Episode 438 Copywriting With Todd Jones Todd’s Copywriting Origin Story

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Show Summary

In this episode of Copywriting with Todd Jones, Todd talks about his copywriting origin story.

Show Highlights:

• Why did Todd get into copywriting?
• Did you know Todd journaled at one time?
• How the business has changed.

Show Notes

Hey, everybody, Rob Cairns here. And today I’m here with my good friend Mr. Todd Jones, and we’re going to talk about copywriting with Todd Jones. And today’s topic is his origin story, how he got in the copywriting, how are you today?

I’m I’m doing pretty good. Not bad for Wednesday.

Yeah, we need no more tornadoes. No and no more rain. And you Americans can keep all your stuff stuff.

So. You can blame that on barrel.

Yeah. Yeah, get rid of it. We had torrential rain overnight, so, you know, we’re done so. That’s where it. Goes where did she get in the copyright?

In the beginning. I was gonna start with Genesis 11, right in the beginning, in the beginning. That is a question I pondered the last few days, and you said we’re going to do this right? We’re going to do this origin story about my copywriting. So let’s let’s. Do this under the guise of the fact that I talked about copywriting. Anything basically leads people toward the sale so. You know, it’s a broader umbrella than a lot of people want to do. So when did I start writing something that leads people toward a sale? And for me, that’s hard to do that going back to. Early mid 20s.

OK.

I did like a lot of people did. Did school, did college. My bachelor’s degree is in religion. I went to small Baptist College in northeast Arkansas and the thing I say, but there’s a lot of things I learned there. But one of the things about my major professors is they taught me how. To research, and they did that by assigning papers, right? So before Google, before perplexity before Gemini, before chat, TPT, we had to go to the library. You know, the thing with all the books and do the research and the card came along and all that jazz. Anyway, I’ll learn how to write. And then when I later, when I did Graduate School, which I didn’t finish, I actually excelled at that part of it. I liked it. So I’m trying to make a transition cause I had a lot of. You know health issues and. Trying to make a a transition into the web world and one of the things I notice is that companies generally, especially smaller companies that we work with, especially early in our career, don’t have somebody to write the content for them or it’s not very well done whatever. It’s assumed that the content comes the website, it’s not. You know all this kind of stuff. And as I and and and I started blogging about football, college football in particular. And one thing you need to do when you do that is have something to talk about, like your podcast. You gotta have something to talk about. So I started doing book reviews. Because I knew how to do book reviews, cause I did them in school. So at the time borders, books and music. Yeah. OK, here we go again. So I worked in a bookstore at the time that I started this college football blog, and the one thing I knew how to do was book reviews. Right. And I was like, well, it’s my my platform. I built it originally. I built on blog. Bought. Eventually I moved to WordPress, but I could write about what I want. So I worked at a bookstore and we got discounts and the ability to check books out and at the time there were a lot of college football books coming out. It was hot. The blind side everybody remembers the movie. The blind side. I read it as a book before I ever saw the movie. Yeah, there were some other ones like that came out and even had a couple people to send me a book to review. Gary Andrew Toles book about Red Grange. He said that to me in the mail I got a a a pre copy of a a book that they were. They thought when Mark Rick was at Georgia they thought he was gonna win national championship. So this guy wrote a book about it before the season came out. He didn’t win the championship. But anyway, I got a book. It was a. It was more or less a spiral bound notebooks. What it was, I mean, it was before it was published. And so I would do these reviews on my website and as well as you know, do my ranking and then the local. I’m not an only site in Dallas, I I was doing some. They were pulling some of my articles in to there that I was called a content partner. But then they said, hey, would you like to do some exclusive writing for something? Sure. And that meant, you know, I got fresh credentials to a couple of games. And Texas Motor Speedway and stuff like that. It was. It was a lot of fun. Now I should say this to say my writing. Certainly I did it in school. But. I went through. A really deep dark depression, and it was my therapy. One of my therapies was the journal I was journaling at the time now.

Do you still turn on time?

I think I was using. No, I haven’t done it in. Years I I should. But I don’t. But anyway, WordPerfect. Do you remember that software? I pretty much journaled in Word. Perfect. Yeah. And so.

All too well. When I when I started in, I started in healthcare at Women’s College Hospital, we were work perfect dose shop in those days and you know till word came around we’re perfect Canadian bundle lane.

Yeah.

They’re owned by blue eyes.

Yeah, I I didn’t switch to. Word for a long time. Yeah, Corel yeah, I use a lot of Corel problems products.

Well.

In my early day.

Yeah. And they were, they were actually owned by Novell at one point were perfect, was owned by Novell too. They’ve been kind of shopped around and it’s still around, I think, but not much use for it these days.

Yeah. I think so, yeah.

And what I’ll tell you is.

No, anyway.

Yeah, keep going.

Anyway, it kind of led me into. I won’t say journalism, and I was going down the whole building WordPress website things so I I kind of had these multiple skills coming into the decade, had to move to Arkansas and trying to reestablish you know.

Yep.

