How to be a ‘misfit’ entrepreneur

Kate Toon:

You have to dig deeper than demographics. Often in marketing, people go, “Oh, this is Clive, he’s 62, he’s got a wife called Maurine, 2.5 kids.” None of that tells us anything about him. CGFs I think helped us really understand the customer pain points, fears, everyone wants … What do they want from this experience?

CGF really goes further, it goes into the dark places of our minds. What is Clive Googling at 3:00 A.M. in the morning when he can’t sleep? What is he really worried about? If you can be there for Clive at 3:00 A.M. when he’s Googling, “Why do I have a rash under my armpit?” If you can be the brand that’s there for him and says, “Oh, this is the reason you have a rash.” Then later, when he goes to buy the cream for his rash, he’s going to remember that brand because you were there for him in his dark moment. Trying to find those, beyond the pain points, into the dark night thoughts.

We all have them. We all wake up at 3:00 worrying about stuff. If you can be the copywriter or the brand that’s there for people in that moment, then you’ve started to build a real relationship.

Kate Toon:

It was, it was hilarious.

Kate Toon:

Yeah, I’ve actually got three podcasts, so you know, I get a bit carried away, I’m an over achiever.

Kate Toon:

Yes.

Kate Toon:

Yeah.

Kate Toon:

Yeah, so my background, I started off at my very beginning job was in events. And then in about 1997 these things came along called websites, and I got a job at a digital agency. It must’ve been one of the first, eh? Working on the Marks and Spencer’s website in the UK, building the first ever e-commerce site in the UK.

And from there, I was mainly in the production side of things, and then I moved into copywriting. I worked on Microsoft, and [Contis 00:03:05], and American Express and lots of different brands, and then eventually set up on my own in about 2009. Yeah, it’s a while ago.

Kate Toon:

I think I always felt like I’m a creative person. I always wanted to be a real writer and write books, but getting in as a copywriter’s quite hard. Agencies are quite challenging to get into, especially the high-level ones like Ogilvy. And it just seemed an easier route for me, because I had, back then, I had some secretarial skills and I could do that kind of thing. But the copywriters were like these lofty beings sitting on bean bags, drinking beer, and it was hard to get into the clique really, so I had to take a 75% pay cut at Ogilvy to become a copywriter, and start from the bottom up. And to be honest, at that point, copywriting didn’t pay as much as being an executive producer, so it was a hard decision to make, but yeah.

Kate Toon:

Yeah.

Kate Toon:

Oh, so much. Not just how I approach copy, but how I approach business, how I approach life, it’s extremely hard work, working in a high-level ad agency. At that point it was Singleton Ogilvy, so it was run by John Singleton. It was a hard place to work, and digital really didn’t have any credence in the agency. They thought websites and the internet were a flash in the pan and it wouldn’t last.

But no, I had some amazing creative directors who really taught me ways into coming up with creative ideas, and also gave me the ability to write when there is no inspiration and there is no motivation, and the ability to just pump it out, to turn up and take that kind of Stephen King approach of sit at your desk and do the work, because you just had to come up with concepts. You had to pull them out of your bottom, because the client was waiting for them. And also the notion that no idea is a bad idea, and it could be thrown around and manipulated into something good. Reverse justification, so you come up with the idea and it doesn’t really work, but then you think of an argument for why it does for the client. Gosh, so much stuff. Presentation skills, time management and how to drink an awful lot of alcohol on a Friday night, that was a big important requirement as well.

Kate Toon:

Yup, yup, yup.

Kate Toon:

I’d say it’s fairly random and fairly natural. Although I worked at Ogilvy, we were never asked to read the Gary Halberts or any of the Bob Blighs. We didn’t write out sales letters. All these things that are kind of taught as essentials, we didn’t do any of those things. We did sit around on bean bags and just through ideas around and chat about stuff. And I think I have no formal training, no qualifications, no degree, no marketing background. So how dare I call myself a copywriter?

And I think the thing is, because I can, and because you learn on the job, and because I think my style is very much talking like a human, I mean a better version of yourself. If you just recorded this chat and we did a transcript, it would be okay. But generally, what we come out with on this podcast will be natural, it will be interesting, it will flow, all these idioms and slang. And if I have that as a basis, I can tidy that up, improve the grammar, maybe restructure it a little bit, but the basis of the copy is there. And I think too many people overthink copywriting and try and follow strict rules and copywriting formulas, and I think that’s when it kind of comes off a bit kind of staccato and static. And we all know how bad SEO copywriting can be. I think it’s about just letting it flow, and reading it out, and making it feel like you’re talking to a real human.

Kate Toon:

I think it all comes down to really working hard on what their brand values are. What do they want to be known for? What do they stand for? What will they not stand for? Those need to be really solid. And a lot of brands haven’t really worked that out.

