Why Your Copy Isn't Converting w/ Joanna Wiebe | Ep 451

0:00Our winning headline was big bum, thick waist, not so perky boobs, question mark. Find clothes you love perfect for your size and shape or something like that. That was voice of customer data. That was them actually saying those exact things. The line before that was something like find clothes you love or something, which is what most people default to. Nobody cared about it. But that came from what people were saying. And so to find that personality is just like step back, shush and like listen to what your customers say and how they say it.

0:30Chris Do: You just did problem agitate solution again, didn't you? Probably. I lived. Well, you said big bum. Yeah. Thick waist. Yeah. Did you say not big boobs? Not so perky boobs. Not so perky boobs. Yeah. Find the clothes that fit you. Yeah. That was the problem. You agitated it. I agitated it. And then the solution is clothes that work for you. It's true. It just works. You did it. It just works. My name is Joanna Wiebe and you are listening to The Future. we've got a pretty cool guest that's going to share with us all her copywriting secrets and her remarkable story about how just a few short months ago she's been struggling to grow on youtube and then she's done something incredible and now she's got over 3 000 growth in her youtube channel i want to tease you with that but really want to learn how to be better communicators through our writing i can't think of a better person to have here live in studio with us Joanna, welcome to the show.

1:20Thanks. This is cool. This is so awesome. Thanks, everybody, for being here.

1:24Chris Do: Let's quickly give some context for people who are like, what am I tuning into? So I'm Joe. I run a company called Copyhackers. I am the original conversion copywriter, as in invented it, if we can say that, after being at a tech company for a very long time and being frustrated by how it wasn't working. The copy wasn't working. So I came up with a different thing called conversion copywriting and have been consulting and teaching that for coming up on 15 solid years. A mutual friend, Dan Martel, he called you the world's greatest living copywriter. That is a lofty, lofty title. I think you just like saying it.

2:01Honestly, I think he's just like, it sounds good.

2:04Chris Do: It sounds really good. I'll take it all day. I'll take that. And there's different kinds of copywriters. Let's start there. What are the different kinds and what kind are you? So many different kinds and I'm not the creative kind. I don't win awards. but I help businesses make money. So that's always for me been a really like I know a lot of creatives just kind of died inside when they heard that. But that's been the part that's less guesswork. So I struggle with people giving me feedback. I don't enjoy it very much when it's just like random feedback. Like, I don't like this. I don't like that.

2:35And that's like creatives get that a lot. And so I had to move out of like focusing on the creative into well, but like it doesn't matter what you like or don't like with this email. It matters if it performs well. And so that's the kind that I do. So there's creative copywriters looking up with tagline or like a phrase that pays. And then there's conversion copywriters. And we write things that perform or should do at least. And then we measure them to see if it actually is performing or not. And then we optimize. And it's all based on voice of customer data and old school direct response stuff, Which is where people start really glazing.

3:12Chris Do: So there's the kind of advertising and copywriting that I'm familiar with that I worked in the last 20 plus odd years, which is headlines and image and campaigns, national campaigns that they do win awards. It's the glossy, sexy stuff. It's the image. It's the brand. But it might not sell a single thing. It might not. They think it does. So conversion copywriting, direct response copywriting, they're the same. Yes or no? Ish. Yeah, but like direct response can get really like gritty and ugly and be pretty off putting today. And like when design does matter and there's like a signal there, a trust signal that just loses a direct response typically.

3:51But yes, conversion copywriting is based in direct response, which is just like listen to what your customers say and then put that into a framework. Like an existing problem agitation solution or desire obstacle solution. Just like slot your messages under that.

4:07Chris Do: Okay, you just said that really fast. Like, we'll know what you're talking about. Can you slow down? Just pump the brakes between each word. Some of the room are like, yeah, they're already nodding. But the rest are like, huh? Say that one more time, please. So most people, most creatives even sit around brainstorming a message. Like, what should it be? How can we make it sound great? And that's good. And that's legit. Like, there's a space for that. But that's not what conversion copywriting is. That's where we say like, okay, well, like, how do customers talk about this? What's the language they use?

