How to Make a Difference With Your Copywriting

Today’s Guest

Table of Contents

I had the pleasure of meeting today’s guest on Leonie Dawson’s Amazing Biz and Life Academy. We later met up in person when she was on holiday in London. I absolutely love her heart-centered approach to copywriting, and I love that she’s taking her business on a new journey with a focus on introverts.

Tanja Gardner is a professional copywriter, word weaver and story sculptor at Crystal Clarity Copywriting Ltd. She helps difference-makers like you write with concise, creative clarity that your readers intuitively “get”. That means they understand EXACTLY what you offer – so you can make more of a difference in their lives.

What You’ll Learn

When you can most benefit from getting help with copywriting
The dangers of trying to do it all yourself
Tanja’s top tips for business owners who want to do their own copywriting

Inspiring Women in Business

Top Business Tools

Outsourcing

Kate Logan Newbill for web development
Tina Robbins for VA services

Connect With Tanja

To connect with Tanja, say hello on Twitter or Facebook, or follow her blog.

Or, discover how to write a scannable web page that people actually read with her Make Your Web Page Crystal Clear guide. It’s completely FREE when you sign up for her short-‘n’-sweet fortnightly writing tips.

Related episodes

Transcript

The transcript for this episode can also be downloaded here (no opt-in required).

How to Make a Difference with your Copywriting

HW: Well, hello, and welcome to the very first episode of the Socially Holistic Podcast, and I am here with my guest Tanja Gardner who is a copywriter for difference makers, who has recently started to focus particularly on introverts. And her business name is: Crystal Clarity Copywriting Ltd. So, welcome Tanya.

TG: Hello Holly, thank you so much for inviting me.

HW: I am so excited to have you here!

Just as a background, Tanja and I met on Leonie Dawson’s Amazing Business and Life Academy and we recently connected, offline, when she was in London, which is near where I live. Tanja is from New Zealand, although she is originally from the UK. So, I would like to have you just tell us a little bit about your background so people can get to know you.

TG: All righty, so, I kind of started off very much as a drifter. I have always been one of these people that takes the path of least resistance, so, I was a psych major at university, then I finished Uni and had no idea what I was going to do with my degree, so I went into advertising, temping, had a lot of temp assignments. And I knew I had a love of writing, but I wasn’t ever sure how I could ever get paid for that, so I just did office work; and I started finding myself asking people if could help them out with the writing stuff, the business letters, the sales proposals and stuff like that. And every now and then somebody would have something that they really hated doing, that they passed my way. And, so, I slowly sort of built up, experience within my job of doing writing stuff even though that wasn’t theoretically part of my job. [HW: um hmm]

Then I had…, I got a sales job, where a large proportion of my KPIs had to do with proofing and editing, and that set me up for the next job after that, so everything has been a gradual step-by-step process, where, I saw a job advertised with the job title ‘copywriter’ and it was in the Natural Health and Wellness Industry, which, I am really passionate about; and it just seemed like it was going to be the perfect job, and I had to go for it and I got it.

HW: Great.

TG: So, I did that for three years. Every step along the way basically was setting me up for setting up my own business as a copywriter, but working, not so much in the way of marketing products, but helping people who want to make a difference in the world. I call them ‘difference makers’. [HW: yes.] And that is what got me to launch my business.

HW: Great and how did you make the shift from a full-time job to a full time business?

TG: Again, it is step-by-step-by-step. I actually wrote a guest post about this, towards the end of last year, and I called it “crossing a chasm in many bounds” or something like that, you know that old saying? [HW: yes!] …crossing a chasm in two short leaps? [HW: yes laughing.] I disagree with that, I think that a lot of the time you can, you just need to look for a different place to cross. [HW: um hmm that’s excellent, an excellent image laughing] If you like I will find you the url for that blog post, and you can put it in the show notes? [HW: yes, that would be perfect. Excellent.] So for me what that looked like was, when I started, when I first had the idea of having a business I was working as a full time copywriter, I had a nice job, the only thing was that I didn’t feel like I was getting to make a difference with it. Which was a real, that’s a core value for me, is making a difference in the world. And I had to get past this hurdle in my mind, that it is actually possible for me to run a business, because I am not business-owner material, trust me. [HW: laughing]. I am just so not what people think of when they think of an entrepreneur. And I had to get past that in my own mind.

