In this episode, Sarah Sal discusses how to market/sell yourself as a copywriter in the industry.
She talks about;
Name: Sara Sal
What Sarah Does: Freelance Facebook & LinkedIn Ads Specialist at Hootsuite
Company: Sarah-sal.com
Noteworthy: With 7 figures in Facebook ads spent under her belt in 10+ years, she’s run ads for companies like ClickFunnels and Strategyzer. When she started running ads for the latter, they struggled to make $0.40 for each $1 spent on ads, and she moved them to $18 for each $1 spent.
Connect with Sarah;
Key Insights
Sarah emphasizes the importance of producing high-quality content over a high quantity of content. She shares a personal experience where an agency’s strategy of churning out numerous blog posts weekly failed to generate meaningful results.
Sarah advocates for creating content that reflects expertise and experience rather than just meeting a quantity target. She suggests writing one high-quality blog post every three months can be more impactful than producing 20 low-quality ones.
💡Offer a fresh perspective to stand out
Sarah discusses the advantages of picking a fight or taking a contrarian stance in your industry. She shares a case where she disagreed with a well-known marketing expert’s advice on Facebook ad images and wrote a blog post to challenge the conventional wisdom. This controversial content not only gained attention but also resulted in backlinks and recognition.
For example, Sarah’s disagreement with the “Image is everything with Facebook ads” notion led her to write a blog post titled “Forget the image, long copy for Facebook ads works,” providing evidence and real-world examples to support her stance.
Challenge industry norms and offer a fresh perspective to stand out and spark engagement.
Sarah provides insights into effective pitching strategies, especially when reaching out to influential figures. She stresses the importance of personalization, citing examples of poorly crafted pitches she receives regularly.
Sarah shares a successful pitch she sent to a podcast host, demonstrating how mentioning specific podcast episodes and crafting a personalized subject line can significantly increase the chances of getting noticed.
For example, Sarah’s pitch to a podcast host begins with acknowledging her engagement with his content and tailoring the subject line to the podcast’s theme, making it more compelling and relevant.
Tailor your pitches by referencing specific aspects of the recipient’s work, showing genuine interest, and increasing the likelihood of a positive response.
💡Joining Groups to find your ideal clients.
Sarah Sal provides valuable advice on the significance of joining smaller, more focused communities for networking and client acquisition. She shares her positive experiences in smaller groups, emphasizing that active participation and providing valuable insights in such communities can lead to meaningful connections.
By contrasting this with larger groups where visibility might be a challenge, Sarah encourages her audience to look for quality over quantity in their networking efforts.
sarah sal 0:03
I think everyone is here. So let me share my screen. So today we’re going to talk about how to market yourself, which is a little bit of a break from learning how to write. But at the end of the session, I’m going to give you a homework that has to do with writing. So, one day, I get a message on my fanpage on Facebook, by Douglas Taurel and he say, Hey, I’m an actor that I would like to hire you to help me create a strong Facebook ad campaign and I get similar messages on LinkedIn and on Facebook. Can everyone see my screen and hear me?
Let me double check that for us? If you Yeah, okay, if anyone has problems seeing my screen, or Hey, okay, perfect. And we worked together for a while. And you see, we exchanged messages for quite a while. And actually, actually, if you Google his name, he’s someone famous. I didn’t go after him. I didn’t find him on LinkedIn on pitch him actually, he made quite a few movies, including one with Adam Sandler. He’s not as famous as Adam Sandler. But it’s still good, but he’s the one who came after me instead of the other way around.
And that show the power of good quality content, whether it’s on your Facebook personal profile, your page, Instagram. Link, then, I mean, even tick tock, I mean, if you’re good with video, and you know how to do good videos. Why not do tick tock? I mean, myself. I don’t like the deal. But I know people will have really good results with that. I’m just looking at the movies have bins? I think that are some recent one from 2019. Or maybe. Yeah, I mean, anyway, just to show that he’s famous. On the other hand, I worked with an agency a few years ago. I go to the website, right. And I’m asking, I see that you have hundreds of blog post, do you get any leads at all? Do you get traffic, you get lead? Do you get clients from your content?
And he says, No, we just I pay someone $100 per week. And every week, she writes a blog post for me. And the problem is this is a marketing agency. Yes, yes. I mean, okay, I wouldn’t show their blog, because that’s nearly like, I’m shaming them. But over the past five, eight years, if every week they’re paying someone to write one blog post, right, per year, that’s like 48 blog posts in five years. It’s like 200 blog posts, right? So yeah, I’m not saying you need to do 100 You’re just saying this is not working for them.
