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Show Summary

Rob Cairns talks to Todd Jones about his copywriting process – Part 1.

Show Highlights: 1. Todd’s Process. 2. The first 2 parts of the process; 3. How the process can help your copywriting.

• Todd’s Process
• The first 2 parts of the process.
• How the process can help your copywriting.

The Process

Show Notes

Hey, everybody, Rob, Cairns here. And then today I have my good friend, Mr. Todd Jones with us for our biweekly segment. How are you doing today, Todd?

I think I’m gonna make it. This is a Friday and we the devil moved to Arkansas this week and settled in and up today. It should be the last of the really bad days. It’s really the this whole summer. Had something happen like you have. And I’m just drained and tired.

Yes.

And like I really want like a five day do nothing setting air conditioner recuperate but. Probably you don’t get the opportunity, but anyway powering through like you today, so here we go.

Yeah, I’m fighting some wound dishes. So you know it. It goes on and it goes on. Anyway, it’s always.

It does, yeah.

Good to have you. And we really enjoyed these segments and we’ve been getting some good comments. So keep them coming please, because God’s running other things to talk about so understood.

Yeah, I every week I think of something else. And I started thinking so, but it depends on where my brains at. If I if I, if I’m fatigued and not feeling well, my brain isn’t functioning at 100%. So I don’t think of things. And coming in today, you know, up up until maybe even this morning or yesterday I didn’t. I only had one idea which would take care of this podcast. But the next one I didn’t have. Well, I have the next idea and. And so stay tuned to the next podcast which I think is in two weeks with me and I will. Reveal that topic, so we’ll try. We’ll try to keep the the topics coming and but if you have topics you have topics and you wanna e-mail rob and say, hey, what about this? And we could add that to the queue and talk.

About that, yeah. And we’re and we’re getting, I’m getting comments these days, as you know even on YouTube. So thanks to everybody listening, we we appreciate you and if we can help you, that’s why we’re here. So so shout out and and ask away and I’m bearing down just for interest sake. Do we get to this on 450 episodes so, you know, five hundreds around the corner kind of deal, Todd. God. And the technical gremlins are out this morning. We’ve already been through some of the Internet freezing on zoom.

It is so hot that I wouldn’t be surprised if heat causing some of the problems.

And but and by the way, I’m I’m going to do something I normally don’t do, and then we’ll get. We’ll get to what we wanted to. Talk about if you like podcasting, make sure you tune in this Thursday night because I got my.

Yes.

Good. I got my good friend, Mr. Ross. Brandon is co-author jumping on, and we’re gonna talk about a book about doing video podcasting. So just a little bug and teaser. Just.

Ohh Ross is amazing, especially at the video podcasting he he’s been doing. He did live streaming before. It’s cool, so yeah, I’m looking forward to that.

Yeah, and. And to be fair, Ross and I, and I think you know my history, I’ve been doing live streaming before, in school, we used to live stream BMX events off the top of the 10 foot ramp on a smartphone using Google Hangouts on air that we’re generating thousands of views by the.

That’s old school, man.

Yeah.

