Geoff: But what they really need help with is actually, sometimes it’s unpacking their messaging, figuring out how to put into briefer, more concise messaging and words what they’re trying to get out there, but, mostly, it’s realizing that writing and marketing copywriting are very different skills, can be very different skills and things to do.

Introduction: Welcome to the Become a Writer Today Podcast with Bryan Collins. Here, you’ll find practical advice and interviews for all kinds of writers.

Bryan: What should every author know about copywriting? Hi, there. My name is Bryan Collins and welcome to the Become a Writer Today Podcast. 

I worked as a copywriter for years while I was self-publishing books and building up my site, Become a Writer Today. Copywriting is a fantastic discipline for any type of writer because it forces you to clarify your words and ideas into language that readers and customers understand. It also helps you sell more copies of your book, which is always nice.

Now, my journey into copywriting was accidental. I started out as a journalist, wasn’t a very good journalist, I was unemployed for quite a while, but I managed to land a few copywriting gigs on the side and, eventually, I got a job working as a copywriter for the British software company, Sage.

I learned many things while I was working for Sage. I met some smart marketers and smart people within the business, but people were always surprised when I was able to take a piece of documentation or a PowerPoint presentation about accounting software and turn it into language that was publishable on a sales page. They were surprised because, for many people, turning complex ideas into everyday language is quite tricky and challenging to do. 

Now, I’m not saying this because I was a fantastic copywriter, it was simply that I’d read a couple of books on the topic and I’d somehow combined it with a few writing skills that I’ve picked up while training to be a journalist. There are lots of great copywriting books that you can find today. I recommend checking out Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz. I’ve also interviewed a number of copywriters on this show. 

This week’s interviewee, his name is Geoff Kullman, he was kind enough to invite me on to his show some time ago and ask me about my writing journey, and in this week’s interview with him, I asked him all about his writing journey, how he became an instructor of the art of copywriting and how he also helps authors turn their ideas and their nonfiction books into emails, into landing pages, and into other digital assets which help them earn more money. 

Now, one of my key takeaways from talking to Geoff is that there are different types of copywriting, but if you’re uncomfortable with the idea of using words to sell, then take heart because copywriting can help you convince your audience to take a decision that’s in their best interest. It can also help you earn a better living as a writer and as a creative and then you can use that money to invest back into your craft and also to improve the quality of your work. 

If you enjoy this week’s interview, I’m on Twitter, it’s @bryanjcollins, and you can also get a discount on Grammarly. It’s my writing software of choice. I use Grammarly every day to check articles that I write, articles that I publish by other freelance writers, and also for simple things like social media posts, emails, and so on. If you wanna get a 25 percent lifetime discount, visit becomeawritertoday.com/try-grammarly-today and I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. 

Now, let’s go over to this week’s interview with Geoff Kullman.

Interview

Bryan: I love talking to copywriters because I was a copywriter for six or seven years for the British software company, Sage. I think copywriting is a fantastic skill for writers because it helps you turn your ideas into everyday language that readers and customers because readers are customers, can understand. But before we get into any of that, you have a fascinating journey about how you found yourself becoming a copywriter. Could we start there? 

Geoff: Totally. I was one of those kids. I think a lot of writers are introverted and shy, especially as kids, like I was and still am, but I was one of those kids who hid behind my mom’s leg all the time, you know? If someone would come up and try to talk to me and I’d just cower behind my mom and let her answer for me so I didn’t really speak until I was five years old. I’ve heard this term, “selective mutism,” I don’t know if that applies to me or not, I just know that I had words, I had vocabulary, I could speak, I just chose not to speak until I started kindergarten, until I went to school, and then I discovered this thing called “words,” which, I mean, I knew words before, of course, but, you know, I discovered this thing called “reading” and “writing” and that I could begin to craft my own worlds where I was the hero, where everyone celebrated what I was doing and was interested in what I wanted to do. 

