The Copywriter Club Podcast

Planning for the unexpected is one of those skills that successful people have. But you can’t plan for everything. This episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast features my guest, Dani Paige, who has become an expert in figuring out how to move forward when you have to deal with the unexpected. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: Dani’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground   Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: Sometimes you can plan for change. Other times you can’t—and you have to adjust anyway. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast. One of the strategies we teach in The Copywriter Accelerator and our other programs where we talk about getting things done is planning ahead for when things don’t go as planned. It’s pretty easy to set goals and expect the future to behave as expected. But the reality almost always turns out differently. So you might come up with a plan to spend next Friday creating a new product or service, strategizing who its for, the various things to include to make it valuable, and so on. But then Friday arrives and you’re not feeling well, or a friend from out of town calls and wants to see you, or a family emergency ends up taking up a significant chunk of your day. What happens then? Planning for the invevitable things that go wrong is a huge part of success. Thinking through the options before they happen can help keep you on top of things. But you can’t plan for everything. A lot of copywriters we’ve had on the podcast have shared that a career they planned on pursuing turned out to be less than they expected. And they make an unplanned switch to writing copy. But there are other ways that life throws you a curveball and you need to quickly adjust expectations and behaviors to make things work. My guest on the podcast today is Dani Paige. She started a corporate career that didn’t go as planned and found copywriting as a result. She’s changed the services she offers more than once. And she’s tried things she thought would work that failed. More recently, she made changes to her business to prepare for maternity leave. Everything was ready to support her new family situation but once again, things turned out differently than she had planned. So how do we as copywriters adjust on the fly when things don’t turn out the way we expect them to. That’s a big part of what we talked about on today’s episode. Dani and I also talked about her journey into copywriting and how she learned to write sales pages and launch copy… if you want to write those kinds of projects, you can learn a lot from Dani and her approach to learning these skills. And what Dani says about community and connection is a theme that has come up several times in the last few months here on the podcast. If you’re not building connections and participating in communities, you are not building a skill that is critical for your future success. There’s a lot of good stuff in this episode so stick around. Before we get to my discussion with Dani Paige, this episode is brought to you by Research Mastery. Research Mastery is the one-stop program or course that will change your writing for the better. Instead of just organizing words, you’ll have the tools and strategies you need to truly understand your customer so they relate to your offer and buy more often. Research Mastery digs into the 4 critical areas of research… if you miss one of them, your research just isn’t complete. And it includes the A.I. tools you need to do research faster, more effectively, and more profitably. You can learn more about this unqiue program at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery And now my interview with Dani Paige.

Writing for clients is just one way to build a copywriting business. Once you’ve done that for a while, you may decide it’s not right for you. So what does the alternative look like? I invited copywriter Krystle Church to join for for the 266th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast to talk about that and a lot more. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: Krystle’s Email List The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Research Mastery   Partial Transcript: Rob Marsh: When your business stops working for you, what can you do to fix things? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast. There are a lot of copywriters who build a successful business writing for clients. Or maybe they build an agency around their offers and niche. But then after a few years they don’t love the business they created for themselves. Sometime we just burn out and need to do something a bit different. Maybe they no longer want employees or contractors. Maybe they get tired of working directly with clients. Maybe they realize that instead of using their skills to attract customers to other peoples businesses, they decide to use their skills to sell products to their own clients. And then many of us are entrepreneurs at heart and have always wanted to build a business other than writing for a list of clients. Shifting a business from offering services to clients to something else can be a challenge. It’s a very different kind of work. Instead of creating assets for clients, you may spend your time creating assets for your own business, then spending even more time getting attention for your offers. For many copywriters, this is the dream—a copywriting business with customers instead of clients. But there’s a lot of work that goes into a business switch like this. Validating offers. Finding a client base for your offers—which is almost certainly a very different set of clients than you’ve been writing for. Building out marketing systems to sell your new products. Figuring out how to deliver value when you’re not actually delivering copy. I wanted to talk about this with someone who’s gone through the process recently. So I invited copywriter and coach Krystle Church to come back to the podcast and talk about the changes she’s made to her business over the past couple of years. The business Krystle has today is very different from the one she was running two years ago. She’s excited about the new direction and having more fun than when she was burning out with a calendar full of projects that required her attention from the time she woke up until she went to bed at night. If you’ve been thinking about re-imagining your business, this episode may give you a few ideas to try. You’ll get a few tips about validating a new offer. And you might even decide to dabble with an offer for your niche that at least gives you a taste of what a different kind of business would feel like. This kind of business isn’t for everyone. In fact, it’s probably not for most copywriters. But it’s worth thinking about how you might be able to add to or change your business so it fits your needs a bit better. Before we get to my discussion with Krystle, this episode is brought to you by Research Mastery. Research Mastery is the one-stop program or course that will change your writing for the better. Instead of just organizing words, you’ll have the tools and strategies you need to truly understand your customer so they relate to your offer and buy more often. Research Mastery digs into the 4 critical areas of research… if you miss one of them, your research just isn’t complete. And it includes the A.I. tools you need to do research faster, more effectively, and more profitably. You can learn more about this unqiue program at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery And now my interview with Krystle Church.

This episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is another guest-less show. It’s just Rob sharing a few thoughts about the importance of creating customer journeys for the products you write for so you’re actually addressing your customer’s needs and not just your clients. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Research Mastery   What we talked about: Transcript is underway…

Newsletters are a big opportunity that many copywriters are ignoring to the detriment of their own businesses. For the 462nd episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I invited newsletter strategist Ciler Demiralp to talk about the newsletter industry and how writers can take advantage of this emerging industry. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: Newsletter Circle Ciler’s LinkedIn The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground   Here’s a summary of the episode:  

What’s the best word to describe a hard-working freelance copywriter? How about feisty? On the 460th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, content strategist and author, Suzanne Bowness, shares the concepts from her new book appropriately called, The Feisty Freelancer. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: The Feisty Freelancer Website The Feisty Freelancer Book The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground   Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: What’s the best adjective to describe a hardworking, client-pleasing, financially successful copywriter? How about feisty? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast. When it comes to freelancing, this is no one right way to do things. There are thousands of niches to serve. Millions of clients with millions of needs. There are hundreds of ways to find those clients and thousands more ways to solve their problems. But every writer who owns their own business has lots of things in common with others doing the same thing. And if you try to describe them… especially those freelancers who are actually finding clients, doing good work, and earning enough to make a living, well one word that comes to mind is feisty. The feisty freelancer brings energy to their work. They’re not afraid to stand up for themselves or the clients they’re writing for. And they even might be a little playful. The Feisty Freelancer is also the name of a new book written by content writer and former Think Tank member, Suzanne Bowness. Sue’s book is a primer for freelancers of all kinds—not just writers—who want to do more than struggle for scraps. The feisty freelancer has what it takes to succeed. This is Sue’s second appearance on the podcast. The first one happened almost three years ago. It’s episode #319 if you want to check it out. Given Sue’s expertise as a freelancer, it’s probably not a coincidence that some of the ideas we talked about then made it into the book. But it’s been a while since we had that discussion, so I took the opportunity to ask Sue about the topics she covers in her book. Things like pitching, working with corporate clients, marketing a writing business, strategies for being productive and getting things done. We even talked about whether freelancing is something people should be considering at all today. I think you’ll like what she had to share. Before we get to my interview with Sue, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. The Underground includes monthly coaching and expert workshops, an accountability group to keep you moving toward your goals, and more than 70 different workshops to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. Recently I asked a new member why she joined the Underground and she said she did it for the copy reviews. She wanted feedback on her work to help her improve her writing. And where many writing coaches charge as much as $1500 to look at a single sales page, you can get unlimited reviews in The Underground for less than $90 a month. Honestly this just might be the best value in the copywriting world. You can learn more by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu-2. And now, my interview with Sue Bowness…     Transcript is underway…

Want to write a book? Me too. But for some reason, I just can’t get it finished. Or started. I’m stuck. So I asked author and book marketing expert, Lacy Lieffers to join me for this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast to share her thoughts on writing books, the mindset needed to power through the process, why books are powerful business tools and a lot more. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: BlackFoxMarketing Lacy’s Instagram The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground   Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: Thinking about writing a book? Yeah me too. For a couple of years now. So let’s talk about how to actually get it done. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast. If you’ve been listening to this podcast for more than a year or two, you’ve probably heard me talk about wanting to write another book. It’s been a goal of mine for a couple of years even though I haven’t made a lot of progress on it lately. And you’ve probably heard at least one guest talk about the book writing process… guest like Laura Gale, Jennie Nash, Stephanie Chandler, Mary Adkins, Ryan Guthrie and Allison Fallon have all shared their approaches, their secrets for finding time and organizing thoughts for a book, and their frameworks for putting together a best-seller or at least a book that appeals to their readers. It’s been a few months, but we’ve covered this ground before. So why talk about it again? Because if you’re anything like me, it’s less about learning the latest secret for writing a book and more about reminding yourself that this is still a goal, and now is as good a time as ever to get it done. So if you have a goal to write a book, or like me want to write another book—one that better reflects the work that you’re doing right now, or even a novel that will connect with readers today… this episode is for you. My guest today is author and book marketer, Lacy Lieffers. Lacy runs a community for authors and she helps writers at all stages of the book writing process from organizing ideas to creating a game plan to make your book a best seller. She knows her stuff, so I was more than a little interested to see if what she has to share will light that fire under my backside and get my book moving again. We talked about pen names, picking the right book topic for you, how to figure out if your book idea will work, book marketing, and a lot more. If you want to write a book, or you’re stuck in the middle of your book, or you don’t know where to start, this episode is for you. And for me. Before we get to my interview with Lacy, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. The Underground includes monthly coaching and expert workshops, an accountability group to keep you moving toward your goals, and more than 70 different workshops to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. Recently I asked a new member why she joined the Underground and she said she did it for the copy reviews. She wanted feedback on her work to help her improve her writing. And where many writing coaches charge as much as $1500 to look at a single sales page, you can get unlimited reviews in The Underground for less than $90 a month. Honestly this just might be the best value in the copywriting world. You can learn more by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu-2. And now, my interview with Lacy Lieffers…         Thanks to Lacy Lieffers for helping me reset my goal and efforts to finally get to writing my next book. I’ve written a book before, and I’ve got to admit that while I think it’s a good book, by the time I finished writing it, I was no longer in love with the topic or the book itself. And at least in the case of that book, it’s on a topic or niche that I don’t do a lot of work in any more. So it’s definitely time for a book that’s more relevant to my business today. If you want to connect with Lacy or use some of the tools she has created for authors to write and market their books, connect with her on Instagram where she’s got a long list of links to resources for authors. You can also find her at blackfoxmarketing.ca During our discussion we talked about the “speak your book” formula for writing a book. I want to be clear that I’m not saying that that process can’t work. But as Lacy points out, we tend to speak differently than we write. And we listen differently than we read. So you CAN speak your book, but you’ll want to put in a lot of work to make sure it actually reads like a book and not like a transcript which can be hard to follow. If this is the only way you’ll get your book out of your head and down on paper, go for it. And while having a book for it’s own sake may be worth the effort, a book opens all kinds of doors for you and your business that other marketing materials simply can’t. Even a podcast which can be a great way to get your voice and thoughts into the world, it doesn’t have the permanence of a book. There’s a reason why author and authority are basically the same word. When it comes to building trust, getting the attention of your ideal clients, and even booking yourself onto podcasts or events… having a good book makes all the difference. If you want to write a book, drop me an email and let me know. I’d love to hear your process for getting it done. It might help inspire me to get mine done too. Finally, a quick reminder that if you want your copy reviewed by someone who can give you expert advice on how to make it better, jump into The Copywriter Underground now and let me see your latest project. You can learn more about the Underground at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu-2.

If you’ve been doing all the things, listening to the advice of the experts, and you’re still not seeing results, maybe the thing holding you back is your mindset. In this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I’m speaking with former copywriter and current mindset coach, Brian McCarthy. We talked about burnout, imposter complex, confidence and much more. If you’re doing “all the things” and still not reaching your goals, this episode is for you. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: Emily Reagan’s Interview Tanya Geisler’s Interview (Imposter Complex) Brian’s Website Imposter Complex eBook The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground The How to Write Emotional Copy Masterclass   Transcript: Rob Marsh: Maybe the thing keeping you from getting what you want and working with the clients you deserve is you. Want to know more? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast. Content writers, copywriters, social media writers, and marketers of all kinds face a bunch of challenges when it comes to building a successful business that supports the lifestyle that we all want. We talk about finding clients on the podcast a lot… maybe too much because there are other challenges… figuring out our niches, creating irresistable products and services that clients want to buy, pricing, positioning, marketing, and of course writing and so on. All of those business skills are important. If you can’t do them yourself or if you can’t hire someone else to do these for you, you’ll struggle as a business owner. But there is a whole other set of skills that we often overlook that also impact your ability to grow your business. We generally think of these hidden skills as mindset. And that’s what we’re talking about on today’s podcast. My guest is former copywriter and current mindset coach Brian McCarthy. Brian works with copywriters and others to help them work through mindset blocks and develop new skills to overcome them. Things like growing confidence, finding clarity and alignment, over coming imposter complex and a lot more. If you’ve been doing everything right but still struggle to get traction or feel like you’re making a difference in the world… or even just for your clients, maybe refocusing your efforts on mindset is what’s called for. So keep listening for our thoughts on these critical, but often ignored, mindset skills. Before we jump into our interview, a little while ago I recorded a masterclass to show copywriters, content writers and other marketers how to write “emotional” copy. Everyone says emotions sell, but how do you actually write emotional copy? I walk through more than a dozen examples in this masterclass and give you a proven process for figuring out the right emotions to focus on as you write… and how they change as you make your pitch. The masterclass includes several bonuses on storytelling, using A.I. to find dominant and transformational emotions, and much more. You can get this masterclass at thecopywriterclub.com/emotion And now, my interview with Brian McCarthy. Brian, welcome to the podcast. I’m thrilled to have you here, like we were saying, just as we were chatting before we started recording, we met briefly a bunch of years ago, you were doing something slightly different than what you did today. Yeah, tell me just how did you get here. You’re a mindset coach, but you also have a pretty big background in copywriting. So tell me about that? Brian McCarthy: Yeah, so I started copywriting, I don’t know 20, 2014 or so got into that world, and I was always copywriting for a lot of personal growth companies and coaches. I was just very into the personal growth world. And then eventually, like, found my I was doing launches, I was doing case studies, those became like my my main even wrote a book on how to do case studies like that kind of became my main focus. And then I was when the pandemic hit. One of my clients was this big life coach, Ronnie Britton, she’s amazing, and she has a coach. She has a program teaching people how to coach. And then I was like, that seems like a useful skill. I’ll do it. And then took the program, and as I started coaching people, I was like, Oh, this is the greatest thing in the world. And eventually moved from copywriting into coaching full time. And it was one of those, like, oh yeah, no. Like, I was always feeling that nudge to be in the personal growth world, like, yeah, no, wonder. And even during my copywriting career, it always felt like this is a stepping stone to something else. I just didn’t know what that something else was. Then once I found coaching, I was like, oh, it’s it’s that, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So before we jump into all the stuff you’re doing as coaching, I’d love to dive into your copy career just a little bit, because six, six years as a copywriter is nothing to sniff at, you know, writing a book about case studies. So let’s talk about that. How did you get started as a copywriter, and how did you really find those first couple of clients? I got started. I was just listening to podcasts while working at a corporate desk job that was slowly destroying my soul. And I was like, Oh, this sounds kind of nice, yeah, just, you know, travel and write and be on a beach and fire off a letter, and you make a bunch of money and everyone loves you. That sounds like a pretty good career. And then so I ended up, like, getting a severance from that job, say, like, merged and, and I was like, I’m just gonna try this Copyright thing, and spent the first year and a half just fighting for jobs on jobs boards being making little to no money, literally, like, I’d calculate my hourly rate, and I’m like, I made pennies on this ebook per hour. Like, so just slogging it out that was tough. And then eventually things started to stabilize. I got a job with Ramit Sethi, I Will Teach You To Be Rich. I was a senior copywriter with them for about a year, and then left that after a year, and then started to do the freelance thing, and got ended up with, like, feast or famine kind of thing. Like, it was actually going pretty well, but it was really unstable. Like, I finally did that, like, all right, making six figures, traveling the world a bit. It wasn’t, wasn’t all that easy to get to that point, but I got there and then got a couple steady retainer clients eventually after that, where I had like two clients, was making good money working, you know, three or four hours a day and able to travel. So that was kind of like my initial goal of what I wanted, what I wanted to hit as a copywriter. And I was like, oh, hit that. And then, of course, had, and again, it was like for personal growth companies, this parenting company that’s wonderful. So I was very fortunate. I’ve always loved my clients and been able to write for just wonderful people and great programs. Again, doing a lot of launches, case studies, some email marketing stuff. I always liked the longer form sales page and the more in depth, bigger projects, the you know, Hey, can I hire you for four emails? I’m like, What are you talking about? I have to learn so much to write four emails. I can write you like a 40 page letter. That was always more what drew me Rob Marsh: Me too. I’m the same way. I love writing emails, but sales, sales. Email sells copies where I live. Okay, so you’ve got this interesting skill set that you’ve developed since then, but I wonder, you know if you were coaching Brian McCarthy, copywriter just starting out making pennies per project, what mindset skills would you teach him, or would you basically walk him through in order to help him deal with that struggle or make progress faster for beginning copywriters, I guess the question is, what are the mindset things that we need to be focused on in order to make progress? Brian McCarthy: Yeah, great question. A couple things jump out based on a lot of the copywriters that I coach, and especially the ones that are just starting out. There’s one big piece is alignment of finding what actually inspires you and excites you. It’s really easy, and it’s copywriting world and online marketing world to get to seduced by like, Well, the big name person says that this is the best route to go. So now I’m gonna start us build a social media presence. Do you like social like? Do you like Instagram? Do you like social media? No, but it’s the it says. They say it’s the best way. So now I’m going to do that. I’m like, no, no, let’s find what actually works for you. So maybe that’s Instagram and social media, but maybe feeling more inclined to something else, whether that’s the method for growing your business, or the type of copywriting you want to do, or the type of companies you want to do, one is just getting like, the noise and all the stuff out there can be helpful and has its place. But first, let’s start with what’s really inspiring and aligned for you. Then the next piece. So that would be the first like clarity piece, and then the next piece would be the confidence piece of like, okay, how can let’s build up your confidence in a way that’s authentic, where you can own, even if you’re just starting out, you can still own the various skills and values and what you bring to the table beyond because a lot of people get stuck in, like, what I I don’t have the copywriting experience, and that’s all that matters. And it’s just the skills. It’s like, yeah, that’s yeah, that’s all important. And other things matter too. Are like, your ability to take feedback is super important. Your ability to communicate well, to hit deadlines. There’s all these other things, your passion for the work, your ability to listen and like find what the actual like thing worth talking about, even is there’s all these other things that people don’t they lose sight of the importance of it, and because they just focus on what they don’t have versus the pieces they do. So the next part, after the clarity would be the confidence in like, well, what are you bringing to the table and sharing that in a way where you’re not you know, trying to a lot of copywriters think they need to come in and kick the doors down and proclaim that they’re God’s gift to copywriting and gonna make you $10 million overnight. Like, no, don’t do that. Come from an honest, authentic place where you’re owning. Your value and what you bring to the table in a way that feels aligned, and they can see the value, but it’s not this big, you know, puffing out your chest nonsense like, because clients see and feel that, and they’re pretty sick of that too. They don’t want it. And then the last piece would be, the other mindset. Pieces outside of clarity, then confidence would then be like building more consistency. So a lot of what gets in the way that procrastination, self doubt, which is related to the confidence piece, and or again, lack of clarity of how I want to grow my business, like getting consistent with putting yourself out there, developing the habits, that’s another big piece, and that’s a lot easier too, once you have the clarity and confidence pieces in place. Rob Marsh: So as far, I’d love to break this down just a little bit more to understand each set. So starting with alignment, if this is a really difficult thing, obviously I’ve coached hundreds and hundreds copywriters as well. This is one of the starting pieces where you’re really trying to figure out your positioning, the product or service that you’re offering, the value you’re creating, the problem you’re solving, all of that stuff. And it takes, it takes time. I mean, there’s a reason why a lot of beginning copywriters don’t make a lot of money in that first year. It’s because, at least it feels to me like we’re bouncing from thing to thing trying to figure this stuff out. So how do we how do we shorten that process and make it a little bit easier? Because oftentimes a copywriter comes into it, yeah, we might have some background experience. You know, I I was a bartender, or I was a school teacher, I was a nurse and and we can bring that to the table, but sometimes we’re trying to get away from that stuff too, and we’re looking for something that rings a bell for us or really turns us on, but we don’t know what that is yet. Brian McCarthy: And it definitely is an exploration piece. One thing that immediately comes to mind, and this came from a coach I work with a lot, Kavita Singh, so it’s something that she helped me with and and that’s looking at the difference between, like, what you can do versus what you’re meant to do. And it’s like, okay, can I do this thing? Yes, I have these skills in this background, and that’s a needed thing, versus, yeah, more of that internal radar of what excites you and what gets you going. And there is, there is sometimes gonna just be that process of, like, trying things out and getting feedback and, like, there is a okay, like, figure it out as you go. It’s not necessarily like you’re in the garage and get it all fixed up, and then you go, it’s, it’s, it is more of a guess and check thing. So even I mean, that would be my biggest thing is, one is just really focusing on that internal radar and homing in on that and what you’re meant to do outside of like what looks best, or what you should do, or what’s smartest, like, you can still look at that, but make sure you’re not doing it at the expense of that inner peace or that piece inside you. And and the other part is even just honoring the the idea that it might take a little bit like it’s worth doing right, rather than rushing through to get the first thing. And again, this is an industry that very much values speed and instant transformation and all that kind of thing. And it’s an industry that, what do, you know, also has a lot of burnout, also has businesses that don’t exist in five years, you know, because it was more about like, well, this works. Let’s do more of that. And then people build businesses and go, like, I don’t even care about what I’m doing right now. I don’t care about these people. Like, I got sucked in the thing, because it’s what paid the bills, and people said yes to it. And now I’m doing group coaching calls that I hate to a bunch of people that I don’t even want to help. Like, that kind of thing happens in my mind, because a lot of that internal piece and like, what are you really meant to do? What really inspires you? What are the big problems that you know a lot of times that, like you faced in your life, that you want to help people with that kind of thing gets might get cut over or, like, jump through, that piece gets missed a little bit. Rob Marsh: This feels like where the typical advice about finding a niche sometimes goes wrong. And I’ll be upfront, I’m all about finding a niche and working in a niche. I think the data is there in salary surveys that we’ve done that show that somebody working in niche makes significantly more money than somebody who’s a generalist. So obviously choosing a niche is good for your long term copywriting or whatever it is, service business that you’re running. However, sometimes it takes a while to find the niche. You know, as an example, you might become a copywriter thinking, hey, I’m I could write sales copy. I’ve done maybe door to door sales at one point when I was in college, or I sold shoes at Nordstrom, or whatever the thing is. And so I’m going to. Write, you know, sales emails or sales letters, and then as you get into it, you discover this entire world of Salesforce and sales enablement tools and all the things that happen in the background that you could fall in love with. You may not have even known that that stuff exists until you get into the process. And so again, while I’m really big on choosing a niche. I’m also really big on taking time to figure out what it is that you’re interested in, to explore that stuff, to learn the new things, so you can even discover and open yourself up to whatever it is, like you said, that you’re going to be aligned with. Brian McCarthy: Totally, yeah, it’s like, it’s like, how can you be expected to make the decision of the direction to go. If you don’t have, if you’re of a very limited information like you explore these things exactly like you said, then you have more information to work with, and you can make a more informed decision of what direction you want to go. And also, nothing’s forever, right? I mean, you were talking about building a business, and three, four years down the road, you find out that this isn’t something that lights you up anymore, so you can always change that as well. