Neville: It's a common misconception. A lot of people think I train copywriters. A lot of people were like, "Hey, can you send me some copywriters?" I'm like, for the most part, most people are business owners. I actually think copywriting is a tool to promote your own business. So yes, you can make money as a copywriter as you said, become a writer. I do think that's a valuable thing to do to get exposure to many different industries. But if you're very good at marketing, what if you have your own business and apply your marketing skills to that? I think that's the highest leverage thing a copywriter can do. It's to have their own business and apply their marketing sense to it.

(intro)

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: How can you use AI to write effective copy? Hi there. My name is Bryan Collins, and welcome to the Become a Writer Today Podcast. AI tools like ChatGPT are all the rage these days. While they're not going to write everything effectively for you, they can be a real time saver if used correctly. So rather than opening up Microsoft Word or Google Docs and staring at the flashing cursor, and wondering how you're going to write some effective copy for your customers or clients, you can use a tool like ChatGPT. It'll generate headlines for you. It could help you turn product features into benefits, and it could give you a good angle or an introduction for your emails, for your sales page, or even for your blog post about your latest product or service. Not only that, but these tools take away some of the mystery surrounding copywriting. In other words, they make it easier for everybody to express themselves. And if you're a writer working online, then copywriting is a really valuable skill because it will help you sell your products, services, books, articles and, of course, your ideas.

So in this week's interview, I caught up with the expert copywriter, Neville Medhora. He runs swipefile.com, which is a fantastic website if you want to browse new and old copy that has stood the test of time. He also runs copywritingcourse.com where you can get your copy workshops by Neville and his team. He's an expert in the area. He's actually been creating content online since 1998, which is a few years before me. He even built a hugely successful finance blog, which we talked about at the start of this week's interview. It was a great chat with Neville. I was fascinated to hear his approach to, firstly, using AI tools to write copy. Secondly, to the art of using a swipe file, Neville explains exactly what that is and what you should put into your swipe file and how his one helped him start a business. Thirdly, how to grow your platform as a writer in a noisy world today.

I hope you enjoy this week's interview with Neville. It was a great chat. If you do, please consider leaving a short review on the iTunes Store. Because when you leave a review for the Become a Writer Today Podcast, it helps more listeners find the show. And, of course, if you know another writer or perhaps an aspiring copywriter who would benefit from this week's interview, then please do send it along.

(interview)

Bryan: Welcome to the show, Neville.

Neville: Thanks, Bryan. I don't know how much more you could write online before that. That's pretty early.

Bryan: Was there an internet before 1998?

Neville: Oh, my. No, we were sending carrier pigeons back then. It was like the old internet. I'm sure you remember. It's kind of like dial up. I used prodigy.com. My dad was a little bit of a head of the game in terms of the computer thing. So when I was a kid, we did have a home computer that costs $3,000. God knows 1990s money. It had very limited capabilities, and the internet was like a free place where you got movie reviews and stuff. The commerce didn't really happen on the internet. It was like a nerdy thing to do. It's like, "Oh, look. You can look up a movie review online instead of the newspaper." That's what it was back then.

Bryan: That's the internet that I remember when I was a teenager. So it would take three minutes from my phone or my dad's phone to connect to the internet, and then you would look at web pages taking about 60 or 90 seconds to just display a single image. Fun times. People take for granted today how easy it is to get online. You've been writing online since 1998, as you mentioned. You built a really successful finance blog. Could you tell the readers a little bit about that before we talk about copywriting?

Neville: Yeah, I mean, I think it was publishing an HTML before WordPress and stuff got really popular and before blogs were even really coined. Once blogs were coined, I started a thing called NevBlog. I started publishing in college just with the money I made online. These are small amounts. We're not talking about a bunch. We're talking about — I made $90 from some AdSense website that I made in college.

I was trying a journal list kind of stuff, and the best way to do this chronologically was a blog. Because you post something, it shows up at the top. That's what it was. I thought, well, a blog would be a great way to chronicle this. And sure enough, people somehow started finding it. Thanks to the magic of the web back then. You didn't really have search engines that were good. People started reading and leaving comments on my first blog. I was like, where are these people coming from? This wasn't a common thing to meet people over the internet like that. And so more and more people were like, "Holy crap, this guy's talking about money." What's interesting to note: that people go on Twitter and talk about like, "Hi, I'm Bryan. I made $100 from this course. Here's how I make the money."

