TCC Podcast #216: Nailing Brand Voice with Justin Blackman

The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:

Episode 59
Never Lose a Customer Again
The Go Giver
TCCIRL
Linda Perry
Lianna Patch
Abbey Woodcock
The Codex Persona
Ian Stanley
Liz Painter
Prerna Malik
The Big Leap by Gay Hendrix
Justin’s website
The tattoo video
Kira’s website
Rob’s website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

 

Full Transcript:

Rob:   Writing is hard, but writing with personality or perfectly capturing the personality of your client is even harder, but that’s what Justin Blackman does. Justin is our guest for the 216th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. He stopped by to share how his business has changed since the last time that we spoke in depth about the Headline Project way back on episode 59.

Kira:   Before we do that, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground, the membership for copywriters of all experience levels who want to invest in their businesses and grow. As a member, you get more than 60 hours of video training courses on marketing your business, improving your copywriting skills and fixing your mindset so you’re set up for success. Learn more at thecopywriterunderground.com.

Rob:   Okay. So let’s jump into our interview with Justin.

Kira:   Let’s kick this off. My first question I even wrote down was, dude, what have you been up to the last year? Question mark. Question mark. Question mark. Because I feel like you’ve taken off. And I don’t think it’s just me because we talk about you and we say good things in our circles, and I feel like you just have, I don’t know, like you just are doing the right things and it’s paying off and you’ve put in a lot of hard work too that is worth acknowledging. But it just seems like you’re doing really well. And so I am really excited to hear about what you’ve been doing, the changes you’ve made, and how it starting to pay off for you too.

Justin:   See, I think that’s the fun part because the last couple of months, it doesn’t seem like it’s been the hard work. It seems like the years leading up to this have been the hard work. And now, when everything shut down and I was like, “I need to figure out what to do.” I said, “You know what? Now I can have a little bit more fun.” And that’s when I embraced the fact that there weren’t a lot of people talking about just the silly things that I was talking about and writing with the style and the weird techniques and things that I do, because there really was a structure behind that. And I just wrote an email saying, “You know what? I’m going to keep it light.” And I made it fun.

And then at the end of the email, I broke down exactly what I had done above it. And people wrote back to like, “Yes, more of this. I had no idea that there was actually a science behind this. Tell me about this process.” And then I started talking more about that and just having fun, literally not knowing what to do, not feeling comfortable to sell anything because of just the whole economic situation. And that created the course of Write More Personality-er, which was even just a placeholder joke name. I actually don’t like that name at all because grammatically it bugs me.

I was just having fun, and I put some stuff out just to see… really just for entertainment value, just to take people’s mind off of everything. And that’s really what set the wheels in motion for everything that I’m doing right now.

Rob:   So before we get to all of the things that are going on in your business, I think maybe we should take a step back. You’ve been on the podcast a couple of times before this is you’re certainly competing for one of the people that we’ve had on the most. You’ve talked about a lot of the things that you’ve done in the past, the Headline Project and your work with the hotel and some of the other stuff that you’ve done, but maybe we could just recap because while it does feel like you’re everywhere and we keep seeing you pop up in a lot of different places, we know because we’ve seen the behinds, that there’s been like this progression through your career, as you’ve built your authority, as you’ve developed the pathway that you’ve followed, we’ve seen what’s happened.

Maybe you could give us a short recap of some of that stuff. And then we can talk about the particulars, how you’ve partnered with people, the training that you’ve done, the events that you’ve attended, that you’ve spoken at, how you’ve grown your authority, and really look at what you’ve done almost as a case study for what copywriters who might want to do the same thing as you should be doing.

Justin:   I could do all that in case there’s one or two people out there that don’t know who I am, I imagine that there are a lot more than that. The background was, I was working in-house at a international hotel company and I was writing for like 14 different brands at the same time and just pumping out a lot of different content. I had taken a couple of different writing courses. And I was a decent writer, I’d say it was better than average, but I didn’t necessarily identify as a copywriter at that point. I invested in the first round of the Accelerator in the beta program, you guys ran me through the gauntlet clip with the Headline Project where I wrote 100 headlines for 100 days for 100 companies, which came out of an idea through Kira in the hot seat.