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s, we’re always evolving. So it’s very likely that it’s gonna evolve whether, whether you expect it to, or wanted to, or not. Like, yeah, you almost, you almost can’t help it. So yeah, a lot of that fear of like, oh, but if I pick a niche, I’m like, I’m in a prison forever. It’s like, No, you like you, literally like you’re going to keep changing. So as long as your business is a reflection of you, then it’s going to be changing as well. Rob Marsh: Let’s talk about confidence, because, and this is a challenge, we always seem to want to wait to do the thing until we’re confident that we can do it. And we all we’ve talked about this on the podcast a few times, but we all know confidence. You can’t just hand somebody confidence. You can’t teach it. You can’t even learn it unless you do the thing. And so I liked what you were saying about, you know, looking at your background and thinking about some of the things that have sort of gotten you to this point where you are. But let’s, let’s go a little bit deeper on this. How can we sort of borrow confidence or create confidence until we’ve actually proven we can do this thing and we own the confidence that we’re showing out to the world? Brian McCarthy: Yeah, I’ve got a lot to go there. So first of all, that was my biggest I’d say that was probably my biggest hurdle when I was a copywriter, was I always felt like I wasn’t good enough. I was just like, I’m one bad sales page away for like, this is gonna be bad clients gonna hate it. They’re gonna fire me. They’re gonna tell everybody I’m terrible and I’m never gonna get a job again. That, like, I had that for a good five years, like that was just always there. And of course, yeah, that confidence keeps you from like, it kept me, like, under charging at certain times. Kept me from going for certain jobs. It just made me more stressed all the time, kept maybe work longer hours than I need to, kept me buying more courses that I wouldn’t even go through because my own insecurities like, but if I have this magic knowledge, then I’ll be good, right? And that, like, that whole cycle that people get in of chasing shiny objects is just a lack of confidence. So, yeah, there’s, there’s a lot to go in here where you talk about, can you borrow confidence? Like, yeah, absolutely. I think there’s that that can be a little bit of a band aid. But, you know, if you get, like, I had certain mentors and coaches that knew the industry, and that would tell me, like, oh, you can charge that much for that. So be like, Oh, okay, I guess I’ll charge more now. Like, I guess I’ll charge 250 for a copy critique call instead of 100 great. And so you can get that, or even just that was another big thing I did. I would very often hire other copywriters to look at my work. So it’s like, Oh, okay. David robbold told me my copy is good. Okay, it’s good. Like, now I can feel better about it. So having these kind of, yeah, mentors, coaches, people you can hire, even if just a one off, that’s that’s super valuable. And I’d say the other piece where confidence really gets gets going and owned, is when you look at some of the deeper fears and beliefs and expectations people have that’s keeping them from having that confidence, and you start to look deeper at that and unravel it, that works a lot more effectively than a lot of what people are generally doing, of the like, well, just tell yourself this positive thing. Just remind yourself of the wins you do have over and over. Like, yes, that’s important, but if you haven’t done the deeper work of unraveling some of the deeper fears and beliefs, then it’s like planting seeds in a garden that’s already full of weeds. Like, it’s it’s not going to really take it’s not, it’s not going to take root. It’s you’ve got to, like, rip this other stuff out, and then that creates the space for those more, you know, owning your value, and those more confident beliefs, to really settle in and get embodied. And then then you feel that confidence and conviction more yourself. Rob Marsh: Can you give us a. Couple of examples of those existing beliefs that really keep us from developing confidence? Brian McCarthy: Sure. So one that I run into a bunch when I work with copywriters, like they have this idea of, I’m not a real quote, unquote, I’m not a real copywriter, right? Or I’m not or even just, I’m not a real writer. And then so I’m like, okay, cool. So what does a real copywriter mean? And we just go into their definition of it. So like this one client I worked with, she she had these kind of, like, personal issues going on, but basically meant she could only write for two hours a day. And she’s like, well, and she had a full time job for a well known, you know, company that hires a lot of copywriters. She’s like, well, if I can only write two hours a day, like, I’m not a real copywriter. So I’m imposter. I’m a joke. So then I’m like, Well, where did this idea come from that a real writer needs to work write six hours a day or whatever? Like, okay, oh, this is just a made up thing that you created. So she had this definition in her mind of what a real copywriter is. And we just looked at that and looked at the truth of it, and I just would ask a bunch of questions, and basically just start poking a bunch of holes at it, and then it fell apart. Then we found it like, well, what’s a new definition that feels more real and more true to you? And then she’s like, actually, I could be a real copywriter and still work two hours a day and then, and this is how the other parts of my day look, and, and was like, So, and does that feel true to you? Right? Not just a nice idea intellectual exercise, but getting to the point where, like you, honestly, like in your soul and bones, believe that, okay, cool. And, and then she could start to remind herself and operate from that place of like, well, yes, I’m a real copywriter, even if it’s not showing up in this way that I initially thought I had to show up. So that’s, that’s one idea is, how do you work through these beliefs and fears and everything? Look at your definitions. Look at your definitions of what you have, what a copywriter means, of what being successful on this project means that’s, that’s, there’s like several different ways to kind of attack this, and sometimes it takes multiple but that’s one, and it can be a very strong one for helping people get more confidence in in their role. Rob Marsh: I like that approach. A few weeks ago, on another episode of this podcast, I interviewed my friend Emily Reagan, and she told a story. I had actually forgotten of this about this, but she told a story how we were at the copywriter club in real life event in San Diego, talking at the bar, and she mentioned that she she didn’t feel comfortable being a copywriter. She wasn’t a copywriter, and she wasn’t even sure why she was at the event, and it was crazy because she was writing copy for her clients, but because she had assumed the title, you know, whether, whether it was marketing assistant or administrative assistant or virtual assistant, or whatever, at the time, she she wasn’t giving herself permission to be a copywriter, and she reminded me of this on the episode. So if anybody wants to go back and listen to go back and listen to this example, it’s episode 441, I think. But she basically said to me, or I said to her, you have permission. You are a copywriter, right? I it was kind of that sword to the shoulder, you know, you are now a knight, or you are, you know. But the idea here is that you don’t need to wait for, you know, a senior copywriter to say you’re a good enough writer to be a copywriter anymore, or a manager or, you know, and when we work for ourselves anyway, that person’s not coming along. Even a lot of coaches aren’t going to take the time to say you are a copywriter. Give yourself permission. So anyway, kind of a long answer back to you, but it’s such a good example. You don’t need to wait for permission if you’re writing, especially if you’re writing copy for clients. You’re a copywriter, and you might as well own it and start getting better at it. Brian McCarthy: And again, like, that’s, that’s a great example of, like, yeah. The almost like, the borrowed confidence that can can help, right? And like, Oh, cool. Rob told me that, and I’m good. I’m sure there’s a lot of people that have felt that way. And it’s Yeah, ultimately, you do want to get that source yourself, because, like, why, you know what, and what’s the definition of copywriter that works for you, and and why do you need somebody else to bequeath it onto you? Why, like, there’s a little bit of that, why it still can stay a little wobbly and like, it can give us confidence, but it’s still we still have those doubts, is because we’re still getting that confidence from outside of ourselves. We’re still giving the power of who we are and what we’re doing to somebody else. We need somebody else to validate it and to tell us we’re okay and tell us, like what we are, versus owning that and claiming that for ourselves. And yeah, part of that is like just knowing, like just getting really clear on what that is and what we’re showing up with and what we’re bringing. And valuing that, and yeah, and what if you what you want to call yourself based on that that feels true and right for you. Rob Marsh: Okay, so that’s alignment, confidence. Then we have consistency. Consistency feels to me like it’s just a matter of daily practice, or we’re setting the flywheel to do the thing that we do over and over, is it more than that? Brian McCarthy: So I’d say it’s more than that in there can be some blocks in that, right? So what’s keeping you from being consistent? Oh, there’s procrastination. Oh, why are you procrastinating? Oh, well, there’s some deeper fear of, you know, being seen as a fraud, or I’m gonna mess up and everyone’s gonna see I’m incompetent, or whatever it is, or, sometimes it’s misalignment, right? It goes back to the beginning of, why am I inconsistent? Because part of you knows this, ain’t it, and you’re trying to force yourself to do something that just like there’s, there’s just something a little off. So there can be pieces, either based on the first two things, or maybe something else that’s kind of in the way of that consistency. And then, yeah, there’s also just simpler things for, like, tactical steps for building that consistency. Like a lot of times, you know, people put big pressure on themselves of what that needs to be for them to be writing every day, or doing all this kind of outreach, or whatever it looks like to grow their business. And so just one helpful thing that is, you know, there’s always books on small habits and all that kind of stuff, and that’s just a super impactful way to get people going, of like, take the pressure off, do it for five minutes. It’s not even about getting the clients. It’s just about you building the habits of doing that. And when you start to take the pressure off, take the expectations you have for yourself off, then the consistency develops, and then it kind of starts to continue with itself. And these things that you are avoiding become more enjoyable, more automatic, and then you’re doing the things to grow your business and get yourself out there, deliver the copy for your clients, whatever it is. Rob Marsh: Those are some pretty good tools. As far as thinking through those first couple of months of being in business and getting up and going. But a lot of us, we start to hit other bumps as well. The one that really stands out and really hits from the beginning right up, and pros still suffer with it, and that’s imposter complex or imposter syndrome, depending on how people like to define that. We’ve had a really, I’ve pointed people to a previous episode of the podcast where we’ve talked about that with Tanya Geisler, and I think it’s episode number 47 and definitely worth a listen. But let’s, let’s talk about that again. Because no matter, no matter how much you know about imposter complex, it still seems to pop its head up when we try something new, even sometimes when we’re just doing the thing that we do, but maybe it’s for a new client or a new product, whatever. So let’s, let’s talk imposter complex. So what can we do to overcome it? Brian McCarthy: Sure, yeah, and that I went through that podcast, and it was awesome, and I think there’s a lot she shares that can really, like, shed a lot of light for people and help bring clarity. And the kind of crusade I’ve put on lately, because I learned this maybe a year ago, and then I started applying it. And really like seeing changes is that the the fundamental idea that imposter syndrome doesn’t go away, it’s just there forever. You just got to deal with it. It’s just not true. And then so once I learned that, and I started applying to my own life, and I started applying that with clients more, and I’ve seen the truth of that, like, it’s, I understand a lot of the common thing, it’s like, hey, it’s just fear. Like, yes, it’s based in fear. And that doesn’t mean, like I was afraid of dogs when I was three. Doesn’t mean I’m still afraid of dogs. You know, we can overcome these fears. We can dissolve them. And there was another point that just escaped my head. Oh, well, okay, yeah, basically, the idea that it can be, it’s there forever, just isn’t the truth. It doesn’t have to be the truth. And so the the ways that I look at imposter syndrome and help people work through it, it kind of, it’s the first is just looking at the the different fears and beliefs and expectations attached to it, which is similar to what I said before, about like the definitions we create, the definitions of what success means, how we think we need to be these expectations we have in our heads, all this stuff, and looking at that, challenging, that dismantling that, and doing that in a like it takes, it can often take a pretty deep and thorough exploration. That’s why people can think that they know like, Oh, I know I’m putting this outrageous. I know I’ve got this perfectionism thing, and it’s not actually true, but it still feels like I need to be this amazing copywriter with million dollar launches under my belt, or I suck. And I know that that’s ridiculous, and I know that that’s not true, but I still buy into it. It’s like, cool, okay. That just means you haven’t gone deep enough yet. There’s just still more stuff to explore. Or what’s hooking that in your system still? So that’s the first level. The second layer is some kind of core fear that can be kind of dissolved and broken free from. And the third layer is kind of what we touched on before as well, really looking at and owning your skills, knowledge and what you’re bringing to the table, your intention and how you’re showing up even and embodying that, not just knowing it intellectually, not just knowing, oh yeah, I’ve got skills that that are important, but actually, genuinely feeling that. And sometimes there’s internal, other internal blocks that keep us from actually feeling that, that we can get into and owning that. But when you’re when you have that piece too, and you’re able to get all three of those pieces, like imposter syndrome just goes away, because imposter syndrome is just it’s just a mental construct. It’s just this idea we have in our heads of how we think we need to be and how we think people need to react to us. And when you dig into that and let it fall apart, then you’re just showing up, however, like, with a certain intention and how you want to be. You’re just, hey, this is just me, and this is what I’m bringing and that’s it. And there’s, there’s no, like, there’s no room for impostor syndrome anymore. It’s, it just doesn’t, it doesn’t fit. It does. There’s, he’s left the room, it’s gone. And it might still come up a little bit, but it just means, Oh, there’s one of these areas. Is there’s something I’m not quite seeing, and then you explore that area, and then it can be gone again. Rob Marsh: For me, it a lot of this is based on our genetic fears, right? Because fear of rejection is literally built into our genes. 10,000 years ago, if you were rejected by the tribe, you lost family, you lost food, you lost opportunities for mating, you probably died. And because of that, we have a very healthy sense of needing to belong and and be accepted by others, just built into our genes, and anytime that we’re stepping out of the comfort zone, doing something new, doing something that’s challenging, or something where we’re putting ourselves out, maybe it’s on social media where other people are seeing us and may reject us, triggers that Very natural discussion with our brain. It’s like, Hey, you’re you’re putting yourself in jeopardy here, of all of these things that used to be real jeopardy for us, and it’s not anymore. You know, making a mistake on social media is probably not going to affect your ability to eat, or the fact that your loved ones are going to give you a hug tonight. You know, as long as it’s not some egregious, awful thing that you’re saying, you’re probably not even going to get canceled, right? So just being aware and taking a step back to think through what am I feeling, feels like a really big step towards overcoming imposter syndrome, imposter complex. But there’s maybe there’s more to more other fears that I’m not even thinking about here as well. Brian McCarthy: That’s that’s absolutely huge, that that really does come down to a lot of the core piece of it. There can be within that, within that fear of rejection, the fear of, uh, kind of being out of the tribe, there can be different kind of core fears. This is one of the things that I got from Rhonda Britton and her wheel of fear, which is all about finding, like, the specific core fear for you so and it’s not just about like, how people will react, and, you know, my my physical safety, and where I stand in the tribe and all that stuff. And that’s 100% a part of it. And then, yeah, there can be other aspects of it too, right? It’s like and what does this say about me, if I’m kicked out of the tribe, and who I am, and what am I gonna feel, and the shame that like we’re it’s not even just the, you know, survival being the social group. There’s also just certain feelings that we are so afraid to feel of this is proof I’m a loser. This is proof I’m in confident and then I’m going to feel so much shame and worthlessness, and I don’t want to feel that, so I’m going to avoid that feeling. And that’s where the imposter syndrome pops up to help us try to avoid ever facing that and feeling that. And so that’s why another piece of and why you don’t actually have to just live with imposter syndrome forever. Sometimes it can be linked to certain fears, certain pieces of shame, certain things that happened in our past, and if we just let ourselves feel that more fully, then it loses a lot of its power. So that can kind of be another doorway out. Sometimes it’s, you know, we built up this, this fear, and we’re just so afraid to feel it, and it might be tied to something that happened, and we let ourselves feel it, and it moves through us, and to go to that other, to your other point of like, well, this is just ingrained in evolutionary Okay, yeah, and there’s a lot of people that are afraid to post on social media. At first, then after five years, they’ve been doing it and they’re no longer afraid, right? Like sometimes imposter syndrome sticks around, and sometimes it doesn’t Okay, cool. So, so you’ve learned to have this feeling of safety even as you’re posting all this stuff now. Well, do you necessarily need five years of posting to build that sense of safety that you’re okay in who you are and yourself in the standing in society, regardless of the posting. Or are there ways to look at address some of those fears that are coming up so you can get in that state before without needing five years of posting every day to get there? And that’s what I believe and have seen, is can be true. If you go deeper into that fears initially, you can start to unravel them and evaporate them. And yeah, it might still take now, instead of needing five years of posting every day to finally feel confident with it, then now you’re there in a couple of weeks. Rob Marsh: Yeah, so much of this really comes down to just do it anyway. And I know that’s really terrible mindset advice, because there are all these blocks and the head trash that we deal with, but ultimately, the reason that we go through so many of these exercises is to allow us to just do it anyway. Brian McCarthy: There’s a lot of value in the doing it anyway, and it can also be a bigger problem than I think a lot of people realize, because if you’ve got all this fear of what’s everyone gonna think, and I’m gonna get kicked out of the tribe and all that stuff, and then you do the thing anyway, and then you get that negative backlash, man, it’s, it can be now, now the fear got even stronger, right? You raise the bar even higher, it can be even harder to do that. So, like, if you’re not in the pro like, and also, if it’s, if the if the action, so that’s, that’s one possible detriment. And why I’m more focused on, let’s get into and release the block in the first place. So doing the action comes more naturally and easily, and it’s not a thing you even have to force yourself to do. So that’s that’s one piece of it. The other part of forcing yourself to do it anyway is sometimes you forcing yourself might be coming from a place of fear, a place of scarcity, a place of I need to do this so I fit in. So if you’re doing your outreach, you’re posting on social media from a place of fear, then you’re again feeding that fear making it strong, versus if you’re posting from that place of like I believe in this copywriting thing I’m learning about, and I’m excited to share and talk about it, even if I’m not the world’s biggest expert, I’m just sharing a thing I think is cool, and I just want to see who else is think thinks it’s cool with me, such different energies sharing from those Two different places. And if you’re sharing from the place of kind of like forcing yourself, then you can just reinforce that need to work from that place, that fear, the I need to fit in, and then like to go on what we talked about the very beginning, when people build these businesses and realize they’re not satisfied, they’re burned out, they don’t even like what they’re doing all that much. A lot of it’s because they built it from this place of forcing themselves. And I just gotta, you know, do it and like coming from fear and scarcity and having to prove themselves. So there is absolutely a place, I think for Hey, you just got to do it anyway. You just got to watch some of that alignment. And where is that action coming from? Because there is a trap of it can kind of reinforce some of the things and just make them stronger and just keep them with us, if we’re not careful in how we do that makes sense. Rob Marsh: I want to switch our conversation just a little bit. You mentioned burnout, and I think this is a really interesting phenomena. A lot of times, people get burned out, and they don’t really realize they’re burned out, you know, they’re just tired, or they’re tired of the work, or, you know, things that are happening in their business, things just feel like they’re slow, or you’re moving through molasses, however you want to describe that. And then there’s full on burnout, where you almost don’t want to get out of bed, because, you know, whatever it is that is burning you out is, is, you know, holding you down, holding you back. So I’d love to explore this a little bit, but maybe the first question is, how do I even know if, if burnout is happening before you know it gets to the point where, I mean, I just don’t even, I can’t even look at my business anymore. I can’t even face the inbox or my calendar or whatever you know is is just causing that dread. Brian McCarthy: That’s that’s such a good point. And for how to look at spot burnouts happening. I mean, looking at your energy levels, your excitement, one indicator can be your whole life kind of feels like an obligation, like a to do list. And you make such a good point. Like, people don’t see it coming, in part because they’ve just been in it for so long, like it’s what they know. So actually, another, like, kind of random thing, I do improv comedy as well, and that’s also a thing that I like Teach and part of my coaching, but I also perform, and I just love it. And a lot of people will do an improv comedy class or a couple, and then they realize, like, Oh, this is what feeling good is. This is what fun is. This is what joy is. And then they start to realize how much they’ve been missing it in their everyday life. So one thing is just getting out of your kind of everyday stuff and doing other things that can help you start to get that contrast of, like, you know, there’s taking a trip or doing some improv class, or, like, another client, yeah, it took a took a two week vacation, then comes back is like, Oh, I like this helped me get perspective on how much I don’t like what I’m doing right Now, and like, what’s available and what feelings are available. So one is just getting out doing other stuff, and then seeing how you feel and seeing that contrasted to how you feel on an everyday basis can be one helpful thing, and it’s just good to do anyway, because novelty and new explorations and new stuff is good for us. That’s one piece. Another piece is like, if you just wake up and feel like you start going through the to do list in your head and it’s just a non stop slog of obligations, and you’re just going through it, that can be some warning bells. If you’re looking at your day and like, hey, when when did you feel lit up? When did you feel excited? When did you enjoy what you were doing? And if you’re having trouble finding answers to those questions, that could be another sign, if you’re feeling like a sense of purpose, because you can, you can not be enjoying it that much. But man, you know where you’re going, and you know that this is a strong like a necessary piece, and you’re okay with that, like that can be beautiful. So is there a sense of purpose as well for Where are you going longer term? And like, this kind of being the thing that’s going to get you to that next thing, whether you’re clear on what that next thing is or No, but you have a strong belief in it, and you still just have a sense that this is right, that would be another thing I’d check in on. So like, check in on your sense of enjoyment, check in on your sense of purpose. Check in on is everything feeling like an obligation, or is this feeling like expansive and like it’s what you want to be doing so and you know, how much of your day and your week, are these things? These are kind of like different indicators I’d be looking at and kind of ranking different areas, along with your sense of purpose to help see, are you potentially on a road for burnout? Rob Marsh: Let’s say I’m there, burned out. Yeah, what? What do? And I know there are a lot of copywriters that hit this point, and I think the question becomes, should I quit and do something totally different, or is there a way to get the joy back, assuming that we want to get the joy back. What do you recommend? Brian McCarthy: I work with a lot of a lot of my clients. It’s funny, they’ll come to me like being like, I need to quit and get a new job and doing something new. And I’d say maybe half of them end up doing that, and half of them end up like, loving their work again. So there’s, yeah, I would, I’d first look at the patterns I kind of create that created the burnout and some of the internal stuff that led to it. Because otherwise, if you just go jump another thing, cool. But if these patterns repeat now you’re just gonna find another job to get burned out by, and you’re gonna keep doing this cycle. So I would definitely look at, you know, what created the burnout first, and a lot of times, what happens with my clients, and what I find is it’s, it’s due to a lot of internal processes and to how they feel about themselves and their work and their relationships with people in their work. So one example, had a client who was super burned out, and we got and it’s like, oh, the you know, company needs more we need to hire more people. We need better systems, right? It’s what you’re if you’re burned out, you’re probably pointing the fingers at all the people and things, how it’s their fault and the revenue is not good enough, and all that stuff, and then we looked more internal and of like, what how she was viewing herself in the situation, and what we found for her, big time, people pleaser, big time I need to take care of everybody else, and my own needs are on the back burner, and I’ve. Got to, like, be I got to be super responsive. No one else needs to be super responsive. But I need to holding expectations for herself that she doesn’t even have for anybody else. Feeling like, yeah, she’s got to take care of everybody else, and she’s got to make everybody else happy all the time. And so, like, really, the people pleasing thing was like, okay, cool. Let’s work through that. And that was the big thing that allowed her to then start taking bits of time off. And then as she was taking more time off, she started to get more energized again. Another thing I’ll do with clients is just schedule, like 30 minutes a week, an hour a week, to just do nothing, just let themselves do nothing, because their whole day is obligation and doing things, and this sense of, I need to do everything for everyone else. So just giving them a little period of time to just not have that starts to get some internal energy going, of like, Oh, okay. Like, okay. I can feel myself again. I can start to ask myself, What do I want here? So that was almost a little tangent, but just a little like side trick tactic people who start to use, but the other things are like, yeah, the deeper stuff around people pleasing. That’s one example. Another people realize so much of their work is like, I’ve got to they’re actually trying to prove themselves to their peers, to people in their company. It’s this, this drive to prove themselves, show that they’re good enough, show that they’re worthy, is actually what’s causing the burnout. So that’s why again, cool man, get another job. If you’re still trying to prove yourself, you’re gonna end up burned out again. So let’s, let’s deal with that deeper issue so it can be other things as well, people pleasing, proving yourself. These are kind of different, different areas, but these are some of the internal things that create the burnout. And when you look at and dismantle them from the inside, it can be such a quick shift of, you know, within couple months, couple weeks even, it’s like, oh, the burnout is gone, and I enjoy my work again, right? Like, that’s literally what I see that all the time. It’s super cool. Sometimes it takes longer, and, you know, everyone’s got their own path. And sometimes it’s like people pleasing and proving yourself. Like, sometimes you might have a lot of these different things that need to kind of get worked through and sorted out and dismantled and let go of and but those are, those are some of the inner pieces. It’s, it’s really about looking at like, well, what’s been driving you is it obligation, trying to please people, what people think of you, all this kind of stuff, and then learn to be driven from a place of more authentic expression and confidence and expansiveness and inspiration instead. There’s probably some variety here as well. You know, I imagine if I was hired to write the same blog post over and over and over and that, I mean, it happens, right? You get a client that needs you to write about their thing, and you’ve got to figure out the 18th, 19th, 20th, different way to write about their thing, that lack of variety can can cause it as well, and that might be an extreme example. But if all you’ve written is blog posts, maybe it’s time to change it up. And, you know, add some new products to to your writing, or if you have been writing in a niche, as we talked about earlier, and you just you’re seeing the same kind of thing over and over, maybe it’s time to switch that up a little bit and play around in another niche, or with a different kind of client, or with a different kind of copy or voice. Or, you know, there’s so many different ways that we can change up our businesses, but it’s really easy to get into that rut, and then two years, three years, where you’ve been doing the same old, same old, it just it doesn’t light you up the way that it used to. So I don’t know that you’ve got all of the answers on, how do we keep things fresh, but the and obviously, this is why we take vacations. This is, you know, why we try to have hobbies, although oftentimes a lot of copywriters, our hobby is copywriting. It is marketing, right? And reading the books about the stuff, or going to the events about the stuff. And so even your hobbies start to impede on your work and and your well being. So variety feels like a big missing piece here too. Brian McCarthy: Yeah, that’s a great point. And yeah, sometimes that can just be a signal for like, hey, maybe it’s time to level up. Maybe it’s time to try something new. Add a different type of writing into your system. Start, you know, be step up to an editor. Do that, move into a different, higher level role. And I’ll also say there’s, there’s also ways to look at how to make that monotonous work more interesting for you. So I had a client who was in that exact situation, and he was writing these scripts, and he’s just like, I’ve been writing these scripts for years, like I’m so sick of it, and I get that was part of what made me leave copywriting. Like, I’m just like, Man, I just, I just don’t want to do it anymore. I used to be nerd out to it so much. Now I just didn’t care. But you can look at like, and this can be very for individuals of like, okay, but what could make it interesting for you? So me and this client started to explore that and play with these different ideas and what that might look like, and what he found he likes to be, like, intellectually challenged, like he wants it to be hard, so he would like make it hard on himself. I forget exactly what he did, but that was the point. Like he was like, I’m like, what would it look like for this to be more challenge? Like, he’d like give himself different challenges to try to do, to like, write it in this different way that he’d never do before, that he initially thought his clients wouldn’t like, but then it ended up being the most popular video they ever did, and it was just, like, totally out of left field. So he’s like, How can I actually make this more difficult and more challenging became like, the thing of inspiration for him. And there’s, you know, there’s a million other ways, and I’d say it’s probably different for each individual of like, well, how could you make that fun for you? I was also thinking of like, you know, again, fellow of improv comedy. So it could be like, Man, what if you just, like, took on a character and start writing from this character, just to see what they express, and how that can be, right? That could be like, a totally different, you know, just thing to explore, and that, like, again, that would be on a very kind of personal case by case basis. Of, like, what would it take to make this monotonous thing you’ve done a million times kind of fun and interesting and a little bit exciting, and, you know, let yourself explore that a little bit, instead of immediately. And, you know, maybe you know, maybe you find something, maybe you don’t, and then it’s time to move on to something else. But I think it’s definitely a question in an area worth exploring a bit before just being like, well, I guess I’ll just quit this and become an Uber driver or whatever. Rob Marsh: Yeah, as you’re talking I’m thinking about musicians who have that one hit. So my, one of my favorite bands is the Barenaked Ladies. Almost 30 years ago, they have a hit. You know, if I had a million dollars, I bet you that they have probably played that song at least. You know, at all of their shows, the fans demand it. So 200 performances, 30 years, you know, we’re talking six, 7000 times. And and, of course, they’ve got to be sick of the song, like, when you when you’ve done something that many times. And so that band in particular, like, they changed it up a little bit. You know, there’s, they changed the verses, they changed the words and the live performances. But also, there’s, they’re not only doing that song right? They’ve written 20 albums since then. They’ve, you know, done all kinds of different explorations into different kinds of music and and so they’re keeping it fresh. So yeah, while they, the fans demand that they keep going back to that one thing, there’s all of this other stuff that’s happening around that. So there’s a copy writing lesson there. Maybe I’ll drop this into an email to my list as I’m talking it through. But you know, the way to keep it fresh isn’t necessarily quitting, and it’s not necessarily stopping doing the thing that is making you the money and that your clients are demanding, but it’s adding all of these other pieces that allow you to still explore and enjoy the thing that you love doing in the first place? Brian McCarthy: Totally. Yeah, and it just, I thought of a quick like tool that might be helpful for people of if they’ve got, you know, okay, I’m gonna wake up tomorrow and write these emails that I’ve written 100 times if, if your goal isn’t write the email, but it’s, have fun writing the email, like, that’s the rule, if you’re not having fun, stop and then see what it takes, and see what that’s like and and have that be the goal, and see what comes from it, instead of, you know, just just slogging through and checking another box. Yeah? And I think that’s, that’s a great point of, like, they barricade ladies found a way to make it fun for them cool. Take that for yourself. How can you make this fun for yourself? Rob Marsh: I like that, and I’m going to see if I can apply that to you know, how do I have fun while doing my taxes or keeping my books? The things that I really hate about my business? How can I make it fun? Probably pay somebody else to do it is, is the final answer? Brian McCarthy: There’s certain things that you’re just gonna hit a wall, or it’s just like, Nah, man. It’s just, ain’t it? Yeah, that’s not. Rob Marsh: I’ve never, I’m never gonna be the tax happy copywriter, I guess. Brian McCarthy: So expectations there too, because it’s not about, like, how do I make taxes the most fun. It’s like, okay, well, you probably maybe that might be a bit high, but can you at least make it like, not suck, if that’s okay, how do I make this just like, Fine, you know, finds a big increase from dread and misery, you know? Rob Marsh: This is going to be a weird question. But I’d love to see how you, you know, work through this. But if there was a copywriter mindset, what is that? What would that be? Brian McCarthy: Oh, I like this. A copywriter mindset, to me, would be full ownership of what you’re doing, who you are, what you bring to the table, and a belief in yourself and your value that comes from you, it could be informed by mentors and people around you and you know and what you’ve seen and learned in the industry and everything, but ultimately, it’s it’s you taking ownership of that, and rather than being dependent on what other people believe a copywriter should be, what you’ve heard a copywriter should be, again, that can inform you or other other people’s standards of what, what, what needs to be done and delivered and all this stuff, again, that informs you, but ultimately, like you’re Creating this road and owning your value fully yourself. Does that make sense? Rob Marsh: Yeah. Brian, there’s been really interesting discussion. If somebody wants to reach out to you or connect to you, follow you in the things that you’re doing and talking about and helping with, where should they go? Brian McCarthy: McCarthymindsetcoaching.com, I’ve also got, if you like the imposter syndrome talk, which copywriters tend to if you go McCarthy mindset coaching.com/imposter, I’ve got an e book that shows you how some of my clients overcame imposter syndrome, goes a bit deeper to some of the stuff that we talked about. So that could be immediately valuable. And then, yeah, I’ve also got, you know, loads of case studies and stuff on my website, a lot of which are copywriters and showing how helped, how they’ve worked through other areas, like procrastination, self doubt, all that stuff. Rob Marsh: I’ll link to both of those in the show notes so people can find them pretty easily. And I appreciate your time. Brian, thanks. Brian McCarthy: You bet this is great. Thanks Brian for walking through a bunch of the mindset issues that hold us back. I’ve heard marketing guru Perry Marshall call this stuff head trash and I really like that way of framing this stuff. It often is trash that is keeping us from moving forward, but it’s very real and needs to be dealt with so we can move on. If you want to follow Brian, you can find him at McCarthyMindsetCoaching.com. And you can get his free ebook on imposter complex at mccarthymindsetcoaching.com/imposter. And of course you should check out that old episode I mentioned as we were just starting out with Tanya Geisler about imposter complex if you are struggling with confidence or that nagging voice inside your head that is telling you that you’re not ready, or that you’re a fake, or that you’re not qualified. There’s a lot of good stuff on that episode which I’ve linked to in the show notes. If mindset is a struggle for you, I don’t want to miss this opportunity to mention several episodes of the podcast we’ve done’ with mindset coach Linda Perry. You can find those on our website or just google The Copywriter Club and Linda Perry and they should pop up… we’ve covered a lot of ground with Linda and those episodes are also worth adding to your list. Early on in this interview I mentioned that you don’t need to wait for permission to be a copywriter. If you write copy for clients, then you are a copywriter. However, I don’t want to minimize the actual writing chops you need to have in order to be a copywriter. You have to be able to deliver results. You have to know how to persuade and sell. You need to be able to write legibly and clearly and help your clients solve real marketing problems. You can just write a blog post and call yourself a copywriter. I mean, you could, but you’re faking it. If that’s where you are in your journey, focus on picking up those skills. We have a bunch of resources in The Copywriter Club to help you do that… maybe the best place to start is The Copywriter Underground—you can learn more about what that includes at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu-2 And of course you should check out the How to Write Emotional Copy Masterclass that I mentioned at the top of the show… you can find out more about that game-changing workshop at thecopywriterclub.com/emotion

