Everyone Hates Marketers | No-BS Marketing & Brand Strategy Podcast

Erica - 00:00:00:

The purpose of all of this, of being online and capturing attention, is to tap into other people's emotions, make them feel something, and teach them something. Everybody's selfish. As great of a person as you are, nobody actually gives a shit about you. They care about themselves. They're scrolling super fast. And I just wrote a newsletter about this this morning. I don't care if you've got decades of experience as the White House press secretary or whatever. You were a professor at an Ivy League school. I'm using all these American terms. Excuse me for that. But it doesn't matter. And people think, oh, I'm just going to whip up an online profile and be like, I was this amazing person and I did these great things. Follow me. Be amazed by me and learn from me. Absolutely not. Nobody cares about that. They check your credentials later. First, you have to engage them and compel them. And the way to do that is to make it about them and not you.


Louis - 00:00:59:

Bonjour, bonjour, and welcome to another episode of everyonehatesmarketers.com, the no-fluff, actionable marketing podcast for people sick of marketing bullshit. I'm your host, Louis Grenier. In today's episode, you will learn how to authentically grow your personal platform that gets you clients. My guest today is the Head of Content for Grizzle, which is a B2B growth agency. She's edited more than 3 million plus words in her career. And her marketing style really just speaks to me, which is the reason why I invited her today. I love her anti-bro stance, anti-clickbait positioning, which is very much the same as me. She has a way with words that I can't really describe. It's difficult to describe, but it just feels real. It feels like it's a real person not trying to fucking trick me into buying stuff I don't need. And more someone who's actually speaking their mind in a way that is make sense, but see it. I'm just going to read one tweet, my favorite tweet from my guest today. So you get a glimpse of her style. Everybody wants to microdose, but nobody's doing it right. Here's my six-step process to finding, taking, and making the most of these brain power boosters to beat life. Slay the day and get more done than 99% of people. Obviously making fun of the bro marketing going on in the interwebs. Anyway, Erica Schneider, welcome.


Erica - 00:02:20:

Hello. It's great to be here.


Louis – 00:02:21:

Is it?


Erica – 00:02:22:

It is. That tweet that you just read is also one of my favorite things I ever tweeted because it was a response to someone on my mega viral anti-bro tweet, which was all about how it was basically a word salad that the bros use all their favorite terms. And I ended it with something that very clearly... Was poking at fun at men because I'm a woman and I was like testosterone. The replies were insane. So that was a reply, which is amazing that that one has like over 5,000 likes.


Louis - 00:02:56:

Yeah, that's actually very rare, isn't it? So when you say the replies were insane, was it like in a good way, in a nice, in a bad way, both ways?


Erica - 00:03:04:

In the best possible way you can imagine in every way. So the people who, the tweet confused people. Some people were quote tweeting it in agreement, like for the thing I was making fun of, which was fucking fantastic. A lot of people were quote tweeting their own word salads, pointed at whatever the hell they wanted to talk about. And then the replies were things like that, where people were just riffing. Everybody that day was in bro tone, but making fun of the bros. And it was like this amazing, amazing moment.


Louis - 00:03:33:

So let's be clear. The bros can be men, but they can also be non-men, right?


Erica - 00:03:41:

Yeah. Anyone can be a bro. And they're also good and bad bros. So Casey, for example, my business partner, she actually self-identifies as a bit of a bro. She lifts weight at the gym. She has her protein shake every day. She absolutely loves cold showers, which I fucking hate. And she's a really good person. There's also a lot of guys out there that have bro tendencies that are really good fucking people. The worst bros are just self-centered douchebags that are trying to sell you shit in an MLM scheme while taking thirst trap pictures of their abs and posting them next to a clickbait hook.


Louis - 00:04:14:

My favorite bro, I'm not going to obviously name that person, is the one that has an espresso every morning


Erica - 00:04:22:

He's wiping him with bro too.


Louis - 00:04:24:

It makes you feel absolutely horrible for having a normal life with kids and a family. It's like I'm journaling every day and drinking my espresso and here's the view from my balcony. And I only made 20k last night yesterday. I'm so disappointed in myself.


Erica - 00:04:40:

He also eats the same meal all three times a day.


Louis – 00:04:42:

Yeah, I mean, such a waste of time.


Erica – 00:04:43:

Wears the same clothes, obviously walks 20,000 steps.


Louis - 00:04:47:

Yes. Did you hear that 25,000 steps is the new 10,000 steps actually?


Erica - 00:04:52:

I have heard that, but then there are some fitness accounts that seem to be backtracking to 10,000. I don't know, maybe there was a backlash.


Louis - 00:04:59:

Yeah, there might be some clash. Okay, so it seems very easy these days to get attention online and to actually build an audience and then sell products and build a brand or whatever, because we have access to those templates that everyone says, right? We just have to use those templates on Twitter or LinkedIn or via email or whatever, and then that's it, right?