HW: And what things did you have to get past?

TG: I had actually tried to start up a business before, I had tried to do a stress management and online fitness coaching; and I had no idea what I was doing. And I tried to do it all on my own, which, you know is one of those mistakes that I think every entrepreneur makes at the beginning, we think we have got to do everything alone.

HW: Oh yes! [Laughing]

TG: And I had to get past the point, because I had failed before I didn’t believe I was necessarily going to fail again, but I also had to look at what I had done last time, I am not going to say that what I had done wrong, but what I had done that wasn’t serving the desire to have a business. And look at ways that I could do it differently this time round. And I am still doing that! Don’t get me wrong, I have not got this all down yet.

HW: I love this part of your journey because I am a huge believer in: “there is no failure, only feedback”; and I think a lot of people think, “oh well, you know I tried a business and it wasn’t successful, so that means I am just not good in business”; but maybe that just wasn’t the right business for you or not the right business for that time in your life. And there are so many different businesses.

TG: Yeah. I wasn’t in the right places at that point in time, I hadn’t learned enough about myself and I hadn’t learned enough about what I needed to do. I just kind of did that: “great, I am going to do a business, awesome, let’s do this thing…ok, what do I do now?”.

So, that was the first hurdle, the second one was that there were various logistical and legal things that I needed to do that limited when I could launch the business. Once I had the idea, it was still another two or three months before I could legally launch myself as a business. [HW: okay.] I had to get permission from my workplace. [HW: oh]. In my job contract it basically said that I would not have any other sources of employment without my work places okay. And the contract said that the okay would not be unreasonably withheld, but it had to go through the chains, and they had to look at my proposal and just make sure there was no conflict of interest, or competition. [HW right.] Which was totally fair enough.

I had to do the financial and legal stuff as well, all of which meant the point where I decided I was going to go for it, it was another two or three months down the track before I could actually launch. Now, in that time, what I did was to start to think about “ok, who do I most want to work with, and where do they hang out, and how can I make connections with them now, so that when I am ready to launch, I have already built some relationships and some network. And let me tell you as an introvert; that is really hard to do, making those connections.

HW: So what were the biggest challenges you had with making connections?

TG: Just talking to people. One of the things I did was, for example, I signed up for a lot of newsletters, and whenever anybody mentioned something about: “I have got this eBook coming out that I am working on” or “hey, wow look at my new website” what I would do is say “hey, I am a copywriter and I’m totally new, totally green, I don’t want to give you the wrong idea here, but I am trying to get some experience under my belt, and get some nice testimonials. So, what I would like to do, is there anything I can help you with, especially with the eBooks, have you got anyone to edit that you, can I help you in exchange for an honest testimonial? [HW: excellent]. So I wasn’t charging any money, so there was no problem with the logistical legal side of things, but I was starting to very gradually get my name out there, make connections, some of which I still have today, and get that important social profile up on my website, so that when I was ready to launch, I at least had a little bit on there that said: “hey I am worth paying for, honestly”.

HW: Excellent. Testimonials are such an important part of a website.

TG: Oh yeah, definitely. Another thing that I had to do was figure out my niche, which I can just hear some of your listeners cringing at the moment; I cringed the first time I heard it.

HW: I think everyone does! [Laughing]

TG: Yeah, what it really was, was just figuring out who I really wanted to work with; and, for me, that was a challenge partly because, a lot of people have a cause or a mission they really deeply believe in and it is not that they choose it, it calls them. [HW: um hm.] And they would call it their calling, and there is some kind of difference that they really want to make in the world, they want to be part of a movement, they want to see a specific area that is better, basically they leave it better than when they found it. [HW: right, right]. It might be about ecological issues, it might be about vegetarianism, it might be about gay rights, any of these things; that they really focus on that niche, sorry on that cause, and it is really obvious to them where they want to work.

Now for me, there are so many things I believe in, and so many things that I want to support, and there is no way that I could spread myself thin enough to do stuff on every one of those missions. [HW: yes.] Those causes. And I had this epiphany one day, and it was like “hang on a second, even if I did go into one of these particular areas, I don’t know what I would do there, but, I have these amazing writing skills, I love writing, what if I was to use those skills to support the people who are making the differences out there. And then I can support all kinds of different causes. And even be a part of all kinds of making differences. Um, and that was my moment of “ok, so, this is what my business is going to be, I am going to be the person who, I am not going to be the difference maker myself, I am going to be supporting all the difference makers out there, because that’s what I do well.”