In this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, we’re talking about how con men, pick-up artists, magicians and yes, copywriters, use psychology and persuasion to get readers to pay attention and change their behavior. My guest is copywriter John Bejakovic who has just published a new book on the topic. If you want to be a better writer, click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. Stuff to check out: The 10 Commandments Book John’s first interview The Katelyn Bourgoin Interview The Sarah Levinger Interview The Richard Armstrong Interview The Parris Lampropouos Interview The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground The How to Write Emotional Copy Masterclass Transcript: Rob Marsh: Looking for non-obvious ways to be more persuasive? Today we’re talking about the ten commandments of con men, pick up artists, comedians and others. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast. Over the last couple of months, I’ve interviewed a couple of guests about psychology and persuasion… on episode 447 I talked with Katelyn Bourgoin and on episode 448, I spoke with Sarah Levinger. In both of those interviews we talked about using psychology and principles from behavioral economics and neuroscience. Today’s episode covers similar ground in a very different way. My guest is copywriter John Bejakovic. John runs one of the best daily email lists out there, sharing his throughts on marketing, sales, and persuasion. He recently published a book about these topics called, The 10 Commandments of Con Men, Pick Up Artists, Magicians, Door-to-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Professional Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand Up Comedians, and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters. It’s a long title for a short book that covers a lot of ground. I wanted to talk to John about the ideas in his book, but more than that, I wanted to discuss the ethics of using these kinds of tactics to get our readers and prospects to take action. If you want to be a better writer or a more effective communicator or simply want to help your children or customers or friends use information to make better decisions, I think you’ll like this episode. These topics really appeal to me. Not just as a writer or marketer so I can use these techniques myself, but also as a consumer. You can’t avoid the con men who use these tactics unless you understand the tactics and how they use them. Being smart is not enough to avoid responding positively to the ideas we talk about on this episode. Before we jump into our interview, a little while ago I recorded a masterclass to show copywriters, content writers and other marketers how to write “emotional” copy. Everyone says emotions sell, but how do you actually write emotional copy? I walk through more than a dozen examples in this masterclass and give you a proven process for figuring out the right emotions to focus on as you write… and how they change as you make your pitch. The masterclass includes several bonuses on storytelling, using A.I. to find dominant and transformational emotions, and much more. You can get this masterclass at thecopywriterclub.com/emotion And now, my interview with John Bejakovic. Rob Marsh: Hey, John, welcome back to the podcast. You were here, I think it was literally two years ago, Episode 365, where we talked about a lot of different stuff, and people maybe can go back and listen to that, but catch me up on what’s been going on in your business, and this new book you’ve got. John Bejakovic: Yeah, sure. So, yeah, I was thinking about that. It’s been about two years since I was on the podcast last and I think we talked about email and things like that, because that’s kind of my bread and butter. And then at the end of that podcast, you were kind of asking me, what I’m what am I working on? And I was working on this book at that time, and the plan was to have this book, which is a kind of an intersection of different disciplines and the commonalities between disciplines like sales and copywriting, but also things like con artists and pickup artists and stand up comedians and screenwriters. And at that time, I already had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to write in the book, and I was very, very enthusiastic and thinking, I’m going to get the book out in the next few weeks, month or two. And it took me a long time to get the book out, and I finally managed to do it this spring, so, or maybe a little more than a month ago. So the book is out, and it’s exactly what I was planning on being in. You know, you helped me out with, actually, some of the final edits and so on. So that’s kind of the main thing. Otherwise, I’m still very much just focused on email and writing daily emails and writing about persuasion and marketing and copywriting, but the book is the one significant achievement advantage in the past couple of years. Rob Marsh: I love this book. I actually sent an email to my list, sharing it with people and talking about something that Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote the book Big Magic, talks about in her book. There, she mentions this experience that she has where she had an idea for a book and she was noodling on it for a while. And didn’t really do anything with it. And then she had lunch with another friend who had the exact same idea come to her, and she basically said, hey, when you know ideas move from person to person, and if you don’t take it on, somebody else will. And I think I told you this, you know, maybe shortly after we talked on the podcast, I’ve been thinking about writing this, almost this exact same book. Your your title is a little bit more comprehensive. You know, I was thinking of, you know, the persuasion secrets of con men and charlatans and copywriters. And you’ve literally written the, not exactly the way I would write it, but it’s literally the book that I wanted to write. And I don’t know if the idea hopped for me to you, or occurred to us both simultaneously, or it’s just this idea that needed to happen, but you brought it to life. And I think it’s a fantastic book. John Bejakovic: Thank you. I think it’s something that’s in the water because of the people that I’m profiling in the book are all of the disciplines. There’s a lot of people. That’s something I didn’t really write about in the book. There’s a lot of people who started out in one of these disciplines and then who moved to another one, who spotted the same commonalities. So, you know, I think the most famous in our little world is maybe Dan Kennedy, who talks about how all the best copywriters had direct door to door to door sales experience, you know, and all the copywriters that he knows who really became excellent copywriters, they started out going to door to door and how, you know, so many of the the mindsets as well as the techniques from sales apply to copywriting. And I think, like Gary Bencivenga was also famous at that Gary Bencivenga never did the door to door stuff, but he definitely talked about how one of the the secrets to being, you know, a successful one of the secrets to his being such a successful copywriter, is that he went back and he studied what salesmen were were doing. But it goes the other way around. So again, going back to some of these disciplines. So, you know, I’m profiling pickup artists in there, and one of the most famous pickup artists, this guy named mystery, who wore this big top hat, and he was on BH one, well, he started out as a magician, right? So he was like a club magician, before he started approaching girls in clubs. And I don’t know how consciously he brought in some of the ideas from that into into that pickup, seduction world. But it was definitely there. And likewise, for hypnosis, I feel like there’s people who have noticed that there’s a lot of commonalities in these things. So I think it was, I think, I think a lot of people who are, who have been in parts of this world that I’m talking about, I’ve noticed the commonalities is just that, because I already had that concept of the 10 Commandments, and I wanted to have 10 separate disciplines, I went and I really looked at 10 separate disciplines that have some sort of an overlap, or that have a significant overlap. And I think there might have been one or two more that that I skipped just because they wouldn’t have fit within the umbrella of 10 Commandments, but, um, but, yeah, I think it’s, it’s kind of just in the water. Rob Marsh: It’s good. I’m holding up the book for anybody who’s listening. But it, The book is called The 10 Commandments of Con Men, Pickup Artists, Magicians, Door-t-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Professional Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand up Comedians and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters. Yeah, let’s talk about some of these commandments or secrets. The last time we talked, I mentioned a book by Darren Brown that you pointed out we’re not actually like. It’s one of the supposed secret books that sort of passed around underground amongst copywriters and everybody says, don’t talk about it. It’s, it’s one of those secrets. People can go back and listen to that episode if they want to know what book that is. But Darren Brown happens to make an appearance in this book, as well as one of these experts, persuasion. I don’t he’s not a con man, necessarily, but he exposes a lot of cons, you know, in his shows and stuff. So, yeah, let’s talk about some of these commandments. John Bejakovic: Darren Brown appears twice in the book, and I don’t know, for people maybe, who don’t know Darren Brown. So he’s, he’s kind of a stage performer. He’s done hypnosis, he’s done mentalism. He’s also had a bunch of TV shows in the UK where basically the kind of stuff that I cover in this book is the kind of stuff that he talks about in his shows, but he actually puts it into practice. And so when I was writing this book, I did. Part of the reason that it took so long is that I did a lot of research, because I really wanted to dig in and find interesting stories, and not simply, kind of right off the top of my head of like, Oh, here’s kind of like, what the connections are. But it really wanted to have good illustrations for all these things and and I’m, I’m a big. Big reader of, of the New Yorker. You know, here’s my most recent copy, and I really like their style of writing. And one of the things that they one of their kind of go to techniques for, for opening up an article, I don’t know, for people again, who don’t know, maybe in the New Yorker, The New Yorker writes on very random topics. So there can be very, seemingly uninteresting or niche topics that they manage to write about very interestingly. And one of their go to ways of opening up a topic is to go back to kind of the initial historical background of how this topic, you know, how it even came to be or or some sort of the historical incident. So for the book, since the book opens up with the 10 Commandments of of con men, I wanted to go back and find out, where does that term confidence man, con man. Where does it even come from? Or where does it appear? And I managed to track it down to, I believe it was 1849 in New York, and it was this guy, William Thompson, who would walk up to rich looking New Yorkers on the street, and he’d start a little conversation, and within a few minutes, he had convinced them to hand over their gold watches. And he wasn’t lying, he wasn’t begging, he wasn’t bleeding, he wasn’t throwing out, you know, any kind of fake authority. He wasn’t really promising them anything. So it was a remarkable story, because eventually he got caught and arrested for stealing, even though he wasn’t really technically stealing. And so there was a an article in The New York, I think, Daily Herald reported on this guy, and it was an interesting story, but it didn’t really explain how he was doing it. And Darren Brown, I don’t know whether consciously or not, but he repeated this exact same thing where he went onto the streets of a small holiday town in England, and he went up to people, and he started a conversation, and very, very quickly, he convinced people to hand over their wallets, their, I believe, watches, and in one case, somebody’s house keys, right? And the first commandment is about how to do that. And in the beginning, I wasn’t, I wasn’t really sure how to put these commandments in a way that was both succinct and that didn’t give the commandment away. And so from that Darren brown episode, I said, you know, thou shalt ask for directions. Because ultimately, that’s what Darren Brown was doing. He stopped people on the street, he asked for directions, and by doing that, he broke down a lot of the resistance that a lot of us normally feel when we’re faced with a stranger, when somebody’s kind of trying to do something to us, when they’re when it seems like they’re trying to ask us for something, get us to do something, when they’re possibly trying to manipulate us or trying to take advantage of us. When people put themselves into that position, that they’re a little bit helpless, they’re a little bit lost, they’re asking for directions. It’s a very small things, but it’s a very small thing, but it can be very powerful in opening up people to influence. And so that was, that was the first commandment. And, yeah, Darren Brown was a great illustration, because otherwise, I don’t know where I would have taken that episode with William Thompson from 1848 Rob Marsh: I think in the book, if I’m not mistaken, you mentioned, as one of Darren’s credentials that he actually convinces somebody to push somebody off of a building in one of his specials. And if you didn’t write about it, you know, I’m thinking about that because I think this, this is, that’s one of those TV shows. It’s on YouTube. Everybody listening should go and watch that. Because if you want to know the power of influence and the power that we as marketers have to, you know, move people from where they are to, you know, some other state That special is, it’s both fascinating and also incredibly frightening in some ways, because, you know, I’ve said this a few times, but persuasion is a superpower, and when you are able to use it, hopefully to help people. But you know, some of the examples in your book are slightly more nefarious, you know, and people are taking advantage of people with these superpowers that we have, that literally can, can make people act against what they would say is their own best interests. John Bejakovic: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I had to be very careful, and I tried to do that in multiple places in the book to basically highlight that, you know, I’m not encouraging people to do criminal things. I’m not encouraging people to do immoral things. And that’s not the point of this book. This book is, in a way, a collection of techniques, the way I just described. You know, if you want to, let’s say. Soften somebody up or open them up to influence then, yeah, asking for directions or making yourself to be vulnerable in that way is, is a way to do that. But the reason that I wrote this book was because, yeah, branding, these techniques are very transferable, and you can use them in in lots of different ways, including ways that are completely beneficial to both sides. And also, I think it’s, you know, all of these techniques are pointing to some sort of deeper thing within human beings and human minds and the way that we work. And I try to write about those things as well. So, you know, the fact of, you know, why does it happen that in so many disciplines, people keep discovering that, oh yeah, if you ask for a favor or if you make yourself out to be a little bit a little bit inferior or a little bit somehow lost or somehow vulnerable, why does that make people predisposed to liking you, you know, and I feel that that that points to some interesting stuff that that’s telling me about myself, and that I think tells me about how other people are, so that whether you want to use this stuff in in a business context to persuade or whether you simply want to use it to understand yourself better, because I don’t know about you, Rob, but one of the reasons I kind of got into marketing, or that I stay in it, is that I think, you know, Robert Cialdini talks about this in his book Influence. He says he’s kind of a patsy in the sense that he’s really a sucker for for all sorts of, like marketing ploys, or all sorts of like persuasion techniques, or, you know, people on the street stopping him and asking him for money. And in many ways, I’m the same. I’m very, very gullible. And it only takes me, it takes me some time after that to say, like, what happened, you know, like, how did this work? How did this work on me? Why did I do this? And, and so, yeah, that’s one of the things that I wanted to figure out. Not just, well, okay, there’s these common techniques to these different disciplines, but what’s really going on, and what is a what does it point to at a more fundamental level about human you know, Rob Marsh: You mentioned Cialdini, I think, in pre suasion, his second book, he actually deals with that. He says so many people came up to him when he would teach his seminars and say, hey, you know, why are you teaching us to manipulate people? And there’s a chapter in persuasion where he talks about this is actually a manual for people to understand what’s happening so they’re not manipulated or taken advantage of. And that’s why he wrote influence in in the first place, was to help people understand what was going on. And so there’s definitely value in understanding this so that we’re not fooled, or we can see the people around us who maybe are being taken advantage of by some people. But yeah, then it’s our responsibility to use use what we know wisely to help people help themselves, right, and to not take advantage. John Bejakovic: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I know a lot of these techniques, and even so, I’m still, I still find myself getting, you know, not necessarily suckered, but in this, I definitely still react to these techniques, you know. So there’s some part of the human brain which is just so instantaneously reacts to some of this stuff. And I think that that’s kind of one of the things that I tried to get across in the book of some of the things that I talk about, for example, the Darren brown thing, stopping somebody on the street and getting their wallet 3040, seconds later. It’s, it’s hard to believe that that’s possible, right? And and yet it is possible. And it happens. It doesn’t happen in every case, but, yeah, the the way that our brains work, it’s, it’s very strange, and there are some sort of short circuits there. And you know, if you know the right buttons to push, you can activate those short circuits and strange, strange stuff can happen. Rob Marsh: Yeah, I remember seeing a study that was talking about how intelligent people look at this kind of stuff and say, oh, you know, I’m smart. I’m not going to fall for this stuff. That’s what less intelligent people do. And the study measured the IQ of people who joined cults and fell for cons and various things, and they found that the people who were most able to fall for these kinds of things were actually the more intelligent people. So there’s some correlation between being smart and still, you know, falling for this stuff, whether it’s that we think we’re smart enough to not be fooled and so we get fooled, or there’s something else going on, but there’s a there’s a lot of usefulness in knowing this stuff so that we can look for it. John Bejakovic: Richard Armstrong, the copywriter, he wrote a he wrote a book about con men, a novel about con men. And then to get people to read that, he had a little PDF where he was writing about, you know, the techniques of con men and how that applies to ethical persuasion. And one of the things was the very beginning of that little PDF was how con men choose their marks and or their, you know, the the target or their victims, let’s say, and one of the things that they looked for was definitely intelligence where, where? If you are not of sufficient, let’s say intelligence, you’re not going to get the opportunity. You’re not going to be interested. But the people who were sharp enough, they could immediately, kind of see what it was, and they kind of jumped to the conclusion of like, wow, there’s a really great opportunity here and and that’s why they that’s why they made, you know, good prospects or good victims for this. Another thing that I mean just about how crazy marketing can be, this is another Dan Kennedy thing. I guess Dan worked with, or he knew somebody, or maybe this, no this, I think this one back to Gary Halbert. Apparently, Gary Halbert worked with some company, I think, out of Arizona that was selling very suspicious male enhancement products, I think back in the early 2000s or something like that. And and this, I think stuff was completely hoken Like this was just complete snake oil. Eventually, this company, I think, was prosecuted by the FBI or somebody else, and not even because they were selling completely bogus products, but because of it, in tax reasons, but because of that, all of this stuff surfaced about who their customers were and what was happening. And it turned out that out of their, you know, they had a huge database of people who had clicked on a link and read that some magical powder would, you know, increase body parts by three to six inches. And it turned out that the number one category of people who are buying this were doctors and dentists, right? So that’s to say that, you know, these are people who are not only somehow pre selected to be intelligent, but they supposedly have a significant amount of professional training and tell them that there’s no way, there’s no way that this is going to work, and yet that in the privacy of their own home, that desire or that response to those triggers is so strong that it overrides the experience, it overrides the intelligence, it overrides all of that training and education and and the most, and the people who should know the best that it’s not going to work are the ones who fall for the most. I suppose, Rob Marsh: If you’ve fallen for a con, or you find yourself, you know, easily manipulated, there is some respite, or, you know, some satisfaction in knowing that you’re probably one of the more intelligent people out there, even though you might keep doing these dumb things. So one of, one of my favorite ideas you talk about in the book is you phrase it a little bit differently, but it’s this idea of making the skeleton dance that we have bad things, you know, or some, sometimes there’s a flaw in a product. And I don’t just mean a blemish. I think the blemish effect is a little bit different from, you know, having an actual skeleton. But let’s talk a little bit about that. Why does this work? You know, when something clearly is broken, and yet we can make this skeleton dance, and it makes us still want something. John Bejakovic: So, yeah, I think, I think it’s a few different things going on. I think, first of all, and I think these are kind of main themes that are running through this book. One is the theme of of trust, which I think is such a crucial thing in marketing and copywriting. And, you know, I think for people who might be newer to copywriting, I know that this was my reaction when I when I got into this field, when people who seem to be very experienced, they would talk about the importance of trust, and I would say, Yeah, okay, but I mean, I really need to know the headline formulas and the secret words and so on. And really, no, you know, really, it is about, how do you get how do you build sufficient trust, particularly when it’s somebody that maybe you’ve never met before, that only appeared in your, I don’t know, inbox or your Instagram feed or in your physical mailbox two minutes earlier. How do you build up that trust so that you’re willing to say, Okay, I’m willing to take the next step, and sometimes that next step means actually, you know, sending money to that person. So I think trust is one thing, and another thing is the power of the reason why, right, and just the fact the very fundamental human need, not just for proof, but for this specific kind of proof, for having a coherent understanding of like cause and effect and reason why, and making the skeleton down. Dance takes those two things and and combines them, right? So, for anybody who might not know, this idea making the skeleton dance is basically, if there’s a flaw or an objection or some sort of aspect of your offer, or you personally as the salesperson that is going to bubble up to the consciousness of your prospect. You want to raise that objection or flaw or whatever it is, you want to be the one to bring it up first, and that’s the part that that addresses trust, right? Because if you don’t, then you become suspicious, right? Because it’s something that you knew about, but you tried to hide and and for most things that are really big problems, that are the skeleton in the closet, they’re going to bubble up, right? They’re going to bubble up either before people buy or after they buy, and if they if it bubbles up after they buy, then they won’t buy anything else. And, you know, we are in the copywriting world, and we’re in the direct response world, and then direct response world things, you know, the profits are made on the back end. So if you, even if you manage to sell something to somebody once, but then, then they discover the skeleton in the closet and they feel burned, then you’ve effectively, you know, gotten a customer at break even who’s never going to buy anything from you again. So you you’re at net zero, or maybe worse off, right? So that’s one aspect of making the skeleton dance, is that trust aspect. And on the other hand, if you do bring up a negative voluntarily, then that automatically puts you on the same side of the table with your prospect, which is a powerful place to be in, because suddenly you’re in this position of collaboration and kind of playing the advisor rather than a salesperson, or some sort of a conflict of being on the other side of table. But the other aspect of it is that, you know, it’s not simply bringing out the skeleton from the closet, but it’s actually making a dance, right? And this is an idea by by this guy. What’s his name? Mar, yeah, I forget his first name, but his last name is Mark and and Barry Marsh, so Barry Mar and basically the idea is you don’t simply want to bring up a negative, but you want to make it work for you, and you want to show how some positive comes out of that negative, right? Whether it’s that the negative is a consequence of the positive or the the negative is the consequence, or the positive is the consequence of the negative. Or somehow there’s some connection, right? So that you can turn around this, this negative into actually being a proof element and into being a reason why there’s something attractive and good about your offer, right? And that’s that’s a powerful thing because of proof, but it’s also a very necessary thing, I think, for humans to simply have that awareness of like, there’s a coherent story here, and there’s a reason why this negative is here, and that’s super important. Rob Marsh: I think my favorite example of this in the marketing world is Buckley’s cough syrup. This gets popped up quite a bit, you know, where people will say, Oh, this is a case of, you know, showing off a blemish or that kind of thing. But it’s, it’s actually more than that, because cough syrup tastes awful. You know, if you buy it thinking that you’re, you know, buying a cherry flavored cough syrup, and your cough is going to go away, you know, automatically, you can be severely disappointed with that first swallow. In fact, you may, you may, you know, throw up. I mean, it really is that nasty. And so they basically make that dance by by showing the whole reason it’s nasty is because it works like that. The ingredients that make cough syrup work do not taste good, and you can’t mask them with flavor. And that’s the whole idea here. And so the fact that it’s this terrible tasting thing is an indicator that, you know, it’s actually going to do what you’re hiring Buckley’s cough syrup to do. But we see this in all kinds of things. You know, some of the examples that use in the book. There is comedian Patrice O’Neill, who, you know, uses talks about how he’s racist in order to tell a racist joke, and gets the audience laughing along with him, which, even the way I’m talking about it probably makes some listeners feel really uncomfortable, you know, because this, these are the cultural norms that we have that say you can’t do this thing or this is unacceptable. And yet, by again, putting it out in front of the audience and making the skeleton dance, he brings an audience along along with it. So in some ways, this is one of the biggest marketing superpowers. I think that there is out there is if you can make. Or a products less than positive aspects actually be positive, then you’re a pretty good marketer, copywriter, John Bejakovic: I think if you do that, you not only, you not only kind of take away the sting from the objection, but you, you know, in a very subtle way, you also put the burden onto the onto the downsides of any alternatives, right? Because suddenly people have nothing to, you know, their their negatives or their doubts have been taken away. And then they start thinking, Well, okay, this, this, I, you know, Rob’s offer is queen. He’s, he’s told me all the negatives, and he’s actually shown me how these are, in some way, even positives, for me, these other alternatives. So, you know, John’s, John’s solution, it sounds good on the surface, but there don’t seem to be any negatives, right? And that makes me a little bit suspicious. And, you know, somehow that same need for a reason why a coherent story makes it so that people start to spin up their own story and so that, so that they spin things in a negative way that you know works against the alternative. So I think you’re absolutely right. I think it’s, it’s very powerful thing. The only thing is that it sounds very scary, and I think a lot of people, including if you’re doing it for yourself, it’s very scary, but maybe you can will yourself to do it. If you’re doing it for a client, then it’s doubly more so that the client might just be like, Okay, that’s that might be a fine idea in theory. I definitely don’t want to run this as a campaign or as an ad, because it’s very counterintuitive to do this. Rob Marsh: Yeah, this is something that comes up in so many areas too, you know, I think about people looking for work, you know, for jobs that may have, you know, gaps in their employment record, or, you know, things that that they would typically want to hide, and if you can surface that, say, hey, you know, yeah, I didn’t work for the last year, but that’s because I was doing this great thing that’s actually really beneficial for what I want to do next in my career, you know, though, to be able to turn those kinds of things into a positive again, I said it already. It’s a superpower, but it’s the kind of skill that, if you want to progress, if you want, you know, to we all have flaws, you know, without a doubt, and some of them are pretty big, so we have to be able to figure out a way to make those things work for us. John Bejakovic: I can speak to this, I feel like, you know, I’ve been working as a copywriter for a while now, 10 plus years. I guess I feel like the one thing that keeps getting better, that I keep getting sharper at, is exactly this of just like, kind of running a sales argument through and then realizing, okay, well, what’s the, what’s the likely objection or or suspicion that a client or that a prospect might still have at this point, and then proactively, you know, attacking that or addressing that even before it pops up, you know? And I feel like, you know, this is ultimately kind of what the the bottom the gist of the game is, I think, like, you know, agora had that, I think copy boarding process, or whatever it was called, and all it was was like, Okay, there’s some sort of a, if you’re writing a sales letter, there’s some sort of a sexy idea to open it up that sucks you in. And then all it is is really a series of objections addressed, I mean, written in a sales letter format, but proactively thinking, what’s the next objection they’re going to have, and bringing that up yourself, and then working out why, you know that’s actually something that works in your favor. It’s not what you think, or it’s proof of something else, or whatever it is. Rob Marsh: Do you have a favorite chapter in the book? John? John Bejakovic: I have particular stories that I like, but I think in terms of one that I particularly find, consistently, for me, useful, I believe it’s chapter chapter eight or chapter nine, and it’s about committing to the bit, because I feel like a lot of the other chapters are very specific techniques. They’re like, Okay, here’s like a little thing that you can do, or you can, you can ask for directions, or you can, you know, make the skeleton dance. And I had to hide that chapter about committing to the bit deep into the book, because it’s much less about the specific technique. It’s ultimately about the idea of you just got to do it, or you have to be confident. But that idea of being confident is so not helpful. I feel in in many situations, if you could be confident, then people will be confident. And you you know being told to be confident doesn’t help. And so in that chapter, I had some stories where I think I took that idea of like, Okay, what does it mean to be confident? How does that actually look? How do you deal with that, even if you’re not necessarily feeling confident and and what happens if you try to be confident, it doesn’t work out, and you have, instead of getting a good reference experience of like, oh, I pretended to be confident, and it worked out, and now I’m a little bit more confident, and things are better. But what happens if you try to be confident, you act and then it flops, right? And I feel like this is super relevant in in a lot of situations, right? So if you know, just recently, I was talking to somebody about creating a course, you know, you know, some a copywriter who had decided to create his own course, and he was talking about how he felt imposter syndrome, or nervousness about about taking that next step, even though he knew the material well. I think it’s relevant for that. I think it’s very relevant if you’re talking to talking to clients, if you’re trying to get jobs. I think it’s very relevant if you have your own email list, and if you want to write emails daily. I think it’s very relevant in everyday situations. Again, in the book, I talk about, you know, pickup artists and guys who are going up to girls in clubs and trying to appear smooth and confident and having something interesting to say. I talk about hypnotists trying to hypnotize somebody and looking very authoritative and saying sleep, you know? And I’m talking about comedians who go up on stage and they have a routine that’s good, and they’ve worked through this, but unless they have an authoritative, confident delivery, the audience isn’t going to laugh right. And on the other hand, even if they have mediocre material, then the audience will still get into it, and they will laugh, right? And so there is magic. There is some magic about this charisma or some energy, except it’s not useful to me personally to hear, Oh yeah, you just gotta be cool dude, or you gotta be, like, confident, or you just gotta have charisma, or you gotta be yourself. I needed something more operational. And that’s kind of what that chapter is about. And so that’s something that I find myself thinking back to on a daily basis, squad, you know, I’m ready to quit something, or I’m ready to say I’m just not. This isn’t working. And then I remind myself of things that I’ve written. And I say, Okay, well, if I wrote this, and if other people are reading it, I should be acting on it as well. Rob Marsh: Yeah, one of my favorite chapters is the chapter on focus, and this is something that I’ve noticed. So I think you’re like this too, but I love watching magicians, you know, do their acts, and then, you know, most people are, I think, are wowed, and then they move on. But I like to go back and re watch the acts and see if I can see where the misdirection is happening, you know, and where my focus is being, where I’m being told to move my my focus so that something else can happen in the background. Kind of ruins magic in a way, you know, when you start to see it, but it’s, it’s fascinating to me how easily all of us are directed into, you know, look, look here, or watch the light, or don’t look at that in order for something to happen behind the scenes. And I think this is one of those things where, you know, when people start thinking about, they’re like, well, marketing shouldn’t be about misdirection, which is true, it shouldn’t be, and it’s not, but directing focus on specific things that we need people to pay attention to is, again, a huge part of what we do. And some of the stories that I think you had in that chapter were pretty fascinating as well. John Bejakovic: I don’t think I’m going to be giving away a huge insider secret here. But a long time ago, Parris Lampropoulos had this webinar series where he was sharing his kind of some of his biggest