TCC Podcast #266: How to Push Through Writer’s Block, Transitioning from Copywriter to Coach, and Writing Million Dollar Launches with Angie Colee

The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:

Kira’s website
Rob’s website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Angie’s website
The Well-Fed Writer by Peter Bowerman
Mindset by Carol Dweck
Episode 208

Full Transcript:

Rob:  Becoming a great copywriter doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, most of us have stumbled around a bit to get where we are. I spent time at a web startup and running my own SaaS business while Kira learned how to sell and clean cars at Enterprise Rental Service, she picked you up. So stumbling around a variety of jobs to find your way into copywriting is pretty common. But the good news? Through the missteps and the struggles, most of us finally arrive at something resembling a successful copywriting career, and our guest for this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is Angie Colee. Angie is a copywriter and a copy chief turned business and confidence coach who took a while to find her way into the copywriting role that she’s the best fit for, and the advice that she shared in our interview is fantastic. We think you’re definitely going to want to stick around to hear what she had to share.

Kira:  But before we dive into this episode, TCCIRL is the sponsor of this episode. TCCIRL, our big event, our big annual event, is going back to in-person stage in 2022 and we couldn’t be more excited. It’s a two and a half day event where you get to connect and hear from other copywriters and marketers about the best tools and strategies you can use to grow your copywriting business and to enhance your own skills and mindset, and one of the best parts is connecting in real life with other copywriters that maybe you’ve bumped into online and you finally can connect in-person over lunch, over dinner, over coffee, over drinks. Tickets are limited and this is not like a faux scarcity thing. We actually have a venue that can only hold a certain amount of people so if you do want to attend this year, if you’re missing hanging out in real life with fellow copywriters, grab your early bird ticket. Now is definitely the time to do that.

Rob:  Yeah, I am so excited to get back in-person live with everybody. We were I think the last conference before the virus shut everything down and –

Kira:  We were. Yeah.

Rob:  It’s going to be fun, so the event will take place on March 28th through the 30th. It’s in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m not a tax expert but The Copywriter Club In Real Life likely qualifies as a business deduction for your taxes so it’s a little bit like getting the government to pay you to come and hang out with us which is a pretty good deal. If you want to learn more or get your tickets, you can go to thecopywriterclub.com/tccirl-2022, that’s 2022.

Kira:  And Rob, we haven’t seen each other since then, have we?

Rob:  No. We haven’t. Not in person.

Kira:  I haven’t seen you since March 2020.

Rob:  So yeah, this might be the first time that we see each other in two years in person anyway, so …

Kira:  Weird, okay.

Rob:  It’s going to be good. But I mean, we’ve done this before. People come from all over the world, literally from Europe, from India, from Australia, and all over the United States and Canada. Even South America, it’s just a great place –

Kira:  D.C.

Rob:  To build a killer network, so … One or two people from D.C. All right, let’s get into this episode. We started by asking Angie how she ended up as a copywriter.

Kira:  Angie, we want to know everything about you. We want to know your story, we want to know how you ended up as a copywriter and now a confidence coach. Share the path please.

Angie:  Hmm well, it’s long and windy, so buckle up. I wanted to be a screenwriter. I really thought I was going to be like Shonda Rhimes, creating worlds, Grey’s Anatomy, running things. I even worked for NBC Universal, CBS Films, Warner Brothers, TNT, TBS, like all of the majors. I was working down in Hollywood after I got my master’s degree, and then I got laid off from The Oprah Winfrey Network. Don’t hate Oprah though because it was in a moment of desperation after I got laid off that I remembered this one book from a random screenwriting class two years earlier called The Well-Fed Writer, and I still can’t explain to this day what made me go spend $20.00 I didn’t really have on a book at Barnes & Noble back in the day. Picked up this book, read it in an afternoon and thought, “I could probably do that,” and then proceeded to stumble my way and fail my way forward into eventually this career. That’s why you probably see that I’m a big proponent of you don’t necessarily need a degree to become a copywriter. I quite literally fell into it and decided this was something I could do and every bit of experience, I took that and leveraged it into the next level up and to the next level up and eventually I was running teams and eventually decided I didn’t want to necessarily be a copywriter anymore, I wanted to be a coach.

