Doctrines From The Cult of Copy

In this interview Colin shares some his copywriting wisdom including…

www.cultofcopy.com

Joey Bushnell: Hey everyone, this is Joey Bushnell, today I have with me one of the worlds top copywriters, his name is Colin Theriot. Colin, thank you very much for being with me today.

Colin Theriot: My pleasure Joey, thank you for having me.

Joey Bushnell: Colin, how did you become a copywriter?

Colin Theriot: It’s a funny story, a lot of the people that I meet in copywriting that are interested in following in my footsteps will ask me “How did you get started, what do you recommend?”.

For me I was working at a marketing company as what I call “Web Monkeying”. Which involved doing graphics, HTML or Java script, setting up a hosting account anything that they needed. I can’t remember if the writer was sick or she was just busy with other projects, but the guy running that company, Andy Jenkins, said “Do we have anybody working here who can volunteer?”. We were really small, this was at a company called Stomper Net.

I’m not sure if it’s still around but at the time I was there in 2007, it was a pretty big deal. So Andy asked “Who do we have working here who can volunteer”. We only had 5 employees so I just volunteered because that’s the kind of person I am. I guess what I did was pretty good because Andy said “This is good, do you like it?” I said “Sure”. He said “OK well get good at it because you are the new chief marketing copywriter for Stomper Net.”

For the next 3 years I worked there, writing all of their blog posts, emails and at least a drafty of their sales letters. I can’t say I wrote the final version while working there just because they had so many good marketers on staff. Everybody got to weigh in but I wrote the drafts.

So if you look at it, I had the advantage of some of the best marketers on the internet at that time, looking over my work and telling me how to get better. I did that for about 3 years and the guys who own that company split up and went their own way. I figured that was a good time for me to check out and start doing my own thing. From there I continued to work with Jenkins. We did “Video Boss” together and “Kajabi” together and I’ve been doing my own thing since.

So it was accidental, I was in the right place, at the right time to volunteer for what I didn’t realize I was part of the internet marketing community at the time. When I was working at Stomper Net it was just a job. I didn’t realize we were at the top of the pyramid at that particular time. It was one of those things where I was in the right place at the right time and that I spent a lot of time doing it everyday so by the time I went freelance I was already at least as good as any professional that had been doing it for 3 years.

Joey Bushnell: That’s a cool story, I wasn’t actually aware of that, so back in the early days of when I was getting into internet marketing in about 2007-2008 Stomper Net was one of the big things at the time. You probably sold to me and I wasn’t even aware of it Colin.

Colin Theriot: It’s quite possible, for a large portion of my career no one knew that I was the one writing the things that were selling people.

Joey Bushnell: Awesome so we now we know a bit about you, during this call I’d love to ask you some questions about how we can improve our own copy.

So my first question is… How do you work out the nature of someones problem so that you can know how to write to that person?

Colin Theriot: I do a little bit of research, I try to look for places where people who are interested enough in the niche to discuss it with each other, are very likely to be the people that would buy information about that topic. If they are having conversations online they are expressing interest enough to actually create content. They might not think of it like that. Most people don’t think of posting on a forum as creating content, but they are.

So I figure if they are willing enough to sit there and type out a bunch of stuff about this topic they are probably the kind of people that would buy info. So I look for places like that, such as Facebook groups, forums and I just try to get a grasp of what they are talking about as the problem.

Once I know that then I’ll look at the product. I try to not look at the product first because I feel like it puts me inside a box and limits my thinking. Even when I look at the product I’ll only get a short description of what it is and what it’s meant to help with.

I like to write at least the first draft, again it’s just about not putting myself in a box so a lot of times I’ll write a first draft without ever actually seeing the product. I’m just working off of my imagination of what the product is based on and what the person who made it described it as.

A lot of times we will do an editing pass afterwards because I will have over imagined it or given it credit for it being something that it is not quite. But I find it’s better to over imagine it then reign it back in than starting out knowing exactly what it is and not being able to get that big idea that goes beyond what the product does.

Besides looking at what the main problem is that people are talking about what I’ll try and do is connect it through a story so the problems they are experiencing, the product that we are offering seems to fit those problems exactly.

