkovich: Absolutely. That does count as it. I love to think of, you know, it doesn’t have to be so overthought. It can be homework assignments, which I know, you know, everyone dreads. We’re adults. We don’t go to school anymore. We don’t have homework. But really, it can be homework assignments. It can be something as small as taking a poll or, you know, asking people to communicate in your community that you’ve built. It really is just as small as checking in and making sure they’re still there. Because when you implement these milestones and these action steps, if someone’s not completing them or if someone isn’t engaged, you can tell and then you actually have the ability to course correct.

Rob Marsh: Right. OK, so S is solid content.

Maya Stojkovich: So content, you know, it’s what you compile into your course. It’s everything that you bring. It’s how you make your course happen. It’s the transformation. It’s all your knowledge, right? The issues that we see usually in here is that everyone knows their stuff. Course creators know their stuff. You come with so much expertise and so much knowledge. You’ve done your research. But your course taker isn’t there yet. And so we see a lot of information dumping. We see a lot of, you know, higher level information being thrown in and not actually made into these bite sized pieces. So it’s really just engaging with your content a little bit differently. And it’s taking a holistic look at your content in terms of everything we’ve talked about thus far. You know, you’ve the goal, you have the pathway, you have your unique course proposition. Does your content actually filter through all of these different aspects and deliver in your course.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, cursive knowledge seems to be something that could impact a lot of course creators because we do assume that people are at a level that we’re communicating at. And so this feels like, it isn’t, but it feels like dumbing things down sometimes in a way to be able to engage at a lower level of expertise and delivering that information, which is not easy for anybody.

Maya Stojkovich: No, it’s not. And it’s one of those things of how do you actually take a step back and recognize, okay, this is where my course taker’s at. How do I get them to where I want them to be? How do I get them to that expert level? And so it might seem like dumbing it down, but really, again, it’s just engaging with your content differently and actually engaging with your audience. And that’s why it’s so important to know who your audience is, and also root yourself and goal-wise for your course in your audience as well. Because yes, it is about you, but it is also about delivering something to them. And so you almost have to like remove the ego and remove the self from the content.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, maybe a better way of for me thinking about this is that rather than dumbing it down, you’re basically providing a ladder that starts at the bottom and helps people step up to where you are and ultimately delivers the promise. That’s beautiful. Well, maybe I should be a course corrector. I don’t know. And E you teased is engagement.

Maya Stojkovich: Yeah. So you got engagement and ongoing investment. So we look at the engagement throughout the course. Again, this is another big one. Oftentimes in courses, engagement gets lowered and you don’t know why. And so we look at why and we are able to diagnose and figure out why. happens to be all of the issues that we’ve mentioned thus far, so you get to actually look at your course a little bit differently. And then we look at ongoing investment. We want to see if your course takers are buying into you and your services and continuing on, because you almost want to leave them with that little cliffhanger and say, hey, you can learn more. And do they bite? So that’s what we look at.

Rob Marsh: OK, so a lot of our listeners are just copywriters, content writers. Maybe they write for course creators. Maybe they don’t. But it feels to me also that this course framework is, in a way, it’s like a sales framework. It’s a way to get somebody from wherever they are right now to making an investment and then actually purchasing something towards the end. Am I misreading that?

Maya Stojkovich: No, no, you’re not. I mean, it really is. You never want to forget that you’re always selling something. Your course is meant to help provide for you and your business. Your course is meant to be this additive to this funnel, right? Like, I never want to shy away from that because a lot of people see course as this like unique kind of standalone thing, or maybe they think it leads into something else. But this is where you do have to be really clear about it because you are selling something. You do have to almost pitch and sell even while you’re still doing the course. It does actually end up sounding a lot like sales. It definitely relates to what your copywriters are doing. I think it actually makes it a little bit more manageable when you start to think of it that way rather than viewing this course because so many people get overwhelmed in course creation. Then when their course fails, it’s like, they spiral and they don’t know what’s going wrong and they sit there and then they beat themselves up. Or if you’re writing for courses too, it’s how do you prevent that for a course creator. And when you actually just start to look at it as, you know, I’m engaging with people and I’m getting them hooked and I’m bringing them in and then I’m leading them through this funnel that is the course itself, I think it makes it a lot more pleasant to deal with. Yeah, for sure.