When you talk to a brand they say, “Oh, well we want to be professional, we want to be knowledgeable.” It’s like, everybody wants to be that, push it a little bit harder. And then really digging into their brand personality, and you can use really dumb ways into this. If your brand was a movie star, who would play it? If my brand was a movie star I’d like to think it would be played by Tina Fey. She’s-

Kate Toon:

Yeah, she’s everything I would want to be. She’s funny, she’s intelligent, she can be silly, but she can still be really impressive. She’s done amazing things, blah, blah, blah, so that can really help. And if I think about, “What would Tina Fey say?” While I’m writing my copy, it makes it easier. Tina Fey’s different to The Rock, she’s different to Donald Trump, so if I can keep her avatar in my mind, it makes it easier, so brand values, brand personality.

And then I think most brands will come to you and say, “Yeah, we want to be really fun, and conversational, and wacky.” And then you write the copy and they’re like, “Yeah, not that kind of fun, not that wacky.” And it’s about persuading them that being conversational, contracting words, using familiar phrases, it doesn’t make you sound any less professional.

We don’t want to be like, “Yo dude, check out our new insurance.” It’s awful, we don’t want to be try-hard, but we want to mirror the language of our customers. That’s often a great starting point as well, going and reading testimonials, what people are saying about your brand. What words are they using? Great, mirror them, and then you’re going to get an immediate connection with the customer.

Kate Toon:

Totally.

Kate Toon:

It is. It’s the neglected child of the marketing world. Because often what will happen is, the client will go, “Oh, I can write the copy.” Or if the client doesn’t say that, the account manager will say, “Oh, I can write the copy.” Because writing copy’s easy. We all think we can write, just like we all think we’ve got a great sense of humor and brilliant dress sense, but we don’t. Some do. You do obviously Alex, but-

Kate Toon:

[crosstalk 00:10:38] Where’s mine? I want one sent. Anyway, but yeah, so I think people think, “Well we can do it.” And then they get down to actually the nitty-gritty of writing it and they go, “Actually, we can’t do this.” Often it’s the last thing as well. It’s kind of the most important thing, but it’s left until last.

I’ve worked with all different people in business. Often it’s the business owner if it’s a smaller business. If it’s a larger business, maybe the marketing manager. Sometimes maybe, if it’s with an agency, it’ll be the creative director, or the producer, or the account manager. And often it’s a committee, which is obviously the worst. You know what this is like in agency world, where it’s like, “Well we’ve looked at it, and now we’re just going to show it to Maurine in marketing, and then we’re going to show it to Bob who’s in sales, and I’m going to show it to my wife, and my hairdresser, and my cousin Kevin because he wrote a newsletter in 1972 and knows all about copy.”

Often about 17 different people will be looking at the copy, and that’s when the copywriter has to be quite strong about why they’ve made the decisions they’ve made and be able to back them up, and go, “Nope, the reason I wrote it like that is because of this, and it’s based on your brand values.” And you have to have reasons for why you’re writing the way you’re writing, so you can argue.

Kate Toon:

I think you’re right. I think the reason you struggled to find the word then is because it’s a little bit persuasion, it’s a little bit education, and it’s a little bit selling. Especially as a copywriter, you don’t finish selling your services when the proposal is signed, you are still presenting and pitching the copy every round that you do. And especially in an agency world, there’s quite a performance involved in that.

You bring them in. We’ve all seen Mad Men. The whisky’s on the table. Although, green tea or whatever, “Do you want muffins?” You put on a show. The creatives are often wheeled in, in wacky outfits, to put on a show and to sell the copy.

I think truly if a client doesn’t understand conversion copy, the power of SEO copy, the power of conversational copy and building relationship, it can be really, really hard for them to see the value, and to see, just as it is with anything. You can get a website overseas for like $200 on Fiverr. And if that’s what you want, you get what you pay for.

I think I don’t work too hard to persuade clients about that, because the kind of clients that I want to work with kind of already get it. And then it’s more about trying to not be too subjective with the copy and going, “Yeah, I know that’s not something … We have to find a meeting ground between what you would say as a brand, and what the customer wants to hear.” I often have a little test that I like to use, and it’s called the we-we test by the way. And it’s so many brands, they write from their perspective, “We want to talk about this. We are this. We have experience. We can do this.” And I just try and flip them around to, “You want this. You need this.” And try to try and focus on the customer rather than themselves.

But it is, a lot of copywriting is talking to the client about why you’ve written what you’ve written. And as I said, everyone thinks they can write. Not everyone thinks they can code a website, or design, but most of us write every single day. And so yeah, it can be quite an interesting conversation.

Kate Toon:

Oh, this is my favorite question. I love this question. Yeah, I think there’s lots of different routes into talking to your customers. The first thing is to actually talk to them, to ring them up and to get them on the phone and say, “What was this experience like working with us? What was good about it? What was bad about it?” You can use surveys, but surveys are quite a blunt tool that puts people in boxes. Much better to let someone just chat and listen.

But the way that I approach it, I’ve got two little acronyms for you now. We love an acronym. The first one is BDF. And that is around thinking about your customers preconceived beliefs, deepest desires and darkest fears.

