Shanelle Mullin, copywriter and content curator for ConversionXL joins The Copywriter Club Podcast with Kira and Rob talk to talk about what copywriters really need to know about testing, how she picked her career path at the age of 15, what writers can do to network more effectively at conferences like CXL Live (where Shanelle plays a big role) and how she has connected with so many “big names” online. After the last marathon episode, this one is a more reasonable length. Lots to learn here...

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

The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:

Sponsor: AirStory

Life Lessons Learned from 10 Years of Marketing

Habbo Hotel

Rene Warren

OnBoardly

Klout

Joanna Wiebe

Gary V

Tim Ferris

Peep Laja

Talia Wolf

ConversionXL Live

ConversionXL Institute

A/B Testing Mastery

Psychological Backfiring

Buying Modalities

Oli Gardner

Sean Ellis

Jared Spool

Krista Seiden

Joel Klettke

Shanelle’s twitter

Kira’s website

Rob’s website

The Copywriter Club Facebook Group

Intro: Content (for now)

Outro: Gravity

Full Transcript:

Kira: 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.

Rob: What if you could hang out with the 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 Kira and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast.

Kira: You’re invited to join the club for episode 23 as we chat with copywriter and content creator Shanelle Mullin about choosing a career at the ripe old age of 15, taking risks, conversion optimization, analytics, and curating content for fast-growing startups like Onboardly and ConversionXL.

Rob: Hey, Kira, Shanelle.

Shanelle: Hey guys.

Kira: Hi. Thanks for joining us, Shanelle.

Shanelle: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Kira: Great place for us to start is with an article you recently published, I believe you recently published it, on Medium entitled Life Lessons Learned from 10 Years of Marketing. It was a great read and I know you mention that you really got into marketing at the age of 15. I would love to start there and find out what compelled you to jump into this world of marketing at such a young age?

Rob: Yeah, what kind of a kid thinks, “Hey, I know what I’m ready to do already”?

Shanelle: Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of a weird story. I was probably 13 at the time and I was playing a game called Habbo Hotel, which if you’re not familiar ...

Kira: What is that game?

Shanelle: You create like a little pixel avatar of yourself and then you walk around this hotel and you can chat with people from around the world and you can collect furniture and play games and it was really fun when I was 13 and I was obsessed with it.

Kira: Wait, it sounds fun right now. I kind of want to play.

Rob: Check into that.

Shanelle: Yeah. I decided to look into other people who were making these mini-Habbo Hotels and they were basically just teenagers like me and they were all hanging out on this forum. I joined this forum and I just ended up talking to them and getting to know some of the marketing people and I had no idea what marketing was of course because I was 13. They just explained it to me like simple price, product, placement, and promotion terms and I was like, “That sounds amazing,” for some reason. I started reading about it and by the time I was 15 I had gotten my first marketing gig, which was exciting.

Rob: Where do you go to from there? You know, you’re 15, you’ve basically started your career. Tell us the rest of the story. What happens? How does it unfold over the next few years?

Shanelle: Yeah, so I actually started working for the guy who ran this forum that I was part of.