If you’ve been doing all the things, listening to the advice of the experts, and you’re still not seeing results, maybe the thing holding you back is your mindset. In this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I’m speaking with former copywriter and current mindset coach, Brian McCarthy. We talked about burnout, imposter complex, confidence and much more. If you’re doing “all the things” and still not reaching your goals, this episode is for you. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

Emily Reagan’s Interview

Rob Marsh: Maybe the thing keeping you from getting what you want and working with the clients you deserve is you. Want to know more? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

Content writers, copywriters, social media writers, and marketers of all kinds face a bunch of challenges when it comes to building a successful business that supports the lifestyle that we all want. 

We talk about finding clients on the podcast a lot… maybe too much because there are other challenges… figuring out our niches, creating irresistable products and services that clients want to buy, pricing, positioning, marketing, and of course writing and so on.

All of those business skills are important. If you can’t do them yourself or if you can’t hire someone else to do these for you, you’ll struggle as a business owner.

But there is a whole other set of skills that we often overlook that also impact your ability to grow your business. We generally think of these hidden skills as mindset. And that’s what we’re talking about on today’s podcast.

My guest is former copywriter and current mindset coach Brian McCarthy. Brian works with copywriters and others to help them work through mindset blocks and develop new skills to overcome them. Things like growing confidence, finding clarity and alignment, over coming imposter complex and a lot more. If you’ve been doing everything right but still struggle to get traction or feel like you’re making a difference in the world… or even just for your clients, maybe refocusing your efforts on mindset is what’s called for. So keep listening for our thoughts on these critical, but often ignored, mindset skills.

Before we jump into our interview, a little while ago I recorded a masterclass to show copywriters, content writers and other marketers how to write “emotional” copy. Everyone says emotions sell, but how do you actually write emotional copy? I walk through more than a dozen examples in this masterclass and give you a proven process for figuring out the right emotions to focus on as you write… and how they change as you make your pitch. The masterclass includes several bonuses on storytelling, using A.I. to find dominant and transformational emotions, and much more. You can get this masterclass at thecopywriterclub.com/emotion

And now, my interview with Brian McCarthy.

Brian, welcome to the podcast. I’m thrilled to have you here, like we were saying, just as we were chatting before we started recording, we met briefly a bunch of years ago, you were doing something slightly different than what you did today. Yeah, tell me just how did you get here. You’re a mindset coach, but you also have a pretty big background in copywriting. So tell me about that?

Brian McCarthy: Yeah, so I started copywriting, I don’t know 20, 2014 or so got into that world, and I was always copywriting for a lot of personal growth companies and coaches. I was just very into the personal growth world. And then eventually, like, found my I was doing launches, I was doing case studies, those became like my my main even wrote a book on how to do case studies like that kind of became my main focus. And then I was when the pandemic hit. One of my clients was this big life coach, Ronnie Britton, she’s amazing, and she has a coach. She has a program teaching people how to coach. And then I was like, that seems like a useful skill. I’ll do it. And then took the program, and as I started coaching people, I was like, Oh, this is the greatest thing in the world. And eventually moved from copywriting into coaching full time. And it was one of those, like, oh yeah, no. Like, I was always feeling that nudge to be in the personal growth world, like, yeah, no, wonder. And even during my copywriting career, it always felt like this is a stepping stone to something else. I just didn’t know what that something else was. Then once I found coaching, I was like, oh, it’s it’s that, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So before we jump into all the stuff you’re doing as coaching, I’d love to dive into your copy career just a little bit, because six, six years as a copywriter is nothing to sniff at, you know, writing a book about case studies. So let’s talk about that. How did you get started as a copywriter, and how did you really find those first couple of clients? I got started. I was just listening to podcasts while working at a corporate desk job that was slowly destroying my soul. And I was like, Oh, this sounds kind of nice, yeah, just, you know, travel and write and be on a beach and fire off a letter, and you make a bunch of money and everyone loves you. That sounds like a pretty good career.

And then so I ended up, like, getting a severance from that job, say, like, merged and, and I was like, I’m just gonna try this Copyright thing, and spent the first year and a half just fighting for jobs on jobs boards being making little to no money, literally, like, I’d calculate my hourly rate, and I’m like, I made pennies on this ebook per hour. Like, so just slogging it out that was tough. And then eventually things started to stabilize. I got a job with Ramit Sethi, I Will Teach You To Be Rich. 

I was a senior copywriter with them for about a year, and then left that after a year, and then started to do the freelance thing, and got ended up with, like, feast or famine kind of thing. Like, it was actually going pretty well, but it was really unstable. Like, I finally did that, like, all right, making six figures, traveling the world a bit. It wasn’t, wasn’t all that easy to get to that point, but I got there and then got a couple steady retainer clients eventually after that, where I had like two clients, was making good money working, you know, three or four hours a day and able to travel. So that was kind of like my initial goal of what I wanted, what I wanted to hit as a copywriter. And I was like, oh, hit that. And then, of course, had, and again, it was like for personal growth companies, this parenting company that’s wonderful. 

So I was very fortunate. I’ve always loved my clients and been able to write for just wonderful people and great programs. Again, doing a lot of launches, case studies, some email marketing stuff. I always liked the longer form sales page and the more in depth, bigger projects, the you know, Hey, can I hire you for four emails? I’m like, What are you talking about? I have to learn so much to write four emails. I can write you like a 40 page letter. That was always more what drew me

Rob Marsh: Me too. I’m the same way. I love writing emails, but sales, sales. Email sells copies where I live. Okay, so you’ve got this interesting skill set that you’ve developed since then, but I wonder, you know if you were coaching Brian McCarthy, copywriter just starting out making pennies per project, what mindset skills would you teach him, or would you basically walk him through in order to help him deal with that struggle or make progress faster for beginning copywriters, I guess the question is, what are the mindset things that we need to be focused on in order to make progress?

Brian McCarthy: Yeah, great question. A couple things jump out based on a lot of the copywriters that I coach, and especially the ones that are just starting out. There’s one big piece is alignment of finding what actually inspires you and excites you. It’s really easy, and it’s copywriting world and online marketing world to get to seduced by like, Well, the big name person says that this is the best route to go. So now I’m gonna start us build a social media presence. Do you like social like? Do you like Instagram? Do you like social media? No, but it’s the it says. They say it’s the best way. So now I’m going to do that. I’m like, no, no, let’s find what actually works for you. So maybe that’s Instagram and social media, but maybe feeling more inclined to something else, whether that’s the method for growing your business, or the type of copywriting you want to do, or the type of companies you want to do, one is just getting like, the noise and all the stuff out there can be helpful and has its place. But first, let’s start with what’s really inspiring and aligned for you. Then the next piece. So that would be the first like clarity piece, and then the next piece would be the confidence piece of like, okay, how can let’s build up your confidence in a way that’s authentic, where you can own, even if you’re just starting out, you can still own the various skills and values and what you bring to the table beyond because a lot of people get stuck in, like, what I I don’t have the copywriting experience, and that’s all that matters. And it’s just the skills. It’s like, yeah, that’s yeah, that’s all important. And other things matter too. Are like, your ability to take feedback is super important. Your ability to communicate well, to hit deadlines. There’s all these other things, your passion for the work, your ability to listen and like find what the actual like thing worth talking about, even is there’s all these other things that people don’t they lose sight of the importance of it, and because they just focus on what they don’t have versus the pieces they do. So the next part, after the clarity would be the confidence in like, well, what are you bringing to the table and sharing that in a way where you’re not you know, trying to a lot of copywriters think they need to come in and kick the doors down and proclaim that they’re God’s gift to copywriting and gonna make you $10 million overnight. Like, no, don’t do that. Come from an honest, authentic place where you’re owning. Your value and what you bring to the table in a way that feels aligned, and they can see the value, but it’s not this big, you know, puffing out your chest nonsense like, because clients see and feel that, and they’re pretty sick of that too. They don’t want it. And then the last piece would be, the other mindset. Pieces outside of clarity, then confidence would then be like building more consistency. So a lot of what gets in the way that procrastination, self doubt, which is related to the confidence piece, and or again, lack of clarity of how I want to grow my business, like getting consistent with putting yourself out there, developing the habits, that’s another big piece, and that’s a lot easier too, once you have the clarity and confidence pieces in place.

Rob Marsh: So as far, I’d love to break this down just a little bit more to understand each set. So starting with alignment, if this is a really difficult thing, obviously I’ve coached hundreds and hundreds copywriters as well. This is one of the starting pieces where you’re really trying to figure out your positioning, the product or service that you’re offering, the value you’re creating, the problem you’re solving, all of that stuff. And it takes, it takes time. I mean, there’s a reason why a lot of beginning copywriters don’t make a lot of money in that first year. It’s because, at least it feels to me like we’re bouncing from thing to thing trying to figure this stuff out. So how do we how do we shorten that process and make it a little bit easier? Because oftentimes a copywriter comes into it, yeah, we might have some background experience. You know, I I was a bartender, or I was a school teacher, I was a nurse and and we can bring that to the table, but sometimes we’re trying to get away from that stuff too, and we’re looking for something that rings a bell for us or really turns us on, but we don’t know what that is yet.

Brian McCarthy: And it definitely is an exploration piece. One thing that immediately comes to mind, and this came from a coach I work with a lot, Kavita Singh, so it’s something that she helped me with and and that’s looking at the difference between, like, what you can do versus what you’re meant to do. And it’s like, okay, can I do this thing? Yes, I have these skills in this background, and that’s a needed thing, versus, yeah, more of that internal radar of what excites you and what gets you going. And there is, there is sometimes gonna just be that process of, like, trying things out and getting feedback and, like, there is a okay, like, figure it out as you go. It’s not necessarily like you’re in the garage and get it all fixed up, and then you go, it’s, it’s, it is more of a guess and check thing. So even I mean, that would be my biggest thing is, one is just really focusing on that internal radar and homing in on that and what you’re meant to do outside of like what looks best, or what you should do, or what’s smartest, like, you can still look at that, but make sure you’re not doing it at the expense of that inner peace or that piece inside you. And and the other part is even just honoring the the idea that it might take a little bit like it’s worth doing right, rather than rushing through to get the first thing. And again, this is an industry that very much values speed and instant transformation and all that kind of thing. And it’s an industry that, what do, you know, also has a lot of burnout, also has businesses that don’t exist in five years, you know, because it was more about like, well, this works. Let’s do more of that. And then people build businesses and go, like, I don’t even care about what I’m doing right now. I don’t care about these people. Like, I got sucked in the thing, because it’s what paid the bills, and people said yes to it. And now I’m doing group coaching calls that I hate to a bunch of people that I don’t even want to help. Like, that kind of thing happens in my mind, because a lot of that internal piece and like, what are you really meant to do? What really inspires you? What are the big problems that you know a lot of times that, like you faced in your life, that you want to help people with that kind of thing gets might get cut over or, like, jump through, that piece gets missed a little bit.

Rob Marsh: This feels like where the typical advice about finding a niche sometimes goes wrong. And I’ll be upfront, I’m all about finding a niche and working in a niche. I think the data is there in salary surveys that we’ve done that show that somebody working in niche makes significantly more money than somebody who’s a generalist. So obviously choosing a niche is good for your long term copywriting or whatever it is, service business that you’re running. However, sometimes it takes a while to find the niche. You know, as an example, you might become a copywriter thinking, hey, I’m I could write sales copy. I’ve done maybe door to door sales at one point when I was in college, or I sold shoes at Nordstrom, or whatever the thing is. And so I’m going to. Write, you know, sales emails or sales letters, and then as you get into it, you discover this entire world of Salesforce and sales enablement tools and all the things that happen in the background that you could fall in love with. You may not have even known that that stuff exists until you get into the process. And so again, while I’m really big on choosing a niche. I’m also really big on taking time to figure out what it is that you’re interested in, to explore that stuff, to learn the new things, so you can even discover and open yourself up to whatever it is, like you said, that you’re going to be aligned with.

Brian McCarthy: Totally, yeah, it’s like, it’s like, how can you be expected to make the decision of the direction to go. If you don’t have, if you’re of a very limited information like you explore these things exactly like you said, then you have more information to work with, and you can make a more informed decision of what direction you want to go. And also, nothing’s forever, right? I mean, you were talking about building a business, and three, four years down the road, you find out that this isn’t something that lights you up anymore, so you can always change that as well. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s, we’re always evolving. So it’s very likely that it’s gonna evolve whether, whether you expect it to, or wanted to, or not. Like, yeah, you almost, you almost can’t help it. So yeah, a lot of that fear of like, oh, but if I pick a niche, I’m like, I’m in a prison forever. It’s like, No, you like you, literally like you’re going to keep changing. So as long as your business is a reflection of you, then it’s going to be changing as well.

Rob Marsh: Let’s talk about confidence, because, and this is a challenge, we always seem to want to wait to do the thing until we’re confident that we can do it. And we all we’ve talked about this on the podcast a few times, but we all know confidence. You can’t just hand somebody confidence. You can’t teach it. You can’t even learn it unless you do the thing. And so I liked what you were saying about, you know, looking at your background and thinking about some of the things that have sort of gotten you to this point where you are. But let’s, let’s go a little bit deeper on this. How can we sort of borrow confidence or create confidence until we’ve actually proven we can do this thing and we own the confidence that we’re showing out to the world?

Brian McCarthy: Yeah, I’ve got a lot to go there. So first of all, that was my biggest I’d say that was probably my biggest hurdle when I was a copywriter, was I always felt like I wasn’t good enough. I was just like, I’m one bad sales page away for like, this is gonna be bad clients gonna hate it. They’re gonna fire me. They’re gonna tell everybody I’m terrible and I’m never gonna get a job again. That, like, I had that for a good five years, like that was just always there. And of course, yeah, that confidence keeps you from like, it kept me, like, under charging at certain times. Kept me from going for certain jobs. It just made me more stressed all the time, kept maybe work longer hours than I need to, kept me buying more courses that I wouldn’t even go through because my own insecurities like, but if I have this magic knowledge, then I’ll be good, right? And that, like, that whole cycle that people get in of chasing shiny objects is just a lack of confidence. So, yeah, there’s, there’s a lot to go in here where you talk about, can you borrow confidence? Like, yeah, absolutely. I think there’s that that can be a little bit of a band aid. But, you know, if you get, like, I had certain mentors and coaches that knew the industry, and that would tell me, like, oh, you can charge that much for that. So be like, Oh, okay, I guess I’ll charge more now. Like, I guess I’ll charge 250 for a copy critique call instead of 100 great. And so you can get that, or even just that was another big thing I did. I would very often hire other copywriters to look at my work. So it’s like, Oh, okay. David robbold told me my copy is good. Okay, it’s good. Like, now I can feel better about it. So having these kind of, yeah, mentors, coaches, people you can hire, even if just a one off, that’s that’s super valuable. And I’d say the other piece where confidence really gets gets going and owned, is when you look at some of the deeper fears and beliefs and expectations people have that’s keeping them from having that confidence, and you start to look deeper at that and unravel it, that works a lot more effectively than a lot of what people are generally doing, of the like, well, just tell yourself this positive thing. Just remind yourself of the wins you do have over and over. Like, yes, that’s important, but if you haven’t done the deeper work of unraveling some of the deeper fears and beliefs, then it’s like planting seeds in a garden that’s already full of weeds. Like, it’s it’s not going to really take it’s not, it’s not going to take root. It’s you’ve got to, like, rip this other stuff out, and then that creates the space for those more, you know, owning your value, and those more confident beliefs, to really settle in and get embodied. And then then you feel that confidence and conviction more yourself.

Rob Marsh: Can you give us a. Couple of examples of those existing beliefs that really keep us from developing confidence?

Brian McCarthy: Sure. So one that I run into a bunch when I work with copywriters, like they have this idea of, I’m not a real quote, unquote, I’m not a real copywriter, right? Or I’m not or even just, I’m not a real writer. And then so I’m like, okay, cool. So what does a real copywriter mean? And we just go into their definition of it. So like this one client I worked with, she she had these kind of, like, personal issues going on, but basically meant she could only write for two hours a day. And she’s like, well, and she had a full time job for a well known, you know, company that hires a lot of copywriters. She’s like, well, if I can only write two hours a day, like, I’m not a real copywriter. So I’m imposter. I’m a joke. So then I’m like, Well, where did this idea come from that a real writer needs to work write six hours a day or whatever? Like, okay, oh, this is just a made up thing that you created. So she had this definition in her mind of what a real copywriter is. And we just looked at that and looked at the truth of it, and I just would ask a bunch of questions, and basically just start poking a bunch of holes at it, and then it fell apart. Then we found it like, well, what’s a new definition that feels more real and more true to you? And then she’s like, actually, I could be a real copywriter and still work two hours a day and then, and this is how the other parts of my day look, and, and was like, So, and does that feel true to you? Right? Not just a nice idea intellectual exercise, but getting to the point where, like you, honestly, like in your soul and bones, believe that, okay, cool. And, and then she could start to remind herself and operate from that place of like, well, yes, I’m a real copywriter, even if it’s not showing up in this way that I initially thought I had to show up. So that’s, that’s one idea is, how do you work through these beliefs and fears and everything? Look at your definitions. Look at your definitions of what you have, what a copywriter means, of what being successful on this project means that’s, that’s, there’s like several different ways to kind of attack this, and sometimes it takes multiple but that’s one, and it can be a very strong one for helping people get more confidence in in their role.

Rob Marsh: I like that approach. A few weeks ago, on another episode of this podcast, I interviewed my friend Emily Reagan, and she told a story. I had actually forgotten of this about this, but she told a story how we were at the copywriter club in real life event in San Diego, talking at the bar, and she mentioned that she she didn’t feel comfortable being a copywriter. She wasn’t a copywriter, and she wasn’t even sure why she was at the event, and it was crazy because she was writing copy for her clients, but because she had assumed the title, you know, whether, whether it was marketing assistant or administrative assistant or virtual assistant, or whatever, at the time, she she wasn’t giving herself permission to be a copywriter, and she reminded me of this on the episode. So if anybody wants to go back and listen to go back and listen to this example, it’s episode 441, I think. But she basically said to me, or I said to her, you have permission. You are a copywriter, right? I it was kind of that sword to the shoulder, you know, you are now a knight, or you are, you know. But the idea here is that you don’t need to wait for, you know, a senior copywriter to say you’re a good enough writer to be a copywriter anymore, or a manager or, you know, and when we work for ourselves anyway, that person’s not coming along. Even a lot of coaches aren’t going to take the time to say you are a copywriter. Give yourself permission. So anyway, kind of a long answer back to you, but it’s such a good example. You don’t need to wait for permission if you’re writing, especially if you’re writing copy for clients. You’re a copywriter, and you might as well own it and start getting better at it.

Brian McCarthy: And again, like, that’s, that’s a great example of, like, yeah. The almost like, the borrowed confidence that can can help, right? And like, Oh, cool. Rob told me that, and I’m good. I’m sure there’s a lot of people that have felt that way. And it’s Yeah, ultimately, you do want to get that source yourself, because, like, why, you know what, and what’s the definition of copywriter that works for you, and and why do you need somebody else to bequeath it onto you? Why, like, there’s a little bit of that, why it still can stay a little wobbly and like, it can give us confidence, but it’s still we still have those doubts, is because we’re still getting that confidence from outside of ourselves. We’re still giving the power of who we are and what we’re doing to somebody else. We need somebody else to validate it and to tell us we’re okay and tell us, like what we are, versus owning that and claiming that for ourselves. And yeah, part of that is like just knowing, like just getting really clear on what that is and what we’re showing up with and what we’re bringing. And valuing that, and yeah, and what if you what you want to call yourself based on that that feels true and right for you.

Rob Marsh: Okay, so that’s alignment, confidence. Then we have consistency. Consistency feels to me like it’s just a matter of daily practice, or we’re setting the flywheel to do the thing that we do over and over, is it more than that?

Brian McCarthy: So I’d say it’s more than that in there can be some blocks in that, right? So what’s keeping you from being consistent? Oh, there’s procrastination. Oh, why are you procrastinating? Oh, well, there’s some deeper fear of, you know, being seen as a fraud, or I’m gonna mess up and everyone’s gonna see I’m incompetent, or whatever it is, or, sometimes it’s misalignment, right? It goes back to the beginning of, why am I inconsistent? Because part of you knows this, ain’t it, and you’re trying to force yourself to do something that just like there’s, there’s just something a little off. So there can be pieces, either based on the first two things, or maybe something else that’s kind of in the way of that consistency. And then, yeah, there’s also just simpler things for, like, tactical steps for building that consistency. Like a lot of times, you know, people put big pressure on themselves of what that needs to be for them to be writing every day, or doing all this kind of outreach, or whatever it looks like to grow their business. And so just one helpful thing that is, you know, there’s always books on small habits and all that kind of stuff, and that’s just a super impactful way to get people going, of like, take the pressure off, do it for five minutes. It’s not even about getting the clients. It’s just about you building the habits of doing that. And when you start to take the pressure off, take the expectations you have for yourself off, then the consistency develops, and then it kind of starts to continue with itself. And these things that you are avoiding become more enjoyable, more automatic, and then you’re doing the things to grow your business and get yourself out there, deliver the copy for your clients, whatever it is.

Rob Marsh: Those are some pretty good tools. As far as thinking through those first couple of months of being in business and getting up and going. But a lot of us, we start to hit other bumps as well. The one that really stands out and really hits from the beginning right up, and pros still suffer with it, and that’s imposter complex or imposter syndrome, depending on how people like to define that. We’ve had a really, I’ve pointed people to a previous episode of the podcast where we’ve talked about that with Tanya Geisler, and I think it’s episode number 47 and definitely worth a listen. But let’s, let’s talk about that again. Because no matter, no matter how much you know about imposter complex, it still seems to pop its head up when we try something new, even sometimes when we’re just doing the thing that we do, but maybe it’s for a new client or a new product, whatever. So let’s, let’s talk imposter complex. So what can we do to overcome it?

Brian McCarthy: Sure, yeah, and that I went through that podcast, and it was awesome, and I think there’s a lot she shares that can really, like, shed a lot of light for people and help bring clarity. And the kind of crusade I’ve put on lately, because I learned this maybe a year ago, and then I started applying it. And really like seeing changes is that the the fundamental idea that imposter syndrome doesn’t go away, it’s just there forever. You just got to deal with it. It’s just not true. And then so once I learned that, and I started applying to my own life, and I started applying that with clients more, and I’ve seen the truth of that, like, it’s, I understand a lot of the common thing, it’s like, hey, it’s just fear. Like, yes, it’s based in fear. And that doesn’t mean, like I was afraid of dogs when I was three. Doesn’t mean I’m still afraid of dogs. You know, we can overcome these fears. We can dissolve them. And there was another point that just escaped my head. Oh, well, okay, yeah, basically, the idea that it can be, it’s there forever, just isn’t the truth. It doesn’t have to be the truth. And so the the ways that I look at imposter syndrome and help people work through it, it kind of, it’s the first is just looking at the the different fears and beliefs and expectations attached to it, which is similar to what I said before, about like the definitions we create, the definitions of what success means, how we think we need to be these expectations we have in our heads, all this stuff, and looking at that, challenging, that dismantling that, and doing that in a like it takes, it can often take a pretty deep and thorough exploration. That’s why people can think that they know like, Oh, I know I’m putting this outrageous. I know I’ve got this perfectionism thing, and it’s not actually true, but it still feels like I need to be this amazing copywriter with million dollar launches under my belt, or I suck. And I know that that’s ridiculous, and I know that that’s not true, but I still buy into it. It’s like, cool, okay. That just means you haven’t gone deep enough yet. There’s just still more stuff to explore. Or what’s hooking that in your system still? So that’s the first level. The second layer is some kind of core fear that can be kind of dissolved and broken free from. And the third layer is kind of what we touched on before as well, really looking at and owning your skills, knowledge and what you’re bringing to the table, your intention and how you’re showing up even and embodying that, not just knowing it intellectually, not just knowing, oh yeah, I’ve got skills that that are important, but actually, genuinely feeling that. And sometimes there’s internal, other internal blocks that keep us from actually feeling that, that we can get into and owning that. But when you’re when you have that piece too, and you’re able to get all three of those pieces, like imposter syndrome just goes away, because imposter syndrome is just it’s just a mental construct. It’s just this idea we have in our heads of how we think we need to be and how we think people need to react to us. And when you dig into that and let it fall apart, then you’re just showing up, however, like, with a certain intention and how you want to be. You’re just, hey, this is just me, and this is what I’m bringing and that’s it. And there’s, there’s no, like, there’s no room for impostor syndrome anymore. It’s, it just doesn’t, it doesn’t fit. It does. There’s, he’s left the room, it’s gone. And it might still come up a little bit, but it just means, Oh, there’s one of these areas. Is there’s something I’m not quite seeing, and then you explore that area, and then it can be gone again.

Rob Marsh: For me, it a lot of this is based on our genetic fears, right? Because fear of rejection is literally built into our genes. 10,000 years ago, if you were rejected by the tribe, you lost family, you lost food, you lost opportunities for mating, you probably died. And because of that, we have a very healthy sense of needing to belong and and be accepted by others, just built into our genes, and anytime that we’re stepping out of the comfort zone, doing something new, doing something that’s challenging, or something where we’re putting ourselves out, maybe it’s on social media where other people are seeing us and may reject us, triggers that Very natural discussion with our brain. It’s like, Hey, you’re you’re putting yourself in jeopardy here, of all of these things that used to be real jeopardy for us, and it’s not anymore. You know, making a mistake on social media is probably not going to affect your ability to eat, or the fact that your loved ones are going to give you a hug tonight. You know, as long as it’s not some egregious, awful thing that you’re saying, you’re probably not even going to get canceled, right? So just being aware and taking a step back to think through what am I feeling, feels like a really big step towards overcoming imposter syndrome, imposter complex. But there’s maybe there’s more to more other fears that I’m not even thinking about here as well.

Brian McCarthy: That’s that’s absolutely huge, that that really does come down to a lot of the core piece of it. There can be within that, within that fear of rejection, the fear of, uh, kind of being out of the tribe, there can be different kind of core fears. This is one of the things that I got from Rhonda Britton and her wheel of fear, which is all about finding, like, the specific core fear for you so and it’s not just about like, how people will react, and, you know, my my physical safety, and where I stand in the tribe and all that stuff. And that’s 100% a part of it. And then, yeah, there can be other aspects of it too, right? It’s like and what does this say about me, if I’m kicked out of the tribe, and who I am, and what am I gonna feel, and the shame that like we’re it’s not even just the, you know, survival being the social group. There’s also just certain feelings that we are so afraid to feel of this is proof I’m a loser. This is proof I’m in confident and then I’m going to feel so much shame and worthlessness, and I don’t want to feel that, so I’m going to avoid that feeling. And that’s where the imposter syndrome pops up to help us try to avoid ever facing that and feeling that. And so that’s why another piece of and why you don’t actually have to just live with imposter syndrome forever. Sometimes it can be linked to certain fears, certain pieces of shame, certain things that happened in our past, and if we just let ourselves feel that more fully, then it loses a lot of its power. So that can kind of be another doorway out. Sometimes it’s, you know, we built up this, this fear, and we’re just so afraid to feel it, and it might be tied to something that happened, and we let ourselves feel it, and it moves through us, and to go to that other, to your other point of like, well, this is just ingrained in evolutionary Okay, yeah, and there’s a lot of people that are afraid to post on social media. At first, then after five years, they’ve been doing it and they’re no longer afraid, right? Like sometimes imposter syndrome sticks around, and sometimes it doesn’t Okay, cool. So, so you’ve learned to have this feeling of safety even as you’re posting all this stuff now. Well, do you necessarily need five years of posting to build that sense of safety that you’re okay in who you are and yourself in the standing in society, regardless of the posting. Or are there ways to look at address some of those fears that are coming up so you can get in that state before without needing five years of posting every day to get there? And that’s what I believe and have seen, is can be true. If you go deeper into that fears initially, you can start to unravel them and evaporate them. And yeah, it might still take now, instead of needing five years of posting every day to finally feel confident with it, then now you’re there in a couple of weeks.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, so much of this really comes down to just do it anyway. And I know that’s really terrible mindset advice, because there are all these blocks and the head trash that we deal with, but ultimately, the reason that we go through so many of these exercises is to allow us to just do it anyway.

Brian McCarthy: There’s a lot of value in the doing it anyway, and it can also be a bigger problem than I think a lot of people realize, because if you’ve got all this fear of what’s everyone gonna think, and I’m gonna get kicked out of the tribe and all that stuff, and then you do the thing anyway, and then you get that negative backlash, man, it’s, it can be now, now the fear got even stronger, right? You raise the bar even higher, it can be even harder to do that. So, like, if you’re not in the pro like, and also, if it’s, if the if the action, so that’s, that’s one possible detriment. And why I’m more focused on, let’s get into and release the block in the first place. So doing the action comes more naturally and easily, and it’s not a thing you even have to force yourself to do. So that’s that’s one piece of it. The other part of forcing yourself to do it anyway is sometimes you forcing yourself might be coming from a place of fear, a place of scarcity, a place of I need to do this so I fit in. So if you’re doing your outreach, you’re posting on social media from a place of fear, then you’re again feeding that fear making it strong, versus if you’re posting from that place of like I believe in this copywriting thing I’m learning about, and I’m excited to share and talk about it, even if I’m not the world’s biggest expert, I’m just sharing a thing I think is cool, and I just want to see who else is think thinks it’s cool with me, such different energies sharing from those Two different places. And if you’re sharing from the place of kind of like forcing yourself, then you can just reinforce that need to work from that place, that fear, the I need to fit in, and then like to go on what we talked about the very beginning, when people build these businesses and realize they’re not satisfied, they’re burned out, they don’t even like what they’re doing all that much. A lot of it’s because they built it from this place of forcing themselves. And I just gotta, you know, do it and like coming from fear and scarcity and having to prove themselves. So there is absolutely a place, I think for Hey, you just got to do it anyway. You just got to watch some of that alignment. And where is that action coming from? Because there is a trap of it can kind of reinforce some of the things and just make them stronger and just keep them with us, if we’re not careful in how we do that makes sense.

Rob Marsh: I want to switch our conversation just a little bit. You mentioned burnout, and I think this is a really interesting phenomena. A lot of times, people get burned out, and they don’t really realize they’re burned out, you know, they’re just tired, or they’re tired of the work, or, you know, things that are happening in their business, things just feel like they’re slow, or you’re moving through molasses, however you want to describe that. And then there’s full on burnout, where you almost don’t want to get out of bed, because, you know, whatever it is that is burning you out is, is, you know, holding you down, holding you back. So I’d love to explore this a little bit, but maybe the first question is, how do I even know if, if burnout is happening before you know it gets to the point where, I mean, I just don’t even, I can’t even look at my business anymore. I can’t even face the inbox or my calendar or whatever you know is is just causing that dread.

Brian McCarthy: That’s that’s such a good point. And for how to look at spot burnouts happening. I mean, looking at your energy levels, your excitement, one indicator can be your whole life kind of feels like an obligation, like a to do list. And you make such a good point. Like, people don’t see it coming, in part because they’ve just been in it for so long, like it’s what they know. So actually, another, like, kind of random thing, I do improv comedy as well, and that’s also a thing that I like Teach and part of my coaching, but I also perform, and I just love it. And a lot of people will do an improv comedy class or a couple, and then they realize, like, Oh, this is what feeling good is. This is what fun is. This is what joy is. And then they start to realize how much they’ve been missing it in their everyday life. So one thing is just getting out of your kind of everyday stuff and doing other things that can help you start to get that contrast of, like, you know, there’s taking a trip or doing some improv class, or, like, another client, yeah, it took a took a two week vacation, then comes back is like, Oh, I like this helped me get perspective on how much I don’t like what I’m doing right Now, and like, what’s available and what feelings are available. So one is just getting out doing other stuff, and then seeing how you feel and seeing that contrasted to how you feel on an everyday basis can be one helpful thing, and it’s just good to do anyway, because novelty and new explorations and new stuff is good for us. That’s one piece. Another piece is like, if you just wake up and feel like you start going through the to do list in your head and it’s just a non stop slog of obligations, and you’re just going through it, that can be some warning bells. If you’re looking at your day and like, hey, when when did you feel lit up? When did you feel excited? When did you enjoy what you were doing? And if you’re having trouble finding answers to those questions, that could be another sign, if you’re feeling like a sense of purpose, because you can, you can not be enjoying it that much. But man, you know where you’re going, and you know that this is a strong like a necessary piece, and you’re okay with that, like that can be beautiful. So is there a sense of purpose as well for Where are you going longer term? And like, this kind of being the thing that’s going to get you to that next thing, whether you’re clear on what that next thing is or No, but you have a strong belief in it, and you still just have a sense that this is right, that would be another thing I’d check in on. So like, check in on your sense of enjoyment, check in on your sense of purpose. Check in on is everything feeling like an obligation, or is this feeling like expansive and like it’s what you want to be doing so and you know, how much of your day and your week, are these things? These are kind of like different indicators I’d be looking at and kind of ranking different areas, along with your sense of purpose to help see, are you potentially on a road for burnout?

Rob Marsh: Let’s say I’m there, burned out. Yeah, what? What do? And I know there are a lot of copywriters that hit this point, and I think the question becomes, should I quit and do something totally different, or is there a way to get the joy back, assuming that we want to get the joy back. What do you recommend?

Brian McCarthy: I work with a lot of a lot of my clients. It’s funny, they’ll come to me like being like, I need to quit and get a new job and doing something new. And I’d say maybe half of them end up doing that, and half of them end up like, loving their work again. So there’s, yeah, I would, I’d first look at the patterns I kind of create that created the burnout and some of the internal stuff that led to it. Because otherwise, if you just go jump another thing, cool. But if these patterns repeat now you’re just gonna find another job to get burned out by, and you’re gonna keep doing this cycle. So I would definitely look at, you know, what created the burnout first, and a lot of times, what happens with my clients, and what I find is it’s, it’s due to a lot of internal processes and to how they feel about themselves and their work and their relationships with people in their work. So one example, had a client who was super burned out, and we got and it’s like, oh, the you know, company needs more we need to hire more people. We need better systems, right? It’s what you’re if you’re burned out, you’re probably pointing the fingers at all the people and things, how it’s their fault and the revenue is not good enough, and all that stuff, and then we looked more internal and of like, what how she was viewing herself in the situation, and what we found for her, big time, people pleaser, big time I need to take care of everybody else, and my own needs are on the back burner, and I’ve. Got to, like, be I got to be super responsive. No one else needs to be super responsive. But I need to holding expectations for herself that she doesn’t even have for anybody else. Feeling like, yeah, she’s got to take care of everybody else, and she’s got to make everybody else happy all the time. And so, like, really, the people pleasing thing was like, okay, cool. Let’s work through that. And that was the big thing that allowed her to then start taking bits of time off. And then as she was taking more time off, she started to get more energized again. Another thing I’ll do with clients is just schedule, like 30 minutes a week, an hour a week, to just do nothing, just let themselves do nothing, because their whole day is obligation and doing things, and this sense of, I need to do everything for everyone else. So just giving them a little period of time to just not have that starts to get some internal energy going, of like, Oh, okay. Like, okay. I can feel myself again. I can start to ask myself, What do I want here? So that was almost a little tangent, but just a little like side trick tactic people who start to use, but the other things are like, yeah, the deeper stuff around people pleasing. That’s one example. Another people realize so much of their work is like, I’ve got to they’re actually trying to prove themselves to their peers, to people in their company. It’s this, this drive to prove themselves, show that they’re good enough, show that they’re worthy, is actually what’s causing the burnout. So that’s why again, cool man, get another job. If you’re still trying to prove yourself, you’re gonna end up burned out again. So let’s, let’s deal with that deeper issue so it can be other things as well, people pleasing, proving yourself. These are kind of different, different areas, but these are some of the internal things that create the burnout. And when you look at and dismantle them from the inside, it can be such a quick shift of, you know, within couple months, couple weeks even, it’s like, oh, the burnout is gone, and I enjoy my work again, right? Like, that’s literally what I see that all the time. It’s super cool. Sometimes it takes longer, and, you know, everyone’s got their own path. And sometimes it’s like people pleasing and proving yourself. Like, sometimes you might have a lot of these different things that need to kind of get worked through and sorted out and dismantled and let go of and but those are, those are some of the inner pieces. It’s, it’s really about looking at like, well, what’s been driving you is it obligation, trying to please people, what people think of you, all this kind of stuff, and then learn to be driven from a place of more authentic expression and confidence and expansiveness and inspiration instead.

There’s probably some variety here as well. You know, I imagine if I was hired to write the same blog post over and over and over and that, I mean, it happens, right? You get a client that needs you to write about their thing, and you’ve got to figure out the 18th, 19th, 20th, different way to write about their thing, that lack of variety can can cause it as well, and that might be an extreme example. But if all you’ve written is blog posts, maybe it’s time to change it up. And, you know, add some new products to to your writing, or if you have been writing in a niche, as we talked about earlier, and you just you’re seeing the same kind of thing over and over, maybe it’s time to switch that up a little bit and play around in another niche, or with a different kind of client, or with a different kind of copy or voice. Or, you know, there’s so many different ways that we can change up our businesses, but it’s really easy to get into that rut, and then two years, three years, where you’ve been doing the same old, same old, it just it doesn’t light you up the way that it used to. So I don’t know that you’ve got all of the answers on, how do we keep things fresh, but the and obviously, this is why we take vacations. This is, you know, why we try to have hobbies, although oftentimes a lot of copywriters, our hobby is copywriting. It is marketing, right? And reading the books about the stuff, or going to the events about the stuff. And so even your hobbies start to impede on your work and and your well being. So variety feels like a big missing piece here too.

Brian McCarthy: Yeah, that’s a great point. And yeah, sometimes that can just be a signal for like, hey, maybe it’s time to level up. Maybe it’s time to try something new. Add a different type of writing into your system. Start, you know, be step up to an editor. Do that, move into a different, higher level role. And I’ll also say there’s, there’s also ways to look at how to make that monotonous work more interesting for you. So I had a client who was in that exact situation, and he was writing these scripts, and he’s just like, I’ve been writing these scripts for years, like I’m so sick of it, and I get that was part of what made me leave copywriting. Like, I’m just like, Man, I just, I just don’t want to do it anymore. I used to be nerd out to it so much. Now I just didn’t care. But you can look at like, and this can be very for individuals of like, okay, but what could make it interesting for you? So me and this client started to explore that and play with these different ideas and what that might look like, and what he found he likes to be, like, intellectually challenged, like he wants it to be hard, so he would like make it hard on himself. I forget exactly what he did, but that was the point. Like he was like, I’m like, what would it look like for this to be more challenge? Like, he’d like give himself different challenges to try to do, to like, write it in this different way that he’d never do before, that he initially thought his clients wouldn’t like, but then it ended up being the most popular video they ever did, and it was just, like, totally out of left field. So he’s like, How can I actually make this more difficult and more challenging became like, the thing of inspiration for him. And there’s, you know, there’s a million other ways, and I’d say it’s probably different for each individual of like, well, how could you make that fun for you? I was also thinking of like, you know, again, fellow of improv comedy. So it could be like, Man, what if you just, like, took on a character and start writing from this character, just to see what they express, and how that can be, right? That could be like, a totally different, you know, just thing to explore, and that, like, again, that would be on a very kind of personal case by case basis. Of, like, what would it take to make this monotonous thing you’ve done a million times kind of fun and interesting and a little bit exciting, and, you know, let yourself explore that a little bit, instead of immediately. And, you know, maybe you know, maybe you find something, maybe you don’t, and then it’s time to move on to something else. But I think it’s definitely a question in an area worth exploring a bit before just being like, well, I guess I’ll just quit this and become an Uber driver or whatever.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, as you’re talking I’m thinking about musicians who have that one hit. So my, one of my favorite bands is the Barenaked Ladies. Almost 30 years ago, they have a hit. You know, if I had a million dollars, I bet you that they have probably played that song at least. You know, at all of their shows, the fans demand it. So 200 performances, 30 years, you know, we’re talking six, 7000 times. And and, of course, they’ve got to be sick of the song, like, when you when you’ve done something that many times. And so that band in particular, like, they changed it up a little bit. You know, there’s, they changed the verses, they changed the words and the live performances. But also, there’s, they’re not only doing that song right? They’ve written 20 albums since then. They’ve, you know, done all kinds of different explorations into different kinds of music and and so they’re keeping it fresh. So yeah, while they, the fans demand that they keep going back to that one thing, there’s all of this other stuff that’s happening around that. So there’s a copy writing lesson there. Maybe I’ll drop this into an email to my list as I’m talking it through. But you know, the way to keep it fresh isn’t necessarily quitting, and it’s not necessarily stopping doing the thing that is making you the money and that your clients are demanding, but it’s adding all of these other pieces that allow you to still explore and enjoy the thing that you love doing in the first place?

Brian McCarthy: Totally. Yeah, and it just, I thought of a quick like tool that might be helpful for people of if they’ve got, you know, okay, I’m gonna wake up tomorrow and write these emails that I’ve written 100 times if, if your goal isn’t write the email, but it’s, have fun writing the email, like, that’s the rule, if you’re not having fun, stop and then see what it takes, and see what that’s like and and have that be the goal, and see what comes from it, instead of, you know, just just slogging through and checking another box. Yeah? And I think that’s, that’s a great point of, like, they barricade ladies found a way to make it fun for them cool. Take that for yourself. How can you make this fun for yourself?

Rob Marsh: I like that, and I’m going to see if I can apply that to you know, how do I have fun while doing my taxes or keeping my books? The things that I really hate about my business? How can I make it fun? Probably pay somebody else to do it is, is the final answer?

Brian McCarthy: There’s certain things that you’re just gonna hit a wall, or it’s just like, Nah, man. It’s just, ain’t it? Yeah, that’s not.

Rob Marsh: I’ve never, I’m never gonna be the tax happy copywriter, I guess.

Brian McCarthy: So expectations there too, because it’s not about, like, how do I make taxes the most fun. It’s like, okay, well, you probably maybe that might be a bit high, but can you at least make it like, not suck, if that’s okay, how do I make this just like, Fine, you know, finds a big increase from dread and misery, you know?

Rob Marsh: This is going to be a weird question. But I’d love to see how you, you know, work through this. But if there was a copywriter mindset, what is that? What would that be?

Brian McCarthy: Oh, I like this. A copywriter mindset, to me, would be full ownership of what you’re doing, who you are, what you bring to the table, and a belief in yourself and your value that comes from you, it could be informed by mentors and people around you and you know and what you’ve seen and learned in the industry and everything, but ultimately, it’s it’s you taking ownership of that, and rather than being dependent on what other people believe a copywriter should be, what you’ve heard a copywriter should be, again, that can inform you or other other people’s standards of what, what, what needs to be done and delivered and all this stuff, again, that informs you, but ultimately, like you’re Creating this road and owning your value fully yourself. Does that make sense?

Rob Marsh: Yeah. Brian, there’s been really interesting discussion. If somebody wants to reach out to you or connect to you, follow you in the things that you’re doing and talking about and helping with, where should they

go?

Brian McCarthy: McCarthymindsetcoaching.com, I’ve also got, if you like the imposter syndrome talk, which copywriters tend to if you go McCarthy mindset coaching.com/imposter, I’ve got an e book that shows you how some of my clients overcame imposter syndrome, goes a bit deeper to some of the stuff that we talked about. So that could be immediately valuable. And then, yeah, I’ve also got, you know, loads of case studies and stuff on my website, a lot of which are copywriters and showing how helped, how they’ve worked through other areas, like procrastination, self doubt, all that stuff.

Rob Marsh: I’ll link to both of those in the show notes so people can find them pretty easily. And I appreciate your time. Brian, thanks. 

Brian McCarthy: You bet this is great.

Thanks Brian for walking through a bunch of the mindset issues that hold us back. I’ve heard marketing guru Perry Marshall call this stuff head trash and I really like that way of framing this stuff. It often is trash that is keeping us from moving forward, but it’s very real and needs to be dealt with so we can move on.

If you want to follow Brian, you can find him at McCarthyMindsetCoaching.com. And you can get his free ebook on imposter complex at mccarthymindsetcoaching.com/imposter. And of course you should check out that old episode I mentioned as we were just starting out with Tanya Geisler about imposter complex if you are struggling with confidence or that nagging voice inside your head that is telling you that you’re not ready, or that you’re a fake, or that you’re not qualified. There’s a lot of good stuff on that episode which I’ve linked to in the show notes.

If mindset is a struggle for you, I don’t want to miss this opportunity to mention several episodes of the podcast we’ve done’ with mindset coach Linda Perry. You can find those on our website or just google The Copywriter Club and Linda Perry and they should pop up… we’ve covered a lot of ground with Linda and those episodes are also worth adding to your list.

Early on in this interview I mentioned that you don’t need to wait for permission to be a copywriter. If you write copy for clients, then you are a copywriter. However, I don’t want to minimize the actual writing chops you need to have in order to be a copywriter. You have to be able to deliver results. You have to know how to persuade and sell. You need to be able to write legibly and clearly and help your clients solve real marketing problems. You can just write a blog post and call yourself a copywriter. I mean, you could, but you’re faking it. If that’s where you are in your journey, focus on picking up those skills. We have a bunch of resources in The Copywriter Club to help you do that… maybe the best place to start is The Copywriter Underground—you can learn more about what that includes at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu-2

And of course you should check out the How to Write Emotional Copy Masterclass that I mentioned at the top of the show… you can find out more about that game-changing workshop at thecopywriterclub.com/emotion

This isn’t the first time we’ve talked about LinkedIn. But in this episode, we cover specific recommendations for the content you should create and post as well as a proven process for connecting with clients. My guest is content writer Divya Agrawal and what she shared could change your approach to LinkedIn for the better. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

Divya’s LinkedIn

Rob Marsh: If you’ve got enough clients or you’re not willing to put yourself out there to find the clients you need, well, you can probably skip this episode. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

Like last week, we’re revisiting a recurring topic on the show this week, but unlike last week, the recurring topics isn’t persuasion or psychology. This week we’re talking about the biggest challenge facing almost all copywriters and that’s finding clients.

Even established copywriters will struggle with this from time to time. One of the trusims of business is that if you don’t have clients willing to pay you for the work you do, it doesn’t matter how good your website is, it doesn’t matter how good a writer you are, it doesn’t matter that you can solve your client’s problems better than anyone else… without the client, you don’t have a business.

My guest this week is Divya Agrawal, a SaaS and Tech copywriter who has deep experience finding clients on LinkedIn. 

Divya started her career as a programmer but quickly figured out she was on the wrong job track, so she switched to writing. The lessons she shares from her experience launching this new business will help any copywriter or content writer who is looking for clients to work with. Specifically, Divya used LinkedIn to create connections with prospects. Her success posting content and making comments on other posts is a model for other writers who want to do the same… and LinkedIn is where a significant number of the people who hire copywriters hangout and connect. If your clients are there, you need to be there too.

In this interview, Divya shares the questions she uses to vet her prospects before they become clients, and she outlines exactly how you can connect with clients on LinkedIn yourself. This is informaiton she charges her coaching clients for, but she’s sharing much of it today for free.

Before we jump into our interview, a little while ago I recorded a masterclass to show copywriters, content writers and other marketers how to write “emotional” copy. Everyone says emotions sell, but how do you actually write emotional copy? I walk through more than a dozen examples in this masterclass and give you a proven process for figuring out the right emotions to focus on as you write… and how they change as you make your pitch. The masterclass includes several bonuses on storytelling, using A.I. to find dominant and transformational emotions, and much more. You can get this masterclass at thecopywriterclub.com/emotion

And now, my interview with Divya Agrawal.

Divya, welcome to the podcast. I’m excited to hear your story and to talk about how you’re finding clients, but tell us, how did you become a freelance copywriter for Tech.

Divya Agrawal: Thank you so much for having me on the podcast, Rob, I highly appreciate this chance to talk to you. I have been a big fan of your podcast, so it’s really cool that I get to sit here and share what I know.

Yeah, I became a freelance tech writer back in 2017 end of 2017

after a year long stint at a IT company as a software engineer, I was a Salesforce developer for a year, and that didn’t work out. I did not like the corporate environment. I did not like the work I was doing. So then I was like, I need to do something else. I had always been a writer. So I was one of those kids in school who is asked to write other kids speeches. So I was the introvert writing speeches for my more extroverted friends, who would get on stages and deliver those speeches. I was participating in essay competitions, all of those things. 

So I also had a lot of passion for technology. I was always learning about new technologies. I was good at development, if I do say so myself. So when I decided to shift gears, I was like, let me try and combine two of my passions, writing and technology, and that’s how I got into it. I had a little bit of an internship experience at a local IT company writing their social media content. So I when I decided to do this full time, I reached out to the HR. I was like, This is what I’m doing full time now. Do you have contacts for me? And he put me in touch with a bunch of companies, and that’s how I got my first client.

Rob Marsh: So as you were reaching back to the school and they gave you these contacts, did he make warm introductions, or did you have to reach out to them directly, like how. Did that all come together?

