Copywriters Podcast

For as long as I remember, new people coming into direct response marketing believe that the old rules no longer apply, and they are in an entirely new game. It’s just human nature. As bestselling author Robert Heinlein told the Washington Post in a 1984 interview, “every younger generation that has ever come along thinks they invented sex.” This comes to mind because of a comment I saw the other...

It’s kind of unusual when someone you work with bursts into your office with an urgent problem, and then you proceed to develop a solution to that problem and simplify it over the next 10 years, and then your solution ends up becoming one of the most important books in business history. But that’s what happened with our Old Masters Series selection today. Its origin story, nearly 100 years ago, be...

It turns out in the larger world of culture and fashion, we’ve reached a breaking point. This is important for copywriting because of something we’ve always known and practiced, and today we’re going to take a wide-ranging look at the opposing forces of perfection, which is not real, and authenticity, which is not perfect. Both perfection and authenticity have been used to sell stuff. And we’ve se...

He is known for one of the most famous sayings in copywriting: “Enter the conversation already going on in the prospect’s mind.” Yet most copywriters don’t know much about him, or even who he is. That would be Robert Collier, who introduced the concept to copywriting 90 years ago, when he published The Robert Collier Letter Book. I first learned about the book from Gary Halbert, more than 30 years...

Somewhere near you, right now, there's a store with a whole aisle of spiral notebooks marked down to 79 cents. The gargantuan engines of the big yellow buses are getting tuned up or are already tuned up and ready to roll.  Pencils are getting sharpened.  And millions of kids are about to get something most adults never get anymore: A fresh start. A new year of learning. Think about that. Stude...

How do you make the transition from having a job to being a freelance copywriter? Or, maybe more to the point, if you’re already a freelancer, how do you do what you do and get all the advantages of being a business? Most copywriters don’t know. It took me years to find out and figure it out myself. Today we’re going to drastically shorten the learning curve for a lot of listeners. Our returning c...

Nathan came up with the idea for this show, and it started, of all places, in his mom’s kitchen. Here’s what happened:  If Mom says dinner will be ready in 30 minutes, Nathan is much less likely to go digging through the fridge. So if she wanted to stop him from digging through the fridge, she wouldn’t have to say a word about the fridge. She could just start cooking dinner. Think about that for a...

I was rummaging around on youtube when I came across this video with an outrageous claim: “This book literally teaches you to think like a Harvard lawyer.” My skepticism shot into high gear, but when I watched the video, from a youtube educator named Stephan L. Petro, I saw he was on the level. I’ll tell you about the book in a minute. It’s really valuable for any copywriter, because it will help...

This week I had a great conversation with a Hollywood screenwriting coach and screenwriter himself, and it reminded me about how much people in Hollywood know that copywriters can learn and use. One of his most important points was there are structures that make stories work. Not rigid formulas or two-dimensional templates, but guidelines with benchmarks that have proven time and time again to act...

Today we’re continuing with Part 3 of our Old Masters Series, focusing on the contributions of Albert Lasker.  That’s because in 1898, Albert Lasker arrived in Chicago to work at Lord and Thomas, which he took over in only a few years. And what Lasker and the copywriters he hired would do over the next 10 years would change the course of advertising. We’ve covered lessons in Parts 1 and 2 of this...

The world of copywriting and ecommerce almost changed forever last September 29, when Open AI launched something called Instant Checkout. This new service was designed to let you seamlessly buy something right from Chat GPT. Instant Checkout crashed and burned over the next six months for a number of reasons. One, the infrastructure wasn’t there to let it happen. It was launched before there were...

Today we’re continuing with our Old Masters Series focus on the contributions of Albert Lasker. This is Part 2. Lasker is the one person in history who, more than anyone else, created the foundation for what advertising is today—at least direct response advertising. On today’s show, we’re going to review some more of the most important lessons we have learned resulting from his innovations more th...

Albert Lasker didn't just become one of advertising's biggest names—he helped invent the way modern direct response marketing works. In this episode of the Old Masters Series, we explore the principles that transformed advertising from clever announcements into measurable sales systems. You'll hear the stories behind the ideas that influenced generations of copywriters, from Claude Hop...

