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Rob:   So many copywriters follow what we’ve called a winding path from one career or kind of experience to their role as a copywriter. And some even grow beyond that to help with things like branding or voice development and marketing strategy. Our guest for the 226th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is Christy Cegelski. Christy started writing as a mommy blogger, but then she got really serious about selling when she and her husband launched a company to sell the margarita mix that they had created. What she learned from running that company came in handy when other business owners started reaching out and asking for help with their copy for their businesses.

Kira:   Before we share our interview with Christy, this podcast episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. That’s the membership for copywriters who are ready to start investing in their business, improve their sales calls, proposals, and build a network that supports them with ideas, leads, and more. To learn more, visit thecopywriterunderground.com.

Rob:   Christy’s experience ranges from mommy blogger to food product creator, to copywriter, to digital product maker and podcaster. But we started our interview with a question about how she became a copywriter.

Christy Cegelski:   It’s funny because listening to so many of your podcasts, I realized that none of us have a typical story where we dreamed one day we were going to become a copywriter, and here we are. I guess I kind of, I didn’t know that it sort of had become such a cliche, that it was, everybody came about it in such a strange way. But for me, I mean, I was a stay at home mom for years and years, and I really wanted to get back into writing. It was something that I was really good at when I was a kid. It was sort of an escape for me growing up in the environment that I did, which is another story for another day.

But back in 2007, I was reading a lot of mommy blogs. And this is kind of back in the day when bloggers were bloggers and not influencers like they are now. But that medium really kind of became an outlet for me as I started my own blog the next year. And it was a way for me to sort of get back into the practice of writing every day and just sharing my own experience as a wife and a mom. And it was working on that blog that ultimately led me to the decision to go back to school, to get my bachelor’s degree in English, with a writing focus.

And at the same time, I started pitching myself for some freelance writing gigs in local publications. And these assignments literally paid zero to maybe up to $50 an article and you can’t really make a living on that, right. It kind of seemed like what I was hearing my whole life about not being able to make a living as a writer was really kind of proving to be true. But I stayed in school, I loved it. I was still sort of getting these random low-paying writing jobs here and there. And then at the start of my final semester, my husband and I kind of veered off course a little bit and created a line of all natural locale margarita mixes, kind of by accident. It was totally random.

But we really had no business kind of getting into the food industry or bottling this stuff. We were completely naive about anything to do with grocery stores and food packaging and all of that. But everybody that we were sharing this stuff with was like, “Oh, you really need to bottle this. You need to bottle this.” And so the short story is we found a manufacturer to bottle the mixes for us. We hooked up with a few distributors and we started getting these margarita mixes into a lot of local natural grocery stores, specialty food stores. We sold them online and that was really my first experience with e-commerce. It wasn’t big back in 2010 when this was happening. People weren’t really buying food online.

But what I kind of found throughout the whole process is that I really loved working behind the scenes in a creative capacity. And I seem to have a knack for building an audience and for email marketing. I wrote all the website copy, copy for the marketing materials, emails, all the social media captions. And I was able to really grow our audience and our sales without really knowing that what I was doing was copywriting. So that was kind of the start of it. And then long story short, we closed that business after four years because we just didn’t make enough money at it. But the interesting thing that sort of came out of that experience was that other business owner, friends and acquaintances started to reach out to me for help with their website copy and content for their brands.

And at first, I was writing a lot of copy for other product-based businesses like ours, but it kind of transitioned pretty quickly into writing for personal brands in the coaching and online course space. That was kind of my intro to copywriting when I didn’t really know that it was a job title or that it was something that you could get paid for.

Rob:   Yeah, so let’s go all the way back to that first blog. What was the topic? What were you writing about? Were you also doing the mommy blog thing or did you have anything specific?

Christy Cegelski:   It was definitely a mommy blog. It was called Heavy on the Caffeine. And I actually really liked that title, might revisit it for something, who knows? But yeah, it was just really about being a stay-at-home mom and my life with little kids. And I just really had fun with it. I had no idea what I was doing and it was just fun.

Rob:   Yeah. I remember those early days of blogging, I did something similar. I think Kira also did something similar and just sort of experimenting, playing with … Yours was a shoe blog, is that … No, wait, tall.

Kira:   Oh my God.

Rob:   I’m trying to remember.

Kira:   About being tall. I had a blog about being a tall person, which is the worst idea for a blog ever. And then I had one about rebelling against the bridal industry. But yeah, I miss those days too, good times.

Christy Cegelski:   I miss it. I really miss it.

Kira:   Let’s go back.

Rob:   That’s definitely a better way… Well, maybe not a better way, but it was definitely a nice way to share a lot of thoughts and be able to engage in an audience that wasn’t on a platform like Facebook or Twitter, where you get sort of all the negativity and all that comes along with it.

Christy Cegelski:   Yeah, definitely. Because I think people were not going to kind of take that extra step to leave a negative comment. It just wasn’t worth their time.

Rob:   Yeah. Okay. Let’s fast forward a little bit then and talk a little bit about your experience with the margarita company. So you were doing mostly, I’m assuming mostly content marketing for that, but what exactly did that look like? And maybe one or two big takeaways from that experience.

Christy Cegelski:   Well, this was back in the day when Facebook, I don’t think there was Instagram yet. But it wasn’t a pay to play platform. It was pretty easy to build up a fan page and communicate with people that way. It was really just about showing up every day and engaging. But it’s interesting because something that happened back then when we were sort of getting our website up and running and we worked briefly with the marketing team, because we were kind of looking into different ways to get our name out there. Did we want to go the radio ads route? Did we want to invest in TV ads or that kind of thing?

I think there were Facebook ads, but not a lot of people were doing them yet. It was pretty new. But I remember the social media marketing, a team member on the marketing team telling me that email marketing was dead and he didn’t understand why I was so invested in sort of putting up a collection of cocktail recipes on our website in exchange for people’s emails. I didn’t know it was called a freebie, I didn’t know about lead magnets or that sort thing. But it just was really intuitive to me that you offer this thing that they’re going to love in exchange for their email so that you can communicate with them. And it was just kind of like one of those moments where it’s like you know you have to sort of listen to your gut on that. You know what I mean? Because clearly he didn’t know what he was talking about.

