Copywriter Colin Theriot joins Rob and Kira for the 104th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Colin is well known as the leader of the Cult of Copy (as well as four or five other related Facebook groups). He often jumps into the club to answer questions or comment on something, and we thought it was about time to talk shop with him. In our discussion, we covered:

•  how Colin became a copywriter

•  why he started The Cult of Copy

•  the short cut to getting people to know who you are

•  how beginning copywriters can create a copy learning experience

•  the most important thing for beginners to learn (this skill is portable)

•  his philosophy for running more than one Facebook group

•  why he offers a “jobs” group and why you probably shouldn’t use it

•  the five Vs of the Viking Velociraptor Formula <-- this is gold

•  the “artist vs. cabinet maker” mistake copywriters tend to make

•  the scalability secret for earning more by doing less

•  why you need to treat your business like a business

•  why he tells copywriters to read books that aren’t copywriting books

Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:

The Cult of Copy

Understanding Comics by Scott McLoud

Books by Elmore Leonard

Kira’s website

Rob’s website

The Copywriter Club Facebook Group

Intro: Content (for now)

Outro: Gravity

Full Transcript:

The Copywriter Club Podcast is sponsored by Airstory, the writing platform for professional writers who want to get more done in half the time. Learn more at Airstory.co/club.

Kira:   What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That's what Rob and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast.

Rob:   You're invited to join the club for episode 104, as we chat with Copywriter and cult leader Colin Theriot about starting a cult and running a Facebook group with nearly 25,000 members. The 5 Vs of the Viking Velociraptor Formula, what most copywriters are doing wrong today and why, when asked about his favorite books about copywriting, he doesn't recommend books about copywriting.

Kira:   Welcome Colin.

Rob:   Hey Colin.

Colin:  Hi guys. Thanks for having me.

Kira:   Yeah, great to have you here.

Colin:  Sweet.

Kira:   So Colin, let's kick this off with your story. How did you end up as a copywriter?

Colin:  I was working at an internet marketing company. It was an eCommerce company. I was working there as a graphic designer/SEO analyst/content writer. One of the owners of that eCommerce site and his other marketing partner in other ventures, they decided to launch this thing called StomperNet and I was working there making their web pages at the time, so I helped them, stayed up on launch night, making some HTML for that. And they launched it and it was a big record breaking launch. I think was like $24 million at the time. And so I got called over from the eCommerce site to go work on that. And then while we were wiring, my boss at the time, Andy Jenkins, his house for Wi-Fi so we could work there legally, while I was doing that, the writer we had on staff at the time, I can't remember to this day if she was sick or if we were just busy and had too much stuff going on, but it was sort of like a voluntary basis, ‘Hey, we need this sales letter rewritten, because we're about to relaunch with all these new features we've added.’ So I took a shot at it and Andy was like, ‘This is pretty good. Do you like doing it?’ And I'm like, ‘Yeah. It's easier than wiring your house for Wi-Fi.’ And he's like, ‘Well cool, because you're the chief marketing copywriter, so get good at it.’

Over the next, I think it was a little under two years, I worked with all the high end marketing faculty they had there that were all copywriters in their own ...