#200: How to Become a Truly Persuasive Copywriter

Welcome back to another edition of the Course Creation Incubator podcast. I’m your host, Gina Onativia, and we are officially celebrating 200 episodes. Can you believe it? 200. Now, I saw a stat the other day that 85% of podcasts don’t publish on a consistent basis. So I’m so proud to be one of the 15% still hanging in there, putting out content, hopefully great content each and every week.

And I couldn’t have done it without you, without you listening and when I first started this podcast, I had no idea how much this would grow into this incredible community. And I’m so grateful for you listening. I’m so grateful for the conversations we’ve had over the past years. I’m grateful for the guests that have been on to thank you for being here, for showing up each week and believing in the power, of course, creation and getting your marketing out there and just taking action, taking massive action.

And to celebrate this huge milestone, we’re also officially opening the doors to the conversion copywriting playbook, my brand new live course with the one and only the best marketing copywriter out there, Megan O’Leary. We are going to go live over four weeks to teach you how to become a truly persuasive copywriter. This program is designed to help you write words that sell because no matter how great your courses or your program or your life workshop, if your copy isn’t persuasive, you likely won’t attract the buyers that you deserve.

And if you’re putting in the work and I know you’ve been putting in the work, by the way, you’ve been listening to me, you’re likely an overachiever, you’re an expert. I want it to pay off for you. So today, in honor of 200 episodes plus conversion copywriting Playbook officially opening, I thought, let’s talk about how to become a more persuasive, confident copywriter.

So you can see a little bit of what’s possible when you sign up for CCP. I’m going to talk through a little about the what what are the elements that make up a really great copywriter? And in CCP and Conversion Copyright Playbook, we’re going to talk through the how how do you get into the mindset of a great writer like Megan O’Leary, someone who’s writing copy for campaigns every day.

So whether you’re a writer yourself or your managing writers or your course creator or entrepreneur, you’re solopreneur or you have a small business, This could be a really great course for you or if you have a small team that you want to learn about core marketing principles, this is great for them as well. We already have a couple of organizations that are signed up and they’re going to send multiple people from their team.

This would be a great class for you. We’re only going to open it up for a week. Make sure you check it out and we’re going to do it live this time. And I’ll be honest, we don’t know if we’re going to do it again. O’LEARY And I said, let’s try it this one time. Let’s see how it goes.

I’ll link to it in the show notes so you can enroll and grab your spot. Okay, Let’s dive in to what it means to be a truly persuasive copywriter. And by the way, these are all the attributes that Megan O’Leary already has. And I have to a certain extent, and this is a little bit of a love note to Megan because she’s such a great copywriter and this is what you’re going to see inside of the course.

You’re going to learn how to ask questions like Megan, how to think like Megan, how to look at copy, and then take it to the next level. All right. The first element to being a truly persuasive copywriter is, of course, your audience. It’s about your audience and knowing your audience inside and out. As always, it starts with audience.

Any time. As marketers, we want to start with the pain points, the desires, the challenges. It doesn’t start with us. Sometimes we may feel like it starts with us, like we get excited about an idea, but then we have to ask, Well, is that something that our core audience really wants or is that something that I’m just excited about?

Also, we want to think about what’s the emotional transformation that they want from us. Now, O’Leary is going to talk about the questions that she asked before she starts any project so we can kind of get into that mindset. So O’Leary is going to talk about the questions that she asked before she starts any project or any campaign.

And inevitably it is about the audience and really drilling into the that need and the emotion that they’re either feeling right now, they’re not feeling or the emotion that they’re moving toward. I’ve said this on the podcast before, and I’ll say it again Tom Blue in the face. But people buy based on emotion the emotions that they think the product or the course or whatever the purchase is will bring them.

I just bought these running socks the other day and I love them. They’re compression socks. They make me feel great when I run and they’re out of stock on Amazon and Target and everywhere I could find. And I finally found them for twice as much as I paid last time. But I paid it because they make me feel amazing because there’s no other socks that make me feel that way, that make me feel comfortable and knowing that I can just run and I can go for it.

If you’re a runner or you’re an athlete, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You buy shorts. I buy running shorts because they’re my favorite running shorts because they move with me. They move well, right. That’s the power of emotions driving purchases. It’s not about the product. It’s how it made me feel and it made me feel like I was real runner.

So I pay twice as much for it. So that’s number one. Having a deeper understanding of who you’re talking to, and we’ll talk about that in the course and we’ll dig deep. Is your course, is your service, is your offering so good and so juicy and drives such emotion like my socks that people will go out of the way to hunt for it, that people will go out of their way to buy it.