And that’s what put me on the map. I eventually got recognized about a year after that by an agency that was creating Facebook ads, long form Facebook as an email series for coaches and consultants. They needed someone that could write in multiple different styles and voices. And without even realizing that I was able to do it, I took an assignment with them just as a test and made it fun. They had a very lighthearted style, but I was able to emulate it really quick. Some of that also came through the Codex Persona, which was a training that I’m now a co-instructor, but because of that really unique skillset that I had developed without realizing it, I nailed the project.

And he told me afterwards that I was the first person in four years that ever nailed it on the first try. So I went with that confidence. I left the hotel company, moved to create a Pretty Fly Copy as it’s really is its own entity and took on the agency is my first retainer client. And my first year, I wound up doubling… My first year as an official copywriter and freelance slash business owner, I wound up doubling my salary from the hotel company. Over the course of two years, I’ve written for more than 329 different people, realized that I didn’t necessarily want to continue writing the Facebook ads and emails, but I was able to figure out that the consistent process that I had with being able to sound like different people was my superpower.

The being able to nail voice was something that I could do better than pretty much any other writer that I had come across. And it took a long time for me to be able to say that as confidently as I can now. I’m still not entirely comfortable with it, but I’m starting to own the fact that I’m pretty darn good at voice. And now, I’ve moved forward with training other people on that process. And in addition to just the voice, I also have broken down all the techniques that I’ve stolen from all these different people and from my background studying comics and comedians and improv, and combine it all together now. And I love working with copywriters to teach all this stuff.

Kira:   All right, cool. Yeah. Let’s talk about doubling your salary because you just slipped that in there, but that’s a big deal. You left your full-time gig at the hotel, went out on your own and doubled your salary. It sounds great and wonderful and probably anyone listening is like, “Huh, how do I do that? I want to leave my job and double my salary.” Are you just a unicorn and it’s just you Justin, or is there a method to the madness and something that other people could pull from that and possibly replicate?

Justin:   This is where it really helped to have you guys in my corner. If you remember, this was right before round two of the Think Tank. You had just finished the beta program, and you and I were talking about it and I had actually decided not to do it because I was pretty comfortable in my job. And then this offer came seemingly out of the blue, but really it was because of a year of the Headline Project in getting my authority out there. I didn’t really know what to do, and you guys helped me structure a contract that gave me security so I could create a company with a retainer basis.

We set up a couple of different parameters with minimum monthly amounts that I would get paid and the minimum amount of deliverables, and we also set in a cancellation clause. So it wasn’t just 30 days, but because I was leaving a full-time job for this and they really wanted me and they actually wanted to bring me on full-time there, we basically did a three-month cancellation, because all my eggs were going to be in one basket for a while, and that was scary. But I took the leap, we put in that cancellation clause and we rolled that out for a full year.

That was a great process because with this retainer, I didn’t necessarily have to work on any other projects for the month and I would still be okay. If I wanted to finish up those projects quicker and bring on other clients, I was able to do it. And that gave me a chance to continue to develop my skills as an entrepreneur because I had total employee mindset for a while, but I was able to build up my business and network a little bit more so when the time come that the agency contract did end, I was in a place that I can move forward.

Rob:   So I’m really taken with this idea that as you’ve progressed through your career, that where you are now is completely dependent on all of those steps that you took, that you walked through. Do you think, and I’m going to break the rule of podcasting, never ask a yes or no question, but do you think that if you had missed any of those steps, if you hadn’t done the 100 Headline Project or if you hadn’t connected with the client that had you writing Facebook ads every day, if you had skipped any of those steps, would you be where you are today?

Justin:   No.

Rob:   And maybe explain that a little bit.

Kira:   No, and interview’s over.

