Copywriters Podcast

People start out writing copy all kinds of different ways. But how many times have you heard, “It all started with beer?”

I’m not talking about drinking a beer. I’m talking about brewing your own beer! That’s how our guest today, Billy Broas, got started in online marketing: He launched a website for his fellow home beer brewers. That was in 2010.

His online course sales from the site got to the point where Billy was able to leave his job and become an entrepreneur. He hired me as a copywriting mentor in 2015, and his since gone on to do great things helping people launch online courses. Especially the new wave of instruction called cohort-based courses.

Now, course creators are very often not copywriters, which makes sense. But Billy is, and, as a teacher, he needed to find ways to get some important copywriting concepts across to them quickly and meaningfully. On today’s show, we talked about what I consider a brilliant construct to do just that, called The 5 Lightbulbs, today.

Billy told us how he came up with The 5 Lightbulbs construct, and what it is.

As it turns out, it worked just as well back in the day — like 100 years ago — as it does today. In other words, it’s kind of universal. Bill walked us through Old Master Max Sackheim’s famous ad, written in 1919, with the well-known headline “Do You Make These Mistakes In English?”, to show how it follows the 5 Lightbulbs formula to a tee.

But in 2022, it’s a very flexible formula, for copywriters and non-copywriters alike.

Billy told us about:

- How non-copywriters use it to organize a sales letter

- How marketers use it to sequence emails in a sales campaign

- How teams use it as a common language, or a shorthand

Bill also offered Copywriters Podcast listeners a free 5 Lightbulbs worksheet, to audit any marketing message, available at

https://5lightbulbs.com

Download.

Just like Tom Hanks knows how to make movies, Kevin Rogers knows how to navigate comedy. Really. He spent years as a professional stand-up comedian, sharing the stage with other great comics like Chris Rock, Billy Gardell, and many others.

You may be more familiar with Kevin as a superstar copywriter and copywriting educator, which is how he spends most of his working time now. He has created Copy Chief, a community-based forum and training center for copywriters. This was after he had reached the top echelon of pro copywriters himself.

Kevin’s also the Amazon best-selling author of The 60-Second Sales Hook, where he shows how to use a proven joke formula to create a powerful marketing hook.

Kevin has many, many more credits to his name.

But as you can see by now, Kevin is the perfect person to come on the show to talk about an increasingly high-wire act for copywriters, and really anyone in business who has a sense of humor: What you can get away with, and what should you avoid at all costs, when it comes to using jokes in the era of ‘woke.’

Kevin has gotten back to doing standup on a limited basis, and as for the copy he writes, he says he doesn’t use a lot of humor there to begin with.

Comedy, therefore, is still very much a part of his life — just not part of his copy.

When Kevin coaches or does presentations, though, his funny side continues to shine through.

However, he’s aware of what’s going on throughout the copywriting world, and in today’s show he talks about specific examples of, as he puts it, “people who I think are using humor wisely” in their own copy.

If there’s anyone who can guide you and your jokes through the land-mine-strewn fields of cultural correctness that we all have to navigate these days, it’s Kevin. You’ll really appreciate his perspective and spot-on suggestion on how to keep your sense of humor without losing out to the woke crowd.

A couple resources to get more from Kevin:

- https://copychief.com

- his podcast: http://copychief.com/ccr

Download.

These days, more and more people from more and more backgrounds are thinking about writing sales copy, or actually doing it. The main reason is the number of online business has exploded. This is due in part to all the people who spent so much time at home during the pandemic.

But there are other reasons as well. One important one is, a lot of people who didn’t like to buy online in the past will only buy online now, if they possibly can. So, a much bigger market.

Anyone who didn’t start out their career as a copywriter knows that it takes some adjustments. Writing copy is hardly like writing term papers at school or even writing weak-kneed prose at advertising agencies.

Copy is muscular, and it has a job to do — it has to sell something.

Today I thought we could take a look at what people from six specific backgrounds need to know and, just as important, need to change about their thinking in order to write copy that works.

I asked myself the question, what are the most common categories of people I’ve either mentored, or critiqued copy for, or done copywriting and marketing consulting for? And what showed up as the most important change they needed to make to become more successful with their copy?

The categories are: Entrepreneurs… Sales Pros… Licensed Professionals, like doctors and lawyers… Experts in their respective fields… Software developers… and journalists and content creators.

People from each category bring a lot to the table… but they all have similar things, within the category, that are holding them back.