It’s really not about finding the right problem, it’s about taking the problems that they have no matter what they are and figuring out the way to connect it to the product so the product feels like a solution.

I’m not selecting a problem so much as I’m figuring out how to make what they are complaining about fit. A lot of that has to do with story telling. Just being able to tell a story and walk people from point A to B.

It’s really easy, one of the tricks that I use, which works in any niche, is if you are familiar with what a straw man argument is? It’s commonly used in political discussion and debate, and what it is, is if you can’t argue against your opponents point you make up something that is not necessarily true, like you misunderstand what they said turn it into the boogie man and then you attack that. So they can’t really defend against it because it’s not really what they said. But it sounds like you are defending against it, you just turned it into something else and you’re arguing against that.

In a similar way what you can do with these problems is if I know you’re having a problem with your internet marketing, just for example that is a niche I usually work in, I know you are employed and you do the internet marketing thing on the side but you wish it was making you enough for you to quit your job. That is the presumption I have based on looking through forums and what people were talking about this and where they are in their life. I take that specific problem because all this PDF that you buy will teach you is how to use Facebook for example.

I’ll look at the problem that you have about internet marketing and I’ll think of the ripples that it has. Like a rock tossed into a pond it makes ripples that effects all of these other aspects of your life. Your problem with internet marketing is amplified when you’re in your car driving to work, when you are sitting in the cubicle that you hate in this fluorescent lighting, when you have to talk to your crappy manager who has bad breath and leans in too close.

All of these little fictional things that it affects like if you are stuck in traffic driving to and from work it puts you in a bad mood when you get home and maybe you take it out on your wife, your kids or your dog. Maybe you can’t sleep at night, there are all of these ripples where it touches these other parts of your life that isn’t specifically when you are at the computer making your web pages.

So by extrapolating the problem and talking about all of those other things it’s very easy to make them feel like whatever product you have feel like a solution to them. You paint the picture that everything that is going wrong in their life is attached to this one problem. It makes a product that only has one particular solution for one particular problem all of a sudden seem like a Swiss army knife because it’s going to have this positive ripple effect that will fix all of those other problems.

Joey Bushnell: So do you have any tips for weaving a story into copy? Is it a difficult thing to do? Does it have all of the normal things that a story would have like characters, heroes and villains?

Colin Theriot: Pretty much, what I try to do is try to keep things simple because I am a creative person but when you’re doing this kind of work you can’t rely on your creativity because you’re not making an argument, you are making a product.

I have deadlines to hit so what I have is formulas that I know will work just as a basic structure then within that if I have the time and inspiration maybe I’ll get an excellent idea. But even if I don’t I’ll have something good and workable because I know the structure works.

So with that being said, the structure of a story that I use and come back to over and over again is you can think of it like a super hero story…

The person who made this product is the super hero and they have their super powers which is the benefits that this product delivers.

They also have their origin story which is how I came to be the person who has these powers. The way you want to set that story up is you open the letter with your authority which is “Hey, I’m an expert at this, that’s why you should be listening to me, but I didn’t used to be, I used to be more like you. Here’s what it used to be like when I was like you ” then you describe their problem to them.

Then you shift and say “but then something happened, it was a lucky break. I figured this stuff out, I made this leap to where I’m an expert at this now. But here’s why I’ve come back to help you with it”. In that really basic story structure there are a few really beneficial things, then you segue into your product, whatever the product may be.

The points of the story are relative so I can do 2 different products for the same person and the story of how I used to not be an expert at this particular thing and what happened to make me an expert at this particular thing will change each time.

When I’m trying to set myself up as an authority about copywriting and I want to tell you how I got from there, not being one, to here, being one now the story is different than if I was going to tell you a story about how I built up a Facebook group to 1300 members in 6 months. The beginning and end point would be different even though I’m the same person.

The art is in picking the starting point and ending point so people can read it and see “I want to make that journey”. That’s is what it’s about. You are really selling them a transformation or journey. They don’t necessarily want the result they want to be the kind of person who can get that result.

Joey Bushnell: Is it important that we tell this story in first person or does that not really matter?

