Copywriters Podcast

I’m in a book discussion group with a client and two of his friends. The only problem is, both of his friends are also podcasters, so you can imagine how hard it is to get a word in edgewise.

The book we were discussing last time was Jonathan Haidt’s A Righteous Mind. This is an especially important book because it offers some concrete ways to bridge the big political divide going on in America and really much of the rest of the world right now.

I want to focus on something else in the book that’s not political, though. Several times the author makes a point of emphasizing that people are very concerned with what other people think about them.

We talk about that idea and break it down in today’s show. For now, I want to say this is something that a lot of copywriters and marketers miss the mark on. Which is a shame, because it’s a powerful selling tool. You could hardly say it’s unknown, but it’s not very well understood, either. Once you see what I’m going to show you, I think you’ll understand it a lot better.

We start by looking for the deep underlying message in a TV commercial for the prescription drug Linzess. Though the spoken words and words on the screen are all about the medical condition and the drug, the story portrayed by the actors and scenery are quite different. We look at how the advertiser used the concern about what other people think to sell a drug designed to help people with belly pain and constipation.

Then, we review with Jonathan Haidt said, as well as two little-known parts of Vic Schwab’s “How to Write a Good Advertisement” and Gene Schwartz’s “Breakthrough Copywriting.” Both of these Old Masters knew the how-other-people-think element of copywriting extremely well, and have some really important things to say about it.

Finally, we look at how we, as direct marketers, can use this sales angle. Obviously we don’t have the wherewithal to set up, hire for, and film a commercial like Linzess did. Fortunately, there’s a much simpler way to use the what-people-think angle, subtly, in your copy. We’ll share an example with you.


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I was watching TV last Sunday, and since we record a few episodes ahead, I was watching TV on the last Sunday of May.

The show was “Meet the Press,” and it always starts with the announcer starting by pointing out that this is the longest-running show on TV. Of any show.

From a marketing point of view, that’s an enviable place to be. Usually, when you’ve been on the air since 1947, that lasting power alone simply radiates trust. People tend to trust anything that’s been around a long time.

So it really caught my attention when in the waning seconds of the show, the moderator, Chuck Todd, said something I’ve never heard him, or anyone else on TV, say before:

“Thank you for trusting us.”

The reason this caught my attention really doesn’t have much to do with Meet the Press, which is by far not one of my favorite shows, nor what it might have said about Chuck Todd, who, to be honest with you, is not my favorite TV personality.

I was a little stunned by the words “thank you for trusting us” because I don’t think anyone in Chuck Todd’s position would utter words like that unless he, and a lot of very nervous people around him, were worried about keeping the trust of the viewing audience.

And don’t think for a minute this rising tide of distrust is limited to that moderator, that show, or that TV network. It is widespread. It is, frankly, everywhere. And as a marketer and copywriter, this is something you need to be aware of and to adjust your marketing message to.

I have handpicked three emotional triggers from my book Breakthrough Copywriting. I have never shared these three before, because, frankly, they are pretty intense.

But I think they are good medicine for the distrust that ails us.

(first) Trigger 2: Empathy through shared misery

When people are hurting, scared or mistrustful, showing them that you know how they feel will bring down barriers and make them much more open to what you have to say.

I’ve heard that empathy is easier for some people than for others. I have also heard a theory that either you’re born with it, or you’re not. I don’t know if that’s 100% real, but I do know that some people have natural empathy and others have to work at developing it. Right now I would say it’s simply one of the most important qualities and assets you can have, as a copywriter and as a business owner.

(second) Trigger 6: Sour Grapes to Vintage Wine

Sometimes severely underpromising the results you know your product can get, can increase sales.

If you go too far past what people think is real and possible for them, even if you know that much more is real and possible, you’re going to lose a lot of sales. This, again, is why it’s so important to know your customers.

(third) Trigger 11: From Desperation to Salvation

Trace the path of from complete helplessness to an amazing turnaround, that you can actually deliver with your product.

A lot of people are feeling pretty desperate right now. If you have a legitimate offer that will help them out of the quicksand, this is a great format to use to tell your story.

All of these are from Chapter 10 of Breakthrough Copywriting.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1548706957

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We’re back with another show in our Old Masters series. A return visit for the ideas of Claude Hopkins, but completely different material since last time, when we pulled out some key points from his book Scientific Advertising.

As I said before, and it’s worth repeating,

When I first started learning how to write copy, everybody told me “read Scientific Advertising.” It’s a book written in the first part of the 20th century, over 100 years ago, by Claude Hopkins, who many consider the father of direct-response copywriting.

I did read the book. I read it again. In fact, I read it 15 times.

But for today’s show, on the advice of my friend and previous Copywriters Podcast guest Don Hauptman, I looked into an excellent book from long ago called “Masters of Advertising Copy.”