Rob Marsh: OK, so that’s the course corrector. We may come back to some of this stuff, but I would love to just get your thoughts about the course industry itself. Because I think a lot of people with courses saw this golden year or two during the pandemic where everybody was learning online, everybody was investing in that. And then the last two years has become significantly more difficult for most, not all. There are still a few people who are really selling well. But a lot of course, owners have really struggled. So what’s going on? What’s causing all that?

Maya Stojkovich: I know. I think this is such a great question. And I love talking about this because, you know, we saw it as like the golden years and also COVID too, right? COVID happened. We were all stuck indoors. Everyone was like, we need community. We need to learn. And then there were courses. And so the online e-learning market boosted up. Here’s the thing with it. It’s still growing. And so I don’t want people to lose hope because it is growing. So by 2030, it’s supposed to be $687 billion more in revenue. And I just think that that’s a really positive statistic. On the other hand, though, you also have another statistic that says about 95% of horses fail. And so I challenge it by looking and saying, you know, I don’t actually think there’s an issue with courses and people buying courses in and of itself. I really think there’s an issue with the quality of courses and also how you set yourself apart and sell in this market that is very saturated. You know, I don’t shy away from that. We don’t shy away from that, the course character at all. 

There are a lot of courses. I just think that there are a lot of courses that get thrown together with all these hopes, these dreams of more time, more money, more freedom, give back to me and my business. and then they fall apart, and then shame spirals happen, or you have course takers that end up falling apart and also have shame spirals happening. So it’s just like a lot of collective negative mindset issues that end up coming to play and then really impacting these courses. Again, 95% fail. I think that that is such a glaring statistic that really shows it’s not necessarily the course market that’s an issue, it’s just how we’re interacting with our courses. And that doesn’t make us wrong or bad, it’s just looking at it differently. Because here’s the thing, we’re not all stuck indoors anymore. It’s not COVID. But how do you cultivate community and really boost up your course and tell a story with it and make it impactful so people clamor for it, so they actually want it, right? And, you know, we’re also in a time and an age where people want community more than ever. People want to connect more than ever. And it’s like we’re all somehow isolated. We have social media. We don’t know necessarily how to interact with people anymore. We want that connection, that a  face to face connection. And courses actually do provide that. So if you set yourself apart with your course, I really think, you know, it’s why we think of those names, the big names that can still sell. Right.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that makes sense. I want to ask you about this statistic, this 95% of courses failed. And maybe I have a slightly different take on it, too. But is that a measurement of just completion, or are there other ways of looking at that?

Maya Stojkovich: Yeah, there are definitely other ways of looking at that. So we like to look at completion rates. I always say that it doesn’t show the full picture, though, because you can have 95% completion rates, and still no one’s actually applying your content You know, Linda and I are actually talking about this on our podcast, too, because we just think it’s such a glaring issue because everyone looks at completion rates and they’re like, well, it’s doing great or it’s doing poor, but it doesn’t actually measure how your course takers are doing. I think it also, you know, you have to look at engagement. Where are they dropping out? How many are dropping out? What does that look like? your content? Is it being applied to your course taker’s lives actually? Are you really delivering that transformation? So there’s a bunch of different ways you have the ability to measure course success, which is also probably why you look at a statistic and it’s so big, it’s like 95%, right? And I also think that likes to point out there’s an issue in every course. And while it might be minor and not causing a big problem, There are issues, and they’re continuously popping up. So how do you correct? How do you deal with it? Because I hear so many people also saying, I had to rerecord 10 hours in my course. And I’m like, then there’s something wrong. It’s not you. And let’s figure it out. Let’s actually dive in and address these issues, because it’s holistic. It’s not just like one glaring issue. It’s not just completion rates.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I look at it too and think, for example, so one of the modules in our accelerator course deals with processes, another one with packages. And I think from time to time, people will actually join our course having different pieces of their business figured out, but maybe they don’t have processes in place. And so when they get to that module, they use it, they fix the problem. And maybe that’s what they were there for. And they don’t really care about the branding module that’s coming later. Maybe they’re OK with what they’re doing. And so I feel like sometimes that number gets in the way. And that comes back to, I think, what you were saying as far as these results and these outcomes. Sometimes we have this huge promise at the beginning of a course. But what people really need is maybe one of those steps along the way that get them to that big promise. I don’t know, maybe I’m thinking about that wrong.