Rob:  Okay, so what exactly were you doing for Oprah?

Angie:  I was a digital production assistant, which is a fancy title for someone … You know wen shows solicit videos from you for a contest and 500 million people submit a video? Someone on the other end has to go through all those videos. That was what I did for The Oprah Winfrey Network.

Rob:  You also mentioned The Well-Fed Writer by Peter Bowerman. That’s a great book by the way and we’ll link to it in the show notes. But what specifically did that book help you to do?

Angie:  Well, that’s the funny thing. Like I tried just about every prospecting method that he suggested. I mean I did cold calling, I dropped flyers, I sent letters, I went to … What is it, chamber of commerce meetings locally back when you could still meet with people. I joined online sites like Elance which I think is now Freelance.com but … Or Upwork. Joined all those sites, I tried everything and just kind of slowly but surely found clients, like through the online platforms I wound up writing the production script for Miss Black USA Pageant for a few years in a row. I took any writing project that somebody would pay me for, and then just basically kept leveraging that slowly and surely towards direct response which was where I felt really called the more I learned about copywriting.

Kira:  And roughly what is the timing of this because I know many copywriters look at you and they’re like, “Hey, Angie is a top copywriter.” So did this take ten years, did it take five years, less?

Angie:  So, I got my master’s degree in May of 2010. November of 2010 is when I decided to make a serious go at this business. Then I freelanced a little bit, largely unsuccessfully, with the help of generous unemployment funds until about April of 2012, which was when I got my first part-time junior role, and that was on the back of all of this freelance experience that I had just stumbled my way into, not knowing what I didn’t know. Which I thought was pretty cool, so I got a good foundation for about a year and a half working there part-time and I hit a wall with that role. Like I really am just somebody that just wants to go fast and figure this thing out and I was feeling a little bit stifled. It was a good role, it taught me a lot, but I had a set number of blogs, a set number of emails, and as many product descriptions as I could fit into the remaining hours, and after a while, that just got to be boring. I love them, it was a fun team, I don’t want to crap all over any opportunities, but …

So, I started applying for a full-time role. I found a hardware retail chain that was looking for a full-time copywriter. The interesting thing was the person that connected me to the job thought that I didn’t have enough experience, and I pushed back on her and was like, “I disagree with you and here’s why,” and I guess I must have made enough of a case for her to pass me through to the creative director, because I wound up ultimately getting the job. Had to figure out a lot of things on the fly there. I didn’t know how to write a catalog and then I was handed one and I had to figure out how to write it in three days and teach myself how to use Adobe InDesign, which was ridiculous. But yeah, and then made it clear from there that I wanted to be a senior and I wanted to train people and just … I kind of articulated the thing and then trusted that the path would appear. I don’t know that I consciously ever made that choice that if I will it, the path will appear, but that’s kind of how things wound up.

Then that was kind of a toxic work environment, the one where I graduated to senior, or I was promoted to senior and learned all these catalogs and print retail and all kinds of interesting stuff. I wound up quitting in December of 2016 and walking away from that job, and then four months later, when my second attempt at freelancing was kind of hitting some fits and starts, I was briefly considering going back. I even took a temporary in-house contract with them for a week to cover a colleague that was on vacation and I wound up getting fired from a job I didn’t even have when the entire creative department was let go. So talk about having some sort of inkling that things were maybe not working so well with the company and deciding to walk away just in time.

I was briefly heartbroken by that because I think I had in the back of my head, “I could always go back if this freelance thing doesn’t work out.” But then a week later, not even kidding, is when I got the offer to join Jeff’s team on a 90-day retainer so the universe has a very weird sense of humor when you put things out there and just try to make it work.

Kira:  Okay. All right, so you joined Jeff’s team around 2016?

Angie:  May 2017.

Kira:  Okay, all right, and you mentioned different levels of copywriting. Can you just kind of articulate what those levels are in your mind for copywriters? I know there’s a different path for every copywriter, but what levels do most of us hit along the way?