secrets. And I don’t think this was a really big secret. It was just very, very impactful to me. And Paris kept saying over and over, he said, does it help your case? Does it hurt your case, or is it neutral, right? If it hurts your case, or if it’s neutral, it goes out, right? And you only include things that help your case. And you know that chapter on focus is in many ways, let’s say, you know, the way you can apply that to marketing is specifically that thing that I mean again, in the beginning, I said that this book is about techniques, and it’s about kind of the underlying psychology or neurology. And I think the underlying neurology here is that we don’t really realize how limited our focus is and how. Very little we can actually focus on at a given moment, and then our brain stitches that together into something that feels like a coherent picture, where we feel like we’re really looking at something that looks like a poster or a photograph, but it’s really not we, you know, the our visual field is incredibly blurry, and we have about, you know, a dime’s size worth of focus is just we keep flicking around to things that are interesting. And, you know, that’s not just vision. It’s kind of how reality is. And when it comes to an opportunity or a product or a course, you know, there’s 1,000,001 things you could potentially say about it, right? And as marketers, yes, we want to be transparent, and yes, we want to make the skeleton dance, but at the same time, we also want to orchestrate some sort of like a presentation of what it is that we’re selling that paints it in the best possible light. And that means guiding people from unsold to sold, like, you know, showing them a series of mental images, or giving them a series of facts or arguments that, you know, build up a certain emotional state in their brains and and that get them to say, Okay, this is, this is something that is good For me, right? And again, you know, this is something that all copywriters who reach a certain level of success keep repeating, but that means you want to work with good clients, right? Because you can, you can do. You can paint that series of pictures for crap products. You know, again, it really won’t probably work long term for you or your client, you can, you can make a large money grab quickly, but it’s not a sustainable business. And there are enough people out there with good products that that you really can sell stuff that is worthwhile, but the way you sell it is exactly this. You know, Paris is thing of, does it help my case. And you know, magicians do the exact same thing, where they get you to look exactly where they want you to look, and they build up this story in your mind, where the conclusion is, this is magic, and something magical just happened. And I agree with you. I watch those videos a lot, and I love watching them. And in a way, it spoils the magic trick when I know it, but it also like the next, next magic trick, I’m just as much of a sucker for it, and I get just as much, like, satisfaction and joy. Like I feel like nothing puts me into that state of mind of, like, being like a kid again, like watching a magic trick because I’m genuinely, like, amazed. I feel like I I follow again. I’m such a patsy, and I follow exactly what the magicians want me to do. And I really get into that state. And I just get an absolute thrill out of something magical happening and something disappearing when it shouldn’t have disappeared, and something appearing when it shouldn’t have appeared, and things change in color and so on. So even though I know some of the tricks, now, I’m not a magician, and I never really studied this stuff, but even though I know some of the tricks, I still fall for it every time. Rob Marsh: What’s really frustrating is you could watch a magician do a trick. You can figure it out. You can see where the misdirection is happening, or where somebody forces a choice, you know, in order to make sure that the right card or puzzle piece or whatever gets selected. And then you watch a similar trick by maybe a different magician, and you can’t, like, I can’t see where the misdirection is happening, right. Or I can’t see where the person moves off stage to appear, you know, in a different suit, you know, in 10 seconds. Or like, and so, you know, it’s like, I know how this trick should be working, but I still, no matter how many times I watch it, I can’t figure out how the magician is pulling it off. And and you’re right, it’s, it’s still magical, and it still tickles my brain in a way. That’s, it’s really pleasurable to watch. John Bejakovic: That brought to mind. I have a quote in the book from Gary Benson Vanga, where he says, the only power we have as marketers is to anticipate what people are going to think and, you know, for magic, or for any of these other disciplines, it’s the same. It’s like, kind of the, you know, the market, let’s say, or the audience moves on and becomes more sophisticated, and then it’s the magicians or the copywriters, or, I don’t know, the pickup artists role, to say, Okay, now that the market has moved on, how do I adapt to that, and how do I integrate what they now know into what what I’m doing? And I think there was this famous story of of a magician. I think it was di Vernon who so Harry Houdini, who I have in the book, Harry Houdini had this thing where I think he had a challenge. I think it was maybe like, okay, $100 if you can come and have a magic trick, the fools Harry Houdini. Houdini was, of course, a magician. He became. Am known as an escape artist, but he started his career, and he ended his career as a magician and and he was also, you know, very fond of these challenges, and he was very fond of debunking other magicians, and kind of position, positioning himself as the guy at the top of the pyramid who was so good he could even give tricks away, because, you know, it was a way of of putting other people beneath him. Well, the one guy who managed to fool Harry Houdini was di Vernon. And again, I’m not a magician, so I don’t even really know what the trick was. It was a card trick. All I really know is that it was a trick where I think, like, maybe it was like a way of putting an ace into the middle of the deck and having it pop back up to being the top cart. And I think one of Houdini’s conditions was show me the trick three times, and I’ll figure out how you do it right. And guy Vernon showed him the trick three times. It was the same trick each time in the in terms of the card popping up to the top, and Harry Houdini couldn’t figure it out. And the reason was that each time, Dai Vernon used a different technique to do it, so it was the same end result. But he knew that okay, if he repeated kind of the same thing, Houdini was probably looking for that, even though, you know, it all looked very much the same every time. But it looked, you know, it looked pretty much the same, but Houdini would have probably figured out had die Vernon done the same thing three times. He got the same effect, though, by doing three different techniques. And that’s how he managed to fool Harry Houdini and that kind of, again, goes back to, you know, the same thing about knowing these tricks and then still falling for them, right? So that ultimately, people still laugh at jokes, even though the tricks of comedians are kind of well known. You exaggerate. You, you know, have triplets, you, you know, you make fun of some sort of a group, or you make fun of yourself those you know, all of these things are well known, yet people go to comedy clubs and they laugh, right? Or people know that, yeah, you know, there’s a certain format to a headline, and you throw in some testimonials, and you have free shipping. And people are gonna, you know, react to that and buy to that, even though it’s well known. And so somehow, you know these, these ideas and these tricks and the underlying psychology there’s, there seems to be infinite permutations, and you can apply them over and over and over. Rob Marsh: A related idea that you bring up in the book. It’s almost the opposite idea, and that is that you can’t always tell people exactly where to look or what to do. Sometimes you have to let them come up with the idea themselves. And I don’t remember what the title of the chapter is, but one of the examples you use is when Ronald Reagan is running against Jimmy Carter in the presidential election. And, you know, he finishes up this debate with his final pitch. It’s just a few days before the election, and he could have said things like, you know, inflation is, you know, X percent out of control. We’ve had these long gas lines. You know, Carter told us all to turn down the thermostat like he could have pointed it at a bunch of things that people knew were going on, but he didn’t do that. He basically let people come to their own conclusion by simply asking, Are you better off today than you were four years ago? Which naturally lets people think all of these things that are going on without being told them by somebody who they would then react and say, well, he’s just saying that because he’s a politician, or, you know, whatever reason. And so in some cases, you want to direct attention, and in other ways, or in other cases, you want to be able to be a little bit more open. And, you know, obviously he’s, he’s guiding your thoughts. He’s taking you back to to where we were four years ago and to where we are today. He’s inviting a comparison, but he wants you to bring the data to the argument, and again, related idea, but almost the opposite. John Bejakovic: Yeah, I’m glad you bring that up, because I guess the first podcast, I kind of like hinted at this book, and then two years later, the book is out. And then the next book I want to write is exactly on this idea of, like, how do you get people to have a certain idea and feel like it’s their own? And yeah, absolutely. What Reagan was doing was, I mean, this is another one of the currents that’s running through the book, is that none of us likes to feel manipulated, none of us likes to feel bullied, none of us likes to be told what to do. I mean, there is a certain point at which we come to trust somebody sufficiently, and we put ourselves into somebody else’s hands, whether that’s a leader who we kind of trust them to guide us to the new place. We. Or it’s somebody like a hypnotist, you know, we say, okay, just tell me what, what I should be doing, right? Or a therapist, or somebody like that. But in a normal day to day situation, there’s this prickliness, right? There’s this reactance, where as soon as we feel that somebody’s telling us something, or a natural reaction is to say, yeah, actually, but, and then to argue for the other end, right? And so what Reagan was doing is absolutely like you said. He it was, it was a very tricky thing, just basically rephrasing things in terms of a question and saying, you know, are you better off? Right? Do you feel more secure? Do you feel our country is more respected today. Do you feel that you can get more for your money than you could? And of course, he wasn’t. This wasn’t a disinterested, you know, completely Socratic dialog, or, you know, where he was really inviting people to discover things for themselves. He was guiding them to a very specific kind of outcome, but the way he was doing it was so that he eliminated or minimized that reactance, right? So that people could say, well, he brings up a valid point, even though he’s not really telling me about it. But you know, that thing he asked about, am I better off now? Now that I think about it, I’m really not, but had, you know, had he said basically the same thing, but simply just turned it into a statement, instead of asking it as a question, it probably would have, you know, gotten people’s hackles up, but, but, yeah, I think that in marketing, you know, marketing is not psychoanalysis, where we really want to guide people to discover things completely on their own. So we do want to guide them to a certain kind of conclusion. But the question is, how do we do that in a way where they have the feeling like it was their own discovery, or that they feel ownership of the idea, or they don’t feel that resistance and reactance that we all normally feel when we feel that somebody’s trying to tell us something, or trying to get us to do do something, or trying to command us, right? So questions are definitely a very, very effective and very subtle and very simple way to do that. Rob Marsh: I feel like we could keep going on, but I want to leave something for people to actually, you know, find in the book themselves. It’s like, I said, it’s a great book. It’s relatively short. It’s about 150 pages, very easy to read. It’s loaded with stories, in fact, as you go through your learning principles, but it’s not textbook. Ask, you know where it’s like, Hey, here’s a principle, and this is how I’m going to show it to you. You you discover it through all the stories that you’re telling, which is its own kind of genius, I think, in its own persuasion technique. So John, tell us where we can get the book, and you know where we can follow you if we want to get that next book about, yeah, how do we, how do we persuade people and let them come to the belief that they’re doing it on their own and and we won’t, hopefully have to wait two years for that one? John Bejakovic: Yeah. So the book basically is available on Amazon. If you go on Amazon and and look for 10 Commandments of con men, or if you just type in my name, the book will come up. It’s got that charming black cover. Was only the text on there, so it’s very noticeable. And if you want to read more stuff like that, because I’m writing these daily emails, and often I’m writing about the same kind of persuasion and influence stuff, including about, you know that topic of, how do you get people to have that idea on their own? Then it’s just go to my, my personal website, which was my last name.com, Bucha, which.com and and then you can sign up. Or you can, I have a an archive of 2000 plus emails. So if you don’t want to sign up, you can read, read the archive, or if you want to sign up, then you get on the list. And my emails arrive every night, so you can, you can see if you like them. Rob Marsh: It’s one of the few daily emails I really look forward to. You know? What you share usually leaves me thinking of something that I hadn’t thought of before, and even, even when I have thought about it before, it’s usually a new take or a new way of looking at it. And so yeah, sign up for John’s emails. Get the book. It’s definitely worth reading. You kindly mentioned me at one point in in the acknowledgements. So thank you for that. But again, fantastic book. Highly recommend it. It belongs alongside, you know, Cialdini influence and all of those other books that we read about persuasion is it’s a lot of fun. So yeah, go grab that. Thanks John for for sharing. John Bejakovic: I appreciate it, Rob, thank you for the opportunity. And thank you again that you said you’re in the acknowledgements, and that’s because I. Um, you know, you helped me edit this book and get it out. And you had some, some great feedback that I integrated into the book. So you helped me make it what it was in the end. Rob Marsh: Well, it’s, it’s 99.99% John. And you know, I might have fixed a comma or two, but, yeah, it’s, it’s a good book worth reading. Thank you, John. Rob Marsh: Thanks John for talking through many of the ideas in this book. I’ve linked to it at the top of the shownotes so you can easily find the link to the book on Amazon. If you’re listening using a podcast app, that link should be in the description so you can just click it there. Or you can find it at thecopywriterclub.com/podcast. I don’t get a commission for recommending it, I just think it’s the kind of book that will help just about everyone be a better writer and marketer. Some of you may have heard me share on a previous episode that I teach a college class on marketing. A couple of weeks ago, after a class on the way the media and many marketers use these technique to manipulate their audiences, a student came up to me afterwards and told me this whole topic was making her rethink her career in marketing. Maybe this topic does the same for you. I told her that it should actually be the opposite. That marketing needs more people who are bothered by manipulative tactics to help make sure we use persuasion and psychology to help our customers, not take advantage of them. Just because a tactic can be used unethically, doesn’t mean we can’t use it ethically. If that were the rule, we’d have to shut down the entire internet. And publishing industry. Let alone activities like public speaking, acting, broadcasting and more. By learning these principles, you can help make sure the companies you work for always use them to do good instead of bad. Don’t forget to check out the How to Write Emotional Copy Masterclass at thecopywriterclub.com/emotion

What do you do when the worst happens in business? Are you prepared? In this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I spoke with copywriter Topaz Hooper about the steps you should be taking now to prepare for an economic downturn. The ideas we talk about here are good business practices even if the economy booms. But they become more important when things are uncertain. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: American Copywriter Co. Topaz’s new Instagram The first interview with Topaz The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Research Mastery   Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: Are you prepared for the worst in your business… economic downturns, recessions, the loss of clients and ongoing projects? If not, this episode is for you. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast. In today’s episode I’m catching up with Topaz Hooper who was a guest on the show several years ago. Topaz’s business has followed the trend that so many copywriters and other freelancers followed through the pandemic and afterwards. Most of us saw a nice bump in clients and revenues but then things started to change and she’s had to reinvent her business to adjust to the changes. We’ll get into that in the interview. Topaz also happens to be the second American expat who is living and working in The Netherlands that I’ve had on the podcast over the past couple of weeks. That wasn’t intentional, but maybe this was a hint that more of us could be living overseas and working with clients here in the states. I don’t know. The big topic we covered in this podcast is how to survive in a recession. We are not in a recession—at least as far as the general business cycle goes—at the moment, but there have been some difficult economic events that have scared a few people and caused them to predict that a recession is somewhere out there on the horizon. We are not predicting a recession, but we are talking about how to be prepared for it if it happens to come… maybe this year, maybe next, but certainly at some point in the future. But beyond the general economic environment, there have been micro effects in the copywriting world… things like A.I. taking on a lot of work, especially at the lower end of the spectrum. And some industries, finance and tech come to mind, have suffered their own downturns with layoffs and clients cancelling projects. So while these haven’t shown up in the overall macro-environment, what you see happening in your niche may be close to a what an actual recession might feel like. If you’ve felt that, you’ll want to listen to this whole episode. One more thing I want to mention, I talked about this topic—preparing for a recession—at The Copywriter Club In Real Life in 2020… that was right before the last mini-recession happened. Topaz and I talk about some of those ideas on this episode, but you can go even deeper with them in an article written by Anna Hetzel. I’ll link to that article in the show notes if you want to check it out. It’s worth reading. Before we jump into our interview, this is probably the last time I’ll mention this for a while but I want to share with you all of my research secrets… especially my 4:20+ research method that helps copywriters like you uncover the ideas and insights you need to write great sales copy. It’s part of Research Mastery which also includes more than twenty different techniques for capturing ideas, all of the questions I use to learn more about my client, their product, their customers and their competitors as well as the documents you need to capture your research and several tutorials on how to use A.I. to speed up your processes and even help with your research itself. There’s a bonus on using Airtable to collect and sort your data and more… You can learn more about this unique resource at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery… research mastery is all one word. Check it out now at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery. And now, my interview with Topaz Hooper. Topaz, welcome back to the podcast. It’s great to have you here, excited for this discussion, talk, chat, whatever we’re gonna whatever we’re gonna call it, but you were here a few years ago episode number 305, catch me up. What has changed in your life since we talked about cruelty free copywriting and sales and all of those things. Topaz Hooper: So the first time we chatted, thanks for having me back, Rob. It’s so good to be here. Yeah, life has changed quite a bit. Cruelty Free copywriter was my baby in 2021 I think I jumped on the pod, like you said in the 300th episode somewhere. And at that time, vegan food, plant based fashion, clean beauty were all rising and they were really heavily funded, and they needed copywriters everywhere. And I couldn’t be everywhere, but I had a very good, successful business. And since then, you know, people are feeling a bit of a financial pinch these days, and those industries are not doing as well. So I’ve had to pivot quite a bit and launch new things and do new things. So I’m excited to get into how I’m sort of pivoting in this era of quasi recession, energy and maybe how others can learn from what I’ve done. Rob Marsh: Okay, this is really interesting, and I think it’s going to be a really good conversation, because, like you said, things have changed. Especially here in the States, there’s a lot of uncertainty about what’s going to be happening tomorrow or next week, or what’s not going to be happening. And things seem to be up in the air. There is talk of recessions, political policy, maybe bringing that faster or slower. But regardless of, even if you set all of that stuff aside, the business cycle itself, every 7 to 10 years, we go through some ups and downs. And this last cycle, we’ve had things like AI, we’ve had some layoffs in the tech sector because of that, which has brought more people into the copywriting world. And so before we start talking about some of the things that you’ve done to shift as you were looking at your business, what made you realize that things were changing? What were some of those first indicators where you’re like, I need to start paying attention or like, for a lot of us, sometimes that just goes over our heads and suddenly we just don’t have money, or we don’t have clients, and we’re like, Okay, we got a problem here. Topaz Hooper: Honestly, I was paying attention to my clients on social media. Every single client that I have, or potential client. I follow them on social, and I like all their stuff, and so the algorithm sends me all their posts. And I just started seeing more and more of my favorite brands closing. And I was reading time after time due to unforeseen circumstances, we’re closing the business, or, due to this sort of difficult time to launch a company, or to grow a company, or, you know, import, exports, you know, all these sort of business owner terms, I started to see that people were just closing shop. They’re just like, people aren’t buying our shoes anymore, or people who don’t don’t have money for this extra special thing, and we’re closing so I start to see this trend happening, probably like middle of last year, 2024, to about now, 3 or 4 years after the other started closing, and I started to look into why that was happening. And so that’s when I started to get a little bit worried. Okay, you know, if these are the people that I know of, imagine all the other brands in my niche that I typically serve. What are they going through? I also started to pay a lot of attention to LinkedIn. Some bigger brands were closing meaty, which is a popular vegan mushroom brand, sold for less than their value this year. I think they were valued at 50 million and they sold for 4 million recently. Those are signs that, you know, my industry is not doing well. And so what I started to notice was my favorite brands were closing shop, and that’s why my inbox started to sound a little empty, a little bit like a cave with an echo. And so that’s when I started to think, okay maybe something’s wrong. And so I kind of had to become a bit of a quasi economics professor, and start digging into what is supply chain, and what are factors that make businesses close or open, and what does this mean for my business? Rob Marsh: This is interesting. So obviously, we need to be paying attention to the industries that we’re working in if we’re seeing this kind of stuff happening in our industries as well. What do we need to be doing? Let’s talk about recession proofing, or preparing for what could happen with an economic downturn. Topaz Hooper: Yes, first of all, kind of circling back, you got to become an economics professor or something. I know many of us, we are in the copywriting business because we love writing, or we love marketing or we love sales. We’re not economics people. Maybe we know how to do our bookkeeping, but we don’t look at inflation necessarily. And in the context of our business. We might think of it in our homes, oh, the price of milk is up or something. But we don’t think about, what does that mean for my clients? You know, I think we all need to start reading the jobs report. We should all start listening to the federal Federal Reserve Chair. We need to all be looking at the growth trajectory of our niches in the last six months or a year. And so I think we all need to start putting on our economics hats, because that tells us why we’re not getting clients. It’s more so those factors that impact the businesses that we serve, and less about whether your marketing was good that day or whether your social post was seen. And so for me, the big recession proofing process has been just that deep dive. Is it me or is it the market? And when I started to realize it’s not me, my website still converts, my emails are still good. The market’s not doing well. I started to say, Okay, what do I need to do now? And so I think step one is just getting in tune with the local economics of your area. I know the copywriter club serves, you know, has people from all over the globe, and I know if tech is declining here, but tech is doing well in India, and is doing great in China or wherever. People are listening. You know, we have to sort of think about our own local economic situation. And so, you know, be an economics professor. Read all the nerdy stuff, you know, look at Forbes, whatever you need to do to get a sense of your industry. So that’s number one. Rob Marsh: So before we move on from that, let’s talk a little bit about inflation. There was worldwide inflation that happened over the last two or three years, and at the same time that a lot of the prices were going up for our businesses, for our personal lives, we also had in the marketing world, AI come on the scene and start to push down some of the things that at least copywriters in the middle ranges and the lower ranges were able to charge and so we sort of had pressure from two sides happening here, where prices were going up, but our ability to charge more was stymied a bit by that. So that kind of an impact starts to show up, even if you’re not able to watch a lot of the economic indicators that you’re talking about, that starts to show up in our P&L, or when you look at the end of the month and there’s no money there, this is part of why that is going on. That’s not really a question. But I just want to throw that out, because it is the reality that we’re all dealing with. Topaz Hooper: You’re so right, Rob, and I would say if you want to recession proof your business in the era of AI, you have to take the bull by the horns, so to speak. You know, I am so guilty of being the person saying, AI is never going to take my job. You know, honestly, I’m good like, I don’t need to learn it. I don’t need to engage with it. It’s just going to be there. And if clients want to use it, great, but other clients will use copywriters like me, and that’s not untrue, but more and more clients are saying, can you please use AI to speed up your copywriting process, or can you run that headline through AI, just so that we, you know, have another idea here. And so copywriters who are feeling a little bit threatened by AI right now and aren’t able to charge the rates that they usually do, keep your rates steady. Just use just but jump on the AI train. I know that The Copywriter Club has done so many episodes about how to engage with AI, and I do think that is going to be a tool that’s going to save your business in the long run. For example, I was doing some Substack content writing for a thought leader in the clean beauty space, and she used AI for a ton of her articles. And I’m like, there’s nothing wrong with that, but they’re not that good. Let me use what you’ve written with AI, and let me make it more human. Let me adapt it. Let me clean it up. Let me target it better. And those articles performed better. I didn’t tell the client to stop using AI, but I jumped on top of it and said, Okay, let me fix it for you. I still charge my same rate. I just gave her a better article with AI. So I would suggest people to not fight it, but to own it and to use it, and to take the power away from AI and make it a tool for you instead of a replacement for you during approach. Rob Marsh: Yeah, it reminds me of the way that I talk to my kids about bullies. You know, you take, you take away their power by doing certain things or whatever. And I suppose that’s an apt analogy here, because some of us have seen AI as a bully. To us, it’s taking away our livelihood, or it is impacting the way that we work, or the way that clients are thinking about the value that we bring to the table, and so taking away its power, it’s just a good reframe on that. Okay, let’s talk about what do we need to do to prepare for this is the reality we’re in? What do we need to do to make sure that we’re gonna actually survive the next year or two, assuming that things may get worse? Topaz Hooper: Let’s get personal here. We all live in a place where we pay rent or mortgage. We have to go get food, we have, we have living expenses. And more and more copywriters use their business funds just for living. Many of us live hand to mouth. Many of us, you know, maybe 80% of our income from copyright and go straight into our personal living expenses. If you want to prepare for a recession, please lower your cost of living. Maybe it might be a little too late. Maybe you’re stuck in something that you can’t get out of. But if you can get out of a high cost of living area, if you can get out of paying for an extra bill or an extra car or an extra thing, please try to reduce your cost of living before it’s too late. And the reason why I say this is because during the peak of the pandemic, we copywriters, I know we’re making six figures. I was making six figures. It was a great era. Times have changed, and now my friends who upgraded their life during the height of the pandemic, they got new Teslas, they got a new mortgage, they got a new this. Now they’re saying, oh my goodness, this is way too expensive, and I can no longer afford it like I could in 2022 and so my suggestion is, before the pandemic comes, try to save 50% of your business income. I know it’s hard, because we all have living expenses, but if you can save 50% put half away, use, use the rest, you’re going to thank me in a year when the when the actual height of the recession hits, or knock, knock on wood, hopefully it doesn’t hit, but you’ll be happy in a half a year. Two years when the recession has come. And the truth is, there are, there are recessions within the United States. They’re always there. It has nothing to do with you. It’s always going to happen. So the more that we can prepare by keeping our cost of living low, the better. In addition, you also want to lower your business expenses. Maybe you were an agency in 2022, 2023, 2024 you had subcontractors. You had a lot of tools. You had a lot of apps. Now you’re starting to realize, did I really need to spend $130 a month on SEMrush for one project that I do once a year? Or could I have just done the free version? Or do I need eight subcontractors? Maybe I just need one or two. And so, you know, how can you diminish the cost of working so that you can save that 50% of your business income and put it away, put it away, put it away. So, yeah, cost of living, and then saving 50% of your income is going to be a game changer for the recession. That’s how so many of us survived. That’s how I’ve survived those good and bad months. Save, save, save, cut, cut. Rob Marsh: Yeah, I love this advice. This is something that I’ve done in my own business recently, and looking particularly at software tools where I see, okay, I invested in this tool because it’s got five or six different things that I might use in the future, and ultimately, I’m only using two of them. Is there a tool out there that actually gives me those two, and I’m not paying for all of these extra features, and because of that, I have changed email service providers. I’m looking at alternatives to tools like Asana. Asana is not incredibly expensive, but you know, if you’re paying a couple of $100 a month and can switch to a tool that’s maybe 25 or $30 a month for you know, that’s going to cover 80% 90% of what you’re using a tool for those kinds of trade offs can be very worthwhile. And at the same time in personal business, you know, do you really watch Netflix and Prime and Disney+ and Max and, you know, there’s places where we can say one at a time, we can cut back so that our personal number helps reduce the pressure on our business to provide for this high cost of living. And I’m being a little flippant in saying streaming services is the problem. There’s this conversation out there that all you need to do is give up avocado toast and you’re gonna have a safe retirement. We’re not being flippant about that. There are legitimate things that people can do and enjoy life, but at the same time, you want to be careful that you’re not over indulging in things that you’re not using in order to bring your expenses down. Topaz Hooper: Oh my gosh, you nailed it. Rob, one cool thing that I’m so, like, surprised that I didn’t know about was Google Tasks, which acts like a note taker, slash Task recorder that does something more. It’s more basic than Asana, but it can act as an Asana. So look at all the tools out there that can do, what your favorite tools do, but a little bit cheaper or free. You know, I worked at Google for two years. There’s a ton of tools… for example, my phone is now on Google Voice. I save money by changing my phone from a $90 a month bill to a 100% free internet based phone. People can still leave me voicemails. People I can still call my mom like nothing’s changed, except that I don’t pay anything anymore. And so it’s just one of those things that if you can find tools that are free or low cost that do exactly what you need them to do, go for it, find it, do it. And especially when you’re in a slower period and you’re feeling like your business is walking into a recessionary period, this is a great time to start digging around and cleaning house, fixing things, screwing in light bulbs, you know, repairing and painting the the facets of your business that were kind of looking crusty when you were at your height, and now you have the time to fix them. So go for it. How? You know, go under construction, do some auditing on your expenses, and figure out, how can I save $300 a month for the rest of the year? One other thing I would mention, and that saved me, is, instead of getting an app and spending monthly on it, buy the one year payment of that app. So for example, I use Calendly. It’s like 90 bucks a year. Instead of paying, you know, $8 a month, I pay 90 bucks a year, and that bill goes away for an entire year. So during the peak of my business, when I’m super rich and everything’s going well, I buy all my subscriptions for the year, so that during my slow month, I don’t even have to look at a bill anymore. It’s just all running on its own. That can be a really cool way to kind of have it out of sight, out of mind, and you’re not worrying about something month to month. When you’re in your slow period, that’s a really good idea if your business cycles through, you know? Rob Marsh: So a lot of us have very quiet periods. Say, the end of December into January. Sometimes there’s a quiet period around tax season. Sometimes summer quiets down a little bit, just because of the realities of the school year, the business year, the business cycle. So being able to stagger those expenses to make sense? Well, obviously it makes sense. Back in 2020 at TCC, IRL, I gave a presentation on stage. It was basically, how do you prepare your business for a recession? This was right, as COVID was hitting, we were all looking, you know, down very similar kind of a situation where we’re very unsure of what the future was going to look like. And the very first thing that I talked about was, don’t run out of money. And that’s exactly what we’re talking about here. Is you’re just ensuring that you’re going to have enough money to make it through the month, or you’re gonna make it to the next positive client experience so that you can keep going. And so all of this stuff is really about, how do you make sure that you