Level up your copywriting w/ Sam Parr | E2226

Like I wasn't selling anything particularly special, and so I started like Googling how to be a salesperson, and I learned about this thing called copywriting. And what I realized was if I could take my ability to sell one-to-one, which I eventually learned how to do, and put it on paper, you could sell one to an infinite number. There was a guy named David DeAngelo, he would write these like 5,000-word emails where it's just plain text, and they were making $30 million a year selling e-books on how to like hook up with a girl.

So basically, there's a lot of sales pages that you go to and it's just tons and tons of words. You're going to say, 'That doesn't work on me. That used to work then, it doesn't work nowadays.' And you're going to see like cheesy headlines and all that stuff, and you're going to think, 'None of that works on me.' You're wrong. It does. Long-form copy typically is almost always better than short-form copy. Anyone who sells a lot of anything knows all these principles. And one of the principles is that long form is better than short form. And a lot of people listening, they're not going to believe it, but they're wrong.

What's up, guys? Jason, are you going to read the books? Which one did you get?

So I used to work—I used to own a hot dog stand in college. That's how I paid my way through college. And I had a hot dog stand. I called it Southern Sam's Wieners, as big as a baby's arm. And I would like sell... Yeah, you know, that's called copywriting.

Like I wasn't selling anything particularly special. And so I started like Googling—this was back in like 2010—how to be a salesperson. And I learned about this thing called copywriting. And what I realized was if I could take my ability to sell one-to-one, which I eventually learned how to do, and put it on paper, you could sell one to an infinite number. And so I started reading a bunch of bloggers. And I actually got really interested in the world of internet marketing, which back then was very shady. And there was these guys that would write these books that would teach young men like myself who weren't particularly good with women, basically, how to pick up girls. And a lot of it was very shady and weird.

Yeah. But it was so successful in terms of a business, and you had guys—I don't know if you remember this—like there's a guy named David DeAngelo, he would write these like 5,000-word emails where it's just plain text, and they were making $30 million a year selling e-books on how to like hook up with a girl. And that is when I got interested in copywriting, where I got interested in like the dark arts a little bit of copywriting, and I was like, okay, how do I master this and then let's actually use it to sell stuff that I love. And so that's how I originally got into copywriting.

They're animals.

I was gonna say they stole your stuff.

You'll love it.

And then type in Joe Sugarman on Amazon and buy his Adweek.

That one's probably above everything. My favorite. That one was out of print, but I'll send you a link where you can get it for cheap. But so here's how it worked. So like in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, before the internet existed, you had these guys like David Ogilvy, and they basically wanted to sell, let's say, a vacuum to a housewife. Well, how on earth did they do that? Well, some of them would go door-to-door or buy radio commercials, but a lot of them, what they did was they would do these services where you could send a letter to a million housewives in America. And that basically meant you had to send pieces of paper with typewriter writing, and you had to use words so good that you had to make your money back because it was incredibly expensive to do this. And so they got incredibly good at figuring out what words convince people to buy and take action and do stuff. And so I love learning from those guys from the 50s all the way up to the 90s, like pre-internet era guys. Those are the best places to learn from. And David Ogilvy is one of those. Ogilvy & Mather, that was a multi-tens-of-billions-of-dollars ad firm now, and they're glamorous, they do all, you know, probably Ford or Ferrari, all this fancy stuff, but he started as a copywriter. Kind of like he would write these—just they called them sales letters—these letters that they would mail to people to sell anything.

So here's what people listening to this, you guys are going to think a couple things. You're going to think ads don't work on me. Obviously, that's nonsense, right? You're going to see long-form copy. So basically, there's a lot of sales pages that you go to and it's just tons and tons of words. You're going to say, 'That doesn't work on me. That used to work then. It doesn't work nowadays.' And you're going to see like cheesy headlines and all that stuff. You're going to think, 'None of that works on me.' You're wrong. It does. We could go through examples, but you just had Amazon, like for example, long-form copy typically is almost always better than short-form copy. You just were, Jason, on Amazon.com, the most well-known website potentially in the world. And if you were to look at that book that you just had up and you were to see all of the words that were on there, as well as all the photos, as well as all the reviews—there's probably 10,000 reviews, that was probably tens of thousands of words on there. If you go to apple.com and you look at how much an iPhone costs or you want to buy an iPhone, it's going to have a photo. A photo is worth a thousand words. Tons of photos and tons of words, going to be a really long page. Anyone who sells a lot of anything knows all these principles. And one of the principles is that long form is better than short form. And a lot of people listening, they're not going to believe it, but they're wrong.

The Adweek. This is one of my favorite books.