Colin Theriot: I always try to make a sales letter written in identifiable first person source. So it’s usually, in the niches I work in, the person writing the letter is the creator of the product. It doesn’t have to be but I still think, especially on the internet, you want a first person voice persona or spokesperson who your prospect is talking to.

Even though it’s a static page on the web if you have a little bit of video in there, comments, a community where you interact with your audience there should be someone there so they feel that they are talking to a person. Not an entity or an “Us” but a “Me”.

Then you can say things like “I know you’ll love this” because that makes if you’re talking to a person. But if you say “We know you’ll love this” it’s a bit weird an impersonal because I don’t know who “We” is. Is it 50 people, 100, are they men, women, a mixture or children? I don’t know anything about a “We”. But if you show me a picture of a person or I see them on video and talking it’s more direct.

All copy is, is salesmanship in print and when you’re in a face to face selling situation it’s not a “We” it’s a “Me”. There’s only one salesman they don’t come at you as a group and sell you it’s a one on one thing because it makes people comfortable. So I try to write to simulate that as if I am one person talking to just one person. Then I’ll write the letter from that point of view. Even if you don’t have an identity where you’re like “Hi my name is Joey Bushnell” or “I’m Colin Theriot” even if there is not a single identity, you still want to write as if it’s one person speaking to one person.

Joey Bushnell: OK, how do we show that our solution is the best solution available? And I mean in comparison to other products out there on the market, other solutions, how do we convince them that we are the ones who have the answer for them?

Colin Theriot: A lot of people make the mistake where they don’t want to talk about competitors because they feel their customer will leave and go to check out the competitor.

What you really want to do is what everybody knows, you take your product and look for the features and then figure out the benefit that the feature provides and that’s how you sell your product.

So what I recommend is you take that feature and benefit and you take it a step further and you figure out why it’s an advantage, what unique advantage does that particular feature and benefit give you?

Then you want to look for the features your product has that are unique. Meaning no other product like yours has that one feature. It could be anything. It could be the fact that the person who wrote it is a best selling author. It could be that it has one little technical feature that the other ones don’t have. It doesn’t matter if it’s insignificant, all that matters is it’s unique.

Once you describe it to someone, the product that doesn’t have that feature will be lacking, even if it’s an insignificant feature. It could be the dumbest thing in the world like a coin pocket in some blue jeans. That little tiny pocket that is inside the other pocket. I always wondered what that was for so I looked it up and apparently you’re supposed to keep loose change in that tiny pocket. I don’t even carry cash on me let alone loose change. If someone described that to me as a feature as being beneficial I would look at other jeans that don’t have it as being lesser, even though I would never use that particular feature. It sounds dumb in that example but you see tons and tons of that kind of thing everyday. You’ll see it in main stream marketing in TV commercials.

So that is one flip side of it and if you want to amplify it even more you look at your competitors products and you don’t have to name them by name but what you do is you do the same sort of exercise on their product but you do them negative side of it as opposed to the positive side.

So when you look at your product and you look at features, advantages and benefits. When you look at competing products what you are looking for are flaws, disadvantages and detriments.

Such as what is a negative result of using this product? What disadvantage does it leave you at compared to people using your solution? What are the flaws in the product that your product doesn’t have?

You don’t name those products by name but you use those points in your copy especially when you’re telling that story like I mentioned where you say “Here’s what it was like when I was in your position”. So you need to describe that from that perspective. Here are the problems and flaws in the products I bought, here’s the detriments that I suffered and here’s the disadvantages I felt I was suffering from. By doing it that way then describing your product first, it feels like your product is a perfect fit for their problem.

Second, if they leave your letter and go to look at the competitors, all they are going to see is all of the flaws that you pointed out. Now all of a sudden your product seems like the leader because it has all of these good things that you have to have and it doesn’t have any of these bad things that the other products have. 

I’ll tell you a quick story, I learned that tactic from shopping for a mattress. There is a place here in Atlanta where I live called furniture alley and it’s a bunch of furniture stores all in a row. So if you want to buy a mattress there are about 5 mattress stores in a row, all competing with each other. So we went to the first one, it’s weird because it’s on a one way street so if you go to a mall you start at the beginning and work your way down.