People didn't use to talk about money a few years ago. This was not a thing that happened. It was considered very taboo to talk about your income. In fact, it made a lot of people that I knew uncomfortable, that they're like, "You're telling people how much money you make? I can't believe this." It was a weird thing back then. And so there's a whole personal finance community. We meet safety and notable. It's become very big. There's a bunch of people in this personal finance community that would just share their income and how they did it. That was the budding of this internet community. I was part of it. That was my first bit of notoriety online.

Bryan: Wow. Impressive. It's helpful, I think. It was helpful for me when I was starting my blog to see how other bloggers had actually built a business online, and what they actually spend money on and how they earned money for their particular websites. I know that's a little bit different to personal finance, but I certainly found a lot of great ideas from the likes of Pat Flynn who are publishing on their income reports over at Smart Passive Income.

Neville: Well, personal finance encompassed a lot, even mortgages. I was too young to even have any relation with that. But people will talk about how they budget. That was a big thing: how they budget. Some people would talk about what they spend a lot of money on, what they spend a little bit of money on, ways you can save money.

Then I was particularly interested in ways you can make money. Because I thought you can only save so much, then you also have this bit of a miserable life if you would just keep saving. So how can I make more money? That part of the personal finance industry really took off. People were like, "Wait. You could just make more money?" Now we take it for granted, right? You just go online and do business with everyone. But back then, it was a budding thing. So it was very exciting. It kind of reminds me of all the ChatGPT stuff right now. Everyone's building tools of what can you do with this thing. That was the same kind of feeling back then of like, oh, my God. You can now connect with people all over the world. What do we do here? So that was the fun part.

Bryan: So you have quite a big blog — 1,500 articles. That's more than a hobby. So what happened to it?

Neville: Personal finance became like its own little industry. I used to go to FinCon and all that stuff. Then what happened was, other businesses I started started getting bigger. So I was part of a company called AppSumo. I also ran a rave company at the time. That was my main income earner.

Bryan: A rave company?

Neville: A rave company. I've never been to a rave in my life. I had houseofrave.com. I have no idea what happened to it now.

Bryan: That's a great name for a rave website.

Neville: Yes, this was drop shipping back in the day when that was like a smart idea. Now it's quite obvious that you could drop ship. And so I knew how to get to the top of search engines. I would rank, and people would buy stuff from me. That's how it used to go. Then as Amazon and stuff started catching up, it got harder and harder to build that company. I would make the same amount of money plateauing but working harder.

At the same time, I started learning about copywriting. That's where we enter over here. One of my friends was like, "You have a big email list. Why don't you send emails out to those people and sell them stuff?" I started selling them, and nothing happened. There was no sales. So I put a lot of pictures, a lot of Buy Now buttons. You can find them somewhere online, and it did nothing. I was like, well, that's a disappointment. Then I started learning about copywriting from Gary Halbert. I read the Boron Letters chapters 1 through 25 online for free. That's where I started going, oh, you have to actually tell people why they should buy something. They may not intuitively understand all the use cases for this product. And so I did that. That was like my first $10,000 plus revenue day.

That clicked a window in my mind thinking, oh, if you say the words differently, a different result can happen. Enter copywriting. From there, I started doing primarily emails to generate sales for my company. Then at the same time, one of my good friends, Noah Kagan started a little side project called AppSumo. He had the same problem with the emails. I said, "Let me try writing these." Once again, we did that. He had like a $10,000 revenue day. AppSumo started growing quite big. And so I went full time with that and sold House of Rave.

Bryan: Impressive.

Neville: So the nevblog.com took a little bit of a backseat as I got busier with that.

Bryan: How long were you with AppSumo for?

Neville: I still own equity in the company. I was probably working a lot with AppSumo for probably about five years. Then the copywriting course took off within. It was launched within AppSumo. It was launched on the AppSumo platform. Then enough people were asking me, "Can you do copywriting for me? Can you come in and revamp our sales process?" All that kind of stuff. And so I started copywriting as a full-time company, Copywriting Course.