And this looks like not an interesting title, or you know, it's like long. It doesn't follow any of the rules, but I'm telling you this is the best book. So why does long work better? Well, it does for a couple reasons. One, when people skim, you need different areas to grab their attention and get them to come back down. But it's all rooted in this thing called the slippery slope. So in order to sell anything, I want you to fall down this slippery slope where you start where you're interested, you get a little bit more desire, and finally I get you to take action. So it's called AIDA: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. I need to grab your attention. I need to keep you interested. I got to make you desire what I want you to desire. And then I have to make you take action by very specifically telling you what to do for the next step. It's not necessarily that long is better than short. It's that you want the least amount of words to be the most effective. And oftentimes, you need a lot of words to be incredibly effective. And for a person who's going to buy your product, the goal of good copy is to make me, the writer or the marketer, write to you in such a way that it feels like I know what you are thinking better than you do, and I know your problem so intimately that I must have a solution because no one else has been inside of your head as good as I have right now. Therefore, you feel the way I feel. You could guide me out of this pain. So let me give you an example. If you were selling—I'll do a weight loss thing because that's typically kind of scammy—but let's say if I was writing a weight loss ad for women, I would say like, 'I know why you stand on the edge of your friends when you take a photograph with your buddies at the beach. I know why you wear that cover-up. I know that you offer to take the photo. I know why you do that.' And you go into like the shame that someone feels. And these are things that she has probably never said to herself. But if I write in such an intimate way, you start to think I know you. Now, of course, you want to use this power for good, not for bad, but I'm just giving an example. And so long does a better job of getting you to fall down this slippery slope where you are just ready to buy at the end.

And that's going to get your attention big time because it's—yeah. And it also triggers a bunch of emotion. So emotion is part of this as well, but that gets your attention for sure. Now, interest.

So let me give you an example. Let's say that I want to convince you to drink water. I'm going to make up a bunch of facts, so don't hold me to these facts. I would say, 'Have you ever seen those big muscular guys at the gym carrying around gallons of jugs of water?'

The reason they're doing that is because it actually makes them build muscle 30% more than if they weren't going to do that. You see, the thing about water is it helps carry amino acids, which are essential to building proteins in your body. And so if you don't drink enough water, you're just not going to build enough muscle. And that's why these guys who are all big and jacked, that's why they always carry these jugs of water. So that was my desire. My interest and desire was making you interested. And then my action is like, so if you want to get bigger muscles, here's what you need to do: every day before you go to the gym, fill up this gallon of water and drink all of it before noon. That's how it works. And so you take that format of attention, interest, desire, action, and you could apply that frankly to anything. And that will get you 90% of the way there. You see this on Instagram. If you scroll through Instagram, every Instagram influencer talks about a hook. The hook is the first five sentences that grabs your attention. They call it a hook, and then they call it a meat, and then they call it a CTA. So hook, meat, CTA, but it's all the same verbiage. But young kids, that's what they say. If you ever follow—just follow one person on Instagram who gives advice on how to get popular on Instagram, they're going to say hook, meat, CTA. It's the same thing as attention, interest, desire, action.

There's no such thing as too long. There's only such a thing as too uninteresting. Do you guys remember on Twitter when Twitter got really popular during the pandemic, there was this joke of people called Thread Boys?

That's exactly what I'm describing here. If you go on Twitter and look at what are some of the most shared tweets of all time, it's things that are longer than the norm because you need someone to be emotionally invested. And what's going to happen is your funnel—maybe it's going to be that the goal is not to make 100% of the people read your thing. It's to make the right 5% of the people read your thing, and you want them to share at a 90% rate as opposed to a lot of normal content. You might have a lot of eyeballs, but it's not going to make someone compelled to share. And so the thing about copywriting is it's all rooted in two things: one, getting what's in my brain and what's in my emotion into your brain and your heart. And the second thing is getting you to actually do something. It could be as simple as MLK giving a speech and wanting you to change your opinion on racism. Or it could be, I want you to buy something. But it's all about influencing action. And there's certain words. Human nature is human nature. It's been the same since the beginning of time. There's certain ways to actually do this.

