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Oh everybody welcome to tutorial Tuesdays today Joanna here from copy hackers Sarah is having technical difficulties so hopefully she'll be able to join us in a bit but for now I'm going to be running this cool so we're like whoo I made it well done you so it's like a weird tech day it's like Google just kidding I was gonna make a Google Donald Trump joke okay anyway okay quick housekeeping before we dive into today's tutorial chat is where you can throw any of the comments you have as we're going people are already saying cool things Sonja's a loser Heather as well Tech has been dodgy the past week for us my actual keyboard died today so I have to go to the Apple store and pick one up at lunchtime so that's fun Tuesday tectorial well done yes the cats the cats are back there are they're in a mood there it's like the seasons so changing I guess and we have one cat there okay good so now that we've got that covered chat is where you put any thoughts you have that you would like to share that are worth sharing if you want them to go straight to me just hit all panelists I'm the only panelist today so it'll go to me directly I will not be able to answer that when I'm actually presenting most likely I will not be able to but I'll do my best if you want to just say hey to everybody or get in on a conversation make sure you're sending that message in chat to everyone depending it might say everyone for you or all attendees okay cool we also have the Q&A area if you have questions at the end of this training today this tutorial and you want to ask them you want to make sure that they're in the queue so I don't miss them um then go ahead and put those in Q&A and we will have time at the end of today's tutorial to take those we are recording this so let's dive in hide everybody who's saying hi someone I've never got the tutorial link this time but every name is dear but you're here so that's good it worked out that's awesome people are setting feeling intrigued great topic today thank you thanks oh you're using an old link okay yeah it works because once you register once it'll probably the same link for you all the time just so you know um yeah alright so today's tutorial is on the conversion copywriting process this is one I decided to do because and this is gonna anyway I decided to do this one today because when you sign up for a copy hackers like for a free ebook or whatever you opted in for whatever lead magnet brought to you to copy hackers you are redirected to a thank you page the cats you redirected to a thank you page that asks you a question and that question something you might know it because it's been up for a couple of weeks now two weeks or something that question is what was going on in your life that brought you to sign up for or whatever it might be copy hackers today and one of the bigger trends that we're seeing in their responses is a lot of people who are like I'm thinking of becoming a copywriter and we regularly get emails from people who are like look my construction job is over or thinking of retiring or I did retire I used to be a teacher and now I want to be a copywriter there are a lot of people who are still starting out and we tend to kind of jump ahead to like okay you're writing copy here's how to write an email but some people are still just figuring this stuff out so this tutorial is for you if you are new to conversion copywriting or to any copywriting at all and you want to get it right right out of the gate this will help you today a lot of people sit down like when they're writing copy you sit down and you look at the screen and you start typing things and you wonder why doesn't feel right it's like okay this is writing but how is this gonna get people to say yes to me like how is like me thinking aloud on the page even if it sounds nice how is it going to convince people to say yes and that's where you go like oh no and then you back up and you get impostor syndrome when you're like oh man there's so many things I need to learn you there probably are a lot of things to learn it's true but don't get overwhelmed by it let's start with the process because when you're gonna write copy that converts you're not going to sit down and just start typing out your thoughts that's not gonna work good point Elizabeth me too that's not gonna work sitting down I'm doing that is just it's going to cause all the problems mentioned here's what to do instead it is a very very simple three-part process you do not have to overcomplicate it I teach this in the 10x freelance copywriter which we're probably going to reopen again this November to start in January this is what conversion copywriters know and need to know okay really straightforward it doesn't have to be a terribly long tutorial today I'm going to share it with you now okay you should be sharing my screen three very simple steps I will zoom in on that just going to that show you see my keyboard I forgot that it's broken Network cool so you should see that up close now this is unlikely to surprise anybody who's been writing copy for a while again so this is again for newer people people who are newer to copywriting and conversion copywriting in particular we begin and we always follow this three-step process so if you're working with the client internal or external there's never any part of this process that is optional there might be smaller part like this process might be more research and less validation sometimes but a client should never say oh we don't need Reese and discovery like don't worry about that just get right into right and you just wants you to write it like I appreciate that you want to go do all this other stuff but we just want you to write it you're not gonna do that that's not what we do we begin with research and discovery all the time and this tends to be that like the biggest part of the work and if it's not the biggest part of the work 99% of the time it means you're doing it wrong you need to find your message in the research of this every phase and then and only then once you've done all sorts of listening to their team a little but also to their prospects or customers that are X customers I'm not going to get too deep into that part today but research and discovery is everything that's where your messages will come from that's where your messaging hierarchy and messaging hierarchy here knew that it's just the order that messages go in and not just like on the page but like which