Shadowing Practice: How To Write Words That Make People Buy (Full Course) - Learn English Speaking with Video

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This is likely going to be the longest video I ever make, but hopefully the most useful.

In the next hour, I'm going to reveal everything

that I've learned working behind the scenes with the biggest personal brands in the space.

This one skill has allowed me to help launch a New York Times bestselling book, break a Guinness World Record, drive millions of dollars in revenue,

and design a life with time and location freedom, all as a 20-year-old kid.

And in this course, I'm going to go over what copywriting is and why it matters, how to think like a copywriter, my five C's for writing on the internet,

hooks, bodies, and call to actions, how to get better at copywriting, how to make money from copywriting, and how to sign high ticket clients.

Oh my goodness, you guys are in for a treat.

Let's get to it.

Real quick, I created a free workbook that goes along with this video with a bunch of templates, exercises, and reflection questions for you,

and it follows and maps the video.

And so if you want to download that and go through it with the video, feel free to do so.

All right, back to the video.

So what actually is copywriting?

If you're like, Jay, you just named all of these cool, insane things, but what even is copywriting?

Well, when I first heard of copywriting, I thought it was this, you know, the little C logos that you see next to logos like the copyright trademark.

That's what I thought copywriting was.

But copywriting is really just transferring information from one brain to another in the simplest way possible.

It's persuasive writing.

I first heard of copywriting from a guy named Sam Parr

who sold a media company for tens of millions in dollars

and I thought gosh if it worked for him then learning copywriting would probably be useful for me too.

And I think like if we were to zoom out we all know that code is important.

Code is the back end of the internet but media or copywriting is the front end of the internet.

And in an age where you can build almost anything with AI the only remaining alpha is distribution.

If you can shift the supply and demand curve in your favor, if you can make yourself oversubscribed,

if you can develop distribution because of your skills, the world is yours.

A blog post is copywriting.

A YouTube script is copywriting.

A short script is copywriting.

Emails are copywriting.

Ads are copywriting.

So the better you get at copywriting, the better you get at everything else.

It's also a life skill.

Think about it.

If you're an investor, you have to convince LPs to give you money.

If you're a founder, you have to convince investors to fund you.

If you're a founder, you have to convince your team to join you.

If you're an employee, you have to convince that team to hire you.

If you're a parent, you have to convince your kids to go to bed on time.

It doesn't matter what you do.

Learning how to think and communicate as effectively and persuasively as possible is a life skill.

So how do you get better at copywriting?

The first step to getting better at copywriting is to realize that it was never about the writing in the first place.

It was about the thinking.

See, I can give you a bunch of templates and hacks that make you feel like you're getting value.

For example, if I said you should use identity-based hooks and say business owners or chiropractors or YouTubers or use outcome-based hooks.

If you're ambitious but inconsistent, watch this video.

If you're a business owner doing between $1 to $3 million a year, keep watching.

Or promise hooks.

We will deliver X and Y or you don't have to do Z.

We will build your entire webinar funnel for free

and just take a percentage of what we make you or you don't have to pay at all.

I can give you those things, but I would much rather teach you how to fish than just simply give you fish.

Because then you're just stuck repeating templates without understanding the why behind why they're working.

So the first step to getting good at copywriting is to follow what I call the six P's of copy thinking.

And this is the process

that I go through with all of my clients before I write any piece of content or copy or messaging.

And the six P's are people, positioning, promise, proof, priority, and process.

I know that was a mouthful but stick with me.

Let's go through all of them and then I'm going to give you two examples of all six.

So the first P is people.

Who is your offer for?

Because you can't answer the question why should they choose us until you know who is they.

Let's say you're selling a marathon training program.

Well if you're selling to a beginner who's never run a marathon before then they're probably afraid of

not being able to finish or being dead last.

So your promise to them is you'll finish your first marathon.

If your avatar is a busy professional, then maybe they're afraid of not being able to stick to the training plan because they're busy with work.

And so your promise is we will design a training plan that fits your 60-hour workweek schedule.

If your avatar is a runner over 40, then maybe they're afraid of getting injured.

And so your promise to them is you will be able to run the marathon while being healthy.

If your avatar is someone who's chasing the Boston Marathon qualification, then maybe their fear is missing the mark by 90 seconds.

And so your promise to them is, hey, we're gonna get you over that cross line by a lot so you don't have to even worry about that.

If your avatar is someone who's coming back from an injury, then maybe they're afraid of re-tearing that injury.

And so your promise to them is, we will help you run a marathon while staying healthy.

Do you see how important it is to understand who you're talking to before you figure out what your messaging

and positioning is?

And so step one is to get crystal clear about who your avatar is.

And my favorite way to do this is to build an empathy map.

And so what I want you to do is to draw two lines, one going up and one going down.

And you first start with current.

So what is your avatar doing on a daily basis?

What are they seeing?

What are they hearing?

What are they smelling?

What are they feeling?

You put yourself in their shoes.

What does their daily reality look like?

And so people often talk about the golden rule, which is treat other people the way you want to be treated.

But there's actually a rule above that, which is the platinum rule.

Treat other people the way they want to be treated because that's true empathy.

It's putting yourself in their shoes, not them in yours.

Then you draw a line down to future fears.

And this is hell.

Where do they not want to end up?

What is their worst possible reality?

Get clear on that.

Then you go to their current frustrations.

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What are the things in their daily life that they are not liking or they want to avoid?