Maya Stojkovich: No, I mean, what I just kind of was thinking about as you said that is, you know, this is all just information. Linda and I always say, what you’re looking at is just data. Like, I think it’s so important to look at it that way, because you can see people drop out right after that one module, people are like, I got what I’m here for, and I’m done and I’m out. you can look at that and be like, oh, that is so disappointing. Why didn’t they stay the whole time they just invested? Like this is, you know, this is great stuff. I know what I’m offering is amazing. And they’re just telling you something. Maybe that means you need to break it apart. Maybe that means you need a whole separate course on just that to engage those buyers differently. It’s really just data, and it’s allowing you to take the temperature of your course so you have the ability to course correct and make those changes where it’s needed. It’s not, you know, I’m bad, I’m terrible, or I have this amazing thing and they don’t want it. What’s wrong with them?” Because there’s so many stories we tell ourselves and can tell ourselves about our courses. I’ve seen it in so many course creators. As a course taker myself who has dropped out of a course before, you sit there and stories, all the stories, but really it’s just data. It’s saying, where am I not meeting certain expectations or where is my course falling apart or what are they telling me so I can just do this a little bit differently. It’s nothing, you know, it’s all fixable, which I think is great.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that makes sense. So let’s say I’m listening and I’ve been thinking about, you know, I’m a successful copywriter. I’ve been thinking about creating a course for some of the people in my niche. Maybe it’s, you know, how do you write emails for, you know, this industry or something like that. And I want to get started. Do you have advice for somebody beyond that framework, you know, where it’s like, OK, I’m sitting down. I’m going to create my course. What are maybe one or two, maybe three things that I should be doing to make sure that that first launch is going to go OK? And obviously it doesn’t. I’m going to come and join the course creator to figure it all out. But I want to start with a really good foundation.

Maya Stojkovich: Yeah, absolutely. I think that one thing to really set yourself up for success is compiling, and this sounds so silly, but compiling everything you want to say. I think, you know, this goes along with the content piece, but it’s more than that. It’s really saying, I have this brilliant idea, now what? And I really think that starts with compiling your knowledge base. I don’t think there’s a better place to start because then you can actually sift out, you know, if it is about writing emails, making better emails, whatever it is. you then actually have a whole process in front of you, and then you can pick and choose what’s the most important. And that’s actually going to set you up for success. And I also think, you know, taking the time to really envision what do you want out of this course? What are your hopes, dreams, aspirations? And I know that that sounds kind of woo woo, but I really think that’s important to actually sit and engage with yourself so you know what might come up for you mindset wise or what might come up for you in terms of you know, getting stuck on something, some hopes, some dreams, and again, not then being able to collect that data. I really think those are two big things. It’s like just compiling your knowledge base and putting it in front of you so you know where you’re going, what you’re doing, and also just, you know, taking a second to say, what do I really want out of this?

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that’s all good advice. You talked a little bit about in the engagement step, you know, things that we need to be doing to add community. There are a ton of courses out there that it’s just you log in, you see the video, you maybe get a transcript. That’s it. That’s it. There’s like no engagement with the course owner or whatever. So can we talk about some of this stuff? How do we add this in?