Erica - 00:05:20:

Yeah, of course. Just do that. We can end the podcast here.


Louis - 00:05:25:

So what's wrong with that?


Erica - 00:05:26:

Yeah, templates are the worst because they don't give you any breathing room to, first of all, figure out why they work. Templates take words and they smash them together in a way that is designed to get attention. And if you don't understand why it does that, then you're never going to be able to make words in that order yourself to make it yourself, to make it your own. So if you run out of templates, you have to recycle the old templates and you just sound like you're totally ununique from yourself, but also you're totally ununique from anyone else out there. One of my favorite things I did, I don't know if you came across this when you were looking on my Twitter, but I, there's a couple templates out there that ended up being really overused. One of them was the fucking, these 10 websites are so good. They should be illegal to know. And then another one was disappear for six months. And like, I do these five things and I promise you, and you'll come back. You're going to be like a super transformed mega fucking like hero and take over the world. And so I smashed all of those together into a Canva template and made a little meme. And that was also really fun. But my point was that, you do have two choices online, right? You can buy a template or use template and sound just like everyone else, or you can sound like yourself. Now, the first one might work. Maybe you'll get likes, maybe you'll get followers, maybe you'll get engagement, maybe you'll even sell shit, but then you're locked into that personality. And if you ever try to like ever flow from it, hard to do it because you don't know how to write well and you don't know what works. So it's like short-cutting your way to success. And it also, you might end up sounding like someone else and not yourself. The only way that you're going to not hate yourself online every day, if you want to be online every day, is to have fun and be yourself. So that's just, I could go on an entire episode of why I hate templates, but those are the main points.


Louis - 00:07:19:

So have fun, be yourself. Okay, that makes sense, but it's very fluffy, obviously, because it's a statement. So I think today we can deep dive into that and what it actually fucking means, what we should be doing, what we should not, and dive in into the kind of a step-by-step. You tell me whether you want to be challenged on brand personal platform versus personal brand now, or do you want to go through a little step-by-step?


Erica - 00:07:48:

It doesn't make a difference to me.


Louis - 00:07:49:

Okay. So let's talk about it. The behind the scenes, if you're listening to this, is that before the show, Erica has sent me an email saying, actually, change of direction or at least change of topic or slight change of topic. We're not going to talk about how to build a personal brand that gets your clients. We'll talk about how to build a personal platform that gets you clients. Tell me more about why you felt the need to change that to platform.


Erica - 00:08:15:

Okay, so let me get ahead of something that you might challenge me on right away, because I've had some practice with-


Louis - 00:08:20:

Do not read my mind. Do not read my mind.


Erica - 00:08:23:

Some people have challenged this already publicly and probably the most common response is like, this is just fucking semantics, who cares? And my response to that is, yeah. You know what, in this case, if you want it to just boil down to semantics, I welcome it because the word brand, when you put it in front of personal or behind or whatever, however you want to say that, quick effort lens in the word, pisses people off. They hate it. The response to us saying down with the personal brand was insane. We've gotten over 350 comments on posts and responses to our email, essentially saying, “thank God, the word personal brand makes me feel cringy, icky”. I feel like I'm productizing myself. I feel like I'm stuck in a box. Why should I brand myself? Businesses brand themselves. Employees at businesses, I guess if you're doing employee advocacy, maybe it makes a little bit more sense to brand yourself. But me as an entrepreneur who I'm primarily speaking to, why am I “branding myself”? And so semantically, if that drives you so insane that the word platform makes you feel better, great. So that's just the first thing I will respond to.


Louis - 00:09:36:

I actually saw that very reply about semantics and I actually have it there in my notes, believe it or not. But the reason why I want to talk about it, because there is a big lesson there that I learned years ago. And obviously, every experience is different and context is different. But I used to have what I call the conversion rate optimization agency in Dublin years ago. I was very happy with that category because I felt I was the only one in Dublin offering this. Like I knew, like I felt there was an opening there. The problem was people didn't understand what it was. I had to “educate clients”. And secondly, there was no demand for that category, right? So no one was looking for commercial rate optimization. I mean, they thought they didn't need it. They thought they just need more traffic, more paid ads or whatever. Yeah, actually they need both. You need good traffic, you need good converting pages and shit like that. So what I've learned the hard way there was to use the words people use because they understand it, because there's demand, because people search for it, and then play inside that box and fuck with it. So like, marketing podcasts, I didn't try, I challenged the marketing podcast category when I started, but I didn't try to rename podcasts into an audio experience or whatever. And I think it's a bit, this is why I was so curious to hear your thought about this, is because to me, you are challenging yourself personal branding to be better because it's not about fucking LinkedIn profile or like playing fakey, it's actually being authentic. It's actually all of that. So why not just play inside that box?