Kira:   Can we still get these margarita mixes? Can we purchase them still?

Christy Cegelski:   No, we closed the company back in 2014. It is very expensive to start a food company. Little did we know that grocery stores expect free product for their initial orders. When they’re putting your product on the shelf, they want a certain amount for free. And then they also expect you to do demos on a regular basis, which you have to hire people for, obviously you can’t show up to every single store, every single time to do a tasting. And then we didn’t know this, but apparently when there are the sales flyers that you get at the grocery store, those discounts come from the manufacturer. It’s sort of like this constant digging in your pocket, and when you’re a small two-person company and you’re bottling something in small batches, there’s really not a whole lot of room for that. We found out pretty quickly that it was not going to be the moneymaker for us. But it was fun while it lasted.

Kira:   What other lessons did you take away from running that business for four years that you have applied to building your copywriting business and platform?

Christy Cegelski:   Well, I really learned to stick with what I like to do and what I was good at. We had to do a lot of in store demos, just literally setting up a table at different liquor stores, at different grocery stores. And I hated it. Sometimes, this is awful to say, but I would cancel at the last minute because I just didn’t want to be that upfront sales person or face of the brand. And it wasn’t that I didn’t believe in it, it just was not what I felt called to do. I really love doing all the creative stuff behind the scenes. And I guess when it’s a situation where you don’t have a lot of money to invest in team members you do what you have to do, right. But I just knew that kind of being the sales person and working with stores on such a personal one-on-one level was not what I was good at or what I wanted to be doing with the rest of my life.

Rob:   Let’s fast forward again, as people started reaching out to you and asking you to help with their marketing, at what point did it dawn on you that this really needed to be a business? So you started investing in your own website, your own marketing, reaching out to the kinds of clients that you really wanted to start working with maybe as you shifted from products to personality driven copy.

Christy Cegelski:   Yeah. Back in June of 2018, I think it was, I saw a Facebook post from a graphic designer that I was Facebook friends with, but I didn’t know her in real life. And she asked if there were any copywriters who could help with some of her website projects. She had a bunch of websites that she was designing and they were in various phases of completion, but ultimately being delayed and messing with her timeline because her clients didn’t know how to write about themselves. And they were the ones responsible for providing the copy.

And like I said, at the time I still didn’t really know what copywriting was or that it was something I had been doing mostly for free all this time. But I sent her a message and she referred me to my first legit client. And at the time I was kind of surprised and scared because I had no systems set up for onboarding clients or even taking payments. I didn’t even know what to charge, I had to Google it. But jumping in I guess before I was a 100% ready or felt fully prepared, just sort of forced me to figure it out right away. I set up PayPal, I threw up a website. Actually I don’t even think I threw up a website right away. I think it was within a couple of months. I was just determined that I was going to make sure that this was a real thing before I invested too much into it. And it just grew faster than I ever could have imagined really.

Kira:   Yeah. Let’s talk about the growth. How did it grow? Why did it grow? What were you doing to make it grow so fast at that point?

Christy Cegelski:   Honestly, I don’t think there was anything I was doing other than just showing up for these clients. All of my business at first came from referrals, people who … The graphic designer sent me my first few clients. And then these clients would refer me to other people who were building websites and they would rehire me for … We’d finish a website project and they would email me and say, “Hey, do you write emails too,” or, “Hey, do you do social media captions? Do you write blogs?” And so back then I just was taking every job that was offered to me because I was just determined to make it work. And I did everything, if it needed writing I did it.

Rob:   As you’re doing all of this stuff, you mentioned you had to learn a lot of this in your own business and you had the writing stuff down, but not necessarily the marketing. How did you learn the strategic side of this as you were doing it? Were there resources that you were leaning on or were you just kind of feeling your way through the entire thing?

Christy Cegelski:   I really just figured it out. I mean, of course I was like everybody else, I googled all the things and I listened to all the podcasts and followed all of the marketing gurus. And honestly, I think that that’s kind of one of the reasons that I felt so burnt out in my first year of business, because I was really just trying to do all the things and follow this template for how to grow and scale a business. And it really was unsustainable for me. I was doing what all of these people were telling me to do, but not necessarily what I felt called to do or what I felt excited about doing. And so that’s kind of one of the lessons that I’ve really learned over the last year is to kind of lean more into the feminine strategies for growing my business versus masculine strategies and energy.

Kira:   Can you talk more about that too. I know since we’ve been working with you and since we met you in the Think Tank, you’ve pivoted and kind of followed your intuition a lot more as well. Can you give some examples of what that looks like for you or what it looked like for you, and when you changed and kind of started focusing on what you felt more called to do rather than all the things you have to do.

Christy Cegelski:   Yeah. I just really have sort of more and more been learning to focus on listening to my intuition. And I know it sounds woo or whatever, but I decided that I’m just … I just got tired of forcing things. I don’t want to take the prescribed route and build a business around programs or packages that aren’t interesting or fun to me. And I mean, in the interest of full transparency, I am not the main breadwinner in my household, so I don’t have to take on every potential project that comes my way.

Even though in the beginning I did that because I wanted to prove that this was a legitimate business. I wanted it to work. So I took every single job that came my way and kind of the good thing about that was that I learned what I love doing and what I was really good at, but it also kind of showed me what projects I wanted to say no to in the future, if that makes sense. And as it turns out, the things that I’m excited about doing are actually the things that have turned out to be the most successful. I always kind of keep that in the back of my mind when I’m thinking about what my next step should be.

Rob:   You mentioned that you got really burned out in that first year, tell us a little bit about how you dealt with that. Did you have to take a step back from the business or were there other things that you were doing in order to get back on top of things and really fall in love with what you were doing again?

Christy Cegelski:   Yeah, for sure. I mean, like I said, I just was taking every job that was offered to me. Anybody who came to me, I would do it, whether they were an ideal client or not. And I think kind of what changed things for me was taking a step back and looking at what were the things that were producing the best results for my clients and that I was having the most fun with. And also, I kind of got to the point a year in, maybe 14 months in, where I kind of had to look at outsourcing before I felt ready to do that.