Anybody, when they come to use a product or service, I always use lawyers as the example, because it’s really easy one. Say I’m writing copy for a big law firm. Someone comes along, they have preconceived beliefs about lawyers. We won’t necessarily go into them, but I’m guessing it’s going to be, “They’re going to overcharge me. They’re going to talk in legalese. It’s going to cost me a fortune.” The deepest desire is that they want this horrible legal issue to go away as quickly as possible, and they just want it to be easy and smooth, and they don’t want to go to prison or whatever it may be. And then their darkest fear is that it’s all going to go wrong, they’re going to spend an awful lot of money, and they’re going to get bamboozled and confused. If you understand that BDF or pain points, you can address that in your copy.

You have to dig deeper than demographics. Often in marketing people go, “Oh, this is Clive, he’s 62, he’s got a wife called Maurine, 2.5 kids.” None of that tells us anything about him.

I’ve got one more acronym for you, it’s called the CGF, it’s the Clive-Google Factor. I know, I made that one up myself.

Kate Toon:

Well yeah, CGFs I think help us really understand customer pain points, fears. Everyone wants … What do they want from this experience? CGF really goes further, it goes into the dark places of our minds. What is Clive Googling at 3:00 A.M. in the morning when he can’t sleep? What is he really worried about? If you can be there for Clive at 3:00 A.M. when he’s Googling, “Why do I have a rash under my armpit?” If you can be the brand that’s there for him and says, “Oh, this is the reason you have a rash.” Then later when he goes to buy the cream for his rash, he’s going to remember that brand, because you were there for him in his dark moment.

Trying to find those, beyond the pain points, into the dark night thoughts. We all have them. We all wake up at 3:00 worrying about stuff. If you can be the copywriter or the brand that’s there for people in that moment, then you’ve started to build a real relationship.

Kate Toon:

Well, I think-

Kate Toon:

Well, there’s some great tools out there. [AskThePublic 00:17:49] is a great little tool where you can put in what you do, or the noun, or the verb that you want to work on, and it will come back with all the questions. I just think Google’s great though, because we have a rough idea. And once we put that question into Google, one of my favorite things, predictive search in Google is when you put in, “How do I convert to …” And the answers that come back are, Christianity, Catholicism, PDF. I love that. [inaudible 00:18:18].

Google gives us a lot of insights, and we know now with featured answers and featured snippets, that you put your question in, and then directly under that, it’s going to give you five more questions. And if you keep clicking, it keeps on going, and goes deeper, and deeper, and deeper down into the darkest recesses of what people type in. I think you can find out a lot just by Googling. You can work a fair bit out there, yeah.

Kate Toon:

Yes.

Kate Toon:

Well, really copywriting in its very nature is conversion copywriting, because copywriting just means words that sell, essentially. People often make a distinction between copywriting and content writing. Content writing is more about words that educate and inform. But really, let’s be honest, the copy that we’re writing to educate and inform is generally there to also sell in the end, it’s just a little bit further away from the sale.

Conversion copywriting I guess, can often be about more of a single goal, about really leading people down this path of hooking them in, getting their attention, getting their interest, addressing their desires and their pain points, explaining the features, the benefits, the advantages, providing proof and results, and then a call to action. That’s classic conversion copywriting.

SEO copywriting is obviously about trying to connect the dots between what people are typing into Google, and I say Google, because massive market share, sorry Bing, what people are typing into Google and what you have on your page. Because although Google gets more and more sophisticated with algorithm updates like Hummingbird and BERT, at the end of the day it’s still a robot. Terminator hasn’t happened yet, so it’s about going, someone that types in … The basic one we always say is, someone typed in, “Blue widget.” Have you talked about blue widgets on the page? Is it relevant? Is it helpful? Is it useful.

But I don’t think the two things are distinct. You get a lot of conversion copywriters saying, “I don’t do SEO.” And a lot of SEO copywriters going, “I don’t do conversion.” But it’s all the same, because we have to write for humans first and Google second. There’s no point getting someone to the page, and then it being an awful blob of copy that just says, “We’re a Sydney window cleaning company, in Sydney, that cleans windows.” SEO copywriting gets people to the door, conversion copy gets them to sale. It has to all be cohesive and holistic, you can’t separate the two.

Kate Toon:

Well, I think whenever I start some copywriting work, I think about what’s the intent. We talk about a lot in SEO about searcher intent. Is it conversion intent, information intent, comparison intent or navigational intent? And I maybe think local intent is kind of another one as well.

If it’s conversion intent, I am going to go more towards classic conversion templates and formulas, like problem, agitate, solution, PAS, and AIDA, attention, interests, desire, I can’t remember what the last one is.

Kate Toon:

Action. There you go. You should be a copywriter. I’m going to go more down that route, but at the end of the day, I still have to go, “Well, what would someone type into Google to find this page?” If I’m going down an informational route, well then I’m much more at that top-of-funnel stage. They don’t really know me, I have to focus on the question in hand rather than shoving the price and product down their throat. I have to be educational, interesting and funny. And then maybe at the bottom of the page I can kind of bring in the product, but I’m not going to ram it down their throat. I think you dial up one dial, and you dial down the other. And you’re constantly doing this.