Erica - 00:11:14:

Yeah. I don't want to is like the best answer I can give you. And neither does Casey, who's my business partner, but I've never done anything traditionally online or really in my life anyway, but online. And so I have been trying to grapple with building a personal brand and it's not working for me on like every level. And people always ask me, it's what you said. How do you show up here and like sound so you, you just have this sound to you and it's hard to capture and explain. And my response truly is I'm just being myself first and foremost. I'm being myself. I'm a weirdo. I write stupid poems. I make up dumb songs. I'm creative to a fault. I'm always in my head. And a lot of that comes out on social. Yeah, it's strategic. Yes, I have a purpose. Yeah, I want to make money. But I think people connect with me and feel like they know me and feel like they trust me maybe faster than other people because i'm not trying to be anything but myself, like it's obvious that I am me. And so, what I think a lot of people struggle with, and myself included is, I'm a marketer, right? If you know anything about building a brand for a business and then you try to apply that to yourself, it just feels weird and wrong. And that's never what I've done. So like, yeah, we're going to still have to use the word, obviously. You have to for a while. You have to educate people. But just the response already from not just like random people, from some big marketing people that I look up to have been like, this is really good. I think we're on to something. I think maybe it's just right place, right time. Obviously, this could totally fail and nobody will pick it up. But, I think I would say it anyway. Because I just hate the phrase.


Louis - 00:12:57:

Yeah, it's funny how in my head, I think a few years ago, I would have completely agreed and say, go for it. Today's world, it's so fucking tough to educate. And I guess, yeah, educating a small group of people through your email list or whatever, for sure. But to me, what you described, and I see you to have a very, very strong and great personal brand. It's just a good one because it's you. But I do believe in today's world, you have a brand, whether you like it or not. Because in the way, scientifically, how a brand is defined, you know, it's about like those associations that people build in their memory structure, like those little nods. That's what a brand is. It's the same that happens with individuals because we perceive it the same way as business when you see on LinkedIn or whatever. So, to me, yeah. I'm happy that you're in that space because it's funny, we decided, both of us, at the time of recording this, it's August 2023, to go around the same space, to double down on that same space. At the time we are recording this, I'm going into personal branding for marketers/creatives. So people in that industry, you could be entrepreneurs or whatnot. So it's fun to hear your perspective. And I have the exact same diagnosis of the situation, but the solution you came up with is slightly different, but it’s potato, potato, tomato, tomato, as they say. The last thing I would say to challenge you to fuck with your brain a bit so that you can think about it before falling asleep is I do feel there's a lot of virtue signaling around this. So what I hear publicly is not what I hear privately. So publicly, yeah, everyone says I hate personal brand. Privately, I get emails, DMs or whatever about, hey, I'm fucking desperate. I want to build my personal brand. It's almost like they're signaling that, yeah, I'm like the other cool boys. I'm not like the other girls. I hate personal branding as well, but always feels not 100% true.


Erica - 00:14:53:

Yeah, sure. I get those emails too. But man, my inbox has been flooded lately with people saying, I've been trying to build personal brand for years. I've bought all the things. None of it's working. I think it's because no one else is really teaching me how to be myself first and foremost. So I dig this vibe. Again, whether the term sticks or not, I don't care. I think the premise behind it is really speaking to people. And I think there's a shift regardless whether the term personal brand wins in the long run. I do hope that it's the same end goal. And I think we're all working towards that anyway. Maybe people will just refer to it as both.


Louis - 00:15:32:

If your term wins, then I'll just switch to that. I'm easy, I'm not attached to anything. Okay, so you explain and summarize the premise of our conversation today a few seconds ago. So how do we do this, right? Because everyone's talking about it. You need to be authentic. You need to be yourself, blah, blah. I don't know how to be myself. Blah, blah, blah. It all sounds fake. Okay, how the fuck do we do this?


Erica - 00:15:54:

I mean, that's the first question that you need to ask yourself, right? Like, why am I here? And with the people that I've worked with, a lot of them aren't really sure like how to show up online. We know why they're there. They have goals. They want to build their business. They want to get more clients, but they don't know how to have real conversations with people. Maybe they're an introvert. And they don't know what to talk about. And I think that's where they're getting tripped up. I know I'm here to get more business. I know I need to build a personal brand. That word makes me feel stuck, trapped, whatever. So, maybe I'm not doing like the things I should be doing with when it comes to relationship building, actually making friends. When I first started, I think I was lucky in the sense that, oh, I still do have a full-time job, but now I'm also trying to monetize. And I had no expectation of doing that at first. So when I was doing this, I was literally just like making friends. I wasn't trying to sell anything. I think it's definitely a different mindset when you're starting with the intention of selling. I think that can really trip you up. But if I'm proof of anything, it's that if you don't try to sell something for a year and you just really focus on building actual relationships and everyone feels like they want to get on the phone with you right away because you are so yourself, that can be really powerful when you do decide to monetize. So that's one way to look at it. How do you show up as yourself? Again, that totally depends on who you are. I would say you still need to be strategic in not everything you post about, but there needs to be certain things that you are, have a goal with what you're teaching people, how you're structuring your posts, what your general sense is, but you should still also do personality posts and that how many you do and like how far you go is totally up to you, but you should bring personality into it. It's none of this is easy to explain, obviously.


