It’s the one thing every business blowing up with email right now has figured out: Golf Digest, Tech Brew, Marketing Brew, Seth Godin, Daily Dad, Daniel Throssell.

They’ve all cracked this.

In this article, I’m going to explain the revenue reversal rule alongside seven other new marketing rules you have to understand to win with email year.

Let’s dive in.

The Revenue Reversal Rule

Here what it means:

Focusing on revenue makes you less revenue.

Here’s what’s happening in our culture: we are more fatigued of being sold to than ever before. Think about how many ads one person sees in one day — over 4,000 ads between Twitter, email, YouTube & TV.

So when you become a brand or a person that just continuously shoves products down people’s throats, their loyalty to you decreases while their fatigue increases. You are reversing your desired effect and repelling instead of selling.

So what is the cure for increasing revenue?

The flip to the revenue reversal rule is:

Focus on relationship instead of revenue.

Oh, I know I just lost some of you!

“Oh, another relationship guy!”

Listen, lose if you want to.

Otherwise, if you want highly tactical advice on this, keep reading.

Starting with rule number one.

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1. Personality-Based Emails Instead of Brand-Based Emails

I’m a personal brand — Alin Dragu.

My YouTube channel goes to my email list, so it’s very easy for me to write personality-based emails. But a lot of you run emails for clients, or you have a brand that you send emails from.

Let me give you an example of what personality-based emails look like in that scenario.

I used to write emails for my friend Phil Bonelli, who runs Hopewell Farms.

Hopewell Farms was sending a weekly email just like most people do — a generic, newsletter style email – about what’s happening on the farm, discounts, what’s on sale. It looked like a bulletin.

When I came in, I said we’re going to do things a little differently:

• We stopped sending emails from Hopewell Farms

• We started sending emails from Phil at Hopewell

I injected Phil as the person behind the brand. You could do this with any brand — it could be the CMO, the CEO, or just someone interesting on your staff. Honestly, it doesn’t have to be someone who’s a senior person in the company. It’s better to be somebody with a lot of personality.

In my case, it just happened to work out that Phil is a very optimistic, bombastic, high-energy guy. So writing in his voice was super fun and easy.

And instead of those weekly bulletin emails, we started telling stories behind the brand — which leads me to point number two.

2. Stories Over Sales

When all you do is talk about sales, people don’t buy from you until there’s a sale.

If you tell stories about the brand and about your customer’s problems, people will buy based on relationship, not based on discounts.

So every week we’d send emails about:

• What was happening at the farm

• Us making fun of other brands selling inferior products

• Cool stories our customers sent us about the food they bought

We would tell these great stories that would get people to reply and nod their heads and say, “Oh my god, I saw that too, that was crazy.” It got them to like us, know us better, and know what was happening behind the scenes. That’s how they built a relationship with us.

Hopewell Farms used to get $100-$300 worth of orders when they sent their email. This was a very tiny list, maybe 1,000–2,000 people at the time.

When we started doing personality-based, story-based emails, we increased sales to $1,000-$3,000 every week — and it kept growing instead of spiking up and down.

This is the power of storytelling and personality-based emails. People buy people, not products. You have to get that through your head. They’re buying you first, and then they’re buying the product — which leads to tactic number three.

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3. Create an Email Experience

Ben Settle calls this “world building.”

One of the most tactical and practical ways to build a world is to write your emails with settings and characters that become familiar to the reader.

Think about Harry Potter — you’re always at Hogwarts, and you have Hermione, Harry, and Ron. You have a cast of characters that come in and out. You’re doing the same thing, but with email.

I created a cast of characters for Hopewell Farms:

• Farmer Phil

• The farm dogs — always doing crazy things on the farm

• Lindsay — his wife

• Ron — one of the farm workers, hilarious

That experience becomes a world that people become familiar with and even addicted to being a part of. It’s why novels do so well. It’s why sitcoms do so well — because you know Ross and Rachel, you know Kramer. When you develop a relationship with characters beyond just the person you’re writing the emails from, you get to point number four.

4. Turn Your Emails Into a Saga

Instead of every email being an individualized story, sale, or experience, let the stories build on top of each other.

For example, I told multiple stories about upgrading Hopewell Farm’s equipment so they could process more chickens.

But I turned it into a fun saga: the wrong equipment was delivered, then the guy installed it wrong, and we had to send it back. I turned it into a hilarious saga that had people wondering, “What’s going on with the crazy equipment people!?”

We took something seemingly boring — an update like “hey, just so you know, we upgraded our equipment” — and instead told story after story after story, which got people addicted to what was going to happen next.

This is one of the most underrated ways to build an email list that people continue to open, reply to, and buy from:

Find a story that contains a journey, then use multiple emails to create curiosity and open loops around what happens next.

Which leads to rule number five.

5. Email More Often, Not Less Often

Do you think people are interested in hearing a story or a saga that takes eight weeks to finish because you can only email once a week? Not a chance!

In fact, I was emailing 3-5x a week for e-commerce brands.

For my personal brand, I email every single day — because I’m working on my business every day, so I have stories to tell every day. Emailing more often increases your relationship with your people, not decreases it.

Think about it: if I had coffee with my wife every Sunday at 8 a.m. and just gave her a wall of updates that happened in my week, and then left — would my relationship with my wife be good?

No. It’s not going to be good! I’ll tell you that right now.

But what if every morning I made us some coffee, sat her down, and said, “Hey babe, check this out — this is a hilarious thing that happened to me yesterday.” She’d reply, I’d talk back and forth, and then we’d do it again the next morning, and the next morning, and the next morning.

You have to think about your email list as a two-way conversation. When you’re emailing daily or at least multiple times a week, it continues to build the relationship. It gives you the opportunity to tell more stories and build the experience that gets people into your world more often.

If you’re using personality-based, story-driven emails exactly like I’m telling you, you will do far better than 99% of the other brands who are just shouting and touting discounts at people.

6. Minimal Over Mass

Your emails should look like your grandma designed it.

Mostly plain text, with maybe an image or two dropped in throughout. Not these beautiful, designed emails with colors and blocks and all these things you send to a design team.

It should look like you honestly just opened Gmail and started typing stuff. Your grandma should be able to read your emails and think it was written one-to-one, just for her.

This goes back to revenue over relationship. If people open your emails and it feels like a mass email, they’re immediately turned off — they’ll archive it, unsubscribe, or move away, because they don’t want to be marketed to.

Think about when you get home and take the mail out of your mailbox. What do you do? You instantly split it into two piles:

• Personal mail

• Marketing mail

What do you do with the marketing mail? You immediately throw it in the trash — you don’t even open it. You only open the mail that looks personal.

Email is the exact same experience. When you take a minimal approach to your email design, you give yourself and your readers the opportunity to get sucked into your world and your stories — and become addicted to not just today’s email, but tomorrow’s, and the next day’s, and the next.

Which leads me to the last point.

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7. Have an Insanely Recognizable Voice

More people are using Claude & ChatGPT to write their content — and it’s making everyone sound exactly the same.

Think about it: what if every business used the same colors? McDonald’s uses red and yellow. What if Best Buy also used red and yellow? What if Chipotle also used red and yellow too? You’d look at that and think everybody looks the same — you couldn’t tell the difference between any of these brands. Your brain neurologically begins to filter out everything that looks, feels, tastes, smells, and sounds the same.

That’s why today, you have to sound different. Whether your emails are really funny, or you use dry humor, or they’re short and spiffy and fast, or you write very sophisticated and smart — you have to find that magic tone of yours that makes people open it and immediately recognize, “Oh, this is Phil from Hopewell,” or “This is Alin Dragu.”

It’s never been more important to dial in your voice.

A great example of this is the Wendy’s Twitter girl. Instead of being every boring brand on the internet, she had a savage voice. She trolled everyone — McDonald’s, Starbucks, every other fast food restaurant — from the Wendy’s account. It was hilarious. Whenever Wendy’s tweeted, it was insanely recognizable that it was Wendy’s.

When you open my emails, it’s insanely recognizable that I wrote them — bombastic, funny, loud, high energy. But on the opposite side, if you open an email from, say, Ryan Holiday, it’s very chill, very smart, sophisticated, written as if he’s a literature writer.

You have to be able to nail the voice.

Quick Recap

1. Personality-based emails instead of brand-based emails

2. Stories over sales

3. Create an experience — a world people can get sucked into

4. Turn your emails into a saga — multiple emails to tell one bigger story

5. Email more often, not less often

6. Minimal over mass design

7. Have an insanely recognizable voice

One of the best resources I can give you to nail all seven of these is my Skool Community — CopyCreator Club. If you want to build up your own email-based business like mine, click that link to get access to my personal mentorship & training.

I hope you found this article incredibly useful.

Let me know if you have any questions, happy to help.

Your friend,

Alin “Email Goat” Dragu

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On paper, I was killing it.

But I did something that I made one day: I quit.

With a wife and three kids and a mortgage and having to figure out health insurance and all that stuff, I quit my VP career so I can build a one-person business writing online.

In this article, I’m going to tell you exactly why I quit, and the exact framework that I used to build my one-person business while working my VP career — and it’s the same framework that I’m using today to scale my one-person business.

I’m not going to give you some sort of “this is what you should do.” I’m going to peel back the curtain and show you exactly what I’m doing, my actual business numbers, content, all of that stuff. So stick around.

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Why I Left

The most obvious reason I left my career is that I didn’t want to work for someone else.

But when you think through that, everybody says that.

“I don’t want to work for anyone else, I want to work for myself, I don’t want to have a boss.”

I couldn’t make the jump with just that kind of mindset, because I’ve got a wife and kids and family.

I’m not quitting McDonald’s and dumping my $9-an-hour job. This is a six-figure job with opportunities to climb the ladder, remote work, ownership — all of it. This was a bigger decision than most people think, and so I had to dig the layers deeper.

I went one, two, three layers deeper, and I want to unpack that with you — it may actually help you in your own decision to either stay or quit your job.

Layer One: What’s Really Holding Me Back?

The first layer I had to unpack: why don’t I want to work for someone else? What’s holding me back? I have really good circumstances, I’m making good money — what is it?

One layer deeper is I want more control over my time and my money. The word I really use for myself is autonomy. I want autonomy over my time and my money.

Layer Two: Why Do I Want That Autonomy?

After wrestling with that, I had to go even deeper. Why do I want more control over my time and my money? I make good money, I work remote — it’s not too bad. Why do I want more control over that?

The thing I kept coming back to: I don’t want to outsource my success and growth to be dependent on other people’s decisions.

No matter how much influence you have, if you work anywhere, you have to inherit consequences from other people’s decisions. Those consequences affect your life — where you live, what car you drive, how you provide for your family, how much time you spend with your kids.

Think about it practically: even as the vice president of a company, if the CEO walks in and says, “I’ve got this great idea for a new product I want to launch,” and I don’t agree with him, I still have to launch that product. And if that product doesn’t go well, think about how my head is going to swirl: I didn’t like that product anyway. I said it wasn’t going to work. Should I say that I said it wasn’t going to work?

Now you have to inherit the consequences that the product didn’t work. It wasn’t your decision. Now you make less money and you spent lots of hours in meetings launching a product you don’t give a crap about.

Now amplify that times ten.

What if the operations team isn’t building systems you’d agree with? What if they don’t want to try AI because they’re legacy people? There’s a lot of good on the other side too — good people, good systems — and you inherit those consequences as well. But depending on how you’re wired, you have a natural inclination. I’m naturally ambitious. I naturally have drive. I naturally know what I want to do. That’s just who I am.

And working with a team of people who don’t have the same drive and ambition as you means you give up two huge resources of your life…

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The Two Resources You Give Up

1. Time. Spending time building someone else’s thing, where you inherit the consequences and don’t have all the decision-making power, means you’re spending the best time and energy of your life. Think about 9-to-5.

Think about how much energy and time in your prime years. I’m a 33-year-old man. I’m in my prime earning years. This is when I can do the best work of my life. Even if you’re in your 40s, 50s, 60s — you can still build something meaningful. And where you spend your time controls the destiny of your outcome.

If you’re investing all of your time and creative energy, and you’re coming home brain-fried with no energy for anything else, that’s going to affect who you are in 5, 10, 15, 20 years. This is why I think there’s a huge epidemic happening, especially in the United States: people commute an hour to work, spend eight hours a day frying their brains, commute an hour home, pick up fast food, and veg on Netflix because they have no more energy or time to do anything else. They are fried. And I just didn’t want to become like that.

People become the best employees they could possibly be, but the worst version of themselves at the same time — because all of your time and energy is going into growing this company, so someone else can scale, so someone else can have more awards and a bigger company and a corner office.

Me, on the flip side: I just want to have breakfast with my family, drink espresso, write words on the internet, read books, and be healthy. I don’t want any of that stuff. So I don’t want to inherit the consequences of someone who does want all of that — and I don’t want to be the one helping them get it at the expense of my life.

2. Opportunity cost. The longer you wait to build a one-person business you love, the longer it takes to do it, and the less time you have to do it.

I’m 33 now. I started building my one-person business at 29. I’m four years into this, and I’m still nowhere near the goal I want to be at for my one-person business. But I’m a heck of a lot further than 99% of people, especially those who never start — because they don’t know how to start, they don’t have a system, they don’t have the energy to do it while having a full-time job.

That opportunity cost starts to stack and compound against you. It’s kind of like investing in a bank account, but negatively — the longer you wait, the more negative it compounds, because now you have less energy, less time, less drive, less ambition.

I’m 33 but what happens when I’m 43? 53? 63? You’re running out of time to do this. Eventually you just end up retired. You climb the corporate ladder, you look back, and you have one of the top regrets that most people have on their deathbed: I wish I would have worked less. I wish I would have been myself more. I wish I would have done the things I wanted to do.

Think about 40 to 50 hours a week worth of work — that is your life. So I knew I needed to figure out a way to do my own thing.

What I Didn’t Want to Build

I have my own ambitions. I want to build my own thing. And the thing I don’t want to do is build an agency.

I don’t want to build a client-based business, because that’s the same as having a boss — except now you have multiple bosses. I don’t want to be at the whims of someone else telling me, “This is what I want you to do, this is the thing I need you to make, this is the product we’re shipping.”

I want to build my own business where I sell my own stuff, my own products, my own content — everything built around my life, my energy, my lifestyle, and not at the demands of anyone else.

When you go look at how to do that, especially in the creator economy, you get a bunch of YouTubers and content creators telling you that you need to build a big social media audience, create tons of content, then do affiliate sales and commissions.

And I was like — this is stupid, this is not sustainable.

How can you expect someone to build a massive audience part-time? You don’t need that big of an audience to monetize. I’ve been in marketing my whole life, and half the internet’s advice was from 19-year-old dumb-dumbs who have no idea what they’re talking about.

And the other side of it: I can’t sustain a life with a wife, three kids, and a mortgage betting on affiliate commissions and a social media audience. None of that made sense. So I invested in coaching and mentorship, building a business off my 15 years of marketing experience — and I created a framework that I used to build my one-person business while having my vice president career.

I was able to do this part-time while having a full-time career, because the process is so simple, so clear. I needed something stupid simple that I could show up to every day, know exactly what to do, get the results I needed, and actually grow this thing. If it wasn’t that simple, I wouldn’t be here today.

The ARC Framework

I’m going to pull back the curtain. You don’t need a huge audience for this. You don’t need to be a social media guru.

I broke my business into three stepping stones.

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Step 1: Audience

You need an audience. Does it need to be a million followers? No — but first you have to understand you do need people. Traffic is the most important part of your business, because if you don’t have traffic, you don’t have customers, you don’t have people whose problems you can solve.

There are two ways you can build a social media audience:

• Organic content — costs you time

• Paid content — costs you money

It depends on which resource you want to trade more of. I actually had more money than I did time, but I didn’t run the paid ads route because of step 2 of my business model: relationship.

The reason I chose organic content — specifically a YouTube channel — is because I wanted to build something with a compounding effect. If I ran paid ads, the minute I turn them off is the minute I stop getting customers. I’d still be at the whim of someone else’s decisions. With organic, evergreen content, it compounds over time. A YouTube video I make today can be seen six months, a year, two years from now, and it will still help people because it’s an asset I put into the digital atmosphere.

I started on Twitter, writing primarily there, and grew it to about 6,000 followers. But I moved from Twitter to YouTube because of that evergreen aspect — a tweet or a thread is dead tomorrow. Either it does well or it doesn’t, and you’re constantly putting out content that doesn’t compound in your favor.

With YouTube, I have about 4,000 subscribers right now, 159 videos, and I drop about 2-3 videos a month, all about writing online, being a copywriter, and selling through writing.

My hack: you need to pick the platform you enjoy the most. You have to be sustainable — you’re not building a one-person business in 20 days, 30 days, three months. It’s going to take one to three years. Pick the platform you have fun building on, or you’re going to quit.

Now, when someone clicks a video of mine, I teach a lot of content and give away value for free — showing my authority on copywriting and writing. But there’s a next phase to the ARC framework.

The main hack for the audience piece — the reason you don’t need a massive social media audience to build a thriving business — is that social media grows my audience, but it’s not what grows my overall relationship with my audience.

Step 2: Relationship

The relationship with the audience is really the thing they’re buying. They’re not buying your product, your community, your coaching — they’re buying you. The more they know you, hear from you, talk to you, the better the relationship.

YouTube creates a starter relationship — people get to know you, see you on camera, learn from you — but you can’t control the consistency or pace they actually see you. Maybe they don’t have the bell turned on, maybe YouTube doesn’t show them your next video, so they don’t hear from you for a week, two weeks, three weeks. That relationship doesn’t strengthen.

So in my YouTube videos, I plug what I’d consider “bribes” to join my email list — a welcome gift. One of my bribes is Become Dangerously Persuasive, my two-hour masterclass on copywriting (the most underrated skill for building a one-person writing business). I have a two-hour course/presentation, and in the video I walk them through it, then put the link below along with other free resources.

When they click that link, it opens up what I call a lead magnet page (a “bribe page”). In exchange for someone’s email address — which is way more direct communication than YouTube or Twitter — I send a gift. In my case: “How to go from a beginner to a paid writer by becoming dangerously persuasive with copywriting in just two hours.” Someone puts in their email, hits send, and joins my email list. Which leads to the second part of the ARC framework: relationship.

This is huge — most people in the creator economy miss this. They make YouTube videos or tweets and then try to sell their stuff. It doesn’t work that way. Twitter penalizes you for putting links out. The YouTube algorithm is up and down — it could get nerfed, it could change — and you don’t own that direct communication.

So if your people don’t have the bell on, don’t check Twitter, or the algorithm doesn’t feed them the video that week, you’re at the whims of the algorithm. I took the algorithm completely out of the equation, because I can’t bet my business on things that could happen to me. I needed a failproof, simple plan.

Email has been around for over two decades, working flawlessly. People still check their email every day. In fact, I send an email every single day. This is part of my business model — my key philosophy is relationship.

Think about it: most people send one email a week, and it’s a long, used-up letter formatted like ChatGPT wrote it. Imagine if every Sunday at 7 p.m., that’s the one time I talked to my wife — “Hey, how was your week? Here’s a brain dump of everything that happened.” That’s what a weekly newsletter feels like to me. It doesn’t make sense, because I’m optimizing for relationship.

I write a daily email so that every morning it’s like having an espresso with my wife. I sit down, grab an espresso, and say “How was your day? How are you doing? Here’s an incredible story I think you’re going to love.” She laughs, we hang out — she loves me because she hears from me every day.

People think one email a day is going to annoy people, get a bunch of unsubscribes. Yes — but you’ll also get the most loyal fans possible, because the people who stick around on your list are your true fans. Very much like Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans. My entire business model is built on this: with a 4,000-subscriber email list, I don’t need 20,000 people who buy from me. I need 1,000 really great customers who buy everything from me.

My daily emails are 300–500 words, story-driven. I’m not trying to teach something every day. I actually flipped the way most people build a one-person business: they use entertainment to attract an audience and education (via a weekly email) to sell. I flip it — I do education to build my audience and prove I know what I’m talking about, then I do entertainment because email is inherently boring (it’s just words on a page). If I can entertain someone via email, I can get them to open tomorrow’s email, and the next day’s, and the next.

The Framework Behind My Emails: SLO (Story, Lesson, Offer)

I use a framework called SLO — Story, Lesson, Offer — for how I write, structure, and send my emails:

1. Story — I tell a compelling, fun, entertaining story from my world so people get to know me better and resonate with me (whether they end up liking me or not).

2. Lesson — From that story, I give a lesson. For example, one email talks about one of my favorite books, Dungeon Crawler Carl — I tell a crazy story about it, then teach a marketing/copywriting lesson.

3. Offer — I make an offer to buy one of my products.

Even at just one or two sales a day of a $99–$149–$200 product, that ends up being $3,000–$10,000 by the end of the month, depending on volume.

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Step 3: Continuity

Here’s where things get really interesting. I can’t be at the whim of “did this product sell, did this product not sell, did I do a launch or not” and the roller coaster of income that comes with it. Another big problem creators have: they launch courses, make a ton of money, then make nothing for three months.

So instead of just selling a product, I sell a continuity item on top of everything else — one that pays on a recurring, subscription basis. That’s the baseline to everything else I sell.

I do this through my Skool community, the CopyCreator Club. Right now there are 114 members paying $50/month — about $5,700/month — where I teach how to build a one-person business writing online. Inside the club: exclusive drops, bullet trainings, masterclass guests like Ben Settle, Daniel Throssell, Parker Worth, coaching threads, monthly newsletters, and people winning and helping each other.

That’s just one way to create a continuity product — coaching is another. One of my club members, Robin Timbers, just launched his own continuity coaching product and went completely clientless. He doesn’t have clients anymore — he coaches full-time, with customers paying him on a recurring basis, built through his own email list of somewhere between 1,000–2,000 people.

You don’t need a huge audience. Maybe you build a newsletter and sell subscriptions on Substack — I have one myself, with almost 300 subscribers, including paying subscribers. It’s not my bread and butter by any means, but it’s proof of the model.

If you have 1,000 people paying you $10/month, that’s $10,000/month. Is 1,000 people crazy? No. You don’t need 100,000 subscribers, a million followers, or a 10,000-person email list. You need 1,000 paying subscribers at $10/month — or a community at $50–$100/month — as long as it’s some sort of continuity model.

On top of that, if you want to sell courses, run a 21-day challenge, a cohort, or anything else — great, that’s extra money. I combine both models: a base of continuity, and then I sell other trainings, courses, and affiliate products on top. And if you want, you can take on client work or a project here or there — but you don’t need to, because you have a base income off your own one-person business.

Your Obvious Next Step

This is the exact structure I’ve personally used, and still use today, to build my one-person writing-online business. I write my YouTube scripts, then I record them. I write my daily emails. I write all the content in the community. It’s all writing. It’s all copywriting — the hook in this video, the script, my daily emails that persuade you on my courses, the content I sell and teach inside the school community.

If you haven’t mastered the art of copywriting, grab my gift down below: 41 Advanced Copywriting Secrets. Study these and I guarantee you’ll get more attention, more clicks, more sales, more subscribers, and more people opting into your continuity product.

That’s the entire model. That’s the system I used to leave my job so I could have more control over my time and my income. I’m a normal guy. If I can do it, you can definitely do it.

If you want me to coach you and help you personally, check out the CopyCreator Club community, where you’ll get my personal mentorship and access to over 100 other people building their own one-person businesses.

Either way, I hope this was helpful for your decision-making and for building the life you actually want to live. If you have any questions, drop them in the comments below. I appreciate you reading — share it with a friend.

Alin

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In 2011, a Pixar employee named Emma Coats wrote a Twitter thread on the 22 rules for storytelling. They’re an absolute masterclass in story, psychology, and human persuasion.

In this article, I’m going to show you exactly how I use these storytelling secrets to write highly addictive emails to over 5,000 creators & copywriters every single day.

If you’re interested in stealing the secrets from the world’s greatest storytellers so you can become a better writer and even sell more of your own products, then this is going to be the best article you read all day.

I’m going to specifically break down the 13 rules that I’ve personally used.

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Rule #1: You Admire a Character for Trying More Than Their Successes

In this context — via my daily emails — I am my own character. I write personal stories coming from me to my customers and readers, offering products that I sell on my own.

You are your own character in your brand, whether you have a YouTube channel, a Twitter following, an email-based business like mine.

The idea is that you are a character that your readers like. You want your readers to like you, and they want you to succeed — but they don’t want you to succeed easily.

People don’t like it when somebody is just constantly winning with no obstacles. It’s no fun to read. So you have to sprinkle in:

• The hard roads

• The detours

• The things that have been thrown your way that tried to stop you from success

This is the opposite of what most gurus try to teach you — always posting your wins, wins, wins. But people want to see the humanity in your storytelling.

You have to overcome obstacles. It makes your storytelling far more addictive because people don’t know whether you’re going to get there or not. It also creates this underdog tone, because they want to continue to cheer for you.

In essence: no great story has ever been told about a character who did everything right.

Example: I wrote a story where I had the biggest product launch of my life but I was running on fumes because I’d been up for almost 48 hours straight writing promo emails.

Rule #2: Keep in Mind What’s Interesting to Your Audience, Not What’s Fun to You as a Writer

They often can be very different.

The sweet spot in your writing and storytelling needs to be in the middle of:

• What do you want to write?

• What do your readers want to read?

You are focused on your reader’s journey. Your writing is a mirror to their experience. They see themselves in your journey, but you have to write the things they want to read.

So before I ever put pen to paper , I’m always thinking: Is this going to be interesting to my readers? Is this what they like?

A lot of times I’ll point it back to data. I go back to emails I’ve written before that got a lot of replies, a lot of purchases on my products. Or if you’ve written threads — what have they liked before? That gives you an inclination of what your readers enjoy and what they don’t. Spend more time writing the stories they enjoy.

Example: I wrote a fictional comic book style story as my email one day. Which is wildly untypical in the copywriting niche. My readers loved it. That email got an insane amount of replies. So I wrote more emails like that.

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Rule #6: What Is Your Character Comfortable With? Throw the Opposite at Them.