HW: Excellent!

TG: So, I launched the business part-time while I was working my day job, and then I had a change in circumstance that would have been well July last year, my dad passed away.

HW: Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.

TG: Which was a very difficult time, but, one of the gifts that he gave me, one of the many gifts he gave me, this one just happens to be financial, was the ability to quit my job and focus on my business full-time without having to worry about my business supporting me financially from the get-go.

HW: Excellent, that’s great.

TG: I cannot describe how grateful I am for that, because I don’t think I would have had the courage to launch full-time if it hadn’t been for that change in circumstances.

HW: I think that is a huge part of what makes people so hesitant to start a business, because it is a huge leap financially, if they don’t, you know, most businesses don’t generate enough money to live off in the first couple of months, so.

TG: I mean, I don’t know what it is like in the UK or the US, but here in New Zealand, our Inland Revenue Department expects a business to make a loss for the first three years, and they don’t really start getting upset with you until you are in your fourth year if you are still registering a loss. Now, online businesses are well known for walking out of the red much more quickly, because, we have lower overheads to start with. We don’t have to invest quite as much into our businesses to start them up. But, there is still the reality that it takes a while for things, for the ball to start rolling, and in the meantime, if you don’t have a financial cushion, it is a lot harder, and I certainly…my hat goes off to people who start their businesses without that financial cushion, because I feel I got to take the easy way.

HW: So, you are recently focussing, particularly on introverts, so you have kind of found your niche and you’ve started to focus on them; why would you say that there is all this buzz on introverts on the Internet, because I just keep reading about them all over the place. Everyone is talking about them!

TG: It’s funny, isn’t it? Okay, the reason that I focus myself, I started focussing in on working with introverts is because I caught some of this buzz as I was reading and learning about it and it was like “oh my god, this describes me so much”. [HW laughing.] I can’t believe how many tendrils of introversion seem to have kind of wriggled their way into areas of my life, that I had no idea had anything to do with introversion. So, that’s why I focussed on it, but I think from a, sort of a more environmental point of view, I think Suzanne Cain’s The Quiet Power of Introverts, which incidentally is on my library hold list but I still haven’t read it. [HW: oh wow] So many people have talked about it and I can’t wait to get to it; I think her book was just a world-changer, suddenly everyone was realising that introvert doesn’t mean anti-social, it doesn’t even mean shy, although a lot of people think that it does. There are plenty of confident introverts, and I consider myself a confident introvert, there are actually shy extroverts as well. But I think that people started reading it and realising that the extrovert business model, in fact just the extrovert model of interaction, where the more you are social, the better, the more friends you have the better, the more time you spend with other people, the better. That works really well for extroverts, and there is nothing wrong with it if you are the sort of person who thrives on social interaction. But somewhere between 25% and 57% of us, depending on who you ask, are introverted, and for us that model is so draining. Because we have to spend energy to interact with other people, even if we love them deeply, even if we enjoy our time with them, interacting with them actually uses up our energy reserves and we have to recharge by being alone. And I think that there are so many people who for all of their life have been told that they are anti-social, or they just need more confidence, or that they need to get more friends, and they felt like there is something wrong with them, and then they have read this book and it’s like “oh my god, it’s not just me, I am not broken, I don’t need to be fixed, I’m just an introvert and that’s fine”. [HW: yep]. For me that was a really seminal moment, and I have realised as well that there are a lot of strengths associated with being an introvert, that are really useful in building a business and building business relationships and then maintaining those relationships, but we don’t get told about them, because we keep getting these messages that the only way to promote our businesses is to hustle, hustle, hustle and go out and do the extrovert thing.

HW: So what are the strengths that you see that introverts have?