Louis - 00:17:45:

But I'm going to challenge you to go deeper. So let's go deeper into this because, again, it's very similar to what I've learned over the years. Like people want to build something that speaks to their soul. They don't want to, it needs to connect deeply to them. And I started the exact same way as you did. I started this podcast fucking years ago, almost seven years ago, for fun, to learn from people I admired. And I made friends along the way because there was no pressure. I didn't monetize. I fucking hate that term, by the way. I didn't monetize until a couple of years ago. So, again, yeah, that pressure was not there to sell. And I think that's a very good point already. I think it trips people up for sure. So I get that completely. Now, people listening to this, I know for a fact, they're marketing, not marketing, whatever. They all want to get that freedom, right? Because I think that's what it is about. Freedom of thought, freedom of doing whatever the fuck, whenever the fuck you want. Freedom of working with the people you want to work with. Freedom to say what you want, et cetera, et cetera. I think it boils down to that. Freedom to spend time with your family, et cetera. So what can we give them, practically speaking, to go deeper nto those topics that they can talk about and into what genuinely speaks to their soul?


Erica - 00:18:55:

It really helps to tap into what you're passionate about and you don't have to know that right away. So when I started, I didn't write down, hey, I'm going to start posting online and like making fun of bros all the time. That was not even on my radar. Keep your eyes open is the first practical tip. Look around. What are people saying? What are people talking about? What are they doing? What's your opinion on it? Do you agree or do you disagree? You don't have to do anything with that information at first, but you have to note it. So the first thing that I noted was everyone on LinkedIn was some like at the time, 2022, early 2022, when I was wrapping up there, everyone was obsessed with saying, if you're not making a 100K in the first six months that you build a personal brand, like you're totally failing and you suck. And it was just everywhere. So I noticed it. And eventually I started to write some very opinionated ranty posts about it. And I was making fun of it and it was catching on. And that wasn't me manufacturing something. That was me having a genuine response to something that I thought was stupid. And again, that comes with a bit of being unafraid. There's something that I call experimental confidence that you definitely need to get if you're trying to build a personal brand or a personal platform.


Louis – 00:20:04:

What is that?


Erica – 00:20:05:

Experimental confidence means you're going to experiment a lot. Posts have a really short shelf life and you can always delete them. Yeah. I'm a big, I'm an editor. So I'm a big fan of editing and making sure that you know what you want to say and how to say it or whatever. But if you want to delete it afterwards, or if you post something and it surprises you, it does well, it doesn't do well. It's getting an interesting response. Note that, right? That's how you show up in life too. You know what the people around you and then you adjust. Note what's happening. Passions get noticed. So if you're passionate in your response and you make people feel something, you're going to get noticed. So when I started making fun of the people that were preaching, you had to make a 100K in this like ridiculous timeframe, or else you were a failure. People were noticing that and catching on and it was starting some really good conversations. So I leaned into that. Like it wasn't intentional. And then it became very intentional. Now it's incredibly intentional.


Louis - 00:20:52:

That's very interesting. Let's go back to the first bit because there's something that you have that a lot of folks don't, especially non white men with beards, right? So not people like me, right? Which is that confidence of actually taking that step of pushing through that fear and fucking posting something. So many are afraid of what could happen if they disagree with something or if they challenge something or whatever. So, where does that come from for you? Is it like something that you're just used to, a bit like me? My teacher in high school called me an intellectual terrorist because I always, that's me, right? Is that learned? Is that part of you? What is it?


Erica - 00:21:32:

It's part of me. It's part of me. And you don't have to do it. I've taught a lot of people that don't feel confident in confrontational situations ever. And that's fine. So again, this is why it's such like one-on-one work. It really depends. But for me, yeah, no, that's me. I'm a rule breaker. I don't really like rules. When someone tells me what to do, I'll probably do the other just to spite them. Like I have no problem with confrontation. I'll fight you if I need to fight you. That's just me.


Louis - 00:21:56:

So what do you advise to folks who are not like you, right? Who are dreading as soon as they write a little line on the tweet and they're like, fuck, what are people going to say? And they're going to send me hate mail and my career is going to be ruined and stuff.


