Divi Chat Episode 224 - Conquering the Copywriting Conundrum with Vito Peleg

what's up everybody welcome to divi chat i don't expect a lot of people to be here live with us for the at this moment because we are so close to on time like so like so close it's one it's divvy chat 01 which means we're early yeah so uh oh yeah somebody just mentioned in the chat we have six more minutes no we're here because we got to keep you guys on your toes none of this showing up at seven after thinking you're on time that's what we get to do anyway we we're excited we're here almost certain time we've got uh a fun guest with us today our pal vito peleg let's hear it for vito he's here joining and uh we are going to talk about the thorn in the side of every web developer web designer and that is copy the dreaded copy whether you're trying to get it from a client find a copywriter to do it you're trying to do it whatever it is it sucks right so we're gonna try and conquer this beast today and see if we can make your life a little bit easier uh before we dive into this topic we're gonna go around oh i forgot to tell vito beforehand we go around in a circle okay so i'm gonna i'm stephanie yes yes clockwise around this is new and it's been a very very difficult adoption so we're just gonna try it today someone messes up everything every time yeah uh and i should have i try to say it before we start to remind everybody so that's on me today my name is stephanie hudson i run focus wp where we help busy freelancers and agency owners who want to add more services to their um to their options for their clients or if they just need a few more hands on deck and one of those things happens to be copywriting so we may mention that later as well but anyway uh you can find out more at focuswp.com and come hang out in our facebook group focus on your biz and mike is gone alfred he was just vacant back his seat was make it okay i'm a bit i'm a bit worried about my wi-fi things are things i'm having a few technical difficulties here so i will carry on and see what happens uh so hi everyone i'm mike of design pro broadcasting from the uk uh looking forward to tonight's topic copywriting um at web design pro we like nothing more than a bit of laura mipsum to create websites but we also like alternatives to laura mipsum there's cupcake ipsum keeping everything sweet zombie ipsum works well very well for anyone like me that doesn't do mornings stephanie would probably like cat ipsum but unfortunately no one has yet called the market in steve jobs ipsum now i can't think of anyone on the panel that may want to fill that void so during the show tonight let us know what ips and you would like and we'll display it on our live stream i love it how can i feel [Laughter] forgot pirate ipsum which is my favorite pirate yes or gore i should try one of those i still get clients saying to me oh there's the there's some other language on the screen like yes because you haven't given me your content anyway we'll come to that later exactly i'm sarah oates and sorry i've been thrown here um today it is 9 00 a.m in australia so i was here an hour ago i was ready to go i was like super on time this week and i didn't realize the time had actually changed so if you're in australia and like me you were an hour early welcome we now get to be here at 9 a.m for the rest of summer which is so exciting um no more 8 a.m or 7 a.m which is very exciting um i do try and get myself some colored lights because i need to join the cool kids but they're so like povo hold on can i move they're so promo that you can barely see oh well you also have them inside a bookshelf well it's behind the bookshelf i was hoping it would like spray upwards anyway i'm going to be moving offices i didn't want to like attach it to a wall i'll get advice later i'm not as cool as the cool kids but i'll get there don't you worry uh you can catch me at enduro.com.edu or in dual web on the socials over to me yeah yeah you got it you got it so i'm vito i'm the founder of atarim and the co-founder of bertha dot ai um i i started as a freelancer building websites for clients dealing with all of these uh nonsense that we're gonna be talking about uh uh on this session and then i then i scaled up an agency uh to a team of 12 before um venturing on to build products that are designed to help web agencies like us to eliminate all of these challenges and really it was interesting that you mentioned the lower mipsums because um we bertha was called um by a few people it was it was called the logan ipsum killer so showing how that works [Laughter] you'll never kill our ipsum hillary uh hey everyone tim streifler here i'm broadcasting from san clemente california and you can find me online at divi life.com where i have all my divi plugins child themes tutorials and layouts and uh i guess i'm gonna go ahead and say that my favorite is hipster ipsum and i've actually used it on real sites um and it's i don't know it's more conversational and it's very hipster so it's talking a lot about coffee shops and uh brewing and stuff like that let me guess you knew about hip strips and before it was cool i did exactly yes 100 it's still like pretty under the radar it's still you know it's not mainstream yet so right so it's still okay yeah so guys top the topic for today is conquering the copywriting conundrum do you like the alliteration that we threw in there for the copywriting today and i thought maybe we'd kick off uh the episode by sort of discussing what type what what is this conundrum a lot of most episodes we have tim kick off by defining something i don't think we really need to define copywriting but tim maybe break down some of the like just an overview of sort of some of the struggles and then i thought maybe we'd talk about how each of us have tackled these things in our in our agencies yeah absolutely so when you're building websites for clients the constant struggle is getting content from your client so content being images being the copywriting a lot of smaller businesses they don't have a full-time writer on staff or you know they're not trained in copywriting and so it's always a constant struggle to get content and then also getting content that's actually good and and well written because there's a difference between um copy that's done for a blog post then copy that's done for a sales page and so um yeah this is definitely an important topic and so i'm excited to to hear from vito on on some of his solutions because i've i've heard about them but i haven't myself diving deep into them so um yeah very excited to hear about bertha um does that answer your question stephanie on breaking down the conundrum i mean that's that's the one issue so where does the copy come from you know we we know how to build a website we can design it or we can get designers to do it we can develop it or we can get other developers to develop for us but a lot of times when we really run into those to the struggle is the copywriting it seems like most folks in this in in the industry like the people that are listening that are here right now you're probably not a copywriter you