TG: Sorry, what are the? [HW: What are the strengths that you see that introverts have that can help with business?] Sure, okay, so, first of all, we tend to be… extroverts tend have a lot of relationships, but have them reasonably shallow, we tend to go deep and narrow, so in general we are good at building a few relationships but building them deeply. We are often good at listening. [HW: okay.] We are really good at working on our own, a lot of us excel at researching, actually, when I did my Introverts Guide to Promoting Yourself Online course, in February of this year, I was talking about introvert strengths, and one of the participants said: “what about intuition?” And that’s something I had never seen in any of the books that I had read, or the research that I had done on introversion, but it makes sense, because when you are an introvert, you tend to be really comfortable in your own head; you are really comfortable keeping yourself company, and you are used to being alone with your thoughts, and alone with your feelings, and so you actually are often more in touch with your intuition than an extrovert might be.

HW: Very interesting point.

TG: Yeah, Yeah, I thought it was fascinating, so that went into the next version of the course!

HW: Excellent! [Laughing.] So, what would you say is a typical work day is like for you?

TG: Oh, all righty, so my work days vary. Although my brain is very process orientated, I am not very good with routine. [HW: okay]. So, I am really good at planning out an entire routine for myself down to the hour, and then not following it, in any way shape or form. [HW: laughing]. So, what I tend to do, is, I get up fairly early, I do a lot of training in my business, I figure that I am a service provider and as such, the best thing I can invest in in my business, is me and my own skills. So, especially at the moment, I am getting up crazy early because I have a couple of phone calls each week, which hit at 5am my time, which mean I am up at 4am. [HW: wow.] The major thing with my day is that I get to spend it on my own, which I do love. [HW: excellent, laughing.] That’s the introvert in me, I have got all of my own community and my friends are there if I want to drop in and see them, but I can control the level of interaction with them, so that if I don’t have the energy, I just don’t check-in with my online communities. And, some of my week is spent doing client work, some of it is spent doing a little bit of product development, depending on whatever I have in the works at the time, and some of it is spent doing writing and blogging and writing emails and such like. So, basically, it is very flexible, very fluid, I try to get out of the house, at least every couple of days just because…[HW: laughing] I am not sure it is good for me to spend an entire week in the house on my own, and I try and get some exercise into my day when I can. But, yes, it is just very, very, fluid.

HW: Excellent, that sounds like a beautiful work week. [Laughing].

TG: It feels good for me.

HW: What about outsourcing? Are there any parts of your business that you outsource?

TG: Absolutely! Now, I have to say that it took me a while to do this.

HW: I think that happens to everyone.

TG: Yeah, it is not just about being able to afford it. It is having the mindset that ‘if I am going to make this work I need help’ which is a scary thing for an introvert to get to, it is also, there is a level of, kind of feeling as though you are faking it. You have this sort of thought process of: “I am not at the stage yet where I really need someone, I can’t justify it”. And I am just kind of playing dress-up [Both: laughing] if I get somebody else involved, but, I have to say that the outsourcing I have done has just been the best thing ever for my business. So, do you want to know who I outsource to, or just the things that I outsource?

HW: Um, just the things, and a few, if you recommend anyone we can include them in the show notes.

TG: Cool, okay, so, everything, all my tech that’s related to my website, I basically have a total care package, with someone called Katie Logan Newbill. [HW: okay]. And she just looks after everything for me, all my security, my backups, my, any time I have an issue with something tech, if something is running slow, or not appearing as it should do on the screen, I get onto Kate and she is on it like a shot usually, she is awesome.

HW: Perfect.

TG: So, I don’t have to think about that.

HW: That’s so…peace of mind with your website is so important.

TG: Yeah, oh yeah. And she does the hosting as well, so I don’t have to worry about that. [HW: great] Okay, so, in addition to that I have since, I think it was January or February, I started working with a VA; that was one of the real ones that for me felt like ‘I am just playing dress up in mummy’s clothes’. [HW: laughing]. I am not employing a VA, am I?

HW: I love that image!

TG: [Laughing]. The reason I started working with Tina [Robbins], my VA, was that I knew back in February, that I was going to be taking a five/six-week vacation in May to June of this year; and I wanted someone to keep the home fires burning and keep an eye on my email, and make sure that nobody was having massive crises, that I needed to get involved in, without me having to check it every day while I was on holiday. As we worked together, I sort of found out more things that I could delegate to her, and again, like everything else we have talked about so far, it has been very fluid, we didn’t go into it with a “I will get you to do this, this and this and that’s all it is ever going to be”.

HW: Yeah, it flowed into something else.