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Maybe if they have a nine to five, they hate sitting in traffic or they hate having to dress up for work

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or they hate having to sit in these useless meetings

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or having to have like a 30 minute lunch break or being told when to go to the bathroom.

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Then you draw a line up to their future goals.

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This is heaven.

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This is the reality that they want to get to.

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And so my personal rule is I don't start writing copy until I feel like I have an overabundance of material, until I feel like I have almost too much to say

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because of all of the context I have on who my avatar is.

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And this is a super pro tip.

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This is probably the most athlete you'll get.

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I've run this with two clients and it works like crazy the best way to research who your avatar is, is to talk to your customers.

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Some of the best ads we've ever run is when we downloaded all of our sales calls, we uploaded it into AI, transcribed it, identified the specific reasons why they bought,

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and then said those exact things back to them in the ads.

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For example, if someone on the sales call said, I'm ready to build something that gives me more freedom, flexibility, and control over my time and income,

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then we might write an ad hook that says, the most dangerous thing a woman can do is become disgustingly financially independent.

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If someone says, I am excited to invest in myself

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and learn more sales skills with the goal of one day

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escaping the nine to five life to have more freedom and time to live.

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Then an ad hook that we might write is the normal path will never make you a millionaire nowadays.

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And this isn't some escape the matrix bro science BS.

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I'm being so serious right now.

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We are literally conditioned from a young age to treat anything other than the normal path as a scam.

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If someone writes, I've been a stay-at-home mom slash wife for quite a few years, and with my kids in school,

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I feel like I finally have the time to do something for myself and make some damn money, then we might use an ad hook that says,

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if you've been looking for a way to make money around your schedule without starting a whole business, you need to hear this.

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If someone says, my goal is to build consistent 30k months so I can eventually transition fully out of corporate sales, then an ad hook we might say is, you don't have to quit your job,

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move cities, or blow up your whole life to start making more money.

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You just have to learn one skill.

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If someone says, hi, I'm a broke and overworked Chicago girlie who pursued her 20-year-old self's dream of working in sports, and now I'm turning 30 this year and ready for financial stability.

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Then an ad hook that we may write is, if hard work was the answer, the donkey would own the farm.

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And I don't say that to be harsh, but it's true.

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We were told from a young age that if you just work harder, put in more hours, follow the rules, be patient, that eventually you'll get what you deserve.

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But it's just not true.

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Do you see how I'm repeating back the beliefs and desires that people have said on sales calls back to them?

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If you can describe someone's pain point better than they can, they'll subconsciously believe that you have the solution.

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The pain is the pitch.

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The second P is positioning.

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And so this is why people should choose your brand or your offer over anyone else's.

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Positioning is how your product is perceived in your consumer's mind.

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When you have strong positioning, it increases brand recognition, it lubricates the sales process, and it makes it easier for others to talk about you.

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And one of my favorite quotes is from Seth Godin.

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He says, successful brands are built with your customers talking about you, not you talking about you.

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Marketing is about creating the conditions for other people to eagerly spread your idea.

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And so there's this story of how the legendary copywriter, Claude Hopkins, went in to save this beer company, Schlitz Beer.

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And they were dead last in sales.

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And it was because they were competing on this positioning of pure beer, that our beer is pure.

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But the problem was all the other beer companies had the same messaging.

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They were all saying that they were pure.

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And so Claude was like, what does pure even mean?

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And so he visited the factory and he got a tour of the factory.

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And what he found out was there was a ton of processes to make sure that their beer was pure.

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There was 4,000 foot artesian water wells.

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There was expensive filters and there was a thousand year old mother yeast cell.

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And Claude was like, why hasn't anyone talked about this before?

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And the staff was like, well, every beer company does the same thing as us.

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We all do it.

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But Claude said, no, this is actually really important.

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This is great positioning.

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And so he crafted an advertising campaign around all the different ways and techniques that Schlitz beer was filtering their beer.

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And then they crushed it and became number one in sales.

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And it's not because they were doing anything differently.

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they were just simply stating the facts, but they were the first person to state the facts.

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And so it's like, yeah, you can use AI to write for you, but AI can't uncover these hidden advantages and strengths of your clients.

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So when you're crafting your copy and your campaigns, it's on you as the copywriter to dig up these interesting angles and use them.

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I think you're beginning to start to see the pattern here of, you know, I haven't even talked about writing at all it has all been about research.

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And that's because the game is won before the pen is even used.

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The third P is promise.

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And that is what people get when they use your product or service.

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And it's not about features or deliverables at all.

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It's about who you're helping your customer to become.

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It's about what they want.

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It's the outcome.

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Steve Jobs didn't say, hey, this product has five gigabytes of data.

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He said, Amazing little device holds a thousand songs.

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And it goes right in my pocket.

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And so my favorite test for this is the so what test.

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And so imagine you're selling an artesian rug.

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Level one is, you know, why should you want an artesian rug?

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Well, it's a five by five, you know, rug made out of silk.

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It's super beautiful. So what?

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Well, it'll be large enough to anchor your room. So what?

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Well, your room will feel pulled together rather than random. So what?

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When people walk in, the room will feel intentional and clean. So what?

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Well, you'll get compliments from people and people will think you're awesome. So what?

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You'll feel like someone with great taste and a home worth showing off.

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Do you see how we've gone from deliverables to benefit to benefit to core outcome that we want?