I was talking about before we got on in the when we were in the green room. If you want to call it that. I was telling you about the the podcast episode where my friend Brittany Hodak interviewed Shama Hyder. Well, a little story with Shama and these. Neither of these ladies are in copywriting per say, but they are marketers and they’re very. Good at what they. To and Brittany talks about customer experience and I highly recommend her book and her podcast and all of her content, as well as Shama. But when Shawna started she was in Dallas and I was in Fort Worth, so our circles were fairly close, right? And I was running this football blog. Called DFW football and mostly what we covered because getting to. Access to the Cowboys or anything like that was like, not really something that I was going to get access to. I was doing a lot of semi pro minor league football coverage and there’s a lot of. It down there. And there was a. Lot of it and one of my writers from Oklahoma, he decided, hey, let’s have a podcast and said, OK, whatever and. He did it, so I say we had a podcast. Really. He did it. I I just joined in for the fun and he used blog talk radio. Ohh yeah, essentially, yeah. You know, talk about, you know, it’s not well. It was live streaming, but it was all audio. And so you had this little dashboard and somebody calling in. Well, I would interact with Shama via e-mail. So what? What happened when I did the DFW football, I was looking what other people were doing, which is what you do competitor research, right. And came across this other blog. Where they did positive news. Well, through that I found Shamas website because they did her videos back then. It’s like 2006 or 7:00 somewhere in that neighbor, maybe 2008. They did her videos because they had this journalist video background. And so she her team did their website. And so they had this little partnership going on. That’s how I found out about Shama, who’s global now, you know, everybody knows what, Shaw? And uhm, so she had her first book in the in a PDF format on sold on her website. No Amazon, nothing. And I bought it. It was nearly 30 bucks. And so I invited her and she accepted to come on to our little podcast show. It was like 2 hours of us just jabbing away. About. The ball and she came on to talk about how teams could use social media to get their information out better, and she was a delight. It was. It was a lot of fun and all that before. She just kind of blew up. And so yeah, I I live streaming live audio. I I do like the radio. Clock format to be honest with you, and there’s a there’s a guy now. This gets in a little bit of my of of my own personal interest, right? Professional wrestling you and I should do a podcast just about professional wrestling and storytelling at some point, but. There’s a guy named Chris Van Vleet. He is Canadian. You know him? But he lived in Cleveland for a long time and think he’s in LA now. He’s does these podcast shows. Mostly they’re all performers and some of them, most of them are wrestlers like 90% of them are wrestlers. Professional wrestlers of some kind. And he, you know, I have really gotten into his podcast.

OK.

Listening to him watching him tell the get the stories, actually there was a the most recent one is with Chad Gable and Chad said, you know what I really like about you is I get on these things and they they. They wanna they want dirt on people. They want rumors, they want backstage stuff, he said. You’re you’re really interested in my story. You know how I got to where I am? He he had that little snippet on Instagram and I sent it to Chris and I said this is what it’s about. And so it’s been, it’s been fascinating to watch it. Yes, Todd? Well, listen to other podcasts. I rarely listen to business podcasts. Frankly, it’s usually professional wrestling or college football or something like that. Anyway. If yeah.

By, by the way, so do I listen other podcasts? And if you ever curious to see what I’m listening here, here goes my shameless plug. Morning. Go over to Rob Karens dot XYZ Slash blog and I post pretty semi regularly what’s on my podcast catcher on my phone on a regular basis. So you wanna see what I’m listening? Go check it out.

I’m I’m terrible because I don’t use my phone for podcasts. I use my computer so it’s what I can get on YouTube or Spotify if I don’t get them there then. I can’t. I don’t really like. Listen to them and and I usually tend to listen to. I don’t always listen. I’m not one person that listens to every single podcast of people alike. It’s a pick and choose like. Ohh well, Brittany is interviewing Sean. I’m going to listen to that. Chris is interviewing Chad Gable. I go back, listen to that, etcetera. You know, there’s another one. I listen to the guy. And Jay accused accused. So I think so. His name. He’s a. It’s a story. It’s storytelling, but it’s in business. So I really like what he’s doing.

He yeah, he’s awesome. He’s absolutely. Anyway, let’s jump in there. There’s the life and Internet, according to Rob and Todd this morning. So.

Yes, good guy.

Happy, happy day everybody and. We were talking about processes and you and I both have processes and in my business I have all kinds of them. I know our friend Ryan Batterbury, who’s a monthly host on this show. Ryan has them. We all talk about them and we go nuts when our clients don’t follow them. That’s let’s talk copywriting processes.

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s the problem with every kind of self-employed person, right? A process.

This.

Whether you are a designer like our friend Colleen Grazer or Devinder or, or even Paul Lacy, who’s putting out some really cooler stuff these days, or your content writer I and I’m in the, you know, I got my foot in a lot of different worlds, marketing and copywriting content writing. WordPress. Yes. And so, yeah, process no matter what kind of business you run, you live and breathe on processes. And so you know, I built the website copy framework a few years ago and I put that out and I figured after after that, I like I kind of realized, you know, I kind of follow a little bit of process. It’s not real complex. And for a long time there was 3 phases. I call them phases, but I added one recently and so it’s really four. I did 3 largely because it’s easy to remember. And I’ll lay them all. Out and we’ll go back and talk. About each one of them.