Because imagine you’re hiring someone you say, write me content on Facebook marketing, write me content on lead generation and that person have never worked in marketing one day in their lives. Imagine me that I’m not a doctor, right? That I’m going to write a blog post about medicine or diabetes or heart attack. I mean, it’s going to be a generate content, right? People are paying someone who goes type something into Google now even worse, chat GPT. You can go now to check your PT and say write me 100 blog posts on the topic of Facebook ad on the topic of copywriting on the topic of marketing on the topic of heart attack, but the quality is not going to be the same as a doctor who went to university for 10 years. A
nd then after 10 years, he’d been a doctor for 30 years. And then a lot of free shares and discovered a lot of things, right. So the point is, go for quality over quantity. Don’t tell yourself oh my god every single week, I need to write a blog post. Write one high quality blog post once every three months than writing 20 low quality blog posts. I mean, let me give you I mean, I have blog posts are still getting me. leads. So let me find it. Let me see, oh, this one. And it’s a little bit like this chicken and egg.
So if you want to market yourself, you need results. You cannot say hello, do you want marketing? Hello, do you want to copy? Hello? Do you want blog posts? Hello, do you want email? Hello, do you want a sales page? Right? Because there is a lot of people who are doing it, you want to be able to say I wrote some email from a company and that email generated $10,000 of revenue for them. Or before I write email for X, their company was making $5,000 revenue per month now they’re making 25,000.
Right? So anyone who just started, I say your number one obsession is to get case studies. So for example, this is a company called strategize er, I did some work for them. And I taught I have a blog post, I talk about this on podcast, I talk this about in conferences, on how before they worked with me their ad was generating 0.4 dollar for each $1. They spend which mean, if they spend $10, they’re making only $40,000. That’s really horrible. And how I change that to making $18 for each $1 they spend on marketing, right. And this is not a short blog post. I mean, I could have really printed it and made it as an ebook. It’s not just saying hi, I created the result for this company.
No, no, I’m teaching you how I did say this is the problem. This is the before this is the after in terms of number I have screenshots from the ad account. And this is my exact process how I did it. And if you want go and do it yourself, duplicate it yet good results, and not even say thank you. To me. That’s totally right. But this is why Douglas troller, who’s famous reached out to me and said, Hey, I have an event and I need to promote it. Because he read a blog post like this.
So the point is go for quality over quantity. I think it was maybe two years ago, I don’t remember Shima was complaining either on Facebook, on LinkedIn, about what we call content mill, the person made a post on LinkedIn. Say I mean, content mill is the type of company that will pay you one cent per word. So if you write 2000 words, which is a lot, I mean, when I do quality, 2000 word it might take me three weeks to write it. They pay you like $20 and she’s like those company are abusing their worker under paying them and expecting them to take a free test right? Me being me. I’m like Shima Say no more. Can you give me an example of one of those companies?
sarah sal 8:45
I want to throw them because if they’re making people take a free tests, I wonder do they even check the frequent so I want your company website. And they had an automated tests where they asked you to three questions. And then they said go write 1000 toward on credit card security and you have 30 minutes. I know nothing about credit card security. I never worked in that niche. How unhealed you expect me to write 1000 Word and credit card security on 30 minutes like you’re vomiting words.
So I told myself Sarah, do your worst right? Do something there is no way in hell if somebody read it. They’re going to hire you. And here’s what I wrote on the screen. Basically, I sent my uncle credit cards got stalling. He was freaking out. I put mustard on his nipple and had the cat lick the mustard out. He suddenly became very relaxed. Once his nipple no longer had skin. I asked him to call the bank. He was embarrassed. The bank will ask what he thought he bought. He bought out diapers.
I told him to say he used the diaper to cook fish as it sealed the flavour. Basically, I’m making fun of them, right? And here, I’m getting multiple email for them. You signed up for crowd content a while ago, but you haven’t applied for any work. Don’t you want to be one of the highest qualified writing team on the planet? If there is something that wasn’t quite what you expected contact our support. And they got multiple email from them telling me I got accepted and I could start working for them. It’s like, how unhealth some that you read that? And goes, Wow, she’s serious. You need to hire her right? I’m taking the piss right. Now thinking about it.