might be but you're probably not and so that's it's tough to find somebody that can write well for you and it's expensive to ha and then that jacks up the price of the project without really increasing your profit a ton and then if you don't do that if the client doesn't want to do that then you've got to get the copy from them or write it yourself and writing it yourself is never easy and when the it comes from the client like where to begin with the list of issues from that right so we because they don't do it well they never turn it into they always always always underestimate the amount of time and stress that it'll cause them to write it plus it's never going to be keyword driven and all of that once they do it then like the current struggle that i'm battling with which is like it's it's not new but for some reason it's circling back around into my workflow and that is do you design without the copy if you design a website without the copy you guaranteed are gonna have to redesign parts of it once you get the copy but if you wait for the copy and it's coming from the client they don't know how much to write or what to write it's it's like this catch 22 where there's no scenario that one depends on who's writing the copy like i think if a copywriter is writing the copy they should do it before you design but it's the client writing the copy then i think you can get away with you doing the design because they often don't know what to write where to write how much to write and so you can almost like point them in the right direction where where you might give them like little headings and you say like this would be a little bit about you and this would be like your services and this would be and so you kind of you can then guide them and then they go okay well i need to write like four sentences here or you know i think right it's very different depending on who is writing the copy absolutely now i'm i'm excited to have vito here because he's got these tools that he's built but besides that vito grew a really big agency how many staff did you have like more than a dozen huh yeah 12. well a dozen okay yes you had a team of 12. so you're no stranger to this this issue how did you guys know so we built more than 800 websites and the content was a struggle on each one of them uh so um um the way that we like initially i tackled this exactly like everyone else um as soon as the project started you did the discovery session and then you send the client off to get the content right um you go ahead you have two to four weeks and then come back that was like a really big thing in the industry it still is uh the content first approach um but uh that didn't work well at all uh because like uh sarah was saying they have no clarity they have no context they don't know what they're doing so and they have no guidance from uh from us to deliver to to get that in the right places and so um um and we tried google docs and we tried like to just map it out with like titles and here we need um a blurb about this and here we need a blurb about that but that didn't give them the visual representation and we ended up what really worked well is setting up wireframes um inside the browser so they can basically walk around their own website so we develop these kind of wireframing templates uh that uh you can just walk around the website and walk around is this a metaverse did you already invent the metaphase i'm only living there you know i'm already uh but you do walk around the website right you jump between the different pages pages and you can see visually and within context what are the pieces of text that are that are required of course you have logan ipsums and some guidance since to uh this is gonna be the about us tell us a little bit about yourself about your business what is your vision what is your mission all of those kind of uh little bits and pieces and that is built into those wireframing templates so um that tackles the exactly the catch 22 that you're talking about stephanie because we didn't um design anything we just laid out a page that it was designed to have no design just through these uh type of layer layout templates and um and yeah and once the client gave us the content then we went in to input it in there of course they still procrastinate sometimes and that was um i picked what it is to a few things first they don't have the tools to do it uh but also because um we a lot of time gave them way too long of a time span to execute on this so we get we tell them go for it you have two weeks you have four weeks uh and we're gonna get to this stage in a month from now or something like that instead of really taking into account how long it really takes to create copy if you already have the layout and you just need to talk about your business so we try to remove all of this complexity by um by just defining it as a two day and a weekend which was the time span that worked the best for every touch point with the clients two days and the weekend that's that that's that's my always go to when we needed to work with someone you did that you tried that no i haven't i forgot that you used to do that and i love that i i'm like kicking myself but i didn't just use that on my last project so do you guys hear that two days and a weekend that's what they get so and i think that is so perfect because that way if you're gonna do it on the clock they can take their two work days if they're too busy at work then okay then you're doing it on the weekend like get her done and really what it did is it just encouraged them to open their calendar and look there and say where do i fit this instead of saying sometime in the next week and then they just kind of like okay i'll do it tomorrow i'll do tomorrow tomorrow and the week is over so the whole idea is just to get them to think about when exactly are you going to do this and we told them it's going to be about three hours of work um i mean for a basic uh business website of course sometimes it's a little more complex but uh that worked the best really okay we can wrap up [Laughter] so what happens like okay so that all sounds well and good i tell my clients you get two days in a weekend two days in a weekend comes and goes all right didn't get it right we was this came up and that came up and oh it's a crisis okay one more time two two days in a week still don't get it like where's the car where the do you have consequences no but we do have follow-ups before it's time to follow up so um the we don't wait until the weekend passes uh after the two days it's like okay the two days are over are you gonna do it over the weekend what are you planning to do so we give them an out before it's too late because what what i found in just like it's just relationship building if you um um if you allow the time to pass then they create um i'm not sure how to say it in english but they basically create a fault over the project or over the relationship they already kind of they have a foul over the relationship so they start closing up and that happens in a lot of relationships that's that's a lot of times why people even get divorced because there