Yeah. I've got four or five things that I tell people. The first is start with like the big idea. You can call it a hook or you can call it an angle. And that's basically if you're just telling your buddy about a TV show, like what happened? Oh, it's about a—like you're describing the movie Ted. It's about a talking bear who's really vulgar. I don't know. Like you know what I mean? Like just like that one-liner. The second thing is to write like you talk. Now, to get very tactical, it's to write simply, and it's to write at a fourth or fifth grade reading level. There's this app called HemingwayApp.com. It's free. And what you'll notice is that if you have to look something up in a thesaurus, don't use the word. The goal is to write at a fourth or fifth grade reading level. And I'll give you guys a really good example. Warren Buffett owns an insurance company. That's a very complicated business. But his annual letters, on average, I believe each sentence that he writes, it's about 18 words per sentence. And the reading level is something like a sixth grade reading level. And this is why Warren Buffett in part is famous, because he was world-famous for saying these very simple phrases like, 'It's when the tide goes down is when you learn who doesn't have their swimsuit on.' Like these really amazing analogies. One of the reasons why is he was a brilliant marketer and he was really good at writing simply and using analogies. And so I tell people: start with the big idea. Write simply. I tell them use the active voice, not the passive voice. I'll give you an example: 'The boy kicked the ball' versus 'The ball was kicked by the boy.' The second one is bad. The first one is good. Most people actually use the second one. So you always want someone to be doing something, not something being done to them, if that makes sense. And then the last two or three things I say: always remove adverbs. Stephen King famously said, 'The road to hell is paved with adverbs.' Don't say—don't use adverbs. And then also, a lot of times a really effective way to be a better writer is you write like—let's say you have this big sales page for a lot of your founders. They might have that, or a cold email, or something huge that's going to be seen by millions of people. The best way to make it good is to pretend that you are just writing to one person, and you really literally write a letter to them explaining it. And that's a really good way to get out of people's heads.

I use it to help me find the big idea, but it can never do a good job of writing. So with my company, Hampton, I was making like an email convincing people why it was great—or it could be for Launch, Jason, or to go to a conference, one of your conferences. So is there any cool phrases that describe what it means to be around other ballers like you? And there was this one idea called the Michelangelo effect, where basically like you are around other smart people. And the idea that Michelangelo once said—he said the statue of David, he goes, 'The statue was in there. I just removed the unnecessary stone.' And the way that I—if I was Jason, I would say, 'Have you guys ever heard of the Michelangelo effect?' The idea is that when you're surrounded by other amazing people, you're sort of like the statue of David. The greatness is inside of you, but every time you meet someone great, it's just chiseling away to find that amazing statue underneath all that unnecessary nonsense. That's exactly what this conference does. So like that is an example of an attention-getting idea. Does that make sense?

So let's get even deeper. So what I would—so I use AI, that exact phrase of 'you're the average of the five friends.' I was like, I've heard that before, or I want to come up with a different angle. And I came up with this different angle where I was like—the headline was like, 'You've already heard that you're the average of your five best friends. But I'm going to tell you something even more astounding, which is that there was a scientist in 1976. He studied 20,000 people and they looked at obesity rates. They looked at poverty rates. They looked at happiness. And what they found was that the people who were around overweight people when they were young became overweight. The people who were around successful people when they were young, they became successful. The people who were around depressed people, they become depressed. This isn't just a cute phrase. This is actually science. We looked at this over 20,000 people over a decade. Now, here's the good news for you: you can pick who you can be around.' So anyway, you see how like we can like—now, I didn't know about that study, but I asked ChatGPT. I'm like, give me some type of evidence. That's where these large language models have changed everything.

It's awesome.

Yeah, it does. And if I—so if someone is listening to this and they actually want to get like pretty good at copywriting, here's what I think you should do. There's this idea called copy work. Did you ever read the blog post I wrote about copy work?

I didn't invent this. I just stole this from—this is how we used to teach kids how to write. Like, but basically the idea is like, well, if you want to get good at playing piano, you don't just like sit a kid down and say, hey, write a song. You tell them play Jingle Bells. Play Happy Birthday. Okay. Do you like rock and roll? Let's play Green Day or Foo Fighters. You might like that. Do you like classical music? Let's play this. And then you do that for a little while and then you could like—I like this piece. I like this piece. I like this piece. I can kind of mold that together to make my own bit of art. With copy work, what I like to do is I find the best sales letters, or it could even be the best book. So it could be like Catcher in the Rye. That's what I did it with. And you just sit down for a few minutes—I would do it for an hour, but you can do it for 15 minutes—and you word for word would get one of these big yellow notepads and you write it out word for word and you copy it word for word. And that will make you—just doing that act will make you a better writer. And so if you have to write something really important like a sales page, you find a sales page. So I love hey.com. That's a really good sales page. You write it word for word and you feel the texture of the words and that changes your brain and it changes what you do.

Yeah. Yeah, there's a reason why Jeff Bezos makes everyone write narrative-formatted documents as opposed to slideshows, because my opinion is that if you are a clear thinker, you're not always a great writer, but a great writer—a clear writer is always a clear thinker. Does that make sense?

