Copywriters Podcast

Today we go deep into the headline wisdom of Old Master John Caples and his book “Tested Advertising Methods,” originally published in 1932. What’s so important about this book for today’s show is, it contains a chapter called “Twenty-Nine Formulas For Writing Headlines,” and this chapter is pure gold, no fat. It’s hard to appreciate the immense value of what he says in this chapter. I had to go through it several times to make it into podcast material. It’s clear and simple, but it’s dense. In fact, there’s so much there that I couldn’t fit it into one podcast. We’d have to cover one formula a minute. Going that fast would make it incredibly hard to develop useful ideas. It would all go by in a blur. So today is Part 1. We’ll cover 14 formulas. And we’ll cover the other 15 next week. By the way, don’t get intimidated by the word “formulas.” While Caples is accurate in describing them that way, they’re MUCH easier to use and understand than you might imagine. Now the headline formulas are in the last o

Our Old Master today begins a chapter of one of his books with this question: How do you cope when readers do not believe what you have written? And, he answers it: You plug the gaps where belief leaks out. Sounds like a great plan, but it leads to two more questions: 1. What are those gaps? and 2. How do you plug them? Now what’s especially interesting about this Old Master is that he’s not a copywriter. But he is a very successful writer and, for my money, the best teacher of how to write fiction you can find anywhere. And, even more interesting -- the gaps where belief leaks out for fiction writers are largely the same ones that cause problems for copywriters. And so are the fixes. I’ve tweaked his ideas ever so slightly to make them a perfect fit for copywriters. Our Old Master was named Dwight Swain. We talked about five mistakes Dwight Swain identified in the chapter “The Dynamics of Disbelief” from his book “Creating Characters: How to Build Story People.” His main point in the chapter is,

Our guest today, Kyle Jordan, has a website where he breaks down online ad sequences. The series of breakdowns is called “Full Funnel Nudity.” We’ll get to that soon enough, but first, about Kyle: His first client five years ago was a technical marketing course company called Data Driven Marketing. As a copywriter and marketing strategist, Kyle increased the traffic to their website by about 400%; doubled the size of their email list in one year; and helped them come up with six new products. But most important, with this first client, Kyle learned the technical side of online marketing from a copywriter’s point of view, in a way that few others have. This know-how led to his specialty, which he calls Funnel Renovations. He has helped multiple clients rehab their funnels and double their sales, just by fixing the funnel alone. He’s also written for famous professional athletes and influencers -- always with the goal of growing the sales of the business. Kyle shared some tips with us today from in-the-tren

A lot of copywriters would like to know how to get into financial copywriting, and our special guest today, Rob Braddock, is just the copywriter to tell you. He started his financial copywriting career about five years ago at Agora Financial, where he did well. Rob left Agora to work at WealthPress. Working with a high-powered team, he wrote copy that resulted in millions of dollars of additional sales. All told, Rob counts about $60 million in sales in his career so far. Not too shabby. He’s gone off on his own and has been a freelancer since last December. Rob agreed to come on today to help people who want to get into financial copywriting understand how he did it, and give them some ideas on how they could get started. Rob’s a Marine Corps veteran and had personal experience doing face-to-face sales before he ever wrote a sales letter… a couple things to keep in mind about what has made him so successful. One thing I especially appreciate about Rob is how he gets straight to the point without getting

Our guest today is Million-Dollar Mike Morgan, who has broken sales record after sales record with his sales letters and VSLs. Mike is now copy chief for Money Map Press, a major direct mail publisher. He’s also a still-very-active copywriter. He doesn’t have time for many podcast interviews, so we’re especially grateful that he could join us today. Here’s why he’s here: Let’s say you’ve just written a great sales letter for a product launch. Well, guess what? Your work is NOT done yet. You still need emails — lots of them. To your list. To your new customers, after they buy. And for affiliates to mail out for you. Plus, you ALSO need ads and advertorials. To get prospects to your page. Oh, and don’t forget. All these things have to be done FAST. Well… Mike has just the solution to your problem. And I’ve got to say, it’s pretty cool. On the show, Mike told us how he did a lot of these things intuitively, but had to develop a system for a new group of copywriters getting started at Money Map Press. He

