#143: Why It’s Become So Darn Hard to Write Convincing Copy

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia.

Hey there. Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host, Ed Gandia, and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. You can find detailed show notes for this episode@b2b launcher.com forward slash, episode 143 in those notes include a summary of our discussion as well as links to resources we mentioned during the show. And as I talk with fellow copywriters about what's happening in the business, there's one theme that keeps coming up how increasingly difficult it's becoming to write persuasive copy. Now that's long been an issue in the ultra competitive direct response industries of financial newsletters, non natural health, business opportunity, and so forth. In fact, an insider recently shared with me that the copy and promos in some of these markets are quickly turning into a what he feels is a dangerous race to the bottom. But it's also becoming a big challenge in other less aggressive settings, even in the B2B content marketing world. To get some insights and answers on this topic, I recently turned to one of the top conversion copywriters in the business. Joann Joanna is the founder of Copy Hackers and of Air Story, which is a new content creation platform for marketing teams and educators. You don't have to be a direct response copywriter to get value from this episode. I think if you write any kind of persuasive content, you'll find some great insights and some great ideas here. Hope you enjoy. Joanna, welcome. Is so great to talk to you.

Thanks. It's so great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Well, you're someone. You don't know this, but I've been wanting to have here on the show for a while. I love the work you put out there and I love how you think about the craft of writing copy. So I definitely want to dive deeper into this topic with you today. But before we get there, love for you to give us a bit of background, tell us a bit about yourself, the kind of work you do.

Sure. Cool. Well, thanks. I'm excited to be here too, by the way. Thanks. Um, I am a conversion copywriter. We made up the term conversion copywriter, so it's ours. I'm just kidding. Um, I am a conversion copywriter and I've been doing this copywriting thing for about 15 years now, which is a pretty long lifetime for a copywriter, in my experience at least there are some diehards, but a lot of copywriters end up turning into like, oh, I'm gonna go become a marketing manager or something. Which always kills me a little inside. Quite a lot inside. So 15 years I've been doing this. I started out at an agency, a B2B agency. And then I went into. I went to be the senior copywriter at intuit, makers of TurboTax, QuickBooks, all that fun finance stuff. And then after that I went out on my own to start a little business that is called Copy Hackers. And that's where I got to work with ton of cool clients like Wistia, Buffer, Crazy Egg, metalab, lots of cool stuff. So yeah, that's kind of the short version of moi.

And when did you go out on your own?

Actually, I was shocked to realize it was seven years ago. So in October this year I had a moment of realization that it was. It's been seven years because it started seven years ago. So 2010, I gu guess is when I went out on my own, which is crazy. I can't believe it's been that long. I actually now I'm questioning it, like how could it been that long? But yeah, that's when I did it.

That's awesome. That's great. And that would a great background to go out on your own. Right. Because one of the challenges a lot of people have, at least my listeners, many of my listeners come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Many of them don't have, you know, that agency background or they've been writing copy forever. They've been writing and they're good at what they do, but they're kind of starting. They learn the craft and then they go out on their own. You had a great educational experience there with agencies and Intuit and so forth.

Yeah, like you don't realize obviously when it's happening because I completely fell into what I do, but it's you. If I could do it over again knowing that it would work out like it did, I would do it largely the same way. Because that agency experience in the beginning, even though you're getting paid junk like the idea you're barely getting paid if we're being real. Like you're just at the poverty level in most cases when you're starting out as a copywriter at an agency. So it's like, oh, how long do I have to do this? But so valuable for people who are like struggling with copywriting. I again and again Recommend, like, just take a pay cut, go and work for an agency for a while. It's a really good start. And then of course, moving into Intuit where it was super data driven and we did a lot of AB testing. That gave me a really nice balance against the grade of copywriting that I started with.

Now you said you kind of fell into this, so how did that happen? You obviously didn't, you know, when you were a kid, didn't dream about becoming a copywriter.

