If you’re involved in copywriting in any way, you know right now we’re at an inflection point.

Things have been changing fast over the last two years, and show no signs of slowing down.

People who hire copywriters tell me it’s harder than ever to find a good one… yet people who write copy for a living, many of them, tell me it’s really hard to find good-paying work.

There’s clearly a disconnect. AI has a lot to do with it.

The very definition of what a copywriter is, and what a copywriter does, seems very much in flux.

Today I want to suggest five copywriting goals for 2026. These are based on how I was able to help my own mentoring clients solve problems and develop their marketability over the past 12 months.

I work with established copywriters and business owners who use direct response, and what I helped them with on a very personal, customized basis would be a good idea for most everyone who listens to this podcast.

Links:

Copywriting Mentoring: https://garfinkelcoaching.com

Persuasive storytelling: The Persuasion Story Code

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CFD2KXNQhttps://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CFD2KXNQ

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It takes a lot of courage and a lot of confidence to do what our special guest today has done… and that’s fire all his clients and start an email-based business.

But Alin Dragu did just that, and he’s here to tell us about it.

He’s the best-selling author of the book Meaningful Marketing, he spent 5 years as direct of marketing at one of the fastest growing churches in the US, and 3 years as the VP of growth at a Christian marketing agency.

Alin is definitely a copywriter’s copywriter. He’s obsessed with reading novels and old fiction letters. And he admits he’s secretly obsessed with luxury watches, something Nathan’s a collector of as well.

Finally, in case you end up taking Alin to dinner, which probably wouldn’t be a bad idea, you should know he says he’s never refused a steak, ever in his life.

Now, here’s what we asked him:

1. So Alin, could you give us a quick tour of what you do?

2. I’m very interested in your S-L-O framework that you use to write all your emails. Could you walk us through that?

3. So as I understand it, your funnel works something like this:

- you make youtube videos that promote your lead magnets

- when people get the lead magnets, of course they opt-into your list

- every day you send one, and I quote, “very entertaining story” while also plugging one of your products

- and you get sales every day.

I was wondering if we could go through one of those stories and you could break it down for us–like, say, the “I spent $613 on coffee” story? And talk about what makes a great story?

4. You are in a very email-list-dependent business. How do you deal with the issues that come with that, like trolls, unsubscribes, and delivering content every day?

5. You need to come up with a new idea every day. How do you do that without running up against burnout?

6. OK, you do something a lot of people are afraid to do. It’s something Nathan and I strongly recommend, though. Tell us how you sell in every email and get people to keep opening the next email?

7. So tell us about who your list is for and how someone can join.

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Link to get on Alin’s list:

https://alindragu.com/

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Last fall, our returning champion Glenn Fisher and his business partner Nick O’Connor teamed up with mega financial publisher Marketwise for a bold experiment:

Offer FREE training in financial copywriting to 12 people who competed for the spots. There were 500 people applied. Of the 12 who were selected, Glenn says, four were offered jobs… and two are being mentored by financial copywriting legend Mike Palmer.

You know, in many stupid businesses, when something works, the business immediately stops doing it and decides to try something else.

Lucky for you, Marketwise is anything but a stupid business. They know a good thing when they see it.

So they decided to keep working with Glenn and Nick and run more programs through 2026.

And Glenn’s back on the show to tell us what they learned and what’s next… and how you might be one of the lucky 12 in a future cohort!

Links:

Financial Copy U: https://www.financialcopyu.com/

The Fix, Glenn’s and Nick’s other program: https://thefixcopywriting.com/

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So a lot of people are building their brand by pouring tons of money into traffic… A/B testing… tracking every click… but deep down, you feel that something’s not landing.

It’s almost like you wonder if you’re coming across as desperate, rather than confident.

Maybe it’s time to take a look at a cherished assumption in online marketing:

Namely, that more information and more volume equals more authority.

Not really, says our own Nathan Fraser. He’s given me an advance peek at his new book, The Signal. I was so excited by the refreshing ideas he has in there that I wanted him to talk about it on today’s show… and he agreed.

Look. Nathan says you should stop begging the algorithm and start commanding attention. And he has some proven ideas on how to do that.

Which he’ll share with us today.

Here are the questions I asked him:

1. In your book, you say, “Marketing that begs for attention becomes noise. Marketing grounded in conviction becomes signal.”

What do you mean by this, and how can someone make sure their marketing has minimum noise and maximum signal?