is just a gap of communication people start lying or hiding different truths and then uh and then over time it just keeps building up and adding up on on top of each other until no one wants to see each other and people just ghosts that's just a teaser for next week's episode on marriage counseling it's all the same it's just really it's an important part of it it's true though it's true what vito is saying about you you're starting off a relationship here it's a business relationship but you're trying to maintain that relationship trying to build that build those bridges early on in in your in your client relationship and then when you receive that first uh draft or something that they've written maybe it's fine maybe something finally has arrived in your inbox with an attachment on it and you think i've got some copy and then you open it and you put your head in your hands it's about three lines and then in the email it said i wasn't very inspired and it is difficult it's difficult because at that point you might need to go back and have an uncomfortable conversation with them but i like sarah's approach which was sort of to sort of try and try and help them by i think probably doing this initially rather than waiting for that word document with about three lines in it by saying you know this is the this is what we're looking for and if you don't feel qualified or you're you're going to struggle with it then we would recommend getting a copywriter or or looking to work with somebody to refine your message so recently we we worked on a project with um with a company and um they bought uh me in as a web designer they bought somebody else in as a marketer they put someone else in for copywriting they put us all into a room we bounced ideas around um and it was kind of like it was kind of despite you know me being in the web design space and somebody else being in the marketing space we just came came together and they used that time albeit that they were paying us but that's fine but they were using that time to refine their message and talk about i'm going to say story brand type headlines which will probably come on too a little bit later but it's an important thing to get to get rights and they were on a deadline so at that point they were just like very keen to get moving and i quite like that because i think the more pressure that there is to to produce a project um you'll find people will excel it's when you say oh it's going to take about eight weeks for this project to to to go live and then you hit the twelfth week and you're still waiting for the copy and you know and it and when it does come it's not great you gotta build that momentum early on and uh and instead of uh just throwing them off for for like huge time spans um just keeping it nice and short so that everyone feels accountable uh and you're also delivering stuff from your side exactly like like sarah is doing so sh sarah you gave them something that they can look at um so you did your part and if you do it fast if you do your part fast it signals to the client that all right this guy is on it so i i probably should step up and uh and clear up my schedule for for tomorrow to get this to not slow down the project but if you sit back and just wait for it to come then they will just do the same yeah totally agree it's so i think oh sorry go ahead mike no no no go on sir i'm stephanie sorry i was just thinking about how um there are there are so many different facets to this and i would love to hear if you guys are in the live chat or even if you're listening later you can leave a comment i'd like to hear what your current system is we've seen a few in the chat already and i think there are so there's the client way and then there's a few different other ways right so there's like hiring a copywriter doing it yourself etc there's a few different models that that can be so i think what we're talking about now is one of the more common ways there's some which is to have the client write it and i think this tends to happen on lower budget projects too do you guys agree with that yeah yes yes and no because even with uh with higher projects that we did um um it was it was sometimes a hard sell and because you know a lot of clients don't really understand the value of awesome copy they just want a website they want the result they will just want to run with it um so um i don't know is it our place to train them on the value of proper copywriting maybe but if we were hired to deliver the website and they want to take care of it then cool i'm just going to empower them to do it themselves but we did have an option and we had like subcontractors lined up for the other scenario and we we were very upfront about this from the beginning that it's not as easy as you think uh so um if we can add it on to the project then that's great but that was usually something that we added on after the proposal so it's kind of out of us you know it's not it's not part of our service it's something that we can help you with like bringing a photographer to your shop that takes pictures around and stuff like this but um it wasn't part of the bill so it wasn't part of our budget so eric um our other divi chat pal is uh he's on the road tonight uh heading to handle a family situation but he's he's in the live chat and he says that they've started just providing the content um he says no more option we just provide it and he this is just included in the rates so eric i'm interested in how you're dealing with the the pricing difference because depending on who you go with you know i mean if you if you want to get stuff done right it's it is costly to have copywriting done well you know and and it should be because it's so important i mean they say they don't say web design is king right the content is the king so like we have you know that's super important that's because [Music] if you're including copy i think you like you're providing a much more superior service and i think that's where you can get away with charging more it's kind of a little bit like agencies here locally in town charge four times what i charge so when you know when an agency is i don't know if they include copy as a part of that but i kind of think there's this expectation that when the price is higher what comes out of it is higher and it's that kind of ball rolling thing where if you're charging more for your what you're producing then you can afford to just have bigger clients and therefore you can just say no to the ones who don't want to have the copy and i think for eric like if he's charging these high prices and he's saying well this is just included if you don't want to take it you don't have to take it but this is what's included then people are going to take it and they're choosing to use a company who's charging higher rates for a reason and so i think it's one of those things like where people are expecting a better end product therefore they're willing to pay a little bit more for it um do i want to go down that track not really because i feel like i'm not ready to hit that market and the market i have at the moment is the market that's