Justin:   No, we’re done. So the Headline Project, again, it had been, I’d say probably a 14 to 16 months from the time I did that to the time that the agency reached out to me. And I hadn’t even connected the dots right away that that was how they found me. And he didn’t either, it was because of an SEO ranking when they search for funny copywriters, which I, yeah, Lianna Patch was number one, I was number two. I don’t know if I’m still number two, but there was a point actually when we first started in the first round of the Accelerator, my goal was to rank for funny copywriter, and you guys helped me create some content that did that. Then the Headline Project just boosted up my rankings and my authority as far as Google is concerned, so it helped with that.

So they found me because of the Headline Projects and I was able to move forward because of the business building skills that I learned in the accelerator, which even when I took it, I wasn’t entirely sure why I was taking it. It was just kind of like “You know what? I’ll learn this, maybe it’ll come in handy one day. I don’t really know.” But that’s been the story of my life, is I’ve accidentally been prepared.

Kira:   Right. And because you were in a full-time job that you were happy with at the time you joined our beta accelerator program.

Justin:   Yeah, I was very happy. I had no intention of leaving.

Kira:   Okay. So I want to hear more about that retainer that allowed you to double your salary because you were there for over a year. How did you grow and advance business during that retainer time that you could say it was comfortable? I know you were working hard and it kept you quite busy and it was demanding, but I feel like it’s really easy to get into a retainer situation, especially if you’re getting paid well, and get really comfortable and possibly even lose that year if you wanted to grow and just I don’t know, lose that time, but you didn’t do that. So how did you look at it and what were some of the steps you took to grow your business while you had that retainer?

Justin:   I did lose that time for a while. There were times that I just enjoyed making money and just writing. I was in that shut-up-and-let-me-write phase where I didn’t have to deal with clients, there was an account manager that just gave me feedback, they gave me the intake forms. I took that, I watched a video or two, and then I just wrote. And I was in writer heaven, no contacts with clients, very little feedback, just wrote and wrote and wrote for hours a day and I loved it. I got super comfortable with that. I learned a ton about mindset during that year, we can circle back to that in a bit because I know we want to focus more on this.

But I learned more about mindset and productivity and realized that if I wrote faster, then I could have more free time, and built that and then use that free time and set in the processes to get what normally took four weeks done it two weeks so I could still take out additional work that would be more fun or more in line with what I wanted to do or take a couple of classes or read more about business because I did know that with all my eggs in one basket, I was in a dangerous spot. So continuing to grow and read more about business, and even dive into a lot of the business books that I had been putting off for a long time, that helped a lot.

I guess I stayed a little scared that all of it could go away and that helped.

Rob:   So you mentioned books. I want to stop and just ask favorite business books that you read during that time? What was most impactful?

Justin:   Most impactful. There was one that you gave me, and it wasn’t Never Lose A Customer Again, which was a good one that you gave me. The one with, there’s like the five different types of people that you meet. You gave it to us in the Think Tank.

Kira:   In heaven?

Justin:   It was like that, but in the real world. But I remember it talks about the different types of people, and one of them was the connector. I can’t remember. But it’s a fictional story about a businessman, he’s on a sales call and he’s not making his quota.

Kira:   The Go-Giver?

Justin:   Yes. The Go-Giver… that’s it.

Kira:   Yeah, that’s a good one.

Justin:   That one helped a lot. That really changed my way of looking at what my role was and how I could up-level and network was out… Finding my role in what networking was to slowly build my business and find my space.

Rob:   So then that relationship ultimately comes to an end, you decide you don’t want to be that anymore. Then what? In your business, how did you make the big leap to the next big thing?

Justin:   There was a long pause, probably three months where I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to do. And that was right at TCC IRL in New York, the second one. I had just finished that retainer and wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to do. And I basically took a month off of client work just to decompress because I’d been writing so much, I just didn’t want to write anymore. And couldn’t quite figure out what I wanted to do. And because of some of the networking that I had done, that’s when I connected with Abbey Woodcock and started learning more about voice and realizing that that was the superpower that I had.