I always thought that I couldn’t afford to outsource and get help until I was making six figures. But I was drowning in client work long before that was even on the horizon. I just kind of took the leap. And my first subcontractors that I brought on were, I hired a junior copywriter to help with some blogs that I was doing for retainer clients. I hired a VA and I hired somebody to help me put together my first digital product. And ironically as soon as I brought on those first few contractors within that 12 months or 14 months into my business, I had my first five figure month. That was kind of a lesson right there to kind of do some … to think about doing those kinds of things before you feel ready to do it.

Kira:   What advice would you give to a copywriter who is listening and who wants to start outsourcing, but isn’t quite sure of the best approach and what they should do first?

Christy Cegelski:   I think for me it was looking at what were the things that were taking up my time, but that weren’t generating revenue, right. For me that was spending a lot of time creating graphics in Canva and scheduling social media posts. While that might be fun sometimes, it was taking me away from the money-making activities in my business, connecting with new clients, taking on those jobs that I turned away that I just didn’t have time for. I would say that, take a look at what are the things that you’re spending time on that maybe somebody else would love to do. And it allows you to focus on the things that are bringing in the revenue that you need.

Rob:   I want to ask about your work today. Who is your typical client? What is the kind of typical project that you would work on with them and what are you charging them to work with you?

Christy Cegelski:   These days I work with online coaches and course creators mostly. And even though I have niched down in terms of my ideal client and kind of a few offers that I have, I don’t do one particular thing. I’m not just an email copywriter, for example. I kind of like a little bit of variety, so I do write a lot of email copy, but I also still really love to write website copy. I take on a few of those, even though that’s not one of the things that’s on my website as an offer. I do a lot of sales pages. I love writing sales pages. And it’s funny, there’s so much talk about niching down and getting really tight with that. And I think that that has its benefits, it serves a purpose.

But it’s okay to kind of give yourself a little bit of wiggle room and still do some of the other projects that you love to do. And people won’t stop asking you, even I have three offers on my website and I still get people who reach out to me for other things like webinars scripts, or I even recently had somebody ask me for help with ghost writing a book. Just because you put it out there sort of what your offers are doesn’t mean that you’re not going to get other opportunities.

Kira:   Let’s talk about your other offers. And can you give us a complete picture of what you have out there in the world today? So you mentioned a couple of services. What are some of the other products, programs that you’ve created that you offer today?

Christy Cegelski:   Yeah, so I created a mini course, it’s called the six-figure sales funnel. That was my first digital product that I started creating a year, it was just about a year into my business, kind of when I started to transition a little bit and outsource. And over the last couple of years, that has definitely morphed and been revamped a little bit and I’ve changed course platforms. But it’s basically, it gives you the basics of setting up your very first email marketing funnel. It takes you through how to decide on what kind of freebie that your ideal clients are actually going to want. It takes you through the email funnel, your welcome series, your nurture sequence, promo sequence, that kind of thing.

And I’ve just kind of recently set that up as sort of a slow funnel. So that’s the initial offer. And then there’s an order bump of a sales page template where I have literally a swipe file you can copy and paste and customize the copy for the sales page. And it comes with a wire frame sample so that people can kind of understand where the copy should be placed on the page. And I’m working on adding a one-time offer, which will be swipe files for all of the different email sequences that I teach about inside the course. That’s the main digital product that I have, and that has been really fun to create because I’ve gotten to kind of play around with it and add things and get feedback. People from the Think Tank have been super helpful with taking a look at that and kind of giving me some ideas of how to just beef it up and make it even more valuable.

And that’s really all that I … other than that, other than my service, the done for you services, that’s the only product that I offer at this point. I kind of like that. I kind of like just having the one offer and just keeping it simple. I never want to kind of get away from the done for you services. I know that a lot of copywriters are kind of getting more into coaching and consulting and even speaking. And I think for me, I never see myself giving up kind of the done for you services because it’s kind of where I get to really be creative and just have fun.

Rob:   Yeah, I think it’s interesting. We do see a lot of copywriters who don’t want to work with clients anymore. And I think a lot of that comes from the fact that copywriters price themselves so poorly that working with clients isn’t fun. And so they’ve got to go find something that is more rewarding. But speaking of pricing, so give us a sense of how you’ve priced your product and then the typical client project, ranges so that we can understand exactly how much you’re charging for what you’re doing.

Christy Cegelski:   Yeah. So for my services, I mean, this has been an evolution, believe me, because when I started, I was literally charging $35 an hour. And I only picked that because I googled it and I picked some number right in the middle of the range that I saw. And to be honest at the time $35 an hour seemed like a lot of money because I had been a stay at home mom, right. And my first paid writing gigs were maybe paying up to $50 for a 500 to a thousand word article. I was like, yeah, that sounds great. But then I sort of realized pretty quickly with all of the expenses that come with running an online business, $35 an hour just wasn’t sustainable. That was kind of one of the first things I looked at when I decided to switch over from charging hourly to creating packages for my services.

And it was kind of a work in progress to figure out what works and what doesn’t and what people were looking for in terms of my services. One of the things that I do a lot of is email copy. And so a typical email sequence, like welcome sequence, say that’s three to five emails will be $1500 to $2,000 done for you. A sales page, from scratch sales page, I do for $2,500. Obviously my pricing has shifted quite a bit, but I’ve also … Now things are different. I have the experience and I kind of know a lot more about conversion copywriting, and I feel pretty confident in the prices that I charge. And I know that people get a lot of value and that I produce results. I felt, I’ve come to a good place with it.

Kira:   Let’s stop here and talk about a couple of things Christy mentioned. Rob, what stood out to you?

Rob:   Well, we’ve talked with a bunch of people who have started out writing as bloggers. It’s kind of maybe the gateway drug to copywriting. You had your Tall Blog, I had my own blog where I started writing about marketing back in 2004. This stuff that we all kind of start to do, it seems to oftentimes start with blogging.

Kira:   Yeah, that’s true. I mean, I didn’t realize until we talked with Christy, but I had a couple of different blogs. It was like The Tall Blog that didn’t last long about being tall. And then it was The Mathematics of Glamor that allowed me just to get creative and kind of write about a whole bunch of different topics. And then finally Bridal Rebellion where I focused on the wedding industry. And so yeah, I kind of miss it, if anything, it reminded me of how much I loved writing about a wide range of topics and how I want to get back to that and figure out how to kind of weave that into everything I’m doing today.