messages need to be seen first and which ones which messages support something those bigger messages so so so your research will drive Dave Collins is here it don't look like a robot that was me doing my robot commit no I don't have to okay we're about to that's good recorded yay okay so good we're back awesome Esso research and discovery great that's where we do most of our work as conversion copywriters because we are listening we're eavesdropping then comes synthesizing everything we heard and turning that into and turning that into written coffee like actual coffee and then why are framing that and editing in the awesome as we like to say the third step is validation and experimentation a lot of people think oh this is where you a be test oh no my clients won't AV test what am I supposed to do validation is an important part of this you can't always a B test everything that's a big thing to know going into this is the conversion copywriter and this is true whether they've been doing this for a while or not you cannot a be test everything it's a beautiful dream but it is only a dream and there were problems with a be testing we won't get into that today either but the goal in this third phase of your conversion copywritten process is to make sure you are putting the best possible version out for your one reader or your ideal prospect validation can help with that so validating is putting copied if in front of people who are likely to be your prospect and that's to see about persuasion are you being pulled in watching where people trail offices can be using click tracking and scroll nothing to see before even goes live but like put it out there on a landing page and drive traffic to that you know actual domain that's kind of standing alone see how it's going to see where people are being lost etc etc five-second text is another really good option here where you can say okay we're worried about the clarity of the homepage headline or the landing page headline or the actual placing area on the sales page we're worried clarity worried over getting specific enough five-second test won't tell you if your message is persuasive but it can tell you really good things like did people even understand what that headline was about so validation and experimentation is where you're saying okay here's the copy we have that's written based on all of this great voice of customer data which is what we call it voice of customer data which is the research all of this stuff edit but we still can't say for sure if this is going to be the absolute right version to go with or if it's in its optimum state actually launch it so we're gonna go on five-second test get some quick quick gut reactions on clarity on how specific things are on whether images our ideas are sticking or images we're kind of coming to life for people they understand your value prop and can repeat it back to you and tell you what it means that's what five-second tests comm is really great for that's the third phase so this is the whole process yeah varam Arun sort and saying that wrong five-second test helps clarify the final offer for me and that's great it'll help with a lot of things having to do with clarity don't expect a lot more than that but it can help you make sure and if you're familiar with tutorial Tuesdays you'll know that we have seven sweeps and the clarity suite is always the number one sweep you want to always go over your copy and make sure that above all it's clear above everything else it's clear so if five-second test can help you with that that's a huge win for you and it can really point out problems that you have lander has a question here about missing the research of discovery discussion we didn't really get too much into so don't worry Lander do you guys use SEM rush when you research too we didn't get into all the things we use for research but absolutely I don't use SEM rush but I know either she did okay cool so that's the process it is always always always your process without fail then I wanted to kind of touch on this because um it's been coming up a lot especially in our mastermind that we won the writing itself so when you do the research and discovery you are likely to put together documents that like synthesize everything that's you're hearing your messaging hierarchy all of the things that I already mentioned for that but then when you sit down to write I've seen some people do all that research and then still go over to a document and stare at the page and go like ok what no you don't have to do that you don't want to do that and we actually can make it a bajillion times simpler than staring at a screen and this is like don't overcomplicate your job your job is to be extremely good at listening and then to make sure that and it sounds good so that might sound like what well let me show you so when you're actually writing the copy what I do is I use two screams that's it I take the research that I've done and I put it on one half of the screen and then I put my document on the other half of the screen and then I look at the research and let's say so I'm going to do this right now I'm going to hold this one bear with me I know they're smarter ways to do that I don't know shortcuts I know I don't but I don't know what the shortcut is to make your screen go into two different things so please don't get angry with me for being like I didn't get training on my neck I'm just glad that my awesome works with my MacBook that's all okay so I've got two things showing here now as I mentioned we have this survey that we run on the Thank You page when you sign up for copy hackers we're asked what was going on in your life that barred you to sign up with copy hackers today this is one of the Thank You surveys that we run based on where you sign up and then we just have all the responses so if I were to write copy for copy hackers or why you should choose copy hackers what the reasons are that people sign up for coffee hacker then I could just sit here open up my AK my document itself and let's say I was going to write a page for why new copywriters or why let's say I have a question about ok what do people think when they think copywriters and come to the site so I'm gonna keyboard I keep forgetting so I have to use my laptop once so I'm going to search copywriter and this is just an example you don't have to search but I have to give you like a topic to write so here's one be ready book so I search the word copywriter in our results and I can go through