So give them to me one after.

The first first stage is research, the second one is strategy. The third one is execution and the final one that I added recently is distribution, because if you don’t distribute what you’ve created and copy then you might as well have not done anything so. Distribution. You know, is a big part of doing that and that gets more complicated because of the algal gods. We can, you know, talk about that all day but so.

So what? Let’s let’s go take a deep breath. And let’s go. It was research. Stride.

Strategy.

Distribution.

Execution then distribution.

And. And then distribution. So those kind of. So if I was listening to this podcast and or looking at the show notes, I’d be writing those four things down on the. Piece of paper right now.

Yeah. And I’m going to give you, I have this, this P well, it it’s an image graphic I did on Canva and I will. I will give that to you to put into the show notes so, but it’s really important to think about what’s what’s in each of these and. And really, I put this I I was writing an article for one of my clients of the day and I added it in there. I was like, I need to make it up. And I thought, and I went ahead and put my website on it so that people wouldn’t like, think it was a. You know my clients thing, it’s my thing, but everybody has a process. So if you are a business owner and you are getting copywriting, some kind of copywriting done from. A copywriter, they’re going to fall. They’ll have different variations, but it’ll be similar to this. And frankly, if you think about it, take the distribution part off your. Your website development is essentially the same thing. It’s all research strategy execution. But so research. We people don’t think about it too much in the copywriting world, but there is a lot of research involved and I I say internal and external research so. Internal research is probably is really key. Well, they’re both key internally. When somebody’s coming to do copywriting for a company, they need to know. Everything they need to know about the company now, some companies, especially in content writing and also some in copywriting, they will give you a brief and the brief will have if it’s done very well, we’ll have a lot of that information and you know like OK, you really don’t want. To hand off positioning to your copywriter, but they can do that. Copywriters are very good at positioning, a lot of them are, but a lot of times what happens in my, my. Which is that I get a project and they don’t have things documented like this is my unique value proposition. These are the benefits of our service. You know these this is who our target audience is. You know, all this stuff should be documented. So if you don’t have it documented, then your copyright is going to have to go through the process of trying. To figure out. What those things are, if you’ve already got it, if you’ve had a a marketing consultant to do that and document it and make it a part of the creative process, it’ll cut some time and probably expense for you as a client off. If you’ve already done it that, that copyright. But I’ll go back to it, tell you a story, I. Got to tell. You a story, right? And I meant. To look this. Up before I got on, but I didn’t. There’s a story they told, and I, you know, I can’t remember the copywriter now. And it was. I first read it on copy Blogger a long time ago. I think Brian Clark wrote the story. And was about a company in Texas who sold what we would call. UM. What’s those cakes you get at Christmas time with all the stuff in it? Fruit cake. Yeah, and it was a bakery in Corsicana, TX. Nowhere. Corsicana is it’s just outside of Dallas, about South, South of Dallas, about an hour. And they sold these fruitcakes. They sold a lot of things, actually. And they’re having trouble. They were slipping in sales and all that kind of stuff. So they brought in this. Master copywriter and I, you know the name is would be familiar if you who it was and frankly I forgot to go back and read the story, reread the story. I didn’t realize who it was, but it was a well known copyright. It took some time to really just spend learning about the company. This is internal research, right? He’s trying to find a competitive advantage. There’s your words that you like so much. He’s trying to find a competitive edge for this company and this particular product, and he’s researching. He’s researching and asking questions and observing. And he says, hey, where are these pecans come from that you use in? Fruit cake down in Central Texas. We got some pecan trees that are over 100 years old, and we always use these pecans. We don’t get them anywhere else. We’re not getting it from some big wholesale distribution. We get it from these trees and that changed everything. He made the copy all about these. Well, these pecans from 100 year old pecan trees, and I think they even changed the name to pecan loaf or something like that. Sales went through the roof, so.

Can I kind of can I kind of stop you there? For a second. Yeah. We’re talking about competitive advantage, as you know, or the inside advantages, I call it my favorite book, Mr. Robert Book I had wrote that book everywhere. I wish I got affiliate sales for the number of people bought it. You should, but that’s another story.

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

You should, yeah.