Erica - 00:22:09:

Just reach out to people, honestly, because you never know what can happen online. I'm not going to tell you that won't happen, but just figure out what makes you passionate. Casey, my business partner, for example, she doesn't go around making fun of a bunch of people, but she does write really strong, powerful posts about overcoming trauma and figuring out who you are after something really intense happens to you. She's not being confrontational to anyone in that sense, but she is reaching into her soul and putting it on screen. And again, that's something that takes time. You have imposter syndrome, you have fear, what are people going to think? You've got to just build that experimental confidence, whatever you feel passionate about talking about it will come through when you're showing up as yourself and you're actually bringing that passion. Someone said to me the other day, you know, all your bro stuff, Erica, it doesn't make me better at my business. It doesn't help me earn more money. But like, when you tell me that you have something to sell me, whether or not I need it, I'm going to think about it because I trust you and I want to buy from people like you. So,


Louis – 00:23:08:

So yeah.


Erica – 00:23:10:

Just find your passion. It's not easy. I'm not going to help people find that. That's why I partnered with Casey. She's amazing at that.


Louis - 00:23:18:

So one thing that I do quite a lot in that phase would be one to ask people around, what do you think I'm very good at? What do you think I'm very passionate about? Like that, because it stops you from doing those stupid fucking 24 personality type and those stuff that have been debunked by science because it's self-reported. People have different answers depending on the time of day, depending on time of month, whatever the fuck. And asking people is great because it actually is your brand, your platform, or your whatever the fuck. It's how people see you. And that's what people remember about you. What do you think is my unique ability or whatever you want to call it? Asking your colleagues, ex-colleagues, friends, family members who know you well. Fans, like people who follow you, whatever. Usually that gives you a boost of confidence and you'd be amazed at how many similarities you'd find even from people who don't know each other, right? They'll say the same thing the same way. So that usually works a lot. And the second thing you alluded to that earlier is, don't try to figure it out and just post it, all right? Try to challenge yourself, I would say, with a deadline. Do it every day or something to start with, because else you're going to procrastinate. At least that's my view. And just see what sticks and see what energizes you the most, right? And just send some signals out there and see what happens, right? That's why I talk about anxiety a lot nowadays, because people really, really love when I talk about it. So that's an example.


Erica - 00:24:44:

100%. Yeah. Casey has similar exercises in our course where you have to reach out to people. She says, don't do it synchronously, like on the phone, because they'll lie to your face to try to make you feel better. So do it asynchronously, have them write something down and send it back to you. And she also has a lot of reflection exercises and it's all really brilliant. So that's all super helpful. But I would say you also, if you're nervous about posting, especially when you're just starting, you don't have to post right away. Go do the same thing, but just on replies. That's a little bit less scary.


Louis - 00:25:17:

Yeah, so that's something that is very underrated when everyone is like hardly focused on like followers and subscribers and those online decontext measuring and, yeah, replying to people. It's being used and abused as well. We are not going to name him, but like this LinkedIn course that everyone under the sun has taken and trying to do the same, where you pick big accounts and you reply and try to be the first to reply and it just gets overused like anything in marketing, right? So how do you do it well?


Erica - 00:25:52:

Yeah, I don't use any of those tools that alert you when you're a favorite creator. I think that's a little bit much, but some people love them and yeah, they can be useful, I guess. When I first started, and I've been trying to think about this a lot lately because- I forgot, but I think that I like located a couple types of people, like industry peers, people that would potentially be the best to learn from me, freelancers, freelance writers, and then people that I didn't really know that I was just curious about interacting with. And I would intentionally search for some of them because I knew who I wanted to speak to. And I would follow them and then if they popped up on my feed, or if I had them in a list and I saw what they posted, I would reply to it if I had something to say. And usually it's way more than just like, oh, nice post or whatever the hell ChatGPT can generate for you, which is also don't do that. But, you want to add something to it. The only way you stand out ever, obviously being yourself is important, but you have to have an opinion. So if you have an opinion, whether that's an opinion that agrees or an opinion that disagrees, share that opinion. Because that will make people actually be like, oh, this is a unique reply. Better chance that the person that posted it is going to reply back, potentially follow you eventually. And that just helps with your growth.


Louis - 00:27:15:

So step one, figure out who you are and all of that. We said that it's not that easy and you can't just create a spreadsheet or whatever and just figure out who you are there. And then without ever being visible, I truly believe that it's the other way around. You have to fucking be out there in some ways. It doesn't have to be on LinkedIn or Twitter. It could be being interviewed on a podcast or whatever. And that's how you figure it out. Step two now, because you're an editor, you know how to write words and how to put them together in a way that makes sense and connects to people. So how do you then figure out those topics? What should talk about? How do you stick to them? How do you pick them?


Erica - 00:27:53:

I mean, you don't have to have it. I don't think you have to find a niche. I think that we're all multidimensional. And so talk about like, why are you online in the first place? You need to know that you need to know why you're there. If you're just messing around, fine, but it's going to be a bit harder to capture people's attention and get them to rally around you if you're talking about something different every single day, unless you're known as the person that talks about something different every single day.


Louis - 00:28:15:

Why are you online?


Erica – 00:28:18:

Me?


Louis – 00:28:19:

Yeah.