Divya Agrawal: Yes. So when I reached out to the HR at the company that I had interned with, I just had to tell him that, you know, this is what I’m doing full time, and he knew that I was good at writing. I understood technology and how it worked. So he confidently put me in touch with other people, and I actually didn’t have to do a lot of convincing. It was actually really easy to get my first client. Of course, I have experienced other struggles in business later, but getting my first few clients was not a struggle.

Rob Marsh: So you have a background in programming and technology, obviously, that gives you some advantage in writing for tech. But as a writer, do you think that copywriters need to know you know tech, to write for tech or SAT you know they need to have maybe done some development work in order to write for SaaS companies? Or how does that skill set benefit you or hold copywriters back?

Divya Agrawal: I would say, if you are working for SAS, you do not need a lot of development experience. But for the for the kind of clients that I work with, they are deeply into technology, and I, even I with my background, have to spend some time understanding what exactly they do. So let’s say I worked with a an AI ops client. So then I had to understand what aiops does. I had to understand how IT operations work in IT companies and all of those areas. I had to deeply read and understand about them before I began working with the client, my clients also help me with the right materials, like they have internal marketing materials that I study and prepare myself with. But if you are doing SaaS or less complicated technology writing, I don’t think it’s important to have a degree in computer science, because as writers, I believe we can write about anything, because the skill lies in asking the right questions and not in knowing all the answers. So I don’t think that a degree is important. And I have proof about this because I worked as a writer for a age for an agency in the US that works with law firms, and I didn’t know anything about any laws, even in India, let alone the US, but I was able to work with them because I was able to ask the right questions.

Rob Marsh: And what are some of those questions, and I should maybe just jump in. I totally agree with you. I think you know, when we’re writing about things, obviously it helps to understand how a mechanism works or how a program functions, but the real thing that we’re selling is the benefit for the client or the end user. And so as long as you understand how that, you know, this transformation happens this result they get, obviously, we could write about it, but you know, in in thinking about this of what are those questions that you’re asking to get to that end result?

Divya Agrawal: First of all, I asked about the buyer group that we are targeting for a specific piece of content in B to B, there are buyer groups. And then I try to understand if there’s a specific buyer persona that the post or the white paper is aimed at, what are their specific challenges? What is the status quo? What are they struggling with right now that my client is trying to solve with their product, and then I try to understand what is their competitive positioning. So who are the other competitors in the market? A lot of the times, status quo is the competition. So how things are done in legacy companies with legacy IT systems is generally the competition. So then I try to understand whether if that’s the case, or if there are other players in competition, and how my client’s product is different from those competitors, and how they are trying to position and what is the narrative that they are bringing to to make the buyer understand that this is the status quo. This is what you’re losing out on right now, and here’s what how we can shift it, here’s how we can improve it, and here’s how the competitors are doing, but here’s why that’s a weaker solution, and here’s why ours is stronger. So those are the things that go into it. And then, yeah, and then finally, bringing the products, features, benefits, into the limelight as and when the piece demands it.

Rob Marsh: That makes sense. Okay, so let’s go back to your story. You were launching this writing business, you reached out to get these referrals. But obviously, referrals don’t last forever. You’ve got to continue to grow your business. So what was the next step for you as you were looking for additional clients?

Divya Agrawal: Yeah, early on, I really heavily relied on LinkedIn. LinkedIn was still very in its early stages. This is 2018 2019 and there were a handful of creators who were doing videos on LinkedIn. And I started doing videos, you know, I was in that young person. I was with that young person energy in my early 20s. So I was experimenting with everything, and then somehow I started getting a lot of leads from LinkedIn. From all this experimentation, I was posting a lot. I was posting videos. I was doing carousels, everything. And then other writers started asking me how I was being so active on LinkedIn, being so visible, growing my business, and that’s when I started the second arm of my business, which is coaching freelance writers and copywriters on the lead generation strategies.

Rob Marsh: So when we were talking a while ago, I mentioned we’ve talked a lot about LinkedIn on the podcast. In fact, some listeners may see that, you know, oh no, here’s another episode about LinkedIn. And, you know, I even said to you, hey, we’ve covered a lot of this stuff. So what can we talk about that might add some additional ideas for copywriters and content writers, and hopefully, like, we can really dive into your process and and go, you know, so granular that people walk away from this episode knowing exactly how to succeed. But as you started out, you’re posting a lot of video content. Is that still like the stuff that’s working today? How has, how have things changed since 2018 2019 to where we are here in 2025…

Divya Agrawal: Oh, a lot actually. LinkedIn used to be so much less crowded and noisy. Back then, like I said, only a handful of creators were doing content at all on LinkedIn. Today, there are a lot of a lot more professionals creating content on LinkedIn from all kinds of careers, which is really great to see. However, specifically with video, I don’t think that video is that big on LinkedIn right now, because I see it from the perspective of, okay, when I log into LinkedIn, am I watching videos? And I’m not. I scroll past them. Um, usually I feel like LinkedIn is a very text heavy platform, and I expect to read a lot when I go on LinkedIn, but when I’m in, when I’m on Instagram, I expect to see a lot of videos. So yeah, I don’t think videos are big on LinkedIn right now.

Rob Marsh: Okay, so what is working right now?

Divya Agrawal: What I believe works for freelance writers and copywriters is creating lead generating LinkedIn posts. And what I call lead generating LinkedIn posts are posts that are written from the perspective of your ideal clients you disregard all the distraction and the noise on LinkedIn, and you focus on what your ideal clients need to know about you before they can hire you. So how can you build that know, like and trust factor with them? And then you just put the blinders on and create your own content, and that’s how I have been finding leads on LinkedIn, growing my business, etc.

Rob Marsh: So can we talk about some specific examples of how you’re doing that and what you’re posting, the kinds of problems that you’re talking about, or the ideas that you’re sharing that really pull in these potential clients?

Divya Agrawal: Sure. So how I see it? I see LinkedIn. I see my services, specific services that I offer as LinkedIn pillars. Content, pillars, so let’s say thought leadership, content, white papers, case studies, interview led blog posts. So all of these are specific content pillars. And then for each of these services, what do your ideal clients want to know? So they want to know, what is your process of creating content? What are some of the testimonials from you having done the same work for other clients. How do you approach these deliverables, and what do your collaborations with clients look like? How far do you invest in your projects? So are you just doing writing? You get a brief and you write and you’re done, or are you also doing strategy work? How do you ensure that each piece. Of content fits into a bigger strategy and fits into the bigger picture and helps the clients. Helps your clients achieve their goals. How you maintain client relationships and partake in your clients success? How much do you charge? What are the timelines you work with? Whether you prefer long term engagements or one off projects, and then, do you conduct interviews? How do you conduct interviews? What’s your process there? How you handle revisions and feedback? All of those things are what your ideal clients are interested in knowing about your business. And that’s what I focus on the most in my own LinkedIn content, and this is what I teach freelance writers to also do. Of course, there are other kinds of content, like introducing yourself on LinkedIn every once in a while, sharing some behind the scenes from your business, or maybe sharing your pets pictures, your kids pictures, things like that.

Rob Marsh: Okay, and this is probably obvious, but I just want to be crystal clear so that nobody misunderstands. You just gave us this long list of things to be writing about on LinkedIn, but you’re not suggesting we put all of that into one or two posts. These are individual ideas for posts. So one day I might write about revision process, my revision process, and the next day I might write about, you know, how much I charge, or why I charge the way I do, and then the next day, or it’s probably not even every day, you know, three days later, or whatever I write about. So you’ve just given us, it was probably about 2425 things that could easily fill a content calendar for a month or two, and then almost just start over and sort of talk about those same topics again in a slightly different way.

Divya Agrawal: Yes, and if you match each service to each of those ideas, you probably have like three months of content right there which speaks to your ideal clients, which talks about how you specifically deliver service, how you specifically work with clients, so it’s not generic content. It really brings out your expertise, your experience, why you do things the way you do them, even how you learned to evolve your processes anytime you’re making a small change in how you deliver a service or how you set up your back end processes, you can create a post about it.

Rob Marsh: And would you say that these these post ideas are LinkedIn specific, because they’re so based around your business, or could you take some of these and also use them, say on Instagram or Tiktok or some of the other platforms.

Divya Agrawal: For sure, all of these ideas can be content ideas for other platforms, if you are using other channels for your business’s marketing.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I suppose if you’re gonna take those ideas though, you obviously you’re gonna customize them for that channel. So you mentioned earlier Instagram you expect to see videos. So you wouldn’t be posting copy or text on Instagram. You’d probably want to make a video talking about the same kind of a thing as you go through. But I also, I like that you break it up by product and making those your content pillars. So, you know, if I write sales pages, you know, I’ve got 25 things that I can write about sales pages. But I also happen to write case studies, and so I’ve got those 25 things about case studies, and each of those pillars may attract a slightly different client into my business.

Divya Agrawal: Yes, exactly. And talking about specific services, you could also match that up with multiple niches. So if you are working in tech, and let’s say you also do healthcare writing, then you can create all sorts of combinations there and talk about things repeatedly, which is completely fine. Sometimes writers are like, you know, my content is not unique. Other writers are also talking about the same things, but that is a common objection when you think about things from the perspective of your peers, because you are connected with probably hundreds of writers on LinkedIn, but your ideal clients are not connected to hundreds of writers. They are only they may only be connected with a few or more, probably you might be the only writer in their network, so they are not seeing this content over and over again. But so again, it’s like you center your ideal prospects when you think about content and you forget all of the other distractions.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think that’s actually a really important point that I think point that I think people forget. We see so much marketing and so many things from, like you said, peers, other copywriters, other designers, programmers, you know, all of these people who are doing the same things that we do as freelancers, but our our audiences don’t always, you know, there. Not necessarily in the marketing space, right? So if I write for roofing companies, I’m not sure that there’s a lot of roofers on LinkedIn, but let’s assume that there are. They’re not seeing 100 posts from other copywriters. They’re seeing mostly people in the construction industry or people that they’re connected with. So I think that that’s a really good point. But let’s also talk about, how do we make our content stand out? Because one of the things that’s happened with LinkedIn is that there is so much sameness Now, part of it is that we see it over and over and so, you know, maybe the problem’s not quite as bad for our clients as it is for us, but I have a feeling that there are clients who are seeing, you know, the same kinds of posts, the same and especially with AI, you know, literally, the same kinds of headlines, the same ideas, over and over. And so how do you make content stand out? And how are the people that you’re working with on LinkedIn doing that as well?

Divya Agrawal: One way to make your content stand out is to incorporate stories. So things that are happening in your business every day. You went on a discovery call, it went well, you talk about that. You went on a discovery call, it didn’t go well. You talk about that. You recently completed a project. You provide some context into how you made it successful, whether there was a challenge that you had to overcome, whether it went smoothly, and what are the processes that you put in place to make it so. So all of these stories make your content unique, because a lot less people on LinkedIn are sharing real business stories and showing, okay, this is what’s up in my business. A lot more are out there talking about, here’s how to do things in your business, or a lot more like how to achieve something, how I achieved something. But a lot less content on LinkedIn is about actually sharing behind the scenes of your business. So that’s one way that your content can stand out.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, stories are big, and obviously stories tend to be personal, and so you know, the things that have happened to me haven’t happened to you, so that that definitely helps. So what kinds of success have you seen with LinkedIn? So you know, you’ve been posting this stuff, but how did this impact your business

in a big way?

Divya Agrawal: I would say last year alone, I received 115 plus leads from LinkedIn for both my short term and long term projects, and I have had all kinds of opportunities come in. One was a book feature, so one of my freelance writer friends wrote a book, and I got to be one of the interview features in the book. I have had guest contribution opportunities to contribute guest articles on some really great websites. There have been podcast appearances and so, yeah, all kinds of opportunities, actually.

Rob Marsh: And how often are you posting?

Divya Agrawal: Right now, I’m posting five to six times a week.

Rob Marsh: Okay, so literally, every day you post, yes, nine leads a month. You know, that’s roughly 115 leads a year. Is pretty good. Obviously, they’re not all for tech projects or tech writing projects. But how do you then go from somebody who reaches out and says, hey, I’m interested. You know, what does the conversation look like so that you can actually close those clients?

Divya Agrawal: Yes, my first priority is to qualify the lead. So I have a pretty tight system that I use to qualify whether or not a client is going to be good for me. And how I do it is, I qualify the company, the person and the project. So there has to be a fit in all three of those areas for someone to be an ideal client. First of all, I will look at their like, what company they are associated with, what is the project they are talking about. I will get on a discovery call, and then I’ll find out more details. And as I go, I will keep checking these boxes that I have, and yeah, at the end of it, hopefully, if they’re a good fit, we get to work together.

Rob Marsh: So what are those boxes that you’re checking? What like? How do you know that a company is a fit, a person’s a fit, and a project is a fit?

Divya Agrawal: Yeah. So I have this series of questions, and I think everyone should make their own series of questions. So for example, to qualify the company, I am asking how much foundational work this client already has. So if there are startup, they could be starting marketing from scratch. Much if they’re a more established company, they might already have their value proposition, positioning different audience segments that they target. They might know why their customers buy, how their product differs from the competition, et cetera. Then what is their budget for content marketing? How much revenue they are making annually than their payment terms. So are they okay with upfront payment? Do they have a 30 or 45 day payment policy? Do they need me to sign a non compete clause? Do they want me to sign an NDA and not reveal that I’m working with them how big of a company it is, so the biggest companies usually have a lot of bureaucracy. On the other hand, startups often come with a lot of chaos and change because they’re figuring everything out. So I like to be somewhere in the middle of those two and then what is the project? So for the project, are they providing clear expectations for what they are looking for? Will they provide me the topic to write the content, if it’s a series of blog posts, or do they want me to help with the editorial calendar? Do they provide me additional background material, or is it my job to do an in depth research? Are there interviews involved? Is there any kind of SEO work involved? Is there designing work involved? And then I also measure a project by Is it like a next level project for me, or is it more of the same? So depending on your experience level, you might prioritize more of the same projects, or you might want to reach out of your comfort zone and go for next level projects. And then what are the timelines that the client has set up? And yeah, if it’s an ongoing project or a one off project, and then people. So there are a lot of red flags that I now avoid, having worked with some problematic people in the past. So some of those red flags is um, if they are engaging in some fear mongering, you know, like AI is already taking over, there’s less work to go around. Are you sure you’re um ready to let this project go? If they are using that sort of language to negotiate, um, negotiate me on my price. Then, is, is the person looking for help with a single project or hoping to build a long term relationship with you that is a big green flag for me, because I like to work with clients over a long period of time. Then, are they late for calls? Are they constantly canceling calls on the last minute? So yeah, and over the years, as I’ve worked with people, I have created this huge list of things that I look out for.

Rob Marsh: It’s a good list, and obviously we’re all looking for those red flags. So having those of the leads that you get then, and you put them through this discovery call process, how many of them do you close on a monthly basis? And what does a typical project look

like?

Divya Agrawal: I don’t have that statistic for you right now, because it’s really hard to like measure. I do have an Excel sheet where I capture all the leads, but I just don’t do a good job of finding out what that percentage is. But yeah, this is my process of closing them. I like to sign contracts. I like if they have a policy of upfront payment, or if I suggested and they are ready to do that.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, and you mentioned you like to work long term. So you know, usually you’re signing a retainer of some kind. What does that work look like on a month to month basis? Is it a couple of blog posts? Are you working on a variety of different projects? What does that typical retainer agreement look like?

Divya Agrawal: Yes, sometimes it’s a series of blog posts month after month, and other times it has also been white papers, it has been case studies. So I had this client who I was writing two blog posts and a white paper for every month, there was this other client who I was refreshing case studies for every month. So those two were like long term, recurring work.

Rob Marsh: That makes sense. So going back to LinkedIn, let’s say that I have not been posting on LinkedIn, or maybe I posted a four. Few times last year, but I haven’t posted in several months. The idea of posting five or six times a week, even though you’ve given me this list of all of these things that I could write about, you know, 25 ish items, you know, across my different content pillars, it still feels like too much, really too much to get started. So what is the bare minimum that I would need to do, or another copywriter would need to do in order to start seeing traction.

Divya Agrawal: Yeah, there are a few things if you don’t want to directly go into publishing your own content, you can start by engaging with other people’s content. You probably follow a lot of freelance writers. You probably follow a lot of your ideal prospects, so start engaging with their content. Leave really thoughtful comments under their posts, and really try to make a conversation. And don’t just do it for the sake of getting visibility, but really see how you can add to the conversation. Bring a different perspective. Again, share a story. All of the things that you can talk about in your own content can also be stuff that you can post under someone else’s content. So comments are content too, and that will help you warm up your posting muscle a little bit, and then once you’re more comfortable being visible on LinkedIn, and you have sort of a network of people that you’ve engaged with, you’ll feel more comfortable posting on LinkedIn, because then those people might engage with your content also.

Rob Marsh: And as I start out is once a week enough, or do I really need to be posting more than that in order to, you know, to grow my presence there,

Divya Agrawal: I would say whatever you can start with is the ideal cadence for you. So if you all you can do is once per week, then start with that. And as you go, you can ramp it up. You can then do twice per week. There’s this law. I don’t know what it’s called, but it works. When you want to start anything new, it goes like, first you just do it, then you do more of it, then you do it better, and then you add something new to it. So that’s the law that goes with everything. So first of all, just do it, then do more of it, then you do it better. So you look at okay, how can I make my posts better? How can I fix the hook a little bit so that people are intrigued about my content? How can I add some storytelling into it, make it sound better, flow better, and then you add something new. So then maybe you start experimenting with other formats on LinkedIn, like carousels or add images, or maybe videos.

Rob Marsh: Okay, that, yeah, that definitely makes sense. So as I’m again, thinking about this process of how we do it in your posts. Do you specifically have a call to action in any of them where you say, Hey, I have an opening this week, or I’m taking on new clients, or if you want help with web copy or blog posts or whatever, do you ask for work? Or do you let people figure that out on their own.

Divya Agrawal: Yes, I do add calls to action to some of my posts, but that’s like a call to action that’s there after they have consumed my entire post. So the entire post is not about me asking for work. It’s about maybe sharing a sample that I did for another client, and then adding some context around the project, like this is how I executed this, et cetera. And then at the end, I might say, I’m open to new projects. If you are looking for something similar, DM me.

Rob Marsh: So it’s kind of a soft sell, but you’re making the invitation, yes. Okay, so obviously, this has helped you grow your business, and you’ve done it well enough that you’ve brought in other copywriters, content writers who want help from you to do this. How are other copywriters succeeding as well? Obviously, they’re following your process, but can you share, just like some examples of some of the things that they’re doing and the success that they’ve seen.

Divya Agrawal: Yeah, I was on a catch up call with a bunch of freelance writers, and one of them has taken one of my content workshops, and she was sharing that a recent client that she converted came in as a lead from a post that she created after, like, learning from my workshop. So yeah, it and even, like, sometimes writers are not very open to sharing that they landed a lead or got a client like we, we all forget. We learn from people, and then we implement their systems. We move on. But when I see them posting on LinkedIn consistently, I just feel very happy that they have started showing up on LinkedIn and being visible. And yeah, I think I’m the cheerleader. I’m always liking posts from people in my network.

Rob Marsh: So yeah, again, Yeah, makes sense. So earlier on, as you were telling us your story of how you got started, you mentioned that you had several struggles as your business has grown. Tell us about some of those. You know, what have the what have been the hard things about growing your business and the things that you’ve struggled with as you’ve started to find success?

Divya Agrawal: Yeah, I think one of my biggest struggles has been discipline. So because this is a one person business, and if we are not disciplined, there’s literally no one to tell us to do things or not do things, so that has been one of my biggest challenges. I am so much better at it now, but I do remember a time where I had gotten a little bit lax with my marketing, and then two of my biggest clients that made up like 80% of my income, suddenly they stopped working with me in the same month, and this was during the pandemic too. So then I had to ramp up my efforts on marketing, and it takes a lot of time to build the same momentum, as opposed to if you are always consistently marketing your business. So and other little things also, like discipline shows up in all aspects of business. So, yeah, I feel like being my own boss. I kind of felt like I could get away with things, but I have discovered that that’s not true. You have to stick to processes. You have to do things consistently in your business that keep it running and keep it at a healthy growth trajectory.

Rob Marsh: How much time are you spending creating content for the marketing side of your business versus the content for your clients?

Divya Agrawal: I would say a couple of hours. So I when I sit for a couple of hours on a day, I’m able to create content for two to three weeks. So, yeah, okay.

Rob Marsh: So what does that process look like? Because I have a feeling somebody might hear you say two hours, and that’s 15 ish posts, 15 to 18 posts. That seems like, I mean, discipline doesn’t seem like a problem at that point, because clearly you are putting out a lot of content. And so what does that writing process look like so that you can get that much

stuff done?

Divya Agrawal: Yeah, I would also say that I’ve been doing this for a long time, like ever since I started posting on LinkedIn in 2018 just one or two breaks that I’ve taken. Besides those, I have been consistently posting content, so there’s a lot of practice that I’ve had, but what my process looks like is that I will so I continually document what’s happening in my business. First of all, I’m always taking notes on my phone, and this is something that I also think writers have a mental block around. We think that we have to sit in a chair and spin up ideas about content from thin air, or we are like, we feel like we’re always short of ideas and we are thinking about ideas, whereas what I teach is that you need to notice content in your everyday life, in your everyday business. So anytime something interesting happens in my business, anytime I notice myself doing something differently or doing anything interesting, I make a note of it. So anytime I sign a new client, anytime a prospect says something interesting in a conversation, all of those are content ideas. Anytime you finish a project, anytime you start a project, there are things that you do in your business every day that you might think are pretty normal and regular, and you feel like everyone must do it, but we operate in very different ways as business owners, and something as regular as like how you set up your desk can be idea for content, because we all do things differently, and that can become like a point of conversation on LinkedIn. So first of all, noticing things and taking notes all week long, and then at the end of the week, probably on a Sunday evening, when I’m well rested, but also thinking about work again, I sit down for a couple of hours and I look at those notes on my phone and I flesh out those posts. So that’s also why it takes me a. A less amount of time to quickly create content. And the other thing that I do is something that I shared earlier, which is focus on one service at a time, and think about how I deliver that service, what my process looks like. I might zero in on one part of that service. So let’s say, if I want to talk about writing blog posts, I might focus on how to create unique blog post introductions, how to conclude your blog posts, or, like, how to create infographics for a blog post article. So zeroing in on a particular part of the service, sharing samples on LinkedIn about that service. All of these, yeah, give me your view.

Rob Marsh: Do you repost content or reuse content that you wrote, say, last year and you and if you do, how do you change it up?

Divya Agrawal: Oh, yeah, all the time I actually teach this, and I highly encourage people to repost their content. If it’s been a couple of months and you want to talk about the same service again, sometimes I just shamelessly repost it. No changes made nothing. Some other times I do, like, if I posted something last year, I might notice that I have changed my process a little bit, or I’ve added something to it, which is when I will update the post. If I shared a sample or a testimonial, I might update that to a more recent sample or testimonial from a client.

Rob Marsh: Are you using AI as part of this process at all?

Divya Agrawal: I am not.

Rob Marsh: Are you using AI in your business at all, or it’s all your brain?

Divya Agrawal: In my business? Yes, in my business, I use it to Oh, actually, in my content also, I sometimes use AI. I will tell you how. So if I want to focus on a specific service and I feel like I’m out of ideas, I will simply tell AI to give me, like, a broad range of ideas. I will just ask it a question related to that service, like, what are some of the challenges with blog post writing today, or what are the trends in blog post writing, but those will not become my content. What AI throws at me will not become my content. That will just give me things to think about, so then I can respond to something that it’s saying, instead of just again sitting there and thinking of ideas and in writing for my clients, yeah, again, I use AI to think widely about things. So I will search a topic, and then it throws a bunch of stuff at me, and then I can decide if this thing needs to be part of the narrative that I’m building for this article, or if this deserves a place, if this needs to be researched more, which is when I’ll more deeply research it and then include it in the piece.

Rob Marsh: So going all the way back to when we started talking, you were a computer scientist, a programmer, but you also were a writer on the side. How did you sharpen your copywriting skills, or learn how to be a copywriter coming from the background that you came from. What are some of the things that you’ve done to continue learning?

Divya Agrawal: I would say I read a lot, so I have learned from reading and observing a lot. I follow a lot of freelance writers and copywriters who do really great work. And when they post something that they have worked on, I try to see what are the different elements. I try to pick it apart essentially, and really focus on okay. They have structured this article a certain way. They have include, included these perspectives, or this is how they are building the narrative. They’ve included a lot of examples from different sources. So, yeah, I think I have learned by reading widely.

Rob Marsh: And I suppose, I mean, that’s probably how I learned the most as well. You know, do you have a favorite author or book or reference that you’ve gone to?

Divya Agrawal: Oh, no, I have hundreds. I could not name one, but yeah, there are a lot of writers out there who just do phenomenal work, and I’m always reading what they’re posting.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I agree. Divya, this has been helpful as I think about, you know, I don’t post on LinkedIn a lot. I have some guilt around that, where I feel like I should probably be there, posting, talking about some of the stuff that we talk about on the podcast, a lot the things that, you know, I teach on in the copywriter underground, and the workshops that I do there, and even. The clients that I you know, happen to be working with. So this has given me a lot of things to think about. Hopefully it’s been helpful for other copywriters who maybe struggle with the same kind of thing. You know, how do I show up in this place where there are so many clients? But I appreciate your approach to this and your advice to us. It’s been really helpful if people want to reach out to you or follow you, where should they go?

Divya Agrawal: Yes, please connect with me on LinkedIn. That’s the best place.

Rob Marsh: Thanks. Thanks for your time,

Divya Agrawal: Divya, thank you, Rob.

Rob Marsh: Thanks Divya for laying out the process for connecting with potential clients on LinkedIn. If you’re wondering what to share, go back and listen to the list of 25 things that you can write about and then do it. Use those prompts to create content for your business.

Of course, if you don’t love LinkedIn, much of the advice—and those 25 topic ideas that Divya shared also work on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube and anywhere else you are showing up with content for your prospects.

And if you don’t want to be in any of those places… my question for you is where are you showing up? Where are you connecting with potential clients? Because no matter how good we are as writers, there is no line of prospects out there just waiting to magically discover you. If they can’t see you somewhere, you might as well not exist. 

If you want to run a service business… and copywriting is a service business… you have to do something. If you’re not going to post on social media, you need to go to events, or work your network, or respond to posts on job boards, or spend money on ads, or blog and guest blog for others in your niche, or post videos, guest on podcasts or something… you have to be out there. What Divya shared in this episode will help you do that.

Don’t forget to check out the How to Write Emotional Copy Masterclass at thecopywriterclub.com/emotion

In this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, we’re talking about how con men, pick-up artists, magicians and yes, copywriters, use psychology and persuasion to get readers to pay attention and change their behavior. My guest is copywriter John Bejakovic who has just published a new book on the topic. If you want to be a better writer, click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

The 10 Commandments Book

Rob Marsh: Looking for non-obvious ways to be more persuasive? Today we’re talking about the ten commandments of con men, pick up artists, comedians and others. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve interviewed a couple of guests about psychology and persuasion… on episode 447 I talked with Katelyn Bourgoin and on episode 448, I spoke with Sarah Levinger. In both of those interviews we talked about using psychology and principles from behavioral economics and neuroscience. Today’s episode covers similar ground in a very different way.

My guest is copywriter John Bejakovic. John runs one of the best daily email lists out there, sharing his throughts on marketing, sales, and persuasion. He recently published a book about these topics called, The 10 Commandments of Con Men, Pick Up Artists, Magicians, Door-to-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Professional Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand Up Comedians, and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters. It’s a long title for a short book that covers a lot of ground. I wanted to talk to John about the ideas in his book, but more than that, I wanted to discuss the ethics of using these kinds of tactics to get our readers and prospects to take action. 

If you want to be a better writer or a more effective communicator or simply want to help your children or customers or friends use information to make better decisions, I think you’ll like this episode.

These topics really appeal to me. Not just as a writer or marketer so I can use these techniques myself, but also as a consumer. You can’t avoid the con men who use these tactics unless you understand the tactics and how they use them. Being smart is not enough to avoid responding positively to the ideas we talk about on this episode.

Before we jump into our interview, a little while ago I recorded a masterclass to show copywriters, content writers and other marketers how to write “emotional” copy. Everyone says emotions sell, but how do you actually write emotional copy? I walk through more than a dozen examples in this masterclass and give you a proven process for figuring out the right emotions to focus on as you write… and how they change as you make your pitch. The masterclass includes several bonuses on storytelling, using A.I. to find dominant and transformational emotions, and much more. You can get this masterclass at thecopywriterclub.com/emotion

And now, my interview with John Bejakovic.

Rob Marsh: Hey, John, welcome back to the podcast. You were here, I think it was literally two years ago, Episode 365, where we talked about a lot of different stuff, and people maybe can go back and listen to that, but catch me up on what’s been going on in your business, and this new book you’ve got.

John Bejakovic: Yeah, sure. So, yeah, I was thinking about that. It’s been about two years since I was on the podcast last and I think we talked about email and things like that, because that’s kind of my bread and butter. And then at the end of that podcast, you were kind of asking me, what I’m what am I working on? And I was working on this book at that time, and the plan was to have this book, which is a kind of an intersection of different disciplines and the commonalities between disciplines like sales and copywriting, but also things like con artists and pickup artists and stand up comedians and screenwriters. And at that time, I already had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to write in the book, and I was very, very enthusiastic and thinking, I’m going to get the book out in the next few weeks, month or two. And it took me a long time to get the book out, and I finally managed to do it this spring, so, or maybe a little more than a month ago. So the book is out, and it’s exactly what I was planning on being in. You know, you helped me out with, actually, some of the final edits and so on. So that’s kind of the main thing. Otherwise, I’m still very much just focused on email and writing daily emails and writing about persuasion and marketing and copywriting, but the book is the one significant achievement advantage in the past couple of years.

Rob Marsh: I love this book. I actually sent an email to my list, sharing it with people and talking about something that Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote the book Big Magic, talks about in her book. There, she mentions this experience that she has where she had an idea for a book and she was noodling on it for a while. And didn’t really do anything with it. And then she had lunch with another friend who had the exact same idea come to her, and she basically said, hey, when you know ideas move from person to person, and if you don’t take it on, somebody else will. And I think I told you this, you know, maybe shortly after we talked on the podcast, I’ve been thinking about writing this, almost this exact same book. Your your title is a little bit more comprehensive. You know, I was thinking of, you know, the persuasion secrets of con men and charlatans and copywriters. And you’ve literally written the, not exactly the way I would write it, but it’s literally the book that I wanted to write. And I don’t know if the idea hopped for me to you, or occurred to us both simultaneously, or it’s just this idea that needed to happen, but you brought it to life. And I think it’s a fantastic book.

John Bejakovic: Thank you. I think it’s something that’s in the water because of the people that I’m profiling in the book are all of the disciplines. There’s a lot of people. That’s something I didn’t really write about in the book. There’s a lot of people who started out in one of these disciplines and then who moved to another one, who spotted the same commonalities. So, you know, I think the most famous in our little world is maybe Dan Kennedy, who talks about how all the best copywriters had direct door to door to door sales experience, you know, and all the copywriters that he knows who really became excellent copywriters, they started out going to door to door and how, you know, so many of the the mindsets as well as the techniques from sales apply to copywriting. And I think, like Gary Bencivenga was also famous at that Gary Bencivenga never did the door to door stuff, but he definitely talked about how one of the the secrets to being, you know, a successful one of the secrets to his being such a successful copywriter, is that he went back and he studied what salesmen were were doing. But it goes the other way around. So again, going back to some of these disciplines. So, you know, I’m profiling pickup artists in there, and one of the most famous pickup artists, this guy named mystery, who wore this big top hat, and he was on BH one, well, he started out as a magician, right? So he was like a club magician, before he started approaching girls in clubs. And I don’t know how consciously he brought in some of the ideas from that into into that pickup, seduction world. But it was definitely there. And likewise, for hypnosis, I feel like there’s people who have noticed that there’s a lot of commonalities in these things. So I think it was, I think, I think a lot of people who are, who have been in parts of this world that I’m talking about, I’ve noticed the commonalities is just that, because I already had that concept of the 10 Commandments, and I wanted to have 10 separate disciplines, I went and I really looked at 10 separate disciplines that have some sort of an overlap, or that have a significant overlap. And I think there might have been one or two more that that I skipped just because they wouldn’t have fit within the umbrella of 10 Commandments, but, um, but, yeah, I think it’s, it’s kind of just in the water.

Rob Marsh: It’s good. I’m holding up the book for anybody who’s listening. But it, The book is called The 10 Commandments of Con Men, Pickup Artists, Magicians, Door-t-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Professional Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand up Comedians and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters. Yeah, let’s talk about some of these commandments or secrets. The last time we talked, I mentioned a book by Darren Brown that you pointed out we’re not actually like. It’s one of the supposed secret books that sort of passed around underground amongst copywriters and everybody says, don’t talk about it. It’s, it’s one of those secrets. People can go back and listen to that episode if they want to know what book that is. But Darren Brown happens to make an appearance in this book, as well as one of these experts, persuasion. I don’t he’s not a con man, necessarily, but he exposes a lot of cons, you know, in his shows and stuff. So, yeah, let’s talk about some of these commandments.

John Bejakovic: Darren Brown appears twice in the book, and I don’t know, for people maybe, who don’t know Darren Brown. So he’s, he’s kind of a stage performer. He’s done hypnosis, he’s done mentalism. He’s also had a bunch of TV shows in the UK where basically the kind of stuff that I cover in this book is the kind of stuff that he talks about in his shows, but he actually puts it into practice. And so when I was writing this book, I did. Part of the reason that it took so long is that I did a lot of research, because I really wanted to dig in and find interesting stories, and not simply, kind of right off the top of my head of like, Oh, here’s kind of like, what the connections are. But it really wanted to have good illustrations for all these things and and I’m, I’m a big. Big reader of, of the New Yorker. You know, here’s my most recent copy, and I really like their style of writing. And one of the things that they one of their kind of go to techniques for, for opening up an article, I don’t know, for people again, who don’t know, maybe in the New Yorker, The New Yorker writes on very random topics.

So there can be very, seemingly uninteresting or niche topics that they manage to write about very interestingly. And one of their go to ways of opening up a topic is to go back to kind of the initial historical background of how this topic, you know, how it even came to be or or some sort of the historical incident. So for the book, since the book opens up with the 10 Commandments of of con men, I wanted to go back and find out, where does that term confidence man, con man. Where does it even come from? Or where does it appear? And I managed to track it down to, I believe it was 1849 in New York, and it was this guy, William Thompson, who would walk up to rich looking New Yorkers on the street, and he’d start a little conversation, and within a few minutes, he had convinced them to hand over their gold watches. And he wasn’t lying, he wasn’t begging, he wasn’t bleeding, he wasn’t throwing out, you know, any kind of fake authority. He wasn’t really promising them anything. So it was a remarkable story, because eventually he got caught and arrested for stealing, even though he wasn’t really technically stealing. And so there was a an article in The New York, I think, Daily Herald reported on this guy, and it was an interesting story, but it didn’t really explain how he was doing it.

And Darren Brown, I don’t know whether consciously or not, but he repeated this exact same thing where he went onto the streets of a small holiday town in England, and he went up to people, and he started a conversation, and very, very quickly, he convinced people to hand over their wallets, their, I believe, watches, and in one case, somebody’s house keys, right? And the first commandment is about how to do that. And in the beginning, I wasn’t, I wasn’t really sure how to put these commandments in a way that was both succinct and that didn’t give the commandment away. And so from that Darren brown episode, I said, you know, thou shalt ask for directions. Because ultimately, that’s what Darren Brown was doing. He stopped people on the street, he asked for directions, and by doing that, he broke down a lot of the resistance that a lot of us normally feel when we’re faced with a stranger, when somebody’s kind of trying to do something to us, when they’re when it seems like they’re trying to ask us for something, get us to do something, when they’re possibly trying to manipulate us or trying to take advantage of us. When people put themselves into that position, that they’re a little bit helpless, they’re a little bit lost, they’re asking for directions. It’s a very small things, but it’s a very small thing, but it can be very powerful in opening up people to influence. And so that was, that was the first commandment. And, yeah, Darren Brown was a great illustration, because otherwise, I don’t know where I would have taken that episode with William Thompson from 1848

Rob Marsh: I think in the book, if I’m not mistaken, you mentioned, as one of Darren’s credentials that he actually convinces somebody to push somebody off of a building in one of his specials. And if you didn’t write about it, you know, I’m thinking about that because I think this, this is, that’s one of those TV shows. It’s on YouTube. Everybody listening should go and watch that. Because if you want to know the power of influence and the power that we as marketers have to, you know, move people from where they are to, you know, some other state That special is, it’s both fascinating and also incredibly frightening in some ways, because, you know, I’ve said this a few times, but persuasion is a superpower, and when you are able to use it, hopefully to help people. But you know, some of the examples in your book are slightly more nefarious, you know, and people are taking advantage of people with these superpowers that we have, that literally can, can make people act against what they would say is their own best interests.

John Bejakovic: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I had to be very careful, and I tried to do that in multiple places in the book to basically highlight that, you know, I’m not encouraging people to do criminal things. I’m not encouraging people to do immoral things. And that’s not the point of this book. This book is, in a way, a collection of techniques, the way I just described. You know, if you want to, let’s say. Soften somebody up or open them up to influence then, yeah, asking for directions or making yourself to be vulnerable in that way is, is a way to do that. But the reason that I wrote this book was because, yeah, branding, these techniques are very transferable, and you can use them in in lots of different ways, including ways that are completely beneficial to both sides.

And also, I think it’s, you know, all of these techniques are pointing to some sort of deeper thing within human beings and human minds and the way that we work. And I try to write about those things as well. So, you know, the fact of, you know, why does it happen that in so many disciplines, people keep discovering that, oh yeah, if you ask for a favor or if you make yourself out to be a little bit a little bit inferior or a little bit somehow lost or somehow vulnerable, why does that make people predisposed to liking you, you know, and I feel that that that points to some interesting stuff that that’s telling me about myself, and that I think tells me about how other people are, so that whether you want to use this stuff in in a business context to persuade or whether you simply want to use it to understand yourself better, because I don’t know about you, Rob, but one of the reasons I kind of got into marketing, or that I stay in it, is that I think, you know, Robert Cialdini talks about this in his book Influence. He says he’s kind of a patsy in the sense that he’s really a sucker for for all sorts of, like marketing ploys, or all sorts of like persuasion techniques, or, you know, people on the street stopping him and asking him for money. And in many ways, I’m the same. I’m very, very gullible. And it only takes me, it takes me some time after that to say, like, what happened, you know, like, how did this work? How did this work on me? Why did I do this? And, and so, yeah, that’s one of the things that I wanted to figure out. Not just, well, okay, there’s these common techniques to these different disciplines, but what’s really going on, and what is a what does it point to at a more fundamental level about human you know,

Rob Marsh: You mentioned Cialdini, I think, in pre suasion, his second book, he actually deals with that. He says so many people came up to him when he would teach his seminars and say, hey, you know, why are you teaching us to manipulate people? And there’s a chapter in persuasion where he talks about this is actually a manual for people to understand what’s happening so they’re not manipulated or taken advantage of. And that’s why he wrote influence in in the first place, was to help people understand what was going on. And so there’s definitely value in understanding this so that we’re not fooled, or we can see the people around us who maybe are being taken advantage of by some people. But yeah, then it’s our responsibility to use use what we know wisely to help people help themselves, right, and to not take advantage.

John Bejakovic: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I know a lot of these techniques, and even so, I’m still, I still find myself getting, you know, not necessarily suckered, but in this, I definitely still react to these techniques, you know. So there’s some part of the human brain which is just so instantaneously reacts to some of this stuff. And I think that that’s kind of one of the things that I tried to get across in the book of some of the things that I talk about, for example, the Darren brown thing, stopping somebody on the street and getting their wallet 3040, seconds later. It’s, it’s hard to believe that that’s possible, right? And and yet it is possible. And it happens. It doesn’t happen in every case, but, yeah, the the way that our brains work, it’s, it’s very strange, and there are some sort of short circuits there. And you know, if you know the right buttons to push, you can activate those short circuits and strange, strange stuff can happen.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I remember seeing a study that was talking about how intelligent people look at this kind of stuff and say, oh, you know, I’m smart. I’m not going to fall for this stuff. That’s what less intelligent people do. And the study measured the IQ of people who joined cults and fell for cons and various things, and they found that the people who were most able to fall for these kinds of things were actually the more intelligent people. So there’s some correlation between being smart and still, you know, falling for this stuff, whether it’s that we think we’re smart enough to not be fooled and so we get fooled, or there’s something else going on, but there’s a there’s a lot of usefulness in knowing this stuff so that we can look for it.

John Bejakovic: Richard Armstrong, the copywriter, he wrote a he wrote a book about con men, a novel about con men. And then to get people to read that, he had a little PDF where he was writing about, you know, the techniques of con men and how that applies to ethical persuasion. And one of the things was the very beginning of that little PDF was how con men choose their marks and or their, you know, the the target or their victims, let’s say, and one of the things that they looked for was definitely intelligence where, where? If you are not of sufficient, let’s say intelligence, you’re not going to get the opportunity. You’re not going to be interested. But the people who were sharp enough, they could immediately, kind of see what it was, and they kind of jumped to the conclusion of like, wow, there’s a really great opportunity here and and that’s why they that’s why they made, you know, good prospects or good victims for this. Another thing that I mean just about how crazy marketing can be, this is another Dan Kennedy thing. I guess Dan worked with, or he knew somebody, or maybe this, no this, I think this one back to Gary Halbert. Apparently, Gary Halbert worked with some company, I think, out of Arizona that was selling very suspicious male enhancement products, I think back in the early 2000s or something like that. And and this, I think stuff was completely hoken Like this was just complete snake oil. Eventually, this company, I think, was prosecuted by the FBI or somebody else, and not even because they were selling completely bogus products, but because of it, in tax reasons, but because of that, all of this stuff surfaced about who their customers were and what was happening. And it turned out that out of their, you know, they had a huge database of people who had clicked on a link and read that some magical powder would, you know, increase body parts by three to six inches. And it turned out that the number one category of people who are buying this were doctors and dentists, right? So that’s to say that, you know, these are people who are not only somehow pre selected to be intelligent, but they supposedly have a significant amount of professional training and tell them that there’s no way, there’s no way that this is going to work, and yet that in the privacy of their own home, that desire or that response to those triggers is so strong that it overrides the experience, it overrides the intelligence, it overrides all of that training and education and and the most, and the people who should know the best that it’s not going to work are the ones who fall for the most. I suppose,

Rob Marsh: If you’ve fallen for a con, or you find yourself, you know, easily manipulated, there is some respite, or, you know, some satisfaction in knowing that you’re probably one of the more intelligent people out there, even though you might keep doing these dumb things. So one of, one of my favorite ideas you talk about in the book is you phrase it a little bit differently, but it’s this idea of making the skeleton dance that we have bad things, you know, or some, sometimes there’s a flaw in a product. And I don’t just mean a blemish. I think the blemish effect is a little bit different from, you know, having an actual skeleton. But let’s talk a little bit about that. Why does this work? You know, when something clearly is broken, and yet we can make this skeleton dance, and it makes us still want something.

John Bejakovic: So, yeah, I think, I think it’s a few different things going on. I think, first of all, and I think these are kind of main themes that are running through this book. One is the theme of of trust, which I think is such a crucial thing in marketing and copywriting. And, you know, I think for people who might be newer to copywriting, I know that this was my reaction when I when I got into this field, when people who seem to be very experienced, they would talk about the importance of trust, and I would say, Yeah, okay, but I mean, I really need to know the headline formulas and the secret words and so on. And really, no, you know, really, it is about, how do you get how do you build sufficient trust, particularly when it’s somebody that maybe you’ve never met before, that only appeared in your, I don’t know, inbox or your Instagram feed or in your physical mailbox two minutes earlier. How do you build up that trust so that you’re willing to say, Okay, I’m willing to take the next step, and sometimes that next step means actually, you know, sending money to that person. So I think trust is one thing, and another thing is the power of the reason why, right, and just the fact the very fundamental human need, not just for proof, but for this specific kind of proof, for having a coherent understanding of like cause and effect and reason why, and making the skeleton down. Dance takes those two things and and combines them, right? So, for anybody who might not know, this idea making the skeleton dance is basically, if there’s a flaw or an objection or some sort of aspect of your offer, or you personally as the salesperson that is going to bubble up to the consciousness of your prospect. You want to raise that objection or flaw or whatever it is, you want to be the one to bring it up first, and that’s the part that that addresses trust, right? Because if you don’t, then you become suspicious, right? Because it’s something that you knew about, but you tried to hide and and for most things that are really big problems, that are the skeleton in the closet, they’re going to bubble up, right? They’re going to bubble up either before people buy or after they buy, and if they if it bubbles up after they buy, then they won’t buy anything else. And, you know, we are in the copywriting world, and we’re in the direct response world, and then direct response world things, you know, the profits are made on the back end. So if you, even if you manage to sell something to somebody once, but then, then they discover the skeleton in the closet and they feel burned, then you’ve effectively, you know, gotten a customer at break even who’s never going to buy anything from you again. So you you’re at net zero, or maybe worse off, right? So that’s one aspect of making the skeleton dance, is that trust aspect. And on the other hand, if you do bring up a negative voluntarily, then that automatically puts you on the same side of the table with your prospect, which is a powerful place to be in, because suddenly you’re in this position of collaboration and kind of playing the advisor rather than a salesperson, or some sort of a conflict of being on the other side of table. But the other aspect of it is that, you know, it’s not simply bringing out the skeleton from the closet, but it’s actually making a dance, right? And this is an idea by by this guy. What’s his name? Mar, yeah, I forget his first name, but his last name is Mark and and Barry Marsh, so Barry Mar and basically the idea is you don’t simply want to bring up a negative, but you want to make it work for you, and you want to show how some positive comes out of that negative, right? Whether it’s that the negative is a consequence of the positive or the the negative is the consequence, or the positive is the consequence of the negative. Or somehow there’s some connection, right? So that you can turn around this, this negative into actually being a proof element and into being a reason why there’s something attractive and good about your offer, right? And that’s that’s a powerful thing because of proof, but it’s also a very necessary thing, I think, for humans to simply have that awareness of like, there’s a coherent story here, and there’s a reason why this negative is here, and that’s super important.

Rob Marsh: I think my favorite example of this in the marketing world is Buckley’s cough syrup. This gets popped up quite a bit, you know, where people will say, Oh, this is a case of, you know, showing off a blemish or that kind of thing. But it’s, it’s actually more than that, because cough syrup tastes awful. You know, if you buy it thinking that you’re, you know, buying a cherry flavored cough syrup, and your cough is going to go away, you know, automatically, you can be severely disappointed with that first swallow. In fact, you may, you may, you know, throw up. I mean, it really is that nasty. And so they basically make that dance by by showing the whole reason it’s nasty is because it works like that. The ingredients that make cough syrup work do not taste good, and you can’t mask them with flavor. And that’s the whole idea here. And so the fact that it’s this terrible tasting thing is an indicator that, you know, it’s actually going to do what you’re hiring Buckley’s cough syrup to do. But we see this in all kinds of things. You know, some of the examples that use in the book. There is comedian Patrice O’Neill, who, you know, uses talks about how he’s racist in order to tell a racist joke, and gets the audience laughing along with him, which, even the way I’m talking about it probably makes some listeners feel really uncomfortable, you know, because this, these are the cultural norms that we have that say you can’t do this thing or this is unacceptable. And yet, by again, putting it out in front of the audience and making the skeleton dance, he brings an audience along along with it. So in some ways, this is one of the biggest marketing superpowers. I think that there is out there is if you can make. Or a products less than positive aspects actually be positive, then you’re a pretty good marketer, copywriter,

John Bejakovic: I think if you do that, you not only, you not only kind of take away the sting from the objection, but you, you know, in a very subtle way, you also put the burden onto the onto the downsides of any alternatives, right? Because suddenly people have nothing to, you know, their their negatives or their doubts have been taken away. And then they start thinking, Well, okay, this, this, I, you know, Rob’s offer is queen. He’s, he’s told me all the negatives, and he’s actually shown me how these are, in some way, even positives, for me, these other alternatives. So, you know, John’s, John’s solution, it sounds good on the surface, but there don’t seem to be any negatives, right? And that makes me a little bit suspicious. And, you know, somehow that same need for a reason why a coherent story makes it so that people start to spin up their own story and so that, so that they spin things in a negative way that you know works against the alternative. So I think you’re absolutely right. I think it’s, it’s very powerful thing. The only thing is that it sounds very scary, and I think a lot of people, including if you’re doing it for yourself, it’s very scary, but maybe you can will yourself to do it. If you’re doing it for a client, then it’s doubly more so that the client might just be like, Okay, that’s that might be a fine idea in theory. I definitely don’t want to run this as a campaign or as an ad, because it’s very counterintuitive to do this.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, this is something that comes up in so many areas too, you know, I think about people looking for work, you know, for jobs that may have, you know, gaps in their employment record, or, you know, things that that they would typically want to hide, and if you can surface that, say, hey, you know, yeah, I didn’t work for the last year, but that’s because I was doing this great thing that’s actually really beneficial for what I want to do next in my career, you know, though, to be able to turn those kinds of things into a positive again, I said it already. It’s a superpower, but it’s the kind of skill that, if you want to progress, if you want, you know, to we all have flaws, you know, without a doubt, and some of them are pretty big, so we have to be able to figure out a way to make those things work for us.

