Curing Copywriting Amnesia, Writing Viral Threads, And Success Shortcuts | Espresso Hour Q&A E4

Boom. Welcome to another episode of the Digital Writing Espresso Hour, where the running joke is, it's much shorter than an hour because we are once again hyped up on double espressos. Let's dive right into the first question Pedro asks. If you guys woke up tomorrow with copywriting amnesia, how would you get better at writing again as fast as possible? Books, courses, hand copying from good examples. So we'll link to a Twitter thread I wrote on this in the show notes. But basically I distilled my process for learning copywriting because when I dove into the world, I immediately was overwhelmed. Where I thought I needed to read every book, take every course, study every sales letter, kind of research every technique, and immediately was overwhelmed. So what ended up actually working for me was picking one copywriter and just diving into everything they've created. So what I did was I went down the rabbit hole of Craig clemens. I downloaded 10 podcasts he spoke on, 10 books or 10 articles he wrote and 10 sales letters that he put together. And I just studied those. So I kind of limited the universe of what I could go study, knowing that if I was studying one of the best people, that was going to take care of itself. Importantly, from there, I distilled everything I learned. So first was just kind of a complete immersion. I was like, get me into this world. What's the jargon? Who's doing it well? How do I understand this stuff? And then once I kind of got my feet wet and probably spent 10, 15 hours just kind of soaking in it, I said, okay, let's create a one page breakdown of everything that I just learned. And I ended up writing a Twitter thread on it. Once you just take those two steps of I'm going to dive into someone who is playing this game well, and then I'm going to distill everything I learned publicly, importantly, the public part. Because if you are sharing your learnings in public, you're going to do a better job distilling them versus if you just say, oh, yeah, I'm understanding this right, and they end up in the back of a Apple Notes notebook for forever and never get seen again. So when you publish something, it's going to force you to distill it, it's going to force you to learn it, it's going to force you to better understand it. So that was kind of my framework. And then from there I kind of expanded where, okay, I went down the rabbit hole one person. Now let's actually use that person to generate recommendations on what to learn next. So after studying Craig, I said, what books did Craig learn with? What people did Craig look up to? And he recommended the Boring Letters, Writing that Works and the adweek Advertising Handbook. I downloaded all three of those bottom put them on my desk and read those. So I think that's just a more general framework for learning. Don't try to take everything. Pick one person who's playing the game well, study them relentlessly, distill what you learned and then use them and the resources they used to learn to say, okay, I'm going to now kind of explore from there.

That's a great answer. I think all of sales copy can be summarized in one sentence, which is benefits, not features. You know, there, there's a lot to be learned from the sales copy legends and there's a, there's a lot of really great resources out there, but they all point back to the same thing, which is learning to not talk about you yourself, your company, your brand, your product, your service, and instead talk about the customer. The customer's wants, the customer's needs, the customer's questions, the customer's dreams and aspirations. All sales copy is is you describing the state that your target customer wants to be in. Where sales copy goes wrong is when you spend all that time saying, well, here's all these things that we have. No one really cares all the things that you have. They don't care if it takes one step or 100 steps. They just want to know is the outcome that they desire going to happen. So sales copy is just unhooking your brain from let me talk about myself to let me talk about the customer.

Yeah. This was one of Craig's key frameworks and it's right copy. That is the conversation the person you're targeting is having in their head. So use the words that are using, ask the questions they're asking. The goal is to make them say, I don't know how you understand my problem so clearly. Which is why a lot of the easiest businesses or products to create are problems that you've solved for yourself in the last two years because you know exactly what those struggles were or what those problems were or what those issues or what the dream outcome was. Right. It's much easier to write copy where you used to be the target customer versus I'm going to go create a skincare brand for middle aged moms. You know, I would have a lot of struggle trying to write copy for that. But with ship 30, I knew all the problems that a beginner writer was facing who wasn't publishing as Much as they'd like so that the copy basically wrote itself because I just wrote a letter to my former self like hey, what are you struggling with? And answered all those. All right, next question. Mike asks why do we need writing now more than in the past? So Cole, I know you have some thoughts on this one.

Yeah, I think both we were chatting about this before we hopped on and I think we both have really different but important answers here. So the main thing this makes me think about is, especially in a post Covid world, think about how much now happens over text. It already happened a lot, but think about how much more now happens over text. We work remotely, we communicate with coworkers via Slack, Microsoft Teams, zoom chat, email. A lot of the most efficient marketing vehicles are text emails, automated emails. You think about video and how short form video is accelerating. Well, most people who do short form video well script out what they're going to say before they say it. So writing is literally everywhere. And I like to not think about it as like you could almost rephrase this question as why do we need clear thinking now more than in the past? Because it's not really about writing. Right? Writing is the vehicle for clear thinking. And clear thinking is exceedingly important when you're trying to communicate with team members that are all over the world, or you're trying to communicate an idea in a 30 second video, or you're trying to communicate an idea that's gonna be inside an automated sequence that's gonna run 365 days a year. Clarified thinking is so important in the digital age because everything is accelerated in the digital age. Everything is scaled infinitely. So if something isn't clear, that lack of clarity is being scaled and if something is clear, that clarity is being scaled. So I like to think of it more along those lines is like think of writing as your ability to clarify and scale what it is that you're trying to say. And if you aren't able to get clarity, then the downside is just as magnified.

