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Will Green_3 Principles for Effective Business Copywriting
01 November 202337 min

3 Principles for Effective Business Copywriting

with Will Green, Copy Road
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Contents:

In today’s dynamic business landscape, where companies constantly compete for customers’ attention, effective business copywriting is your best chance to rise above the noise. Our guest, Will Green, of Copy Road, shares three key copywriting principles that can significantly improve your brand’s impact, help build persuasive messaging, and establish meaningful connections, ultimately driving business growth and lasting success.

About Will Green:

Will Green is the master of copywriting. He’s the Founder of Copy Road, where he’s teaching others to turn content into cash flow for their businesses. Will is one of the few copywriters to earn 7-figures in royalties, making him the best person to talk to about copywriting for businesses.

Will used to work in a Charleston-based independent publishing house, Joggling Board Press, where he was in charge of marketing and platform development. He became a junior copywriter at Stansberry and further honed his copywriting skills at Money Map Press. Now, he’s helping clients with their copy while also sharing his valuable knowledge through his course “The Hunger Games,” where 100% of profits from buying go towards feeding hungry people.

Mastering the 3 principles of effective business copywriting

With new businesses launching on every corner of the internet, standing out from the crowd can sometimes feel like an uphill battle where you relentlessly compete for the customers’ attention. That said, three principles of business copywriting can make your brand messaging more impactful and effective: Simplicity, Big promises, and Iron-clad proofs.

Firstly, keep your copy simple and straightforward to ensure your message engages your audience. Then, make big yet attainable promises that tap into your customers’ aspirations, showing the exceptional benefits of your product or service. Finally, make sure you back up these bold claims with solid evidence. As you fulfill your promises, you’ll witness firsthand the undeniable power of high-quality copy. Master these principles of effective business copywriting, and you’ll no longer chase customers – you’ll begin to attract them.

Episode highlights:

  • Copywriting principles, though effective, can lose their impact when being overused, making them predictable to the audience. Mastering these basics empowers you to refresh your messaging while maintaining relevance with your audience. (06:17)
  • In business copywriting, less is more. Concise, resonating copy is undeniably effective, memorable, powerful, and persuasive. This minimalistic approach is a crucial principle as it makes your message clear and easy to understand, and ultimately – more memorable.  (07:25)
  • The secret to writing a winning copy is simple – make a big promise to your audience and make sure you deliver on it. The trick is understanding their problem, offering them a practical solution, and convincingly showing that you can and will fulfill that promise. But making the promise is only half the battle; the ability to deliver on that promise is what ultimately distinguishes successful businesses. (08:24)
  • Building genuine customer relationships is a vital aspect of business copywriting that often gets overlooked. Copywriting is not just about crafting persuasive words; it’s about creating a narrative filled with honesty and transparency. This sets the stage for a consistent relationship, trust, and loyalty, ultimately impacting the overall customer experience and business growth. (13:09)
  • While artificial intelligence has many strengths, achieving consistency at scale with it is still a challenge. For instance, AI isn’t up to par yet when it comes to preserving cohesion across different types of content. But paired with human understanding of communication, it can achieve tremendous results. That’s why there’s no reason to fear AI. Instead, embrace it as a powerful business tool for maximizing human potential and accelerating business progress. (26:25)

Will’s best advice for entrepreneurs:

“What works in copywriting is you make an offer that people want, and you make it clear, and then you prove that you can deliver it because if you promise me something I want and you prove to me that you can deliver it, and I can afford your price, I’m going to buy.” (07:25)

Connect with Will: 

Resources Mentioned:

Follow Beyond 8 Figures:

Will’s best advice for entrepreneurs:

“What works in copywriting is you make an offer that people want, and you make it clear, and then you prove that you can deliver it because if you promise me something I want and you prove to me that you can deliver it, and I can afford your price, I’m going to buy.” (07:25)

Episode highlights:

  • Copywriting principles, though effective, can lose their impact when being overused, making them predictable to the audience. Mastering these basics empowers you to refresh your messaging while maintaining relevance with your audience. (06:17)
  • In business copywriting, less is more. Concise, resonating copy is undeniably effective, memorable, powerful, and persuasive. This minimalistic approach is a crucial principle as it makes your message clear and easy to understand, and ultimately – more memorable.  (07:25)
  • The secret to writing a winning copy is simple – make a big promise to your audience and make sure you deliver on it. The trick is understanding their problem, offering them a practical solution, and convincingly showing that you can and will fulfill that promise. But making the promise is only half the battle; the ability to deliver on that promise is what ultimately distinguishes successful businesses. (08:24)
  • Building genuine customer relationships is a vital aspect of business copywriting that often gets overlooked. Copywriting is not just about crafting persuasive words; it’s about creating a narrative filled with honesty and transparency. This sets the stage for a consistent relationship, trust, and loyalty, ultimately impacting the overall customer experience and business growth. (13:09)
  • While artificial intelligence has many strengths, achieving consistency at scale with it is still a challenge. For instance, AI isn’t up to par yet when it comes to preserving cohesion across different types of content. But paired with human understanding of communication, it can achieve tremendous results. That’s why there’s no reason to fear AI. Instead, embrace it as a powerful business tool for maximizing human potential and accelerating business progress. (26:25)
Connect with Will: 
Resources Mentioned:

Transcript

[Intro]

A.J. Lawrence:
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the show. While our guest is an entrepreneur now, it’s more about sort of the information he’s generating out there and what he can help other entrepreneurs learn. And we’re going to be talking about copywriting, pirates, basic fun stuff. But before, just one thing, please. If you’re enjoying the show, please go and leave us a review at the listening platform of your choice. It helps us find really great entrepreneurs and people who can help entrepreneurs like today’s guest, Will Green. Hey, Will, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Will Green:
Oh, no, thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

A.J. Lawrence:
We’ve been talking for a little bit. What I found so interesting, why I really wanted you on the show, is you cross a lot of different spaces in, I always call it the clip from the world, but it’s the make money online world. There’s the affiliate world. There’s the copywriting. It goes from the true purists all the way down to the people who just figured out the newest hack. And that’s the newest thing. When I’ve been following your stuff, you use some of the lessons that have been around forever and ever in copywriting, but you cross over what it feels like into some new areas with it. And as we were joking earlier, you use a pirate and it’s a yellow and black pirate as your icon. Where did this come from? When did you become a pirate?

Will Green:
Yeah, I’ve been a pirate since I was six years old. And the options for birthday parties at the place I went to was you could have a pirate camp or a dinosaur camp. And I chose pirate. And we’ve been firmly in the pirate camp since then. The version of my logo before, the one where I felt like I had to become marginally more professional, was a jolly roger I drew when I was nine. I just like pirates. And then I grew up. I’m just old enough that the Internet was around when I was a kid, but they were still telling you it was pre-Facebook, and they were telling you, never put your real name or face on the Internet or bad people will come to you.

And they scared me with that very deeply. When I was like twelve and as I was starting my thing when I started my LinkedIn, I was like, I really don’t want to put my face on this. So I took the WordPress mystery man and I got a clip art pirate hat and beard and put them on top of him and yellow background and named him Yoho. And that’s what we’ve been using, I don’t know, seven years. It works. Yeah, exactly. But it’s the little generic icon just with a cliff art beard and pirate hat right on top of it.

A.J. Lawrence:
I like that a lot. Now I want the audience to understand you have, at least on your twitter and this is how we’ve been interacting up until just about a half hour ago, you have a devotion to marketing copy. I know you haven’t done every day for this, but the daily marketing truths and just your positioning of how to look at it, there’s very little flap to it. Yes, you are selling things and all this, but you’re not overly doing this. How did you kind of come to that direction where you are now with copywriting?

Will Green:
Yeah. So what’s different about me than a lot of that, not to say anything about the clickfunnels, but username that clickfunnels crowd. I did not decide I was going to become an affiliate marketer, sell something off Clickbank, figure out copy as I went along and do that and do hacks and then immediately go, hey, I can make more money selling people how to do copywriting. I don’t make any money selling how to do copywriting. If you buy the Hunger Games, which is my copywriting course, 100% of the profits goes to feeding the hungry because I’m deeply of the opinion, if you have to make money telling people how to write copy, you don’t know how to write copy. I came out of this, I was working as a marketing director at a little actual book publishing company in my early 20s. Publishing art books doesn’t feed your kids.

A.J. Lawrence:
Cool.