What is your character good at? Challenge them. Make them respond.

In this essence — if you are the character — what is the thing you’re really, really good at? Try something else in life to create stories that increase the amount of obstacles for you.

I know this sounds counterintuitive. You want to continue to win. But remember Rule #1: people don’t want to read about someone who’s always succeeding and everything goes right for them.

Here’s how I apply this personally:

I’m a clientless copywriter. I don’t write for clients — almost ever. I write my own stuff and build my own products. But every once in a while, I will take on a client in a niche I’ve never written for before, just for the story — to see how it goes.

• Sometimes it goes crazy and I get a viral story, like the time I wrote on Twitter about firing a $6,000 client.

• Sometimes it goes really, really well and I still get the story.

Do things in your life that make you — the character — get out of your comfort zone, so you can at least get a story out of it.

Rule #7: Come Up with an Ending Before You Figure Out the Middle

Endings are hard. The way I use this in my email storytelling is I always get in front of my readers about what I am trying to accomplish next.

Whether it’s:

• Launching a new business

• A personal hobby

• Breaking 90 in my golf game

There’s always some goal, some ending that I am chasing after — and I’m guiding my reader along in the journey so they know exactly what I’m chasing.

It gives them clarity. It gives them a map. And you don’t always have to give away the ending, but at least knowing your end goal will give you a map of what to write towards.

Example: I often tell stories about the ups and downs of building my Skool community — CopyCreator Club. My readers know the “ending” of me building a fully autonomous business, which makes the journey towards that ending way more intriguing to them.

They think, “will he fail? or will he win?”

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Rule #8: Finish Your Story, Even If It’s Not Perfect

In an ideal world you have both, but move on and do better next time.

People often ask me, “How do you write a daily email?” The perfectionist in them — or the idea of coming up with stories — makes them feel like not every single thing you write is going to be gold.

But the more you write, the more chances your writing is going to get better and better and better.

I’ve personally put myself on the hook that every day I’m going to tell one story to my audience. I’m going to try and make it as amazing as possible. But some days? It is what it is. You ship it. You move on.

This is the best way to become an incredible storyteller:

1. Show up every day

2. Write a story — your email, your thread, whatever it is

3. Ship it

4. Move on

5. Do better tomorrow

Reps = excellence

Rule #10: Pull Apart the Stories You Like

What you like in them is part of you. You’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.

This is something I recommend every copywriter and writer has — a swipe file.

Every time I read something that’s incredibly interesting — especially a story — I put it in my digital swipe file. I keep a Notion folder with all the great stories. I copy and paste them in, move them along, and try to figure out: What is it that I like about this story?

Specifically — the things that made me buy something. If your story or email made me buy something, I try to reverse-engineer that:

What emotions did you trigger that made me so enticed that I actually spent money on this thing?

And I use that in my copywriting tactics. Understanding what makes you tick as the audience will help put your brain in the audience’s shoes when you are writing for them.

Example: I read a story from Ben Settle one time about him sleeping under his office desk during a hard period in his life trying to sell a pyramid scheme product. He then learned copywriting and was able to change his life. It inspired me to learn copy.

Rule #11: Putting It on Paper Lets You Start Fixing It

If it stays in your head, you’ll never share it with anyone.

One of the best pieces of wisdom I’ve gotten from my mentors and other writers is this:

Writing begets writing.

Meaning — you’re not writing once you get the idea. You’re writing to get the idea.

Sometimes I’ve had just a crinkle of a thought — hm, what is that? — and then I start writing it. Just a draft. Nobody has to see it. And you let the idea come to you. You let the story evolve on its own as you are writing.

Often when I write my 500, 600, 700-word emails, I barely have a sentence — just something like, I think this is the direction I want to go in — and I just keep going and let it flow out. Often I ship those stories with very little editing because the way they’ve evolved on their own is really, really natural.

Don’t worry about perfecting the idea before you start writing it out. Write it out to get the idea.

Rule #13: Give Your Characters Opinions

This specific rule reminds me of that part in Revelation in the Bible where it talks about how God will spit out the lukewarm.

The same thing is true with your audience.

When you write lukewarm — when you’re not for or against anything — your writing becomes really boring. It’s not interesting at all. People want to know:

• What is your character for? What do they love? What are they passionate about? What are they striving for?

• What is your character against? What do they hate? What do they find evil in the world?

You have to have those two things in your branding. You have to have a brand enemy and a brand ally in your writing. And oftentimes it’s best to have one of each that you develop over time.

Think Harry Potter and Voldemort. He has a huge enemy that took seven books to defeat. People don’t get sick of your enemy — they continue to rally around that conflict.

This is going to create super fans for your brand. And it’s also going to repel the people who honestly you want nothing to do with your reading anyway.

Example: I often write emails about my intense hate for the corporate 9-5 world. The long commutes. The ridiculous meetings. The oppressing c-suite executives. This fires up my readers and gets them to rally around these stories with me.

Rule #14: Why Must You Tell This Story?

What is the burning belief in you that your story feeds off of?

Whenever you sit down to tell a story, you have to go back to the heart of it and ask: Why did I think this was good anyway? What made me think — man, that would be super fun to tell?

The heart of the story is often the same emotion you’re actually trying to emulate in your reader.

• Did it make you happy?

• Did it make you sad?

• Did it make you angry?

That’s what makes a good story — the heart of it gave you some sort of emotion, and you’re trying to replicate that emotion in the person reading it. That’s going to guide the way you write your stories, because you’re going to use certain verbiage to evoke certain emotions. And that emotion originally started with you.

Example: One of my most repeated stories is when I got robbed by a pastor. I’ve told that story so many times because it has two major emotions — a beginning and middle that makes you furiously angry and an end that couldn’t make you happier.

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Rule #15: If You Were Your Character in This Situation, How Would You Feel?

Honesty lends credibility — and if you’re a copywriter like me, credibility is the number one resource to salesmanship. Because people are not buying your product. They’re buying you.

Especially in a business like mine, where it’s a personal branded business — not a logo or anything like that.

Some of the best emails I’ve ever written — emails that people replied to and bought from — are when I genuinely just wore my heart on my sleeve:

• I’ve told stories where I’ve been angry at clients who shafted me in the past, and I was just really honest about how pissed off they made me.

• I’ve told heartfelt stories where I was struggling with my business, thinking about past times, and I was really honest about it.

And those have built the most trust. People say, “Oh, he’s not just some fake guru trying to sell his stuff. This guy’s a real human — with a family, with emotions, with life, with problems, with wins, with successes.” And they can relate to that.

Vulnerability is so rare nowadays that when you inject it into your storytelling, it makes people really believe it’s worth reading.

Rule #16: What Are the Stakes? Give Us a Reason to Root for the Character.

What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against them.

Stakes is one of the most underrated forms of storytelling. I like to combine this with the “know your ending” rule. What is the thing you’re trying to reach as a character?

Here’s how it works:

Let’s say you as a one person business, you are on a mission to retire your parents. You are the character. The ending is that you’ve achieved is retired parents. Now ask: What are the stakes if you do not achieve that?

You have to make the stakes detrimental — not just to yourself, but to your reader. That increases the chances that people are genuinely rooting for you to keep going.

If you don’t retire your parents, will they:

• Have to live in a foreign and oppressed country?

• Experience a life of stress over money forever?

• Have to work until they do and you never see them?

Your readers want you to achieve your goals.

So you start building this super fan base of people who see:

• Your goal

• All the odds stacked against you

• All the things you can’t overcome

• “You have to learn this. You don’t have time. You have a family depending on you.”

All of these things create stakes. And stakes make people care.

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Rule #17: No Work Is Ever Wasted

If it’s not working, let go and move on. It’ll come back around to be useful later.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve started writing a story, an email, a thread — whatever — and I just think, man, I’m not feeling it. This isn’t hitting me. I don’t think I have it.

It’s not wasted.

Here’s what I do instead:

1. Leave that document

2. Walk away for a couple hours

3. Go play a round of golf, hang out with my kids, read a book, work on something else

4. Come back a couple days later, a week later, two weeks later

5. Tip-tap that story again — and bam, it clicks

I have reused stories I thought were completely dead and brought them back to life.

My system for this:

I use Notion and set it up like a Kanban board with three columns:

• Haven’t Started

• Currently Writing

• Published

I have so many things sitting in “Currently Writing.” And I cannot tell you how many times I’ll click through and go, “What is this story?” — and then I come back, rewrite it, and it’s great.

Give yourself an opportunity to finish it later. You don’t have to knock it out today.

Rule #22: What Is the Essence of Your Story?

And what’s the most economical way of telling it? If you know that, you can build it out from there.

The essence of your story is what we call in copywriting your big idea. Your story should have:

• One big idea

• One main thing you’re trying to get across

• One plot

• One guidance towards the end result

Especially when you’re writing short stories like I am — 500 to 600-word emails — you’re not writing a 500-page novel. We’re writing Twitter threads. We’re writing emails. We’re writing ads. We’re using these stories in the most economical way possible:

• What’s the beginning?

• What’s the middle?

• What’s the end?

• What’s the one thing I’m trying to get across?

Most people make the mistake of interweaving:

• Too many concepts

• Too many characters

• Too many stories

• Too many plot lines

And trying to condense all of that into 500 words is so confusing to the reader. They just don’t understand: What is the point of this?

The fewer the characters. The fewer the plot lines. The fewer the angles. Start there. Get it to its bare essence. And if you’re an advanced enough writer and you can add some twist, some turns, without actually diluting the story itself — then do that. But start as simple and basic as possible.

Wrapping Up

That’s it. Those are the 13 Pixar storytelling secrets that I think are going to help you become a highly addictive writer — and sell more of your stuff, grow your business, and really get your writing out there.

If you enjoyed these tips, then you are definitely going to love my free copywriting guide called Copywriting Secrets Cheat Sheet. It carries 41 advanced copywriting techniques on how to be highly persuasive with your writing to sell more of your stuff.

Until next time,

Alin “Story Seller” Dragu

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I have personally spent $22,000 studying the greatest copywriting legends to ever do it — from Gary Bencivenga to Gary Halbert to John Caples to David Ogilvy. And over my last five years of mastering the craft of copywriting, I’ve run into one massive issue when it comes to learning the skill: most of the greatest copywriting teachings are not packaged for the modern era.

The old lessons, takeaways, and fundamentals are packaged for direct mail sales letters and things we don’t even do in this modern day.

So what I’ve done is spent the last few weeks obsessing over everything I’ve learned. I’ve packaged them into the best lessons you could possibly have, and I’ve structured them for modern-day simplicity — so you can take everything in this masterclass and go from knowing absolutely nothing about copywriting to walking away with the confidence that you can actually get paid for your writing.

I’ve broken this out into seven simple steps:

Know → Trigger → Hook → Write → Structure → Offer → Get Paid

Those are the seven stepping stones I wish I had known five years ago when I was getting started. I’ve already pieced it all together for you here.

The Foundation: Copywriting Secrets & Aha Moments

Before we get into the steps, we need to lay a foundation. These are the “aha moments” I’ve had along the way that you don’t get just by reading a book — you get them by absorbing hundreds of copywriting books, sales letters, and emails over thousands of hours.

1. The New Definition of Copywriting

You’ve probably heard that copywriting is “sales in print.” That comes from copywriting legend Claude Hopkins — and it’s semi-correct. But it’s an old definition, and it doesn’t apply to where we are today.

The real definition of copywriting in the modern era is: words that create action.

They are persuasive words that create action — and that action is not always a sale. That action could be:

• A click

• An open

• An opt-in

• A sale

Modern-day copywriting shows up everywhere:

• YouTube titles — Clicking a video is persuasion by hook & desire

• Email subject lines — you open the email

• Article headlines — you read the essay

• Tweets — they persuade you to click someone’s profile

• Lead magnet opt-in pages — they persuade you to put your email in

You’re using and seeing copywriting more than you think. It’s not some sleazy sales tactic — it’s embedded throughout your entire business, whether you have a personal brand or a brick-and-mortar company.

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2. You Don’t Create Desire, You Channel It

This goes back to copywriting legend Eugene Schwartz. He talked about the idea of channeling desire.

People already have desires in their heart to do something. When you’re writing copy — when you’re writing words that create action — all you’re doing is channeling their existing desires into the action you want them to take.

If I want you to opt into my email list, I might say, “Click the link below to get this copywriting training for free.” That training is something you already want. You already want to learn copywriting. So I’m channeling your desire to learn copywriting toward the action I want you to take — opting into my email list.

This goes for anything:

• Weight loss

• Relationships

• Making money

You’re taking people’s already-existing innate desires and showing them how your product satisfies those desires. You don’t create desire inside of people.

3. Copywriting Is No Longer a Career

When I look back at it, Gary Bencivenga, Gary Halbert — all these guys had a career in copywriting. That doesn’t really exist anymore.

I write copy for a living, but I don’t portray myself as a copywriter. Because it is actually more of a meta skill than an actual career.

Nobody wants a copywriter — they want the end result of a copywriter. They want the skill of copywriting attached to a more result-driven medium.

For example: I run a personal brand as a creator. I’m a creator. I see myself as a creator, or as a publishing company, or as a media empire — and copywriting is one of the main levers I use to grow that business. I use it to write articles like this, write emails, make products, and make offers. But I am still a creator — not just a “copywriter.”

The same applies to a business owner running a company. Your job is to use copy to create ads, build funnels, build campaigns that make you more money. This is a skill for you to leverage, not necessarily an identity to encapsulate.

4. How to Measure Copywriting Success

It can get dicey when you start thinking about all the metrics — open rates, click-through rates, all of it. And you start wondering, “Is my writing any good?”

It took me too long to realize the answer is simple: Did the people you wanted take the action you wanted them to take?

That is the only thing you’re measuring.

• Sales copy → Did they buy your product?

• YouTube titles and thumbnails → Did they click your video?

• Email subject lines → Did they open your email?

When you write copy, you measure the one action tied to that copy to determine whether it was successful. If it was below your standards, increase your skill to increase the output. If it was high, you’ve got a banger — and you can reuse it.

5. The 40/40/20 Rule

Most sales and marketing gurus actually get this backwards. They’ll talk about the power of the actual writing, especially copywriters — “copy is the best thing since sliced bread.”

But this goes back to a rule from legendary marketer Ed Mayer called the 40/40/20 rule:

• 40% of your copywriting success is based on the people viewing or reading the copy

• 40% is based on the offer

• 20% is based on the copy itself

That means if you get your writing in front of the right people and make them an irresistible offer, you’re already 80% of the way to success — before you even write a single word.

You could write mediocre copy, but if your offer and target audience are dialed in, you will win. On the flip side, you can write incredible copy — but if your offer sucks and your target audience isn’t dialed in, your copy will tank.

Copywriting is the cherry on top that amplifies your success.

Now that we’ve dialed in the foundations – let’s walk into the seven steps you need to feel confident getting paid for your writing.

Step 1: Know Your Target Audience

This is the most important step for copywriting. It’s the most important step for human living.

You have to understand the psychology of humans because humans are buyers. They’re the people investing in your products, opting into your email list, reading your content. If you don’t understand who those people are — what makes them tick, what makes them happy, what makes them sad — you can’t write copy.

No one cares about you. They care about themselves. You have to tap into a world where you understand them more than you even understand yourself.

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The Three Ways to Know Your Market

1. Be the Market

This is the number one way. I hear copywriters say all the time, “I want to write to coaches and founders. I want to write to gym bros. I want to write to golfers.” And I say — are you a golfer? Are you a gym bro? Are you a founder?

Because if you’re not, you’re going to struggle. There are things those people go through that they navigate in their heads and never say out loud. They’ll never put it on a Facebook post, never write it on a survey, never say it at all. You only know those things by being the market.

I sell in the golf niche, and the best way I’ve increased my sales was by actually going to play golf. I’d hit my driver and it’d go to the right — and I learned that’s called a “slice,” and that 99% of golfers have that problem. Or when I wanted to write to gym bros, I went to the gym. I realized I was nervous. I didn’t know what I was doing. I had all this anxiety and I just left. Then I realized — gym anxiety is a real thing. That’s not something gym bros will tell you on a survey. You experience that by being the market.

One of the best ways to do this: write to your own self a couple years back when you were just “becoming” the market. What problems were you going through then? Now you can write about how you’ve solved those problems. That’s an increasingly powerful thing.

2. Be a Secret Shopper

Go look at other people who are selling to the people you want to sell to. Find creators with big audiences in that market — big YouTube channels, email newsletters — and go down the rabbit hole:

• What YouTube videos are doing really well?

• What ads are performing?

• What products are they selling?

• What words are they using? What pains are they triggering?

When you see five, six, seven people in a niche selling the same product over and over — that tells you something. Obviously that’s a big problem for that audience, otherwise everyone wouldn’t be selling it.

Another trick: go to YouTube channels, click their most popular videos, and note what gets the most views. Do that across five to seven creators and you’ll start to see the same four or five topics that dominate a niche.

The best secret shopper move: actually opt in and buy some of their products. Go through their whole funnel. What do the upsells look like? What do the emails sound like? What does the sales page say? Get the full customer experience — and see what they missed and what they nailed.

3. Have Coffee in Their World

Go hang out in Reddit threads, YouTube comments, and Facebook groups. There is a certain language that comes with every niche.

If you were selling me a golf course on “hitting your clubs better”, I’d know you weren’t a golfer because golfers don’t say “hit your clubs” – they say “pure your irons.” You have to use the language and the words your market uses.

When you can use their language and understand how they talk about their problems, you will better know how they’ll respond to your words.

A great story here: Gary Halbert was in a room with legendary copywriter John Carlton. John had written a sales letter and passed it to Gary for feedback. Gary’s response was, “Have some gahd*mn empathy!” And he threw it back.

Give a crap about the people you write for. This is one of the best market research strategies there is — actually caring about your market. If you don’t care, people will sniff that out immediately. They’ll know you’re just trying to make money off them.

Now that you know how to hack the brains of your target market – we need to establish what exactly do you need to know about your market?

The Five Things You Need to Know About Your Market

There are five core things you need to fully understand at the highest level:

• Desires — What do they want today?

• Pains — What keeps them up at night?

• Dreams — What do they want in the future?

• Fears — What are they scared of?

• Obstacles — What’s stopping them from getting there?

The Two-Layer Tactic

Here’s the secret: there are two layers to each of these emotions.

Surface layer — what they say out loud
Deep layer — what they won’t say

You can really only get to the deep layer by being the market.

What they say: “I want more clients.”
What they actually mean: “I want to stop worrying about money and feel in control of my life.”

What they say: “I’m not getting results.”
What they actually mean: “I’m scared I’m wasting my life on the wrong path.”

Amateurs write to the surface: “I can help you get more clients.”

Pros write to the deep layer: “I can help you find control of your time, your life, and your systems so you never have to worry about money again.”

Which one resonates more? You see the difference.

Secret: When you’re the market, you say things in your own head — and those are the words you can swipe for your copy. Nobody tells you that. When you’re secretly saying those things to yourself about your fears and obstacles because you are the market, write those things down. That’s your gold.

Free Bonus: Use my Secret Market Secret AI Prompts to hack your target audience’s brain in just 15 minutes and do all this work for you.

Step 2: Trigger

Trigger means there is some sort of emotional trigger inside the people you’re trying to serve. If you hit it just right, it will make them pay attention. If you don’t trigger someone, they won’t read, they won’t slide down your copy, they won’t click.

1. You have to trigger someone emotionally.

Think of it like a sliding scale. On one end you have negative emotions — anger, frustration, sadness, fear. If you can really pull that trigger, chances are they’re going to click, listen, read, and buy. On the other end you have positive emotions — excitement, joy, desire, elation. Same result. In the middle is lukewarm. This is where most people play it safe. They don’t want to piss anyone off, they don’t want to over-promise. And what happens is you create this lukewarm writing that no one cares about.

This is even in the Bible — Revelation says, “I will spit the lukewarm out of my mouth.” People are the same way. If you get someone lukewarm, you will get zero clicks and zero sales.

2. People buy emotionally, but they justify logistically.

Somebody’s going to buy your product because it gave them hope. But when they go tell their spouse they spent $499 on a course, they’re not going to say “it gave me hope.” They’re going to say “it was on sale, 50% off.” They didn’t buy it because it was on sale. They bought it because you triggered an emotion. People remember emotions. They don’t remember how much they paid for stuff. They remember how you made them feel.

3. The Life Force 8

This comes from copywriter Drew Whitman’s book Ca$hvertising. These are the eight scientifically-backed emotions that people have the highest desire to fulfill — the greatest triggers you can use:

• Survival, enjoyment of life, life extension

• Enjoyment of food and beverages

• Freedom from fear, pain, and danger

• Sexual companionship

• Comfortable living conditions

• To be superior, to keep winning

• Care and protection of loved ones

• Social approval

You don’t have to inject all of these. Pick one that applies to what you’re selling, and use it to make someone want to click, buy, or engage.

4. Sell the Transformation, Not the Feature

Once you understand the emotion, you need to understand the transformation that emotion gives them.

You’re not selling a 100% cotton soft mattress. You’re selling “the best sleep of your life.”

You’re not selling a two-hour training. You’re selling “the ability to finally make money with writing.”

Don’t sell the feature. Sell the transformation.

5. Fear Beats Desire

Out of all emotional desires and transformations, remember this: people will buy to solve their pain faster than they will buy to prevent pain.

AG1 is a $97/month supplement that helps you get your nutrients — preventative maintenance. It’s massive. But do you know what’s infinitely bigger? GLP-1 medications that help people lose weight. They exploded with very little marketing.

Why? Because GLP-1 is a painkiller, not a preventative. People’s fear of being overweight and sick overcomes their desire to stay in shape. Fear and pain will forever outsell desire and a promise.

Here’s a visual I want you to burn into your memory.

Your reader is in a tree. The tree is on fire. They’re scared and in pain. Your product is the ladder that gets them out.

You show up and say: “Looks like you’re in a tree that’s on fire. I have a metal ladder. Would you like to use it to get out? It’s $97.” And they say, “I’ll pay it right now.”

Now imagine that same person in a tree that’s NOT on fire. You walk up and say, “Hey, eventually that tree might rot or catch fire — it’s pretty dry out here. I have this $97 ladder just in case.” They say, “Ah, I appreciate it. I’m good though.”

That’s fear beats desire. If you don’t trigger the emotion, they won’t buy.

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6. The Six Persuasion Triggers

On top of emotional triggers, you need to understand the persuasion triggers that increase someone’s desire to buy. These are the six most powerful I’ve ever seen:

• Curiosity

• Proof of value

• Story

• Urgency and scarcity

• Honesty

• Authority

On Curiosity

People are curious about what they care about. Specifically something that can solve their pain.

Imagine this:

You wake up every single morning with intense back pain.

Then you see two ads:

1. How to cure your back pain with this 100% cotton mattress

2. Fix your back pain today with this one simple bedroom change

Which would you click? They both lead to the same content but one of them makes you curious.

On Proof of Value

If I say, “My community is worth $1,000/mo” – no one cares.

But if I say, “100+ writers pay $1,000/mo for my community.” – suddenly you care.

Because there’s proof.

On Urgency and Scarcity

A lot of people think deadlines are sleazy. If you’re not lying about it, it’s actually generous. Humans are indecisive. A deadline forces them to make a decision — and either way, they’ll have clarity. Add a reason why the scarcity or deadline exists and it becomes far more believable.

On Honesty

Which version is more persuasive?

“I’m selling my library at 50% off.”

vs.

“I’m selling my library at 50% off because I dropped half the books when moving. They’re in good condition, but not perfect — that’s why they’re discounted.”

The honest version wins every time. When people believe you, they buy from you.

On Authority

People want to be led by leaders and experts.

They want to make sure they’re doing everything in their power to not be fooled.

Which article would you click:

1. Top 10 Copywriting Secrets Ever

2. Alex Hormozi’s #1 Copywriting Secret

The second, obviously. Because Hormozi has authority. You can hijack authority like this to make your triggers more irresistable.

On Story

Here’s a structure I’ve used thousands of times:

*Character (your reader) — Normal day, normal life. They’re hanging out in their tree, life’s good, they’re pondering

*The tree is now on fire — Something bad happens. A death in the family, a financial crisis, a health scare. The pain and fear increase

*You (the helper) — You’re their Yoda, their Gandalf. You come in and say, “I see you’re in this tree and it’s on fire. I’ve been there. I know exactly what you’re going through. Can I help?”

*The product (the ladder) — You show them the way out. “Here’s how you get out. It’s $97.”

*Resolution — They climb out. The transformation happens.

Your reader is more willing to buy when you, as the helper, guide them toward the product. Your social media content and emails are the helper phase — where you build the relationship and show them you understand.

Now that you understand persuasion triggers…

We need to be able to write hooks that instantly capture their attention with those triggers.

You ready?

Step 3: The Hook

The hook captures their attention.

David Ogilvy said 80% of your readers will only read the hook. Four out of five people who engage with your tweet, email, sales letter, or article will only read the hook and decide right there — should I click? Should I buy? Should I read on?

You are in competition with everyone else trying to capture attention. TikTok, Netflix, all of it. You have to write hooks so good and so persuasive that they stop and say, “I want some of that.”

The job of a hook is to get them to read the next sentence. That’s it. You’re not trying to sell the click — you’re just trying to create enough curiosity that they read the next line.

Picture your reader on the couch. They’re eating steak tacos, ice cold beer next to them, game on. Their phone buzzes — it’s your tweet, your email, your article. Would they put down the taco? Would they pause the game?

If no → your hook sucks.
If yes → you’ve passed the couch test.

The 7 Elements of a Killer Hook

1. Curiosity

Open a loop they feel compelled to close.

“I fired a $6,000/month client. Here’s what happened.”

That was one of my most viral tweets ever — over 1.2 million views. Most copywriters want to get and keep clients. The contrast of firing a client created irresistible curiosity for anyone in that market.

2. Pain

Touch a nerve. Trigger the emotional pain point.

“I wasted $5,000 on copywriting courses, but this one book is a gold mine.”

You’re touching the nerve of wasted money — something a lot of people learning this skill have experienced.