What's weird is that I would watch who's the Boss? And Angela, the mother, was in advertising and I would go like, that's so neat. She gets to like come up with ideas and like present them to clients. It was cool, but I didn't know it was a thing like that. It was a thing that she did because she lived in America and I was being raised in the interior of British Columbia, Canada. There are not a lot of advertising agencies around. So you don't think that it's a thing. But. No, but I didn't grow up wanting to be a copywriter. I totally fell into it. I didn't really know what marketing was. When I got my first job at the marketing agency, like, it was B2B marketing. Word of mouth marketing was the core of this business of the agency that I was working at. But I, yeah, I fell into it. I was supposed to be in law school when. So the day I started law school, my dad passed away. And so that changed like everything. Like, that's a really sudden wake up call or at least a hold on, let's pay attention to some things more than just like kind of floating through life. So I was just kind of doing, I took, I deferred my admission to law school for a year. And so like, well, maybe I'll just like figure something else out in the meantime. I don't know, I'll work at Starbucks, just whatever. I just didn't have mentally what it took to go and do law school at that point. And then my friend was working at an agency at. She was the assistant, she was answering phones and things like that. And she's like, well, we've got, you know, an opening coming up for a creative writer here. And I was like, oh, that sounds interesting. At an advertising agency? What? Like Angela from who's the Boss? So I applied, went through, got that job. But that's really how I fell into it. I didn't, I didn't know. She had to. My friend had to explain marketing to me and I was just like, what do you mean marketing? So what, what is this market I don't like? I was really dense with it. I had a degree in English, which is a great degree to have for a lot of reasons, but it did not teach me anything about marketing. So, yeah, that's just. There was a. It was a stumbling and then tumbling in process to actually get started in copywriting.

Well, so you know, you mentioned who's the boss. I'm convinced that, you know, in 20 years we're going to see people who grew up watching Mad Men and said, when I saw that as a kid, I said, that's what I want to do.

Isn't Mad Men the best? Like, Mad Men, like, validates all the work that we do. Unless you don't need validation. I'm someone who likes like, oh, see, that's what I do. It's close to that. It's a little bit like what he does, right?