And we talked internal research, but don’t you determine your competitive insight? Advantage by doing the external part as well, and that means researching the editors for that.

Oh yeah, competitors, you got to get to that. Yeah, but this is all in the internal research. So the copywriter needs to do the internal research because they’ve got to find they’ve, they’ve got to learn about the company. They gotta find all the and and a lot of times, especially small businesses, they don’t tend to have this stuff documented, which is fine. And that’s why they’ll go back to the same copywriter, cause the same copywriter come in and create what some people call a key message copy platform. I call it a core messaging document, something like that. It’s it. It’s your north star. It’s your. Or I called a messaging compass, compass. You you have the compass. For what? Your message is. If you don’t have that copywriters going to do that, if they’re really good, they’re going to want to do that. And that is where the internal the internal research comes from. Now, external research.

Yes.

Where is your competitive advantage? Yes, it can come from what you learn about. You’re, you know, chances are there aren’t one. Any other bakeries there might have been other bakeries that use pecans like that, but they took the advantage of focusing on that, whereas the other bakeries did not. So I used to be like, ohh well, there’s a there’s a couple of things you need to do with externally research. One is your competitive. Like, what does other companies do? It not so. You can copy them. I think that’s a mistake. A lot of companies do. They look at what other companies doing so they can emulate them. Don’t do that. Why? Because you look just like them.

Especially when you’re doing pricing like, how many times do I look at a pricing page? And in WordPress spaces classic you go to the and they all look. They’re darn friggin. Yeah, I can say that’s my podcast and they’re.

Hmm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

They’re all laid out the same. They’re all laid out in the same chart, you know, very similar pricing. Well, I’m gonna tell you if your price is the same and all you’re offering is the same, why should I go to John Jane’s? Rob or Todd, there’s no reasons.

Disadvantages. No advantage. At all. What you’re looking to do is to create an advantage. So whether it’s pricing or how you create your the look. Cuz I can, I can almost tell and I’ll be a little bit not so nice here, but I can almost tell an elementary site elementary website when I see it.

And I.

Because they all do the same thing, they all do the same thing. All there’s a lot of things moving when I see a lot of things moving, I’m like. That’s an elementary website.

That’s what people.

Yeah, don’t do it because you can. To do it. You know. But anyway so.

Do it. Stop there for a SEC. Don’t do it because you can’t do it and do it. If it generates leads which convert to sales in the store, yeah. This this bit. Ohh let’s show a slide room. We all went through that because they can’t peers if it doesn’t generate new leads which generate the cells, who cares? It’s it’s pretty and it’s not generating leads that makes sales. Who can? There’s some the best websites out there. Honestly the most simplistic websites and their coffee and their design. So think about that.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, so external external research is about finding where you are different from your competitors. And now there’s another component of external research that.

Yeah.

I don’t think that we just talked about too much. That’s what I call voice of customer research. I it’s not unique term with me. I get it from Joanna Weed, the queen of conversion, copywriting, as I call her. If you want to learn a little bit more about voice of customer research, I employee you go follow my friend Hanna Shamji on LinkedIn she doles out. Information typical every week value she did one this week was great. One of the things that Hannah excels at, she’s a she’s another Canadian and and would be a great guest on your podcast, by the way. One of the things that Hannah excels. That is the actual interview with the customer has so a lot of people like. We got a couple surveys and we got a couple of interviews. We asked them a list of questions and call today and you need you need you need more than that. But that’s better than nothing. You need to interact with your customers to find out what they say about your product, how they say it and how you can use what they say.

So.

Stop right there. That is gold. And the reason that is gold. Is and I’m sitting here nodding my head at you as you’re talking. Cause you and I. Know each other well.

I’m fired up, baby.

That’s the me too, because what people do. Copy website design creators is they design or write for what they want. And what you’re saying is you need to find out where the customers want for your wife, for what the customer wants, which is to see us.

Joanna, also a Canadian, has drilled that into my head. With all the times I have been on one of her live Tuesday tutorials or read her emails or whatever and one of the reasons I follow Shama, she’s become actually it’s good. I’ve worked with a girl, a girl, a lady. When I was in borders, who went on to get her degree and about the same thing that Hannah got. And then she went into the same thing. So it’s kind of weird. Small world in a lot of ways. But Hannahs background, her degree, her graduate degree, her graduate degree is in counseling.