I started talking more about that, got her approval and permission to use some of her frameworks and modify them toward becoming my own. It took advice from the outside. It took you guys, Prerna, Chanti, every one of the Think Tank, really helping me figure out that voice was my superpower. And probably over the course of three months, I really repositioned everything to go all in on voice guides.

Kira:   How did you know when it was time to leave that retainer? Because I think it’s easy to stay. Again, if it’s comfortable, it pays well, it’s easy to stay for a while. And there’s nothing wrong with that if that’s where you want to be, but how did you know it was time to move on, especially since you didn’t know exactly what the next step was.

Justin:   There are two ways that I knew, the first way is because they told me. It had to do when Facebook changed the algorithm and it really affected their business, and so we saw a slowdown come in, so work just wasn’t coming in. So that was clearly a big part. But even before that, I was really okay with everything. Aside from seeing the shutdown coming…. Actually, it’s not the shutdown, they’re alive and well at this point, they just had to step back and wait for the new algorithm to kick in.

But it got to the point when I opened up some of the new projects and I just felt gross about it. And not that the client was bad, but it was just like, I’ve done this ad 1,000 times. Yeah, I’m putting a new spin on it. Yes, it’s a new person, but I just didn’t feel good about the work anymore. Not the quality of it, just the fact that I was still writing it. And I hadn’t really grown any more over the last few months than I had in the beginning. I think that was probably the biggest issue, is when I stopped growing.

Rob:   Yeah, it’s this is a really interesting topic that maybe we should explore a little bit more, this idea of growth and how do you identify times in your business or in your life where maybe you’re a little stagnant and it’s time to, whatever it is, try a new thing, maybe it’s buy a course or whatever. So aside from the feeling gross, you had this happen several times in your career, Justin, how do you know? How do you know when it’s time for the next thing?

Justin:   You just trust your gut really. I guess looking back, I’ve almost been fortunate where I’ve been forced out of situations. It doesn’t seem fortunate at the time, but before when I was in the corporate world, I was on a three-year cycle where every three years I was getting laid off because of company changes. And even when I left the hotel company, there were pending layoffs. Actually, if I had stayed, I would have been laid off later. And that would have been probably a three and a quarter years. So there was that, but I think maybe that put an innate fear in me that every three years, I need to change it up.

I don’t know if that’s the right answer, but a lot of it was just when you stopped growing or when you’ve learned all that you can, that’s probably time to find it a real-

Kira:   Justin’s done a really great job of going from unknown to the famous copywriter who many of us know, and we know him for what he does best, which is voice, but that path from obscurity to fame isn’t an easy path and it’s not always a clear path. What do you think, Rob, are the milestones along the way or the points along that path from obscurity to fame?

Rob:   I think it’s important… You say it’s not easy because we often will say it. Sometimes I hear a lot of other people say, “You’ve just got to get yourself out there. You’ve just got to get yourself in front of the right clients,” or whatever. And to somebody who’s maybe new to copywriting, even some people who’ve been around for a while, it’s not that easy, it’s not just as simple as getting yourself in front of the clients. There’s almost a process to it. And as we’ve explored it, as we’ve done it ourselves in our own businesses, as we’ve seen a lot of the experts that we’ve interviewed, it feels like there’s a couple of things that most people have in common.

And I don’t think there’s just one path, there’s lots of ways to do this, but most people seem to focus when they’re getting themselves out there, trying to build their level of celebrity or the level of fame or whatever, they focus on one or two things. They go all in on. So they go all in on a particular social medium, or they go all in on podcasting, or they go all in on building a YouTube show, or speaking on stage, or they focus in… They may do one or two other things, but they really tend to focus on one thing. So that’s one of the things I really like about what Justin did is he went all in on headlines, and literally, every single day for 100 days, more than three months, he spent three to four hours writing headlines, posting it. And then after the project was over, he’d done his 100 days.