TG: Yeah, we sort of said, “okay let’s try this” “how does it work when I delegate this? How does it work when I delegate that?” Some things have been perfect and I still get Tina to do them now. And other things it is like “you know what I am not actually saving myself any time with this thing, and I quite enjoy doing it, so I might grab that back.” [HW: yep, that makes sense.]

And the other thing I happily outsource, is that I have an accountant dealing with my, I think what you call a CPA, dealing with all of my tax stuff and a lot of my finance. I do really, really, really, basic bookkeeping myself in terms of, I track my incomes and outgoings myself, because, as a business owner I feel like I should be on top of that. I don’t believe in leaving that level of detail to somebody else. But, anything beyond the simple basic stuff, anything that requires more than an excel spreadsheet, basically. [HW: laughing] That, I am happy to pay somebody else to do that, because I would stress myself silly that I was forgetting something and that the idea that the Inland Revenue were going to come down on me like a ton of bricks for some kind of honest mistake.

HW: [laughing] Sounds like a smart decision then?

TG: It feels like it, yeah. Those are the three things that I outsource at the moment, I can vaguely imagine that at some point I might end up outsourcing some of my social media as well. [HW: um hmm]. It is not that I don’t enjoy doing that, it is just that I spend way too much time on it, it is too much fun, and I really should do more business-y stuff rather than playing on Facebook. But I am not at that point yet.

HW: Ok, that is something I hear a lot! So, in addition to your outsourcing are there any business tools that you use in terms of online or offline, hardware or software, what do you use that kind of helps you with your day-to-day business?

TG: All right. So, Dropbox is a major for me.

HW: I love Dropbox, it is so fabulous!

TG: I could not; okay, when I did my trip over to the UK, my idea was that I was going to work part of the holiday, and I just wanted to put boundaries around when I would a working and when I would be spending time with family, and when I would be having my introvert alone time. [HW: um hmm]. And there was no way that I could have set up my business and worked with my clients the way I did, without Dropbox or some similar form of cloud based storage. So, for people who don’t know Dropbox, Dropbox is a way of storing your files so that wherever you are in the world, whatever computer you log-in on, you can access them.

HW: Yes and also your iPhone your iPad it’s everywhere.

TG: You can log-on in an Internet café, you can do it.

HW: Yes, love it.

TG: That was top of my list. I actually, interestingly enough one of the things I have started doing, is stopped using a tool. When it was just me, and I was mostly doing personal email stuff, I used Outlook and downloaded all my email server. [HW: oh yes]. But, now that I have a VA, I need her to be able to access my email, and so what I have done, is taken a step back and gone back to using Gmail mostly as a webmail. I only use Outlook now to backup, and archive my emails. And I find some of the tools in Gmail, especially the filters, and I think it is called boomerang?

HW: Oh, I LOVE Boomerang!

TG: I have just discovered it, boomerang, I have just discovered it properly two weeks ago.

HW: Oh excellent.

TG: Oh my god; it is, again, some people who don’t know, Boomerang is a little plug in that goes with Gmail that allows you to…firstly, it means that you can queue an email for sending later on, so it doesn’t have to go to the person that you are sending it to, when you hit send. So, I can work on an email over the weekend, and then have it sent as though it was sent on Monday morning, Which makes it look at least, like I don’t have the horrendously fuzzy boundaries that I do around my weekend work. [HW: laughing] The other thing it will do, is that you can to ping you if you send an email and you don’t hear back from it within a certain amount of time, so it is like a little reminder that you know. So, if I were to email Holly about some project that we were working on together, rather than me having to keep in mind that I haven’t heard back from her in three days and call her up, I just tell Boomerang to ping me if a reply hasn’t come in.

HW: Yes, so convenient. [TG: awesome.] And another thing that it does is you can keep your inbox clean by, if you have done your two hours of emailing for the day and you have still got fice emails left to go and you don’t want to answer them today, you can ping them to Boomerang out of your inbox and come back, either tomorrow, or whenever, I love that feature.

TG: I haven’t used that yet, I have this weird system called inbox zero-ish. [HW: oh! Okay]. Which is kind of like inbox zero but more flexible. [HW: laughing]. So, basically, I tend to try and limit myself to check in on my emails two or three times a day but that’s not what happens. That’s what I try and do, and, basically, I deal with the urgent stuff from within Gmail, and anything that is not urgent for that week I just leave, and then once a week I do my download from Gmail to Outlook, and that’s where I go through and do my inbox zero-ish and basically try and file or deal with any of the quick non-urgent stuff. But there is always a little bit that gets left over. [HW: yes.] And that’s why I call it zero-ish.