John Bejakovic: I can speak to this, I feel like, you know, I’ve been working as a copywriter for a while now, 10 plus years. I guess I feel like the one thing that keeps getting better, that I keep getting sharper at, is exactly this of just like, kind of running a sales argument through and then realizing, okay, well, what’s the, what’s the likely objection or or suspicion that a client or that a prospect might still have at this point, and then proactively, you know, attacking that or addressing that even before it pops up, you know? And I feel like, you know, this is ultimately kind of what the the bottom the gist of the game is, I think, like, you know, agora had that, I think copy boarding process, or whatever it was called, and all it was was like, Okay, there’s some sort of a, if you’re writing a sales letter, there’s some sort of a sexy idea to open it up that sucks you in. And then all it is is really a series of objections addressed, I mean, written in a sales letter format, but proactively thinking, what’s the next objection they’re going to have, and bringing that up yourself, and then working out why, you know that’s actually something that works in your favor. It’s not what you think, or it’s proof of something else, or whatever it is.

Rob Marsh: Do you have a favorite chapter in the book? John?

John Bejakovic: I have particular stories that I like, but I think in terms of one that I particularly find, consistently, for me, useful, I believe it’s chapter chapter eight or chapter nine, and it’s about committing to the bit, because I feel like a lot of the other chapters are very specific techniques. They’re like, Okay, here’s like a little thing that you can do, or you can, you can ask for directions, or you can, you know, make the skeleton dance. And I had to hide that chapter about committing to the bit deep into the book, because it’s much less about the specific technique. It’s ultimately about the idea of you just got to do it, or you have to be confident. But that idea of being confident is so not helpful. I feel in in many situations, if you could be confident, then people will be confident. And you you know being told to be confident doesn’t help. And so in that chapter, I had some stories where I think I took that idea of like, Okay, what does it mean to be confident? How does that actually look? How do you deal with that, even if you’re not necessarily feeling confident and and what happens if you try to be confident, it doesn’t work out, and you have, instead of getting a good reference experience of like, oh, I pretended to be confident, and it worked out, and now I’m a little bit more confident, and things are better. But what happens if you try to be confident, you act and then it flops, right? And I feel like this is super relevant in in a lot of situations, right? So if you know, just recently, I was talking to somebody about creating a course, you know, you know, some a copywriter who had decided to create his own course, and he was talking about how he felt imposter syndrome, or nervousness about about taking that next step, even though he knew the material well. I think it’s relevant for that. I think it’s very relevant if you’re talking to talking to clients, if you’re trying to get jobs. I think it’s very relevant if you have your own email list, and if you want to write emails daily. I think it’s very relevant in everyday situations. Again, in the book, I talk about, you know, pickup artists and guys who are going up to girls in clubs and trying to appear smooth and confident and having something interesting to say. I talk about hypnotists trying to hypnotize somebody and looking very authoritative and saying sleep, you know? And I’m talking about comedians who go up on stage and they have a routine that’s good, and they’ve worked through this, but unless they have an authoritative, confident delivery, the audience isn’t going to laugh right. And on the other hand, even if they have mediocre material, then the audience will still get into it, and they will laugh, right? And so there is magic. There is some magic about this charisma or some energy, except it’s not useful to me personally to hear, Oh yeah, you just gotta be cool dude, or you gotta be, like, confident, or you just gotta have charisma, or you gotta be yourself. I needed something more operational. And that’s kind of what that chapter is about. And so that’s something that I find myself thinking back to on a daily basis, squad, you know, I’m ready to quit something, or I’m ready to say I’m just not. This isn’t working. And then I remind myself of things that I’ve written. And I say, Okay, well, if I wrote this, and if other people are reading it, I should be acting on it as well.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, one of my favorite chapters is the chapter on focus, and this is something that I’ve noticed. So I think you’re like this too, but I love watching magicians, you know, do their acts, and then, you know, most people are, I think, are wowed, and then they move on. But I like to go back and re watch the acts and see if I can see where the misdirection is happening, you know, and where my focus is being, where I’m being told to move my my focus so that something else can happen in the background. Kind of ruins magic in a way, you know, when you start to see it, but it’s, it’s fascinating to me how easily all of us are directed into, you know, look, look here, or watch the light, or don’t look at that in order for something to happen behind the scenes. And I think this is one of those things where, you know, when people start thinking about, they’re like, well, marketing shouldn’t be about misdirection, which is true, it shouldn’t be, and it’s not, but directing focus on specific things that we need people to pay attention to is, again, a huge part of what we do. And some of the stories that I think you had in that chapter were pretty fascinating as well.

John Bejakovic: I don’t think I’m going to be giving away a huge insider secret here. But a long time ago, Parris Lampropoulos had this webinar series where he was sharing his kind of some of his biggest secrets. And I don’t think this was a really big secret. It was just very, very impactful to me. And Paris kept saying over and over, he said, does it help your case? Does it hurt your case, or is it neutral, right? If it hurts your case, or if it’s neutral, it goes out, right? And you only include things that help your case. And you know that chapter on focus is in many ways, let’s say, you know, the way you can apply that to marketing is specifically that thing that I mean again, in the beginning, I said that this book is about techniques, and it’s about kind of the underlying psychology or neurology. And I think the underlying neurology here is that we don’t really realize how limited our focus is and how. Very little we can actually focus on at a given moment, and then our brain stitches that together into something that feels like a coherent picture, where we feel like we’re really looking at something that looks like a poster or a photograph, but it’s really not we, you know, the our visual field is incredibly blurry, and we have about, you know, a dime’s size worth of focus is just we keep flicking around to things that are interesting. And, you know, that’s not just vision. It’s kind of how reality is. And when it comes to an opportunity or a product or a course, you know, there’s 1,000,001 things you could potentially say about it, right? And as marketers, yes, we want to be transparent, and yes, we want to make the skeleton dance, but at the same time, we also want to orchestrate some sort of like a presentation of what it is that we’re selling that paints it in the best possible light. And that means guiding people from unsold to sold, like, you know, showing them a series of mental images, or giving them a series of facts or arguments that, you know, build up a certain emotional state in their brains and and that get them to say, Okay, this is, this is something that is good For me, right? And again, you know, this is something that all copywriters who reach a certain level of success keep repeating, but that means you want to work with good clients, right? Because you can, you can do. You can paint that series of pictures for crap products. You know, again, it really won’t probably work long term for you or your client, you can, you can make a large money grab quickly, but it’s not a sustainable business. And there are enough people out there with good products that that you really can sell stuff that is worthwhile, but the way you sell it is exactly this. You know, Paris is thing of, does it help my case. And you know, magicians do the exact same thing, where they get you to look exactly where they want you to look, and they build up this story in your mind, where the conclusion is, this is magic, and something magical just happened. And I agree with you. I watch those videos a lot, and I love watching them. And in a way, it spoils the magic trick when I know it, but it also like the next, next magic trick, I’m just as much of a sucker for it, and I get just as much, like, satisfaction and joy. Like I feel like nothing puts me into that state of mind of, like, being like a kid again, like watching a magic trick because I’m genuinely, like, amazed. I feel like I I follow again. I’m such a patsy, and I follow exactly what the magicians want me to do. And I really get into that state. And I just get an absolute thrill out of something magical happening and something disappearing when it shouldn’t have disappeared, and something appearing when it shouldn’t have appeared, and things change in color and so on. So even though I know some of the tricks, now, I’m not a magician, and I never really studied this stuff, but even though I know some of the tricks, I still fall for it every time.

Rob Marsh: What’s really frustrating is you could watch a magician do a trick. You can figure it out. You can see where the misdirection is happening, or where somebody forces a choice, you know, in order to make sure that the right card or puzzle piece or whatever gets selected. And then you watch a similar trick by maybe a different magician, and you can’t, like, I can’t see where the misdirection is happening, right. Or I can’t see where the person moves off stage to appear, you know, in a different suit, you know, in 10 seconds. Or like, and so, you know, it’s like, I know how this trick should be working, but I still, no matter how many times I watch it, I can’t figure out how the magician is pulling it off. And and you’re right, it’s, it’s still magical, and it still tickles my brain in a way. That’s, it’s really pleasurable to watch.

John Bejakovic: That brought to mind. I have a quote in the book from Gary Benson Vanga, where he says, the only power we have as marketers is to anticipate what people are going to think and, you know, for magic, or for any of these other disciplines, it’s the same. It’s like, kind of the, you know, the market, let’s say, or the audience moves on and becomes more sophisticated, and then it’s the magicians or the copywriters, or, I don’t know, the pickup artists role, to say, Okay, now that the market has moved on, how do I adapt to that, and how do I integrate what they now know into what what I’m doing? And I think there was this famous story of of a magician. I think it was di Vernon who so Harry Houdini, who I have in the book, Harry Houdini had this thing where I think he had a challenge. I think it was maybe like, okay, $100 if you can come and have a magic trick, the fools Harry Houdini. Houdini was, of course, a magician. He became. Am known as an escape artist, but he started his career, and he ended his career as a magician and and he was also, you know, very fond of these challenges, and he was very fond of debunking other magicians, and kind of position, positioning himself as the guy at the top of the pyramid who was so good he could even give tricks away, because, you know, it was a way of of putting other people beneath him. Well, the one guy who managed to fool Harry Houdini was di Vernon. And again, I’m not a magician, so I don’t even really know what the trick was. It was a card trick. All I really know is that it was a trick where I think, like, maybe it was like a way of putting an ace into the middle of the deck and having it pop back up to being the top cart. And I think one of Houdini’s conditions was show me the trick three times, and I’ll figure out how you do it right. And guy Vernon showed him the trick three times. It was the same trick each time in the in terms of the card popping up to the top, and Harry Houdini couldn’t figure it out. And the reason was that each time, Dai Vernon used a different technique to do it, so it was the same end result. But he knew that okay, if he repeated kind of the same thing, Houdini was probably looking for that, even though, you know, it all looked very much the same every time. But it looked, you know, it looked pretty much the same, but Houdini would have probably figured out had die Vernon done the same thing three times. He got the same effect, though, by doing three different techniques. And that’s how he managed to fool Harry Houdini and that kind of, again, goes back to, you know, the same thing about knowing these tricks and then still falling for them, right? So that ultimately, people still laugh at jokes, even though the tricks of comedians are kind of well known. You exaggerate. You, you know, have triplets, you, you know, you make fun of some sort of a group, or you make fun of yourself those you know, all of these things are well known, yet people go to comedy clubs and they laugh, right? Or people know that, yeah, you know, there’s a certain format to a headline, and you throw in some testimonials, and you have free shipping. And people are gonna, you know, react to that and buy to that, even though it’s well known. And so somehow, you know these, these ideas and these tricks and the underlying psychology there’s, there seems to be infinite permutations, and you can apply them over and over and over.

Rob Marsh: A related idea that you bring up in the book. It’s almost the opposite idea, and that is that you can’t always tell people exactly where to look or what to do. Sometimes you have to let them come up with the idea themselves. And I don’t remember what the title of the chapter is, but one of the examples you use is when Ronald Reagan is running against Jimmy Carter in the presidential election. And, you know, he finishes up this debate with his final pitch. It’s just a few days before the election, and he could have said things like, you know, inflation is, you know, X percent out of control. We’ve had these long gas lines. You know, Carter told us all to turn down the thermostat like he could have pointed it at a bunch of things that people knew were going on, but he didn’t do that. He basically let people come to their own conclusion by simply asking, Are you better off today than you were four years ago? Which naturally lets people think all of these things that are going on without being told them by somebody who they would then react and say, well, he’s just saying that because he’s a politician, or, you know, whatever reason. And so in some cases, you want to direct attention, and in other ways, or in other cases, you want to be able to be a little bit more open. And, you know, obviously he’s, he’s guiding your thoughts. He’s taking you back to to where we were four years ago and to where we are today. He’s inviting a comparison, but he wants you to bring the data to the argument, and again, related idea, but almost the opposite.

John Bejakovic: Yeah, I’m glad you bring that up, because I guess the first podcast, I kind of like hinted at this book, and then two years later, the book is out. And then the next book I want to write is exactly on this idea of, like, how do you get people to have a certain idea and feel like it’s their own? And yeah, absolutely. What Reagan was doing was, I mean, this is another one of the currents that’s running through the book, is that none of us likes to feel manipulated, none of us likes to feel bullied, none of us likes to be told what to do. I mean, there is a certain point at which we come to trust somebody sufficiently, and we put ourselves into somebody else’s hands, whether that’s a leader who we kind of trust them to guide us to the new place. We. Or it’s somebody like a hypnotist, you know, we say, okay, just tell me what, what I should be doing, right? Or a therapist, or somebody like that. But in a normal day to day situation, there’s this prickliness, right? There’s this reactance, where as soon as we feel that somebody’s telling us something, or a natural reaction is to say, yeah, actually, but, and then to argue for the other end, right? And so what Reagan was doing is absolutely like you said. He it was, it was a very tricky thing, just basically rephrasing things in terms of a question and saying, you know, are you better off? Right? Do you feel more secure? Do you feel our country is more respected today. Do you feel that you can get more for your money than you could? And of course, he wasn’t. This wasn’t a disinterested, you know, completely Socratic dialog, or, you know, where he was really inviting people to discover things for themselves. He was guiding them to a very specific kind of outcome, but the way he was doing it was so that he eliminated or minimized that reactance, right? So that people could say, well, he brings up a valid point, even though he’s not really telling me about it. But you know, that thing he asked about, am I better off now? Now that I think about it, I’m really not, but had, you know, had he said basically the same thing, but simply just turned it into a statement, instead of asking it as a question, it probably would have, you know, gotten people’s hackles up, but, but, yeah, I think that in marketing, you know, marketing is not psychoanalysis, where we really want to guide people to discover things completely on their own. So we do want to guide them to a certain kind of conclusion. But the question is, how do we do that in a way where they have the feeling like it was their own discovery, or that they feel ownership of the idea, or they don’t feel that resistance and reactance that we all normally feel when we feel that somebody’s trying to tell us something, or trying to get us to do do something, or trying to command us, right? So questions are definitely a very, very effective and very subtle and very simple way to do that.

Rob Marsh: I feel like we could keep going on, but I want to leave something for people to actually, you know, find in the book themselves. It’s like, I said, it’s a great book. It’s relatively short. It’s about 150 pages, very easy to read. It’s loaded with stories, in fact, as you go through your learning principles, but it’s not textbook. Ask, you know where it’s like, Hey, here’s a principle, and this is how I’m going to show it to you. You you discover it through all the stories that you’re telling, which is its own kind of genius, I think, in its own persuasion technique. So John, tell us where we can get the book, and you know where we can follow you if we want to get that next book about, yeah, how do we, how do we persuade people and let them come to the belief that they’re doing it on their own and and we won’t, hopefully have to wait two years for that one?

John Bejakovic: Yeah. So the book basically is available on Amazon. If you go on Amazon and and look for 10 Commandments of con men, or if you just type in my name, the book will come up. It’s got that charming black cover. Was only the text on there, so it’s very noticeable. And if you want to read more stuff like that, because I’m writing these daily emails, and often I’m writing about the same kind of persuasion and influence stuff, including about, you know that topic of, how do you get people to have that idea on their own? Then it’s just go to my, my personal website, which was my last name.com, Bucha, which.com and and then you can sign up. Or you can, I have a an archive of 2000 plus emails. So if you don’t want to sign up, you can read, read the archive, or if you want to sign up, then you get on the list. And my emails arrive every night, so you can, you can see if you like them.

Rob Marsh: It’s one of the few daily emails I really look forward to. You know? What you share usually leaves me thinking of something that I hadn’t thought of before, and even, even when I have thought about it before, it’s usually a new take or a new way of looking at it. And so yeah, sign up for John’s emails. Get the book. It’s definitely worth reading. You kindly mentioned me at one point in in the acknowledgements. So thank you for that. But again, fantastic book. Highly recommend it. It belongs alongside, you know, Cialdini influence and all of those other books that we read about persuasion is it’s a lot of fun. So yeah, go grab that. Thanks John for for sharing.

John Bejakovic: I appreciate it, Rob, thank you for the opportunity. And thank you again that you said you’re in the acknowledgements, and that’s because I. Um, you know, you helped me edit this book and get it out. And you had some, some great feedback that I integrated into the book. So you helped me make it what it was in the end.

Rob Marsh: Well, it’s, it’s 99.99% John. And you know, I might have fixed a comma or two, but, yeah, it’s, it’s a good book worth reading. Thank you, John.

Rob Marsh: Thanks John for talking through many of the ideas in this book. I’ve linked to it at the top of the shownotes so you can easily find the link to the book on Amazon. If you’re listening using a podcast app, that link should be in the description so you can just click it there. Or you can find it at thecopywriterclub.com/podcast. I don’t get a commission for recommending it, I just think it’s the kind of book that will help just about everyone be a better writer and marketer.

Some of you may have heard me share on a previous episode that I teach a college class on marketing. A couple of weeks ago, after a class on the way the media and many marketers use these technique to manipulate their audiences, a student came up to me afterwards and told me this whole topic was making her rethink her career in marketing. Maybe this topic does the same for you.

I told her that it should actually be the opposite. That marketing needs more people who are bothered by manipulative tactics to help make sure we use persuasion and psychology to help our customers, not take advantage of them. Just because a tactic can be used unethically, doesn’t mean we can’t use it ethically. If that were the rule, we’d have to shut down the entire internet. And publishing industry. Let alone activities like public speaking, acting, broadcasting and more.

By learning these principles, you can help make sure the companies you work for always use them to do good instead of bad.

Don’t forget to check out the How to Write Emotional Copy Masterclass at thecopywriterclub.com/emotion

Looking for clients? In this episode I’m sharing 21 different ideas for ways to connect with clients for your copywriting business. I guarantee you’ll find at least one idea—and probably more like four or five ideas—that will work for you. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

The Copywriter Club Youtube Channel

Rob Marsh: How do you find new or better clients? Here are 21 different ideas you might want to try. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

This episode of the podcast is going to be different from any episode I’ve done recently… in fact, in more than 450 different episodes, I can’t remember ever having an episode where not only did I not have a guest, but also didn’t have a co-host or someone else to chat with and bounce ideas around with. So in a sense, we’re making Copywriter Club history right now.

But we’re not covering a new topic. In fact, we’ve talked about finding clients on almost every interview we’ve conducted with copywriters over the last eight years. And my guests have shared a ton of great ideas for finding clients. At some point in the future, I’d love to create a supercut of all the ideas we’ve shared over the years… but that would be dozens of hours long and it’s not at the top of my to-do list at the moment.

However, on this episode, I’m going to share 21 different ideas, actually it will probably be more, 21 different ideas for ways to find clients. Not all of them will work for you. But I promise, if you stick around to the end of this episode, you’ll find at least one and probably five or six ideas that WILL work for you and that you can start using right now.

I’m also going to share some advice… the dos and don’ts of reaching out to clients—some of the things you need to do first and what you absolutely can’t afford to do.

If this topic appeals to you, I’ve got a couple of resources for you. The first is The Copywriter Club Youtube channel. I’ve posted several videos there about finding clients, pitching clients, the questions to ask to attract clients and more. Those videos are relatively short and will help you improve your outreach process so be sure to check them out.

And I’ve put together a mini offer I’m calling the Client Finding Ignition Kit. It includes a 36 page report that covers what I’m talking about in this episode at more depth, and also includes three different workshops on finding clients. One focuses on Upwork and other online marketplaces, another is all about what’s working on LinkedIn, and the third is all about what to do if you need to find clients right now. And it also includes a one-time coaching call to talk about your approach and your pitch to make sure it will work. If you want that, go to thecopywriterclub.com/ignition

Finally, I won’t go through all the stuff it includes, but there are a ton of resources in The Copywriter Underground to help you find, pitch, and land clients. If you want to find a full-time job, there’s a workshop all about that. If you want to improve your discovery calls, there’s a workshop and playbook all about that. If you want to go deep on what’s working on LinkedIn, Upwork, and several other places to find clients, there are resources for all of those too. And that’s on top of all the other workshops, coaching, community, lead sharing and more… that’s all available at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu-2.

Before I jump into that first idea, though, I want to just talk about a couple of things that are really important to keep in mind before you start finding clients. The first idea is that you do not have a business without clients. This is the thing that we do. We write copy. But if we’re not writing copy for a client who’s paying us to do it, we don’t actually have a business. We’re just doing this thing. So whether you have one client you spend all of your time on, or you have 19 or 20 clients, you’re writing small things for over the course of the month, someone has to pay the bill. Someone has to pay you for this skill that you have, and if you don’t have clients, that’s the very first thing that you need to do. So don’t spend any time getting ready in your business.

And by that, I mean don’t spend any time building a website. Don’t think about even building a portfolio. You don’t have to worry about having a social media presence. You don’t even need a LinkedIn page or anything like that. What you need is a client. And so I want you to go out there and land that first client. Now there’s some things that you’re going to have to do in order to do that. We’ll talk about these in a minute, but I want you to land that first client, and then once you’ve had that client, you’ve done. The assignment. You’ve created a piece of copy, you’ve solved a problem for them. You’re going to do it again. You’re going to find a second client, and you’re going to do the same exact thing before you do your website, before you have a LinkedIn page, before you have social media presence, you can go out and find the second client. You’re going to solve a problem for them, and then the third time, you’re going to find a third client, and you’re going to solve a problem for them, probably writing copy or the thing that you want to do. And once you’ve done that three times, once you’ve acquired and proven that you can find clients, that’s when you’re going to back up and say, Okay, I’m going to get my business assets ready. So it’s going to make it easier for me to find the next client.

In order to do that, you need to do a couple of things. First, you need to identify who you serve. There are so many ways to look at this, and mostly we think about this as choosing a niche. I help people in the health and wellness niche, or I write copy for finance companies, or I help Coaches find clients, right? We talk about this generally by industry, the industry that we work on, but there are so many different other ways to think about niching as well. You can niche by the type of client that you work with. Let’s say that you like working with enterprise level clients or mom and pops or startups that have gone through their second round of funding. Lots of different ways to cut this so that you’re working with a certain kind of client, but if you you know, help mom and pops solve their marketing problems, or help them solve their email sequence problems, or whatever. The thing is, you can do that for mom and pops across many industries, or you can do that for a variety of different clients across all kinds of other ways that we think about niching.

Another way that you can be thinking about this is the problem that you solve. So if you are a copywriter who helps businesses or memberships reduce churn, or helps a SaaS company reduce the churn on their monthly signups. You could you’re basically identifying that problem reducing churn, right? Or maybe you’re the problem you solve is onboarding customers into different kinds of programs or software. Maybe the problem that you are solving for people is acquisition, customer acquisition, Facebook ads, those kinds of things. So there are lots of different ways to look at marketing problems. In fact, there are so many marketing problems always copywriters can solve.

We put together a list of more than 30 different marketing problems and included it with our P7 Client Acquisition Program. I didn’t talk about that at the beginning of the show, but if you want more information about that, you can find it at thecopywriterclub.com/p7 there’s this massive list of problems that you as a copywriter or a content writer as a marketer can solve for your clients. Oftentimes it will involve writing copy or writing content, but sometimes these problems are attached to the things that we do, and we can think a little bit bigger about the problems that we’re helping our clients solve.

Another way to think about who you serve is the voice of the style that you write in. There are certain clients who want a particular voice or style, and if you can capture that and talk about that in a way that attracts them again. It’s another way to niche your business. You could also help businesses at different stages. So you know, whether they are a startup, whether they are in a later stage of development. You know small to medium size or medium to large size businesses, the different stages that a business goes through, comes with additional problems that they need to solve, and additional opportunities where you can step in and help.

Another way to think about this is the deliverable you create. Maybe you are the only person who writes welcome sequences for your clients, or you help them solve a problem with creating weekly regular content that drives traffic to a variety of products, whether that’s on their blog or elsewhere online. Maybe you help with social media and the deliverables there are related to the platform where you’re posting. So there’s lots of different ways to think about who it is that you serve, but after you have found those first three clients, what are the things that those clients have in common, and is there something that can indicate who it is that you are able to help right now that doesn’t have to stay static. You can change this over time, but when you’re just getting started, or when you’re looking for clients, you want to be looking at some of the clients that you’ve already worked with. What do they have in common? Because you know, you can help them, and you should be able to find more people like them.

You also want to be able to identify the problem that you’re solving. So we’ve talked a little bit about that as we’re talking about niching, but the more you know about the problem you solve, the better. You can talk about it, the better that you can bring it forward so that people can identify, oh yeah, this is the person to talk to if you need help with that. That will help you as you reach out to potential clients, and later on, as they reach back to you to help identify the thing that you do for them, you also have to be able to talk about the value that you deliver. So oftentimes, as copywriters, we talk about the thing we do. Yes, I write blog posts for small businesses, or I write sales pages for health and wellness companies, or I write welcome sequences for coaches and course sellers. But that’s not really the value. That’s oftentimes what clients come to us, asking us for hey, I need blog posts, or I need a sales page, or I need a welcome sequence. But the real value is the thing that those assets get for our clients, and so it might be authority, it might be attention, it might be additional traffic. It’s almost always also going to include revenue and sales and the ability to continue to do this, because your client is actually making money, but identifying the value of the thing really matters for talking about it. And as we go through all the ideas I’m about to share here, you need to be able to talk about that value that you bring. It’s not just a blog post, but it is authority building content that’s going to help you connect with your clients. It’s going to help bring additional sales. It’s going to get you out into the world in front of new audiences, all of the kinds of things, the what you do has value, and we’ve got to be able to talk about it a couple more things to think about when you’re reaching out to clients is we want to remove as much risk as possible for clients. So a lot of clients have worked with copywriters in the past who disappeared on them, who didn’t deliver what they promised, who missed deadlines, who allowed scope creep to happen, and so what they got was not exactly what they wanted or what they needed. And because of that, a lot of clients look at working with copywriters and other freelancers as risky.

They don’t know that if they cut you that first check before you start working, that you’re actually going to deliver on what you promise. And so if you can remove the risk for those clients in order for them to see that it’s not just low risk, but they’re not going to lose you need to do that. And of course, there are different ways to do this. One the best way is probably to offer a guarantee. We usually say we don’t guarantee copy, because you can’t guarantee the performance of the copy that you write, because it’s based on so many different variables, whether they’re going to show it to the right audience, whether they’re going to be running traffic to it, whether the ad is actually going to be talking to the right people, bringing the right people to your copy. But guarantees are a really easy way for us to say, hey, yeah, we will remove the risk, or I will continue working with you until we get this thing working for you, so that we are delivering on our promise.

Other ways to remove the risk is to show testimonials, to show case studies, to show that you know how to do this, that you’ve done it before, to show examples of the work that you can do, so that your client can envision, that they can see you actually do the thing that you promise to do, having a framework or a process that you work through that is consistent and delivers a proven result, and being able to talk about that with your client another way to remove the risk. Again, there’s so many ways to do this, but you’ve got to make it easy, ultimately, for your client to say yes, and part of that is removing the risk. Other parts are make that buying process easy. Sign up for stripe or wave app or something that allows them to easily charge a credit card or to click the button, say yes. If you make that process of working with you, signing a bunch of forms, getting all of the materials that you need in order to get started, if you make that difficult, if you make that, you know, increase the friction there, and make it really hard for clients to say yes, then they will say no. We need to make it easy for them say yes. And so all of those things that we can do on the front end matter. But back to my original point here, don’t wait to start reaching out to clients until you have those things in place. You need to find clients first. The you don’t have a business unless you’ve got paying clients, and until you’ve got two or three paying clients, you really haven’t proven you can do this over and over.

Okay, having said all of that, let’s talk about some of the ways that you can actually get out there and find clients. And the number one is something we’ve talked about a lot on the podcast, but that is networking. Everyone has a network. Your network includes. It’s everyone from your parents and your siblings, your friends, the people you went to high school with or college with, teachers, professors, the person who works at the coffee shop that you see you know, the different professionals that you might work with, if you’ve got a masseuse or you work with an attorney or a bookkeeper, work acquaintances, neighbors, even people in line at the grocery store, the folks at the dog park, anybody that you run into during your daily life, people at the gym, people at church, people at your coworking space, former coworkers or bosses or supervisors, anyone that you meet and interact with. These people are in your network, and many of them want to help you succeed. And so your first step, as you are thinking about who is in your network and who you can reach out to, is make a list of these people there.

My guess is that as you start this out, you can find at least 25 but it might be more like 150 or 200 people who are in your network, loose affiliations or connections, relationships that you have with these people that you might be able to reach out to and let them know what you do, the problem you solve, and who you solve it for. There are all kinds of different ways. So again, we’ve talked about this on the podcast, but I’ve talked with copywriters who landed clients you know, talking to people at the laundromat, people who you bump into at the store, people who have a conversation with at a cocktail party. All of these people are potential clients, and as long as you can direct the conversation to their problems, the problems that you help them solve, and how you do that anybody in your network could help you. It’s not just about asking the people in your network if they have work for you, but also asking them if they know somebody. So if you have 100 people in your network, and each of them has another 100 people in their network, well now we’re talking to as many as 10,000 people, and that’s more than enough connections to start a very successful business, if you get all of your ducks in a row, and if you’re able to talk about that problem you solve, who you solve it for, and are able to deliver on those promises. So get out there. Tell everyone that you meet, what you do, the problem you solve, and who you solve it for, because your network is the number one way for you to find and connect with clients.

Number two is to find clients on Facebook or in Instagram or in other groups. There are groups on LinkedIn. There are dozens of groups now popping up in places like telegram and slack, and you know, all these other tools that we have for connecting with each other. But what you want to do is you’re not just going to show up in a Facebook group and start spamming all of the members. You’re not going to be DMing everybody. You want to show up and demonstrate your expertise, your focus, by commenting when people ask for help in a Facebook post or in a LinkedIn post, or even content that they’re posting elsewhere.

We can do this in a couple of different ways. So not only is there the content that you’re going to comment on and show that you can think deeply about the problems or the questions that they’re asking. But there are also groups where people collect and so if you happen to work with, say, software developers and help them create website copy in order to sell their products, well, join a few groups for software developers. Open up Facebook and search for software developer, and you’re going to see the groups that cater to those people join the group and then start commenting on the content that’s in there. Like I said, Don’t be DMing and pitching outright, but demonstrate your ability to solve problems, your ability to think strategically about the questions that are being asked. Propose ideas for free, share the different things that you would do, and people will start to notice and even recommend you as the expert. Idea number three, you’re going to be looking for clients in online job marketplaces. So usually when we talk about this, we’re thinking about things like Upwork or Craigslist or any of the other marketplaces that are out there.

Now there are some trade offs in this, and that is that there are 1000s of other writers on these forums fighting tooth and nail for the exact same projects that you want, and many of them are going to be charging less than what you can afford to charge. That’s okay, that that they’re there, because what the marketplace helps you do is what we’ve been talking about already. Focus on the client you serve, the problem you solve, and how you do it. And if you get the Upwork workshop that I mentioned in the ignition kit at the top of the show, we’ll show you how to create the. Type of profile that will stand out, and how to use the search features in those marketplaces in order to connect with the people that you could work with.

There are a couple of rules of you know to follow as your their rules of thumb number one, ignore the beginner projects. Even if you are a beginning copywriter, you want to be looking at intermediate and expert projects, just because you don’t want to be competing for those $5 type projects, but you need to have a profile that helps you stand out. And so there’s work to be done there. We’ve talked about this on the podcast in the past, so you can go way, way back to Episode 19, where we talked about Upwork with Danny Margulis. We talked about it on episode 315 with Rob Perry, if you want to check that one out as well. And of course, I mentioned that there’s the workshop in the Ignition Kit and The Copywriter Underground, if you want to see exactly how to attract clients on job boards like or job marketplaces like Upwork.

Idea number four is looking for gigs on job boards. So there are literally hundreds of these out there. I can name off just a few flex jobs, remote of IO, let’s work remotely. There are other copy writing boards on Facebook, things like cult of copy, contently, skyward. Some of these may have been acquired by other job boards. They change over time. You can use LinkedIn for this. There are other job sites as well, ladders, lensa, again, there’s so many out there, and most of the stuff that you’re going to see posted on these job boards is not going to be a fit for what you do, but you want to keep an idea out, or, sorry, an eye out for the opportunities that might be applicable to what you do, and you want to figure out a way to respond to those posts so that you stand out from all of the others.

Now a job posting on LinkedIn will oftentimes receive 100 200 maybe even more, applicants to a job. I was just talking to somebody earlier this week about a job posting that they posted, and they had 1400 respondents to it. And so you definitely need to figure out a way to stand out when you’re going to be competing with other writers on job boards. But job boards are really good at collecting the various jobs that are out there, and if you can find a couple of really good ones, you’ll have two or three different jobs every single day that you can consider and possibly respond to. Oftentimes they are full time jobs or part time jobs, but there are contract and freelance jobs out there as well.

So job boards can be a great place for you to find clients. I mentioned LinkedIn earlier, but number five way to find clients is looking on LinkedIn. Now this can be a longer term strategy, but by posting content on LinkedIn, and by having a completed profile that tells people exactly who you help and what you do, the problem that you solve, the value that you bring to your client. Once you do that, now you can use LinkedIn to search. So that’s certainly one way to do it. You know, go to the Jobs tab search for freelance copywriter or contract copywriter or sales copywriter, or any of the words that are related to the kinds of work that you want to do. You can add a location filter if you only want to look for jobs, say in the United States or maybe in Atlanta or maybe in Texas, or however you want to filter those out, and then you will see things that are there. You do need to be a little bit careful. There are a lot of fake jobs out there. There are content farms that, you know, post jobs that are looking for cheap help. And so you do need to put a little due diligence into this. But you can find good opportunities on LinkedIn. There are lots of them.

And like I said earlier, you just need to figure out a way when you respond, a way to make you stand out. You’re not just responding with a hey, I’m interested, and here’s my resume. You really do have to stand out from the hundreds of other people that are out there while we’re talking about LinkedIn. Also, you can cold pitch prospects on LinkedIn. So as you connect with people or follow people on LinkedIn and comment on their work and see the content that they post, you start to see opportunities that you might be able to help with. And so you can use the DMS on LinkedIn in order to reach out to potential clients as well, and if you’ve got a decent template for that, that can, you know, speed things up.

As far as making that connection, we talk a lot about how to connect, how to warm up cold leads in that client acquisition system, the p7 client acquisition system I mentioned briefly, and you can find out more about that at the copyrighted club.com, forward slash p7 Is all about how to warm up somebody from cold or from a loose connection to somebody who is really interested in working with you, and it’s all because you write what I call a love note pitch. So you can find out more about that, but look for five to 10 people in your niche on LinkedIn, the exact person that you can help and send a connection request. And then, you know, follow up with them as they post content. Post your own comments on that, not just Hey, nice, nice work or good idea here, but really substantive, thoughtful comments so they start to see you. And then when the time is right, you can reach out with a direct message offering to help with whatever problem that they have.

Idea number seven for finding clients is using social media. So again, there’s nothing new here. If you’re posting content on Instagram or on LinkedIn or any of the other social media channels you’re you’re basically doing the right thing. But you don’t just want to be talking about copywriting, because potential clients don’t really want to learn how to be copywriters. They want a copywriter who’s going to handle that stuff for them. So you want to be posting about the problems that you solve. You’re going to want to share case studies and testimonials and talk about the work that you do. You’re going to want to talk about your process and how effective it is. Post about exactly how you solved a problem for your last client. And of course, be sure to respond to the comments that you get that your prospects might be leaving on your content if they’ve interacted with you a few times, reach out with a DM or an email, let them know exactly how you could help solve a similar problem, and obviously we’ve been talking about doing that in various different ways, but social media can be a great place to find clients. If you’re into the kind of content that you want to post on social media doesn’t have to be there. Again. We’ve got a lot more ideas to go through here now.

Idea number eight is to start your own group, especially for your prospects. So this isn’t what I would call a beginner level strategy, but if you are an experienced copywriter, this strategy can create a steady stream of clients that literally could last for years. As the leader of a group, you are collating a bunch of potential clients that need your experience and expertise, and as the thought leader in the connector, the person who is connecting people in the group, you’re able to show up as the expert and become the natural person that they want to reach out to. So you can create a group in all kinds of places, Facebook, LinkedIn, Discord, Slack circle, again, so many different places to do this. But the key here isn’t to create a group for copywriters or for content writers. You want to target the people in your niche. You want to choose a name that makes it easy for your prospects to see that that’s the place where they can connect with people like them and hear your expertise. So if I were going to create a group for coaches, I would choose a name like the coach marketing group or something like that, where people are easily able to see the value that might be in that group from the name, and then, of course, once they see that, they’ll want to join.

Idea number nine is finding clients by cold emailing so much like cold calling or reaching out via DM on Facebook or LinkedIn, you can find emails of potential clients and reach out to them directly. Hunter IO is a tool that’s fantastic for this. I think there’s a free option with hunter that you can get something like 20 or 25 different emails a month for free. But when you’re looking for these clients to reach out to, you know, listen to for podcast interviews, or look for posts on their blogs or or look for the movers and shakers in the industry or the niche that you serve, and reach out directly. Don’t use standard cold email templates that you get from someone else. You’re going to want to customize it. You’re going to want to write, basically, again, what I call a love note pitch and send that to them in order to warm them up.

But there’s just so many different ways to identify these people, and email is a great method for reaching out to potential clients related to that is idea number 10, and that is finding your next client by snail mailing. So good old fashioned show up in the mailbox with some paper or with something that is so different. Now, one of the things I love about this idea is that you are virtually guaranteed to be the only copywriter or the only content writer or the only marketer showing up in that place. Unfortunately, with cold pitching and email, there are probably going to be, certainly, within a week, three or four others that may be doing the. Same thing. But if you’re willing to pay for an envelope and a stamp and write a letter, you can actually show up where nobody else is and where people are actually looking for something besides credit card mailers and card stacks and newspaper deals that all go straight to the recycle bin. They’re looking for some kind of one to one contact, and if you can be the person that creates that for them. You can create a really good connection where nobody else is, and like I said, that’s their home. You can actually do something even more creative, if you want to create something that we would call a shock and awe mailer. That’s a term that I’ve borrowed from Dan Kennedy, but this is where, instead of just sending a letter and a standard envelope, you’re going to get a larger envelope. You’re probably going to put inside it some samples, sales materials. If you have a book, you can put a book in there, you know, some kind of tchotchke or something that makes it lumpy, because people, once they receive this because, you know, it’s in a colored envelope, or it’s in a big envelope, or a FedEx envelope, something like that. It’s different. It’s unique, and it can really stand out. Something as simple as a greeting card can also stand out because people like that. Personalized one on one, one copywriter that I know did this with a newsletter and created a newsletter identified 200 different people that they would mail this four page newsletter out to, and over the course of three or four months, sending out to these 200 potential clients with just advice, the sales material, you know, all of the different ways to solve the problems that they had filled his entire client roster, and he has gone on to make more than a million dollars a year, and that is a true million dollars. Fantastic way just to get in front of your ideal clients where nobody else is.

Idea number 11 is to connect with fellow copywriters. So I’ve mentioned this even recently on the podcast, but if you can reach out to other copywriters who know you know the work that you do, and you know you staying in touch with them when they get leads that they perhaps can’t work on because maybe they’ve got too much work, or it’s not a fit for them because it’s not the right niche, or some other thing, they can often pass them on to you, and obviously you can do the same for them, but this is a little bit of a long term strategy. You’ve got to do the groundwork, you’ve got to create a relationship and build trust with these other copywriters in order for that to happen. So you’ll be reaching out to them in places like social media or LinkedIn or at conferences, masterminds and in person events, so that you can get to know each other and trust each other, so that you’re willing to share those kinds of leads and relationships. I mentioned this, I think, in last week’s podcast, but copywriter I know passed my name on to somebody she had been working with but didn’t have time to help that person ended up doing three or four projects with me. They passed me on to a project manager who did another three or four projects with me. It was almost six figures worth of work over time, and that was all through one friendship made in one group, when I connected with a fellow copywriter. And I’ve done that over and over with a variety of copywriters over the past 10 years or so.

Idea number 12 is to build partnerships with content agencies or marketing agencies, SEO agencies, design firms, anybody who might need copy but maybe doesn’t have their own copywriter on staff. This is a tactic that can result in work and a full roster really, really quickly, because a lot of agencies, when they get too much work for their internal team, they need resources that they can reach out to. And so if you can become the freelancer for a an agency that they’re turning over their extra work to, they can do their overflow and hand that off to you. That’s a really valuable service for them, and that’s a great way for you to find work without having to pitch a variety of different clients. Now if you do this, oftentimes, you might need to have an agency rate, because agencies are going to mark up your work and pass it on to their clients. So this probably won’t matter a whole lot. If you’re charging, say, 50 or $75 an hour, agencies will generally market up considerably more than that. But if you’re charging, you know, 150 $200 an hour, you may need to reduce what you charge to something like 70% of that so that the agency can mark it up 30% and, you know, pass it on. But because you’re not doing the work of finding clients, you’re not even doing a lot of client management work, trading that small percentage off of what you normally would get paid can often be very worth it. So reaching out to agencies can be a great place to find clients.

Idea number 13 is hobnobbing with clients. Conferences and events. So again, this is a really good way to establish relationships, face to face and build trust, where a lot of other copywriters are not going to be too many copywriters are there in social media, or they’re showing up in the DMS, or they’re pitching in the inbox, but very few actually show up to industry events for their clients. Now I’m not necessarily talking about showing up at events for copywriters or for marketers, so this might not be,

Idea number 14 is using online ads. So again, this is not a beginner strategy, but if you’ve got a proven offer that clients respond to, you could post ads in places like Facebook or Google. It’s becoming more and more popular to run ads on YouTube, even Reddit does ads. Now you can run ads on LinkedIn, Twitter, Tiktok, Pinterest, Amazon, there’s so many different places, so find the place where your audience is set a daily budget doesn’t have to be a whole lot. Could be 10 to $20 a day, and have an ad that’s going to either introduce a lead magnet so that you can be start emailing and connecting with these people or advertise your offer and your service. We recorded a podcast a few weeks ago with Tara Zirker about this. If you want to check out what you can do with ads, that might be a great way just to follow up and take some action on that I did.

Number 15 is connecting with marketing consultants who have related services, so like the agency strategy SEO consultants or sales funnel consultants, email system consultants or ESP, like, there’s so many different marketing consultants who don’t write copy, but oftentimes they Need copy to put into the systems that they are building or working on. And so you know, if you know a HubSpot consultant or maketo consultant, Email List Manager, Facebook ad consultant, you may be able to connect with them, and they could connect you with their clients who might need ad copy, sales enablement, copy, case studies, emails, all of that kind of stuff. Idea number 16 is to attract prospects with the what I’ll call the free ideas method. So with this method, you are providing a mini critique or an audit that identifies mistakes that potential clients are making on their websites or in their funnels or email campaigns or other marketing assets, and you’re going to suggest ways for them to improve.

So once you find a prospect that you want to work with, check their website or their funnel or email sequence, whatever it is that you want to audit and look for things that you can improve, and what would you do differently or better, and what could they be doing to improve their responses? And once you have a. List of ideas, send an email and ask if you can share those ideas. If they don’t say yes, follow up with another email, with a recording, say, using a tune, a tool like loom or zoom, where you’re actually walking through the ideas that you came up with. Now you want to be a little bit careful with this method, because most clients don’t like to be told that their copy is bad or their marketing assets suck, or that they’re terrible at what they do. So you want to make sure that you’re keeping things positive, that you’re suggesting ideas for improvement, and you’re not assuming that things don’t work just because it doesn’t look like what you would do. Oftentimes, the stuff works, and if you don’t have access to the numbers behind what they’re doing, you don’t want to be saying, you know, you’re definitely not getting the clients that you think you are. You’re not doing a good enough job. They may be doing a pretty good job. And so you’re really looking for a way to keep it positive, but to offer some improvements.

Idea number 17 is to reach out to clients with remarkable content, wherever it is that you post. So LinkedIn, medium, another publishing platform, when we say remarkable, we mean it’s really got to be something that’s a little bit different. So you’re not just regurgitating the same old, same old. You’re not just posting AI fluff, but you’re doing really deep thought leadership that stands out. There’s just so much mediocre content in the world. We’ve all created it. We’ve all put it out there, and it just disappears into that sea of sameness. And it’s not worth doing if that’s the level of create creative work that you do. But if you’ve got ideas, or you can do surveys or information that’s not readily available anywhere else. It can be a great way to attract the audience that you’re looking for. So one example that we have done at the copywriter club, and many of you have participated in, is our annual salary survey. Now, obviously we’re talking to copywriters, and so we’re asking copywriters information about that. But in your niche, you could create some kind of a survey or industry report that has this kind of proprietary information that you have collected, you’ve curated in some way, and you make that available for people so that they will connect with you. It’s a little bit of a long game. You may need to follow up with people after you’ve published it or made it available, but it’s a great way to get attention and reach out and connect with the clients that you want to be working with.

Obviously, I did number 18 guest posting, so this just gets your work in front of your ideal clients. You can post on your own website, but my guess is you probably have very little traffic there. Most copywriters don’t get more than a few visits a day, if that. But there are large sites that publish content that have audiences that are eagerly awaiting for more ideas. There are newsletters that you can connect with that will help you get in front of the people who are reading those kinds of newsletters or guest posts, and so look for those kinds of opportunities. One way to identify that is to go to Google and search for terms like submit a guest post or guest post guidelines, become a contributor. Things like that will help you identify those sites that accept guest posts. And of course, you want to put those terms in quotes so that it looks for those specific terms, as opposed to, you know, pages that include all of those words.

Idea number 19 is to attract prospects with a regular newsletter. So I touched on this when we were talking about showing up in the inbox. But I want to come back to it, because I really, really love this idea. So there are newsletter platforms now with recommendation engines and Paid Subscriptions. You know, online tools like sub stack, beehive, Convert Kit and so you can create these kinds of newsletters that are hyper focused on the kinds of clients that you want to work with, whether that’s an industry or whether it’s a type of problem or service or deliverable, you could easily create the preeminent newsletter for that industry. And of course, tools like substack, beehive, they are online, so it shows up in the inbox. There’s tools for helping you find additional readers that can be super effective. And I mentioned, you know, the idea of taking this and actually making it a hard copy and sending it out again. Just worth underlining that idea, because it’s such a great way to connect with your ideal clients.

Idea number 20 is to place an ad in a newsletter that’s already out there. And so there are dozens of newsletters that may already be going after your industry. If you’re writing in AI. There’s probably 30 different AI newsletters on sub stack that have readerships of more than 5000 or. Readers, and some of them have hundreds of 1000s of readers. If I wanted to put an offer in front of them, I can buy an ad in that newsletter and show up as a sponsor. Newsletters do it in different ways, but you can show up as the sponsor of the newsletter with several paragraphs talking about you or your product. Maybe there are smaller ways to do sponsorships, but to be seen by 100,000 potential clients with an offer that you know they want to sign up for, that you’re putting in front of them can be a great way to start that client attraction funnel.

Idea number 21 we’re on a podcast right now. So being on podcasts can be exceptionally good for talking to the clients that you want to talk to. Again, it matters the kinds of podcasts that you choose. So you want to be looking for podcasts in the industry or the niche that you serve. You know, again, if you’re a copywriter and you show up here on the copywriter club podcast, that’s great. You’re getting in front of other copywriters, but if you’re writing for coaches, your reach for coaches may be a little bit limited by the audience that listens to this show. So look for shows that help or talk to the audience that you want to write for, and then pitch the hosts of those podcasts you know show up and let them know what are the three or four things that you can talk about, what are a couple of topics that they haven’t covered over the last four or five months on their shows?

I’m serious when I say, go back and listen to all of the shows to see what they talk about. Because if you can find those ideas that are missing when you reach out to the podcast host and say, Hey, I noticed you haven’t talked about haven’t talked about this idea or that idea, and I would love to talk about my framework for that and my process for accomplishing this, or how your listeners can do these three things in order to see a success, those kinds of pitches really do work when you’re Talking to the right podcast hosts.

Okay, so that’s 21 ideas. Of course, there are lots more, and maybe we’ll get into more in a future episode. Before we leave off, I want to just mention a couple things you don’t want to be doing when you’re looking for clients.