Will Green:
So I needed something else.

A.J. Lawrence:
That’s like not-for-profit work.

Will Green:
Right, it was, except I needed it to be for-profit work. So I made a change and I got a job at a company called Sandsbury, which is a division of a much bigger company called Agora, which is a huge financial newsletter company. And I’ve worked my entire career as a working copywriter. First copywriter, then senior copywriter, then copycheet. I’ve had campaigns that did very well. I’ve done very well personally. Just directly writing copy. And one thing that has ruined my life as a hiring manager are all the copywriting courses out there that tell people, oh my God, you’re going to work 3 hours a week from the beach and you’re going to make a million dollars a year as a copywriter.

And I’m like, look, I made a million dollars years of copywriter and I worked 80 hours from my desk while my body devoured my internal organs for sustenance. That is not what you’re doing. And if that’s what you think you’re doing, could you please not apply for these jobs? So copy is one of those things that has never been complicated. It’s human behavior. It’s a very simple set of things that things, but that doesn’t make it easy. And I really want people that are going to follow me, that are going to read me that are going to try to do this, understand the distinction between doing a common thing uncommonly well and thinking that there’s this silver bullet out there that’s going to cure all your problems. Because, yeah, there are tactics that work really well.

We were talking before about post note ads. Those are amazing. They work really well right now, but they’ll stop. Like if everyone starts doing them, they’ll stop.

A.J. Lawrence:
What Will’s referencing, he had a blog post that got a ton of- blog posts, God, I’m dating myself. Twitter post where he said one of the biggest pricing hack is just put the price on a post it note and use that as the image for your offer. I guess you were getting a lot of flack for doing that because people didn’t want you to share that.

Will Green:
Yeah, a bunch of my affiliate marketer friends who are running like 10 to $50 million a year on Facebook ads were like, and it’s just take your headline for whatever your thing was on a post-it note, stick it on a wall and take a picture. It works so much better than a more designed graphic. And it works for all sorts of reasons. It has depth and shadow to it that a graphic actually very hard to get, which you get on a photo. It’s got bright colors. It’s a physical thing. You feel like you pick up all of these things, freeze conversion. But right now if you just take a post note ad, they tend to beat everything else. But like any other marketing tactic, yes, a lot of people know it and do it, but if everyone starts using it, it’ll work less well because right now it stands out.

You have this sea of really fancy images or these graphics and these giant bundle shots of these courses. And then you get a poster note that says, click here to make money. And people are like, wait, what’s that? Because it stands out. So a lot of my friends were like, delete that right now. Don’t tell people this. Please don’t tell them our good tactics that work. And those silver bullet tactics like that, they’re not what move the needle long term.

What works in copywriting is you make an offer that people want, and you make it clearly, and then you prove that you can deliver it. Because if you promise me something I want and you prove to me that you can deliver it and I can afford your price, I’m going to buy. That’s it. Period.

And all of copywriting, I say this all the time, the first lesson I ever teach any kids that come to me, they want to learn copywriting is I ask them if they can define copywriting. And copywriting does have a definition. And there’s sort of a famous one that’s been out there for years that I hate. That is copywriting is salesmanship, which is absolute and complete nonsense because you can’t put salesmanship in there. Salesmanship is a live one on one interaction where I have all of these amazing tools that I can judge based on my prospect’s response. What I should say next, I can modify my argument based on what they’re saying. A copywriter has none of those tools.

You can’t put salesmanship into it. Copywriting is the scripted transfer of belief in a promise. When I start a piece of copy, I make my reader a promise. At the beginning of the copy, I believe the promise. At the end of the copy, they believe the promise. That’s it. That is what successful copy does. And anyone adding anything else is talking about a tactic to accomplish that.

But what you are doing is you scripted. It’s not spontaneous. I can’t change it. It’s not improv. Once it’s out there, once I have a sales page out there, it’s static for that reader. Once I have a video out there, it’s static for that reader. So it’s pre-scripted. I can’t change it in the moment. I have to make my best shot at taking my belief in the truth of my promise and making your belief in the truth. And that’s all we ever do. Every day, every way.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah, that is the law. What I find so interesting, if I were to take copywriting and literally just put marketing, it’s the same thing where a lot of times people will kind of try and start diverging their terminology. Marketing is just anything that kind of helps you bring that awareness. And I’ve always, early in my career, enjoyed all the sub niches and the extra vocabulary. But as I’ve gotten older, it’s more like this is all the same stuff. We’re just trying to do these things to help bring this type of event to occur. You come across though, very much as some of the agency experience from the higher end copywriting, your approach to it, and that sort of direct response, a very high end level of direct response. Do you ever look at instead of courses, do you ever think of marketing services or teaching people how to incorporate this greater? Or is it pretty much in service of promoting courses? Or is that just the easier path?