OK.

Therapy and because that is the best way to learn how to interview someone. Now, she goes into interview techniques and all that kind of stuff, but the point remains the same and there are ways to get voice to customer research. There are a lot of ways to do it. Some of us more effective than others, but a survey. Is a way. It’s not the most effective way and most people will tell you that, but it is a way to get. But what’s the customer receive? Research. I’m gonna give you if you’re a small business owner, can’t afford someone like Hannah to come on to do this. I’m going to give you a slip.

Right.

A. A A tip, that’s like a I’m not going to say I’m not gonna hack. I don’t want to call it a hack, but it’s kind of a shortcut. When you’re a small business, first of all, you don’t have the number of customers that a larger company you know and they have hundreds of thousands of customers. You can’t interview one you as a small business or medium sized business usually know your customers. So you can get them on a call. It can be a phone call or something you record. I think you record because I don’t want. I can’t personally spend time trying to take notes and follow a conversation. There are some people who can do that, but I can’t do that. So if if you got them on the phone, find some way to record it, of course, get permission.

Happening.

There’s a lot goes into that, but ask them simply about their story. You you know, there’s there’s. You’re basically have three questions. What were you doing before you found out? You know, when you needed it, knew you needed a solution. What were you? What kind of things are you doing? Who were you looking at? Those kinds of things. The before part. Right. OK. When you found us, what was it that about us that made you decide to use us? This is the. These are the the. The hallmark questions you’re gonna ask, but you wanna ask him to tell it to you in the form of a. The story and then the the last question is the IS is before, during and after is what you’re asking. The last part is like. Well OK, since you’ve been using this, how has it improved your business or whatever you know this the problem you had so you ask it and then there to form you ask it to you don’t get them and tell it to you. It’s the single detail because. Most people struggle with that unless they’re really good at that. You get them to tell you the story. Tell me the story. About what? How what it was like when you were looking for when you knew you had this problem and you were looking for it. Then you let them tell the story. You record it. Then when you record it, you can go back and get transcript. Trip and then you can start looking through the transcript and pulling out the essential information. That’s kind of a now if you have the budget, hire somebody like Hannah to do that. She works with larger companies obviously, because she’s not inexpensive, but. And and there are. Other people I know, some other people who do. As well so.

Our our friend Ross Simmons is another one. I mean, you know, if it’s not falling on acts Twitter, you better be because everything Ross drops all day long is gold, gold and more gold. I mean, he’s just.

Oh, OK, yeah, yeah. You you have. Hijacked by Ross Simmons. Introduction. But we’ll we’ll continue that. That was for later, but that was for later. But anyway, yeah. Ross. Who’s another Canadian, by the way? I what? I don’t know what it is about these Canadians, but they’re sharp people. So anyway, that’s your internal and external research that you that you. At a copywriter or your team? Who? You know, if you’re if you’re hiring an agency from a copywriting company, like if you’re hiring the copy hackers agency or something like that, they’re probably gonna have multiple people working on your project. If you’re hiring a smaller agency or a solo, then they’re going to probably spearhead it all. But, you know, these are things these are in in. An ideal world. You wanna do these things? And and do them thoroughly, but I know it’s an ideal world, right? You you may be like we need to get this project out the door within two months or or, you know, three months or whatever. You may not have time to thoroughly do all that, but this is what this is. What it looks like in the research phase. You have to do these things. To create what I call the messaging compass right? It is the compass that always points north and you know I’ve used a lot different phrases for this, but that probably my favorite one. Even and and that is really the crux of the website copy framework right there helping you create a messaging compass. So the second phase is what I call strategy. This one is, you know. You’re you have. You have to look at all the pieces of content or copy you’re wanting. You’re right. Like, if it’s a website copy for pack that you know you’re writing a website copy. So web pages are. Writing in most cases, you’re gonna write a home page. You should write an about page, and then you’re probably. If you’re a product company, you know how many products you have. You say you got three products. OK, we’re gonna write a page for each product. If your service and you got three service, you got to write a page for each service. Sometimes you have. Variations of those. So you might. Right, one for each of them. So there’s the first part of that. You’re like, OK, you’re assessing. If you’re doing a some kind of e-mail campaign like, OK, we’re gonna write 12 emails that that’s, you know, the strategy. That’s what you’re doing. And then you’re determining what you want to do. It’s. Really is what you’re doing. Determining direction to get the goals that you’re trying to to make, and so whenever it’s website copy and which is what I do, the website copy framework say you got a homepage, an about page and a server main service page. And let’s let’s just do an individual service so you can have a like a hub service page like oh wait, we have three services. Here are services here, here and here and then you can have a patriots one. But let’s just say we got one service say we’re a website design company and that’s what we do. We don’t do anything else. That’s what we do. We we design everything in figma. And you, we turn it over to you to give a get a developer to do it. Whatever.