Maya Stojkovich: I love this. I know you just got me so excited. Yeah, you’re a little excited right now. I love this aspect because community is so vital and so important in a course. And even if they’re not engaging with you, how can you just take a second to create a community, even if it’s small? So that looks like having a place for them to comment and interact with each other. And I don’t care if it’s an evergreen course and there’s a small comment section that’s been up for years. People can actually engage and comment on other things that have been left and can see things. And I think that even in and of itself creates just a small element of community. Or for bigger courses, do you have that Slack channel? Do you have that Facebook group? Are people interacting with it? One thing I will always say about community is as the course creator, you have to take the first leap. That is vital. You have to take the first leap because everyone else is coming in thinking, well, I should already know this and why don’t I know this? And I can’t believe I’m having to take a course on this. And oh, you know, and again, all these stories and no one wants to take the first leap. It’s like, you know, if you’re in a crowded room and someone asks for a comment and you’re looking around and you’re like, OK, who’s going to say something first? It has to be you.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. And what does that look like? Is that like, is that me, the course owner? I’m always putting in the first comment saying, Hey, what do you think about this? Or is it even more outreach? Like let’s jump on a video call and you know, just chat for 10 minutes about what your goals are for, you know, for this. Like, I guess there’s a million ways to do this.

Maya Stojkovich: Yeah, there really are. And you know, there’s not, Best thing about course is it’s not one size fits all, right? And so it’s up to course creator preference. I like to say if you have an evergreen course and it’s not something you’re checking all the time and it’s there and people are engaging and commenting, you can tell course takers to comment. You can say, hey, what’s one thing you learned? What’s one key takeaway? Or in a Slack channel, you know, pose a question about this module that they’re in and get them to think about it a little bit differently. Maybe help them get a little unstuck or just push them. Or, you know, if you do have maybe even a smaller course and have the ability to hop on those one-on-one calls right off the bat, do it because it allows them to start to filter through their thoughts and then actually engage in this process a little bit differently because then they have a stake in the game. You know, you want your course takers to come in and actually invest themselves because, again, then they’re going to continue to invest themselves in everything you have. And so it’s allowing them to come and really give themselves to this course. And that’s why I say, you know, you have to be the first one and it doesn’t have to be this big step, because I think also often course creators can get bogged down by their course. They can get exhausted. They can get burnt out, not just by their course, but also in work itself. And so how do you make it manageable? That’s why it’s also up to the course creator.

Rob Marsh: One of the trends that I’ve seen happening in the course world is this move to, like, smaller workshops, you know, little, you know, $27 masterclasses kind of a thing. Would you also recommend engagement there as well, where the investment isn’t much. So maybe a course creator doesn’t have a lot of time to put into it. Because again, you know, the money difference between a $27 course and $1,000 or $2,000 course is pretty significant. Is that mostly just a place for the comment section? Or would I do something different there?

Maya Stojkovich: I think, I think a comment section works fine for something with, you know, it’s $27 and minimal engagement and I think that’s more so you have to know where that workshop or where it lands in your funnel almost. It’s like, okay, is this going to lead into a course? Because maybe I have to do like a little bit more, but I don’t have to do a ton, right? You can have a comment section or you can have a Q&A portion of it, right? You can have a place where you engage and then tell them what comes next. And that really is just engaging them that bit differently. It doesn’t have to be dramatic, drastic. It doesn’t have to be hopping on a one-on-one call. But it can also be saying, you know, you have my email. If you have a question, please reach out. I’m here. I love to talk. You know, it’s just that little extra step that allows them to feel more comfortable so that then maybe they can come into your course. the $1,000 course and say, all right, I can do this. This is manageable. And I know that they have my back, too, and that they’ll actually deliver.

Rob Marsh: I think what you said about the funnel is really important as well, because if this is the first step in the funnel and this is the first taste that somebody gets with engagement with you, you want to show them what engagement looks like at a higher level as well. So if you simply just ignore somebody with that $27 workshop, but your course has some really great engagement ideas or ways that you do that, it feels like you’re missing showing off what they would get. And so there’s probably some strategy thinking through, like, how much do I really show off so that I can move to the next step?