The book has 25 chapters, and each is written by a different copywriter. I knew we had to start with the one by Claude Hopkins. His chapter is humbly titled, “Some Lessons I Have Learned In Advertising.” But to give you an idea of how eternal every single one of Claude Hopkins’s lesson is, I couldn’t find one that is not in active use today.

Five lifetime lessons from Claude Hopkins

1. Demonstration and samples

Sampling and demonstration, which are different forms of the same thing, make up the best way to sell anything.

Features by themselves usually don’t sell. Features + benefits work some of the time. But demonstration, where the customer gets to sample the product personally, usually works best of all — because people know from direct experience what they’re getting and what the benefits will be.

2. Free gift and curiosity

You can get people interested by offering a free gift, and you’ll do even better if the gift is a mystery until they get it.

People always like to feel they’re getting “the better end of the deal.” This is a proven way to operationalize that desire on the part of prospects into a way to get more sales.

3. Power of drama with a boring product

Drama will help you sell a lot more products, and if you dramatize a boring product, you can sell it when you couldn’t sell it before.

This is similar to the idea in Jeff Walker-style launches. The drama adds to interest in the product in a way that’s hard to match with anything else, when you do it right. It’s hard to get this right, but when you do, you’ve got a gold mine on your hands.

It’s hard to get it right because it’s like marketing entertainment. Publishing a best-selling book, or releasing a hit song or a movie, is usually much chancier and harder to do than simply making a lot of money with a good product.

4. Test everything

Test small before you scale up.

Early on in his career, many companies came to Hopkins with product ideas they were certain would be winners. Hopkins says he made “several great mistakes by relying on my judgment and on theirs.”

5. Seeking out the details that convince

Your USP can be buried in trivia (or so it seems to many business owners and execs). But that “trivia” can be a detail the decides the prospect to buy from you, and become a customer.

Gene Schwartz even developed a category of copy to label this kind of description: Mechanism. The key is not just using a mechanism in your copy, but using it convincingly to make a customer see why you are the preferable choice in the marketplace.

Resource:

Masters of Advertising Copy, Edited by J. George Frederick:

https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Advertising-Marketing-Routledge-Editions-ebook/dp/B086H4L4K8


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Our guest today is Harlan Kilstein. He’s a copywriter, an entrepreneur, and a whole lot more.

Here are 7 facts you probably didn't know Harlan.

1. John Carlton and I took turns humiliating his copy when he got started. Unlike most people, he took the feedback and turned himself into a great copywriter.

2. He's an ordained rabbi.

3. His sidekick, who we hope you don't hear in the background is named Kalba. She's a Pomeranian. He name means Bitch in Hebrew.

4. He lost over 60 pounds doing Keto practicing what he preaches.

5. His office is a mega shrine to the singer Meat Loaf.

6. He has nearly 2 million followers on social media.

7. He would do anything for love but he won't do that.

I don’t know what “that” is, and hopefully we won’t find out on today’s show.

Harlan, welcome. And Kalba, please keep it down.

Here are the questions I brought to Harlan:

1. Big-picture, what are you doing for business on Facebook?

2. When did you first learn about Facebook compliance rules, and how did you find out?

3. What difference does it make — that is, how much more latitude do you have in your marketing — when you’re posting or advertising inside your own group?

4. What would you say are the two-three most important changes you’ve made in copy, both on and off Facebook — as a results of compliance rules? Could you give at least one before-after example?

5. What would you say are the biggest mistakes you see other people making regarding Facebook compliance?

6. Tell us about the Keto project I helped you with.

7. What additional advice do you have for copywriters and marketers, especially re: Facebook compliance?

If you're having issues with Facebook compliance and you can't figure out if it's your ad, your landing page or just that Mark Zuckerberg doesn't like you, just send Harlan a message on FB.

Harlan on Facebook


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If you’ve noticed that your copy isn’t converting recently as well as it used to, maybe it’s too complicated to read.

Now, copywriting experts have been saying what I just said since the time of Claude Hopkins, more than 100 years ago. Which is since the dawn of time, as far as direct-response copywriting goes.

But in the last few years, things have changed. Simply writing less complicated copy isn’t good enough, because the way people read has been altered. People now read by text messages. By Facebook. By Instagram. By Youtube.

Some people I find worth listening to are saying that people’s brains have changed. It’s not my original idea, and I’ll get into this in more detail in just a little bit. But the way we’re spending so much time with our screens is literally rewiring our neural pathways, and this changes our brains. Which changes the way we read.

I’m gonna say that, as marketers and copywriters, we have been living in a world that is not as literate as it used to be, and this is by a wide margin. Since we can’t customize our copy for every individual reader, we have to pick one person to represent all of them. And I think the reality is, in a lot of cases, that one person, that avatar, is someone I would call post-literate.