He then spent the next six months to a year, hopping on podcasts, talking about it, posting on his own blog, sharing his experiences, really milking the work that he had done over those 100 days for the next year in order to build his credibility. And then of course that led to one thing, and he did it all over again with brand voice.

Kira:   Yeah. It seems like it really comes down to confidence. And even for Justin to come on our show this time and say, I don’t have his exact wording, but I’m confident that I’m one of the best copywriters who can capture voice of clients and mold myself to their voices. That takes confidence to go into podcasts and even say that, and I don’t think that’s something he could have said a couple of years ago, or at least when he first came on our show. So part of that is figuring out, “Well, how do I get that confidence?” And like you said, something like an authority building project, like the Headline Project where you’re doing something that’s super focused and that most people, 90% of people would not do.

And because it’s hard or it’s grueling, it’s going to take a lot of time, maybe it’s stressful, it’s just tough. And so I think if you can find something that most people will not do because it’s that difficult, that’s where you have an opportunity to stand out, and to practice, and to teach from that, and talk about it and be the only one talking about it because you’re the only one who did it. And it doesn’t have to be writing headlines like Justin did, it could be anything, but thinking through how you could create your own challenge like that, that would allow you not only to improve and gain confidence, but also to teach and talk about it and build it into your marketing.

Rob:   Yeah. And I think it’s really important to remember, Justin did not have the confidence to do the Headline Project first. Confidence comes after doing the thing. We were there when he was talking about starting this project, and it was an experiment, he’s like, “Well, maybe I’ll try it. And who knows if I’ll finish it.” He actually did three or four days before he even started talking about it because he wanted to make sure it was something that he could lean into and do. So confidence, you can’t wait for it before you start doing the thing. And it’s the same thing when he moved into brand voice, we were there for those discussions as well, “Should I make this move? Should I take on this client? Should I be doing this thing? Or should I be focusing on something else?”

And it wasn’t necessarily confidence led him to do it, but just willingness to try. And because of the experience he had doing all of the things he did with brand voice, now he also has the confidence to go out into the world as one of the experts talking about it.

Kira:   I think one of the important parts is that when you take on something that feels really big and daunting like the headline, that you take it seriously, and you’re intentional about doing it, whether it’s something that lasts for a week or 30 days or maybe six months that you go all in and do it well. And that’s what Justin did that separates him from so many other people who have good intentions and take on a challenge like the Headline Project, but don’t actually complete it, which is easy. It’s easy to give up on something that big, when you have to pay the bills and take client work and you get distracted

But Justin was able to harness that project into his own authority and build his business off of that because he took it seriously from the beginning and he took it seriously until the end, and then beyond when he was teaching and talking about it.

Rob:   Yeah. And I also think that somebody is listening to this thinking, “There is no way that I can carve out four hours to write headlines every single day.” It does not need to be something as big as the Headline Project. If you are just starting out and thinking, “Okay, I want to build my authority, I want to get known in my niche.” You could start out by posting on LinkedIn once a day or maybe twice a week, if once a day is too often. Posting on Instagram and trying to engage an audience there for 15 or 20 minutes a day, or maybe three times a week, if every day is too often.

You do not need to go all in on a super huge project that you really don’t have time for and that you’re going to quit two or three weeks in simply because you can’t get it all done. You can start small, it really just depends on what fits in your business, what is going to fit for your niche and for the clients that you’re trying to attract, make sure that you’re going after those people and you’re focusing on the things that are going to move your business forward.

Kira:   All right. Let’s jump back into our interview and talk a little bit about mindset and magic. Let’s talk about mindset, you mentioned that you had an employee mindset and that you focused on your mindset during that time you were at that retainer. And then I know from talking to you that you really took it seriously and really invested in programs and coaching that would help you transform your mindset. Can you just talk a little bit about what was the catalyst for you? How did you even recognize that you were struggling with that? And then what were some of the investments that you made time-wise or money-wise in that space?

