Copywriters Podcast

It takes a lot of courage and a lot of confidence to do what our special guest today has done… and that’s fire all his clients and start an email-based business. But Alin Dragu did just that, and he’s here to tell us about it. He’s the best-selling author of the book Meaningful Marketing, he spent 5 years as direct of marketing at one of the fastest growing churches in the US, and 3 years as the V...

Last fall, our returning champion Glenn Fisher and his business partner Nick O’Connor teamed up with mega financial publisher Marketwise for a bold experiment: Offer FREE training in financial copywriting to 12 people who competed for the spots. There were 500 people applied. Of the 12 who were selected, Glenn says, four were offered jobs… and two are being mentored by financial copywriting legend...

So a lot of people are building their brand by pouring tons of money into traffic… A/B testing… tracking every click… but deep down, you feel that something’s not landing. It’s almost like you wonder if you’re coming across as desperate, rather than confident. Maybe it’s time to take a look at a cherished assumption in online marketing: Namely, that more information and more volume equals more aut...

What was discovered and perfected over 100 years ago, that is one of the most important marketing strategies online today? We have a special Old Masters Series show today. It’s a hybrid between marketing discoveries of the early 1900s, and top moneymakers of 2025. Our old Master is Claude Hopkins. Most people don’t realize that there’s a strong connection between two of the most important principl...

Our returning champion today, Dr. Doug Pew, is well known in two different worlds: The world of high-powered copywriting for online course creators, where he has done many six and seven figure launches. And the other world where Doug is known is that of music. He is a composer whose work was actually performed at Carnegie Hall! And he wrote an opera that was performed at the Kennedy Center. Those...

Do you have an imaginary friend? Whether you do or not, today we’re going to talk about why a particular imaginary friend can solve one of the biggest problems copywriters are having today. And that problem is, your copy’s not connecting with the right target group of prospects. So your conversions are way lower than you’d like them to be. Now, the perfect solution to that would be to have a real-...

Ever spend hours, just waiting for the “perfect time” to start writing? Maybe first you decide to do a guided visualization. Or answer a few emails. Could be that there’s that perfect song that always gets your juices flowing… or a motivational youtube video you love… Well… Here’s a tip: Don’t wait and don’t find an excuse to do something else. Just start. I know it sounds crazy. Maybe impossible....

What if you found you were sitting on tons of money that you didn’t even know about? It sounds like the beginning of a new Netflix series, right? But this happened in real life to our returning champion, Agency owner and entrepreneur Cath Rehorn. She will be the first to admit that numbers are not her. She’s a words and people person, not a data ninja. But she developed a conversation with ChatGPT...

Our very special guest today is Angus Fletcher, professor of story science at Ohio State’s Project Narrative. His research has been called “life-changing” by Brené Brown and “mind blowing” by Malcolm Gladwell; has been endorsed by psychologists, neuroscientists, and doctors such as Martin Seligman and Antonio Damasio; and has been supported by institutions ranging from the National Science Foundat...

A lot of people struggle with email marketing. Today’s special guest, Tom Ruwitch, has been at it for a quarter of a century… and he’s discovered some pretty interesting things about using stories to sell, as well. In 2001, Tom founded an email marketing business called MarketVolt. This was very early in the online business revolution. His company licensed their software to businesses worldwide, a...

As we record this in mid-October, the world has without a doubt gone absolutely bonkers over AI. People are making all kinds of extreme predictions: Some see a heaven on Earth in a future with AI, and others confidently predict unmitigated disaster. But how many of these people are talking from actual in-the-trenches experience? Who can take the long view based on what they’ve actually done and se...

Our guest today does something I’ve been looking for in a guest on this podcast for a long time–he helps beginning copywriters get started and become success. Matthew Volkwyn is a coach, copywriter, marketer and entrepreneur. He doesn’t just talk the talk; he walks the walk. Matt has helped dozens of business coaches rapidly grow their own businesses with email marketing, a he’s built three six-fi...

Have you ever been in a meeting where people are brainstorming ideas, and each idea is more idiotic and off-target than the last one? It has happened to all of us. And if you’re an experienced copywriter, sometimes it’s hard to bite your tongue. Because the cheerful but inexperienced leader of the meeting has announced a rule: “There are no bad ideas!” Well, yes there are. In that meeting, you jus...