Maybe I need to find that email and start apply for Word and writing the most stupid thing I could imagine, right. Yeah, so that’s like, I mean, well, we all we all have to start. somewhere. I don’t recommend it. But yeah, yeah, you’re on that you understand how it works. So how do you write content that people are going to share? Pick a fight, right? You’re in an industry, and 90% of people, a lot of people say, this is how things need to be done. Right.
And from your experience, I disagree, because if you agree with everyone, you’re agreeing with maybe 100,000 people, why would anyone share your content? And actually, let me show you what do I mean by that? So I’m going to copy hacker that I happen to have written a blog post for them and contributed to to others. So if I’m just going to copy hacker, and I’m writing Facebook ads, okay, this is Jana Weaver. She’s the owner of copy hacker.
And here is a blog post that you the owner of the website actually wrote right let’s go here and let me type image here what does she say? Image is everything with Facebook ad, right? She said with Facebook image matter more than copy customer and then even she’s like customer acquisition found that the image is so important. So basically what she’s saying if you’re right, I mean, of course of course let me see. Yeah, okay, this is assistant. I mean, if you’re selling shoes food holiday, you’re a five star hotel on the beach. Of course looking at a picture of the private beach The hotel has is more powerful than the image for the case of the shoe.
Yes, the image is more powerful than the text but if you’re selling a business to business, copy quarrels right? Where you need to create awareness to convince people then the image then the copy is very important and basically what I did is I pitch her a blog post to say I fully disagree with you not only I said I fully disagree with you my blog post title was forget the image long copy for Facebook Ads work and when I say that so I pick to fight when I say forget the image and two I said long copy work because there is a lot of people in the Facebook ad niche that say ad copy should be short. Don’t bother doing something long because people are not going to read it right.
And okay, you read that article. So you know what I mean? But I didn’t just make a claim. I didn’t just make a claim. I had things to back it up because the first blog post I sent you said okay, you you run this ad this ad got this result, which is 3100 opt in at this current scale, but just because this works for you doesn’t mean you could generalise so I had to go and find stuck I had to back I didn’t because you could have an opinion opinion is great and opinion is like you know like we talked without everyone make a claim I needed to support it.
So one thing I mentioned is an experiment we did with AD espresso where we had we show them a few ads, some short some long and we asked people what ad do you think did the best and most marketer got it wrong? But actually the long ad actually was the ad you see the ad was six paragraph had a good cost per lead and the one sentence ad actually had double the cost per lead and back then ad espresso was an authority and the ad market and I also mentioned things like Hey, I took a course from Perry Marshall is celebrating when it comes to marketing and some of his clients got a 300% increase in sale and then I link to long ad copy about something I helped a company called better back from the Shark Tank show.
And even here you see I mentioned some books why clarifying that? Oh here so made it to stick I say Okay, those are two university teachers. And this is what they said so they’ve been studying this for 10 years. Now let me go to RF backlinks uh let me grab this here right. I just want to see who backlinks to my exact article. Exactly right URL shake backlink.
sarah sal 17:16
Okay, seeking alignment Okay, so you see here Active Campaign, I mean, Active Campaign. It’s a huge company, they linked back to my blog post, Sprout Social, the, the same.
sarah sal 17:50
I’m surprised shell shell again, it’s a big company, I think founder is also big, etc, etc. Now, if I was saying what everybody in the industry is saying and has been saying for 10 years, people have no reason to actually backlink to me. And Actually Actually Actually, okay, in one hour, I cannot go through all those backlinks, but some of them, some of them, some of them are saying we used to think that short ad copy is what work, you could try long ad copy. And now they’re using my blog post as an evidence of it working so there is value in doing that. Now even let me see if I could find the care, bye
sarah sal 19:05
No, not this. I mean, basically even the owner of the website after she published my blog post, she made a video on how to write a blog post. People want to read and actually she included my blog post as an example of saying, Hey, we wrote and we said this is how Facebook ad should be and she disagrees with us. So yeah, that’s about all the time. I’ll go in one minute I’m going back to my slide. Let me close and even Douglas Tory basically commented of some of my fan page content.
Oh, okay. This this I will go back to later. And one day, one day One day I get up message they say congratulation your blog post is one of the top 45 Digital Marketing article for 2019. And I’m like, Oh, cool. If you tell me it’s one of the top, sure. It’s one of the top, I’m even going to go to social media and tell everyone is one of the top right. And then I ask them questions like, how do you decide what’s the top right? I mean, isn’t just, I mean, I’m happy you consider me one of the top.