Rob:   I’ve heard you talk about The Tall Blog before, and I’ve heard you talk about Bridal Rebellion, but I’ve never heard of The Mathematics of Glamor, that’s new to me. What exactly did you cover with that?

Kira:   Well, I had this really cool, I think I told you about the drink for a doodle where I would collect self-portraits from people all around the world. And I would pay them for it through a drink. I was buying them a drink, but I would really just send them a check for $5. I was paying them $5 for a beverage of their choice, and they would send me their self-portrait and I would publish it. And the whole idea was just to allow everyone to express who they really are through any form of media. And it was just really fun. It was just really fun to see people’s storytelling through these doodles. And I kind of, I mean, again, I was like, that was a really fun idea.

Rob:   Yeah, it is.

Kira:   And I connected with a bunch of people around the world and you can see where that links to copywriting. I just didn’t see it at the time. I’m all about storytelling and in different forms. Again, that was fun. I should get back to it.

Rob:   Yeah, that’s kind of a cool idea. I’m trying to think what I would do for a self-portrait that you could post on your blog of me.

Kira:   That will be really fun. I should, yeah, maybe get back. And then I talked about a lot of different topics. I mean, it’s cringey like dating and lots of romance. It still lives out there on the interwebs.

Rob:   Going to have to go find it. It’s cringey, but I’m going to-

Kira:   Oh my gosh, it’s very cringey.

Rob:   Something else that kind of stood out to me from what Christy was talking about is just this whole product creation thing. And I know that there are a lot of different ways to do this. Obviously Christy started with a physical product, like a grocery store product, and she mentioned some of the things that made that really hard to grow and to build. But we often talk about digital products, courses that copywriters are either writing for, they’re creating themselves or memberships or downloads, that kind of thing.

And then there are a lot of copywriters who have created their own other products like nutritional supplements or, you mentioned dating, but several copywriters who have built dating type products, help people to land that guy, land the girl, whatever. And it seems like a natural evolution a lot of times of copywriting and using the powers that we develop as content creators, as copywriters to actually sell things that we create and take a better ownership of what we’re doing with the businesses that we have.

Kira:   I would love to create dating product. But yeah, I think it’s a good reminder that as copywriters we have so many options ahead of us in business and that Christy started that way with the products, but we can all kind of move in that direction if we choose to. And that copywriting gives us this great tool kit and advantage as we build different types of businesses. And so I think it was just a good reminder to hear from Christy that she had this really cool margarita mixed product that as copywriters we can do that too and figure out what works for us.

Rob:   Yeah, exactly. And then that’s not all that she talked about that’s worth commenting on, but she mentioned the thing that she’s doing with outsourcing and hiring and working with other people, bringing them into your business. And we recently did a training in the underground all about how do you know you can actually afford to do that in your business so that you’re making enough money that you can bring in the people who can do the help that you need, and trying to make sure that you’re bringing in enough to be able to afford them and make your business work.

Kira:   Yeah, and it seemed like Christy was saying that she was bringing in people to take on the tasks that were taking her so much time and preventing her from focusing on revenue generating activities. And I think that’s one way to approach it, but we’ve also, you and I have received advice that we should bring on team members and contractors who can generate revenue. I think you could look at it both ways, but just figure out where is the struggle for you? And it doesn’t make sense to bring in someone who’s a revenue generator. And what does the compensation look like there? Or do you just replace a lot of the tasks that are $15 an hour tasks so that you can focus on the thousand dollars an hour tasks?

Rob:   Yeah. If you go that second route where you’re replacing the things that you’re doing that’s taking up your time, then you need to make sure that whatever you now use your freed up time for is bringing in that extra revenue. Or like you said, it’s always a good idea to bring in people who can actually help generate that revenue. If they’re bringing in more than you’re paying them, or more than the contribution they’re making back, then that just helps your business to grow.

Kira:   Yeah. And then also Christy shared a little bit about how she dealt with overwhelm and burning out and how she’s kind of evolved through that and pass that. And I think that’s worth mentioning too, because we’ve been able to see it since she joined the Think Tank and how she approaches business. And I remember at the beginning it did feel like, I could feel that she was trying to force things and kind of follow a lot of the formulas that are out there with like launching the course and doing things step-by-step the way we’re supposed to. And once Christy kind of let go of that and kind of just followed more of her intuition and allowed her business to be more fun and followed what she was interested in. It just seemed to a whole lot easier. And she seems to enjoy it so much more now.

Rob:   Yeah. Being overwhelmed by all of the things that you have to do is something that we hear from so many people. When we’re coaching people and talking with other copywriters, oftentimes they come to us and say, “Hey, I’m falling behind. I see where everybody else is doing or these great big steps that everybody’s making forward and I’m falling behind, or my steps are not as big.” And I think we do have this tendency to think that we’ve got to do all of the things now, and we’ve got to know all of the things now, we’ve got to follow all of the people who are putting out content and we’ve got to buy all of the courses and we’ve got to finish all of the courses. And sometimes it’s just better to choose one thing to lean in on that, focus on that, do that one thing well, be deliberate, be slow about it, and just take the steps to gradually grow your business in a way that makes sense.

Kira:   Yeah. And I used to feel that way quite often. I still can fall into that trap. I think it’s … I mean, I can’t imagine anyone who doesn’t ever fall into that trap of looking at what other people are doing and feeling like they’re not doing enough. But I don’t know, it’s just helped me I think to transition and kind of look at the long game and just realize I am definitely the tortoise. And I am a proud tortoise and I do see the long game of other milestones. And I think when you step back and can see the big picture, you can see where, hey, I can actually do all the things I want to do over the next 20 years, 40 years, not over the next year. And it just takes some pressure off to know that there is time for all of that, and you don’t have to just jump into all of it at once. And if you do, it’s just not going to work out well anyway.

Rob:   I think when you’re deliberate, you actually end up building a better foundation for what it is that you’re doing or what you choose to do. And when you rush into all of the things you may be getting that dopamine hit where you’re learning new things and you’re doing something new and it’s always exciting and whatever, but oftentimes we’re missing the baseline, the foundation that really helps make sure that your business is solid and stable and won’t fail when that newness wears off.

