Copywriter Jeff Kimes is our guest for the 144th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Jeff is a former scientist and musician (or rather, he's currently a musician making his living writing copy for clients). We asked Jeff about his path into copywriting and a bunch of other topics including...

•  Jeff’s journey from scientist to copywriter

•  the “copywriting” lessons he learned as a musician

•  how he creates connection with his readers

•  the importance of setting the stage to create a better experience

•  what he’s doing today as a copywriter (and where he is living)

•  the challenges of writing for a single client and learning their voice

•  the benefits of working with a single client

•  how we can optimize for learning throughout our careers

•  what Jeff is doing to build his authority today

Jeff also shared a few thoughts about the ethics of copywriting and why thinking about how your copy serves your customers matters. Click the play button below, find it on your favorite podcast app, or scroll down for a full transcript.

 

The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:

Jeff's music

Joshua Bell in the Subway Video

Brian Clark (Copyblogger)

Brian Kurtz

Scott Adams

Jeff’s website

Kira’s website

Rob’s website

The Copywriter Club Facebook Group

The Copywriter Underground

Intro: Content (for now)

Outro: Gravity

 

Full Transcript:

Rob:   This podcast is sponsored by The Copywriter Underground.

Kira:   It's our new membership designed for you to help you attract more clients and hit 10K a month consistently.

Rob:   For information or to sign up go to thecopywriterunderground.com.

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 number 144 as we chat with copywriter Jeff Kimes about how science, music and travel combined to make him a more effective copywriter. His research and writing process, seeking out experiences that grow his career. And we might even talk a little bit about the ethics of copy.

Kira:   All right, welcome Jeff.

Rob:   Hey Jeff.

Jeff:    Hello.

Kira:   I want to say welcome back because we already did interview months ago, but we just lost the file. It just didn't work out. So welcome back. We never got to publish that conversation, but I know this one will be even more insightful. So Jeff why don't we start this off just with the basics of how you got into copywriting and then we'll go from there.

Jeff:    So as far as my own journey into copywriting, I've lived a couple different phases of life, which I think is pretty normal at this point in society. I started out in science. I was working in a psychoneuroimmunology lab. After school I was doing, working in vaccine development. I worked in neuroscience labs and stuff like that. And after a while I got really sick of the lab life and was really hungering for more. And I always had a real big travel bug inside of me. And so went on a, found jobs that facilitated that lifestyle. I worked at sea a lot in marine biology and used that to fund eight years of world travel that was very musically inspired. I'm also a musician and I'd go to a lot of countries where I was really inspired by their musical traditions and learned to teach over there. And then I would take what I learned and incorporate it into music that I was making back here in the U.S. and used that to launch a music project that I played with for several years. It was really fun, enormously fun. Not terribly profitable, but just a really, really beautiful life experience.

And in that process of growing a band and trying to make music my life and make that my living started to really come into contact with the necessity of marketing.