Angie:  So, I think there’s the raw rookie, just trying to figure out how to get paid to be a writer and you don’t even necessarily know what kind of writer you want to be just yet so you try a little bit of everything. So that’s where I was when I was editing people’s business plans and creating production scripts, whatever people would pay me for. As I learned more about the different types of writing, I found myself drawn toward copywriting, sales writing, and when I found this junior role, it became more about get as good as possible at writing, and the reps really helped with that.

So, I mentioned that I got a little bit bored in that role and I did, that’s true, but just having to crank, whether I was motivated or not really helped me to get good, which leveraged me into the full-time role with benefits and a salary in the San Francisco Bay area which was fantastic, and then learning different skillsets like how to be good at print media, how to fit everything that you need to say in a 30 second commercial spot, and not forget the name of the company. Totally done that before. That’s another fun story.

When I told my boss that I wanted to be … My copy chief at the time that I wanted to be a senior copywriter, he basically laid out, “Okay, so I need you to be good at delegating projects, overseeing junior writers, helping with the voice style guide.” So it was just kind of layering on levels of responsibility and then when I wound up on Jeff’s team I started as a copywriter and quickly became the team lead and then his copy chief as I gained mastery over his voice, worked with Abbey Woodcock actually to develop the voice guide and the training guide, and then brought on two more writers that you might recognize, Candice Lazar and Chris Orzechowski also were on the team and for a while we just cranked out promotions and launches and it was fantastic.

Rob:  Can I ask about salary levels and what you were charging for the work that you were doing at this time? What were you charging per project and how did that change when you took a full-time role?

Angie:  Okay, that’s a really good question. Because when I was first starting and I was trying to figure it out, I took anything that sounded reasonable. Like $85.00 to edit the script, sure, that seems like it makes sense. I didn’t have any concept of what it took to cover the bills, the business bills and taxes on top of that. So I wasn’t kind of operating from I would say a business health perspective, just like, “Oh, I could get paid to do this. Cool.” When I took the first junior role, I think I was making $22.00 an hour for 20 hours a week. When I signed on for my full-time role, it was a $68,000.00 base salary with a 15% bonus which was the most I had ever been paid in my life, so I was super happy.

That’s when I kind of hit the wall because as my skills grew in that role over the years that I was there, I discovered that the company had this arbitrary 6% merit cap, and that was one of the reasons that I ultimately wound up leaving, because I had written an email campaign, three emails, that made almost $10 million in sales and so when I went and said, “Hey, I did a bunch of research. Turns out I’m behind the salary curve. Can we make this work? Here’s the results and the value I bring to the company.” They were like, “No, 6%, take it or leave it.” I was like, “Really? I pay for my whole department and I can’t get … Okay. Okay.” So I don’t know if that helped or not. I took a little bit of a pay cut when I left that company and went to Jeff’s team, but the freedom trade-off to me was worth it and then Jeff’s team was incredibly generous with performance bonuses which has been my favorite thing for a while so …

Kira:  Yeah, let’s talk more about performance bonuses because I think that’s a new concept for a lot of copywriters who haven’t worked on a team like Jeff’s. How should we approach it if that is something that we should consider and look out for so that we are compensated for that?

Angie:  It’s a really phenomenal team and that’s what I loved about it was that they preached creative business about freedom and flexibility and then the team really had that on the back end too which was really nice. So I don’t know exactly how Jeff’s team calculated it because they had their own figures. I know when I was still in the corporate office it was 15% and it depended on a variety of targets including whether the company met their overall goals. The way I’ve heard some other copywriters structuring it is if you hit certain targets, you get certain percentages if that makes sense. So just for round numbers’ sake, let’s say we had a goal to hit $100,000.00 in sales. Well, that would be your flat fee, and if we hit $150,000.00, you would get X% bonus, if we hit $200,000.000, you got Y% bonus, and if we went beyond that, you could calculate from there. I know that that’s kind of speaking in vagueness but it’s kind of hard to quantify all of the potential bonus structures out there so I’m trying to perhaps oversimplify a little bit.

Rob:  So, I’m listening to you talk about your journey and it seems so smooth from beginning to where you are now. Not a meteoric rise, but also not a snail’s pace either. Just naturally moving from one good opportunity to another. Things seem to happen just when they need to happen for you.

