Copywriters Podcast

Our returning champion today is Kim Krause Schwalm, and she is going to share some amazing and unique information with you.The late Clayton Makepiece, a legend himself in copywriting, said, and I quote: “Kim Krause Schwalm is one of the hottest copywriters alive.”Here’s a little background:Kim was always a marketer who could write copy. Before she launched her freelance career in 1998, she spent years in corporate marketing — from Brand Manager to Publisher — including building the Healthy Directions supplement business to the equivalent of nearly $40 million in sales within its first three years. But we’re talking to Kim today as one of the top A-list direct response copywriters in the country. She's racked up dozens of controls, beat legendary copywriters head-to-head, and was the first female copywriter to create a package that became a Boardroom control. Her clients have included Bottom Line, National Geographic, Green Valley Natural Solutions, and other leading companies across the US, England, Germany, and Singapore. Kim has a bachelor’s in Math and Statistics and an MBA in Marketing. She brings that rare combination of creative instinct and analytical rigor to everything she writes. And, she is the author of the number-one Amazon bestselling book, Client Badassery Secrets.Today, she’s going to share secrets about writing bullet points you simply won’t get anywhere else.Here’s Kim’s offer. There’s really more than I can tell you about. Seven deliverables and three bonuses. Some highlights include• Her Get Dangerously Good Copywriting System• The bullet writing boot camp, which today’s show was drawn from• Kim’s Million Dollar Controls Master Class• Her Supplement Copy Boot Camp… and much, much more. Six more pieces, in fact. Copywriting education I wish I had when I got started.This bundle will only be available until midnight Pacific Daylight Time on Friday, June 19. You’ve got to read about it for a sense of everything you get, and then you can decide if this is for you.Here’s the link:https://kimschwalm.lpages.co/kims-copywriting-vault-for-david-garfinkels-followers/

We’re really at a crisis point for a lot of marketers.It’s not just that ads keep getting more expensive.It’s that it just gets harder and harder to get and keep prospects’ attention.And with everything being engineered and optimized by AI and CRO, stuff ends up looking more and more the same. And that only works against you.You know you need to stand out–but how?Well, the best way to get and keep attention is, and always has been, a story.But how long is a story?I mean, a Hero’s Journey story can take hours.And even the type of compact tales I introduced in my book The Persuasion Story Code can take two to three minutes. That’s not very long, but at a time of shrinking attention spans, it’s still too long.Now, you can try using outrageous hooks. But in addition to shrinking attention spans, you’re also fighting against rising levels of skepticism and outright distrust.If you say something that gets attention but just isn’t believable, you’re still sunk.So, what would be ideal to solve this problem?It would be a persuasion story you could tell in 15 or 20 words.Impossible, you say?That’s what I thought until I really started working on it.One of my clients, Ari Nirsissian, helped me quite a lot in the development of my thinking and writing of these new kind of attention magnets, the one-sentence microstory.It really is a story. It really is persuasive.And it really is short!Just the right size for today’s attention spans.Today I’m going to show you, step by step, how I developed three of them… and how I combined them into one electric three-sentence paragraph, which takes less than a minute to read out loud.Resources:To find out more about my book The Persuasion Story Code, check out this link to the Amazon page:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CFD2KXNQAnd to find out more about my coaching for experienced copywriters and business owners, go to:https://garfinkelcoaching.com

Life must have been at least a little frustrating for our Old Master on today’s show. His name was Walter Weir. He was a very active and successful copywriter and advertising professor, but he must have constantly run into resistance along the way, since so many of his ideas were ahead of their time. Walter Weir was born in 1909 and he died in 1996. He published a couple of books which are nearly impossible to find today. Maybe the publisher, my old employer McGraw-Hill, took them out of print quickly because the ideas were so far ahead of their time that they didn’t sell very well. I don’t know. What I do know is I was fascinated by his ideas. Here are 5 takeaways from an exploration of Weir’s writings and thinking, from today’s show: 1. Write copy that you truly believe, because people can feel it when you don’t. When you don’t believe it, your reader won’t either. And if your reader doesn’t believe it, they won’t buy. 2. Use words that people can FEEL as well as merely understand. Forget about clever word-plays. Say stuff they can feel in their bones. 3. If you’ve got a group going over the copy, write the copy yourself. By yourself. Just you. While a committee can review, only one voice can lead. 4. Forget about features and benefits. Instead, present a description of something someone would feel good about using. People don’t tend to buy just to HAVE something. They buy to FEEL something. 5. Cut everything that doesn’t sound like something a real person would actually say. Because unless it sounds like a human, it won’t reach one. Download.

It takes a lot of courage and a lot of confidence to do what our special guest today has done… and that’s fire all his clients and start an email-based business. But Alin Dragu did just that, and he’s here to tell us about it. He’s the best-selling author of the book Meaningful Marketing, he spent 5 years as direct of marketing at one of the fastest growing churches in the US, and 3 years as the VP of growth at a Christian marketing agency. Alin is definitely a copywriter’s copywriter. He’s obsessed with reading novels and old fiction letters. And he admits he’s secretly obsessed with luxury watches, something Nathan’s a collector of as well. Finally, in case you end up taking Alin to dinner, which probably wouldn’t be a bad idea, you should know he says he’s never refused a steak, ever in his life. Now, here’s what we asked him: 1. So Alin, could you give us a quick tour of what you do? 2. I’m very interested in your S-L-O framework that you use to write all your emails. Could you walk us through that? 3. So as I understand it, your funnel works something like this: - you make youtube videos that promote your lead magnets - when people get the lead magnets, of course they opt-into your list - every day you send one, and I quote, “very entertaining story” while also plugging one of your products - and you get sales every day. I was wondering if we could go through one of those stories and you could break it down for us–like, say, the “I spent $613 on coffee” story? And talk about what makes a great story? 4. You are in a very email-list-dependent business. How do you deal with the issues that come with that, like trolls, unsubscribes, and delivering content every day? 5. You need to come up with a new idea every day. How do you do that without running up against burnout? 6. OK, you do something a lot of people are afraid to do. It’s something Nathan and I strongly recommend, though. Tell us how you sell in every email and get people to keep opening the next email? 7. So tell us about who your list is for and how someone can join. -- Link to get on Alin’s list: https://alindragu.com/ Download.