2. You talk about the Pratfall Effect and how not coming across as “perfect,” or trying to, actually bonds a business with its customers better than trying to appear cool and flawless. How does this work?

3. I love what you say about overexplaining–that it indicates insecurity and this repels rather than attracts the right people. Could you talk about that?

4. So there are two philosophies I’ve seen these days: Omnipresence, where you show up everywhere all the time, and being very selective and making it difficult to get access to you. You’re in favor of the second approach. Why do you feel that way?

5. Your advice for building an attractive signal that draws the right customers to you is to “select, not sell.” What does this look like?

6. You identify five buyer beliefs in a very interesting chapter called “Belief is the Real Funnel.” This is so different from what anyone else I have heard says. I notice that in the five-step funnel you outline, Apple somehow got the first belief to become part of the popular culture.

Could you go through these beliefs and make some suggestions about how to create them in an actual funnel?

7. You write "Identity closes deals long before logic ever enters the room." How do you determine how your product changes your prospect’s sense of identity?

Get your copy of The Signal at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0G5FGMH21

Visit Nathan's site at CultishContent.com
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What was discovered and perfected over 100 years ago, that is one of the most important marketing strategies online today?

We have a special Old Masters Series show today. It’s a hybrid between marketing discoveries of the early 1900s, and top moneymakers of 2025.

Our old Master is Claude Hopkins. Most people don’t realize that there’s a strong connection between two of the most important principles he wrote about and used – sampling, and demonstration – and what makes for an effective lead magnet in today’s world.

For this episode, I went back into two of his most important books, Scientific Advertising and My Life in Advertising. We’ll talk about those first.

There are tons of gems in there and these books are well worth reading many times, which I have done myself.

So we’re going to focus on a narrow slice of the wisdom on today’s hybrid Old Masters Series show.

And then, we’ll catapult into 2025 to see how those ideas have evolved.

My Life in Advertising/Scientific Advertising, by Claude Hopkins https://www.amazon.com/dp/0844231010/

Sample Lead Magnet: First Two Chapters Of The Persuasion Story Code https://PersuasionStoryCode.com

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Our returning champion today, Dr. Doug Pew, is well known in two different worlds: The world of high-powered copywriting for online course creators, where he has done many six and seven figure launches.

And the other world where Doug is known is that of music. He is a composer whose work was actually performed at Carnegie Hall! And he wrote an opera that was performed at the Kennedy Center.

Those worlds overlap in certain ways sometimes for Doug, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

He’s written copy for music businesses like Creative Piano Academy, Lauren Bateman Guitar, Become A Bassist, and J209, an a cappella singing group, who he helped grow their Instagram following to over 15,000 in a couple of months.

Most of his work for these businesses has been to create sales, and, as you might expect, selling students into an online music instruction business is different in some ways than other types of copywriting.

Yet the differences are fascinating, and they may help you with your own copy, even in non-musical niches.

Contact Information:

Doug’s Copywriter website is where you can book a call about a copy project:

www.dougpewcopywriting.com

or can email him directly at [email protected]

If you want to check out the music business, you can visit…

https://latterdaymusiversity.com/

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Do you have an imaginary friend?

Whether you do or not, today we’re going to talk about why a particular imaginary friend can solve one of the biggest problems copywriters are having today.

And that problem is, your copy’s not connecting with the right target group of prospects.

So your conversions are way lower than you’d like them to be.

Now, the perfect solution to that would be to have a real-live focus group of honest, unflinching prospects available to you 24/7. People you could ask about their problems, their fears, their hopes, their dreams.

But… sorry. You can’t.

However, what we’re going to talk about today is the next best thing. And the good news is, you can build this imaginary friend pretty easily from real-world data.

So you get the equivalent of your 24/7 focus group, but it’s not high-maintenance. In fact, it doesn’t require any care and feeding at all.

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Ever spend hours, just waiting for the “perfect time” to start writing?

Maybe first you decide to do a guided visualization. Or answer a few emails. Could be that there’s that perfect song that always gets your juices flowing… or a motivational youtube video you love…

Well…

Here’s a tip: Don’t wait and don’t find an excuse to do something else.

Just start.

I know it sounds crazy. Maybe impossible.

But here’s the thing:

When you’re not writing, it almost never “feels like” the right time to start writing.

And, as it turns out, it’s nearly always better to write something bad than to write nothing at all.

As the great Gary Halbert said, “Motion is better than meditation.”

That is what we’ll talk about today.

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What if you found you were sitting on tons of money that you didn’t even know about?