Number one, you do not want to wait to be chosen. You can’t sit back having built a great website, or knowing that you’re a great copywriter, or knowing that you can solve a problem for a client and wait for the client to come and find you, or wait for somebody else to say, Hey, Rob is a great copywriter. You should hire him, because that’s not going to happen. You have to get out there. You have to find one or two or four or five ideas where you can start showing up and say, hey, here I am. This is the problem I solve for you. You are. This is the person that I help, and this is the value I bring to the table. Let’s talk about how I can help you.

Number Two, don’t beg for work. So even if you are desperate, even if you know that you can help this client, you don’t want to show up, asking them or begging, putting yourself in a subservient position, because when you do that, clients can feel that you’re desperate, and people who are capable, people who are expert at what they do and are proven successful at things like copywriting, they don’t have to beg for work, because people come to them. And so when you start to beg for work, when you plead, when you show up desperate, it shows that you are not the expert that you need to be. So don’t ever beg for work, no matter how desperate you are.

Number three, don’t list is, don’t waste your time convincing people that they need copy. If the person that you’re talking to doesn’t already believe that copy is part of the solution to their problem, move on, because you’re going to spend way too much time convincing them they’re not really going to believe you until they see proof. They’re going to be difficult clients to work with. You’re going to have so much more success if you are talking with clients who already believe in the power of copywriting or the power of marketing to solve many of the problems that they have and finally, don’t work for free. Now let me be clear on what I mean by that. I’m not saying you shouldn’t get paid, because you absolutely should get paid, but there are ways that we get paid that aren’t necessarily in dollars, and so it is perfectly okay for you to work for no dollars, but when you do this, you should be getting something else from the effort that you’re putting in.

Number one, you should be getting a sample that you can use or in order to drop into your portfolio or to share with other potential clients, to show that you do this kind of work for real clients, you should be getting a case study that shows the thinking that went into the process. It talks about the problem. You’re trying to solve, and the various approaches that you considered, and then the results that you get, if you are, you know, doing a project for no dollars, you should get a referral from the person you’re doing it for. You know, let me know, you know, one or two people who you know, who also need help. Or, you know, talk to them about me. There are different ways to do that referral thing, but these are all ways that you can get paid if you’re actually working for no dollars. That’s not for free, because, again, you’re getting paid, but it’s by something that’s not money. So don’t ever work for free, even if you are not getting paid.

Okay, I mentioned a bunch of helpful resources the top of show the ignition kit, which dives into what I’ve shared here in much more depth, and gives you three different workshops to help you find clients if you need them right now, and includes a short coaching call to help you dial in your pitch, your niche and more that’s at the copywriter club.com, forward slash ignition.

I’ve referred to our p7 client acquisition system a few times. There’s all kinds of stuff that’s included in that. And you can find details about that proven system at thecopywriterclub.com/p7 and I mentioned The Copywriter Underground at the top of the show, which is like a home for all kinds of resources, including leads from other copywriters, workshops, coaching, community and more you can find that at thecopywriterclub.com/TCU-2.

And of course, I have linked to all of those and more in the show notes for this episode. As I said at the top of the show, this episode is a little bit different. So if you liked it and you would like more episodes like this with me, just sharing some of the things that I know, in addition to the regular interviews that I do, please email me to let me know I’m at [email protected] that is my real email, and I do get all of the emails sent to that address. And I really appreciate your feedback. You know, again, tell me if this is helpful and I can share more thoughts on other topics, anything from say, AI to offer creation to how to get better as a copywriter. So let me know.

What do you do when the worst happens in business? Are you prepared? In this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I spoke with copywriter Topaz Hooper about the steps you should be taking now to prepare for an economic downturn. The ideas we talk about here are good business practices even if the economy booms. But they become more important when things are uncertain. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

American Copywriter Co.

Rob Marsh: Are you prepared for the worst in your business… economic downturns, recessions, the loss of clients and ongoing projects? If not, this episode is for you. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

In today’s episode I’m catching up with Topaz Hooper who was a guest on the show several years ago. Topaz’s business has followed the trend that so many copywriters and other freelancers followed through the pandemic and afterwards. Most of us saw a nice bump in clients and revenues but then things started to change and she’s had to reinvent her business to adjust to the changes. We’ll get into that in the interview.

Topaz also happens to be the second American expat who is living and working in The Netherlands that I’ve had on the podcast over the past couple of weeks. That wasn’t intentional, but maybe this was a hint that more of us could be living overseas and working with clients here in the states. I don’t know.

The big topic we covered in this podcast is how to survive in a recession. We are not in a recession—at least as far as the general business cycle goes—at the moment, but there have been some difficult economic events that have scared a few people and caused them to predict that a recession is somewhere out there on the horizon. We are not predicting a recession, but we are talking about how to be prepared for it if it happens to come… maybe this year, maybe next, but certainly at some point in the future.

But beyond the general economic environment, there have been micro effects in the copywriting world… things like A.I. taking on a lot of work, especially at the lower end of the spectrum. And some industries, finance and tech come to mind, have suffered their own downturns with layoffs and clients cancelling projects. So while these haven’t shown up in the overall macro-environment, what you see happening in your niche may be close to a what an actual recession might feel like. If you’ve felt that, you’ll want to listen to this whole episode.

One more thing I want to mention, I talked about this topic—preparing for a recession—at The Copywriter Club In Real Life in 2020… that was right before the last mini-recession happened. Topaz and I talk about some of those ideas on this episode, but you can go even deeper with them in an article written by Anna Hetzel. I’ll link to that article in the show notes if you want to check it out. It’s worth reading.

Before we jump into our interview, this is probably the last time I’ll mention this for a while but I want to share with you all of my research secrets… especially my 4:20+ research method that helps copywriters like you uncover the ideas and insights you need to write great sales copy. It’s part of Research Mastery which also includes more than twenty different techniques for capturing ideas, all of the questions I use to learn more about my client, their product, their customers and their competitors as well as the documents you need to capture your research and several tutorials on how to use A.I. to speed up your processes and even help with your research itself.  There’s a bonus on using Airtable to collect and sort your data and more… You can learn more about this unique resource at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery… research mastery is all one word. Check it out now at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery.

And now, my interview with Topaz Hooper.

Topaz, welcome back to the podcast. It’s great to have you here, excited for this discussion, talk, chat, whatever we’re gonna whatever we’re gonna call it, but you were here a few years ago episode number 305, catch me up. What has changed in your life since we talked about cruelty free copywriting and sales and all of those things.

Topaz Hooper: So the first time we chatted, thanks for having me back, Rob. It’s so good to be here. Yeah, life has changed quite a bit. Cruelty Free copywriter was my baby in 2021 I think I jumped on the pod, like you said in the 300th episode somewhere. And at that time, vegan food, plant based fashion, clean beauty were all rising and they were really heavily funded, and they needed copywriters everywhere. And I couldn’t be everywhere, but I had a very good, successful business. And since then, you know, people are feeling a bit of a financial pinch these days, and those industries are not doing as well. So I’ve had to pivot quite a bit and launch new things and do new things. So I’m excited to get into how I’m sort of pivoting in this era of quasi recession, energy and maybe how others can learn from what I’ve done.

Rob Marsh: Okay, this is really interesting, and I think it’s going to be a really good conversation, because, like you said, things have changed. Especially here in the States, there’s a lot of uncertainty about what’s going to be happening tomorrow or next week, or what’s not going to be happening. And things seem to be up in the air. There is talk of recessions, political policy, maybe bringing that faster or slower. But regardless of, even if you set all of that stuff aside, the business cycle itself, every 7 to 10 years, we go through some ups and downs. And this last cycle, we’ve had things like AI, we’ve had some layoffs in the tech sector because of that, which has brought more people into the copywriting world. And so before we start talking about some of the things that you’ve done to shift as you were looking at your business, what made you realize that things were changing? What were some of those first indicators where you’re like, I need to start paying attention or like, for a lot of us, sometimes that just goes over our heads and suddenly we just don’t have money, or we don’t have clients, and we’re like, Okay, we got a problem here.

Topaz Hooper: Honestly, I was paying attention to my clients on social media. Every single client that I have, or potential client. I follow them on social, and I like all their stuff, and so the algorithm sends me all their posts. And I just started seeing more and more of my favorite brands closing. And I was reading time after time due to unforeseen circumstances, we’re closing the business, or, due to this sort of difficult time to launch a company, or to grow a company, or, you know, import, exports, you know, all these sort of business owner terms, I started to see that people were just closing shop. They’re just like, people aren’t buying our shoes anymore, or people who don’t don’t have money for this extra special thing, and we’re closing so I start to see this trend happening, probably like middle of last year, 2024, to about now, 3 or 4 years after the other started closing, and I started to look into why that was happening. And so that’s when I started to get a little bit worried.

Okay, you know, if these are the people that I know of, imagine all the other brands in my niche that I typically serve. What are they going through? I also started to pay a lot of attention to LinkedIn. Some bigger brands were closing meaty, which is a popular vegan mushroom brand, sold for less than their value this year. I think they were valued at 50 million and they sold for 4 million recently. Those are signs that, you know, my industry is not doing well. And so what I started to notice was my favorite brands were closing shop, and that’s why my inbox started to sound a little empty, a little bit like a cave with an echo. And so that’s when I started to think, okay maybe something’s wrong. And so I kind of had to become a bit of a quasi economics professor, and start digging into what is supply chain, and what are factors that make businesses close or open, and what does this mean for my business?

Rob Marsh: This is interesting. So obviously, we need to be paying attention to the industries that we’re working in if we’re seeing this kind of stuff happening in our industries as well. What do we need to be doing? Let’s talk about recession proofing, or preparing for what could happen with an economic downturn. 

Topaz Hooper: Yes, first of all, kind of circling back, you got to become an economics professor or something. I know many of us, we are in the copywriting business because we love writing, or we love marketing or we love sales. We’re not economics people. Maybe we know how to do our bookkeeping, but we don’t look at inflation necessarily. And in the context of our business. We might think of it in our homes, oh, the price of milk is up or something. But we don’t think about, what does that mean for my clients? 

You know, I think we all need to start reading the jobs report. We should all start listening to the federal Federal Reserve Chair. We need to all be looking at the growth trajectory of our niches in the last six months or a year. And so I think we all need to start putting on our economics hats, because that tells us why we’re not getting clients. It’s more so those factors that impact the businesses that we serve, and less about whether your marketing was good that day or whether your social post was seen. And so for me, the big recession proofing process has been just that deep dive. Is it me or is it the market? And when I started to realize it’s not me, my website still converts, my emails are still good. The market’s not doing well. I started to say, Okay, what do I need to do now? And so I think step one is just getting in tune with the local economics of your area. I know the copywriter club serves, you know, has people from all over the globe, and I know if tech is declining here, but tech is doing well in India, and is doing great in China or wherever. People are listening. You know, we have to sort of think about our own local economic situation. And so, you know, be an economics professor. Read all the nerdy stuff, you know, look at Forbes, whatever you need to do to get a sense of your industry. So that’s number one.

Rob Marsh: So before we move on from that, let’s talk a little bit about inflation. There was worldwide inflation that happened over the last two or three years, and at the same time that a lot of the prices were going up for our businesses, for our personal lives, we also had in the marketing world, AI come on the scene and start to push down some of the things that at least copywriters in the middle ranges and the lower ranges were able to charge and so we sort of had pressure from two sides happening here, where prices were going up, but our ability to charge more was stymied a bit by that. So that kind of an impact starts to show up, even if you’re not able to watch a lot of the economic indicators that you’re talking about, that starts to show up in our P&L, or when you look at the end of the month and there’s no money there, this is part of why that is going on. That’s not really a question. But I just want to throw that out, because it is the reality that we’re all dealing with.

Topaz Hooper: You’re so right, Rob, and I would say if you want to recession proof your business in the era of AI, you have to take the bull by the horns, so to speak. You know, I am so guilty of being the person saying, AI is never going to take my job. You know, honestly, I’m good like, I don’t need to learn it. I don’t need to engage with it. It’s just going to be there. And if clients want to use it, great, but other clients will use copywriters like me, and that’s not untrue, but more and more clients are saying, can you please use AI to speed up your copywriting process, or can you run that headline through AI, just so that we, you know, have another idea here. And so copywriters who are feeling a little bit threatened by AI right now and aren’t able to charge the rates that they usually do, keep your rates steady. Just use just but jump on the AI train. 

I know that The Copywriter Club has done so many episodes about how to engage with AI, and I do think that is going to be a tool that’s going to save your business in the long run. For example, I was doing some Substack content writing for a thought leader in the clean beauty space, and she used AI for a ton of her articles. And I’m like, there’s nothing wrong with that, but they’re not that good. Let me use what you’ve written with AI, and let me make it more human. Let me adapt it. Let me clean it up. Let me target it better. And those articles performed better. I didn’t tell the client to stop using AI, but I jumped on top of it and said, Okay, let me fix it for you. I still charge my same rate. I just gave her a better article with AI. So I would suggest people to not fight it, but to own it and to use it, and to take the power away from AI and make it a tool for you instead of a replacement for you during approach.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, it reminds me of the way that I talk to my kids about bullies. You know, you take, you take away their power by doing certain things or whatever. And I suppose that’s an apt analogy here, because some of us have seen AI as a bully. To us, it’s taking away our livelihood, or it is impacting the way that we work, or the way that clients are thinking about the value that we bring to the table, and so taking away its power, it’s just a good reframe on that. 

Okay, let’s talk about what do we need to do to prepare for this is the reality we’re in? What do we need to do to make sure that we’re gonna actually survive the next year or two, assuming that things may get worse?

Topaz Hooper: Let’s get personal here. We all live in a place where we pay rent or mortgage. We have to go get food, we have, we have living expenses. And more and more copywriters use their business funds just for living. Many of us live hand to mouth. Many of us, you know, maybe 80% of our income from copyright and go straight into our personal living expenses. If you want to prepare for a recession, please lower your cost of living. Maybe it might be a little too late. Maybe you’re stuck in something that you can’t get out of. But if you can get out of a high cost of living area, if you can get out of paying for an extra bill or an extra car or an extra thing, please try to reduce your cost of living before it’s too late. And the reason why I say this is because during the peak of the pandemic, we copywriters, I know we’re making six figures. I was making six figures. It was a great era. Times have changed, and now my friends who upgraded their life during the height of the pandemic, they got new Teslas, they got a new mortgage, they got a new this. Now they’re saying, oh my goodness, this is way too expensive, and I can no longer afford it like I could in 2022 and so my suggestion is, before the pandemic comes, try to save 50% of your business income. I know it’s hard, because we all have living expenses, but if you can save 50% put half away, use, use the rest, you’re going to thank me in a year when the when the actual height of the recession hits, or knock, knock on wood, hopefully it doesn’t hit, but you’ll be happy in a half a year.

Two years when the recession has come. And the truth is, there are, there are recessions within the United States. They’re always there. It has nothing to do with you. It’s always going to happen. So the more that we can prepare by keeping our cost of living low, the better. In addition, you also want to lower your business expenses. Maybe you were an agency in 2022, 2023, 2024 you had subcontractors. You had a lot of tools. You had a lot of apps. Now you’re starting to realize, did I really need to spend $130 a month on SEMrush for one project that I do once a year? Or could I have just done the free version? Or do I need eight subcontractors? Maybe I just need one or two. And so, you know, how can you diminish the cost of working so that you can save that 50% of your business income and put it away, put it away, put it away. So, yeah, cost of living, and then saving 50% of your income is going to be a game changer for the recession. That’s how so many of us survived. That’s how I’ve survived those good and bad months. Save, save, save, cut, cut.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I love this advice. This is something that I’ve done in my own business recently, and looking particularly at software tools where I see, okay, I invested in this tool because it’s got five or six different things that I might use in the future, and ultimately, I’m only using two of them. Is there a tool out there that actually gives me those two, and I’m not paying for all of these extra features, and because of that, I have changed email service providers. I’m looking at alternatives to tools like Asana. Asana is not incredibly expensive, but you know, if you’re paying a couple of $100 a month and can switch to a tool that’s maybe 25 or $30 a month for you know, that’s going to cover 80% 90% of what you’re using a tool for those kinds of trade offs can be very worthwhile. And at the same time in personal business, you know, do you really watch Netflix and Prime and Disney+ and Max and, you know, there’s places where we can say one at a time, we can cut back so that our personal number helps reduce the pressure on our business to provide for this high cost of living. And I’m being a little flippant in saying streaming services is the problem. There’s this conversation out there that all you need to do is give up avocado toast and you’re gonna have a safe retirement. We’re not being flippant about that. There are legitimate things that people can do and enjoy life, but at the same time, you want to be careful that you’re not over indulging in things that you’re not using in order to bring your expenses down.

Topaz Hooper: Oh my gosh, you nailed it. Rob, one cool thing that I’m so, like, surprised that I didn’t know about was Google Tasks, which acts like a note taker, slash Task recorder that does something more. It’s more basic than Asana, but it can act as an Asana. So look at all the tools out there that can do, what your favorite tools do, but a little bit cheaper or free. You know, I worked at Google for two years. There’s a ton of tools… for example, my phone is now on Google Voice. I save money by changing my phone from a $90 a month bill to a 100% free internet based phone. People can still leave me voicemails. People I can still call my mom like nothing’s changed, except that I don’t pay anything anymore. And so it’s just one of those things that if you can find tools that are free or low cost that do exactly what you need them to do, go for it, find it, do it. And especially when you’re in a slower period and you’re feeling like your business is walking into a recessionary period, this is a great time to start digging around and cleaning house, fixing things, screwing in light bulbs, you know, repairing and painting the the facets of your business that were kind of looking crusty when you were at your height, and now you have the time to fix them. So go for it. 

How? You know, go under construction, do some auditing on your expenses, and figure out, how can I save $300 a month for the rest of the year? One other thing I would mention, and that saved me, is, instead of getting an app and spending monthly on it, buy the one year payment of that app. So for example, I use Calendly. It’s like 90 bucks a year. Instead of paying, you know, $8 a month, I pay 90 bucks a year, and that bill goes away for an entire year. So during the peak of my business, when I’m super rich and everything’s going well, I buy all my subscriptions for the year, so that during my slow month, I don’t even have to look at a bill anymore. It’s just all running on its own. That can be a really cool way to kind of have it out of sight, out of mind, and you’re not worrying about something month to month. When you’re in your slow period, that’s a really good idea if your business cycles through, you know?

Rob Marsh: So a lot of us have very quiet periods. Say, the end of December into January. Sometimes there’s a quiet period around tax season. Sometimes summer quiets down a little bit, just because of the realities of the school year, the business year, the business cycle. So being able to stagger those expenses to make sense? Well, obviously it makes sense. Back in 2020 at TCC, IRL, I gave a presentation on stage. It was basically, how do you prepare your business for a recession? This was right, as COVID was hitting, we were all looking, you know, down very similar kind of a situation where we’re very unsure of what the future was going to look like. And the very first thing that I talked about was, don’t run out of money. And that’s exactly what we’re talking about here. Is you’re just ensuring that you’re going to have enough money to make it through the month, or you’re gonna make it to the next positive client experience so that you can keep going. And so all of this stuff is really about, how do you make sure that you don’t run out of money?

Topaz Hooper: Yes, and that’s a great segue into my next tip for how to recession proof your copywriting business multiple streams of income and building a backup business. Now, some of us started copywriting as a side hustle. You know, we had a full time job and we started a copywriting business, and it was our side hustle. Now it’s a full time thing, but maybe you need a side hustle for your copywriting business or an adjacent one. So for example, cruelty-free copywriter gave me six figures. I loved it. I saved everything. And then when the industry started to decline, I started to look around and say, Hmm, is there another industry or niche that I can serve? Are there other services that I can offer that still make me feel good. I’m I’m an expert in them. I feel confident in those subject matters or in those deliverables. But I can build it while cruelty-free copywriter is still running strong. I can build an adjacent business on the side. Lots of big companies do this holding. Holding companies have eight different companies underneath them, and they all run them separately, and when one goes down, the other one rises, and they manage to keep themselves afloat by having multiple companies in their portfolio. Copywriters can think about it in the same way. Let me have a business that’s just for cruelty-free, and let me start a new business that’s for real estate or luxury or a totally different construction, a totally different industry that has a different market and has different fluctuations. So I’m super happy to announce that I just launched a new copywriting business. 

It’s called the American Copywriter Co and we help global businesses reach American audiences. This for anyone that knows me, they know that I’m a traveler and I’ve always, always, always loved building relationships with global companies, global people. I love being everywhere. And many of the companies I would meet are like, wow, you seem like a great girl, but your niche didn’t cool too free, and we’re not, we’re furniture, or we’re or we’re tech, or we’re not quite Are you sure you want to work with us? You seem like you don’t serve us. And it was very hard for me to say, Oh no, I do serve you, I promise. And they look at my website, they’re like, Are you sure? Now I’ve created a business where I can say, Yes, I do serve you. I do serve global companies that want to launch and grow in the United States, and I’m their translator in chief, their copywriter in chief, to help translate their French furniture brand messaging into something that an American in New York City or LA can understand and relate to and want to purchase from. This is something that I think is in demand and makes me unique. It still leans into sort of what makes you special? What are you an expert in? This idea of copywriting and building your niche, but it leads into a new, untapped niche that’s growing. And so I would highly recommend any copywriter who’s looking at their niche, whether it’s tech or health and wellness or something, and they’re just like, oh, is this gonna keep going down? Like, I need to do something without totally abandoning what you’ve done. Build another side business and see and then grow them, cultivate them, you know, together and lean into the one that really serves that season and, you know, scale down the one that is kind of in a dormant state.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, this is really good advice. Let me add to that just a little bit for those who are thinking, Well, I don’t really want to run two separate businesses. There’s also a way to do that within an existing business, and that is to come up with several different offers that are doing different things. So if you have in the past been writing case studies and white papers, maybe it’s time to branch out and start offering your clients something more like emails or sales pages, or maybe you’ve been writing sales pages and emails, but your clients are leaning into more content that could get picked up by AI in order to be found in AI search, right? So here’s an opportunity to expand your offers. Making more offers within an existing business does something similar. So I admire what you’re doing, building, you know, entirely a second business focused on a second set of you. Niches, clients and offers, but there’s maybe an easier way to, like you said earlier, create a side hustle for your side hustle, and that is, you know, make more offers to your existing clients in your existing business.

Topaz Hooper: Nailed it. You’re totally right. I think if you’re someone who has a brand name that’s not totally niched, it’s like, you know, Topaz Hooper copy or or something that can be reinvented or expanded upon. Go, diversify your deliverables. Super, super smart as copywriters, we’re taught to do social listening. We’re taught to listen to what our clients want, their their customers. What are they saying? Let’s practice social listening in our business. Go. Let’s walk over to our ideal client, or our past clients, and say, How are you doing? What? What are you struggling with? What do you need now? Oh, you don’t need a website anymore. You need ongoing email. Well, I don’t quite offer that, but I can. And so I think we all have to go back into the clients that we’ve served and start doing some social listening about what the market needs. What I’m hearing now is people are moving away from, you know, certain deliverables, and they want more different types of deliverables, like, maybe they’re doing more trade shows. They don’t want websites anymore. You did that for them last year. It’s beautiful. Now they need some trade stuff, or they need packaging, or they need brand strategy, because they’re looking to rebrand soon. You know, how can you listen in and say, Is there something that you need that you would like this season? And some of them will tell you they’re like, Yeah, we could really use more packaging stuff. Do you do that? And you can say, Yeah, I do that. Yeah. I do that. Quickly. Add it to your website.

Yeah, definitely expand your deliverables. Don’t be afraid to listen in and be adjustable to your comp, to the companies that you serve. This advice of listening goes back to what you were saying when you first started talking about the reason for your shift. If you can see that your clients are struggling, you know to make sales or to do something in their business, and you can see it early enough so that you can actually help them solve that problem, create some value for them, help them launch a new product, or create sales for an existing product line. You’re watching them and seeing what’s happening in real time. That’s an opportunity where you can step in and say, hey, I can see what’s going on in the business, and I may be able to help you fix that. I may be able to bring more customers to the table. I may be able to help you reduce churn so that you’re not losing customers all of these things, all these problems that we can solve for our clients. But if you’re not watching your clients, paying attention what’s going on in your business, you’re gonna miss those opportunities. Yes, and that’s a great way to recession proof your business is leaning on the relationships that you have existing if you’ve done great work for a client and they love you, they just don’t need any more website stuff, you can totally lean in again and say, How can I help you this season? How can I help you next week? How can I help you next year? And cultivating those relationships can lead to more work, especially during a recession, when people are usually cutting their full time staff and looking to lean back into freelancers or sole sole solopreneurs. I guess you could say who they trust. And so, you know, how can you be the trustworthy person who has the right deliverables at the right time and you show up in their inbox on the perfect day? And so I would say, don’t be afraid to Yeah. Adjust your deliverables, pivot your niche a little bit as well. That’s one thing I learned with cruelty free copywriter. I was so heavily niched in plant based CPG, which is consumer packaged goods, for those that don’t know, basically plant based snacks, vegan fashion and beauty, that there was people in the luxury realm that are also cruelty free or sustainable that were like, Oh, we’re kind of in your niche, but we’re not quite Are you open to ethical diamonds, like lab grown diamonds? Oh, maybe that seems Are you open to sustainable furniture? Okay, maybe or, or are you open to compostable gloves. Is that something that you serve, you know, it is cruelty free, it is plant based, but it’s not quite in those specific niches. So, is there some kind of outside, quasi neighborhood niche that can also meet your business’s criteria, or, you know, or offer the or for people that want the deliverable that you offer. You know, Can you expand a little bit? Can you pivot? And so that’s what I learned, too. So I did, I took on an ethical diamond company, and it was awesome. And I took on a French furniture brand that does, you know, sustainably made, handcrafted furniture from the coast of Brittany, and it was great. And I was like, There’s nothing that’s not vegan or cruelty free about this. It’s just not food, fashion or beauty. And so there are some ways that you can still keep your company’s mission, your company’s direction, your company’s goals, your deliverables, and just sort of see what else is ancillary or what else is neighboring around, which. Where that industry is growing.

Rob Marsh: You mentioned these relationships and really dialing in on those. And I think this is a really important point as far as recession proofing a business, not just the existing relationships, although those are really good, you know, it’s easier to sell a customer who’s happy with your work and you’ve worked with before than it is to find a new customer. But this is the time that we should be building our network of friends and relationships outside of our customer base of the few copywriters that we’ve talked to, because those relationships take time to build and develop, and they don’t pay off, sometimes for months, sometimes for years, but when the recession hits, if you don’t have those relationships in place, building them becomes desperate, and you’re you’re sort of too late to make it work, and clients start to see it not as a relationship, but as a desperate plea for money and work.

Topaz Hooper: Oh my goodness, networking is such a dirty word for some people. It feels icky for introverts or people that kind of don’t like that. But I want to reframe networking in the context of recession proofing your business, which is networking should not be a tit for tat. Give me this. Give me that I’m using you. You’re using me. I think a lot of people approach networking in that way, and it leaves a really icky taste in everyone’s mouth. Networking should be a

relationship building tool and a reputational amplifier. You walk into conferences and say, Hi, my name is Topaz, and I do American copywriter CO and and Hi, that’s just what I do. What’s your name? Show me a picture of your dog. What do you do on Sundays? And the sort of relationship building aspect is so much more sustainable. And what happens is you start to become friends with people. Like, networking is like professional friends. It’s like, LinkedIn, you know? It’s like professional friends. And then whenever someone’s like, Man, I really could use a copywriter for something, you’re the first person that they think of because they met you two weeks ago at a conference. And so I would say your network is your net worth, and those and people that you know are oftentimes the people that will hire you. And I think as long as you lean in on networking as a relationship tool instead of a give me this, give me that you’re gonna have so much more success than other people during this processionary period. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that’s exactly right. It. We have to think about networking as friend making or relationship making, instead of, like you said, the tit for tat, you know, you give me this, I give you that, the cheesy, you know, mixer, cocktail party thing that we envision. I can think of several people that I’ve met over the course of my career who have become true friends. You know, we go to lunch, we hang out, who also, as time goes on, you know, every six months or so, there’s an opportunity for me to provide a lead for that person or for them to do it. For me, I don’t maintain the friendship because it’s going to lead to that kind of a thing. They are friends, and I enjoy going to lunch. We, you know, talk about our families, you know, things that are going on in our lives. But you know, because that friendship exists, sometimes these positive benefits for our businesses come out of that, and that’s how we have to look at building networks. It’s not too late. Start today, but look at it like I’m looking for friends, I’m looking for people to hang out with. I’m looking for people to talk with online, just to share ideas and thoughts, and not necessarily to beg for work,

Topaz Hooper: yes. And I think one of the things that has changed since the since the pandemic is that people are looking to meet you in real life like we. I think many of us in the copywriter world got kind of lost our networking chops a little bit because we were stuck in our houses during the pandemic. I mean, everyone lost everything was online. Yeah, everyone from all ages, lost their social skills during that period. But we got so used to doing online things, networking online, and now people are like, so do you want to get coffee again? And we have to be like, Yeah, I will I will walk, I will take a train, I will take a bus, I will bike ride, I will drive to go get a coffee with you. And I think something really powerful is cultivated there when you start to have these relationships with people, where you’re meeting in person, and they see you again and again and again. For example, I was working with a CPG company, and I started having coffee with the founder. I just met her through some networks. I was like, we should get coffee. You seem like a girl that I would love to nerd out with about this or that. We started becoming friends, we started hanging out. And then all of a sudden, she asked me to do some work for her. And I was a little bit surprised, because I never pitched her at all. I was just like, Hi, I just happen to be a copywriter. So what’s your favorite color, you know? And she said, I really want.

Work with you. And I said, why she’s like, because I know you. And that was it. That was the only reason why she wanted to hire me, is that she knows she knew me. And so if you want to recession proof your business, continue to be known, continue to go to networking events, to private parties, to to places where you don’t even think there’s clients, but just be that person that’s like, hi, yeah, I just don’t happen to be a copywriter, but I’m also a really great tennis player. Do you want to play tennis sometime and just see what happens to

to your business when in those desperate moments when you really do need clients, you don’t have to beg. You can just say, Hi so and so it was nice meeting you last week. It just so happens that I’m open to client work. If you know of anybody that is looking for a copywriter in the email or launch, just let me know and send them. Send them my way. I have gotten,

I would say, 6k to 8k worth of work just from that casual, let’s play tennis together, relaxed thing alone, and now I’m not struggling during this recessionary period or this quasi recessionary period, because I just made a bunch of friends. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, another place to make these friends, it’s been really beneficial to me personally, and you’ve seen this, I’m sure, in your business, but sometimes in joining a program or a membership or a mastermind, something like that will connect you with the right people.

I’ve mentioned this once or twice on this podcast, but I joined a mastermind and met, you know, a bunch of other copywriters, one of whom connected me with somebody that was in her network and she didn’t have time to help them with a project. So I hopped onto that project, which then turned into, like, four or five other projects, and I made almost six figures from that one contact. And that would never have happened if I hadn’t joined the membership where we met. And so I know, you know, on this podcast, I pitch our membership quite a bit. The copywriter underground, it doesn’t have to be that particular membership, but being in programs with people who are doing similar things to what you are doing is a fantastic way to build that network of other people that you could reach out to, again, not not necessarily for work, but for friendship, for Help that results in these kinds of positive business outcomes.

Topaz Hooper: Yes, I was part of The Copywriter Club membership, and I met a woman named Michelle Carrington, who is a beauty copywriter. And again, she and I were just friends. I’m like, hi, you’re in the same you know, membership, let’s be friends. We became friends. And then I started to notice a dip in my business, and I thought it was me. I was like, maybe it’s me. And I reached out to Michelle, and I said, Hi, Michelle, it’s so good to see you again. Blah, blah, blah, I’m noticing, you know, I would love more clean beauty clients right now. Is there anybody that knocked on your door that, you know, just didn’t seem like the right fit? She said, Actually, yes, there were two people that didn’t seem like the right fit. One wanted website copy, but it wasn’t quite beauty. And one woman wanted social media support, but I don’t do social media stuff, and I’m like, Well, I do, do you want to send them my way? She said, Sure. One of those clients became a regular client for six months, and the other one, I did a four figure website copy revamp for and so sometimes you meet people in networks that you again, you never pitch them. You just happen to say hi, just if you have anybody, let me know, and then they do. And so like The Copywriter Club is a gold mine of brilliant, amazing, smart, well connected individuals who are just fantastic humans, but also people that maybe can help you during

a recessionary period, and why not lean on them? Why not get coffee with them? Why not tell them that you need help from time to time? And let’s see what happens. And that’s another thing. I hate asking for help. And there is a way to ask for help or ask for support during a recession that’s not desperate, and there is a way to lean in and tap your networks without being like, beggy, and that is doing what I did with Michelle, reaching out and just saying, hey, let’s get coffee. Let’s have a life update. And here’s what’s going on in my business. And sometimes people really are like, you’re an amazing copywriter. I know people let me, like, make some phone calls and all of a sudden, when you thought your business was sort of declining, it’s rebounding. And so that simple tool alone to help bulletproof your business from recession is literally asking for help, leaning into your networks and doing it in such a way where you’re open to receiving new clients or new support.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, as we’ve been talking about this, you kind of made a comment, and we’ve skipped over that. I want to go back to when you were talking about as your business started to decline, you started to look at different, related areas in the business that you could serve. You mentioned the French furniture company, I think, and some others. And that comes to this point where you need to be thinking about how you’re framing your business, the problem you solve, the message that you’re putting out into the world. And it might be time, as you look at your copywriting business, to reframe it in a different way, so that either you go more narrow into a niche, or maybe you broaden out a little bit so that you can take on additional clients. But the way that you’ve been talking about your business for the past two or three years may not be the way that you need to talk about it for this coming year, or for the challenge that we’re moving into.

Topaz Hooper: Yes, you are right on the money. And I would say that that could be just a simple messaging rebrand. Should you rebrand your messaging? Do you need to say something different this year? Back in the pandemic, people might have said, Oh, you know, clients are now online, and your website looks terrible. Let me help you. Nowadays, people might need to hear. Listen, there’s so much competition. I can help you stand out. And so have you looked at your messaging? Have you reimagined your ideal client? Your ideal client can change companies, change their demographics all the time. You know, I served plant based CPG for years, and for years, it wasn’t just vegans buying plant based meat, it was health conscious omnivores that said, Oh, maybe I should try something new for my heart or whatever. Now those health conscious omnivores are like, you know, I kind of did like the steak. I think I’m good. I don’t need to go back to beyond. And now those companies are like, Well, what do we do now? We’ve been targeting omnivores this whole time. How do we switch it up and go back to vegetarians or vegans or so on. And so you can do the same thing in your business. You can look at your messaging and say, Has my client changed? And the answer is yes, your client probably has changed. Your client probably is in a different place. They probably launched different products. They’ve targeted different people. And so what you can do, kind of circling back to the very beginning is again, do that deep research on look at your website. Look at your client’s website. What is their messaging these days? Does it seem like their clientele has changed? Can you learn more about their new clientele so that you can write better copy for them in the future? You know? What can you do to rebrand, reframe? And that’s why I started a new company because I figured out I wasn’t going to be able to make the hard pivot from culture free copywriter to American Copywriter Co. It was just too hard of a pivot. The domain was purchased. I couldn’t do it. I needed to start something new. And so if you feel like you can rebrand, amazing, do it, refine your messaging, re target. But if you feel like you just kind of got to keep that ship afloat, but go buy a new one and start something new. You can do both, too.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, some ideas aren’t expandable, and that’s when you need to say, Okay, we’re going to do something new. Some ideas are and you should lean into it. So, yeah, thinking about the way that you’re framing, talking about the business, talking about the problems that you solve, talking about the clients that you serve. Clients that you serve. Huge part of getting ready for a potential downturn. What else? What else should we be thinking about and preparing for?

Topaz Hooper: I think people have to remember that it’s not just them, and that’s a psychological thing to prepare for a recession, people get very nervous that they were the problem. You know, their social media didn’t work, or their landing page is no longer converting. And I think one thing to know is that it’s not sometimes it’s not you. You did everything right. What you can do is change your mindset and say, What can I do to pivot? And that’s sort of the big picture for everything. If you want to recession proof your business, start with your mindset. Remember that it’s not always what you wrote that caused your decline. Is there something bigger? And what can you do to pivot? And I find that it can be difficult for some people to pivot, because they really got so used to being in tech that, you know, they’ve been in tech for five years, they’re happy there. But maybe there’s something else beyond tech that you can do, and maybe there’s some skills that you can expand upon. Some of my favorite copywriters during down periods, they like to re skill. For example, I’ve had five people come up to me and say, Hi, do you do paid ads? And it’s been embarrassing for me to say, No, I don’t do paid ads, but then I’m like, should I be doing paid ads? And that’s what all my clients want now. So how can I re-skill? How can I make my business bulletproof by adding skills that are high, that are highly advantageous, are growing right now and that my ideal client wants. So let’s take this time to reskill. Let me, let me go, take a new course. Let me go, join a membership group. Let me, let me retool and then come back sharp and so, bulletproofing your business often means re imagining and rebranding and re and retooling. So just take advantage of that downtime. Enjoy it, you know, go on a second, you know. You know, walk today and listen to a copywriter club podcast episode and think about what you can do to retool today, you know.And so there’s so many things that you can do that are mental, that are financial, as we discussed, that are networking, and that are also just straight up rebuilding from the ground up. So I would just say, Don’t be stuck in your ways. That’s one way to be a sinking ship. There’s nothing worse than being someone who got really stuck in their ways and now the ship is down. You have the tools to pull yourself out, to reinforce your ship, to add new gadgets when there’s no rain and when there’s no waves, and then when the waves come, you’re stronger than ever.

Rob Marsh: I really love this idea of re-skilling. Obviously, you know, we have courses and things that can help copywriters add to their skills, but this is really vital or crucial, especially, you know, as we’ve talked about, ai, ai in particular, is a skill that every copywriter needs to be leaning into learning how to use, whether it’s knowing how to prompt to get good content or ideas out of it to building AI agents. I saw something today as I was going through some email that I think it was Upwork, or maybe Fiverr had mentioned that requests for jobs around AI agent building, and you know, the kind of work that these process tools can help with, has gone up something like 15,000%

which is a ridiculous number. Now it’s probably going from a very low number, so it’s easy to make that number look high, but even if you’re starting with just, you know, a few dozen that massive increase shows where part of the market is moving and so are skilling to take advantage of those kinds of needs that clients have, or at least they’re expressing, is a massive part of preparing for a downturn,

Topaz Hooper: And again, I had to change my mindset around that. I was really anti AI forever, and now I’m seeing you gotta, you gotta go for it. You gotta go with it. You can’t beat it. You gotta join it. And you know, one final thing I would say around how to, how to recession proof your business is try to be open to part time roles. There’s a there’s a it’s like a bit of a sin in the copywriter community to say that you took a full time in house copywriting job. It’s like you’re not a copywriter, a freelance copywriter, anymore, and it sort of has a stain. People feel like they have to announce that they’re no longer trying to stay 100% freelance, but what if you did a full time freelance copywriting in-house gig? That is still a contract rule, you know, and you still get benefits, but you’re not looking for eight clients a month. You’re just you’re working with one big one. That’s how I survived in many, many years of cruelty free copywriter, I just had one gigantic 30 to 40 hour per week client, and then any other copywriter, client, copywriting clients that came my way, I was like, Okay, I’ll make room for you in mid March or this or in this area, but I’m good. And so what I’ve done this time around as well as I’ve secured a 20 to 25 hour part time role with an amazing supplement company that’s doing a lot of great work, and I’m happy there, and I’m good, and the recession is going to come and go, but I’m good, I’m anchored. And so copywriters can also start to think about you’re not less of a business owner. If you work a certain amount of hours or have a very stable client. You’re not an imposter, right? You’ve just found a way to secure yourself to a good, solid client. And then whoever comes in between can come right? And it takes the stress off of your business, it takes the stress off of the monthly, day to day expenses, and then you’re not as scared and desperate as you would be otherwise.

Rob Marsh: I’m really glad you mentioned that, because I have seen this happening over the last year where a lot of copywriters are taking on part time roles, maybe even moving into a full time role with a company and keeping their freelance business as the side hustle. We’ve even created some resources in the copywriter underground, just note, because we know this is happening to help people find those kinds of roles.

But you’re right. It is not a failure of any kind. In fact, it’s a really smart move, especially if you struggle finding clients, or struggle with all of the business things that happen around serving clients when you have an in house role, the process, the structures, they’re all in place around you, and you’re able to just write. Hopefully you have a manager or somebody there who can give you positive feedback. Help you grow, help you learn. Help you increase your skills, if not.

But oftentimes those companies have budgets where you can hire coaches, join programs and get that kind of feedback to help you. So it’s a hugely advanced, an advantageous opportunity, sometimes, to move out of the struggle and into something that becomes a bit of an anchor for your business, and then maybe a year or two from now, the opportunities change and you’re ready to move back out into freelance, maybe a different role, in house, somewhere else, or at an agency. All of these are legitimate ways to work as a copywriter.

Topaz Hooper: Yes, and I love being a part of a team. Again. I’m not the only copywriter at this part time role. There’s another copywriter that’s just focused on content and brand strategy, and I’m focused on PDPs and landing pages, and it’s fantastic. And now I’m like, Hey, can you take a peek at this PDP does this make sense? Do you think this is gonna work well with your you know what, what you’re doing? She’s like, No, change this and change that. And I’m like, it’s so nice to have another copywriter there. So if you’re also someone who has been a solopreneur their entire career, you know you’ve been in this echo chamber with your copy, and you’re not quite sure if it’s still kind of good. Sometimes getting a part time role and getting other opinions, getting some other marketing folks to kind of peek at your stuff is a great way to rebuild your confidence, too. After some months of being like, wow, clients are kind of declining. Is it me? Does my copy suck? Have I lost my chops? No, you haven’t just get some other folks to work with that might offer you a confidence boost and some new copy ideas.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, while we’re talking about some of these mindset things as well, I want to just add staying positive is really critical here, and it is not easy to do if your business has suffered a downturn, if clients are leaving, if you’re struggling to increase rates, or, you know, people are asking for reduction in hours, reduction in projects, those kinds of things. It’s really hard to stay positive, but it is so important that you do stay positive, that you’re reflecting, you know, these, these positive outcomes, not only for yourself, but for your clients, because people see that they’re drawn to positive energy. And you know, if we, if we start approaching clients negatively or in desperation, you know, all of these things that we might be feeling internally, it sort of goes against this industry advice that you need to be vulnerable. You need to be sharing everything. And there are times when that’s appropriate, but when you are trying to find clients, when you’re trying to find work, when you’re trying to connect with people, build your network, build friendships or relationships, that is not the time to be evoking all of these negative energies. So stay positive.

Topaz Hooper: That’s true. And one way to keep your spirit up, if you’re someone that just really loves to give, you really love the act of giving copy and writing copy, because it’s an act of service for something. You can volunteer. It’s incredible. You can join a board and do some of the copy for the for the for the Board’s website. For example, I just recently started volunteering at an animal sanctuary, and they’re like, We need a copywriter to help us. And I’m like, great. I’m like, they’re like, they want three hours a week. I’m like, I can do that. And what it does is it still keeps my optimism high. I’m like, I’m still valuable. I still have something to give. It’s not that I am valueless because my clients have shriveled up these last three months, I still have something to give, and I’m doing it for a very good, good cause. And kind of circling back to the networking thing, what happens is, is when you volunteer, you get introduced to new people. And those new people say, Wow, this animal sanctuary websites, amazing. Who wrote this? Of course, the founder is happy to say, this person that I know is a copywriter, and she’s fantastic. And then companies start to look at you and say, Oh, well, we actually are hiring, you know. Do you have some time, you know? And so sometimes a volunteership, or, you know, helping your kids, you know, school organization with some marketing stuff, or spending your energy in a positive way can reinforce the positivity in your mind and your business, but also continue to operate as a networking tool as well. And so keeping yourself busy is fantastic, and it’s a good way to keep your spirit high if you’re feeling like the recession is looming. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I love that. This whole discussion, I think, has been a really good reminder of the things that we should be doing in our business all of the time. They become a little bit more critical as we approach some kind of a potential downturn or a recession or a change in business. So this is the stuff we should be doing. If you haven’t been doing it, start. Start doing this stuff more. Do it now. You know, work on your systems. Work on how you’re talking about your business. Look for new relationships, new friends. Stay positive. All of these things are so critically important.

Topaz Hooper: Yes, and just keep your mental, your financial and your business health in order at all times, if possible, especially at your highest times. You know, don’t be afraid to go back in and say, How can I keep this strong?

And I just would encourage all the copywriters just to really know, like, if you’re feeling there’s a slowdown, it’s not you. I just want everyone to know it’s not you. Your copy still rocks. You know, you’re still an amazing business owner. Keep going, and there’s always a rainbow at the end of the storm. So we will get through this. We will survive, and we will have amazing copywriting businesses.

Rob Marsh: Absolutely. That sounds like a really good place to stop, but topaz, if somebody wants to catch up with you, follow you. Find you as the American copywriter living right now in Europe, helping businesses, you know, Americanize their copy or reach new audiences. Where should they go?

Topaz Hooper: Yeah, so you can find me at americancopywriterco.com, and also you can find me on Instagram, at the same handle, and on LinkedIn, you can punch in American copywriter CO, and you’ll find me in the company section, but yeah, those are great places to connect with me. And if there are any global businesses out there that need copywriters or need a copywriter to help them translate their amazing business into a message that American audiences will understand, I’m your girl, so thanks again for the time, Rob. I really appreciate it. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, of course, I will link to all of that in the show notes, so people can find you easily. Go back and listen to episode number 305, when Topaz talked about her first business, you get to know a lot about her as well. This has been a great conversation. Thanks Topaz for making it happen. I appreciate it.

Topaz Hooper:  Thank you so much. 

Rob Marsh: Thanks Topaz for sharing the details of your career journey, business change and what you’re doing to prepare for an economic downturn. It’s hard to predict where the economy is headed with changes to inflation, tarrifs or not-tariffs, the just flared up war in Iran that may spike oil prices which can have effects on other parts of the economy… it’s quite possible we don’t see a recession this year or next. But it’s also very possible we see one, so it makes sense to prepare. Getting ready for the inevitable, won’t hurt your business in the meantime, but it will help if the worst actually happens.

I’ve linked to Topaz’s website in the shownotes, as well as our first interview with her a few years ago, and the article on our website about prepping for a recession. You can find them all at TheCopywriterClub.com

There’s nothing new about these ideas we’ve been talking about… building your network, starting a side hustle, making more offers, cutting expenses both in your business and personal life so you don’t run out of money, and staying positive… if you do this stuff in addtion to building a great busienss by solving big problems for your clients, you’ll do okay when the worst happens.

Finally, I mentioned this at the top of the show, our course, Research Mastery will give you the ideas and insights you need to write better copy, get more impressive results, and increase sales and conversions that will keep clients coming back to you for more. You can learn more about this course at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery. Get it today.

That’s the end of this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast.

If you like what you’ve heard, please share it with someone you know. Simply copy the link from Spotify or Apple Podcasts, drop it into a short email, and let your friend know you were thinking of them as you were listening to The Copywriter Club Podcast.  I promise, when you share The Copywriter Club Podcast, your friends will thank you.

See you next week.

As the owner of a copywriting business, you have a lot to think about—your products, your clients, your research process, writing great copy, finding new clients and more. So it’s no wonder we tend to push legal questions to the bottom of the to-do list until there’s a problem. Don’t do that. Andrea Sager is my guest for this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. And she’s got a lot of great legal advice on using A.I., contracts, business entities, and protecting your business and assets. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

AndreaSager.com

Rob Marsh: Do you have questions about contracts, trademarks, business entities, and your legal risk and liabilities? Today, I have answers. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

About a year before I took on my first freelance writing project—I’m going back a long time here—I took the LSAT, that’s the test for admittance into law school. I had thought I would become a lawyer from about the time I was in eighth grade. And I did well enough on the test to get into most of the schools I was planning on applying to. 

My plan at the time was to practice law in the non-profit sector. And to help with that goal, I decided to enroll into a Masters program in public administration. But once I started that program, I was so bored by the curriculum, I couldn’t envision myself finishing. 

At the same time I met someone who asked me to write an article promoting a product for a company she was working for. When I realized I could make money as a writer, I turned my back on my dream of being an attorney and started writing copy.

So when it comes to legal advice, I can’t really help, but my friend Andrea Sager can. Andrea has helped hundreds of small businesses with legal advice and services. I tried to ask her all of the legal questions copywriters tend to have about things like using A.I., contracts and agreements, trademarks, and how we limit our exposure to legal liability that could cost you your business, your home and more. This stuff matters. And I hope you enjoy this interview.