Kate Toon:

I think again, the we-we test is something we’ve talked about. I still see a lot of SEO companies pushing the exact match, SEO keyword, stuffing into content. I still see it. “This is the 72 keywords we want you to use on this 200-word page.” It’s like, there’s not enough space. I can’t even get a preposition in there.

And I think just being overly formal, really overly formal, and forgetting that people buy from people. And people, even if you’re a brand, people still want to feel like they’re helping someone within that brand. As we move towards this buy local, and buy small, the big brands are actually struggling I think. They’re struggling because we don’t want to buy from them. We see them as corporate evil geniuses, so they have to work even harder to build a relationship with us.

And we see, I think these days we see through it so much. We see through the fluff and the chutzpah. We want transparency and honest. I think the brands that do a great job of that … What’s the toilet roll brand that does an amazing job? I can’t … The ones that send you the toilet rolls, it’s gone out of my head. But they-

Kate Toon:

Yes, and they-

Kate Toon:

These brands that started up online primarily and have got bigger and bigger, and they just, they’re honest. And when they make mistakes, they make mistakes, and it flows all the way through. Really great brands that tote a voice on the homepage, it’s the same as in the email. It’s even in the error messages. When you make a mistake on the form and it says … It doesn’t say, “We are sorry, the form was submitted incorrectly.” It’s like, “Oops, the form didn’t work. We’ll got onto Bob in the back.” That’s what we want.

But I think still old-school SEO tactics, and a fear of being friendly. I think those are the main areas I see.

Kate Toon:

[crosstalk 00:24:42] Yes.

Kate Toon:

Yeah, well-

Kate Toon:

Well I think, it was slow, so it’s taken a while. I’m not one of these people who had overnight success. I left Ogilvy, I worked as a copywriter for about five years. And I think I got as far as I could get. For the hours I had, they were very limited. I only had about 20 hours a week because I had a young kid, and I was charging top-notch rates and working with brands that could afford them. And you get to the point, I think it’s the Warren Buffet line that says, “If you exchange your money for time, you’ll work until you die.” And so, your time for money, sorry other way around. There was only so much more I could charge. I couldn’t make any more time, so I had to try and get into this passive income thing. I didn’t have to, but I felt I wanted to.

Throughout my working in copywriting, I formed little communities. I’ve always tried to be about community over competition. And I would say to people, “Hey look, I’ve got this great template that I made for myself at Ogilvy that makes writing a press release really, really easy.” Or, “I’ve got this little cheat sheet for writing video scripts.” And people would be like, “Oh, can I have that? Can I have that?”

And so I was like, “Well I’m giving these away for free, I could make a little shop.” So I made a little shop, with my one little Word template, and I sold it for $7.00. Now it’s about $37.00. And since then, I think I’ve probably sold about 6,000 or 7,000 copies of that one template. And from there it just grew, very slowly, incrementally.

I was doing SEO for brands like Pedigree Chum. And smaller brands would come along and they couldn’t really afford the rates that Pedigree Chum were paying, so I was like, “How can I make this affordable for them? Oh, I could make a little mini course, or I could do a little workshop or a webinar.” And it just grew really slowly to be honest.

Kate Toon:

Oh yeah, the how.

Kate Toon:

I kicked off both the Recipe for SEO Success and the Clever Copywriter School in 2017 properly, so I guess it’s only three years really, it’s not that long. And the first tactic I did, the first thing I did was just put things live and nothing happened. That whole thing of, “I’ll build it, they will come.” No they won’t. That was the first thing. That was a mistake.

The first thing that really kicked things off was I did a challenge. I did a 10-day SEO challenge, where you got an email a day with a task in it. And then for the people who joined that I set up a little Facebook group. And I promoted that, and I put it everywhere. And the first time I did it, I got about 500 people. And that was just through word of mouth, because back then, even four or five years ago, challenges were quite a new thing, Facebook groups were quite a new thing. Today I don’t think it would happen so quickly.

Those 500 people did it, and that challenge was better than someone else’s paid product. It was good. You could’ve charged a fair amount for it. It was a lot of word of mouth.

And I just really focused on that Facebook group, which I still have now today. It’s called I Love SEO. And whenever I went on a podcast I talked about it. It was in my footer, it was in my header, it was the drum that I banged repeatedly.

And as soon as someone joined that group, which had a really low barrier to entry, all they have to do is give me their email address, no money, nothing, it’s easy to join a Facebook group, but then they were my people, and I could communicate to them as I wanted and I could build the trust.

And then when I had something to sell, I had a little gated community of people who were ready to buy and already liked and trusted me, so then launched the next thing and the next thing. And it’s just, that is all my tactics really, and giving away really good-quality resources.

I have an SEO checklist. Again, it’s not like a one-pager in Word. It’s a 15-page, detailed thing with tools and tips. And at first you get nervous about that, that you don’t want to give away your IP. Why is anyone going to buy from you if you’ve given it all away? You don’t buy a cow and milk it yourself or something. I don’t know what the expression is. You don’t buy a dog and bark yourself.

Kate Toon:

If you know-

Kate Toon:

Yeah, don’t buy a dog and milk it, or something. Anyway, you have to have the confidence that even if I do an 18-page checklist, that SEO is vast, it is vast. There are so many angles and areas to it. I’m never going to give away all my knowledge.