4:34Like, exactly. Don't summarize it. I don't want to hear your summary. marketers like step back. We're just going to listen to what customers say. We're going to document it exactly as they say it. And then we're going to take that and say like, okay, well, these are like problem messages. This is what they're saying. That sounds like a problem that they're having with their current solution. So we're in like category problem. Okay. What do we do now with that? We take an exact phrase. Like, I really hate how X tool doesn't. How about I give you one? Doesn't work. Good. Yes. Thank you.

5:07Chris Do: Can you do this freestyle? I will freestyle it. Yeah, that's my life. My wife has a Tesla. Nice. And it's not as smart in some things. And so I hate it when I have to like slap that card on the door and hit a certain spot at a certain time period for it to freaking open the door. Yes. My Volvo, which is older with ancient technology, I just push a little button. It just knows it's me. I know why it does that, but I hate it when it does that. So how do we work with that? You are in category. You're saying here is. So you don't have a problem. like I wish I could get from A to B, which is like a car will solve that.

5:38You're in the, okay, I'm in the category of cars. I understand cars, but here's my problem with these kinds of cars. So if I'm trying to sell used cars, let's say, and I'm competing against the new cars, because I am, because the person has a choice, why would I buy a older car than a newer car? And you just said, why? One of those reasons would be, well, the newer cars are all like fancy for no good reason. They're extra tech. And that's not the case with an older Volvo. And so you could take that and use that copy in like, that's a problem. Great. So I've heard the problem and now I can put it on the page.

6:14How? You don't just throw it on the page. You use a framework. And the framework in this case, because it's problem, I would probably start with problem. State what the problem is. My wife's newfangled Tesla gets in the way of me actually getting somewhere, whatever your line was actually. Yeah. Put that on the page. Right. Just like that. And then underneath is the next part, which is agitate. So problem, agitation, solution. Agitate is more examples of bringing that to life. So more times where you're like, give me more examples of that pain and other pains related to it. Like so if our argument is new cars are rife with problems around trying to be extra cool with their tech, we need like an old analog car.

6:56Then what other examples of buttons. Yeah. I like buttons. You like a button. That's perfect.

7:02Chris Do: I don't want to dig through menus to figure this out. And then that will get into the solution side. So the solution is, hey, a car with buttons, a car with a cup holder that isn't heated. So problem, imagination, solution, that's all voice of customer that was put in there. And this is copied up. I live on a sales page. Yeah. A sales page, an email, an ad, a video, sales letter, all of the places where you're meant to go from A to decision of some kind. Whereas like a billboard, you're not meant to go from A to decision of some kind. So my problem is I hate how smart cars are so dumb sometimes.

7:37Yeah.

7:38Chris Do: Okay. And then agitate it. Yeah. Like it takes five seconds to open a door. Yeah. And you walk away sometimes not knowing if your door is locked. Yeah. And that I have to dig through menus to play a song. Yeah. That's not true, but let's just say. Yeah. Or I just missed turn signals or where's the hazard button. Yeah. Yeah. Solution is, hey, you can buy a smart car that is actually smart. That opens. Right. I feel like I'm a really good teacher that you got there. I want to make sure everyone in the room who's not a copy hacker themselves, and there's a couple people here who are, is do you understand?

8:13Chris Do: Do you have a question? Now would be a good time. Do you get it? So based on Chris's example, how would you decide whether you were going to do DOS or the previous framework you were talking about. Yeah, that's a good question. Hold on, hold on. DOS? That's another framework. You guys are talking inside baseball here. All right, let's expand on that. What does DOS mean? DOS is desire, obstacle, solution. So what is the thing that they want most? What is getting in the way of them getting that thing? And then what's the solution? And you choose your framework typically based on the hook. So that means we pour over a voice of customer data.

8:50And that is where it's not going to be necessarily data driven at that point. You are relying on your gut, on what you've learned over the years, on how people talk, on, oh, that sounds different from what I'm used to. So you pull those interesting lines out that are like edge cases. And so you choose your hook based on the voice of customer. And then once you know if the hook is a problem hook, then you're probably going to choose problem agitation solution. If it's a I wish this were true kind of hook, that desire, then you'll probably start at desire obstacle solution. Doesn't mean you have to, but that's like a good starting point for it.

9:28Yeah.