Angie:  I’m glad that you said that too because I’ve struggled with that mindset-wise throughout the course of my career feeling like I should be further along, especially in comparison to some of my brilliant colleagues, many of whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with or dining with. But I think one of the biggest takeaways that I personally have from this journey is it’s okay to be where you are right now, and that your path is your path. It’s okay to go at your pace. Nobody else’s pace applies to your particular situation, and I think … I’m not a superwoo person but I think that’s because you’re where you are until you learn what you need to learn in order to move forward, and so if you feel like you’re moving a little bit slower, look around and see what is this situation trying to teach me? Versus maybe, “The world’s out to get me, I’m stuck, I can’t move as fast as I want.”

I think that mindset was a big takeaway from all of this too because I remember being stuck at that corporate job, not being able to get a raise, feeling very frustrated at this toxic work environment, and telling one of my mentors at the time, you know him, his name is Kevin Rogers. I was feeling very stuck, very taken advantage of, very victim-mindset, and he recommended a book called Growth by Carol Dweck which kind of changed my entire approach to everything. To really sum that up at a high level, it talks about a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. A fixed mindset is very much like the world is against me, I don’t see any solutions, this is too much, it’s not my fault. Whereas a growth mindset looks for opportunities, even when things seem impossible and says, “Okay, what can I learn from this? How can I move forward?”

So, I read that book and kind of changed my approach and noticed how my career started moving faster. I felt a little bit more confident. Started taking steps toward getting myself out of this job for good, even though I had a mortgage in San Francisco, I didn’t necessarily feel safe walking away from a salaried job. But I felt ultimately that it was something that I had to do, thanks to this growth journey.

Kira:  Are there any other examples of how that growth mindset showed up in your business or your life during that time?

Angie:  I would say yeah, just being open to trying things in different ways and not being married to one thing just because it’s worked in the past or you’ve heard that it worked for somebody else. Actually when you guys invited me on stage last year at The Copywriter Club in real life, so that was at the start of the COVID outbreak and we had a speaker drop out of the morning panel and so I came on the panel, and one of the great questions that people asked was what’s the best prospecting method to use, and literally everybody on stage had a different answer for how they went about getting high paying clients and so when it came to me I was like, “My answer is notice that everybody said something different. It all works. It just depends on what works for you. What makes you happy to do this. I will never do another cold call again in my life.” I just won’t. I’ve tried it though, to see if it works, and it does work. It’s just too slow and too frustrating for me, and there are easier ways for me to do business. So just that really helped in terms of being open to trying something and not shutting it down before I’ve tried it and then once I try it, treating it like an experiment and seeing what data comes from this that can inform my next move forward versus win or lose.

Rob:  What advice would you give to just starting out Angie, or to a new copywriter who wants the kind of career that you’ve built?

Angie:  I would say step up before you feel like you’re ready. Because you’re never really going to feel like you’re ready. I wish that I had seen that for the lesson that it was at the time that I took the full-time copywriting role because literally two weeks in, the creative director came up to me and said, “Hey, so about that holiday catalog that we’re reviewing on Friday,” and it was like a Tuesday afternoon and it was like what holiday catalog, and he goes, “You know, Christmas, holiday catalog, we’re going to review it on Friday,” and I was like, “Seriously what catalog? What are you talking about?” That was how I figured out that I had to write a catalog in three days and teach myself a new piece of software and the lesson in that was opportunities present themselves, you can either make an excuse that I don’t really know what I’m doing or you can just kind of awkwardly fumble your way through it. That was not the most perfect catalog that ever existed. It’s not something that I really put in my portfolio and go, “Look, I’m a genius. Check this out.” But I figured it out and from that point forward became the company’s kind of go-to catalog writer as I got better and better at those skills and it all came from saying yes to an opportunity I didn’t feel ready for but I just kind of had to do.

Kira:  What about advice for copywriters who are getting into copy chiefing and taking it at that level? I know we’ve heard so many positive comments from other copywriters who have been chiefed by you and learned from you and mentored by you. What does it take to be a really solid copy chief and what are some simple steps we could take if we’re moving in that role?