willing to pay my prices and if i include a copy i would then have to notch it up to the next step and i don't think i would get i reckon i'd drop about 50 of my clients if that happened if i went up by another i don't know two thousand dollars something like that i think i would or more as a bunch of clients yeah and so i think it's that that tricky thing right like if you're in the market where the clients that you're getting for say a base five page website they're willing to pay ten thousand dollars well then of course you can include the copy and you know and then it's way less stressful for you because you've included the copy so it's it's who's your market and are they willing to pay that kind of price my market's not willing to pay 10 000 for a five page website so then how do i i then have to talk them into it basically if they're not getting the content done then i have to kind of put it out there and say look we want to wrap up this project sometimes clients will just wrap up the project and that's fine like that's on them if they decide not to move it forward but as long as they pay for it kind of thing but most clients will get to a point where they either pull their finger out and actually write the content or they will say look i can't like i just can't do it so we need a copywriter and then they go down that track and yes the project takes much longer than we anticipated but as long as you have priced it out like as long as at that point you say well that's fine but the project's going to be delayed by another two months realistically so i'm going to send you an invoice right up to 90 of the project and we'll just do that final 10 once you're ready to kind of pop in the content and go live assuming there's no design changes and then you haven't lost out at that point yeah um but yeah i just feel like i could be wrong but i feel like my target market here isn't ready to be up front at that higher rate from the beginning they might get there in the end but at the beginning they're not there so what i want to hear about is that additional option of not having to pay a copywriter but still being able to deliver it to the client using ai because i think the the situation that you're describing sarah it would be perfect to be able to do what eric does without cutting into your profit and without having to hike the price up on clients and and missing out on a big portion of those and i shared some numbers eric just shared some numbers nice um 65 per page say it out you got to say it out loud for the people eric says i'm charging 200 per page copywriting my cost is 65 per page so so that's reasonable five to seven page site you're looking at an extra grand so that's getting into the realm of possibility um and maybe eric has found the unicorn of content writers but any content writers i've talked to are not charging that low so you know good on you if you can find the unicorn at 65 per page um but i know australia has a very specific way of speaking and i would be very hesitant to even hire an american um oh yeah like let alone kind of anyone from around the world because i think the way we speak is really particular and if you tried to write it from anyone who wasn't from australia it is not going to sound australian like it's just not which is even where we come into the ai stuff and i think i'm not sure if it's gonna sound right if it's ai but i haven't tried it so i'm really interested to hear about well and then like that i've got a british project manager and she was just writing some emails for me and i'm like nope nope nope yeah these words i don't know and then like if you're if tom tries to write our emails they just all say thank you so much thank you thank you well here's the thing though is that mike and sarah aluminum and aluminium are spelled the same way so but there's still a tone in voice there is a few she's she's like still fighting it i'm not getting into that one time it's so different like when i it's like stock photos i can instantly tell if it's an australian stock photo or an american stock photo and then people can have there's kangaroos is it the kangaroos no it like there is a vibe in stock photos and we often can't use regular stock photos because you can instantly tell they're american and so it's this really tricky thing where it's really subtle but it's subtle enough that we cannot use that in our websites unfortunately like it just it it's really fun that's really interesting it doesn't work so this is the thing isn't it this is the thing but with copy and we're talking about copy that resonates so we've got a company in the uk called innocent drinks and they make basically make fruit drinks but not from concentrate so they've been they've been in the market years and years and years and i would recommend just going to their website and looking at the way in which they deliver their message they've it's part of their brand their whole in way the way they speak that they the colors that they've chosen it everything is is written in a certain way they've even got on their contact page it says call us on the banana phone but it's just kind of like it's the whole message and the way it comes in so i think when we're looking at um websites we what we're trying to do is deliver the best we can and so you might even have a client that might be interested in quirky type language so at that point you you know you really do need somebody to to come in and do that and you might recommend it as well because you might say look this is a really neat uh different type of um product that you've got here so let's let's try this let's go down the quirky route and and see where where that leads it depends on on their budget of course um but it's it's i always think that um images and and content and the text itself are what's going to ultimately sell to that customer and so like tim i'd be really interested to hear what vito's got to say about bertha uh simply because i wonder how that would fit into something like that so let me allow me to introduce bertha so that you don't have to brag on yourself but bertha is an ai copywriter so basically in the world of if any of you are appsumo fans you've seen all of the ai copywriting coming out right so there's been a few engines that have been released into the world that are that are powering these copywriters and there there there's a couple engines and then there's several different ways that you can handle it on the other end of things so vito and andrew palmer have partnered up and they created bertha dot ai which is a one of these copywriting uh bertha b e even though people in australia and england say birther probably [Music] yeah like cinema let's go to the cinema yeah because i did try and spell it oh no it's bernie b-e-r-t so and then vito also has adoram which for those of you who have been under a rock that's uh formerly known as wp feedback so he's been built into this system for collecting content they've built in this ai tool which is a really clever use of that rather than going someplace else and so within divi for example the little bertha icon pops up right in your text boxes