And so I found these other worlds as I was writing them that were always interesting to me, always fascinating, and where I could be the one that was always in charge. As the youngest brother, I was never in charge, so I could always be in charge in the worlds that I wrote, and I found really, really early on that writing was something that I loved to do and that other people said I did a good job at, so, you know, the words that weren’t coming out verbally found their way onto the page.

Bryan: Your story is a little bit similar to me in that I also wanted to write when I was in school. It was only when I reached about 17 or 18 and had to pick a course for university that I started to ask, “How could a writer earn a living?” Did you decide at any point that this was going to become a career for you? 

Geoff: Not really. In college, I was the one that — I didn’t like exams, I liked essays, so whenever people, classmates, friends were complaining that we had this five-page or ten-page or however many page essay to write but preferred a two-hour exam, I would just say no. I wanna write that ten-page paper rather than that two-hour exam. 

So, I did, even going in through college, all through school, and into college, I preferred writing but I never thought of it as a career. I had a different career path in mind so I never really gave myself that permission to consider myself a professional writer at the time. 

Bryan: At what point did you start earning a living from writing? 

Geoff: Well, that has to do something with the other career path that I went down. So, I, from about late teen years through my 20s, I wanted to be a pastor, I wanted to work in churches, and so I did that, that’s what college and post college was all about, was figuring out and becoming and studying to be a pastor and then eventually becoming one for a number of years. 

But then, once I was in that role, working at a church, leading people, I discovered that that wasn’t a story I believed in anymore so I could no longer be a pastor and I figured, well, I really don’t have very many transferable skills. You know, I know the Bible, I know all those other types of things, but I don’t have any skills that I could put on a resume that would make me hirable. 

But this one thing I did know was writing and how to create content so that’s when it became clear to me that, oh, this one transferable skill that I do have from that pastor world could actually be relevant to this new world as a writer. 

Bryan: Many copywriters start by freelance writing. Was that something that you did? 

Geoff: Yeah, and something that I still do, yeah. So when I left my full-time gig, I didn’t even consider looking for a job anywhere. I never have in the years since, just always been freelance, always been hired directly by clients, not through an agency. 

Bryan: When you were freelancing, did you focus on any particular niche, or niche, as they say in the United States and Canada?

Geoff: We’ll stick with niche. Niche is good. Although it doesn’t rhyme as well, the riches are in the niches is not really — doesn’t make sense. Right. So, right off the bat, I really struggled to figure out what my niche was gonna be. I thought it would be just small businesses in general or entrepreneurs, if I wanted to get a bit more specific, and that’s where I started. It was just kind of anyone who wasn’t big enough to have their own marketing department that will wanna hire me as a business or as a business owner. 

But as time went on, I tried to niche down into the SaaS space, which, with Sage, you’re familiar with how that world goes, how that world works. Eventually, though, I found myself — my network, as I built my network, it kind of made me lean towards niching down to thought leaders and authors and experts. So, that’s the niche I’m in now, but it was a bit of a gradual push to get there.

Bryan: Did you learn copywriting taking courses or books or from other copywriters? And the reason I ask is when I began working as a copywriter, I looked around for courses and the only one that I could find was by the American Writers and Artists Institute, quite a good online course but it’s not really something that’s taught in classrooms or in universities.

Geoff: Yeah, the difficult thing about becoming a freelance writer like for marketing is that you have to unlearn a lot of what you learned in school, how you learned to write an essay, how you learned to properly structure paragraphs, things like that. I mean, you don’t do away with rules and grammatical rules entirely but how to market is you have to learn to write a bit. The first thing I learned was actually a framework, a marketing framework, so not specifically how to write copy but how to message things well and how to tell that story well. 

And then later on discovered Ray Edwards, Mike Kim, some other copywriters who some of them I learned directly from more just by reading what they wrote and unpacking it and dissecting it myself, but no real huge copywriting like official certificates or trainings other than that initial certification that I got, which wasn’t about copy, it was about messaging. So, yes and no.

Bryan: Were there any particular copywriting books that you picked up over the years that have helped? 