Legendary NY Yankee Yogi Berra said it best: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” He’s right, you know. But there’s one important exception, and I don’t blame Yogi because, as talented a player and a coach as he was, Yogi wasn’t a copywriter. So he didn’t know about the important exception we’ll talk about today: showing your prospect a compelling future. Not every copywr...

A little over a month ago we did a last-minute podcast about an audacious experiment our special guest today, Nick O’Connor, did with Glenn Fisher and the financial publishing giant Marketwise: Glenn told us how they put together a special program called Financial Copy U, which would train 12 copywriters ABSOLUTELY FREE on how to write copy for financial publishers. With the understanding that som...

It’s the sure-fire strategy that makes you overconfident. It looks like this: The copy’s loud. Aggressive. Alpha-male on a double dose of adderall. It’s practically SCREAMING at you to buy. And you know what? Sometimes it works. But not most of the time. Especially these days. Hyper-aggressive copy is just a huge risk you don’t want to take. And here’s why: While it’s true that pressure might trig...

Today we take a deep dive into the part of copywriting that people talk about all the time. And even though people talk about this all the time, most of them don’t really understand it. That is, psychology. Not the kind of psychology you experience in a therapist’s office—although there’s a little bit of overlap. Not what you’ll find in brightly colored grid of buyer personas. Not mindset. No, we’...

Sometimes copy fails because it’s just not executed well enough. And also, copy that simply misses the mark — doesn’t align with the target prospects and what’s on their minds — won’t do well either. But you can have all the fundamentals in place and done well, and sales can still fail to happen. Why? That would be because the strategy behind the copy was weak or even non-existent. Today, we’re ta...

Three weeks ago, we had a very special Old Masters Series show: The Art of War, Copywriting Edition. But we only covered half the book, so that made the previous episode Part 1. Today we cover the rest of the book, Chapters 7 through 13. And that makes today Part 2. Here’s what you need to know: The Art of War was written by Sun Tzu (SOOON-tzeh) about 2500 years ago, as a treatise on military stra...

In the 1980s, before Internet marketing had even really begun, our very special guest today and returning champion was working as a tech writer in the foreign exchange trading department of Bankers Trust in New York. In his new book “How The Web Won,The Inside Story of How a Motley Crew of Outsiders Hijacked the Information Superhighway and Struck a Blow for Human Freedom,” Ken McCarthy writes: “W...

$6.7 million. That’s how much mega financial publisher Marketwise paid out to copywriters in royalties in 2024. And now they’re making an offer so good we had to rush today’s special guest, top copywriter and best-selling author Glenn Fisher, on the show to tell you about it. The offer is simple, yet overwhelming: FREE training from Marketwise to 12 lucky copywriters… and one of them will be offer...

Most copywriters know the classics of our field—but today we’re drawing from a master whose work predates modern advertising by more than two millennia. In this episode of Copywriters Podcast, we’re unpacking Sun Tzu’s The Art of War—a book written over 2,500 years ago, yet still shaping strategy for business titans like Elon Musk and Marc Benioff. While it was originally written as a guide to mil...

It may have been the furthest thing from what he was thinking when our special guest today, John Caprani, ventured into copywriting. But he’s come up with a fascinating specialty that’s worth paying attention to, and that’s Local Celebrity Advertising. See, we all know what so-called “omnipresence” is online. That’s when your prospects see you everywhere, and so they become familiar with you, in t...

One way that AI can save you from expending massive amounts of blood, sweat and tears is a way that a lot of people aren’t using. And that involves its incredible ability to analyze, find trends, and organize information. On the face of it, all that sounds pretty boring and hardly applicable to copywriters and business owners. But today’s returning champion, Cath Reohorn, has used her impressive i...

Can you picture yourself having the guts and imagination to bring 14 of the top copywriters in the business together to share their best action steps using AI to make money and/or save time? I certainly couldn’t, but our guest today is an adventurous man and a successful copywriter-wrangler. Because he did it. Please welcome John McIntyre, who recently invited me and a host of others. This wasn’t...