and things so vito explain what is actually happening though if you don't mind so let's start just kind of understanding the the the level of technology that is with this with this uh new ai tools that came out over the past year or so because this is the game changer really the the way that this technology evolved over the past year so this is really really fresh um and cutting edge in terms of all the stuff that we are we're being challenged with on a day-to-day basis up until a year ago or a year and a half ago the biggest ai model that was trained on content was let's say this big right let's say the size of uh of um of a tennis ball right because i know that there's also like an audio version of this right yeah so the size of a tennis ball now it's the size of the earth in terms of the of of uh the amount of content that was fed into this ai from all over the world from all kinds of different dialects from all kinds of different languages um we're talking about hundreds of billions of um of pieces of content that was introduced into this ai that was released about a year ago and um that is the game changer of this industry and from here it's just going to keep going exponentially over the upcoming years there's already discussions about the the next level which is you know it's going to be the size of the sun if we're going to keep uh with this uh analogy uh and um and the more that it is trained the better it is to predict what you want of it so the way to kind of uh um understand is how it works it's not really it's kind of different for for us to understand because we're a lot of us are developers or we're used to this concept of if then type of uh uh of of interacting with technology but ai creates strings on the go so the way that it works is really like the human brain or like i am speaking right now i don't know what is the word that i'm gonna say in about five sentences from now because i'm stringing these sentences as i'm saying them and that is what the ai does based on the information that you fit into it so this is already like when i when i realized how it worked it already blew my mind um so what we try to do is uh we try to take all of this information that we have in building websites and we all know you know after you build a few let's say 10 20 100 500 websites it kind of starts looking the same right you have the hero section with the with the top with the unique selling proposition on top then you have some kind of a sub headline below that and then a call to action button you have those three icon sections where you talk about the benefits and you have left to right left to right with content right and then there's some kind of a grid maybe blog post maybe um products or something like this so most websites around the world kind of look the same if you look at them from a from a bird's eye view and so um um we looked at at uh um all of these website components and we created or we trained the ai to uh to generate the content for each one of these unique um pieces of content or or micro copy that you would need when you're building a website and so and then on top of that we built it into wordpress so that you can have it where you need it so if you're inside tv um you're writing a title you drop a title block uh in there and when you click on it you have the birth icon that is just going to give you a few suggestions of what you should write in there and when you click on the suggestion you like you're just going to type it in um you know into where you need it so that's really systemizes the way that you go through the page and in the same way that sarah you and i used to do the go in and type in this should be your unique selling proposition this should be a little information about you so instead you just click a button and it would give you the unique selling proposition it gives you the about us it gives you the um all of these pieces of content now when it comes to what you were talking about about the the sentiment and the kind of the dialect uh of how it's pronouncing different things uh it works so you you can tell it that you should be for australian audiences and it will try to fit that type of um of language or you can even say like uh i'll write it in the tone of voice of ozzy osbourne right and it will do it like that or arnold schwarzenegger you know all efforts just go to the chopper that's why because instead of uh right now i have like a chrome extension that i just dropped all the ipsums so instead of that you just put in what you should have there and you get that unique selling proposition you get all kinds of really awesome stuff and all you need to feed into it is um four parameters the brand name the show description of the product itself uh or the business itself so that would be like um three lines that you can write about uh i'm building a website for or this business is a is a yoga shop that does this and that you know and that's enough and then below this you put in the target audience so that it creates copy that is compelling and and it speaks to that target audience it tries to point them out throughout the conversation and finally you have the sentiment which is where you put the arnold right and based on this or witty or or snarky or you know exactly what you said about this company mike um i was actually working on this with a great good friend of mine that has a huge um copywriting agency here in london they do like jack daniels and volvo and you know like the the big brands and he his type style of writing is very um um witty you know very kind of like a tan and cheek type of thing and so um so he's he's like no way it can produce the stuff that we're making and so on you know and he's just like you know he haven't spoken to me since so i know that it worked great [Laughter] yeah this is really interesting because i've i've been seeing a lot about these ai writing tools and uh i've gotten a lot of buzz out there in the in the marketing world especially and so whenever i see something like this that's new that comes out my first kind of initial reaction is well is it just a gimmicky tool right or something where it looks cool it looks shiny but it doesn't actually perform in a real world setting or you might use it once and it's kind of you know uh it's kind of cool but it's not really practical in the long run however from what i've seen from people that i follow and respect is that it's not gimmicky and that it actually is a good long-term solution that performs um so yeah this is this is fascinating and i like that you guys have it built directly into wordpress and the page builders and all of that um so that it's even more useful so yeah i'm excited i would imagine i reckon you could use it in place of laura mipsum like even if you didn't say we're going to produce your content for you but even if you did it from the perspective of we've put in some copy that you might like to consider and even if all it does is it helps you kind of get the ball rolling yeah could be an ipsum yeah like where they it's it's enough to help them go oh i hate that and then they start writing kind of thing or it's enough