Kira:   And it also goes back to what Brian Kurtz shared that we’ve mentioned several times at TCC IRL, just that the power of going deep and not wide. And I do think in a world and industry where people have shiny object syndrome, and most people are trying to go wide and do everything and jumping, and can’t really stick with something for very long, if you are able to go deep and really commit to whatever you’re focused on, that you already have an advantage. And it’s like I will take all the advantages I can get at this point. I will take that advantage any day.

Rob:   Yeah, Brian is a very, very wise mentor, wise man.

Kira:   Yes, he is.

Rob:   Okay. Let’s go back to our interview with Christy and talk about her writing process and what she does to boost the creativity that she puts into projects for her clients.

Kira:   Can we talk about your creative writing process, because I know you mentioned you’ve niched down a little bit, but you still take on projects in a variety of deliverables. But when I look at your copy from projects we’ve worked on, it seems like you definitely are writing this really like personality driven pop culture email sequences that just are so fun and engaging and also convert. What are you doing that’s different than most copywriters when it comes to writing these emails that really connect and feel fun to write and to read?

Christy Cegelski:   Well, thank you. That makes me happy because I just love that. I love sort of taking the things that make people who they are and sort of bringing that to the forefront, things that they wouldn’t necessarily think that people are interested in knowing. I just wrote an email sequence for a client recently. And of course I do all the voice of customer research, but I spend as much time doing research on my clients and kind of gathering stories from them and finding out their favorite things. Like what is the music that they always have playing on in the background? What’s their favorite band t-shirt?

For this particular client, one of the emails focused on a story of how she met her partner on Tinder. And so I just try to incorporate sort of the fun, quirky things that make people relatable, something that we can all sort of identify with, that embarrassment of having to tell people your how we met story, and it was on Tinder. And for her we went through how she was afraid to make that first date because she was sure he was going to be a serial killer, right. Because that’s the common thing we all think, oh, you meet somebody online, they’re a serial killer. It’s just sort of finding kind of the different angles or the interesting things about people that they might not think to share with their audience.

And of course it always has to have a point in sort of transition from the fun story to the topic of the email or the offer, whatever it is. But I kind of approach it kind of like a blog post in the beginning, from back in the day of having a mom blog, what is something that … what’s a subject that I might write about to kind of share with people to show them that we’re all kind of the same, right. But then obviously you’ve got to bring the marketing piece into it.

Rob:   Yeah. Will you walk us through that onboarding and research process? What do those calls look like? Are you sending or giving your client a survey to fill out? Are you doing a couple of calls of interviews, one long call? From the time they sign the proposal until you start to go to work, what does that start to look like?

Christy Cegelski:   Yeah, so we always have some sort of discovery call, almost always. And I take a lot of notes during that initial discovery call. And then from there when I get the green light for the project, I put together a custom brand voice questionnaire for every client. There are sort of some standard questions, I’ve templated it. But I take each question and make it kind of applicable to them. We start with that before I can do sort of the voice of customer research. That’s what I base that on.

And then depending on what they’re hiring me for, if it’s a shorter email sequence or a sales page, we might have only one call where I kind of gather stories. If it’s a longer more ongoing project, we’ll have two or three calls. And I just kind of find things, I pick things out of the questionnaire that I might want more information on, or I stalk them. I stalk their social media, I look kind of into the background of their personal lives and try to come up with some questions, some prompts for stories, that kind of thing. And yeah, it just kind of snowballs from there. It’s like kind of the more information you gather, the more questions you get so it’s really easy to … I mean, it’s really easy to make it go on forever, right? You can never know all the things. Gathering the information is kind of the easy part. It’s sort of sifting through all of that and making it work as part of their marketing mix is kind of where it’s a little tricky, where the art of it comes in.

Rob:   And where do you struggle in projects? Where do things break down for you?

Christy Cegelski:   I am not great at transitioning. That’s probably the thing that I practice the most is sort of transitioning from the story to making it relevant to the topic or the offer. If it’s just a straight up sales email, I can write that all day. If it’s storytelling, that’s easy and it’s fun, but sort of making it work together so that it all makes sense. I’m not a fast writer, so it definitely takes me some time.

Kira:   Let’s pivot and talk about the platform that you’ve built, the brand that you’ve built, community that you’ve built, because one thing that … well, many things that you’ve done well, one thing that really stands out is how beautiful the brand is that you’ve created and how it feels very consistent across multiple platforms. Can you just talk a little bit about the thought process behind the brand and platform that you’ve built with the different offers with social media, with the podcast you launched recently? It’s a really seamless experience for prospects from my perspective.

Christy Cegelski:   Well, I’m glad to hear that. I can’t say that I really planned it all out. I kind of just have fun with it. I like playing in Canva sometimes and trying different things. I have a few inspo boards on Pinterest. I mean, I do put thought into it, I like it when things match and look good. I try to make sure that everything is cohesive. My brand voice, the colors, the fonts. I think just being consistent with all of that stuff is really important in order for your brand to be recognizable without maybe your logo or your photo being front and center. But I don’t overthink it, I just kind of play around.

Rob:   And you’ve also launched a podcast. Tell us why you decided to do that. And I know there’s been a lot of work in the backend to get this going. So walk us through what has been going on as you’ve really gotten this up and going.

Christy Cegelski:   Yeah, I have been having the best time with the podcast. Really it was something that I had on my radar for a few years. But it’s actually kind of a good thing that I didn’t start it back when I first was thinking about it because it would have been something totally different than it is now. But I was getting really hung up on the stuff I didn’t know how to manage like the technology. I was letting it stop me. And I think if I’m being honest, there was also kind of initially the thoughts of, well, who am I to start a podcast? Who’s going to care? Who’s going to want to listen to this?

But I think as I kind of developed my brand and my offers a little bit and really understood what I wanted it to be about, I definitely was more confident about putting it out there. And it was just something that sounded like fun. I think that’s really one of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned from launching this podcast that just focusing on the things that are really exciting and that make you want to work on it. I was always wanting to work on it. I was always wanting to learn more about microphones and audio and onboarding guests, all the silly nerdy things.