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If you're not clear about what your customers actually want and the core outcome that you're helping them deliver, then they won't be clear on it either.

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And if you confuse, you lose.

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The fourth P is proof.

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Why should I trust you?

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And proof is evidence that backs up your promise.

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Trust is belief with evidence.

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Belief without evidence is called faith.

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And so there are three types of proof.

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The first type of proof is authority by association and this is when you use an authority figure as your proof.

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Elon Musk says X Y & Z.

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Dr. So-and-so says do this.

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The second type of proof is your results.

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I scaled my business to 500k a year and here are the five lessons I learned.

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I went from making eight dollars an hour as a barista to becoming a millionaire by 24.

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Here's how I did it.

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And the third type of proof and this is the most important

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and strongest type of proof is your client's stories and results.

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This is Sabrina.

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I helped her go from making $50,000 a year as a teacher to making $50,000 a month as a high ticket closer.

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A key point here is that proof is relative.

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And so you want to match the proof with your avatar.

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And so if you are selling to a middle-aged 50-year-old Asian woman,

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then you want to show case studies and proof of other middle-aged Asian women, right?

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If you show a case study of a young white kid from Alabama, then it's not going to be as strong as someone who looks and sounds like the middle-aged woman.

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One of my favorite exercises to get better at thinking about proof is what I call the deaf and mute test.

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And so imagine that you're deaf and mute.

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You can't say anything.

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You can't explain your point.

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You can't argue.

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All you can do is point at different things.

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And so you can't point at trusted by industry leaders, but you can point at different logos.

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You can't point at proven results, but you can point at a number.

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You can't point at highly experienced, but you can point at 400 clients, 11 years in the industry.

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And so an example for me would be like, I can't point at I'm a great copywriter, but I can point at wrote ads for $106 million launch in three days.

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The fifth P is priority.

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Why should people act now?

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And there are only two reasons why people act.

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They want to go toward something pleasurable or away from something painful.

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I prefer to use pain in my ads because people will jog towards pleasure, but they will sprint away from pain.

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There are three simple ways to highlight priority.

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Number one is scarcity.

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So there's limited spots.

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Number two is urgency.

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This goes away in X amount of days.

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And number three is the cost of inaction.

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And this is my favorite.

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What happens if you stay on your current path?

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Because the gap between where they are and where they want to be, that gap creates deprivation.

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And deprivation is the cousin of motivation.

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And so you can kind of think about it like if you're drowning underwater, you don't casually swim up to the surface.

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No, you kick and claw and fight your way up to get air.

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Similarly, the stronger the deprivation, the stronger the motivation to take action will be.

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And the sixth and final P is process.

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How does your offer work?

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If I said, hey, I'll help you lose weight.

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Well, there's many ways I can help you do that.

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I can give you GLP-1s.

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I can get you on a caloric deficit diet.

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I can get you to start doing Pilates.

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I can help you train for a marathon.

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All of these are different processes to get to the outcome that we want.

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A good process does four things.

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Number one, it explains why other solutions fail.

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Number two, it creates a believable path.

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Number three, it feels different.

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And number four, it's easy to understand.

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And I'll share an example of this in just a second, but a quick way to figure out what your process is, is to ask yourself, number one, what do most people believe?

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Number two, why are they wrong?

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And number three, what do you believe instead?

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Everyone thinks X, it's wrong because Y, and the solution is Z.

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Everyone thinks you have to start a business to start making money online, but you can actually get paid without being an influencer or building a whole business, it's called high ticket sales,

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or everyone thinks more activity equals more progress.

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But you can actually scale faster by identifying the limiting factor and solving it.

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We call this the value acceleration method.

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All right, so those are the six Ps.

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People, who is your offer for?

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Positioning, why you over others?

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Promise, what do they get?

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Proof, why trust you?

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Priority, why act now?

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And process, how does it work?

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And so I want to share two quick examples of these six Ps

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and how I turn that into an ad just to show how I think about this.

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And so Alex Ramosi, the people that he's targeting are business owners doing over $500,000 a year in revenue.

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The positioning is we teach you what's working in our portfolio companies.

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The promise is learn the one to three things to scale past your current level.

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The proof is last year my portfolio generated over $250 million in aggregate revenue.

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The priority is if you don't act, then all problems are out to you and you don't have a business.

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You have a job and our workshops get booked out.

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The process is see how we scale using the value acceleration method, which is the compilation of all the stuff I've done across all the different industries.

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And so if we know that those are the six Ps for Alex Ramosi, the ad almost writes itself once we know all of those Ps.

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So here's an example ad.

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If your business is doing between one to three million dollars a year in revenue, then you're in what we call the swamp,

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which means you're too busy to work on the business because you're drowning in the business, but you don't have enough cash to hire the key hires you need.

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So you're stuck in a vicious cycle.

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You can't grow without help and you can't afford help without growth.

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So what do you do?

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These are all the symptoms of having key man risk.

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And in order to build a more scalable company, growth can't fully depend on you.

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That's exactly what we help business owners do at our scaling workshops.

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If you're a business owner, I'd like to invite you out to our headquarters here in Vegas to see how we scale using the value acceleration method,

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which is the compilation of all the stuff I've done across all the different industries.

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And if that sounds interesting, you can click below, book a call, and I'd love to potentially meet you and see you in person.

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So we call out who he's targeting, business owners doing over one to $3 million a year.