Angie:  Oh, that’s great. I would say the best lesson that I learned from my first real copy chief was to leave room for people to solve problems in a way that you wouldn’t. Because when I first became a senior writer and I was training other people, I was really trying to get them to follow my vision and execute it the way I would do it if I were writing this project, and he took me aside and he was like, “That’s great. I get that you have a vision and it can work, but you do realize that there are dozens of potential solutions to this problem, right?” And theirs could work just as well as yours, they could not work as well as yours, but we won’t know until we try.

That was really an eye-opening moment in our practice I try to adhere to this day. Like your approach is going to be different from my approach just by merit of us being two different people, and your idea could turn out great, even if I can’t see the vision for it. So if you trust your vision for it, okay, sell it to me, and if we go through a couple of rounds of revisions together and I go, “You know what? It’s still not working. We need to come up with another concept,” that’s when we can switch in to a different vision or if I’ve got an idea that they can run with, I’m happy to do that. So that was a big takeaway.

Another big takeaway was being able to … As a writer myself, swallow my pride when a concept is not working. Roy Peter Clark and a lot of other good, talented amazing writing coaches and teachers teach this concept of kill your babies or kill your darlings, and I learned this the hard way when I wrote a post card campaign for that retail company. I can’t even remember what the joke is to this day, that should tell you how important this piece of writing was to me but I had written something witty and funny and I was convinced it was brilliant and it was going to make everybody laugh and we’re going to make millions of dollars, we’re all going to be rich.

And we go to this creative review meeting and my chief looks at it and he goes, “I don’t get it.” So I explain it to him and I’m like, “It’s funny, right?” He was like, “Aha. Yeah. I get that now. Could I have a new copy on my desk by this afternoon?” I was like, “Wait, but you just said that you got it. Why do I need to rewrite this?” And he goes, “Angie, are you going to follow the truck and explain the joke to everyone?” And I was like, “Well no, that’s stupid. Why would you say that?” And he goes, “Well, if I didn’t get it, I’m probably not the only one who won’t get it. That means it’s not clear enough and you need to rewrite it.” And I was like, “Ooh.” Punch to the gut, but it turns out he was so right.

Then I would say if you want to be a copy chief, leading with empathy. I don’t think that junior writers or people that have been at this for a little while set out to disappoint you if they blow a deadline, if they turn over a concept that doesn’t look like it’s been researched or worked properly. There’s usually something that’s happening in their head or in their life that has led them to this place where they didn’t turn over the draft on time and now the timelines have gone off the rails. So I tend to lead from that place of what’s going on, I’m on your side. Like this isn’t about making Angie happy, this isn’t about impressing me. This is about us teaming up together to do good work for the client and for their customers.

So, use me as the asset that I am. Don’t worry about making me mad. The only thing that’s going to make me mad is if you disappear, if you don’t communicate. If there’s something that you’re not getting and you don’t reach out for help, and I could have helped you with that, those are the things that I get upset at. I don’t get upset at you trying your best and just hitting a rough patch, not having motivation, not being able to work your way through this concept. Like that’s exactly what my role as a chief is for, to help you figure out those rough patches and get going again so that you feel confident in delivering the end product.

Rob:  You mentioned that you worked with Jeff Walker. He’s obviously one of the biggest names in the launch world. How did you make that connection and what did you learn from the experience of working with him and his team?

Angie:  That was actually interesting because I met Jeff through Abbey Woodcock. As I mentioned she had done his voice and style guide and his training role. I didn’t know who he was before I joined the team so I think I had a little bit of an advantage of not being super intimidated by, “Oh my good, he’s famous.” As I started preparing and doing the application materials and the writing tests I got a little bit more intimidated and I almost dropped out, but that’s another good story for another day.