3. Promise

The transformation you can provide your specific reader.

“Here’s how to fire your boss and start writing for yourself online.”

If someone is stuck in a 9-to-5 they hate, that promise is exciting or infuriating — either way, it’s triggering an emotion.

4. Specificity

Specificity increases believability. Vague writing disengages.

“The guy hopped in a car” vs. “The guy hopped in a ‘69 red Camaro.”

Your brain visualizes the second one. Specific numbers, details, and claims create tangibility in your reader’s mind.

“How I type really fast” vs. “How I type 156 words per minute.”

The second one is dramatically more engaging.

5. Simplicity

Write a headline so simple they automatically read the next line without thinking.

Gary Bencivenga once wrote a headline that was just: “Lies. Lies. Lies.”

Imagine that on a thumbnail. Simple, bold, curious. People naturally click because it’s so effortless to engage with.

Imagine every syllable costs you a dollar. How would you write your headline then?

6. Proof

Proof might be the most powerful element in sales.

“Watch this two-hour copywriting crash course written by a 15-year marketing executive who sold $11 million worth of products.”

That proof immediately answers the skeptic’s question: why should I trust this person? It also filters for quality buyers who are serious.

7. Time Frame

Time frame creates tension and curiosity.

But you have to make sure the timeframe makes sense.

“Master copywriting in 12 months” → not that interesting, sounds like a lot of work.
“Master copywriting in two weeks” → a little more interesting.
“Master copywriting in two hours” → intriguing and challenging.
“Master copywriting in two minutes” → BS detector goes blaring

The sweet spot is something challenging but intriguing and believable. Too slow and you lose people. Too fast and you lose people.

Classic example from John Caples: “Can you play piano? Neither could I 3 months ago.”

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Stacking Hook Elements

Watch what happens when you combine elements:

“I wasted $5,000 on AI courses, but this one course made me $11,569 in 13 days.”

Count the elements stacked in that one hook:

• Curiosity — what courses did he waste money on?

• Pain — he wasted a lot of money

• Promise — he made $11,569

• Specificity — $11,569 not “twelve grand,” 13 days not “two weeks,” $5,000 not “a bunch of money”

• Proof — he actually made the money

• Timeframe – in 13 days

Five hook elements in 17 words. That’s a banger.

__

Now that we’ve got hooks down.

We need to upgrade the rest of your writing.

Step 4: Write

A lot of people think copywriting is just sales. But if you can’t write — if you don’t know what good writing looks like — you won’t be able to tell whether copy you’ve written (or had AI write) is actually good or bad.

Here are six upgrades to make your writing undeniable.

Upgrade 1: Benefits Over Features

Nobody buys a drill. They buy a hole. They don’t care how they get there — they care about the result.

Feature: “Lose weight.”
Benefit: “Go to the pool excited to take your shirt off.”

Feature: “20 cold email templates.”
Benefit: “Land high-paying clients in your sleep”

Feature: “AI writing template collection.”
Benefit: “Write your weekly newsletter in 30 minutes instead of four hours.”

Features describe. Benefits sell. Stop describing your product and start selling the transformation.

Upgrade 2: Specificity Is the Sauce

Specificity paints a picture in your reader’s mind. The more specific you are, the more tangible and believable your writing becomes.

Before: “Wake up early”

After: “Wake up at 5 a.m. sharp feeling like you’ve slept for a week.”

Before:”How to start a side hustle”

After:”How I built a $3,782/month business in 90 days while working my 9-to-5.”

Before:”Get more subscribers”

After: “Get 1,000 email subscribers in three weeks or less without paying for a single ad.”

Specific numbers turn vague claims into proof. They’re far more engaging every single time.

Upgrade 3: You, Not Me

The more times you say “me” and “I,” the less enticing your writing is. Nobody cares about you unless you can help them.

Before: “We’ve been in business for 20 years using premium materials.”

After: “You get 20 years of hard-won experience and materials built to outlast everything else you’ve tried.”

Before:”Our software has 50 powerful features.”

After: “You’ll finish in an afternoon what used to eat your entire week.”

Make everything about your reader. Their benefit. Their transformation. Their result.

Upgrade 4: Paint the Picture

Don’t just tell them the benefit — drop them inside a visual, visceral image of them experiencing it. Make them feel like it’s already a memory before they’ve bought anything.

“I’m gonna help you make money online.”

vs.

“Imagine sliding into your home office chair tomorrow, opening your laptop with a fresh cup of espresso next to you, writing on the internet — no boss, no Slack pings, no revisions. Just you, doing whatever you want.”

Which one makes you lean in?

“This mattress has memory foam.”

Vs.

“Slip into the softest foam you’ve ever felt and finally wake up with zero back pain.”

If they can feel it, they will bite.

Upgrade 5: Say It Simply

Complexity kills clicks. People read with their eyes, and dense complicated text makes them say, “Nah, I’m good.”

Before: “Advanced Coding Secrets to accelerate your Programming Education in 3 months or less.”

After: “Learn to code in 12 weeks, even if you’re starting from zero.”

Before: “Master the fundamentals of personal finance and wealth building for long-term success.”

After: “Invest like the rich. Start with $100.”

Before: “Top 10 effective methods for writing engaging content that resonates with your target audience.”

After: “10 ways to write tweets that go viral without guessing.”

Imagine every syllable costs you a dollar. Would you still write it the same way?

Upgrade 6: Bigger Proof, Not Bigger Promise

Promises are like balloons. The bigger the promise, the more likely it is to pop because it stops being believable. The bigger the claim, the bigger the proof required to back it up.

Before: “The most amazing memory foam pillow ever made.”

After: “Wake up without neck pain — used by 15,000 happy customers.”

Before: “Our coaching program will absolutely transform your business.”

After: “14 out of our last 20 clients hit $10,000/month within 90 days.”

Before: “The best productivity app on the market.”

After: “Rated #1 by 40,000 users — average users save 6 hours a week.”

Don’t inflate your promise. Increase your proof. It’s more persuasive every time.

Quick Recap: The Six Writing Upgrades

• Benefits over features

• Specificity is the sauce

• You, not me

• Paint the picture

• Say it simply

• Bigger proof, not bigger promise

Step 5: Structure

You have to structure your writing in a way that’s persuasive. Most people either really struggle with this or they underestimate it — they just start writing with no framework, wondering where to put the proof, where to put the promise, how to make it all flow.

These are proven structures that have worked for decades. You can adapt them to tweets, sales letters, emails, ads — anything. Think of them like Lego blocks. Put them together the right way and you can build something amazing.

Framework 1: PAS — Problem, Agitate, Solution

• Problem — Hook them with the problem they have

• Agitate — Make the problem worse (also called “twist the knife”)

• Solution — Introduce your fix

Short-form example in tweet style:

“Do you sleep less than six hours every night?” — Problem.

“Is it wrecking your work, your mood, and your marriage?” — Agitate.

“Our new mattress — backed by 14,000 reviews — helps you sleep 8+ hours a night, trusted for 25 years.” — Solution with proof.

You can also stack multiple problems before the agitation. Do you sleep less than six hours a night? Does it take you more than 10 minutes to fall asleep? Do you continuously wake up throughout the night? The more problems you stack, the more pain you create, the more someone wants the solution.

This is the first structure I recommend for ads, emails, and sales pages — because pain and fear are the strongest emotional triggers. In a tweet, it could be one sentence each. In a Meta ad, it’s a couple of sentences each. In a full sales page, it’s 33/33/33 across the whole piece.

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Framework 2: AIDA — Attention, Interest, Desire, Action

This one is from Gary Halbert. Great for content you create on a consistent basis, because PAS used repeatedly can come across as too negative.

• Attention — Capture it with your hook

• Interest — Give them something interesting that keeps them reading

• Desire — Channel their existing desire

• Action — Tell them what to do next

“Copywriting is dead.” – Attention

“The new Claude Opus 5 is beating A-list copywriters left and right.” – Interest

“And the prompts to use it are insanely simple.” – Desire

“Comment ‘prompts’ below and I’ll send them to you.” – Action

Short form is one to two sentences per phase. Long form means spending 80% of the sales page on Interest — building the full case — then escalating into Desire and closing with Action.

Framework 3: BAB — Before, After, Bridge

This one has a story element built in, which makes it even stronger — and stories are 20x more memorable than facts.

• Before — Where they are now, or where you were

• After — Where they could be, or where you are now

• Bridge — How to get from one to the other

“12 months ago, I was 286 pounds of pure fat. Today I’m 168 and jacked. Here are six odd meals I ate to get shredded without being hungry.”

“Five years ago, I couldn’t write anything worth reading. Today I’m a #1 bestselling author. Here are 10 writing prompts I use every day that transformed my habits.”

“A year ago I was sleeping three hours a night. Today I sleep nine. Here’s the mattress that changed my life.”

The curiosity lives in the gap between Before and After. The Bridge is what they’re buying. This works in any format — tweet, email, ad, long-form sales page.

Step 6: The Offer

The offer is the thing that’s going to sell the click, the action, the purchase.

Remember — 40/40/20. Forty percent is the people, forty percent is the offer, twenty percent is the copy. Your offer is half the battle.

The magic of a great offer comes down to one concept: your offer has to be so good that your reader would feel stupid saying no.

Here are the elements that make that happen.

Element 1: Your Core Product

If your core product doesn’t channel desire and solve a real fear or pain for your target audience, nothing else matters. Great marketing on a bad product just helps you fail faster.

Take a hard look at what you’re selling. Ask: does this solve a real pain or fulfill a real desire for my market? If the answer is yes, then we start leveraging the other mechanisms.

Element 2: Unique Mechanism

The unique mechanism is something you do that no one else does. It’s the “only.”

For me: Copy Creator Club is the only community for copywriters and creators to build a clientless online business. Other copywriting communities teach fundamentals or help you get clients. I give you a system to fire your boss and sell your own stuff using writing in the creator economy. Nobody else does that.

Apple: “We’re the only ones with AirDrop.”

Amazon: “We’re the only ones with this much in one store.”

Find your “only.” Position yourself as the only one who does what you do the way you do it.

Element 3: Specific Result in a Specific Time Frame

“I will 3x your ROAS in just 90 days, or I’ll give you every single dollar you paid me back.”

You’re making a clear, specific promise with a guarantee attached. Remember: the bigger the claim, the bigger the proof. If you don’t have proof yet, lean harder on the other elements and make your guarantee more powerful instead.

Element 4: Price Anchoring

McDonald’s used to run billboards making fun of Starbucks’ $4 coffees. “Why would you pay $4 when ours is $1?” That’s price anchoring — showing someone the value of what they’re getting relative to what they’d pay elsewhere.

I use this in Copy Creator Club: live weekly coaching calls, instant access to me, masterclass training, a monthly newsletter, a community — all for $50/month. Individually, those things would cost far more from various providers.

This gives people the justifiable logic they need. Remember — they buy emotionally, but they justify logically. Price anchoring helps them do that.

Element 5: Urgency and Scarcity

Why must they act now?

Urgency is a time-based deadline — “price increases in 72 hours.”

Scarcity is a quantity-based limit — “only 10 spots left.”

Combining these creates powerful FOMO. If it’s real, it’s not sleazy — it’s generous, because it forces an indecisive person to make a decision.

Always give a reason why the urgency or scarcity exists. “I’m capping the membership because I can only properly serve 100 people, and at that point I need to charge more.” A reason why makes it believable.

Element 6: Guarantee

Pair a specific result with a strong guarantee and your offer becomes dramatically more powerful.

Ben Settle once did a webinar offer where he said: “Come spend two hours on this webinar. If you get to the end and feel like I wasted your time, email me and I’ll send you $100.”

The result was a huge response from his target audience. And it became his fastest-growing company in his portfolio.

Here’s an example for client work: “I’ll double your email sales in 30 days or less. If I don’t, I’ll refund every dollar you paid me — and send you a $300 bottle of wine for wasting your time.”

How does a client say no to that? Remove the risk, remove the resistance.

Element 7: Bonuses

Perceived value in bonuses increases conversion rates.

For my email list: “Join my list and I’ll send you two gifts worth $50. Two books that both sell for $25 on Amazon, both with five-star reviews — free when you put your email in below.”

The offer becomes: give me your email, I give you $50 in real value.

Bonus rules to remember:

• Make bonuses congruent with the main offer — if you’re selling a client acquisition course, bonus cold email templates, not random notion templates

• Give bonuses real dollar values that people can verify

• Add a deadline — “when you join before X date”

The Killer Offer Formula in One Sentence

“I help [audience] achieve [specific result] using [unique mechanism] in [specific time frame], guaranteed.”

“I help golfers break 80 using my Triple Coil Swing in 90 days, guaranteed.”

“I help men lose 20 pounds by eating my keto recipes in 22 days, guaranteed.”

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Step 7: Get Paid

Now you know everything you need to create incredible, persuasive copy. There are two paths to getting paid with writing — and you can start either one immediately after finishing this.

Path 1: Write for Other Businesses

This is the simplest path and the one most writers start with. But remember — you do not sell copywriting. You sell growth, clicks, and sales. Benefits over features.

Here is the exact roadmap I’d tell myself to follow if starting from scratch.

Step 1: Find where you are the target market

Start with what you already buy. Golf gear? Health supplements? Video games? Books? Make a list of brands in that world. Go to Apollo.io, type in your niche, and get a list of brands, their emails, and contacts.

The three services to start offering:

• Email copywriting

• Meta ads copy

• Sales pages

You can add social media, but the above three convert better and command higher rates.

Step 2: Be a secret shopper for their existing copy

Opt in to their email list. Go through their funnel. Buy their product if you can. Screenshot everything they’ve written. Go to Facebook Ads Library and look at their active ads.

Step 3: Rewrite their copy using what you’ve learned

Find the missing elements — no proof, no unique mechanism, weak story, no emotional trigger. Inject all of it. Benefits over features. Specificity. Emotional triggers. Structure. Then put the before and after in a clean Google Doc or Notion document.

Step 4: Send a hyper-personalized cold email

Not “do you have 10 minutes?” Not a mass blast. One email. Specific. Personal.

“Hey [name], heads up — I’ve bought your hats before. I wear them on the course all the time. When I got your welcome sequence after purchasing, I noticed you’re missing several elements that could help you sell significantly more hats. I took your welcome sequence and rewrote it. Here’s what I’d love to do...”

Step 5: Make them a killer offer

“I’d love for you to A/B test your email against mine. All you have to do is copy and paste my version into Klaviyo and test them head-to-head. If mine outsells yours, I’ll write you three more emails for free — so you can see it wasn’t a fluke, and we can talk about partnering on your email campaigns. If mine doesn’t outsell yours, I’ll send you a $100 gift card for whatever bottle of wine you want for wasting your time.”

That’s an offer they can’t refuse. You rewrote their copy, you’re a real customer, you’re removing all the risk — and 99% of brands don’t know what they’re doing. You will win.

Step 6: Build the case study

Before and after. This brand was making $10k/month, now they’re making $23k/month. Here’s exactly what I did. Case studies become your next offer to the next client.

Step 7: Ask for referrals

“By any chance, do you know one other brand that would benefit from this? I’d love an introduction.”

They’ll either say no (keep asking monthly), refer someone, or expand your services within their own business. Either way, it’s a win.

But if you don’t want to go down the client work path and do things the way I do them…

Path 2: The CopyCreator Path

This is the path I’ve built for myself. I no longer do client work. I write for myself — and I make money doing it.

The framework is called ARM: Audience → Relationship → Money.

Audience

Pick a mission you’re on and document it. Not a niche — a mission.

On a mission to get into Stanford? Document the journey. On a mission to become a scratch golfer? Document everything you learn. On a mission to get shredded? Document the transformation.

People are attracted to missions. They follow along because they’re on the same mission. Your job is to build an audience around that mission on social media — YouTube, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, wherever you can consistently show up.

But here’s the caveat: social media is rented land. Google owns YouTube. Elon owns Twitter. The algorithm can change overnight. Email is the only platform that’s been around for decades with no algorithm.

So your goal is to bribe your social media audience — with a killer offer — to join your email list. Once they’re on your list, you can communicate directly, build deeper relationships through story-driven emails, and own that relationship forever.

Relationship

Email is where you go deep. It feels one-on-one. Use your email list to tell deeper stories about your mission. Share what you’re learning. Share what you’re overcoming. Build trust.

Money

Once you have an audience and a relationship, you make offers. I recommend starting with one of these three:

• Community — like a Skool group. Collaborative, recurring revenue.

• Paid newsletter — information, recurring revenue.

• Cohort — a time-limited sprint on a specific outcome, like a 21-day YouTube launch challenge.

Why these over courses or PDFs? People want to do things with people. Communities, newsletters with comment sections, cohorts — anything with a network effect will sell more and produce better results.

And recurring revenue beats one-time sales every time. I’d rather build a business making $5,000/month every month than sell $5,000 once and start over.

The core principle: everything you sell should help someone solve a problem on the way to their mission. You’re on the journey ahead of them — you solved the problem, you packaged the solution, and you sell it to the people coming up behind you who are dealing with the same thing.

You don’t need anyone’s permission to start. You could open a Twitter account, build an email list, and create your first product today. Will you make money today? Probably not. But if you start building now, you’re investing in a business that compounds over time — one that you own, that no client can fire you from, and that grows with every word you write.

If this is the path you want to take and want my personal mentorship to take you there, checkout CopyCreator Club.

The Whole Game

Know → Trigger → Hook → Write → Structure → Offer → Get Paid.

That’s the whole game. You understand the foundation of copywriting, the psychology behind it, the frameworks that have worked for decades, and the two paths you can take to monetize it starting today.

Now go write something.

Your friend,

Alin “El Copy Goat” Dragu

I wrote my first book in just 87 days.

No editor. No AI. No publishing deal, no agent, no writing degree. I did it in a Google Doc while working a full-time job, being a husband, and taking care of my three kids.

Since then, I’ve written my second book — which will publish later this year — and I’m already working on my third.

In this post, I’m going to expose why less than 1% of people who say they want to write a book actually write a book, and the ridiculously stupid simple system you can steal to finally write the book you’ve been sitting on.

First, Why I’m So Bullish on Writing a Book

Before I wrote my book, I saw a trend happening in the culture that scared the living daylights out of me.

I had people from all kinds of directions telling me, “Don’t write that book. Instead, turn it into a digital course that you sell for $99.”

At the same time, I was seeing indie bookshops closing because nobody was reading books anymore. Instead, they were scrolling TikTok for four hours a day.

And then to top it all off, we have AI — which has made all information so readily accessible that people are like, “Why would I read books when I can just prompt ChatGPT?”

Here’s why.

Dr. James Hovard, a neurologist and ex-teacher, did a study on over 80 countries. Not just America. Not just the UK. 80 total countries.

In that study, he found that Gen Z was the first generation in over 200 years to not surpass the prior generation on any cognitive abilities.

Every generation — stopping at the millennials — had surpassed the prior generation in all cognitive abilities. Except Gen Z.

This is everything from:

• Basic attention

• Memory

• Literacy

• Numeracy

• Executive functioning

• General IQ

Gen Z scored lower on every single scale against millennials. And the only correlating factor that could have changed those results so dramatically? An increase in low-quality digital technology — TikTok, scrolling, the internet — and a significant decrease in reading physical books and writing ideas down.

This should scare the living daylights out of you. Because at the same time, you’ve got people on Twitter saying “reading is a waste of time, just take action!!!!”

But our ancestors have been writing stuff down since the days of Jesus. They spent three to four hours reading every single day and became the smartest people alive. That’s why we still read Aristotle. That’s why we still read Marcus Aurelius. That’s why we still read Gary Halbert — these guys who were readers and writers.

Which is what leads me to this: not only can writing your own book solve 99% of these problems for you, it can also throw you into a new universe in your own business.

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The Reeeediculous Benefits of Writing Your Book

1. The Best Writers Are Voracious Readers

Austin Kleon says, books are made of books.

To write one book, I’ve read 100 books.

When you’re writing a book, you’re naturally reading other books — which gives you an immense injection of higher quality content than anything you’d scroll on Twitter, email newsletters, or TikTok.

That process of reading to write trains you as a person who can take an idea, solve a problem, and be a self-didactic learner. You’re creating the entrepreneur within yourself. Readers and writers are people trying to solve a problem — they do the research, then execute by writing it down. That’s the same process as entrepreneurship, running parallel.

I am now a full-time solopreneur since publishing my book. I had a full-time career. Now I am my own full-time career. I truly believe writing this book was the launching pad into that world.

2. Books Have No Ads and No AI

Especially prior to 2022 — a long-form book isn’t littered with a protein shake ad every three pages like your Twitter feed or email newsletter.

You can actually sit there and:

• Increase your concentration

• Increase your ability to single-task

• Consume the highest quality content on earth

A long-form book with no ads and no AI is going to change the way your mind thinks. You’ll absorb wisdom at a higher efficiency rate than if you were just reading Twitter, newsletters, and everything littered with crap AI copy.

You are what you eat. If you eat garbage all day, you’ll regurgitate garbage.

3. Nothing Has More Legacy Than a Book

The people who told me to create a $99 course instead — I’ve done all those things. I’ve created $1,000 courses that sold multi-six figures. I’ve created $500 courses, $299 courses, $99 courses. I will continue to create courses. But that does not take away from what a book does.

A book has significantly more legacy.

I wrote this book in 2022, launched in 2023, and it sells more copies today than it did then.

Courses have peaks and troughs:

• You launch, you sell a bunch

• The course gets old, people get fatigued

• It sits on someone’s hard drive, unwatched

• The legacy of that course dies very quickly

When somebody orders my book, it sits on their bookshelf. It’s a physical reminder of me and my domain and my expertise — in their home, far beyond any course.

A course is dead within 12 months. This book is going to sell for 20, 30, 40 years.

It’s the same reason the Bible, written over 2,000 years ago, is still the most distributed book in history. Same reason Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations and Stephen Pressfield’s books from the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s still carry such high legacy.

4. Writing a Book Documents the Progression of Your Life

Look at John Mark Comer. He’s written a book about depression. Then a book about eliminating hurry from his life. Then a book about love and marriage. Then about rejecting the lies of the devil in his life.

As he’s learning these things in life, he’s documenting them — and they’ll be passed down to his kids.

I’m building an autonomous business where I wake up, write 3-4 hours a day, make a multi-six-figure income, and then move on with my day. Along the way, I’m documenting everything I’m learning:

• Copywriting

• Funnels

• Social media

• Mindset

• Building habits

• Content systems

I’m packaging my best-of-the-best ideas into books — in the most timeless, legacy-driven way possible. And you can see that progression of life toward a fully autonomous, fully free, fully abundant life.

Every step you take, you can write a book about it.

5. Writing a Book Is Self-Discovery and Self-Mastery

You don’t write a book because you’re a master at an idea. You write a book to become a master at that idea.

Because to write it, you have to explore the ideas you’ve already learned and go beyond them. You have to dig the well deeper into every single idea.

In writing Meaningful Marketing, I had to:

• Challenge my own ideas and thoughts

• Simplify the way I was thinking about those ideas to communicate them clearly

• Go down rabbit holes to find incredible stories, simplified systems, new ways of communicating

Seth Godin calls it thrashing. That process of thrashing in your mind forces you to discover things about yourself, your skill set, and your topic that you’d never discovered otherwise.

6. You Become an Authority on That Topic

What’s going to give you more authority?

“Hey, I launched a $99 course on this topic.”

Or:

“Hey, I wrote a book about it.”

Writing a book commands respect — from customers, from high-paying clients, from high-status people. Readers are leaders. Everyone in a high-status ecosystem is reading books and writing their own ideas down. It’s almost assumed.

When I put “published author” in my Twitter bio, I genuinely believe it increased the conversion rate of people who clicked over from my tweets.

When I launched Meaningful Marketing as a #1 bestseller, I put “#1 bestselling author” in my bio. That status is attractive. Attraction equals magnetic. Magnetic equals money.

Even if you’re not writing to sell the book, you’ll attract:

• More high-quality people

• More dollars into your business

• A bigger email list

• More opportunities to sell your own stuff

That’s exactly how I did it. The book is free in exchange for an email address. You join my list. I email you every day. And eventually, I sell you something that actually helps your life. That’s how it works.

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The Stupid Simple System to Write Your Book in 90 Days

Step 1: Pick a Big Idea

You don’t have to write a title. You don’t have to write a subtitle. You don’t have to outline the book.

You just have to pick a big idea.

I use two P’s to balance between:

• What problem can I solve?

• What am I passionate about writing?

When you’re passionate about something, you typically already have a book’s worth of information in your head — you just don’t know it yet. And your passion should solve a problem.

(Quick note: we’re talking about nonfiction books here. I can’t help you write a fiction novel — I don’t know anything about writing those.)

For example, let’s say I’m writing a fourth book called Hit Publish Daily — a book about building daily writing habits, because that solved a major problem in my life. Learning to write every day helped me get my ideas on paper, write my daily emails, sell my community.

The problem I’m solving: helping people build a daily writing habit.

My passion: I love writing and live it every day.

You can get four or five ideas like this:

• A book about how to break 100 in golf

• A book about how to crush stress with meditation

• A book about making money with copywriting

• A book about writing books

Pick the one that solves the biggest problem and has the most passion behind it. If you have to lean one way, lean toward passion — because the more passionate you are about writing it, the more likely you’ll actually write it.

Step 2: Brain Dump Your Micro-Ideas

Take your big topic and write down every tiny idea attached to it. Just brain dump — little bullets of anything connected to the topic.

Do not prompt Claude. Do not open ChatGPT. Stop it.

Use your brain. It’s been around for thousands of years. It’s more advanced than any AI. Sit down, grab a piece of paper, set a timer for 15-30 minutes, and try to get 20, 30, 40, even 50 ideas out.

For Hit Publish Daily, I might write down:

• Permissionless writing — you don’t need anyone’s permission to write every single day

• Sacred hours — the hours of your day where you’re most productive and least distracted (for me, that’s 5:15 AM when my kids are still asleep)

• The PET Method — Place, Experience, Time. Set a place, create an experience around it, have a specific time — and you’ll keep writing

• Identity — having the identity of a writer. What do writers do? They write.