And.

You would create a page for your web design and and and each of those have I have copy formulas frameworks for those a lot of different things go into that, but the the main copywriting formula that I have kind of adapted in the last year or two that I think is really good for fleshing out these pages. Especially the service page and the product page is the Pastor Framework. It’s a problem or what is the problem that that the that your customer has that’s coming to your page amplify you amplify or agitate that problem just a little bit you kind of twist the knife a little bit and you offer solution your solution you know is you whatever and then you have oh which is the offer this. Is the offer. And then you have the the R which is like a kind of recall, a like a second. I’m sorry. There’s a T in there and the T is for testimonials. So PASTOR problem, agitate solution testimonial. That they use another word, but it’s basically a testimonial and then offer and then a recall the offer. So it’s like a double call to action at the end and I may not have that exactly right, but that’s essentially what a Pastor framework is. And then I do some other things in there like if it’s a product or a service I. Council people to put their process in there, right, there’s a couple of reasons. For that one. It lets the person who is coming to your site assuming this is a. Website or web page. Know that you actually have thought about this, and you’re not flying by to see your pants when you get the project, you gotta process. So and. Two, that’s gonna let them know it gives a little bit of credibility to you, right. And then I think it lets them know that you have a process going to file. They should follow that process. They don’t need to deviate from it. But also I think sometimes people will brand their process and. Which I think I I like that ideal now. There’s no reason to brand something that. You know every little thing, but I mean, Donald Miller made a living off of the story brand framework. I have sold, you know, 70 something copies of the website copy framework. That’s essentially a process. So brand it don’t don’t be afraid to brand it. Now you don’t have to. But you know, give it a name. You know, we utilize the sunny digital development process to take care of your website SEM process or whatever you want to call it. And then you use that throughout your web. Right.

It has to. It has to do with brand recognition. The more you brand it, the more it’s. It’s the same reason, you know, I know we’re talking copywriting in terms of process, but if you ever look at my emails that I send out on a regular basis and you look at the subject on you know I put SDM in square brackets right at top of the.

But. It helps.

Yeah.

That, and there’s a reason. For it, it’s branding and it’s writing and it tells people this is an e-mail from sending digital marketing and they they don’t even have to look. They don’t have to look at.

That is a. Whole nother topic for one of these podcast episodes brand awareness. It is. There are studies that are coming out more than one now, and I’ve been convinced this a long time that who the e-mail is from is more important than the headline in.

Yeah.

The e-mail the title. And so. It’s a. It’s a. Anyway that that’s a I will open an e-mail because I know it’s from you or Jay or Ross or Brittany. Far more than the headline you.

Know because people read and follow and work with people they like. So. And that’s what it comes down to.

So.

Yeah, I’m back. Sorry about that.

That’s OK, the techno grumbles.

Oh. So.

So that’s the second part of your process and I think we’re gonna do and because we’re running a little long today, we’re gonna break this up into a two-part show because. So we will be back with you in two weeks and Todd will go through part three and four of this process and we’ll wrap it all up. Then if you want to check out Todd’s work, make sure you.

Sounds like a plan.

Go to copy. Flight because that’s where everything Todd is on the web, right? Or ask him on her ex, harass them on LinkedIn. Because he’s active on LinkedIn.

Don’t mess with me on Facebook, just just X on LinkedIn.

Please.

And we’ll be back with you real soon, Todd. Thanks so much. And you have a wonderful weekend and we’ll talk.

Go, go hogs.