And then yeah, it’s just grown by word of mouth. I don’t have an affiliate program for the course. I haven’t really done ads. I tried briefly to do Google ads, but SEO course is just a hugely expensive phrase. And I’ve done a little bit of Facebook ads, but it’s so noisy in Facebook ad world, everyone’s got a $37.00 template, everyone’s doing a webinar. The biggest tactic for me has been the podcast.

Kate Toon:

No, not really.

Kate Toon:

I went straight in, because I already had five years of clients. My first audience, as is most people, your first circle of people who already know you. You go a bit wider, you go … And let’s be honest, when I first launched it, I think the first round I only got 17 people. It wasn’t like woo. And it was cheap, it was cheap as chips back then. It was only like $400.

And then the next round I got 16 people, so it went down. And I was like, “Oh god, what have I done?” I also sold it before I built it. I sold it to those people and then I built it week by week. And then the next round I got 30, 40, 50, it goes up, it goes up.

But no. And then I did start posting, mostly on Facebook. Back then LinkedIn was still very stuffy and formal. I think it’s changing a bit now. Instagram just seemed to silly to me, although I’m doing it a bit more now. Most of my stuff has come from Facebook. I do use Twitter but that’s more to keep up to date with SEO trends and chat to other SEO people. I don’t really think I get a lot of market from that. And also email marketing.

As you’ve noticed all the way through here I’m like, “I get their email. I send them something awesome. I send them another awesome thing.” Email marketing has all been huge for me. I was the email marketing manager for O2 back in the UK briefly. I learned a lot there about email, and I still think after SEO, it’s the second most powerful tactic, even more than ads if you ask me.

Kate Toon:

I just think O2 were very forward thinking. We’re talking a long time ago now, about segmentation. None of these CRM systems existed back then, so we would really try to make emails not one static email, but pull in elements based on people’s mobile spend, their package, the type of phone they had. An email might have maybe 17 or 18 different segments that we would pull together into a four-segment email. That was huge. And just the work that we did on mining the list, and the A/B testing of subject lines, even just that 1% difference in open rate made a huge difference, because they had a list of 1,000,000 people, so just the pre-work and the personalization, and how we found that the more we personalized the less impact the email had, the cheesier it got.

If we started to say, “Hey Alex, we know you live in woop-woop, and you like cats, and nice T-shirt you were wearing last week.” People got freaked out if we got much beyond the salutation and one other bit of … People didn’t like to know that we knew that much about them. We had to be subtle in the way that we knew things about them.

And also, even back then, they were doing great sequencing. So you joined, you got your first email, your welcome email. What did you get next? What did you get next? What did you get next? How frequently did they sell? The whole value-trick approach of jab, jab, punch. Give, give, now we can sell. Give, give, now we can sell. And just that whole flow, which now we all talk about. It’s funnels, everyone’s got a funnel. But back then it was really innovative and different. So yeah, I still use a lot of those tactics today.

Kate Toon:

No, not quite that many. And this is it, I don’t think you need a huge, huge list. We talk about people like Amy Porterfield who’s got millions of people. I don’t want to pay those kind of fees, that actually you’re paying them so much. You could have a relatively small list, you just have to treat them well and not spam them. And yeah, people expect a lot these days.

For example, I’ve got a free course that people can do, and it’s a good course. It’s not six minutes of me talking about myself. And then after that, then they get the checklist, and then they get a list of tools, and then they get something else. And only after about four more emails do I then say, “Hey, here’s the first paid thing. Here’s the first paid thing.” And then again, there’s free stuff, free stuff, free stuff. And then there’s, here’s another thing that you could buy.

And my big course is not cheap, it’s over $2,000 and sometimes people have been on my list for three or four years before they … Well, I know now, because my list is about three or four years old, people buy now and I’m like, “Gosh, you joined …” Because in the early days I would watch everyone who joined, “You joined four years ago. It’s taken you four years to buy.” Not because the price was wrong, not because necessarily they didn’t like me, but just because the timing was wrong, or they didn’t have a website yet. But they stayed on that list.

We talked at O2 about, we talked about spam emails, we talked about bacon emails. Bacon emails that, they’re not spam, you kind of want them, you just kind of don’t want them now. Say you sign up to buy something from a store, you like it, then you get all the follow-up emails. You never unsubscribe because you know one day you will want to buy again, so you just delete them, delete them, delete them because one day you will want to buy and you’ll forget the name of the brand, so you kind of keep on that list. I’ve got a lot like that. Most of us, we can’t aspire to have emails that people are desperate to open, but we can aspire to be bacon.

Kate Toon:

Yeah, I do a monthly newsletter, I try to do it monthly, but again, I’m just me. I don’t have a huge, massive team of people. I’ve got people helping me but no employees, so I say monthly. It’s monthly when I can manage it. And I make that a really great roundup. I include news, and tips, and advice, and sales. I do that once a month.