Maya Stojkovich: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, this is one thing that we do look at. We like to look at, you know, the before and the after, too, when you work with us, because it tells you a lot, you know, Where are you getting your course takers from if you have a funnel and you say okay? I have that $27 workshop and that leads into my course like you can start to think about that workshop a little bit differently and put in that little extra emphasis in there so you can bring them to your course. Because again, a lot of people think, you know, no one’s buying in. Money is this big issue. People just want to connect. And if you give them a reason to buy in, I promise you they will. Like, they really will. And even if it takes just like a little bit more time, They will, but they have to trust you first. It’s human nature, right? Like, they want to know that they’re actually going to get the results that they buy, because how disappointing is it if, you know, they buy and they spend thousands of dollars and they don’t get the results? Like, that hurts for the course taker and the course creator.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that makes sense. Before we started recording, you said that you had started thinking a lot about storytelling and narrative and its place in courses. Talk a little bit about that, because again, it feels like sometimes the modules are separate from each other and there’s not necessarily a story that connects them. So what’s your thinking there?

Maya Stojkovich: I actually love that we were just talking about workshops in this too because this is – I was watching some workshops as a lifelong learner over here. But that’s where I started thinking about that piece and I was like, huh, like what comes next is their course or what their offer is and I’m not sold by their workshop. Like there isn’t a story to it. And I think it’s so impactful to think about storytelling in terms of what story is your business telling and what story is your course telling, especially your course, to your audience that allows them to buy in beginning, middle, and not drop out, to actually stay the full way. It’s like what I was talking about with, you know, education program coordinator position with the kids is how do you make them care? How do you make them interested? And that really is by storytelling. Because if I sat and I was leading a course, and it’s about, you know, courses like we have, and I’m like, hey, you know, it’s really cool if you like set a goal, and here’s how, and here’s all this information, here’s X, Y, Z, okay, on your way, do it. They’re going to be like, this was so boring. 

Or, you know, or if I have one module that’s packed full of stories, and it seems really cool, but then they don’t know how to apply it, I’ve lost them.” It’s not just in one module, because you’re right, there’s module one, module two, module three. You offer all these elements. How do you combine them all together and really craft this beautiful story for the course taker so they know their why, they know their objective, and they know the how? I think those elements really get told through story to actually just engage people a little bit differently. They’ve bought into the information you’re selling. There’s a reason they bought your course. They said, hey, I see what you’re offering has value. I want this end goal transformation. I know I’m going to get it through XYZ information. A lot of people on their websites have, here’s what you’re going to get out of module one, module two. They know what they’re signing up for. But how do you make it interesting?

This is also where unique course proposition comes in. How do you insert yourself? How do you insert case studies, personal examples? personal anecdotes. They work wonderful. And I’m not even just talking about like the successful stories either. Tell your failures. Don’t be afraid to like show yourself and show case studies and in an honest, raw light because everyone’s coming in with their humanness, and they just want to learn and get that transformation, but they need that extra oomph, and I think storytelling is a wonderful way to do that in your course.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. That’s got me thinking about ways that I need to add more stories into a couple of things that I’ve been working on.

Maya Stojkovich: So that’s good. Usually does.

Rob Marsh: Let’s shift a little bit, because you’re a mindset coach. Let’s talk a little bit about the mindset that it takes to be a successful coach, course runner, course owner, because it’s not quite the same as running a copywriting business where you’re working one-on-one with clients. Talk a little bit about that and what it requires.

Maya Stojkovich: Yeah, working one-on-one with clients, you actually have the ability to engage with them a little bit differently. You go from one-to-one to one-to-many and then you go, whoa, what is coming up for me? I’ve seen it so many times. Really, I’ve landed in the stories we tell ourselves because you have no idea what is going to come up for you in your course until you run your course. I think that is why we personally love working with course creators who have an established course and we love correcting it. so much mindset comes up. And it’s not just for the course creator, it’s also for the course taker. But I’m always just so astounded by the shame spirals that people can go into when even one small thing goes wrong with their course. So say you have lowered, lowered engagement rate in the middle, right? That’s where a lot of drop off tends to happen in the course. 