Geoff: Well, let me turn around and look. So the first one by Ray Edwards was How to Write Copy That Sells, which still to this day I pick up and look through. Then I’ve got other books like Copywriter’s Handbook, this great book called Launch about how to do a digital launch and how to, again, not specifically about copy but how to frame the whole thing. The Next Email Revolution, a bunch of stuff by Bob Bly. But even then, not tons of copywriting books because, in general — and then some of the great classics by Schwartz and those types of folks and Ogilvy — but a lot of the lessons that you can learn, you can learn them just by seeing what’s working out in the world, out on the interwebs, and dissect it and unpack it yourself. So, that’s a lot of what I did. I have a lot of books. I have bookshelves full of books behind me, but most of what I learned is seeing what other folks were doing and what other folks were finding works really well in that moment and in that time. 

Bryan: When I was doing that, my process involved signing up to people’s email lists, saving all their emails into Evernote, and clipping their sales pages into Evernote and trying to figure out how all the different pieces fit together, almost like a jigsaw, and then I’d kind of get a feel for subject lines and propositions and emails and on landing pages. Did you take any approach like that when you were analyzing what worked?

Geoff: Yeah, that was certainly one approach, signing up for email lists. And then I took a next step, which was difficult as an introvert, but I — some of those folks that I really wanted to learn from, so I opted into their email list to learn from them and dissect what they were doing, but then I took that next step of actually getting to know some of them, reaching out to them, getting in their network, sometimes joining their programs but mostly just building relationships with them intentionally so that they could, whether they knew it or not, start to teach me about this copywriting stuff and how they were doing it and why they were doing it a certain way. 

So, like I said, that was very intentional and exhausting and difficult as an introvert to do that, as a shy person, not an outgoing person, to do that but that’s been my main way of learning is really getting to know the folks that I want to learn from and then having them teach me. Sometimes they’re aware of it, sometimes they’re not, but that’s been my approach.

Bryan: After studying copywriting for a few years, I noticed that there is pushy copywriting that’s very salesy and really after getting somebody to convert, and then there’s copywriting that kind of leads people towards making a decision that’s helpful for them. Because, at the end of the day, copywriting is all about selling a product or a service or a book. And as somebody who was a pastor, did you find it hard to transition to a type of work that involves selling? Because many new writers I’ve spoken to would say that they like to keep their creative work and money separate and it should be distinct. Was that something that you encountered? 

Geoff: Well, I always thought of — I think the same thing of copywriters and marketers that I would have thought of pastors and preachers in a past life. Anyone that’s just trying to push me and convince me and convert me, I’m not interested in what they’re selling, whether it’s a faith or a widget or a book or whatever. 

My sense is, my belief is if you’re pushing too hard, you’re just gonna push me away. So, in most of the copy that I write, whether for myself or for clients, I tend to be more conversational and more not pushy, not skeezy or salesy, but what that does as well is it builds relationships and so, eventually, you can start to go there, you can start to lead people there of actually asking for the sale, they actually want what you have, they wanna work with you, they wanna buy from you. But you do that in a more roundabout approach, a less sleazy, less salesy approach, which, in my case, like I just said, has actually led to more sales by doing it in that roundabout, non-salesy way. 

For me, it feels more authentic to who I am, for my clients as well, they’re drawn to me because that’s how I write and they want me to write that way for them as well. It’s not just based on manipulating people into sales but actually building relationships and converting people that way. 

Bryan: A big part of your client base is authors. Are those non-fiction authors or fiction authors?

Geoff: All non-fiction. I’m trying to think — never had a fiction author, no. Just nonfiction. 

Bryan: Oh, interesting. And what type of services do they look for from you? 

Geoff: Interestingly enough, they can write very well and when they get into the Google Docs to edit what I’ve written for them, you know, they’re tidying things up that even as a professional writer, copywriter, rather, I might not have noticed and yet they do. But what they really need help with is actually sometimes just unpacking their messaging, figuring out how to put into briefer, more concise messaging and words what they’re trying to get out there, but, mostly, it’s realizing that writing and marketing copywriting are very different skills, can be very different skills and things to do. 