And I think because I was following this thing that I really wanted to be doing, it’s really come together very effortlessly. I put together the podcast, the first I think six episodes, got all the artwork, onboarded a podcast producer, recorded all the intros, set up all of the interviews. I think I did that all within five or six weeks and then it was live. And I put together a launch team and was able to get reviews right away and get several hundred downloads within the first couple of weeks. And it was just really exciting. It all just sort of happened very organically and I’m just having the best time with it. And I kind of, I purposely chose the podcast versus starting some other kind of group program or membership to scale my business because the idea of kind of going the more prescribed route was really dragging me down. I didn’t want to work on it. I didn’t want to create content. But the podcast was really lighting me up, so I was like, you know what, that’s the thing that I’m going to do. And I think it was definitely the right decision.

Kira:   We talked to a lot of copywriters who want to start a podcast. But they get hung up on the idea around, well, I kind of need to have the whole show figured out before I launch it. It needs to be a forever show. Maybe they don’t say it needs to be perfect, but that seems to be the thinking, like I think I need another format, how it’s different in the marketplace, all these things which are important, but then it stops them from ever launching it. From your experience, what advice would you give to someone who’s really interested in launching a podcast, but just maybe not feeling as clear about what it should be about and therefore they aren’t doing anything to move it forward?

Christy Cegelski:   Well, I think it’s definitely okay to understand that it’s going to change and evolve just like anything else that you do. I know that when I first started the podcast, I’m a copywriter obviously, so I wanted to share tips and strategies about helping people automate their businesses with funnels and write better copy for their businesses. But that initial idea has kind of shifted a little bit in that I have interviewed a lot of people in the holistic health field and I focused a lot on self-care and mental health and mindset stuff. Because those were sort of things that I was going through and dealing with that I knew were struggles for me. And I wanted to help other female business owners who were going through the same thing.

At first, I thought, okay, well, this is maybe going to seem a little off topic. The first person that I interviewed that wasn’t strictly about strategy and scaling. But I just realized this is stuff that we all deal with as business owners. We need to learn how to grow our businesses in a sustainable way, in a way that’s not going to kill us, right. I think understanding that it’s going to grow and change and that’s okay. I would say get help definitely, the things that are holding you up, the things that are your sticking points. For me, like I said, it was the tech, it was how to record the audio and just little details like that.

I found somebody to help me with that and that it kind of took away my excuses because I didn’t have to do it all myself anymore. And I would say that the thing that was the biggest help in launching the podcast was putting together a launch team. And I know that you kind of mentioned that a little bit that I did that, but that was really the best move to sort of build momentum and get a lot of great reviews out of the gate. I don’t have the downloads that you guys do, but the show is consistently in the top 50% of business podcasts, which is pretty good for a new show. I don’t think that would have happened if I hadn’t built excitement around it and invited people to join me before I launched it.

Kira:   Let’s break that down even more because I do want to talk about your podcast launch plan and team. A lot of us do launch podcasts and we don’t have that momentum that you’ve had. Can you kind of break it down for us and share how we could do that for our own podcast when we launch it or relaunch it?

Christy Cegelski:   Yeah, for sure. Obviously I’d never launched a podcast before, but I was part of a book launch team for a fellow B schooler. And so she was self-publishing a book and it was going to launch within I think seven or eight weeks from when she started. And she put together a launch team to help people get the word out. And I thought, why not do this with a podcast? I didn’t have as much time. I think I did it two weeks before the launch. But basically what that entailed was I just announced to my audience, my email list and on social media that I was starting a podcast and I really invited them into the process. I asked for feedback about the name. I asked for feedback about who they would want me to interview, what kind of topics they would like me to cover that really got people engaged and responding to me and kind becoming part of the process.

I also offered visibility in exchange for people sharing it with their audience. Basically if they posted about it, left a review, shared it with their audience, I would share their website, share their information, what they do, their business with my audience. When I launched the podcast and I’m still doing this every week when I send an email, I’ll include one of the launch team members, I’ll talk about their business, I’ll talk about their website. Sometimes I’ll share the review that they left on iTunes. And I post about it on social media. And if they share a certain episode of the podcast, I repost them and I talk about their business. It’s sort of this reciprocal promotion, right. But it just sort of … because I was excited about it and I was including them in the process from the beginning, they were excited about it and it was really easy.

People were more than happy to share it and to leave the reviews. They just were so great. I would definitely say to invest in putting that together. And you can even use this for like, if you were launching a website, you could do kind of the same thing, put together a launch team or launching new Facebook group, I think it would work too. It doesn’t have to just be a podcast, but yeah, it definitely built momentum out of the gate. And I think it’s one of the reasons that I’ve had as many downloads this early as I have.

Rob:   Yeah, no doubt. So in addition to amplifying the efforts of the listeners, people on your list who are sharing it, how has the podcast affected your own network and the relationships that you have, especially with the guests that you have on?

Christy Cegelski:   Well, it definitely brings, it introduces me to a different audience, right. Because every time I interview somebody and they’re sharing it, it brings their audience to me and vice versa, so that’s been very helpful. I’ve had different people reach out to me that I didn’t even know, weren’t sort of in my circle and they’ll message me about a certain podcast episode. It’s kind of taken on a life of its own. But one of the things that I’ll say about interviewing people, one of the things that was really hard for me to get over in the beginning was asking people to be on my show, right. And Kira, I think you and I might’ve talked about this a little bit in one of our calls. But I was so nervous to ask for guests.

In the beginning, I just had a bunch of people who were like, “Can I be on your show? Can I be on your show?” And I was like, “Sure, I need guests.” But I didn’t really feel comfortable asking people to be on my show because I felt like it was so new and I didn’t have the audience maybe to kind of entice them. But what I’ve learned is that people really love talking about themselves, and they love sharing what they do. I have not had a single person say no to me yet. I think it’s just one of those things where you got to ask, and most of the time the answer is going to be yes.

Kira:   Beyond the podcast, what else has helped you level up the most in your business over the last year?