I think Naval said writing is programming for the human brain, right? So both your brain learning how to think and if you want to communicate your ideas, you need to clearly write about them. I just see writing as the foundation for all creative work. So YouTube videos, like you said, with short form videos, look at the best performing short form it is there is not a wasted word. So a fun exercise I've been doing when I see someone posting a YouTube short that's like 20 seconds, that has a ton of views, I'll actually Write out every single word that they said in that. And I also do this with YouTube scripts like Take a Mr. Beast Hook, Write it out and tell me that is not a clear, concise, not a single wasted word. And that all starts with writing. So we think about video as something different. You're just talking out something that you wrote. So writing is the foundation for any kind of creative music writing video. It's all writing.

Another interesting thing we were talking about too is how is the role that writing and organic content now plays in the paid ads era that we're kind of watching break apart. What do you think about that, Dickie?

My take is that what we saw with Facebook we where you could start with building an audience there and then it all eventually went paid. Is the return on creating a high quality written organic content engine is never been more important I think because as we move potentially away from the hyper targeted paid ads, you're going to be far more reliant on building up a potential customer base of loyal readers rather than being able to find them directly. And the only way you're going to be able to do that is through your writing. So in terms of yes, writing was important in the paid ads era, but differentiated high quality educational or entertaining writing is so much more valuable when the difference between your product being successful or unsuccessful is no longer is Facebook helping me target the right people, but it's is my writing attracting the right people? So that's my take is that in the age of organic content taking over paid advertising content, which I think we're heading to, I don't have a strong view on that. But I know that organic content is not going to get less important today than it is right now. It is as important as it's ever been. It's only going to get more important. All right, another good question here. Scott asks. We all know there is no easy path to success. However, we also know that there are steps along the way that are supercharged or put your business into warp speed. What was that for y'? All? And ship 30. So I'll start with a tactical answer. And so ship 30 will triple in 2020 relative to 2021. And by far the biggest difference was our email marketing and email list growth. So by the end of 2021, I think our newsletter had about 11,000 subscribers and we just hit 51,000 today. So we 5xed in 2022 and that was a concerted effort around. We're going to create a high quality newsletter and we're going to create a High quality free email course. Where opting into our email list is not just, hey, join our newsletter. It's, hey, if you want to learn things that a lot of people would be charging for, subscribe to our newsletter. Our overall framework for this is give away as much free educational content as you can. Because people don't pay for information, they pay for packaging, implementation, speed, outcomes, all those things. So we were able to generate far more emails, which then led, when we would actually go to market the course, a far easier ask because we'd provided so much value for free that when you ask, hey, we have an upcoming cohort, do you want to join? It's a much easier decision for that person to say yes. So the way to kind of think about an email list is you are building equity and then occasionally you extract dividends. Now, a lot of people extract dividends far too much with their email list. So it's build a little bit of equity, Ask, equity, ask. We ran cohorts every nine weeks, so we were providing eight weeks of free educational content. And then one week before, the cohort would say, hey, you know, you've been on our list a long time. Hope you're enjoying it. We have a course coming up and we'd market it that way. So that was the big change that we didn't do almost at all in 2021. We did it in 2022. It's going to lead us to triple or maybe even 4x by the end of the year.

That was a big year. It's a big year. I think that on the tactical side is absolutely the answer. On the higher level, more strategic side, what I really like encouraging other people to, to think about and pay attention to. I actually, I mean, maybe Dickie, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't know of any other course, especially in the Twitter ecosystem, that's by a partnership. It's always one creator, whereas ship 30 has been both of us. Dickie and I have built ship 30 together. And there were both things that we brought to the table that we couldn't do individually. And when we first met, that was the opportunity that we saw. You know, a lot of times when people are thinking about building something, they're very quick to want to. It's a scarcity mindset. They want to, they want to keep all of it for themselves. They. They look at it as a net negative if they partner up with someone. Dickie and I didn't look at it that way. We saw it as, you know, if we partner up this is a one plus one equals 30 million. What is going to supercharge you and your business? Sometimes it's not just a tactical thing. Sometimes it's a very strategic. I'm going to do a partnership with someone. And in the short term, it looks like you're giving up a lot, but in the long term, you're exponentially more successful. And I just always find it interesting how many people try and go at this game by themselves, you know, and it's harder by yourself. You have to acquire more skill sets by yourself. It's lonelier by yourself. But there's so many benefits to finding someone to partner up with.

