TCC Podcast #454: 10 Commandments of Influence with John Bejakovic

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. Stuff to check out: The 10 Commandments Book John's first interview The Katelyn Bourgoin Interview The Sarah Levinger Interview The Richard Armstrong Interview The Parris Lampropouos Interview The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground The How to Write Emotional Copy Masterclass Transcript: 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 ...

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.   Stuff to check out: The Copywriter Club Youtube Channel The Finding Clients Ignition Kit The P7 Client Acquisition System The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground   Full Transcript: 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.

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.   Stuff to check out: American Copywriter Co. Topaz's new Instagram The first interview with Topaz The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Research Mastery   Full Transcript: 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.

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.   Stuff to check out: AndreaSager.com Legalprenuer.com The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Research Mastery Course Full Transcript: 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,

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. Stuff to check out: Matt's LinkedIn Matt's Website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Research Mastery Course   Transcript: 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.

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.   Stuff to check out: Grace's Newsletter The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Research Mastery   Full Transcript: 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,

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.   Stuff to check out: Sarah's Twitter Sarah's Community Tether Insights The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground   Full Transcript: 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.

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.   Stuff to check out: Katelyn’s Newsletter Wallet Opening Words <— Get this! The Milkshake Video Clayton Christensen's How Will You Measure Your Life? The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground   Transcript: 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,

Can copywriters who run a service business attract good clients using Facebook ads? The short answer is "yes". Facebook Ads Strategist, Tara Zirker, is my guest for this episode The Copywriter Club Podcast, and she explained that not only can they use FB ads to attract clients, they may be able to do it for as little as $10/a day... and that could attract dozens of leads—more than you would need to hit six figures. Want to know how to do it? Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: Your Ad Kit (Tara's Newsletter) The Successful Ads Club The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground   Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: Do you think of Facebook ads as a tool for growing your copywriting business? If not, it might be time to update your thinking. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast. This is not the first time we’ve talked about Facebook ads on this podcast. I think I keep coming back to this topic because I see so much potential here—both for our own businesses and for our clients’ products and services. This is the kind of strategic skill that helps set some copywriters apart from most others. When you understand the ins and outs of driving paid traffic to your offers, you become imenselly valuable as a writer. And if you use these skills for your own products and services, you could create an almost endless pipeline of customers ready to pay for your help. But, for some reason, Facebook ads feels difficult. You’ve probably heard the same stories that I have of a creator who turns on ads and steps away for the weekend, only to wake up Monday morning to bill for thousands of dollars and no leads to show for the ad spend. This is something you probably can’t set it and forget it, at least as you’re gettinng started. I wanted to understand more about using ads and the analytics we need to pay attention to when we start using them to maximize our experience. So I invited Facebook ad strategist and founder of the Successful Ads Club, Tara Zirker, to walk me through all of this. We talked about how to scale a business with ads on a tiny budget… like $10 a day… what metrics you need to watch, what to test and what you can not bother with and a lot more. I’ve been on Tara’s list for quite a while and really appreciate her approach for running ads to your business… and yes, this works for service businesses like copywriters and content writers. Tara is about to tell us all how to do that in this interview. Before we get to my interview with Tara, 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. But I doubt that will be your experience because 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. 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 Tara Zirker… Tara, welcome to the podcast. I'm thrilled to have you here, as I was telling you, right before we hit record. But before we get into all of this stuff around Facebook, Facebook ads and your expertise, just tell me how you got to where you are. How did you become the expert in Facebook ads?  Tara Zirker: Thanks so much, Rob. I'm so happy to be here and talk to your community.

In a world where A.I. can write all of the words for free, what is a copywriter to do? What tools should they adopt and how should they approach artificial intelligence? I invited Petter Magnusson, the creator of PurposeWrite, to join me on The Copywriter Club Podcast to discuss these questions and talk through how copywriters can use tools like his to serve our clients better. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: Petter on LinkedIn PurposeWrite (sign up for a free trial) The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: It’s been three years since ChatGPT launched and changed the world. So what does A.I. mean for copywriting today? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast. When OpenA.I. released the first version of ChatGPT to the public, what had been a quiet conversation about artificial intelligence happening mostly behind the scenes suddenly burst into our collective consciousness. Writers and creators in particular were suddenly aware that at least at some level, these large language models could do some of the work we were being hired to do. Many of us dove into these tools to see what they could do. We launched a short-lived podcast that talked about how A.I. was impacting so many different ways of working, certainly within marketing, but also in many other industries. You can find the 20+ episodes of that podcast on The Copywriter Club website. Since that time, the dust has settled a bit. The A.I. tools have gotten a bit better. Image creation tools are significantly better. Writing tools have also improved, but it remains true today that the best copywriters seem to be able to use them to get the best outputs… if you want good copy, copy that captures attention and converts readers into buyers, it helps a lot to have a copywriter guide the inputs and rework the outputs you get from the A.I. model of your choice. Another thing we’ve seen in over the past couple of years is that while tools like ChatGPT and Claude get most of the headlines, lots of other tools have added components of artificial intelligence to improve their products, speed up useage, and make applications more sticky. At the same time we’ve seen the launch of job-specific A.I. tools that do one thing… like writing emails, or writing articles at speeds humans simply can’t match. So when it comes to A.I., where are we headed next? What tools will we be using to get better results? And how helpful is it to have a user or prompt engineer or copywriter who really knows what they’re doing versus just playing around to see what they can get a model to do? I asked Petter Magnusson, the developer of PurposeWrite to talk a bit about A.I., the tool he’s built, and also the broader environment of artificial intelligence and where he sees us going from here. And because whatever happens with A.I. will have a big impact on copywriters, this is a topic I may come back to in the coming weeks. This whole industry is fascinating. The speed of change is a bit scary.  During our conversation, I had a realization. In the past copywriters charged for the things we delivered… the words. Officially we sold blog posts or sales pages or emails or some other copy, but it was the words that clients expected to get. But now that ChatGPT can produce the words pretty much for free, we need to move up the value chain and sell the process, the strategy, the analysis, and the ideas. And bringing that to the A.I. model you use will make the outputs there so much better. Any way… I think this is a discussion you’ll enjoy. Before we get to my interview with Petter, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. Unless you are hitting the 30 second skip button when you get to this point of the show, you are no doubt familiar with The Copywriter Underground. I talk about it every week. The Underground includes more than 70 different workshops—an...