Christy Cegelski:   Oh, that’s a good question. I think it’s definitely been agreeing to do the things I feel the least prepared to handle. I’m not a huge fan of surprises. I like to feel like I’m completely prepared for whatever situation I put myself in, which I realized after a lot of therapy is just me trying to control things, right. I try to learn as much as I can ahead of time and work out all the details, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but learning about something and taking action toward it are two very different things. I can kind of get stuck there in the learning phase. But jumping into something that I don’t feel fully prepared for really makes me grow by leaps and bounds because I have no choice, but to take action, and you grow by doing.

Rob:   If you could reach back to just starting out blogging Christy, doing the mommy blog thing, and give her one piece of advice that would maybe get her where she’s going a little faster, what would that be?

Christy Cegelski:   I think that I would have told myself to start building an email list way back then, definitely building a platform because I don’t think anybody knew what was around the corner with social media. And it was pretty easy to grow an audience back in the day, but now we sort of know with all the algorithms and other issues, it’s tough, right. Because we don’t those platforms. So yeah, I think that’s what I would just tell myself.

Kira:   This question is more self-serving for us, but as a member of the Think Tank over the past year, what’s been most helpful or useful in that mastermind group that people may not know about who have not experienced a Think Tank before?

Christy Cegelski:   I think definitely the level of support that we get inside the Think Tank, it’s unbelievable. I’ve never experienced anything like that. You and Rob, you’re so hands-on, and you’re so accessible. And it’s funny because I still … when we get on a Zoom meeting even if it’s the group, I still find myself saying, “Oh my God, it’s Rob and Kira.” I kind of can’t believe that I get to learn from you guys, but you’re just so accessible and you give so much, you really give so much. I’ve said this so many times I think in the last month that you’re probably sick of hearing it, but I truly never want to leave. I don’t think I will ever be a part of another program that is as good as this or quite like this.

Rob:   Well…yeah, you don’t have to leave…

Kira:   Nobody’s kicking you out, Christy. Thank you for saying that. Yeah, that means a lot.

Christy Cegelski:   No, really, I am just blown away literally all the time.

Rob:   What’s next for you, Christy?

Christy Cegelski:   Well, I really want to focus on watering the seeds that I’ve planted. I think Kira and I had this conversation a while back. I tend to be somebody who I’m just always onto the next thing. I think that’s kind of the culture, the hustle culture that we’re all sort of inundated with. But I really want to spend time focusing on growing the podcast. I started this podcast and I love it and I would love to see it reach even more people, help even more business owners. I’m going to focus on that.

And one of the things that I have done a lot of, I’ve spent a lot of time on inside my done for you services is VIP days. I guess that’s more of a done with you service. But I’ve really loved those. And I think I’m going to kind of make that a bigger part of my business in 2021, so we’ll see. Not a whole lot of big changes, not a whole lot of new things on the horizon, but yeah, I definitely kind of want to focus on some of the things that I’ve already created.

Rob:   Awesome. Well, thank you for showing up, jumping in and sharing so much about your business. We really appreciate it. This has been very cool to hear all of the progress that you’ve made and where you’ve come from, so thank you for joining us.

Kira:   Yeah Christy, it’s been fun to watch you in the Think Tank because I’ve seen how you went from wanting to launch that course and almost trying to force it and then changing and pivoting and creating business on your own terms, which sounds so cliché. But launching the podcast, having fun, and just focusing on what’s really working rather than forcing these elements of the business. And I think you’re such a great example to all of us, of what business could be like, that it can be fun. You can do what you enjoy the most and you don’t have to follow all the formulas that are out there. Even if you have in the past, you can stop and build the type of business you want. And so I think you’ve been a great example of that for our community. And I’m sure you’ll be an example of that for more and more people through your podcast too.

Christy Cegelski:   Oh, thank you. Yeah. I mean, I still have a lot to learn. But every day it gets easier and I’m learning more and more to just kind of lean into what feels right, what feels good.

Rob:   That’s the end of our interview with Christy. Before we wrap up, let’s talk about one or two other things that maybe stand out from this last half of our conversation. Kira, what jumps out to you immediately from just the last 25 minutes or so?

Kira:   Well, I think it was our conversation about the podcast mostly because Christy has launched her podcast in the last, I don’t know, six months or so. And it’s just, again, been fun to see how it’s evolved for her and how much she’s enjoying it and how much it’s changing her business in such a great way. And so I think what I took away from that is just that when she started it, she didn’t quite know what direction it was going to go necessarily. And so she has let it kind of organically take its own form over time. And I think that sometimes we feel like you have to start a podcast and know exactly the hook and everything specific about it and how it will be different than all the other podcasts.

And you can almost feel like you’re stuck in a box. And I do think that’s a reason why a lot of people don’t start podcasts, at least a lot of the copywriters we talk to. They feel like it’s this commitment and once they start it, they can’t change it and they can’t change the subject matter. And for Christy, again, she just continues to kind of see what questions she likes to ask and what type of guests she’s gravitating towards. And she’s just letting it transform with her. And I think that’s something we can do as podcast hosts. We don’t have to stick to a certain script. We can let it evolve with us over time.

Rob:   We are all in on podcasts. Obviously we’ve been doing this for quite a while and I know you and I have recommended to a lot of people that they should have a podcast or the very least they should be on podcasts. But do you think that all copywriters should have a podcast?

Kira:   Oh, I kind of do. And I know we disagree on this, but unless you don’t enjoy it, if you just hate it, you should not do something that you despise.

Rob:   For sure.

Kira:   But I think if it’s for personal growth sake, yes. I mean, it will help you, if you want to speak as part of your business and speak on stage and you want to show up on Instagram and Facebook Lives and you want to be a better speaker, it is a 100% worth it, even if you don’t have many listeners. And if you want to build authority, it is totally worth it even if you’re not the perfect host or interviewer or speaker. And I think because if you do it consistently and you commit to it, you can improve.

And I really think anyone can improve, even if they’re awful starting out. I tend to think that everyone who has an interest in it should definitely test it at least for a season of 10 episodes to give it a try before they rule it out and say, “This isn’t for me. I can’t possibly do it.” Because I’ve seen how we’ve improved. And I feel much more comfortable speaking on the podcast than I did a couple years ago when I started out. I just think that it’s a personal growth journey as much as it makes sense strategically as a business to create one.