Justin:   Yeah. I tried a lot of different things. I think when mindset first started to hit my radar, people were talking about money mindset, and I believe Tarzan was one of the first people that did it. And that’s played into gender roles and stereotypes here, but as a guy, it didn’t really resonate with me at all. Guys weren’t talking about this, I was even getting some comments from other people that were trying to push these programs like, “Hey, will you come into this group, I can’t get any guys to register?” And I’m like, “No, I don’t want to, I don’t really have a money mindset.” I mean, I did, I realize that entirely now, but at the time, it wasn’t.

I guess it was a stage of awareness, and I wasn’t at that stage. What got to me was it hit a point when I was writing and it would take me hours to come up with something that took minutes. And I realized that I was just getting stuck, there was this need to make it perfect. And this had to do a lot when I was writing for myself, and I think it’s because I held myself to a high standard because I always felt like I was a pretty good writer and I was like, “This needs to be right. This needs to be good. I need to prove to people that I’m a damn good writer.” So I focused and I struggled really hard and I was editing as I wrote and just stopped the process and gunked up everything.

And I was talking to Ian Stanley who had gotten into mindset, and he’s like, “Your ego is getting in the way.” And I’m like, “What does that mean?” And he broke down this whole need for perfection and associated to mindset, and I was like, “All right, tell me more.” He gave me a couple of different guided meditations, and I had never meditated before, I thought that was a little hippy-dippy. But the way that he did it, it was a story. So the guided meditation, you’re walking yourself through a story, and I liked that aspect of it. And that really helped me, it showed me what I was doing wrong, it showed me where I was gumming up my process, where I was slowing myself down.

And it worked, I was writing faster, I was running better, it was just like someone opened up the valve on creativity, just ideas were flowing, and I was getting out some of the best stuff I had written in years. And I said, “All right, there’s more to this.” I went deeper, got into more meditation, figured out more mental blocks and mindset that I had around family, around money, around business. The employee mindset was real, and that had to do with a lifetime of being an employee. But two, even when I had that retainer gig, I was sitting back and the work was coming to me. I never felt like I had to go out and hustle for it, it just came. And then I did the work and then I handed it in. So I was used to people handing me projects, and I liked it.

It’s easier when you don’t have to do your own marketing and go out and hustle. So really fell into that mindset. So getting out and pushing myself out there to the point where I needed to rely on myself to get clients, that took a big mindset shift. There was a point where I was like, “Well, you know what, I’m good enough that people should come to me.” And it doesn’t work that way. As much as I wanted it to, it didn’t work that way. So I had to change my mindset on that and go out and push myself. And then it had to do with, am I really good enough? And then I started working with Linda Perry, who I met through the Think Tank, and she opened up even some bigger mindset issues that I had just around owning my authority and my presence.

I sound more confident now, but a lot of that is because of the work that I put in over the last two years.

Rob:   Let’s say that I have a friend who’s stuck in that before state, they maybe have mindset issues, maybe it’s money mindset, maybe it’s authority based or whatever, what are one or two steps that they can start taking that they might be able to follow the same path that you have and start to get that stuff under control?

Justin:   Guided meditations were the easiest first step, for sure, because meditating is hard, but a guided meditation is more passive where you’re listening and you’re letting your mind wander. And even just the whole act of shutting down your mind and not punishing yourself if you start to wander where you’re just like, “Oh, my mind’s wandering, back to focus.” And just that little tweak where you’re allowing yourself to just calm down. It doesn’t take long for that to work, just a couple of days, a couple of weeks, and that’s when you realize, “All right, maybe there’s something more going on here.” That’s really what opened up the door to me, before that, I never really believed in mindset.

Kira:   You mentioned proving something to people that you felt like you had to prove yourself, and the perfectionist, the need to be perfect stemmed from that. What advice would you give to someone listening who feels the same way and like they need to prove their credibility as a writer? What can we do to overcome that?