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We tell them why they should want to solve this problem

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so they can get out of their vicious cycle of being in the swamp.

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We make the promise that we'll solve the one to three things that are bottlenecking your business.

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We talk about the process, which is the value acceleration method, and then we give proof that he's done it across all the different industries.

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The second example is for Shelby Sapp, and Shelby runs an offer that helps women get into high ticket sales, and it's a little bit more of an unsophisticated audience.

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What I mean by that is these are women who haven't been sold or marketed a lot of business opportunity offers, unlike Alex's B2B audience.

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And so rather than leaning on a specific process like the value acceleration method, the actual process is the opportunity vehicle itself, high ticket sales.

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So here's an example.

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If you don't wanna quit your job to start something new, but you wanna make more money, then this is your sign to get into high ticket sales.

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My name's Shelby Sapp, and I went from making $8 an hour as a barista to being a millionaire at 24 years old, and I'm in a sales industry that very few people understand.

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It's called high ticket sales.

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You don't need to go into an office, you don't need to work a nine to five, you don't even need to have sales experience in order to get started.

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And it's helped me move into my dream home on the water, drive my dream Porsche, and buy multiple investment properties.

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High ticket sales is the best sales opportunity for women to

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start making extra money by taking these high ticket calls from anywhere in the world.

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Yes, you can work remote, choose your own hours, and close expensive deals for some of the best online coaches and creators.

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There is not a better opportunity in the world to start stacking your savings.

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So if you give me 60 minutes this Tuesday, I'm inviting you to register for my live high ticket sales masterclass for free.

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It's only for women.

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And I'm going to personally show you how to start closing high ticket deals and how to land on your first offer.

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So click the button below to register and secure your spot for this Tuesday at 8 p.m.

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Eastern.

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Do you see how all the pieces are starting to come together?

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It's not about the words.

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It's about the thinking behind the words.

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And I want to stress the importance of this because if you understand the six P's of copy thinking, you'll never grow broke.

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This is how you build campaigns.

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This is how you position products.

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This is how you scale brands.

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If you understand how to think, the world is yours.

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Man, I can probably stop here and that'll be the course, but let's keep going.

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Once you know how to think like a copywriter, the next step you have to take is how do you write like a copywriter?

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These are my five C's for writing on the internet.

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And I like to call this real-world writing because in school you're taught

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that you have to write five-paragraph essays and use big words

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and long sentences to sound smart and that you can't use me or you or I or any first-person

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Adjectives and a teacher is paid to read your writing, but in real life.

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It's the complete opposite It's not about how smart you are

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as the writer It's about how smart the reader feels and nobody owes you their attention

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I like to operate from the lens that everyone who reads my stuff is busy, distracted, and has a below fifth grade reading level.

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And so the first C is to be clear.

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They cannot buy from you or be persuaded from you if they don't understand what you're trying to say.

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And one of my favorite ways to write more clearly is not to try and write more clearly, but to remove anything that's unclear.

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We start from the end and work our way to the front.

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And one of my favorite tests for whether my writing is clear or not is what I call the firefighter test.

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And so imagine that you're in a house and there's a fire downstairs

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and there's people on the upstairs level that you have to warn.

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And you go up there and you run upstairs and you say, hey, guys, I need to tell you something.

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You know, there's a situation going down downstairs that, you know, we may need to think about and we kind of have to act quickly.

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Are you guys listening?

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Okay, so there may or may not be a fire downstairs and I don't know how big it is, but we should probably do something.

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That is horrible, terrible, super unclear.

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Now, imagine you run upstairs and say, hey guys, there's a fire downstairs.

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I need you to open the window and jump out.

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You see how much more clear that is?

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And so pro tip, use Hemingway app.

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It's a free tool.

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I'm not affiliated with it in any way, but basically you can paste your writing into Hemingway

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and it will grade your writing level and show you the specific sentences

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and words that you should cut or rewrite to make it more clear.

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The second C is concise.

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You want to have writing that has no wasted words.

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In school, you're rewarded for hitting that like 500 word count or whatever.

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But again, in the real world, no one owes you their attention.

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And so I like to pretend that every word that I write costs $10.

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And so the question I always ask myself before I publish any piece of writing is, what can I cut without removing quality or understanding?

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And one of my favorite ways to get better at writing more concisely is to write tweets.

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And so for the beginning of my career, I used to write 10 plus tweets a day for six months straight.

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Because what Twitter does, I guess it's called X nowadays, is there's a 280 character limit.

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And so it forces you to be concise.

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I think the beauty of also writing on Twitter is it becomes a foundation for everything else.

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And so I see Twitter as my idea playground.

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I like to test a bunch of ideas because you don't get penalized for posting 10, 20 times a day.

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And so what you can do is you can see what ideas

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or angles resonate on Twitter and then turn those into ad hooks, turn those into points for a YouTube video, turn those into short scripts.

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And so Twitter becomes a foundation for all the other content.

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The third C is concrete.

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And this is where you want to make your writing visualizable.

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You want your readers to be able to picture what you're writing in their heads.

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And so instead of saying, we help business owners grow, you can say we took a roofing company from 14 leads a month to 70 leads a month.

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I think a big thing here is when you are trying to describe something big and amorphous, for example, like love, it makes sense to zoom in.

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Because if you say I love you, it's hard to picture that.

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What does that mean?

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Right?