Keep going until you hit 40-50 ideas. Just keep going. You’ll eventually have chapters — you’ve basically outlined your book without even trying.

Step 3: Open a Google Doc and Create a Tab for Each Idea

Take your piece of paper with all your micro-topic ideas and open a Google Doc. Create a new tab for each individual micro-idea.

Now here’s the mental shift that makes everything easier:

You’re not writing a book. You’re writing blogs.

A 500-1,000 word blog. That’s it. You know how much easier it is to write a blog than a chapter of a book? So much simpler. So much less overwhelming.

With chapters come all these connotations — it has to be perfectly structured, 3,000 words, sub-topics, all that. No. You’re writing a blog. That’s it.

Step 4: Use the SL Structure for Every Blog Post

To write each blog, use the Story-Lesson (SL) Structure.

If you’ve read the best-selling nonfiction books of the last five years, you’ve seen this everywhere:

• Atomic Habits uses it

• The Psychology of Money uses it

• Seth Godin uses it in all of his books

It’s the simplest, most effective structure you can follow:

1. Start with a story — because stories hook readers. 80% of book sales are fiction novels, not nonfiction. Why? Because most nonfiction is dry and boring. But if you inject a story at the beginning of each chapter, you hook the reader and get them to extract the lesson at the end.

2. End with the lesson — one good lesson. That’s it. Not 80 lessons per chapter. One story, one lesson.

Example — Permissionless Writing:

I’d open with a story: About five or six years ago, I was working at one of the largest churches in America as Director of Marketing. I was working 50-60 hours a week. Everything I created had to be approved by my CMO, our board of directors, a huge team. Every piece of content got ripped apart. Everything I published needed someone’s permission.

Then I’d give the lesson: Writing is permissionless. You can write anytime, any part of the day. Nobody can tell you not to do it. They don’t have to approve what you write. It is completely permissionless.

That one lesson is going to connect with someone. One good story, one good lesson — that’s all you need.

Step 5: Use the PET Method to Actually Show Up and Write

Now you have your topic, your 40-50 blog posts to write, and your structure. All you need now is the place, experience, and time to actually do it.

The PET Method:

• Place — find a place you’d enjoy writing in. I like my office. Dead quiet. I hate coffee shops, I hate how loud and distracting they are. Find your place.

• Experience — create an experience around it. For me, that’s a cup of espresso, sometimes a candle, maybe some lo-fi beats. Very cozy, very chill. When I sit down to write, I’m relaxing and having a great time.

• Time — set a consistent time. Mine is 5:15-5:30 AM. My kids are asleep. I’m not getting text messages. The world isn’t around me. I write for 30-45 minutes, maybe an hour.

If you do this for two months, you will have written a book.

Think about it: you have 40-50 blog posts, each taking 30-45 minutes to write. Do that once a day for two months. That’s it.

Step 6: Write the Entire First Draft Before You Edit Anything

This is the biggest caveat.

Do not edit, restructure, or rewrite anything until you’ve written the entire first draft.

Write every single blog post first. Because people who finish the first draft are 88% more likely to finish the entire book.

Once you’ve written all of it, then you go back:

• Edit it

• Structure it in whatever order makes sense — oh, I should teach this before this

• Drag the tabs in Google Docs to reorder your chapters

You don’t need Scrivener. You don’t need Notion. You don’t need Obsidian. You need to write.

Step 7: Edit Yourself — Don’t Use AI

When you’re done with your first draft, edit the book yourself.

Please do not use AI to edit your book. It will strip the sauce out of your voice. It’ll try to “correct” your voice naturally and remove everything that makes it sound like you.

Don’t use Grammarly heavily either. If anything, use it at the absolute lowest setting — just to catch misspelled words. Do not let it change your words.

You edit it. You structure it. You give it a title. 99% of your book is done.

You Have Everything You Need

There’s a whole other world around book design, formatting, publishing on Kindle, and launching as a #1 bestseller — and if you want me to walk through that in a future post, leave a comment below.

But for today, you have everything you need to write your first book. Every step. Every reason. The system is stupid simple:

1. Pick a big idea (passion + problem)

2. Brain dump your micro-ideas

3. Create a Google Doc tab for each idea

4. Write each one as a blog using the Story-Lesson structure

5. Use the PET Method to show up consistently

6. Finish the full first draft before editing anything

7. Edit it yourself — no AI, no heavy Grammarly

If you can write one blog a day for two months, you can write a book. Full stop.

Now go write the book you’ve been sitting on.

If you enjoyed this article, feel free to checkout my book Meaningful Marketing.

You can also grab it for free here.

Thanks for reading!

Alin

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I bought this book by Robert Green called Mastery. And I bought it with the hopes of figuring out one thing:

What on God’s green Earth am I here to do in life?

I spent the last 20 years of my life getting good at skills, but with spurts of obsession.

The first of which was the guitar. I have been playing guitar since I was 7 years old. Every day as a kid, I’d lock myself in my bedroom and shred for an hour. Two hours. Three hours.

I knew I was getting quite good when my older brother, Claude (real human, not AI 🤣), popped in my room while I was playing and said, “Whoa. That was you? I thought that was the radio.”

I smirked.

A sense of pride swelled up in me like the sunrise on a chilly spring morning.

“Thanks bro...”

“Keep it up, and you could do music for a living.”

I’d never thought of that. I could do this forever? Kick me twice and call me Sally, I’d love that!

So I kept going.

I played guitar every day. Eventually, I got good enough (and old enough) that the guys in my church started asking if I would be willing to play in the Youth Band.

Church Youth!? Mom, I made it.

You might as well have told me Led Zeppelin called — Jimmy Page is sick and specifically requested Alin Dragu step in his place.

I idolized our church youth band.

Which is ironic because idolatry is a sin according to Jesus. But the 17-year-old boys playing in the band sure seemed to enjoy everyone gawking at them.

(Yet another sin, you skinny jean wearing nerds)

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But now I get to be one of those nerds who gets gawked at. Sin aside, I wanted it.

And boy, did I ride that wave. My obsession with guitar took me further in life than I ever thought it would. Playing in the church band opened up the door (literally) for me to play guitar at a much bigger church.

By much bigger, I mean the tiny student ministry at one of their campuses was bigger than my entire childhood church.

Another Led Zeppelin moment.

I was a pompous wanna be rockstar who just happened to use church as an outlet for fame and glory… until I met a guy named Lee Baker.

Lee became the worship pastor of the campus where I was playing guitar. And he taught me everything I wish my no-good-piece-of-sh*t Dad would have taught me growing up.

He taught me humility. He taught me how to read good books. He taught me how to care for other people. He taught how to be a humble follower of Jesus who doesn’t need to be in the limelight to be happy.

And best of all, he taught me the solo the “Its A Long Way To The Top” by AC/DC.

(I think I’m still working on the whole limelight thing)

Eventually, his mentorship (specifically the “read good books” part) helped me learn a whole bunch of other crap I never learned in my adolescence.

Things like being disciplined, working out, building good habits, making money, being a good friend & following Jesus.

I distinctly remember reading “Blue Like Jazz” by Donald Miller (before he became the StoryBrand guy) and thinking, “Whoa. Books are f****ing incredible.”

I never stopped reading.

Every week, I’d read a book or two.

In fact, it was getting so expensive for me as a 20-year-old guy making very little money to read books that I kept making brand new Gmail accounts so I could open up free Audible trials twice a week to keep grabbing books.

I eventually became such a good mentee under the wisdom of Lee that the Big Massive Church I’d been playing guitar for ended up hiring me to be their Social Media Manager.

Which I had gotten fairly good at since I was doing social media for a bunch of guitar brands.

As I started working at the church, I learned an enormous amount of things that I’m really flippin’ good at.

Photography being at the top of that list.

As a Social Media Manager, I’d gotten really good with a camera. And obsessed.

I watched every video on YouTube from Peter McKinnon, Alan Palendar & Matti Haapoji.

I spent thousandsssss on camera gear.

Thousands I didn’t have.

I remember one time having $1,000 in the bank, and I spent $900 on a camera lens. Knowing damn well that groceries aren’t free.

But I couldn’t help myself!

Down the rabbit hole I went.

Photography led to videography which led to graphic design which led to web design which led to a deep web of confusion by the time I was 27 years old.

I’d floated through my 20s getting really good at a handful of things, but I wasn’t “good enough” at any of those things to think I could make a serious living doing it forever.

Nor did any of those things really sink its teeth into me anymore. I’d become a little numb to it all. It had my attention at some point, but when I had gotten to the point where it would take 10x the amount of work to “break through” to the next level, I capped out.

I was a really good guitarist, but not the best.

A really good photographer, but not the best.

And so on.

I was your quintessential Jack of All Trades, Master of None.

And I f****ing loathed it.

So. Much.

I wanted so bad to have my one thing. The thing I could build a legacy around. Something I could be known for. Something that the obsession seeped so deeply into my veins that I would never consider it work, but simply play disguised as work.

And nothing I had touched up to that point was gonna be that thing.

So I became a little depressed. Well, a lotta depressed.

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I mean… imagine doing all these things since you were 7 years old, and now you wonder, “I still have no idea what to do with my life...”

Which is exactly how I ended up in my home office, sitting at my desk with a copy of Robert Greene’s book — Mastery.

Trying to figure out exactly what I’m going to master.

But before I even cracked the book open, I opened my phone and texted my good friend, Lee.

“Hey man, can you talk?”

He calls me instantly. What a friend.

“Whats up, man?”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“How did you know that you wanted to play music for the rest of your life?”

What I was really asking him was, “For God Sakes, tell me what I need to do to find the thing I love and want to do forever.”

And honestly, I don’t remember very much of what Lee said. I think if anything, he sniffed out that I was struggling with this and was just trying to be a friend.

But one thing he did say changed my life.

He said, “Sometimes I write stuff down. Helps me think through it instead of it swirling around in my head.”

Hmmm. Good idea.

So I did just that. I opened up a new Note in Apple Notes and just started writing.

I wrote about my journey with guitar and photography and church and social media and lee and music.

And then I kept writing.

In fact, it’s been six years since I wrote that first entry in my Apple Notes.

And since then, I’ve written over 1,000 words every single day. I became a full-time Copywriter. I wrote two books, one of which became a #1 Best Seller. And I have 5,000 people who read my email stories every single day.

Little did Lee know how much he really did help me find my one thing.

I hope one day I can return the favor.

In the meantime, I’m going to finally read Mastery by Robert Greene.

My advice to you. Start writing. Even if you don’t want to be a writer. Writing is the best way to discover the thoughts of your heart and mind. Because when you start writing... your life begins to pour right out of you. Things you never knew were inside of you.

You can’t get that prompting AI.

That comes from real, sit-your-ass-in-a-chair writing.

Keep writing my friend.

P.S. If you’d like a copy of my #1 best-selling book, Meaningful Marketing, for free...

click here and grab it.

Here’s what it says…

Russell Brunson · 4 days ago

I want to be transparent about something that happened recently.

We let go of our copywriting team.

That was one of the most painful decisions I’ve made in business. Not because of performance. Not because of talent. But because of a shift in the world that is accelerating every single month.

Here’s the reality I shared with the entire company team this week:

We are now competing against two-person companies doing $1.8 billion in revenue. We are competing against one person who can do the work of 80 developers. We are competing against people whose AI never sleeps.

The question every professional needs to be asking right now is NOT “will AI affect my job?”

It’s “will I be the one running AI, or will I be replaced by someone who is?”

The window to get ahead of this is open right now.

I’m revealing exactly how we’re using AI — live — next week.

I am shocked AI Russell wrote this…

I even Google’d it (which is a website where you type stuff in and it finds it for you but doesn’t talk back to you) and confirmed this is 100% REAL.

Which led to think exactly what you’re thinking…

IS COPYWRITING DYING RIGHT IN FRONT OF US?

I mean even Brunson, who is notoriously known for being mentored by copywriting legend, Dan Kennedy, has given up on the idea of Human Writers.

Should you, too?

We’ll as I’ve been chewing on this…

I wanted to give you my honest, raw opinions.

And I want to do so by breaking down his announcement and inject my perspective, kay?

“We let go of our copywriting team.”

Not entirely true.

After digging, I found that he actually let go of his Junior Copywriters. He still has human editors and a Copy Chief that edit the AI.

Which… can you imagine quarterly performance reviews with Claude?

Uhhhh Claude, getting reaaaaaally tired of the em-dashes brother… no more PTO for you!

“We are now competing against two-person companies doing $1.8 billion in revenue.”

Translation:

Here’s competing with YOU.

Brunson has a mega company. I don’t. You don’t. We are people. Personal brands with an email list. A YouTube channel. A Substack account.

He is scared of YOU.

I see this as a massive opportunity for Creators and Freelancers.

“We are competing against people whose AI never sleeps.”

Brunson is banking on SPEED.

If I were you, I’d bank on EXPERIENCE, QUALITY & ORIGINALITY.

The things AI can’t replicate.

Stop trying to bank on speed like these mega-organizations who have an unlimited budget for tokens, automations and the like.

Be a freaking human, write original content, respond to your people, build relationships and ride the WAVE…

(All waves come down eventually)

“It’s ‘will I be the one running AI, or will I be replaced by someone who is?”

Unmentioned Third Path:

Or you can be the person that creates original content that AI didn’t touch.

Again, he’s banking on speed and efficiency for CONTENT.

Which makes ZERO sense.

The world doesn’t need more 💩 content. It’s need original, personality based content written by humans who want to connect with other humans.

Use AI for reporting, ordering coffee and doing other shyt you don’t wanna do…

But for me…

I’m betting AGAINST the guy who goes all in on Robot Creativity.

“I’m revealing exactly how we’re using AI — live — next week.”

Theeeeeeere it is!

Baby Brunson is shilling some AI webinar!

Reminds me of what Sensei Settle says:

“The only people making money off AI right now are people selling courses on how to make money off AI right now.”

All this to say…

Here’s where I stand:

*While 90% of my industry banks on AI as the future of writing — I am going to “defy the norms”, ride the wave and not let AI touch my copy.

*I will continue to use AI for research, design, reporting and any other shyt I don’t derive joy from or find deeply creative (like… WRITING)

*I will swallow my FOMO & sip espresso while watching others make millions selling AI stuff while little ol’ me slowly grow my clientless marketing business (that I plan on doing the long, hard and consistent way so I don’t have to whiplash my life when this wave tanks)

*I will DOUBLE DOWN on human writing and the art of THINKING.

If you’re like me and think Brunson is making a HUGE mistake by outsourcing his copy...

I highly recommend you grab my Copywriting Cheatsheet that contains 41 secrets that our boy Brunson won’t be using anytime soon.

Study that to beat his conversion rates on ads, emails and social content =)

Your copywriting friend,

Alin “El Copy Goat” Dragu

P.S. Do you think he’ll regret this? Or no?

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These are 41 Copywriting Secrets that I have personally used to go from a nobody five years ago to a full-time six-figure copywriter today — with over 5,000 email subscribers and over $11 million sold in the funnels that I’ve written for myself and for my clients. This is what I do all day long.

Let’s dive in.

(**Heads up… Everything I’m about to show you is available as a CHEAT SHEET. Click the link, put your email in, and you can use it anytime you want to write copy.)

Secret #1: Your Copy Should Be a Mirror

When people read your copy, they should feel like they are reading a story about themselves. It should be emotionally resonant — when they read it, they’re nodding:

“Yes. Oh my gosh, yes. This sounds exactly like problem I’m going through.”

The copy is about them, not you.

Secret #2: People Do Not Care About You

Write with WIIFM — What’s In It For Me?

They care about their problems, their pains, their desires, and their life. They don’t give two rips about your success and what you’ve done. Every sentence you write should be for them — to solve their problem, improve their life, move their things forward.

Secret #3: Find Your Big Behemoth Idea

Great copy actually doesn’t start with writing. It starts with a big idea.

Something so explosive that when they see it, their heart starts pounding. It matters that much to them. It’s so resonant with what’s happening in our culture, in their life, that they’re saying, “Yes, I need to know more about this now.”

Secret #4: Make the Skeleton Dance

Every product has drawbacks. Don’t hide those drawbacks. Show them to your reader.

What this actually does is create believability and trust in what you’re writing. If you only talk about the good things in your product… people start to assume you’re hiding something. Don’t hide it, show it.

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Secret #5: Be a PASTOR

PASTOR is one of my most highly-used, highest-converting frameworks.

It stands for:

1. P — Problem: Talk about the person’s problem

2. A — Agitation: Make it worse. If they don’t solve this, what happens?

3. S — Solution: Introduce the solution, which is your product

4. T — Testimonial: Give testimonials, proof, case studies — whatever it takes to prove your solution works

5. O — Offer: Make them an offer they can’t resist

6. R — Response: Give a reason to respond right now

Secret #6: Sell Benefits, Not Features

Steve Jobs is the most iconic example of this. He sold “1,000 songs in your pocket” with the iPod instead of saying “five gigabytes of storage.”

No one cares about the storage. They care about the songs in their pocket.

Another way to reframe this: when you sell a quarter-inch drill bit, you’re not selling the drill bit — you’re selling the quarter-inch hole that someone gets from the drill bit.

What is the thing that your people get from buying your product? Not the product itself — the outcome.

Secret #7: Make Your Reader Imagine Themselves With Your Product

Adobe is phenomenal at this. They constantly show people using Photoshop and Lightroom — putting you in the perspective of editing photos and making amazing designs. They’re showing you your life with that product.

What does your reader’s life look like after they buy your product? Put them in that image. Paint that picture.

Secret #8: Obey the 40/40/20 Rule

• 40% of your success in sales comes from the quality of your list — the people you’re selling to, whether from Meta ads, your email list, whatever

• 40% comes from the quality of your offer

• 20% is the copy

Great copy cannot save you from a bad offer or a bad list. Fix those two things first. Make a great offer to a great list, and the copy will act more like fuel — an amplifier.

Secret #9: People Buy Emotionally, Not Logically

People will justify logically. If I go tell my wife I bought a $1,000 course, I’ll say something like, “It was on sale.” That’s the logical story I’d tell her.

But I didn’t buy it because it was on sale. I bought it because I have a pain that the course solves. Or there’s a fear deep in my soul and that course promised it would solve that fear for me.

Those are the parts we don’t say out loud — but that’s actually why we buy.

Secret #10: Deadlines Are Generous

When you give a deadline, you’re forcing someone to make a decision — to buy or not to buy. Whether they buy or not, that’s totally fine.

What you’re actually doing is giving them relief from the indecision that’s been stewing in them. “Should I buy this? Should I not?” Well, now the decision is made because the deadline is over.

Secret #11: Long Copy Is the Daddy

The more you say, the more you sell. The more people read your stories, your ideology, your features, your benefits — everything in the copy — the more they’ll be indoctrinated with the idea of wanting to buy from you.

You can’t be boring. You have to be exciting. But long copy will always outpull short copy.

Secret #12: Curiosity Is the Most Potent Drug in Humans

Humans are physically incapable of not solving their curiosity. If you say something that makes someone curious about what you’re going to say next, they will want to click your headline, open your email, or read your sales letter.

In your copy, open a loop of curiosity. Say something they’re already wondering. Open the loop there, then tell the rest of the story in the copy.

Secret #13: AI Cannot Tell Stories, But Stories Sell

Everything you sell is bought by a human, and humans are wired to process information through stories.

The more your story feels real to them and resonates with what they’re going through, the more likely they’re going to attach themselves to you and your product — which then gets them to read the whole sales letter. The more they read, the more they sell, and so on.

Secret #14: Great Copy Cannot Fix a Bad Product

I’ve gone down this rabbit hole many times — writing great copy for a really crappy product, especially in the ecom world when I was taking clients early on. I learned my lesson.

Before ever taking a client, I start asking: “What kind of testimonials, proof, case studies, success stories do you have?”

If they don’t already like it, I can’t write for it. Because copy is more like fuel — it doesn’t create sales, it amplifies sales. If you don’t have a fire already going, there’s nothing I can do for you. But if you have a fire going, I can turn it into a roaring, exciting fire that sells.

Secret #15: Write to a Starving Crowd

Find people who are already interested and desperate for what you have to offer. Stop trying to create desire. Think about what they already like, what they already want, why they would already want the thing you have.

Gary Halbert told this story when he was teaching a college class. He said:

“If you could have one advantage for opening a new burger shop, what would you choose?”

People said things like: best prices, best location, best ingredients.

And Halbert said, “No, you’re all wrong.”

What he’d choose: a hungry crowd.

Who cares if you have the best prices, the best ingredients, or the best location? If you don’t have a starving crowd who wants what you have, you will not sell a thing.

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Secret #16: Study One Master

My first year in copywriting, I bumbled around trying to study a bunch of different gurus. Don’t do that.

Find one person whose copywriting you’re absolutely addicted to. Study everything they write, everything they sell. Buy all their courses. Buy everything you can get your hands on. Turn them into your mentor from a distance.

Once you’ve read everything that person has to offer, then move on and start studying someone else.

It’s way too confusing to learn copywriting if all you do is bounce from guru to guru, because everybody’s angle is a little different and it messes with your head.

Secret #17: Proof Smokes Promises for Breakfast

Promises are like balloons — the bigger they are, the more likely they pop. Anybody can make a promise. Anybody can make a claim. That doesn’t make it believable or trustworthy.

The rarest ingredient in high-selling copy is proof:

• Testimonials

• Case studies

• Demonstrations

Put proof in your headline. Put proof in your body copy. Put proof in your offer. Put proof after your objections. Put proof everywhere you can to show people this is legit.

Secret #18: Demonstration May Be the Greatest Form of Proof

PT Barnum helped Otis elevators get off the map — and they now make up 70% of elevators on the planet. The way they did it was through dramatic demonstration.

Barnum put Otis himself floating in the middle of a town square on one of his elevators — an elevator designed to stop from falling even if the ropes were cut. He did it live. He cut the ropes live. The elevator flew, then stopped, based on the mechanism Otis made.

After that one demonstration, Otis became a multi-millionaire in the 1800s.

Can you demonstrate your product? It will sell more.

Secret #19: Pain Sells More Than Desire

Promising someone a bright, fluffy future is good — but it doesn’t sell as much as finding a pain they have right now and showing them how to solve it.

People are less attached to the future. They are so entrenched in what they’re going through right now that they will buy whatever it takes to get out of discomfort.

Secret #20: Write in Your Market’s Words

Very much like Secret #1 — mirroring your market.

The way you do it: scroll through forums and comments, read direct messages, go hang out with the people in your market that you’re trying to sell to. What are the exact words they’re saying? Use those exact words and put them into your copy.

Like John Carlton’s famous “one-legged golfer” ad. He was talking to the guy who created that golf method, and that guy was the one who gave him the headline idea — the sales letter that made millions of dollars. John didn’t write that headline. He stole it from his market.

Secret #21: Think Like a Fish

Don’t hang out with fishermen — other marketers obsessed with fancy lures and the latest gurus. That’s how fishermen think.

Spend time swimming with your market. What do they care about? Where do they act? Where do they spend their money? Where do they go? What do they buy?

You have to understand the people you’re selling to far better than the people who are trying to sell to them.

Secret #22: Know Their Awareness Level

Eugene Schwartz created the five stages of awareness:

1. Unaware

2. Problem Aware

3. Solution Aware

4. Product Aware

5. Most Aware / Offer Aware

If you’re selling something brand new and people don’t even know they have this problem, you’d sell with stories and education.

But if you’re selling a smartphone in 2026 — everybody knows about smartphones. They’re solution aware, product aware, and offer aware. So instead of stories, you make an offer with a unique mechanism so different from everyone else that that’s how you stand out in a saturated market.

Secret #23: Play Golf Often

I usually play golf once or twice a week. Whenever I’m stuck writing copy or can’t think of a new breakthrough idea, I actually leave everything I’m doing and go play golf for 3–4 hours.

By the time I come back, I’m brewing with fresh angles and ideas — because I’m letting my mind do the work to find the answers for me.

This is called incubation, from Joe Sugarman. It is vastly underrated. Most hustle bros just try to work through slumps. Never do that. It’s way more fun to play four hours of golf and come back with flowing ideas.

Secret #24: Write Like a Barista

Pretend you’re a barista at a coffee shop. You’re pulling a shot, somebody’s sitting at the coffee bar, and you’re having a conversation with them. You’re genuinely excited about the product you’re telling them about. You’re talking to them like they’re talking back.

That’s how you write copy.

• Super simple and easy to understand

• Short sentences

• Clear words

My hack for this: I voice-dictate my ideas and stories into my phone to capture my natural flow, then go back and edit it on the computer. That writes probably half your copy.

Secret #25: Sell Identity, Not Products

Don’t sell someone running shoes. Sell someone on the idea of being a runner.

People buy who they want to become. If you can attach your product to their identity, they will be far more attracted to what you’re trying to sell them.

Secret #26: Every Sentence Has to Earn the Next

If the sentence I just read doesn’t make me want to read the next sentence, cut it.

Getting people to read a lot of copy is like taming a lion. You have to be very careful how you walk that lion down your sales page. One slip-up and that lion gets scared and runs away.

Secret #27: Compete With Netflix

You are not competing with other advertisements. You are competing with entertainment — TikTok, Netflix, YouTube.

Everything you write has to be so compelling, so addictive, so entertaining that they don’t want to go to those other forms of entertainment. They want to sit and read exactly what you have to say.

Secret #28: One

Write your copy for:

• One person

• With one offer

• To one funnel

• That solves one problem

• With one big idea

Anytime you try to layer multiple offers, multiple stories, or try to appeal to this person and also that person — it’s noise. You might as well have never written it.

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Secret #29: Your Headline Has One Job

Your headline’s only job is to get them to read the next sentence.

You’re not selling the product. You’re getting them to invest in reading the rest of what you have to say. Capture their attention, open the loop of curiosity, and get them in.

Secret #30: Repel the Losers

There are people your product is not for. Call those people out. Tell them exactly why they should not buy your product.

One — you don’t want them buying your product anyway.