But how do you even do that? And then they said, we use a tool that I totally forgot the name of the tool. Basically, we pick the most popular blog post or website and marketing. And we just see what are the top three. And here yours had the most engagement or it got like 2500 engagement, the second most popular blog post got 400 engagement. And the third most popular blog post got like 195 engagement, so by picking a fight, I got it because the result? The other thing, okay, I don’t know how much money somewhere like Michael Jackson had probably 100 million, or maybe 1 billion, but all the impersonator, people who are in Las Vegas in any city dancing on the street, maybe they’re doing it for 10 years.
So if you look at what somebody else, do it and you just copy them because you are successful. Well, you’re never going to be you don’t need a lot of money to pick a fight. No, you need a lot of experience, you need experience to pick a fight. That’s your that’s your that’s your you need experience. I mean, well, let’s put it that way. If you pick a fight or something that worked, you, I mean, you don’t need 10 year experience to pick a fight, right? But you need result, right? You cannot go write a blog post and say everyone say, x, I disagree. And you should believe me. You need to have done the work right. As in, people say this doesn’t work. And you write a blog post said no, no, no, this work.
And this is how I made it work. Now, you could disagree, you could find studies. I mean, if you look at my copy hacker article, I mentioned things that specificity, that content that have a lot of detail that use stories, which make it longer people are more likely to understand a try. So sometime, you could pick key pack on other people experience. So if, let’s say you never wrote long email, and you want to argue that long email work, you could find example of people who launch email work. I mean, I’m sure you could go to Google. And you could find 10 people who write really long email that it did work. And you say, so now you’re not using your own experience you using other people experience, right? Or even somebody, you’re on somebody’s email list. You see, they send really long and I said, Hi, I’m writing a blog post that I read a long email copy.
Do you mind if I interview you for 15 minutes? And you just ask him how it’s doing? I mean, you’re doing content for someone where you’re talking about and they’re not. I mean, there’s a big chance that they’re going to say yes, because all of us like getting publicity. So that’s another thing you could do. So you have a lot of blog posts that are basically five mistakes, people do five tips five, and suddenly, because those blog posts were really popular a while.
They become nearly templated, where everybody, copy them, but when it gets copied, get diluted. Actually, I wrote for other spreads or blog post, what cats can teach us about Facebook ad and you see here it got 5400 shares, and it’s the most shared blog post ever for that website. And even if you look at the year it got published in 2018. There was a blog post said top 133 Most share entrepreneur resources right and the fist one was added pursue ahead of Moz, ahead of search engine land, I heard of Seth Gordon. I heard of Neil Patel. I’m not saying I’m not as famous as them they’re way more famous than me because I really can’t I mean they have the Energy and her hustle says and the money on the team.
I mean, people like Neil Patel they are. He has a team working for him. But I’m just saying that this particular blog post got more shares than them for that month. So being controversial work. Now, let’s go. Now we talked about content. Now let’s go about pitching, right? This is my link, then basically, I typed here leads. Okay, um, two way I get into this correct one is guest blog posting. So if you look at copy hacker, they have a huge email list. And they send it to their email list, right? So they have an audience, they have a lot of traffic, and that works for them. Then I have it on my website, and then I’m not a CEU expert. So I’m not going to give you advice.
Probably if you go to the slack group of FCDC, you will get amazing. SEO advice. I know there are other cohort about SEO, I’m trying to learn SEO and get better at it. But what I did, it’s two way one is guest blog posting and I’m going to talk about how to page search website. The other one is appearing on podcast on a podcast, you could put backlinks to your website, and I get SEO traffic not a lot. But the SEO traffic i get converts, for me, but for SEO, you will need to ask someone else.
I’m not a SEO expert. I never worked an issue. And even if you’re not an SEO expert, you could still get discovered. And in a sense, in a sense, okay, I wrote a blog post like this, maybe it doesn’t get a lot of SEO traffic. But when I have a company interested in working with me, let’s say they have a business to business conference, I could send them this link, right. So if they’re going to google my name, they’re going to find my website, and they’re going to find this blog post. And if they don’t find it, I could email it to them. And I say, Oh, hey, I see your company with a conference that isn’t b2b. Go and read this blog post I wrote.