I think they have to first be convinced why it's worthwhile to even study in the first place. I don't think a lot of people are bought in. And so I think that the best way to get bought in is probably read the book that Jason showed earlier. It was David Ogilvy on Advertising. I would read that book. And that would do a good job of convincing you that it's even worthwhile. I mean, I think we all agree that selling is important. We're all selling ourselves to a potential girlfriend, to someone we want to recruit, to someone we want to raise from. Jason, I'm trying to sell him to invest in my startup. And so copywriting is just sales on paper. And so I think that we have to convince you to do that. And the second thing, if we were going to teach a founder how to do it, I would buy those books and then I would practice—like literally take the book and I would write a couple pages out of it word for word and I would do that. Literally, if you do that for 20 minutes a day for 20 days, you will get better. One of the great things about Twitter—I think there's a lot of bad things about it, but one of the great things about Twitter and on social media is you get instantaneous results. And so you could see, is what I'm writing, is it resonating and is it compelling? And you see habits right away when your life depends on it, and like you're embarrassed or not of it, you get results quick.

Well, do you expect a bunch of AI tax experts to be good writers? We could help them.

Above the fold should be a feeling, I think. So I'm looking at taxgpt.com. If I was them, I'm sure they've done this. I'm sure that they've talked to 50 accountants and I'm sure that they know there's like five lines. Like when you're pitching to an investor or something, you're sort of like a comedian testing your jokes in small rooms before you get to like the Netflix stage and you see like, 'Oh, that resonates.' Or when I just said this, the customer, the accountant just kind of leaned in. And so the goal should be to tell it to like 10 or 20 people and see what caught their eye. And so if I was them, you know, I would have to research a little bit about accountants, but I would have been like, you know, that feeling on April 15th or whatever tax day is, like where you're like scrambling, looking around, like you know how you feel at your office where you're overstressed and you're working 20 hours a day. No more. You don't have to do that anymore. Like I'm selling—if I'm these guys, I'm selling this emotion of like life is calmer now, and not exactly what they have, which is 'AI tax assistant for tax professionals and businesses.' So their first line would be like—I haven't filed my—I mean, my accountant does my taxes. So I'd have to think about like what stresses you about taxes. Like, have you ever had that feeling where your accountant messages you and you owe this big tax bill and you wish you had known in advance that it was actually going to come up?

Yes. Like you have to intimately describe like a feeling that someone has, and it's like, we solve that by doing this, this, this, and this.

I think that words usually do better. A video does better than anything. A video, you know, the idea is with copy, it's just that when I say copywriting, I also mean video and audio and things like that. But copywriting is just like a way to sell. And I would probably say that if I'm a small company—are these guys new, right?

There's a world where I would put like—for any smallish company, there's a world where I would put a letter from the founder that says like, 'Hey there, fellow accountant. You're probably wondering what this is.' Well, let me...

Explain. You see, I used to be an accountant and I experienced this feeling all of the time. So, I would probably put a letter from them right on the... I think a lot of people don't realize this, but the About Us page on any person's website is typically the second most visited page. So, if you look at any About Us page, if you go to Hampton's About Us page, we tell a story. The About Us page is very important. I would just go ahead and put that on the front and I would put a picture of the founder and the team. I've made this bet before, people. I think I could sell more copies of anything than most companies with just a Google Sheet or a Google Form and just plain text, than any website that has lots of fancy photos. So I would lean into the personal side.

This is my Hampton co-founder Joe. Yeah, that pulls you in.

Yeah. So this is on my About Us page. It says, 'This is my Hampton co-founder Joe,' and this photo is from an Inc. magazine story about him and the story about how he lost $100 million. So the story goes, my partner Joe was a very successful entrepreneur. He started a company that he sold for $114 million at the age of 24. But then he started this new company called Little Things, which was a blog that went very viral, and they scaled to $70 million very fast. But then Facebook made a huge change. And unfortunately, this change happened right as Joe was about to sell the company for a hundred million.

Zuckerberg made the change to the algorithm. His revenue dropped from 60 million to 10 million, and the company went out of business three months later. And that photo is from an Inc. magazine story written about that experience. And that is when I met Joe and we had conversations that could help push ourselves forward. And that's when we had the idea for Hampton. Let's do this for other people. So do you see how like I...

There's a story that matters more than anything. I mean, look at like, I don't want to use one of your nemeses, but like Palmer Luckey has done a great job.

Look, with Andrew, I think the only reason I brought it up was in Business Insider, there was an article about defense tech and how it's having its moment. It's like because this guy who looks a little bit strange and says some funny wacky stuff, there's a story behind it. Same way like one could argue, I don't know much about Palantir, but I know the founder and I have to imagine that there's a story premium on that stock.

Good story.

No, you don't even... First of all, it doesn't matter if you're like the nerdiest quiet guy ever. Like you could be very likable on camera for one, and for two, you can do all of this via a keyboard. You and I have a famous book in common and I heard you talk about it and it's so funny because I've listened to this book twice and the book is How to Get Rich.