If you run ads for your business, here’s a tantalizing question for you: How would you like to increase your response by 30%, without writing any new copy? How about 300%? Impossible, you say? Don’t say that to our special guest today, Katie Switzer. Because once she explains a few things, she is going to give you real-world examples where these kind of increases have actually occurred. Katie started out as a mechanical engineer. She learned marketing when she started her own online business for other parents -- she has four children herself. Soon she was taking on marketing clients. Her main focus was improving conversions based on market research and data-driven copywriting Katie has also worked as a marketing manager for a marketing analytics software company. These days, she’s helping business owners collect and understand their marketing data — and use what they find to improve their results. I’ve got to admit, I was pretty excited to hear what she has to say. Here’s what we asked her: 1. At th

The ‘R’ word is popping up a lot these days. That word is “recession,” and there’s a good reason everyone’s talking about it. Prices are going crazy. It seems like everything’s doubled in the last few months. If unemployment weren’t so low, it would be a slam-dunk and everyone would say we’re in a recession. This is important for copywriters and entrepreneurs, because there are specific strategies you can use to stay afloat and even grow your business in a recession. We’ll talk about them today. Are you skeptical that anything could work in a recession? A Forbes magazine article says that seven billion-dollar family fortunes trace back to getting started during the Great Depression. So it’s possible to do well when the economy’s in the tank. Now some experts I’ve seen on TV say we’re not in a recession yet. A really bright guy on the left says we’re pretty close, and just as bright a guy on the right says there’s a very good chance we’ll go into a recession soon. I don’t agree with either of them. I thin

After a long pause, we are back with our popular Old Masters Series. Today, a deep dive into an important part of the work of Clyde Bedell. He’s not all that well known these days, but decades ago he was one of the top guys you would turn to if you want to learn how to write copy that works. Besides being a highly successful advertiser, he was a prominent teacher. For example, he built a national sales training program for Ford Motor Company in the 1930s. When he was teaching copywriting at Northwestern University, he couldn’t find a suitable textbook, so he wrote one. That turned into “How To Write Advertising That Sells.” It was first published in 1940—13 years before I was born. The book is 8-1/2 by 11 and a massive 539 pages. It’s pretty hard to find a copy these days, but I found one copy on Amazon for $736. Lucky for me, I got my copy years ago when it was easier to get and not quite as expensive. We zeroed-in on one chapter which I would call “7 Keys To Believability.” The word for believability t

A big question, maybe THE big question, copywriters ask themselves when they sit down to write, is this: “Where do I start?” Of course you’ve got to already know... your product and its benefits. You’ll need to put together the best offer possible. You may need an origin story for the product. Knowing the price and guarantee are important. But this is all for naught if you don’t have a deep and thorough understanding of your PROSPECT. Because if you’re selling to the wrong person -- or to nobody in particular -- your copy is not very likely to work. I came across eight killer questions -- not for copywriting, but for writing screenplays. From the excellent new book, “The Protagonist’s Journey,” by successful screenwriter and college professor Scott Myers. These questions on his list are for getting to know the hero of the film you are planning to write. Today, though, we’ll look at how we can tweak these questions just a little to create a very powerful tool for anyone who writes copy. Just like with a

Our returning champion is Dr. Harlan Kilstein, who has a brilliant innovation in copywriting he’s agreed to share with us. Harlan was a guest here two years ago when he gave us some much-needed information about Facebook compliance. But don’t make the mistake of assuming Facebook is the only thing he knows anything about, because Harlan is a super-successful copywriter and entrepreneur who knows a LOT about a LOT of things. He’s written super-profitable copy for many big names in the direct-response business. He’s created several very successful businesses of his own. And recently he’s come up with a “new” system to sell called Interactive Sales Letters. I put “new” in quotes because it’s not really new at all. In one way. The concept behind it has been around, and proven, for decades. But the way Harlan is using the concept is brand-new… it’s working… and that’s what he’s going to tell us about. 1. To get us started, what is an interactive sales letter and what about the results you’ve gotten so far shou

