The Importance of Great Copy With Brad Smith

Andy Splichal 0:10

Welcome to the Make Each Click Count podcast. This is your host, Andy Splichal. And today we're happy to welcome our next guest to discuss the topic of why it is important to have great copy and how you can best do so. He is the CEO of a SaaS company called Wordable and he runs two successful agencies in the content production and the digital PR industry. Doing this all while living in Hawaii with his wife and three daughters and enjoying exploring the islands hiking trails and beaches. Say hello to Brad Smith. Hi, Brad.

Brad Smith 2:26

Hey, Andy, how's it going?

Andy Splichal 2:28

It's great. It's great. Thank you for joining us today. Now, before we dive into today's topic, which is the importance of great copy, let's first hear a little of your backstory and what ultimately led you to do what you are doing now?

Brad Smith 2:45

Yeah, definitely. So I started doing a lot of this stuff. I don't know if 10 plus years ago, I think I've been self employed for around that time, I worked probably like a lot of people I worked in house if you'd open positions, like in marketing teams. Then I went out on my own and did consulting and freelancing, then started an agency and grew that and then started another one and grew that. And so I guess my background started in, in SEO and on the nerdier side of marketing and figuring all that stuff out kind of the hard way. From there. It's transitioned and double down into the intersection with content specifically because SEO has just become so difficult over the last 10 plus years and complex and it's in my mind, it's really difficult to do all have it really well. So you kind of need to specialize and get really good at the individual pieces or, or parts of it. And that's kind of what we've done in the last few years.

Andy Splichal 3:45

Okay, okay. And you're based in Hawaii, right?

Brad Smith 3:48

And yeah, we are currently on Oahu and moving over full time over to Hawaii pretty soon so excited about that.

Andy Splichal 3:58

No I imagined live in living in Hawaii. You know, I've never been there but I imagined that must be a blessing and a curse with all the distractions. Have you always been in Hawaii?

Brad Smith 4:08

No, I've been I grew up in California and then lived in Denver for a few years. Hawaii is great. It's it's actually not that bad. Especially if you're on a slower part of the island where pace the the you know, the pace of life outside of the internet is nice and slow and relaxing and people are nice and friendly and things just you know get down a little slower when you log in. And when you start you know talking to people on Slack and answering emails and doing zoom calls. That's when it gets a little hectic and crazy but you the biggest downside is just making up for it you know, super early for phone calls. That's the the timezone change is always a little tricky, but overall, you can't really complain, you know.

Andy Splichal 4:51

Sure. Now, how do you manage it? How do you run three companies and balancing your time with theory of three daughters and a wife? How do you balance it all, what's your secret?

Brad Smith 5:01

Yeah, I wish there was a secret. I, to me, the three kinds of entities all are super, super related. And so it makes a lot easier in my head. And that's it's not like one is a, you know, ecommerce site. And another was like a brick and mortar and they aren't related are in the same space. So to me, it's all kind of like, the work being done under one entity relates to the work being done and the others too. So it's, it makes it a little easier because there's there's some overlap then between like the teams and all that kind of stuff. When I really struggled getting on my first business cold this off the ground, years ago, because I was never good at building processes and systems and teams and all that kind of stuff. And so the short answer is, we've become a lot better at that. And so as the agencies have started to largely run themselves, and we have seen your people in place that are making most of the day to day decisions, as that's happened, it obviously freed up a lot of my time, too. So I'm able to focus more on like your longer term stuff, or rebuilding and revamping and this this new SaS product called vertical. Otherwise, I just, you know, get up early, I'm able to end relatively early too, which is nice. So it's like I said, it's not, it sounds like a lot, but it's, it's fairly manageable.

Andy Splichal 6:24

Now speaking a word of bullets. Let's talk about that for a minute. You're the CEO, and it's to SaaS company SaaS. Can you explain what what a SaaS company is for those that might not know?