we are searching for a copywriter and then someone writes two days ago well you see I wanted to become a copywriter but I gave up after seeing alibaba's a copywriting tool I thought to myself there's no point learning now in just two years that thing will murder all human copywriters but I decided I couldn't let that scare me anymore so I'm back I'm here to fight the good fight I want to serve the human race sir I want to defend all human copywriters that is why I signed up and you're not always gonna get people who write things like that like that's pretty awesome well done putting that response together it makes it nice to go through survey results it's not always gonna be that way but what we could do here if we're writing a page that's supposed to maybe convince people to become a copywriter or it's time to write a long-form sales page to sell a program on becoming a copywriter like brand new you're not a copywriter you want to figure out what to do we would sit here and look at that exact line maybe even copy it directly over and then just paste it here and start actually just writing this in to copy now that might sound like what do you mean take this and use this as potentially not I want to serve the human race I wanted append all TV copywriters but maybe there's a section on the page that's about like if people have an objection to becoming a freelance copywriter or a new copywriter where they're like well those other BOTS that do this now this becomes the core of what just try to use my keyboard of what we write in that section I'm not gonna sit here and dream up what do people think when they're writing when they're wondering they should become a copywriter that's never gonna be useful and I can't come up with that and say like oh they're wondering will they get jobs will they make any money but we're not ever gonna get as deeply into what people are really thinking until we start going through the data itself now we've taken what I'm showing here this type form that I'm showing here and we have exported it into Google Doc into Google sheets and we go through it and we organize things and tag things and we've cut this all up with the air story researcher to tag things there as well so it's not always gonna be a matter of just like looking at this and copying and pasting but very often in simply a matter of having your research open on one side identifying important pieces of it which is the listening part of your job you're there to listen not to write identify the best the most engaging stuff the stuff that makes you pay attention and then simply slightly revised that to turn it into copy that's it that's the whole show hub that's 90 percent of the job then you go over and you do your sweeps and you make sure everything like pulls together in a non disjointed kind of way um that's your whole job that's everything that's simplifying it I know because it might be like when you sit down to do this you're looking at this is going like but like how how do I turn that into copy and you might be like okay that actually isn't gonna work as coffee but I want to become a copywriter but I gave up so I gave up after seeing alibaba's AI copywriting tools so we can just say [Music] right that could be a crosshead that introduces a section that's all about why you shouldn't give up on this that might be an email we're writing when people are worried about whether they're gonna be replaced by a bot of some kind point being you don't sit there and just start writing split your screen in two and just take what people are saying then put it on the page all right I'm going to stop sharing now that is the entire tutorial in a perfect 20 minutes as promised but almost never delivered on because we almost always go over so hope that helps you again three phases research and discovery writing wire framing and editing and validation experimentation okay now the questions that we have if you have them throw them in Q&A Isaac says how do you deal with a client that wants all email to be super short testing so email is very very easy to test I don't know why so I would dig into what they want all email to be super short that's like question number one help them diagnose their misconceptions and then walk them through when copy when short copy works well and when long copy works better so you're there to coach your client through this remember you're the expert if your client doesn't recognize you as the expert they might not be your client very long that would be my take on it no that sounds like easier said than done because everybody has bills to pay and things like that but be careful not to waste your energy let's say you've got ten years as a copywriter and you give up three years of those to a client or many clients are going to burn you out with really crazy ideas that are just like whipped up of the clear blue sky like email should always be short just be careful not to let them take up too much of your space because where did they get that idea like where did they get this idea from why do they believe that's true start there Isaac than us yes I wonder how exactly you turn BOC data into actual copy would love to see an example someday so I was going to show you an example today realized example I was gonna show you is protected by an NDA so so unfortunately I realize that and it's a really good example so unfortunately today isn't gonna cover that but another day down the road I might even just ask the client if they're like cool with me showing people that especially once their new copy goes live but yes I want to show you I have every contingent of showing you I forget sometimes and excited NBA's ok Reno asks what are the seven sweeps of your cookie the seven sweeps are on copy hackers comm in the tutorials area or any page you're on has a sidebar with links to tutorials in it scroll to the bottom of that sidebar I know sometimes it's tricky because of the way that like sites are laid out but scroll to the bottom of it and you'll see the seven sweeps there cool there's training on like each one of them so easy peasy Debbie says um not so unquote but I've been wondering in general about creativity in conversion copywriting I noticed her eyes emails are incredibly fun and creative you pop in these snappy lines and see any characters how important is it to say things in a fresh one inch anyway so that's a branding thing really um if you're speaking to enterprises you may not want to go too crazy with the voice aim to be really careful