9:28Chris Do: So we now have talked about two frameworks, problem agitate solution or desire obstacle solution. Yeah. Was there a third one that you had mentioned earlier? There are many. So one of the most common ones is attention, interest, desire, action. But it's my least favorite. Why do we talk about it then? Well, because it's the most popular. People love it. And it's like really old school. It goes way back to like everybody who ever started learning to write copy learned attention, interest, desire, action. But what is interest and what is desire? Like, I can't tell the difference. So I'm like, but how do you grab attention?

10:01Do you grab it with like what? There's too many open ended things. There's too much guessing going on. So I don't enjoy it.

10:09Chris Do: All right. So basically, it doesn't matter that much, I think, which framework you use. You just pick the one that works for you. All right. I've noticed something recently with your channel. And the reason why I think we're talking is because Drigo found you. Yeah. And it's because your YouTube channel has blown up recently. Yeah. Now, this is pretty remarkable. And we were talking about this with Paul, her brother, in case you're just joining us, is that you've been making content for eight years. Yeah. Eight years on YouTube, on YouTube, and you have on average about 1 ,500 views on a good day.

10:44I did. And that was a good, and I would say round down. Yeah. Or more 750. Yeah.

10:50Chris Do: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Very good. And during that entire time, you've amassed a whopping 13 ,300 subs. After just eight solid years of effort. How did you feel about making content and not getting a ton of results? No, that really sucked. Right. So and I think most of most I mean, most people that I know who have been trying to crack YouTube are like, what? What do you do? And so that was us. But because we had built our brand on long form written blog posts, I was like, it's OK. It's fine. Like YouTube will just be a thing we kind of experiment with and we'll like go back and forth and back and forth, which we did.

11:26And we'll just keep going with like putting out books and putting out other longer form written content. that was fine until AI came along and decimated all things written and turned all knowledge into findable with a single just conversation in ChatGPT, which that's the world we live in. That's what it is. But it just meant like, oh, OK. So although it's still useful to write blog posts, it's still useful to do things that AI will then take and send people back to you for. it was time to get more serious about YouTube, especially with AEO and how important YouTube is for answer engine optimization.

12:05Yeah.

12:05Chris Do: Okay. Eight years, not a lot of results. I just don't know how I would be doing this for eight freaking years. But it wasn't constant. It wasn't like I was like out there every week doing something. It was like, so we had a business that was built on launches. It was a course business. You would do launches and then you have a team that's sitting there between launches because we didn't evergreen. We were fully two launches a year and those take like two to three months to do. But that leaves six months of the year where your team is like not doing that. And so I was like, well, let's just, you know, fill in the time with YouTube and like other things.

12:40It wasn't like we weren't trying to win on YouTube. It was guys, we should be doing something. What should we do? Let's do something. And so we put one person on my team. He was our videographer for courses. and so he was like well I yeah I could get to know YouTube and get good at it and so we put him into this mastermind that was gonna you know solve everything and I didn't work um it came out so what happened at the end of that one video was created at the end of that 12-week mastermind and it was a 12-hour white noise video for you work you work to this white noise video and the first comment on it, one of the two, I think, was, really?

13:23I was like, preach. Yeah. Because we shouldn't produce a white noise video on YouTube.

13:30Chris Do: I don't even know what a white noise video is. Yeah. It's like, hey, copywriters, work to this white noise. Which is you? No. It was, I don't even know where the hell it came from. I have no idea. Like hearing a washing machine? White noise. You know, like you fall asleep to white noise? Like the ocean? Yeah. I never played it. So have you ever hired someone on your team thinking that you could level them up, sending them to master courses and classes, spending money and time and resource to only discover you might have made 0.01 progress? I have been there myself. 100%. Why did it happen with you?

14:03Chris Do: Why do we as founders of companies think, oh, let me just put Bob or Mary in charge, pay them to do something, and then expect it to work? Why do we do that? We don't know where else to put them in this case. Why do you? Well, I've done that too. Okay. But not like that. Oh. So you have a person on your team burning a hole in your wallet. You're like, outside of launches, we need you to do something. Otherwise, I can't employ you. You find something for them to do, a problem that you want solved, and you put them together. My feeling is I have a lot to do. I know we need to do this thing. And I would take this course if I had time to take this course.