Two — by calling out who it’s not for, you actually increase the desire from the people who it is for. It feels exclusive. They’re thinking:

“Oh yeah, I’m not that guy. I’m definitely not that person. This must be for me.”

While you’re repelling the losers, you’re increasing the desire for the people who will actually pull the trigger.

Secret #31: People Buy You Before They Buy Your Product

Whether you’re a personal brand or a company, your voice, your personality, and your personal views on life will encourage someone to listen to more from you. Because people like us buy from us.

It’s one of the reasons I’ve bought so much from people like Daniel Throssell and Ben Settle — because I’m very much like those guys. A lot of Ben’s worldviews I share. Daniel and I are both 33, both dads, both disciplined, both believe in Jesus. We have all these things in common, which makes me more attracted to what they’re selling.

Secret #32: People Read With Their Eyes

Formatting matters. Short sentences. Paragraph breaks. Rhythms — one sentence, then three sentences, then two sentences. Big bold text to break up paragraphs.

Good formatting reduces the illusion of how much copy they have to read and creates a slippery slope where they just glide down because you’ve made it so easy to digest.

It’s like a meal on a plate. If it looks ugly, gross, and overwhelming, you’re not gonna want to eat it.

Secret #33: Inject a “Don’t Give a Sh*t” Attitude

Neediness is the ultimate way of repelling great buyers. If they read your copy and feel like you’re begging for the sale — it’s gross. People don’t like that. It’s unattractive.

Gary Halbert used to do this thing where after he made an offer, he’d say:

“Look, you could buy this or not. Either way, I’m eating steak tonight.”

Basically saying: I don’t care whether you buy or not. I’m rich, I’m good, I’m happy. You can do whatever you want.

That’s the ultimate aura of non-neediness. Inject that into your copy.

Secret #34: Make Your Copy Itself Valuable

You’re now 34 secrets into this article… which is actually an ad to get you to download my cheat sheet, join my email list, read my emails, and buy my stuff.

(Oops, said the quiet part outloud!— see secret #37)

But you’re still reading! Because this article is incredibly valuable!

When you can make your ad itself so valuable that it doesn’t feel like an ad — it feels like pure value — people don’t throw that away. They don’t skip it. They keep the things that are actually helpful to them.

Secret #35: Specificity Is Credibility

Don’t say things like “I’ll help you lose weight.”

Say “I’ll help you lose 10 pounds in 30 days.”

Specific claims feel true. Vague claims feel fake.

Secret #36: Do Not Reinvent the Wheel

Go to websites like Swiped(.co) or create your own swipe file of emails and ads that have worked on you in the past. Figure out: why did they work? What did you like? What didn’t you like?

Use that to recreate the wheel for your own emails, sales pages, and ads. Figure out what’s winning, take notes, swipe those, make them your own.

Just don’t steal someone’s work.

Secret #37: Say the Quiet Part Out Loud

You have things in you that are polarizing, contrasting, and create massive conflict in people’s lives. You need to be polarizing.

Say things that will shock people — because:

• Shock creates conflict

• Conflict creates attention

• Attention creates traffic

• Traffic creates sales

Secret #38: What to Say Beats How to Say It

Every market has a “trigger” based on what’s happening in their world — the culture, the zeitgeist, their industry. It’s top of mind and all they’re thinking about.

If you can figure out their biggest pain, biggest fear, or biggest desire that’s happening culturally right now and say something about it, you will trigger them to give you their attention.

Secret #39: Stack Value Before Revealing Price

Pump up your product — so many bonuses, premiums, benefits, all jammed together — before you ever reveal the price.

By the time they get there, they’re thinking, “Oh my gosh, this is going to be $1,000... $2,000... this is going to be incredibly expensive.”

Then they hit the price and feel immense relief — “Oh, it’s $300? I thought it was going to be $1,000.”

You’ve price-anchored them with value first. That makes it far more likely they’ll buy, because your actual price is so much lower than their internal anchor.

Secret #40: Consumption Is Good, But Absorption Is Better

Reading and understanding are two very different things.

You need to say things — your stories, your copy, your offers — so clearly and so simply that they don’t just read the whole thing, they absorb it. They’re able to make a decision because they know exactly:

• What they’re going to get

• When they’re going to get it

• How they’re going to get it

• What it’s going to do for them

Secret #41: Ruthlessly Attack Your Enemies

If someone out there is selling your people an inferior product — or worse, something actually harmful to them — you need to attack them.

It creates conflict. Say why that product is trash. You have a responsibility to tell your people why it will hurt them.

And two — it creates this intense, dramatic conflict between you and them that generates attention, which creates traffic, which creates sales.

Thanks for reading!

Here’s what I want you to do next…

Grab the Cheat Sheet so you can use these next time you write an ad, email or sales page.

I appreciate you taking the time to read this.

If you have any questions, I reply to every single email sent my way.

Your copywriting friend,

Alin “El Copy Goat” Dragu

P.S. If you want me to personally help you write better copy and sell more stuff — checkout CopyCreator Club.

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The hottest job on the market right now is a copywriter who does Meta ads.

(Which is now apparently called a ‘Creative Strategist’ hahah)

In this letter, I’m going to be talking about why this job is so hot right now, what it is and how you can create unlimited insanely persuasive ads that rip for your clients.

For the last five years, I’ve been running Meta ads for some very serious big brands. I’ve spent over $14 million running Meta ads, I’ve created well over 1,000 ads, and I even wrote, recorded, and trained two big agencies on this Meta ads shift back in October 2025.

Now I want to give away all my “Cheat Sheet” of secrets I’ve personally been using to create high converting ad campaigns this new Meta Ads Andromeda era.

We’ve got a lot to cover, so let’s dive right in.

Why Is This Job So Hot Right Now?

Here’s the story.

Back in October 2024, Zuckerberg dropped a new AI algorithm called Andromeda. He slow-rolled it out as a test phase with some Meta ads accounts. After testing it with a small number of accounts for about a year, in October 2025, he rolled out Andromeda across the board for all Meta business ad accounts.

So every single company in the world that was using Meta ads to sell stuff is now forced to use their new AI algorithm called Andromeda.

This completely changed the way advertising had been done on Meta.

The Old Way

You would have a Meta ad specialist — maybe an agency or freelancer — who would create two or three ads a month. They’d have a budget and specify the targeting.

They’d say: “Here’s three ads, here’s a thousand bucks, and I want you to show these ads to 25-to-35-year-old women who like yoga.” And Meta would be like, “You got it, cheech! I’ll do it.” The budget would split between the three ads and bada bing bada boom… you’re done.

The New Way

In October 2025, when Meta rolled out Andromeda, Andromeda said: “I don’t care about your targeting! You don’t know anything about your people. I know your people better than you know your people.”

(Which is actually kind of true — it knows a scary amount of stuff about your people.)

So it said: “What I want you to do is upload 30 ads, and I will tell you who I’m going to show it to. I’m going to tell you which ones are losers and which ones are winners.”

It basically abolished the entire idea of targeting. You don’t put in targeting anymore. Andromeda decides the targeting based on the ad. Whatever ad you create, it scans the Meta system — Facebook, Instagram — and says, “I know exactly who would like this ad.”

But that created a huge problem.

For Andromeda to work, it needs a lot more ads to test against those people. It gobbles ads down… NOM NOM!

So instead of 2-3 ads per month, it’s more like 20 to 30 ads per month — which created a massive problem for companies that now have to produce that volume and don’t have anybody to do it.

So a bunch of big brands tried to figure out: what are we going to do? So they came up with a new job position called the Creative Strategist — someone who creates and writes ads at the pace of 20 to 30 a month to fulfill the Andromeda algorithm.

Which, at the end of the day, is just a sexy name for a copywriter who does Meta ads.

It’s writing ads, thinking of different hooks, angles, and ideas, A/B testing those ads, figuring out which ones work and which ones don’t, scaling the winners and killing the losers.

But now those 20 to 30 ads a month that companies are freaking out about is YOUR problem…

They’re hiring you to solve that problem. And you have to figure out how to create 20 to 30 ads a month — ads that actually work, convert, and sell stuff.

So I wanna give you a crash course on how to come up with tons of ad ideas that rip.

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Creative Strategist Crash Course

(Pssssst — I have created a PDF cheat sheet that contains all of this + examples for you here)

Part 1: The Four Big Swings to Test

In the old Meta ads world, people would test things like colors and fonts — little tweaks. You don’t test tweaks anymore. You test swings. Big things that make it obvious what’s working and what’s not. And these four big swings are more emotional than logistical or systematic.

Swing #1: The Biggest Pain

What is the one pain that is costing your people sanity, sleep, or money? That pain is going to be your ad.

Let me give you some examples using AG1 — the health supplement where you scoop one scoop, put it in water, shake it, drink it.

Pain examples for AG1:

• They’re exhausted all day but can’t figure out why

• They know their diet is garbage, but eating healthy feels impossible with their schedule

• They’ve got a drawer full of supplements they never take

• Their gut is constantly bloated or sluggish and nothing they’ve tried has fixed it

• They have this low-grade anxiety that they’re not doing enough to take care of themselves

Every single one of those pains is an ad. You’re figuring out which one resonates with your audience — which one gets them to click, land on your website, and consider buying.

Swing #2: The Biggest Desire

What do they really want right now? What’s a promise that would make them say, “Man, if I had that, I’d be dreamin’.”

Desire examples for AG1:

• They want to last through the day without a 2 PM coffee just to survive it

• They want to feel like their health is handled without spending eight hours counting macros

• They want to feel sharp, clear, and locked in — like they did in their 20s

• They want to look in the mirror and feel young and happy

• They just want peace of mind that they’re doing something every day to take care of their body

Now here’s an important note: pain will always outsell desire. Desire does well, but pain is the number one driver of clicks on ads. You want to be careful how you use pain, but pain is going to out-drive desire 9 out of 10 times. Desire is a good test though — especially when you need that variety across 20 to 30 ads a month.

Swing #3: The Biggest Fear

What is the thing your people are dreadfully scared might come true?

Pain and fear, while similar, are not the same thing — and both will always outpull desire.

Fear examples for AG1:

• They’re terrified they’re going to wake up at 55 and realize they’ve been neglecting their health their whole life

• They’re scared that their low energy and brain fog is a sign something is seriously wrong with them

• They fear they’re slowly becoming a shell of who they used to be physically and that the best version of themselves is already behind them

• They’re afraid that no matter what they try, nothing’s actually going to work and they’ll just feel stuck forever

• They’re terrified they’re going to end up spending $500 a month on supplements and all of it is trash

Every single one of those is an ad. I just gave you 15 ad ideas off these three swings alone.

Swing #4: Crazy Contrast

You have to say something so polarizing that no one else in your market has the guts to say it. But it has to match your brand — how you say it has to match how your brand would say it.

Crazy contrast examples for AG1:

• “Supplements Suck” (then talk about how one scoop replaces 86 supplements)

• “You Could Be Healthy in One Minute Per Day” (because that’s how long it takes to scoop greens)

• “Coffee Is Destroying You”

• “Your Doctor Is Lying to You”

• “The Health Industry Wants You Confused”

Crazy contrast is basically this: what do 90% of people believe that your brand doesn’t believe? Say that thing. Just make sure it ties back to your product and how your product solves the thing you’re talking against.

(If you need help figuring out pains, fears, desires, and crazy contrast ideas, I already made another resources where I walk you through my secret AI hack for rapid market research using Gemini. Figures all this stuff out for you in 15 minutes)

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Part 2: The Eight Ad Types

Now that we’ve covered big swings — which are more emotional — let’s talk ad types, which are the styles of the ads themselves. This is more on the tactical side.

1. Listicle — A numbered list that highlights benefits, problems, or tips. Example for AG1: “5 Reasons Your Gut Hurts” or “5 Natural Ways to Love Your Gut.” You can even write the listicle directly in the copy.

2. Advertorial — Looks like a Wall Street Journal-style news article, but it’s actually an ad. The copy reads like journalism — they don’t know they’re reading an ad, they think they’re reading news. Can be written long form directly in the ad copy, then links to an article that embeds your offer.

3. Direct Response — Simple and straightforward. Here’s the product, here’s the offer, go buy it. Limited copy, clear CTA. Think: “Buy one, get one. Free shipping.”

4. Quiz — “Take a free quiz to see if you’re overspending on ads.” Overspending on ads is a big pain point — the quiz lets you test how big. You can do the same thing for desire or fear.

5. UGC (User Generated Content) — Looks and feels like normal content but it’s actually an ad. Someone reviewing a product, shot on their iPhone at home. It looks organic, not produced.

6. Problem/Solution — Start with a very specific pain point, agitate that pain, then attach the solution. This one kind of combines the biggest pain and biggest desire — you mesh them into one ad. Hormozi does this amazingly. His headline: “Are you struggling to scale?” Then he teaches: “To scale, you need one of these three things...” Then: “I can help you solve this problem.”

7. Storymation (Story + Transformation) — Somebody who’s taken your product has transformed from one person to another. You tell the story of that transformation. V-Shred does this brilliantly — a guy went from a 6XL to absolutely jacked and shredded. Told the story, showed the transformation*. Offer the product as the solve.*

8. Irresistible Offer — Slightly different from direct response. This is a flash stack with an offer so good to you typically don’t do it. Including bonuses, discounts and a deadline. It creates urgency and makes someone feel like they’d be crazy to miss it.

Part 3: The Infinite Idea Flywheel

Now we’re going to take those ad types and big swings and turn them into an infinite idea flywheel so you can create 20 to 30 ads per month.

Step 1: Understand Pairings

Take a big swing + an ad type and pair them to create a new ad. Examples:

• Biggest Pain + UGC = new ad

• Biggest Desire + Listicle = new ad

• Crazy Contrast + Quiz = new ad

Four big swings × eight ad types = an infinite combination of ideas.

You can also take one big swing and test it against all eight ad types. That’s eight ads right there. Then take the next desire and test it against all eight ad types. And you just keep going.

Step 2: Mix Up Formats

Take those pairings and execute them in different formats:

• Video (#1 performing format on Meta ads)

• High-quality photograph

• Graphic design

• Carousel

Now you do a Big Swing + Ad Type + Different Formats. Even more ads.

Part 4: Scaling the Winners

Your clients are going to ask: “Which ads are working? Which aren’t?”

A good benchmark: 2–5x ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) means your ads are working.

• Spending $100, getting $200 in sales = 2x ROAS

• Spending $100, getting $500 in sales = 5x ROAS

Anything above that and you’re an absolute G that people should be paying a ton of money for.

How to Scale

Once you identify what’s working:

1. Find the big swing that wins — then test it with all eight ad types

2. If fear wins, test fear in all eight formats (direct response, listicle, advertorial, etc.)

3. Mix those up across video, photo, graphic, and carousel

4. That’s 16–25 ads right there just off your winner

Then go try other fears. New fear × eight ad types × four formats = another 30 ads. Then another fear. Rinse and repeat.

Part 5: Tools to Use

Facebook Ads Library

Go to the Facebook Ads Library (link in the cheat sheet). Type in any brand and see every ad they’re currently running.

The key thing to look for: the oldest ads. If Alex Hormozi has been running an ad since October 17th — and it’s now six months later — that ad is doing amazing. Nobody keeps spending money on an ad that isn’t working. The longer an ad has been running, the stronger the indicator that it’s converting.

The Forecast Creator

The Forecast Creator (link in cheat sheet) was created by my good friend Andrew Spikes, CEO of Missio Marketing. This is helpful especially for client work, because clients are always going to wonder: “Are these ads working?”

You come in, enter their budget, industry, and goals — and it forecasts expected ROAS, lifetime return, customer acquisition cost, impressions, clicks, and purchases.

Example:

• Meta ads → E-commerce purchase goal

• Budget: $10,000/month

• Customer lifetime value: $500

• Average order value: $200

• National, medium-to-well-known brand

Forecast: 6.5–10.2x ROAS. Lifetime ROAS of 16–25x. Customer acquisition cost of $20–31. X number of purchases.

If you change the budget to $5,000/month and drop the average order value to $60 and lifetime value to $200, the forecast changes too — ROAS drops to 1.6–2.7, CAC goes up to $23–38.

This is a conversation that makes you look really smart in front of your clients. You’re aligning expectations before the campaign even launches.

Part 6: Common Problems (And How to Solve Them)

When you’re launching this many ads, your clients are going to have questions. Here’s what they’re going to ask and how to solve it.

Problem: High CPA (High Cost Per Acquisition)

You’re spending more to get each conversion than your forecast or your client expected.

How to fix it:

1. Test stronger offers — Your offer is the biggest lever for improving conversions

2. Simplify the funnel — Every step in your funnel is a place where you can lose customers. If it’s form → website → quiz → email sequence → sale, that funnel may be breaking down at multiple points

3. Try different creative — Specifically, try the four big swings. Try a different pain, a different fear. You might not be resonating with the market, which is why Meta is taking longer to find the right people, which costs you more money

Problem: Low ROAS

You’re not hitting that 2x, 3x — you’re at 1x, 1.5x, or worse.

How to fix it:

1. Add upsells in the funnel — If it costs $50 to acquire a customer and they’re buying a $50 product, you’re breaking even. But if you add congruent upsells that move the average order from $50 to $150, you’re now making 3x your acquisition cost without changing the ads at all

2. Try a totally different offer — Maybe this offer isn’t resonating. Try something attached to a different pain, a different fear, or something with more profit margin. If your acquisition cost is $50 and you’re selling a $25 product, you’re losing money. If your acquisition cost is $50 and you’re selling a $500 product, you’re winning

3. Cut underperforming campaigns — If you’re A/B testing and one campaign is ripping while another is killing you, but you’re still spending money on both — stop. Turn off the loser and put more money on the winner. Do it fast. Meta likes to spend your money quickly, and you need to be checking the account every day

Problem: Low Click-Through Rate

People are seeing your ads (you’re getting impressions) but they’re not clicking.

How to fix it:

• Your hook isn’t catching them. People are scrolling social media and you have three seconds to stop the scroll. Either your video, graphic, or visual is not compelling enough — or your hook just isn’t landing

• Try different hooks and angles. Big swings are your biggest lever here. Try a different pain, a different fear. You have to find the right angle that makes someone stop mid-scroll and say, “Wait, what?”

Problem: Bad Leads

You’re getting leads into your funnel, but they’re not buying anything. You’ve got email subscribers but nobody’s buying.

How to fix it:

1. Add qualifying questions to your opt-in form — Asking for name, email, and phone number will get you fewer leads but higher-quality buyers. Fewer leads who actually buy beats a pile of leads who never will

2. Clarify the offer in the ad itself — A lot of times you’re running a lead magnet offer that isn’t congruent with what you’re actually selling. If you get someone with a lead magnet about losing weight but then make an offer about building muscle, those are two completely different things. The ad has to be congruent with the offer

3. Clarify the target in your ad — Remember, Andromeda doesn’t care about your targeting settings. Which means the targeting has to come from the ad itself. You have to say “Hey, photographers...” or “Hey, school teachers...” — put that language in the ad copy so Andromeda can identify who you’re talking to and find them

Problem: Ad Fatigue / Ad Burnout

The same people have seen the same ad too many times without clicking.

In Meta ads, this is called frequency. It used to be that you could reach a frequency of six or seven before worrying. Nowadays it’s more like two or three. When frequency gets that high, Meta stops wanting to show that ad because people aren’t engaging.

The only fix: create more ads. Which is exactly what this cheat sheet helps you do.

Now you go crush it!

Listen, I know creating 20 to 30 ads a month sounds like a lot — whether you’re doing it for clients or for your own business. If you want more help beyond what I’ve shared here, I have a community called CopyCreator Club. I’m in there alongside 100+ copywriters who are insanely good at marketing and advertising. We do weekly calls, hot seats, copy roasts. I’m in there every single day, and I’ll personally help make sure your ads are cracking.

But no pressure. Download this cheat sheet, use the exact framework I’ve personally been using, and I guarantee you’re going to start seeing better ads.

I hope you found this letter really helpful. Thanks for reading!

Email me alin@alindragu.com if you have any questions I didn’t answer today. I’m happy to respond and help you get cracking.

Till then — I’m going to enjoy some espresso and make some more ads.

Your CopyCreator friend,

Alin “Has Been Creatively Strategizing For A While” Dragu

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If you could double the amount of leads, email subscribers, or online sales that you make without having to make more content or spend more money on ads, would you wanna know how?

That’s what I’m gonna show you in this article.

Because everything that you create online—videos, ads, articles—should all lead to one thing: a landing page. And if you can double the conversion rate to that landing page, you can double your leads without double the work.

By the way, I’m Alin Dragu. I’ve spent 15 years in the marketing industry working for Fortune 500 companies like P&G. Three of those years, I was the Vice President of Growth at one of the fastest growing marketing companies in the United States. And today I’m a full time content creator and copywriter.

This is what I do all day long.

Everything that I’m gonna show you in this article—the landing page, the breakdown, the template—you can grab here completely free.

But we got a lot to cover muchacho! So let’s go ahead and dive in.

11.7% Cold Traffic

Here’s a landing page I made that converted at 11.7% on cold traffic.

I created it for an email marketing agency that I co-founded with my good friend Ben Fitterman.

(I’m no longer part of that agency. I’m a full time copywriter and content creator, as I mentioned. This is what I do now.)

But when we were doing this together, this landing page converted:

• Cold traffic at 11.7%

• Warm traffic at 68%

Industry standard benchmarks in 2026 is converting cold traffic landing pages at around 5- 6%. Which means that this landing page converted at almost DOUBLE that.

Which means we were getting double the leads and email subscribers without having to double the traffic or create more content.

And what I wanna do for you is I want break down exactly why this page works so well, and give you a template & formula for you to walk away and do the same thing for your own courses, service-based business, coaching, digital products, lead magnets, whatever it is.

The Above-the-Fold Structure

First thing that you’ll notice is there is no scrolling. I cannot scroll down. Everything you see on this screen is above the fold.

Above the fold meaning being in a visual point where anybody—mobile, desktop, iPad—sees all of this in one screen. That is incredibly crucial.

I have tested:

• Really long landing pages

• Medium length landing pages

• Just a straight up above the fold

And the above the fold converts higher every single time.

In the one screen — you see seven elements.

Let’s break them down one by one so you can see the copywriting and sales psychology I’ve injected into each element.

1. The Eyebrow Copy

“Free 7 Day Course Reveals…”

In the first eyebrow copy up at the very top, you want to reveal exactly what your person is going to get by being on this page.

It could say:

• Free 7 day email course

• Free 83 page report

• Free AI tool

• Free guide

It doesn’t even have to be free. It just has to be very clear what is the exact thing that I’m going to get on this page?

2. The Headline: Audience, Problem, Desire, Mechanism

“How Subscription-Based Brands Cut Churn & Drive 30%+ of Their Revenue Using Email & SMS”

This headline is broken out into four unique elements.

1. Audience

2. Problem

3. Desire

4. Mechanism

“Subscription based brands” → This is the audience. This is who we are targeting. When they see that and they say, “oh yeah, I sell supplements or I sell meat products” — perfect! They can self identify.

“Cut churn” → That is the problem that audience wants to solve.

“Drive 30% of their revenue” → That is the promise/desire they want to have.

“Using email and SMS” → That is the mechanism that we use to solve that problem for that audience and achieve that promise.

So we’re talking audience, problem, desire, mechanism…

All in ONE headline.

3. The Objections Section

“(Even if you’re not technical, haven’t built flows, and your list is collecting dust)”

After they get the clarity, right under it is what I would call the objections section. This is your “deck copy.”

In your deck copy we want to overcome the objections because chances are people have heard stuff like this before.

They’re like, “ah, yeah, cut churn, drive 30%. Well, I’ve tried it.”

Things that they’re gonna say in their head like…

• “I’m not technical”

• “I don’t know how to build flows”

• “I haven’t emailed them in years”

You have to pre-answer the obstacles for people:

“Even if you’re not technical, haven’t built flows, and your email list is collecting dust.”

This builds credibility that you know what you’re talking about.

4. The Big Image Section

Then you walk down to the big image section. I think of this in three ways.

Option A: Product Image

If I’m giving away a mini course, a webinar or something like that, I’ll typically have the actual product and maybe my face right next to it the product. So its very clearly a product giveaway.

Option B: Personality + Proof

In this case, we made a pretty big claim that we’re gonna be able to drive 30% of your revenue and cut churn. So what I did here was put some personality behind it with a side by side photo and then some screenshots of proof.

The big one here being proof. If you can inject proof into the image, it will convert higher.

Option C: VSL

One other way that you could do this if you don’t wanna do the image and you wanna go next level is you can inject a VSL here. In that VSL, it’s you personally talking and you can inject the proof in the actual VSL itself.

5. The Email Opt-In

The next part of this framework is the actual email itself.

There are three ways to kind of think about this:

1. Email only → Will get you the most opt-ins

2. Name and email → Will qualify your buyer a little bit more, but you’ll get a little bit less opt-ins

3. Email, name, and phone number → Your opt-ins will dramatically drop, but you’ll get higher quality leads, in fact much higher quality leads

Every question that you ask decreases the amount of opt-ins you get, but it increases the quality of the person. Because the more information they’re willing to give you, the higher quality that person is likely to be.

So if you’re selling a high ticket coaching service or a done for you high ticket service, a lot of times asking for that phone number, that name, that email all together will get you the best buyers.

It may not double your conversion rate, but if you’re sitting at industry standard conversion rate, but with significantly better buyers, that may double your revenue, double your income, which may be worth it for you.

6. The Button

“Send me the email course”

The next thing is the actual button itself. Don’t say “sign up” or “yes please” or anything like that.

This is the part where I really like to focus on action.

This goes against a lot of what gurus do on their landing page where they usually write the “benefit as the button”. They may use say something like “increase my revenue by 30%” or “cut my churn” or whatever. And that’s the button action.

I don’t like to do benefit as the button action because it smells like bull**.**

You see that and you’re like, “alright, dude, like, come on.” It increases the skepticism, so I don’t like to do that. I’ve already got it in the headline, I’ve got the proof.