to help them go it's kind of close i'll just like edit these few bits and pieces but it's like it kind of helps them get away from that blank screen blank page thing that happens to people so instead of saying you need four sentences you need four sentences that are kind of like this but feel free to modify it however you want it might be enough that it kind of it's not fully writing the content for them but it at least points them better in the right direction yeah it solves the same problem as like layouts and child themes do right because it's like trying to design from scratch is really hard but if you have a starting point where then you can customize and tweak and stuff and by the time you get done it ends might end up looking nothing like what it started but you couldn't have gotten that to that point without it and the same thing with with writing it's like you get that writer's block you're like not sure where to start and stuff so um yeah yeah i'm sorry go ahead this is a really big point about the writer's block because a lot of times you would just like look at this and say like what you know and that is the experience that a lot of customers have uh because they or a lot of clients have when when they when they're asked to give the content because they just don't have this even though you know writing copy for a website i see it as having a conversation you know if you sit next to someone at the dinner table you would probably say everything that is coming up on your homepage you start with the unique selling proposition if they want more then you keep telling them about the benefits and if they want to say all right let's do it then click the button right let's to go to the call to action and all those kind of stuff so it really isn't like a conversation but um but it it it it does get you past this stage where you uh where you're just looking at the sentence and like what do i what what should i put here and so i i agree that it should be treated this technology should be treated as the 80 to 90 percent you know but you still want to give it your own uh type of vibe and stuff but it's still got it's gonna give you most of it it might say that you started the company in 56 and it was your dad's uh firm you know that you you took over uh because it doesn't really know uh so you would want to tweak those kind of things in there but all in all it's it's like a wordpress plugin you you we always used it as the in the agency we would find the plugin that would give us 80 of what we needed and then we would build the extra 20 or custom css the extra 20 that uh um fitted into the design so that's kind of the same mindset there i wonder i wonder if anybody's been on that sumo uh like i was when all of these uh tools came out because there's i own like five that is there's so many isn't there but there is a difference uh in some insects yeah first of all there are so you can't really use the the the one that i was talking about the earth size model uh with an appsumo model because or business with an optional business model the lifetime ones uh just because um you have to pay the the you know um the api so every time someone clicks the button you pay the api so if you have like thousands of people clicking this like crazy on a lifetime deal then these companies are not going to stay in business so what they do is they leverage they a lot of them because it was kind of a hype thing for for a couple of months people were leveraging like really tiny um open source solutions they were leveraging the tennis balls and they actually gave the whole thing um a really bad reputation even though this technology is incredible and you know you're using the same thing as like themes that you buy from embedded market compared to like a really good quality theme that maybe you have to pay annually or like an event plug-in that you pay a one-time thing on um code canyon compared to like the events calendar or one of these ones where you pay every year and it sucks because you're paying like 200 a year and you think this completely sucks but you're paying for a company to keep functioning and you're paying for quality and you're paying for updates and you're always going to get a better product when you pay for these things like anytime someone wants to a free thing i get we have to start that way but you get what you pay for from this perspective and you don't really want to pay like a one-time thing and then in three years you can't use it anymore because you've you know paid a bit more at the beginning but then it doesn't actually help you so i think it's the same thing and sometimes it's hard to get your mindset past that but we want to actually pay the people who are providing a good quality service for us and that's the thing with appsumo as well because what you end up with there is this market is saturated and and these companies are not all going to be there in the next few years for whatever reason because people do gravitate to um something that becomes popular so it's kind of trying to pop your head up above all of the rest of the competition veto isn't it it's kind of saying and it's explaining that as well because you don't get those explanations on appsumo so by saying that you know it's the sun not the tennis ball is is a great way to describe it isn't it the tricky thing with appsumo though is it's a little bit like gambling because every now and then you miss the one like i always regret missing um oh what's the proposal one better proposal yeah and some people got that on appsumo when they were just starting out and then their lifetime on like wouldn't you love to be lifetime on better proposals like there are a few and it's that gambling thing of like but these guys could be the next i don't like the stock market when something is terrible yeah so vito did you look at appsumo when you were when you were thinking of your own launch or have you just sort of you know thought no i'm i'm not going anywhere near that space uh oh what is that as a way of launching you mean yeah yeah uh well they reached out to me a few times for atarim and when it was wp feedback back then and now with bertha um they're really on it you know they they are they are in the groups they see what's going on they reach out to founders um but it's just crazy you know like the the way that um you would get like seven dollars on a user forever you know what what are you going to do this how are you going to build a a company you know i'm not i'm not into the game of uh just releasing a product every day the last one i released was two and a half years ago now there is one uh so and in the meantime we build companies you know behind those products so um with doing it with that it's just uh it's just insane without the feedback when we first started we released like 200 lifetime deals for uh five hundred dollars not fifty uh and that allowed me and and we kept all of the revenue um we did we did the campaign ourselves so we didn't give them 70 like they're taking uh so um so we were able to have a uh to hire a team and to start developing the product and to start you know building like a