Bryan: Do you copyright for—

Neville: That was 2015 or so, yeah.

Bryan: Oh, not too long ago. I worked as an in-house copywriter for a British software company for about seven or eight years. So it was a great profession. I got to read all the great copywriting books.

Neville: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, you are just like moving things around. It's like the lowest effort, highest reward thing: that you move a couple of words around, and it changes the outcome potentially.

Bryan: Before we get into your current business, I'm curious, you mentioned ChatGPT there a few months ago. Do you think AI is going to put the copywriters out of business? Because it seems like anybody can plug in a few benefits or a few features and ask AI to spit out a sales page or an email funnel?

Neville: Yeah, we've seen this play out before with technology over and over. We just talked about newspapers and now the internet. This is the same conversation that happened 20 years ago, right? People were like, "Well, the internet is not fast, and people can't access it. There's not as many people. There's newspaper routes everywhere in the world. It's already an established medium." The people that did not start publishing online got left behind or eventually came to see the light.

And so it's the same thing. You need to use AI as a tool. What it's going to do, it's going to take out a lot of the monkey work. I use AI every day. I pay for the advanced version. I use GPT 4, GPT 3. I've invested in a company that started with GPT 3 called CopyAI that was doing this early on. So I've played with it every step of the way. I do not say I'm afraid of this or anything. I jump right in. You start to instantly learn what it's good for and what it's not good for.

Is GPT 3 good for making blog posts? You can make a blog post. Can you make a blog post that's going to rank very high in Google for a competitive keyword? Probably not. So can it augment your writing? Yes. Do you need to write very long pieces of copy anymore? I don't think so. I don't see it as much. And so it's really good for idea generation. I use it for that all the time. I use it for figuring out SEO things. I say, "Hey, look at this article, and go find me a bunch of keywords that I should add. Write me a couple paragraphs of what I should add." Then I use my human brain to sort through that and make a better post.

And so if you're not using GPT, or ChatGPT, or any of these tools, I believe you will eventually get left behind. I think you've still got about a year or two before you don't have to do anything. But eventually, you will have to start using this. Yes.

Bryan: Bing has already rolled out ChatGPT and their search engine, page one result or page zero. Google has said that they're going to do the same with their AI tool bar over the next few weeks or months.

Neville: Let me explain what it means to some people. Whenever people went from analog to digital, there's people literally with slide rules marking outlines on where to print something and placing metal prints so that newspaper ink can go on the paper. That was a job that used to exist. I remember going into drafting rooms of the Houston Chronicle where I grew up and seeing that. None of those jobs exist anymore. It's all done on a doc. Now you pull up a doc. All of that stuff, spacing, all of that, it's all done. The computer does a lot of that monkey work for us, and we could do more of the creative work. Similarly, this is going to do a lot of the monkey work and maybe creating an outline for you, maybe capitalizing things for you, maybe editing things for you.

Sometimes I want to sort a bullet point list from long to short. I had to sit there and go, okay, that's the shortest one. I got to put that at the top. The second shortest one is right there. I got to put that right in there. I just put that into ChatGPT now, and it sorts everything I copy and paste. That just took out a bunch of monkey work I don't need to do. And so that's the way to use these tools. What can I do? What do I currently do that takes up a lot of brain power that I could just outsource to this machine? That goalpost of what that is is going to continuously move over the years.

And so I think all of a sudden, this is like a new shock to some writers that you don't start with a blank page. You used to be talking about writer's block. Now you have no excuse for writer's block. Just tell it to write something, and then you modify it from there. It's a different process writing now.

Bryan: Yeah, I'd agree. It's a supplementary tool to whatever it is you'd like to write. So to go back to copywriting, I'm looking at swipefile.com at the moment. It's a great site.

Neville: My favorite.

Bryan: You have a collection of all of that from the 1940s and 1950s, as well as, I guess, some more modern ads on social media, on Twitter. So where do you source all of the sales copy and the ads for Swipe File? Did it take long to gather them?