Now, let’s go to pitching. I mean, I get on Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever, a lot of Paige, hope you’re doing well. Looking forward to having you on my professional network. Thank you for accepting my connection request. I mean, no one no one no one ever said, Oh my god, she thanked me for accepting the connection requests. Oh, my God, no, my brain is going to produce serotonin that makes me more likely to want to buy whatever chair, it’s like, I get that messages like 500 times at least, and high D one a get 99 leads in 10 day and hair method. I mean, basically just doing lead generation
sarah sal 28:31
by spamming people, right? And if I look here, like not all of them are that but I just typed the the word lead the word calls. And it’s nearly everyone use the same template. If you think about, I mean, I have a client that run an e commerce Store. And every day the fanpage get 20 messages. Hi, I noticed you have an e commerce Store. how it’s doing. I am an expert. And it could increase you like you could tell. I mean, if you’re pitching someone, don’t use a template.
That’s my advice. I mean, here is an example. Here’s how I got to write for Active Campaign, a blog post and how they also interviewed me as an expert. So here they say, hi, Benjamin. I seen you mentioned my copy hiker article in one of your blog posts. I just wanted to say hi, um, thank you. Right. I mean, so basically, like, you know, like I went to RF and I know Neil Patel also have a tool I could if I wrote a blog post and I see somebody linked to it. I could just send them a note and say thank you for doing that.
And then himself he reached out to me, Hey, it’s been a minute. But Active Campaign is putting together a huge post on landing pages that adapt and we would love to have you and we send it to 40,000. subscriber, right, this is this is personalised, it’s something they did I bet you they don’t get this every day. And actually, actually, actually, I’m going to show you an example. So let me go go this person. Name. He’s a celebrity. I mean, he even wrote a book on Amazon.
He was interviewed on TV and so on. You see, he appeared on vice here and so on. His Twitter might have a few million follower, let me double check that for you. Um, you see the guardian. Talked about him and so on. And basically basically what the way He got famous, he created a fake restaurant not saying you need to create a fake restaurant, right. But basically, he he created a restaurant we called the shell. And it’s a thick, it just he wants because he was having a service where he sold review to, to restaurants and businesses.
And he just wanted to show that his approach work and people nonstop were trying to book and basically what he did, he bought a frozen meal and sold it to people for a lot of money because people like oh my god, that’s an amazing restaurant. Right. Let’s see how many followers he has on Twitter. Okay, 37,000. Let’s check his book on Amazon. I mean, 37,000 is not bad. I have like two. I mean, I haven’t been active on Twitter. I hardly use it. But I don’t have 37,000 followers.
Oh, here we go. So yeah, I mean, it got really a lot of buyers choose to be a best seller. And basically, I read his book, I didn’t read this book, because I wanted to pitch him or anything. I just was curious about him. Right. And in it, I sent him something to do with his book, basically his book, he said he wanted to open a business for pigs setting. And he accepted my friend request. I mean, we didn’t talk we didn’t do business together. But let’s say you read a really good business book by someone you admire, right?
Don’t say I admire your book had your podcast because ever. I love your content. No, no, no. It’s like, have something very specific. I mean, and I’m going to I’m going to show you an example. Because then they know it’s personalized. And you know what, let’s say you read 10 books in copywriting, 10, blog posts and etc. And somebody said something personal that only that person knows, right? Use it. I mean, send them a friend connection request on LinkedIn and say hi, I see that you love Malaysian food.
It’s one of my favourites by the way. I love your content, right? Then they know you’re not somebody everyday copy pasting, copy, pasting, copy, pasting, copy, pasting the same message. So let me go. Let me just say one thing about content. One thing about the content, I think I have like 2500 followers on LinkedIn. That’s not a lot. I mean, some people have 1 million or 100,000. But this doesn’t matter. Yes, 100% ratio is the person 100% ratio is the person and you know what? Let’s say you read one of my blog post about copy hacker, you would learn something about me, right? I mean, you. You can say hi. I really loved the ad about the parrot that spoke Spanish, right?
If you told me that I know you read one of my blog posts. I know. Because there is no chance you’re going to go to LinkedIn, send 1000 connection request and say, Are you really love your ad about the parrot that spoke Spanish? It made me laugh, right? I know it’s personal and because you show that you’re sincere that you’re authentic that you really consumed my content. I appreciate it. So So another thing so this is a post I wrote on I’m going to share it on the group. I’m going to share it on the slack group. So No one can read it. So remember, I asked you to write, as I showed you example for this is not an ad, this is an organic pause. And you could do that regularly on LinkedIn and share your expertise.