14:40Chris Do: You seem like a really smart person. You should figure this thing out. And it's almost never worked out. Almost never. We just throw money at the problem and it just doesn't work out. And so I tell people, if you have this feeling in your body, like I need to learn this, but I paid that person or hired that person to do it. Most likely it's the universe telling you, stop what you're doing. Learn this skill because it'll transform your life and your business. It is so true. So in this particular case, I was like so annoyed that we still hadn't cracked YouTube. A year passed. I still wasn't able to find it.

15:10I had job openings. No one was coming forward as like they could help us with this. And so I was like, I'm going to learn this myself. I'm going to block out the summer and I'm going to master YouTube. Along with that, I took one course. It was Ali Abdaal's part-time YouTuber course. And there was a bonus video from the people who had helped Mr. Abdaal build his YouTube agency. Oh, the plot thickens. And I was like, tell me more about these people who helped him. And that was the beginning of. So this course, I didn't learn anything out of it. No offense. I'm sure it's a great course for many people.

15:51But for me, I just got the bonus video. And I was very happy with the bonus video. And it allowed me to hire the people who could help me.

15:59Chris Do: Let's run the stats here. I have the stats here. Okay. So for eight years, Joanna's been plugging away at this. Getting kind of not great results. I would throw myself off a bridge. Okay. Whatever. And then in December of last year, 2025, just December of 2025, three months, you've grown from 13 ,000 subs to 74.9, 75 ,000 subs. And your average view count went from 1 ,500 if we're being ambitious and generous to over 108 ,000 views per episode, average. And you've dropped 12 videos. You've grown by 3 ,000 % in watch time and views and engagement and retention. What's happened to your life? Yeah, it's great.

16:37it's a really good outcome I didn't expect it and then the outcome of that is so many things for example I'm here right now I've been following you for years and years and so when I got a DM and I was like hey come on the show I was like what and it was purely because of the YouTube stuff otherwise I wouldn't be here so there's that leads just lots of leads people that I wouldn't have been exposed to. So it's like it's the effect that you expected, which is, hey, if you can actually do well at something like YouTube, then you'll get more leads and get more traffic. We get so much more traffic, which opens up new problems because you're like, well, why aren't they converting on this page?

17:19Now we have to work on that page and things like that. But yeah, it's building that authority moat that is so important in a time of AI in particular, when if you're a subject matter expert, you can be really easy replaced by AI. So how are you going to stay relevant? How are you going to be somebody that gets hired? Got to make sure people know your name. All right.

17:42Chris Do: What you were saying is you're like old school, not super legacy media, legacy ish media with books, blog posts, things like that. And then you bump into new media, which is social media. Yeah. And now we're bumping into new, new, new media, which is AI is wrecking everything. Totally. Yes. Okay. Everybody here, whether you like it or not, your livelihood, the way you communicate, the way you're being communicated to is going to be impacted if it's not already by AI. Yeah. You might not like that reality. You might go kicking and screaming into the night, but it's happening. And there's, I just don't know if it could change.

18:20Chris Do: What can we do, especially if you're in the writing space or personality space, what do I do to create a moat to prevent me from being wiped out completely. You have ideas on this? Yeah, no, that's what we do. So yes, for starters, we had a very healthy multi-seven-figure business on Coffee School. That was our primary program. And one, AI came in and destroyed freelance copywriters three years ago. So we've seen a decline over time, but it also caused people in-house to buy the courses. So we had just a shifting audience. But then courses more recently have just like, they're done. They're done.

18:59They're dead. We still sell like one or two a day, but it's not what it used to be in any way. You can't do anything like it's just like great. It covers the hosting fees. But it's also kind of good for us because it's actually very boring business to sell courses. You're very disconnected from people. You're really focused on numbers, on hitting numbers. And it's like this is someone's two or three thousand dollars that they've invested in potentially their whole career. They really, really want something out of this. And you're like disconnected and you've got marketers who are like stacking up numbers.

19:30And it's good because it's revenue and it helps grow business and we can reinvest in things, etc. But I definitely had felt disconnected already and wanted. So I started doing this like mentorship program. And then that tired me out because it's very hard to mentor people. You can't control their lives and you just want to control their lives and make the right decisions for them and then watch them make the sad ones. So I didn't want to do that. But when it comes to building a moat, which is the critical thing, which is what you just asked. Yes. Three things. The three things are write a book, figure out YouTube or something that's like YouTube.