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But if you say, you know, sometimes I wake up and I put my hand out next to the bed

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and you're not there and I open my eyes

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and you're not there and I roll over and I sniff your pillow

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because it smells like you and reminds me of you.

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That's more visualizable, right?

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I'm not saying that all your writing has to be visualizable, but when you are trying to articulate or describe something meaningful like an emotion,

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it makes sense to zoom in and try and think about how people will picture this in their head.

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The fourth C is conversational.

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And so this is really just about making your reading readable for your avatar.

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And so one of the biggest mistakes I see people make

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when they're writing specifically for social media is they take a lot of habits

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that they learned in school and they apply it to LinkedIn posts or Twitter posts.

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And it reads very corporate and robotic.

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But if you read the writing out loud, it's just not how anyone talks.

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And so what you want to do is match your writing with your readers in group.

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Meaning if you're talking to 20 year old college students, then you want to use the same lingo and language that they're using.

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The party was positively pushing P.

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That's cap, your honor.

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It's giving leading questions.

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So that they trust you.

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And if you're talking to 50 year old lawyers, then you probably want to use different language and lingo that they use.

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And this is why understanding your people, who you're talking to is so important.

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Because if you're talking to 20 year old college students, then please don't hesitate to reach out becomes just text me if you need anything.

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The fifth C is cadence.

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You want your writing to read almost like music.

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If you have the same run-on droning sentences, then your reader will be bored out of their mind.

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And people who are bored usually don't buy.

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And so I'm going to put up on screen Gary Provost's Write Like Music.

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It is my favorite example of what writing with cadence means.

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This sentence has five words.

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Here are five more words.

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Five word sentences are fine, but several together become monotonous.

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Listen to what is happening.

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The writing is getting boring.

409

The sound of it drones.

410

It's like a stuck record.

411

The ear demands some variety.

412

Now listen.

413

I vary the sentence length and I create music.

414

Music.

415

The writing sings.

416

It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony.

417

I use short sentences.

418

And I use sentences of medium length.

419

And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length,

420

a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals,

421

sounds that say, listen to this, it is important.

422

So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences.

423

Create a sound that pleases the reader's ear.

424

Don't just write words, write music.

425

And so two quick tests to write with more cadence.

426

Number one is to read your writing out loud after you've written it.

427

If there's anywhere that you stumble or sounds unclear, rewrite it.

428

The second test is if you squint your eyes and only look at the outline of your writing, you can actually look at the shape of the sentences.

429

Does it vary or is everything in one straight line or does it have like a choppy Z?

430

I think the big point here about the five C's of

431

writing for the internet is we are not trying to win awards for poetry.

432

We're not trying to entertain the reader.

433

We're simply trying to be clear.

434

The best copywriting is like the windows in a mall.

435

It's see-through.

436

You're not trying to see the window.

437

You're trying to see the stuff in the store.

438

Similarly, the best copy does not draw attention to the writing itself.

439

It acts like a window to what the offer is.

440

I know that was a lot.

441

Are you still with me?

442

Let's dive into hooks, bodies and call to actions next and then we'll talk about how to make money with copywriting.

443

The advertiser David Ogilvie once wrote, the average person reads five times as many headlines as they do bodies of copy.

444

And so when you've written your headline you spent 80 cents out of your dollar in advertising.

445

It's not an over exaggeration to say your hook determines probably 90% of your post's performance.

446

And so while there are many different ways you can write a hook

447

and I'm not gonna pretend I can share all of them in this video, I will share the hook formula that's worked the best for me and hopefully it helps you.

448

And the formula is that virality equals benefit times relevance times credibility divided by perceived effort.

449

Let me explain.

450

Benefit is why people should care.

451

What are they going to get from reading this piece of content or copy?

452

Relevance is how many people this piece of work applies to.

453

Credibility is why they should listen to you

454

and perceived effort is how much effort it takes to both read the piece of content

455

and also implement it and

456

so one of my favorite examples of what this viral hook formula looks like in practice is a Twitter thread

457

that I wrote for Noah Kagan a few years ago it

458

says I was employee number 30 at Facebook then I got fired for a long time I was bitter

459

that they let me go but the lessons I learned from mark

460

and Facebook helped me build a 100 million dollar a year company 10 lessons I learned from working directly under Mark Zuckerberg.

461

And so the credibility is that he worked as employee number 30 for Facebook.

462

The benefit is that you are going to learn the 10 lessons he learned.

463

The relevance is that 10 lessons can be applied to pretty much anyone.

464

And the perceived effort is super high because almost never get access to Mark Zuckerberg.

465

And so instead of having to have access to him, you can read this thread.

466

For the body of a post, again, there are many different ways you can write a body.

467

It just depends on what you're writing.

468

But there are two universal frameworks that I like to use when I'm writing posts or like to at least think about.

469

The first is the what, why, how.

470

And this is typically for educational content.

471

And so step one is what is the point you're trying to make?

472

Step two is why people should care.

473

And step three is how do they implement it?

474

And so for example, you should drink more water.

475

That's the what.

476

Why?

477

Because drinking more water helps you think more clearly, speak more articulately, makes your skin glow, and you feel more energized.

478

How do you do it?

479

Well, before every meal, drink an eight-ounce glass of water, and that will be 24 ounces of water every day, and that is more than enough to get started.

480

You can actually read in my books, I like to use this to structure chapters, is what is the point I'm trying to make, why should people care, and how do you actually implement it?