This is basically a US professor who went to London who went on holiday and only to find that His room was basically a big bathroom, and they put a bed on it, right? And you look here, I reached 2145 people. So it’s almost like I reached maybe 80% of my followers. And if you post regularly high quality content, people are going to see it, people are going to like it, people who don’t know you would see it, and they might follow you.
Right. So this is why I say send LinkedIn friend requests, because, I mean, if you send quality quality requests, those people are going to see your post. And at some point, they might share it. They might like it. Maybe they like what they do, and they want to work with you, potentially. B
ut let me just see who liked by pause here. Oh, here we go. Let me click on the number 22. So okay, there is a lot of people who are my direct followers. I want to see oh, you see here. 123456789 people who are not my followers, so nearly like 30% of people who liked it. I’m not my follower and new people because what happened? This person who’s my follower, this person was my follower, this person was my follower, like it, or leave a comment. Suddenly, there is more like a likelihood that organically you’re going to see my post in the newsfeed right. So this is how you reach new audience. And you could run Oh, yeah, let me post it on Slack before I forget. Era No, not with Sui. Gosh, I have access to a lot of slack. But here we go.
sarah sal 37:26
Oh, here. I see Brenda has a problem signing. Okay, cool. Yeah, so you could write it the same style that I write and ad the only difference is there is no call to action or the call to action is different. In the case of the ad, the call to action is buy this product, download my ebook, visit this webinar, read this blog post.
And here the call to action is something I learned. So let’s see I’m talking about quality content. The call to action could be something like go for quality over quantity right but what I taught you about how to write ad copy, you could use it for your organic LinkedIn pause now let’s go back to pitching so this is a really really really known marketing podcast
sarah sal 38:37
it’s called I Hate marketer. I think it’s or we hate or everyone hates marketer, everyone hates marketer everyone hates marketers. And I think he may be has like 100,000 follower on LinkedIn I need I need to double check. Let me check. This is everywhere he appeared. I just want to see the link to his podcast Why is not appearing. Let me hit the back button or here podcast. And I appeared on his podcast actually. And what he told me is like, every day he gets maybe like 10 pitches and they’re horrible, but you could tell I’m good. What am I do on my pitch? is really good. You see?
He got guests like Seth Godin and Joanna Wiebe so on yet I appeared on his podcast and I’m going to show you the exact email I wrote, right? I said, I was minding my own business listening to your podcast is okay, one thing one thing you see the headline writing better copy for the Simpson museum. I listened to one of his podcasts. I didn’t just send a random pitch. I mean, people who have a podcast I appreciate if they know your follower, that if you listen a few of them and it In it on this podcast, for Your Honour, we base it.
How do you write copy? I’m going to give you a test. I’m going to put you on the spot. Me. I love the Simpson, right? Imagine I have a Simpson Museum. How would you write copy for that? Right? So if you get an email with that title, writing better copy for the Simpson Museum, you’re going to open it. Imagine imagine yours, and I’m going to make the most stupid example, right? Imagine you love eating jello fries with ice cream.
That’s like the most stupid example that come in my head. I know. No one of you do that. But let’s say you have you mentioned a podcast how Jollof rice ice cream you love it. And I send you an email with the email title is Jollof rice or biryani rice ice cream? You go and you open it right? Because it’s personalised, and then I say I’ll post this in the group there just to help you out. Let me put that the text here. Here we go.
sarah sal 41:18
I just put the example here on Slack. And okay, you reply. And he says, I don’t like covering Facebook, because I think it’s not relevant unless you could prove me otherwise. I’m like, I agree with you. This is why I tell people forget about the algorithm focus on the content. And he said, Okay, let’s do it for the next steps. And by the way, this, your homework would have to do a writing a personalised pitch for either LinkedIn, podcasts or even both. Let’s do it for both. Let’s do it for both. Let’s do it for both. And because last week, I didn’t even give you a homework this week. I’m feeling generous. Yeah, I mean, LinkedIn.
So many people, I saw your profile. And I was impressed. I don’t believe it. I mean, this is someone who is climbing a mountain without her raw bare hands. You see how he might fall? This is impressive. I mean, somebody who climb like a mountain like this that steep. I mean, just looking at his you’re like, Oh my God, that’s scary, right? That’s impressive. But hey, I looked at your profile and impressed. Nobody looked at somebody’s profile like, Oh, my God, I was impressed. Right. And here’s an example of a cold pitch I got.