Will Green:
Yeah, like I said, when I do a course, for me, I think info is the best way to build an audience and to build authority. Also, to quote Jay Abraham, if they don’t pay, they don’t pay attention. So I don’t want to be out there beyond the very light stuff I do on Twitter, which is two tweets a day or every six months when I bother to post something on LinkedIn. I don’t want to be out there providing a lot of free value. I actually hate the people that tell me that I have to provide value free. That’s stupid. I want everyone to understand their relationship with me and that is I give you value and you give me money. And if you don’t give me money, I don’t care if you give value because that’s what we’re doing here.

So that’s why the Hunger Games, which is my copywriting course, exists the way it does. It’s $200 if you want to take it. I guess three, it’s 297. And if you want to take it, great. It’s massively more valuable of that than copywriting courses that cost 10x more. And I’ve made a lot more in sales over my career than most people charging 10x as much. But also, the Hunger Games comes with two promises and they exist for a very real specific reason, besides the fact to make it easier to sell. The first is 100% of profits go to feeding the hungry. Because I don’t need to make money off this course.

I make my money actually doing copywriting for clients from other products. And the second is this. It is just under a month of content with daily lessons. They’re about 15 minutes a day, and the system tracks if you do them. And if you do every lesson every day on time after the last lesson, I just go on PayPal and I send you your money back. It’s not a refund. You don’t ask for it. It’s tracked automatically.

My assistant goes through if the system says, hey, they’ve done everything and made sure that you didn’t go through one of the times where there’s an assignment and just mash keys to get the character in there, real stuff. But if you do all that, we give you your money back. And the reason is really simple. It’s a marketing funnel and I have higher end services. And if I get you to pay to participate in my marketing funnel, fantastic, because I hate free trials. Free trials are ridiculous. No one ever does anything on them because they haven’t committed. But if I can get you to commit $300, even if in your brain it’s free, because you’re going to do it, I’m pretty confident in myself.

There’s no universe where you care about marketing direct response. And you hear me talk every day for a month about marketing direct response, that if you need someone to do marketing and direct response for you after that, you don’t immediately go, well, we’re calling Will.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah, theory.

Will Green:
But if I’m going to provide you that value, you’re absolutely giving me money first, because I want you to understand our relationship. It is very, very hard to take someone in, and I’ve done the work for them. Their conversion rates are just lower. It is not true to say that if you get someone in your email list for a year and you provide them free value, you provide them free value, you provide them free value, you come in and say, have this product that’s $5,000. You don’t get a conversion rate that’s higher than someone that gets someone on their list, proves they know what they’re doing and sells two days later. In fact, you get a much lower conversion rate because you’ve established a relationship with this person that you’re now violating. They expect you to do that and you get hundreds, or if your list is big enough, thousands of emails saying, what the hell are you doing? You’ve always done it free before.

Why you just want my money now? You changed. I hate it. Why are you doing that? If you really cared about us like you said you do, you just give us this for free. I mean, they get blasted. You get put on blast. And you should, because you’ve established a relationship with people. And usually people that do that early in their email funnel say something ridiculous like, look, I’ve been very successful, and I just want to help you. So here’s all this value. Well, then you’ve lied to them right on the beginning.

You’ve built your whole relationship on a lie. When you get to what you really wanted, it’s a portrayal of that relationship. And all we ever do to go back to copywriting is the scripted transfer of belief in a promise. If I am a liar and I’ve been lying to you since day one about what I want out of this relationship, there’s absolutely no reason to believe my promise later when I say I can give you what you want, but it costs money. Whereas if I say day one, I am a pirate. This is called the Hunger Games, because you don’t win, you survive. And if you want value, you give me money when I come back 30 days later and say, I can absolutely solve this problem for you. And solving this problem called $20,000, I haven’t violated the relationship.