481

The second framework is the but-therefore framework, and this is mainly more for storytelling content.

482

When most people tell stories, they tell it very linearly, right?

483

I woke up and then I brushed my teeth

484

and then I changed my clothes and then I went to the grocery store

485

and then I forgot my keys at home and so I had to go home, right?

486

Very boring story.

487

There's no tension.

488

There's no story arc.

489

It's just a, it's a straight line.

490

If you use the but therefore method, then you're naturally going to create more tension and surprise.

491

I woke up and went to the grocery store, but I forgot my keys at home.

492

Therefore, I went back home, but I realized that someone was in my kitchen, right?

493

It creates this natural story arc because you're flipping back and forth.

494

Call to actions or CTAs.

495

There's again, a ton of formulas, but I think the number one point here is we're not trying to be influencers.

496

We're trying to grow our business or get something out of content.

497

And so CTAs are super important.

498

What do we want people to do next?

499

And I like to use a who, what, when, how framework for my CTAs.

500

So you state who you're looking for, what they need to do, when they need to do it by, and how they should do it.

501

For example, if you're a copywriter starting from zero

502

and you want to learn how to sign your first high-paying client in the next 90 days, click the link below to download my free workbook

503

and you'll be able to fill it out in 20 minutes and get more clarity on how to get better at copywriting.

504

That's a CTA.

505

Remember, one CTA to one avatar to one offer.

506

So how do you get better at copywriting?

507

The secret to getting better at copywriting is, drum roll please, to read great writing and write more.

508

I know, crazy.

509

But there really isn't any other secret.

510

When I first started to get into copywriting, I immersed myself in the world.

511

I tried to find every copywriting book that I could find.

512

I read old advertisements every day.

513

I would listen to podcasts about copywriting and YouTube videos about copywriting

514

while I was in the line at my cafeteria in my school.

515

I created a swipe file of every piece of content

516

or hook that captured my attention and then spent time analyzing why they captured my attention.

517

I did copy work, which is when you read writing

518

and then hand copy the words on a separate notebook to understand the rhythm of what good writing looks like.

519

Every single day, I wrote 10 plus tweets for six months.

520

And I worked at three copywriting agencies before I started my own

521

so I could learn and practice the skill

522

while also getting a peek at what the agency was doing and how it operated.

523

Yes this is going to take time, yes it's tedious, yes when you do copy work your hand is going to start to cramp, but that is the point.

524

You don't want to just skip this part and make money, you want the skill and this is why like lottery winners go broke again.

525

It's because it wasn't about the money, it was about who you had to become come to earn that money.

526

I've always said, I don't want financial security.

527

I want financial confidence.

528

I want the confidence in knowing that if I lost everything, I could get back to where I was over and over and over again because of the skillset that I have.

529

All right, time for the juicy stuff.

530

How do you make money from copywriting?

531

So fundamentally, if you want to make money online, there's three parts to it.

532

You have traffic, you have conversion, and you have an offer.

533

You need people, you need to sell them something, and you need to have something to sell.

534

And so copywriting helps you with all three parts of that funnel.

535

And so if we were to break this down into a funnel, you have usually social media content or paid ads, right?

536

And so you can specialize in writing shorts or Instagram reels for business owners.

537

You can specialize in writing YouTube scripts for business owners.

538

You can specialize in writing paid ads for business owners.

539

That's traffic.

540

You have to get people in the door.

541

The second part is conversion.

542

Once you get attention on social media and you get attention through ads, It usually funnels somewhere, usually an email list or a webinar or a VSL,

543

which is a video sales letter.

544

It's simply the video that you put on a landing page or the landing page.

545

All of those different things you can write copy for.

546

Usually people bundle it up because it's part of one process.

547

They bundle it up and I say, I do all of that.

548

But you can start with just one of these things and specialize in that.

549

And then that conversion has to funnel to an offer and someone has to create an offer.

550

And so if you learn how to think about copywriting, if you learn the six Ps, when you craft offers, you'll be better than the average business owner

551

and you can help them shape what that offer looks like to be more valuable.

552

So you can do social media ghostwriting, you can be an ad copywriter, you can be an email marketing specialist, you can be a VSL webinar specialist,

553

you can be a growth operator and partner with influencers

554

and build the back end of their businesses and say you do the influencing, you get the traffic and I'll build everything else.

555

I think the big rule here is to try and go high ticket.

556

If you work with richer people, they tend to pay better.

557

They tend to be better clients, easier to work with, understand your value.

558

If I were starting over, I would probably pick two niches right now.

559

Number one is the tech and startups lane.

560

I would either write launch videos or help them run ads.

561

We're in like a tech bubble right now.

562

And so people are raising a ton of money, needing to spend that money on marketing and they don't know what to do with it.

563

And so I would come in and be like, I'll help you spend this ad budget, this marketing budget, and I'll write the ads.

564

I just take a percentage of what I make you.

565

The second niche that I consider is the info space.

566

I would try and partner with info brands and position myself as an email copywriter and say, hey, I'll write a email sequence for you completely for free upfront,

567

but I'll take 10 to 15% of all the revenue that I generate you through email.

568

And if you're like, okay, yeah, Jay, easy to say, just charge more and go high ticket.

569

But like, how do you actually do that?

570

Well, let me tell you.

571

To make more money and to be able to charge more, you need to create more value.

572

What is value?

573

Well, value is created through three main ways.