And then I’ll do what I call solace emails. Not soulless, but solace, for the sales. But also for all my courses, I create wait lists, so I’m not spamming my big list. If you want to be on the sales email, ask me, I’ll put you on. If you want to be removed, I’ll remove you. And then I try not to spam the big list. Maybe one email per launch. I launch the big course three times a year, that’s it. The rest of the year you won’t be sold to, and that’s really important to me as well, because you know.

But I have no fear as well, about removing people from my list. We all know that massively impacts deliverability. If people haven’t interacted for six months to a year, I’m not going to keep them. They’re clearly not interested. They may not have the time or the energy to remove themselves, so I’ll remove people for me.

And then people email me and go, “I’ve stopped getting your emails. Can you add me back?” And I’m like, “Oh, okay.”

Kate Toon:

It is.

Kate Toon:

The free and the low-cost one I think we’re up to nearly 10,000 people have been through those. The big course, I know the exact figure, we’re up to I think 984 people have taken the big course, so yeah.

Kate Toon:

Yes.

Kate Toon:

Yeah, gosh, because I’m torn between … I’m a copywriter at heart, but I saw a gap for the SEO thing. You know Alex, about four years ago, really wasn’t that many people teaching SEO. There was the dude from ClickMinded, and Heather who does SEO and copyright, but there really wasn’t that many. Now everyone’s got an SEO course. I saw a niche, but my heart still lies in copywriting.

Yeah, the Clever Copywriting School started with that one template. It’s a shop, a directory, a job board, and a membership and a conference. I run an annual conference called Copy Con. Yeah, but it’s a membership primarily, where we help people be better … Give them skills advice, but a lot of business advice as well, because most copywriters are great writers, but they’re not great business people.

Kate Toon:

Is it the-

Kate Toon:

It’s funny, because the reason I set that up was because all my money was coming three times a year with the big course in these big chunks. But I just wanted some recurring income. And I believed the dream as well Alex. It’s not the dream, it’s really, really hard work.

The things that I’ve found haven’t worked is giving people too much content. You think, “I just want to given, and give, and give, and the more I give them the better it will be.” But then people get overwhelmed, they have no sense of completion and they kind of want to cancel, because look, “I’m missing out on all of this, and I’m paying this money and I’m missing out.” One of the earliest things I learned, there’s only four elements a month. We do a coaching call every month where we could ask questions. We have a couple of masterclasses, like so maybe about how to write for chat bots, or how to write video scripts. And then we have a training with me once a month, and that’s it. And it all goes into a library, so there’s oodles of stuff in the library, but it means that people aren’t feeling they have to turn up too many times in a month. That was one thing.

The pricing is really interesting, what people will pay and how much. That was interesting. I’ve actually no longer got a monthly option, because you just get so many tire kickers who come in for a month, and you can’t really get the gist of it in a month. It was a brave decision and I know that it means I don’t get as many members as I could, but I’m about quality not quantity. But the real thing with the community, with the membership is building the community, because people come for the resources, and the freebies, and the templates, and the training, but they stay for the community.

And obviously, you alone cannot create that. You have to set a culture, but then you have to rely for the people in the group to enforce that culture, because you can’t be there all the time. You have to build people up within your community and enable them to facilitate the community for you in a way. It’s very people-based.

It’s not really about, “I’ve got 17 checklists and 52 videos.” It’s about how do you feel in the group? Do you feel supported? Do you feel helped? Do you feel judged? That seems to be the main thing.

Kate Toon:

Well, I like to think of it as kind of the Tooniverse. Yes, the obvious part of it is the Facebook community. I’ve got about 10,000 people in there, post stuff and help people. But really, you kind of enter into this world of stuff. While you have that, you also get the free course, and you get the checklist, and there’s webinars, and there’s … It’s like an ecosystem. And obviously the goal from my end is to move people through from free, to low cost, to big cost, to the membership, and that’s the end goal. And then maybe from there, to other things that I may decide to do later.

But yeah, it was also about, and this may make me sound cheesy, but it generally was about a need to help people. I, when I started in SEO, joined a lot of the communities on Google. They were very male dominated and I felt like an idiot whenever I asked a question. There was one particular guy who used to screen grab my questions out of the group and write blog posts, “Kate Toon asked this.” And it was kind of a subtle dig, because as soon as you ask a question, you’re showing that you don’t know the answer. And it’s like, “But aren’t we here to learn from each other?” “No we’re not. We’re here to bang our chests and wave our willies and show that we know more than everybody else.”

I wanted to create a place where, because I still ask questions in my own group, I don’t know everything about SEO, none of us do, it’s huge and changes every five minutes, so I wanted to save space. That community is as much for me as it is for the people in it. It’s really helpful. It’s also a great place for me to test ideas out, to see what I should do next.

I try not to look at my competitors. Instead, I’ll go into my group and say, “Hey, I’m going to do a webinar. Would you prefer it was on this, this, or this?” And the people choose, and then I make it, and then people buy, so it’s great for me in so many ways, and for the people-

Kate Toon:

Well I there’s a definite approach and there is a definite strategy to it. I didn’t think there was, but there really has, and I’ve seen it coming out of me in the last few months, few years. I have really clear boundaries.