Brad Smith 6:37

Yeah, exactly. So it's software as a service. Basically, back in the day, when used to acquire acquire software, you have to buy like an annual license or a lifetime license, and then download it to computer and all that kind of stuff. And SAS is just essentially just making this available for like a much lower monthly fee. I believe Salesforce was maybe the first to popularize it, I don't know if they were the first to like create the concepts. But essentially, the tool came out, we acquired wearable, about a year ago, the tool helps people move content and publish it extremely fast. And so to give you an example, in our agency, we publish something like three 400 articles a month. And it's very time consuming to have not just an editor but but people after the fact like an account manager or project manager, go through the content, and like proofread it, make sure it looks good, make sure it meets the client specs, and then upload format and optimize each piece of content when you're doing that much volume. So we're having to do all that stuff manually. And workable essentially will just automate everything. So you can take a piece of content from Google Docs, or you can take like 10 pieces of content, and automatically move them into whatever website or content management system you're using, and just kind of automate the whole publishing process.

Andy Splichal 7:57

And so you license that ability to other agencies to ecommerce companies, or who are your clients with Wordable?

Brad Smith 8:06

Yeah, it's largely two men agencies is one bulk, because like the pain point, we feel, we have clients on a bunch of different tools and systems. And so you kind of have to like adapt to what everyone's using. So agencies has one big customer base. And then the other big customer base is marketing teams, who might be publishing a lot of content or working with like, a lot of different writers. And it's always again, it's always tricky to because you don't want your writers or people like back getting bogged down with this type of like tedious manual labor usually. So those are the two the to big stack. And then it's just a it's just like a small area of relatively smaller monthly payment as opposed to some some type of bigger license.

Andy Splichal 8:44

Now let's switch gears and talk about coffee for a minute. You are pretty celebrated copywriter. I see you've been highlighted by the New York Times Business Insider, Next Web, Martec Today, Marketing LAN Moz, Sharp, I mean a whole bunch of them. How did you become such a proficient copywriter?

Brad Smith 9:06

That's a good question. I originally was writing a lot for free because I know their options to get my name out. So I've been self employed for maybe like 10 years. I didn't probably do it the smart way. And that I didn't really have a network. people that knew me, I didn't really work in another agency with clients that knew me. I didn't really have any industry connections. So basically, I became self employed. And then I had no way to sell my stuff. And I had no idea what I was doing. And so I started just by writing and pitching sites because I knew I could do that. And I knew I enjoyed it. Fast forward a few years and it started to snowball and that's a couple bigger sites that I was writing for, offered to pay me to become the kind of like a recurring column in a sense, much bigger sites that started to see me on those places and then also Want me to write for them. And so pretty soon I was writing for a ton of different large sites and making decent money at it and kind of realized that a lot of the other stuff I was trying to do a lot of the other services that we were trying to work on could probably be a lot more effective if we were doing it through this type of long form content, because it's really difficult to write interesting, unique stuff. For very technical products for business audiences, a lot of times it becomes very like dry or, or you have to water down too much and it's just kind of like a pain point that a lot of these companies come across and I kind of backed into finding that I was like a decent fit both of that I had the the marketing and the business background to understand like, what they're trying to do and how to how to convey that and then also the writing ability to make it clear and concise and somewhat enjoyable to read hopefully.

Now Have there been any copywriters that have inspired you in your, in how you produce your copy or your system?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, today, a lot of our stuff tend to be a little more systemized just because we are an agency and we do a lot of volume, we work with a lot of big clients who, generally if we're doing a lot of content, even for one client with a bunch of writers, they often want it to sound similar to each other. So it tends to that we tend to have more of a, a formulaic type guidelines for those types of writers. But for me personally, that was at the time reading a lot of like, really good writers who were out there and then also reading just I always was I always gravitated towards writers who had something interesting to say, and wrote it in a unique way of providing example, that in a completely different space would be someone like Anthony Bourdain, who's who was obviously more well known for like his his food work and his TV, but if he actually started as a writer and if you read his writing the voice and the tone that comes across that he was able to come up with and the just the crazy kind of personality that he would be able to inject in it was always that that kind of stuff was always really interesting to me. So I tried to bring personally something similar like that to any of the writing that I did where I would try to bring some kind of like just just kind of some kind of like personalities and kind of snark something to make it sound a little different and a little more informal like and something that was more enjoyable to read it wasn't just you know, like another list posts that that no one on the internet needs to read another have in their lifetime.