And I was working for agency and they started using me to do some. I did a little bit everything at the agency. It started off with me building. I would take the design from the designers in the in the office and. Build the website to spec as close as I could. I wasn’t very good at it, but I did do it. I did a few and I had a lot of help. One of the guys who was probably 20 years my younger, who was helping me out a lot. He was really talented front end designer, developer and I learned some stuff. But I also learned wasn’t very good. At it, I wouldn’t. I mean, I wasn’t terrible at it, but I was pretty good at. I’m pretty good at customizing themes, building something straight from a Photoshop file. Maybe at my best use, but. In the process they started having me to do some writing and blog, you know, the blogs thing I did that for some other people. And I started writing for the local, the statewide business, business, politics and business news organization. So I realized that. I had the skill, this writing skill, and I was on a podcast the other day and I said I remember discovering copy bloggers probably and pro bloggers. I know you were on pro bloggers a lot back in the day. Darren Rouse and and Brian Clark.

I don’t know.

So those are two powerhouse blogs at the time and I I probably consumed at the time everything I could with copy blockers and maybe started learning a little bit about copywriting. I didn’t really know what copywriting was. I just knew about my content writing content marketing, which is kind of what I went along doing with along with my website. So. Thing, because kind of like your origin story, you said you learned that building website wasn’t enough. You had to find a way to get people traffic, right? Well, for me, that was content writing. And so I went down that road and then I discovered the world of copywriting and started learning from. You know, the Joanna weaves and the Ben settles and some of those kind of people along the way. And so I that’s kind of a Long story short really. I mean not real short, but I for me, I feel like it goes back to. School riding, learning to write for school, learning how to write a book, review, learning how to write a research paper, learning how to write something about a text in the in the Bible. I mean, I was, you know, and you learned about research. And again, like I said, we did. It wasn’t like we were. Going to Google and Googling this stuff, we were pulling out books you know and and quoting stuff and quoting thoughts from a book and you had to cite it and you, you know, you did in WordPress there was a lot of WordPress, word, WordPerfect and a lot of fun and you use the Chicago Manual style and you know, all that stuff. Was kind of a precursor. Order to copywriting and. You know, in in reality when you use any kind of writing in business and I and I tend to forget about video and audio scripts, but those are a big copywriting tool that’s still being used. I see job opportunities for people who can write YouTube scripts, and I’m like, that seems like an odd job, but. I guess people. Do it. But anyway, those are all something your words were a business or an organization because nonprofits need it to. That brings people closer to the cell. If you look at a funnel and you think, OK, you got a long funnel. Anything, in my opinion. That’s drawn and closer to the cell, even if it’s at the top, what we call the top of the funnel and and that’s why I don’t have a problem including content writing. In in the term copyright, I mean it’s not a difference between copywriting and content writing. It’s just a difference of the type of copywriting. That’s the way I view it. So I differ with some of my friends in the copywriting world in that regard.

No choice. So true, you mentioned Darren Rouse South of Australia and we all know Pro Bowl, we’re back in the day. It was funny. I was, I was thinking and how things have changed. It used to be.

Yeah. Good job.

You could write blog articles day after day after day and you draw traction. And Darren actually put out an ebook which I bought back in a day called basically a mini course on how to write blogs for 30 days to increase your traffic. Well, that strategy doesn’t work anymore. But in those days, it certainly did.

Yeah.

Work. You know, I’m not. I haven’t. I’m. Not completely, I’m not completely. Sure that it doesn’t work, but I think it’s time consuming to. Do. And. And. I mean. Whenever all things equal, the the the site that’s putting out something the most is usually the one that gets. But you’re right, everything is upended. That’s why I call it the algo gods, because the algorithms and I’m not just talking about Google. Google’s just one of them. You have all the social medias are running on our algorithms. They’re all running out. Items and so the the the point of getting someone from wherever to your site, especially organically is not as easy. It was in 2020 or 2010. I mean, when Darren and Brian Clark were doing those things and so.

No.

You know, even now I told you I was. Just on a A. The weekly call with Ann Smarty from Smarty Marketing and one of the reasons I do that is because there’s so much change going on. With SEO, I’m not an SEO expert by any stretch, but I love to get on her. Her listen to her, her her podcast or whatever she calls it and listen because she’s in the weeds every day doing this stuff for clients and she knows she’s testing stuff and so I get a lot of information. In the SEO world. Through the the the traction goes through her and Lily Ray. I mean, there’s other people too. I actually forwarded you an e-mail from Glenn Aesop before we got on the show. So yeah, I mean it’s it’s SEO what we call organic.

Thank you.

Whatever SEO has really changed dramatically and so social media? No. So I don’t know what the.

There is no question on that on that one, I mean. It keeps changing and then you’ve got. I don’t even want to get into it in this one it’s we’ve talked about you and our time and time again is AI and the impacts of SEO and AI and that whole mess and you know Yost.