don’t run out of money? Topaz Hooper: Yes, and that’s a great segue into my next tip for how to recession proof your copywriting business multiple streams of income and building a backup business. Now, some of us started copywriting as a side hustle. You know, we had a full time job and we started a copywriting business, and it was our side hustle. Now it’s a full time thing, but maybe you need a side hustle for your copywriting business or an adjacent one. So for example, cruelty-free copywriter gave me six figures. I loved it. I saved everything. And then when the industry started to decline, I started to look around and say, Hmm, is there another industry or niche that I can serve? Are there other services that I can offer that still make me feel good. I’m I’m an expert in them. I feel confident in those subject matters or in those deliverables. But I can build it while cruelty-free copywriter is still running strong. I can build an adjacent business on the side. Lots of big companies do this holding. Holding companies have eight different companies underneath them, and they all run them separately, and when one goes down, the other one rises, and they manage to keep themselves afloat by having multiple companies in their portfolio. Copywriters can think about it in the same way. Let me have a business that’s just for cruelty-free, and let me start a new business that’s for real estate or luxury or a totally different construction, a totally different industry that has a different market and has different fluctuations. So I’m super happy to announce that I just launched a new copywriting business. It’s called the American Copywriter Co and we help global businesses reach American audiences. This for anyone that knows me, they know that I’m a traveler and I’ve always, always, always loved building relationships with global companies, global people. I love being everywhere. And many of the companies I would meet are like, wow, you seem like a great girl, but your niche didn’t cool too free, and we’re not, we’re furniture, or we’re or we’re tech, or we’re not quite Are you sure you want to work with us? You seem like you don’t serve us. And it was very hard for me to say, Oh no, I do serve you, I promise. And they look at my website, they’re like, Are you sure? Now I’ve created a business where I can say, Yes, I do serve you. I do serve global companies that want to launch and grow in the United States, and I’m their translator in chief, their copywriter in chief, to help translate their French furniture brand messaging into something that an American in New York City or LA can understand and relate to and want to purchase from. This is something that I think is in demand and makes me unique. It still leans into sort of what makes you special? What are you an expert in? This idea of copywriting and building your niche, but it leads into a new, untapped niche that’s growing. And so I would highly recommend any copywriter who’s looking at their niche, whether it’s tech or health and wellness or something, and they’re just like, oh, is this gonna keep going down? Like, I need to do something without totally abandoning what you’ve done. Build another side business and see and then grow them, cultivate them, you know, together and lean into the one that really serves that season and, you know, scale down the one that is kind of in a dormant state. Rob Marsh: Yeah, this is really good advice. Let me add to that just a little bit for those who are thinking, Well, I don’t really want to run two separate businesses. There’s also a way to do that within an existing business, and that is to come up with several different offers that are doing different things. So if you have in the past been writing case studies and white papers, maybe it’s time to branch out and start offering your clients something more like emails or sales pages, or maybe you’ve been writing sales pages and emails, but your clients are leaning into more content that could get picked up by AI in order to be found in AI search, right? So here’s an opportunity to expand your offers. Making more offers within an existing business does something similar. So I admire what you’re doing, building, you know, entirely a second business focused on a second set of you. Niches, clients and offers, but there’s maybe an easier way to, like you said earlier, create a side hustle for your side hustle, and that is, you know, make more offers to your existing clients in your existing business. Topaz Hooper: Nailed it. You’re totally right. I think if you’re someone who has a brand name that’s not totally niched, it’s like, you know, Topaz Hooper copy or or something that can be reinvented or expanded upon. Go, diversify your deliverables. Super, super smart as copywriters, we’re taught to do social listening. We’re taught to listen to what our clients want, their their customers. What are they saying? Let’s practice social listening in our business. Go. Let’s walk over to our ideal client, or our past clients, and say, How are you doing? What? What are you struggling with? What do you need now? Oh, you don’t need a website anymore. You need ongoing email. Well, I don’t quite offer that, but I can. And so I think we all have to go back into the clients that we’ve served and start doing some social listening about what the market needs. What I’m hearing now is people are moving away from, you know, certain deliverables, and they want more different types of deliverables, like, maybe they’re doing more trade shows. They don’t want websites anymore. You did that for them last year. It’s beautiful. Now they need some trade stuff, or they need packaging, or they need brand strategy, because they’re looking to rebrand soon. You know, how can you listen in and say, Is there something that you need that you would like this season? And some of them will tell you they’re like, Yeah, we could really use more packaging stuff. Do you do that? And you can say, Yeah, I do that. Yeah. I do that. Quickly. Add it to your website. Yeah, definitely expand your deliverables. Don’t be afraid to listen in and be adjustable to your comp, to the companies that you serve. This advice of listening goes back to what you were saying when you first started talking about the reason for your shift. If you can see that your clients are struggling, you know to make sales or to do something in their business, and you can see it early enough so that you can actually help them solve that problem, create some value for them, help them launch a new product, or create sales for an existing product line. You’re watching them and seeing what’s happening in real time. That’s an opportunity where you can step in and say, hey, I can see what’s going on in the business, and I may be able to help you fix that. I may be able to bring more customers to the table. I may be able to help you reduce churn so that you’re not losing customers all of these things, all these problems that we can solve for our clients. But if you’re not watching your clients, paying attention what’s going on in your business, you’re gonna miss those opportunities. Yes, and that’s a great way to recession proof your business is leaning on the relationships that you have existing if you’ve done great work for a client and they love you, they just don’t need any more website stuff, you can totally lean in again and say, How can I help you this season? How can I help you next week? How can I help you next year? And cultivating those relationships can lead to more work, especially during a recession, when people are usually cutting their full time staff and looking to lean back into freelancers or sole sole solopreneurs. I guess you could say who they trust. And so, you know, how can you be the trustworthy person who has the right deliverables at the right time and you show up in their inbox on the perfect day? And so I would say, don’t be afraid to Yeah. Adjust your deliverables, pivot your niche a little bit as well. That’s one thing I learned with cruelty free copywriter. I was so heavily niched in plant based CPG, which is consumer packaged goods, for those that don’t know, basically plant based snacks, vegan fashion and beauty, that there was people in the luxury realm that are also cruelty free or sustainable that were like, Oh, we’re kind of in your niche, but we’re not quite Are you open to ethical diamonds, like lab grown diamonds? Oh, maybe that seems Are you open to sustainable furniture? Okay, maybe or, or are you open to compostable gloves. Is that something that you serve, you know, it is cruelty free, it is plant based, but it’s not quite in those specific niches. So, is there some kind of outside, quasi neighborhood niche that can also meet your business’s criteria, or, you know, or offer the or for people that want the deliverable that you offer. You know, Can you expand a little bit? Can you pivot? And so that’s what I learned, too. So I did, I took on an ethical diamond company, and it was awesome. And I took on a French furniture brand that does, you know, sustainably made, handcrafted furniture from the coast of Brittany, and it was great. And I was like, There’s nothing that’s not vegan or cruelty free about this. It’s just not food, fashion or beauty. And so there are some ways that you can still keep your company’s mission, your company’s direction, your company’s goals, your deliverables, and just sort of see what else is ancillary or what else is neighboring around, which. Where that industry is growing. Rob Marsh: You mentioned these relationships and really dialing in on those. And I think this is a really important point as far as recession proofing a business, not just the existing relationships, although those are really good, you know, it’s easier to sell a customer who’s happy with your work and you’ve worked with before than it is to find a new customer. But this is the time that we should be building our network of friends and relationships outside of our customer base of the few copywriters that we’ve talked to, because those relationships take time to build and develop, and they don’t pay off, sometimes for months, sometimes for years, but when the recession hits, if you don’t have those relationships in place, building them becomes desperate, and you’re you’re sort of too late to make it work, and clients start to see it not as a relationship, but as a desperate plea for money and work. Topaz Hooper: Oh my goodness, networking is such a dirty word for some people. It feels icky for introverts or people that kind of don’t like that. But I want to reframe networking in the context of recession proofing your business, which is networking should not be a tit for tat. Give me this. Give me that I’m using you. You’re using me. I think a lot of people approach networking in that way, and it leaves a really icky taste in everyone’s mouth. Networking should be a relationship building tool and a reputational amplifier. You walk into conferences and say, Hi, my name is Topaz, and I do American copywriter CO and and Hi, that’s just what I do. What’s your name? Show me a picture of your dog. What do you do on Sundays? And the sort of relationship building aspect is so much more sustainable. And what happens is you start to become friends with people. Like, networking is like professional friends. It’s like, LinkedIn, you know? It’s like professional friends. And then whenever someone’s like, Man, I really could use a copywriter for something, you’re the first person that they think of because they met you two weeks ago at a conference. And so I would say your network is your net worth, and those and people that you know are oftentimes the people that will hire you. And I think as long as you lean in on networking as a relationship tool instead of a give me this, give me that you’re gonna have so much more success than other people during this processionary period. Rob Marsh: Yeah, that’s exactly right. It. We have to think about networking as friend making or relationship making, instead of, like you said, the tit for tat, you know, you give me this, I give you that, the cheesy, you know, mixer, cocktail party thing that we envision. I can think of several people that I’ve met over the course of my career who have become true friends. You know, we go to lunch, we hang out, who also, as time goes on, you know, every six months or so, there’s an opportunity for me to provide a lead for that person or for them to do it. For me, I don’t maintain the friendship because it’s going to lead to that kind of a thing. They are friends, and I enjoy going to lunch. We, you know, talk about our families, you know, things that are going on in our lives. But you know, because that friendship exists, sometimes these positive benefits for our businesses come out of that, and that’s how we have to look at building networks. It’s not too late. Start today, but look at it like I’m looking for friends, I’m looking for people to hang out with. I’m looking for people to talk with online, just to share ideas and thoughts, and not necessarily to beg for work, Topaz Hooper: yes. And I think one of the things that has changed since the since the pandemic is that people are looking to meet you in real life like we. I think many of us in the copywriter world got kind of lost our networking chops a little bit because we were stuck in our houses during the pandemic. I mean, everyone lost everything was online. Yeah, everyone from all ages, lost their social skills during that period. But we got so used to doing online things, networking online, and now people are like, so do you want to get coffee again? And we have to be like, Yeah, I will I will walk, I will take a train, I will take a bus, I will bike ride, I will drive to go get a coffee with you. And I think something really powerful is cultivated there when you start to have these relationships with people, where you’re meeting in person, and they see you again and again and again. For example, I was working with a CPG company, and I started having coffee with the founder. I just met her through some networks. I was like, we should get coffee. You seem like a girl that I would love to nerd out with about this or that. We started becoming friends, we started hanging out. And then all of a sudden, she asked me to do some work for her. And I was a little bit surprised, because I never pitched her at all. I was just like, Hi, I just happen to be a copywriter. So what’s your favorite color, you know? And she said, I really want. Work with you. And I said, why she’s like, because I know you. And that was it. That was the only reason why she wanted to hire me, is that she knows she knew me. And so if you want to recession proof your business, continue to be known, continue to go to networking events, to private parties, to to places where you don’t even think there’s clients, but just be that person that’s like, hi, yeah, I just don’t happen to be a copywriter, but I’m also a really great tennis player. Do you want to play tennis sometime and just see what happens to to your business when in those desperate moments when you really do need clients, you don’t have to beg. You can just say, Hi so and so it was nice meeting you last week. It just so happens that I’m open to client work. If you know of anybody that is looking for a copywriter in the email or launch, just let me know and send them. Send them my way. I have gotten, I would say, 6k to 8k worth of work just from that casual, let’s play tennis together, relaxed thing alone, and now I’m not struggling during this recessionary period or this quasi recessionary period, because I just made a bunch of friends. Rob Marsh: Yeah, another place to make these friends, it’s been really beneficial to me personally, and you’ve seen this, I’m sure, in your business, but sometimes in joining a program or a membership or a mastermind, something like that will connect you with the right people. I’ve mentioned this once or twice on this podcast, but I joined a mastermind and met, you know, a bunch of other copywriters, one of whom connected me with somebody that was in her network and she didn’t have time to help them with a project. So I hopped onto that project, which then turned into, like, four or five other projects, and I made almost six figures from that one contact. And that would never have happened if I hadn’t joined the membership where we met. And so I know, you know, on this podcast, I pitch our membership quite a bit. The copywriter underground, it doesn’t have to be that particular membership, but being in programs with people who are doing similar things to what you are doing is a fantastic way to build that network of other people that you could reach out to, again, not not necessarily for work, but for friendship, for Help that results in these kinds of positive business outcomes. Topaz Hooper: Yes, I was part of The Copywriter Club membership, and I met a woman named Michelle Carrington, who is a beauty copywriter. And again, she and I were just friends. I’m like, hi, you’re in the same you know, membership, let’s be friends. We became friends. And then I started to notice a dip in my business, and I thought it was me. I was like, maybe it’s me. And I reached out to Michelle, and I said, Hi, Michelle, it’s so good to see you again. Blah, blah, blah, I’m noticing, you know, I would love more clean beauty clients right now. Is there anybody that knocked on your door that, you know, just didn’t seem like the right fit? She said, Actually, yes, there were two people that didn’t seem like the right fit. One wanted website copy, but it wasn’t quite beauty. And one woman wanted social media support, but I don’t do social media stuff, and I’m like, Well, I do, do you want to send them my way? She said, Sure. One of those clients became a regular client for six months, and the other one, I did a four figure website copy revamp for and so sometimes you meet people in networks that you again, you never pitch them. You just happen to say hi, just if you have anybody, let me know, and then they do. And so like The Copywriter Club is a gold mine of brilliant, amazing, smart, well connected individuals who are just fantastic humans, but also people that maybe can help you during a recessionary period, and why not lean on them? Why not get coffee with them? Why not tell them that you need help from time to time? And let’s see what happens. And that’s another thing. I hate asking for help. And there is a way to ask for help or ask for support during a recession that’s not desperate, and there is a way to lean in and tap your networks without being like, beggy, and that is doing what I did with Michelle, reaching out and just saying, hey, let’s get coffee. Let’s have a life update. And here’s what’s going on in my business. And sometimes people really are like, you’re an amazing copywriter. I know people let me, like, make some phone calls and all of a sudden, when you thought your business was sort of declining, it’s rebounding. And so that simple tool alone to help bulletproof your business from recession is literally asking for help, leaning into your networks and doing it in such a way where you’re open to receiving new clients or new support. Rob Marsh: Yeah, as we’ve been talking about this, you kind of made a comment, and we’ve skipped over that. I want to go back to when you were talking about as your business started to decline, you started to look at different, related areas in the business that you could serve. You mentioned the French furniture company, I think, and some others. And that comes to this point where you need to be thinking about how you’re framing your business, the problem you solve, the message that you’re putting out into the world. And it might be time, as you look at your copywriting business, to reframe it in a different way, so that either you go more narrow into a niche, or maybe you broaden out a little bit so that you can take on additional clients. But the way that you’ve been talking about your business for the past two or three years may not be the way that you need to talk about it for this coming year, or for the challenge that we’re moving into. Topaz Hooper: Yes, you are right on the money. And I would say that that could be just a simple messaging rebrand. Should you rebrand your messaging? Do you need to say something different this year? Back in the pandemic, people might have said, Oh, you know, clients are now online, and your website looks terrible. Let me help you. Nowadays, people might need to hear. Listen, there’s so much competition. I can help you stand out. And so have you looked at your messaging? Have you reimagined your ideal client? Your ideal client can change companies, change their demographics all the time. You know, I served plant based CPG for years, and for years, it wasn’t just vegans buying plant based meat, it was health conscious omnivores that said, Oh, maybe I should try something new for my heart or whatever. Now those health conscious omnivores are like, you know, I kind of did like the steak. I think I’m good. I don’t need to go back to beyond. And now those companies are like, Well, what do we do now? We’ve been targeting omnivores this whole time. How do we switch it up and go back to vegetarians or vegans or so on. And so you can do the same thing in your business. You can look at your messaging and say, Has my client changed? And the answer is yes, your client probably has changed. Your client probably is in a different place. They probably launched different products. They’ve targeted different people. And so what you can do, kind of circling back to the very beginning is again, do that deep research on look at your website. Look at your client’s website. What is their messaging these days? Does it seem like their clientele has changed? Can you learn more about their new clientele so that you can write better copy for them in the future? You know? What can you do to rebrand, reframe? And that’s why I started a new company because I figured out I wasn’t going to be able to make the hard pivot from culture free copywriter to American Copywriter Co. It was just too hard of a pivot. The domain was purchased. I couldn’t do it. I needed to start something new. And so if you feel like you can rebrand, amazing, do it, refine your messaging, re target. But if you feel like you just kind of got to keep that ship afloat, but go buy a new one and start something new. You can do both, too. Rob Marsh: Yeah, some ideas aren’t expandable, and that’s when you need to say, Okay, we’re going to do something new. Some ideas are and you should lean into it. So, yeah, thinking about the way that you’re framing, talking about the business, talking about the problems that you solve, talking about the clients that you serve. Clients that you serve. Huge part of getting ready for a potential downturn. What else? What else should we be thinking about and preparing for? Topaz Hooper: I think people have to remember that it’s not just them, and that’s a psychological thing to prepare for a recession, people get very nervous that they were the problem. You know, their social media didn’t work, or their landing page is no longer converting. And I think one thing to know is that it’s not sometimes it’s not you. You did everything right. What you can do is change your mindset and say, What can I do to pivot? And that’s sort of the big picture for everything. If you want to recession proof your business, start with your mindset. Remember that it’s not always what you wrote that caused your decline. Is there something bigger? And what can you do to pivot? And I find that it can be difficult for some people to pivot, because they really got so used to being in tech that, you know, they’ve been in tech for five years, they’re happy there. But maybe there’s something else beyond tech that you can do, and maybe there’s some skills that you can expand upon. Some of my favorite copywriters during down periods, they like to re skill. For example, I’ve had five people come up to me and say, Hi, do you do paid ads? And it’s been embarrassing for me to say, No, I don’t do paid ads, but then I’m like, should I be doing paid ads? And that’s what all my clients want now. So how can I re-skill? How can I make my business bulletproof by adding skills that are high, that are highly advantageous, are growing right now and that my ideal client wants. So let’s take this time to reskill. Let me, let me go, take a new course. Let me go, join a membership group. Let me, let me retool and then come back sharp and so, bulletproofing your business often means re imagining and rebranding and re and retooling. So just take advantage of that downtime. Enjoy it, you know, go on a second, you know. You know, walk today and listen to a copywriter club podcast episode and think about what you can do to retool today, you know.And so there’s so many things that you can do that are mental, that are financial, as we discussed, that are networking, and that are also just straight up rebuilding from the ground up. So I would just say, Don’t be stuck in your ways. That’s one way to be a sinking ship. There’s nothing worse than being someone who got really stuck in their ways and now the ship is down. You have the tools to pull yourself out, to reinforce your ship, to add new gadgets when there’s no rain and when there’s no waves, and then when the waves come, you’re stronger than ever. Rob Marsh: I really love this idea of re-skilling. Obviously, you know, we have courses and things that can help copywriters add to their skills, but this is really vital or crucial, especially, you know, as we’ve talked about, ai, ai in particular, is a skill that every copywriter needs to be leaning into learning how to use, whether it’s knowing how to prompt to get good content or ideas out of it to building AI agents. I saw something today as I was going through some email that I think it was Upwork, or maybe Fiverr had mentioned that requests for jobs around AI agent building, and you know, the kind of work that these process tools can help with, has gone up something like 15,000% which is a ridiculous number. Now it’s probably going from a very low number, so it’s easy to make that number look high, but even if you’re starting with just, you know, a few dozen that massive increase shows where part of the market is moving and so are skilling to take advantage of those kinds of needs that clients have, or at least they’re expressing, is a massive part of preparing for a downturn, Topaz Hooper: And again, I had to change my mindset around that. I was really anti AI forever, and now I’m seeing you gotta, you gotta go for it. You gotta go with it. You can’t beat it. You gotta join it. And you know, one final thing I would say around how to, how to recession proof your business is try to be open to part time roles. There’s a there’s a it’s like a bit of a sin in the copywriter community to say that you took a full time in house copywriting job. It’s like you’re not a copywriter, a freelance copywriter, anymore, and it sort of has a stain. People feel like they have to announce that they’re no longer trying to stay 100% freelance, but what if you did a full time freelance copywriting in-house gig? That is still a contract rule, you know, and you still get benefits, but you’re not looking for eight clients a month. You’re just you’re working with one big one. That’s how I survived in many, many years of cruelty free copywriter, I just had one gigantic 30 to 40 hour per week client, and then any other copywriter, client, copywriting clients that came my way, I was like, Okay, I’ll make room for you in mid March or this or in this area, but I’m good. And so what I’ve done this time around as well as I’ve secured a 20 to 25 hour part time role with an amazing supplement company that’s doing a lot of great work, and I’m happy there, and I’m good, and the recession is going to come and go, but I’m good, I’m anchored. And so copywriters can also start to think about you’re not less of a business owner. If you work a certain amount of hours or have a very stable client. You’re not an imposter, right? You’ve just found a way to secure yourself to a good, solid client. And then whoever comes in between can come right? And it takes the stress off of your business, it takes the stress off of the monthly, day to day expenses, and then you’re not as scared and desperate as you would be otherwise. Rob Marsh: I’m really glad you mentioned that, because I have seen this happening over the last year where a lot of copywriters are taking on part time roles, maybe even moving into a full time role with a company and keeping their freelance business as the side hustle. We’ve even created some resources in the copywriter underground, just note, because we know this is happening to help people find those kinds of roles. But you’re right. It is not a failure of any kind. In fact, it’s a really smart move, especially if you struggle finding clients, or struggle with all of the business things that happen around serving clients when you have an in house role, the process, the structures, they’re all in place around you, and you’re able to just write. Hopefully you have a manager or somebody there who can give you positive feedback. Help you grow, help you learn. Help you increase your skills, if not. But oftentimes those companies have budgets where you can hire coaches, join programs and get that kind of feedback to help you. So it’s a hugely advanced, an advantageous opportunity, sometimes, to move out of the struggle and into something that becomes a bit of an anchor for your business, and then maybe a year or two from now, the opportunities change and you’re ready to move back out into freelance, maybe a different role, in house, somewhere else, or at an agency. All of these are legitimate ways to work as a copywriter. Topaz Hooper: Yes, and I love being a part of a team. Again. I’m not the only copywriter at this part time role. There’s another copywriter that’s just focused on content and brand strategy, and I’m focused on PDPs and landing pages, and it’s fantastic. And now I’m like, Hey, can you take a peek at this PDP does this make sense? Do you think this is gonna work well with your you know what, what you’re doing? She’s like, No, change this and change that. And I’m like, it’s so nice to have another copywriter there. So if you’re also someone who has been a solopreneur their entire career, you know you’ve been in this echo chamber with your copy, and you’re not quite sure if it’s still kind of good. Sometimes getting a part time role and getting other opinions, getting some other marketing folks to kind of peek at your stuff is a great way to rebuild your confidence, too. After some months of being like, wow, clients are kind of declining. Is it me? Does my copy suck? Have I lost my chops? No, you haven’t just get some other folks to work with that might offer you a confidence boost and some new copy ideas. Rob Marsh: Yeah, while we’re talking about some of these mindset things as well, I want to just add staying positive is really critical here, and it is not easy to do if your business has suffered a downturn, if clients are leaving, if you’re struggling to increase rates, or, you know, people are asking for reduction in hours, reduction in projects, those kinds of things. It’s really hard to stay positive, but it is so important that you do stay positive, that you’re reflecting, you know, these, these positive outcomes, not only for yourself, but for your clients, because people see that they’re drawn to positive energy. And you know, if we, if we start approaching clients negatively or in desperation, you know, all of these things that we might be feeling internally, it sort of goes against this industry advice that you need to be vulnerable. You need to be sharing everything. And there are times when that’s appropriate, but when you are trying to find clients, when you’re trying to find work, when you’re trying to connect with people, build your network, build friendships or relationships, that is not the time to be evoking all of these negative energies. So stay positive. Topaz Hooper: That’s true. And one way to keep your spirit up, if you’re someone that just really loves to give, you really love the act of giving copy and writing copy, because it’s an act of service for something. You can volunteer. It’s incredible. You can join a board and do some of the copy for the for the for the Board’s website. For example, I just recently started volunteering at an animal sanctuary, and they’re like, We need a copywriter to help us. And I’m like, great. I’m like, they’re like, they want three hours a week. I’m like, I can do that. And what it does is it still keeps my optimism high. I’m like, I’m still valuable. I still have something to give. It’s not that I am valueless because my clients have shriveled up these last three months, I still have something to give, and I’m doing it for a very good, good cause. And kind of circling back to the networking thing, what happens is, is when you volunteer, you get introduced to new people. And those new people say, Wow, this animal sanctuary websites, amazing. Who wrote this? Of course, the founder is happy to say, this person that I know is a copywriter, and she’s fantastic. And then companies start to look at you and say, Oh, well, we actually are hiring, you know. Do you have some time, you know? And so sometimes a volunteership, or, you know, helping your kids, you know, school organization with some marketing stuff, or spending your energy in a positive way can reinforce the positivity in your mind and your business, but also continue to operate as a networking tool as well. And so keeping yourself busy is fantastic, and it’s a good way to keep your spirit high if you’re feeling like the recession is looming. Rob Marsh: Yeah, I love that. This whole discussion, I think, has been a really good reminder of the things that we should be doing in our business all of the time. They become a little bit more critical as we approach some kind of a potential downturn or a recession or a change in business. So this is the stuff we should be doing. If you haven’t been doing it, start. Start doing this stuff more. Do it now. You know, work on your systems. Work on how you’re talking about your business. Look for new relationships, new friends. Stay positive. All of these things are so critically important. Topaz Hooper: Yes, and just keep your mental, your financial and your business health in order at all times, if possible, especially at your highest times. You know, don’t be afraid to go back in and say, How can I keep this strong? And I just would encourage all the copywriters just to really know, like, if you’re feeling there’s a slowdown, it’s not you. I just want everyone to know it’s not you. Your copy still rocks. You know, you’re still an amazing business owner. Keep going, and there’s always a rainbow at the end of the storm. So we will get through this. We will survive, and we will have amazing copywriting businesses. Rob Marsh: Absolutely. That sounds like a really good place to stop, but topaz, if somebody wants to catch up with you, follow you. Find you as the American copywriter living right now in Europe, helping businesses, you know, Americanize their copy or reach new audiences. Where should they go? Topaz Hooper: Yeah, so you can find me at americancopywriterco.com, and also you can find me on Instagram, at the same handle, and on LinkedIn, you can punch in American copywriter CO, and you’ll find me in the company section, but yeah, those are great places to connect with me. And if there are any global businesses out there that need copywriters or need a copywriter to help them translate their amazing business into a message that American audiences will understand, I’m your girl, so thanks again for the time, Rob. I really appreciate it. Rob Marsh: Yeah, of course, I will link to all of that in the show notes, so people can find you easily. Go back and listen to episode number 305, when Topaz talked about her first business, you get to know a lot about her as well. This has been a great conversation. Thanks Topaz for making it happen. I appreciate it. Topaz Hooper: Thank you so much. Rob Marsh: Thanks Topaz for sharing the details of your career journey, business change and what you’re doing to prepare for an economic downturn. It’s hard to predict where the economy is headed with changes to inflation, tarrifs or not-tariffs, the just flared up war in Iran that may spike oil prices which can have effects on other parts of the economy… it’s quite possible we don’t see a recession this year or next. But it’s also very possible we see one, so it makes sense to prepare. Getting ready for the inevitable, won’t hurt your business in the meantime, but it will help if the worst actually happens. I’ve linked to Topaz’s website in the shownotes, as well as our first interview with her a few years ago, and the article on our website about prepping for a recession. You can find them all at TheCopywriterClub.com There’s nothing new about these ideas we’ve been talking about… building your network, starting a side hustle, making more offers, cutting expenses both in your business and personal life so you don’t run out of money, and staying positive… if you do this stuff in addtion to building a great busienss by solving big problems for your clients, you’ll do okay when the worst happens. Finally, I mentioned this at the top of the show, our course, Research Mastery will give you the ideas and insights you need to write better copy, get more impressive results, and increase sales and conversions that will keep clients coming back to you for more. You can learn more about this course at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery. Get it today. That’s the end of this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please share it with someone you know. Simply copy the link from Spotify or Apple Podcasts, drop it into a short email, and let your friend know you were thinking of them as you were listening to The Copywriter Club Podcast. I promise, when you share The Copywriter Club Podcast, your friends will thank you. See you next week.