Getting your message into a book, even a non-fiction book, is hard enough, but then getting that book in the hands of readers is a whole other ballgame. So, that’s where they bring me in. Quite often in — most often in email campaigns that I write for them, sometimes in long-form sales pages, things like that. Right now, working with an author on pretty much everything from redoing the website to running an email campaign, getting them on podcasts and all that type of stuff, also writing some marketing copy for them.

Bryan: Oh, interesting. So I’m getting ready to self-publish a kind of story-driven parenting book and I was writing one of the emails about this book earlier this afternoon, but if somebody is listening to this and they’re getting ready to self-publish some non-fiction, what things should they consider when creating their email campaign?

Geoff: The most important thing that I always tell people is to know your audience and know them well, perhaps even know them better than they know themselves, if that’s possible. So, doing the research, doing the pre-work of knowing who you’re writing to. So, as authors, they have a head start on that. They know who they’ve written this book for in general. You know, in marketing, we call it like a customer avatar or something like that. 

But a lot of that knowledge of who you’re writing to has already been done as, hopefully, as you’re writing and editing the book. So that’s the first and important piece is to know who you’re writing to and what they’re struggling with. And especially if you’re writing non-fiction, then that’s exactly what you’ve written a book perhaps for is to get people over a hump or to get over an obstacle so you already know that pain point that they’re struggling with because that’s why you wrote the book, if it’s the type of authors that I work with, anyway.
 
If it’s a biography or a history book, maybe not, but self-help and business books and those types of things, you know who you’re writing for and you know what their struggles are already. So, knowing that, doing that research, if you don’t know them well enough, knowing them better, knowing them deeper than you do at the outset, that’s the important piece at the outset. 

Bryan: I’m sitting down to write my email campaign, should I map out the entire campaign before I write a single email? 

Geoff: Yes. I’m trying to think of — in most cases, if you’re writing a book, you know what the end is before you — or sometimes, you know what the end is before you begin. Especially if you’re writing a non-fiction book, you generally know what the answer is before you ask the question.

So, yeah, you should know where you’re leading people before you write the first word. You know, I think it was an Alice in Wonderland, right? “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” So, it’s important to know where you’re trying to lead people in order to actually map the thing out for them. So, whether that’s an email campaign or a sales page, or an entire launch campaign, you gotta know the end and the destination before you start driving out your driveway. 

Bryan: Do you like to weave in a story between all of the emails or have an overarching theme?

Geoff: I love to include — I prefer to include stories in most of the things that I create. Now, I’m working mostly with, we call them personal brands, so I don’t write very much for businesses and those types of folks, you can still weave stories in there as well, but I write mostly for people that are running their own business or writing their own books or leading their own group of people. 

So, in all those instances, in all those types of people that I work with, an important piece to their marketing is that their audience has to feel like they really know them well. We do that through stories, right? We tell stories to build that connection, to build that trust between the author or the entrepreneur and their business. 

So, I started our conversation by telling you about how I hid behind my mother’s leg as a kid, that’s a story that lets people a little bit behind the curtain to know who I am and why I do what I do. We do the same thing, I do the same thing, I write it into their emails, into their sales pages for their marketing so part of that marketing is letting the audience know who they’re listening to.

Bryan: When you’re writing out the emails and you’re putting in the call to action for the book, are you sending people to a sales page on their website or to an Amazon sales page?

Geoff: I’ve done both. Generally speaking, unless the author is, you know, has a garage full of books that they’re trying to sell, we generally send them to the Amazon listing. Amazon is such a behemoth on the internet, right? It directs so much, it owns and directs so much traffic on the internet that it’s always — typically, not always, but typically worth your while to just send people straight there. 

At least that’s what I found for myself and my clients of sending people there. And in that case, it’s important to have a highly tuned Amazon listing, which I hire out other people, I’m no expert on Amazon listings per se, but that’s important to have that on point. Because even if I were to write a sales page for a client, say, an author, the call to action button on that sales page would typically just send them to the Amazon listing anyway, like I said, unless they have a garage full of books that they’re trying to get rid of. So, yeah, the answer is typically to send them to Amazon.