Post-literate. Not illiterate. Post-literate means they can read, but they don’t want to. Maybe not the way that you do.

They don’t want to have to focus very much at all. They don’t have patience for anything too complicated.

So, the market is not the same level of literate that we used to think we could write to and sell.

On average. Of course, there are some 15-year-olds who sound like Oxford professors when they speak. But I’m talking about the market in general, the broad swath of people who might buy your offer. The target prospect you are trying to reach, for most businesses. We’ll look at what’s happening and why.

I’m also going to suggest three simple, powerful things you can do in the way you write your copy that will reach the increasing post-literate portion of your market, and will work just as well with the literate members of your market as it always did.

Here are some of the many topics we covered in today’s show:

Multitasking

The shrinking percentage of the market that can still read

Something Gene Schwartz said (long before the current situation arrived) that could be very helpful now

How farm animals think (and why that matters to marketers and copywriters)

Our genetic need for storytelling — a key to reaching “non-readers”

Three easy changes you can make to your copy to reach more prospects.

One article and three books mentioned on today’s show:

Adam Garfinkle article: https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-erosion-of-deep-literacy

The Brilliance Breakthrough, by Gene Schwartz: https://brilliancebreakthroughbook.com

Thinking in Pictures, by Temple Grandin: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001ODEQS4

Wired for Story, by Lisa Cron https://www.amazon.com/Wired-Story-Writers-Science-Sentence-ebook/dp/B005X0JTGI
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What is an offer

- Not just what you’re selling, although that’s a big part of it

- It’s how you sell it. How you present it. How you arrange it.

- For testing, it’s one of the Big Three (besides headline/hook and pricing/payment plans)

- Maybe you’ve heard: “The best product doesn’t win. The product with the best marketing wins.

- Often, the product with the best marketing ends up being the product with the best offer

- The conventional wisdom on what an offer is:

- core product plus bonuses

- dollar value, dropped to selling price

- value stack: taking what’s in the offer and making it seem as valuable as possible

Why most offers don’t work nearly as well as they could… or… don’t work at all

- Sometimes they were just thrown up there like spaghetti against the wall, to see if it will stick

- But often, the reason they don’t work is because

- They’re what the business owner wants to sell the customer

-or-

- They’re what the business owner thinks the customer should want

-rather than-

- A watertight fit with what the customer really wants

How to go about building an offer that will work

- For a product - special, high-value related bonuses, or discount

- For service businesses - free initial consultation, but craft it to be valuable. Offer some specific, tangible-as possible outcomes for the prospect — no strings — that you can deliver in the course of a session

- For digital subscription businesses or software: free first month. Don’t expect “free” to carry the offer by itself. Make sure they know what they’re getting ahead of time, in as much benefit-rich detail as possible

Other factors

- value, security (risk-reversal), and the “perfect fit”

- the emotional wrapping paper on a solid, attractive offer

Examples of great offers

Infoproduct/software (easy to discount)

- Carlton - Kick-Ass Copywriting Secrets of a Rebel Marketer - 80% off ($20)

- Kirk Hunter Orchestra - Reg 500, on sale for 100. On the advice of my music teacher, I grabbed it


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On today’s show, we look at two very interesting questions:

First, how do you market your business when you have a highly specialized business almost nobody has even heard of before?

Second, how do you use copy in your business, when you’re not a copywriter yourself and you’ve never been able to find a copywriter that gets how to communicate what you do?

Our guest today, Rick Harmon, will help us get the answers to both questions. And this information will be very useful to any business owner who writes copy, and lots of useful tips for most copywriters, too.

Rick’s specialty, in a nutshell, is to make loans that help people straighten out messes with inherited property. Probate lawyers have a saying: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way. But when there’s no way in sight, Rick Harmon will find a way.”

Actually, they don’t have that saying at all. I made it up for this show. But they should, because that’s what Rick does. He straightens out probate messes that no one else can straighten out.

Now, sounds like a great service, but as long as it’s a business, you need to get clients. And that’s where Rick’s unusual story comes in.

We asked him these questions:

1. Can you give our listeners a little “slice-of-life” story that gives us a sense of how upside-down and inside-out things can go in your business?

2. Our mutual friend, the great sales trainer John Paul Mendocha, said something you have found incredibly useful in your marketing: “All sales is a process of disqualification.” What does that look like in real life?

3. Strategic Relationship Marketing

We start with a quote from a Hollywood composer, Bear McCreary, who wrote scores for many shows and films, including Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead, and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.:

“The kind of business skills that you need are really social skills. The smartest business move you can make is just being smart socially, politically. Understanding how to walk into a room and make everybody feel validated, make everybody feel like they’ve made a good decision in hiring you, or they should make a good decision hiring you.