Copywriters have been using LinkedIn to connect with and land clients for years. So why is it still so difficult to grow an audience on that platform? I asked copywriter and LinkedIn Strategist, matt Barker, to chat with me about this for the 450th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. We talked about the best content to post, the biggest mistakes people make on LinkedIn, and how to get the right followers to pay attention to you. If you want clients to find you, click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. Stuff to check out: Matt’s LinkedIn Matt’s Website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Research Mastery Course   Transcript: Rob Marsh: Looking for ideas for finding and connecting with potential clients on LinkedIn? You’re in the right place. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast. There are a lot of ways to find and land clients. There’s cold emailing which allows you to choose the clients you want to work with—and if your pitch warms up your prospect and offers to solve the right problem for them, it can be very effective. Incidentally, if you want to learn how to cold pitch effectively, check out thecopywriterclub.com/lovenote. Beyond cold pitching, another popular method for attracting clients to you is posting content on social media. And for copywriters, Instagram or LinkedIn seem to be the two go-to platforms. And yes, there are copywriters using other platforms like TikTok or Threads and seeing success there, most of the action seems to be on these other, older platforms. We’ve talked about finding clients on LinkedIn several times on the podcast. And in fact, we’ll talk about it again in the near future. But because so many copywriters are using thise platform to build an audience, it bears repeating some of that advice from time to time. But it’s not just repeating the same stuff… we’re looking for new ideas that work now. The algorythm is always changing, so keeping an eye on what’s working now is important. So with that as our preamble, I invited copywriter turned LinkedIn Audience Building Strategist, Matt Barker, to share with me—and you as my listener—what is working on LinkedIn right now. Matt has built an audience of more than 170,000 followers on LinkedIn. His posts get 100s of comments and when he shares his programs or other products, the sales follow. Matt will be the first to say that getting attention on LinkedIn is harder today than it was two or three years ago. But that doesn’t mean it’s hard to stand out. In this interview, Matt and I talked about what works, what he’s posting more of lately, and how sharing content to inspire and motivate can bring in more clients than posts pitching your services. I think you’re going to like this interview… Before we get to the interview, just in case you missed this last week when I mentioned it, I put everything I know about conducting research and using A.I. as part of my research process into a short course called Research Mastery. It includes the 4:20+ research method that helps copywriters like you uncover the insights you need to write great sales copy. ..more than twenty different techniques for capturing ideas, … all of the questions I use to get find big ideas about my client, their product, their customers and their competitors as well as the documents you need to capture your research and several tutorials on how to use A.I. to speed up your processes and even help with your research itself. But unlike other resource courses that take hours to watch and implement, this one will teach you everything you need to know in a single afternoon. You can learn more about this unique resource at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery… research mastery is all one word. I’ll link to that in the show notes so you can easily find the link if you can’t type the URL into your browser right now… thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery And now, my interview with Matt Barker. Matt Barker: Yeah, thanks for having me on. By the way, I used to listen to this podcast a little bit when I was getting to learn copywriting and that sort of stuff three years ago. So thanks for what you do with your episodes, it’s helping people maybe more than you know, appreciate that, yeah, but yeah, with my LinkedIn profile, it was I started writing on there in January 2022, the main purpose for that was to get copywriting clients. I just left my job about three or four months prior, I worked in marketing. I was in marketing for about eight years, B to B and B to C, so I kind of understood marketing pretty well, and copywriting was a small part of that, but I wasn’t really sure how to be a really good copywriter. So. Yeah. Fast forward to when I started link running on LinkedIn, January 2022, I was using it primarily to try and get clients for my new copywriting business. I’d started, and it was pretty difficult at the start, because I just didn’t I had this thing that a lot of people experience at the beginning, when they start kind of writing content online that’s from their own perspective and their own personal profile, not through like a company logo, or like through their work, through a brand, where you just feel really kind of anxious and worried about what people will think of you, and you know, you’re, you’re putting yourself out there. And it was really difficult for the first sort of two or three months trying to, you know, kind of get over that. But so glad I did, because it and I kind of stuck to it. I would, I would read a lot of content about people who were doing similar things, writing content on LinkedIn consistently, and the kind of the power of, you know, having your, your own personal presence on on LinkedIn specifically, and as well as just set social media in general, so I could see that there was a long term benefit to it. So I kind of always had in my mind that I wanted to just stick to it and see what would come of it. And then after three months, I kind of had that, like there was a little breakthrough, of, like a post that done particularly well, and that was enough for me to be like, Ah, okay, this is, this, is really, this, like, could be, really be something. And it just kind of snowballed from there, really, I, I’m very data driven, so I was always looking at, like, what, why did this post work? How can I do more of that and do it and just consistently get better and better and better. And so it became a bit of an obsession, a bit of a kind of, you know, competition. You’re looking at other people growing and doing other things and, yeah, just managed to be really consistent and constantly wanting to improve. I think is, is one of the big things Rob Marsh: Or, you know what you were, you bumping along with one or two comments, and suddenly this one has, you know, hundreds or you know what, what did that look like? Matt Barker: The difference was, I was, yeah, I was posting every night, every two or three times, every week for about three months, and I was just getting like one like, three likes, four likes, no comments. It took me ages to even get a comment, I think, which is quite funny, but I think that’s what most people experience. But yeah, the difference between that, that post that kind of had that initial reaction was, I think it got something like 80 likes or and 2030 comments, I can’t remember, but I think, I think there was a certain creator with about 6,000 followers at the time who managed to see it, catch it, and engage with it, and I think that had a big impact. But the difference in writing of that post versus the other ones was kind of night and day, when you look at, like, what works on LinkedIn, it was like, there was a there was a proper hook, like a real hook that actually, like, grabbed someone and talked to a pain point and was compelling someone to actually read it. It was concise, it was kind of formatted. It was easy to read. So it was, yeah, I think when you look at that versus the stuff I was doing before that, it’s quite clear, yeah. Rob Marsh: Let’s talk about that a little bit more deeply. You know, what is the best content to be posting on LinkedIn, so that you’re actually getting engagement, and not just engagement from anybody, but engagement from the people that you want to work with, you know, people that maybe would hire you, you know, to do copy your content for them. Matt Barker: Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s an ever evolving thing the way, because, because these social platforms, they have their algorithms and that kind of dictates, you know, how much, how many impressions, and how what reach your posts get. But so that can, that can be a bit of a minefield, and that that can kind of make things not so consistent as they should be, as opposed to, like, traditionally, if you’re writing a landing page or, like, a sales letter of some sort, where you’re just driving traffic to that that piece of copy will just perform as it performs and you improve it, or as you improve it. You know, the only variance is the visitors. And on social platforms, you’re kind. If there’s, there’s external factors which are kind of out of your control, but typically the kind of the writing process is the big frame. The main framework that was the most helpful for me, was understanding problem, agitate, solution. To start off by highlighting a big, painful problem for a specific target audience, agitate that problem, make it really feel real, and kind of be able to make the reader feel like, oh, this person really understands, like, the problem that I’m facing. They truly understand me, and obviously that comes from the research that you put into understanding your target audience and then presenting a solution. So whether that’s like a step by step process that you have, or whether it’s just a one line kind of motivational kind of sentence that’s going to change their kind of beliefs. That was the main framework for me that has always worked well on LinkedIn, because you’re able to use it in so many different ways. You’re able to tell stories with that kind of framework. You’re able to educate your audience on, you know, problems that they’re experiencing, but you’re also able to use it to show off, you know, like results and outcomes that you’ve driven for other clients and past clients. So it’s such a helpful framework that I think just works across the board on LinkedIn, and then the other kind of variants of that are like the formats that you use, is it text only? Is it you adding some sort of visual to help illustrate the point? Or any, or, you know, some, there’s a kind of a format on LinkedIn that that gets a strangely large amount of reach is these kind of PDF guides called carousels that they call them on the platform. And they’re kind of these multi page guides. They’re typically not really following that kind of problem, agitate solution framework. They’re more kind of in depth pieces, but those kind of pieces of content can do extremely well. And if you, if you hold someone’s attention for that long, and you really, and you really educate them and kind of dive into their into their conversation that’s happening for them right now, that that’s those pieces of content can really have a big impact in terms of kind of lead generation, because they can get that really high reach, but then they can also really deeply resonate, because you can go into a lot of detail. Rob Marsh: When it comes to trying to talk to the right people, you know, potential, ideal clients, Dream clients that we might have, are you letting the algorithm do that work based off the content, or are you doing anything specifically to target them beyond just knowing what your ideal client’s problems are? Matt Barker: Yeah, so there’s kind of, I’d say there’s three, there’s there’s three kind of areas of of LinkedIn, ultimately, there’s your profile, there’s the net, there’s your network, and there’s your posts, the kind of three kind of main things that kind of have the biggest impact within those is your profile, where you have your headline, you have a very short amount of you have a very short headline that when you post, you your image is there, your name is there, and then there’s a headline underneath which is essentially, or should essentially be, your value proposition. So what? Who? Who am I helping out of that? How do I help them? That can be extremely powerful, because that’s essentially your, you know, your advertisement. It’s at the top of all of your all of your posts, no matter what your content is, that’s going to be the thing that’s there, if that, if that, if that headline is very targeted and calling out your ideal customers, showing them how you can help them, showing the problems that you solve in that really concise, like 10 or eight word sentence that can have a really big impact if your if your posts are then dialed in so we can come on to the posts, part of that, that kind of TRIO now. So with your content, the main thing that drives ideal clients and target audience to your content is the hook, because that’s obviously the first thing that people see if someone’s scrolling the feed, if your hook is, you know, calling out your ideal client, if it’s talking to a past or current pain that that person is experiencing, if it shows a potential kind of outcome that they’re looking for, if it includes any other you. Are words, phrases or kind of emotions that just trigger your ideal client and your target audience. So specifically it doesn’t matter what the format is, it’s gonna grab them if it, if it, if it gets into their feed and if it gets in front of them. So then that brings us on to the network side of it, in terms of connecting with the right people. So, you know, using the search bar to find, you know, founders, whoever your target audience is, using sales nav, if you have it, to go deep and really dial in, drill into those kind of demographics to find exactly your ideal client, connecting with them and then actually having conversations with them in the DM so the direct your direct messages, so actually talking to them. Because what that does when you actually talk to them in the DMS, which is a trick that a lot of people, I don’t actually think, realize is when you talk to them in the DMS, it the next time they log into LinkedIn, the likelihood of your most recent post being top of their feed is extremely high. So if you’re able to combine all that together, so connecting with the right people talking to them, having a headline that is optimized to speak to that person, and then having content going out that is also optimized speaking to that exact person. It is just all of a sudden your post is right at the top of their feed, and it’s something that they can’t ignore, essentially. Rob Marsh: So this is a really interesting thing that I hadn’t thought of, and I want to make sure that I understand it correctly. So when it comes to commenting and appearing in somebody else’s feed, does that happen when you’re commenting on your posts, or does so let’s say you post something, I comment on your post, will that then put my content and we have a conversation in your in your comments, so it’s not just, Oh, great post, Matt, you know, or, you know, those, those kinds of non comment comments, will that put my content into your feed? Or does that have to happen on my content that you would, that conversation would be on my content that you’ve basically opted in and said, Oh, I’m interested in this because I’m commenting on Rob’s post, and now my stuff will show up in your feed. Does that question make sense? Matt Barker: So I would for for your post to show up in my feed or to my audience, I would have to comment on your post. So that’s why, that’s why you know what I referenced earlier with that, that early post blew up for me. There was that one Creator who just had a much bigger audience than me, who engaged with it and that sent my post into their audiences, into his audiences feed. Rob Marsh: Okay, that makes sense. So let’s talk about how we get our first followers, and how we make sure that we have the right first followers? Because, you know, like any audience, you know, it’s great to have 100,000 followers, but none of those are your potential clients, your potential buyers there. It’s really not that great. You’re just creating content that’s going out there and being enjoyed but doesn’t actually have any kind of real business impact. So what do we do to get those, you know, first 1000 plus followers. Matt Barker: So the main thing is actually going out and finding them and pulling them in. So, like we mentioned, actually going out and connecting with them. Obviously, that is quite difficult if you, if you are completely starting from zero, because you would need to work on your profile and kind of build your profile out. So when you connect to someone, and that pop that connection, request pops up in their inbox. If they click on your profile, they can actually see all the reasons why they should connect with you, even if your connections are at one or two or whatever, there needs to be all the information on your profile specific to them and showing them how you can benefit them and why you’re why you’re A beneficial connection. So that’s going to be really important for someone just starting out to make sure their profile looks really good, looks really strong and compelling, and talking to a specific person. Because when you do that connection request, that’s going to be essentially their, their only one of their only kind of part, one of the main parts of their thought process, when it comes to accepting or rejecting, obviously, your content works with it as well. Rob Marsh: I was just trying to make sure that I understand this. So let’s say that I want to work with supplement companies, you know, people who are making vitamin supplements, nutraceuticals, you know, that kind of thing you’re basically saying, I need to go out and find 2050, 100 of these people, maybe they’re marketing directors, vice presidents, founders, whatever, and start to connect with it, like either put in connection requests or start to interact with their content. Is that right? Matt Barker: Bit of both, yeah, connection requests. The reason for the connection request is, then if, if they become a first degree to connection, when you are then putting out content that is targeted for that target audience, it’s going to be highly relevant to them, and the likely it increases your chances of them hopefully engaging with your content. And that’s ultimately the goal, because the kind of you want your if you’re if you want your post to perform, well, there’s this kind of testing, kind of phase that the post goes through after you post it, and if your close connections aren’t engaging with it at a high rate, then it’s not going to be pushed out to any anyone. It’s not going to be pushed out any further. So want to keep your con that’s that’s the kind of good thing about LinkedIn these days, is that it is rewarding that kind of like people with really niche, targeted audiences and people with really niche, targeted content, because it’s just, it’s making sure that those people are seeing the right the right content. Rob Marsh: That’s kind of an interesting idea then. So, you know, let’s say that I’ve got, you know, because I’ve collected these over the career, you know, several different jobs, or whatever, co workers who are maybe not my ideal clients. Should I be unfriending them and friending people who are my clients to curate that really tight group of potential clients I like, I’ve never, I mean, I’ve always just sort of thought, the bigger the network, the better. But it sounds like maybe having a more curated network is actually better on LinkedIn, at least if you want to use it for client acquisition. Matt Barker: Yeah, this is where it kind of gets a bit tricky. And I think it I think a lot of people disagree, and a lot of people would agree, depending on how you kind of go about it. So the strategy that I’ve always approached with LinkedIn is, it kind of looks a bit like a traditional marketing funnel with your top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom funnel content. And that top of funnel content is really, I guess, and more, what I’ve been kind of leaning towards recently with it is it’s more showing your identity, like who you are, why I should trust you as a human, you know, because ultimately, we’re just speaking to each other through screens and now, especially with like AI and how much just copy paste content there is out there. It’s kind of got to this weird position where the more human you are, the more you can stand out. So there’s almost this kind of battle to just prove that you’re human and that can have a really big impact on your sales, right? Because, you know, obviously that building relationships of scale is what the kind of game is it on LinkedIn. So there’s that element of it where you you actually just want to put kind of human, humanized content out which isn’t necessarily always educational or targeted towards that target audience, who you would, who would be your ideal client, because you kind of just want to let people know, like, Hey, I’m human. I’m just doing like, normal life things you want to kind of get, you want to kind of tap into, like the different emotional side of your audience, to help them kind of believe in you as a person. And that is, in turn, going to then help when you’re posting this kind of middle funnel content where you’re showing off, like, your expertise and the skills you have around the service you provide, and then the bottom funnel content when you’re showing, like, you know, Client Results, outcomes that you’ve driven specifically for clients. So it’s a really important part of it, but that’s where it gets a bit shady, because you don’t want to, it’s good to have a niche audience, but it’s also you need a reason for people to trust you as a person. So it’s difficult. Rob Marsh: I guess that’s worth thinking through. It might be worth, you know, somebody setting up some accounts to really test, you know, a super, super dialed in profile that only follows potential clients, versus one that’s that’s got maybe a more general application, and just sort of, I may not be a real test or a real way. Yeah. I mean, it might not be scientific because, you know, setting the profiles up for two different people, or, you know, the connections that you would get, but yeah, it’s just kind of an interesting conundrum. Matt Barker: I think it really depends on how you ultimately want to approach it, like long term. I think for me, I always wanted to approach LinkedIn long term as a place of I want to attract clients to me, which long, long term would mean I have to do a lot less outreach. I don’t have to spend as much time sending DMS and doing outreach. I can leverage my audience post, get a lot of reach and attract people to me, but early on, right at the start, that just doesn’t work. So you have to do all the outreach to get things going. So you can kind of, you can do it at the start just by DMing and having conversations and and doing the outreach, but the effectiveness of your profile in the early days of when you’re doing that, it’s not going to, it’s not going to show as much social proof. You know, because you don’t have as many followers, you may not have the content that is getting all the engagement, and whether we like it or not, that does have an impact on people’s kind of psyche, you know? So, yeah, I think early on, you can definitely get clients on LinkedIn by really going heavy on outreach and just being really targeted with it. And then if you get those conversations going, then, if you’re good at sales, then you can, you know, get on a call. You can show all this work that you’ve done, if you’re if you’ve got all that experience, and you’re an experienced business, then you just need to get them on that call and show them what you’ve done. But if you’re someone like me, who, back in 2022 was just kind of just starting out, you need to really build up that portfolio and give people a reason to trust you. So it’s, yeah, it’s kind of two different approaches, I guess. Rob Marsh: At what point are you trying to move people off of LinkedIn into, you know, a freebie or a product, or get them to your website, or some other kind of engagement. Or are you looking at and saying, Hey, as much of this as I can get to happen on LinkedIn, I’m happy to have it there on the platform. Matt Barker: I’m very regularly plugging like, I guess I call it, you’d call it lead magnet, but lead magnets, that phrase is a bit overused now, isn’t it? Rob Marsh: But everybody hates them, right? Matt Barker: For me, I’ll rotate between different types of ebooks or email based kind of courses to give them some give, give my audience something for free to then get them onto my to my email list, and then I can send them regular emails. So that’s something that I’ve been doing pretty regularly. In my content. There’s a, there’s a bit of a, it’s a, I’m not sure whether we could class it as a myth or not, but putting a URL into your LinkedIn post can typically destroy the reach. So if you, if you write a post, put a link saying, hey, go here and grab this thing. LinkedIn doesn’t like you, sending people off platform, obviously. So then the algorithm catches it and says, no, no, you’re not, you’re not doing that. But sometimes it can be really effective if you kind of disguise that link in a kind of educational piece of content and attach, you know, like pictures or PDFs or something like that, to kind of disguise the link, you can and word it properly, then you can kind of bypass it appear and yeah, that that the the conversions you get from just plugging the link straight in the post to send them to a lead magnet or another resource to then take them off platform, massively outweighs if you kind of, if you just man, if You just type, go to my bio and download this thing, it’s an easy one click versus finding something else, clicking to your profile, finding the next clicking again, it’s just a lot less clicks. But yeah, the conversion rate, or the amount of clicks you can get by just putting the URL straight in the post can be really good. Rob Marsh: I see a lot of conflicting information about the kinds of posts that work on LinkedIn. You know, I’ve seen people say you always have to have an image. I’ve seen people lately saying video works really well. You mentioned the carousels, and I seem to engage. I seem to be seeing a lot of carousels. In my view. Indeed, and I tend to engage in a few of those at least go three or four pages deep. What’s the best content right now, in your opinion, on LinkedIn, what’s working and, you know, what should we be thinking about doing more of it. Matt Barker: It completely depends on your goals. You know, if you the format that I found that works the best for follower growth, it and impressions, has been these carousel posts, specifically educational, step by step, carousel posts. So if you say, for example, here’s how I write a LinkedIn post, start to finish. I’ll then show you screenshots, step by step. What I do to do that process is that specific type of content for me, and that it’s been consistent over the last three years, has always been the piece of content that has really big spikes in follower growth and gets a lot of impressions. So that’s for that kind of outcome, for posts where I’m looking to drive inbound leads, because I’m not, not necessarily looking to do that from every post. When you kind of look at a strategy as a whole. It plays a part of it, but you need to kind of be fairly kind of softly, softly with it, because you don’t want to kind of, you know, annoy people and being too salesy and that sort of stuff. So if there’s a particular post around, trying to drive inbound leads from it, and really trying to pull in that ideal client. It can be text only, or it can be text with a really clear screenshot or image of proof of a client getting a result, like a happy message, saying, I just got this result. Thanks so much, or a testimonial, or something like that, or even a video, whatever that, whatever the format of the thing you’re attaching is, it just needs to show social proof of a customer or a client happy and new. And the text is, is you documenting kind of how it happened and talking about that at win? So the format, it really depends, you know, on what your goal what your goals are, but, but equally, there’s, there’s people who, and it’s been the same for me. I’ve written text only posts which are, you know, 2500 characters long, and they have completely blown up, which typically isn’t the kind of optimal kind of format for explosive growth, or kind of a viral post, if you want to call it that. So it kind of ultimately comes down to how good is your copy, in my opinion, if your copy is really good, really interesting, and talks to the right problems and the right person, then that’s always the main, the main thing. And you can go text only if you really get that dialed in. Rob Marsh: When we first started talking, you mentioned how you kind of like to look at the data and see what’s performing, what’s not performing. How do you look at that now, do you kind of keep an eye on the baseline, and you know, if you have a post that is above average, are you still breaking that down and saying, What did I do differently here? Or if one performs below average, are you still looking at that saying, you know, where’s the mistake here? Or does it just kind of come so naturally now that you just know what’s going to be an above average post, and it all still works. Matt Barker: There’s an element of that, yeah, because it’s got to a point now, I’ve written probably 5000 plus LinkedIn posts, so there’s a bit of that kind of ingrained in the process when I’m writing and creating, but I actually just did my kind of my Quarterly Review, where I sit down and I I open up my analytics and I filter by either impressions or repost or reactions, depending on it. Can I think when I just did it, I looked at impressions. It’s not too important which one you look at, but impression looking so looking at impressions as a metric can be a little bit misleading because of what we were just talking about with the algorithm. Yyou can post the same thing today, you can post it again next month, and it will be wildly different, but with reactions and engagement rate, I see that as someone has intentionally clicked like or they’ve done something to say I like that. Yeah. And that’s been in someone’s control, versus like this mythical algorithm. So yeah, you can sort your post by either of those metrics, whatever you want. And I’m looking at, I’m looking at the top 20, or the top 10% of posts that I put out, I’m putting them in a collection, and then I’m copy and pasting the hooks into a kind of document so I can see all the best hooks, and kind of analyze what the what the structures of those were, what the topics were, what the topics of the posts were that performed very well, what kind of pain points they were touching on. And I’m essentially looking at that every quarter, or, yeah, every quarter normally. So I’m kind of making sure that I’m using the right kind of hooks that are working well on LinkedIn for my audience right now, and I’m talking about the right topics that my audience are caring about right now and responding to right now. Because these platforms can change so much, it’s almost not worth looking at what worked last year. Sometimes that can sometimes they can work. If you take that post from last year, for example, this time last year, and kind of rehash it, it can there are the there are the odd posts that can work, but people, what people want to consume and what people want to read about, just changes so much on on social media. I think LinkedIn is a bit slower than than other platforms, I think, because just naturally what it is, it’s a professional place, not necessarily like a kind of quick, twitchy trend kind of platform, but yeah, looking at, looking at the last three months data, and just trying to find what those top 10% with posts were so you can take them and say, Okay, how can I create more content around these specific topics? How can I create more content that is using these kind of hook structures and these, these, these formats of content that I’ve used, and just really dial in on those specifically. Because I think when I looked at my data, it was something like 45% of the impressions I gained in those three months came from less than 10% of the posts, which, to me, sound is well crazy. And I think that was out of something like 180 posts. So it’s, it’s something like 2018 posts that contribute to almost half the impression. So it just shows you how much of a game is. Of like consistently posting things that you think are good and just seeing and just waiting and see which, one kind of pops, you know? Rob Marsh: So you just went through this process of analyzing these aside from the PAs formula we already talked about, what did you see? What other trends did you see in your high performing content that people seem to be reacting to? Matt Barker: It was, I mean, I post a lot of educational content. So it’s hooks that are kind of, you know how to or calling out a kind of specific problem in the hook. But then there was also stuff like, I posted something about how my dad, he’s 64 and he’s retiring soon. And that post got a lot of engagement. So there’s this kind of, it was a real mixed bag, to be honest, but it just kind of shows where the platform’s at right now with kind of, you can, you can, it likes the educational content, so, you know, kind of showing people how to do stuff, how you do stuff works. But then there’s also this kind of human side of it that still works, where, you know, I’m talking about my dad, who’s retiring, and there’s that, there’s those sorts of things that still work, and there’s no real kind of set formula. I don’t think there were hooks that are four or five sentences long, you know, over 30-40, words long, that worked very well. There were hooks that were less than 10 words that worked very well. Carousels done well. Text Only did well. There was such a mixed bag. It’s, actually, it’s quite hard to just say, Okay, this is the, this is the one thing, but, but ultimately, it’s, it’s, it’s more a case of kind of listening to what you’re. What your audience are signaling to you, it’s going to be completely different for everyone. So it’s almost, you almost can’t say, like, this is, these are the topics that work really well because it’s completely dependent on what your audience are telling you. The topics that performed really well for my audience and what I put out might be completely different to someone else. Rob Marsh: Yeah, that makes sense. So I have a question that I want to ask. I do not mean this as a criticism or to be cheeky, but there are a lot of people on LinkedIn who are doing really well, and they are selling a lot of the same things that you do, which is how to do well on LinkedIn. I’m curious. You know, what you’re seeing outside of that? Hey, follow me, you know, and I can show you how to grow on LinkedIn. But rather, what you’re seeing other people accomplish with LinkedIn in other niches, you know? So maybe it’s people you’ve worked with, or people that you’re seeing on LinkedIn, and the things that they’re doing to grow obviously, these ideas that we’re talking about could work in other niches, but how are you seeing it being applied elsewhere, you know, to land clients, to Grow audience. That’s you know, beyond this will help you grow your audience on LinkedIn. Matt Barker: It’s an annoying one, because you don’t, you don’t want to be the person who’s talking about and growing on LinkedIn, on LinkedIn, or, you know, writing about writing on LinkedIn, on LinkedIn. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s a weird one. But, yeah, clients that I work with, I’ve just early parts of this year, I’ve been growing a group called Copy builders, where we’re all writing posts together, helping people write posts quicker, more effectively, getting better engagement and attracting clients to their business or new opportunities, whatever their whatever position they’re in. And some of the range of people in there are quite interesting. There’s, there’s one guy who’s an offshore driller… Rob Marsh: I wouldn’t imagine seeing that on LinkedIn… Matt Barker: Yeah, not your typical business world on LinkedIn at all. But he’s just been absolutely, like, crushing it. Like, I don’t like the word crushing, but he’s been, he’s just been doing so well. And what he’s been doing really well is, so the position he’s in right now. Is he still working in offshore drilling, but he just has this passion for photography, so he’s mixed the two things. And what he’s been doing is kind of posting observations and opinions on the offshore drilling industry, stories of and experiences of his, you know, his experience in that industry, as well as some educational content around it, which almost feels weird to do for offshore drilling, but he’s done a bit of that, but mainly it’s been the stories, observations and kind of opinions on the industry, and he’s pairing that up with really nice photography of, you know, people on the, you know, working the drills, people who are working, and it’s just been doing really well. He’s grown to, I think, eight or 9000 followers now. I think he started out, I think he only started on LinkedIn a few months ago. And, yeah, I think, yeah, that’s, that’s a really good, I think that’s a great example of kind of how you can apply it for a niche that just isn’t anything to do with the platform. And then there’s other other kind of niches, like, you know, marketing agencies tend to do particularly well on there, whether it’s web development, advertising, branding, they don’t, they tend to do very well in terms of, it’s a great place to show off their projects that they’re working on. You can post videos and images. So if you’re, if you’re very design focused, you’re able to use that, that kind of visual element, to really show off your work. And that really works well to attract clients, whether it’s, you know, completely not LinkedIn related at all. So yeah, they’re kind of the two that kind of spring to mind. Rob Marsh: How big does an audience have to be to you know, really start to support a freelancer in their work, in their business, to bring in enough clients, enough prospects every month? Matt Barker: It’s tough to say, but in my experience, it was, it took me a. It took me about five or six months to really start seeing lead consistent lead flow. And that was starting from scratch. And I was a freelancer to start. Freelancer starting completely from scratch. Business from Scratch. Audience from scratch. I think my audience at the six month point was at something like 8000 or 9000 maybe maybe 10. But I really don’t think you need that many. I think that I’ve seen people who have taken my courses, and people who have worked with who are, you know, newer freelancers, and they’ve got 2000 followers, and they post fairly pretty niche content, and they’re able to attract clients and use the content they put out as kind of you know partners to their outbound and outreach that they do. So, yeah, I really don’t think there’s a minimum. I think it’s how effective you are with your copy and your content, and how effective you are with your outreach, and how well your profile is set up, kind of like how we’re talking about. Rob Marsh: To me, it seems like one of the big challenges that a lot of us have on LinkedIn is this idea that we need to self promote, especially, I think copywriters, maybe designers, freelancers. You know, a lot of us are introverts. We like working alone, you know, we don’t, you know, love being out there, and so it can be really difficult. You know, talking about successes or talking about our own expertise, how did you overcome that? And you have, you know, advice for people who are sort of struggling with that, saying, I don’t really want to talk about myself in that way, or I am uncomfortable telling people how awesome I am. Matt Barker: Yeah, it is really hard. It’s weird, isn’t it? Especially since I’m British, and we have this thing of self deprecating and putting ourselves down. It may even be worse for you right there. I’d love to see the stats on that, if we could somehow figure it out. But yeah, it’s really hard. I definitely have that kind of streak in me. And even now, it sometimes gets a bit like, do I kind of feel, you know, confident putting this, this result out? I think it’s definitely a lot easier now. But yeah, I think at the start it was the turning point were was just being more comfortable and kind of absorbed with the idea that every that the piece of content that I put out today could just be completely forgotten tomorrow. And I think for me, that’s, that’s quite reassuring. It’s a bit, it’s all it’s kind of depressing, but it’s reassuring at the same time, I think, because it doesn’t matter how many followers you, you could put a bad post out, and it doesn’t do very well. It can. It will deflate you, and it will kind of knock your confidence. But you can just do another one tomorrow, and you can do another one the next day, another one the next day, and the likelihood of someone seeing all of your posts is just extremely slim, because, you know, there’s a very small percentage of people who are logging into LinkedIn every day, same time, looking at the same person, checking for the same person’s posts. So it was, it was kind of coming around to that idea, really, that not every post is that important, and I’m kind of playing this longer, longer game. So when I do promote myself, it doesn’t feel like that much of a big deal, because if it say it bombs or it doesn’t do very well, it’s like, Ah, okay, well, I’ll have another go next week. Rob Marsh: What part do pods and other groups play in LinkedIn? Growth, growth today, and these are these groups that are sort of invisible to, you know, anybody who’s just kind of scrolling through the feed, but obviously groups of friends or colleagues, coworkers that hop on like each other’s posts, promote each other’s posts. Is that still something that you need to be involved in to jumpstart the stuff? Or can you get around that? Matt Barker: So, so for me, at the start of when I was growing my profile, I wouldn’t it wasn’t a pod, but just naturally through meeting people and connecting with people and kind of finding these guys who I really got. Along with who were kind of on the same kind of trajectory as me of kind of wanting to grow their profile. We were, we were putting out posts every day as well, and we were kind of doing the same things. So we would create this Whatsapp group, and we weren’t sending posts in or kind of, you know, just chucking the URL in and saying, Hey, engage with this. We were just engaging with each other’s content anyway. But by creating a WhatsApp group where we could actually just talk, share ideas, share what’s working, and kind of collaborate in that way and kind of keep pushing each other, that was the biggest kind of growth driver for me, because I was able to kind of grow alongside a small group of other people, and it was all organic. It wasn’t forced. It wasn’t manufactured. Because the problem with these, these kind of big engagement pods that seem to run is the content can be just complete trash. But if it’s thrown in these pods or whatever, then, because there’s so many people going and liking it, it can, it can, it can blow up. But the minute you stop using that, all that engagement just goes away, because your content is then not very good. So then you’re just left with, you know, so you end up, you would end up being stuck in this kind of perpetual loop of needing to use this, this pod, which is a bit of a kind of sad reality, really, because you’re never, you’re never truly kind of growing your your own skills, if it’s, if it’s A profile that you’re writing content for yourself. But there is definitely, there’s definitely a point of when you, when you grow on LinkedIn. I was talking to someone about this the other day when, obviously, there’s not many people who would, who would hit this mark, but when you hit the 50,000 follower mark. I’ve spoken to quite a few people about this, and it’s as soon as you hit that mark, your engagement just seems to just drop a bit and plateau. And you really struggle to get going after that. So you really have to have a really engaged audience and really, really get your community, your, you know, your community kind of side of things and your networking side of things going. You really have to keep that going. But then what happens is you either do that or some people then say, Damn, I need to try and manufacture this, this engagement back. And that’s when they start going to pods. Rob Marsh: I mean, it’s, again, it’s another challenge that, I guess you have to decide if it’s worthwhile or not. I’m not sure about that. I mean, I’ve been in groups where people have definitely shared each other’s content, but I’m not sure that I would want to play in a pod the same way for the reasons that you that you mentioned, what would you say is the biggest mistake you’ve made as you’ve grown your audience posted on LinkedIn, you know, basically turned LinkedIn to the into the platform where your business lives? Matt Barker: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think there’s, there’s probably two. There’s kind of two moments where that come to mind. One of them is pretty much right at the start. It took me, I think it took me two or three months to actually comment on anyone’s posts or DM anyone I was just because I’m naturally introverted. I was just so kind of scared of commenting and engaging with people. That was the thing that was kind of holding me back in those early stages. And as soon as I started doing that, everything, everything grew because my content was was decent, but I just wasn’t doing that the other the networking side of it and the engaging side of it to make friends and find, you know, make new connections that would would then come and visit my content and give me some more engagement. So there’s, there’s kind of that element and and we’re along with that, not not seeking help, like not try. I wasn’t looking for I wasn’t finding enough resources, and I wasn’t taking the kind of the leap on any kind of courses which would help me accelerate my my LinkedIn, writing skills, my LinkedIn. You know, skills in general. You know, copy, networking approaches, content strategy. I was figuring that all out myself, and it just took so long for me to really kind of get to a point where it was working. It took probably sort of six or seven months really, which for a freelancer just starting out is trying to cope. Business that wasn’t too helpful. So there was definitely that. So I think looking back, I would, I would definitely get help at the start, and just try and find that that kind of, either that, course, or that, you know, something, that person, that coach, or someone who can just help me skip all that horrible start bit and just say this is what you need to be doing from the start, because I think that would save you so much, so much time. And then two, there was, there was a moment, and this, this is really kind of a mistake around audience growth, not business related. Business related. It was, it was great. But if we’re strictly talking audience growth on LinkedIn and content related, there was a period around the start of think 2023 where a friend of mine, another copywriter on LinkedIn, we were having this kind of race to grow our followers and try and get to 100,000 followers. And it was great for us. We were competing, and our content game, like, really leveled up, and we were kind of really understanding how the platform worked, and what was, you know, what content was best for our audience a lot quicker, because we were competing against each other, not the best for business. I’m not endorsing that as a strategy, but I built up so much momentum in that period of where we were growing, I think I went from something like 40,000 to 100,000 in about five months. So it accelerated really rapidly. But then once I hit 100,000, I completely changed my approach. And I went from I was posting, kind of broader writing, copywriting, kind of content, and then I really changed that, that approach to being very strictly kind of content strategy for founders and agency founders, and that, that that shift, just completely took the momentum that I’d built and and I was all of a sudden neglecting a very large part of my audience, so that engagement dropped. And I did that for a few months. Business wise, it was great, because I was able to start signing, you know, higher value clients, more clients. I launched a course in that period, which performed extremely well for me, and I was able to kind of attract much better clients for me. So business wise, it was fantastic, but audience growth wise, I would have kept that momentum going, because by now that it could be something, you know, like three, 400,000 followers or more, Rob Marsh: Imagine how much bigger your business could be if you had. This has been really interesting, Matt, and obviously given me a few things to think about that I’ve never considered with LinkedIn before, if people are still here listening, want to get in contact with you, I know you have free book on your profile at LinkedIn, but where should they be going to follow you? Matt Barker: Yeah, so if you go to Matt Barker on LinkedIn, my headline is, I make LinkedIn posting fast, easy and fun. There’s a how to build your LinkedIn audience ebook right at the top of that page. If you click on that, you can download that for free, and I’ll give you some kind of tips and show you through some mistakes and stuff that I’ve made along the way, so you can help build your audience, that’s the best place to find me and can follow my content and and if you enjoy it, then you can get engaging and reach out. Rob Marsh: Thanks, Matt. This has been, like I said, interesting, you’ve given me a lot to think about. I appreciate your time. Matt Barker: Thank you. Thanks for having me on. Rob Marsh: Thanks to Matt for sharing how he grew his own following on LinkedIn, starting with struggling to find clients for his own business to helping dozens of clients build their own followings. You can follow Matt on LinkedIn. I’ve put a link to his profile in the shownotes for this episode. You can also check out copybuilders, the program Matt is building that works for just about any niche. I’ve linked to Matt’s site in the show notes so you can find that. Matt’s advice on how to write content that resonates with potential clients should feel very familiar to copywriters. He mentioned how research uncovers the beliefs and emotions you can use to tap into in order to entertain and educate your audience. These are the kinds of insights you can discover with Research Mastery, our short course that will help you find the ideas that resonate with your audience. We didn’t create the course specifically for posts aimed at your LinkedIn audience, but if you’re posting on LinkedIn, it will help you find the ideas that will connect with your audience. Get it at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery Clearly LinkedIn is a great environment for connecting with clients specifically because it is entirely business focused. But it takes time, so get started. Follow Matt. Post once or twice a week, but more importantly connect with potential clients and post comments on their content. Success happens when you connect to others more often than when you capture someone’s attention temporarily. As Matt shared, the topics and content types that will work for you may not be the same as someone else’s. So in order to make LinkedIn work for you, you need to be trying new things, different things, and some of the same things you see others posting… in order to figure out what will work with the readers in your audience.

If you want to write more persuasive copy, you need better insights from your research. But how do you get them? Sarah Levinger is my guest for the 448th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast and we talked about research insights, trend spotting, how A.I. can distort your research analysis, and how to make your copy more persuasive. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: Sarah’s Twitter Sarah’s Community Tether Insights The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground   Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: Can psychology help you capture and hold the attention of your readers… then sell more of your products to your customers? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast. On last week’s episode of the podcast, we talked about buyer psychology and how to use it to sell your products and services. It’s a great interview and I recommend you don’t miss it. This week’s episode is a kind of part 2 to that interview. In addition to specific persuasion techniques, today we’re going to go deep on research and discovering insights that a good copywriter can build a sales argument. If you want to use the techniques we talked about last week, what we talk about in this interview will give you the baseline insights to make them so much more effective. My guest today is Sarah Levinger, founder of Tether, a research insights platform that helps uncover emotional, behavioral, and identity-driven insights so marketers can connect on a deeper, more human level with their customers. And she uses A.I. to augment the process. Sarah walks through the process and framework she created for finding the kinds of insights that resonates with customers. She categorizes comments and research data by emotion, which leads to a better set of avatars and marketing ideas based on emotion rather than taglines or words that get a little tired as prospects see them over and over in your ads and other marketing. Then Sarah goes even deeper than feelings to uncover beliefs—she talks about why in this interview. I think you’re going to like what she has to share about that. Sarah also mentioned something about A.I. that I hadn’t considered before that kind of shifted the way I’m thinking about using tools like Claude and ChatGPT to analyze data. If you don’t understand this change, if you use A.I. in your research or analysis process, your copy will probably not connect as well you expect. Before we get to my interview with Sarah, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. If you haven’t jumped in to see what the Underground includes, now is the time. It’s guaranteed, which means you can join and if you don’t find the resources you need to grow your business, just let us know and we’ll refund your money. The Underground includes more than 70 different workshops—and accompanying playbooks to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. This week we’re adding another expert workshop all about how to create the perfect for you copywriter website. If your website doesn’t stand out or doesn’t help you land clients, you’ll definitely want to join us. The Playbooks make it easy to find quick solutions to the challenges you face in your business everything from finding clients, conducting sales calls, using A.I., building authority on LinkedIn or YouTube or Pinterest, and dozens of other workshops. You also get dozens of templates including a legal agreement you can use with your clients, monthly coaching, regular copy and funnel critiques, and more. You can learn more and join today by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. And now, my interview with Sarah Levinger… Sarah, welcome to the podcast. Before we hit record, I told you I’ve been wanting to have you on for quite a while. I’ve been following your stuff online. The way you talk about persuasion psychology, it just rings my bell. So I’m so glad to have you here. But before we get into all of this stuff, how did you get to where you are, where you’re basically, you know, this marketing consultant to DDC companies using psychology to help, you know, increase responses, all of that kind of stuff. How did you get here? Sarah Levinger: Oh, gosh, that’s that I don’t even know that the journey that I’ve taken to get there has been a really interesting one, and I really do think I landed here on purpose at this particular time. So I started in marketing when I was 21, really, really young. I went to school to be an equine scientist. I wanted to be a vet for horses. I thought I wanted to be an equine scientist and go be like an equine vet. And then I found out very quickly, I don’t like blood, but I don’t like needles. This is not for me. So during that first, like, college year, I took a course in InDesign. Does anybody remember what InDesign was? I miss that platform so much. Oh my gosh. I really, really enjoyed designing in there. So that was, like an elective that I took, and I just got so hooked. I was like, This is so fun, like, I love the art side of this. So I moved back home. I was up in Wyoming for a minute, and then I moved back home with my parents. Went back to college for graphic design, and I had a professor in my second semester of college who was like, you know, if you’re good at this and you really enjoy doing design or marketing or art or whatever it is, you don’t have to have a degree. You can just go work. And I was like, what I don’t have to pay for college? Great. I don’t like college anyway. So here we go. So I quit college, and then I basically just, like, freelance for the next 10 years straight. And it was interesting, because this was, like, it, I mean, this was 2010 2011 so it was right at the start of YouTube being a thing. Tutorials online were just barely beginning to like, blow up. So there wasn’t really a whole lot of information on how to market or how to do things online in the digital space. So I had to go to the library of all places and just check out a bunch of books to learn how to do all this stuff. So I would go and check out books on like WordPress websites and Amazon, FBA, how to copyright, how to do all the sorts of stuff. And next to that section was this giant, like, I don’t even know, old textbook section on early childhood development and neuroscience, psychology and consumer behavior, stuff that was like, nobody has touched this book in years. But it was so interesting. So I kept checking those. But that just because they were, like, fascinating to me. And then I did that for like, 10 years straight. I just devoured information on how people work. Now, I didn’t tell anybody that I had this information or I knew anything about this for decades, until I kind of accidentally fell into paid advertising right before COVID hit in 2019 I had a newborn and a two year old at home, and I was like, I’m gonna die, like I have to talk to somebody. So I got on Twitter, and I just started chatting with people in the industry who were also doing media buying at the time, and then it just kind of exploded, mostly because I think I hit it just at the right time, the right place. This is why I kind of like alluded to that earlier. Sometimes your journey leads you to just the right time, the right place. At the time, when I was on Twitter, I thought I was going to be the last one talking about it, but I ended up being one of the first to talk about how you can apply psychology to add specifically when it comes to messaging, and see amazing drastic results. And I, I guess people just kind of really grabbed onto it and just ran with it because I grew a following. You know, within a year, I had probably about five to 10,000 followers, and I was starting to, like, get good business and drag good leads. And I was like, this is fun. This is a good role for me. So fast forward to now. I’ve kind of created, like, the perfect job for Sarah, where I get to study humans all day long, and I get to focus primarily on marketing and messaging. So, yeah, it’s been a journey. Rob Marsh: It’s a cool journey. So, and what you’ve built today is called Tether, and tell me how you’re doing that, like I’ve seen the products that you offer. I’ve seen how you talk about some of the stuff. But in the copywriting world, the content writing world, there’s a lot of research, but, and we’re all talking about like, how do you do research, or whatever, but oftentimes there’s a little bit of a disconnect between getting the research done and actually being able to apply it. And I think you’re bridging this gap a little bit. Sarah Levinger: I’m trying my hardest. Yes, it’s really interesting, because I think everybody kind of understands what research is, why it’s important. A lot of people understand how to do it. And then there’s then there’s many, many people out there, I think, that do it very, very well. They’re adept at it. Then there’s this, like, very, like you said, big gap between the people who have the information and the people who need to use it. And that, I think, has always kind of existed in business in general. We understand that we need to go after a specific customer type, or a specific person, and then there’s a big gap, and then there’s all the people who talk to that specific person and draw them into the business. So when I started to do paid advertising, I fell in love with it, mostly because I was able to take what I was learning on the psychology side, tactically, put it into an ad, and then see results within maybe four hours, sometimes less. Within 30 minutes, I could tell whether it worked or not. So it was much faster way of testing the messaging that I wanted to test. But that in between, Spot kind of became where, I guess, the sweet spot for Sarah kind of started to kind of morph. I guess so Tether came out of a lot of requests, honestly, from my customers and. Asking me, I would go in and I would run their media, buying their ads for them, and they would always ask, how is it that your ads fit better than everybody else? Like, we have lots of other ads in here, and you seem to be getting consistent good results with your ads. How would that happen? And so out of necessity, I was like, I have to come up with some sort of tactical framework to show them what I’m doing. So at the time, like I said, I didn’t know I was doing any of this. It was just like a part of Sarah’s process for research. I was going through and on the brand Instagram pages for any of these D to C brands that I was working for. I was pulling down all of the comments that was underneath all of their organic pieces of content that talked about the brand or even the product, even the ones that didn’t have anything to do with anything. I just pulled them down and then analyze them one by one. Now this was before AI, so I had to go through by hand and categorize them into the categories that I wanted, which, at the time was emotional categories, because I was like emotion psychology, this kind of all makes sense. Obviously, people buy things for emotional reasons, and then we justify them with logic, so I’ll categorize them into emotional category, and then I’ll just go ahead and, like, run an analysis on that. So this was all done in Excel spreadsheet, and based on frequency numbers, I could tell which emotions were coming out of just the language that customers were using. So I don’t know that I was necessarily a better writer or a better like, you know, Ideator for abs. I think it was more of the fact that I just got much, much closer to the customer, and then I was able to take what I found and basically repurpose it. So I had a framework that just I repeated over and over and over, Rob Marsh: Yeah, it seems to me, then, in my experience, you know, working with copywriters, a lot of the time, you know, we’re looking for specific words. Sometimes we’re looking for emotions, but, but you know, when, even when I go through research, knowing that I should be looking at all of it together, every once in a while, something will jump out. I’m like, oh, that’s the idea, right? And then maybe I stop or and so, having gone through and done that work to, like, really figure out, okay, every single comment, it feels to me like that’s almost the putting in the 10,000 hours kind of thing that trains your brain so that, so that it becomes really effective and insightful. Sarah Levinger: Yeah, yeah. Well, and it was interesting, because that was the very first product I ever really had, was what I was calling it NLP at the time. So it was the NLP research panel, and it was called NLP because I didn’t know this was the term, but what I was doing was basically manual natural language processing. So there’s computers that do that. Obviously, Sarah was just doing it by hand. So I’d pull all the data down, categorize it, pull out frequency numbers for the emotions, emotional categories that I was looking for, and then I would write new copies based on the emotion that I felt, not necessarily the keywords and phrases that the customers were using, mostly because the keywords and phrases are important, and they I mean, they still are important. They were important. They are important. But the problem was, in paid advertising, if you use that keyword and phrase too many times. It’s fatigue. People kind of stop paying attention to it, and then it doesn’t work anymore. So fast forward, a couple years later, I had someone ask me, this is great. We love your NLP, it’s really interesting. It’s helping. But do you have any information on getting accurate avatars built, like customer types from all of the data that you’re pulling down. And at the time, I was like, No, but I could probably build that. I constantly look at these things like, I think I could probably make that. Why not? Like, we’ll see if we can ever so the next product that I built was called the CIM. So the CIM is a core identity map, and this particular research panel uses picture based surveys and metaphorical surveys to pull out these emotional like deeper insights out of our customers. So they’re very odd surveys, because about 80% of them are non-functional, I would say. So we ask questions like, if this product was a superhero, which one would it be? And why? Those types of things. Once you’re going to make an association of the brain, you would help pull out some very interesting insights of what people believe about things, not just how they feel about it, that in general, for humans, what you believe affects how you feel, and what you feel affects how you behave. So for consumption, especially since I’m on the paid advertising side, studying just the behavior of clicks or conversion rates and those types of things, not entirely helpful for me, because I have no idea what caused it, right? I just know it happened. So some people take one step back and go, Okay, we need to study the emotion, which is very, very helpful. But again, that’s only one piece of the equation. We can tell how they felt about what caused the conversion, but we can’t tell why they did it. So I go all the way back to the beginning and study behavior with the CI or study belief, sorry, that the CIM, so that way and understand more. Can you give me an example of how that works? Yeah. So, for instance, one of the best you kids into this I’ve ever saw was we had a CIM that was interesting. They had built basically this one. A skincare brand, and they were having a really hard time because the acquisition customer type was too expensive, like that. They were just, like, bleeding money, basically. So we ran a CIM basically just to see what their customers believed about the whole industry, not just their particular product. Because most businesses study themselves, or they study competitive they don’t study the industry, which I find fascinating, because I’m like, Oh, Rob Marsh: That totally rings a bell, too. I do the same thing. Like, of course, you want to look at your three or four closest competitors, so you don’t copy what they’re doing, but you also clue into, you know, the basics, and then, of course, your own product. But yeah, industry wide, that’s a lot, and that’s a lot for one person to handle too, or one small agency. Sarah Levinger: Yeah, that’s why they usually come to Sarah, because I’m like, don’t go do this yourself. Just hire someone to do it. Blind you. So industry wide, though, this is a very interesting it’s a very interesting ecosystem, if you start to study industry, mostly because a large majority of the time there is one person at the top and then there’s a number two, and they fight with each other constantly, COVID, colon, Pepsi, right? Apple and Microsoft. Then there’s an outlier, usually a third player in here who’s quietly serving an audience that’s like secondary to the larger market that these two are fighting over. Right? That third base. Sometimes they are brand, brand new meaning, like you’ve never seen them before. They just came out of nowhere. Liquid Death is probably a good example of this. Like nobody really saw them come and they just were all of a sudden, there. You also have some of these who have been quietly like practicing their skill for such a long time that they notice a market gap before the two top players do and can like slip in immediately. So I think it’s beneficial to study your competitors and beneficial to study yourself, obviously, but it’s even more beneficial to study the industry as much as you possibly can, because you’ll start to notice consumer shift. That’s what we’re kind of looking for, especially at Tether. Consumer shifts happen all the time for all sorts of different reasons, political reasons for economic reasons for cultural movement. In particular, celebrities have a huge like play on cultural sway, like your customer type is swaying their behavior based on what they believe. And if their beliefs change, then all of their behaviors change too. So back to skincare. When we ran a CIM for them, we found that their customers were a little overwhelmed, not necessarily by like, the industry, like they understood what their problem was. It was usually acne or dry skin or wrinkles or whatever. They were more overwhelmed with the fact that I now have like, 70 bottles that sit on top of my counter, and I’m constantly, like, swapping them out in and every day and like, I just, I’m just overwhelmed with the amount of like ridiculousness that I have in my life now due to these bottles on my counter, it had nothing to do with the skincare, which I found really interesting, but it was such a definitive thread that they the customer types were just like, You know what? I’m just kind of done with the mess and the chaos of what this industry has brought into my life. Now, that’s a very definitive belief and emotion that we can start to message to on the coffee side, to talk about the fact that, like, this is the last time you’ll ever have to switch to another skincare brand. Rob Marsh: So part of this, what you’re doing is trend spotting, which is maybe a little bit different, again, from what most typical copywriters or even researchers do. So, you know, aside from, you know, running your own panels, are there other tools that you’re using to spot trends and to see what’s coming in order to get ahead of that? Sarah Levinger: I have tested a ton of stuff recently, and I think this is something you and I were talking about, $4 pocket there. There’s a place for AI. I think in this conversation, I don’t think it’s where people think it is. I typically use AI as a second brain. So I will have it do data analysis for me, because it can spot patterns and things that I just can’t see. If I have spreadsheets or data, I’ll go through and have it analyzed for me and just say, what do you see in here that I just don’t see? So that’s incredibly helpful. When it comes to research. I have a difficult time using AI as a production tool, and this is something that I’ve been slowly starting to learn more and more about. Because when we first started, I think everybody was just like, this is going to cut years off of our production time. It can do analysis, so it can tell us exactly what we should run from what I’m seeing. That’s not at all true. So in general, I typically default to surveys in particular, because it’s voluntary information, and it’s information that’s like, non biased. It’s just, this is just a person out there. It’s anonymous. We don’t collect any sort of email addresses or names or anything. It’s headed we just collect the actual data of people answering the pictorial survey or the metaphorical survey. And that’s on purpose, because I don’t want it to cloud kind of the what we’re trying to actually learn. So ideally, use AI, but it’s, it’s not as a production tool. It’s primarily just to help me think a little bit more, if that makes sense. Rob Marsh: Since we started talking about AI, let’s, let’s keep going here. Because, like you said before we started recording, you said you have a few thoughts, and I think they probably track pretty closely to what what I think about A.I. But as far as AI goes and writing copy, tell me where you are in your brain and with your experience. Sarah Levinger: So far, AI has been a very interesting tool to track. When it first came out, this was, like the most amazing thing we had ever seen. Like we just everybody grabbed it, everybody used it. They went from like zero to 5 million users in like 48 