Justin:   I think the simple fact if you’re listening to this, if you’re in the Copywriter Club, then you are probably a better writer than 98.9% of the world. So know that. As long as you are better than the people that you’re helping, you are helping. There are still certain people that I know are better writers than me in certain areas that I absolutely love their writing, I love their style. I stopped comparing myself to them and I realized that, “You know what, I’m pretty good where I am, and that’s okay.” And I embraced my imperfections, I actually even doubled down on them. And that’s even what right more personality it is, it’s basically figuring out what your style is, and even if it’s not perfect, it’s rolling with that.

And there’s a Neil Gaiman quote that I use all the time, and he says, “Style is the stuff that you get wrong.” And I’ve embraced what I get wrong and turned it into style.

Rob:   I love that quote. Now I’ve got something to ponder and think about. As you were going through your mindset battles and the different things that you were working on, were there any things that you tried that didn’t work or that maybe set you back a little bit?

Justin:   There are lots of things that set me back. I would say each time I discovered a block, little things, and Linda is a master of this, some of her like her suitcase, exercise that she does, she does these little meditations where you’re just thinking back and figuring out what it is. Those set me back every time I uncover something new, I’m just like, “Really that? That little incident in the grocery store when I was eight years old. That?” It gets in your head until you figure out the correction. So I think, yeah, there’s always going to be a step back when you’re about to move forward.

Actually, Mariana Norton, she had a great line when I stepped back for a little bit, she’s like, no, it’s like, when you’re about to jump off the high dive, you go to the edge, you look over and then you step back and then you run and jump forward. I was in the stepping back point. So I think that there’s always a few things with mindset that you’re going to learn that will push you backward, but then you just run through it.

Kira:   How do you look at it and moving forward? You’ve done a lot of the work already, you’ve worked with people who specialize in that. Do you have some practices that you continue to focus on? Or do you take some breaks from mindset because things are going well and revisit whenever you hit another block? How do you look at that?

Justin:   I am a classic example of when things are going well, you can stop doing it because it’s working. It’s not the way that that works though. The fact is, it does stop working, it’s like charging a battery and then unplugging it, it’ll eventually die back down. It is a constant practice, but there are times that I think I’m more focused and clear. I don’t meditate every day, but I know that when I do, I’m better. I should meditate every day, it’s just been hard with quarantine and everybody at home to find that time, but I think that probably means it’s also more important than ever.

I think the biggest steps of where I’m able to not be in it as deep anymore is when I realized that it’s a mindset thing coming up. Like if someone says something and I find myself immediately reacting defensively I don’t necessarily say it. I say, “Wait, hold on, something’s going on here? What is it?” And I interpret it internally before it becomes a bigger issue. So just being aware and then maybe trying to figure out what it is later, I think that that’s helped, I think that’s where I’ve been able to step back a little bit. But no, I’m definitely better when I practice it every day.

Rob:   I want to change the conversation just a little bit, let’s talk about writing with more personality or however we do that. So you’ve carved out the space, I know there are others who write with a lot of personality, with humor. You mentioned Leanna, she definitely does it. Abbey has got processes around that, you mentioned Abbey as well. What are you doing? And tell us about the things that you teach in your course and how do you teach people to write with more personality?

Justin:   I think that the background that I accidentally build up since the time I was a kid really came into play here, and it’s just where I see the patterns and the structures behind jokes, and they really apply to writing as well. And I’ve said this before, but if you made a Venn diagram of a comedy techniques and copywriting techniques, you would have a circle. So what I do is I see the overlap and I dissect the patterns in that, and I just show people where it works, like, “Hey, this style worked here, this structure is setting up the same thing. You can apply this to that.”

And it’s just finding the patterns and showing how to steal like an artist, how to borrow techniques from Twitter and apply them to email, just really showing the full gamut of what’s available to you to build up your arsenal, and then you can create and choose on your own. But I think the difference is with a lot of great writers, you read them for the entertainment value, what I do is I go and like, “Wait, why is this funny? What’s interesting about this.” And I go deeper than I probably should, and then I just show the secrets.

Rob:   Okay. Let’s reveal some of those secrets. To get started, what are one or two things that we can start doing ourselves to infuse our copy with more personality or to help us capture our client’s personality and be able to reflect that in the copy we write?