Yeah. Because most people in my circle of influence in my network, they have no idea that people actually get paid to write that. They just like, this is so foreign to them that they don't get it. Well, so let's talk a little bit about where things are today in copywriting. And this is interesting because I just had a conversation with a colleague last month about this. And then I know you've talked about this as well, several times. You make the point that it's getting harder and harder to write convincing copy. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Yeah, so I get, I get a little frustrated. So as a conversion copywriter, part of that is having, and a lot all. I mean, most copywriters feel the same way or have the same kind of approach to things that a conversion copywriter does, largely by and large. But part of it is that you need to be constantly in the know about user experience or ux. You need to know about SEO. You need to know about obviously conversion rate optimization, inbound marketing, content marketing, all the whole world of digital marketing. But, but the user experience part of it, the UX side is the. Is the most frustrating for me as a copywriter and it's making it harder to write convincing copy. And here's what I mean. UX is largely controlled or created and then controlled by the Nielsen Norman Group. And they're very similar smart people there and people who are branching off of that and not even affiliated with Nielsen Norman Group. There's this whole world of user experience and they all have the best intentions, I'm sure of it. Just like I have the best intentions. My intentions, however, as a copywriter are to not just go with the natural inclination of the user to, let's say, scan a page for what they're looking for, but rather to try to get them to pay attention to things that they might not have otherwise paid attention to. So what? So user experience and people who love talking about user experience, they'll hold that People don't read online. That's like the thing that people say, oh, people don't read online. People don't read online. And it's this huge excuse to get your copy down to basically the shortest possible version itself. Like, I was just on this landing page for Asana, the project management solution which I use and love, and the landing page headline is in this huge text. Move work forward. And a lot of user experience people would be like, great. And I'm not. Now if you're in user experience, you're like, joanna, that's not true for all of us. I'm not saying it's true for everybody. But there's this prevailing narrative that people just don't read online and you have to get everything down to as few words as humanly possible. And then, and only then have you done your job as a copywriter. To our great shock, when we do that, nobody converts, right? Like, nobody actually moves because they told us they don't want to read online. And we pay attention to them scrolling around looking for things and say, see, they just want to move really, really quickly. Like, let's do things to let them move quickly. Let's make it a really scannable PA and let's make our emails like two sentences with a call to action. And that's what we're going to do because that's what users need. But that's not, that's not how it works. That's not how we can actually convert people. Move work forward as a three word headline is a tragedy from my point of view. Like as a conversion copywriter, I look at that and I weep because I know, I know that the world thinks that that's the way you're supposed to write copy today. They're all then cool. Most people are cool with accepting a 1 to 2% conversion rate or with saying, you know, it's just really hard to convert people online, guys, so we're just going to have to like start hiring sales forces and things like that. When the reality is that in my, in my experience, and this could be biased by the things that I've read and the tests that I've done and maybe there's another point of view out there that's like, that could help me not be so angry about this stuff. But people need to read online. And people do read online. They do. Hello. Hi. Content marketing is entirely based on people reading online. And it's like changing everything for everybody. So people can read online. They're just being trained to scan online by the short, meaningless copy that we're writing for, quote unquote, scanning eyes. And the designs that that copy is put in that again, the design is built with the idea that nobody is going to pay attention. So let's just make everything as short as humanly possible and we'll add bright colors around it and hope that that grabs their attention. So that's for me, we're pulling out the best of what copywriting can do. All of the greats are rolling over in their graves like thinking like, oh my gosh, how is this happening? How did we leave this world behind with all of our great lessons to write to get people to say yes, only to have them shorten everything down to three word headlines. So that's for me, we're training people in the wrong direction. And then we're shocked when they don't read what we wrote because we wrote boring crap that was not made for anybody to sit and actually consume. It's like pandering to all the wrong things about people. So that's my point of view.

Well, then I think what you're, what I'm getting out of that argument, I think is extremely valid is that it's faulty logic. Just because people don't read as fast online. Because I know that's the other argument and I do believe that's true. You don't read as fast on a computer screen as you do on paper. That doesn't mean that they don't read online. I mean, I'm reading all the time on my computer screen. It just, I used to, at first I remember because I'm such a dead tree guide that I would print stuff out. I'm like, I, this is right, but, but now it's just not practical. I mean the speed of business and it's just, it's not. And then I wasn't reading the stuff that I was print, which is not good. But the logic that, okay, if people read less and we live in an environment right now where people just want the headline, right the snippet, then let's just give them that. But that's not how you make it easier for them to read online. User experience is not about, let's give Them a three word statement. Right. It's like, might as well then send them to a page with a buy button that says buy my stuff.

Totally.

You're saying let's make it easier, more palatable. But that doesn't necessarily translate into let's just give them a three word headline. That's meaningless because it's very difficult to write a powerful three word headline.

Exactly. And so part of this problem. So a couple things with that. Right? The difficulty. No, like writing for scanners can't be the first thing we think about. It should be something that we consider. Just like we should consider voice and tone, just like we should consider reducing risk. All the things that we should consider in the editing stage. But it can't be the always go to place when we're writing copy. And I have friends and user experience. I'm not against user experience. User experience is huge. My problem is people who read a single blog post about user experience where they got, oh, people don't read online. Nielsenorman Group said. And they've been saying it for years. People don't read online. So people don't read online. So we're never going to put like more words than I, random Joe Marketer would read online. So that's like, it's this consumption of little pieces of information which of course we all know that's a dangerous thing, right? A little bit of knowledge. It's that and then the strange application of that little bit that you've learned. So copywriters in the end are left on teams that are responsible for increasing conversion rates. They are using words. The copywriters are using the words that are supposed to be your online salesperson. But we're really asking them to be a salesperson who's only allowed to use three words to grab the prospect's attention. So I'm shopping in a retail environment and the salesperson that comes up to me can only use three to six words and they have to be right. Like this is. We know that's like nutty. And that's not to say that a headline should be the opening of a conversation like, hey, how's it going? What are you looking for today? I'm not saying that either. But we're putting these really strange unfounded rules around the very thing that is meant to help us grow our business in a scalable way. And that is copy. And so that's my frustration on an ongoing basis. It never ends. I'm constantly mad.