I’m the same guy you met day one, who you trust, who you’ve been building belief in, telling you that solving this problem calls $20,000, and the guy that told you to solve for 200 is lying.

A.J. Lawrence:
Having crossed back and forth between marketing and sales and for years, saying they’re pretty much the same thing. It’s just the amount of direct, face to face talking you do. It is interesting how you’ve built that value, what everyone calls that relationship development. You’re getting people to pay, which sets you up for better client understanding. Your product discovery has to be through the roof, because you know where people are spending this. So what are then your upsells? Is it the typical done with you, done for you? You’ve mentioned masterminds. Because I’m curious, do you work as a copy consultant on things, or is this pretty much straight info all the way through?

Will Green:
I definitely will do client work on copywriting, but very expensive when it comes to that. So I take two or three clients a year there, because if you actually want a copy package, it starts at $65,000 plus a 4% royalty.

A.J. Lawrence:
More info focused products.

Will Green:
Yeah. So my background is financial info, so almost all of my clients these days are financial newsletter publishers because they’ve got big market, high margins and they can afford me, whereas no Ecom brand could do that because the margins don’t bear it out. I like clients with lots of margins because then they can save me lots of money. So if you go all the way through the higher games, I’ve got a weekly live call that I do. That’s more money. That’s a couple of. I’ve got. What I’m really excited that I’ve been working on now is actually do video teams, because video old sales is an absolute game changer for people who haven’t done it and don’t do it well. A good sales video double triples conversion rates.

They’re absolutely amazing. How can you. They’re hard to do well, and there are whole lots of complicated steps in the process that are hard to do well once you’ve got a camera set up, like you’re not done yet. So I’ve actually worked with one of my good friends and who’s my partner on this. He’s been vertically integrated for 20 years, doing ECOM in the UK and Pakistan. So he’s a UK and a pakistani citizen and he’s had factories in Pakistan that make the stuff he sell online. He just go direct to sell. And beginning of last year, we took one of his factories and we turned it into an academy and an office building.

And we started training remote teams to do high process oriented tasks that are very expensive to do in the west, but that really break themselves down to not being creative work so much as being very process driven. First you do this, then you do this, then you do this. And we’ve trained them for computer and programming tasks. And then what I did was I created a post production team. And in our academy is I’ve trained people to be video editors. Graphic designers say trained, they come in with two years experience, but we built teams to do all the post production work. So all the graphic design, all the animations, all of the cuts, all of that that come after you film the video that you need to do to get high production quality video. And one of our teams, I mean, I’ve done it.

I’ve run the budget. If you want to do hire one of our teams in the US, it would be about $180,000 in staff calls. Because you’re talking about an $80,000 production coordinator, talking about a $75,000 graphic designer, you’re talking about an $80,000 video editor. And we bundled them together, we got them trained, we pay 150% local wages. Our video editors make more than doctors do in this town. And we then embed them permanently with companies that are video heavier and want to be video heavy as their full time video post production team, and it’s an 80% call savings for them. And then we’ve got amazing work. What I love about it is we’ve really, actually taken this town and we changed the economy of this town, my partner and I are now the biggest employer in town.

We’ve created over 100 jobs. Our growth limiter right now is buying the lot next to the building because we need a bigger parking lot because we can’t have everyone come into the office anymore. And we can’t have them work from home because their houses don’t have Internet or reliable electricity. Like we have generators and stuff at the office. They have to be there. So my biggest upsell right now is actually, if you want to do video and you want to learn how to do great direct response video, it’s a combination info and fulfillment offer where there’s an onboarding package where you work for two months with me actually learning how to both work with this team and the principles of really good video. And I help you through your first video as you learn to work with the team. Because even though our teams are great, there are a lot of things that come when you say, do understand that this team is 9 hours off the east coast time, so you’re never going to be in a live meeting with them because your workday starts, theirs ends, and their cultural references are different.

Like, if you say, I want this to look like blank tv show, you really need to add a YouTube link to that description because that means nothing. But we teach you how to work with an international team on an asynchronous basis. We teach you what makes good design and how to do it, how to build out the brand vibe that you need for good video. And then we give you the team that’s your team, 40 hours a week full time for you, for your business. That’s yours to crank out video. If you’ve ever done direct response video. One thing you find even in the US is you can take people with huge experience that don’t understand the marketing, direct response side of it, and they make these beautiful Hollywood cinematic commercials and you’re like, with nothing to. You didn’t put the link. You didn’t put the link to the website. Please put the buy link in. That’s why it exists.