574

You can save people time, you can make people more money, or you can reduce their risk.

575

For example, if I said, I will write an email sequence for you in the next 14 days completely by myself, and I'll help you generate $100,000,

576

or I'll work for free, that's a pretty no-brainer offer.

577

And if they don't take your offer, there's usually three reasons why, and this is a checklist that I go through.

578

Number one, am I making it hard to say yes?

579

How can I reduce the time investment on their end?

580

Number two, am I not showing how I'd make them money?

581

Maybe I have to explain it better.

582

Number three, do they not think I can do it?

583

Maybe I need to show more proof or results.

584

And so if you play around with the three vectors of value, speed, risk, and ease, you're able to create a more irresistible offer and charge more.

585

If you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, back up, Jay.

586

I'm just trying to learn copywriting right now.

587

It was way too overwhelming.

588

Number one, I apologize.

589

I think I am starting to suffer the consequences of the curse of knowledge, meaning I've been in this industry for the last five plus years.

590

I'm starting to forget a little bit of what it's like to be a beginner.

591

And so there are gaps that I probably didn't explain super well.

592

So if you are an absolute beginner, this is what I'd recommend.

593

Number one, study copywriting.

594

Watch courses, watch YouTube videos, listen to podcasts, do copy work.

595

Number two is practice in public.

596

Start a Twitter account, start a LinkedIn account, and basically document your learning in real time.

597

You know, I just read the boron letters.

598

Here's the lesson that I learned.

599

Here's day one of doing copywork.

600

Here's day two of doing copywork.

601

Here's day three of doing copywork.

602

Show your results in public because this increases your surface area for serendipity.

603

Number three, I would work for an agency.

604

I think there is no better way to spend time practicing your craft

605

and make money from it while not having to go out and hunt for clients.

606

Number four, once you do leave the agency, what I do to get my first client is work for free.

607

I'd say, hey, you know, being upfront, I don't have a ton of case studies.

608

I want you to be my case study.

609

And so I'm willing to do this work for you for free upfront.

610

Once you have some case studies, then I would focus on charging money.

611

All right.

612

How do you get clients?

613

If you have no money, then you should have no shame.

614

And so when I was starting out, I was 17 years old and I had no degree, I had no experience,

615

and I didn't want people to think of me as the 17-year-old kid who had no experience and used that against me.

616

They'd lowball me, they'd take advantage of me. And

617

so what I did is I would show up to sales

618

calls with a Google Slides presentation of all the things that I would do for them.

619

So I'd basically do the work up front.

620

I would give specific ideas that I would implement for them to make it a no-brainer for them to say yes.

621

And so the big idea here is if you want to get an opportunity, you need to show two things.

622

Number one, that you want the opportunity.

623

And number two, that you can do the opportunity.

624

And the best way to show both of those things is to do the work upfront.

625

My favorite question of all time is how can I make this a no-brainer for the other person?

626

How can I reduce the friction it takes for them to say yes?

627

And so I want to read an excerpt of my new book, Work With The Best, on the tag method,

628

how I use this approach to land a $150,000 job as a 17-year-old kid with a nine-figure CEO.

629

Because if I was starting over from scratch, this is the playbook that I would run over and over and over again.

630

So I got my author copy of Work With The Best.

631

You can see the author copy.

632

And I want to read this to you.

633

So this is called the tag method.

634

And I learned this from Charlie Hohen, who was the director of special projects for Tim Ferriss, and eventually started his own business.

635

The tag method starts with T, which is target.

636

I found out that Noah Kagan, who ran AppSumo, nine-figure company, was looking for help growing his newsletter in preparation for his book launch.

637

I had followed him on Twitter and watched a ton of his YouTube videos, so I was familiar with his work and knew his career was the direction I wanted to go.

638

The A is audit.

639

I didn't know Noah's background that deeply, so I spent 50 hours researching everything I could about him and his business.

640

I googled Noah Kagan and scrolled all the way down and went to the second and third page of results.

641

I watched his oldest YouTube videos from over a decade ago.

642

I listened to the podcast interviews he went on.

643

I figured out the backstory of AppSumo, the key people in his life, his best friends, things people had said about him, things he'd said about himself in old interviews.

644

I wanted to understand how he thought, what he cared about, and what his priorities were.

645

Then I audited his newsletter from top to bottom.

646

I asked myself, if I had this job, What would be the first thing I do to put together a strategy?

647

I tried to answer every question that I could think of.

648

How big was his email list?

649

What platform was he hosting it on?

650

What did his landing page look like?

651

And what was the first thing a visitor saw?

652

How did people sign up?

653

What was the welcome email?

654

Where were subscribers coming from?

655

What social platforms was he promoting it on?

656

And which ones was he ignoring?

657

Where was he being consistent?

658

Where was he not?

659

What were other creators in the space doing that we could learn from?

660

I pulled the similar web data on his traffic sources.

661

I looked at what percentage of his traffic was coming from each platform.

662

I could see that Twitter and LinkedIn had a ton of room for growth that he wasn't taking advantage of.

663

And then the G is gift.

664

Once I had all the research, I needed to turn it into something Noah could look at and immediately understand.

665

So I built a 19 slide deck in Google Slides.

666

It was purposely scrappy looking because I knew Noah valued people who were real and approachable, not corporate and buttoned up.

667

And I made it visual and skimmable

668

because I knew he was a busy guy who probably wouldn't read a 10 page memo.

