A recap of the week online in the copywriting industry.
Hello, I hope you had a great week.
My apologies for the gap in the posting schedule- I took on a writing challenge this week and the writing challenge won. She’ll be posted Tuesday as this week’s how-to.
Welcome to this week’s new subscribers! Thank you for taking a chance on this scraggly unknown. I hope I live up to the hype. Please enjoy the comment section and like button while you’re here.
I have listened to feedback and I agree, I went hard on the blog content. I promise a fully diversified and dynamic content schedule moving forward.
That’s it from me until next week. My email inbox is always open and I am active on LinkedIn and sort of active on Twitter.
From Caroline
Grifter of the Week
I found this weeks grifter on Twitter trying to hock a copywriting course.
Let’s look at the grift-
🚩#1- having too many job titles. This is probably the weirdest example I’ve seen.
🚩#2- zero authority. I can say Im a specialist and engineer. Still doesn’t give me authority to teach people how to fly planes.
Seeing as he hasn’t provided qualifications, I will:
Freelancer= I don’t have a boss or skill set
Affiliate marketer= I only want something from you
Entrepreneur= no entrepreneurs who have created a successful business still call themselves entrepreneur on public profiles
Contractor and Landscaping expert= why did he say any of this? If he used to be a contractor and landscaper and now he’s moving into freelance affiliate marketing, who cares what he used to do.
🚩#3- the course title is a word salad.
What is “Practical Coaching and Implementation” copywriting? Or is the company called Practical Coaching and Implementation? Which one is it? Because the former isn’t a style of copywriting, and the latter is the only mention of the company name anywhere.
🚩#4- the word We when it’s one person talking.
We is a common tactic to fool the audience into a false sense of trust. This isn’t some guy trying to make you buy unqualified statements from him, there are several people who collected their unqualified statements together to sell to you. MUCH more credible.
🚩#5- who is the audience?
He starts with “are you stuck in a rut with your copywriting?” Which infers he’s talking to copywriters. And then he says his course is for copywriters, then lists other people who aren’t copywriters. Then he finishes off with Stop Paying for Copywriters. It’s because he knows his course isn’t for copywriters. He’s using the word copywriter as a dog whistle.
🚩#6- the link in bio goes to a WhatsApp group.
Have a landing page, at least.
🚩#7- the promised value for the audience is undefined and a smoke screen.
Valuable skills- what skills are valuable and why? “You will come out with the writing skills business owners value”? Is that what he means?
Understanding the psychology of persuasion- persuasion is copywriting. That is its defining feature and point of difference to just writing content. This is another indication that this course is not for copywriters, or legitimate business owners.
Discounted price- if we don’t know the original price, any price is a discounted price.
A smokescreen word jumble is your clear sign that this is a grift. Nothing is defined and the only specific teaching outcome- understanding persuasion- is literally the first thing you learn about copywriting when you start.
This is the top Google result.
The truth is, no copywriter, even a newbie copywriter with a couple of paid gigs under their belt, is taking this course. Neither is anyone who has owned their own business for longer than a week.
This course is absolutely designed to separate people who have zero experience with the marketing industry and it’s functions from their money. This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. That’s why the best thing he can offer you is understanding the definition of copywriting. If you don’t know what copywriting is, the fact that HE knows it’s about persuasion, gives you the impression he is all-knowing. I will bet a million dollars his knowledge begins and ends there.
I don’t rate this grift too harshly, because he does refrain from making wild claims about the millions you can make from copywriting after taking his course. It also looks like a one-and-done proposition, so you’re not likely to waste much money. Although an up sell to a membership or masterclass is probably half the course outline.
If you see a grifter in the wild, @ me on Twitter @coconutdraws17 or send me an email. Let’s enjoy them together.
ChatGPT, the next generation AI chatbot, isn’t that great.
OpenAI released the beta model of ChatGPT on November 30. It is described as being a natural language tool driven by AI technology.
It’s capabilities have been listed as
can maintain human like conversations
Answer follow up questions
Admit mistakes (x to doubt)
Challenge incorrect premises
Reject inappropriate requests (FYI it has already failed this. Within a couple of days, network developers found how to circumvent this and the AI became sociopathic)
Issues with plagiarism, complete fabrication being presented as fact and generating malfunctioning or incomplete code are the most common problems people are encountering with the technology.
My initial impression of ChatGPT is its reputation is completely overhyped.
If you had just listened to social media reviews, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the second coming.
It’s still in its research stage.
Other AI’s that already exist perform the same functions. Their advantage is that because they are custom built, they are much more successful in achieving outcomes. Grammerly is an example- it’s designed to find flaws in text, and it does.
The gossip over on Likedin indicates there is a significant audience online who are still playing the emperor’s new clothes. When I gave it a test run, it gave me copy that used “purpose” 6 times in a 300-ish word piece.
Most reputable news publications have paywalls on the topic, meaning the “journalism”-for-views crowd is still dominating the narrative. But the reality of the quality of the text and code it produces cannot be denied forever.
I think the only thing ChatGPT is good at is being a fad.
Lastly:
Google endless scroll feature changes SEO
This week, Google announced its “endless scroll” Crome extention. Mirroring the Tiktok format giving users bottomless scrolling and constant content, Google now allows users to scroll as long as they like through endless possible search results. This extention has killed page 1, which is the coveted spot for every single website.
A successful SEO strategy lives and dies on ranking page 1. The steps to achieve that can be complicated and time consuming, and an entire industry has grown around this one thing. Being ranked page 1 in Google search results is big business.
Now with the endless scroll feature organic discovery is much more likely for websites. And organic discovery somewhat negates the need for the full suite of SEO tools.
So what is a likely future for SEO in a world of endless scroll?
In its current iteration, this really knocks the legs off the SEO industry. However, major pillars of SEO strategy like target keywords, website UX and back-end development have the capability to pivot into User Experience Optimization (UXO, I literally just came up with that. Let’s see if I’m a Nostradamus of the internet).
That’s probably what I would do, and fast, if I worked in SEO.
How do I become a paid sub?
Hello! Do you think ChatCPT was worth the hype?