It sounds like the beginning of a new Netflix series, right?

But this happened in real life to our returning champion, Agency owner and entrepreneur Cath Rehorn.

She will be the first to admit that numbers are not her. She’s a words and people person, not a data ninja.

But she developed a conversation with ChatGPT to get it to review her Stripe data, even though, as she also admits, at first she really didn’t have any idea what she was doing.

And she realized that with minimum effort–like, mainly, sending out a few emails–she could add 54,000 British pounds, or about $70,000 US, to her revenues every year.

And with only a little more effort, she reckoned, she could bring in even more.

Her thought process and how she tackled a clumsy problem with such persistence and humor should be of interest, and possibly very valuable, to anyone who runs a business and even does a pretty bad job of keeping track of their numbers.

You probably remember Cath because her podcast, titled Selling Them With Kindness, got a lot of engagement and some really heartfelt comments from listeners.

Cath’s business is called Kind Copy. She lives in Wales in the UK. She has a true family business, since it employs herself, her husband, her sister and 2 other team members.

Article about how Cath used ChatGPT:

https://catherinereohorn.substack.com/p/i-got-more-clarity-on-my-business?r=1xjc2

Cath’s website: https://kindcopy.co.uk/

Cath’s social media links:

https://x.com/kindcopy

https://www.instagram.com/kindcopyuk/

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Our very special guest today is Angus Fletcher, professor of story science at Ohio State’s Project Narrative. His research has been called “life-changing” by Brené Brown and “mind blowing” by Malcolm Gladwell; has been endorsed by psychologists, neuroscientists, and doctors such as Martin Seligman and Antonio Damasio; and has been supported by institutions ranging from the National Science Foundation to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

In 2023, he was awarded the Commendation Medal by the U.S. Army for his “groundbreaking research” with U.S. Army Special Operations into primal intelligence.

His latest book is called Primal Intelligence: You Are Smarter Than You Know.

There are very few books or writers who have affected me as much as Angus and this book have.

In the few weeks since I have read it, my coaching has changed. My thoughts about intuition, imagination and emotion have changed. I’ve watched close to 20 videos featuring Angus on youtube… and I don’t typically ever watch that many videos about one person.

Dr. Fletcher says that as humans, we think in story, not in words or pictures. He has plenty of research and street cred to back this up. Hollywood studios consult with him regularly. In addition to everything else, he’s a screenwriter, and a very compelling author.

I could go on and on but that wouldn’t leave much time for us to talk, would it?

So I will start with something familiar, and soon you will discover how mind-blowingly different some of Angus’s groundbreaking ideas are.

But first, the amazingly familiar part…

Copy is powerful. You’re responsible for how you use what you hear on this podcast. Most of the time, common sense is all you need. But if you make extreme claims... and/or if you’re writing copy for offers in highly regulated industries like health, finance, and business opportunity... you may want to get a legal review after you write and before you start using your copy. My larger clients do this all the time.

1. A lot of people in the direct marketing community have felt boxed-in by the conventional wisdom that the only true kind of story is a hero’s journey. I believe you have a very different point of view about stories, that includes that anatomy of the brain. Could you tell us about it?

2. Let’s talk about primal intelligence. When I first found out about your book and before I read it, my guess about primal intelligence was, well, pretty primal. Lizard brain stuff. That is, the animal description that you either mate with something, or you kill it, or you eat it.

You have a different and I think much more sophisticated and I would say much more useful definition of primal intelligence and it has to do with four qualities of thinking that have nothing to do with logic. Could you talk about that?

3. Our listeners are copywriters and business owners who use direct response copy in their businesses. Pragmatic creativity is high on the list of capabilities people always want to increase. Could you share your thoughts on what creativity is, from the point of view of primal intelligence? And how to increase our abilities to be creative?

4. In your book there’s a surprisingly long list of people, including politicians, scientists and even a famous classical composer, as well as writers, who have mentioned Shakespeare as a major influence in their lives. What is it about Shakespeare’s work that is so valuable to all these people?

5. Can you give us some more tips about using stories in our content and advertising that will capture people’s attention and help us with our businesses?

6. Tell us about your work with Army special operators?

7. Would you like to give us a preview of the book Primal Intelligence?

Links:

Primal Intelligence

https://www.amazon.com/Primal-Intelligence-Smarter-Than-Know/dp/0593715306

Angus’s LinkedIn Address

https://www.linkedin.com/in/angus-fletcher-99713617/

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