Justin:   Yeah. Before I do this, I just want to say, it’s almost like when you watch Penn & Teller, and they reveal how the magic is done, but when you see it, it doesn’t take away from it, it actually makes it more interesting. You’re like, “Wait, how did they do that?” Because you’re still impressed by the fact that these people can do this and they have the creativity to create it. There’s a lot with the cadence that I do, some of the easiest things to tell, like this would be Penn & Teller showing the French Drop, how to make it look like you changed hands with a coin or something, would just be playing with the cadence. And one of the comedy techniques is you always end on a power work and you want your funniest words to be last, you want the last word to be the punchline.

And there are a couple of different reasons for that. One, it holds your interest to the end, and two, for a comedian, you’re not going to laugh over the line. So it gives a distinct pause. So one of my favorite things to do is restructure any sentence, so the funniest thing, or the most powerful thing is always going to be the last word. It’s an easy technique. I play around with my cadence, I write like a comedian where I focus on word economy and I cut out extraneous words. So my cadence is super short, super tight, my average word per sentence is like eight. Most people’s tend to be around like 13.

So by playing around with that, but I also know that if I want to make a sentence 37 words long, it looks really out of place and really interesting, so sometimes I do that deliberately. And that’s a fun way of changing the cadence and changing the flow and the rhythm. So there’s some easy ones with that. Playing with punctuation, I control the reader speed a lot by either swapping out commas for em dashes, so I get a little bit of a longer pause, or just changing things around stylistically, playing around with the capitalization. There’s all these little things that just don’t make sense and are breaking the rules, but really help you enunciate and control the way that the reader is interpreting and feeling the words.

Kira:   What advice would you give to writers who want to figure out their unique voice, maybe they spend most of their time writing for clients, so they haven’t focused on developing their own voice. And maybe they also get a little bit tripped up too because they’re focusing and reading other people’s, other writers emails and Insta posts, and so they might be comparing themselves or pulling in other voices and still feel like I haven’t discovered their unique voice?

Justin:   It takes a while. It took me a long time. I actually, if I look at my writing from four years ago, it’s almost unrecognizable, not just the tones or what I’m talking about, but the style is totally different. Writing for that agency, as much as I did, they had a very short, punchy style, totally changed my style to the point when I wrote an email once about three years ago, and I remember, actually, I guess two years ago, panicking as I wrote it because it didn’t look like me, and I forgot how to write like me. And that was actually a rebirth period. I truly couldn’t figure out how to make this email look and sound like me, and I just burned it all down and built it back up. I don’t know that that’s something that every writer can or should go through, it was scary it was, it was an anxious moment.

But I think what helped was, I think, I stole other people’s style by swiping copy and not straight out. I would always adapt it, but by taking the lines and looking at the structure and rewriting things in my way. And I figured out what I did differently and created this hybrid model of other people and them, and it was just doing it enough until I found only the things that I liked, and that’s all that was left.

Rob:   Let’s say there are copywriters listening who maybe are going through a similar process or certainly trying to do it for their clients. I know that one of the things that you create for your clients as you work through this stuff is a voice guide. Can you talk about what a good voice guide includes? Maybe there’s certain sections. This isn’t something that I do in my work, so it’s interesting to me when I see other people doing it, but walk us through your process for developing that voice guide and what you would deliver to a client.

Justin:   The reason why I focus on voice guides is because I saw so many that were just useless, and they had good intentions and no offense to the people that wrote them, but they’re designed to appease the CEOs and the marketing teams, but as a writer, they really didn’t do me any good. And it was at a point when I was at the hotel company where I would be in a room and everyone’s nightmare was he had like 12 different people reviewing your copy. All 12 of them had an opinion and all 12 of them were right. And the voice guide didn’t put clear enough boundaries in there that we knew exactly how it was supposed to sound and what walls we were supposed to play with it. And it was just too loose.

And I learned that more entrepreneurs and personal brands were having trouble figuring out how to stay w