like um too much voice can make things feel a little cheaper sometimes so and that's that might sound like what how do you know well this is like fifteen years of watching this stuff happen a lot of copywriters love to dive into voice oh I'm gonna bring this to life with like this I'm gonna throw these like colloquialisms in it and it's gonna sound like oh here's whatever it can come off as because it's heavy-handed it comes off sometimes is slightly um I'm mature ish so I think that it's a matter of doing your best to just walk the fine and if it feels like you're getting too zany as you put it pull back better to be less zany then too much now that again depends on your brand so our copy hackers emails especially the ones that write writes people really like them some people really like them and some people don't I gave a talk at the copywriter Club in real life in New York last February where we listened oh we showed screenshots that people send the emails to us that we're like over written guff was one lizard risk was a reply to one of the emails that we wrote things like that like some people really like in some people want so if you're cool what's kind of polarizing people that way it's not an aggressive polarization like we're not left versus right or some really weird thing going on um but just be careful I would just say that just be careful how important is it to say things in a fresh by an entertaining way how important is it to your audience to hear things in that fresh fun entertaining layer okay and Rico says how much too much research is there such a thing I haven't experienced there being too much research ever you can feel overwhelmed by it but we call our research process and immersive message finding process and that's really like almost like when actors get in character and then like stay in character and you hear about them like going into a coffee shop I was like some Lord of the Rings character because they were in character um that's about like immersing yourself in it so that you can authentically produce in that and that's the same kind of thing here can you really immerse yourself in just tons of insights into what prospects and customers are thinking and feeling what they want what the products can and cannot do for them all of that kind of stuff I've never experienced too much research I definitely felt the pains of too little though Debbie says how about a little more info on wireframing we get into wire framing in my mastermind and in the 10x freelance copywriter I can definitely do that I have moved over the years away from lo-fi wireframes to producing more high fidelity wireframes so they tend to look more like a completed page with just like places where images should go and then instruction on what that image should be but everything else is largely done so I can do that um I think just a matter of identifying where people need to I guess we just start out with early wire framing um but that's something that we can definitely put in an upcoming tutorial thanks Debbie serve says how much weight you place on SEO as a web copywriter so I don't identify as a web copyright it just as a note you might be like semantics but it's good not good it's my role so I am a web copywriter it's worried about things like SEO um it also feels like kind of an old term though just as like a side note for me as someone who lives in breathing stuff 24/7 for 15 years so as a conversion copywriter though or even as somebody who's just in digital marketing SEO is a consideration it's rarely up there for me in the considerations so there are many many ways to get traffic to a page into your site many ways many great ways some of them not that affordable others affordable what happens when you get them there I'm worried about once they're on that page are they going to be convinced and convert say yes to us in some way so for me I'm not that worried about it other people maybe those who do you identify as a web copywriter would put it further up I know that I when I was called senior web copywriter at Intuit a bajillion years ago SEO was something I worked very closely with the SEO team on everything all the time but they also worked with the legal team on everything all the time so give a lot of considerations when you're writing copy and says well goes to QA oops are there any tips about how to conduct good research to make sure you have a lot to work off of so I know there was chat about hahaha I just saw the comment about Bob why I still think about that fondly um yeah so we get into this in coffee school quite a bit into the research and get into our first book which is available free on copy hackers comm is called we're stellar messages come from and it is all about research now it's 7 years old and some of it is outdated like user testing comm is sort of a pain in the ass these days their pricing is just like it doesn't even work for small businesses at all anymore like you have to be an enterprise to get anything so things like that are slightly outdated but yeah I would start with that free ebook go there and and we'll do other tutorials on that but you want to do surveys interviews that you get transcribed all sorts that you can go through track chat transcripts things like that there's so much there's so much to do but we want to make sure that we're focusing on learning so that we can write better copy not learning for the sake of learning so only focus on things that actually matter to what the triming direct which means you don't necessarily have to say okay show me your google analytics when you're writing a long-form sales page you could just ask the team for like the one or two data points you might need instead of like going into someone's GA and wasting a lot of time in there when you could just ask someone else to pull a report for you it's little pieces that you might need um so we're to follow on that daddy says certain between emails and web pages in this aspect I assume that means like when it comes to writing this way no nope it's all writing this stuff follow that process and don't sit there and start the page templates like we're not talking in this when we get into writing we're forming and editing that includes using templates using frameworks getting into more formulas and things that all happens in the writing way for me an editing process so if you're like well when I'm writing templates you guys teach us all sorts of all right I'm writing emails and you guys teach us all sorts of templates