What I like to do is make it really clear what the action is going to do for them—not the benefit, but the actual action that when they click the button, I’m going to send them the email course.

So it says right here: “Send me the email course.”

Very simple, very clear.

7. The Proof Under the Button

“Written by Ben & Alin — Co-Founders of Dragu, Fitterman & Co. We’ve helped 7-9 figure eCom brands 2x–3x their LTV and reduce churn by 28% in under 90 days — all through email & SMS.”

The last part is the proof. I love to get the proof under the button, something that they can see.

I’ve got it written by Ben and Alin, co-founders, which when you put co-founders of an agency, that’s some proof.

Proof elements stacked:

• “We’ve helped seven to nine figure ecom brands” → proof

• “2-3x their LTV” → proof

• “We’ve reduced churn by 28% in 90 days” → proof

You could do things like:

• 4,000 downloads

• Five star ratings

• A really high leverage testimonial that your target audience would really know who that is

It would resonate to be like, “oh, man, this guy’s worked with Russell Brunson” or whomever is very famous in your industry.

So you could do those sorts of things.

Building It on Carrd

I built this landing page on a website called Carrd. I’m not affiliated by any means. It’s just really simple.

Here is the template for free.

Duplicate the template.

Change the copy and the image. Connect it to your email provider. You’re good to go!

That’s it!

Thanks for reading!

If you found this article helpful, you would love my email list at alindragu.com where I tell a short story every single how on I use copywriting & content to build my own clientless lifestyle business on the internet every single day.

Enjoy.

Your CopyCreator friend,

Alin “Builds High Converting Landers” Dragu

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If we haven’t met, my name is Alin Dragu, aka El Copy Goat.

A little context:

I actually have a few degrees. A bachelor’s in business, a bachelor’s in marketing, and a theology degree from when I was a pastor — which I’m no longer, by the way. I still love Jesus, but I’m no longer a pastor at a church.

Today I’m diving into seven books and one special bonus book — so you’re gonna have to wait till the end to see that one.

Here’s what I believe:

We are in an economy where college is becoming almost practically irrelevant, especially with the access to the resources we have today. And these books are about to prove my point.

Because if you read, study, and master these, I guarantee you will learn infinitely more than spending $40,000 to $100,000 to go sit in a classroom — with someone who hasn’t lived the life, hasn’t built the business — to be taught a bunch of theories and concepts that are outdated and don’t work.

It just doesn’t make any sense today!

And I’m living proof of that.

So are these books.

Starting with…

Book #1: The Art and Business of Online Writing

The first time I read this book was four or five years ago. I’d been writing blogs and posting things, but I wasn’t able to dominate a social media presence the way I have today — over 6,000 followers on Twitter now, almost 4,000 on YouTube, not including Instagram and TikTok.

That is because of the skill set I built from this book:

• Writing hooks

• Structuring content

• Telling stories

This is not something you can just prompt into ChatGPT or Claude or whatever. These are skill sets you have to learn — to craft rhythm, taste, emotion. There’s just so much juice in this.

Too many people underestimate the value of writing online. Whether you’re a thought leader, you’re building in the creator economy, or you’re a copywriter — this is a skill set that’ll go on and on forever.

Every marketer needs to read this book.

Buy It Here

Book #2: Insanely Simple by Ken Segall

Most people have not heard of this one.

Ken Segall was a creative director at the advertising agency helping Apple in its heyday — we’re talking iPod, iPhone, Mac. He worked directly with Steve Jobs to launch those campaigns.

In fact, Ken Segall is the one who named the iMac. They were going to call it the Mac Man. Steve Jobs couldn’t think of anything better, and Segall said, “Let’s call it the iMac.” That turned into the iPhone, the iPod — all of it. You can credit Ken Segall for that.

The premise of this book is how Steve Jobs built Apple into the largest company in the world, as fast as he did, based on the concept of simplicity.

One of my favorite quotes in this book:

“Nobody’s company has ever failed from being too simple.”

This is more relevant now than ever before in 2026, where we are just so complex in our:

• Offers

• Messaging

• Communication

Especially in the creator economy — we are scattered all over the place because we can build and ship and create products as fast as we can think of them.

This book is a litmus test to make sure you’re on the right track. It gives you the systems, the ideas, and the mental fortitude to ask yourself: Am I doing things as simply, effectively, and with excellence as possible?

Absolutely fantastic book. Could not recommend this more.

Buy it here

Book #3: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

If you’re in the creator economy and you have not read this book — shame on you 🤣

This book has literally changed my life.

The biggest concept that affected me is the idea of leverage and compound interest.

I was working at corporate companies, climbing the ladder. And when Naval laid out his leverage ladder — how to actually build leverage — the top two leverage levers he identifies are code and media. I’m not a coder, but I am big into media: YouTube, podcasting, writing online.

When you pair this book with The Art and Business of Online Writing, you have a dangerous duo. Because:

• The Art and Business of Online Writing teaches you how to create media

• The Almanac of Naval Ravikant teaches you why it’s the most powerful asset you can build

This book gives you the systems and ideas on how to think about building your business — building assets instead of assignments.

And honestly, this book is the spawn of CopyCreator Club.

CopyCreator Club is a byproduct of this book, because I realized that copywriters were stuck in the client chase — always chasing the next gig, the next client, the next paycheck. When really, you can use things like media and other leverage-based assets to build a copywriting career based on the creator economy, not the client economy.

All of that came from this book. Highly recommend.

Buy it here

Book #4: Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson

Even though this book has been out for over a decade, I just reread it again for the third time this year.

This is still, to me, the golden standard of building a personal brand.

And personal brands are so much stronger than logo-based brands — especially in 2026. If you go online to any social media profile, you’ll notice that personal brands have significantly more:

• Followers

• Likes

• Comments

• Engagements

• Fans

...than brands that are just logo-based.

Russell Brunson perfectly explains this with ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels is only what it is today because of Russell Brunson — because he wrote books, posted media online, did podcasts, spoke at conferences, and injected ClickFunnels into those conversations.

So if you’re building anything — selling products, selling a business — you’re actually selling yourself first.

This book teaches you:

• How to sell yourself first

• How to build yourself into a personal brand

• How to develop your character arc, your stories, your offers

Fantastic book. Read it multiple times.

Buy it here

Book #5: 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene

Here’s one that most people would never guess to be on this list.

Yes, it’s technically a book about war — stories of people you’re trying to beat — and you can think of those as your competitors in the business world. But more than that, what this book teaches you is how to think like an entrepreneur.

That means: people-focused first. Serving first instead of selling first.

You have to be able to get into the heads of your people — their:

• Pains

• Dreams

• Desires

• Hopes

• Obstacles

Figuring out how to do that takes an enormous amount of human nature and psychology study. And this book is jam-packed with how humans think, why they think, how they make decisions, and how you can strategically make decisions that make you more persuasive and more dangerous in your niche.

Fair warning: this book is not going to connect the dots of sales and persuasion for you directly. But if you can read it and start to understand how these tactics actually apply to your business — it’s a very interesting, very powerful book.

Buy it here

Book #6: Overdeliver by Brian Kurtz

There are two concepts in this book that I just have to rave about, because they changed the way I do business.

Concept #1: RFM — Recency, Frequency, Monetary

This changed the way I sell, upsell, and do business with my customers. RFM means finding the people who:

• Have bought from you most recently

• Buy from you most frequently

• Spend the most money

Using RFM, I’ve been able to curate a hyper-targeted list of buyers in my business so I can be more congruent in the offers I make them. I solve better problems for them. They become more raving fans because of how I serve them — just by looking at the data.

I know who my best customers are, what they want, what they’ve bought. And I serve that small list of very best customers way more heavily than trying to solve problems for everyone.

That changed my life.

Concept #2: LTV — Lifetime Value

The other thing he teaches is measuring and optimizing for lifetime value — building your business to serve your customers over a lifetime, not just a transaction.

Most entrepreneurs and marketers are all about selling stuff the first time. They don’t care if they sell junk. They don’t care if people ever come back.

But this book teaches you how to build a lifetime business — one that lasts decades and decades.

And that’s what I’m interested in. I want to serve people who want to buy everything I ship, because everything I ship is excellent, it solves their problem, and people come back for more.

A quick note on Brian Kurtz: if you don’t know who he is, he managed over $9 billion in direct response mail at a publishing company called Boardroom — one of the biggest publishing companies in the world. He’s worked with the greatest copywriters and direct response advertisers on the planet. If anybody knows how to build a multi-million dollar company, it’s this guy.

Highly, highly recommend.

Buy it here

Book #7: The Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joe Sugarman

We could not end this list without the greatest copywriting book ever written.

I get this question all the time: “What’s the one copywriting book I should read?”

Well, you should read a bunch of them. But if you’re only going to read one — it’s this one.

Here’s why copywriting matters for every marketer and entrepreneur: copywriting is sales in writing, and everything is written.

• YouTube scripts are written

• Texts are written

• Pitch decks are written

• Emails are written

Everything is written. And if you know how to write, you know how to persuade.

Joe Sugarman does the best job, in my opinion, of breaking down:

• The timeless strategies for copywriting

• The timely tactics on how to apply them

He makes it simple, easy to understand, and does it with great storytelling and great examples.

You can get this book for 20 bucks. And honestly, this is what most gurus online regurgitate in their $997 courses. They’ll sell you a course for a grand, and they’re just regurgitating Joe Sugarman. So go to the source.

This is your go-to book if you’re ever going to up your game as a copywriter.

Buy it here

Bonus Book: Meaningful Marketing — My Book, Free for You

As promised, those are the seven books that absolutely make my degrees irrelevant. But there’s one more I’d love to gift you for free.

It’s called Meaningful Marketing, and I wrote it about three years ago.

It’s 38 simple principles to help make your marketing actually match your mission.

This book is less about direct response advertising and more about:

• The emotions and meanings behind the marketing you do

• The principles that help you feel good about the marketing you’re creating

Because there are a lot of sleazy people out there. A lot of marketing bros on TikTok who really just want to sell and make money.

Don’t get me wrong — I love selling and making money. My whole brand is about selling and making money with copywriting. But I want to do it for a long time. And I think you do too.

We want to be around here posting videos, writing content online, building relationships with people, and helping the people in our niche. Because if we sell stuff but we don’t help people well — this is not the place for you.

But if we sell stuff and we help people, then we need the principles to keep us aligned.

Meaningful Marketing has five-star reviews on Amazon — straight up five stars, not even a four-star in the mix.

Grab the free PDF version. It’ll put you on my email list, and I’ll send it right to you. You’re more than welcome to unsubscribe if you don’t want to stick around — but I highly recommend hanging out for at least a few days, getting some great emails, and seeing how I sell with story every single day.

Or buy it here.

That wraps us up for today!

Hope you enjoyed this. Feel free to share this article with someone you think would enjoy it.

And leave a comment down below — what book did I not mention that you think is absolutely worthy of wiping away a college degree?

I think I hit some real bangers, but I’d love to hear your recommendations. What should I read? What’s not on this list that needs to be?

Catch you on the next one.

Your copywriting friend,

Alin “El Copy Goat” Dragu

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Here’s a crazy thought:

You don’t have to be online to create an online business. Let me explain.

Four years ago, when I started building my creator business, I spent about eight to ten hours a day online... replying to comments, writing, posting, recording, scrooooooolling all day long. And then I realized I was just turning my creator business into another job.

And daddy didn’t like that!

Fast forward to today:

90% of my creator business is done offline, and I do it in about three to four hours a day instead of eight to ten.

I know the AI bros out there are saying, “Bro, I could do it in 10 minutes a day.”

Yeah, dude, we can tell you do it in 10 minutes a day. 🤣

But in this article, I’m going to give away everything that I’m doing to help you make money online without having to be online, and do it in about half the time of 99% of other people out there.

If I haven’t met you, my name is Alin Dragu. I’m a copywriter and a content creator. I’ve made over $2 million for my clients writing copy for them, and well over multiple six figures for myself doing content creation online. This is what I do all day long.

Let’s dive in...

The System the Creator Economy Runs On: The ARM Funnel

The first step to reclaiming your time and spending more time offline is understanding the system the creator economy grows in.

The framework I use is called the ARM Funnel. ARM stands for three things:

• Audience

• Relationship

• Money

Those three phases are your big needle movers. If what you are doing does not increase the amount of people following you, your relationship with those people, and how much money you’re making in the whole ecosystem... then what you’re doing is not important. It is not a needle mover.

So you’ve got to pare down everything to three questions:

• Does it grow my audience?

• Does it build my relationship?

• Does it make me more money?

If it doesn’t do any of those things, WASTE OF TIME!

A — Audience: Stop Chasing Dirty Rotten Algos

Here’s the biggest thing most people waste an enormous amount of time on (this is where people end up spending all their hours online instead of offline, burning out in the comments and all that crap.)

Most people hear gurus say:

“Post as much as you can. Engage. Be the reply guy all day long.”

So they go on Instagram and Twitter and Threads — Lord, stay away from Threads — and they start reply-guying all over the place. Nobody likes that. It’s annoying. You hate it, they hate it equally. You don’t want any of that.

Algorithmic Platforms vs. Evergreen Platforms

What you actually want to do is stay away from algorithmic platforms — the ones where if you stop engaging, they stop boosting you. Those platforms value you spending TIME ON THE PLATFORM more than they value quality content.

Gross 😷

Instead, look for what I call evergreen platforms — platforms where you can do my favorite thing: post and ghost. You want to post a really high-quality piece of content... whether it’s an article, video, or whatever. Then let the content speak for itself. If it’s good content... it. will. grow.

My three favorite evergreen platforms are:

• YouTube (video)

• Podcast (audio)

• Medium (writing)

The thing these all have in common: you can post quality content and people can find it way, way down the line. YouTube is the king at this. You could post a video and five years later it’s still getting views, email subscribers, YouTube subscribers, and all that. Because YouTube is a search engine. People come to YouTube to look for specific things, especially educational content — which is exactly why I spend the majority of my time building for YouTube.

Same goes for podcasts. Searchable, evergreen, not based on an algorithm. You could post a podcast and boom, move on with your day.

Medium works the same way for writing. I’ll give a shout-out to Substack too — it has a similar vibe where you can post articles and build email subscribers. But with Substack, it does require some engagement if you really want to grow. Their Notes feature is basically like Twitter. If you just post an article once a week you’ll still grow, just slower.

If you’re a writer, I’d actually do Medium, Substack, AND a blog on your own website for SEO content — and just repurpose the content across all three to multiply that evergreen effect.

Watch This... You Can Create All of This Offline!

Any of these platforms, you can record and write completely offline. You don’t have to be inside YouTube, Medium, Substack, or a podcasting app to create the content.

I’m writing this offline right now! I am not on the internet. I write, record, research, and edit all of this stuff offline. I’m not scrolling timelines. I’m not replying. That’s not how I grow this business — I grow by creating.

In fact, I write all my content on a digital typewriter. I hit send when I’m done and it goes to my email. Then I edit and schedule it in my email software. You can do this stuff completely offline.

Then you schedule it with a scheduling platform, you spend the least amount of time on those platforms, and you move on.

R — Relationship: Using a Tool from 1997

Relationships are what you do to invest in your audience. Kevin Kelly teaches that to have a thriving online business, what you really need is 1,000 true fans. Not a million followers. A thousand true fans — people who are willing to buy anything and everything you put out because they like and trust you, because they love what you’re doing.

People will buy my stuff because they like and trust me. There’s a million content creators and copywriters out there, but you connect with the personality, the relationship. That’s why there is a deeper phase to just building an audience and that deeper phase is email.

Your Funnel: YouTube to Email

My email list is where I send daily emails with deeper lessons than I teach on YouTube. Deeper stories, more context, more background, and a more personalized experience. That is exactly what you need to be doing.

A funnel that works — a lot like mine — looks like this:

• People watch your YouTube videos

• You offer a lead magnet — e.g. “Five at-home golf exercises to hit your driver farther” — and they give you their email address to get it

• They join your email list, and you show up in their inbox daily, weekly, or three times a week — building your relationship

The reason email builds a better relationship than social platforms is because email is personal. It feels one-on-one to them. Especially when you write the way I write, which is conversational and story-driven. Even though it goes to thousands of people, it feels like it’s just for them.

And here’s the kicker: all those emails can be written completely offline. 🤯

Turn the Wi-Fi off on your laptop, write in the backyard, at a café, in the sun — doesn’t matter! You don’t have to spend a single second online to write your emails. No designing, no pictures, none of that crap. Just write a short story every single day about what you’re doing to grow in your niche.

M — Money: Did Someone Say Ka-Ching?

Your creator business has to make money somehow. And there are two ways I’d highly recommend:

• Paid newsletter

• Paid community

This is where the last 10% of my business lives — the part that’s actually online.

I have a paid community on Skool called CopyCreator Club, where I help copywriters and creators fire their clients, fire their bosses, and build a full-time lifestyle business in the creator economy using writing.

Why Not Courses, PDFs, or Cohort Launches?

Most people want to do courses, sell PDFs, and do cohort launches.

Here’s the problemo...

The revenue isn’t STABLE. You do a launch, money’s up. You stop launching, money’s down. Ain’t nobody got time for that!

And just because you made $10,000 one time doesn’t mean you make $10,000 a month. Now you’ve got to go do that same thing again and again. You need something where they’re paying you a subscription. Recurring revenue.

Back-Of-The-Napkin Math

Here’s how the numbers work on a paid newsletter:

• $10/month × 100 people = $1,000/month

• $10/month × 1,000 people = $10,000/month (six figures)

And here’s how the numbers work on a low-ticket community (like mine at $50/month):

• $50/month × 100 people = $5,000/month

• $50/month × 200 people = $10,000/month

Okay. Now the whole thing.

A complete funnel looks like this:

• YouTube (or your evergreen platform of choice)

• → Email list

• → Low-ticket paid community or newsletter

Once you have this, you realize: if what I’m doing isn’t growing my YouTube channel by creating content, writing a daily email, or serving my community — it is a waste of time.

You now have (say it with me) ...focus!

Three to four hours a day spent either:

• Creating content

• Writing emails

• Serving your community

Anything outside of that is a complete waste of time. You’re not speaking here, teaching there, building this, trying that, running ads, or whatever. You have FOCUS.

You say: this is my funnel, this is how I’m going to build it, this is what works, and I just have to scale it — and that takes time.

3 Years. Not 30 Days.

You can’t do this overnight. This is not a 30-day plan. This is a three-year plan.

If you want to learn how to build a YouTube channel, grow an email list, and sell a low-ticket offer — that stuff takes time. This is not some AI GuRu WoRkShOp.

If you’re looking for that 30-day fix, the dropshipping boys on TikTok are still over there strokin’ their egos.

But if you want to do real bidniz... the kind that supports your family, runs in three to four hours a day, and is something you love — then I highly recommend checking out CopyCreator Club.

If you need anything else — reach out via email. I don’t respond to anything else... because I’m offline. I’m playing golf. I’m in the backyard. I’m hanging out with my kids.

Until next time.

Your CopyCreator friend,

Alin “Professional Offline Life Enjoyer” Dragu

Subscribe now

I’ve invested over $22,000 learning copywriting. I’ve written copy every single day for the last four years. I’ve sold over $220,000 of my own digital products that I created, marketed and delivered. I’ve built an audience of over 10,000 copywriters online and 5,000 on my email list. And that’s not even talking about the clients that I’ve worked with.

Copywriting is what I do all day long.

Subscribe now

My name is Alin Dragu.

And today, we’re going to be answering your most burning beginner copywriting questions.

We’ve got some deep cuts in here as well and some free gifts sprinkled along the way. So enjoy the ride 🙂

Heads up, I’ve collected these questions over the last few years via email replies and Twitter and all that stuff.

I copied and pasted a bunch of stuff into my notion document and then I uploaded it to AI and said, give me the most frequently and commonly asked questions out of all these questions.

It boiled it down to 35 questions for me. So I’m going to answer all 35 of those for you.

Question #1: Can AI Replace Copywriters?

AI can replace copywriting for some people, but I don’t think it will ever replace copywriters.

It’s never gonna get to the point where it’s self autonomous in its ability to do market research and product research and find that product to market fit in a unique fashion.

It’s going to be able to write copy and write bullets and things like that, but it’s always going to need a mastermind behind it to feed it the proper information so you can get it to the goal that you wanted to get it to.

Will it replace copywriters?

No, not the good ones. Will it replace people who don’t know anything about copywriting and they’re just prompting it? Yeah, absolutely. You have to understand the skill.

Question #2: What’s the Number One Meta Skill to Learn in Copywriting?

Oh, easy - writing hooks.

Hooks is the number one meta skill to learn in writing copy, because it’s 80% of the viewership.

David Ogilvy mentions that 80% of people who see your ad will only read the headline and nothing more. That’s five times the amount of people reading your content.

If you understand how to write hooks, you will then have a significantly higher likelihood that that person either reads your email, your ad, your sales letter, whatever it is.

If you fail at the hook, then you’ve wasted hours of writing absolutely nothing.

Which is exactly why I put together a free resource for you called 101 Super Sticky Hooks.

This is one of the most helpful resources that you could ever have as a copywriter. You dominate this and you will get more attention, more clicks, more sales for sure.

Question #3: How Did You Get Your First Client?

It’s very different than how most people think they should get their first client.

I actually got my first client by writing on Twitter for a long time. I was already writing copy for myself, building my own products, doing my own stuff.

I never liked the idea of client work because I had already spent 10 years in the marketing industry. I had a web design agency prior. I had a logo agency. I’d already had a lot of experience working with clients.

So when I started writing online, I already had the plan to just write for myself. I didn’t want any other clients or anything like that.

A friend of mine who was a mutual connection between the client that I did end up working for, he reached out to me and was curious — “Hey, man, I know you’re doing this whole copywriting thing. I love your emails. I love your ads, things like that. Would you consider writing for this guy?” He runs an ecom brand. So he reached out, he connected us.

We ended up working together. I made a whole bunch of money - over $30,000 on that first client, which is the only reason I agreed to it is because he agreed to a super high commission.

Worked out really well. I still don’t do client work because it still took an enormous amount of work to do it.

But overall the way that I got that first client was by:

• Writing online

• Being present in people’s inbox by sending a daily email

• Eventually a friend reached out to me through a relationship and made the personal connection

So that is a great way to have clients chase you instead of you chasing them.

Question #4: What’s the Number One Copywriting Book You Recommend?

I hate this question.

Here’s why I hate this question is because everybody thinks there is some silver bullet book. Copywriting is an art. It’s a skill, it’s a craft just like anything else. Just like if you were to learn to code, or if you were to learn to dance, or if you were to learn to play golf.

It all adds up together, so there’s no one book that’s like, this was the “end all be all” book for me. It was the process of reading hundreds of copywriting books that formed my mind into it.

Now there are some great books that I would recommend. And the first book that I would genuinely recommend is the Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joe Sugarman. But I wouldn’t expect to read that book and be like, okay, I’ve got it. I’ve nailed it.

No, I’ve personally read over 100 something copywriting books, and every single time I read a new copywriting book, my mind is further formed into the art and craft of copy. So it’s the process more than it is the product.

Question #5: Why Did You Niche Down to Email Copywriting?

Honestly, it was just a really natural fit for me because I follow people like Daniel Throssell, Ben Settle, Chris Orzechowski, and I just love the way that they get to tell stories every single day.

And so you get to stay in this niche like copywriting and marketing, but you get to attack it from all kinds of different angles because you can attach stories to it where a sales letter and ads are more product focused and they’re less consistent.

How often are you writing ads and sales letters? Where an email you can write an email a day, you could tell a story a day.

And so it just had this more consistent fun storytelling, joyful process that I can show up, write every single day and get better and better, and better. So it was just a natural fit for me.

Question #6: What Software Do You Use for Sending Emails and Why?

I use Kit.com.

I use it because it’s the simplest email service provider that I’ve come across.

• I used Beehive before. I didn’t like it cause the way that they embedded all the crazy designs and it was really hard to just do a plain text email, which is what I send.

• I used Ghost prior to that. Didn’t really like that because it was very limited in sequences where Kit kind of has it all.

You could do sequences, landing pages, plain text emails. It’s really simple. They have good analytics. I’m sure there’s other systems out there that are really good. I’ve thought about Berserker Mail, but I add images and gifs to my email, so Berserker Mail is kind of out for me. But yeah, overall I really like it.

Question #7: Can I Be a Copywriter if I’m Not a Native English Speaker?

Yes, but you will have a hard time writing to native English speakers if you don’t understand English.

And if you’re trying to write for the English market, the first thing you should do is learn English. And then from there, you know, you’ll learn copywriting.

And it’s not something I recommend because copywriting in itself is already very hard to learn. And so now you’re learning two massive skills right now. You have to learn English, and then you have to learn copywriting.

But it’s not impossible, right?

Like I didn’t know English till I was seven or eight years old. My parents immigrated from Romania. Romanian is actually my first language.

You know, obviously I wasn’t that old to overcome that difference, 7, 8 years old. But over time, if you master the art of speaking English and then you want to write copy in English, yeah, it’s totally fine.

That’s fantastic. You could do it. It’s just gonna be hard and it’s gonna take a long time.

Most people try and write copy first while they’re learning English. I would not recommend that. I would recommend learning English and then learning copy.

Question #8: How Long Does It Take to Make Money from Copywriting?

That all depends on you.

For example, one of the ways you can make money today is, let’s say you write on Twitter, you launch a product on Gumroad, it’s a $2 product, and it solves a problem for someone.

You could put out 10 - 15 tweets today to a killer Gumroad $2 product that has great copy.

You could sell something today, so you could start making money today.

Or you could dilly dally around six months reading books, thinking you’re not good enough, and then you’re trying to land a client, that’s gonna take you another 3, 4 months.

There’s all kinds of different paths that people take that either make it longer or shorter.

My preferred method is to:

• Write your own stuff on social media

• Get those people to an email list

• Write your own copy via emails

• Sell your own products via whatever platform - Gumroad or anything like that

And it’s all your copy, your funnel the entire time. And you can dictate the speed of how much you sell, when you sell by your ability to reach new people and write great copy.