669

Then to remove any remaining doubt, I created nine pieces of ready to publish social media content

670

that he could post right now to test whether I knew what I was talking about.

671

He loved it.

672

And I became his head of content at 17 years old.

673

If you want to land a client, the pitch deck strategy is one of the best approaches you can use because it shows that you are a hungry,

674

ambitious, high agency person, and it also demonstrates your competence up front.

675

It makes it super easy to say yes, because so they can open the Google Slides on their phone, quickly scroll through and figure out whether you know what you're talking about or not.

676

And so if you're interested in seeing more about the pitch deck that I created for Noah Kagan, I also created it for acquisition.com and also for Beehive,

677

the very first internship that I got.

678

All of those are linked below in the description.

679

I highly recommend checking it out.

680

I know that was a lot.

681

I basically just word vomited a bunch of information at you

682

and I appreciate you for making it to this far in the video.

683

I think the big idea here is to just start.

684

Start messy, start imperfectly.

685

You know, I started learning copywriting when I was 15 and I think, you know, I'm 20 now

686

and I still think I have a long way to go to figuring out how to be great at it.

687

And so just realize that this is a long game and that most importantly, it'll be worth it.

688

I don't think I've ever met someone who said they regretted learning copywriting.

689

Because no matter what you do, fundamentally, you will not get poorer from learning how to communicate and write persuasively.

690

I think the last point I'll make here is that when you feel discouraged, when you feel that things aren't going your way, I want you to ask yourself two questions.

691

Number one, does giving up increase the likelihood that I get what I want?

692

And number two, what story do I want to tell at the end of this?

693

Do I want to

694

say that things were hard and that I gave up or that things were hard and I kept going, that I won anyway because I'm a winner.

695

And so remember that this is a long game and you cannot lose if you do not quit.

696

I'm rooting for you.

697

Peace.

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85 sentences

Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “How To Write Words That Make People Buy”. This video has 697 sentences and 9009 words to shadow. The speech runs for 43:32. The speaker talks fast, about 207 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 85% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
avatar noun	/ˌæv.əˈtɑː(ɹ)/	An incarnation of a deity, particularly Vishnu.
copywriter noun	/ˈkɑːpiˌɹaɪtɚ/	A person who writes advertising copy (the text used in advertisements).
marathon noun	/ˈmæɹəθən/	A 42.195-kilometre (26-mile-385-yard) road race.
acceleration noun	/əkˌsɛl.əˈɹeɪ.ʃən/	The act of accelerating, or the state of being accelerated; increase of motion or action; as opposed to retardation or deceleration.
funnel noun	/ˈfʌnəl/	A utensil in the shape of an inverted hollow cone terminating in a narrow pipe, for channeling liquids or granular material; typically used when transferring…
specialize verb	/ˈspɛʃəˌlaɪz/	To narrow in scope.
upfront adjective	/ʌpˈfɹʌnt/	Honest, frank and straightforward.
perceive verb	/pɚˈsiv/	To become aware of, through the physical senses, to see; to understand.
downstairs adverb	/daʊnˈstɛɹz/	Down the stairs.
bore verb	/boɹ/	To inspire boredom in somebody.
implement verb	/ˈɪmpləmənt/	To bring about; to put into practice; to carry out.
artisan noun	/ˈɑɹtɪzən/	A skilled manual worker who uses tools and machinery in a particular craft.
brainer noun	/bɹeɪ.nə(ɹ)/	someone with a certain type of brain
cadence noun	/ˈkeɪ̯dəns/	The act or state of declining or sinking.
copywork noun		The practice of copying popular works line by line to improve writing skills.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
figure out verb		To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.
go through verb		To travel from one end of something to the other.
back up verb		To move backwards, especially for a vehicle to do so.
do over verb	/ˈduˌoʊvɚ/	To cover with; to smear or spread on to.
find out verb		To discover, as by asking or investigating.
give up verb		To surrender (someone or something); to inform on (someone).
go down verb		To descend; to move from a higher place to a lower one.
go up verb		To move upwards.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

Who is your offer for?
Why should I trust you?
What happens if you stay on your current path?
How does your offer work?
People, who is your offer for?

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result	If I said, hey, I'll help · If you're a business owner, I'd like · If I were starting over, I would probably
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	I've learned · has allowed · I've run
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	be treated · being told · were told
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	rule, which is · that, which is · someone who looks

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 193 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, don't, I'm. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: marathon /ˈmæɹəθən/, empathy /ˈɛmpəθi/, rhythm /ˈɹɪð.əm/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: acceleration /əkˌsɛl.əˈɹeɪ.ʃən/, specialize /ˈspɛʃəˌlaɪz/, deprivation /ˌdɛp.ɹɪˈveɪʃən/, vicious /ˈvɪʃəs/, compilation /ˌkɑm.pɪˈleɪ.ʃən/
Long words — get the stress right: copywriter /ˈkɑːpiˌɹaɪtɚ/, acceleration /əkˌsɛl.əˈɹeɪ.ʃən/, deprivation /ˌdɛp.ɹɪˈveɪʃən/, millionaire /ˌmɪl.i.əˈnɛə(ɹ)/, credibility /kɹɛd.əˈbɪ.ɫɪ.ti/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like avatar, copywriter, marathon.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: How To Write Words That Make People Buy (Full Course) - Learn English Speaking with Video

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