Before we get to the interview, the last couple of weeks I’ve mentioned that I put everything I know about conducting research and using A.I. as part of my research process into a short course called Research Mastery. It includes a lot, but it’s not an overly long, impossible to watch course. Instead it’s the kind of course you can watch in an afternoon or weekend and walk away with a research process that helps you uncover the insights you need to write great sales copy. ..more than twenty different techniques for capturing ideas, … all of the questions I use to get find big ideas about my client, their product, their customers and their competitors as well as the documents you need to capture your research and several tutorials on how to use A.I. to speed up your processes and even help with your research itself. But unlike other research courses that take hours to watch and implement, this one will teach you everything you need to know in a single afternoon. You can learn more about this unique resource at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery… research mastery is all one word.

I’ll link to that in the show notes so you can easily find the link if you can’t type the URL into your browser right now… thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery

And now, my interview with Andrea Sager.

Hey, Andrea, welcome to The Copywriter Club Podcast. I am thrilled to have you here. It’s been quite a while since we talked to an attorney about all of the stuff that we need to be thinking about in our businesses. So I’m excited to have you here, but before we get started, maybe you could tell us your story. Just how did you become an attorney, an author, founder of the legal preneur.com and if I’m reading your website correctly, last year, you were ranked in the number 22 trademark lawyer in America. How does that all happen? 

Andrea Sager: Thank you so much for having me. I so I way back when I started my journey in big law I got the big, fancy, quote, unquote dream job right out of law school, which was the plan. I thought I was going to be married to my job work my way up to partner. And the first week there, I it hit me all of a sudden, and I remember thinking there is absolutely no way I can sit here for the next 40 years of my life, so immediately I’m trying to plan my exit. But it was a little harder because my husband, at the time we he was staying home with our son, and I was the only breadwinner. I was the only one making any income. But about seven months into my journey in big law. I always tell people I manifest getting fired, but ultimately I just wanted to work with small businesses. I had a previous small business where I had connections with other small business owners, and they kept coming to me at the firm, asking for help with trademarks and similar things that I do today for small businesses. I. And the firm didn’t want to help them. And at the time, I was confused, because nobody was asking for a discount, nobody was asking for a discounted rate. They just needed help, and nobody to go to and so I saw this clear need in the market, and after seven months being at the firm, I had an idea that I would be able to survive if I went out on my own, but I couldn’t exactly make the leap on my own, and luckily, the universe pushed me out and said, All right, here you go. You no longer have a job here, so you got to figure out how to make it work. So that the day that I got fired, I launched my law firm, and I was I was ready. I was planning on it. I launched my law firm, had my first client that night, and that was seven years ago, and it’s been quite the journey ever since I launched my law firm. Andrea Sager law in 2018 legal preneur came about in 2020 when I wanted to reach even more entrepreneurs. And legal preneur Is the what we what I call the DIY side of things. We have all the resources. We can file your LLC. You can buy all the contract templates, all the legal related but no attorney client relationship. That is what legal preneur is. So it’s just an opportunity to meet even more entrepreneurs where they’re at and still providing all of the resources that you need to set up and grow and be successful as a business owner. So that’s how I got started. It’s been a wild ride, but it’s it’s been quite the journey, and just so fun. And I’m every day, I’m so honored to be able to serve entrepreneurs. And in my law firm, I primarily now just do trademarks, and that that’s how I have been ranked so highly I’ve it honestly is an honor, just because that is my passion, is helping small businesses, and just being able to continue doing this year after year, day after day after seven years, it gets better every day, and I’m just excited for the next seven years.

Rob Marsh: I’ll bet most people, when they get fired, don’t have the plan. They’re not ready to go. It seems to be pretty shocking, and there’s sort of a period of adjustment. Doesn’t sound like that happened to you? You hit the ground running.

Andrea Sager:  I was ready. What’s funny, actually, is so we were living in Cincinnati at the time, and we were making the move to Houston, so on that Monday, we put our house for sale. Wednesday, I had texted my husband and said, I you know I can’t he we knew I wasn’t happy. We knew I wasn’t going to stay there. But I said, I can’t stand it here. I want to quit today. Can I just quit? I think we have enough money to hold us over until we move. And he said, Just wait until we have a contract on the house. That way we know it’s going to sell. And I said, fair enough. Absolutely, that makes sense. Friday morning is when they walked into my office and told me that I had a choice to make, and they offered me a severance package, and I actually just packed up my thing so quickly and never went back.

Rob Marsh: Well, that’s the start of a good thing, and so what you’re doing today is helping a lot of entrepreneurs, like you said, with legal stuff. So let’s talk about this. Obviously, our audience here is copywriters, content writers, marketers, most of whom, but not all, most of whom, are freelancing in some capacity. Maybe it’s their full time business. Maybe they’re doing it on the side. Maybe they’re trying to figure out how to do it full time. Where should they be thinking about legal stuff? That’s maybe a terrible way to ask the question. What’s the first thing that they should be saying? Okay, if I’m gonna do this thing right from the beginning or from where I am now, I’m gonna start doing it right, what’s the first question they should be asking.

Andrea Sager: Number one that you want to always take care of, no matter what business you’re in, no matter what stage you’re in, if you haven’t done this already, it needs to be done yesterday, and that is filing an LLC, which is a limited liability company. And what I want to make sure everybody understands is, even if you’re a freelancer or a contractor, you are a business owner. And I worked with so many people throughout the years where there is a misunderstanding and they think, Oh, I’m just a freelancer. I’m a contractor. I’m just a 1099, I don’t have a business that is actually a business. And you have to make sure that once you take that first step to being a business owner or a freelancer, a contract, whatever you want to call it, you have to make sure you are protecting yourself every step of the way. And step number one is filing that LLC, which is a limited liability company, and the whole purpose of that is to make sure that you as an individual are protected from the debts of your company.

Rob Marsh: So you say LLC, obviously there are a lot of different kinds of business entities, and there’s maybe some crossover here between, say, a tax advisor and attorney and what people will say, but why an LLC and not say an LLP, which I think is a partnership or even a corporation, a C Corp with, say, an S election or. Why would an LLC be the optimal option here?

Andrea Sager: So most of the time, as a small business owner, an LLC is the way to go, because you get the same liability protection as a corporation, but there’s less fees, there’s less maintenance involved. And a lot of people want to say, Oh, I have the S Corp. Actually, you are either an LLC taxed as an S corp, or you’re a corporation taxed as an S corp. So you’re not an S Corp is not a standalone entity. It’s just the tax election. So usually, if you are definitely, if you’re a single member, solo business owner, LLC is the way to go. My broad, general advice as to when you should go the corporate route. To have a full Corporation, usually it’s when you have investors, but if it’s just you, maybe you have another partner or two. LLC is the way to go. An LLP, there’s a lot more tax consideration. There’s more liability considerations, but for simplicity purposes, most of the time, an LLC is your best option. It’s the best for simplicity purposes. It’s the best for tax purposes. And when you initially create the LLC, you’re taxed the same way as a sole proprietorship, which means you’re filing a Schedule C on your taxes. Once you’re making enough money, that’s when you make the S corp election. Typically, I mean, you definitely want to chat with your tax advisor. I’m definitely not the tax pro here, but most of the time, I’ll hear, Oh, somebody said I shouldn’t file the LLC until I’m making a certain dollar amount or the LLC doesn’t have any benefit until you’re making a certain dollar amount. They’re confusing it with the S corp election, and that is correct. In regards to the S corp election, you cannot actually make the election until you are making a certain dollar amount, because you can’t get the benefits until you’re making a certain dollar amount. But always, always, always, always, you want to protect yourself as an individual, and from day one, that’s the LLC.

Rob Marsh: So you say, protect yourselves. Let’s talk about some of the risks. Let’s say that I just heard you tell me I need to do this LLC thing, but it feels hard. I don’t want to go to my state incorporation office or online to do it. I’m thinking I can get by for this first year while I figure out if this is even something that I want to do. What are the risks? What might happen if I don’t do this?

Andrea Sager: So the biggest risk is creating liability where somebody can come after you and your personal assets and this. So ultimately, that means anything that happens before you’re an LLC, you can be sued for personally, even if at the time of the lawsuit you do have the LLC, because at the time of the act, whatever happens, and it’s not anything you’re doing maliciously, it’s something you do on accident, which I’ll cover some of those instances, but you want to protect yourself against all of those, what ifs those accidents that you’re not sure of. We don’t know every which way we could or could not be sued. We’re in we’re in the US. We can be sued for any and every million but it’s just that simple added layer of protection. And if you’re thinking, Oh, I don’t have assets, I don’t have anything that they could even come after, I’ll do this to protect myself later. Honestly, it’s just a little bit of time and a little bit of an investment to protect yourself years down the road, to protect yourself from 1000s, potentially millions of dollars down the road, and the goal is to have assets. The whole purpose we’re trying to build our empire, our future. The goal is to have assets. So you never know when somebody’s just sitting by waiting for you to acquire those assets. And then here comes the lawsuit. And of course, I am talking worst case scenario. Not everybody’s going to get sued. Most people are not going to get sued, but don’t be that person. Don’t be that one person.

Rob Marsh:  So let’s talk about some of these mistakes that we could make. Again, we’re talking mostly to copywriters or content writers. Are we saying things like, you wrote a website for a client, the client decides that it didn’t perform well enough that maybe they had a higher expectation so they’re going to come after you for for performance issues. Or is it more like the risks of say, you know you’re meeting together and somebody accuses you of some kind of harassment or something like that?

Andrea Sager: Yeah, it can be all the above. The most common issues that I see, number one, especially for a copywriter, would be not performing on the contract. So if you maybe you leave something out or the work isn’t as great as the company wanted, or what they expected, we want to make sure we cover those bases in the contract. But if they are not, you. And they could sue you. That’s why you have the LLC to where they can only come after what the business has. They cannot come after you personally. So always you want to make sure you have backups in the contract, to make sure that you know the the work product is not to their satisfaction, because that’s always subjective, making sure you know they ask for 20 revisions. You’re getting compensated after a certain number of revisions. You know how to bake all that into your contracts, but it’s just accounting for all those little things that you don’t know, what you don’t know. And the other big one, especially for a copywriter, is copyright infringement? You know, played plagiarism. Where is the line? How do you know if you’re infringing on someone? Is it your original work, or is it inspired by someone else? And Copyright infringement is not always the easiest to say yes or no, it is infringement. And another big one right now is AI, of course, you know, can we use AI? How you know, what are the parameters around that we can get in that in a second? But when it comes to copyright infringement, specifically, the legal test is substantial similarities, substantial similarity. What is that nobody knows? The courts don’t even know. So I always tell and there’s no such thing as changing it up 30% or 50% whatever number somebody’s thrown out there. No court has ever said that in America. So you want to be as original as possible. However, that being said, there are no original ideas. The laws were written in place to allow inspiration, to allow people to have the same ideas, because ideas actually cannot be protected. It’s the expression of the ideas. So when you are trying to ensure that you’re not infringing on someone else’s copyright, be original, be as creative as possible, and if you can prove that, hey, I was original, I was creative, likely you’re not infringing on anybody, but if you’re copying someone, maybe you’ve changed like, one or two words out of a 300 page document. That’s probably infringement.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, obviously that second example is pretty blatant, and most of us would say, yeah, that’s plagiarism. You shouldn’t be doing it. But it seems like the real risk here is having the same idea that somebody else has and expressing it in a similar way, not necessarily knowing that that other person has also had the idea, but because they had it a year before, or whatever they find out about it now you’ve got a problem. You’ve written some copy for a client that is substantially like it, and you didn’t intend to do anything wrong. You weren’t plagiarizing. It just happens to be similar. Is that, does that track? Right?

Andrea Sager: And where you want to make sure you are staying on track is the idea can be the same. So if you’re writing how to do X, Y Z, and somebody else has written how to do X, Y, Z, that’s perfectly fine, as long as your expression of that is different, it’s in your own words. Because ideas themselves cannot be protected. It is the expression. So just think about is okay? So they can have the same idea, I can have the same idea, but it’s how we’re expressing these ideas, that’s what makes it not infringement. 

Rob Marsh: If I’m trying to be clever and make my logo look like Coca Cola logo, I’m gonna have a problem, because I’m expressing it in a way to be funny, maybe, or even in parody, but doing something, especially with a firm like Coca Cola that is definitely gonna wanna protect their assets, right?

Andrea Sager: And not only may that trigger copyright infringement, that may also trigger trademark infringement so really quickly, the difference between trademarks and copyrights, and because these are two of the most misused terms with entrepreneurs, trademarks protect your brand identity, your branding, your logo, your slogan, a product name, any unique name within your business, it can probably be protected with a trademark. Copyrights are your content, your creative work, your photos, your videos, your blog posts, your website copy, your social captions, so the consistent creative work that’s a copyright, usually like the one and done, naming of things. That’s a trademark. Okay?

Rob Marsh: That makes sense. So I can imagine somebody thinking, well, this really won’t be a problem for me, because if the client gets upset, I’ll just refund the project fee and no problem. What do you think about that?

Andrea Sager: That could work if the client isn’t. Getting in trouble for copyright infringement, and this is one thing you do want to make sure is covered in your contracts. Who’s liable if there is copyright infringement. Because if the client says, hey, I want you to write on this topic, this project, I want this covered. I want this covered, and you’re really just changing up a little bit of what the client’s giving you who’s liable for that the client’s telling you what to do. You’re really just following what the what the client’s saying. So you always want to make sure that your contracts are covering who is liable for copyright infringement in these cases. And another added layer of protection, of course, is insurance. Especially as a copywriter, you want to make sure you have IP insurance. If something happens and you do, you are found and you’re in trouble for copyright infringement. And honestly, sometimes it just happens. Sometimes, you know, clients come to me whether they’re trademark infringement, copyright infringement, they come to me like I did the work I did, I did the searching, I thought, I did my due diligence, and sometimes it it’s still infringement, unfortunately, so you just have to make sure, as a business owner, you are taking the added layers of protection. So what you know, can you just offer the client a refund? Potentially, yes, but if the client’s actually getting sued for infringement, they may want more if they’re getting pursued for more,

Rob Marsh: So that’s why we need the legal entity that will protect us. And then if we are being sued, you know, let’s say we have the entity in place. We are being sued for something that happens. How does that protect us? What are the limits involved there? You know, again, you mentioned insurance, which you would hopefully have, that will cover losses if that happens. But you know, what are? What are the protections that you actually get from having this entity, entity in place?

Andrea Sager: Now, when you have your LLC, and let’s play this out, you, you have your LLC, you you you get sued for copyright infringement, and it’s a black and white case. Yes, you did commit infringement, and now the company, or you’re getting sued for $100,000 I am making this up $100,000 and the business only has 5000 in assets. What happens? Likely, if they are actually suing you, they’ve done their homework. They know there’s something that they can get and another and if so, if your business only has the 5000 they may try what’s called piercing the corporate bail, which means you lose that LLC protection. Number one way to lose the LLC protection is commingling funds. So if you’re getting paid for a project, you have that deposited into your personal account instead of your business account. So rule number one, when you have the LLC treat it like an actual separate entity. You have to have a separate business bank account make sure all payments to the business are going into that business bank account. And you can also chat with an accountant around how to how to actually pay yourself, or how to actually ensure that you are maintaining the corporate structure as far as payments go. But if they are able to pierce that corporate veil, that’s bad. That is very bad news for you as a business owner, because ultimately the LLC is useless, but a lot of times it doesn’t go that far, so they’re ultimately usually just going to be able to go after what the business owns.

Rob Marsh: And if there really is only $5,000 in the business entity, that’s all they can go after your home or other assets. If you have been really solid about honoring the business entity, you’ve kept things separate, all of that is in place exactly. Yeah, so that’s the number one reason we want to be doing this in the first place.

Andrea Sager: Exactly.

Rob Marsh: So that’s business entity we kind of started like drifting into, you know, trademark protection and some other stuff. But let’s, let’s talk about trademarks. What can we trademark? What should we trademark? What should we just be thinking? Well, that’s, you know, everybody talks about that, so I’m not going to touch that. How do we break that down?

Andrea Sager: I always suggest starting with your brand name, because that’s, that’s typically the business, the biggest business identifier that you have. And remember, trademarks are your brand identity, so trademarks equal branding. So you likely have multiple trademarks within your business. I can’t tell you how many times a business owner comes to me and they say, oh, I want to file a trademark, but I don’t think I have any trademarks. And you know, we go through and we point out a number of trademarks, so you likely already have a. Number of trademarks that you can file. So if you’re you’re listening to this, make a list of what you have. So think about your brand name, your logo, if you have a slogan that you use, if you have different offering names, maybe you have different packages, those names can be protected with a trademark. If they are unique names, if it’s like platinum, gold, like, Absolutely not. Those can’t be trademarked. But if you have some unique name as a copywriter, I can imagine many of you have some clever, some clever phrases and terms in your business, and if those become synonymous with your business, if they become really identifiers for your business, that is something that you should be trademarking, because that’s how you grow your brand’s value. That’s how you grow your brand’s recognition.

Rob Marsh: And those become assets. Obviously you can sell later.

Andrea Sager: Exactly, you can sell them, and not just that. We can license them. You can get royalties. So a lot of people don’t realize when you know, we know passive income is just a buzzword thrown around everywhere online, but one of the true, only true passive income avenues is intellectual property, through royalties and licensing fees. So IP is not just a business, a way you want to protect your business, but it can also create those additional revenue streams in your business.

Rob Marsh: Okay, so your names, titles, that kind of stuff. We should be protecting it. What’s the, what’s the first step on that, other than identifying, okay, I want to protect my business name. What do we do in order to make that happen? 

Andrea Sager: So you can, you can always spot. You can always DIY. And I’m not the type of lawyer that’s going to tell you, Hey, you have to work with the lawyer to do this. You have to hire me to do this. Everything is figureoutable. You can DIY all the legal stuff, and it’s not illegal if you don’t do any of it. The whole purpose of what I’m talking about on this entire podcast is lowering your risk level as a business owner, as an entrepreneur. So in order to file the trademark, if that’s something you want to do on your own, you can go to uspto.gov, which is the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and file your own trademark applications. You pay the filing fee. Right now, it’s 350 and you file. And as of today, it is at least 14 months from the day you file to the day you’re registered. And that’s the bare minimum. If there are refusals, there’s office actions, it could be a lot longer. If you work with an attorney such as myself, we do a search first. So the search is usually about a week or so. We scour the internet, scour the trademark office to find out what else is out there and determine what your risk level is going into the application process. Because I’m not going to file something that I know is not going to get approved. That’s why I’m ranked number 22 I don’t file just anything, so we do the search to make sure that you are pretty much getting approved. It’s just a waiting game. And the thing that you have to understand about trademarks, it’s not just the same name. That’s infringement. Trademark infringement is when likelihood of confusion is present, so the name or the mark, if it’s a logo, the mark only has to be similar. It does not have to be the same. So it’s the mark that has to be similar, and the goods and services also have to be similar. If both are similar. And there’s an argument that consumers are likely to be confused as to who is who. That is trademark infringement, and that’s what we need to avoid. So when you’re if you’re doing your own search, of course, you want to try and find the low hanging fruit, the same, or, you know, whatever pops up in a Google search. But you really have to also try and look at and search for phonetic similarities, and adding a word like the or making something plural that is not going to relieve you of infringement. So it has to making any change. Has to relieve yourself of, you know it. Can there be an argument here that somebody may purchase from me, thinking that it’s this other person, because if that argument is likely that is trademark infringement. So the search, that’s really the most important part, especially when working with our team, because once we get through that search and we give you the green light, you can run with the name. You don’t have to wait any longer to use the name that’s the search. Is your go ahead from us, and then we file. And, you know, handle all the steps in the trademark process. But starting the trademark process, just understand it’s going to take well over a year,

Rob Marsh: Understood, and while we’re talking about this, the difference between the circle R and the TM trademark. Mark, and even SM service marks, when can you use the TM and when can you use the circle R?

Andrea Sager: Yeah, so the TM or the SM that can be used honestly at any time, that means you claim to have the exclusive right to use the mark. It does not mean you have the exclusive right the R circle symbol. That is what you can use when you have the registration, not when you’ve submitted the application, but when you actually have made it through that whole process, and you have your registration certificate, you can use the R circle, and that means you do have the exclusive right to use that name.

Rob Marsh: My understanding I’m not an attorney. Don’t play one on a podcast. My understanding is, and you were kind of touching on this, a trademark say in one industry does not mean that you can’t use those same words or ideas in another industry. So if I saw a really cool trademark say used by my area hospital, you know, we save lives or whatever. And I thought, hey, I want to use that in my copywriting business. I save lives. There’s a chance that that’s allowable, right? Because they are different industries, different uses, different I mean, everything really is different, but the words.

Andrea Sager: I’m right about that, yes, and two brands can have the same exact name, the same exact mark, and it not be infringement, because the goods and services are so different. So we all know Delta airline and delta The Kitchen Sink Faucet Company, those coexist. They both have a federal trademark registration because it’s not likely that somebody purchases an airline ticket thinking they’re buying a kitchen sink faucet and vice versa. So brands can coexist with the same exact name.

Rob Marsh: The danger here, though, would be okay. I really like this Disney character that I and I want to name a business after it. So, you know the let’s call it the Snow White service. You know, in my business, I’m guessing that’s gonna run into some problems, even though we’re in totally different industries,

Andrea Sager: One more thing that so the power of a trademark, because I’ll get a lot of pushback, sometimes from people that say, oh, a trademark is not worth it, because you have to sue to enforce it, and so unless you have a lot of money to sue, it’s not worth it. But today, it’s a very different case. So 15 years ago, yes, absolutely, that was the case. But today, everybody’s online, and most clients that I work with they’re concerned with policing their brand, maintaining their brand online. Once you have a trademark registration, you don’t have to sue, you don’t have to send a cease and desist letter. You can submit a trademark takedown online wherever the infringement is. So if you have your brand, and you get a trademark, and you have your website, and then there’s somebody on Facebook that has this Facebook page that’s in the same or a similar name as your trademark, and they’re infringed. It’s infringement. You can go to Facebook or meta and submit a trademark takedown, submit all the information, and usually it’ll be removed within a couple of days. And you can do that on your own. You do not have to have a lawyer do that for you. That is the power of a trademark. We do that constantly for clients. You can do it on Instagram, Tiktok, you can on every, pretty much every website. You can submit these takedown forms. And that’s the power of a trademark registration, because as we’ll get into copyrights, you’ll learn that you can do this at any time. For copyrights, but for trademarks, you have to have the registration. So you want to have that registration as soon as possible in order to be able to enforce it and police it online.

Rob Marsh: And you have to have the circle R to be able to do that, not the TM, right, correct?

Andrea Sager: And you don’t have to use the circle R, you just have to have that registration. So absolutely, I always suggest using the circle R, but it’s not a requirement. But once you have that registration, you can start submitting those takedowns online.

Rob Marsh: Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about copyrights. This should be something that copywriters know about, because everybody in the world thinks that, you know, when you say, I’m a copywriter, that we’re attorneys doing, you know, copyright work. So what are some of the differences and what do we need to do differently to protect our copyright to our content?

Andrea Sager: Yeah, so copyrights, remember, this is your content, your creative work. The cool thing about copyrights, you automatically have protection the moment the work is created. So you write this 500 500 word something, and the moment you finish it, as long as it’s unique and creative, you have a federal copyright to it. You don’t have to submit an application. You automatically have federal copyright protection the moment. Snap a photo on your phone, you automatically have federal copyright protection. There are benefits to getting the registration. However, it’s not necessary. Copyrights are automatic, and there’s no I think these call it like a poor man’s copyright, where you’d mail it or something like that.

Rob Marsh: Don’t open the envelope.

Andrea Sager: Because I think there used to be, like people would think there was a publish, publishing requirement, which meant sending it, but it’s automatic. So snap a photo, record a video. It’s automatic, which is really cool, because, like I said, policing your work online. If you post a photo to Instagram and somebody else posts it as their own photo to Facebook or wherever, or they take your blog post and they post it as their blog post, you can immediately submit that copyright takedown, and it’ll be taken down within a couple of days, because that is copyright infringement. 

Rob Marsh: So where does Fair Use come in with this? And the reason I ask is a lot of copywriters have swipe files where, you know, maybe we’ve collected five or six examples of a guarantee statement. We think, Hey, this is really good, and we swipe it, we drop it into a sales page, maybe for our own business. So it’s not risking it for a client. But you know, there are only so many ways to word a guarantee, you know. So how does Fair Use play in all of this. And when are we stepping beyond fair use?

Andrea Sager: So fair use. I let me preface this by saying Fair Use is actually a very, very tough hurdle to fall into. And I would never tell somebody like, Hey, meet these requirements and you qualify for fair use. You always want to chat with a lawyer before trying to claim fair use. And the thing about fair use is you can still be sued for copyright infringement. Fair Use is only a defense to copyright infringement, so there’s a people always will try to use fair use in the wrong way. So just First things first, understand that it is very hard to fall into fair use, but about the actual like guarantee statements or refund policies, those likely may not even qualify for copyright protection because the Copyright Office specifically says short quotes are not protected. 

Rob Marsh: What’s a short quote? What does that even mean? Short quote?

Andrea Sager: Nobody knows. So nobody knows, but they I mean it for me as a copyright attorney, I just have to see it, and there’s no like, if it’s this many words, it’s a short quote. If it’s this many, it’s a long it’s a longer quote. There’s, there is a court case. I think it was around 150 words that starts to be a safe harbor for for more than 150 that that does start to qualify as a longer quote. However it’s not a slam dunk either way, whether it is or isn’t. But when it comes to those policies, there’s really no unique words there anymore. So unless somebody can prove like, Hey, this is so unique to me. Because, you know, here’s my proof that I wrote it this way five years ago, and here’s all these unique words that nobody else has ever used before. Likely It’s everybody’s using the same version somehow. So I wouldn’t definitely no fair use there, but it’s just something that’s common, just common to use, and doesn’t qualify for copyright protection.

Rob Marsh: Anything else we need to be thinking about when it comes to copyright copyright protection

Andrea Sager: When to get the registration. So remember, you don’t need the registration to have copyright rights. However, if you have the registration before somebody infringes, or if you submit the application within three months of publishing the work, you’re eligible for statutory damages. Statutory damages, long story short, it just makes it easier for you to prove your case in court, or easier to prove the damages in court, and the other party may have to pay your attorney fees if you have to sue for copyright infringement. The reason why that’s important is because it’s actually pretty hard to quantify damages in copyright cases. Let’s say you post the and this is an easy example. You post this video on Tiktok, and, you know, you get some views, whatever. And then somebody else posts this video on Tiktok, and they go viral, and they make millions of dollars because the your video went viral for them, you’re gonna think, Oh, I’m I’m damaged, millions of dollars. You. But you’re actually not damaged. It may actually have made you more money if they found out who the original creator was. So just because somebody made millions off of your work, it doesn’t mean you were damaged that much. So it’s it really is hard to prove damages in copyright cases, so it having the statutory damages eligibility, it’s a big bargaining chip when pursuing someone for copyright infringement.

Rob Marsh: Let’s talk about contracts. Obviously, we’ve got our entity set up now. We’ve got our trademarks, but we’re gonna be working with clients on a pretty regular basis, or we may have partners or affiliates, or we may be working with, you know, being an affiliate for other people, what do we need to know about contracts and have in place so that we’re protected there?

Andrea Sager: Rule number one is, don’t be afraid to use them. Never be afraid to use a contract. I hear from small businesses all the time, oh, it’s just a handshake deal. I don’t want them to think I’m trying to pull one over. No, we are business owners, we use contracts. Now, what contracts you need will depend on what you’re doing, but anytime money or value is changing hands, you need a contract. So on your website, you always want your privacy policy in terms of use hands down, you need those every website. Now for an affiliate agreement, there’s so many situations to account for. You know, how often do you get paid? What if there are refunds? What if you know, somebody files a chargeback, not even a refund. So there’s a lot of situations to account for in affiliate agreements, and my and regardless of it, if it’s an affiliate agreement or whatever kind of contract, if you’re a newer business owner, don’t be intimidated by the contracts you may need. I’m I’m hugely a fan of starting with contract templates, because as a newer business owner, you likely don’t know what you want or don’t want in your contracts. So if you go work one on one with a lawyer, they’re going to just give you best practices, and likely it’s their template, but you’re going to pay them 1000s of dollars for their template. So I would say starting with Attorney drafted contract templates, usually the best way to go. As you gain experience in business, you’ll learn what you like, what you don’t like. You may have some mistakes. You’ll learn from things, but you’ll know when the time is right to then graduate. I call it graduating to a custom contract. And then, and I always tell clients, make notes of you know what you like or don’t like in your current contracts, and then you’ll know when the time is right to go work one on one with a lawyer to make sure that everything you want to be accounted for is in those contracts. So number one thing in your service agreements, so as you’re providing these services to clients, the most underrated provision is intellectual property. In my opinion, that’s always the most important. Who owns the work, and the client is always going to think, Oh, I’m paying you for this. I own the work. But actually, the default law says the contractor owns the work, unless you’re an employee and you’re creating intellectual property for your employer. The employer owns that IP that the employee creates. But if you’re a contractor, by default law, you own the IP, and if the client wants to own it, I always tell I especially in this situation where, if it’s a copywriter or a photographer, charge more if the client wants to actually own the intellectual property, because if they want to own it, you may not even be able to sample from it. You may not be able to use it different version for different projects. You may not even be able to use it for your portfolio. So and another thing there is just under maybe explaining to the client, like, Hey, you’re free to use this. You have this license to use this for x, y, z, but I own it, and that’s ultimately the best situation most of the time for contractors, is you own the IP. You’re giving a license, which is permission to use to the client.

Rob Marsh: This seems really useful if you’re working with a lot of clients in the same niche, say, in different demographic areas or different cities, that kind of thing. So if I’m working for, say, tennis clubs, and I’ve written some copy for a sales page for tennis lessons that I can relicense out to tennis clubs, say in San Diego or in New Orleans or Miami, they’re not competing with each other, so they probably don’t really have a problem with that, but I get to keep the ownership and actually turn my copy into something that’s more valuable than a one time sale.

Andrea Sager: It’s licensing your intellectual property.

Rob Marsh: So let’s say a. Client wants to own it. Obviously we can write in some exceptions to that as well that preserves our right to use it for advertising purposes or portfolio purposes, whatever. What other kinds of exceptions to that rule should we be thinking of if we are giving the client the rights to the work that we do?

Andrea Sager: So what I tell clients is to have your base rate. And this may be this, I don’t know how, for those of you listening, I don’t know how you think about your rates right now, but what I tell clients is have your base rate and have it include XYZ, like hey, you can use it for ABC up to, you know, people can view it up to 2000 times. And if they want to have it to where 10,000 people can view it. So then you have the rate times five. Then if they want it to be in print publications, if they have it. So this is a big one for photographers. Where they get they’ll get brand photos, and the photographer tells them, like, yeah, you can use this on your website. And then they get interviewed for Forbes, and the photos and Forbes, well, the the client thinks like, Oh, I’m just going to give them that photo. No, you have to actually go back to the photographer and get a bigger license, because a lot more eyes are on that photo. So same thing when you’re thinking about your copywriting, how many eyes are going to be on it, and that’s what you want to think about when charging your rates is how many eyes. And you may want to have a viral, virality clause, if, depending on what the work is being used for, if it has the potential of going viral and being more successful. Hey, here’s my bonus, if this does go viral,

Rob Marsh: Makes sense, what are the kinds of contract stipulations should we thinking about earlier we were talking about the liability that we might have, and so I’m thinking some kind of an indemnification clause is really important to make sure that we limit that amount of liability.

Andrea Sager: So, and that’s going to come back to how much creative control do you have versus the client. Because if the client is basically saying, hey, I want XYZ, just, you know, add some more words here, the client’s really telling you what to do, you don’t want to be liable if it is infringement. So you definitely want to be indemnified in that situation. If you’re if they’re saying, hey, I want you know this big project, you just do your thing, write it all, do whatever. You have a lot of the creative control. So if it is infringement, likely the client is not going to want to indemnify you. So indemnification means that the client, the party, hiring you. They will step into your shoes, or they will take liability if there is infringement issues the client. Sometimes they understand that, sometimes they don’t. So if they push back, it may be a negotiating point for for compensation, and it’s also a big consideration for your insurance, if you are or are not going to be indemnified, do you need different insurance for this project? So just, just a lot of different things to think about when it comes to liability. Who’s responsible? You know, if is there a limit to the response the responsibility you may have. So thinking about indemnification, the limitation of the liability, all of those need to be baked into the contract, and they all all of those considerations should affect the compensation that you received,

Rob Marsh: Along with that probably very similar idea, but if you are writing for the client, and you don’t have the resources to do, say, you know, a check to make sure that it’s 100% original. You You’re obviously, we’re writing something that’s original. We’re doing our best, but we maybe can’t check that, specifying in a contract that it is the client’s responsibility for, you know, any kind of legal checks, that kind of a thing would be another, at least in my head, seems like a really smart move. Yes, exactly. Okay, so that’s entity we’ve talked about, trademarks, copyright, contracts, what else. What other legal hurdles are there out there that we’re just not thinking about or seeing now?

Andrea Sager: So those are the main three for every single business, no matter what stage of business you’re in, there likely will come up other things if, depending on what kind of trouble you get yourself in. But once you have those three covered, you’re pretty solid. You’re pretty solid unless you’re doing something malicious, fraudulent, not something that I want to cover, but when you have those three set up in your business, that’s going to take you a long way of being protected, and it’s not something you want to put on the back burner. Once you tackle these things up front, you’re going to be set for a long time. You’re it’s going to take you a long way make the investment, the time and. In monetary investment up front to ensure all of these are set up properly, and that’s what’s going to save you a lot more money in the long run.

Rob Marsh: we’ve all seen, you know, all the TV shows or whatever, when something happens and somebody says, well, we’ll talk to my lawyer, right? Or call my lawyer. Most of us don’t have a lawyer to call. Or, you know, here’s my lawyer’s card. Call them that kind of at what point does it make sense to actually have a lawyer, as opposed to using a site like the legal preneur or, you know, contract shop or something like that. You know, when should we have that one to one relationship with an attorney?

Andrea Sager: I think it’s actually an internal feeling. I when you’re feeling uncomfortable like, Oh, I feel like, maybe I should have somebody that can go to and talk to and especially if you have a lot of questions that come up here and there a lot of lawyers, especially similar to me, that have a smaller practice, we have a pretty affordable, one to one rate on a monthly basis. So a subscription model, a membership model, and I would find a lawyer that you really resonate with, you work well with and be on that subscription model, because, like for us, it’s very low cost, and you get all access to your own attorney every month, and all your questions are answered, all that, all the LLC, the contracts, the intellectual property, all that’s taken care of. So there is the DIY route. But also, just for a little bit more of an investment, you can have that one on one attorney relationship to not. And it’s not just about, hey, this issue is coming up, that issue is coming up, but it’s also, can be, hey, how do I negotiate this? Hey, how do I fight for this rate? How can I negotiate this in the contract? So don’t think it’s always for when issues come up, but it’s also lawyers should be helping you negotiate your contracts.

Rob Marsh: That makes sense. This has been really fascinating discussion as fascinating, I suppose, as legal discussion can be. But obviously this is important stuff to cover and take care of, and it’s the kind of stuff that I think we tend to leave and just kind of ignore until there’s a problem, in which case it might be too late. Yeah, exactly. Let’s talk about AI. Last topic for today. You mentioned it earlier. What are the risks there? You know, a lot of writers are using it now, not just for ideas, but to actually write deliverable copy. We’ve all heard that AI can’t be copyrighted because of the source material. But what are the risks and what should we be aware of so that, yeah, we don’t get into trouble, say, two years from now, because what we’re doing today,

Andrea Sager: yeah, so, and keep in mind there’s, as the years come up, there’s going to be a lot more to say in the legal space around AI, but as of right now, anything created from AI is not protected because there’s no human component. It has to be created by a computer, by a human in order to be protected with a copyright. However, even if you use something created by AI, not just getting ideas, but actually like, hey, you know, chat, write me this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they spit it out, and you use that, even though you cannot protect that with a copyright, it doesn’t mean it’s not infringing on somebody else’s work, because all of that is being sourced from the internet. And so somebody did actually come up with that, or something very similar. So you’re still running the risk of infringing on somebody else’s copyright if you use exactly what comes out of chat or whatever AI you’re using.

Rob Marsh: So I suppose this goes back to something you mentioned earlier, but what if I change it up 20%?

Andrea Sager: Well, then even if you change it up 20% How do you know you’re not still matching somebody else’s original work?

Rob Marsh: These are really questions, who knows? Who knows what’s going on with it? I don’t suppose that a lot of copywriters are going to stop using AI because of the risks. I think a lot of people probably perceive this is a really general risk, and everybody is stepping into it together. But on the other hand, you know, there are, there are some litigious companies or groups that are out there that are looking for opportunities to step in. And so, yeah, maybe you’re not worried about it because you don’t own your house, but if you do own your house, you don’t have an entity set up, and you step into something like this, it could be really costly. So it’s definitely something we should be aware of.

Andrea Sager: I personally love AI for ideas. I use it all the time for ideas, but I absolutely do not have it spit out any, even a full product for me, I just get the ideas and drum up my own product. So that’s my suggestion on how you should be using AI. I know. That that is not what everybody does, though.

Rob Marsh: I teach a college class, and it’s eye opening what kids are doing with AI today. I think it’s just gonna get worse and worse. I can only imagine Exactly. Thanks. Andrea, this has been great. I really appreciate your time, your expertise. If somebody wants to follow you or check out some of the contracts, the resources that you have. Where should they go?

Andrea Sager: Yeah, the legalpreneur.com you can find all of our resources there. Andreassager.com is the law firm, and you can get started with your trademark there. You can follow along on Instagram at AndreaSagerLaw and then Instagram and Tiktok at @thelegalpreneur.

Rob Marsh: Thanks to Andrea for the legal education I delayed a couple of decades ago. Andrea’s advice about lower your risk level is good whether you’re thinking about trademarking a framework or a business name, or you simply want to have a contract in place to ensure you and clients are on the same page.

This stuff is important. And while I’m not trying to scare anyone, the risks are real, so it may be worth the time and effort to talk to an attorney like Andrea. I’ve included links to her site in the show notes. What’s more, if you need a legal agreement to use with your clients, there’s a good one inside The Copywriter Underground which you can join at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

And I should just mention again you can get all my research secrets at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery

Copywriters have been using LinkedIn to connect with and land clients for years. So why is it still so difficult to grow an audience on that platform? I asked copywriter and LinkedIn Strategist, matt Barker, to chat with me about this for the 450th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. We talked about the best content to post, the biggest mistakes people make on LinkedIn, and how to get the right followers to pay attention to you. If you want clients to find you, click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

Matt’s LinkedIn

Rob Marsh: Looking for ideas for finding and connecting with potential clients on LinkedIn? You’re in the right place. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

There are a lot of ways to find and land clients. There’s cold emailing which allows you to choose the clients you want to work with—and if your pitch warms up your prospect and offers to solve the right problem for them, it can be very effective. Incidentally, if you want to learn how to cold pitch effectively, check out thecopywriterclub.com/lovenote. 

Beyond cold pitching, another popular method for attracting clients to you is posting content on social media. And for copywriters, Instagram or LinkedIn seem to be the two go-to platforms. And yes, there are copywriters using other platforms like TikTok or Threads and seeing success there, most of the action seems to be on these other, older platforms.

We’ve talked about finding clients on LinkedIn several times on the podcast. And in fact, we’ll talk about it again in the near future. But because so many copywriters are using thise platform to build an audience, it bears repeating some of that advice from time to time. But it’s not just repeating the same stuff… we’re looking for new ideas that work now. The algorythm is always changing, so keeping an eye on what’s working now is important.

So with that as our preamble, I invited copywriter turned LinkedIn Audience Building Strategist, Matt Barker, to share with me—and you as my listener—what is working on LinkedIn right now. Matt has built an audience of more than 170,000 followers on LinkedIn. His posts get 100s of comments and when he shares his programs or other products, the sales follow.

Matt will be the first to say that getting attention on LinkedIn is harder today than it was two or three years ago. But that doesn’t mean it’s hard to stand out. In this interview, Matt and I talked about what works, what he’s posting more of lately, and how sharing content to inspire and motivate can bring in more clients than posts pitching your services. 

I think you’re going to like this interview…

Before we get to the interview, just in case you missed this last week when I mentioned it, I put everything I know about conducting research and using A.I. as part of my research process into a short course called Research Mastery. It includes the 4:20+ research method that helps copywriters like you uncover the insights you need to write great sales copy. ..more than twenty different techniques for capturing ideas, … all of the questions I use to get find big ideas about my client, their product, their customers and their competitors as well as the documents you need to capture your research and several tutorials on how to use A.I. to speed up your processes and even help with your research itself. But unlike other resource courses that take hours to watch and implement, this one will teach you everything you need to know in a single afternoon. You can learn more about this unique resource at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery… research mastery is all one word.

I’ll link to that in the show notes so you can easily find the link if you can’t type the URL into your browser right now… thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery

And now, my interview with Matt Barker.

Matt Barker: Yeah, thanks for having me on. By the way, I used to listen to this podcast a little bit when I was getting to learn copywriting and that sort of stuff three years ago. So thanks for what you do with your episodes, it’s helping people maybe more than you know, appreciate that, yeah, but yeah, with my LinkedIn profile, it was I started writing on there in January 2022, the main purpose for that was to get copywriting clients. I just left my job about three or four months prior, I worked in marketing. I was in marketing for about eight years, B to B and B to C, so I kind of understood marketing pretty well, and copywriting was a small part of that, but I wasn’t really sure how to be a really good copywriter. So. Yeah. Fast forward to when I started link running on LinkedIn, January 2022, I was using it primarily to try and get clients for my new copywriting business. I’d started, and it was pretty difficult at the start, because I just didn’t I had this thing that a lot of people experience at the beginning, when they start kind of writing content online that’s from their own perspective and their own personal profile, not through like a company logo, or like through their work, through a brand, where you just feel really kind of anxious and worried about what people will think of you, and you know, you’re, you’re putting yourself out there. And it was really difficult for the first sort of two or three months trying to, you know, kind of get over that. But so glad I did, because it and I kind of stuck to it. I would, I would read a lot of content about people who were doing similar things, writing content on LinkedIn consistently, and the kind of the power of, you know, having your, your own personal presence on on LinkedIn specifically, and as well as just set social media in general, so I could see that there was a long term benefit to it. So I kind of always had in my mind that I wanted to just stick to it and see what would come of it. And then after three months, I kind of had that, like there was a little breakthrough, of, like a post that done particularly well, and that was enough for me to be like, Ah, okay, this is, this, is really, this, like, could be, really be something. And it just kind of snowballed from there, really, I, I’m very data driven, so I was always looking at, like, what, why did this post work? How can I do more of that and do it and just consistently get better and better and better. And so it became a bit of an obsession, a bit of a kind of, you know, competition. You’re looking at other people growing and doing other things and, yeah, just managed to be really consistent and constantly wanting to improve. I think is, is one of the big things

Rob Marsh:  Or, you know what you were, you bumping along with one or two comments, and suddenly this one has, you know, hundreds or you know what, what did that look like?

Matt Barker: The difference was, I was, yeah, I was posting every night, every two or three times, every week for about three months, and I was just getting like one like, three likes, four likes, no comments. It took me ages to even get a comment, I think, which is quite funny, but I think that’s what most people experience. But yeah, the difference between that, that post that kind of had that initial reaction was, I think it got something like 80 likes or and 2030 comments, I can’t remember, but I think, I think there was a certain creator with about 6,000 followers at the time who managed to see it, catch it, and engage with it, and I think that had a big impact. But the difference in writing of that post versus the other ones was kind of night and day, when you look at, like, what works on LinkedIn, it was like, there was a there was a proper hook, like a real hook that actually, like, grabbed someone and talked to a pain point and was compelling someone to actually read it. It was concise, it was kind of formatted. It was easy to read. So it was, yeah, I think when you look at that versus the stuff I was doing before that, it’s quite clear, yeah.

Rob Marsh: Let’s talk about that a little bit more deeply. You know, what is the best content to be posting on LinkedIn, so that you’re actually getting engagement, and not just engagement from anybody, but engagement from the people that you want to work with, you know, people that maybe would hire you, you know, to do copy your content for them.

Matt Barker: Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s an ever evolving thing the way, because, because these social platforms, they have their algorithms and that kind of dictates, you know, how much, how many impressions, and how what reach your posts get. But so that can, that can be a bit of a minefield, and that that can kind of make things not so consistent as they should be, as opposed to, like, traditionally, if you’re writing a landing page or, like, a sales letter of some sort, where you’re just driving traffic to that that piece of copy will just perform as it performs and you improve it, or as you improve it. You know, the only variance is the visitors. And on social platforms, you’re kind. If there’s, there’s external factors which are kind of out of your control, but typically the kind of the writing process is the big frame. The main framework that was the most helpful for me, was understanding problem, agitate, solution. To start off by highlighting a big, painful problem for a specific target audience, agitate that problem, make it really feel real, and kind of be able to make the reader feel like, oh, this person really understands, like, the problem that I’m facing. They truly understand me, and obviously that comes from the research that you put into understanding your target audience and then presenting a solution. So whether that’s like a step by step process that you have, or whether it’s just a one line kind of motivational kind of sentence that’s going to change their kind of beliefs. That was the main framework for me that has always worked well on LinkedIn, because you’re able to use it in so many different ways. You’re able to tell stories with that kind of framework. You’re able to educate your audience on, you know, problems that they’re experiencing, but you’re also able to use it to show off, you know, like results and outcomes that you’ve driven for other clients and past clients. So it’s such a helpful framework that I think just works across the board on LinkedIn, and then the other kind of variants of that are like the formats that you use, is it text only? Is it you adding some sort of visual to help illustrate the point? Or any, or, you know, some, there’s a kind of a format on LinkedIn that that gets a strangely large amount of reach is these kind of PDF guides called carousels that they call them on the platform. And they’re kind of these multi page guides. They’re typically not really following that kind of problem, agitate solution framework. They’re more kind of in depth pieces, but those kind of pieces of content can do extremely well. And if you, if you hold someone’s attention for that long, and you really, and you really educate them and kind of dive into their into their conversation that’s happening for them right now, that that’s those pieces of content can really have a big impact in terms of kind of lead generation, because they can get that really high reach, but then they can also really deeply resonate, because you can go into a lot of detail.

Rob Marsh: When it comes to trying to talk to the right people, you know, potential, ideal clients, Dream clients that we might have, are you letting the algorithm do that work based off the content, or are you doing anything specifically to target them beyond just knowing what your ideal client’s problems are?

Matt Barker: Yeah, so there’s kind of, I’d say there’s three, there’s there’s three kind of areas of of LinkedIn, ultimately, there’s your profile, there’s the net, there’s your network, and there’s your posts, the kind of three kind of main things that kind of have the biggest impact within those is your profile, where you have your headline, you have a very short amount of you have a very short headline that when you post, you your image is there, your name is there, and then there’s a headline underneath which is essentially, or should essentially be, your value proposition. So what? Who? Who am I helping out of that? How do I help them? That can be extremely powerful, because that’s essentially your, you know, your advertisement. It’s at the top of all of your all of your posts, no matter what your content is, that’s going to be the thing that’s there, if that, if that, if that headline is very targeted and calling out your ideal customers, showing them how you can help them, showing the problems that you solve in that really concise, like 10 or eight word sentence that can have a really big impact if your if your posts are then dialed in so we can come on to the posts, part of that, that kind of TRIO now. So with your content, the main thing that drives ideal clients and target audience to your content is the hook, because that’s obviously the first thing that people see if someone’s scrolling the feed, if your hook is, you know, calling out your ideal client, if it’s talking to a past or current pain that that person is experiencing, if it shows a potential kind of outcome that they’re looking for, if it includes any other you. Are words, phrases or kind of emotions that just trigger your ideal client and your target audience. So specifically it doesn’t matter what the format is, it’s gonna grab them if it, if it, if it gets into their feed and if it gets in front of them. So then that brings us on to the network side of it, in terms of connecting with the right people. So, you know, using the search bar to find, you know, founders, whoever your target audience is, using sales nav, if you have it, to go deep and really dial in, drill into those kind of demographics to find exactly your ideal client, connecting with them and then actually having conversations with them in the DM so the direct your direct messages, so actually talking to them. Because what that does when you actually talk to them in the DMS, which is a trick that a lot of people, I don’t actually think, realize is when you talk to them in the DMS, it the next time they log into LinkedIn, the likelihood of your most recent post being top of their feed is extremely high. So if you’re able to combine all that together, so connecting with the right people talking to them, having a headline that is optimized to speak to that person, and then having content going out that is also optimized speaking to that exact person. It is just all of a sudden your post is right at the top of their feed, and it’s something that they can’t ignore, essentially.