Course creators then look at themselves in such a critical lens and they go, what is wrong with me? What am I not doing? What is wrong? How did how did I let this happen? And then it just spirals and spirals. And then they actually aren’t able to, you know, address the issues from a nice, secure, happy little spot that they were when they were creating their course and building it. So super excited. And then it causes burnout. I mean, I don’t I can’t even tell you how many course creators have come to us and been like, I’m exhausted by my own material. And I’m like, It’s a shame spiral, it’s mindset, I promise.” And it was like, oh, why? Really? Mindset? Are we sure? It’s like, yes, I promise you it’s mindset, but that’s because course creators don’t always come prepped from that one-to-one-to-one-to-many, being like, okay, I know what’s going to come up for me. I know that it’s going to make me feel X, Y, Z, and so here’s what I’m going to implement. But it’s also why I encourage really delving into like mindset when it comes to your course, because then you’re actually able to build in those buffers, because then when you see people drop out, you can actually look and go, OK, I know this doesn’t have anything to do with me. What’s happening for my course taker at this point? Because it actually takes you out of the self then at that point.

Rob Marsh: Feels like there’s almost an opposite opportunity too, although the opposite may not want to actually come to you for help, but somebody who’s such the expert, I know this stuff better than anyone else. I don’t need to change it. This is the way I learned it. Everybody else can learn it the same way, which could lead to failures as well. Again, that person’s probably not saying, well, Maya and Linda can help me fix this because they know everything, but maybe there’s some of that going on too.

Maya Stojkovich: Right. No, definitely. It does come up. I also, you know, course creators, they know their stuff, like, y’all know your stuff. I always said this, like, they come as an expert and they come with this knowledge base, but then that makes it so hard to like work on the issues almost because it’s like, you get stuck.

Rob Marsh: How about money mindset? I think there’s a lot of anxiety around pricing courses. And I’ve even seen, again, because of the change in the market, sometimes people have lowered prices to try to make a course more appealing. Other people actually have raised prices in response. So what do you say about that kind of an issue?

Maya Stojkovich: I mean, oftentimes I see people actually lower their prices. Please don’t do that. I mean, it’s – value your course at what you think to be true. You know how much work you put into your course. You know what people are getting out of your course. Price it and don’t be afraid. I really think that that’s so important because yes, money mindset comes in and I can tell you now. Go look at your self-worth, like how’s that showing up, all that. But really, you know, it’s one of those things where you know what you did. You know how much effort is in your course. Please don’t lower it just because you’re not seeing people come in. Please maybe like just go look at other areas. Like how’s your list doing? That’s always, you know, a question I love to ask because are you drawing in the right people? Because the right people will buy in when they know what you’re selling is important and they know they need it. And so I really, around money mindset, I always ask course graders, please don’t lower the pricing. And also, if you’re hiking up the pricing and it’s not quite right and it’s super high and then you’re getting people buying in, what you’re also then going to see is a lot of dissatisfied customers by the end of it. And that’s just like a little cautionary tale of, hey, if you do raise it too high, here’s a great way to tell is that by the end of it, people are going, hmm, I didn’t quite get what I thought I was going to get and I spent a lot of money. 

And then you’re going to get not so great feedback. And the reason that that’s so important is because, you know, word of mouth does exist. These people are in your space. If they’re coming to you, they’re in your space. And, you know, you also don’t want negative feedback on your course. A course is a part of your business. It’s, you know, you put a lot into your course. So I think there’s a Nice mindset when it comes to money because you never want to price it too low, but then you don’t want to price it too high. I think it’s just really being able to critically look at your course and say, okay, how much is what I’m offering worth? Then you can also play around with it. That’s another thing is you don’t have to stay rigid in your mindset around money. You can play around with it. Are more people buying in at this rate? What does it look like at the end? Or are they not and maybe why? And then let’s get some feedback from the people that have been in my course and paid for it. So I just think that that’s also a great way to measure some of that and reduce some of that mindset around money.

Rob Marsh: So most of what we’ve been talking about so far really is applicable to course owners, but all of us are also on the other side as learners from time to time. So I wonder if you’ve got advice for learners who may be in a course that isn’t perfect. So maybe this is you going back to your experience with our course, which I still think is perfect. The engagement issue may have been different. I don’t know. No. Joking a little bit. What advice do you have for that learner who is maybe not quite feeling it? What can they do to ensure that they’re actually getting the value out of a course that, obviously they bought it, they want the transformation, they want the result, but somehow they’re getting stuck?