20:05And there's a reason for YouTube and get on stages. And those three things all work together as well. You do one and the other things get easier. It's just the hardest one to crack is YouTube.

20:14Chris Do: This is pretty cool. Yeah. But now you have to have a new offer. Yes. So in our case, for a lot of different reasons. Right. So with answer and being optimized for chat, GPT, et cetera, allows us to sell more courses, but there's always going to be fewer and fewer of those. And that's just the way it is. One of the visuals that I've had is we've had this really great business, great brand going along. It's an airplane. And then it just started to free fall. And we have been in this like, how do we get this thing back up? You're nose diving and pulling it up. Full nose dive. And now how do we pull it back up?

20:51and it's not going to get up here and fly like it did before. It's not going to be on the same path. It's a totally different path, doing different things. But what's cool is that we do now have a greater focus on working with clients and teaching their teams, which is a thing that I'd wanted to do, but had no reason to build a business around it because I already had a very healthy business that honestly, I like a lot of free time too. And it gave me so much free time. I could garden. But now, so we're doing more of the coaching programs and the teaching people at large organizations.

21:24Chris Do: How to use AI? No, now we're teaching them because large organizations are still, one, sort of using AI, two, using it pretty inconsistently and getting slop out of it, right? Because they have never known how to find their message, but it was really easy to cover that up. But now business is harder for everybody and you got to make sure that things are performing. And so they're looking around going like, Like, okay, let's look at first principles for marketing. What are we saying? Do we sound different? And nobody knows how to sound different internally. And you can't go to chat GPT and say, make me sound different.

22:01And I love AI, by the way. I think that it's so useful in so many ways. And it really sucks that I have a bad taste in my mouth about what it's done to all of our knowledge. But yeah, that's the reality of it.

22:14Chris Do: One last thing. The mode against AI, personality. The AI stuff tends to be very middle of the road, very milquetoast, vanilla. And it follows formulas really well. Creative, personality, voice, nuance, it doesn't get at all. How do we bring personality into our writing? Even if we use AI, how do we bring it into it? Lots of ways. But you're going to yawn again because it's listening to what customers say. It really is. It really is. People say interesting shit and your brand doesn't have to be. I mean, you can be the, you know, the liquid death that do all of this like big brand voice stuff. And that's cool and fine.

22:52And that is great. That's going to be a bit of that's a moat, right? You can't replicate that. You can, but you'd probably be inauthentic and kind of cheesy about it. But no, it's listening to when people say cool stuff. Like I was working years ago on a brand that was trying to just get more women to buy clothing on their using their app. And our headline, our winning headline was big bum, thick waist, not so perky boobs, question mark. Fine clothes you love, perfect for your size and shape or something like that. That was voice of customer data. That was them actually saying those exact things.

23:25The line before that was something like fine clothes you love or something, which is what most people default to. Nobody cared about it. But when you use real words, and I know like bum and boobs and words like that are going to probably get more noticed. It doesn't have to be that dramatic. But that came from what people were saying. And so to find that personality is just like step back, shush, and like listen to what your customers say and how they say it. Every time. Realtors. So if you want to know how to listen to what your customer does. Okay.

23:56Chris Do: You just did problem agitate solution again, didn't you? Probably. I live. Well, you said big bum. Yeah. Thick waist. Yeah. Did you say not big boobs? Not so perky boobs. Not so perky boobs. Yeah. Find the clothes that fit you. Yeah. that was the problem you agitated it and then the solution is close it work for you it's true it just works you did it just works you just passed that i passed that you did you passed it amazing so one of the things that we're thinking about of course when we're writing is that ai is going to come around and summarize it and so does anybody have any reason to open and read your email when ai will just summarize it and so that's where having a personality goes a long way.

24:35Like your personality in your emails can be as simple as like, I saw this recently, there was like this newsletter that has a footer that always has like an interesting fact in the footer. And it's a reason enough to open up the email and actually read through. I know H-I-U-T, I can't pronounce their name, denim, cute denim, H-I-U-T. They make jeans and they send emails that are just about the denim that they're using in their newest gene. And it's a whole story of like where this denim comes from. And that's one form of personality. Like they believe that people care about this. They'll talk to you about it as if you care about denim, too.