Our special guest today didn’t start out planning to be a copywriter, but found his way into it after posting online reviews of his favorite martial arts movies in college, and getting his writing compared to that of Dan Kennedy. He looked up Dan and found what he had to say interesting. But he didn’t become a copywriter or a marketer at the time. Instead, he finished his degree and went from job...

Last week, we did a show on how content marketing is failing direct marketers when you do it the way everyone else does it. Basically, social media encourages you to crave attention and approval, instead of get results. Nathan asked me if we could a completely different version of the show, where we focus on including direct response elements in our content marketing. I thought that was a great id...

Our returning champion today is Kim Krause Schwalm, and she is going to share some amazing and unique information with you. The late Clayton Makepiece, a legend himself in copywriting, said, and I quote: “Kim Krause Schwalm is one of the hottest copywriters alive.” Here’s a little background: Kim was always a marketer who could write copy. Before she launched her freelance career in 1998, she spen...

If you’ve always wondered about content marketing, you’re not alone. It’s a confusing term and there’s no standard definition to describe what it means. It really depends on your point of view. Well, we have a point of view on this podcast, and it is the point of view of direct-response copywriting. Now, to be sure, not EVERY word you write is part of a sales letter, even from our point of view. B...

Social media can be a HUGE waste of time, but sometimes when you’re scrolling you come upon a gem. I did last week, and it led to all kinds of crazy thoughts. I was on Twitter/X, and I discovered this post by lesser known but A-plus screenwriting expert Tom Vaughan, who has written eight films. On Twitter/X, he wrote: I have noticed many younger writers prefer to forgo a romance in their screenpla...

If you’re noticing the advertising landscape changing a lot and changing fast, it’s not your imagination playing tricks on you. Things really are changing. Our special guest a few weeks ago, Mike Pavlish, pointed this out. He noted that “ugly” ads were outperforming “pretty” ones–that is, user-generated content, UGC, homemade ads of a sort, were vastly outperforming slick, polished, high-productio...

People always talk about opening your copy with a story, but most of the time, when you say what kind of story, they’ll look at you like you’re an idiot and say, “Hero’s journey, of course,” like there were no other viable options. Well, the problem with that is, the way the great purveyors of hero’s journey stories, Hollywood Screenwriters, use them is as a macro story. The whole two hour movie i...

Think about these two things: First, learning to write copy, and Second, then actually writing it. Wouldn’t it be nice if those two things, learning to write copy and then doing it, were free of confusion , anxiety, and terror ? That was the burning question that started me on the path of mentoring copywriters. I wanted to make it happen. Because early on, I had such a rough time learning myself....

Today we have the fourth and final installment of our hit Old Masters Series segment, Copywriting 101.  We’ll be talking about the last seven fundamentals. And if that little voice in your head is asking, “What the heck are we doing reviewing fundamentals?! ”, let me remind you of what basketball legend Michael Jordan said: “Get the fundamentals down and the level of everything you do will rise.”...

Our returning champion Mike Pavlish has written dozens of VSLs that have brought in $10 million or more. In fact, over the last 30 years, Mike’s copy has brought in over $810 million in sales. And his work is still bringing in the big bucks today. How good is Mike? On his website he’s got testimonials from legends like Gary Bencivenga and Bob Bly. But this one from an eye doctor named David Tavel,...

We’re going through massive and disruptive upheavals all over the place, and of course copywriting is no exception. I’m seeing the need for a complete mindset shift to survive, thrive and even dominate in copywriting. It’s curious to me that the mindset shift is a return to the garden. I know that phrase means a lot of things, depending upon your background. What I mean by a return to the garden i...

As we return to our hit Old Masters Series segment, Copywriting 101, I’d like to let you know that the first edition of John Caples’s book Tested Advertising Methods was published in 1932–that’s 94 years ago! Caples updated the book more than once over the decades–the last edition was published in 1998. But the interesting thing is, over that 60 plus year span, the fundamentals remained the same....