A.J. Lawrence:
But once we were working in some subgroups of a large CPG, probably their diapers have been on. If you have children, your baby’s bottoms. And they were doing some experiments on their own. This is 15 years ago. Their own ecommerce place. Yeah, they want to try different brands because they were seeing it grow up and they were like, okay, we don’t want to be owned by Walmart and Amazon. So how do we do some of our own direct ecommerce sale. We were asked to look at this site they had spent a couple million dollars on.

And I remember literally it was kind of the end of a large meeting and oh, the board’s meeting next door and they kind of want to hear your opinion on this. And I’m like, ok. And we walk in and they’re like, yeah, we just had this. It was the same design team that does the ballet, blah blah blah in Paris. And as I’m looking at it and I’m like, something’s weird. And my head of sales just goes, there’s nowhere on the page it says buy. There’s literally not a single, there’s all sorts of great cop like, oh, we trust you, we give to the, yeah, there’s that. It’s beautiful, but there’s no buy.

And is this still towards specifically finance? Because that process itself I played around with nowhere near as sophisticated and the value is really high. But are you doing this just for financial info products or is this for anyone who’s looking at this type of potential of direct video response?

Will Green:
This is definitely for anybody that wants video. Obviously my first clients are financial because those are my current clients. Right. I’m also doing video. And would you like to pay me a quarter of what you pay Scott? Yes. Okay, cool. That was a pretty easy sales pitch. Scott doesn’t like to be very much, but, but the whole thing is one I like diversification, being totally niche dependent, especially on a niche with a very high regulatory burden like financial kids.

If you have the FTC decide that this year they’re going to crush financial publishers, which has happened in the past and will happen again, you go from having like I’m having a great year to nobody spending money and everyone’s in cockroach mode is get small and survive. And I don’t want to be forced into cockroach mode because you are. You see, Ecom is such a growing segment of the market and it’s got such a huge semi pro segment in it, which are great customers. Those are the people that want to do it, kind of have their thing going, but maybe even make enough money that they have a great life itself. But they’re not building a business or a cool us team to do anything. They can become a great client for this and they can work well, but it’s not something where I have to be like, well look, a full copy package is a three month full time commitment for me that it’s me working on a three month full time. So I have to charge a lot of money to the thing I’m doing now, I can onboard people. The onboarding process is specific.

It’s replicatable. It doesn’t matter what your product is. I don’t have to have a deep dive understanding of your product to really do it. To say, here’s what makes really great video, here’s how you learn your audience. Here’s how you build a visual bible for graphic designers so that no matter who’s doing it, you can go and have a very simple checklist that says, is this the correct lower third? Are you using brand colors? If I put this on mobile, can I still read all the text on screen? Because if you don’t tell a graphic designer that they don’t do it, that’s just a checklist item you learn. So the process is, anybody that wants to get into video, if you want to do good ugc for your Yeecon store, whatever it is that you want to create a lot of high quality video output to grow through direct response, putting it out there on your socials, putting out there on your control pages, putting it out there in your sales process, we can take a really hard part of it that the only part that makes it kind of a hard to sell to ECom is they don’t even actually know that post production exists. So you have to educate them on the product problem. The easy part with financial info is they’ve been doing sales videos so long that they know how hard post production is.

And I literally pick up the phone to them and say I’m doing this. And they’re like yes, I don’t even finish the pitch before people sign up because there’s a real need there. But as we scale their info and Ecom, or info and financial is a much smaller market than Ecom in general. And because I don’t charge a massive premium, my teams are actually much cheaper than a us team. Of course there’s a decent margin there for me, but if I only have ten clients, it’s not going to do it. So no, I’m very interested in bigger markets. I’m interested in bringing good marketing to a wider variety of people. And a lot of my motivation there was honestly the same as the motivation of my mastermind.