That’s what we want to figure out. The second element as a persuasive writer, we want to know what the compelling messages are. I talked about this in a podcast a few weeks ago, so if you have your idea of the audience, you want to know what these messaging pillars are, what are we saying to them? What are the benefits?

What’s our promise? Persuasion isn’t about pushing people into decision. It’s about making them see what your course or your program or your workshop is the right choice for them. And when you do it well, well, selling becomes effortless. So I’ve talked about course promises before on this podcast, and I love a good course promise, because that’s our North Star when we’re outlining our course.

And it’s the same thing for our campaign and for our marketing. We want to have our messaging pillars. So that drives the overarching messaging for the campaign, that goes along with our topic and our theme. We’re going through this right now with a webinar campaign, seeing how we can differentiate with what we’ve done in the past, what is different than what we’ve done before, Where’s our audience right now?

Are they new? Have they been around for a couple of years or a couple of months? Where are their heads right now? What challenges are they facing? What solution do we want to present and benefits and promise that will speak to that? For example, we’re talking about how AI is going to play into this campaign and how we want to play up the human connection.

Now we know these keywords are going to be really important, so our messaging pillars will reflect those keywords. So again, we’ll teach you all this in the conversion copywriting playbook. Then a third element in persuasive copywriting is of course giving the FOMO the urgency and the scarcity. How are they going to miss out? What is the exclusive limited time offer that they might miss out on if they don’t enroll?

Think about the last time you really wanted something but hesitated and then it was gone. Me was a little tight discount a product that sold out or an opportunity that passed. That’s great. FOMO in action. And if you don’t create the same urgency for your audience, they’ll put off buying your course, maybe forever. I remember there was an online running club that I wanted to sign up for.

I know there’s a lot of writing in this episode. Just stay with me. And it was a quarterly club, like a live club that I haven’t seen again, and I just thought I wasn’t ready for it. I was just getting started. This was last year when I was still recovering and I missed out. I haven’t seen that running club, that online running club offered again.

And I’m kind of kicking myself that maybe I should have done it and maybe I could have revisited those principles later and now I missed out. So that’s a little bit of FOMO, right? You want to make your folks feel like that? Regret, right? The little bit of FOMO, you could do that by having a reduction in price.

It could be a juicy bonus that’s going to go away. So for me, at the beginning of this episode, I said, Hey, we might never do this class again. Get in. And we’re doing it live. We might never do it live again. There’s FOMO there, there’s scarcity, there’s urgency. Another piece that I could mention is I haven’t put out a course marketing training for the public in years.

I do a lot of done for you and I do one to ones, but it’s been a while since I put out something about courses or course marketing. This is your opportunity to get in. So there’s a little bit of FOMO there too. Hey, I’m going to teach a course marketing bonus with Conversion copywriting playbook. Make sure you get in because I don’t know when I might do a training again.

It’s been a couple of years. We could also mention a limit to a class. I mean, we’re doing a live class, so we will limit the class we haven’t mentioned a particular number yet, but if we start to fill up, we’ll add that to our emails. Hey, there’s only X amount of spots left. You can say your price will never be like this again.

I’ve talked about this before, but when I put out the six week accelerator, it was half the price for what is offered for it was a total bananas price. So making sure you have something that’s going to make people move and having deadlines so important, people do not move unless they have a deadline. So make sure you are clear about what something expires.

That’s why I’m saying the doors are only open for one week. Okay. Our fourth piece of persuasive copywriting is, of course, having fabulous headlines and hooks. O’Leary is a master at this. I’ll throw out a pretty good headline. Something that’s okay. And then she’ll make it truly great. That’s something we’ll do together and keep. I know my keywords, I know what I want to convey, but she makes it sound so good because she gets inside the head of my audience.

And then of course, having those hooks that are going to grab you from the beginning in emails and knowing how to grab their attention because we know attention is so scarce these days. All right. The fifth and final element that I did want to bring up, because this is the through line of everything we do is, of course, telling great stories and examples, providing that emotional connection that shows and tells rather than me training you on something specific, learning through stories, learning from case studies.

It’s compelling. It’s powerful because their stories and examples are all of these elements wrapped into One is exactly what we’re going to teach in the conversion copy playbook to teach you how to write persuasive confidently. It’s a 30 day live experience will coach you in real time writing emails and other marketing copy. And we’re going to do live critiques too.

We’re going to see what happens when we get an email, and then O’Leary takes it over and does a great edit, or we’re going to do critiques. When we got something out of I and then how to make it even better, how to polish it and make it actually sound like you or the person that you’re writing for.

We’d love to have you in the class. Doors Are open. Course Creation Boutique Ecom Search Copy a link to it in the show notes. And thanks again for celebrating Tuesday with me. It means so much. And until next time be you and be brilliant and get it done. And I’ll see you for the next 200 episodes.