If you wanted to find out how to make your Facebook ads start working again, who would you turn to? Well, we’ve found someone I think you’ll like. His name is Depesh Mandalia. Besides being a successful online agency owner, with over $100 million in sales for clients to his credit, he is also a gifted speaker, coach and teacher. Depesh left the corporate world when his job kind of evaporated during the 2009 financial meltdown. But he landed on his feet and within 36 months he had his first seven-figure year, at first as an affiliate marketer. He began training entrepreneurs and other marketers in 2018, with something he calls the BPM method. Today he’s going to tell you about it and why it’s very profitable with Facebook in the current environment, even after Apple has clamped down on the data available to marketers. The title of this episode is “Why Nobody Can Make Facebook Ads Work Anymore.” Obviously our guest and his students still can, and what Depesh had to tell us was great. I started out by drawi

I’ve been aware that there’s something out there called “TikTok,” but I didn’t pay much attention to it, other than the occasional TikTok video reposed somewhere else. The reason I didn’t pay much attention was I thought it didn’t have much to do with business, and it didn’t have anything to do with advertising. Ummm… I was wrong. TikTok had almost $5 billion in revenue last year, and it had over a billion users. Not only that. 11% of them were over 50 years of age -- old folks, like me. Then I learned about today’s guest, Emmanuelle Daigle. Emmanuelle is a marketing agency owner and the founder of TokTrend, a community that keeps business owners up to date on TikTok and Instagram reels trends. As an early user of the TikTok platform, Emmanuelle has a deep understanding of its users preferences and how to create ads that convert (because spoiler alert, your Facebook ads won't cut it there). Emmanuelle told us about TikTok from way back when, and how she has seen it evolve from its early days. She explaine

One of my Facebook friends asked a question in a copywriting group about whether there are more kinds of proof than what most people think of – namely, logic and testimonials. This got me to thinking. I realized there are other kinds. These other kinds of proof are just not that obvious to everyone. In fact, the less obvious they are, the more they fly under the radar, and... the more powerful they are likely to be. Proof is one of the most under-used parts of copy, but it’s one of the most important. Why? Because it’s going to be really hard to get people to believe you without enough convincing proof elements. And no belief = no sales. So you definitely need all the proof you can get. I’ve identified four kinds of proof the best copywriters are already using all the time, but most people don’t fully understand or even know about at all. At least some of them. And we’ll go over all four today. So we’re took a deep look at four kinds of proof. Believe me, there was some overlap between the categories. Still,

When you’re all but done with your copy -- especially long-form copy, like a sales letter or a VSL script -- you’ve got to take one final pass to make sure everything is right. Of course you’re looking for the numbers to add up and the words to be spelled right -- you know, if you’re into “spelling,” that is. But there are bigger-picture copy edits to do. I haven’t heard much about them from other people, but our guest today, the Copywriters Podcast’s own Nathan Fraser, has a list that is going to knock your socks off. I mean it. This is good stuff. Top pro’s know this and use this, but Nathan’s the first person to write it down and organize it, all in one place. Best of all, it’s an addition to his already very useful and extremely reasonable book, “Sales Page Cheat Codes.” Nathan told us about three simple copy-editing cheat codes that can boost the conversion power of your copy in a big way. The first one is a form of big-picture editing: Looking at two goals (your own, and your reader’s) and pretty much r

As copywriters, we draw inspiration and know-how from all kinds of sources: professional salespeople… music… the sports world… fiction… even, the movies! But I have to admit, our guest today is the first copywriter I’ve ever heard of who draws her approach from The Simpsons! Yes, those Simpsons. Marge, Lisa, Bart and of course, the most unforgettable one, Homer. Copywriter Sage Polaris has come up with an ingenious system for seeing the Simpsons as personality archetypes — and using that viewpoint to reach more buyers in every promotion. Apparently it really works, too. Today she’ll tell us how she used this system to write copy for a $1.25 million launch. Overall, Sage has written copy for more than 400 clients, with millions more in sales results. Now, getting your copy to that level of performance is rare enough in and of itself. But bringing it into the frame of everyone’s favorite cartoon dysfunctional family is unique, it seems to me. Here’s what Sage told us about on the show: • The four persona