Erica - 00:28:20:

I want to help people write better because a lot of people suck at it and it's a really useful skill.


Louis - 00:28:24:

I was well-rehearsed. I thought I would trip you up, but clearly not.


Erica - 00:28:30:

My point is, you can learn the technical aspects of frameworks, editing, how to say things without redundancy, power words, active over passive voice, like all those technical things. But that doesn't really matter if people aren't resonating with the message. And that's something that I think a lot of people miss. They try to become these writers that don't need a lot of copy editing and they totally skip the developmental editing aspect of it. And what that means is there's a couple types of editing. There's developmental or structural editing, there's copy editing, and then there's proofreading. They are three different things and they are not meant to be done at the same time. So developmental editing is looking at something and thinking, what the hell am I saying? What's my unique angle? How am I going to present this argument in a way that makes the most sense to help me reach my goal? Copy editing is sentence by sentence. Am I using the right words in the right order? Is it easy to read? Is there a readability level that is easy to digest by the broadest group of people? Am I repeating myself? Is it cohesive? Am I using examples to back up my point? Are there takeaways? Is there a fucking CTA? Like all of that, right? That's copy editing. But most people think that's all that editing is. And if you skip over the developmental editing side, then you're not a writer. You're just not because writing is thinking and you're not thinking. So, you need to think, why am I here? What am I trying to say? How am I helping people? What are they going to learn from me? It doesn't matter. Yeah, like you should have a set of topics help, pillars help. But really, if you're consistently providing value in a way that is easy to understand and makes people feel like, your information is helping them achieve a job to be done, then that's good writing.


Louis - 00:30:15:

Okay. So I actually learned the term developmental editing years ago with one of my ex-colleagues at Hotjar, who is also a very keen editor into all the nerdy about all of this, just like you. Yeah, I've learned a lot from her on that process. So I agree, there are the two types... They're not as important. You might say they are, but like for the topic of today, I don't believe they are as important. It's okay if you make a grammatical mistake. I make them all the time when I write emails or posts. It doesn't matter. So how do we do this? Because it feels like we're going into the very, very core of it, of the topic of today, right? Which is like, how do you figure out what to say to whom in a way that resonates? So tell me more about that process. It's second nature to you. You know your shit. But, you know, if you had to explain it to someone stupid like me, How do you do it?


Erica - 00:31:06:

Again, if you're there, then it's because you have a desire to be there. What is that desire? What's your experience that you can pull into? If you don't have any experience, what are your interests that you can dive into? The purpose of all of this, of being online and capturing attention, is to tap into other people's emotions, make them feel something and teach them something. Everybody's selfish. As great of a person as you are, nobody actually gives a shit about you. They care about themselves. They're scrolling super fast. And I just wrote a newsletter about this this morning. I don't care if you've got decades of experience as the White House press secretary or whatever. You were a professor at an Ivy League school. I'm using all these American terms. Excuse me for that. But it doesn't matter. And people think, oh, I'm just going to whip up an online profile and be like, I was this amazing person and I did these great things. Follow me, be amazed by me and learn from me. Absolutely not. Nobody cares about that. They check your credentials later. First, you have to engage them and compel them. And the way to do that is to make it about them and not you. So what do you teach? Doesn't matter what you're talking about. Honestly, what are you teaching people? What are they going to learn from giving you their, what they consider valuable time when really we all know we're doom scrolling for four hours, not doing anything valuable.


Louis - 00:32:24:

So one of the key there, I know you've talked about that before, that I've learned the hard way, is to really be specific. I think the difference between accounts or whatever website or authors or whatever that bore me to death is that they use very vague terms and talk about very wide topics like how to handle objections on your website. It's like, where the fuck does it even start? It's too big. I can't visualize it in my head. I can't see it. I can't, you know. So what do we mean here? Like when you talk about specificity to be so specific, what does it entail connecting to this developmental editing phase?


Erica - 00:33:00:

Yeah, I mean, it entails going deeper by five levels than you think you need to.


Louis - 00:33:04:

So let's give an example.


Erica - 00:33:06:

Okay, how to write better emails. Cool. I don't, what's that mean? How to get more email opens. Okay, like that's better.


Louis - 00:33:14:

Why?


Erica - 00:33:16:

Because instead of just some broad, like how to write better emails, that's not speaking to a specific problem that your audience has. And it's not implying that they're going to learn about this and that's the expertise you're going to share. This is a big mistake. People think, I got all this email expertise. I'm going to talk about that. Nobody has time to sit down and read everything in the world about emails. Even those big, huge, long SEO pieces, like nobody reads all of those fully. People have specific questions. People have intent. People have specific problems. And people have jobs to be done, which is a marketing term that just means if you want to clean the floor, don't sell them a mop, sell them cleaning the floor. If you say like how to be better with a mop, that's not going to really pique my interest as much as like how to have a fucking clean floor so that your eight months old that are crawling around and I don't accidentally ingest dog hair.