I had to learn on the fly, and the great thing about Jeff was that he uses the process that he teaches to launch his own product, which teaches the process that he teaches. So it’s a great meta-experience to just be behind the scenes in the launch and the great thing about Jeff’s team is when you are coming on board, they have a policy that your first launch you watch instead of jumping into the deep end and trying to manage all these moving parts. That was a great thing because I was able to take kind of my corporate background and my experience in developing systems for growing teams and help systematize some of what we were doing with Jeff’s launch processes so that we didn’t have to recreate launches from the ground up every time, and I love also that Jeff is a big advocate of if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Because I think a lot of people kind of get caught up in this, “We have to be new, we have to be new.” Why do you have to be new? If people like what you have, do you really have to create something new every time? It could just be the same product that people love. So he has the same core product that he’s taught for more than 15 years now. He updates it every couple years. We follow pretty much the same launch process, we tweak the messaging a little bit every year, and that’s about it. So I kind of loved how seeing behind the scenes of a big business like that, you could see the streamline happening and it doesn’t have to be kind of as complicated as it might look from the outside.

Kira:  What else? What else did you learn from seeing behind the scenes of a successful company like that? Other lessons that we could take from not only Jeff but just the whole team that could strengthen our own copywriting businesses?

Angie:  Oh, that’s a good one. I see this idea that these big companies have it all together and what could I, tiny peon copywriter, possibly hope to bring to these companies? Jeff Walker had been in business for over 20 years before I came on board and he had never had an abandon cart sequence before me. So don’t assume that just because they have this big business and they’re successful that they’ve been able to hit all of these milestones and implement all of these sequences. Sometimes you grow so fast that you just don’t have time to implement these things. Sometimes things have been working so well that you just haven’t had a need before now and then if somebody comes on with the experience that can lead a project. Like I tried to pitch it probably three or four times when I realized that we didn’t have an abandoned cart and I wasn’t getting a firm yes or no just because when it’s launch time, things go crazy.

So finally, I just wrote the whole thing and was like, “The abandoned cart sequence is ready for your approval.” I just kind of slid it in with the other deliverables as things were happening, and the first time we ran it, it recovered … I want to say 60 sales at $2,000.00 a pop, and then when you consider that you can rerun that every launch, I mean that’s a multimillion dollar asset in three emails that I created that didn’t exist before, and that’s not to say that’s something that I’m trying to brag about or that like, “Angie’s fantastic.” Don’t look at something from the outside and assume that you know what’s going on and that you can’t possibly add value. You can always find a way to add value and it might be a lot simpler than you think, like this abandoned cart sequence.

Rob:  So many copywriters want to work on launches because they hear the kinds of fees that copywriters charge as high as $50,000.00 or $60,000.00 for a single project. Which of course isn’t a single project but in reality it involves several sales pages, maybe as many as 50 or 60 or more emails, webinar, video scripts, Facebook ads and on and on. But regardless of all that, where can copywriters go to learn more about doing this kind of a launch and how can they find these kinds of projects?

Angie:  Well, you can’t go wrong getting involved in Jeff’s world because when people talk about launches, a lot of people in business pretty much follow his system and a lot of the other launch systems that you see out there are different versions that people have come up with that simplify or streamline one position or another. But basically it all is derived from the system that he set up and you might have noticed the three videos and then the sales letter and then the open cart week. That’s like the boiled down version of it. There are people in his community that have just started businesses or they’re kind of in that awkward growth stage and they don’t know how to implement this that are already in his world and because he’s such an evangelist for copy, they’re like, “Oh my god. Can I hire you?” That happened to me at events all the time. Like they wanted to hire Jeff’s copywriter and I’m like, “No. Thank you though. I’m very flattered. I actually have an extensive network of friends, I can introduce you to people, let’s talk budget, timeline, all that jazz.”

That said, I’m glad that you brought up that people want to get into launch copywriting usually because they hear this $50,000.00, $60,000.00 price tag and they’re like, “Hell yeah.” $50,000.00, $60,000.00 is usually for … It could be four to six months of solid work and I mean just one of the email sequences that we had for Jeff’s last launch before I left the team was approaching 250 pages with all the different variations in the list segments and stuff that we had going on. So I want to contextualize being paid $50,000.00, $60,000.00 for a launch package because I mean we’re talking writing the great American novel worth of launch copier to earn that much.