Maya Stojkovich: Yeah. I think that it’s really important to vocalize some of those issues as a course taker who has had mindset issues come up and dropped out and also, you know, strung along through a course by like tooth and nail, you know, just sitting there like, okay, I’m going to get through this. It’s one of those things that when you vocalize, it actually reduces the shame that you’re feeling and kind of the pressure of it all because then you actually have the ability to go to someone who just genuinely wants to help. I mean, this has been a lot about the course creator. But something about course creators is they’re offering this because they really want to help people. Ultimately, they want to impact people. That’s why courses get created in the first place. And so if you’re the course taker and you’re sitting there going, I just spent money and I’m not seeing what I want to be seeing and I’m feeling really upset about this, reach out. Like, ask for the help because, you know, and that’s always the scariest thing to do, right, is actually asking for the help and then having to admit it. But I really think it is the best thing you can do. It’s almost like the antidote is just vocalizing where you’re at because there’s no shame in falling behind in a course. There’s no shame in saying, you know what, I’m not getting what I want out of it. but how can I problem solve? It’s like, again, that shift. It’s just this little mindset shift that comes with just saying, you know what, I actually do need some help, or I need some direction, or maybe this isn’t right for me, but I want to talk with the course creator and actually see what’s going wrong.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, all of, I underscore all of that. I think it’s really important to, you know, raise your hand, get that engagement because you’re right. You know, especially if you’re past that refund stage or whatever, you know, it’s like you still ought to get your money’s worth. And if it takes a little effort, I’ve had people tell me occasionally, well, I’m afraid I don’t want to ask for too much. to which I’ve always responded, you keep asking and I’ll let you know when it’s too much because like you said, I want to make sure that people get the transformation that they’re promised out of any course that they would take from us. So hopefully anybody listening who’s in that kind of a situation will do that and ask for more so that they can actually get that result. So Maya, what’s next for you and Linda? What’s next for this course creator? Where are you guys going from here?

Maya Stojkovich: Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve been kind of talking about it through like little little hints through is we have a bootcamp that we’re launching actually. You guys can go to our website at thecoursecorrector.com and we have an eight-week bootcamp that’s super hands-on and we’re really excited about it. It’s going to help course creators actually dive into their courses. It’s really meta because we have a course about correcting courses, but really dive in and actually see what’s going wrong. It’s through our course framework and you then have the ability to actually take apart your course and put it back together. have a fully functional running course that actually gives back to your business, like, you know, those promises that you’re guaranteed. So.

Rob Marsh: OK, so we definitely can check that out at coursecorrector.com. Where else should people go to follow you, Maya?

Maya Stojkovich: Yeah, absolutely. So another spot on our website, you know, we also have a self audit if you’re not quite sure where your course is going awry. But we also are on Instagram and LinkedIn. So I know that all of that’s going to be linked as well. And we have a Facebook. So We’re really accessible, and if you ever want to hop on a call, we’re more than welcome. We love talking courses, clearly.

Rob Marsh: Amazing. Yeah. Well, I may even call you back. We’ll see. Talk about my courses. Yeah. No, I mean, I love, you know, I love Linda again. I know I’m saying this a second time, but I respect everything that she has done. She’s an amazing human being and a great educator. I love what you guys are doing together. So if you’re listening to this and you’ve got a course and it’s not quite right, reach out. because Linda and Maya can definitely help. And thanks, Maya, for spending so much time with us today.

Maya Stojkovich: Yeah, of course. Thank you so much for having me on.

Rob Marsh: Thanks to Maya for sharing her process for fixing courses, fixing our mindsets, and finding community in the programs that we either run or we help our clients to sell. If you write for coaches, membership owners, or course creators, what Maya shared should help you as you work with these clients to improve the way that you talk about the results that they deliver. Be sure to connect with Maya on LinkedIn and check out the coursecreator.com where you can get more details about that program, learn the basics when you join their email list and a lot more. Maya and Linda are worth following even if you don’t have a course of your own, so be sure to check them out. 