Rob Marsh: So this is a really interesting thing that I hadn’t thought of, and I want to make sure that I understand it correctly. So when it comes to commenting and appearing in somebody else’s feed, does that happen when you’re commenting on your posts, or does so let’s say you post something, I comment on your post, will that then put my content and we have a conversation in your in your comments, so it’s not just, Oh, great post, Matt, you know, or, you know, those, those kinds of non comment comments, will that put my content into your feed? Or does that have to happen on my content that you would, that conversation would be on my content that you’ve basically opted in and said, Oh, I’m interested in this because I’m commenting on Rob’s post, and now my stuff will show up in your feed. Does that question make sense?

Matt Barker: So I would for for your post to show up in my feed or to my audience, I would have to comment on your post. So that’s why, that’s why you know what I referenced earlier with that, that early post blew up for me. There was that one Creator who just had a much bigger audience than me, who engaged with it and that sent my post into their audiences, into his audiences feed.

Rob Marsh: Okay, that makes sense. So let’s talk about how we get our first followers, and how we make sure that we have the right first followers? Because, you know, like any audience, you know, it’s great to have 100,000 followers, but none of those are your potential clients, your potential buyers there. It’s really not that great. You’re just creating content that’s going out there and being enjoyed but doesn’t actually have any kind of real business impact. So what do we do to get those, you know, first 1000 plus followers.

Matt Barker: So the main thing is actually going out and finding them and pulling them in. So, like we mentioned, actually going out and connecting with them. Obviously, that is quite difficult if you, if you are completely starting from zero, because you would need to work on your profile and kind of build your profile out. So when you connect to someone, and that pop that connection, request pops up in their inbox. If they click on your profile, they can actually see all the reasons why they should connect with you, even if your connections are at one or two or whatever, there needs to be all the information on your profile specific to them and showing them how you can benefit them and why you’re why you’re A beneficial connection. So that’s going to be really important for someone just starting out to make sure their profile looks really good, looks really strong and compelling, and talking to a specific person. Because when you do that connection request, that’s going to be essentially their, their only one of their only kind of part, one of the main parts of their thought process, when it comes to accepting or rejecting, obviously, your content works with it as well.

Rob Marsh: I was just trying to make sure that I understand this. So let’s say that I want to work with supplement companies, you know, people who are making vitamin supplements, nutraceuticals, you know, that kind of thing you’re basically saying, I need to go out and find 2050, 100 of these people, maybe they’re marketing directors, vice presidents, founders, whatever, and start to connect with it, like either put in connection requests or start to interact with their content. Is that right?

Matt Barker: Bit of both, yeah, connection requests. The reason for the connection request is, then if, if they become a first degree to connection, when you are then putting out content that is targeted for that target audience, it’s going to be highly relevant to them, and the likely it increases your chances of them hopefully engaging with your content. And that’s ultimately the goal, because the kind of you want your if you’re if you want your post to perform, well, there’s this kind of testing, kind of phase that the post goes through after you post it, and if your close connections aren’t engaging with it at a high rate, then it’s not going to be pushed out to any anyone. It’s not going to be pushed out any further. So want to keep your con that’s that’s the kind of good thing about LinkedIn these days, is that it is rewarding that kind of like people with really niche, targeted audiences and people with really niche, targeted content, because it’s just, it’s making sure that those people are seeing the right the right content.

Rob Marsh: That’s kind of an interesting idea then. So, you know, let’s say that I’ve got, you know, because I’ve collected these over the career, you know, several different jobs, or whatever, co workers who are maybe not my ideal clients. Should I be unfriending them and friending people who are my clients to curate that really tight group of potential clients I like, I’ve never, I mean, I’ve always just sort of thought, the bigger the network, the better. But it sounds like maybe having a more curated network is actually better on LinkedIn, at least if you want to use it for client acquisition.

Matt Barker: Yeah, this is where it kind of gets a bit tricky. And I think it I think a lot of people disagree, and a lot of people would agree, depending on how you kind of go about it. So the strategy that I’ve always approached with LinkedIn is, it kind of looks a bit like a traditional marketing funnel with your top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom funnel content. And that top of funnel content is really, I guess, and more, what I’ve been kind of leaning towards recently with it is it’s more showing your identity, like who you are, why I should trust you as a human, you know, because ultimately, we’re just speaking to each other through screens and now, especially with like AI and how much just copy paste content there is out there. It’s kind of got to this weird position where the more human you are, the more you can stand out. So there’s almost this kind of battle to just prove that you’re human and that can have a really big impact on your sales, right? Because, you know, obviously that building relationships of scale is what the kind of game is it on LinkedIn. So there’s that element of it where you you actually just want to put kind of human, humanized content out which isn’t necessarily always educational or targeted towards that target audience, who you would, who would be your ideal client, because you kind of just want to let people know, like, Hey, I’m human. I’m just doing like, normal life things you want to kind of get, you want to kind of tap into, like the different emotional side of your audience, to help them kind of believe in you as a person. And that is, in turn, going to then help when you’re posting this kind of middle funnel content where you’re showing off, like, your expertise and the skills you have around the service you provide, and then the bottom funnel content when you’re showing, like, you know, Client Results, outcomes that you’ve driven specifically for clients. So it’s a really important part of it, but that’s where it gets a bit shady, because you don’t want to, it’s good to have a niche audience, but it’s also you need a reason for people to trust you as a person. So it’s difficult.

Rob Marsh: I guess that’s worth thinking through. It might be worth, you know, somebody setting up some accounts to really test, you know, a super, super dialed in profile that only follows potential clients, versus one that’s that’s got maybe a more general application, and just sort of, I may not be a real test or a real way. Yeah. I mean, it might not be scientific because, you know, setting the profiles up for two different people, or, you know, the connections that you would get, but yeah, it’s just kind of an interesting conundrum.

Matt Barker: I think it really depends on how you ultimately want to approach it, like long term. I think for me, I always wanted to approach LinkedIn long term as a place of I want to attract clients to me, which long, long term would mean I have to do a lot less outreach. I don’t have to spend as much time sending DMS and doing outreach. I can leverage my audience post, get a lot of reach and attract people to me, but early on, right at the start, that just doesn’t work. So you have to do all the outreach to get things going. So you can kind of, you can do it at the start just by DMing and having conversations and and doing the outreach, but the effectiveness of your profile in the early days of when you’re doing that, it’s not going to, it’s not going to show as much social proof. You know, because you don’t have as many followers, you may not have the content that is getting all the engagement, and whether we like it or not, that does have an impact on people’s kind of psyche, you know? So, yeah, I think early on, you can definitely get clients on LinkedIn by really going heavy on outreach and just being really targeted with it. And then if you get those conversations going, then, if you’re good at sales, then you can, you know, get on a call. You can show all this work that you’ve done, if you’re if you’ve got all that experience, and you’re an experienced business, then you just need to get them on that call and show them what you’ve done. But if you’re someone like me, who, back in 2022 was just kind of just starting out, you need to really build up that portfolio and give people a reason to trust you. So it’s, yeah, it’s kind of two different approaches, I guess.

Rob Marsh: At what point are you trying to move people off of LinkedIn into, you know, a freebie or a product, or get them to your website, or some other kind of engagement. Or are you looking at and saying, Hey, as much of this as I can get to happen on LinkedIn, I’m happy to have it there on the platform.

Matt Barker: I’m very regularly plugging like, I guess I call it, you’d call it lead magnet, but lead magnets, that phrase is a bit overused now, isn’t it?

Rob Marsh: But everybody hates them, right?

Matt Barker: For me, I’ll rotate between different types of ebooks or email based kind of courses to give them some give, give my audience something for free to then get them onto my to my email list, and then I can send them regular emails. So that’s something that I’ve been doing pretty regularly. In my content. There’s a, there’s a bit of a, it’s a, I’m not sure whether we could class it as a myth or not, but putting a URL into your LinkedIn post can typically destroy the reach. So if you, if you write a post, put a link saying, hey, go here and grab this thing. LinkedIn doesn’t like you, sending people off platform, obviously. So then the algorithm catches it and says, no, no, you’re not, you’re not doing that. But sometimes it can be really effective if you kind of disguise that link in a kind of educational piece of content and attach, you know, like pictures or PDFs or something like that, to kind of disguise the link, you can and word it properly, then you can kind of bypass it appear and yeah, that that the the conversions you get from just plugging the link straight in the post to send them to a lead magnet or another resource to then take them off platform, massively outweighs if you kind of, if you just man, if You just type, go to my bio and download this thing, it’s an easy one click versus finding something else, clicking to your profile, finding the next clicking again, it’s just a lot less clicks. But yeah, the conversion rate, or the amount of clicks you can get by just putting the URL straight in the post can be really good.

Rob Marsh: I see a lot of conflicting information about the kinds of posts that work on LinkedIn. You know, I’ve seen people say you always have to have an image. I’ve seen people lately saying video works really well. You mentioned the carousels, and I seem to engage. I seem to be seeing a lot of carousels. In my view. Indeed, and I tend to engage in a few of those at least go three or four pages deep. What’s the best content right now, in your opinion, on LinkedIn, what’s working and, you know, what should we be thinking about doing more of it.

Matt Barker: It completely depends on your goals. You know, if you the format that I found that works the best for follower growth, it and impressions, has been these carousel posts, specifically educational, step by step, carousel posts. So if you say, for example, here’s how I write a LinkedIn post, start to finish. I’ll then show you screenshots, step by step. What I do to do that process is that specific type of content for me, and that it’s been consistent over the last three years, has always been the piece of content that has really big spikes in follower growth and gets a lot of impressions. So that’s for that kind of outcome, for posts where I’m looking to drive inbound leads, because I’m not, not necessarily looking to do that from every post. When you kind of look at a strategy as a whole. It plays a part of it, but you need to kind of be fairly kind of softly, softly with it, because you don’t want to kind of, you know, annoy people and being too salesy and that sort of stuff. So if there’s a particular post around, trying to drive inbound leads from it, and really trying to pull in that ideal client. It can be text only, or it can be text with a really clear screenshot or image of proof of a client getting a result, like a happy message, saying, I just got this result. Thanks so much, or a testimonial, or something like that, or even a video, whatever that, whatever the format of the thing you’re attaching is, it just needs to show social proof of a customer or a client happy and new. And the text is, is you documenting kind of how it happened and talking about that at win? So the format, it really depends, you know, on what your goal what your goals are, but, but equally, there’s, there’s people who, and it’s been the same for me. I’ve written text only posts which are, you know, 2500 characters long, and they have completely blown up, which typically isn’t the kind of optimal kind of format for explosive growth, or kind of a viral post, if you want to call it that. So it kind of ultimately comes down to how good is your copy, in my opinion, if your copy is really good, really interesting, and talks to the right problems and the right person, then that’s always the main, the main thing. And you can go text only if you really get that dialed in.

Rob Marsh: When we first started talking, you mentioned how you kind of like to look at the data and see what’s performing, what’s not performing. How do you look at that now, do you kind of keep an eye on the baseline, and you know, if you have a post that is above average, are you still breaking that down and saying, What did I do differently here? Or if one performs below average, are you still looking at that saying, you know, where’s the mistake here? Or does it just kind of come so naturally now that you just know what’s going to be an above average post, and it all still works.

Matt Barker: There’s an element of that, yeah, because it’s got to a point now, I’ve written probably 5000 plus LinkedIn posts, so there’s a bit of that kind of ingrained in the process when I’m writing and creating, but I actually just did my kind of my Quarterly Review, where I sit down and I I open up my analytics and I filter by either impressions or repost or reactions, depending on it. Can I think when I just did it, I looked at impressions. It’s not too important which one you look at, but impression looking so looking at impressions as a metric can be a little bit misleading because of what we were just talking about with the algorithm. Yyou can post the same thing today, you can post it again next month, and it will be wildly different, but with reactions and engagement rate, I see that as someone has intentionally clicked like or they’ve done something to say I like that. Yeah. And that’s been in someone’s control, versus like this mythical algorithm. So yeah, you can sort your post by either of those metrics, whatever you want. And I’m looking at, I’m looking at the top 20, or the top 10% of posts that I put out, I’m putting them in a collection, and then I’m copy and pasting the hooks into a kind of document so I can see all the best hooks, and kind of analyze what the what the structures of those were, what the topics were, what the topics of the posts were that performed very well, what kind of pain points they were touching on. And I’m essentially looking at that every quarter, or, yeah, every quarter normally. So I’m kind of making sure that I’m using the right kind of hooks that are working well on LinkedIn for my audience right now, and I’m talking about the right topics that my audience are caring about right now and responding to right now. Because these platforms can change so much, it’s almost not worth looking at what worked last year. Sometimes that can sometimes they can work. If you take that post from last year, for example, this time last year, and kind of rehash it, it can there are the there are the odd posts that can work, but people, what people want to consume and what people want to read about, just changes so much on on social media. I think LinkedIn is a bit slower than than other platforms, I think, because just naturally what it is, it’s a professional place, not necessarily like a kind of quick, twitchy trend kind of platform, but yeah, looking at, looking at the last three months data, and just trying to find what those top 10% with posts were so you can take them and say, Okay, how can I create more content around these specific topics? How can I create more content that is using these kind of hook structures and these, these, these formats of content that I’ve used, and just really dial in on those specifically. Because I think when I looked at my data, it was something like 45% of the impressions I gained in those three months came from less than 10% of the posts, which, to me, sound is well crazy. And I think that was out of something like 180 posts. So it’s, it’s something like 2018 posts that contribute to almost half the impression. So it just shows you how much of a game is. Of like consistently posting things that you think are good and just seeing and just waiting and see which, one kind of pops, you know?

Rob Marsh: So you just went through this process of analyzing these aside from the PAs formula we already talked about, what did you see? What other trends did you see in your high performing content that people seem to be reacting to?

Matt Barker: It was, I mean, I post a lot of educational content. So it’s hooks that are kind of, you know how to or calling out a kind of specific problem in the hook. But then there was also stuff like, I posted something about how my dad, he’s 64 and he’s retiring soon. And that post got a lot of engagement. So there’s this kind of, it was a real mixed bag, to be honest, but it just kind of shows where the platform’s at right now with kind of, you can, you can, it likes the educational content, so, you know, kind of showing people how to do stuff, how you do stuff works. But then there’s also this kind of human side of it that still works, where, you know, I’m talking about my dad, who’s retiring, and there’s that, there’s those sorts of things that still work, and there’s no real kind of set formula. I don’t think there were hooks that are four or five sentences long, you know, over 30-40, words long, that worked very well. There were hooks that were less than 10 words that worked very well. Carousels done well. Text Only did well. There was such a mixed bag. It’s, actually, it’s quite hard to just say, Okay, this is the, this is the one thing, but, but ultimately, it’s, it’s, it’s more a case of kind of listening to what you’re. What your audience are signaling to you, it’s going to be completely different for everyone. So it’s almost, you almost can’t say, like, this is, these are the topics that work really well because it’s completely dependent on what your audience are telling you. The topics that performed really well for my audience and what I put out might be completely different to someone else.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that makes sense. So I have a question that I want to ask. I do not mean this as a criticism or to be cheeky, but there are a lot of people on LinkedIn who are doing really well, and they are selling a lot of the same things that you do, which is how to do well on LinkedIn. I’m curious. You know, what you’re seeing outside of that? Hey, follow me, you know, and I can show you how to grow on LinkedIn. But rather, what you’re seeing other people accomplish with LinkedIn in other niches, you know? So maybe it’s people you’ve worked with, or people that you’re seeing on LinkedIn, and the things that they’re doing to grow obviously, these ideas that we’re talking about could work in other niches, but how are you seeing it being applied elsewhere, you know, to land clients, to Grow audience. That’s you know, beyond this will help you grow your audience on LinkedIn. 

Matt Barker: It’s an annoying one, because you don’t, you don’t want to be the person who’s talking about and growing on LinkedIn, on LinkedIn, or, you know, writing about writing on LinkedIn, on LinkedIn. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s a weird one. But, yeah, clients that I work with, I’ve just early parts of this year, I’ve been growing a group called Copy builders, where we’re all writing posts together, helping people write posts quicker, more effectively, getting better engagement and attracting clients to their business or new opportunities, whatever their whatever position they’re in. And some of the range of people in there are quite interesting. There’s, there’s one guy who’s an offshore driller…

Rob Marsh:  I wouldn’t imagine seeing that on LinkedIn…

Matt Barker:  Yeah, not your typical business world on LinkedIn at all. But he’s just been absolutely, like, crushing it. Like, I don’t like the word crushing, but he’s been, he’s just been doing so well. And what he’s been doing really well is, so the position he’s in right now. Is he still working in offshore drilling, but he just has this passion for photography, so he’s mixed the two things. And what he’s been doing is kind of posting observations and opinions on the offshore drilling industry, stories of and experiences of his, you know, his experience in that industry, as well as some educational content around it, which almost feels weird to do for offshore drilling, but he’s done a bit of that, but mainly it’s been the stories, observations and kind of opinions on the industry, and he’s pairing that up with really nice photography of, you know, people on the, you know, working the drills, people who are working, and it’s just been doing really well. He’s grown to, I think, eight or 9000 followers now. I think he started out, I think he only started on LinkedIn a few months ago. And, yeah, I think, yeah, that’s, that’s a really good, I think that’s a great example of kind of how you can apply it for a niche that just isn’t anything to do with the platform. And then there’s other other kind of niches, like, you know, marketing agencies tend to do particularly well on there, whether it’s web development, advertising, branding, they don’t, they tend to do very well in terms of, it’s a great place to show off their projects that they’re working on. You can post videos and images. So if you’re, if you’re very design focused, you’re able to use that, that kind of visual element, to really show off your work. And that really works well to attract clients, whether it’s, you know, completely not LinkedIn related at all. So yeah, they’re kind of the two that kind of spring to mind.

Rob Marsh: How big does an audience have to be to you know, really start to support a freelancer in their work, in their business, to bring in enough clients, enough prospects every month?

Matt Barker: It’s tough to say, but in my experience, it was, it took me a. It took me about five or six months to really start seeing lead consistent lead flow. And that was starting from scratch. And I was a freelancer to start. Freelancer starting completely from scratch. Business from Scratch. Audience from scratch. I think my audience at the six month point was at something like 8000 or 9000 maybe maybe 10. But I really don’t think you need that many. I think that I’ve seen people who have taken my courses, and people who have worked with who are, you know, newer freelancers, and they’ve got 2000 followers, and they post fairly pretty niche content, and they’re able to attract clients and use the content they put out as kind of you know partners to their outbound and outreach that they do. So, yeah, I really don’t think there’s a minimum. I think it’s how effective you are with your copy and your content, and how effective you are with your outreach, and how well your profile is set up, kind of like how we’re talking about.

Rob Marsh: To me, it seems like one of the big challenges that a lot of us have on LinkedIn is this idea that we need to self promote, especially, I think copywriters, maybe designers, freelancers. You know, a lot of us are introverts. We like working alone, you know, we don’t, you know, love being out there, and so it can be really difficult. You know, talking about successes or talking about our own expertise, how did you overcome that? And you have, you know, advice for people who are sort of struggling with that, saying, I don’t really want to talk about myself in that way, or I am uncomfortable telling people how awesome I am.

Matt Barker: Yeah, it is really hard. It’s weird, isn’t it? Especially since I’m British, and we have this thing of self deprecating and putting ourselves down. It may even be worse for you right there. I’d love to see the stats on that, if we could somehow figure it out. But yeah, it’s really hard. I definitely have that kind of streak in me. And even now, it sometimes gets a bit like, do I kind of feel, you know, confident putting this, this result out? I think it’s definitely a lot easier now. But yeah, I think at the start it was the turning point were was just being more comfortable and kind of absorbed with the idea that every that the piece of content that I put out today could just be completely forgotten tomorrow. And I think for me, that’s, that’s quite reassuring. It’s a bit, it’s all it’s kind of depressing, but it’s reassuring at the same time, I think, because it doesn’t matter how many followers you, you could put a bad post out, and it doesn’t do very well. It can. It will deflate you, and it will kind of knock your confidence. But you can just do another one tomorrow, and you can do another one the next day, another one the next day, and the likelihood of someone seeing all of your posts is just extremely slim, because, you know, there’s a very small percentage of people who are logging into LinkedIn every day, same time, looking at the same person, checking for the same person’s posts. So it was, it was kind of coming around to that idea, really, that not every post is that important, and I’m kind of playing this longer, longer game. So when I do promote myself, it doesn’t feel like that much of a big deal, because if it say it bombs or it doesn’t do very well, it’s like, Ah, okay, well, I’ll have another go next week.

Rob Marsh: What part do pods and other groups play in LinkedIn? Growth, growth today, and these are these groups that are sort of invisible to, you know, anybody who’s just kind of scrolling through the feed, but obviously groups of friends or colleagues, coworkers that hop on like each other’s posts, promote each other’s posts. Is that still something that you need to be involved in to jumpstart the stuff? Or can you get around that?

Matt Barker: So, so for me, at the start of when I was growing my profile, I wouldn’t it wasn’t a pod, but just naturally through meeting people and connecting with people and kind of finding these guys who I really got. Along with who were kind of on the same kind of trajectory as me of kind of wanting to grow their profile. We were, we were putting out posts every day as well, and we were kind of doing the same things. So we would create this Whatsapp group, and we weren’t sending posts in or kind of, you know, just chucking the URL in and saying, Hey, engage with this. We were just engaging with each other’s content anyway. But by creating a WhatsApp group where we could actually just talk, share ideas, share what’s working, and kind of collaborate in that way and kind of keep pushing each other, that was the biggest kind of growth driver for me, because I was able to kind of grow alongside a small group of other people, and it was all organic. It wasn’t forced. It wasn’t manufactured. Because the problem with these, these kind of big engagement pods that seem to run is the content can be just complete trash. But if it’s thrown in these pods or whatever, then, because there’s so many people going and liking it, it can, it can, it can blow up. But the minute you stop using that, all that engagement just goes away, because your content is then not very good. So then you’re just left with, you know, so you end up, you would end up being stuck in this kind of perpetual loop of needing to use this, this pod, which is a bit of a kind of sad reality, really, because you’re never, you’re never truly kind of growing your your own skills, if it’s, if it’s A profile that you’re writing content for yourself. But there is definitely, there’s definitely a point of when you, when you grow on LinkedIn. I was talking to someone about this the other day when, obviously, there’s not many people who would, who would hit this mark, but when you hit the 50,000 follower mark. I’ve spoken to quite a few people about this, and it’s as soon as you hit that mark, your engagement just seems to just drop a bit and plateau. And you really struggle to get going after that. So you really have to have a really engaged audience and really, really get your community, your, you know, your community kind of side of things and your networking side of things going. You really have to keep that going. But then what happens is you either do that or some people then say, Damn, I need to try and manufacture this, this engagement back. And that’s when they start going to pods.

Rob Marsh: I mean, it’s, again, it’s another challenge that, I guess you have to decide if it’s worthwhile or not. I’m not sure about that. I mean, I’ve been in groups where people have definitely shared each other’s content, but I’m not sure that I would want to play in a pod the same way for the reasons that you that you mentioned, what would you say is the biggest mistake you’ve made as you’ve grown your audience posted on LinkedIn, you know, basically turned LinkedIn to the into the platform where your business lives?

Matt Barker: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think there’s, there’s probably two. There’s kind of two moments where that come to mind. One of them is pretty much right at the start. It took me, I think it took me two or three months to actually comment on anyone’s posts or DM anyone I was just because I’m naturally introverted. I was just so kind of scared of commenting and engaging with people. That was the thing that was kind of holding me back in those early stages. And as soon as I started doing that, everything, everything grew because my content was was decent, but I just wasn’t doing that the other the networking side of it and the engaging side of it to make friends and find, you know, make new connections that would would then come and visit my content and give me some more engagement. So there’s, there’s kind of that element and and we’re along with that, not not seeking help, like not try. I wasn’t looking for I wasn’t finding enough resources, and I wasn’t taking the kind of the leap on any kind of courses which would help me accelerate my my LinkedIn, writing skills, my LinkedIn. You know, skills in general. You know, copy, networking approaches, content strategy. I was figuring that all out myself, and it just took so long for me to really kind of get to a point where it was working. It took probably sort of six or seven months really, which for a freelancer just starting out is trying to cope. Business that wasn’t too helpful. So there was definitely that. So I think looking back, I would, I would definitely get help at the start, and just try and find that that kind of, either that, course, or that, you know, something, that person, that coach, or someone who can just help me skip all that horrible start bit and just say this is what you need to be doing from the start, because I think that would save you so much, so much time. And then two, there was, there was a moment, and this, this is really kind of a mistake around audience growth, not business related. Business related. It was, it was great. But if we’re strictly talking audience growth on LinkedIn and content related, there was a period around the start of think 2023 where a friend of mine, another copywriter on LinkedIn, we were having this kind of race to grow our followers and try and get to 100,000 followers. And it was great for us. We were competing, and our content game, like, really leveled up, and we were kind of really understanding how the platform worked, and what was, you know, what content was best for our audience a lot quicker, because we were competing against each other, not the best for business. I’m not endorsing that as a strategy, but I built up so much momentum in that period of where we were growing, I think I went from something like 40,000 to 100,000 in about five months. So it accelerated really rapidly. But then once I hit 100,000, I completely changed my approach. And I went from I was posting, kind of broader writing, copywriting, kind of content, and then I really changed that, that approach to being very strictly kind of content strategy for founders and agency founders, and that, that that shift, just completely took the momentum that I’d built and and I was all of a sudden neglecting a very large part of my audience, so that engagement dropped. And I did that for a few months. Business wise, it was great, because I was able to start signing, you know, higher value clients, more clients. I launched a course in that period, which performed extremely well for me, and I was able to kind of attract much better clients for me. So business wise, it was fantastic, but audience growth wise, I would have kept that momentum going, because by now that it could be something, you know, like three, 400,000 followers or more,

Rob Marsh: Imagine how much bigger your business could be if you had. This has been really interesting, Matt, and obviously given me a few things to think about that I’ve never considered with LinkedIn before, if people are still here listening, want to get in contact with you, I know you have free book on your profile at LinkedIn, but where should they be going to follow you?

Matt Barker: Yeah, so if you go to Matt Barker on LinkedIn, my headline is, I make LinkedIn posting fast, easy and fun. There’s a how to build your LinkedIn audience ebook right at the top of that page. If you click on that, you can download that for free, and I’ll give you some kind of tips and show you through some mistakes and stuff that I’ve made along the way, so you can help build your audience, that’s the best place to find me and can follow my content and and if you enjoy it, then you can get engaging and reach out.

Rob Marsh: Thanks, Matt. This has been, like I said, interesting, you’ve given me a lot to think about. I appreciate your time.

Matt Barker: Thank you. Thanks for having me on. 

Rob Marsh: Thanks to Matt for sharing how he grew his own following on LinkedIn, starting with struggling to find clients for his own business to helping dozens of clients build their own followings. You can follow Matt on LinkedIn. I’ve put a link to his profile in the shownotes for this episode. You can also check out copybuilders, the program Matt is building that works for just about any niche. I’ve linked to Matt’s site in the show notes so you can find that.

Matt’s advice on how to write content that resonates with potential clients should feel very familiar to copywriters. He mentioned how research uncovers the beliefs and emotions you can use to tap into in order to entertain and educate your audience. These are the kinds of insights you can discover with Research Mastery, our short course that will help you find the ideas that resonate with your audience. We didn’t create the course specifically for posts aimed at your LinkedIn audience, but if you’re posting on LinkedIn, it will help you find the ideas that will connect with your audience. Get it at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery

Clearly LinkedIn is a great environment for connecting with clients specifically because it is entirely business focused. But it takes time, so get started. Follow Matt. Post once or twice a week, but more importantly connect with potential clients and post comments on their content. Success happens when you connect to others more often than when you capture someone’s attention temporarily.

As Matt shared, the topics and content types that will work for you may not be the same as someone else’s. So in order to make LinkedIn work for you, you need to be trying new things, different things, and some of the same things you see others posting… in order to figure out what will work with the readers in your audience.

I covered a lot of ideas in this episode with copywriter Grace Baldwin. We talked about product marketing, building an agency, conducting research (including one research technique you’ve never heard before) and the importance of community in growing your copywriting business. This is a good one. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

Grace’s Newsletter

Rob Marsh: Hidden inside this podcast are a couple of ideas that will take your research game to another level… and I promise at least one of these you’ve never heard before.  This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

I’ve interviewed close to 350 different copywriters and close to another hundred or so other experts on this podcast over the past eight years. And you would think that by now, I’ve heard just about everything there is to learn or know about copywriting, research, persuasion, finding clients and the many other topics we talk about every week. Often the topics we cover are good reminders of things I already know but maybe don’t apply to my business the way I should. Other times I hear ideas that I have implemented and what we talk about is a confirmation that what I’m doing in my business is helpful to my clients.

And yet, I am constantly surprised by new ideas, new ways to do old things, and new insights that guests share that have never occurred to me before.

That happened as I was recording this episode. My guest today is my friend Grace Baldwin. Grace is a copywriter with a background in strategy and product development. She’s in the process of building her own design agency. Grace has constantly leveled up as she’s built her business, working with bigger clients, taking on bigger projects and helping to create more impact for the brands she works on.

While we were talking, she shared one way she does brand voice research—something I have never heard other copywriters doing and something that has never occurred to me before… and yet it’s the kind of idea that may help you as you conduct research for your clients, especially if they are in early stages and don’t yet have a lot of customers to intervew or survey. 

After hearing that, I shared my favorite research technique for getting a founder to share the features, benefits and other details about a product in a way that helps me capture these for my sales copy.

If you want to hear either or both of these ideas, you’re going to have to listen to the rest of the podcast.

Before we do that though, since one of the topics we touch on in this podcast is research, I want to share with you all of my research secrets… the 4:20+ research method that helps copywriters like you uncover the ideas and insights you need to write great sales copy. I’ve shared them all… more than twenty different techniques for capturing ideas, plus all of the questions I use to learn more about my client, their product, their customers and their competitors as well as the documents you need to capture your research and several tutorials on how to use A.I. to speed up your processes and even help with your research itself.  You can learn more about this unique resource at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery … research mastery is all one word. Check out thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery.

I’ll link to that in the show notes so you can easily find the link if you can’t type the URL into your browser right now… thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery

And now, my interview with Grace Baldwin.

Hey, Grace, 

Grace Baldwin: Hi Rob. 

Rob Marsh: I am so excited to have you here, so let’s let’s start with your stories. You were in the think tank. We hung out so much together a few years ago, but it’s been a little while. So catch me up and catch up our listeners. How did you get to be marketing consultant, copywriter for B to B, Tech brands, branding specialists, like all these things that you’re doing, and now you’re building an agency.

Grace Baldwin: Yeah. So okay, the story starts kind of while I was still in school, so I kind of became a copywriter on accident, like everybody or like, I think most of the people that are on the show, right, never really imagined that this is kind of what life would look like. But when I was in high school, I would always really had fun writing like flyers, and, you know, I threw parties in my basement, and I loved writing the invitations. And then around my senior year of college, I kind of realized, Okay, wait, people will pay me to do this, which was amazing. 

And then after school, I moved to Amsterdam and fell into the world of B to B technology. I started working in ed tech. Then I went to e-commerce tech, and then finally ended up in, like, in a space tech company, which was really interesting. And that’s kind of when I came into Think Tank. I was working at a space tech company. I knew I always wanted to be freelance, and so I was really building the foundations through the Think Tank while I was still there, and then, since 2022 I’ve been out on my own, and now I’m building a branding agency.

Rob Marsh: So let’s talk about that. Because, yeah, building an agency. I mean, on the one hand, it’s pretty easy to say, Oh yeah, I’m building an agency. On the other hand, there is so much work that goes into it. So yeah. Tell us about that.

Grace Baldwin: Yeah, I tried starting to build an agency last year, and I kind of burned myself out on it because I didn’t have any of the processes or anything in place. And to be fair, it’s still a fairly new thing this time around, but this time, I have a co-founder who has some experience with building agencies and managing people, and so that’s making a big difference. And we’re working with, we’re going to be working with a coach to help us avoid some of the big mistakes that I think I started to make last year when I was trying to do it by myself. Yeah,

Rob Marsh: That makes a ton of sense. So who are you trying to serve? And like, What is the vision for the agency? What does that look

like? 

Grace Baldwin: Yeah. So the vision for the agency right now is to be really working with innovative technology companies. So and when I say innovative, I mean kind of like deep innovation. So my background is in space tech and in the energy industry as well. And we want to be working with companies that are supporting we’re calling it planet tech, right? So within agriculture, within space, within Climate Technology, just people that are making really interesting solutions that are kind of what I like about beauty is like, it’s kind of the back doors of the world, and I want to help them tell their stories. 

Rob Marsh: I love that, and I love the idea of planet tech, that’s just a really unique way to talk about it.

Grace Baldwin: Yeah, we’re kind of kicking around different names and everything right now, but that’s kind of what we keep coming back to.

Rob Marsh: Okay, I want to come back to this, but I want to kind of jump back to as you were getting started as a writer. Obviously, you had some in house experiences, but your goal was always to be freelance, and you were freelancing on the side. Tell us just how you launched that side of your business. You know, how you got started, how you found your first clients…

Grace Baldwin: So the first clients, so I discovered the copywriter club, actually, when I was still in school, and I joined the free Facebook group then and listen, I binged every episode of this podcast. And maybe, maybe it wasn’t when I was still in school, but was within the first year. And I’ve kind of found my first clients through these Facebook groups, and maybe not necessarily the copywriter club one, but through another writing Facebook group. And that’s kind of how it all got started. 

And then for two and a half, three years I was I ended up working in house, but I always had this. I was very tapped into the copywriting club community in the backs, in the back of things, and continued trying to build up a brand while I was doing it, which then helped when I got laid off,

for sure. 

Rob Marsh: And as far as like reaching out to clients, were you pitching clients individually? Were you posting content and clients were finding you like, how did that all work?

Grace Baldwin: In the beginning, it was pitching and just connecting with people on, yeah, in these Facebook groups and just saying, hey, you know, I’m looking for work, anything I can help out with. And then eventually, eventually, when I got more serious about my business, I started posting content on, posting content on LinkedIn, and people were coming

to me, 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of your content on LinkedIn. You seem to be pretty, pretty good at the whole LinkedIn game. I mean, spill your secrets on that as well.

Grace Baldwin: I don’t really have any secrets. So whenever I have talked to Chris Collins about this too, but I say that the one of the best things about my business, and one of the worst things is that whenever I have an idea, I can put it on the internet, and that’s kind of how I write content.

Rob Marsh: So you’re just like, oh, it’s Tuesday morning. You’re not thinking, I’ve got to get a post up. It’s just whenever an idea occurs to you, you share it, 

Grace Baldwin: Yeah, or whenever I see something that one of my clients is struggling with, and if I am able to see kind of a connective thread between what client is struggling with and what client B is struggling with. I’ll post about my thoughts on it, not obviously naming my clients names, but just talking about the larger problem that I’m noticing or the different trends that I’m seeing across whatever is happening the different conversations that I’m having. 

Rob Marsh: I like that approach because it immediately suggests that you’re the expert working on big problems. And I think when readers see it, they’re like, oh, wait, I have that problem. As opposed to so much of the other content that’s on LinkedIn, it’s like, you know, well, I mean, all the listicle type stuff that’s just, it has been out there and is over, but even a lot of the shared templates that we have for hooks and that kind of stuff. Just, I don’t know, so much of LinkedIn just feels templatized and un-useful.

Grace Baldwin: Yeah, and I think that that’s a trend I’m seeing, you know, online in general, in LinkedIn specifically, is that people want to hear your stories and your experience. It’s very easy to for anybody to, especially with chat GPT or with AI to, you know, create a post that’s like three messaging tips, but I think people want to hear more about what you did and what the lessons that you learned and how you applied them moving forward, and that’s kind of what I’ve embodied. 

Rob Marsh: And do you take the same approach then, like as you’re thinking about your clients with your agency or for freelance. Are you ever helping them talk about that stuff too? Or are you 100% in on branding?

Grace Baldwin: We’re kind of 100% in on branding right now, but that might, you know, might evolve. But as part of the branding, what we’re trying to do is give people, give these companies a perspective on the world, or, like, a point of view on the world. That’s a big pillar of what we do, and then they can use that as a filter for whenever they’re creating content.

Rob Marsh: So let’s talk about that process, because that’s really interesting to me. I mean, again, so many of us work with our clients. We touch their brand. Sometimes we even help them develop their brand, voice or, you know, give them input on their the visuals that they’re working on. But I mean, it’s a, it’s a really involved process to get this right. So will you walk us through the process that you go through, and so we can see, kind of, like, how that all comes together? 

Grace Baldwin: Yeah, definitely. So it kind of, it’s a it’s evolving now that I’m working with a design partner, but historically, what I have done in, like I when I was working in house, I discovered the world of Product Marketing, and I realized, okay, a lot of the foundations of conversion copywriting overlap with product marketing and, um, so, and that means really starting with, you know, the positioning of the business and understanding where they sit, where this business sits in the product sits in the eyes of the consumer, right? And what is unique about the product, and what is the story about the product that we can tell, rather than the story that we want or that we you know, the client wants to tell. Because sometimes what the product does and what the client wants to tell the world are two different things. And you know, if you want to sell the product, you have to find them the angle that works for that product. So that’s what we start with, that positioning, and from that a message usually kind of develops, and we also create the next step is like personality and perspective. So we try and create a brand archetype and point of view through which they can filter all of their business making decisions through, and then only after all of the positioning messaging, and then kind of messaging concept is done. Do we move into the brand? And that’s where we take the message, take these two couple different messaging ideas, and combine them with the brand so it’s a unified concept. Because what I’ve learned is that it’s very easy for companies to do positioning, do messaging, and they’re these kind of islands, and then brand comes in afterwards and tries to retrofit onto the strategy. But what we’re trying to do is align strategy, or bring brand into the strategy side of things.

Rob Marsh: Okay, I want to go deeper on this, if we can. 

Grace Baldwin: Yes, I’m rambling a little bit, but yeah, 

Rob Marsh: It’s not even rambling. It totally makes sense. But I think we’re covering a lot of really deep ground, really fast? Yes, yes. Can we? So it sounds like we can kind of break down the process into three major steps. One is front end research. And then there’s some some strategy around identifying the archetype and what that strategy looks like moving forward. And then there’s branding beyond that. Is that? Is that correct?

Grace Baldwin: Yeah, so that’s a much better way of saying what I was trying to say. But what we call it the brand stack, and we have the three it is exactly three parts. It’s first is like positioning strategy, then it’s personality, and then it’s presentation. So the actual, you know, visuals and how it actually looks out in the world.

Rob Marsh: Awesome. I like that. So let’s talk a little bit about your research process then, because this is obviously where all of those ideas come from. What are you doing that helps you surface the unique things to help you identify things like voice archetype, the different things that become part of that brand? 

Grace Baldwin: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So a lot of my clients, if I can talk to customers, that’s amazing, or if I can listen in on recordings with customers, recordings with customers, that’s amazing. But I have found with my clients, it’s sometimes more useful to try and find I’m a big fan of using podcasts for voice of customer research, and when I say podcasts, I mean like peer to peer podcasts for their target audience. And I like this because often I find that if you’re interviewing a customer, they’re gonna their natural tendency is to try and be helpful, and that is skewed, or that they’ll provide a skewed perspective. But when you listen to a podcast that says that’s all about you know how to be the best Customer Success Manager of the Year. You find out what their deeper values are and what they really are focused on in their work. And so that’s kind of where I start in terms of desk research.

Rob Marsh: That’s a really good idea. I hadn’t actually ever thought of that before, but I mean, that feels like a game changer in some ways.

Grace Baldwin: So that really emerged a couple of years ago. I was working with a client on a landing page, and I was doing research, and I didn’t have access to their customers. So I started, it was around the end of the year, so I started listening to a couple of these podcasts, and I realized that what we were trying to put out into the world about this product was wasn’t actually matching what our what in this case, it was like what a customer success managers actual KPIs are, and what they really cared about. And so. We were able to tweak the messaging a bit to be way more powerful, just because we were a fly on the wall, rather than, you know, trying to have direct conversations with the client. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah. I mean, I’m just kind of like thinking through how I could use that same idea on my own, with my own clients as well. Because again, I think it’s kind of a game changer. So when you’re doing that, what are the kinds of things that you’re looking for, or that you’re pulling out? Is it just stuff that feels unfamiliar, or like, how do you, how do you identify the ideas like, oh, wait a second, that’s something that I can build on.

Grace Baldwin: That’s a good question. Normally, it’s just kind of intuitive, you know, like just actively listening and trying to see, okay, what is you what is the pattern that’s emerging? What is the thing that they keep bringing up? And it’s nice if I can find, like, two or three podcasts that are in the same realm, and you can hear, okay, this, this idea is echoed across a couple different spaces, and that’s where you’re able to find something. But then from there, you take that research, plus whatever research you have from your internal workshops with the client. And then that’s kind of you start iterating on concepts from that, okay.

Rob Marsh: And then as you start to move into step two, how does your process sort of evolve so that you’re turning ideas and insights into strategy?

Grace Baldwin: So what we do, we take, we try and approach it from a messaging concept perspective, which is something that I learned from, really, from reading breakthrough advertising Right? Which the whole what we try and do is we look at the market sophistication, the customer stage of awareness. They’re like mass desires, which is what we identified in the first stage, along with the product capabilities. And then we create, we’re trying to create two to three different concepts from there, and each concept will be have a slightly different flavor. And then we, at that point, we also introduce the beginning of a design concept as well, because what we want is that the brand’s visual design matches the overall message and positioning. And then from the client, then kind of picks from there, and whatever concept they go with is how we start building out the personality. Rob Marsh: So I know I’m putting you on the spot here a little bit with this question, but can you give me an example of how that works? 

Grace Baldwin: We did this with a client recently where what we did there in the energy industry, and so we kind of worked with them, and we did some research in their early stage. So we didn’t have time for a ton of research. They didn’t have any customers or anything. But we presented a couple different options. And said, Okay, we can go basically in this direction with your brand, or we can go in this direction with your brand, and the messaging is slightly different here, because it might be, for example, you might have, like, more cool, toned, like, precise design, you might have cool, more cool tone, precise designs, and then your tone might also change slightly there. Or you could have something that’s a bit warmer and a bit more of a like a lover brand archetype. But we gave them two options, and then they picked one, and we went with

Rob Marsh: And when it comes to the kinds of clients that you’re working with, it seems like there’s some real trade off opportunities for, you know, again, we’re talking planet tech. So, you know, you want people to like you, or to see that you’re doing good things for the planet, but at the same time your tech and so you’ve got a side of the brand that is scientific and functional and delivers results, right? And so there’s, it’d be interesting to balance the two.

Grace Baldwin: Exactly. And a lot of clients that we talk to don’t, they don’t want to scream necessarily that they’re eco friendly, right? I mean, that’s not their main purpose. You also want to be able to avoid greenwashing if that’s not the main driver. A lot of times, I’ve worked on products where the main driver and the main value of the product is not about reducing carbon emissions, it’s about helping the team operate more efficiently, which is then a business outcome, rather than, like a climate outcome. 

Rob Marsh: And obviously, if you’re showing up and accused of greenwashing, that can hurt your brand. Tell me about the last stage, which is really design and copy. How does that all come together?

Grace Baldwin: So from that point, it’s just a matter of refinement. Once we kind of pick a direction, my design partner, he goes and he, you know, works his he’s like the creative genius, and so he works with magic on that. And then I will create the brand voice guide, and we bounce each one of the nice things about having a co founder is that we can bounce the ideas off of each other and make sure that it’s all aligned. And then we put it together in a final presentation. And then from there, we can work with the client on web copy and any other assets. 

Rob Marsh: Okay, so I love this process, and right now the agency is just you and your partner, but like, What is the vision as far as team goes?

Grace Baldwin: That’s a really good question. You know, we’d like to keep it pretty small, but you. We’re still kind of in the early stages of defining what we want the vision to look like, okay, but we both want it to be something that feels easy and fun. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, exactly the kind of business that I want, too. So what has copywriting taught you about building brands and branding?

Grace Baldwin: That’s a really good question. I think the answer is everything. I think that you know, and admittedly, I’m biased, right, like, as you know, I’ve worked for 9, 10 years as a copywriter, and I really think that copy is the foundation. And I think that what it’s taught me is that copy needs to be involved earlier on in the process. I think that often copywriting, and specifically, tone of voice gets kind of added on afterwards. But really, copy is how you shape your messaging. It’s how you shape the presentation to the world. It’s how you shape your you have to come up with slogans and headlines and things like that. And it should be leading. It’s strategy incarnate. And it should be leading kind of the crusade,

Rob Marsh: I think a lot of copywriters see it this way. Sometimes designers don’t see it this way. And yeah, it’s interesting. You know, when you’ve got a design partner, really, the real answer is that both design and copy should be in the meeting from the beginning. And that strategy impacts both copy and design, although it tends to show up in the copy more obviously, at least to me.

Grace Baldwin: We’re biased that, yeah. I mean, if we had my designer on the phone, he might be like, he might have something different to say, but, but, but no, I agree. I think that, like, I have a massive respect for design, and I think that that’s why we work very well together. He also has a huge respect for copy, and we both think about it strategically, and that’s why we’ve moved towards this kind of concepting, idea of presenting the ideas together and then so that our clients can sort of see how they work together.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I like that. I’ve been and I’ve seen so many situations where design and copy, it’s not that they’re necessarily at cross purposes, but because one, you know, person is advocating for the importance of copy, and the other is advocating for the importance of design, you end up with, you know, a designer saying, well, the copy’s got to fit in this space or or The copywriter demanding that there’s got to be, you know, additional space for storytelling, and it just can create conflict in ways that are detrimental to finishing a project.

Grace Baldwin: Totally, yeah, and I’ve just learned that it’s all about compromise. And I’ve been blessed to work with amazing designers when I was in house, and, you know, just throughout my career and the great ones, see you as a teammate.

Rob Marsh: So I asked about copywriting, teaching you about brand, but you’ve also got, like, a massive amount of experience on the product side and on product development. So how does that impact what we do with brands?

Grace Baldwin: Yeah, I think that kind of I said, what I think product marketing has taught me is that branding really needs to be around the product right? And I think that too often there’s a disconnect between what the brand is saying and what a product actually does. And so it’s the same thing, like your product team also needs to be involved in the branding process because they are understanding, or, you know, they’re shaping what it actually is, and they know the technical details about it, and they’re able to give insights that other people on the team can’t, or, like, a commercial team can’t,

Rob Marsh: Have you brought some of that into your process as well? Again, because that’s your brain is in that process. You’ve done it so much. How does that show up in in the process that you do as you develop copy and and design together?

Grace Baldwin: So one of the things we really do is we try and always start with a product demo. And for my clients, you know, I’m working with on client, working on projects where with clients who are truly experts in a very specific thing, right? And there’s no way that I can match that. But so what I tell my clients in our process in general, is that it’s very collaborative, and I can help with the strategy and I can help with the words, but I really need their help with all the nuance.

Rob Marsh: I like that. One of my secrets for writing sales pages, I like to start with a product demo also, because to me, if you have the person who build the thing try to sell it to you, they’re talking through what they think are the most important points, features, benefits, whatever it is. Now, they’re not always their best their own best customer, but like that as a starting point. So you understand, you know what the founder or the developer or whatever, like this is the thing that I built for the thing that it solves is immensely helpful, absolutely, and it helps with products. You know, if you’re talking to somebody that, or if your audience is very technical, they want to know all the technical details. It’s important to get that insight from, you know, the person developing it. But it’s also important to get the sales pitch from sales and sort of see where there’s overlap. But yeah, having those technical details and the stories behind, behind specific features, that’s where you can those are opportunities for differentiation. Yeah,

one of the things that you know, as we’re chatting, I realized, obviously, you’re doing way more than writing copy, your leading strategy. And there may be a lot of people who are listening, thinking, Okay, how do I go from the person who’s asked to develop, you know, a couple of emails or to write a blog post or a sales page to the point where I’m actually advising my clients on what to do? How did you jump from copywriter to strategist?

Grace Baldwin: That’s, I think my honest answer is that I mean, working in house for several years was really, really helpful in that, because I got to understand how, how, and I worked in house at startups, right? So, I mean, where I was on a marketing team of maybe three people, I was the only writer, and so I was doing all of the writing. And I think understanding kind of how my clients businesses operate, helps, helps a lot. But then I also think that just time and, like, really digging into the principles of conversion copywriting has helped me be able to leverage strategy so much more.

Rob Marsh: So do you think it takes time then, like, does it? Is there a short cut to learning strategy or to being a strategist? 

Grace Baldwin: I think just doing it, you know, over and over, you learn every time that you do something new, and I’m continuing to learn, right? But, yeah, this is it. I do think that experience helps.

Rob Marsh: That’s probably an obvious question, because I was thinking the same thing as you’re answering that I’m like, I was just working with a copywriter or marketer who’s building her business, and, you know, is talking about the things that she wants to help do. And the her biggest problem is that she hasn’t actually done a lot of this stuff, you know, at this point. And we see this a lot, where people try to step into a role that they haven’t actually had any success in, but they’ve read about it, or they’ve learned how to write a prompt for AI to tell them what to do, and the outcomes are just not the same.