Bryan: Are your clients using bonuses or other incentives to encourage their subscribers to buy more than one copy?

Geoff:  It depends on the goal of the campaigns but, sometimes, they’re adding in bonuses, a lot of times they’ve created an online course to complement the book so that’s very specific to my type of audience who I might have a client base who I’m writing for where they build an online course that people can buy in addition to the book. Sometimes it’s low dollar, sometimes it’s high dollar, but we bundle that all together. Sometimes it’s folks or authors trying to get folks to buy in bulk so they might add in some extra bonuses there. “If you buy X number of books, then you’ll get access to me. I’ll come on to your mastermind group call for an hour or I’ll teach you one on one for an hour,” or whatever, we add in some of those bonuses. But it really depends on the campaign and what our goals are. So sometimes yes, sometimes no.

Bryan: When your email campaign is ready to hand over to a client, do they send it all over the course of several days or do they send it as evergreen, or are there other best practices that listeners could learn from? 

Geoff: Again, a bunch of my answers are always “It depends” because it really does depend on one strategy to the next, one client to the next. But, generally, if it’s evergreen, yeah, then we wanna have that all written up, prepped and ready to go and into the email management system all ahead of time so that we’re not fumbling and bumbling as we go. So, generally, yeah, we drip that out over time for the client. But sometimes, it’s — especially if it’s a live launch where we’re really adapting as we go over the week, say, if they’re launching a campaign or a book over a one-week period, then we might have some more live elements built in there where we’re responding to questions or addressing a current event or something like that. But, typically, we write it out all ahead of time and make sure it’s prepped and ready to go.

Bryan: Interesting. Interesting. So, I’m curious also about how you balance working with multiple clients and running your business. Do you spend a lot of time working with your clients or do you only take on a handful at any given moment? 

Geoff: Oh, a handful is too much for me. I’ve learned the hard way that I can’t handle more than — typically, three would be the most at a time for me. I prefer to work with a client one at a time, two at the most, if I can. But, yeah, I’ve learned the hard way, and by that, I mean, I get stressed out, my writing suffers I feel if I’ve got too many on the go at once. And that’s primarily because I get pretty invested in what we’re creating together. 

And then if the messaging starts to get — you know, if I can’t keep track of one brand voice and one message from the next client and their voice and their message, everything gets, at least for me, it feels like it gets a bit muddy, a bit more complicated. So, I prefer to work with one at a time or two at a time. 

Bryan: And how long does an engagement with a client last?

Geoff: So, some clients, it’s a one-month thing, we’re over and done pretty quick. Other clients, it’s six months or beyond. Yeah, I’ve had some clients where it’s over a year. It really does — it’s different from client to client and campaign to campaign so it’s difficult to plan that out and sketch that out to know when to say, “Hey, I’m available, I’m open for my next client.” For me, the key then has been building up a waiting list of folks and saying, “Hey, I’d love to work with you but I’m not taking clients until this month or that month,” and then when a spot opens up, sending out an email or a note to that waiting list of, “Hey, I’m open, I’m available now. Are you ready to get going?”

Bryan: So I was on your podcast a while ago. Are there other parts of the business that you have as well apart from copywriting for your clients? Or other activities that you do every day? 

Geoff: Yeah, so I kinda have two parts to my business right now. So there’s the writing part, the part where I write for other people, for clients, then there’s the part where I teach folks to write as well, to write copy, direct response copy as well. So the one is people paying, they’re an expert, they’re an author, they’re a thought leader, and they have a pretty big audience already, then they bring me in to write as them or for them in that one-on-one type of basis, right? 

And that’s part of why I only can keep one or two clients at a time as well, it’s because I’m pretty in-depth with them. But then I have this other side of the business where I’m coaching other entrepreneurs, other thought leaders that haven’t quite built their business yet to the point where they’re making significant money so my role there is to coach them how to write a good direct response, how to write great direct response copy so that they can grow their business and build their revenue.