The potential is really huge, I mean I’ve heard of people charging that much and then multimillion dollar launch and everybody’s happy and performance bonuses, woo-hoo. But with any campaign that you undertake, there’s also the potential that the market could shift, you’ve been working for four months on something that’s never going to see the light of the day. That actually happened to us on Jeff’s team once where he had this promotion in mind, Candice and Chris and I were confident that we could nail it. We went full steam ahead and then when we turned it over to him, he was silent for two days and I was like, “Oh god. Here it comes. This is when they find out we’re frauds. We’re all going to be fired. Like that’s it, that’s the end.”

Then we were kind of looping on each other for a little bit too, like that’s it. This is fine, everything’s on fire, we’re all going to get fired, and so I wound up telling the team, “Okay, laptops off for the rest of the afternoon. Tomorrow we come back ready to kick ass.” I should probably have asked if I could swear on your podcast since I do it so freely. But I said, “F yeah, copy team, we’ve got this,” and that became kind of our rallying cry through the ups and down of launch world, which can be definitely up and down. So if you’ve ever seen me in the background have FYCT, that’s basically what that stands for. If you’re going to fail, fail big and then just keep going.

Kira:  So, what would you say are the levels for launch copy … Like that, again, working on Jeff’s launch is so much larger, you can charge $50K, you can have performance payouts, but we don’t all start there. So how could someone who is new to the space start and what would that look like?

Angie:  I think that a lot of people see the big multimillion dollar launches like Jeff does and think that that’s all that a launch is, and it doesn’t actually have to be that complicated. Some of the launches start with what he calls a seed launch which is basically just email only and selling a beta version of a product before it gets created and then having the people on your email list that bought into the product co-create it with you. So we’re talking about a couple dozen emails there and then maybe some sales pages. It’s a very light touch on that one whereas a lot of people see that joint venture launch that Jeff does where everybody in the internet universe is mailing for him as well and they’re like, “I want that. I want the multimillion dollar launch.” Maybe start with a $10,000.00 launch. Maybe start with a $5,000.00 launch, or a $500.00 launch, just to see if you can make the sale on something, and then leverage it up from there. Figure out what worked, what didn’t work. That’s really all it is is putting yourself out there, even if you don’t really feel like you know what you’re doing, three day catalog. And then seeing what happens.

Rob:  Let’s jump in here and talk about a couple of things that stood out to us here, so we’ve been chatting with Angie. Lots of stuff jumped out at me, I started making a bulleted list Kira as we tend to do and somewhat 10 items, we don’t have to talk about all of them, but what stood out to you from what Angie was talking about over the last few minutes?

Kira:  Yeah, well I mean, I don’t know. I love Angie, so I just … I enjoyed this conversation so much, and I love that she worked for Oprah and she also wants to be like Shonda Rhimes, which is similar to me. I can relate. There’s so much in this episode about mindset and Angie was cool enough to just open up and talk freely about her own mindset struggles and that’s what I really love about Angie is that she’s not afraid to go there and to get real and she … And to talk about all the hard stuff in her own mind and business, and so for me, that’s a lot of what I pulled out of this portion of the conversation. It was really like the noteworthy quotes that she shared. She said it’s …

Well, she talked about comparing herself to others who maybe had started in copywriting after her or even around the same time and she felt that pressure of like, “Oh, I should be ahead of where I am.” Which I think is common, I feel that, and so her quote that I wrote down and underlined is, “It’s okay to be where you are right now. It’s okay to go at your own pace,” and it’s such a simple quote but it’s so powerful because it’s easy to forget that and it’s easy to compare yourself to other people who are in entirely different situations and you don’t even understand the background of what’s happening in their situation. So why do we compare ourselves so frequently when it’s such a useless process?

