Copywriting lessons from David Garfinkel
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How do you make the transition from having a job to being a freelance copywriter? Or, maybe more to the point, if you’re already a freelancer, how do you do what you do and get all the advantages of being a business? Most copywriters don’t know. It took me years to find out and figure it out myself. Today we’re going to drastically shorten the learning curve for a lot of listeners. Our returning…
Nathan came up with the idea for this show, and it started, of all places, in his mom’s kitchen. Here’s what happened: If Mom says dinner will be ready in 30 minutes, Nathan is much less likely to go digging through the fridge. So if she wanted to stop him from digging through the fridge, she wouldn’t have to say a word about the fridge. She could just start cooking dinner. Think about that for a…
I was rummaging around on youtube when I came across this video with an outrageous claim: “This book literally teaches you to think like a Harvard lawyer.” My skepticism shot into high gear, but when I watched the video, from a youtube educator named Stephan L. Petro, I saw he was on the level. I’ll tell you about the book in a minute. It’s really valuable for any copywriter, because it will help…
This week I had a great conversation with a Hollywood screenwriting coach and screenwriter himself, and it reminded me about how much people in Hollywood know that copywriters can learn and use. One of his most important points was there are structures that make stories work. Not rigid formulas or two-dimensional templates, but guidelines with benchmarks that have proven time and time again to act…
Today we’re continuing with Part 3 of our Old Masters Series, focusing on the contributions of Albert Lasker. That’s because in 1898, Albert Lasker arrived in Chicago to work at Lord and Thomas, which he took over in only a few years. And what Lasker and the copywriters he hired would do over the next 10 years would change the course of advertising. We’ve covered lessons in Parts 1 and 2 of this…
The world of copywriting and ecommerce almost changed forever last September 29, when Open AI launched something called Instant Checkout. This new service was designed to let you seamlessly buy something right from Chat GPT. Instant Checkout crashed and burned over the next six months for a number of reasons. One, the infrastructure wasn’t there to let it happen. It was launched before there were…
Today we’re continuing with our Old Masters Series focus on the contributions of Albert Lasker. This is Part 2. Lasker is the one person in history who, more than anyone else, created the foundation for what advertising is today—at least direct response advertising. On today’s show, we’re going to review some more of the most important lessons we have learned resulting from his innovations more…
Albert Lasker didn't just become one of advertising's biggest names—he helped invent the way modern direct response marketing works. In this episode of the Old Masters Series, we explore the principles that transformed advertising from clever announcements into measurable sales systems. You'll hear the stories behind the ideas that influenced generations of copywriters, from Claude Hopkins to…
Our special guest today didn’t start out planning to be a copywriter, but found his way into it after posting online reviews of his favorite martial arts movies in college, and getting his writing compared to that of Dan Kennedy. He looked up Dan and found what he had to say interesting. But he didn’t become a copywriter or a marketer at the time. Instead, he finished his degree and went from job…
Last week, we did a show on how content marketing is failing direct marketers when you do it the way everyone else does it. Basically, social media encourages you to crave attention and approval, instead of get results. Nathan asked me if we could a completely different version of the show, where we focus on including direct response elements in our content marketing. I thought that was a great…
Our returning champion today is Kim Krause Schwalm, and she is going to share some amazing and unique information with you. The late Clayton Makepiece, a legend himself in copywriting, said, and I quote: “Kim Krause Schwalm is one of the hottest copywriters alive.” Here’s a little background: Kim was always a marketer who could write copy. Before she launched her freelance career in 1998, she…