“These are things that are political skills and social skills, but they’re sort of necessary in any business. If you walk around with an ego, if you walk around making people feel like you deserve the job, then ultimately that’s a bad business decision because you will just quit getting hired, whether or not your work is good.”

Rick, how does that square with your experience?

4. Finally, please talk about the lifetime value of a customer, and the value of the back-end, as it applies in your business.


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Last week I got this really intriguing email. It led to a website with this copy on it:

“Look, I know everyone hates saxophones. And with good reason. Excluding Colin Stetson’s amazing work, and Tom Waits of course, I also tend toward hating on saxophones myself.

“But is it really fair to judge an instrument by it's past misdemeanors ? Can the sax be rehabilitated and made sexy again ?

“Here at Sound Dust we say HELL YES!”

I’ll tell you more about this soon. For now, I want to point out that this was not just negative copy. Not just hater copy. This was a complaint. A complaint about saxophones.

Now, whether you like saxes… hate ’em… or have no opinion at all about saxes, there’s a really good lesson in this copy. And it has to do with something we’ve never covered on this podcast, even though this technique is used all the time… and quite successfully, I’ll add.

The technique is what I’m going to call “complaint copywriting.”

Now, to be clear, we’re not talking about “compliant copywriting,” which is also important but an entirely different thing. Complaint copywriting is important because it is at the heart of what motivates customers deeply. Not all the time, but when it hits, it’s a home run. A grand slam. Big payoff.

We talk about:

1. How complaints are different from ordinary objections, and why answering them in the right way is so much more powerful than merely overcoming objections

2. What complaint copywriting looks like in real life, and how people have used them or can use them to make a lot of money in their copy

3. How to put complaint copy together — a short (but complete) step-by-step process

4. Three unique things about complaints, and why you should seek them out (even though, it’s true, it’s not always all that much fun to listen to them).


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People use the term “control freak” like it’s a bad thing.

And let’s be clear. Sometimes it is.

But our guest today is obsessed about control and controls in the best possible way.

He’s copywriter Brad Nickel, originally from Madison, Wisconsin and now living in Valencia, Spain with his girlfriend and their French Bulldog, named Renée.

Disclosure: Brad’s a client of mine.

He writes copy and manages email lists for 8-figures health companies. And this is where the conversation turns to control.

Brad has written “control emails” that get used over and over again by his clients and their affiliates. His copy has brought in tens of thousands of leads and customers… and helped his clients make tens of millions of dollars.

Today he’s going to tell us how he does this, and give you some tips you can use yourself.

Here are the questions I’m going to ask him:

What is a control?

What is a control email?

What are some examples, and why do you think they worked?

Could you break down of the structure of a control email, and what you think about when you’re putting together an email that could become a control?

What are some do’s and don’ts?

What’s counterintuitive about what usually works?

Brad’s email: [email protected]


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I have often wondered whether direct-response copy would work in large, more conventional businesses.

Our guest today put my question to rest.

Let me introduce you to my friend Jim Van Wyck. He’s been a direct marketer since the early 1990s. And because of businesses he built with direct-response copy, he’s had two seven-figure exits and one eight-figure exit.

In case that jargon doesn’t mean anything to you, I’ll break it down. A seven-figure exit is where you sell the business for more than one million dollars. An eight-figure exit is where you sell the business for more than 10 million dollars.

Jim opened an indoor tennis club in the early eights. He co-founded a bookstore in the early 90s. He had a small chain of weight loss centers in the late 90s in partnership with his wife.

Jim worked closely with a regional insurance brokerage in the 2000s, which was sold to a Fortune 500 company. More recently, he co-founded another insurance agency selling health insurance nationwide, and he was the CEO of that business.

He’s currently creating HealthAmigo.com, which is a national telemedicine and healthcare services company, and he’s the co-founder of that.

A lot of businesses to keep track of, but I wanted to give you an idea of how prolific Jim is when it comes to business building. I asked him to come on the show today to talk about the vital role of copy in his businesses.

Here are the questions Jim answered:

1. We have a famous disclaimer at the top of the show, which award-winning composer Dr. Doug Pew even set to music! But in a private conversation, you said most people have no idea what legal compliance is like until you set up an insurance company. Could you talk about that?

2. Now you have some copy, in story form, that will be used on a video for Health Amigo. Please read it out loud to us and then let’s talk about it.

3. How did you get started with copy? It was in the Yellow Pages, right?

4. Please share the ironic story about the scathing columnist for the Calgary Herald.

5. Any other stories about copy you’d like to tell us?

6. From a learning and knowledge perspective, what would you suggest to fellow business builder who want to write their own copy?

7. For business owners who don’t want to write copy themselves but plan to hire copywriters, what do they need to learn and/or know?

8. In your experience, what’s the difference between using copy for lead-generation (for brick & mortar and service businesses) compared to using copy to close the sale (for mail-order and online digital product businesses)?


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