Dan Nelken is our guest on the 348th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Dan is a copywriter and author of A Self-Help Guide for Copywriters. If you’re a creative, you may have fallen into the inner critic rabbit hole that keeps you in a cycle of stuck. But Dan gives practical and actionable steps to move away from creative burnout and into a process that helps you turn surface-level ideas into substance.

Tune into the episode to find out:

Dan’s experience in ad school and how it shaped his expertise and portfolio. 

The grind that turned into a sustainable copywriting career.

How to come up with ideas without letting self-doubt, inner critic, and the feeling of stuck get in the way. 

The bucket exercise – how to trick your brain into creating ideas. 

What’s the creative process and what tools are useful?

The two reasons procrastination is keeping you from total creativity. 

Why you should use AI to feel inspired rather than disposable. 

How to create a swipe folder system and maximize it. 

Do you have a habit of following through? 

How to make your emotions work for you.

The variety of work copywriters can do and industries they can dive into. 

How to keep your business alive without feeling resentful and burned out. 

Creativity outside of writing – how do we do it?

How Dan’s been able to scale back his client projects by 40%. 

Listen to the episode or check out the transcript below. 

The people and stuff we mentioned on the  show:

The Copywriter Think Tank

Kira’s website

Rob’s website

Dan's website

The Copywriter Club Facebook Group

The Copywriter Underground

Free month of Brain.FM

AI for Creative Entrepreneurs Podcast

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  Creativity is a big part of your work as a copywriter. Whether you're coming up with new angles for leads and headlines or new ideas for content or new approaches for pitches to prospects who you want to work with, creativity plays a big part in all of that, which begs the question, can creativity be systematized? Can processes and formulas help you be more creative? Those approaches feel a little bit uncreative to me, but our guest for this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is Dan Nelken, and Dan is here to correct that misconception. He shared several details about his creative process that might help make you more creative too. Stick around for this fun conversation.

Kira Hug:  But before we all get super creative here, we just want to share something special for you. We call it the P7 Client Attraction Pipeline, which is kind of a mouthful. You can call it P7 for short. This is our client acquisition system designed specifically to help copywriters create a prospecting habit. So we want to make it really easy for you to fit prospecting into your day so it feels natural. And so, not only do we cover prospecting tools you can use, we give you a bunch of pitching templates and we continue to kind of add new templates that work for copywriters. We also give you industry niches, 293 specifically, so you can figure out which niches you could tap, especially if you feel like the space you're working in currently might be slowing down and not hiring. This is where we can be really flexible and explore other niches to find work.

And so, we do all of that inside the pipeline and this program along with supporting you with some behavior shifting that can help you really turn this behavior into a habit so it doesn't become the thing that you try one day and then you stop doing. It does work. We've seen copywriters use these tools and these trainings to gain clients, so it's worth exploring if you don't have a client attraction pipeline in your business. And you can find out more information, thecopywriterclub.com/p7 to find out more information about this client acquisiti...