HW: [Laughing], well at least it is close to zero!

TG: Exactly, and I also feel like I am doing more and getting less overwhelmed than before I used it. For me the marker of a good system is not does it work perfectly, but does it work better than not using it? [HW: yes, that’s an excellent guideline.] Yeah, yeah, that flexibility thing again.

HW: One thing that I wanted to ask you before we moved onto the particulars of your business, and how people can benefit from working with a copywriter, is, do you have any business mentors or are there any business owners that inspire you? Or who have inspired you along your journey?

TG: Oh my, yes; I got you to send me these questions in advance, because I wanted to think about questions like this [HW: laughing]. And the immediate answer I have written under this for this, when I started thinking about it, is “where do I start?!”

HW: [Laughing.] That’s great.

TG: I came up with three specifics that came to mind right now, we talked about Leonie Dawson earlier. [HW: I love her!!] She founded the Goddess Circle which is now called the Amazing Biz and Life Academy; and that’s where you and I met, yay.

HW: Yes!

TG: So, Leonie is totally a mentor for me, she doesn’t know it, but she is. [laughing] What I love about the world of Internet and online space is that anybody can be your mentor, [HW: yes] whether they know it or not, you just have to make them your mentor. [HW: yes]. So, yes, Leonie, she is sparkly and turquoise and magical [HW: laughing]. And all things that my very left brain, logical, processed mind, was missing until I met her. [HW: laughing; I love that.] And of herself she is not enough, because my mind is not totally hippy and sparkly and unicorns and fairy dust, but there was a hole in my awareness and Leonie totally fills it. [HG: Great.]

Danielle LaPort is another one. [HW: Yeah, love her.] That woman rocks. [HW: laughing] I am currently working through her desire map at the moment, and it is just amazing.

HW: I have heard so many great things about that and I have paid for it, I have got the access, and I haven’t had the time to focus on it yet, so I am really, really, looking forward to that.

TG: Yeah, it took me probably three or four weeks after I got the download to start working through it and I am still working through it. And I am still working through at the moment. [HW: It’s massive!] Yeah it is the sort of thing you want to take at your own pace, whether to do the whole thing in an intensive weekend or just dip into it every now and then, which is what I am doing. Yes, it’s fantastic. Then there are people who I know more personally, more closely. Some of the people in my business community I think of as mentors, Rhiannon Llewellyn who runs the love and money revolution community, she is just awesome source, she really is. Um, she is also the person who gave me a really lovely snippet of feedback on my very first introvert programme, she was such a sweety.

HW: Oh excellent.

TG: She has endeared herself in her heart to me forever more. Kate who does my tech stuff, she is actually a really amazing person, and, again, she doesn’t know it but I think of her as a mentor. So yeah there are so many people who inspire me who either, what they teach or just who they are, they give me the sense that “I can do this”. ‘It is big and it’s scary but oh my god I’m going to do this.’ So yeah.

HW: That is a huge understanding when you come to the point where you realise: “I have got this huge business idea, it is so inspiring and I am so excited about it, I can do this”

TG: Yeah, it is that thing of what I create may be nothing like the vision that I had when I started and that’s okay, because it is still going to be perfect.

HW: I love that, perfect. [Laughing.] So, focussing back a little bit on to what you do. When can introverts most benefit from copywriting and promotional help?

TG: All righty, so we talked a about a few of the strengths that introverts tend to have above sort of the standard, i.e. Xx dealing with people, which is what they often think of initially, we talked about the fact that they tend to be good at writing, I am not the only one, a lot of introverts have writing as a skill. But, we tend to be in our own heads a lot, and that can make it really difficult to write copy or promote ourselves from our client’s perspective. It is really easy to talk about what we do, especially if we are passionate about it. We can talk about what we do in terms of the processes that we use, and the specific features that are involved in any one of our offerings. Because we know so much about it and we want to share that knowledge, but we tend to forget that a lot of the time, the people that we are talking to don’t really care about the process,

HW: Right, they want the result.