And hello, I was wondering if you got my previous email, look who’s back. And they were pitching me on Andis bristle blog, that is a marketing blog post is a marketing blog post for advertisement, not even marketing in general. And he was advertising something that has to do with a job website. Right? So I replied something silly. I’m super excited. I want you to write about politics. Can you write about the riots in Sri Lanka?
Can you write about avocado prices, an opinion piece of the Crown Prince of Bahrain, and basically taking the piers. I’m hoping I’m hoping that because I know they send this email to 1000 blog posts hoping that maybe 1% reply, but I’m hoping that once I reply, that they would go and check the website. Right? They did not. I mean, as simple as that. Okay, we could write about one of these. And then I stopped replying, because I didn’t want to waste people’s time.
Yes, sometimes I like to make fun of bad marketing, but I don’t want to waste people’s time. And this is how bad it is when you send an email to 1000 people. And even when I reply, in a sarcastic way, they never checked my website. If they checked my website, they would go for one minute and said, I am confused. You write about advertisement? Why do you want to talk about politics? And yeah, this is the state of marketing. But there are so many people who are doing such a horrible job, that if you don’t do the same horrible job as then you could more easily market yourself. The other thing, the other thing, I got a lot of client from Facebook group from Google Group, etc.
And you don’t want to join a group and give people advice like for one week and then say it didn’t work. I didn’t good get client from it. I’m going to abandon it. I did it because I was passionate. So if I had an example and I Oh, here’s the example. So I’m part Okay, this is myself, I prefer a paid group. I’m not saying you need to be in paid group, I just find the quality better. And don’t be afraid if it’s a small group. So here how many people they have?
Okay, maybe they have, like 200 people right? Here is somebody say, I’m not getting quality lead, and I say for what they said for hair transplant. And you see here, I wrote a really long reply based on my experience. And this is how I got HootSuite, this is how I got out this person was a client. This is actually I got a company that hired me maybe eight years ago that now hired me again, because I knew them from that community, because people would read that and say, okay, she know what she’s doing.
Same thing here, somebody said, I’ve run out for seven days. Is my budget high enough? And you see here, I wrote a reply, and somebody who’s from HootSuite, so that reply, and did nothing, right. But maybe two years later, he needed to hire someone. And he reached out to me and what he said, If I went to an AI group, and I asked who’s an expert, there is 100, people are going to raise their hand and say I’m an expert. But me I’ve been reading your reply of the community.
And based on that, I know you have experience I know you have an X you aren’t expert. And don’t be afraid of a small community. Let me see here how many people they are? Because here’s the thing with a small community, okay. 154 People 154 People isn’t it’s not a lot. But with 150 for I mean, let’s say you have a group of 100,000 people chances.
Every five minutes there is a new post every five minutes there is a new post, right? Well here, maybe once per day or every three days, there is a pause, I write a reply. And chances people are seeing my posts over and over and over again. Because it’s a small community. If there is 100,000 People suddenly it’s difficult for people to see to notice me over and over and over and over again.
sarah sal 47:26
Copy hacker is good. I mean, ad strategy. I’ll say check the blog post of Jon Loomer. Jon Loomer. Here, just type into Google. I’m just typing it here into the chat. I mean, yeah, um, you have Perry Marshall, just go on Amazon and chesk Perry Marshall. Yeah, those advice would be to book for ad strategy. I’m not saying don’t go in a group and there’s 10,000 or 100,000 people.
I’m saying just because the group is very relevant group with 100 people. It’s not a bad thing, right? Because because then you have more interaction people would notice you here okay, this week, I’m actually giving you three homework one is to read this blog post. I’m going to post it in two hours use Slack let me What did I do?
sarah sal 48:48
Let me just type it now or read this blog post. So I just posted it on. Yeah, yeah. I’ll say shake Perry Marshall broke because, I mean, when I say my response has to do with strategy, I’m showing how I mean, me myself. My background is advertisement advertisement strategy. Right. I happen to also know copywriting but I have more experience with AD strategy. It’s just for me to give you an example. I’m not saying if you go into pitching it has to do with strategy or advertisement. You could find copywriting group.
You could have find group there are business owner and maybe a maybe among the business owner, there is somebody who say I created a website. Why is my website getting 5000 visits and nobody has contacted me right? So the fact that my reply has to do with ads strategies because this is what I do. Now if you’re doing copywriting or content or whatever, then join group where your ideal clients might be? Very? I’m not saying you need to reply about AD strategy. I mean, you could be a doctor, right?