Louis - 00:34:07:

That sounds very specific. Unreal.


Erica - 00:34:10:

Very specific. Very, very specific.


Louis - 00:34:14:

Okay, so how to write better emails now?


Erica - 00:34:17:

All right, emails that have better open rights. Cool, okay. How to 2x your open rights. Okay, better.


Louis - 00:34:23:

Why is it better?


Erica - 00:34:24:

It's better because my problem is that I really could use like another, I've got 25% open rates, really wouldn't mind getting to 50. What does better mean? If I have 25, are you going to help me get to 30? That's not fucking good enough. I need 50, right? So I had a two extra open rates. I had a two extra open rates in three months. Better. Now I know how long it's going to take me. How new newsletter writers can 2x their open rates in three months without spending their entire budget. Cool. That's the best one.


Louis - 00:34:57:

And that's because you specified who exactly it's for and therefore who it's not for. And at the end, you mentioned a potential objection or something that is actually preventing them from getting there. This is usually one of the most powerful way to write anything or to come up with anything really is to find this kind of the thing that shouldn't really go together. Am I right?


Erica - 00:35:17:

It's more about answering all of the questions that you can think of, ahead of time. And it's really hard to do that unless you know what questions people typically have. And that is why so many of the things that I post are like, I think I posted these yesterday as well. What should a good hook answer? What should a good body answer? I mentioned it in my email this morning as well. You have to ask yourself these questions and then look at your hook or look at your writing in general, your body of writing and say, have I answered them? And then of course it comes down to like, there's all these different ways that you can organize those words. That's going to like potentially work better, but like also fuck that advice. It depends on your audience. And that's why you also need experimental confidence because what gets 50% open rates for someone else, you need to go into that and be like, I'm going to take what I think will work for me and then apply it to my specific situation because nobody is the same, which is why it depends is the most popular answer to any marketing question.


Louis - 00:36:12:

You're making good use of that answer as well. You said earlier today or yesterday, like your tweets that you mentioned, you said a great hook answers, how will this help me? What will I learn? Is this worth my time? Because as you said, people are selfish and that's not a bad thing to say. It's just the way we are built and wired. And a great body, meaning the thing you write or the thing you say or whatever, why should I care? How does this work? How can I do it myself? What's my next step? You need both to build trust and generate demand.


Erica - 00:36:41:

Yeah, so many people, first of all, the advice that you should spend 80% of your time on the hook and 20% on the body needs to go in the bin. I hate that so much because, yes, if you don't have a good hook, people aren't going to read it. But if you don't support it with a great body, they're not going to stay. Or they'll stay, read to the end and be like, fuck that person. They just wasted my time. Like the people you're describing, they're going to remember you for all the wrong reasons. And they're going to think probably not going to click into their stuff anymore. Maybe I'll just unfollow them too. So I think you need to spend 50% on the hook, 50% on the body. Then take the critical step of stepping away for a second, coming back and doing another 50% on the hook and 50% on the body. It's called self-editing. Please do it. And that way you have spent your time making sure that it's actually all good. What my point was, so many people are obsessed with writing these hooks. Everyone sells these templated hooks and then they get to the body and they royally drop the ball. They make all these grand promises in the hook, like the one that we described about 2Xing your open rates in whatever timeframe. And you read it and you're like, you get to the end. I actually learned absolutely nothing. I don't, this person taught me nothing. There's no actual like how to. I haven't poked the pain enough, so I'm not entirely sure what problem I'm trying to overcome? Are you really talking to me specifically? Like, how do I go apply this right now? Where can I learn more? So many people skip that because they just focus on the hook. So that's wasted potential in my opinion.


Louis - 00:38:04:

Okay, so we have... The way to go about it so that we do proper developmental editing to really figure out why people should care and what's in it for them, etc. Cool. Now, talk to me about those content lanes, pillars, whatever you want to call them, right? Because you can't just pray and pray too much either, right? So there needs to be some sort of a balance.


Erica - 00:38:27:

There are tons of different formats that you can use in writing and it works on social as well. Ideally, the way that you present information is structured in a way that's going to speak to intent. So if I'm writing something at the top of the funnel, it's probably by top of the funnel. If I'm trying to capture awareness from people that are potentially unaware of who I am and what I'm doing, I'm going to make sure that I give plenty of context before I dive into how to do it because these people need to be convinced I'm educating them. But if I'm speaking to people that are already aware of me and they just need more of a bottom of the funnel push in order to whatever that CTA is, it could literally just be follow me. It could be sign up to my newsletter, buy something for me, whatever. Then I'm probably going to skip a bunch of that context. Instead, I'm going to get really specific about the problem that person needs to overcome and then get into way more actionable. This is how you do it. And then of course, it's such a comprehensive, basic ways that you can do this, but storytelling, another buzzword. But if you wrap information in a story, there's a bunch of different ways to do that. That's usually a really good way to get attention at any stage, but especially more at bottom of funnel. And the story can be something as simple as if this person uses it in this way. Here's how they use it. This has changed their life because of that. And you've wrapped that into a person, a real life example of someone using it rather than just speaking of this thing. That's hard to picture without anyone actually talk.