TG: They want to know what difference it is going to make in their lives. How it is going to change whatever problem it is they are experiencing. There is a beautiful example, at one of the tele-summits, a metaphor that somebody talks about, imagine that there are two islands, pleasure island and pain island. [HW; um hmm]. And people are sitting on pain island, and they know they are miserable but they don’t know what the other options are. And you have this boat that will ferry them from pain island to pleasure island, but you have to convince them to get on the boat. Now, a lot of people will sit there and talk about how wonderful the boat is, and how many gadgets it has, and how comfortable it is going to make the journey but they forget that people actually need a reason to leave pain island and go to pleasure island in the first place. And they need to talk about pleasure island and how wonderful it is.

HW: Um hmm. And they need to tell people where they are going with the boat, because if they are going from pain island to even bigger pain island, who wants to be on that boat? [Laughing].

TG: Exactly, if they have got on other boats before that have sunk, they are not likely to trust your boat. [HW: laughing.] And I wish I could remember whose metaphor this is, because I promise you it is not mine, it might be xxx, I am not too sure. So, we as introverts, we know our boats, we know what they will do, and what they won’t do, and we want to tell people about our boat in loving detail, because often we are the ones that built the boat; but just getting out of that mindset and into: “okay, I need to really get into the brain of the person I am writing for. And I figure out what’s important for them.” That’s not something traditionally that introverts have learnt to do.

HW: And is that something that you have kind of trained, or re-programmed, your mind to do since you have been working at this for so long.

TG: Yes! I, with a lot of training that I have done, because this is a constant refrain from a lot of different copywriting and marketing experts that I have a lot of respect for, I have started to realise where I am doing it myself, it is actually harder to see for yourself than anyone else. I can look at someone else’s copy and say “okay, people, this is really good information, it is really interesting for you, but people aren’t going to care, they are going to skip ahead to this bit, so this is what we need to focus on”. I can do that for other people’s stuff, but I need somebody else’s input for my own; which I think is typical of copywriters.

HW: Yes, that makes sense. So, what are the dangers of someone trying to do it all alone? I know outsourcing, as we have already said, is a really, really, difficult thing for people in business.

TG: Yeah, I think kind of what I have just mentioned above, that even if we are really good copywriters, it can be really hard to do our own stuff, to evaluate our own stuff. Also, I think especially for introverts, we have learned that it is a bad thing toot our own horns and we are intruding or interrupting other people by emailing them, or by putting a message up on Facebook. And we know, because we hate being interrupted and we hate people intruding on our space, we don’t want to do that to other people, and I think that that is probably one of the number one things that clients in the past have said to me, introverts on my programme have said to me, they know that they have got something that will make a difference in people’s lives, but they feel really weird in telling people about it.

HW: I hear that a lot [laughing].

TG: Yeah, the other thing is that many of us have grown up writing on paper, or at least writing for print, and we don’t realise that there is a completely different way of writing for the web. That if you are going to be read on screen, there are certain conventions that you need to follow or you are making it harder than it needs to be for your reader to follow, and I, actually, this was enough of a thing in the clients that I was working with at one point, that I sat down and wrote up a Guide: “This is how you can make your webpage as clear as possible for an onscreen reader”; it is actually available on my site for free, if you people want it. The url for it is on the Crystal Clear webpage: http://crystalclaritycopywriting.com.

HW: Perfect thank you.

TG: You are welcome.

HW: Laughing. So, what are your top tips for introverted business owners who want to do their own copywriting?

TG: All righty, so. I would say, start by figuring out what your key message is, because, whether you are writing a webpage or an email, a powerful piece of communication is one that has a single unique message, and I think that the easiest way to do this is to take a step back from what you are thinking you are writing about and say: “what is the one thing that you want your readers to walk away from this with?” If they take nothing else from reading this webpage or this email, what is it that people will walk away with? And, handy hint: this should involve a benefit to them. If it doesn’t they are going to be a lot less likely to understand why it is relevant to them.

HW: That makes sense.