Boring, boring doesn't pay right.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I mean, there are a lot of copywriters out there like even the classic copywriters. I'm sure they're all escaping me right now, of course, but a lot of the classic copywriting books, classic copywriters in and around business and marketing, I've kind of gone through all of them. And I think doing we do content marketing for a lot of like growth in SEO, but a lot of the fundamentals still come back to copywriting. And the style of copywriting still contradicts most of what people learn in school is good writing. And so I think that that's an important skill that people need to understand and learn more about and how do you make How do you make something especially something long and difficult and technical? Interesting. And you do that through the kind of copy of the old school copywriting skill set.

Now the old school or you're talking like a David Ogilvy or Dan Kennedy, or

Yeah, exactly.Okay, yeah, exactly. All those even like the way I look at marketing today, it should be based more on how marketing was defined in like the 60s who were marketing influenced product pricing, distribution, all the classics. They didn't just like run Google ads for people or they didn't just like manage a team and have no say over all those things. And so I definitely think a lot of the if you look at those types of old, you know, quote unquote, old school ads, or if you look at like written ads from the 60s, it's actually not that different from what we're doing today. We're just doing it online and like a new medium.

Now, I see where you've been quoted as saying that you're on a mission to slay awful content, one blog at a time. What are some common copywriting blunders that you see out there?

Yeah, I think there's a lot how much time do we have? No, I think I think a couple of them off top my head if you think of most content on the internet comes across as fairly generic. And what I mean is, it lacks usually lacks specificity. So usually lacks concrete examples and like actionable, insightful information. And that's usually a pretty good indication that not just that the writer is weak but that it's a free That's right. And they don't actually know the space they're talking about. And so I think a lot of times people, I hope, and I think the world is moving to a place where the only stuff that's actually breaking through any of the noise today is stuff that's done by experts. And what that means is like, from a practical standpoint is if we know how long an article should take for a writer, when we manage and monitor this stuff internally, if something is taking a writer longer than it should, it doesn't mean they're a bad writer, it usually usually means they don't know what they're talking about, in that specific space around that specific topic. And so I think that's probably like, the biggest one that I see is kind of this generic, kind of fluffy, watered down average kind of content that doesn't really like say anything new or unique, or connect with like a customer in a way that actually would would want to build trust with them and get them to, like, try their tool or service or whatever. And I think a lot of that comes back to people are looking or trying to use kind of like generic, cheapest writers they can find versus people who actually kind of know what they're talking about and know the space inside and out.

Interesting, you know, in the same spirit, what are some of the common myths that you hear about copywriting?

Myths, I mean, maybe a related one to this is always, that's too expensive, or that writers too expensive, or this content is too expensive, that kind of an idea. So usually, I find after doing this for a long time, I find that companies and people often view marketing as one of two things, either they either viewed it as an investment, or expense, in that they're investing something into content, that's gonna have a long term payoff, the ROI is gonna grow over time. Or they're just trying to like, tick it off their box, and then do it as cheaply as possible. And I think the problem that we see especially, and I'll give you another example, we hired developers, for workable to help us rebuild everything. It's the same with writers as it is, with developers or any like really good skill set like that, it's, you should be looking at like the value you're getting not the cost, necessarily that you're associating with it. Yes, you like everyone needs to stick within a budget. But for example, with higher paid people like the higher like that the most well paid, people in our organization often get stuff done the fastest. And so it often takes them less time. And if you if you think about it, that way, there's less editing involved, all that kind of stuff. At the end of the day, the cost ends up being roughly the same, because we're not paying for a lot of extra work or extra editing and extra problems or taking them three times longer to do it. And it's the the value we're going to get from that is going to be so much better, because the quality is so much better to.

Now, do you still do your own copywriting? Or are you over seen a team or yeah, the head copywriter in charge? Or are you an active copywriter managing I guess?