In my big group, questions don’t go live in the group freely. I pick times during the week and I will answer them when I’m able to. If I don’t have any time, I delete the questions. It’s a free group. I’m not saying I’m going to be here for you every five minutes.

I prioritize questions from people who are paying me. And I will always, for every one thing I do in the free group, I’ll do five things in the paid membership, because there has to be delineation. Why would anyone join the membership if I was giving my all in the group?

I just have to be really strong with that group. I’m also really strong about competitors, because I have not spent five years building a group of 10,000 people for another person with an SEO course to come on in and start helping. I don’t want to build their business, I want to build mine, so I’m very strict about that as well.

To run a Facebook group well, you have to have rules, but you have to be willing to enforce them. And that means you’re not always going to be popular. People aren’t going to like you, because sometimes I have to kick people out and sometimes I have to not answer questions, and people are like, “Hey.” And I’m like, “Well, I’m me, I can only do what I can do, and this has got to work for me. It’s free by the way, so you can’t get that exciting.” But people do.

So really strong boundaries, understanding that it’s very top of funnel in terms of my marketing ecosystem, and I will always give more time to my bottom-of-funnel people who have paid me money. And just doing what I can when I can. And if it’s quiet for a bit, no-one’s going to cry, no-one’s sitting there going, “Oh god, where’s Kate Toon?” They’re just glad not to see me for a week. I just took the pressure off myself to turn up all the time.

Kate Toon:

I do.

Kate Toon:

I think it was literally a couple of years ago. It’s only been fairly recent. I, like everyone else, flogged myself for a long time. And then to be honest, I just got super tired. I did a year where I spoke at 37 events. And we know that speaking at events is a huge time suck, doesn’t necessarily, the ROI isn’t immediate. We don’t all get paid. Sometimes we’re turning up just for the exposure dollars. And that year I was just like, “I literally can’t keep being this person to all these people. And I am sitting here answering a question from Maurine in Wollongong about SEO and she’s being a bit rude, while my son is in the lounge watching tele on his own. What am I doing with my life? This is stupid. My priorities are wrong.” It was quite a switch.

But it took as well some confidence, because I’m a people pleaser. I want Maurine to like me. But then I had to understand that I wanted my son to like me more than some random stranger on the internet. And so that was a big shift for me.

I also got trolled a lot, got a lot of negative comments. That changes your perspective a little bit as well.

Kate Toon:

It does.

Kate Toon:

Because we want to, unless you’re a horrible sociopath, most of us want to be liked. We try and treat business as we do our personal relationships. We generally want to do no harm, be fairly nice. And I’ve realized again, which has taken me a long time, it is impossible to be a relatively successful business owner without some people hating your guts, for no reason. They just don’t like the look of your nose, they don’t like the tone of your voice. You haven’t even done anything to them, they’ve just taken an instant dislike to you.

And I used to agonize about that, but now I’ve realized there’s just nothing I can do. My nose is my nose. Don’t like it? What am I going to do? You know?

Kate Toon:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Kate Toon:

Because you can see me now. I’ve actually made a bit of an effort today, but Alex and I were talking about this before the podcast. I work in a little shed in my back garden. I call it the Toon Cave. I still don’t have a big team, I don’t have fancy offices, I don’t have any full-time employees, no angel investors, no business plan, none of the usual things that people talk about when they’re on their startup journey or they’re a founder.

I read Rand Fishkin’s book about his journey and it couldn’t be more different. You know what I mean? I resent even buying a new pen from Office Works, let alone kitting out an office in Surrey Hills. And also from a female entrepreneur point of view, I don’t have great glossy hair, and I don’t wear pencil skirts, and I’m not very glamorous. Do you know what I mean? I’m pretty scruffy.

The book was really a bit of a permission statement to say, “You can have the kind of business you want, and you can be very successful, whatever that means to you.” But honestly, these days, often that’s largely financial. I think people underestimate how financially successful I am, because I don’t talk about it and because I don’t look financially successful. And therefore was there to say, “You can do it your way. You don’t have to be like these glossy-teethed people lying on Porsches talking about their seven-figure plan. You can do it your way.” That’s really what the book’s about.

Kate Toon:

Well I like making-

Kate Toon:

Yeah-

Kate Toon:

It did totally. And I think it’s there in everything. It was very much in the male entrepreneur world, and now it’s bled into the female entrepreneur world, where everyone’s talking about being a seven-figure this, and a seven-figure that. And there’s a look that you have to have, and there’s a way you have to vibe. Women have to be really positive and really happy all the time. No, I’m miserable quite a lot, and I want to be able to share that side of me as well. Yeah, it’s a permission book really. I’m an entrepreneur but I don’t quite fit the mold I don’t think.

Kate Toon:

I talk about how to start a business without a business plan and zero investment. I talk about dealing with copycats and competitors, and dealing with trolls, how to build a personal brand. Again, I think another thing I think is true for both sexes is we’re taught to not be very emotional about our business, we should be serious, whatever, and how to bring emotion in. How to decide whether that shiny object that keeps distracting you is actually worth following, because sometimes it is. We’re told to not follow them, but most of my cool things in my business started off with shiny objects.