TG: Then, once you know what that key message is, my next tip would be figure out how to communicate it to them in their language and not yours. So, if you are a coach, for example, and a lot of my clients are, [HW: um hmm]. There is a kind of language that comes with coaching, you talk about going to your highest potential, or imagining a desired future, that makes perfect sense to you because you have been steeped in that language for all of your training. It is really easy to forget that the rest of the world doesn’t talk like that. [HW: yes]. And that you could lose people, or turn them off, because they either don’t understand what you are saying, or, they think they do but they get the wrong impression, or they simply get frustrated because they feel like they are not connecting with you because they don’t understand what you are saying. [HW: right] So, understanding how your clients use language, the phrases that they use to describe the problems that they are having and the phrases that they use to describe how it would feel to not have those problems any more. That’s the language you need to use, not the language you learned from your coaching diploma. [HW: laughing]. Yeah, it is a hard one, you don’t always know that you are doing it.

HW: Yes, especially if you have a lot of friends who are coaches, or in similar industries, you are constantly surrounded by people who are talking about these things, and you don’t realise that the entire rest of the world doesn’t speak that language.

TG: Exactly, and I am picking on coaches there, and I apologise to the coaches in your audience, because, in fact, any industry has its own jargon.

HW: Yes.

TG: And there is nothing wrong with that jargon when you are speaking to people who are also in the industry; it because jargon for a reason, often it is a more precise, nuanced term, for something that you have to spend you know three sentences describing rather than speaking a single word of jargon, but, the downside is that people outside the industry have no idea what you are talking about.

HW: [Laughing.] Yes.

TG: So that’s the second tip, the third tip is that when you edit (and you are going to edit!!) you want to look for everything that doesn’t support that one message that you came up with in the first place, anything that doesn’t support it is going to dilute your message, is going to distract from what you really want to communicate, so it either needs to be deleted or it needs to be moved to another page or email. There is a wonderful story, I think it is, who is it, Michael Angelo? Da Vinci?, one of the amazing artists who was asked how they sculpted their amazing works of art, and they commented that they looked at a block of stone, saw the statue within it, and then chiselled away everything that wasn’t the statue. [HW: yes.] And that’s what you need to be able to do with your copy.

HW: I absolutely love that image and love that you have applied it to copywriting.

TG: Yes, it is exactly what you do with copywriting. My fourth tip goes back to the talking in somebody else’s language, is that once you have finished it and you think it is beautiful and perfect, get someone else to read through it for you. And someone who is not in your industry. So, they don’t know the jargon, and watch them read it; because they might not tell you that a bit confuses them, especially if they are not used to giving constructive feedback. They may want to tell you what they think you want to hear. [HW: right]. It is perfect, it is great. But if you watch their face, you can often see the bits that confuse them, and watch as they go back and re-read something three times. [HW: um hmm]. And it is really important that you use someone who is not in your industry, because you want to write for people outside your industry, unless of course your perfect clients are in your industry. If you are a coach for coaches it is not a problem. [HW: right.] But someone who is close to your target audience as possible is ideal. And I am going to be really cheeky here and say that my fifth tip is when all else fails, go download the free guide.

HW: [Laughing], perfect, that’s what free guides are for.

TG: Absolutely.

HW: Well, Tanja thank you so much for this, I think this was so juicy and full of so much really, really, useful information. Not just learning about your journey, but also just very, very, practical copywriting tips for introverts.

TG: Well, it was HUGE fun I have to say to be invited to talk on here Holly, I don’t know whether it shows in the answers I have given you, but this is the first time I have ever done anything like this, so I was really nervous!

HW: Oh fabulous, well, thank you so much, thank you so much. And before we sign off I just wanted to ask you, we are going to include this in the show notes but where can people find you online?

TG: All righty. So, the easiest place to find me is at my website which is: http://crystalclaritycopywriting.com and if my Kiwi accent gets in the way of spelling that out, then I think probably go to the show notes rather than spelling it out

HW: And is that.com

TG: .com yes, and I am also on, Facebook and Twitter, and people can get those links from my website, and if they want to they can keep an eye on me through my blog and there is also a fortnightly newsletter that I do, where I offer just some short and sweet writing tips and some business building promotional tips, just things that generally have been relevant for me that week, or that month; and so I sort of convert them into a short tip and send that out every two weeks.

HW: Ok, great!

TG: So, I would love people want to sign up for that it is called Crystal Writing Tips.

HW: Ok. Perfect. Well thank you again very, very much. [TG: You are welcome.] It was such a pleasure to have you and I am so excited that I am launching my new podcast with you as my first guest, so thank you, thank you, thank you!

[SHP 1] How to Make a Difference With Your Copywriting, With Tanja Gardner