Well, because I think we've taken our eye off the ultimate goal the ultimate goal is to get that conversion, to get that result. And at the end of the day, and this will never change. This is really about what does the prospect care about? What is their pain? And that is a different conversation or a different question from, you know, how can we make it shorter?

Right, right.

Those are two different things. So totally.

I think their pain has to be like, visceral. Right. If we know their pain, we usually need more words than fewer words. It doesn't mean always, but at least to start getting specific enough for people to feel like you're inside their head. We're going to need more than three words in our headline. We're going to need more than six words in many cases in our headline. Not always, but in like every time. I've written headlines. Yes. So, Ed, I'm all frustrated now.

Well, I didn't mean to bring your blood pressure up. I just thought this would be fun to talk about. But. But you know what, since we're on the topic. Right. You talked about what prospects want, what they need. You mentioned another key reason why it's so difficult and that has to do more with where they are in the buyer's journey. Because I think that's another thing we're forgetting about at least a lot of quote unquote experts. So tell us about that.

Yeah. So anybody who's read Gene Schwartz or any of the oldies knows about stages of awareness. And if you don't know what stages of awareness, great, now's the time to learn. It will change the way you write almost everything. So stages of awareness have always existed. That's kind of called a funnel today, or at least it maps well to what we call funnels today based on where a person is, what stage of awareness they're in. On the awareness spectrum, that largely dictates what we need to say and how long we need to take before we can actually get them to convert. So if the five core stages of awareness are, let's start with the far end. Unaware. Okay, so I'm unaware. I'm just going to quickly go through these because I'm sure a lot of your listeners, Ed, know, but then there are some people who won't. So, okay, unaware people are your prospects. Again, they're still prospects, but they're unaware. They haven't felt their pain. They might have heard of your brand, they might know your products, but they haven't felt anything that helps them understand how your product relates to their lives and their needs. So they're just unaware. It's like if you Are happy with your, with your rotary phone. You know that iPhones exist, that's fine. But you've got your rotary phone and you haven't felt any pain that would make anything that would make you go shopping for an iPhone. Okay, fine, so you're unaware. Then there's pain aware, the next one where you're starting to feel some pain. Pain, problem aware, whatever you want to say. Okay, so I felt some pain, but I don't know what the solutions are yet. So then the next phase, the next stage awareness is solution awareness. I've gone from unaware to feeling pain and now I'm looking for solutions. I may be shopping for them. I'm seeing what's good and what's bad that's out there in that. Right after that I become product aware. I should become product aware of your product. So I've heard of the solutions and I've identified that your product is one of those solutions. But I don't yet know if it's right for me. And then most aware is when you're in that real decision making stage, decision making around actually exchanging money for value. And that's where we want to get people to. That's where the buying largely happens, in my experience as a conversion copywriter at least. So if people, our prospects are along this stage of awareness, they're at some point on stage of awareness. We need to know where they are when they join the page, when they start reading the email, when they click on the Facebook ad, whatever it might be. And this requires, of course, that you have different versions of things for different people in different stages of awareness. But we have to know where they are in order to get them all the way through the spectrum to most aware. Most aware with high intent. If we're only writing for scanners and if we're not thinking about these stages of awareness and the need to move people through them. So often I see people, I was going to qualify that. So often I see people jump straight into. Okay, well we want to get them into our free trial for our product. So always put your free trial button up at the top. Just like they'll want it, they'll click it. Yeah, people will click any. You put a button in front of people, a lot of them are likely to click it. Are they ready yet? People? Designers love designers, lots of friends who are designers. But there's this pressure and even like templates that you might buy to like run your small business on templates for WordPress and things like that, they're all putting buttons at the top of the page, like in the hero section. And so if you think you have to lead with a button like this is, this is the problem is these design conventions where you have designs in place that have nothing to do with where your prospect is really at and the offer they need. So if I'm your prospect and I'm pain Aware, I land on your page, I'm top of bundle, essentially, I land on, let's say, your landing page. If you try to get me from pain Aware, I'm joining Pain Aware. If you want me to buy your product by the end of this page, you're gonna need a long form sales page. You definitely need, oh, you have to move me through all the stages of awareness on that single page. People want that, marketers want that. They're like, well, if we're paying to bring traffic here, we want them to convert. We have to make back money on this. So we're going to put a buy now button up at the top and we're just going to give them an incentive to join or a discount to buy right now or we're going to use urgency. We're going to throw a whole bunch of social proof at them. We're going to do all the things that Cialdini says to do in his book. We're going to do it all on top of this page, no matter what stage of awareness our prospect is in. And then shockingly, it might convert better than not having incentives at the top, but it might also lead to refunds and churn and people not actually using the product because they were only in pain Aware. They were maybe at the beginning of the pain aware stage. And you want to move them through solution, through product, all the way to most. Most are with high intent and you want to do that fast. Like you have to have a 99 cent product for that to work. Like you can't do that for most of the products that we're trying to sell. So this complete ignorance, I would say I'm using a hard word there, but it is a lot of ignorance around stages of awareness and the way that you actually have to move people through like what they're going to need to learn before actually get to the place of a paid conversion or even signing up for your free trial. Short of paying attention to that, like if you don't pay attention to that and you ask your copywriter to write something, a page with a weird goal, like a weird conversion metric, you're, you're going to struggle to write convincing copy, the copy will Struggle to be convincing. It won't. It won't be convincing. So Those are my two problems. I got more problems than that. I got 99 problems.