About 30 years ago, I saw my first Gary Halbert newsletter. It was printed, on paper. I was blown away. I didn’t know what I was reading. But I couldn’t stop reading it. In fact, I must have read it 20 times. I had been writing professionally myself for almost 20 years. But I knew I didn’t know how to write like Gary was writing. And for a good long while, I couldn’t figure out what he was doing. Now, I know. What Gary did, the way he wrote, was unique and is still beyond my powers of description today. I wouldn’t ever pretend that I could write the way he could – I can’t. Who can? But I did figure out a couple of key things, that launched my copywriting career and led to millions of dollars in sales. The first thing was that he knew how to sell with the written word. Which is something we’ve talked about a lot on this podcast. The second thing was that he wrote in a totally conversational way, at the same time he was selling. And that’s something we’ve never really dug into before today on this podcast. But

We’re back with Bill Schley, the New York Times Bestselling Author and award-winning Brand Specialist. I’ve gotten to know Bill well over the past few months, working with him on the launch of his new online program, The Brand Titans MasterCourse. I invited Bill to come back because I’ve gotten really intrigued by his approach to branding. Anyone else in direct marketing will find it intriguing, too, because there’s a seamless connection between what we do and what he does. I have to say he’s the first branding expert I’ve run across who not only states the purpose of branding is to set a company apart to maximize sales… … but also who has a proven system to show anyone in any business the exact steps to take to do just that. Bill’s been at it for more than 30 years, after getting his foundation at the legendary New York agency Ted Bates and Company, headed earlier by the great Rosser Reeves. And companies are counting on Bill even today to help them stake their claim in the competitive marketplace. This

If today’s guest looks familiar to you, that might be because you’ve previously seen Rabbi Evan Moffic on Fox News or CNN, where he is frequently called in for commentary and analysis on events in the news. But here’s something you probably didn’t know: Rabbi Moffic is also a copywriter! He’s a former mentoring client of mine. I’m proud of the work we did together and where he’s taken it, and I’ve gotta tell you: He has found uses for what he learned in copywriting in places I’ve never heard of copywriting being useful, or even thought of before! Evan is the senior rabbi at Makom Solel Lakeside, a 600-family synagogue in the Chicago suburbs. A Stanford graduate, he’s also an popular speaker at churches, where his goal is to bring the value of Jewish learnings to as many people as possible. Evan has written several books, including ‘What Every Christian Needs to Know About the Jewishness of Jesus’ and ‘What Every Christian Needs to Know About Passover.’ His latest book is about anti-semitism. But today, Eva

Let’s welcome back for his third time on Copywriters Podcast, Kevin Rogers. No matter what we do, we can’t seem to scare him away. No, actually, we’re really grateful to have him back. Kevin has been on before to talk about humor, and we greatly appreciated that. But today he’s here to talk about something different -- ten rapid-fire steps to get a first draft of your sales paper down on paper or screen. Besides being a successful and experienced stand-up comedian, Kevin is an A-List copywriter and author of “The 60-Second Sales Hook.” He’s also the founder of Copy Chief, a powerful online community for copywriters. But let’s get to his 10-step speed process. Now Kevin wants to be clear: “If you’re out to beat a control, this isn’t the process for you. When you’re writing a magalog to beat another magalog, there’s a much longer process of review, with the team, and things like that. Instead, he says, “This is for a copywriter who knows the product very well. Whether it’s your product or a client’s product. “I

I’m going to tell you three words that can help you charge higher prices than you’re charging now — even higher prices than your competitors. Those words are “emotional risk displacement.” To be honest, I have NO idea of what they mean… but… our guest today does. He’s back! I’m talking about our returning champion, John Williamson. Today, he’s going to talk about Unique Selling Propositions and charging higher prices. And, if we’re lucky, he’ll tell us what “emotional risk displacement” means — since those three words CAN put more money in our respective pockets. John is coming to us from an undisclosed location on the side of a mountain in Scotland. Over the last 30 years, he has generated millions of dollars in sales for himself and his clients with his own special brand of unique selling propositions. He says, “A great Unique Selling Proposition will enable you to steal the attention and win the sales. “Including ‘financial risk reversal’ in your USP will win you even more sales. “But, you can take the pr