So I thought deeply about what those things are. Don’t worry if you’re not in one of these categories and never were. There’s some fun and some insights for you anyway.

Because at least until maybe recently, very few people grew up wanting to become a copywriter. In most families, kids didn’t even know what copywriters were… and neither did their parents.

So, it’s never too late to find out what changes you need to make, from where you stand now, to become really good at writing copy. You’ll find some good first steps in today’s show.

Download.

We are back with the unconventional and immensely creative marketer, John Williamson. Last week he went in-depth on his powerful technique called Emotional Lockpicking™, and we asked him to join us again, which he agreed to do.

John lives in an undisclosed location on the side of a mountain in Scotland. Over the last 30 years he has generated millions of dollars in sales for himself and his clients with his own special brand of unique selling propositions.

He’s also come up with some very interesting ideas about elevator pitches, unique selling propositions, and even how to close a deal with a stuffed tortoise. I find his ideas fascinating and he’ll share some more of them with us today.

One of John’s favorite quotes is:

“All things being equal, people buy on price. Which is why your number-one job as an entrepreneur is to ensure that ‘things’ aren’t equal.”

Probably related to that idea is a speech he has given over 250 times called “How to Charge Higher Prices Than Your Competitors… and STILL Win the Business.”

On the show, John reminds us again that for a marketer today, the most truly scarce commodity is… attention. Not only is less and less of it available, but it’s becoming more and more expensive for a business to get the attention of their prospects, if they can get it at all.

Lucky for us, John has spent years developing unusual and unusually profitable techniques to do that. Sometimes at a surprisingly low cost.

Among the things he talks about are:

• How to rope in the attention of the very best customers in the market… weeks, months, and even years before your competitors even know who these customers are.

• The elevator pitch that turns into an earworm they can’t get out of your head. John explains how to put one of these together, and how it’s been used to get business in the course of a seven-floor elevator ride!

• How he has created out-of-the box USPs that seem to break all the rules, but also punch right through the ceiling on sales records!


Download.

Here at Copywriters Podcast, we pride ourselves on having unconventional guests with unique marketing ideas, but our guest today, John Williamson, really takes “unconventional” to a whole new level.

John lives in an undisclosed location on the side of a mountain in Scotland. Over the last 30 years he has generated millions of dollars in sales for himself and his clients with his own special brand of unique selling propositions.

He’s also come up with an innovative copywriting concept he calls “Emotional Lockpicking.” I find it fascinating and he’ll share it with us today. Plus, he has loads of other money-making ideas I promise you haven’t heard anywhere else before.

One of John’s favorite quotes is:

“All things being equal, people buy on price. Which is why your number-one job as an entrepreneur is to ensure that ‘things’ aren’t equal.”

Probably related to that idea is a speech he has given over 250 times called “How to Charge Higher Prices Than Your Competitors… and STILL Win the Business.”

On the show, John reminds us that for a marketer today, the most truly scarce commodity is… attention. Not only is less and less of it available, but it’s becoming more and more expensive for a business to get the attention of their prospects, if they can get it at all.

Lucky for us, John has spent years developing unusual and unusually profitable techniques to do that. Sometimes at a surprisingly low cost.

Among the things he talks about are:

• How to rope in the attention of the very best customers in the market… weeks, months, and even years before your competitors even know who these customers are. This is possible with one of John’s most prized inventions, Emotional Lockpicking.

• The elevator pitch that turns into an earworm they can’t get out of your head. John explains how to put one of these together, and how it’s been used to get business in the course of a seven-floor elevator ride!

• An amazing one- or two-word addition to your copy using a method John has refined and perfected. The method is called “egoic labels” and just these one or two words have seriously boosted response rates for copy in many industries.

Download.

Our guest today is famous in digital marketing circles as an online advertising expert. His name is Justin Brooke and I’m so happy he can join us.

Justin is the founder of Adskills, a great training company for online advertising. He’s also a super-experienced media buyer, having spent more than $10 million for lead generation as well as eCommerce campaigns.

While Justin could give us super-valuable information on a lot of things, there’s one topic he knows a lot about where I’ve found it’s really hard to find any other expert who is also a good teacher. Justin is both – that is, an expert, and a really good teacher, and that topic is advertorials. It’s great that we get to talk to him about that today.

Here’s what we ask him in today’s show:

1. For people who don't know -- What are advertorials, and how are they useful in marketing?

2. How did you get into writing, and teaching about, advertorials?

3. What are the key differences between an advertorial and...

- content/articles

- sales letters/ads?