We definitely got lucky partnering with someone that has complimentary skill sets. Where I think that's where a lot of people struggle is they go, yeah, maybe I'd want to partner with someone, but I don't know where to look. So we're definitely operating from a place of luck in terms of how we were connected. To be fair, looking all the way back then, I don't think either of us could have predicted that this was how things would accelerate. Right. So it wasn't like we're going to fast forward two years and put ourselves in this spot and then make the decision to partner. We were both kind of like, I can speak for myself, that I had almost no clue what I was doing other than providing an accountability Slack channel. Right. And so when I was like, if this is going to go anywhere from a business perspective, it's not just going to be an accountability Slack channel. It was, I needed someone who knew how to write. I was a 4 out of 10 writer, but I was a 9 out of 10 building a writing habit. And so it was very much like Cole had all this educational content, but not as clean of a way to deliver it. And so if you're looking and thinking about your opportunity vehicle, maybe think about what parts am I missing that maybe someone else has? And that's how you form the ideal partnership. All right, last and final question. Sirajo asks, how do you write threads that get viral with a small following? So, Cole, I know you have a strong take on this, and it always makes a bunch of sense when you explain, explain it. So you want to give it a go?

Yeah. I love this question because to me, it reveals how much about the social media digital writing game. A lot of people just don't understand that's, I think, why we're so passionate about writing about it and educating on it, because a lot of people just don't even understand they don't even know how the game works. So let me explain this. The way that all these social platforms are engineered, now, TikTok being the most extreme example, your follower count actually doesn't matter because how you see content and how content gets distributed to you is not based on how many followers you have. How you see and get content distributed is based on what you consume as a consumer. And then the platform goes, I'm going to give you more of that. Right? So when you as a creator regard, if you have one follower, 100 followers or a million followers, here's how these social platforms work. You create a piece of content, and the social platform goes, all right, we're going to go serve that up to a small number of people. We're going to send it to 20 people. So 20 people are going to get that piece of content in their feeds, depending on the ratio. So the percentage of people in that first tranche, the percentage of people that engage with that piece of content, the platform then decides, hey, based on that first little test, oh, not that many people engage with it. We're not going to bother showing it to more people because the first group of people didn't really seem to like it. But if that first group of people, 50% of them engage with it, the platform goes, Whoa, 50% of the first 20 really loved it. Let's go show it to 200. And then they do a second test. And then I go, okay, well, what percentage of the people in the 200 engaged with it? Oh, it was 50%. Again, let's go show it to 2,000 people. 50% again, let's go show it to 20,000 people. Right. And I'm just using an arbitrary percentages. And so what this means is it doesn't matter if you have a large following or a small following. Having a large following doesn't mean that you go viral more often. Either way, whether you have a million followers or you have 10 followers, the social platform is teeing your content up to a small group of people. And how it engages dictates how much further it goes. So this is what's so great about digital writing, is it's not, oh, people will only listen to me, and my content will only get distributed once I have a big following. No, the big following is an indicator that you are able to produce things that people engage with, and then the following comes as a result of that. And so the unlock for people is you don't have to sit around and wait. It doesn't matter. We're all playing the Same game. It's all a discoverability lottery game. And contrary to popular belief, the big creators don't have big audiences just because they one day magically had that or because they hacked the social platform. They have that as a reflection of their ability to consistently write things that a large percentage of people want to keep interacting with, which causes the platform to distribute it.

Yeah, followers are a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator. I mean, Cole, your most viral thing you've ever written came as your first first post on Quora, right? Or something like that, right?

Yeah, I wrote my most viral thing ever to date. I wrote on Quora in 2014 and I had like, I don't know, maybe 4,000 followers on Quora. How does that happen? Right. Because it has nothing to do with followers.

My most viral LinkedIn post was the very first thing I wrote when I had four followers. It was my most popular tweet. So I had a good sense that it was going to work. But if you, you do not need a big following, like I see people say I have some really good ideas that I'm waiting until I have a bigger following to talk about. Right? And it's no, the way you build the big following is you put out high quality ideas with a small following. My Twitter thread that we talked about in the very first Espresso Hour episode, my first viral Twitter thread, I had 600 followers at the time. It really does not matter on these social platforms. So you should also look at that as an advantage. Right? You could start writing today with cool stories or actionable insights or entertaining anecdotes and go viral right away. So it's never been easier to break into these platforms. Right. And so if you're on the fence, like, ah, it's going to take me so long to build up that big following. Yes, it will, but that doesn't mean you're unable to. It's not the chicken or egg. Like, oh, I can't build a following or write anything until I have a big following. You can start from zero. And every tweet is a lottery ticket, right? So every single time you hit publish on something, it has the chance to 10, 20, 100x your following. So the takeaway there is to just get going with it. Boom. That does it for another episode of the Digital Writing Espresso Hour. If you want your questions answered in the next one, there are two things you can do. First, you can respond to us on Twitter. These tweets go out every single Monday. You can respond to Cole on LinkedIn as well. Or you can reply to this video with a question for the next one. Anyone who does that within the first hour of this video going live, we guarantee we will answer. So that does it. Toss a video. Like if you found this valuable, subscribe if you're watching on YouTube or whatever podcast player you're listening to this on, and we will see you in the next one. Have a great rest of the week.