Why it’s a weekly live poem instead of videos is marketing is my crack and I love it. And I love talking about how you sell any product, not just the ones that can afford to pay me a huge amount of money to talk about it. So as I built copy road, a lot of my question has been just how can I make it economically viable to do what I was going to do anyway. Because a lot of these brand owners that they’ve called me and been like, would you like to spend the next 2 hours telling me how to sell my product? I’m like, yes. There’s literally nothing I would like to do more than that, but I have to figure out how to turn that into a business.

A.J. Lawrence:
Mine tends to be more about how to create the structure and what numbers you should be paying attention to as you go, what that tells you. But I know about addiction. What about AI?

Will Green:
Not worried. Here’s the thing about AI. There’s stuff it’s really good at and there’s stuff where it might disintermediate some of my teams. I might need three people rather than 30 or something like that. But AI is never going to be good at consistency over scale. So much of the things that you train when you’re doing video is you have to have the AI. Remember this is what I did last time. And the graphics can’t be the same as they were last time.

That’s wrong. But you need to stay within our visual bible and make them work together so that if someone goes into sales video. Two, having seen sales video, one doesn’t see my face, doesn’t see anything, and sees a graphic set come up, they know it’s a copy road video because it’s visually coherent. AI is not good at that yet. My second thing is training an AI to do the things that we do. You still have to have someone in your team feed in what you want it to do in a very specific way to get a good result. And that AI regular is going to be more expensive. Even if I just end up training like, like straight up.

Whereas we got it so that I don’t think I’m hurting my marketing position or hurting anything. When I say video is pretty simple. If you run a YouTube channel, you probably have Ford graphics you ever create. And if I’m willing to do the work, and I am, as part of the onboarding process to create a visual bible that says, here are Jim’s Ford graphics and this is what they look like. And these are the fonts we use. And these are the colors we use, then I can take your script and I can also train my guys and they do. Day one in the academy for a video editor is if you haven’t moved their eyeballs and it’s been 5 seconds, you fired. You do not just leave a static person sitting on screen because that’s boring.

Something has to happen, they can go through the script and do it and mark it up and make the changes. And if in ten years, five years, three years, whatever it is, I don’t have video editors that have to go into after effects and create images, I instead they go into Google Docs and they do a call out comments and they hit make video button and something makes the video. I don’t care because the value we bring in here, yes, we execute it, but very few people. And certainly if you’re running an e comm store and you have to deal with both, what’s our next ad campaign going to be? And also who’s running the warehouses at three Pl? Are orders getting to your customers? I will tell you, as a matter of fact, you are not going to sit down and go through your script and call on every graphic you need. And if you don’t do that, the AI is not going to give you one. We are not at a point and we aren’t going to be one the next few years where AI understands context enough to go through and read just a script and create the actual images you’re going to want of your brand and do that. There will still be an AI ring, even if it can do that with more specific instructions.

A.J. Lawrence:
Project manager, right?

Will Green:
Yeah. Then that’ll be what we train my guys to do. One of the beautiful things about working in a country like Pakistan is the other options for the people we train to do this who are incredibly intelligent, incredibly hardworking people, are go work in a literal sweatshop. They’re at a fact sewing machine or whatever, making whatever 30 hours a day, or go do subsistence farming in a field, and if I say I need you to learn how to edit video and you’re going to sit at this computer in this air conditioned office that’s air conditioned, not because I’m a good human being, but because if it’s not, the computer overheats and you’re going to do that and I’m going to pay you 150% of what you can make anywhere else and there is no physical danger and you will be comfortable, they are like, yes, and if I go back a week later and I say, look, I’m not going to fire, you’re doing a fine job. I need you to learn this entirely different skill and sit and do this entirely different thing, they go, thank you, and go. And do know if I were to do that in the US or the UK or Canada, it would be, Jim, you’re doing a great job here and I love you, and I know what you’re doing, but we need to talk about the business needs someone to do this. I think you’d be a great person and I’d have to sell them on why I should continue giving them retrain. Yeah, and it would be a discussion and they would have to get buy in and whatever your team should buy in, blah, blah, blah.

My team is bulked into having a job because they exist in a society where legitimately having nothing is an option. That sounds harsh when I say it that way, but it’s not. I care very deeply about these people, about their success, about the whole ecosystem. But that different milestone, goalpost, whatever you want to call it, reference point they have means that if I have to say, for the business to survive, we’re doing this now and you need to acquire this new set of skills and I need you to acquire it by the end of next month. They will not sleep until next month to keep that happening because they know we’ve got a good thing going.