So we went to the first one and the guy behind the counter is just reading a magazine and says “Take a look around let me know when you’re ready and if you have any questions.” So we found something we liked we talked to him and he told us all about it. We said “OK well you’re the first one in the line so we’re going to go down the street and if you have the best then we will come back.”

He said “Cool, let me give you some advice, you notice that I didn’t bug you it’s because I don’t work on commission. I get paid a salary so I’m not going to bother you if you want to buy a mattress buy it from me, if not OK, I still get paid either way. But the guys down the street are all pure commission. It’s all very young guys and they are all competing with each other even in the same store they’ll fight over who gets to talk to you first. They will lie to you about which mattress you want to get because they get a better commission depending on which one they sell. If they have inventory they need to get rid of they will try and push that on you.”

So he’s telling me all of these flaws, disadvantages and detriments that I’m going to suffer if I go down the road. I didn’t realize it but that is what he was doing. So we leave and go to the very first mattress shop after his and it’s full of 19 year old sales people tripping over each other to get in our face. The very first guy says “Well that mattress is good but check out this one instead”. Everything the guy said before came true.

That was the last mattress store we went to, we turned right back around and went to the first one even though there were 6 or 7 in a row because I didn’t want to waste my time. I learned how to apply that trick to copy because what he did worked. All he did was describe in a general way what my experience was going to be like and all it took was for one little bit of that to come true and I came running right back to him.

Joey Bushnell: Brilliant a great example. Colin I’ve heard you refer to something called “The Monkey Brain”, what is that and how does it help us in copy writing?

Colin Theriot: When I teach this stuff and talk about it I’m constantly trying to come up with better ways to explain it. It’s one thing to understand it and have a grasp of it but some of this stuff can be hard to explain to people.

So the Monkey brain, the thing to remember is people are evolved from apes. So at some level in our brain, if you think of it as a computer code, the core code down at the very lowest level that is not human, it doesn’t think, it doesn’t apply logic, it’s just an animal brain, that part of the brain drives most peoples behavior.

They don’t think it does, they think they apply a logic and act rationally, they think when an option comes up to make a choice they think “Well I weigh up both options and I apply a logic and pick one that makes the most sense.”  But what actually happens is the monkey decides, they pick up on very sub conscious sort of cues, then what happens is the monkey brain decides so fast that the logical part of your brain makes up justifications after the fact to explain why you chose that option.

Then you accept that because it makes sense to the logical part of your brain. But what is happening is, the illogical part is making excuses for what the monkey brain wanted to do.

You’ll see this a lot in the kind of people who complain about having drama in their lives. It’s because they have let the monkey drive and “Oh I don’t know why I cheated on my significant other, I was out of control”. It’s not that they were out of control it’s just they let the animal take over and then later they were unable to provide a logical explanation to why they did what they did. That’s really what happened, they let the animal side come out.

When you are talking about the monkey brain it’s not human so it’s bad at making decisions, it’s bad at math and doesn’t know how to compare numbers, it knows I’m attracted to this and if I want to move toward it or I’m repelled by this I want to move away from it. That is pretty much the only 2 switches it has.

It’s one of the reasons why that saying “Sex sells” that is why because no matter who you are that monkey part of your mind wants to reproduce, it has a desire to do that. So if you make something sexy you are drawn to it dramatically.

The same way as making your competitors seem gross, unsexy and undesirable, like the famous Macintosh ads with the Mac guy and the PC guy. They say nothing really about the machines but the mac guy is so repellant, rude, a jerk and he dresses badly that you are repelled by him. That is the trick of that ad you don’t really think of the mac guys being cool, you don’t want to be like him, you barely now anything about him. But the other guy is such a jerk that you don’t want to be anything like him, it’s a repellant advertising.

The way to learn how the monkey mind works is to research things like logical fallacies or cognitive biases which are things in psychology and philosophy that are weaknesses. It’s ways that scientists have figured out that people are consistently bad at making certain kinds of decisions.