proper business around this what was just version 1.0 at the time so if anything with lifetime deals i think that um this is the right approach but for a lot of founders that are not savvy on market on the marketing front and they just want to get like a surge of users and maybe that's a good idea i would even say that you would get like 2 000 users for what we got 200 and and just supporting those 2 000 users on a on a product that was just born a couple of months ago and it's crazy you know that and that's why most of the initial experiences with appsumo is just horrible because you know there's no way a single founder or two or a team of two can actually um have a sustainable uh um experience for so many people in such a short amount of time you gotta grow into it you know yeah i i strictly don't buy software that is only a lifetime deal so whether it's appsumo or other products i've seen so many products come and go whether they're divi products or wordpress products or just general products out there where it's like you buy something and then they just kind of disappear and the product kind of withers away it can't they there's it's just not a sustainable business model imagine that you would offer care plan clients for uh you know um you know 50 bucks a lifetime and and and what whoever you know uh elegant elegant themes would take 80 of that thing also uh so you're supporting clients you know and people reach out to support all the time that's part of the game of uh running a product um so yeah i i i never could figure out the sustainability of this absolute model yeah cause we're almost out of time i can't believe it but i wanted to touch base on little things too so we've obviously covered this ai option but what if you what if you don't have ai no offense vito but what if you don't use that and whatever you're telling me so you can go in and join hopefully so that that was my one-liner pitch i know i was like where did people find out about it by the way because eric eric uh who's on a road trip said they pulled out he was supposed to start driving and he pulled over into a chick-fil-a parking lot because he's so excited and he wants to know he didn't want the chick-fil-a by any chance eric yeah so tell the people where they find out more and and you can get a thousand words per month uh for free and there's even uh as we're rolling this out there is a really cool agency um a plan for 99 a month and that you can install on all of your clients websites unlimited websites and just empower them to generate copy really that's awesome so let's say we're not going to do that no offense again but like there's other ways too right so let's just make sure we're covering there are copywriters out there so how do you go about finding a human being to write copy like let's say you don't even want to touch it you just want but and and there's a for whatever reason your client's not going to do it so you've sold them on hiring a copywriter what do you do how do you find someone i think it's really tricky i've found people at networking like going to actual local networking things one of the problems i found was i found a really good one and then i started using him and then he ended up being so big that he only works on big clients now and he doesn't want to work on my client website so sometimes now he'll give me recommendations of other people but i find it really hard to find ones who the quality is really good and the price isn't crazy um but i think local networking can be a good way to go obviously it doesn't have to be local like where i live just happens to really like working with local people um but it doesn't have to be local but i think networking type things whether that's on facebook or whatever could be a good way to go yeah and linkedin is a good place to go and find people as well just type in that into a search and you will get an abundance of people come up from that um yeah that's i've met people via networking as sarah said um and i've never never had the opportunity to actually use them yet and it's it's it's a weird thing because it i think what's going to happen with me and um my clients moving forward with this because it's a very excellent subject is to put this front and center i think because it is so there are so many times when this becomes a problem and we always say you know we always allow for life when you're when you're creating a website from beginning to end somebody says typically how long does it take you and we'll we'll give them a sort of ballpark figure depending on what's in the schedule um but copy you have to put it front and center and if you can get it front and center then you've got a really good chance of delivering that project maybe even earlier and then you can get on to your next project so i work with i work with a chick that i met um in some facebook groups and she's not super cheap but my gosh she goes and meets with the client and see that's the other thing are you going to meet with your client or are they because the clients are not scot-free when you work with a copywriter they still have to be interviewed there's so much even if you could write um you know product pages you know or sales pages or things like that like if they've they're the details of each project their bios their about page like there's so much that has to come at least at the core from the client and you have to get their vibe and all of that so um so it's great having somebody that is professional enough and that i trust and she'll come back and give me like a document that's like here's this page i thought this could be laid out like this and i sometimes roll my eyes at her and i go erin you know like i'm the designer here like i'll handle that but secretly i kind of love it because it's like it just saves so much work and energy and it's like she kind of visualizes the page so to have somebody like that uh is great to have if i'm booked up on a lot of projects if it's a client that can afford that price point those kind of things uh i have worked with other levels you know as well and it just depends we we have copywriting with focus so if you ever want to try that out you can it's um it's an it's all us-based team so sarah sorry but uh we don't say good a or anything like that but but it's native english i'm wondering is how many professional copywriters are really just using the ai tools it would be interesting to use ai a lot of them as long as they turn out some good work i don't care so we have um a few brackets to this so we offer the client three price points based on kind of quality if you will um or reputation of the agency that we were working with so uh the high one was the guy that that uh that i mentioned that before and he's working uh you know with like um top brands so um just talk just dropping some of the names allowed them to um understand that this is gonna be a 5k uh you know british pounds type of uh project for a basic website just to get the copy in and and that was a lot so his process was really deep so we would go in and meet them and like you're saying you know interview them properly and create a few