I Yeah, exactly. I do very little writing these is our team, we have about 50 Plus writers that we work with every month. And so we have like a much broader team who manages all that kind of stuff. I will still do copywriting and writing for our own projects. So for example, like what's portable, we just rebuilt it, we're relaunching it. So when it comes to like website copy, when it comes to blog content, that sort of thing, I'll still get involved in those areas. But I'm not I'm not usually the one writing on ongoing basis for clients. I've done. I've done a lot of that in the past. And so I'm sure as you know, and others have done this, there's a certain point where maybe you kind of burn out and just need to do something different for a little while.

Now, speaking of clients, what are some of the top benefits of content? Especially, you know, most of the listeners here e commerce, what what are some of the benefits for producing unique? Well written content for their website?

Yeah, definitely, I think I think there's two ways to think about it. Number one contents, usually the best way to build that brand recognition, and that kind of like ongoing customer loyalty. So that extends to like emails you write that extends to videos, you send out then stents to social clips that you're sending out. If you're able to do it, well, then you're able to better leverage, like your internal resources and time. And you're able to reengage people that already know who you are, and build that kind of brand awareness, simply through content. So essentially, your bid you're able to do it at scale, and are like kind of a an example of that would be if you think about ads, ads are great, especially for Ecommerce. The problem is all these ad networks online are auction based, and they're all gonna get more expensive over time. So in other words, you might be able to bring in like an amazing Facebook advertiser who was able to find some quick wins and optimize your account and bring your cost per click down a little bit this month or the next six months, but in the next year, two years, five years, that those ads are only gonna get more expensive. And the difference with content is that it's kind of an inverse relationship where it takes a lot longer to ramp up. But that based on how like search engines work, and all that kind of stuff, the value of content only grows over time, and your ROI only grows over time, where this month, for example, if you did one article a month, let's say, for five years, in year five, you're probably gonna get like 500% more traffic, without doing or that much work or without investing that much work five years from now. So it's, it's kind of a different relationship in terms of how how you view kind of like the the, as we talked about earlier, that the investment versus the expense or cost mindset?

Now, you mentioned one article a month, where where would you post that article? Like, if you're an Ecommerce company, where would you use this article?

We would always recommend everything go on your site first. The reason for,

Like a blog or

Yep, yeah, exactly. It could be a blog, it could be whatever format you would like to see. So it could be a blog, it could be a page, there's there's reasons for doing long form content on pages, for example, that we can get into, but they tend to go get fairly nerdy quickly. But for the biggest reason is for two things. It's it's owned media. It's stuff that you can reuse and recycle. And it's stuff that is actually going to give you that benefit five years from now, putting putting that content first on a social network is is like playing with fire, because it's going to be temporary, and you're not going to own it any longer. And it's not going to really provide you that value three or four or five years from now. So everything always should go on your site on your blog first. And then you can take and repurpose stuff from that for all those different networks. So for instance, we might have, we might have like the written content on our site, but then we might also have a video person come in to do video summary of it. And then we cut up those video clips, and then we post those on social media.

So repurpose, repurpose?

Yep.

Now you had mentioned SEO and it's getting more difficult. Where do you find content in specifically good content as a piece of SEO?

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's really a massive piece of it. And the reason for that is if you look at how sites rank, and why sites rank and why people search for certain things, and then certain examples come up, it all comes back to content at the end of the day. So again, it could be this could be like a local directory listing, it could be a, it could be a product feature page, it could be a blog post. At the end of the day, people are looking for certain things to solve their problems and pain points. So most often people aren't going to the internet and saying, What is the best CRM alternative to Salesforce? Like, they're usually not starting there? They're usually starting with how do I better manage my customers? How do I automate my follow up messaging? How do I make more money from my email list? Like they usually start with those education information type queries or searches? Exactly. And exactly. And the way, then that you show up for those is by creating more content to line up with those things. So it's kind of like, at the end of the day, it comes back to it a lot. And yes, there's technical SEO that determines whether or not that contents gonna be found. And you know, yes, there's PR and link building that you'll need, especially if you're in like, really competitive areas. You'll need people to find that stuff and to share that stuff before you'll ever get like the the quote unquote, authority to rank well. But at the end of the day, again, if you don't have the content, and if you're not consistently publishing that kind of stuff, then it's always gonna be an uphill battle.