Here’s a good example. If I say to you “Buy this it only costs $5” you have no point of reference. If I say to you “Here’s where information from this product has sold for $50 but you can only get it for $5”. Now all of a sudden it feels like a deal that seems too good to pass up even though it’s the exact same information for the exact same price. Say $50 first, $5 seems cheaper even if I’d said “It used to be $2 but we raised the price to $5 because the demand was so high” That would turn people off even though it’s the exact same product for the exact same price, it just depends on which way you anchor it.

Again that is because the monkey brain is bad at making decisions. It doesn’t stop to think that the previous price has no bearing on this offer. But when you bring that in, the monkey brain can’t ignore it unless you have someone who’s very Vulcan, Spock like in their logic application. They are usually going to make their bad decision making brain go to work and take over which is what we want.

I only write copy and review copy for people who have good products. But this stuff works even if the product is crappy. So I would say use this with caution. Try to put good things out into the world instead of bad but these are the same tools people use to rip off other people because it works. The monkey brain is weak anyone can tap into it. It’s how cult leaders get followers, con artists trick people, it’s how frauds operate, all because it’s easy to trick a monkey brain because it’s all by appearances.

Joey Bushnell: So we use these powers for good.

Colin Theriot: That’s what I would recommend.

Joey Bushnell: Yes, very cool stuff there and I’m sure that is a topic you could talk about for a very long time. Maybe another time we could delve deeper into that, I’m very interested in that.

My next question is, do you have any tips for creating high quality pre-selling content. I know this something you teach the idea of pre-selling content. So what is it and how can we do it well?

Colin Theriot: One of these old chestnuts you see a lot in internet marketing and selling information over the internet in particular, is people talk a lot about this balance. Content to promotion. You have to have a certain percentage of free content to keep people interested and happy and only a certain percentage of commercials because they don’t like commercials. I see that as being totally false.

It’s using a false comparison to modern television which is 60-70% show to 40-30% advertisements which are compartmentalized. We actually see a lot more product placement happening where they put the products in the show itself. What people don’t realize is, at the beginning of television, product placement was the only kind of advertisement. Soap operas existed because characters in the show would use detergent during the show and that was part of the plot.

The point was for house wives sitting at home listening to the radio all day you were selling them detergent. By working it into the story you were tricking them into listening because people become engaged by stories. The idea there for me, is that, the only reason people feel this resistance to promotion versus content is because you have conditioned them to when they come on board your list.

So to me the solution is, if you don’t want people to miss your promotions don’t create a pattern that is good free content, good free content, good free content then promotion. Then it stands out and that’s not what they wanted if they came on board for the free content.

However if all of your content is based around pre-selling which I’ll explain what that is, everything you do even if it’s “Free Content” is setting them up to buy something down the line.

What that means is, they begin to not be able to tell the difference between what is “Content” and what is “Promotion” because they feel the same as far as the content you’re giving them.

You can see how that’s beneficial because it doesn’t make the promotion stand out, there is no way for them to get mad at it because it feels just like everything else that you send them. So how do you do that? The way I recommend people to do that is by going back to the previous part of the conversation. While you’re writing your sales material you get this whole list of problems that your product solves. What you have to do is take that list of problems and that is the content you want to build your free content around, that would be the topics.

So if you sell SEO software, the topics you would want to talk about are “here’s how most people get SEO wrong”, “Here are 5 mistakes people make when getting back links”, “Here are 10 problems to look out for when you hire outsourcers to do SEO for you”. Things like that, taking the problems that there are in your niche and amplifying them, educating people about the problems, making them more solid.

What you are doing is, you can think of it as people in your niche that either have these problems and are avoiding them because it is painful and they don’t like to deal with it. Or haven’t experienced these problems so they are not fully educated on it, either way they see these problems as “blurry” as a way to think of it.

What you are doing by educating them about these problems, is bringing them in to focus. Again what this does to that monkey brain is when it feels like it has a problem it goes on alert looking for a solution. Even though you don’t consciously think that, you do start giving it a little bit of brain power to where if a solution comes across their way, it’s going to stick out as you have that problem in the back of your mind.

So that’s the mechanism that makes us work so when you’re out there telling people about problems, problems, problems then your offer comes along it’s a solution which they want to jump all over. So instead of going content, content, content, promo which will make them irritated because nobody likes to be sold to. Now the pattern is problem, problem, problem, solution.