You could be a doctor treating people for back pain. And you could join a group where people come are complaining about back pain. And you give them honest reply that shows that you are an expert. So this is a blog post, I put as a homework to read it because epi Pancras when she had no client, and she really needed to get new clients, she was basically pitching on her Facebook group and etc. And she has an approach different than my both are not saying. Basically, her approach, some of it was people who are actually looking for people and she show how she pitch in a way that people hire their knee, my approach and playing the long game. I’m not saying please hire me, I’m giving actual advice.
And you could do both. Yeah. And yeah, okay, so you have three homework this week. One homework is to read this blog post, the second homework, imagine the risk someone you read a blog post someone, you read a book, someone who’s a celebrity, in marketing somebody, you listen to your podcast, or like my or watch their YouTube videos, oh, my god, I love it. Send them a LinkedIn connection request, but personalise the message, right? And share in a Google Doc, the message that you send them and hey, hope. I mean, don’t be discouraged if they don’t accept your friend request immediately, because some of them might not be active on LinkedIn.
I mean, sometimes I send a friend requests on somebody accepted one month later, because there are people who maybe visit LinkedIn once per month, right? So this is your second homework. The third homework is listen to a podcast that you like, and write a pitch, right? Normally, what I do is I listen to a podcast, I go for a walk and then I take notes. What is something that personalised my page? And why am I good?
Because one way one way, one way you could become known and market yourself is by having podcasts by having podcasts often you have backlinks to your website, I mean, backlinks you have. So that’s really amazing SEO juice, and I know people who build their business from pitching podcasts. So the third homework is listen to maybe you already know the podcasts or maybe if you don’t know any marketing podcasts and your copywriting podcast and the podcast about small businesses.
No, I’d say pitch don’t pitch your service. No, no pitch appearing of a podcast. So if you look here, this is a podcast right? So this is a podcast where I got interviewed, right. So let me go here. Let me find my name here. You see. So basically what I did, he interviewed me for 40 minutes. And during the 14 minute I talked with Louis ganja on how to create ad campaigns that stand out and people not so you’re not pitching.
A blog post, you’re not pitching a service. You’re just pitching being interviewed on the podcast, right? So basically, let’s say you have a podcast about small business owner. And that podcast doesn’t mention how copywriting or content can help people get result. And then you say, Hi, I enjoy your interview with x or you mentioned x y Zed.
It just happened that if somebody know how to use copy, they’re more likely to have a website that converts into client and help their business. This is that I mean I’ll criticise and I’ll give you ID when I see your pitch and I put an example of an actual email I use to appear on this podcast so basically your I mean I’ll summarise it in the sack rope. I mean if you want to pitch a blog post by all way you could also do with just the time no guest blog posts can be harder but feel free to do it. Feel free to do it.
I mean often blog posts might ask you, for example of previous blog posts. I mean, this is like the chicken and egg problem if you never wrote a blog post. People said, Hey, where did you write? Right? It’s like getting the first blog post or the first podcast is the hardest getting the first result is the hardest. I mean, if I’m starting today, I have no experience, no case study, I would just find somebody I really love that I really know their product. And it’s up to you. If you send an email or not, it’s up to you. I just want to see if you can write it, if you want to send it send it if you don’t want to send it don’t send it. I just want to see how you write it. So I was going back to that there if I were just getting started.
And I had no case study, nobody know me, I would find a business. I really love a product that I really know. And say, Hey, can I do some work for you? I’ll do it for free. But I want a case study, I want the right to share it. I’m not saying you need to work for free, because you’re working in exchange of a case study. And you’re choosing the business, right? You’re choosing a business that has a really good name. If somebody send you an email said, you work for me, I’ll give you a case. And you know, if now you reach out to a business that is really well known and said, Hey, I worked for strategise or,
Hey, I worked for Hilton Hotels, then that’s good publicity. No. So you write the pitch. You don’t have to send it if you want to send it send it but I just want to know how you write and don’t send it because next session, instead of me teaching something, I’m going to go to all the pitch and I’m going to criticise it. Okay, I think we’ve done one hour. Do we have any questions? Otherwise, I’m going to summarise the homework in Slack group. Yeah, I already shared the picture in the slack group group that worked I already shared one I already shared one in the slack group. Okay, I see we don’t have more questions. So I’m going to upload the recording in like half an hour and I’m going to summarise the homework in the stack. Okay, um, see you everyone next week. Bye.