4. Could you give us an example of a successful advertorial?

5. What are some mistakes people make when they try to do advertorials, but mess up instead?

6. What are some of your best go-to tips to creating successful advertorials?

7. If someone wants to learn more about advertorials, what would you recommend?

AdSkills.com


Download.

In just about every copywriter’s life, there comes a time when you ask yourself,

“Why on God’s green Earth are all my clients making money hand over fist, day after day, month after month — and I just get paid just once?”

It’s a fair question because, more often than not, as copywriters, we end up essentially inventing our clients’ businesses.

With our copy. With our ideas. With our expert guidance.

To create a money machine.

Our guest today has a solution to this problem copywriters have. His name is Jason Moffatt, and his nickname is “profit Moffatt” for a reason.

He’s figured out how to do profitable deals, both for his clients and for himself. He started his copywriting career reading books and courses while waiting in his spy van during private investigation stakeouts.

After 17 years in Internet Marketing, Jason teaches digital marketers and copywriters how to get their slice of the pie by acquiring significant equity chunks on any project they work on.

He spends most of his time on Hawaii’s famous island of Maui, playing guitar and helping fellow entrepreneurs and copywriters get paid far better.

We started out talking about what Jason calls “The Inception,” which is his term for the great opportunity right under the nose of most copywriters. But there are a few changes you need to make to your mindset to see the opportunity, and take advantage of it. Jason explained that clearly and in useful detail.

Most copywriters have a million-dollar talent that most of them are unaware of, and Jason talks about how to recognize it and how to leverage it in your business negotiations.

Also, why even though you have other talents of great value, your ability to write copy that converts is disproportionately valuable to a prospective business partner.

Jason then talked about some first steps, but probably the most important one is selecting the right partners for an equity deal, and keeping your distance from the ones who are highly unlikely to work out.

He had some great info on finding partners, negotiating terms... and sealing the deal.

For more, here’s Jason’s course on getting equity deals:

https://equity5000.com/david
Download.

One reason it's hard to write copy is when you start out, you've got so much in front of you, it can seem overwhelming.

Not only that, but just one you get in the groove for writing copy for one part of the letter or VSL, you have to shift gears.

That's because different sections of what you're writing have different rhythms. Each one has a different feel.

For example, a story needs to have good momentum to it. But it's not nearly as fast-paced as good closing copy is.

Today we're going to talk about some ways you can overcome this problem, and it has to do with warming up to write each section.

Just like if you were going to warm up to work out or go for a run, you can warm up to write each section of your copy differently. This will help you a lot, especially if you've got a big project and you feel like you're facing a brick wall.

We talked about Gene Schwartz’s big concept of copywriting: That it’s not “writing,” but in fact is really “assembling.” He mentioned this at a talk he gave to people at Rodale, which used to be a big publisher based almost entirely on direct-response marketing. They closed their doors five years ago, after 87 years in business.

When Gene Schwartz talked about assembling, he meant you have a bunch of little parts, and then you put them together. When you do this, it helps if you first have a structure -- that is, if you have an idea of which part goes where, and why it goes in that particular place.

But don't worry if you don't have that sense when you start. Because often the structure, in the same way as your headline and your hook do, will "reveal itself" as you work through other parts of the copy.

In today’s show, we talked about six “parts” you assemble. And we’ll talk about them in the order that they usually appear in a sales letter.

You may or may not want to do them in that order. We'll talk about that as we go through them.

We covered six key parts of copy, and talk about how and why to warm up for each one when you're first writing. They are: 1) headline, 2) lead, 3) bullets, 4) story, 5) closing copy, and 6) testimonials.

The reason you want to warm up is the same as why you'd warm up when you're working out — to loosen your muscles (in this case, your mental muscles), and to get the momentum of FLOW going.


Download.

Whether you’re running a business or running someone else’s Facebook advertising for them, it always seems like there are a million things to keep track of as far as advertising is concerned.

No doubt about it; there are.

But there are a few things that are truly make-or-break, day in and day out. A few crucial things that will define the line between profitability and losing money. A few things that determine sale or no sale. In other words, a few things that matter a lot more than the others.

Nathan Fraser calls these few things “Advertising Cheat Codes.” Now don’t get him wrong, the other things are important, too. But I’m going to say the difference is, you can slip on the other things a little now and then and they won’t tank your business.

But screw up regularly on the big things, and you could be in for some tough times ahead.