Grace Baldwin: And in that case, you know, if you’re freelance too, something that I learned from Annie Bacher actually, is to just subcontract for other copywriters that are where you want to be, right? And that’s something that I subcontracted for Annie I’ve subcontracted for Aaron Pennings. I’ve subcontracted for several people, and I did it because at the, you know, at the time, I didn’t have time to manage my own clients, and I was also just kind of burnt out. But I also learned a ton from their processes as well. Also subcontracting for agencies helps me understand, help me understand and get that experience, because agencies are just doing it so frequently.

Rob Marsh: I think a large part of mastering anything, obviously, is the doing. And I love that approach, working with a variety of other copywriters who are a couple steps ahead of you, who can offer coaching. You can see their processes, you can learn from them, and agencies like you said, this makes it’s, it’s almost understating it to say, Oh, that makes sense, yeah, because it’s almost like, No, this is the path. This is actually how you get great.

Grace Baldwin: It’s really easy to say, but then, I mean, you have to actually do it, which takes. I mean, I’m in year three, year three of doing my business full time, and I’m only now just kind of getting to the point where I, like, am able to put all the puzzle pieces together. But yeah, it just takes. If I could go back and tell myself, you know, give myself advice, it would be just relax and enjoy the journey. 

Rob Marsh: And so when you talk about subcontract for copywriters, one of the things that makes that happen is that you were able to build relationships with copywriters, other copywriters. How did you do that? Grace Baldwin: Think Tank. Think Tank, The Copywriter Club. I mean, I’m in a Slack group now with like seven other people that I met through the copywriter club, and I talked to them daily I commute. I cannot emphasize how important community has been to me over this journey.

Rob Marsh: This is one of the things that I’ve come to really late in my career. That is one of those no does, but I tried for so long to be the the solitary copywriter. You know, I can do it. I can find my clients. I can do the work. And when I got into my first mastermind, surrounded by other copywriters as well, I’ve mentioned the story on the podcast in the past. But I just remember in that first meeting, kind of having an aha moment where I was like, Wait a second. I have so much to learn from, from these other people in the room. Like I thought I was good, I was good, but when I could see their advantages, what they were doing differently from what I was it was, I mean, it was like, I turned the dial from, you know, three, where I was playing around, to like, nine or 10.

Grace Baldwin: I am just leaving a mastermind right now, actually, where, you know, I joined wanting to be the dumbest person in the room, which is the same thing that happened when I joined Think Tank. I really wanted to be, you know, the youngest person, or like, the least experienced there. But with both of these experiences. I saw where other people were operating at and I knew that there was a path to get there, and it was just eye opening. And then you also, you just meet people and you can who can empathize with your daily struggles.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, yeah. I mean, again, it was a total game changer for me as well, yeah. So tell me about some of the things that maybe you do outside of work that actually influence the way you think about business or make you a better writer.

Grace Baldwin: Well, I run a lot. I just signed up for my first ultra marathon last night, actually, so that’ll be happening in October. But yeah, running and endurance sports is something that I never did that as a kid. I only got into it. I got into it in like, 2018 and fell in love with it, but it’s just taught me a lot about, like, slowing down and pacing myself and not burning myself out.

Rob Marsh: So I also have taken up running the last few years. I used to think of myself as a cyclist, but getting my bike out and, you know, pumping the tires full of air and putting on the kit and road biking has become a lot more dangerous with cars that, you know, don’t seem to be looking for bikes. So I’ve run a lot more. I don’t know that I call myself a runner. I’m more of a plodder, maybe a jogger. I can’t even envision running an ultra marathon like that is so beyond me.

Grace Baldwin: Me either Rob That’s nervous about it

that seems that’s I back in my biking days like I could knock off 100 miles, you know, in a day, or whatever. That was no big deal. 

Rob Marsh: But an ultra marathon is a whole other kind of torture…

Grace Baldwin: It’s the same thing that we were talking about, right? Like, when you’re just getting started, or think there’s no way I can. Mean, I remember, I had some friends who ran a half marathon when I was I think we were 19, and I remember thinking, I will never do that. And then, you know, here I am now getting ready to run an ultra marathon. It’s just something that’s slow, and you get better at over time, and you slowly improve, and your endurance grows, and it just gets easier, or it doesn’t get easier, but you get better at it.

Rob Marsh: I actually saw somebody mention that yesterday. It’s like, hard things. Hard Things don’t get easier, but your strength increases your ability to do hard things increases. Yeah, totally. So maybe marathons is a good or races, whatever is maybe a good place to start developing some of those discipline skills that we need to succeed as copywriters. 

Grace Baldwin: 100%. For me, at least, it has been an amazing way to learn all learn all those lessons in like a safe container, right? And learn to trust myself, and also be able to tell the difference between when something is tough but manageable but or tough but unmanageable.

Rob Marsh: Let’s talk a little bit about working out of the states, being a being an expat copywriter. Oh my gosh, yeah. Obviously, there’s some challenges with that. How have you made it work? 

Grace Baldwin: Well, challenges is kind of an understatement. There’s a lot, you know, I can tell I moved abroad before my prefrontal cortex developed, because I didn’t, never considered international retirement planning, which is a whole minefield of regulations. But we won’t. We don’t need to get into that. Maybe we should get it. My advice for anybody, if who wants to move abroad, or at least out of the US, is find a good tax attorney to talk to before you do it. But beyond, beyond that, I mean, it’s I just, I moved here for love. I’m still with my boyfriend, and just, yeah, it’s been an amazing adventure.

Rob Marsh: I’ve talked about this on the podcast in the past as well, but I am all in on travel. My wife and I, we kind of have a motto, you know, experiences over things. Experiences are better than things. And so every chance we get it’s like, hey, let’s hop on an airplane. You know, who cares about the new car or whatever? You know, let’s do that. And so part of me is jealous that you get to have this full time experience in Amsterdam that you know so many of us, and when we travel for vacations, you know, it’s a totally different experience as well, because you’re trying to hit the three or four highlights. You’re always in a hurry, you’re standing in lines. And when you can actually do it slow, you know, actually experience the culture in the way that you are. I’m, I’m so insanely jealous of of your experience there, Grace Baldwin: Yeah, but then at a certain point, it just becomes kind of normal every day, although, as an, you know, I call myself more of an immigrant than an expat, but I still discover new things about the country on a weekly basis, especially if I like I was at a family reunion for my boyfriend’s family, and I was around a bunch of more Dutch people than I normally am around, and I learned, and there’s just all these like small little things that you never will learn unless you’re actually. Surrounded by that culture,

Rob Marsh: When we were living in France, I’m as I’m saying this. I’m like, nobody wants to hear Rob. I want to hear this. I didn’t know this. Yeah, when we were living in France, I realized how different FedEx is in in France than it is in the States. You know, when you would order something from FedEx? Well, here it shows, you know, sometimes, like, place the order by four o’clock in the afternoon. It’ll be there by 7am right in France, you know, you had, we at least had to go to the shop to pick it up. And oftentimes the shop was closed because, yeah, they just decided to spray off. Yeah, like, like, the immediacy of American culture is just not a thing. And nobody cares, you know? And so sometimes it would take us two or three visits to the place where our package would be delivered just to get it. So those kinds of culture differences, I mean, they’re kind of funny to talk about, but also when you experience them, it’s in some ways, like when you’re talking about being in a community of copywriters, it opens your minds to just different things, different ways that people do things. And in some ways, it’s like a creative playground that just gets you thinking in different ways,

Grace Baldwin: Absolutely, and I think, you know, something that I related when i My first job was, you know, in a Dutch company, and I had a Dutch manager, and my my manager was Dutch, it was me, and then our designer was Canadian, and there we were working on a website project, and my design, my designer, who’s a very dear friend of mine, now, we were stressed out about getting it done on time, because, I mean, we were very deadline driven, and my and it caused, it caused tension in the group. And my manager said to us, guys, like, we can always move a deadline, which was something that she and I were not we’re not. There was a concept we were not familiar with, right? Because we had grown up in these cultures of, okay, there’s a deadline. We have to hit it. And one of the things that I like about Dutch culture, in which I have tried to embrace in my work life, is that Dutch people believe that you have eight hours to work and that’s it, and if you’re working beyond eight hours is a sign that you weren’t efficient with the time that you have, rather than a symbol that you’re going over, above and beyond, which is something I really appreciate,

Rob Marsh: Yeah, something I probably should adopt into my life when I’m sitting at my desk, you know, seven o’clock at night trying to finish something up. 

Grace Baldwin: I mean, it’s 630 in the afternoon for me, or in the evening right now for me, so I’m totally guilty of overworking as well, but it was nice when I was there were more boundaries when I was in house and like, salaried.

Rob Marsh: How much? How much does fun play into that kind of thinking as well? Because oftentimes what I find is, if I am still at my desk at 630 or seven, it’s because I’m actually enjoying the work, and not because it’s a deadline I’ve got to hit tomorrow. Is that like part of the consideration as well, or is it just like, nope, you’ve got your seven and a half eight hours, and then you’re done.

Grace Baldwin: I think it’s a consideration of you know? I mean, if you’re having fun with something, nobody’s gonna say no, but, but I have found that managers will reprimand you for working overtime. Even if you are having fun, they’ll say, Okay, well, go, you know, take a half day off, then if you were working on this on Saturday. 

Rob Marsh: So for those of us who manage ourselves, then we just need to be better managers. Give ourselves the hardest part, though, right? Grace Baldwin: Yeah, I’m a very bad manager of myself, not a bad, not a very bad one, but I’m always learning to be a bit kinder, yeah.

Rob Marsh: So what are the biggest things that you’ve struggled with as you’ve, you know, gone from, you know, moving over, taking that first job, you know, product management, copywriting now, launching your agency. What have been the biggest challenges that you face now,

Grace Baldwin: You mean right now, or through the process? 

Rob Marsh: Through the process…

Grace Baldwin: I think a big I mean moving abroad, you, there’s always a kind of a sense of loneliness that you have to content, you have to contend with because is your you’re very obvious the minute I open even though I speak Dutch, the minute I open my mouth, people know that I’m not Dutch, which is a bit isolating at times. So that’s all about, like, you know, I’ve been, I joined run clubs. I’m trying to build more community here. And so that’s, that’s something that has been a struggle, and that’s also, you know, in terms of business, building those, realizing that’s just a big theme for me, is okay, it’s about finding the right people who can support you. So that’s been a challenge and a learning lesson, but also, yeah, lots of freedom and room to play and explore and try out new things. So the upsides as well. 

Rob Marsh: There’s definitely a part of me that’s very jealous of the business that you’ve built. It sounds like a ton of fun. The projects that you get to work on are game changers. So, yeah, just listening to you talk about what you’ve built since the last time we hung out together, which was, you know, five years ago, it’s amazing to see how far you’ve come.

Grace Baldwin: Yeah, thanks. Sometimes, sometimes it feels like I haven’t made it that far, but then I’ve had. Look back at where I was five years ago when I first joined Think Tank, it’s a world of difference.

Rob Marsh: So as you think about your business now, what’s next for you? What are the big challenges that you have coming up with the things you’re most excited about?

Grace Baldwin: I’m definitely excited about building out this agency and building it up and turning it into something recognizable and that, you know, my co-founder and I, we really just want to focus on doing great work and delivering awesome results. And I’m just excited about leaning into that, and, yeah, exploring leveling up in a new way.

Rob Marsh: So for those of us who want to watch what you’re doing and hear about, you know, the successes as you move forward, where should we go? Where should we be looking for your latest writings?

Grace Baldwin: So LinkedIn is one place. I also have a sub stack where I’m trying to just kind of document what I’m learning. It’s not, I call it a semi regular missive, because I don’t promise to put it out every week, but I’m trying to do every other week, minimum. But those are probably the two places and

Rob Marsh: I’ve seen some of what you’ve put on sub stack, documenting, you know, what you’re learning a lot of the process that you’re going through. So I highly recommend hopping on Grace’s newsletter, checking out what she has to say, because I promise you’re going to be inspired.

Grace Baldwin: Thank you. Yeah, those are good words, yeah.

Rob Marsh: Well, it’s and it’s been awesome catching back up with you grace and seeing what you’re up to in your business. So thanks for taking the time to talk to me.

Grace Baldwin: Thank you for having me on Rob. I mean, I was telling my business partner that it’s such an honor to be on this podcast, because I hope you recognize how big of an impact you have had on people’s careers and with the copywriter club. I mean, I’m just one example, and I’m really grateful for the work that you do. 

Rob Marsh: You are so kind to say that I really appreciate it. I may just have to take that clip out and play it for me every morning. 

Grace Baldwin: Make it your alarm to wake you up to every morning. 

Rob Marsh: Well, people have been listening to me prattle on for so many years, so it’s only fair.

Grace Baldwin: That’s only you know only fair, I guess then,

Rob Marsh: Thanks Grace for sharing the details of your career journey and what you’re building at your agency today. I want to echo what Grace said about finding a community of copywriters who can help you on your own career journey.

I’ve told my own story several times, but it bears repeating the lesson, surrounding myself with several other good copywriters who were willing to read my work, share leads and clients, and even just talk about what is working in their busineses right now was a complete gamechanger for me personally, and I’ve seen it have the same effect in hundreds of other copywriter’s businesses too. If you’re missing that, you should check out The Copywriter Underground at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu where we are focusing on creating more opportunities for copywriters to come together and share these kinds of business changing ideas. 

Coming back to our interview, I’ve linked to Grace’s newsletter  in case you want to follow her journey. You should also check out Grace on LinkedIn where she shared other ideas she’s working on with her clients.

And finally, I mentioned this at the top of the show, our course, Research Mastery will give you the ideas and insights you need to write better copy, get more impressive results, and increase sales and conversions that will keep clients coming back to you for more. You can learn more about this course at thecopywriterclub.com/researchmastery … research mastery is all one word.

If you want to write more persuasive copy, you need better insights from your research. But how do you get them? Sarah Levinger is my guest for the 448th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast and we talked about research insights, trend spotting, how A.I. can distort your research analysis, and how to make your copy more persuasive. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

Sarah’s Twitter

Rob Marsh: Can psychology help you capture and hold the attention of your readers… then sell more of your products to your customers? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

On last week’s episode of the podcast, we talked about buyer psychology and how to use it to sell your products and services. It’s a great interview and I recommend you don’t miss it. This week’s episode is a kind of part 2 to that interview.

In addition to specific persuasion techniques, today we’re going to go deep on research and discovering insights that a good copywriter can build a sales argument. If you want to use the techniques we talked about last week, what we talk about in this interview will give you the baseline insights to make them so much more effective.

My guest today is Sarah Levinger, founder of Tether, a research insights platform that helps uncover emotional, behavioral, and identity-driven insights so marketers can connect on a deeper, more human level with their customers. And she uses A.I. to augment the process.

Sarah walks through the process and framework she created for finding the kinds of insights that resonates with customers. She categorizes comments and research data by emotion, which leads to a better set of avatars and marketing ideas based on emotion rather than taglines or words that get a little tired as prospects see them over and over in your ads and other marketing. 

Then Sarah goes even deeper than feelings to uncover beliefs—she talks about why in this interview. I think you’re going to like what she has to share about that.

Sarah also mentioned something about A.I. that I hadn’t considered before that kind of shifted the way I’m thinking about using tools like Claude and ChatGPT to analyze data. If you don’t understand this change, if you use A.I. in your research or analysis process, your copy will probably not connect as well you expect.

Before we get to my interview with Sarah, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. If you haven’t jumped in to see what the Underground includes, now is the time. It’s guaranteed, which means you can join and if you don’t find the resources you need to grow your business, just let us know and we’ll refund your money. The Underground includes more than 70 different workshops—and accompanying playbooks to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. This week we’re adding another expert workshop all about how to create the perfect for you copywriter website. If your website doesn’t stand out or doesn’t help you land clients, you’ll definitely want to join us.

The Playbooks make it easy to find quick solutions to the challenges you face in your business everything from finding clients, conducting sales calls, using A.I., building authority on LinkedIn or YouTube or Pinterest, and dozens of other workshops. You also get dozens of templates including a legal agreement you can use with your clients, monthly coaching, regular copy and funnel critiques, and more. You can learn more and join today by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. 

And now, my interview with Sarah Levinger…

Sarah, welcome to the podcast. Before we hit record, I told you I’ve been wanting to have you on for quite a while. I’ve been following your stuff online. The way you talk about persuasion psychology, it just rings my bell. So I’m so glad to have you here. But before we get into all of this stuff, how did you get to where you are, where you’re basically, you know, this marketing consultant to DDC companies using psychology to help, you know, increase responses, all of that kind of stuff. How did you get here?

Sarah Levinger: Oh, gosh, that’s that I don’t even know that the journey that I’ve taken to get there has been a really interesting one, and I really do think I landed here on purpose at this particular time. So I started in marketing when I was 21, really, really young. I went to school to be an equine scientist. I wanted to be a vet for horses. I thought I wanted to be an equine scientist and go be like an equine vet. And then I found out very quickly, I don’t like blood, but I don’t like needles. This is not for me. So during that first, like, college year, I took a course in InDesign. Does anybody remember what InDesign was? I miss that platform so much. Oh my gosh. I really, really enjoyed designing in there. So that was, like an elective that I took, and I just got so hooked. I was like, This is so fun, like, I love the art side of this. 

So I moved back home. I was up in Wyoming for a minute, and then I moved back home with my parents. Went back to college for graphic design, and I had a professor in my second semester of college who was like, you know, if you’re good at this and you really enjoy doing design or marketing or art or whatever it is, you don’t have to have a degree. You can just go work. And I was like, what I don’t have to pay for college? Great. I don’t like college anyway. So here we go. So I quit college, and then I basically just, like, freelance for the next 10 years straight. And it was interesting, because this was, like, it, I mean, this was 2010 2011 so it was right at the start of YouTube being a thing. Tutorials online were just barely beginning to like, blow up. So there wasn’t really a whole lot of information on how to market or how to do things online in the digital space. So I had to go to the library of all places and just check out a bunch of books to learn how to do all this stuff. So I would go and check out books on like WordPress websites and Amazon, FBA, how to copyright, how to do all the sorts of stuff. And next to that section was this giant, like, I don’t even know, old textbook section on early childhood development and neuroscience, psychology and consumer behavior, stuff that was like, nobody has touched this book in years. But it was so interesting. So I kept checking those. But that just because they were, like, fascinating to me. And then I did that for like, 10 years straight. I just devoured information on how people work. 

Now, I didn’t tell anybody that I had this information or I knew anything about this for decades, until I kind of accidentally fell into paid advertising right before COVID hit in 2019 I had a newborn and a two year old at home, and I was like, I’m gonna die, like I have to talk to somebody. So I got on Twitter, and I just started chatting with people in the industry who were also doing media buying at the time, and then it just kind of exploded, mostly because I think I hit it just at the right time, the right place. This is why I kind of like alluded to that earlier. Sometimes your journey leads you to just the right time, the right place. At the time, when I was on Twitter, I thought I was going to be the last one talking about it, but I ended up being one of the first to talk about how you can apply psychology to add specifically when it comes to messaging, and see amazing drastic results. And I, I guess people just kind of really grabbed onto it and just ran with it because I grew a following. You know, within a year, I had probably about five to 10,000 followers, and I was starting to, like, get good business and drag good leads. And I was like, this is fun. This is a good role for me. So fast forward to now. I’ve kind of created, like, the perfect job for Sarah, where I get to study humans all day long, and I get to focus primarily on marketing and messaging. So, yeah, it’s been a journey. 

Rob Marsh: It’s a cool journey. So, and what you’ve built today is called Tether, and tell me how you’re doing that, like I’ve seen the products that you offer. I’ve seen how you talk about some of the stuff. But in the copywriting world, the content writing world, there’s a lot of research, but, and we’re all talking about like, how do you do research, or whatever, but oftentimes there’s a little bit of a disconnect between getting the research done and actually being able to apply it. And I think you’re bridging this gap a little bit. 

Sarah Levinger: I’m trying my hardest. Yes, it’s really interesting, because I think everybody kind of understands what research is, why it’s important. A lot of people understand how to do it. And then there’s then there’s many, many people out there, I think, that do it very, very well. They’re adept at it. Then there’s this, like, very, like you said, big gap between the people who have the information and the people who need to use it. And that, I think, has always kind of existed in business in general. We understand that we need to go after a specific customer type, or a specific person, and then there’s a big gap, and then there’s all the people who talk to that specific person and draw them into the business. So when I started to do paid advertising, I fell in love with it, mostly because I was able to take what I was learning on the psychology side, tactically, put it into an ad, and then see results within maybe four hours, sometimes less. Within 30 minutes, I could tell whether it worked or not. So it was much faster way of testing the messaging that I wanted to test. But that in between, Spot kind of became where, I guess, the sweet spot for Sarah kind of started to kind of morph. I guess so Tether came out of a lot of requests, honestly, from my customers and. Asking me, I would go in and I would run their media, buying their ads for them, and they would always ask, how is it that your ads fit better than everybody else? Like, we have lots of other ads in here, and you seem to be getting consistent good results with your ads. How would that happen? And so out of necessity, I was like, I have to come up with some sort of tactical framework to show them what I’m doing. So at the time, like I said, I didn’t know I was doing any of this. It was just like a part of Sarah’s process for research. I was going through and on the brand Instagram pages for any of these D to C brands that I was working for. I was pulling down all of the comments that was underneath all of their organic pieces of content that talked about the brand or even the product, even the ones that didn’t have anything to do with anything. I just pulled them down and then analyze them one by one. Now this was before AI, so I had to go through by hand and categorize them into the categories that I wanted, which, at the time was emotional categories, because I was like emotion psychology, this kind of all makes sense. Obviously, people buy things for emotional reasons, and then we justify them with logic, so I’ll categorize them into emotional category, and then I’ll just go ahead and, like, run an analysis on that. So this was all done in Excel spreadsheet, and based on frequency numbers, I could tell which emotions were coming out of just the language that customers were using. So I don’t know that I was necessarily a better writer or a better like, you know, Ideator for abs. I think it was more of the fact that I just got much, much closer to the customer, and then I was able to take what I found and basically repurpose it. So I had a framework that just I repeated over and

over and over, 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, it seems to me, then, in my experience, you know, working with copywriters, a lot of the time, you know, we’re looking for specific words. Sometimes we’re looking for emotions, but, but you know, when, even when I go through research, knowing that I should be looking at all of it together, every once in a while, something will jump out. I’m like, oh, that’s the idea, right? And then maybe I stop or and so, having gone through and done that work to, like, really figure out, okay, every single comment, it feels to me like that’s almost the putting in the 10,000 hours kind of thing that trains your brain so that, so that it becomes really effective and insightful. 

Sarah Levinger: Yeah, yeah. Well, and it was interesting, because that was the very first product I ever really had, was what I was calling it NLP at the time. So it was the NLP research panel, and it was called NLP because I didn’t know this was the term, but what I was doing was basically manual natural language processing. So there’s computers that do that. Obviously, Sarah was just doing it by hand. So I’d pull all the data down, categorize it, pull out frequency numbers for the emotions, emotional categories that I was looking for, and then I would write new copies based on the emotion that I felt, not necessarily the keywords and phrases that the customers were using, mostly because the keywords and phrases are important, and they I mean, they still are important. They were important. They are important. But the problem was, in paid advertising, if you use that keyword and phrase too many times. It’s fatigue. People kind of stop paying attention to it, and then it doesn’t work anymore. So fast forward, a couple years later, I had someone ask me, this is great. We love your NLP, it’s really interesting. It’s helping. But do you have any information on getting accurate avatars built, like customer types from all of the data that you’re pulling down. And at the time, I was like, No, but I could probably build that. I constantly look at these things like, I think I could probably make that. Why not? Like, we’ll see if we can ever so the next product that I built was called the CIM. So the CIM is a core identity map, and this particular research panel uses picture based surveys and metaphorical surveys to pull out these emotional like deeper insights out of our customers. So they’re very odd surveys, because about 80% of them are non-functional, I would say. So we ask questions like, if this product was a superhero, which one would it be? And why? Those types of things. Once you’re going to make an association of the brain, you would help pull out some very interesting insights of what people believe about things, not just how they feel about it, that in general, for humans, what you believe affects how you feel, and what you feel affects how you behave. So for consumption, especially since I’m on the paid advertising side, studying just the behavior of clicks or conversion rates and those types of things, not entirely helpful for me, because I have no idea what caused it, right? I just know it happened. So some people take one step back and go, Okay, we need to study the emotion, which is very, very helpful. But again, that’s only one piece of the equation. We can tell how they felt about what caused the conversion, but we can’t tell why they did it. So I go all the way back to the beginning and study behavior with the CI or study belief, sorry, that the CIM, so that way and understand more. Can you give me an example of how that works? Yeah. So, for instance, one of the best you kids into this I’ve ever saw was we had a CIM that was interesting. They had built basically this one. A skincare brand, and they were having a really hard time because the acquisition customer type was too expensive, like that. They were just, like, bleeding money, basically. So we ran a CIM basically just to see what their customers believed about the whole industry, not just their particular product. Because most businesses study themselves, or they study competitive they don’t study the industry, which I find fascinating, because I’m like, Oh,

Rob Marsh: That totally rings a bell, too. I do the same thing. Like, of course, you want to look at your three or four closest competitors, so you don’t copy what they’re doing, but you also clue into, you know, the basics, and then, of course, your own product. But yeah, industry wide, that’s a lot, and that’s a lot for one person to handle too, or one small agency. 

Sarah Levinger: Yeah, that’s why they usually come to Sarah, because I’m like, don’t go do this yourself. Just hire someone to do it. Blind you. So industry wide, though, this is a very interesting it’s a very interesting ecosystem, if you start to study industry, mostly because a large majority of the time there is one person at the top and then there’s a number two, and they fight with each other constantly, COVID, colon, Pepsi, right? Apple and Microsoft. Then there’s an outlier, usually a third player in here who’s quietly serving an audience that’s like secondary to the larger market that these two are fighting over. Right? That third base. Sometimes they are brand, brand new meaning, like you’ve never seen them before. They just came out of nowhere. Liquid Death is probably a good example of this. Like nobody really saw them come and they just were all of a sudden, there. You also have some of these who have been quietly like practicing their skill for such a long time that they notice a market gap before the two top players do and can like slip in immediately. So I think it’s beneficial to study your competitors and beneficial to study yourself, obviously, but it’s even more beneficial to study the industry as much as you possibly can, because you’ll start to notice consumer shift. That’s what we’re kind of looking for, especially at Tether. Consumer shifts happen all the time for all sorts of different reasons, political reasons for economic reasons for cultural movement. In particular, celebrities have a huge like play on cultural sway, like your customer type is swaying their behavior based on what they believe. And if their beliefs change, then all of their behaviors change too. So back to skincare. When we ran a CIM for them, we found that their customers were a little overwhelmed, not necessarily by like, the industry, like they understood what their problem was. It was usually acne or dry skin or wrinkles or whatever. They were more overwhelmed with the fact that I now have like, 70 bottles that sit on top of my counter, and I’m constantly, like, swapping them out in and every day and like, I just, I’m just overwhelmed with the amount of like ridiculousness that I have in my life now due to these bottles on my counter, it had nothing to do with the skincare, which I found really interesting, but it was such a definitive thread that they the customer types were just like, You know what? I’m just kind of done with the mess and the chaos of what this industry has brought into my life. Now, that’s a very definitive belief and emotion that we can start to message to on the coffee side, to talk about the fact that, like, this is the last time you’ll ever have to switch to another skincare brand. 

Rob Marsh: So part of this, what you’re doing is trend spotting, which is maybe a little bit different, again, from what most typical copywriters or even researchers do. So, you know, aside from, you know, running your own panels, are there other tools that you’re using to spot trends and to see what’s coming in order to get ahead of that? 

Sarah Levinger: I have tested a ton of stuff recently, and I think this is something you and I were talking about, $4 pocket there. There’s a place for AI. I think in this conversation, I don’t think it’s where people think it is. I typically use AI as a second brain. So I will have it do data analysis for me, because it can spot patterns and things that I just can’t see. If I have spreadsheets or data, I’ll go through and have it analyzed for me and just say, what do you see in here that I just don’t see? So that’s incredibly helpful. When it comes to research. I have a difficult time using AI as a production tool, and this is something that I’ve been slowly starting to learn more and more about. Because when we first started, I think everybody was just like, this is going to cut years off of our production time. It can do analysis, so it can tell us exactly what we should run from what I’m seeing. That’s not at all true. So in general, I typically default to surveys in particular, because it’s voluntary information, and it’s information that’s like, non biased. It’s just, this is just a person out there. It’s anonymous. We don’t collect any sort of email addresses or names or anything. It’s headed we just collect the actual data of people answering the pictorial survey or the metaphorical survey. And that’s on purpose, because I don’t want it to cloud kind of the what we’re trying to actually learn. So ideally, use AI, but it’s, it’s not as a production tool. It’s primarily just to help me think a little bit more, if that makes sense. 

Rob Marsh: Since we started talking about AI, let’s, let’s keep going here. Because, like you said before we started recording, you said you have a few thoughts, and I think they probably track pretty closely to what what I think about A.I. But as far as AI goes and writing copy, tell me where you are in your brain and with your experience. 

Sarah Levinger: So far, AI has been a very interesting tool to track. When it first came out, this was, like the most amazing thing we had ever seen. Like we just everybody grabbed it, everybody used it. They went from like zero to 5 million users in like 48 hours. It was bonkers, mostly because it is an incredible tool. The interesting part about it is, though, as you start to watch the metamorphosis of AI in particular chat is, well, the one that we use the most often in DTC, you start to notice some like, glaringly obvious issues with this platform. The I think the primary one being this is not really assisting workflow. I find which I think. What do you mean by that? Okay, so most people grabbed onto this because they were like, Oh, I don’t need a copywriter anymore. Save me time. Well, I don’t need any, but I could get rid of my entire team and just use this. That is technically true, but the issue is now you’ve basically replaced a team of experts who can get you a headline within a good 30 minutes to an hour, that will probably work 80% of the time with a system who is making basically an educated guess based upon the data you feed it that’s basically suited to you the user, because the more you use the llms, the more gets trained on you as the person, and it will start to feed you stuff that it knows you like. And this is the most difficult thing about llms. It’s like they’re very, very powerful. I still use it constantly because it’s trained on Sarah’s brain, so it’s almost like talking to myself. But toughest part about this is often the output is terrible, so I have to QA two times as much as I used to. I used to QA inside my own brain before I put it on a piece of paper. I think about it for a long time in the shower, like when I’m driving, or what I’m doing things with my kids, without me having to know that I was thinking about it, because it was all subconscious processing. Now we’ve taken our subconscious and stuck it into a computer and said, you do the subconscious processing for me, but let me help you do it. So we’re spending two to three hours QA one headline instead of just sitting and thinking quietly about it in the background before we sit down to our desk.

Rob Marsh: I just kind of had a light bulb go off as you’re mentioning this when you said that llms get trained on our voice, and they get to know us. The biggest problem here is that is that even if we know our customers intimately, we are not our customer, and the knowledge that we bring to the table in order and then to have LLM reflect back what Rob is thinking instead of what Rob’s clients or customers are thinking, or Rob’s clients customers are thinking. Customers are thinking, which is even two steps away, like now. Now we’ve got a really big gap between what’s going to work and what sounds good, because it’s going to sound good based off of, you know, my feedback. I mean, I’m a pretty good writer, yeah, but it’s not necessarily the thing that’s going to work well. 

Sarah Levinger: And in paid advertising, we’re using this primarily to produce massive amounts of ads. So our issue used to be that we had teams of like six to 10 to 20 people, all producing ads for us, copywriters and graphic designers and creative strategists, lots of different things, and all of those people, it would probably take us a good week to two weeks to generate a good 10 to 20 ads. Like it’s a process now we can do it in 20 minutes. Now, if you can take that amount of time, squish it down into 20 minutes, and you can take basically 10 ads and like, double or triple your production, that means a massive amount of messages are now being flooded into the systems on paid advertising. So meta, Tiktok, Instagram, right? That means the consumers are also seeing more messages. That means they’re also now becoming desensitized to any messages that are generic or completely boring, right? No offense to AI, but like, it’s a lot of what comes out of there is quite generic, yeah, so I’m watching this, and I’m tracking it as we’re going through just thinking, in the background, wondering, how long is this going to go before we start to see large scale kind of systemic issues in marketing in general, due to the fact that people think this is faster, but it’s not, or think that it’s better, but it’s not because we are the ones that are feeding all the data into The llms and telling them what to think. Now they still have the ability to go and, like, scrape the web, which is helpful. They can go and look to Google. But who produced all that stuff on Google? We did. So again, I am on the fence. I feel so torn about this, mostly because AI has something called projection bias, meaning they kind of just get. Tests at what they think is probably the best course of action based upon the statistical, mathematical patterns in the data. So we can feed it all the customer data we want, but if you’re feeding it on historical customer data, it’s only going to go after people who bought yesterday, not people who are going to buy tomorrow, so you’re dipping the bottom of the bucket constantly, bottom of funnel customers. And it gets even worse when you think about how many 1000s and 1000s of brands are in one industry. It’s intense. 

Rob Marsh: It’s crazy. So while we’re still talking about this, I know you’re using AI. I use AI. How are you using AI to maximize its effectiveness and not let it get in the way of actually, like, relating to the customer.

Sarah Levinger: So I primarily use it as a data analysis tool, because I’m not a data analyst, and, like, I have people on my team that are helping me with research, but in general, it can see a lot more than I can. I don’t want it to produce and I don’t want it to think for me, because I’m the one that has the real world experience. We all have to remember that AI lives inside a computer. It’s never seen a comb or a shoe or a house, right? It’s never experienced love. It’s also never really experienced rejection or embarrassment. It understands which emotions and words are connected to that word, but it will never be able to understand what it feels like to like be around that. Yet, I don’t know if they’re gonna make that someday. Maybe that would be terrifying, but it’s possible that will happen to them. So because of this, though, I really wanted to pull out things that I am unable to see. So I typically run these metaphorical and pictorial surveys to understand underlying belief systems. And so when I run that data through, we typically have basically qualitative answers that come with the pictures. So we’ll ask one picture of what do you think about this question. Here’s your picture answers. You choose one. They’ll pick an image for us. And then that very next question is going to be, why did you choose that image? Those qualitative answers for why did you pick that are very, very interesting, because they show a whole lot about what people think about themselves. You’ll choose based on emotion, but then you’ll try and justify it with something else, so you can compare them pretty easily. Now, the toughest part about this is I have to describe the image to chat pretty intensely and then tell it. Here’s the image they chose. Here’s what they answered as to why they chose that image. You do this analysis for me and tell me what you see, not necessarily what you think. I don’t try and use that word too much with chat, just because it’s trained on me. So it’s going to think like me. I want to just see what do you see in here that I use all the time, because I want to understand what patterns are in here that I just can’t see right now.

Rob Marsh: So it’s helping you uncover patterns, emotions, ideas, and then you’re taking that, and either you’re writing it yourself or you’re working with a copywriter to put that into action. Sarah Levinger: Yep, exactly, exactly. So like the skincare thing, that was a pattern that I didn’t recognize. Like, when I looked at the data, I was like, oh, confidence. A lot of these women are really into feeling COVID. Into feeling confident. They want to boost their skin, they want to look good, those type of things, but those are normal, everyday things that I would think are a part of skincare. That’s normal, makes sense, yeah? And I said, it’s logical sense. So then I ran it back through the system and said, Okay, go find me some stuff that’s weird in here. Go, go get me some keywords or phrases that are like, I don’t know why anybody would say this about skincare, and one of the ones that came up was, I’m overwhelmed with the amount of bottles on my sink, which I’m like, that has nothing to do with skincare. So it was fascinating, but very, very cool thread that they found, and they’re able to use it now a whole lot better just because it spotted something that was weird. It’s an outlier,

Rob Marsh: So where this stuff seems to be going is, again, moving into the psychology side of this. And this is something that we talk about. We say it a lot, but it’s hard to make actionable. And that is the idea that people don’t buy products. They buy what the product says about them, right? So they’re buying an identity, or they’re signaling something about them. So as an example,I love Jeep. I don’t currently own a jeep, but I have had Jeeps in the past, and I love them, and even though they’re kind of bumpy and clunky in some ways. There’s probably something—I might need to go to a therapist to talk about this—but there’s something about Jeeps that I like that it says about me as a jeep driver, right? So, yeah. So how do we get more of this into the copy and content that we’re creating?

Sarah Levinger: Oh, gosh, yes. So this is really interesting, because this goes down into what how many different associations have you built with Jeep in your head, and what are they attached to? So normally, when you build a memory or some sort of an association as a human, it has to do with how heightened your emotional state was during that particular time period in your life. So it’s possible somebody in your family owned a jeep, or you knew somebody who wasn’t in your family, but was aspirational, somebody sort of like, I want to be that person that owned a jeep. Or it’s very possible that you just had you saw it a lot, right? But same thing happens for like, my kids are. Watching Sponge Bob right now, and like, it’s the funniest thing ever, because I watch it and I can, I can verbatim, just like, go every single line I know, everything that that guy said, because I watched it so much as a kid. So now the just seeing that experience on the TV elicits an emotional response for me, because I saw it so much as the chat. So it just kind of depends. And again, emotional states don’t have to be traumatic. They sometimes they can just be it was there and that was gone. I was excited, and then it was gone, that type of thing. So to get more of this, this is the reason why I’m testing these picture based surveys, metaphorical surveys, because I want to see how close can we get to eliciting that response from somebody without them having to basically, what’s the word without them having to answer in a logical way, if that makes sense. So it’s difficult to get this out, and this is reason why not a lot of people are in this type of research, because hard, it’s very difficult to get this out and to do it without leading an answer, because that’s what most surveys do, especially on like post purchase side, is we just kind of give them a general frame of reference, of like, where did you come from, or what did you like most about it today? What do you wish we had? These are very logical questions, and they’re also well suited to people who read most post purchases are just questions and answers in text based form. If you don’t read well, or if you’re the type person that just doesn’t care, you just button mash your way out of there, and then have gone right? So in general, when it comes to pulling out more of these things, there’s a lot of really good research around picture based surveys that help kind of pull out those emotions. To apply it, though, I think is probably where, like, the bulk of the benefit is. So the nice part is, once you start to find these weird trends, like the bottles on the counter type of thing, you’ll start to be able to understand a little bit more about what these consumers are experiencing in their everyday life. And you guys, copywriters have been very, very close to the psychology of customers more than almost any other role, I would say, in marketing, because you guys had to think so deeply about it to be able to draft good messaging. So finding these tiny little trends and being able to speak to the relatable experience of that customer is probably where this is going to go eventually. And when I say relatable experience, I’m not talking about the problem at all. Almost everybody wants to default to your problem is dry skin. Here’s a solution, very Aida framework. My pushback on that is, I think I’d rather you talk about her experience around her dry skin, because dry skin actually causes all kinds of problems, not just like it’s uncomfortable, but also, if I go skiing this weekend, I’m gonna have to put chapstick on my face, and that’s sticky and uncomfortable, and I don’t like that. It’s a secondary problem that I now have to deal with again. Or if my face is dry and, like, cracked and I flake everywhere, like, that’s uncomfortable because I have a date tonight, and I don’t want him to think that that’s weird, right? There’s like, connected experiences all over the place that stem from one problem, but there’s like, 15 problems that are around it we can talk to as well. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that becomes really interesting. You know, copywriters know the PAs formula, problem, agitate, solve. And oftentimes we’re, we’re really focused on all of the good things around the solution. You know, we will quickly we’re taught, and I don’t know that it’s always correct, but it’s like, Oh, you don’t want to be negative too long, right? Like, mention the problem, but don’t make people feel bad or whatever, but then, so we were really good at if you take this, it solves this problem, and it shows up in your life in these ways. Now you can do all these things you couldn’t do before, but I think like focusing in on the secondary issues is a really interesting idea to me.

Sarah Levinger: Well, I think it’s interesting because if you watch, and this is why I get I get freaked out. There are things too deep. I get freaked out sometimes because I’m like, everything’s attached to everything. Over the course of the last probably 20 to 25 years, we have started to shift as a culture, especially in the US, towards this notion of, Do not offend anyone, right? Do not offend anyone. And it’s happened mostly due to kind of how the millennial generation was parented. But the millennials in particular were very, very sensitive to this idea of everybody included. We’re all in a community. We all want everybody to feel safe. Safety was kind of high priority for this customer type. Now, the interesting part about that generation is they taught it to their Gen Z kids, who are now kind of ramping it up, like there’s even more of this notion of like, don’t offend, no bad feelings. Everything’s fine. That seeped its way into everyone’s mindset because we heard it so much like he talks about the copywriters in the 80s had no problem being me. Like, if you look at some of the long form content from the 80s, copywriters got really harsh about the problem, like they would try and trigger the crap out of people, and all of their content was very, very intense, like they would talk very specifically about this is your problem. This is how you feel about it, and it’s not good. You need to change this, right? They spent a little bit of time on the solution, but they would constantly wrap back into what we call naked. To focused, right? Not so much anymore. Copywriters nowadays, as you said, are so conscious of this idea of like, I need to be careful not to trigger people. But that has caused a little bit of a negative shift in marketing, because now we refuse to talk about the problem. We almost get too soft with ourselves, which means nobody’s selling, which means all of the consumers are kind of bored and just kind of turned out, so it all kind of melds into each other. And so I think about this sometimes, in this respect of psychology applies to everything, first of all, and it’s also interesting to watch, because the herd, the whole group of humans on the planet, we all follow each other a little bit. And I’m not saying that, like, safety is incredibly important, especially mental safety, psychological safety, feeling safe in your body, safe who who you are. I think feeling accepted. These are all good things that came out of like that generation and that movement. But there are always side effects to random things like this, and in marketing, it’s just going to get worse and worse, because the Gen Zers are really intense about it, so it’s gonna be fascinating. What happens the next couple years? 

Rob Marsh: Well, as you talk about this, you mentioned Liquid Death. Liquid Death seems to be like perfectly fit into a reaction to that, right? I remember when I first saw Liquid Death, or within a few months of its launch, I saw a marketer who I really respected talking about how this was an awful brand, toxic masculinity, all of this stuff. And I remember thinking, Wait a second, there’s actually something really smart happening here. Now, obviously there, you know, the heavy metal branding and the name Liquid Death or whatever like, they’re obviously going for a reaction, but it’s, but it’s the fact that all of soda pop branding has been happy, family, pop music, whatever, it opens up this opportunity for literally water to be the bad guy, right? And by bad guy, I don’t mean the evil person. It’s that bad boy image, the James Dean riding in on its motorcycle type image, right? 

Sarah Levinger: Yeah,yeah. Well, this hits on some trends culturally that are really interesting, because Liquid Death probably would not have been able to do what they did in the 80s, right? Because the 80s group did not care literally at all about anarchy or becoming some sort of a misfit or rebelliousness, because they already were, like, there was a whole bunch of people who did not feel stifled in that mostly because a lot of the boomer generation in the 80s already had, like, a good handle on we’re different. We’re already different from our parents. We’re going to start to push our voices out into the world. They became kind of their own group of movement makers in the 80s. That’s what the Boomers were. Now you fast forward to today’s day and age. A lot of millennials and Gen Xers in particular, feel very stifled, like, again, because they’re starting to hear these cultural messages of, like, be careful, don’t hurt anybody. Like, just like, all the time. If you feel that, if you feel stifled in yourself, you’re going to resonate with products that are like, No, we’re going to get loud and we’re going to be weird and it’s going to be whatever we feel it needs to be. So the interesting part is, again, global emotion is really interesting, because you have a group of people that feel this, you bring a product in that solves that need to feel okay with being rebellious, and people will grab it immediately. And you could spot these patterns, but it takes a minute. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, clearly, it takes a lot of work and a lot of research. So, you know, beyond like going into the spreadsheet and, you know, coding everything for emotions, or having a tool like ChatGPT do it. What else are you doing in your business at Tether to spot what’s coming or where the opportunities are? How are you helping clients see that? How do you see that the rest of the industry or the other competitors are here, and that’s why there’s this really good opening for you over here?

Sarah Levinger: Okay, so I run something called the Tether BPE. Everything I have is an acronym, which is not on purpose. That’s just kind of how it happened. The Tether BPE is a brand personality engine. And this was a giant prompt that I read through chat. It starts with doing that kind of, like, deep research about the whole industry, whatever industry we’re studying at the time, all the way back to, I’ll take it back to the 60s, if I have to, like, what was happening in, like beverages in the 60s, so I can understand the history of where we came from. This entire prompt is basically built to help me understand historically what happened throughout the generations and throughout the decades. Where do we sit currently, and what’s the market gap, and predictively, what’s probably going to happen next, mostly so that I can kind of identify, can we see, is there a trend that’s similar to what happened to liquid death? Now they didn’t know that they identified a trend. They just went with what they were going with, mostly because, like, they’re genius, but also because that was part of him, and he noticed a giant people, giant group of people, that were being underserved. That’s what I’m trying to spot with the BP is what’s being on. Deserve that people are craving heavily. So the bbe was kind of born on its own, like off to the side, and then I added to it after reading the Innovator’s Dilemma. I don’t know if you’ve read that book. 

Rob Marsh: I love everything by Clayton Christensen. He was brilliant, and one of my favorite thinkers ever. 

Sarah Levinger: Yeah, I can’t get enough of his work, because I’m just like, oh, my God, that one blew my mind. It was such a dry, technical read, but I had to, like, really stick with it. But the underlying tones of what he was studying are so clear that in market, in industries, especially when you’re helping brands businesses grow, and your job as a copywriter or a graphic designer or somebody who’s like, fronting the load of the operational work. Your job is almost always going to be told to you as go get a sale, but that’s not at all what your role is. The people on the on like the ground floor of the business, our job is to spot patterns quicker than they can spot it at the top, because we’re closest to the customers. So in that particular book, they were talking about the standards industry and how it morphed, and all kinds of crazy things that happened. The people that were at the top of the industries had a very difficult time noticing that the customer bases started wanting smaller, faster, quicker, not necessarily more like more capacity. With this, they just wanted smaller, faster, quicker. So there were a couple companies like scandals or, you know, later it was Sandisk was able to come in and undercut some of these massive brands, because it was like, we’re solving a problem for one teeny, tiny customer group. But the customer group is growing. It’s not really that, like demand is really growing. There’s just more of them kind of coming into the circle. So what I do with the BPE is I’m trying to understand historically what has happened, so that I can kind of track the growth of things, but then predictively, I want to see if we can identify some trends that are coming out of the BPE, like the bottles on the table. And then can we track what the whole industry is saying so that we can kind of put our brands right in the right spot to hit at just the right time. Now, that’s difficult, and I have no idea whether it’s going to work, but it’d be interesting to see if we could do it, because it’s happened in every industry across history.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. I mean, as a real simple example of that is the history of soda pop. You see this happening about every five to six years. There’s a new trend, right, like so, you know, in the 60s and 70s, there was the uncola and Mountain Dew, and then you get things like Snapple and the teas that come along. And the interesting thing is, the soda pop industry is always being disrupted this way, but either Coke or Pepsi comes along and they buy up the company in order to preserve their space. And we, I mean we literally, I think two weeks ago, Pepsi just bought Poppi, or one of the nutritional soda pop brands, right? That’s kind of the latest, the latest thing happening in soda pop. And before that, you know, Liquid Death and water and energy drinks and like you sort of see this happening. And I guess my point here is, if you can figure out how to do that for your clients, this is the kind of superpower that I mean it doesn’t just like, it creates literally 100 million dollar industries. So, how do we do more of that?

Sarah Levinger: Yes, I think chat is making it a whole lot easier for people who would like to stay at home mom in Colorado to sit in her office and be like, what’s happening with the consumers. Get curious. Get curious if you see something specifically, if you see an outlier, stop tracking things that are normal. I don’t care what the consumers are doing. I also don’t really care what the competitors are doing all that much. If it’s normal, if the consumers are acting normal today, cool. Just keep it going. If somebody comes in that door that says something wild to me, that’s like, that has never been attributed to our product. Why would you think that? Like, what is that? Pay attention to it, get curious about it, because at the end of the day, if you see more people coming in saying that same thing, or even if you see something that’s like, I don’t know, one person said this and the other person said that, and they’re kind of related, keep track of it, because trends change slowly, right? And consumers do things very quietly, but they’re always telling you what they want constantly, because they’re voting with their dollars. So you could see it everywhere. And I tell people, track your sister industries too, like track the ones that you don’t think you’re related to, but you definitely are. For instance, in one of the brands that I was looking for, they sell these really cool little flasks, right? They were just gorgeous, beautiful things. They’re 100% attached to the alcohol industry because of what goes in the plow. However, they’re also attached to body positivity. I can’t talk body positivity is one of the industries they’re attached to, specifically because if the millennials stop drinking, they go under so you have to track, you’ve got to look at the entirety of the ecosystem. And this is why you know the study of economics exists. You got to track the whole thing. And I know it sounds intense, and it’s like, oh my God, how would I start that? The best place that you can start, I think, is with chat. Though. This is where I’m like, it’s a second brain. Just use it as a way to go look for things that you can’t book for on your own. It’s got deep research. Now it’s incredibly well versed. I’m pretty sure one of these, one of these models here, was just passing the training test I was reading. 