Well, I really can't help you with most of them, but this one I think we can solve. No, but you bring up a great point, is if everyone's going to be different, then how can you expect to move the people on the far left all the way to the right in one page? It's just impossible. Not with all these constraints. So here's the natural question, Joanna. So how do we do that? How do we segment our visitors a little better? I know this is like we could do. You could write a whole book on that. But generally speaking, how can we do a better job, especially when we're facing pressure from clients to try to get this done? How can we educate them a little better? How can we have an intelligent discussion about how to solve the real problem?

Yes. Great. And one of the good things about the opportunity here when you're segmenting, and we definitely talked about just a second, in my experience, at least, is that if you're taking on clients, this. This is how you get bigger projects. If you become a person they can talk to about personalizing and segmenting their content, they need all of that written so your project gets bigger. Instead of writing one landing page that's there to try to convert everybody who joins it, you can say, okay, we're going to write this landing page for these, you're going to put Facebook ads out there. Every one of those needs its own landing page, because each one of these ads is speaking to somebody in a different stage of awareness with different pain points, etc. So instead of being the person that your client goes to and says, hey, can you write this landing page? We're going to drive a whole bunch of traffic to it. Just leave with the value prop or something like that. Cool. You got it. Instead of having that, you can have a better discussion around, okay, well, let's look at who's coming to the page and then create more pages, a selection of pages for them. That's the kind of clunky way to do it, right? But it's actually good for getting your billable hours or your project rate up. And it's good for the client and for the prospect, too, because you're at least starting to put together pages with messages that are targeted to where the person is on the stage. Awareness, which means you'll have the right offer at the end of the page, et cetera, et cetera. So it's good for everybody. It's just expensive upfront for the client. But the goal is for it to pay off better anyway because you're doing the right thing. But then there are, of course, if you move outside of that clunky approach, you can use real tools to do this. I don't know, Ed, if you're familiar with Brennan Dunn.