25:18They're not pandering. They're not talking down to you. They're just like sharing something. And AI can't beat that. I'm going to keep reading those emails again and again. And even AI will summarize it. And I don't care what AI has to say about it because I want to read about these genes and how these people tell the story of this particular fabric.

25:36Chris Do: Let's do this. In your video, seven content strategies to get ahead of everyone else, you end on point seven. So I'll do this. You have to watch the whole video or link in the description below. You believe in quality over frequency. Let's talk about that. What does that mean? I'm looking forward to your thoughts on this. So most people who are trying to figure out social media and building their brand have heard repeatedly, just keep posting to Instagram, just keep posting to LinkedIn. So many things. There's this go, go, go, go, go, go, go. And it's not typically working at least. And that's exhausting for most brands.

26:14So how are you going to continue to do this work? And it's not getting results. And it's like, well, you need more ad bets. And so there's like a lot of frustration there that I hear from small business owners, startups, from everybody about the challenge in trying to just like frequently publish. And we didn't see results. Now, we weren't frequently publishing on YouTube, but we were publishing daily. We're posting daily to Instagram and we weren't getting big results there. So we had to when we switched to better quality, we got better results, better quality for the platform native to the it has to seem like it's built for the platform.

26:51if it's a question of do more or do better, do better.

26:56Chris Do: My fear, and it's a real fear, I think, is that people are like, oh yeah, of course she said quality over quantity. And then somebody in the audience is going to look at this like, well, I don't have a studio space. I don't want to interview people. I can't get guests like her. I can't buy these mics. I don't have the money. I don't have the lighting and equipment. This is 30 years of evolution here, everybody. Now here's the thing. If I were to tell anybody, if you want to make content, you're going to have a 90 day plan. And the first 30 days, I would tell you just make the crappiest videos you can.

27:24Chris Do: Sure. With the objection of making crap. So the first 30 days is just about expression and just finding rhythm. Yeah. And then I would say the next 30 days is to look through that. I was like, what gave me a little bit of joy? So the next 30 days about like, I have a hypothesis. These are the four things I like the most. Why don't I do this now with greater intentionality? Maybe read a couple of books, watch a couple of videos and try to be a little bit better at this. And then the final 30 days after the 60 days have expired, say, okay, I've tried this and that. This seems to be the thing that both I like and the audience wants.

27:59Chris Do: And that's that Venn diagram where it overlaps. Sure. Because if you make stuff just for yourself and you don't care about views, God bless you. But if you do care about views and reach and engagement and building authority, now you have to give the audience what they want. Yeah. This is the part where now you should start to seek some mentoring and coaching, whether it's paid or free, whatever. just get some help. But there's also like, you have to have blinders on the focus that it takes to say, I'm going to do this for 90 days. I'm going to suck at it until I get better at it. And then I'm going to give it another 90 days, then another 90 days.

28:31And along that way, there's a real life that like was really happening. This is a small business owner. In most cases, there's people who are taking this advice and is just like, there's a new distraction. So it's like they get discouraged so quickly from the 90 day path. It wasn't for me, actually, was I thought, what would a YouTuber do? I had to change in my mind and tell myself, OK, Joe, you're a YouTuber now. Now what? And that's how I was able to make a change in like focusing and saying like, well, fine, I'm going to do YouTube for the next year. And I'm going to tell myself I'm a YouTuber in order to make that happen.

29:07And I may get results So instead of like this, business owners have so many distractions is really what I'm getting down to. You've got a lot of distractions. You've got a lot of hats you have to wear. This is just one of them. How are you going to dedicate a lot of time to social media?

29:21Chris Do: So for people who want to know more about whatever program you're running and how you do what you do, where should we send them? Over to copyhackers.com. That's where you can learn about copy school, about authority figures, or just like binge any of our content as well. And if you're a big corporation and you want your teams to collaborate and figure out your brand voice and messaging. Yes. And you can afford a lot of money. Yes. Then you might want a bespoke solution from you. Yes. Yeah. And we do that as well. So we work with really large, typically tech companies, but it's not always tech companies.

29:51Some entertainment brands as well. People who are like struggling to get their message disseminated across the organization. So we work with those groups, typically in workshop format, but really just like helping people find a better message and make sure the team is all ready. rallying behind those messages.

30:07Chris Do: Well, thanks for being here. Thank you. That was fun.