Question #9: What’s the Best Way to Get Feedback on My Copywriting Without a Mentor?

Oh, easy.

Post on social media.

Social media is a great place to get instant feedback because it is an instant feedback loop. The minute you post something on social media, you measure its worth by the likes, the comments, the engagement, the views, the retweets, things like that.

That’s why I love Twitter so much is because you could post something and if it resonates, it’s gonna grow. If you typically get something like five likes on a post, but then you do this one post and it got 30 likes, well, that’s a noise indicator that says, whoa, something resonates here. And so that is a feedback loop. You don’t need a mentor.

The whole world is your mentor through the internet.

And then you get those people from social media to an email list, and then you get an even better measurement, which is sales.

When you get them to an email list and you start selling them stuff, you measure whether your copy is good by how many sales you got, right? Are people clicking? Are they buying my stuff? And if they’re not, your copy’s probably not great or your offer’s not great or whatever it is.

But social media is the fastest way to get feedback without having to hire a mentor.

Question #10: How Do I Pick My Copywriting Niche?

I would say the easiest way to pick a copywriting niche is using a formula that I call the 4P Framework:

The 4P Framework

1. Passion - What is the thing that you are most passionate about?

That’s the easiest place to start. For example, I really like golf. I could probably write a golf newsletter, sell golf stuff because I enjoy it so much.

2. Profit - Is there profit in it?

I can Google it and realize that golfers spend a lot of money. There’s a lot of golf products out there, billions and billions and billions in that market. So easy to figure out.

3. Problem - What problem do you solve for those people?

4. Person - Who is the person that you’re trying to help?

You figure those four things out and it’s a very clear way to get your niche.

Question #11: Is Copywriting Worth It in 2026?

Well, words are not going away and sales is not going away. So yes.

Now a lot of people throw out the whole AI thing. Well, AI can do it, but remember, AI needs a master, just like coding. I don’t know anything about code.

And so if I go into AI and I start telling it to code stuff, it can code. But if something goes wrong in that code, I have no idea what went wrong or how to fix it. Do I just prompt the AI? Hey, can you find this? And it continues to go wrong because AI is going to put out errors.

It’s the same with copy. AI can write copy, but when it’s wrong or when it’s not working and you have no idea why it’s not working, you are now back to square one where you don’t have the fundamentals, you don’t understand the art of persuasion and writing, which are still the two most insanely vital skills in living.

Persuasion and writing. Everything is communicated through writing. Everything is writing. And persuasion - getting people to buy from you, getting people to buy into your ideas, your thoughts, your products, all of that is copywriting.

So copywriting will never expire. It will never go out of style. The art of copywriting may change the way that it impacts the industry, but learning the skill has been around since Jesus.

Question #12: How Do I Know What to Charge for My Copywriting?

If you are just getting started out and you don’t know what to charge:

Option 1: Work for free for a while

So that way you can build up your case studies and you can build up a portfolio of experience that you have so then you can further sell later. So like Alex Hormozi says, there is a time to earn and there is a time to learn. When you’re first getting a couple clients, I would just be learning.

Option 2: Take a 100% commission deal

That’s what I did with my first client. I made way more than I would have charged a flat fee. I may have been very timid and be like — “Hey, I’ll take, you know like $3,000 for all this work” but I ended up making $30K because of the commission.

So I would structure something like — “if I beat X results by X amount, I want 10%.”

Start there instead of flat fee. I don’t even like flat fee and never get to flat fee. You should always be doing commission.

10% is a good standard. 10% of increased attributable revenue on email or ads or whatever. So that means whatever they’re already making, say they’re making $100K a month on ads already.

Say if I make you $200K a month, I want 10% of increased attributable revenue, meaning since you guys are already doing $100,000, I won’t take commission off that, but because I beat it, I want 10% of the increased what I beat.

So if you make $200,000, and they were already making $100,000, that means you made them an extra $100K. So you get 10% of the extra because you clearly proved yourself.

(That’s $10K in your pocket)

I like structuring deals like that.

Question #13: Which is Better — Long or Short Copy?

There is no such thing as long or short copy being better or worse.

It’s only boring or exciting copy.

So if it’s 20 pages worth of copy, but it’s entertaining as hell the entire time and somebody cannot stop reading it and it’s very persuasive, 20 pages is perfect. But if it’s three pages and it’s boring, then three pages is too long.

It’s never a matter of long or short. I mean, think about it, JK Rowling wrote seven novels for Harry Potter, a million words, right? That is an enormous amount of pages. If the book had been boring, nobody would buy. But because the book wasn’t boring, everybody and their mother bought it. And it’s the number one fiction selling book in the world.

So think more like a fiction author and less like some fancy copywriter that sells stuff need to be entertaining people while persuading them.

So long short doesn’t matter. Boring or exciting, that’s what matters.

Question #14: How Do I Do Market Research?

Well, there’s a lot of ways to do it. You can:

• Spend time in your market

• Talk to those people

• Research Reddit

• Go on YouTube and scrape a bunch of comments

There’s a bunch of ways. But I did create the ChatGPT AI prompts that’ll do it for you using ChatGPT or Gemini’s deep research functionality.

So it’s a five prompt process, super detailed. It takes like 15 minutes and it does all your market research for you:

• Pains

• Problems

• Hopes

• Desires

• Scrapes Reddit, YouTube, all those websites

And it formats it really beautifully for you. You can grab that. It’s free.

Question #15: What Are Some Copywriting Formulas You Swear By?

I used to swear by things like AIDA and PAS and BAB and I still use those, but I don’t really swear by any particular formula anymore.

I’m more focused on the storytelling and the hook.

If I get the hook right and the story is excellent, everything else really falls into place. So I don’t really try and structure it with a particular copywriting formula.

I’m just looking for:

• An incredible hook (which again here is 101 hook templates)

• An incredible story to inject after that hook

Those are the only really two things I swear by. Copy is hook and story.

Question #16: What Software Do You Use for Writing?

I write everything on my computer in Notion. But I also write a lot of my copy on my typewriter.

I have this FreeWrite Traveler typewriter, which isn’t really a software or an app. It’s literally a typewriter. And then when I’m done writing, I hit send and it goes into my email inbox and then I move that over to Notion.

I like Notion because it has a calendar functionality and so you can schedule stuff out inside of Notion. So I can visually see my daily emails, my social media posts, my YouTube videos, things like that. So I just like Notion for the functionality.

Question #17: What is the Best Place to Connect with Copywriters?

The easiest place to connect with copywriters is on Twitter.

I really like Twitter because there’s a ton of great people there. And if you’re really kind and you post great content, you’ll meet people that you do not deserve to be in a room with. I have a bias towards it cause I met a ton of people on Twitter and I still have those relationships today. So that’s the easiest and free spot to do it.

The next best place is a community that I built, the Copy Creator Club.

So right now we have over 60 highly talented copywriters and they’re building their own email-based business just like me. No client work. Great copywriters. It’s $50 per month.

It is a paid community which I actually think are a lot better than a lot of the free Facebook group communities or Reddit. I don’t like Reddit or any of those things, cause it’s just a bunch of newbies asking the same things over and over. And they don’t really know anything about copywriting, and so they parrot each other, and it’s bad information and advice all around.

If you’re looking just to make friends and things like that, I would stick to Twitter. Find cool people, meet them in direct messages, get to know them that way. Or if you’re looking to bounce ideas and really collaborate with other real copywriters, look for a group like mine, Copy Creator Club.

Question #18: Where Can I Go to Study Great Copywriting?

Two Things I Would Recommend:

1. Find great copywriters that you love to read and join their email list

A place I would start is by reading my daily emails. You can also check out people like David Duestch, Brian Kurtz, Ben Settle, Daniel Throssell…

2. Swiped.co

Swiped.co has just collected a lot of sales letters and ads that have been really high performing.

And you can search on swiped.co people like Gary Bencivenga and John Carlton and great copywriters. Their ads will pop up, you can print them, you can read them online, and that’s just great copy. It’s a free place to get a bunch of great copy.

Question #19: What Are the Best Niches to Write Copy For?

The big three are health, wealth, and relationships.

Anything that:

• Makes somebody healthier

• Makes them more money

• Makes their relationships better with other people (like networking things like that)

Those are always gonna be the big three. I obviously write copy for copywriters, so I would be considered in the wealth category.

You can write in other niches, like, again, I mentioned golf earlier, doesn’t really fit well in those three categories - maybe relationships, but golf is a sport, and it’s still a very highly profitable niche.

But the three that will always stand the test of time is health, wealth, and relationships.

Question #20: What Do You Personally Love to Read and Study Copywriting From?

I personally love to read emails. I like to read emails again from my favorite email copywriters:

• Ben Settle

• Daniel Throssell

• Laura Belgray

• Chris Orzechowski

Those are my favorite copywriters that I love to read on a daily basis.

I also love to read fiction novels way outside of the copywriting world. And I love to read newsletters outside of the copywriting world, cause I want to have multiple perspectives to my writing angle.

So:

• Fiction novels for the storytelling aspect

• Emails from copywriters so I can see how they write in the industry that I am also writing in

• Newsletters outside of the copywriting world entirely, so I can see what’s interesting about their emails

Getting more broad-based and then using it to develop my own style and tone.

Question #21: How Do You Flesh Out a Big Idea When You Write?

Basically, whenever I’m trying to write an email or sales letter or anything, I’m looking for the one thing I really want to communicate. And I line that with the one problem that my audience has. And then I try and find some sort of twist or angle to that.

The Formula: One Thing + One Problem + A Twist

For example, I may write an article about how to write $1000 emails. My audience has the problem of writing emails that don’t make any money, right? So I may write an email and my big idea is how to write a $1000 dollar email. That’s the big idea.

That’s interesting, it’s intriguing, it solves a problem, but then I add a twist.

“How to write a thousand dollar email in 10 minutes.”

Now I took a big idea and I niched it down, but it’s significantly more interesting because I added the twist. So it’s something that I know that solves the problem for this very specific person, and I twisted it so that way it makes it significantly more intriguing and interesting.

That twist is the magic bullet, but it has to still solve a problem for your audience. That’s how I flesh it out.

Question #22: What is a Good Daily Practice Routine for Copywriting?

I would say anything that gets you to write 1,000 words a day. If you can write 1,000 words a day, that solves 99.9% of your problems.

My Morning Routine

For me, I wake up at about 6 AM. I will make an espresso or an Americano, something like that. I’ll do my stretch, get some water and I just bum around till about 6:30ish. Let my soul catch up with my body.

And then I’ll go sit down and I’ll write for about 45 minutes to an hour. That’ll get my 1,000 words, maybe a little bit more. And I get that knocked out for the day.

Most of the time I will write significantly more than that, right? I’ll come back a couple hours later. I’m working on other projects. I’ll write another thousand words, another thousand words. But at the end of the day, if you write your thousand words clean, right?

The Key Elements

You find a place that you love to write. I love to write in my office.

You find the vibes that you wanna write with. I like wearing these big over-ear headphones listening to lo-fi beats. And I’ll turn some candles on. I got my espresso.

So I create this vibe and I just enjoy it to write my thousand words.

Find a place, a time, and experience for you to enjoy writing a thousand words. Knock out your thousand, and that’s gonna be the best copywriting routine you could ever have.

Question #23: How Do I Know if My Copy is Good or Not?

Well, it either sells or it doesn’t.

Copywriting is essentially sales in words, so it either sells, which you know if you’re sending emails out, right? Sales is gonna be your number one metric.

But if you’re writing copy for things like social media and you’re trying to persuade them, what are you trying to persuade them to do? To subscribe to your email list?

Well, how many people saw your post versus how many people joined your email list. Those are the metrics of what you’re trying to measure for success of your copy. Did you do that successfully or not? That’s it.

And sales is usually the number one metric.

Question #24: Who Are the Best Copywriters to Study?

#1: Me — Definitely study my emails. I write a daily email, and I’ve been doing this for a long time, and you would love my emails.

But aside from me, it depends on what you’re writing:

For Sales Letters:

• Clayton Makepeace

• Gary Bencivenga

• John Carlton

For Emails:

• Myself

• Daniel Throssell

• Ben Settle

• Chris Orzechowski

For Cold Traffic Ads:

• Alex Hormozi

• Frank Kern

• Dan Kennedy

So it depends on the medium that you are trying to learn, and then studying those guys. I like studying all of them, because you can take bits of these multiple different avenues and form your own voice. But yeah, those are gonna be your go-to legends.

Question #25: What is the Fastest Way to Make $10K Per Month Copywriting?

Well, I would dare say that the fastest way to make$10,000 per month is not always the best way to make$10,000 per month.

The “Fast” Way

The fastest way to make $10,000 per month is by getting four clients to pay you $2,500 a month.

You do this in a lot of industries like:

• Ecom

• Info products

• Influencer marketing

$2,500 is a great rate.

It’s affordable enough for most companies making $1M or more, which opens up the options for you to reach out to a lot of people. You can warm network. So you could probably get that in three to six months with some really intense hustle.

But I would dare venture to say that you should actually invest in your own business through either a paid newsletter or a paid community.

For myself, I have a paid community on Skool. We have about 60 members a month right now paying me $50/mo (which is about $3K/mo). I’ve built that in just the last couple months. I’m projected to hit about 200 members by the end of the year.

200 members paying me $50 a month is $10,000 per month.

I would much rather have that business than the client business. There’s just much more headache and time involved in the client business for a lot of different reasons.

And so I would say build the $10,000 per month business that you enjoy as opposed to the one that gets you there the fastest.

Question #26: Is There a Difference Between Writing on Social Media and Copywriting?

Yes, there’s been this dichotomy between content writing and copywriting, where content writing on social media is definitely meant more to educate and entertain, but over the years, they’ve merged to actually be the same thing.

Because copywriting has went from more hard pushy sales to more educational entertainment, and social media has gone from more entertainment education to more hard pushy sales.

So the worlds have merged into this infotainment vibe that Ben Settle constantly talks about.

And truly social media has become - you’re honestly trying to persuade them to do something, whether it’s buy your book, or join your email list, or click the link below or whatever. Right? You are trying to be persuasive, which is ding, ding ding... copywriting.

And so it really all is the same thing nowadays. And so the skills that you learn in copywriting can be translated into social media, emails, sales, whatever you wanna write.

Question #27: How Do I Find My Writing Voice?

Well… you don’t really find it. You discover it.

Implying that you find it is like one day, you’re just like, “Ah, that’s what I sound like.” And that’s not true at all.

The way I have found my writing voice is that every day for the last four years, I’ve woken up, had some espresso and wrote at least 1,000 words of copy.

And it has been a brutal journey cause I don’t actually feel like I understood my writing voice. And I tried all kinds of different things until about a year ago. So three years into my journey when I started feeling like, “Oh, yeah, I think this is what I sound like,” and even now, I’m still adapting and changing, and that all comes from what you consume.

For me, I mentioned I read email copywriters, novelists, newsletters, etc…

And all of that plays into my writing voice. I take what I like from what I read and it develops into this own style, and you adapt it through writing.

If you consume a lot, but you don’t write, you never develop your voice.

If you write a lot, but you don’t consume, you never find different angles to play with.

And so you need both. You need a consumption habit and a concentration habit of writing daily, and then eventually you start sounding like you.

Question #28: When Do You Typically Write Your Copy, and How Much Do You Write in a Day?

I typically write my copy at about 6:30 in the morning because my kids are asleep, my wife’s asleep, and it’s quiet.

And I write about at least 1,000 words a day. Usually it’s 2-3K words total because I’ll get later in the day and I’ll make more stuff for my Skool community, write YouTube scripts, write social media content, write emails. I’ll be working on a sales letter or a new product.

Just a lot of things I’m constantly writing. And so if I get my thousand in, awesome. But it’s typically two to three thousand.

Question #29: How Do I Overcome Writer’s Block?

I actually don’t believe there’s such a thing as writer’s block. I think it’s actually boring block.

So if you are writing about something you either don’t care about or you don’t know anything about, then you’re not gonna know what to write.

For example, if a client came up to me (which I don’t do client work) and was like, “Hey, I have a roofing company and I’ll pay you to write for my roofing company.”

I’m going to have a really hard time writing for that roofing company because:

1. I don’t care about roofing companies

2. I don’t know anything about roofing companies

So I’m gonna have to do all of this research. I’m gonna drag myself through it and have no passion for it. I’m gonna be staring at a blank page cause I have no idea what to say. And so it takes an enormous amount of work to overcome that because I’m bored by the subject.

But if you ask me and you were like, “Hey, can you write a sales letter on golf? Or can you write something about taekwondo? Boxing? Guitar? Copywriting?” You just named 10 things that I love. And I’d be like, “Yeah, no problem.”

And I could talk about those things all day long.

So writer’s block only exists if you’re writing about something you don’t care about. The best way to beat that is to build your own business, sell your own stuff in a niche that you love and you love to write about.

Question #30: What Do I Do if My Client Doesn’t Like the Copy That I Wrote?

My favorite way to deal with this with clients is to take the conversation from my copy versus their preferences.

What you’re doing there is you’re actually anchoring the copy on either of your opinions. And you wanna get it out of the opinion conversation.

You wanna raise the floor to a data conversation. So it’s not my opinion versus your opinion. It’s what does the data say.

Because ultimately you are not the end result of your copy and neither is the client. The market that you are selling to for the client is the end result. They will tell you whether the copy is awesome or not.

So if your client comes back and says, “Oh, this is too bold or it’s not bold enough or whatever,” you may come back and be like, “Hey, let’s do this. Let’s A/B test five different layers of copy. Let’s try a bold one, a not bold one, this angle, that angle and let’s see what the market says. And when the data comes back to tell us whether this one got sales or that one got sales, let’s just go with the one that gets the most sales.”

So that way it’s not you against your client, but it’s both of you for the market, you’re moving the conversation from opinion to data.

You’re not defensive, you’re also not attacking them, and both of you are moving towards a similar goal.

Question #31: Why Do You Hate Client Work So Much?

The reason I don’t like client work is because it is no different than a 9 to 5 industry where you’re still trading time for a paycheck.

I have to put X amount of time in and give you X amount of deliverables for X amount of money. Not only that, but clients expect:

• Phone calls

• Data reports

• They want you to bend over backwards for them

And even if you have the best clients in the world, you are still doing an enormous amount of work more on their time frame and Google Calendar or whatever it is.

Whereas opposed to if you built your own business, your own email list, and you sold your own stuff:

• You get to pick your own schedule

• You get to make your own products

• You get to adjust your own copy

• They’re not giving you revisions

• You get to create your own offers

• You get to change those offers last minute (or don’t change them at all if you don’t want to)

• You get to have full autonomy and control of when you work, how you work, when you don’t work

That level of leverage and freedom just does not exist in client work.

And in the time that we live in with the internet and email and creator economy and all the good things that you have at your fingertips, it just makes no sense to me to put yourself at the mercy of 4-5 clients a month, dictating what’s good and what isn’t good. Get on their schedule, meet with their people, sell their offers.

It just doesn’t make any sense when you have the opportunity to do your own thing.

Question #32: You Spent $22,000 Learning Copy. Is It Worth Having Spent That Amount? Do You Really Learn Something New With Every Book/Course?

Well, I’ve sold 10 times the amount just for myself, not including any client work. So it’s already made its return on the investment 10x for me. And there’s very few things in life that will give you a 10x return. So, yeah, that in itself is already worth it.

And two, do I learn anything new every time I buy a book or course? I’m not looking to learn something new every time I buy a book or course. I’m trying to understand the fundamentals at a deeper level that I’ve not seen it before, which is different.

Because if I spent $22,000 on all these books and courses and things that I bought, I’m reading them from the perspective of:

• Dan Kennedy

• Brian Kurtz

• Clayton Makepeace

• Joe Sugarman

And I’m getting their journeys, their angles, their storylines on how they applied the fundamentals in different ways. And those things mold your mind over time. And that investment buys your skin into the game to output better.

It’s not a matter of — “Can I just learn everything with a $22 copywriting book and call it a day?” Sure, yeah.

Go buy Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joe Sugarman. You’ll learn 80% of the copywriting skills that you need. You read that book 10 times and you’re good to go.

But to me, that’s not mastery.

That’s the “good enough” crap that people look for on Twitter. I’m looking for mastery. I’m looking to explore every nook and cranny about the details, right? The devil’s in the details. And I’m looking to get as layer deep into everything about this industry so that I can be in that upper 1% echelon.

And you don’t get that by reading one book by one person. It just doesn’t exist.

Too many people are looking for shortcuts to get that good enough. I’m looking for mastery. And that is a shortcut question that I think you’re looking at it the wrong way.

Question #33: Do You Still Believe That Cold Outreach is Still the Way to Go in 2026?

That is assuming that I thought that cold outreach was the way to go before 2026 and it is not.

I’ve never once thought that cold outreaching people was the best way to get clients or customers or whatever it is. And no, I don’t think it is the way in 2026.

I still think that the best way has always been the same way since Jesus was born. And that is through your warm network and relationships.

The way that I did that was by:

• Writing content on Twitter

• Building a relationship with a bunch of people on Twitter

• Getting to know those people through comments and DMs and emails and things like that

That is how every single person has ever reached out to me to be a customer or to be a client of mine is they’ve known me through organic conversations.

I don’t think that reaching out to somebody and be like, “Hey, bro, your funnel sucks and here are five ways to fix it. My company will do it for you for free for 30 days.” Like that stuff is so annoying and nobody likes it.

And the only people that actually benefit from it are the gurus who are putting together cold outreach courses and templates to sell you. They make significantly more money than the people actually trying cold outreach, which should tell you something about cold outreach.

So the stupid slow, hard way of building relationships is and always will be the number one way to get customers and clients.

Question #34: Who’s the Client That You Wish Called You Again Because It Was So Great to Work With Them?

I don’t really love client work or wish to work with any of my clients ever again. But I do have one guy that I wouldn’t even consider a client. He’s just a really good friend of mine.

I write an email a week for him in exchange for an enormous amount of steak.

He has a farm. I sell his farm goods with the emails and he sends me a ton of steak in return. I eat all the steak. It’s good. Protein makes my body strong. It’s my favorite exchange ever.

He lets me write whenever I want. He never checks my emails. He never checks in on me. He never asked me to change anything. He doesn’t even remember that the emails go out except when he gets them. He thinks they’re hilarious. He sends me a text, says thanks so much, and then he mails me a bunch of steak.

That’s the best guy I could ever write for. He’s a good friend, so I’ll be working with him for a long time.

Question #35: How Do I Go Viral on Twitter?

Easy — Better hooks.

Hooks is the number one way to go viral anywhere - could be YouTube, TikTok, Twitter. It’s the first three seconds of your video or it’s the first sentence of your copy on Twitter.

And the best way to write really good hooks is to study really great hooks, which I’ve already given you 101 Super Sticky Hook Templates. You could take those.

So that’s your next 101 tweets. If you tweeted once a day for the next hundred days and then you repeated it three times, you now have a year’s worth of content just off that one resource.

That is the number one way to go viral.

Wrap Up (And Resources mentioned)

Thank you so much for reading!

Here are all the key resources I mentioned in this article:

• Hook templates — https://101hooks.carrd.co/

• AI market research prompts — https://alin-dragu.kit.com/235005f114

• My daily email list — https://alindragu.com/

• My favorite tools & resources — https://alindragu.com/stuff/

• Community for copywriters — https://www.skool.com/copycreatorclub

• Swipe file library — https://swiped.co/

Until next time…

Your copywriting friend,

Alin “El Copy Goat” Dragu

In this article, I’m going to show you the deep writing system that has helped me become a number one bestselling author, build an email list of over 5,000 people, get over 88 million impressions by writing online, and launch over six written courses.

And in just a second, I’m going to break down the four-step system that I’ve personally used for over the last three years that I guarantee will not only help you write over 1,000 words a day, but show you how to get paid for that writing.

By the way, I’m Alan Dragu. I’ve sold over $220,000 of my own digital products by writing online. And I’ve built this system to help me do that while having a career, three kids, a wife, weekends off, and a highly addictive golf habit 🤣

Listen, I know this system works, and I’m gonna show you exactly how to do it, starting with step one.

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Step 1: Write Your Why

You need to get a pen and a piece of paper, and you need to jot down why do you want to start writing more. This is going to be fuel for you when your motivation drains out, cause it will drain out.

For me, it was always freedom and autonomy.

When I started writing a little bit over four years ago, I was at a career that gave me almost no creative freedom. Everything that I created had to be approved by someone. It was revised by 20 other people, and it just made me feel like my ideas weren’t worth anything.

And then one random day, I decided to start writing on Twitter because I could post on Twitter my ideas, my thoughts permissionless. No one revised them, no one approved them. Whatever, it could just be my own. And that freedom and autonomy has stuck with me since I started writing.

That writing on Twitter led to me building an email list, led to me selling my own products, meeting some of the coolest people I’ve ever met, and completely changed my life. So that’s my why: freedom and autonomy.

But what is your why?

• Do you want to be a number one bestselling New York Times author?

• Do you want to make writing a full-time gig so you can quit your job and stay at home with your kids?

You have to find the thing that fuels you so that when you show up and you come to do the hard work, it’s much bigger than just “I’m sitting down for 30 minutes to pen a thousand words.”

It’s, “I’m building my future.”

Step 2: Build a Writing Ritual

I use something called the PET method. I created it for myself. It stands for:

• Place

• Experience

• Time

These are the three things that enhance your writing experience and make it more likely that you will show up every single day.

Place

You need to find a place that you can dedicate completely to just writing.

It may be:

• At your kitchen table

• At your local Starbucks

• A desk from IKEA that you build and put in the corner of one of your rooms

That’s what I did.

Whatever it is, you need to determine: What is the place that when I sit here, this is where I write.

This will trigger your mind to associate that place with that action to make the habit of writing more natural with less willpower involved.

Experience

You can enhance the experience of your writing by adding things that you personally enjoy.

For me, I like to write early in the morning. So what I end up doing is that is when I have my cup of espresso as the only coffee I have all day long. I take 10 minutes and I pull a great shot of foamy espresso.