Yeah, absolutely. He's doing some amazing stuff in this area.

Right with. Right. His tool is called Write Message. And I think it's going to be available soon. I mean, there are already personalization suites like Optimizely, which is an AB testing platform, has personalization as an option as well. Great. Write Message is built, which is Brennan's tool platform. It is built to help you personalize each of those experiences. So when your client, if you're coaching your client on the stages of awareness, let's say. And you say, like, you know what, guys, we've got people who are like in. We've got real prospects coming to this landing page that you have today. Some of them, we did a survey. However you find this out or whatever. We can talk about that if there's time, which I don't think there is. But if you can identify that, let's say, okay, we've got people who are coming here that are problem aware, and then we've got people coming to this page who are most aware because we're, let's say we're driving retargeting ads to the same landing page that we're driving our not retargeting ads to on Facebook. We need to at least have two different pages here. So you can do those different pages or you can do the personalization of each page of a single page. Just of course, that you still have to write new copy for each of them. But you basically, with a tool like Write Message, you install a little line of line of code. It identifies people like the visitors to the page. It helps you understand more about where they're coming from and what that might mean if they've engaged with your brand before or not. That's a big part of this. Right. If they've engaged with your brand before, we can assume that they're further along in the awareness spectrum. It's still not a perfect thing because you're still assuming. But we can make that better assumption instead of just writing a page that's like, let's say for everybody pretending that nobody is new to or that everybody's new to your brand, when in fact you know that they're not so a personalization platform can help you use the data that's already out there to better strategize and then actually write or execute against that strategy for these targeted groups. And again, that could be based on stages of awareness or any other way that you're identifying how much people know about your brand or not.

I love that. And I can, you know, when I, when I found out what he was doing, I thought, you know, this is brilliant. I can't believe nobody has come up with this before. Right. Because that is the holy grail right there. How can we automate the segmentation aspect from, from a visitor standpoint now? So if, assuming we don't have that in place because it's going to be a while before we're really there, before that goes mainstream. Okay, what maybe a couple of suggestions you might have. If we're working with a client, we're really trying to help from a consulting standpoint to better address some of these different audiences.

Yeah. The easiest way that I could recommend going about this is to sell your client on a long form sales page. And then once you've got that long form sales page in place, a long form sales page exists to move people from that early stage awareness through to most aware with high intent. Once you've got that sales page written, you can start I picture, I'm not going to describe how I picture because every time I say people are like, what are you talking about? But you're really taking sections of the page like you can, Once you've got the long form sales page written, you can take pieces out of it and you can chop that sales page up into four different landing pages that you use as like a sort of nurturing sequence with emails in between. If you were to do that, if you were to write a long form sales page and then I'm using air quotes here, but you're effectively chopping that page up into different individual pages and then putting emails together to nurture people through them. Then you'd have individual landing pages that tell one long story that get. And it doesn't have to be the same story, but that like move people from one place all the way through the place you need them to be. And you can land people new prospects on each landing page then as you learn about them. So if you've written this long form sales page and then you chop it up into, let's say four different landing pages, just taking exactly what's there and chopping it up that way, then from there you, as somebody signs up who indicates that they're, you know, only in pain, aware, like they've signed up for a lead magnet. That that indicates clearly to you that these are people who are just feeling the pain, yet they haven't started exploring solutions to it. They don't necessarily identify that your product exists or is a solution and they're just not ready to buy something yet. You could then land those people join your list. They get sent to that top, that first page that you created around the problem. That would have been the top of your long form sales page. Alternatively, you could drive them straight to the long form sales page and see if you can convert them that way too. But once you. What I absolutely do is write, is do the quote on the long form sales page, then see what you can do to chop that up and use the pieces of it to nurture, to join people where they're at, to join the conversations where your prospects are at and then nurture them. You've got all the pieces in place. Once you've written along from a sales page, you have everything you need for a certain sequence, at least to get people to buy. If you're willing to chop that up and look at it more horizontally rather than vertically, then you can start doing really cool things with your clients and with basic tagging in whatever email platform they're using and with basic segmentation inside Facebook and things like that.