Louis - 00:39:57:

How do you advise people to figure out the intent of the people they seek to serve.


Erica - 00:40:05:

I like to talk to them. And that's another part of it. So if you have tons of experience, you should be able to pull on that and you should know, okay, people struggle with this. I've advised people in this way, that way, and this way. And if you don't have experience, then you need to pull on your own experience first. So if you're learning about something, what have you struggled with when learning about it? Why did you even start to learn about it in the first place? What was interesting? What problems have your solutions helped you overcome? And those are the ones that you want to reflect back to the person reading.


Louis - 00:40:39:

One thing that people struggle a lot at that stage is they don't see themselves as an expert. And they're like, okay, I need to be a bit more knowledgeable, a bit more expert. And then maybe I'll start, right? What do you say to that?


Erica - 00:40:52:

No, just start. You don't need to have experience to grab attention. You just have to be able to say something that's interesting. I could have learned something yesterday and talk about it today. I'm not going to take the position of an expert in that sense then. I need to be honest and be like, I'm really interested in this thing. And I learned about it yesterday. It has helped me overcome this problem and I'm trying to use it to get to this solution. Here's what I've learned so far. Take people on the ride with you.


Louis - 00:41:17:

And then people would say, but people will think I'm a fool to share that stuff, I'm supposed to know everything.


Erica - 00:41:25:

Literally, I will go back to what I said about open your eyes. There are so many inexperienced bros on social that are literally, they've been on social for a month and now they have a course on how to be on social. So trust me, the bar cannot be set lower. You are fine.


Louis - 00:41:43:

It's so true. Like it's, oh, it's so true. It's so scary.


Ericca – 00:41:47:

It’s so bad. It's so bad.


Louis – 00:41:49:

And i'm getting, so i'm getting lately i'm getting quite a lot of responses or emails about the fact that people would say, yeah, guilty I actually fell in their trap, I bought the thing because I believed in the promise in the hook and whatever. And of course disappoint because it's of course it was too good to be true. It's such a difficult thing because even though rationally we know that it's bullshit. Irrationally, emotionally, psychologically, whatever you want to say it. We do sometimes, depending on the context we're in, let's say we had a very bad quarter and we're under pressure to make money. We do fall back into those. And it's so difficult to fight, isn't it?


Erica - 00:42:30:

It's so difficult to fight. Look, give yourself some grace. Again, you are not alone. The amount of people that I'm sure you've heard from that have been like, shit, I bought this thing and it was horrible. I've heard from them as well. We all do it. It's really enticing. And everyone everywhere is selling you some secret to success. So it's okay. People come to me after our favorite pro, that journal every morning, and they say, “I'm really glad that I started writing, but now I've just got no idea what to do next”. And I'm like, “it's okay. Welcome. It'll be okay. I'm not going to promise you any of the same bullshit that he did, but I do promise that I will work with you to unlearn everything you just learned and relearn it again”.


Louis - 00:43:13:

Okay, I think it's a good way to end this deep dive. Last question I'd ask you is, what are the top three resources you recommend folks today? It could be anything, podcast books, courses, could be your stuff, could be someone else's as well.


Erica - 00:43:29:

Yeah, if you want to get better at editing, if you're a content marketer or a writer, then you need to watch The Cutting Room by Tommy Walker. He has people like me come onto his show, talk about our philosophy around content editing. And then we do a live edit. So I've been on a show a few times. That's really cool. It's very helpful. If you want to build a personal platform, then you should definitely sign up to my newsletter, Power Your Platform. Casey and I think differently. So that's cool. And what else? I guess I work with them. So this is a cop out. But Semrush has like really good free everything. They have an academy. So you can go to Semrush's academy and learn whatever you want about content marketing and showing up online.


Louis - 00:44:13:

Where can listeners connect with you, learn more from you?


Erica - 00:44:18:

I’m @Erica’s my name on Twitter. Erica Schneider.


Louis - 00:44:21:

Literally, Erica is my name?


Erica - 00:44:23:

Yeah, no, not is. It's Erica's my name.


Louis - 00:44:27:

Erica's.


Erica - 00:44:27:

Because his was taken, unfortunately.


Louis - 00:44:29:

Erica. Okay, there you go.


Erica - 00:44:31:

There's actually way too many Erica Schneider in the world. It's unfortunate. You wouldn't think so, but there are. Yeah, I'm Erica Schneider on LinkedIn. And then my newsletter is Power Your Platform. You can find it on ConvertKit.


Louis - 00:44:44:

Nice. Thank you so much.


Erica - 00:44:46:

Thanks for having me.