Rob:  Yeah, I remember a conversation a few years ago in the free Copywriter Club Facebook group where somebody posted who are these copywriters that are making six figures, I don’t even believe this is true. The person who posted was struggling to make maybe even mid-five figures and because that … When people mention this thing, it just felt so out of reach, and she didn’t believe it, and I think there is a lot of power here. Yeah, there are six figure copywriters. There are seven figure copywriters out there, but that doesn’t mean that we necessarily need to be at the same place they are, we don’t know what clients they’ve got, we don’t know what advantages they’ve got, and so comparing ourselves to them as opposed to maybe where we were six months ago or where we were a year ago is so much less helpful and just recognizing what Angie was sharing, slow and steady is okay. In fact, in a lot of ways, it’s preferred to overnight success simply because the learning proceeds at the right amount, you’re able to help your clients with bigger problems and as you learn how to fix those, then you can take the next step up and you’re literally leveraging your experience and your assignments to move on to the next thing which may be similar or may be slightly better but it doesn’t have to be zero to a million.

Kira:  Yeah, and what’s cool to me about this interview is we … Backstory here, we interviewed Angie before I even had my baby. This was pre-maternity leave, this was from a while back, and we didn’t air it because there was a couple … We lost a couple audio clips that we had to kind of reorganize. But going back now into this episode, it’s actually a lot of key messages that I need to hear post-maternity leave where my whole world has changed and my parameters have changed and I have a lot more restraints right now timing-wise and energy-wise and so a lot of Angie’s advice just resonates with me even more right now because I can’t … How could I possibly compare my situation, how I work and how I show up and my own marketing and my own productivity to someone who maybe didn’t have a baby a couple months ago? Like it’s ridiculous, but we still do it, and I even … I catch myself doing it and so again, just like what Angie said about … She mentioned she doesn’t want to get too woo-woo, but it’s about learning what you need to learn where you are, and there’s always a lesson to learn, and for me right now, it’s about delegation and asking for help, which is something I’ve always struggled with, but I’m forced to do that now because I need that help more than ever.

So, I agree with Angie. There are always lessons we can pull away from wherever we are and look at what the situation is trying to teach us before we can move on, and so yeah. Just that resonated right now especially.

Rob:  Yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to the whole growth versus fixed mindset. When you have a fixed mindset, stuff happens and it’s like … We feel like it’s out of our control or we feel like there’s nothing we can do versus that growth mindset, where we’re always looking for, “Okay, what can I learn from this situation? How can I improve my situation?” Even if it’s only a little bit, 1%, 2%, how can I make this a little bit better? What can I do to make the next thing work better, and that approach as an entrepreneur, as a business owner and as a copywriter just helps all of us I think build a business that serves our needs far better than assuming that here’s the path and I’ve got to be at this point by this point and I’ve got to follow that expert and do what they say … That just doesn’t work all the time.

Kira:  Yeah. Yeah. What else, Rob, stood out to you?

Rob:  So, one other thing that Angie said that you and I have echoed this several times but just the idea of stepping up before you’re ready. She was applying to work with Jeff Walker and her team and she felt like she wasn’t qualified or she wasn’t quite ready for that. We’ve done that in our business, we talk about taking on risks that maybe were … Oftentimes we are ready for it but we don’t feel like … There maybe some head trash going on, something else that’s keeping us from going back, but when you don’t feel ready, oftentimes it’s still okay or even best to step up, put yourself forward, throw yourself into the work, take on a project that feels maybe too big, do something that feels like a big commitment or that you’re putting yourself out there in a way that’s making you uncomfortable, because that’s where growth happens.

Kira:  Yes, and my example of that would actually be I am throwing a party at my house in December for my husband because he’s got a big birthday coming up, he’s turning 50.

Rob:  Wow. Old man.

Kira:  So, I do not feel … He probably would hate it that I’m mentioning that. I don’t feel ready, this is all about me, this is not about him. I don’t feel ready to throw a party because of said baby that is not even five months old and the house that needs … Like is in the process of being totally reorganized, I don’t feel ready but I’m going to use Angie’s inspiration and motivation to step up and throw a really awesome party for him. So stepping up before you feel ready, because oftentimes once you set the date and you send that invite out, the paperless post invite out to everyone you know, you will make the party happen. So whether it’s for personal things like parties, which I love to throw, or it’s for business and professional achievements, I’ve never felt ready for anything. Motherhood, business, the event, TCCIRL, back in person. I don’t feel ready for any of it but we just kind of schedule it and work backwards and work baby step by baby step and do it and so I … Again like that message definitely rings true for me