Now, speaking of problems, if a company out there wants to hire a content writer, where do they start? Should they go to agency? Should they look to hire a freelancer? Should they try to develop some in house talent? What are some tips you could share?

Yeah, definitely. They should do one or multiple of those things depending on kind of where they're at. So there's pros and cons to freelancers in house people and agencies. And I again, I kind of learned this firsthand, because I did all three, I worked in house and places and hire people. And then I was out on my own doing freelancing. And then I started an agency and kind of grew that. And so I think each kind of, you know, spoke of the wheel has its own benefits, pros and cons. So for example, if you're depending on your size, and depending on your budget, depending on the type of content you're trying to produce, all these things should kind of get back here. then. So if you're if you're trying to create new, you know, top of the funnel content, so that content we were just describing where you're trying to solve pain points and problems, and it's education based, and that sort of thing. And if if your budget is on the smaller end, so you want to maybe test the feet of freelance writers, that's gonna give you often the most flexibility, because you can ramp those those people up and down. Hopefully, the freelancers are good enough, and that they do know your space, they know enough about your space to be able to sound you know, intelligent, when they write about it, they're often, you know, hopefully, again, should be a little easier to manage. Whereas an in house person is typically better at knowing, like your product or your business and set it out, they're gonna know way more about, if you do have some really technical product or space, like they're gonna know, all the ins and outs, they're gonna know, like, the common customer complaints and issues, they're gonna be a lot better to write content around your company and your brand and how you see certain things and trends in the in the space, that sort of thing. The problem with in house writers is that they often get pulled into a million other things. So they get pulled into emails, they get pulled into meetings, they get pulled into proofreading other people's stuff. And what happens is, they're not able to, like hit the same kind of output. So they're able to often write a significant amount over the course of a month. Yeah, another distraction for exactly yeah, and it's just, you know, it's just common, it just happens all the time where you think you think you think they're gonna be able to do a certain amount, but they can't. And again, usually it comes back to they're getting they're getting their attention is getting pulled in all these different areas. Freelancers help that for sure. But the common downside with freelancers is you don't always understand or factor in how much time you have to manage everything, and coordinate everything. So how do you get five freelancers to write the same way? Or to write to a certain spec? Or work with them long term? What a freelancer gets sick one month? What if they get a better client in the next month? What if you know what if they just are late on some of their stuff? Are the Freelancers going to do all their own keyword research? Yes or no? Are they going to be the ones optimizing and publishing the content in your website for you? Or do you need someone internally, like so working with freelancers, it solves that problem a little bit with the in house people, but not completely, because there's still a lot of that soft kind of management costs, that's that needs to get associated with it. Agencies kind of do the whole thing for you. And so usually, the downside with agencies is the sticker shock. So they tend to cost a lot more on paper than some of those alternatives. However, the difference is, if they know if they do know your space, and if they do work in your space, it's usually a lot easier, because you can almost outsource the entire thing. So as an example, when someone hires us today, we don't just give them like one writer, we give them a team of people. So they have an account manager or project manager, multiple writers, editors on staff. Also, like the strategy people, so if you are if a company doesn't know how to properly do like an SEO strategy, that's also where someone like an agency with those people in house becomes a lot more, you know, a lot better. Another example, when we acquired wearable. I'm I'm not super technical person. And so we had to hire like a really good lead developer, to help also help us manage other developers, because I'm not the person to kind of manage that project. You know what I mean? So it's kind of a similar thing with agencies where you want to see, do they have the ability to produce a lot of content? And have they done it before in your area? And if so, are you also getting kind of access to this broader team of skill sets that you don't currently have internally?

No, that's great. That's great. Hey, speaking of portable, how can Wordable help a company with their content production?