Bryan: Do you find that it’s difficult to balance both sides? 

Geoff: Very difficult, yeah. I’m still trying to find that perfect balance because both are — I say I’m running two sides of my business, I’m really kind of, in one sense, running two separate businesses at the same time because they are very different. 

They’re very different audiences. It’s kind of the same skill set for me but it’s two very different audiences. So, trying to find that balance, I’m in the messy middle of that right now still trying to find what works best there. I know part of it is limiting my one-on-one clients down to one or two at a time. Still trying to find that perfect mix, though.

Bryan: Interesting. Yeah, I used to coach new writers about how to write a book but then I focused more on courses and, lately, I’ve been focusing more on writing articles. I’ve definitely found it’s difficult to do all of those different types of activities quite well.

Geoff: Yeah. And that’s it, to do it and do it well. You can do it and give it half effort, but if you wanna invest fully into it and you want people to feel and know that they are invested into, then it’s — you gotta give it your all so that’s the difficult part. 

Bryan: Your podcast has been going for quite a while, you’ve had some well-known interviewees on it. Do you find that that’s helpful for growing your business? 

Geoff: Initially, the thought was that it would grow the first part of my business, the client, high-paying, high-end client side of my business, that they’d see the podcast and think, “Wow, this guy must be an expert,” and all that. In reality, it’s mostly — I mean, there’s some truth to that. That’s worked out all right. 

But, in reality, it’s grown that second part where it’s given me this other platform to build my own audience, mostly of people trying to grow their own business still. So, that’s been an unexpected but welcome benefit. The other side of it that I knew would happen from the outset was that it’s really helped me grow my own skills as well because I’m required, as the host, to know what the heck I’m talking about and so I have to invest my time in learning more and know the material well enough to actually teach it to others so it’s helped me grow my own skill set as well.

Bryan: Interesting. Interesting. And what about the way people find the podcast, is it all organic? 

Geoff: Primarily organic, yes. So people, if they’re on my email list, they’ll get emails about it but it’s been primarily organic growth. You know, podcasts never really go viral. If you ever start a podcast or you’re running a podcast, and, Bryan, you know, podcasts don’t go viral. They grow over time. That’s what mine has done, grow over time. There’s some episodes that are more downloaded, more listened to than others, but, in general, it’s just a matter of getting those numbers up and up and the episode numbers up and up. And with that, in my case, listenership, downloadership, I don’t know what the right word is, the folks, the audience is growing along with the podcast.

Bryan: Yeah, I’ve had the same experience. It’s never viral. Unless your name is Joe Rogan. It’s a slow organic growth, which can be good because it gives you time to practice.

Geoff: It’s fun. It’s exciting that it can’t just be, you know, a blip that happens for you where it’s, you know, one thing goes viral and then you’re trying to catch that and keep that. It’s part of the fun, part of the excitement, part of the journey of just knowing that, “Oh, this thing will grow and it will grow over time but it won’t grow fast,” so you have to keep at it, keep intentional, keep your perspective in check the whole time as well.

Bryan: Geoff, where can people find more information about you or the podcast? 

Geoff: The best place to go is, well, my website is geoffkullman.com, don’t try to spell my name, I’m sure there’s a link in the show notes or something. The second place is DM me on Instagram, it’s @geoffkullman, they can add me and then send me a message, let me know that you heard us talking, and then right on my website as well, geoffkullman.com/podcast, you can check out the Psychology of Copywriting Podcast.

Bryan: Sure, I’ll be sure to include the links so listeners can find you but thanks for your time.

Geoff: Absolutely.

Bryan: I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode. If you did, please consider leaving a short review on the iTunes Store or sharing the show on Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you’re listening. More reviews, more ratings, and more shares will help more people find the Become a Writer Today Podcast. And did you know, for just a couple of dollars a month, you could become a Patreon for the show? Visit patreon.com/becomeawritertoday or look for the Support button in the show notes. Your support will help me record, produce, and publish more episodes each month. And if you become a Patreon, I’ll give you my writing books and discounts on writing software and on my writing courses.