I think that's brilliant. I think it's a very practical way of doing it. Plus it allows you as the copywriter to bring value into the relationship. I recommend something that's very doable, but then you were going to do that anyway. But I love the strategy of chopping it up and then just giving different types of buyers what they need at that moment and then nurturing them until they hopefully. What? Perry Marshall. I think a couple other people have used this. I don't know who the originator is, but the bleeding neck, right? Not everyone has a bleeding neck. In fact, very few are have a bleeding neck. So we want to make sure we're there and we're top of mind when the bleeding starts.

Yes. Amen to that.

Love it. Love it. So this has been enlightening and I'm glad it was cathartic for you too. I felt that you needed to get this out.

I just, I can't even. Like I've said it on. I think I might have been at Mozcon, something like that. I was giving a talk and I said, you know, I was basically arguing against Nielsen Norman Group, which is never a Popular thing to do when you're, like, one person up against Goliath, but it's. It's a real thing. And I know. I think if we can just start kind of balancing our view. I'm not saying don't think about user experience. Of course you have to think about that. But while you're thinking about that, think about conversion rate optimization as well. Think about the fact that I love going back to John Caples the first. They sat. They laughed when I sat down the piano. But when I started to play. That ad is a thousand words. Selling people on a lead generation for a book that will teach them to play an instrument from home without a teacher. This is not a great product to sell. I would not line up to sell this product or to write copy for it. People can buy because people will read if you give them something worth reading. He gave people something worth reading with that. He tapped into it with a really long headline. That was emotional. And all of the copy kept pulling you in. People will read online or offline. They will read. We just have to give them something worth reading and then have conversations with people who are saying, there's nobody reading online and just really help them understand that, no, no, people can do this. We've seen a B test that show people. People will read online and then convert.

And even millennials will actually read online, believe it or not.

Well, millennials. What? They're a completely different beast. Just kidding. I know. People with their hatred of millennials, Right? That's always the answer.

Before we sign off, I want to make sure you tell us a bit about copyhackers and airstories. So tell us about both, because I know they're a little different here.

Yeah, well, copy hackers is a place to go to learn how to write what we call conversion copy. So if you're interested in that, you want to see some case studies we've got there that we don't write as case studies. We write them as like, okay, we optimized Wistia's emails. We got 3.5 times the paid conversions. Here are seven things we did that you could go do immediately. Okay, cool. So if you want to get that kind of stuff, go to copyhackers.com, learn there. We have tutorials every Tuesday where I present something about copywriting, and I show you how I do it. Live right there. That's every Tuesday morning. So you can sign up for that. It's free. And then Airstory is the product that we've built. We are about to on December 11, 2017. In case listening to this down the road, we are going with a very free version of the product so you'll be able to work in Airstory. What it is is a writing platform. It's I made it first and foremost to scratch my own itch and what I've seen other copywriters go through as well. But it's really if you're familiar with Agora and copyboarding as a way to write copy, it's all about taking notes, ideas and research and then organizing them on the page in a more meaningful way. So it's a copywriter's platform first and foremost. So do check out Airstory Co and it'll be free right away. So don't be put off by any concerns that it won't be because it will be. So give it a shot.

That is awesome. And I love products that evolve from scratching your own itch. They tend to be the best, so we'll make sure to include those links in the show notes. And Joanna, thank you so much again for coming in today and sharing these ideas. I love talking about this stuff and I just love your enthusiasm around the topic.

That's awesome. Thanks Ed. Thanks for letting me rent and everybody for listening to it.

The High Income Business Writer podcast is a production of B2B business launcher. Learn more at B2B launcher.com.