Yeah, definitely. So often, often, what happens is companies will, again, like we've talked about, they'll hire writers or they have writers internally, often, those people are writing in maybe an Evernote or writing Google Docs, they're eyeing up in a writing app like a Ulysses on your Mac device. And so what happens is some oftentimes, people need to collaborate and approve this content and all that kind of stuff. The issue always comes back to uploading formatting, optimizing that content properly. And so as an agency on the agency side, we see it usually takes an average of like 30 to 60 minutes per piece of content. An example would be if you or a writer writes an article inside Google Docs, you have to then export that information, you have to clean the code when you copy and paste it over. Because a lot of times if you copy and paste content from one tool into into like Shopify, or into a big commerce, even, it'll inject all this bad code that messes with your formatting as it's why you start seeing like your certain lines not coming across properly or certain things missing. That's one issue. The other issue is images. So you have to bring all those images over still and you have to do that manually. A lot of times. Again, if you don't do it properly, what happens is, you forget, this happens a lot on ecommerce sites, you don't crop. You take all these beautiful product images. is where you hire some expensive like, you know, photographer or company. And they take these product images that are massive in file size. And they're, they're huge. They're huge files. And a lot of times those aren't properly, like cropped down and compressed so that they load quickly on a website. And it often slows down your website. So it helps with the site speed as well. Exactly, yeah, there's all these, there's all these little details like that when you when you start really thinking about what's involved in properly doing a lot of content, that worktable essentially just automates. So you connect your writing source, Google Docs, you connect your content management system, like if it's Shopify, or Bigcommerce, or whatever. And then you can apply the same settings. And you could just grab, like, you could just click and select five or 10 different documents, and then click export, and basically move them all over instantly and portable, does all the stuff in the background that kind of like, make sure that your site's gonna load fast, it's going to look right, and it's going to work well for search engines kind of over the long term.

So usability, so

Yep, yeah, definitely.

Now, how can somebody learn more about you or working with Wordable? Or your agency?

Yeah, definitely, the best place to go would probably be wordable.io. We have a lot of stuff there on the on the blog as well about some of these topics we talked about, like, like content optimization, or even content planning, like how do you how and where do you start a lot of these things. My, my content marketing agency is Codeless. And that's a GetCodeLess.com. We do a lot of content marketing for a lot of big companies like monday.com, and a lot of other like big stuff in the SaaS space. And then we have my other agency, you SERP is PR Digital link building. So essentially, like, once you publish all this content, if you are in a competitive space, how do you actually get that stuff to rank and perform and to bring in more customers and all that sort of stuff. And so that's where all the all the little, all the little things I'm working on are kind of interrelated.

Now, before we wrap it up today, what would you like to say to a business owner out there listening that might say, Well, I've been struggling to grow my business? And I really would like to add some fresh content, but ut how should I get started?

Yeah, definitely, I think it often comes down to figuring out what's doable. So if you are short on time, and you're the business owner, in a way you think you want to save time or money by doing the content yourself, but maybe that's probably not the best use of your time. Because this is a long term thing. So that the article you write and post tomorrow is not going to probably not gonna bring in customers, it's what we're gonna bring in customers with long term are, you know, 100 articles that have been published over the last year. And so if it's, if it takes you, if you, excuse me, you sit down, and it takes you four hours to write one article. And you have to do that multiple times a week or every week. That adds up to a lot of time. So I think you need to figure out what's doable for your own kind of schedule. And a lot of times, maybe that means maybe you hire, you know, a freelance writer or two, and then you sit down, and do they interview you for, let's say, two hours, a week, two hours a month, and then they're able to go out and write four articles based on that on an ongoing basis. So I think the key is to be kind of realistic about your own limitations in terms of time, and then figure out how to actually stick to an ongoing weekly and monthly schedule. If because this is an ongoing long term play. And it's often good to try to sit down and do a bunch of stuff in a short amount of time. But that's not often where you see the best results with this kind of stuff. So it kind of needs to work with your schedule and your temperament and all those things.

That's great. Well, thank you those were some fantastic tips. And thank you for joining us today.

Thank you, Andy.

Well, that's it for today. Remember, if you liked this episode, please go to Apple podcasts and leave an honest review. And if you're looking for more information regarding Brad or connecting with him, you could do so through his website when you'll find the link in the show notes. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business using paid ads request to join the Make Each Click Count Facebook group I've been releasing some all new, free live trainings and more will be happening soon. In the meantime, remember to stay safe keep healthy and happy marketing and I will talk to you in the next episode.