or theme plates and you should use those when you're actually in the writing process but the parts that fill in those templates shouldn't come from voice of customer data michael says could I walk you through how we wireframe and yes in another tutorial I will I will put that on the list probably in October or November so stay tuned but yes and then services what software do I use I wireframe in Photoshop actually I think it's one of those things where I've taught myself how to do it and I'm like it's like you can picture like roots like pulling you down like there's no way for me to escape Photoshop now like I have to use it um so that's what I use I used balsamic for wire framing when I first started wire and then that was before they had their nice switch to like get away from the sketch look and turn on the like cleanup like you I look which is much nicer to work in so I switched away from that from balsamic early on because it looks so sketch like which is the point but clients didn't look right for some of the clients I was working with so I switched to photoshop and now boss sonic is better anyway I don't use sketch I don't I don't understand it Barbara says how much time - Alec 8 - research Agathe depends I've got a tech line who works the speed of light and wants things turn around Lea I feel your pain right now a bit overwhelmed well research I've got I wish I'd asked more time to process it so he just went through this intensive for a very cool tech company a two-week sprint to do a ton of research and develop value proposition options for them two weeks it's nothing I would never agree to that but I was like oh I'm not for the challenge that's just crazy because I'm just like a Jew's you um but yeah how much time can you get so it depends on you work great like if you're somebody who if you have four weeks to do something you'll do it all like the night before to do if that's how you work traditionally then shorten up that period anyway so you just like get down to work um but I tend to find that the research is like I think of it and like circles so the research circle is this big the rating and wireframing is this big and then validation and experimentation is maybe a little bit smaller but the research is a huge amount now the more you work with a client the smaller that research kind of balloon gets and the bigger other ones may get in comparison to it but research is so it's time well spent we look at the process and we keep research separate from writing but they kind of you should start with research but the research is writing it's still part of like it's fully part of writing so don't worry too much about all this meeting so much time on research because that's time well spent that's actual writing work that you're doing in there Corvette says how do you use air story for whitening we don't air stories not built for that it's built for turning your notes into long copy and content control says in general how long does the entire process take for example a typical blog post so this one isn't about writing a blog post that you could absolutely use this before writing a blog post but you'd likely capture and document the sources so not necessarily from a survey like you could say whatever but a blog post isn't a blog post is like an article or an essay you might be persuading people with it but it's not there with the explicit intent of trying to get people to say yes to a conversion metric of some kind like opting in or paying buying things like that so it's kind of a hard one to answer mantra we're really focusing more on copy that converts rather than in content Sarah says when you wire form do you leave it with a client sorry I just saw a whole bunch of things coming in that's amazing yeah okay sorry I got distracted but for those who are watching the replay there is a about an interaction that I had with mr. Bob ley legendary copywriter when I wrote a post for copy blogger mr. Bligh left a comment that I did not feel was very productive but I didn't see much others jump to my defense as Sammy says Bob felt that the word mofo which I use in my life byline the time we're saying copy hackers teaches startups to convert like mofos or something or where startups learn to convert like mofos mofo is just just a word that i say like a big you to fem back on pop the album one of those songs was called mofo and I think I would like 17 and I didn't know any better and it was like Oh mofo that's a thing and it just became part of how I talk and think and I didn't question it and mr. blye questions so that was fun anyway that's a side note if you're watching the replay okay let's assume says when you wireframe do you leave it with the client to bring to the web developer designer do you work with the developers on yourself work with them yourself present ideally when you present your wired copy and we get into copy presentations and other tutorials so go through the library of tutorials for presenting your coffee but when you do do your best to have the designer in the room when you're presenting the copy so you can say like this is a low fire wire frame we just want to note that this is not design but it is a low fire wire frame and then just work directly with them most of the time you'll already have had discussions with the designer along the way so there shouldn't be like a weird feeling of you're coming in and stepping on my territory like it should didn't get to that Manuel finishes offer questions with the perks like finisher will there be a replay for this tutorial there will all of our tutorials almost all of them are recorded and shared in our tutorial library on copy hackers comm and if Sara's tech were working she would know check out link but he can go to coffee markers calm and just search in the search bar tutorials and you will get all almost all of our past tutorials including this one it will be up later today that is our hope ok thank you everybody rockers thanks everyone and thanks for chiming in and all this cool that was happening over here as well I really hope that this process helps you if you're new or to conversion copywriting or if you were just kind of wondering what the difference is between like conversion copy writing and kind of more traditional copywriting this should be a good start for you we will see you in our next tutorial Tuesday the week after that I believe I am away in Dublin so it'll be a break but not next week I'll be here next week and we will see you then thanks everyone