Neville: Originally, I was going to open source this to everyone. But then, everyone started sending me just dumb stuff or weird scammy supplements and stuff like that. So I browsed the internet a good portion of the day. I use my phone quite a bit to browse, and so I take a screenshot of it, or I browse Reddit, I browse Twitter, I browse digg.com. I browse a lot of different websites, or from whenever I go see something in the real world. I saw a guy in a Spider Man costume holding a sign that says "free comedy show" with an arrow. I took a picture of that, and that's going to go up there under the outdoor advertising section. And so it's like advertising I see from my real life that I thought was interesting in some way. So mostly good examples but some bad examples to say I would have done something different

The problem I had and the reason I started Swipe File originally was, whenever I would talk to a client, they'd be like, "Well, what are some good examples of emails that you like?" I'm like, oh, crap. Off the top of my head, I don't remember them. So I thought, well, let me start keeping these in a folder. I started keeping them in a folder on my desktop computer and on my phone. The problem was then they'd say, what are some examples of emails you like, and I have to go through that folder. There's thousands of things. So I said, "Let me start a swipe file on my computer." I bought the domain swipefile.com for something like $3,500 or something from someone.

Bryan: A great domain for this project.

Neville: I know. I loved it. I was so happy that that was the domain. It was originally going to be copywritingcourse.com/swipe or something like that. I actually tried to buy swiped.co. Another guy has a nice swipe file online but more like older examples, I would say. More direct response. I wanted to make my own for anyone. And so I made swipefile.com. So if you need a swipe file — I guess it's my personal one — see it. It does have a lot of old ads. It has a lot of current social media ads. I'd say that social media selling is going up and up and up. It's actually where I buy a lot of things from, getting a lot of ideas from. And so that is a popular part of the zeitgeist, so it needs to be in there.

I post a lot of Twitter ads. I post a lot of Instagram ads, Facebook ads, just ads on Google in general, and also just old pieces of advertising that I like. The reason that I post some of those, I think why — let's say an old 1969 image of a Ford Mustang being sold. It's like, how do they sell it well? What did they do? Maybe they used a really catchy image of the product, or maybe they used call outs where they take the image and point arrows to it, and describe some of the features or how much horsepower it has, et cetera. And so I like to think like just scroll through Swipe File, and say what are some interesting ideas I could pick up. That's what it's for. It's actually got quite some traction now.

Bryan: Fantastic. Yeah, because I'm currently testing Facebook ads to grow a Facebook page. I was looking for ideas for creative, and I found some on your site. So that's very helpful. You have a few personal projects going on. You mentioned that you are an investor in a couple of businesses. swipefile.com, your course — which I'll ask you about in a moment. Do you still copyright for your clients?

Neville: All the time. Every Tuesday. Yeah, all the time.

Bryan: Wow. Is it because you're so passionate about it?

Neville: I don't know what the word passionate means. Sometimes I was just like I enjoy doing it, and I get paid for it. So that sounds like a passion, I guess.

Bryan: Just to stop you there. Listeners can't see you, but you're wearing a t shirt that says "I love coffee."

Neville: Oh, yeah. Totally true. So the reason I do consult is, one, you make money off of it. So that's always a nice reason, right? People say money is not important. I don't know if I totally believe that. It is important. So I get paid a nice change for it. That's great. The other thing is: people come to me, and they generally have an established business. They say, "How can I make this process better?" I come in with fresh eyes. I see it for the first time and I go, "Oh, that's why it's confusing." You know how it is. As a copywriter, you can see something wrong right away. But if you look at it every single day like my own sales page, I cannot improve because I see it all the time. It's hard for me to do it. And so I consult for that reason.

I get to see inside all these other businesses that I have no idea. I helped a cleaning business the other day out of a specific state. We improved their local listings, all that stuff to get the more inquiries. It's just really interesting seeing numbers and different industries and how they operate, and maybe how backwards some of them are. I always think maybe in the future, I might go into one of these industries. I get exposure to them through consulting. Also, I just meet all these great people, all these business owners. So I do still do consulting every Tuesday. I stopped doing them every day, because I think you go a little bit crazy if you just do client work all the time. And so I focus on my company most of the time in my own things. But I do think I need to stay a copywriter to be talking about copywriting. I don't really like it when someone's like, "I talk about real estate, but I don't have any real estate." It's like, well, you're not really walking the walk.