So your promos stand out but they are what provides relief instead of an interruption to what they really want. It is the solution to the problems they have been reading about. When you do it right and it works really well, you don’t even have to sell because you’ve been doing the selling all along.

You’ll just say “Hey check this out” and they’ll say “Wow this product is really hitting the checklist of all the problems that I have with this particular topic, this is perfect I’m going to get it.” They don’t have the ability to make the connection that you’re the one who gave them that problem description.

For whatever reason, if I’m warning you about danger to avoid, that feels altruistic to you, it doesn’t feel like I’m selling you anything. So you accept it and internalize it. To you it becomes fact, you don’t have to vet it. Then once you internalize it, when I show you the solution, you remember all of those problems as if they are yours. You naturally want the product because you’ve adopted those problems. You forget that I taught them to you. That is what your need said, that you need for the product before you even promote it to them.

Joey Bushnell: Very cool, so this pre-sell content can be in the form of blog posts, videos before these launches that happen, is that the delivery method for this pre-sell content?

Colin Theriot: Yes it can be videos, blog posts, emails or any forum posts. Anything you put out there that isn’t directly tied to a buy button is the stuff we are talking about.

Joey Bushnell: My final question is, if you could give one piece of advice to a newbie copywriter, someone who is just getting into all of this stuff, what would that be?

Colin Theriot: I would say the thing to be aware of, is that in copywriting, people make this mistake of focusing on the writing part. People have this idea of what writing is, that it is mental work, thinking, creative and these ideas you need to have and being inspired, all of this type of thing.

When really what copywriting is, the disciplines that you want to learn is selling. Once you are good at selling all you have to do is capture that in writing.

So it’s not writing in the same way as you think of a novelist or a poet or anything like that. Beyond that it’s not a mental exercise, it’s a physical discipline. It’s work, manual labor and it doesn’t seem like it because you’re sitting there and typing 15, 20, 30 pages in a sales letter for a $3,000 product, that is work.

The only way to get good at it is to practice. It’s like a sport. You can’t get good at gymnastics, baseball or anything like that by reading a book. You can learn about some ideas and some theories to try but unless you physically do it and do it with regularity you aren’t going to be good at it, it’s a physical discipline.

For anyone who wants to get better at writing copy the only way to get better is to write. Not just write but write and show it to people and see how they convert. Ask them about it, how it made them feel? Get better at doing that but you can only get better by practice, it’s a physical discipline. I think most people don’t realize that about writing. It’s manual labor, you are building something and making something.

Joey Bushnell: Absolutely. Colin, thank you so much for taking the time to do this with me today. Where can we get more information and content from you? Do you have a website or any social media groups where we can connect with you?

Colin Theriot: Sure, I have a blog at colintheriot.com, but I’m not very good at updating it because I’m not a blogger.

The main place I hang out and put most of my stuff is a Facebook group I have called “The Cult of Copy”. If you like any of the sort of devious, dark arts persuasion and manipulation stuff, some of the stuff I hinted at that you said you were interested in, that is what I discuss there.

It originally started out as just being a bunch of peers, colleagues and clients but I’ve opened it up to the public and it’s become really good for people posting articles about writing, posting insights and advice. I post a lot of stuff there. I post a lot of training there. So if you’re already in Facebook you can just search for “Cult of Copy” or I made a short cut URL that goes straight to the Facebook sign up page and it’s cultofcopy.com

Joey Bushnell: If you are interested in learning more from Colin the Facebook group is probably the place to go. If someone wants to get in contact with you Colin, does your website have the information to get in touch with you via that way?

Colin Theriot: Yes, but like I said, I’m mostly on Facebook because of the group that’s what I look at the most but I’m also on Skype and you can find me on my website. Basically I have a really unique name with an Irish first name and a Cajun last name so if you search you will find me and if it’s  Colin Theriot who is associated with the internet in some way it’s probably me. I’ll get to look at it eventually but if you want me to look at it straight away Facebook is probably the best way to get in touch.

Joey Bushnell: Awesome, well thank you once more Colin this has been great, I really appreciate it.

Colin Theriot: Thank you

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