Rob:   Yeah. I mean, I’m not sure that I’m a 100% on board with everybody should have a podcast, but I do think that everybody should be using podcasting as a way to connect with their audience. So whether it’s your own personal podcast or whether you are going to people who are working, having podcasts in a particular niche and talking to that audience, showing off what we know about copywriting marketing, how you take the principles that we learned here and apply that in our own issues. I think that that is an absolute must. And it’s one of the easiest ways to build credibility, to build authority because you’ve pointed out in other places that you’re writing a guest post to go on say the copywriter club blog, or a blog in a niche can take 10, 20 hours.

It takes an amazing amount of effort to create something that’s really worth sharing. But you can sort of think through those same kinds of ideas in a few hours, share them on a podcast, show them on several podcasts and be able to reap those benefits. In some ways it’s less work and a bigger bang for what you do. But you’re borrowing an audience. You’ve got to make sure that you’re doing the research and talking to the right people in the right places. I do think podcasting is a powerful medium, regardless of whether people decide to do it on their own, owning their own podcasts or finding podcasts in a particular niche in order to get out in front of the right clients.

Kira:   Well, and I think you should not start a podcast if you aren’t able to create and produce it consistently, and you don’t have that support and you aren’t able to do it on your own, then that would be the only reason I would say you probably should wait until you have some extra cash to pay someone, a podcast editor, or you have extra time so you could take it on yourself. But I’m just curious, Rob, why do you think some people shouldn’t start their own? Is there another reason beyond that?

Rob:   Yeah. Well, I’m not convinced that everybody has thought through like a purpose for the podcast. Because it’s one thing to sort of start a show of your own or whatever, but if there isn’t sort of a constant theme that you would run through or something that you’re doing to help your listeners evolve in some way or to transform themselves in some way. I think it’s really easy to get lost. And I think people fall in love with the idea of a podcast without actually knowing what it is that they want to create or what the change that they want to help people who might be listening to them create in their lives.

And then maybe there are just some people who podcasting isn’t the right medium for, maybe they’d be better on video or maybe the voice is just way too weird. I hesitate to say that because I don’t think that anybody’s voice really is that weird, but I know some people do feel that way and they’re just really uncomfortable with putting it out there and maybe there’s a better way for them to get in front of their clients. But for a lot of people and maybe even a majority of people, I think podcasting is a powerful medium, and there’s a lot of reasons to do it.

Kira:   They don’t have the Rob Marsh radio voice.

Rob:   I wish I knew what that was. But getting back to what Christy was sharing, one of the things as she started her podcast, she found a really, really good podcast editor to work with and she kind of created this podcast launch team to help her get her voice out into the world so that when she launched, she wasn’t just speaking into the void, talking to no one, not connecting with the right people, but that she really put in this effort to make sure that she had listeners almost from day one.

Kira:   Yeah. And I think that’s something that she’s done that I haven’t seen a lot of other new podcasters do, and we don’t need to. She shared the details of the launch team and what the launch team did. But I would just say if you are launching anything podcast or whatever, that having some type of launch team and a plan to launch it, rather than just kind of sharing it and not even really announcing it is worthwhile. And I think that’s a step that most of us skip. And then we’re like, “Why isn’t anybody listening? Or why don’t I have any reviews.” And Christy planned it out so that she would have those reviews. And so she would have that enthusiasm and people were incentivized to get involved with her podcast before it even launched. I think that was really a brilliant way to start her podcast.

Rob:   Yeah. I think the one thing that stops a lot of people from podcasting is just the fact that it’s so hard to find that audience. I recently saw something, it may have been Seth Godin who shared it. But it was a breakdown of the top podcasts and how many people listened to them. And the top 1% of podcasts have an average listenership of like 35,000 listeners per episode. I mean, that’s pretty amazing, and that’s people like-

Kira:   That’s like our show, right?

Rob:   Yeah, I wish. But it’s serial, it’s maybe some of the NPR podcasts, it’s Glen Washington’s storytelling podcast, it’s those that have that general audience and they’re really engaging. Tim Ferriss is another one that I’m certain is in there. But when you get down to where the top 10 are, you’re talking about roughly 3000 listens per episode. And to be in the top 10%, that’s pretty good. But the average podcast, so right in the median, halfway there is only 124 listens per episode. There’s a lot of people who talk about creating a podcast and making sure that the content is good and the guests are good, but building an audience for a podcast is not easy, and it does take time, it does take effort. Maybe that’s another reason that maybe not everybody’s cut out to have their own podcast.

Kira:   But that could also be uplifting, 124 people per podcast episode is also great. That is a huge room of people who are listening to you. I think that also can be uplifting if that’s the average, I think that’s pretty good for podcasters to have that big room listening to your message for 30 minutes or an hour.

Rob:   Yeah, you’re right. If the 124 are your ideal clients, then I mean this is an awesome way to connect with 124 people who can give you more work in a year than you would ever be able to finish. You’re right, we don’t want to necessarily say that you shouldn’t be doing this if you can’t get those 35,000 listeners, we’re certainly not there as a podcast. But knowing that you’ve got to really connect with your audience and make sure that there’s something there that’s worth it for them to tune in, I think is some of the work that goes on before you would maybe want to start your own podcast.

Kira:   I think we just need a murder mystery podcast for copywriters, and we need to do that to get to 35,000 downloads per episode.

Rob:   Yeah, screams, we can put somebody in jail, try to get them out. Yeah.

Kira:   I want to work on that next.

Rob:   There’s all kinds of ideas we should explore to get to that 35,000.

Kira:   All right. We want to thank Christy for coming on the show and sharing the different things she’s done in her business over the past few years. To connect with her, visit her website at christycegelski.com. She’s also on Instagram at Christy Cegelski. And you’ll find her podcast Captivate and Convert on iTunes or your favorite podcast app.

Rob:   That’s the end of this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Our intro music was composed by copywriter and songwriter, Addison Rice. The outro is composed by copywriter and song writer, David Muntner. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard, we would really appreciate it if you would jump onto iTunes and leave a review of the show. You can also leave a review on Stitcher or wherever it is that you listen to podcasts. And an even better idea is to think of someone who could benefit from what we’ve shared today and email them a link to this episode. To learn more about our programs like The Copywriter Underground or The Copywriter Think Tank go to thecopywriterclub.com. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week. (singing).

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