A.J. Lawrence:
You’ve created benefit, generated value, and this is the way you receive it back. You said earlier you’re only been an entrepreneur for like a year. You’ve been an entrepreneur. But the complexity of the things you’re doing, the logic that goes through the different pieces from people paying to be in your funnel to the upsells to then, now this, which, the video production, that is such a huge thing given just how much global talent is becoming part of so many companies lives and just the inefficiencies I’ve seen and the efficiencies you’re developing through this, you’re doing some really cool entrepreneurial things that I’m geeking out about. Where do you see your own success from these, not the success of these different, know the Hunger games or copy road or this service. What is going to be success for Will Green, the yellow and black pirate?

Will Green:
I’ve got a couple of answers to that. When I was a very young man, when I first went to college, my dad was driving me to the airport and he said, will, I need to give you a piece of advice. And that’s this. Look, you know how they say every generation needs to better than the one before? You need to understand right now, you will never ever do better than your grandfather. And I’ve spent a lot of my life being miserable because I’m never going to make more money than he did. And if that’s your milestone for happiness, you’re going to be a miserable human being. So move it. Choose something else.

And I completely ignored him and I absolutely want to make more money than anyone in my family has ever made. But if I can’t do that, honest to God, I want my kids to finish college with no debt. I want to be able to buy them each a house when they get married or adult, whatever. As an adult, I want to set them up for success in adulthood. I want them to understand that no matter what the economy is doing, that they are always in control of their own life, barring nuclear war. That as long as the dollar is still worth money and we use that as currency, not bullet, it’s on them. And I want to stay in the game until I die. That’s it.

A.J. Lawrence:
Thank you. And thank you for actually answering directly the amount of times I have to kind of pull people like, no, I said not your company, obviously. I think besides joining Will’s paid funnel for the Hunger Games because the money does get back to you and you did reference, I guess it is for the people who don’t follow through. That money goes to charity for the people who do die who get eliminated early won’t go, but I think people should follow at the copy road. But what’s the best way for you?

Will Green:
If you want to follow me for socials, I’m most active on Twitter @thecopyroad. The Copy Road website is currently being rebranded. I don’t know how fast you get there, even right now. There’s a form you can sign up copyroad.com and we’ll get in touch with you. I promise you, if you sign up at copyroad.com you will be given ample opportunities to pay me and join the Hunger Game starting just right away.

A.J. Lawrence:
Well, I did it right before the episode, so let me check it out afterwards. But I do want to point out one of my biggest marketing pet peeves and if will can do this, anyone listening to the show put a freaking email capture on your site and do it in an intelligent, non banging people over the head way because Will literally has nothing on the site other than a pretty cute, simple way of doing it. And if you know, you know. And it’s like that one line made it fun right there as we’ve talked and should be given that he’s a copyright. But if someone’s coming to your site 99.9% of the time they are not coming to buy, right then they are literally just window shopping and thinking you might be interested. So please, my biggest marketing pet peeve about websites, put a freaking way. So that way you will be able to talk to him later or at least me when I’m shopping because, oh, I find something cool. There’s no way other than filling out a form and asking for information.

It’s like, no, just be easy and do it. If will can do it when he has nothing, but with really nice tongue in cheek, you can do something simple on your site. So sorry, that’s just my one. Breaking the wall and talking to the audience directly. Because if will can do it, you could easily do it too. Will, thank you so much for coming on. I am really impressed with what you’re building here. I love your twitter, but this has been even a better geek out session in talking to you about what you’re building now.

Will, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Will Green:
Oh, no, thank you for having me. I had a blast.

A.J. Lawrence:
Very cool.

Well, hey everyone. Please, I asked earlier, give us a review. Prefer 5 please, please. But go wherever you listen to the show. Give us a review because this way it lets us bring more people to listen to the show and we get to talk with really cool people doing really cool entrepreneurial things like Will. And I think we’re going to have to find a way to get Will, if nothing else, to get into how he is building these outsourced teams and how they work into it. But that’s me. Later on, we’ll talk.

Thank you so much for listening today. I really appreciate it and I hope you have a wonderful week. Talk with you soon.