Bryan: You got to do both. Over on Copywriting Course, you blog about your approaches to copywriting. You have information about email guides, content marketing templates, generators, calculators. It looks like you published something yesterday. Do you spend long in researching and writing the content?

Neville: Oh, there's a lot.

Bryan: There's a lot there.

Neville: There's a ton on there. In fact, there's even more on that blog feed that numbers get. You're just probably seeing the public thing. So there's actually quite a bit that goes on Copywriting Course. Actually, you're probably seeing, this week, I'm tinkering with the menu. I did a bunch of usability calls. We have so much stuff in there. It's almost different. It's difficult to get the navigation to all of these things. So what you're seeing on the menu is probably a little bit janky at the moment. That should be fixed by Monday.

We made a whole separate menu thing, which is a lot harder than it seems to fit all the information in there. It's working really well right now. But we're trying to get our average time or page per visit up really high. So on many websites, it's like 1.7 visits or 2 visits. So they click two pages and leave. I'm trying to get people read five articles every time they visit the site and this new navigation.

Bryan: That's very ambitious.

Neville: Yeah, I think it's possible. I think with a Slack-like menu, you can actually do this.

Bryan: Are you building this in WordPress, or you have some sort of custom domain?

Neville: No, we use Invision Community which is a forum software, believe it or not. We have to do form software because we revamped people's copy inside. The problem is I cannot do. I literally cannot do this on a Facebook group. I wish I could just do it on Facebook group. Circle.so is a great community platform. But I can't use them because I can't post 20-page comments with embedded images and videos and things like that. So we have to do it on a forum software. The forum software we use is very, very heavily customized.

Bryan: Oh, interesting. I'm not familiar with that forum software. The people who are visiting your blog or swipefile.com, are these small business owners who are looking for a bit of help with copywriting, they are copywriters themselves?

Neville: It's a common misconception. A lot of people think I train copywriters. A lot of people were like, "Hey, can you send me some copywriters?" I'm like, for the most part, most people are business owners. I actually think copywriting is a tool to promote your own business. So yes, you can make money as a copywriter as you said, become a writer. I do think that's a valuable thing to do to get exposure to many different industries. But if you're very good at marketing, what if you have your own business and apply your marketing skills to that? I think that's the highest leverage thing a copywriter can do. It's to have their own business and apply their marketing sense to it.

Bryan: When you are looking at your own business, are there any particular other types of businesses that you'd like to model yourself on or perhaps copywriters have done well in the past that you say it'd be great if it could work more like them?

Neville: That's a great question. I don't know that any — there are a couple of communities online. Communities have their own separate set of problems and interests. But I've been doing courses a long time. I feel like all course creators — tell me if this is true, because I'm working on this theory. All course creators go like this: you start a course online. You have an audience. You built up an audience. Let's say you have 5,000 Twitter followers or email list or something. Then you say, "Hey, guys. I'm going to release a course." Everyone's really excited for your first course. They're like, "Oh, my God. He's releasing a course. It's great." So they make a bunch of sales. They go, "Wow. This is great." They do it again and again and again. Then by that point, a lot of the audience has bought your course. They'd seen your main points, and they're kind of like, "Okay. What else do you got?" So then you make another course. Then you make another course. Now you got three courses. Now it's almost too confusing. There's a lot of overlap in what you're teaching.

So if I sell you a copywriting course, an autoresponder course, and an email writing course, a lot of people will say, "Well, are they all kind of the same?" The answer is yes, a lot of it is the same type of stuff with a slightly different angle. So then, what happens is course creators start combining their course into a bundle, like a high-priced bundle. Instead of $97, $97, $97. You say, okay, the whole thing is $250 for three. Then oftentimes people go to a community model, which is often a mistake if they don't need to have a community.

We need to have a community because the main thing that copywriting course does is if you have a sales page, if you have an email, you can upload it to our forum. Myself and all the writers go and edit it. Meaning, we go and rewrite it or change around how you sell. Then every Thursday, we have an office hour where I get on the call directly and just help you out. And so a lot of the points of our community is to get you in there so we can actually edit your copy. And so we have a big community of people, primarily business owners, some professional writers that take on clients and get help their client work, which is always fun. So that's why we have a community to do this. So that's the route we've gone. I haven't seen any copywriting companies that do specifically that. There are a few here and there, but they mainly focus on being professional copywriters. So it's a little bit different. I'm not saying there's none, but I think it's like a slightly different angle that we take.