There’s like, about that a week or so ago, yeah, where it’s like, oh my god, the models are outscoring the humans in the Turing test, and people are identifying the model as the human.

So use the tools that you have. I would not use it to produce again. I try really hard to default to I think humans still should be writing and producing for humans. But I would go and look at what what’s connected to you. Take your industry, plug it in. Just say, what do you see? What’s out there? What’s the history of this? Learn, learn, learn. Just act like a historian. But the more that you know, the more that you can kind of see out into the future to tell what’s happening next. Rob Marsh: This feels like a place where you know, we should mention that niching actually becomes part of your superpower, too. So there’s, you know, this conversation in the marketing world, should you niche? Should you not niche? And there are good reasons on both sides to do one or the other. But if you niche, you have a much better ability to spot this kind of thing as it comes up, because you’re familiar with the industry. You’re not just jumping from one project or one client to another. 

Sarah Levinger: Oh, 100% I have that issue right now because I’m so solidly connected D to C. There for a minute this year, I was trying to decide, do I want to move to B to B? Do I want to see if I can open up SAS or like service based or consulting. The toughest part about it is I know too much about DTC, so it’s way too easy for me to come over here and just be like, these are my people, and I know a lot about them, and I can help and serve them, but it could be a blind spot for me and for Tether. If we continuously go down the path of our normal customer, we’re going to miss outliers that might be a better customer type. So, and not to say that, I’ll leave you to see I’ll probably be here forever, but in general, this happens in every business. So this is why it pays to look. It pays to pay attention. 

Rob Marsh: The flip side of niching is that you’ve missed the exposure that’s happening in those other industries, and you can’t bring new ideas from those industries into it. So maybe the answer here is that you need one person who’s focused and niched, and you need a team member next to you who’s paying attention to everything else. 

Sarah Levinger: Yep, yep, yep. That’s why people hire Sarah. Usually they’re like, go out there and find us and stuff, and then we’ll stay close to our customers. So now we have Beth to both room. Yeah, yep. I think that’s probably the best way to do it. 

Rob Marsh: So we haven’t really even talked much about, like, specific psychological tactics or things that you know you’re paying attention to, or that you’re doing with ads and advising your clients to do. But do you have like, just a top two or three tactics? You’re like, okay, these are my go tos. I’m gonna start here. I’m gonna try this stuff first, because I know it’s a good place. 

Sarah Levinger: This is not copywriting related, but rounded buttons tend to produce better clicks, better conversion than sharp ones do, which I find really interesting. They’ve done a lot of studies around that and that, that one in particular has to do with sharp things feel a little unsafe to the mind. Now, I’ve seen a couple of studies that have gone the opposite direction with this, that talk about the fact that it depends on the product. If you have a tool or something utilitarian, rounded corners don’t do anything at all for conversion rates on button, interesting. So if I’m selling an ax or something dangerous, I might want a square, right? Something with sharp edges?

Okay, so second one… I saw it here that was really, really interesting study I read talked about the fact that italics, italics and ads in particular, tend to increase engagement, where people like, like it and share it and do all kinds of stuff. Like, if the text is slanted, now they they specifically said over slanted, but typically italic says, like, I don’t know, it’s like eight to 10 degrees, not that much, right? Yeah, they were talking about like 30 to 33% like, really slanted text, for some reason that does really well. And they said it happens not just on ads, but landing pages and emails everywhere. So without…

Rob Marsh: Would you do it in with, like, small blocks, or like, the entire piece of copy, like, in a Facebook ad, you’ve got that introduced the introductory block, or whatever you want, that whole thing slanted. 

Sarah Levinger: From what I read, I’m pretty sure it’s just headlines like, don’t do the whole thing. Slanted, yes, but headlines, as long as they’re short, like, I don’t know, and that was probably the third study I read, was sweet spot for headlines on advertising in particular, at least, is four to eight words long, interesting. Tapped at eight, yeah, they seem to lose effectiveness at over eight words. So and again, I. I only know studies that pertain to pay to advertise, because that’s what I’ve been to. But for the slant, it’s interesting. If they’re short headlines, make the whole headline slanted, but then your subhead, your body copy, all the rest of it, just keep it a normal, normal font. So weird stuff. Humans are really sensitive to a longer,

strange thing. 

Rob Marsh: I think maybe part of this goes back to just standing out, just being different, right? Because every other headline is straight or slightly italicized, right? So something’s different that triggers our innate sense that I need to pay attention to this, because, again, it might be dangerous, it might be food, it might be an opportunity for connection, right? 

Sarah Levinger: Yeah, that makes sense. I guess the lesson here is, try lots of stuff. Try lots of different stuff, be different from everyone else. Yes, the end of the day, that’s what it comes down to, awesome.

Rob Marsh: This has been fascinating for me. I wish I had another hour, because I think we could just keep going and going. But Sarah, you have a newsletter, if people want to get on your newsletter and follow you, where should they go?

Sarah Levinger: You can actually go to tetherinsight.io. That’s probably the only place to get access to it right now. I feel really bad. I should probably update my email. I get so deep in the weeds on my own business, I’m like, I should really work on that this week. But yeah, so sign up for that. I usually do brand breakdowns in particular. So if you’re looking for studies of brands that have used psychology in the past and how they used it to grow or get more customers or cut costs, that’s usually the first half of it. The next section on that newsletter is most interesting to me. They’re Tether signals. So all of the little insights that we pulled out today from all the brands that I work with. I’m providing those inside that newsletter. So if you want to get access to like a random trend that nobody sees yet, they’re going to be inside that.

Rob Marsh: And then you also write a lot on LinkedIn and Twitter, and so we’ll link to to your accounts there, so people can follow. And before we start recording, you mentioned you might be launching a community here, or by the time this goes live, have launched a community. Tell me a little bit about that.

Sarah Levinger: Okay, so I’ve been asked to do this for years and years, and I just haven’t had time to do it. But I’m finally going to do it this year. I have a community that’s going to be starting up specifically around consumers, consumption, behavior, psychology, identity, and in particular, we’re going to be studying not just d to c, but basically any customer type, anybody that you want to bring into your ecosystems. How do you use psychology to get them in the door faster and cheaper? And primarily, I think this community, it’s going to be good, because I want to start talking to the people who are studying the consumers the most. So I’m hoping to bring in a lot of people from the large scale universities, large scale market research firms, people who know and understand consumers really well. So we can start to talk to them a little bit about what they’re seeing as well. But primarily we’re going to do brand breakdowns basically once a week, so you can submit your brand, or if you want to come in and submit your service, whatever it is, and I’ll take a look at it, and then we’ll talk about here’s all the psychology things you need to put in place. Here’s the way you need to shift emotionally to bring people in. And then I got lots of resources, tons of courses and trainings and things around learning psychology specifically for marketers. 

Rob Marsh: So I’ll link to those in the show notes as well.

Thanks to Sarah for walking through her research and analysis process, how she uses—and doesn’t use—A.I., and we can all get better at spotting changes in trends before they happen. If you’re not already on Sarah’s newsletter, you definitely should be. She write about her research and shares case studies about how she’s applying the strategies and frameworks we talked about on this episode. There’s a lot to learn when it comes to making this stuff work and Sarah is one of the best.

I’ve linked to her site in the show notes as well as her brand new community if you’re interested in finding out more about that as well.

And of course there are lots of resources around persuasion and psychology in The Copywriter Underground. If you’re a member, you’ll find those resources in the new dashboard. And if you’re not a member, you can fix that now at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

That’s the end of this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast.

If you like what you’ve heard, please share it with someone you know. Or, if you don’t know another writer or freelancer who you can share it with—and I find that very hard to believe—visit Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts and leave a review. If you haven’t left a review, now is the time. I promise, when you share The Copywriter Club Podcast, your friends will thank you.

Don’t forget to check out The Copywriter Underground at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

See you next week.

When it comes to getting customers to buy more, it helps to have psychology working for you. So I invited buyer psychologist, Katelyn Bourgoin, to chat with me about the marketing tactics that truly make a difference when it comes to getting customer to open their wallets. This is a great discussion that covers insights like Jobs to Be Done, Trigger Events, and the deep psychology that engages customers and keeps them coming back for more. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

Katelyn’s Newsletter

Rob Marsh: Why do people buy the products and services we write about? If you don’t know the answer to that question, you need this episode. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

Before you can sell the products and services you write about, you need to understand why your customers buy in the first place. This includes marketing concepts like market/message match, jobs to be done, market sophistication, clarifying an offer, finding pain points, and finding under-served markets. 

My guest today is buyer psychologist Katelyn Bourgoin. She writes the Why People Buy newsletter and focuses on using science and psychology to sell more of whatever it is that you are writing about. Personally, these are the topics I could talk about for hours. If you want to sell more of the products and services you write about, you’ll definitely want to listen to this entire episode. What Katelyn shares about “trigger moments” is in my opinion one of the most important concepts in marketing that doesn’t get the attention it deserves. 

Katelyn and I also talked about making difficult decisions like shutting down a business that isn’t working, or choosing between taking a real job and doing something on your own, and the mindset shifts required to make these decisions. And I grilled Katelyn on the methods she used to grow her newsletter. If you write a newsletter (or want to write a newsletter), her ideas will help you attract new readers faster.

Before we get to my interview with Katelyn, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. If you haven’t jumped in to see what the Underground includes, now is the time. It’s guaranteed, which means you can join and if you don’t find the resources you need to grow your business, just let us know and we’ll refund your money. The Underground includes more than 70 different workshops—and accompanying playbooks to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. This week we’re adding another expert workshop all about how to create the perfect for you copywriter website. If your website doesn’t stand out or doesn’t help you land clients, you’ll definitely want to join us.

The Playbooks make it easy to find quick solutions to the challenges you face in your business everything from finding clients, conducting sales calls, using A.I., building authority on LinkedIn or YouTube or Pinterest, and dozens of other workshops. You also get dozens of templates including a legal agreement you can use with your clients, monthly coaching, regular copy and funnel critiques, and more. You can learn more and join today by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. 

And now, my interview with Katelyn Bourgoin…

So Katelyn, welcome to the copywriter club podcast. I’m thrilled to have you here. I’ve been wanting to have you on the show, literally, for like, a year. I’m not sure why it took so long to make the right connections, but thanks to Jordan for helping to make it happen. But since you’re here, tell us your story. I know you’ve got a great story of, you know, some business success and failure, but you have created an amazingly successful newsletter. I love it. It’s one of those that I wait for it to come into my email box, and probably because the topic is the topic that just rings my bell, which is persuasion. So anyway, tell me your story. How did you get here?

Katelyn Bourgoin: That’s a long question. 

Rob Marsh: It was a terrible question. 

Katelyn Bourgoin: No, it’s a great question. I just feel like I’m, you know, I’m always kind of thinking about the best way to share this story, because it’s long and winding as most entrepreneurs are, and like, to your point, things look great today, but there have been a lot of ups and downs to get to this point. And so maybe I’ll share a little bit of the journey before launching the newsletter, which is why we buy so prior to launching the newsletter, if we go all the way back to like 2014 so we’re talking like 11 years ago, I was running a branding agency. I’d actually just sold the sister company, which was a restaurant consulting agency, and I was having this kind of crisis of identity, like I think a lot of folks do, or I was like, I need to stop selling time for money. I want to sell something that scales, something more scalable.

And at the time 2014 I was under the impression that the online course and online, you know, creative world was too busy, so I should do something else. Now, this is funny, considering that it’s still an amazing opportunity for anybody who wants to get into that world. And that’s, you know, really what the business is that I run today, 11 years later. So I decided I was going to do something else, and I was going to launch a tech company. Because how hard could that be? Really, really effing hard, Rob. Things did not go as planned. We launched an initial product, got some venture capital funding. Inc Magazine was saying we were building the next LinkedIn for women. Everything looked awesome from the outside. It was not going awesome on the inside. We really understood the customer we were going after. And of course, I was good at marketing and PR, but not so good at building the right product. I built the wrong product, and it wasn’t solving the core pain point that the audience that we decided to go after needed us to solve for them. It was janky. It didn’t work very well. And so we’d have 1000s of people signing up, and they would post, and they kind of create a profile, and they did not stick around. They didn’t really maintain their activity. And so in the last dish effort, I ended up pivoting to more of a think tank model. 

But at that point, I was so burned out, and we were out of money, and I was just like, I can’t keep going. And so ended up closing down the company, super sad, licking my wounds, trying to decide, what am I going to be when I grow up? Had to go bankrupt because I’d taken a bunch of personally guaranteed loans in the early days before we raised venture capital and trying to figure out what’s next. And I was really fortunate, because I brought on these great investors, and one of the investors that I brought on had a huge portfolio of companies, and was like, Hey, you weren’t so good on the product side. I was like, Yeah, I know. But you were really good at the marketing side. And we have all of these founders that we support that are building incredible products, and they’re not great at explaining them, getting people excited about them, selling them. Will you work with some of our companies? And I said, Yes, are you gonna pay me? It’s like, I really need money. And yeah. So they’re like, Yeah, you can come on as a consultant, and we’ll pay you to work with these companies. And so I started working with all of these brilliant founders who were building world changing technology, their clients were like Boeing and NASA and Tesla and like they were changing the world. And I would go and I would sit down at their boardroom tables, and I’d ask them the question that we want to know as marketers, which is, tell me about your customers. And I was really surprised that most of them could not give me a straight answer. They would be like, oh, you know, like we target, you know, entrepreneurs, or, we target companies like this, but also kind of like this, or the founders would be fighting about who the target customer is in the session. And one time, a founder looked at me straight in the face and he said, our target customers are B to B, online businesses with anywhere between 10 and 500 employees. 

Rob Marsh: Pretty much every business? 

Katelyn Bourgoin: Yeah. So I was like, Okay, there’s clearly a problem to be solved here and helping people to better understand their customers. And so I got really nerdy with this problem started, like, hungrily consuming all of the literature that I could. I’m like, why are so many people having this issue where they don’t understand their customers? They don’t understand the demand that customers have. 

And that led me to discover Clayton Christensen and Bob Moesta work around jobs to be done, which is kind of a whole other conversation we could get into. And it led me to thinking, I’m going to start an insights agency. I want to build an agency that helps companies understand their customers. Will do customer research on the graph, will feed them insights. They need this information to build successful companies. Well, around this exact same time that I have this big idea like, I want to start generating demand for this. I was doing a lot of consulting work. I was running workshops and training for mostly companies in the innovation space, helping them to better understand their customers. And so I started thinking, okay, I need to start priming people for when I eventually launched the agency. And so I created Why We Buy as a newsletter, basically to build pipeline for a future agency. And that was in 2021 and we’d come through the pandemic. We were figuring out the world again in person. Stuff wasn’t happening. It was mostly still virtual. And I found out that I was pregnant, which was exciting, because we’ve been trying, and so we ended up having a baby. And shortly after, within four months, my husband broke his neck. It was like, Oh, crap, what am I going to do? I’ve got this newborn baby. I am, you know, trying to figure out how to build this business. I’m doing it all by myself. And around that same time, sponsors started reaching out to me, being like, we’d like to pay to promote our stuff in your newsletter. And I was really weirded out by that, because, like, what is that a thing? I didn’t even know about this world. And so initially I started just saying, no, it’s not worth my time for like, 200 bucks to promote your thing. 

I eventually ended up having a couple calls with some of these brands and realizing it was a big opportunity, and that there was really an opportunity to build a business around the newsletter. And that’s when I decided to hit pause on the agency idea, and go all in on building a media and education company. And that was the start of what I’ve built today.

Rob Marsh: It’s an it’s an amazing story, and it’s got me thinking… but we kind of skimmed over shutting down the business—bankruptcy. Yeah, it was bad, but when people go through that, it’s really bad. How did you deal with the emotional weight of that happening to you and to keep going? And the reason I’m asking this is there are a lot of people who are starting their own businesses that get into that dip and they get stuck, or they struggle and they have to give up and have to quit, or they have to move on to something else. What was the thing that got you through that?

Katelyn Bourgoin: It’s a great question. I would say that there were two things that happened at that so, funny enough, after closing out that company, I was trying to decide, what’s next? What am I going to do when I grow up? And I actually had a company that would have been my dream job reach out, offering an executive role in their marketing team, and I was at this crossroads. So it was like, you know, I’ve just had to go bankrupt. I’ve built my own thing. I’ve been an entrepreneur for the last—this was 2018—I’ve been an entrepreneur for a long time. I basically had never had a real job, and I was under the weight of this. Like, you know, do I go and get a job or do I keep going and continue to build a company? 

And if I’m honest, the reason that I said no to the job was I felt like an imposter. I was afraid I would not meet their expectations. I didn’t think that I deserved the role that was being offered to me, and so I passed up on it, thinking I’m going to get in there and they’re just going to see that I don’t belong. And that turned out to be the greatest thing ever, because I’ve since gone on to build a company that I really love. I do really feel confident my abilities as a marketer. But it was one of those low points in my life. But the thing that I look at now, and I see it as a bit of a gift, is, once you’ve been that low as an entrepreneur, like once you’ve basically lost everything, the company fails, you go bankrupt. I had a bunch of friends and family who had invested in our round that I had to tell we’ve lost your money. It wasn’t a lot of money, fortunately, but it was enough that it was many, many months of sleepless nights. Once you’ve gone through that, you realize there’s nowhere to go. But that’s the positive about being on the bottom, there’s really nowhere to go but up. And for me, once I identified the problem that I saw these startup founders making, I was like, we made that problem too. We just made it on the other end, like, we also didn’t understand. We understood who we wanted to sell to. I’d bought into the whole idea you have to niche down. You have to be super specific. And we were like, we were going after a very specific persona. They were early stage female entrepreneurs building online businesses. Most of them were in the very early stages. That was a huge mistake for many reasons. You know, early stage entrepreneurs don’t tend to have a lot of money to invest in solutions, which I am now, in retrospect, aware of, but, you know, we’d taken that advice to niche down and to focus on the customer, and I realized that I was so focused on that customer, but I didn’t really deeply understand the problems that that we needed to solve for them and building the right solution. And so that experience my on my own end, and then seeing that rippled out through these other companies, it became really clear to me that we’ve got a lot of people out there building stuff that people don’t want and or they’re building stuff that people do want, there’s doing a terrible job of explaining why they should want it and what it is. And that’s a problem I want to solve. That’s an exciting problem, because you’ve got these great entrepreneurs who are trying to build these world changing solutions that can’t get traction. 

So ultimately, I feel like I had to hit that bottom and feel that pain so that I could see that opportunity, because otherwise I never would have seen it. We’d be having a very different conversation today. Had that company been successful. 

Rob Marsh: Yeah, we probably wouldn’t be having a conversation at all, because I conversation at all, because I wouldn’t be

on your newsletter list.

Katelyn Bourgoin: Exactly. 

Rob Marsh: Well, let’s talk a little bit about how we figure out the message that matches up to that deeply felt pain point? Because you actually touched on it twice, as we’ve been talking for the last 10 minutes or so. Obviously this is a big problem that a lot of people have. So how does somebody go about—I’m thinking of copywriters, content writers, who are trying to figure out—what is my… how do I match my message to the pain point that I’m working for my clients? But also, every business struggles with this. So how do you advise clients or people to figure that out?

Katelyn Bourgoin: That’s a great question. I would say, first of all the answer is that you need to be able to step back from what it is you want to sell and start thinking about what people want to buy. And I think that that takes a real shift for a lot of people, because we often have a motivation that’s personal and selfish around the thing that we’re selling. If you’re you know, for entrepreneurs, our motivation is we want to build this cool internet company where we can work 10 hours a week and make millions of dollars. Our motivation is often coming from a self centered place, and then we try to find a market for that thing. And that’s just not how it works. It’s not effective that way. 

So I’d say that the most important step is starting with this is the way that we you know, I’m working on a workshop right now to help people through this whole process. It’ll help them to basically clarify their offer, figure out the painful problems that they’re like, uniquely qualified to solve, and who wants to pay them a lot for that in two hours. And so this, I’m figuring out the exact step by step process, because I went through this in a organic way. But then when I sat down to be like, how do I actually help other people do this? 

I figured out there is a specific process, and it starts with first identifying the trigger events that lead people to be interested in an offer like yours in the beginning, in the first place, right? So people don’t just wake up one day and go, oh, I want to buy this, like, B to B CRM software, or like, oh, I want to like, come to Katelyn’s workshop. That’s not the way that the world works. Something happens in their life outside of our visibility that pushes them to realize they’ve got a problem that they need to solve, right? Because if they could do it on their own, if they could just figure out what the next step is, they wouldn’t need us. They wouldn’t need us. They wouldn’t be looking for a solution. They’d already be doing it. So a trigger event happens that makes them move into looking for a solution, because they have a job to be done. Right? 

Next step, identify the job to be done. Most people are really bad at this, right? They’re again, they’re creating a solution and then searching for a problem to solve, as opposed to understanding what is the actual thing that people are trying to accomplish? What are the nuanced details around that so that I can create the right solution? So figure out what job it is those prospective customers are trying to get done next. Ask yourself, who are the people that are likely to have that job to be done and willing to pay for a solution because they’re underserved by the existing solutions, or there’s things that are out there, but they’re not right in their use case. So narrow it down. Figure out, like, Who are these potential target markets that have this job to be done? 

And then do what I call pain storming, and this is really fun, which is basically, you just go through, you look at those, those potential buyers. Let’s say you narrow down to three potential segments that you might be able to solve problems for. And you look at, what are all of their problems, right? What are the functional problems they have when they’re trying to get the job done? What are the emotional problems that they have? What are the social problems, the things you know, the way that they worry about being perceived when they’re doing it, and what are their kind of risks? And it’s like, you know, a perceived problem thing that they worry is going to happen. And you figure all of that out for those, you know, let’s say, three potential personas, and then you start to look for the overlap, because I bet you there are problems that are overlapping across those different audiences. And in doing that, you can go, Okay, I’ve identified some very painful problems that you know a particular segment of the market has. 

Now I can work backwards and figure out an offer that actually solves those problems and the messaging to communicate that to those people, because I think again, it’s like we often go about this backwards. We start with what we want to sell, and then we try to figure out where to sell it. And that’s the reason why so many people are struggling.

Rob Marsh: Love that you share that, and it rings true. In fact, listening to you just talk about that process, I hear a lot of Clayton Christensen coming through not just the jobs to be done, but identifying those opportunities where people are underserved is one thing that he talked a lot about in his various books. Can we talk a little bit deeper about jobs to be done? Because I think this is a framework that’s really useful, but also sometimes hard to wrap our brains around, because you’re thinking, Well, of course, the course that I’m selling is teaching people the thing, right? Or the template that I’m selling is helping people get the thing, and that’s not really what jobs to be done, at least that’s only part of the JTB framework. So you talk a little bit about that?

Katelyn Bourgoin: Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve been so blessed that I got to connect with Bob Moesta, who was the co-creator of jobs to be done with Clayton Christensen. So if anybody has watched… Google: “jobs to be done, milkshakes” and you will watch a four minute video where Clayton Christensen, who, for anybody who’s listening, Clayton, he’s sadly passed away, but he was considered one of the world’s foremost experts on innovation. The top CEOs of the world would come to him with their problems, and they say, we want to innovate. We want to create solutions. People buy we keep running into problems where we put stuff in the market. Nobody buys it. Why do we keep doing this? How do we stop and he basically with, with the help of Bob and I think two other people, ended up creating the jobs to be done, theory and framework. And when, in the video, he talks about why people buy milkshakes, and he’s explaining, one of his colleagues went out and started interviewing people and asking them why they bought their milkshake. That colleague was Bob Moesta. And so I’ve been fortunate enough to get to spend time with Bob, to have him participate in work shapes that I’ve been hosting. And like, he’s just blown my mind as to understanding the depth of this, but this is where things get tricky. 

So for most of us, especially people who I think are in the who are building very malleable products, right? So if you’re building a physical product that’s in the world, you kind of get one opportunity to get that right, right, and then you need to think about all of your marketing and everything. But if you’re building everything. But if you’re building a service business, or you’re building a online tool, or you’re building an online course or community, you can really adjust and modify things. So I think that the jobs to be done method of first understanding why people buy solutions like yours or your thing. So the way that they recommend doing this is by going out and interviewing customers and running what Bob calls a switch interview. And what that basically means is, why did those people if Why did they switch from what they were doing before to buy from you and what they were doing before might have been nothing. You might have been the first thing that they bought, or it could have been they were using this other tool that had been working okay for them, but then stopped working because something in their life changed. And when you understand the real details of the buying journey, that’s where all of the insight can come from to figure out, well, what are people actually trying to get done. 

So, funny enough, when I launched the Why We Buy newsletter, it was because I’d zeroed in on the job to be done. Nobody in their right mind, and remember, we were trying to build an insights agency where we would actually go out and conduct this research for our clients. Nobody in their right mind actually wants to do interviews. That is not the job to be done. Nobody wants to do interviews. Nobody wants to do research. Most leaders of companies are allergic to the word research. They don’t want to do it. They don’t want to pay for it. They see it’s often been a huge waste of time. But what they do want is they want to understand why their customers are buying, so they can get more of them right. They want to understand what’s how their buyers are making decision. That’s the job to be done. 

Now, there’s a lot of different ways they can do that. They could go out and, you know, hire my theoretical agency that had ever launched, or they could hire us to do research for them. They could run a survey with their with buyers, right? They could do a bunch of AB testing, run ads and try to test different messages and see if some clarity comes into it. The problem with a lot of the other methods for you know deeply understanding how your customers make decisions is that they don’t actually get to the root of it, because a lot of them are by observing customers or by asking customers to answer these kind of short servers, you don’t get the in depth stuff that you can get in an interview. 

So when I was thinking about a newsletter, I was like, there’s no way I’m going to write a newsletter on research, because research is a project for most companies, right? It’s not an ongoing job to be done. It’s something that they do once and or they do it on a quarterly basis, or whatever they want to be new. And so if they were to sign up for my newsletter, they might read the first few issues, and then when you know research isn’t a priority for them, maybe they’re not gonna keep reading it. I was like, I want to create something that we’re gonna open every week. So if people want to understand what drives buyer behavior, what are other things other than research that I could theme the newsletter around? 

And that’s where the idea for buyer psychology came from. Because I was like, this is another way to understand your buyer’s decision making process. It’s another way to get that job done. And if I can get people to sign up for that newsletter, they’re going to be the kind of people that are probably going to actually be interested in an insights agency that helps them do research. So that’s a long winded answer, but essentially it’s like getting down to the real root of what is the what is below the demand? What job are they trying to get done, taking your solution, thinking out of it. It wasn’t doing research. It wasn’t, you know, running interviews. None of that was what people actually wanted. What they wanted was to understand how their customers make buying decisions so that they could, you know, market smarter. 

And so by understanding that I was able to come up with an idea for a newsletter that would, in theory, attract the perfect people for the insights agency I plan to build pre neck break.

Rob Marsh: Who knows, if you were to launch that agency now… you’ve got 80,000 people on your list who are ready to buy, right? So… I love talking through that and thinking through that process, especially from the standpoint of the listeners to this podcast, copywriters, content writers, marketers, who are doing a lot of these freelance type things. Oftentimes, we’re selling things like websites or sales pages or emails, and we don’t always recognize that our clients actually don’t need websites, sales pages and emails. I mean, they do, but what they really want is the thing that the website, email and sales page gets them, right? Which is a new customer or revenue or in some cases, it’s psychological benefits like, Oh, my spouse respects me, because they can see that I have a real company, at least online, it looks like I’m doing something real and I think we forget that a lot, and we focus so much in on that deliverable.

Katelyn Bourgoin: Yeah, and I think the other thing that we do as marketers, that is that we have to be cautious of. Because I think this is why, when you look at a lot of markets are very saturated, and us as copywriters or marketers are trying to find ways to create a differentiated message. And oftentimes, I think what we do so going back to jobs to be done, the simple way of explaining it is basically the job is the progress that a person is trying to make in a very specific circumstance. So it’s about understanding what is, what is it that they’re trying to achieve? That’s the kind of the job, and then why? Why does achieving that matter? And I think as entrepreneurs, we often will kind of go really heavy into selling. The why, which is off the big rhetoric in marketing, you know, sell the life, sell the life, sell the life with and then our stuff just sounds like everybody else’s. Because, guess what? As humans, we all have the same core goals. We want to survive and we want to thrive, right? We want to make more money, we want to have more time. We want to be more attractive to the other sex. 

So if you jump too much into the why, and you focus your message there, then you end up selling sounding like everybody else who’s selling this big dream, this glitzy dream. So I think it’s really important to understand what the job is, because that’ll allow you to differentiate your messaging and make sure that you’re speaking to that. And part of understanding the job, a huge part of it, as you know, in my opinion, and based on what I’ve seen, is it’s about understanding the struggles people have when completing that job. That’s the opportunity in our messaging. 

And so as I work on this, this new workshop, and I’m using, it’s very meta, but I’m using my own creation of the workshop as an example in the workshop, because, you know, everybody who will be attending that workshop will have bought that product, so it’ll be very, very relevant to them. But as I work through it, it’s like figuring out what the specific job is that people are coming to that workshop before they’re coming there because they want to design a scalable digital offer that they can build on their own without growing their team to scale their service based marketing business. It’s very specific, right? And so when you think about that, once you kind of, like, wrap your hands around that, it’s like, okay, I know that, that I know what this what the trigger is. It’s about, you know, them struggling with growing their existing service based business, feeling stretched, feeling strained, wanting to offer something that’s more scalable. I know what it is they’re wanting to do. They want to figure out what that offer is. Chances are, get digging into the pain points they’ve already tried. They’ve probably launched things before that didn’t really work. They didn’t know why. And there’s the kind of the key context which is really important, which is that they want to be able to do it on their own without hiring more people. 

And so this needs to be something that they can actually when I create a solution for them and I try to sell them that solution, those are always really important things to do. Now I could have my message be, you know, work three hours, like, a week from the beach, and, like, make money while you sleep. That’s a great dream to sell. That’s kind of the why. But that message doesn’t work anymore with people because they’ve seen it too much, and it doesn’t really speak to the real job that they’re trying to get. 

So I think it’s really important to balance that kind of like aspirational why messaging with really getting clear on your differentiated value when you understand the job your customers are trying to get done and the nitty gritty details, you can get clear on that.

Rob Marsh: That’s an incredibly valuable look into what we all need to be doing with our customers and our clients that we’re attracting to us. I would love to shift our conversation a little bit and talk more about your newsletter. There’s a thing that’s happened around newsletters over the last couple of years where creators are growing, tools have emerged—Beehiiv and Substack and Kit—are creating great tools for, not just growing newsletters, but serving clients. How have you grown your newsletter? Because I think everybody does it a little bit differently. I know you have been on social media and Twitter quite a bit in the past, and showing up in various places, but we talked about how we all start with no one reading our newsletter. How did you go from zero to where you are now? And I think it’s like 80,000 something.

Katelyn Bourgoin: So we’re now down to like 63,000. And I’ve been really fortunate. So I’ll share the things that are now available to anybody starting a newsletter. I actually got fairly early access to some of these. So we built from zero to 10,000 based on promoting basically through my social network and through some collaborations with other newsletters. So us promoting them, they promoting us. That was from zero to 10,000 we got there within, I think, probably a year and a half, you know, about 18 months from zero to 10,000 so that was very much like not being super. I think it was like 89,000 but not being super, you know, tactful about it, but what I did do that was smart, and I’ve stopped doing and we’re going to start redoing, was every, um, every Monday, before the newsletter would go out on Tuesday, I would plug, kind of like, tease what the issue was going to be, and I would share a screenshot of, like, some kind of like, unsolicited praise of the newsletter. And that was, I think, the smartest thing that I did, because a reminded people to sign up. So I think a lot of newsletter creators don’t do they don’t remind people to sign up. And it showed that other people were liking the newsletter, and it created this kind of like virtuous flywheel, because then other people would see that post, then we’re reading the newsletter already, and they go, Oh my god, this is my favorite newsletter too. And so I could get more screenshots. 

So that was one smart thing that I did in the beginning, but because we had gotten to about 10,000 I was on a call with Nathan Berry from Kit, and I was actually on his podcast, and he told me about some cool things that they were doing over at that. It was then ConvertKit, now Kit to help newsletter operators to grow their list faster. And I was on a different platform at the time, and it’s like, super exciting. And so I moved over to Kit, and I was an early user of a platform called Sparkloop, which Kit has since acquired. And the Sparkloop team, it was this great new like feature, and they were the first to release it. And it was something that a lot of the big newsletter brands had been doing very manually, but spark made it easy, which was after somebody would sign up for my newsletter, they would see a recommendation of three to five newsletters that I also recommended, and they could choose to then, with one click, sign up for those newsletters too. So we got early beta access to this before it was available to the public, which helped us to grow a lot faster than we would have had we not had access to that early. And so we partnered with a number of other newsletters and promote promoted each other, and that made a big difference in our growth. 

And then, since then, a lot of the growth it still comes from, you know, plugging the newsletter, consistently doing it. We had been testing different Facebook ads to grow the the audience. It worked, but we didn’t see that those readers became buyers within a window of that made sense. So we kind of scrapped that. We might go back to that and then Sparkloop has a paid partnership program in addition to the organic ones, the organic one is, I promote you. You promote me. Nobody pays. If you want to take advantage of their paid program, you can actually set a rate for I will pay X amount of dollars for every subscriber, and then other newsletters will send you subscribers that’s been hit and miss for us, because there’s definitely some folks out there that think have found ways to game that system and spark group. Of course, had to tamper down on that. But again, when we would look at the purchase behavior from some of those subscribers and it come from the paid campaigns, it just wasn’t making sense to continue to grow through that channel. So we were not doing that right now.

Rob Marsh: That’s interesting, that there’s so much power in organic. Obviously what you do when you’re working organically and putting out the content that you know resonates or whatever results in the people who are going to continue following you and buy from you, which I guess that makes a lot of sense, but also makes you just maybe look a little bit of chance at some of the paid tools. I think I need to make sure that the stuff actually brings buyers into into my audience. 

Katelyn Bourgoin: Well, I’ve seen a lot of newsletter operators, and I hate to say that’s a lot of folks who have really, kind of like, gotten high on their own supply when it comes to, like these paid subscriber channels. And I suspect that some of them are not doing the evaluation to see. Are these valuable? Are these folks? Because the thing of the way that spark loop works now, other tools are different, but the way that spark loop works is that people are auto enrolled, rather than needing to click to choose which newsletters they want to like they want to subscribe to when they see that pop up, and my assumption is a lot of people don’t even realize they’re signing up for newsletters. A pop up happened. And we’re used to seeing pop ups, not processing them, closing them, or clicking the button that looks like the button to close it without really, like, analyzing it. I know that that’s totally the way that I navigate the Internet, so I think that there’s probably a lot of folks who sign up for a newsletter that they were excited about signing up for and inadvertently end up on a couple more. And of course, the goal is, if you can create a lot of value, you can show people why you should earn a spot in their inbox. They’ll stay subscribed. And we have a very special sequence when we were running this for those people to make sure that if they you know, that they would know how they got there, that they’d have to make it really easy for them to opt out, and that we would provide a lot of value in the welcome sequence that they’d want to stay engaged. And if they didn’t engage with a certain amount of emails within their first I think, like 14 days, meaning that they’d open and click and things like that, we could then auto unenroll, unsubscribe them and not pay for those. So that was not something that spark that initially heads had released, which is why we ended up doing this big culling of subscribers who probably had no idea that they got on our list, and we didn’t do a good job of actually warming them up at the time. So we got better at that over the years. 

Rob Marsh: So speaking of that initial welcome sequence, I could be wrong, but I’m thinking you actually offered a secret gift at some point, right where you didn’t promise the gift up front. There was no expectation from anybody who signed up, but it was one of those wow experiences, where, as a subscriber, I’m like, oh, suddenly, you’re giving me something that’s way better than what I even requested when I signed up. Tell me a little bit about that. 

Katelyn Bourgoin: So I went into this not really having a name for it, but Chennel Bastilo, who has the newsletter that’s all about growing newsletters, which is called Growth in Reverse. She coined this as being the reverse lead magnet strategy. So I’ll use her language. 

It’s a reverse lead magnet. But essentially, my thinking was, you know, being a buyer psychology nerd, one of the fastest ways to build trust with a, you know, with somebody in your audience, is to delight them. And to delight somebody means that it’s something that’s unexpected, right? If we know that we’re going to get some we’re going to get something, then it’s not delightful. It’s just you know what the expectation was fulfilled, and therefore we might be content and satisfy it, but it’s not delightful. Delight is when something happens that you don’t expect. So it’s when they sign up for a lead magnet and it’s so much better than they expected, which is so often not the case, right? 

We all have a folder somewhere on our Google Drive that’s full of the lead magnets that, like, were super hyped and really shitty. So people have an expectation that things probably aren’t gonna be that good. If you actually deliver something really good, they’ll be delighted, and you’ll have a great experience. So I thought with, again, knowing that we were investing money, particularly into Spark glue and ads at the time to get this cold audience that didn’t know me, had not signed up because they discovered me on social to kind of create this great experience with them. I was like, How do I delight them at the gate? And that was where the idea came from. And, you know, selfishly, the way, there was a strategy behind this too, because we had then gone back and we ended up creating these journey based welcome sequences. 

So one of the first things that we’d ask people is like, what’s your current problem? And we would they had two options to pick, and if they depending on which one they picked, we created a really great onboarding for them, each with a surprise gift, each with like, really value packed emails, but also subtly mentioning our too big products. We don’t, it wasn’t aggressive, there was no promotion or anything like that. But that was, you know, part of the goal is, yeah, we want to be able to delight these people and add them. We also want to remind them this is a pain point that you have, and we want to help them to overcome that pain point with the freebie that they didn’t expect to get, and with, you know, a couple of really insightful emails that people love, and then we want to tell them also, there’s a solution to help you with that problem. And we’ve got, like, if you’re interested, so that we kind of revised things from our initial which was just, here’s this one freebie, and then they would just start getting the newsletter to creating this kind of like mini welcome sequence, depending on their pain points. 

Rob Marsh: I love that strategy. When I heard of that, I thought that’s just brilliant. Just the surprise that you get and the trust and immediate liking that it engenders is just a really great tactic. So I guess congrats on inventing that, or discovering it, or, you know…

Katelyn Bourgoin: I’m sure I didn’t invent it… I feel like, should I have anything coined? A great phrase, and I hope the laws will use it.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, it’s a great idea. Okay, so your newsletter is really about persuasion. You know why we buy all these cognitive biases that we have tendencies that you know, I would love just to. Talk a little bit about some of these now, copywriters, content writers, marketers, we’re all familiar with the pretty typical, you know, six or seven of the theinfluence techniques that Cialdini writes about. So, you know, urgency and scarcity and liking and consistency, right? We get these drilled into our heads all the time. But there’s not just seven or six. There are literally hundreds of these, and you read about a different one each week. So I’m curious, like, what are your favorite three or four?

Katelyn Bourgoin: I’ll give you two, and then I might give you a third one. Okay, so I’d say that my favorite that I’ve discovered was what’s known as the pratfall effect, which is as somebody who is a perfectionist and, you know, toils over making mistakes and being seen as uncredible, this was like a huge relief for me. So the pratfall effect is essentially this idea that when we are evaluating a person or a brand, small imperfections can actually make us like and trust that thing more, because we don’t trust perfect, because we know that it’s not real, right? When something seems too good to be true, our spidey senses start tingling, and so as a create the idea, the study that was one of the ones that started to identify this effect in people, was they would have people interview for a job. I think it was like for a job application. But they’d have these interviewers interviewing these people, and they’d have actors go and they were instructed to actually mistakenly spill a bit of coffee on themselves, like at the beginning of the interview. And that, you know, that mistake that they made actually made the interviewers feel ingratiated to them, and made them rank them more highly on characteristics. And this is the important thing, that there’s a caveat for this. If you’re going to be making a mistake, and people will like you for it, it shouldn’t be a mistake that makes you seem uncredible in your expertise. So if you’re a mathematician, and somebody asked you, what’s two plus two, and you say seven, that is not going to initiate this effect. But if you’re a mathematician who’s great at the math stuff, but then, you know, again, you like to be example, you spill a bit of coffee on yourself, or you have, you make kind of a mistake or a typo or something like that, that can actually make people like you more. So pratfall effect is one of my favorites.

Another that’s powerful, and I think not doesn’t get enough credit, is the Fresh Start effect. So as marketers, when we are planning our promotions, one thing that you need to be aware of is the psychological brain of your buyer, and the idea that there are moments, there are these temporal moments in time where we start to think that things that we didn’t believe in the past, or things that we might have been skeptical about, kind of all wash away, and we’re open to making kind of some bigger changes. And these are these fresh start moments. So the mother of all fresh start moments, New Year’s Eve, right? Like, ah, it’s the beginning of a new year. You know, last year I might have been all of these things that didn’t help me achieve my goal, didn’t get me where I want to go. But this year, I’m going to be this completely different person. This year, I’m going to be able to change all of that, right? 

And so when you can put a message in front of somebody, when they’re likely to have experienced one of these fresh starts, they’re going to be way more open to your message. And fresh starts aren’t just that once a year. You know? It can also be Mondays, right? We all enter the new week being like this week will be different. It can be at your birthday. It can be a, you know, the beginning of another quarter. It can be after getting a divorce, like there are so many of these moments that happen in the lives of people, and if you can get your message in front of them at the right time to take advantage of the fresh start, they’re going to be far more open to being receptive to your message. So those are two that I love. 

I’ll give you one more, because it’s kind of aligned with giving a bonus one. And that’s the Peak/End rule. So the way that we remember and experience something basically comes down to two things, what was the peak, and whether that’s good or bad, and how did it end? And so if you want to create a really good memory for your customers, right, you want to make sure that the peak is high and positive, then at the end is positive and high, right? And so they did this interesting study where there was this, this colon exam that they were they were doing, and they’d have people, after they went through it report how, like, you know, how much they you know, what their experience was with one to 1010, being not a pleasant experience, in the least, right? And one

being, yeah, it was okay. And what they noticed was that there was this painful part of the examination, and then it would just end, right? People were ranking it really high on the unpleasant like stage, they’re like, What happens if we do the unpleasant part? Because the unpleasant part has to happen. It’s it’s the peak. It’s unpleasant, but it has to happen. But then, instead of it just being over, we actually kind of did a few other things. So we’d like maybe take their blood pressure, or we’d like do an abdominal exam, or like something beyond that, and then it would end with, like, something more pleasant. Then people actually ranked it not being so bad. So this idea that if you do have to deliver bad news, be careful about how you deliver it. Don’t just end abruptly, try to, like, smooth it out, and ideally have a very positive peak. 

This happened to me the other day. It’s a great example of a mistake that a company is making around us. I went to the a great spa. It’s a beautiful Nordic Spa here in Quebec City, and when you like, you know, you come into the place, they’re very quick to greet you, and it’s lovely, and the service is excellent. And then you go and you have your day at the spa, and there’s these beautiful plunge pools and all these different things. So everybody would have kind of different peaks of their experience. But then at the end, they made this massive mistake, which is the people who are waiting to check out, they serve all of them last they pay more attention to people who are waiting to get in. It doesn’t matter when those people arrive. Some people that are waiting to check out are sitting here and they’re watching all of the like staff ignore them and instead greet the people who just arrived even later than they’ve been waiting. And I thought, this is strange, like we’ve been here longer. There’s kind of the rules of society, which is that you see people as they as they cued in the line. And my mom, she’s kind of less patient than I am. She’s starting to get frustrated. And ultimately, I’m like, I just had a great day at the spa. I’m going to be chilled with this, but yeah, that’s a little bit annoying. And then I went to tag the spa in a picture later that day, and in doing that, I went on their Facebook page, and I saw all of these low reviews, and the common thing they were complaining about was the checkout experience. So it’s like you’ve just created this amazing day for your customers. And their thinking is probably, you know what? Let’s make sure that when they first get here, they feel so welcome and support, it’s going to create a great first experience. But what they don’t realize is that they’re actually hurting themselves way more by creating a bad end experience. And so the peak end rule is one of my favorites, and I think that we should all think about it. If we’re doing anything that is, it’s an experience that we want people to remember positive.

Rob Marsh: As freelancers, anytime we’re handing off a finished project, oftentimes we’re handing somebody a Google Doc, it may even still have correction marks in it, or whatever, you know, compared to the kid glove, or the white glove service that we provide, you know, when we’re doing an onboarding interview. Yeah, so, so many applications there. 

And even when you were talking about the Fresh Start effect earlier, you mentioned understanding trigger events. And trigger events are another opportunity for a fresh start. Anytime that you know a customer or somebody that you’re talking to has one of these experiences where it’s like, wow, I am never doing that again, or I this is the last time I go a week without a client or like, that is the opportunity for a fresh start that’s not triggered by, say, a Monday or a new year, right? 

Katelyn Bourgoin: Yes, yeah, absolutely. I think that being a marketer, and, you know, I write a lot of copy, I don’t know what I would call myself. I would say I feel I lean more into the identification as a marketer than a copywriter, because I feel like there’s so many better copywriters in me. But I think that we get to have the coolest job, which is we basically don’t get to be these very curious like, we just get to examine humans and try to understand them. And I think that getting to do that is cool because, like, ultimately, we all kind of want to understand ourselves too. So the more that you understand other people, the more clarity gives you on yourself. And so I just think we’re very lucky that we get to spend our time thinking about this stuff. Rob Marsh: Yeah, I agree. And how to help people solve their problems, or move from you know, the before to the after, from you know, the problem to the solution. In some ways, it’s a gift to be able to do this thing that we all get to do. 

Katelyn Bourgoin: It absolutely is, and there are so many great products out there and great entrepreneurs out there that they deserve to be better known. They deserve for their work to be recognized. They deserve to get customers that they can help. And so I think that it really sometimes, there’s been periods in my life where, as a marketer, I’ve felt a little bit, I don’t know, I guess, a little bit frustrated, that I don’t feel like I’m making a difference in a meaningful way, right? There’s been times where I’m like, Oh, I just like, help B to B. Software companies sell more software. But like, then when I kind of like, reframe it, and I remember, no, like, those people are selling real solutions that are going to make their individual customers lives a lot better. That might mean that person’s more productive, and I get to hire another team member, and that means they get to go on the big. Peace with their family and their marriage doesn’t break up. But there’s all sorts of positive things that can come from helping people to solve their problems. And I think that sometimes when I get stuck in this, like, it just feels like I’m gonna, you know, that I I think a little bit about, like, should I just, like, get into, like, political marketing, like, I have moments, and then I’m like, No, you’re, you know, as long as you go back to helping people figure out what problem they’re solving and how to solve it better and to promote that and communicate that better, it’s a great day. 

Rob Marsh: This feels like a really good end note. Again, thinking about Peak End, that’s maybe a really good way to finish up here. You have some really cool products, I’ve mentioned them in our email, the wallet opening words is a download that you have, that I’m definitely going to link to in the show notes and share when we share this episode in our email. But if people want to get on your list, and learn more about all of this stuff, the cognitive biases, persuasion, how we get people to actually buy, and do it in a way that’s ethical and serves their needs, Katelyin, where should they go?

Katelyn Bourgoin: They should go to learn whywebuy.com.

Rob Marsh: Perfect. So hopefully we’ll have everybody who’s listening jump in there and can they’ll see why I’ve become such a fan of your work, what you do, 

Katelyn Bourgoin: Thank you for letting me get introduced to your people.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, this has been phenomenal. I appreciate your time. 

Thanks to Katelyn for talking so deeply about the techniques we need to undertand in order to sell more… if you’re listening to this the week it goes live, Katelyn is teaching a buyer breakthrough workshop on Thursday at Noon Eastern Time. If you get on her list, you may be able to sign up for that workshop… go to learnwhywebuy.com.

I also mentioned Wallet Opening Words… this is a PDF full of tactics like the Peak End Effect, the Pratfall Effect, and the Fresh Start Effect that you can put to work in your own writing and sales efforts. In addition to those three, I think there are like 67 more psychological tactics you can use in Wallet Opening Words. I’ve linked to it in the show notes, but if you go to thecopywriterclub.com/wow you can get that resource from Katelyn. I have it. I refer to it often. It’s great and probably belongs on your virtual shelf too.

And of course there are lots of resources around persuasion and psychology in The Copywriter Underground. If you’re a member, you’ll find those resources in the new dashboard. And if you’re not a member, you can fix that now at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.