variations and so he his process actually extend extended the project um to the same length as the clients doing it themselves but of course the quality was on a completely different level and then i had a middle tier which i met at um um like a like a local uh type of um agency uh hangout here in london and um we ended up just exchanging a lot of work back and forth you know with uh so they needed someone to build websites we needed someone to write the copy they were kind of like you know small agency type of work so that these were our best fit and we also had uh um a cheap one that we were taking off of 5vl and that was working um pretty nicely to be honest like that was kind of quick to the point it was for those clients that didn't care much about it they just wanted to get it done and so um cool we had a i don't remember her name but she was great on fiverr went back to her um quite a few times so we allow the clients to choose what um um which level they wanted really i like that you know sarah you're thinking about your issue of adding more onto your quotes and your folks that will take it but i wonder if maybe it's because it's in addition to like what if it was just the way eric's doing where this is this is your total like this is what it costs and you just sell that and sell the benefits of it and then i think it's a great idea or even an option for a lower number you know like i mean because anybody who hears 4 000 and then here's six and a half thousand they're going to be like no no no i want the 4 000 option like everybody would say that right like it's a that's a tough hurdle to get over mentally but if you start off with saying like this is what we're going to give you this is how awesome it's going to be this is going to be the results blah blah blah blah and then it's going to be six and a half k where your sign right here you know i just wonder it'd be interesting you have to do a little excitement when i'm when i'm my view of trying higher prices is when you know you've got the next three months booked out that's the perfect time to try higher prices but given we've just got past covered i'm pretty happy with just sticking where i'm at at the moment but definitely like i'm not close to it in the future but i do think at the moment from what i've seen around town um the price we're at is like an agreeable price but often people feel like they're stretching to get to that price so i feel like it would be a it would be a bit too challenging you're one of the long times members of divi chat i mean should be like do you know who i am yeah i i don't i don't build websites for clients anymore because i'm full-time with on the product side but if i were still doing websites i would do what eric is doing making it just included just including but then using ai to basically jumpstart everything on board wait what's that you've never used it before and you are like i've never used it before but i'm i'm sold because using technology as a tool to make your life easier to me that's like the beauty of the world we live in with technology and automation and stuff like that where technology again like i mentioned the beginning i'm always fearful of technology that's gimmicky right like i love like smart home stuff but there's certain smart home stuff that i invested in that i'm like that was a waste of money it was really gimmicky it doesn't actually solve any problems and so um i'm always hesitant about when new stuff comes out is it going to be just a kind of a gimmick or is it actually going to provide real world use on a long-term basis and from what i can see bertha and and ai writing tools is exactly that so being able to to take that and just like we use divi we use a page builder to make ourselves more efficient and basically making ourselves more profitable and our clients they benefit too because they're able to get a way better website for way cheaper because of tools like divi i think tools like bertha is is right along with it where hey now they can get really good copy too that you can utilize that artificial intelligence to then benefit the client so yeah and i'm not just saying that because veto's a guest on here i'm actually like super excited about this so yeah you should try it i i haven't written like a sentence on my own since we launched this thing i do the landing pages for us and i do all the you know bits and pieces now with all the black friday campaign it's all there you know it's all done with this thing yeah i think it's like you were saying that vito i think it's still it's an 80 thing isn't it and and there's still no substitute for the other factor that the other 20 or the other 10 however you know whatever it's spitting out and then what whatever you're using if you can if you can get the customer's usp into into it and capture that as well and and the phrasing and the tone um then it's gonna be it's gonna be so useful moving forward yeah it'll give you the usb that's the first one um so yeah like with with this it's and i agree exactly with the page builder example you still need to be a designer to get a good result you know yes you know so it's not it's not going to give you the whole thing um dropping in tv or or whatever page builder in there even using their templates we all know that clients still manage to mess this up often so um so yeah like you know expertise is uh the human mind is still uh is still a you know um in charge and stronger um but if we can lift weights while we're inside a pool that's much much easier right what if your brain is the sad tennis ball though like it may not be [Laughter] anyway thanks for being here everybody i hope you enjoyed this there's a lot more that we could talk about on this that we may branch out into another topic because we didn't even touch on like seo in relation to copy which i think is a big deal how to direct people in any of these scenarios how do you get the proper keywords included and things so if you'd like to hear more about that let us know in the chat or send us a message leave a comment and we'll schedule another copywriting episode um in the upcoming weeks it we it is november it's the beginning of november here as we're recording this so we are moving into holiday season where things get all crazy and we usually take a brief hiatus in the middle so we'll keep you posted on all that stay tuned on the divi chat facebook page and um what else if you could leave us a review that'd be awesome uh rate this podcast you cannot just add disgusted of tunbridge worlds it says here right it says whoever tim off when he said take care bye bye we need to know there was somebody somebody was responsible somebody was responsible [Laughter] end button is very tricky on this thing i just want you to know it's tough and it's so awkward when we're all just sitting here waiting for it to cancel oh anyway yes thanks everyone take care bye bye thanks for coming vito we appreciate you bye everybody

Channel: Divi Chat

Views: 187

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Id: w1L30ekFgtA

Length: 64min 11sec (3851 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 10 2021