Category: Copywriting

Last week, Austin wrote a post for us that quoted every copywriting geek’s favorite writer, Eugene Schwartz, and his classic insights on the five stages of buyer awareness. Schwartz observed that in order to sell with copy, we need to understand the stage of awareness of the people reading our advertisement. To recap, those stages are: Most Aware: Your prospect knows your product, and only needs to know “the deal.” Product-Aware: Your prospect knows what you sell, but isn’t sure it’s right for them. Solution-Aware: Your prospect knows the result she wants, but not that your product provides it. Problem-Aware: Your prospect senses he has a problem, but doesn’t know there’s a solution. Completely Unaware: The person has no knowledge of anything except, perhaps, their own identity or opinion. If Eugene Schwartz had been able to use the communication technology that powers today’s content marketing, he would have gotten even […]

Back in the 1950s, a bedridden man faced certain death from cancer of the lymph nodes. Tumors the size of oranges had invaded the man’s neck, groin, chest, and abdomen. The patient’s only hope was a new experimental cancer drug called Krebiozen. Three days after initial treatment, the man was out of bed and joking with nurses. As treatment continued, his tumors shrunk in half. Ten more days later, he was discharged from the hospital … the cancer was gone. Strangely enough, none of the other cancer patients treated with Krebiozen showed any improvement. Stranger still, a few years later it was conclusively determined that Krebiozen had no therapeutic value whatsoever. Welcome to the power of the placebo effect. The placebo effect, and the power of belief and experience A placebo is, by definition, a substance that doesn’t actually provide the promised benefit — it’s not real. The placebo effect, […]

There’s a lot of content created every day — and most of it gains almost no attention. In 2015, Moz and BuzzSumo looked at more than one million articles published on the web. They found that 75 percent of blog posts had no inbound links, and more than half had two or fewer Facebook interactions. “It may sound harsh but it seems most people are wasting their time either producing poor content or failing to amplify it.” – Content, Shares, and Links: Insights from Analyzing One Million Articles And the web publishing environment has only gotten more cluttered. Most content simply never reaches its target audience. 

It’s no wonder so many people believe that content marketing doesn’t work, even when we have significant evidence to the contrary. It doesn’t have to be this way. If you’ve taken the time to write a well-researched blog post that can educate your reader […]

Back in the day, only digital publishers and marketers knew to never trust Facebook. You know, like that one time when they encouraged us to build audiences on their platform, and then made us pay to promote our content to those very people? How silly of us not to see that obvious bait-and-switch coming. Actually, some of us did. But that was small potatoes compared to what was next. Ever ambitious, Facebook helped screw over way more people starting in 2016 — I mean like everyone. And put a major dent in democracy at the same time, just for grins. But even that wasn’t enough for the banner year of 2016. Facebook also decided to mislead media companies, marketers, and the general public all at once. Finally, the pinnacle of asshattery had been achieved. You’ve heard about this, right? Would Facebook lie to you? Beginning in 2016, the word out […]

Last week, one of our very dear community members, Hashim Warren, said something I loved about our new persuasive copywriting course. “A copywriting course that’s positioned as a copywriting course???” Because, yeah, there are all kinds of classes and programs out there that are positioned as anything but the art of putting words together in a way that persuades your audience. There are “success” seminars and “launching” workshops and plenty of “money getting systems.” And they’re all (if they’re any good) … copywriting courses. When we arrange our words in order to persuade someone to take action, that’s copywriting. There ain’t no magic words Some resources will tell you that there are “hypnotic” terms that will do some kind of crazy magic on your buyers and “make” them buy from you. Yeah, no. Basically, good copywriting boils down to three things: Desire Relationship Safety What you’re selling has to be […]

Copywriting is the answer to: “How can I make money on the Internet?” That’s why there’s so much advice about it. Websites, communities, courses, masterminds. If you’ve built an audience, taught them a bunch of stuff, and maybe even attracted some loyal fans, but you still don’t have a business … it’s probably because you’re expecting content to do the work of copywriting. (And no, a greater volume of content does not compensate for a lack of strategic persuasive copy.) If you don’t have enough sign-ups for your email list, the answer is copy. If you don’t have enough sales for your ebook or course, the answer is copy. If you don’t have enough clients for your business, the answer is copy. If you don’t have enough volunteers for your nonprofit, or voters for your political cause, the answer is copy. And if you’ve been running ads but you still […]

I enjoyed Nick’s post yesterday about some copywriting techniques that work … until they don’t. And I’m glad he spoke to the danger in trying to blindly follow what we think of as copywriting “formulas” without putting the homework in. From the outside, writers can seem like magical creatures. (I encourage this belief.) Because we can create images, emotional states, and even money and freedom, seemingly out of nothing. But we don’t really conjure great copy and content like a Patronus from the tip of a magic wand. Effective writing comes from a very specific kind of homework. From empathetic listening. From spending time with the kinds of folks who make up our audience, and striving to see the world through their eyes. I don’t mind copywriting formulas at all. They’re wonderfully handy cheat-sheets, so we can remember to include important persuasive elements. But formulas are just the beginning. We […]