hours. It was bonkers, mostly because it is an incredible tool. The interesting part about it is, though, as you start to watch the metamorphosis of AI in particular chat is, well, the one that we use the most often in DTC, you start to notice some like, glaringly obvious issues with this platform. The I think the primary one being this is not really assisting workflow. I find which I think. What do you mean by that? Okay, so most people grabbed onto this because they were like, Oh, I don’t need a copywriter anymore. Save me time. Well, I don’t need any, but I could get rid of my entire team and just use this. That is technically true, but the issue is now you’ve basically replaced a team of experts who can get you a headline within a good 30 minutes to an hour, that will probably work 80% of the time with a system who is making basically an educated guess based upon the data you feed it that’s basically suited to you the user, because the more you use the llms, the more gets trained on you as the person, and it will start to feed you stuff that it knows you like. And this is the most difficult thing about llms. It’s like they’re very, very powerful. I still use it constantly because it’s trained on Sarah’s brain, so it’s almost like talking to myself. But toughest part about this is often the output is terrible, so I have to QA two times as much as I used to. I used to QA inside my own brain before I put it on a piece of paper. I think about it for a long time in the shower, like when I’m driving, or what I’m doing things with my kids, without me having to know that I was thinking about it, because it was all subconscious processing. Now we’ve taken our subconscious and stuck it into a computer and said, you do the subconscious processing for me, but let me help you do it. So we’re spending two to three hours QA one headline instead of just sitting and thinking quietly about it in the background before we sit down to our desk. Rob Marsh: I just kind of had a light bulb go off as you’re mentioning this when you said that llms get trained on our voice, and they get to know us. The biggest problem here is that is that even if we know our customers intimately, we are not our customer, and the knowledge that we bring to the table in order and then to have LLM reflect back what Rob is thinking instead of what Rob’s clients or customers are thinking, or Rob’s clients customers are thinking. Customers are thinking, which is even two steps away, like now. Now we’ve got a really big gap between what’s going to work and what sounds good, because it’s going to sound good based off of, you know, my feedback. I mean, I’m a pretty good writer, yeah, but it’s not necessarily the thing that’s going to work well. Sarah Levinger: And in paid advertising, we’re using this primarily to produce massive amounts of ads. So our issue used to be that we had teams of like six to 10 to 20 people, all producing ads for us, copywriters and graphic designers and creative strategists, lots of different things, and all of those people, it would probably take us a good week to two weeks to generate a good 10 to 20 ads. Like it’s a process now we can do it in 20 minutes. Now, if you can take that amount of time, squish it down into 20 minutes, and you can take basically 10 ads and like, double or triple your production, that means a massive amount of messages are now being flooded into the systems on paid advertising. So meta, Tiktok, Instagram, right? That means the consumers are also seeing more messages. That means they’re also now becoming desensitized to any messages that are generic or completely boring, right? No offense to AI, but like, it’s a lot of what comes out of there is quite generic, yeah, so I’m watching this, and I’m tracking it as we’re going through just thinking, in the background, wondering, how long is this going to go before we start to see large scale kind of systemic issues in marketing in general, due to the fact that people think this is faster, but it’s not, or think that it’s better, but it’s not because we are the ones that are feeding all the data into The llms and telling them what to think. Now they still have the ability to go and, like, scrape the web, which is helpful. They can go and look to Google. But who produced all that stuff on Google? We did. So again, I am on the fence. I feel so torn about this, mostly because AI has something called projection bias, meaning they kind of just get. Tests at what they think is probably the best course of action based upon the statistical, mathematical patterns in the data. So we can feed it all the customer data we want, but if you’re feeding it on historical customer data, it’s only going to go after people who bought yesterday, not people who are going to buy tomorrow, so you’re dipping the bottom of the bucket constantly, bottom of funnel customers. And it gets even worse when you think about how many 1000s and 1000s of brands are in one industry. It’s intense. Rob Marsh: It’s crazy. So while we’re still talking about this, I know you’re using AI. I use AI. How are you using AI to maximize its effectiveness and not let it get in the way of actually, like, relating to the customer. Sarah Levinger: So I primarily use it as a data analysis tool, because I’m not a data analyst, and, like, I have people on my team that are helping me with research, but in general, it can see a lot more than I can. I don’t want it to produce and I don’t want it to think for me, because I’m the one that has the real world experience. We all have to remember that AI lives inside a computer. It’s never seen a comb or a shoe or a house, right? It’s never experienced love. It’s also never really experienced rejection or embarrassment. It understands which emotions and words are connected to that word, but it will never be able to understand what it feels like to like be around that. Yet, I don’t know if they’re gonna make that someday. Maybe that would be terrifying, but it’s possible that will happen to them. So because of this, though, I really wanted to pull out things that I am unable to see. So I typically run these metaphorical and pictorial surveys to understand underlying belief systems. And so when I run that data through, we typically have basically qualitative answers that come with the pictures. So we’ll ask one picture of what do you think about this question. Here’s your picture answers. You choose one. They’ll pick an image for us. And then that very next question is going to be, why did you choose that image? Those qualitative answers for why did you pick that are very, very interesting, because they show a whole lot about what people think about themselves. You’ll choose based on emotion, but then you’ll try and justify it with something else, so you can compare them pretty easily. Now, the toughest part about this is I have to describe the image to chat pretty intensely and then tell it. Here’s the image they chose. Here’s what they answered as to why they chose that image. You do this analysis for me and tell me what you see, not necessarily what you think. I don’t try and use that word too much with chat, just because it’s trained on me. So it’s going to think like me. I want to just see what do you see in here that I use all the time, because I want to understand what patterns are in here that I just can’t see right now. Rob Marsh: So it’s helping you uncover patterns, emotions, ideas, and then you’re taking that, and either you’re writing it yourself or you’re working with a copywriter to put that into action. Sarah Levinger: Yep, exactly, exactly. So like the skincare thing, that was a pattern that I didn’t recognize. Like, when I looked at the data, I was like, oh, confidence. A lot of these women are really into feeling COVID. Into feeling confident. They want to boost their skin, they want to look good, those type of things, but those are normal, everyday things that I would think are a part of skincare. That’s normal, makes sense, yeah? And I said, it’s logical sense. So then I ran it back through the system and said, Okay, go find me some stuff that’s weird in here. Go, go get me some keywords or phrases that are like, I don’t know why anybody would say this about skincare, and one of the ones that came up was, I’m overwhelmed with the amount of bottles on my sink, which I’m like, that has nothing to do with skincare. So it was fascinating, but very, very cool thread that they found, and they’re able to use it now a whole lot better just because it spotted something that was weird. It’s an outlier, Rob Marsh: So where this stuff seems to be going is, again, moving into the psychology side of this. And this is something that we talk about. We say it a lot, but it’s hard to make actionable. And that is the idea that people don’t buy products. They buy what the product says about them, right? So they’re buying an identity, or they’re signaling something about them. So as an example,I love Jeep. I don’t currently own a jeep, but I have had Jeeps in the past, and I love them, and even though they’re kind of bumpy and clunky in some ways. There’s probably something—I might need to go to a therapist to talk about this—but there’s something about Jeeps that I like that it says about me as a jeep driver, right? So, yeah. So how do we get more of this into the copy and content that we’re creating? Sarah Levinger: Oh, gosh, yes. So this is really interesting, because this goes down into what how many different associations have you built with Jeep in your head, and what are they attached to? So normally, when you build a memory or some sort of an association as a human, it has to do with how heightened your emotional state was during that particular time period in your life. So it’s possible somebody in your family owned a jeep, or you knew somebody who wasn’t in your family, but was aspirational, somebody sort of like, I want to be that person that owned a jeep. Or it’s very possible that you just had you saw it a lot, right? But same thing happens for like, my kids are. Watching Sponge Bob right now, and like, it’s the funniest thing ever, because I watch it and I can, I can verbatim, just like, go every single line I know, everything that that guy said, because I watched it so much as a kid. So now the just seeing that experience on the TV elicits an emotional response for me, because I saw it so much as the chat. So it just kind of depends. And again, emotional states don’t have to be traumatic. They sometimes they can just be it was there and that was gone. I was excited, and then it was gone, that type of thing. So to get more of this, this is the reason why I’m testing these picture based surveys, metaphorical surveys, because I want to see how close can we get to eliciting that response from somebody without them having to basically, what’s the word without them having to answer in a logical way, if that makes sense. So it’s difficult to get this out, and this is reason why not a lot of people are in this type of research, because hard, it’s very difficult to get this out and to do it without leading an answer, because that’s what most surveys do, especially on like post purchase side, is we just kind of give them a general frame of reference, of like, where did you come from, or what did you like most about it today? What do you wish we had? These are very logical questions, and they’re also well suited to people who read most post purchases are just questions and answers in text based form. If you don’t read well, or if you’re the type person that just doesn’t care, you just button mash your way out of there, and then have gone right? So in general, when it comes to pulling out more of these things, there’s a lot of really good research around picture based surveys that help kind of pull out those emotions. To apply it, though, I think is probably where, like, the bulk of the benefit is. So the nice part is, once you start to find these weird trends, like the bottles on the counter type of thing, you’ll start to be able to understand a little bit more about what these consumers are experiencing in their everyday life. And you guys, copywriters have been very, very close to the psychology of customers more than almost any other role, I would say, in marketing, because you guys had to think so deeply about it to be able to draft good messaging. So finding these tiny little trends and being able to speak to the relatable experience of that customer is probably where this is going to go eventually. And when I say relatable experience, I’m not talking about the problem at all. Almost everybody wants to default to your problem is dry skin. Here’s a solution, very Aida framework. My pushback on that is, I think I’d rather you talk about her experience around her dry skin, because dry skin actually causes all kinds of problems, not just like it’s uncomfortable, but also, if I go skiing this weekend, I’m gonna have to put chapstick on my face, and that’s sticky and uncomfortable, and I don’t like that. It’s a secondary problem that I now have to deal with again. Or if my face is dry and, like, cracked and I flake everywhere, like, that’s uncomfortable because I have a date tonight, and I don’t want him to think that that’s weird, right? There’s like, connected experiences all over the place that stem from one problem, but there’s like, 15 problems that are around it we can talk to as well. Rob Marsh: Yeah, that becomes really interesting. You know, copywriters know the PAs formula, problem, agitate, solve. And oftentimes we’re, we’re really focused on all of the good things around the solution. You know, we will quickly we’re taught, and I don’t know that it’s always correct, but it’s like, Oh, you don’t want to be negative too long, right? Like, mention the problem, but don’t make people feel bad or whatever, but then, so we were really good at if you take this, it solves this problem, and it shows up in your life in these ways. Now you can do all these things you couldn’t do before, but I think like focusing in on the secondary issues is a really interesting idea to me. Sarah Levinger: Well, I think it’s interesting because if you watch, and this is why I get I get freaked out. There are things too deep. I get freaked out sometimes because I’m like, everything’s attached to everything. Over the course of the last probably 20 to 25 years, we have started to shift as a culture, especially in the US, towards this notion of, Do not offend anyone, right? Do not offend anyone. And it’s happened mostly due to kind of how the millennial generation was parented. But the millennials in particular were very, very sensitive to this idea of everybody included. We’re all in a community. We all want everybody to feel safe. Safety was kind of high priority for this customer type. Now, the interesting part about that generation is they taught it to their Gen Z kids, who are now kind of ramping it up, like there’s even more of this notion of like, don’t offend, no bad feelings. Everything’s fine. That seeped its way into everyone’s mindset because we heard it so much like he talks about the copywriters in the 80s had no problem being me. Like, if you look at some of the long form content from the 80s, copywriters got really harsh about the problem, like they would try and trigger the crap out of people, and all of their content was very, very intense, like they would talk very specifically about this is your problem. This is how you feel about it, and it’s not good. You need to change this, right? They spent a little bit of time on the solution, but they would constantly wrap back into what we call naked. To focused, right? Not so much anymore. Copywriters nowadays, as you said, are so conscious of this idea of like, I need to be careful not to trigger people. But that has caused a little bit of a negative shift in marketing, because now we refuse to talk about the problem. We almost get too soft with ourselves, which means nobody’s selling, which means all of the consumers are kind of bored and just kind of turned out, so it all kind of melds into each other. And so I think about this sometimes, in this respect of psychology applies to everything, first of all, and it’s also interesting to watch, because the herd, the whole group of humans on the planet, we all follow each other a little bit. And I’m not saying that, like, safety is incredibly important, especially mental safety, psychological safety, feeling safe in your body, safe who who you are. I think feeling accepted. These are all good things that came out of like that generation and that movement. But there are always side effects to random things like this, and in marketing, it’s just going to get worse and worse, because the Gen Zers are really intense about it, so it’s gonna be fascinating. What happens the next couple years? Rob Marsh: Well, as you talk about this, you mentioned Liquid Death. Liquid Death seems to be like perfectly fit into a reaction to that, right? I remember when I first saw Liquid Death, or within a few months of its launch, I saw a marketer who I really respected talking about how this was an awful brand, toxic masculinity, all of this stuff. And I remember thinking, Wait a second, there’s actually something really smart happening here. Now, obviously there, you know, the heavy metal branding and the name Liquid Death or whatever like, they’re obviously going for a reaction, but it’s, but it’s the fact that all of soda pop branding has been happy, family, pop music, whatever, it opens up this opportunity for literally water to be the bad guy, right? And by bad guy, I don’t mean the evil person. It’s that bad boy image, the James Dean riding in on its motorcycle type image, right? Sarah Levinger: Yeah,yeah. Well, this hits on some trends culturally that are really interesting, because Liquid Death probably would not have been able to do what they did in the 80s, right? Because the 80s group did not care literally at all about anarchy or becoming some sort of a misfit or rebelliousness, because they already were, like, there was a whole bunch of people who did not feel stifled in that mostly because a lot of the boomer generation in the 80s already had, like, a good handle on we’re different. We’re already different from our parents. We’re going to start to push our voices out into the world. They became kind of their own group of movement makers in the 80s. That’s what the Boomers were. Now you fast forward to today’s day and age. A lot of millennials and Gen Xers in particular, feel very stifled, like, again, because they’re starting to hear these cultural messages of, like, be careful, don’t hurt anybody. Like, just like, all the time. If you feel that, if you feel stifled in yourself, you’re going to resonate with products that are like, No, we’re going to get loud and we’re going to be weird and it’s going to be whatever we feel it needs to be. So the interesting part is, again, global emotion is really interesting, because you have a group of people that feel this, you bring a product in that solves that need to feel okay with being rebellious, and people will grab it immediately. And you could spot these patterns, but it takes a minute. Rob Marsh: Yeah, clearly, it takes a lot of work and a lot of research. So, you know, beyond like going into the spreadsheet and, you know, coding everything for emotions, or having a tool like ChatGPT do it. What else are you doing in your business at Tether to spot what’s coming or where the opportunities are? How are you helping clients see that? How do you see that the rest of the industry or the other competitors are here, and that’s why there’s this really good opening for you over here? Sarah Levinger: Okay, so I run something called the Tether BPE. Everything I have is an acronym, which is not on purpose. That’s just kind of how it happened. The Tether BPE is a brand personality engine. And this was a giant prompt that I read through chat. It starts with doing that kind of, like, deep research about the whole industry, whatever industry we’re studying at the time, all the way back to, I’ll take it back to the 60s, if I have to, like, what was happening in, like beverages in the 60s, so I can understand the history of where we came from. This entire prompt is basically built to help me understand historically what happened throughout the generations and throughout the decades. Where do we sit currently, and what’s the market gap, and predictively, what’s probably going to happen next, mostly so that I can kind of identify, can we see, is there a trend that’s similar to what happened to liquid death? Now they didn’t know that they identified a trend. They just went with what they were going with, mostly because, like, they’re genius, but also because that was part of him, and he noticed a giant people, giant group of people, that were being underserved. That’s what I’m trying to spot with the BP is what’s being on. Deserve that people are craving heavily. So the bbe was kind of born on its own, like off to the side, and then I added to it after reading the Innovator’s Dilemma. I don’t know if you’ve read that book. Rob Marsh: I love everything by Clayton Christensen. He was brilliant, and one of my favorite thinkers ever. Sarah Levinger: Yeah, I can’t get enough of his work, because I’m just like, oh, my God, that one blew my mind. It was such a dry, technical read, but I had to, like, really stick with it. But the underlying tones of what he was studying are so clear that in market, in industries, especially when you’re helping brands businesses grow, and your job as a copywriter or a graphic designer or somebody who’s like, fronting the load of the operational work. Your job is almost always going to be told to you as go get a sale, but that’s not at all what your role is. The people on the on like the ground floor of the business, our job is to spot patterns quicker than they can spot it at the top, because we’re closest to the customers. So in that particular book, they were talking about the standards industry and how it morphed, and all kinds of crazy things that happened. The people that were at the top of the industries had a very difficult time noticing that the customer bases started wanting smaller, faster, quicker, not necessarily more like more capacity. With this, they just wanted smaller, faster, quicker. So there were a couple companies like scandals or, you know, later it was Sandisk was able to come in and undercut some of these massive brands, because it was like, we’re solving a problem for one teeny, tiny customer group. But the customer group is growing. It’s not really that, like demand is really growing. There’s just more of them kind of coming into the circle. So what I do with the BPE is I’m trying to understand historically what has happened, so that I can kind of track the growth of things, but then predictively, I want to see if we can identify some trends that are coming out of the BPE, like the bottles on the table. And then can we track what the whole industry is saying so that we can kind of put our brands right in the right spot to hit at just the right time. Now, that’s difficult, and I have no idea whether it’s going to work, but it’d be interesting to see if we could do it, because it’s happened in every industry across history. Rob Marsh: Yeah. I mean, as a real simple example of that is the history of soda pop. You see this happening about every five to six years. There’s a new trend, right, like so, you know, in the 60s and 70s, there was the uncola and Mountain Dew, and then you get things like Snapple and the teas that come along. And the interesting thing is, the soda pop industry is always being disrupted this way, but either Coke or Pepsi comes along and they buy up the company in order to preserve their space. And we, I mean we literally, I think two weeks ago, Pepsi just bought Poppi, or one of the nutritional soda pop brands, right? That’s kind of the latest, the latest thing happening in soda pop. And before that, you know, Liquid Death and water and energy drinks and like you sort of see this happening. And I guess my point here is, if you can figure out how to do that for your clients, this is the kind of superpower that I mean it doesn’t just like, it creates literally 100 million dollar industries. So, how do we do more of that? Sarah Levinger: Yes, I think chat is making it a whole lot easier for people who would like to stay at home mom in Colorado to sit in her office and be like, what’s happening with the consumers. Get curious. Get curious if you see something specifically, if you see an outlier, stop tracking things that are normal. I don’t care what the consumers are doing. I also don’t really care what the competitors are doing all that much. If it’s normal, if the consumers are acting normal today, cool. Just keep it going. If somebody comes in that door that says something wild to me, that’s like, that has never been attributed to our product. Why would you think that? Like, what is that? Pay attention to it, get curious about it, because at the end of the day, if you see more people coming in saying that same thing, or even if you see something that’s like, I don’t know, one person said this and the other person said that, and they’re kind of related, keep track of it, because trends change slowly, right? And consumers do things very quietly, but they’re always telling you what they want constantly, because they’re voting with their dollars. So you could see it everywhere. And I tell people, track your sister industries too, like track the ones that you don’t think you’re related to, but you definitely are. For instance, in one of the brands that I was looking for, they sell these really cool little flasks, right? They were just gorgeous, beautiful things. They’re 100% attached to the alcohol industry because of what goes in the plow. However, they’re also attached to body positivity. I can’t talk body positivity is one of the industries they’re attached to, specifically because if the millennials stop drinking, they go under so you have to track, you’ve got to look at the entirety of the ecosystem. And this is why you know the study of economics exists. You got to track the whole thing. And I know it sounds intense, and it’s like, oh my God, how would I start that? The best place that you can start, I think, is with chat. Though. This is where I’m like, it’s a second brain. Just use it as a way to go look for things that you can’t book for on your own. It’s got deep research. Now it’s incredibly well versed. I’m pretty sure one of these, one of these models here, was just passing the training test I was reading. There’s like, about that a week or so ago, yeah, where it’s like, oh my god, the models are outscoring the humans in the Turing test, and people are identifying the model as the human. So use the tools that you have. I would not use it to produce again. I try really hard to default to I think humans still should be writing and producing for humans. But I would go and look at what what’s connected to you. Take your industry, plug it in. Just say, what do you see? What’s out there? What’s the history of this? Learn, learn, learn. Just act like a historian. But the more that you know, the more that you can kind of see out into the future to tell what’s happening next. Rob Marsh: This feels like a place where you know, we should mention that niching actually becomes part of your superpower, too. So there’s, you know, this conversation in the marketing world, should you niche? Should you not niche? And there are good reasons on both sides to do one or the other. But if you niche, you have a much better ability to spot this kind of thing as it comes up, because you’re familiar with the industry. You’re not just jumping from one project or one client to another. Sarah Levinger: Oh, 100% I have that issue right now because I’m so solidly connected D to C. There for a minute this year, I was trying to decide, do I want to move to B to B? Do I want to see if I can open up SAS or like service based or consulting. The toughest part about it is I know too much about DTC, so it’s way too easy for me to come over here and just be like, these are my people, and I know a lot about them, and I can help and serve them, but it could be a blind spot for me and for Tether. If we continuously go down the path of our normal customer, we’re going to miss outliers that might be a better customer type. So, and not to say that, I’ll leave you to see I’ll probably be here forever, but in general, this happens in every business. So this is why it pays to look. It pays to pay attention. Rob Marsh: The flip side of niching is that you’ve missed the exposure that’s happening in those other industries, and you can’t bring new ideas from those industries into it. So maybe the answer here is that you need one person who’s focused and niched, and you need a team member next to you who’s paying attention to everything else. Sarah Levinger: Yep, yep, yep. That’s why people hire Sarah. Usually they’re like, go out there and find us and stuff, and then we’ll stay close to our customers. So now we have Beth to both room. Yeah, yep. I think that’s probably the best way to do it. Rob Marsh: So we haven’t really even talked much about, like, specific psychological tactics or things that you know you’re paying attention to, or that you’re doing with ads and advising your clients to do. But do you have like, just a top two or three tactics? You’re like, okay, these are my go tos. I’m gonna start here. I’m gonna try this stuff first, because I know it’s a good place. Sarah Levinger: This is not copywriting related, but rounded buttons tend to produce better clicks, better conversion than sharp ones do, which I find really interesting. They’ve done a lot of studies around that and that, that one in particular has to do with sharp things feel a little unsafe to the mind. Now, I’ve seen a couple of studies that have gone the opposite direction with this, that talk about the fact that it depends on the product. If you have a tool or something utilitarian, rounded corners don’t do anything at all for conversion rates on button, interesting. So if I’m selling an ax or something dangerous, I might want a square, right? Something with sharp edges? Okay, so second one… I saw it here that was really, really interesting study I read talked about the fact that italics, italics and ads in particular, tend to increase engagement, where people like, like it and share it and do all kinds of stuff. Like, if the text is slanted, now they they specifically said over slanted, but typically italic says, like, I don’t know, it’s like eight to 10 degrees, not that much, right? Yeah, they were talking about like 30 to 33% like, really slanted text, for some reason that does really well. And they said it happens not just on ads, but landing pages and emails everywhere. So without… Rob Marsh: Would you do it in with, like, small blocks, or like, the entire piece of copy, like, in a Facebook ad, you’ve got that introduced the introductory block, or whatever you want, that whole thing slanted. Sarah Levinger: From what I read, I’m pretty sure it’s just headlines like, don’t do the whole thing. Slanted, yes, but headlines, as long as they’re short, like, I don’t know, and that was probably the third study I read, was sweet spot for headlines on advertising in particular, at least, is four to eight words long, interesting. Tapped at eight, yeah, they seem to lose effectiveness at over eight words. So and again, I. I only know studies that pertain to pay to advertise, because that’s what I’ve been to. But for the slant, it’s interesting. If they’re short headlines, make the whole headline slanted, but then your subhead, your body copy, all the rest of it, just keep it a normal, normal font. So weird stuff. Humans are really sensitive to a longer, strange thing. Rob Marsh: I think maybe part of this goes back to just standing out, just being different, right? Because every other headline is straight or slightly italicized, right? So something’s different that triggers our innate sense that I need to pay attention to this, because, again, it might be dangerous, it might be food, it might be an opportunity for connection, right? Sarah Levinger: Yeah, that makes sense. I guess the lesson here is, try lots of stuff. Try lots of different stuff, be different from everyone else. Yes, the end of the day, that’s what it comes down to, awesome. Rob Marsh: This has been fascinating for me. I wish I had another hour, because I think we could just keep going and going. But Sarah, you have a newsletter, if people want to get on your newsletter and follow you, where should they go? Sarah Levinger: You can actually go to tetherinsight.io. That’s probably the only place to get access to it right now. I feel really bad. I should probably update my email. I get so deep in the weeds on my own business, I’m like, I should really work on that this week. But yeah, so sign up for that. I usually do brand breakdowns in particular. So if you’re looking for studies of brands that have used psychology in the past and how they used it to grow or get more customers or cut costs, that’s usually the first half of it. The next section on that newsletter is most interesting to me. They’re Tether signals. So all of the little insights that we pulled out today from all the brands that I work with. I’m providing those inside that newsletter. So if you want to get access to like a random trend that nobody sees yet, they’re going to be inside that. Rob Marsh: And then you also write a lot on LinkedIn and Twitter, and so we’ll link to to your accounts there, so people can follow. And before we start recording, you mentioned you might be launching a community here, or by the time this goes live, have launched a community. Tell me a little bit about that. Sarah Levinger: Okay, so I’ve been asked to do this for years and years, and I just haven’t had time to do it. But I’m finally going to do it this year. I have a community that’s going to be starting up specifically around consumers, consumption, behavior, psychology, identity, and in particular, we’re going to be studying not just d to c, but basically any customer type, anybody that you want to bring into your ecosystems. How do you use psychology to get them in the door faster and cheaper? And primarily, I think this community, it’s going to be good, because I want to start talking to the people who are studying the consumers the most. So I’m hoping to bring in a lot of people from the large scale universities, large scale market research firms, people who know and understand consumers really well. So we can start to talk to them a little bit about what they’re seeing as well. But primarily we’re going to do brand breakdowns basically once a week, so you can submit your brand, or if you want to come in and submit your service, whatever it is, and I’ll take a look at it, and then we’ll talk about here’s all the psychology things you need to put in place. Here’s the way you need to shift emotionally to bring people in. And then I got lots of resources, tons of courses and trainings and things around learning psychology specifically for marketers. Rob Marsh: So I’ll link to those in the show notes as well. Thanks to Sarah for walking through her research and analysis process, how she uses—and doesn’t use—A.I., and we can all get better at spotting changes in trends before they happen. If you’re not already on Sarah’s newsletter, you definitely should be. She write about her research and shares case studies about how she’s applying the strategies and frameworks we talked about on this episode. There’s a lot to learn when it comes to making this stuff work and Sarah is one of the best. I’ve linked to her site in the show notes as well as her brand new community if you’re interested in finding out more about that as well. And of course there are lots of resources around persuasion and psychology in The Copywriter Underground. If you’re a member, you’ll find those resources in the new dashboard. And if you’re not a member, you can fix that now at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. That’s the end of this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please share it with someone you know. Or, if you don’t know another writer or freelancer who you can share it with—and I find that very hard to believe—visit Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts and leave a review. If you haven’t left a review, now is the time. I promise, when you share The Copywriter Club Podcast, your friends will thank you. Don’t forget to check out The Copywriter Underground at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. See you next week.

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