Fortunately, once you know what these few, very important things are, you don’t ever have to screw up on them. Nathan told us about three of the most important Advertising Cheat Codes today.

His first Advertising Cheat Code is “Stick the Landing.” The standard meaning of these words is to execute a perfect landing after an acrobatic move — especially in gymnastics — or, more generally, to accomplish an impressive feat successfully.

Nathan’s use of the phrase is not so far from the second definition, but of course it does have a very specific meaning when it comes to advertising. One that can make all the difference between failure and success.

His second Cheat Code is, Stand-Out Advertising. If you have a wild imagination, like I do, you might be picturing a guy walking up and down the sidewalk wearing a huge sandwich board. You know, where each side is a placard almost as tall as the guy himself.

While that could fit into Nathan’s overall definition, that’s not what he means by Stand-Out Advertising. But what he does mean could result in a lot of extra sales for your business.

And Nathan’s third Cheat Code is “Big, Beautiful Back Ends.” Now pull your mind out of the gutter -- he’s talking about something else!

What’s vitally important are two related concepts: How much it costs you to acquire a customer, and how well you determine the lifetime value of each customer. Nathan makes it easy for you with some pinpoint advice in this part of the show. The bottom line is, Big, Beautiful Back Ends = more revenue and more profits.

You can get more on each of these PLUS two additional Advertising Cheat Codes, here:

https://advertisingcheatcodes.com/


Download.

Today, let’s talk about staying with big copy projects, once you get started. You know, they say “begun is half done.” That’s true, but then there’s the other half, and that’s where we run into trouble sometimes. The half that’s not done yet, but still needs to get done.

We’ve covered the steps of how to write a sales letter before and we’ll cover it again, but that’s not what I want to talk about today. This is more about how you need to prepare and what you need to do when you’re working to finish your project and have the best copy you can have.

I’ll give you a hint as to where we’re going. I’ve invented something called the Frustration-Flow Scale. All the way to the left is frozen in frustration. All the way to the right on the scale is floating in flow. Effortless and fun.

The trick is to get on the right side of the scale and stay there, for as long as possible, as often as possible.

So all the things we’re going to talk about today are ways to get to and stay on the right side of the frustration-flow scale as much as possible. Not so much so you have a nice day, as, if you are in a flow-state, you are much more likely to get your project done.

Look at it this way. You’re doing a jigsaw puzzle. You’ve got a round piece and a round hole where it looks like it should fit. Frustration would be struggling, pushing, scrunching, scheming to get the round piece in the round hole. Flow would be just slipping it in without so much as giving it a second thought.

That said, in what we’re doing today, getting to flow is the end result. It’s how we want our work to go, but you can’t just “drop into it” with being prepared. Frustration will derail you over and over again if you haven’t done things ahead of time to prevent it.

Think of frustration as a series of detours that keep you from arriving at flow. It’s much harder to keep going on a big project when you keep banging your head on the wall or get your momentum interrupted because there are things that need to be done before you can move forward.

Today’s show is about heading them off at the pass -- that is, clearing away the frustrations in advance. Or, doing what you need to do, ahead of time, to be prepared for steps in the process so they don’t turn into huge stuck points that mire you down.

We’re going to move quickly through three sets of skills and knowledge that will help you get the dang thing DONE: First, mechanics. Second, market knowledge. And third, mindset. And I’ll suggest some resources along the way to help you with these things.

Here’s a cheat sheet for after you’ve listened to the show, to review all of these skills, and the kind of knowledge you need to line up.

1. Mechanics: Learn to do the little things extremely well (learned from Guy Michelmore).

Breaking a complex idea into smaller, simpler parts

Mapping out your sales letter into chunks

Getting human stories

Writing compelling headlines and subheads

Using picture words

2. Market Knowledge

Historical knowledge

Real-time knowledge

Human nature knowledge

3. Mindset

Focus

Flexibility

Faith

Flow

Resources mentioned in the podcast, with links:

$100 MM offers, by Alex Hormozi

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1737475731

The Brilliance Breakthrough, by Eugene Schwartz

https://brilliancebreakthroughbook.com/

Advertising Headlines That Make You Rich, by David Garfinkel

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1683501454

Scientific Advertising, by Claude Hopkins

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0844231010

How to Make Your Advertising Make Money, by John Caples

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083C548ZZ

How to Write a Good Advertisement, by Victor Schwab

https://www.amazon.com/dp/162654963X

Triggers, by Joe Sugarman

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00O3QEFSK

https://www.brain.fm/

Download.