As I said when I introduced Maya, the course framework is similar to the framework that you might use crafting any sales message, starting with the big promise, the clear goals that you have for your readers and going all the way through engagement and keeping your readers interested in all the information that you have to share. So as you think about this, maybe there’s parts of that framework that might help you improve your copywriting and your sales messaging. Think about that. We briefly mentioned that Maya was a student in our own Copywriter Accelerator program when she was just starting out as a copywriter before the course corrector was a thing. If you are interested in checking that program out, you can see the details at thecopywriterclub.com/FastTrack, FastTrack is all one word. A year or so after we created that program, we had a curriculum specialist go through the content, do much the same thing that Maya and Linda do, identifying what was missing and what we needed to add in order to make it better. And the result that you get today includes all of the building blocks for a successful copywriting business. The list of students that went through that program and today have successful, often six-figure businesses might surprise you. It includes copywriters like Chanti Zak, well-known for her quizzes. The voice guy, Justin Blackman, Brittany McBean, who’s written and sold courses of her own on building a six-figure business. Michal Eziek, who’s got one of the best websites I’ve ever seen for a copywriter, has done amazingly in her own business as well, working with tech companies. a variety of other writers that she’s coached to success. Others include Zafira Rajan, Kirsty Fanton, and literally hundreds of others. You can see why they joined and what they learned at thecopyrightedclub.com/fasttrack.

Marketing consultant, Leticia Collins is our guest for the 420th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. She's an expert in community-based email list growth, so it's no wonder she added 4300 people to her list in less than a week. Want to know how she did it? Then this episode is for you. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: Leticia's website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Full Transcript: The money is in the list, or that’s what we’re told. And before you can work on getting some of that money out of the list and into your business, you need a list. If your list is small, you need a bigger list. If your list is full of the wrong people, you need to find the right people. As a business owner, one of your big challenges is your list. And knowing that, would you like to hear how you can add hundreds, maybe even thousands of qualified names to your email list in as little as a week? Hi I’m Rob Marsh and on today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I talked with marketing strategist Leticia Collins. Tish is a successful marketer who has worked hard to grow her list. And in this interview, she shared how she added 4,300 subscribers to her email list in one week. And triped her revenue in the process. If you want to grow an email list full of potential clients for your business, this episode is for you. Before we get to that though… you hear me tell you about several resources that we’ve put together to help you build and grow a writing business. I’m going to quickly list a few of them here so you can get the help you need… we have a free facebook group called The Copywriter Club. You can find us on Facebook and request that we add you to the group where you’ll find seven years of threads about all kinds of copywriting and business questions.  Obviously you know about this podcast. You’re listening to it right now and there are more than 400 interviews with successful copywriters and other experts in our backlist. Once you’ve listened to this episode, scroll through to find interviews with people like Seth Godin, Jay Abraham, Jereshia Hawk, Joanna Wiebe, Todd Brown, Kennedy and so many others. Honestly, it’s the best free library of copy, content and business ideas that you’ll find anywhere. And it’s at your fingertips. Take a minute now to subscribe on your favorite podcast player so you don’t miss another episode. And right now you can get our free, 36 page mini-book called How to Find Clients when you go to thecopywriterclub.com/findaclient . I guarantee you’ll find at least one and probably 5-10 ideas you can use to find a client for your business. We’re here to help you build a business, so be sure to take advantage of all the free resources we’ve provided for you. And now, let’s go to our interview with Tish Collins. Welcome to the podcast, Tish. I want to start with the question we always start with, which is how did you become a content creator, a digital marketing strategist, business mentor, all of the things? Leticia Collins: Hi, well firstly thank you so much for having me on, it's so lovely to be here. And I got started in business, I started my business back in 2019 and I never really saw myself becoming a business owner at all, I kind of fell into it. It started when I went to university, I studied journalism and creative writing and one of our assignments, one of the very first assignments was for us to start a blog. I had always wanted to do that. So I was really excited about it. I started my blog and it was going to be like a portfolio for when I became a journalist. Obviously that didn't happen. Um, but what did happen is I began to grow my blog. I grew my Instagram. I started working with brands and I kind of started my first business that way. And then after a few years I began to get some questions about how I was getting paid to work with brands and growing my Instagram so fast.