Yeah. One of the things the, the. The SEO experts talk about it because because what you’re seeing in search engines. Is we are if you don’t know this by now, we are moving toward search engine results being generated by a period and and so and there’s this. And actually if you if you’re if you’re following SEO, you may know who Rand Fishkin is who start one of the Co. Founders of mas. He is now the founder of Spark Toro, but he put out an article this week or last week about. What they call zero click search results. And that’s the that is like how many people are not clicking on. So it depends on the the query, the query that you’re asking, right? If I go in and say. How do I? I’ve done some of these recently. How do I do you know this? This and this depending on the query. They’ll actually auto generate. You see it right in front of you, the results and there’s no article to Click to nothing. And sometimes I ignore it and go look for. An article but. Sometimes I go OK, like OK, it’ll be something to do with Facebook, but how do I do? Because Facebook changes every week. It feels like I got to do something on Facebook. I haven’t done it in two years. What? OK. And I’ll put in, how do I do this in Facebook and then it’ll auto generate for me. So the search results in Google and I think you’ll start and copilot is becoming big with micro. Well, you’re going to see your search engine results. At least the top half of that be completely AI generated for the most part, at least the top part of it. And so now SEO experts like Ann are trying to figure out how do we get my client. His, his or her content in those results, it’s it’s a changing game, you know. And so it’s kind of a it’s a frustrating deal, but everything has changed, but doesn’t mean you, you know, you still have to find a path to get people to your site. Right. And and I I think a lot about this a lot too. And there’s another area I can go to that I’m I’m not gonna touch on this this particular call, but maybe we’ll do it in the future community building. Oh, that’s another.

No pressure was another topic down the road, yeah.

If you’re a razor, if your readers know Mark Schaefer as you put out a book last year about essentially community being the last frontier or something like that for marketing. And and and Mark has put out predictions before that came true. So I think it’s worth listening to anything he says and but anyway that’s you know, you gotta find ways to get people to your site and search and really if you think about social media especially. In social, in search engines, their goal is not to send you somewhere else. Their goal is to keep you because they don’t make money by sending you somewhere else. So they’re doing a better job now than they did five years ago of doing that, which means that you we get fewer and fewer traffic.

Yeah.

No question, do you ever regret?

How did we get from my original story to that?

Yeah. Did you? Do you ever regret getting? Do you ever regret getting into copywriting or where do you kind of sit on that?

Do I have a regret? I think. I don’t. You know, I’m starting to think about it. Am I really a copywriter? Well, yeah, I’m a copywriter. I I see it as a skill, a good skill. I I, you know, you talked about evolving. You were talking about how you were gonna change your what you call yourself your agency. What do you call it, a digital concierge and I.

Hmm.

Yeah, shout, shout out.

Think it’s brilliant?

Shout out to Mr. Spencer Foreman for that idea, but Thanks, Spence. I’ll steal. That.

Yeah. So we all, we all have to evolve. We all have to evolve and a lot of stuff that people did in the as a as a copywriter is being. Done using AI, so there’s less roles out there and there’s less need. And so guys like you and me and Ryan Waterbury, you know, we have multiple skills. We’re we’re what CM Punk might call 5. Tool player and my friend Steve Roller talks about that as well-being A5 tool player.

Yeah, just a bit.

You and I and Ryan and Devinder and Paul, Lacy and Spencer Foreman and you know, so many people. We’re we have multiple skills. And so copywriting is probably one of my best skills per say because I’m not as good at the back end stuff as you and Ryan are. And I’m not near as good as the design. It’s Paul and Dave, the vendor. But you know, I can do a lot of the same things. And so, you know, I feel like I’m in some sense, we’re all concierge. We’re a digital concierge for clients. What do we need? And I find myself more and more when I get in and and get in touch with someone. When I engage someone, it’s like.

Yeah, yeah.

OK, I’m putting on my consulting app. What do they really need at this time? I mean, sure I can go off and quote them. You know, $3000 copywriting project, but that may not be their best need. I I was talking to my friend Helen this morning and she she had somebody she was talking to me about. We were collaborating with. I said, look, you know what we can do depends on what their budget is. And I said, but what they really need. Are these two things and so. Sometimes it’s not what your main skill is. You know, sometimes they need. They need a website audit on the inside like what are the plugins they’re using? What’s the server you know? Sometimes that’s the best thing they can have. So sometimes. And I found this as a copywriter and even in my own. Career. What they don’t need is a complete website rewrite. Sometimes they just need to rework a page they need to add some social proof. It’s all under copywriting, so sometimes you don’t need to like go in and rewrite the whole page. Sometimes they need to rearrange things, sometimes they need to clarify some things. Sometimes they need to add some persuasive elements, you know.

So true. So true, so true. Todd, as always, thank you for sharing your story. I hope some people find it insightful. I think origin stories are really important, whether it’s WordPress copywriting. Getting, you know, like you and I did recently a founder story which we we shared about my business and how I founded mine. I think they’re really insightful on what makes people tick. So as always, thanks for sharing and we’ll be back with you in a couple of weeks. You have a great day, my friend.

Thank you. Thanks for having me on.