Yeah, and there’s lots of exercises and advice in there, and things you can try out for yourself. It’s not really all about me. It’s about how you can do this for yourself.

Kate Toon:

Ogilvy, Mr. Ogilvy. Yeah, Ogilvy gets wheeled out at copywriting presentation ever. And obviously an amazingly intelligent man. And I think he was an oddball as well, for his time he was an unusual creature.

Kate Toon:

Yeah-

Kate Toon:

Well so are you. All the best people are odd. All my favorite people are odd. I think it’s a huge compliment.

Kate Toon:

It’s a huge compliment to say someone’s odd I think, if it’s said with love I think.

Kate Toon:

I am too. My son’s 11 and he’s head to toe in black Nike stuff, even though he doesn’t play any sport whatsoever. He’s not a sporty person. He’s a geek. And the thing I’ve realized with him is it’s not the time. This is the time of fitting in. I think maybe 15, 16, 17 is when you start to be a bit odd, and you can do it and celebrate it.

It took me a while to embrace my odd. I think really only in the last couple of years I’ve really kind of started being fully myself online, sharing all my good and bad, sharing my sense of humor which some people just do not get at all. And then being that same person when you meet me in person.

Because we’ve had this Alex. We’ve been to a few networking events. And you meet these people that you followed, and in person they are nothing like the person they are. And the people who are the same, aren’t they just lovely? It’s such a relief when you meet someone and they’re exactly who they said they would be. That’s taken me a long time to have the confidence to just be me everywhere, all the time, odd and not.

Kate Toon:

Oh yeah, you creep.

Kate Toon:

Yeah, and again, but I remember when I met you and you talked about the stutter, and I thought that was so great of you to bring that up straight away, then we started doing the podcast, because we don’t know each other that well, but I see your podcast videos coming up all the time. And I watch them all the time, and I’m not even your ideal customer. But slowly, I like to say, people ultimately buy from me because they’re just so sick of me. I’ve worn them down.

I’ll say to people, I’ve got the thing on my form that says, “How did you find me?” And people are like, “I don’t know, but suddenly you were everywhere. Every post in my feed, you were on my podcast, you were … Suddenly you were everywhere.” And I think it’s like they get to a point where they’re like, “We’re so sick of seeing your stuff, just take my money, just go away.”

And I’m being silly, but I think that’s what we do. We slowly, slowly edge into people’s consciousness, we bring out ourselves, and we accept that we are going to get negative comments, and people aren’t going to like us. And that’s fine. Then they’ve just identified themselves as not our ideal customer, thank you very much.

Kate Toon:

17?

Kate Toon:

It makes you feel so old.

Kate Toon:

Yeah.

Kate Toon:

Yeah, yeah.

Kate Toon:

Yeah.

Kate Toon:

It’s such a cheesy thing. When I first went on to LinkedIn I noticed that everybody’s job title was like, “Agency owner, entrepreneur, writer.” And I was like, “SEO copywriter, copywriter.” But I didn’t have a third thing, I just didn’t have a third thing, I couldn’t believe … This was right at the beginning so I just put hula hooper as a joke, and I can’t hula hoop, or I couldn’t then. And it’s kind of taken on a life of its own, so much so that the Sydney Morning Herald contacted me, they were doing an article about Sydney’s best hula hoopers, and I had been identified. And I had to admit to the journalist that I couldn’t hula hoop.

Since then, I have rectified the lie and I have learned how to hula hoop. Next time we’re at a networking event, when we’re allowed, I’ll hula hoop for you to-

Kate Toon:

Yup. It’s a wonderful site, I tell you, yes.

Kate Toon:

Yeah.

Kate Toon:

Oh, okay.

Kate Toon:

None. I’m not a big business book reader, so I would say The Lord of the Rings. There we go.

Kate Toon:

Don’t. Subcontract and don’t have people on staff, it’s a nightmare.

Kate Toon:

I love a bit of Pomodoro. I love working in 25-minute spurts. I can only do about four before I crash and burn. But working on a single task for 25 minutes, with all notifications turned off.

Kate Toon:

Let’s see. I get asked this one a lot. I think really, it’s probably just ignore your competitors. Don’t think you’re doing competitor research, you’re not, you are just comparing yourself. And generally, probably feeling pretty poo at the end of it. Ignore your competitors. Just because they’ve got a big shiny thing, you don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. You don’t know if it’s even working. They could be telling you it’s working, but it could not be. Just focus on your own stuff.

Kate Toon:

Well, I’ve actually just built a Toon Tub. I have an outdoor big stone bath in my back garden.

Kate Toon:

I’ve got a little row of, a pathway to my little Toon Tub. I fill that up. It’s all plumbed in, hot water, have a glass of wine, watch some trashy Netflix, and that’s how I wind down.

Kate Toon:

Katetoon.com. It’s a work in progress. It’s not the best looking site, but that’s where you can kind of start your adventures into all the various bits and bobs that I do.

Kate Toon:

Yup, same, same. I loved it.

Kate Toon:

See you soon. Bye.