Bryan: It certainly is. I was struck by something you said about people bundling all their courses into one mega bundle. I'm doing something similar at the moment while I was considering launching a community at some point. But they could be a bit of a time investment problem, so I haven't done it yet. But you were saying that could potentially be a mistake for some course creators.

Neville: Yeah, let's go through it. Everyone thinks like, "Let's make a community." Okay. Think backwards from this. What do you want the community for? There has to be some reason that it's a community, not just because like, "Oh, I think this would be a great method for passive income." I think a lot of people think like if you just have a community, people would stick around forever. I don't think people want more content. Are you part of any Facebook groups copywriting or otherwise?

Bryan: Oh yeah, I have more than I can count.

Neville: Exactly. So it was really popular a few years ago to start a Facebook group. Everyone's like, "Oh, my God. They're so active." Now Facebook, I just don't even login, or it's just filled with too many posts. What happens is, as these communities get larger and larger, there's 20,000 people. That used to be a benefit. Now I'm like, I'd stay away from this group. Because all it asks is the same damn questions over and over. It's like, how do I become a copywriter? I want to make six figures as a copywriter everyday doing nothing. What do I do? It just become devolves into that sometimes, unless there's a very strong moderator. And so a lot of those groups, it's like I don't know the purpose of them.

Now, there are some reasons to have a group. For example, if you have a cohort where people start from May 1 to May 30. We're going to start and make our blog. By March 31 or April 31 or whatever, you'll publish your first blog. If you have a cohort, yeah, having a group where everyone can chat is great. That's a good reason to have a community. Or, there's a community of your designers, and you're all trying to get more clients. You want to share different clients and share leads or something like that. That's a reason to have a community. I think there needs to be a reason.

The reason we have a community is because people don't want to post their copy publicly or their problems publicly. Then we also go and actually redo all people's copy inside the community. That's the reason we have a community. And so what's the reason that you're doing it? That's sometimes a difficult question. I don't know if you may have one or not. I'm not saying don't try it, but it's nice to have a reason to start with.

Bryan: I guess, from the things you talked there, I would need to rethink what the reason for starting a community would be. I guess it will be to add more value to writers and maybe help them with their craft or their book.

Neville: Well, what specifically does that mean? Can you do that for free? Because what happens is then, okay, now you're going to have to make free content like you're doing right now. But you also have to make valuable content behind the scenes as well. So now you have two separate tracks that you're going to have to nurture. That's a lot of content.

Bryan: That's probably why I'm holding off on it. Because I'm currently more interested in creating a free content on YouTube and podcast like this, and writing articles and so on. So I'm more focused on the content publishing business rather than creating something where I'll be internalized into community.

Neville: Exactly. As someone who runs a community, sometimes I make a video for our backend members. I'm like, damn, this is good. I should put it. So which one do I do? That's why I think the community stuff has to be a different type of content. For example, the videos I make, I generally just publish on YouTube or YouTube shorts. Instead, this content I make for within the community is me doing something boring, like showing how a business works or something along those lines. I'll show like here's me writing a newsletter, which is a lot more boring than some of the YouTube videos that we have to make.

Bryan: Is YouTube working well for your business at the moment? Because SEO is getting a lot harder these days. Part thanks to ChatGPT and AI. Also, a lot more video and social media are appearing on the search results page. So it seems like YouTube and video is a better way to go these days.

Neville: I've been doing video for a long time, and I think video is fantastic. I personally probably consume 2 to 300 videos per one blog post I read now. I don't know about you.

Bryan: Wow. That's a lot of video.

Neville: Yeah, I watch a lot of videos. If you think about it, these videos are short sometimes. So I'm just scrolling through Instagram, scrolling through YouTube, et cetera. But I learned a lot more through video personally. Because that's how we learn as humans. You see it with your eyes and your ears. And so that's video. So I learn a lot more from video. A lot of my growth recently has come from these YouTube shorts. I have an Instagram. Look up Neville Medhora on Instagram. You'll see we have hundreds of these reels. We post one every single day. I think that has got a lot more growth lately than blog posts by far.

Bryan: Are your readers coming through from Instagram?

Neville: Yeah, a lot of them are actually finding me from Instagram, and then a lot of them find me from YouTube over the years. Because what happens is, with every YouTube creator, your top couple of videos just keep producing results over and over. So they'll be like, yeah, I found you a year ago. I looked up copywriting exercises. I found you and started following you. Then the rest is history.

I think a lot of people have found me from YouTube, especially in other countries, I've noticed. I did a lot of calls. Everyone from a different country found me through YouTube. Interesting. Then now a lot of people are finding me from Instagram.

Bryan: Oh, excellent. Have you explored any other networks like TikTok, for example?

Neville: All of them. We post on all of them.

Bryan: Wow. It must be a whole team.

Neville: Yeah, I have an agency that does my short videos. They post them to every single platform, including Facebook which doesn't do super well with the videos. Twitter doesn't do very well with the videos. Occasionally, I post one. Instagram does very well with them. TikTok? I have been growing, so I don't log into TikTok. I don't like using it. It sucks me in too much, so I don't go on there. But it does — you get some hits here and there. But it's not been a platform I find to connect with people on. It's been very difficult to convert people from TikTok into email subscribers or anything else, even customers.

Instagram has been where people follow me. They find my stuff, and then they sign up to my email address. I find that's the best. YouTube is also really good. But I think the format of videos has become much shorter. I don't think you need to sit and watch someone talk for 20 minutes to explain how to write a subject line. You can do it in 30 seconds on shorts now. YouTube is, I find it's not an attention span thing. People say, "People's attention span has shortened." I disagree. I'd say that the forms of media we have are more concise. It used to be that you have to watch a whole documentary to figure out something. Now you can watch 30 seconds or something and get 80% of the way there. And so I think the storytelling methods and technology we have just got better. I've loved doing short videos. It's great.

Bryan: Do you spend much of your week recording the video? Because you mentioned you spend Tuesdays on copywriting.

Neville: I kind of do it when inspiration strikes. I don't know about you as a writer. But whenever inspiration strikes, I write or create. And so it's whenever I come out of the shower and look presentable enough to be on video, it's often whenever I do it. I'll have a big file of things and ideas to record. That's usually like I'll record something, then I'd run out of ideas and I have to keep making more. The good part about the short videos is, if you create a lot of long form video, you can cut up those things into short form video. So my goal is to produce a lot of long form things and then go short.

Bryan: Yeah, that's my approach as well at the moment. Neville, if listeners are interested in learning more about you or copywriting, where should they go?

Neville: You can go to copywritingcourse.com, just exactly as it spelled. You could also find me on all the socials. Look up Neville Medhora on really anything. I have a unique enough name. You'll probably just find me. Type in Neville Medhora on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok. You can see my video post every day. An agency does it, but they are there if you want. And so yeah. Another weird one, LinkedIn. Surprisingly, a lot of traffic from LinkedIn. It's a bit of a sleeper.

Bryan: I kind of shied away from LinkedIn because I was in a corporate company for years, and I left. I feel like it's a work thing.

Neville: Hey, trust me. It is almost unusable. The amount of messages and stuff you get that are automated and stuff is absurd. But I will say that whenever I go home and I see all my family friends, they're like, "Neville, I love all your stuff on LinkedIn." I'm like, "LinkedIn? Oh, yeah, I forgot the agency posts there." I haven't signed into LinkedIn in four months.

Bryan: It sounds like you have a good balance, because you have the agency doing a lot of the social media for you.

Neville: I think you have to. Otherwise, you'll go goddamn crazy with this. Especially the short form videos, there's so much work. It's almost like making a whole video. Me and one of my employees tried to do it ourselves originally. We're like, this is like making a whole new video every day.

Bryan: Yeah, I would agree. I was recording shorts before this podcast interview. It was great to talk to you, Neville. I'll put the links in the show notes.

Neville: Thanks so much for having me, Bryan. I appreciate it.

(outro)

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, discounts on writing software and on my writing courses.