I get my big over-ear AirPod headphones, I turn on some lo-fi beats, I light one of my favorite candles—a tobacco vanilla type candle. And those things have enhanced the experience of my writing.

Espresso, lo-fi beats, noise canceling, candle. It’s a vibe.

And so it makes the experience significantly more enjoyable.

Time

So now you’re at your writing desk, you got the writing vibe going. Now, you need to set the time.

My friends over at Ship30 have something called sacred hours. And sacred hours means it’s the time that you can be the least responsive and the most productive.

For me, this is typically 5 to 6:30 AM. Again, I have a wife, three kids, I’ve got other things that I’m working on. And so 5 to 6:30 AM gives me about an hour to 90 minutes to write in peace. I don’t have to respond to Slack or text messages or email or anything like that. The world doesn’t expect anything from me.

These are typically good times for writers: really early in the morning or really late at night.

But you can’t just have the least responsive hours. You have to have the most productive. When do you have the most energy?

I tend to get a lot of energy in the morning, but I know there’s a lot of night owls who get a lot of energy at night. Whenever your brain is the clearest, you feel the most freedom and you don’t have the obligation to respond to the world—that’s when you’re gonna get your best writing done.

2 o’clock in the afternoon when you’re burnt and you’re already getting text messages and emails and things like that, it’s not gonna help you focus. You’re gonna be incredibly distracted.

Step 3: Obliterate Distractions

I have two very specific ways to help you do this because you really only have one distraction: your phone.

Your phone is your number one distraction. If you can burn this to the ground, then you will write more than you’ve ever written before.

In fact, these two things to obliterate distractions helped me write over a million words last year. That’s more than all seven Harry Potter novels combined.

Last year, I was writing about 2,800 to 3,000 words a day, which leads to over a million. And the way that I did that was by using:

1. SuperFocus App

I’ve installed this app on my phone and it actually has a section for Daily Writer. I set a two-hour goal to write every single day for two hours. And when I turn on the Daily Writer SuperFocus, it blocks every single app on my phone except for:

• Notion (my writing platform of choice)

• Apple Music (which I use for the lo-fi beats)

Everything else is blocked. So I can’t even browse. My phone, my iPad, my computer—all of it blocked. And it makes it really hard to unblock it.

Now all the scrolling and the internet and all that stuff is obliterated.

2. Freewrite Traveler

But I take it a step further.

Out of the million words that I wrote last year, 70% of the words were written on the Freewrite Traveler.

This is not sponsored. They’re not paying me to talk about this product. I bought this product with my own money. And it’s a typewriter.

So it’s a really cool modern-day typewriter that has a great mechanical keyboard. And it does one thing. The only thing that it does is write. It doesn’t have:

• Apps

• Internet

• Browser

• Anything

It has this e-ink display screen that looks like a Kindle. You write on it, but it has a direct connection to your email.

So when you set this up, you can connect it to your Gmail account or whatever so that when you’re finished writing, you hit this little red button that says “send” and it sends it over to your email. So now you can write entirely without a computer, which again is what I do 70% of my writing on.

I take this over to my writing desk, my espresso, my lo-fi beats, blah, blah, blah. And I pound out 1,000 to 2,000 words just on this baby. Then when I’m done, I hit send. It goes over to my email. I copy and paste it over to Notion.

Do my editing on my computer, which, by the way, is a writing hack: Edit on a different screen than you write on—helps you think differently.

And then I schedule it as an email, post it as an article, whatever I’m writing. That has completely removed 99.9% of distractions.

You block your phone. You write on a typewriter so you’re disconnected from the internet. You will write more than you’ve ever written in your life.

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Step 4: Publish Your Writing

I alluded at the beginning that I started writing on Twitter and that Twitter account grew, which grew my email list, which grew my business. I never knew that was gonna happen. I didn’t intend for it to happen, but it did, and it changed my life.

Publishing your writing online is the greatest feedback tool you will ever get.

And you don’t need anyone’s permission. You don’t have to revise anything. That can purely be your ideas.

If I Were Starting Over

This is what I would do: I would go to Substack.com. I would immediately start an account and I would write Notes and Posts every single day.

• Notes is like their Twitter feed-style social media engagement form where it really is like tweets

• Posts is articles, long-form articles that also get sent as email

Again, they are not paying me to say this. I’m not affiliated. I don’t make any money off doing this. I just think it’s a great platform for writers, especially if you want to eventually get paid for your writing.

Why Publish Online?

Because you’re already doing the writing. You might as well post it online and get feedback from those people that read it.

Because if you have a post that gets 100 likes and then you have a post that gets 1,000 likes, you could say, “Whoa, why did this one get 1,000 and this one get 100?”

You could start to dissect the feedback that people have for your writing, and you can double down on what people want and what is helpful for them and expand more on those topics.

It also helps you try:

• Different hooks

• Different articles

• Different segues

• Different writing styles

You find your voice. There’s no downside to publishing your writing on a platform like Substack, Twitter, LinkedIn.

The Built-In Monetization

But again, one of the reasons I really like Substack is because eventually, after all that writing:

• You have followers

• You have email subscribers (cause it’s a built-in email platform)

• It has a built-in paid newsletter option

So if you want to start charging for your emails because you’ve gotten so good, you’re a great writer, you’ve built a following, you are now getting paid to do the writing you were already doing.

You don’t have to change your workflow, you don’t have to add more work on top of what you’re doing. You could literally turn on a paid newsletter and BAM! Now you’re starting to get paid.

Let’s say you had 100 people paying you $10 a month—a monthly subscription. That’s $1,000 a month for your writing.

Let’s say you scale that up to 1,000 people, which in the grand scheme of the internet and all the things that we do, a thousand people’s not that much. Well, that’s $10,000 per month in writing.

Write About Anything

And the beauty behind it is you can literally write about anything.

Let’s say you are writing a novel so you can become a New York Times bestselling author. You can document your whole process:

• What’s your plot?

• Your script

• How’s it going?

• What’s working, what’s not working?

Post that all online. Engage with people like you, and you can build a cult following around your hobby of becoming a New York Times bestselling author.

You could do this for:

• Golf

• Tennis

• Teaching a business

• Teaching AI

• Doesn’t matter

You can build a readership around anything you’re enjoying and anything you’re building.

That’s the beauty of the internet. And all of it can be done by writing online.

Resources to help you write

This is exactly how I’ve built an email list of over 5,000 people and a community on Skool where I teach writers just like you on how to build a two-hour workday with zero clients so that you can work less, enjoy life, and write more.

I hope you found this article helpful, and if so, I got a few things for you:

One, I have 101 Super Sticky Hook Templates for you. One of the biggest struggles with writing is getting attention. And the best way to get attention is writing killer hooks.

Also, while you’re at it, if you’d like to read my writing, I write a daily email at alindragu.com where I tell stories, and I help you build a two-hour workday by writing online.

Thanks for reading.

Catch you on the next one.

Alin

I’ve spent over 100 hours studying the habits of some of the most brilliant and rich copywriters on the planet. And in this article, I’m going to break down five not-so-obvious habits that almost every single one of them have.

Stick around, cause number four may shock you.

By the way, I’m Alin Dragu. I’ve sold over $2 million with my copywriting, and I have over 10,000 followers across my socials and emails.

Copywriting is what I do all day long.

Now first, let me get the obvious things out of the way in this video. I’m not gonna tell you things like:

• They work out

• They read a ton of copy

• They write for five hours a day

We get it. All the normal stuff. That’s not what I’m trying to tell you in this video.

I’m showing you the not-so-obvious things that you may not know unless you have talked to them, studied them, and had them tell you from their mouth what they’re doing, which I’ve done.

I’ve spent a lot of time buying products from people like John Carlton, Daniel Throssell, Gary Bencivenga, Chris Orzechowski, Ben Settle, Parris Lampropoulos, and a bunch of other very rich and brilliant copywriters. That’s what I’m gonna break down here, starting with number one.

Habit #1: They Talk to Their Market Every Single Day

By their market, I’m talking about people that they sell to.

I was talking to the industry titan Brian Kurtz, who has worked with every copywriter on the planet. He’s managed over $9 billion in direct response advertising. And he personally told me this story about Parris Lampropoulos.

Parris is one of the best copywriters alive, and one of his core markets is actually elderly people in retirement homes and hospitals. He sells medications and health supplements and things like that.

And Parris every day would spend time at these retirement homes and hospitals, talking to the people that he was selling to. He would get to know them, have conversations, understand their stories, and spend hours hanging out with his market.

Other Examples:

Eugene Schwartz would read magazines like the National Inquirer and Vogue and all these junk magazines. He would also go and see the most popular movies that he didn’t even like, because he was trying to get in the head of what his market was watching and buying and understanding.

Or people like myself, Daniel Throssell, and Ben Settle who send a daily email and get a flood of responses from our market. And we reply and talk to them every day to understand:

• What problems do they have?

• What are they experiencing?

• What have they tried?

Talking to your market is a core habit of being a rich and brilliant copywriter.

Habit #2: They Have Avengers

Everybody thinks these copywriters are single superheroes like Batman and Superman, Iron Man, Spider-Man, all these guys.

But when in reality, being a copywriter looks more like the Justice League and Avengers. It’s coming together with a very small group of highly talented people.

I myself am in a very small, tight text message group with five other brilliant copywriters. And when I’ve talked to those brilliant copywriters, they’ve let me know about other brilliant copywriters that are also in very tight-knit small groups.

I learned a lot of this while listening to Gary Halbert tapes with John Carlton. They would get in small writers rooms and they would bounce ideas off each other.

This was all on a nine-hour lost tapes from Gary Halbert that he never released. And he was telling the stories about writing together with some of his closest friends. And they would challenge each other, rip each other apart.

Also reading books from David Garfinkel and David Deutsch, who are known as some of the greatest copywriting coaches alive. They do it in tight small groups of very smart people.

Which tells me: if you wanna be brilliant, you don’t go alone, you go with people.

Habit #3: They Have an Alternate Obsession

• Gary Bencivenga is obsessed with olive oil

• Gary Halbert was obsessed with riding his boat

• John Carlton is obsessed with playing golf

• Daniel Throssell is obsessed with his fitness

• Eugene Schwartz was obsessed with arts and painting and collecting

Every single brilliant copywriter that I have come across has had an alternate obsession to their copywriting obsession.

They’ve expanded far beyond the copywriting world to understand what’s interesting, what’s worth writing about.

And they’ve even used these alternative obsessions to actually take a break from their work and just enjoy their life, which ironically, makes them better writers.

Habit #4: They Are Overwhelmingly Analogue

What I mean by that is pen and paper, mechanical watches.

A lot of them rarely have any social profiles or social presence at all. And I’m not just talking about the 80s and 90s people where social media and the internet wasn’t even a thing. I’m talking about modern, brilliant and rich copywriters as well.

Because at first, I thought it was just a traditional approach, not a modern approach. People like Ben Settle, Daniel Throssell, Chris Orzechowski—these guys live overwhelmingly analogue lives in a very digital world.

Including myself. I use mostly pen and paper, wear a normal watch. I write offline. I record my videos offline.

(But I’m heavily on social media)

My hypothesis is that the offline thinking helps them write better.

Obviously:

• No distractions

• No social media feed

• No really bad, terrible writing content that you consume

Which leads to habit number five...

Habit #5: They Write in the Dark

In his farewell seminar, Gary Bencivenga told the story about how he would wake up every single day at 6:00am, pour himself a cup of coffee, and he wouldn’t do anything in the world until he wrote for three hours.

He wouldn’t look at his phone, he wouldn’t answer his messages, he wouldn’t open his mail, he wouldn’t kiss his wife. He’d sit his butt in the chair, and he would write for three hours in the dark before anybody was up.

Parallel that to a modern millionaire like Dan Koe, who has made $10 million from his writing. While studying his habits, he recently released a video talking about his two-hour morning routine, where he:

• Goes for a walk for 30 minutes

• Writes for 90 minutes

• Then opens himself up to the world

The most brilliant thinkers, writers, and entrepreneurs in the world are writing first thing without distraction in the dark before they talk to any human ever.

Recap: The 5 Habits

1. They talk to their market every single day

2. They have Avengers

3. They have an alternative obsession

4. They are overwhelmingly analogue

5. They write in the dark

I hope you found these helpful.

Give them a shot in your own routine.

I’ve been trying stuff like this on and off for years.

If you enjoyed this:

I’ve got a bunch of really cool free stuff for you on my website, alindragu.com/stuff.

• 63 Cash Cow Copywriting Secrets

• Hook templates

• My best-selling book, Meaningful Marketing

• A video on how to outreach to clients and get more clients

All kinds of stuff on there

Head to my website, put your email in, grab whatever you want and enjoy.

Thanks for reading!

I appreciate it, and I’ll catch you on the next one.

Alin

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How you make money with copywriting has completely changed.

And in this article, I’m gonna give you 7 easy, not-so-obvious ways for you to make $100k or more copywriting.

By the way, my name is Alin Dragu. I’ve sold over $2 million with copywriting, and I have over 10,000 followers across my socials and email who study my stuff every day. Copywriting is what I do all day long.

Alright, let’s jump right in.

1. Emails for ECOM Brands

This is definitely one of the most accessible ways to make a lot of money with copywriting.

Here’s the math:

If you have four clients, just four clients paying you $2,500 per month to write emails for ECOM brands, you will make $10,000 a month. That’s $120,000 a year.

My recommendation:

Do unlimited emails for them—3, 4, 5 a week. Price yourself really accurately at the $2,500 mark. Write whatever they want, add SMS. Honestly, it’s not a crazy amount of work.

Four clients is a really good balance, and ECOM brands need retention and email managers now more than ever. They’re selling more than ever, they’re growing fast.

Huge niche for you to make some really good money with.

2. Landing Pages with AI Design

One of the big hurdles in the past with landing pages is that you would give a bunch of copy to the client and they would have to inject your copy into their landing page. Either they don’t wanna do that or they don’t wanna hire somebody else to then design it. And that whole project is a mess.

But nowadays with websites like Wix, Squarespace, and Framer, they have AI prompting for design, meaning you could literally put your Google Doc in, tell it how you want it to be designed, use one of their templates, and it’ll literally inject your copy into AI-prompted design templates.

It’s kinda wild. And so now you as a copywriter can package your service as doing full-blown landing pages with the promise of high conversion.

What This Means for You:

• You’re writing high conversion copy that to sell more products for them

• You can do all the work—the design, the copy, all that stuff

• You use AI to prompt a design for you, but you use your brain for the copy

Pricing:

You could charge anywhere between $3,000 to $10,000 depending on the size of the projects that you’re doing. That is a completely fair rate for full-blown high-converting landing pages.

One to two of those a month, and that is a six-figure income for you as a copywriter.

3. TikTok and Meta Ads

Here’s how this works:

Step 1: Research

You could go to Facebook’s Ads Library—literally go to Google, type in “Facebook Ad Library,” and you could search a bunch of brands that you really like and see if they are running ads.

Facebook Ads Library will not only tell you if they’re running ads, it will show you the ads that they are running.

Step 2: Rewrite

Screenshot a bunch of the ads that they are running, rewrite it for them, reach out to them and say, “Hey, I dare you to A/B test my ad against your ad and see which one converts higher.”

Step 3: Rev Share Deal

One of the offers that you can make for those clients—if your copy does convert higher—is you can offer a rev share deal on increased attribution.

Here’s how it works: These guys are already running ads, which means they’re probably already making money from their ads. You could say, “Hey, if you’re making $100,000 a month from these ads through your sales, I get 10% of whatever is beyond $100,000.”

So let’s say your ads make them $200,000 a month because your ads are that much better. Well, now you get 10% of the increased $100,000 per month as long as you keep writing ads for them.

This kind of rev share performance-based model is really great for people with high skill and who are willing to take the risk for massive rewards on the end.

I’ve personally done this and got some of the biggest checks in my career. I would not sleep on rewriting ads for big brands because they are spending thousands and thousands of dollars to get them in front of people.

They will pay thousands of dollars if you get them to perform better.

4. Paid Newsletter

You can write your own content on social media about whatever you wanna talk about.

It could be:

• Golf

• Guitar

• EDM music

Doesn’t matter—anything you wanna talk about.

The Process:

1. Write content on social media that builds a following

2. Move that following to an email list

3. Bribe that email list to start paying you a subscription to your paid newsletter

The Math:

If you run a paid newsletter that costs just $10 a month, you need 880 people paying you $10 a month to make $100,000 a year.

At a 10% conversion rate, that means you need an email list of about 9,000 people.

Estimate about 12 to 18 months to build a list that size, but that is now monthly recurring revenue that you get on a guaranteed basis forever.

The front-end work takes longer, but the back-end reward is so much better.

This is a great way to set yourself up for a six-figure income by working this year and reaping the benefits for many years to come.

5. Paid Community

Instead of a paid newsletter, you could do a paid community.

Like me, I run a paid community called CopyCreator Club. I teach copywriters like you how to build their own business online using social media, email list, and selling digital assets—exactly like I was talking about with the paid newsletter, except I teach it via paid community.

Benefits of a Paid Community:

• The relationship you have with your people

• The conversations

• The assets

You can also charge more…

My paid community is $50 a month. I’ve seen other people charge $90 a month, $150 a month, depending on the problem that you solve for your target market.

The Math:

For me at $50 a month, 220 members is a six-figure income.

220 people!

That is something that, again, will take a lot more front-end work, 6 to 18 months to build. But then you get the long-term rewards for many, many years to come.

6. Ghostwriting

I’ve not been a huge fan of ghostwriting for social media content per se until right now.

Why? Because never in my life have I seen more AI slop than ever on social media platforms, which is actually creating higher demand for real copywriters who can write high-converting, genuine human-sounding content.

And so instead of flocking to AI to write a bunch of stuff for you, connect and niche yourself down as a true copywriter who understands the craft and can write:

• Content that grows followers

• Content that gets email subscribers

• Content that helps thought leaders and CEOs get their ideas out into the world

Pricing:

I would price this similarly to the eCom email pricing—maybe $2,000 to $2,500 a month, four to five clients max.

Boom, there’s your $100K.

7. Launch a No-Code SaaS

This one’s gonna throw you for a loop.

This is something I’ve been personally exploring myself for about a year now because with tools like Replit and AI, you can actually prompt AI to code an entire Software as a Service (SaaS) product for you.

I saw somebody do this who made a habit tracker but made the habit tracker function like a video game where you level up as you build your habits. You get stats, rewards—felt like Pokémon. Now they’re like a $25,000 a month SaaS.

Here’s Where the Copywriting Comes In:

These products—software as a services—the product is scalable, but they don’t know how to get the word out (the marketing).

Well, you are a copywriter. You can write:

• The ads

• The emails

• The landing pages

• The social media organic content

...to then sell this product after you build it.

So you can make your own software using AI to code the thing for you, and then you build a social media following, an email list, and all this with your copywriting skills. You sell your software product.

That’s kind of a backdoor way to be a really great copywriter but for your own business.

Quick Recap

Here are the 7 ways you can make $100,000 or more by being a copywriter:

1. Emails for ECOM Brands

2. Landing Pages with AI Design

3. TikTok and Meta Ads

4. Paid Newsletter

5. Paid Community

6. Ghostwriting

7. No-Code SaaS

If you found this helpful… you’re gonna love some of the free goodies I have on alindragu.com/stuff.

• 63 Cash Cow Copywriting Secrets

• 100 Hook Templates

• Cold Outreach System

Grab whatever you want, it’s all free.

Enjoy. I hope it helps you, and I will catch you on the next one.

Alin

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In 2025, AI copywriting tools hit a 78% adoption rate across the industry.

Copywriting was named the third most at-risk profession because of AI.

And the creator economy exploded past a 250 billion dollar value while traditional copywriters were fighting for scraps.

What’s going to happen in 2026?

That’s exactly what we’re going to be talking about in this article today.

By the way, my name is Alin Dragu, and I’ve sold over $2 million with my copywriting, and I have over 10,000 followers and subscribers across my email and social.

Copywriting is what I do all day long.

The Story Behind The Story…

Let’s get the obvious thing out of the way.

AI is going to play a massive part in the copywriting world in 2026.

It’s going to get better, smarter, more people will use it, the market will become more saturated — all that.

Those are not trends and predictions, at least that’s not what I’m going to focus on in this article.

I’m going to focus on what happens because of that.

The things you may not be paying attention to. The layer below the layer.

And I’m going to do that by breaking down five predictions based on trends that I’m seeing.

Prediction #1: Warm Traffic Will Dominate Cold Traffic Copy

In 2025, 83.3% of content marketers said that they used AI to help them create their marketing campaigns.

It is estimated that about 90% of content marketers will use AI to create content in 2026.

While that stat is going up, what is going down is cold traffic conversion for direct to purchase.

What I’m talking about here is:

• Meta ads

• TikTok ads

• Twitter ads

People running ads for a direct to purchase campaign.

See

ad, buy thing — that’s a direct to purchase campaign.

And those conversion rates are statistically going down.

People are more skeptical of products, companies, the marketing itself, and have no doubt that AI is playing a massive role in the conversion rate dropping.

Here Are The Numbers…

A typical conversion rate for a direct to purchase is usually between 1.5% to 2.5% based on the industry.

It is now going below that 1.5% where the new industry average is probably going to be 1 to 2%, and then it’s going to be 0.5% to 1.5%, and it’s going to continue to drop until somebody breaks the trend.

What Still Works…

The thing that is working is things like:

• Bribes and lead magnets

• Free stuff in exchange for emails

• Capturing information (phone number, email, whatever)

• Warming them up with welcome sequences and emails and text messages

Taking cold traffic, warming them up, and then making the sale.

The direct to purchase sale is not working nearly as well as it did.

And AI has a big part to play with that.

Cold traffic is continuing to get dominated by people who are sending emails and building relationships via copywriting as opposed to just trying to sell them in one fell swoop.

That’s going to continue to die.

Prediction #2: Blogs Will (And Are) Making a Comeback

Here’s what’s happening in the blog world.

LLMs — large language learning models, AI — are scraping websites like Reddit and high quality websites with lots of blog content to understand the information that people are prompting so it can condense it and hand it to you.

And so while the traditional Google search to SEO to blog format is dying, LLMs are taking this same exact route but giving it to you in a more condensed chat form.

What That Means…

They are learning from blogs, which is exactly why I completely redesigned my website to include:

• Articles

• All my emails

• Social content

All those things condensed into a high quality website.

So that when people are prompting things that I have the answer to, it is scraping my site and giving those answers.

Yes, will it rip me off?

For sure.

But it will also:

• Recommend my ideas

• Recommend my products

• Recommend my articles

And all kinds of things like that to people who are searching for those things.

Which is going to play a bigger and bigger role in people finding out about you, your business, your brand, and all the things that you do.

Blogs are going to be a thing.

Prediction #3: Mega Info Products Are Dead

People are not going to buy $500+ courses with 40+ hours of content and interviews and things like that.

That trend has been dying for 4-5 years and I will declare them officially dead in 2026.

What’s Happening Instead

People are going to AI to get very practical, bite-sized pieces of information on their very specific problem right now.

And so that should dictate how you, if you are a course creator or you sell info products and that is your business model, you should be creating smaller bite-sized info products at bite-sized prices.

The New Model

So instead of creating one mega course:

1. Find one tiny problem that you solve

2. Package it very specifically

3. Sell it for an affordable price

4. Make it really practical

Something that they can use instantly, not 50 pages that they have to read, but something simple:

A template, a copy and paste, a prompt, something easy

Then once you get buyers that buy those things, upgrade them to other more robust, advanced products.

Prediction #4: Creator Work Will Outpace Client Work

A lot of people are thinking about AI as:

Copywriters are now using AI to write copy for their clients.

You’re thinking about it backwards.

This is not the way that it’s going to be done, and it’s not the way you should do it.

Here’s What To Do Instead.

It is now more accessible than ever for you to be a solo business.

One of the reasons copywriters have been freelancing for clients is because you don’t have to carry the burdens that come with running a business:

• The accounting

• The taxes

• The hiring people

All that extra weight.

You just want to write copy. So you find a client and write the copy.

It is becoming significantly more simple and accessible than ever to run your own business with copy because you can use AI tools to do:

• Your accounting

• Your systems

• Your finances

• Your taxes

• Your automations

Which makes it so much easier for you to be a one-person business.

Which gives you time to:

• Sell your own products

• Write your own content online

• Build a Paid newsletter

• Build a Paid community

The internet is your playing field.

And it’s never been easier to be a one-person business. So I have a feeling that more people will take advantage of not having to work for clients and build their own internet business.

I’m betting so big on this prediction that I actually opened up a Skool community called Copy Creator where I am teaching copywriters how to do this—how to turn their skillset into a leverage-based email internet business that has nothing to do with clients, but that they can scale their own content.

Prediction #5: Boring Copy Will Demolish Hypercopy

AI is now trained on traditional copywriting — which is pretty hyper, flamboyant, out there, and very big claim.

“I’m going to 10x your business, 5x your leads. I’m going to triple your business overnight@@@All my email!!!”

This is the type of stuff that current AI models are trained on, and that’s what’s going to saturate the market.

They’re going to oversell and hard sell, and as cringy as it already is, I think it’s about to get more cringe.

The Counter-Strategy

So what do you do when a market is saturated with one style of writing?

You go the opposite.

So now you start saying a lot simpler, more boring claims that sound more realistic and believable, even going as far as what Ben Settle calls “shaking the skeleton”—meaning you start showing the flaws of your products, your ideas right in front of people.

“Hey, it’s going to help you do this, but it’s not really good at doing this and that.”

And people are going to start to connect to it and actually start to believe what you are saying.

My Advice

I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better, but you can hop on the train of writing much simpler, boring copy in:

• Your ads

• Your emails

• Your landing pages

And that is going to be significantly more trustworthy copy than what you’re going to see in 2026.

Recap: The 5 Predictions

To recap:

1. Warm copy is absolutely going to dominate cold traffic copy

2. Blogs are going to make a huge comeback

3. Mega info products are dead

4. Creator work will outpace client work

5. Boring copy will beat hypercopy

I’d love to hear what predictions you have for 2026.

Drop it in the comments below.

We’ll look back at the end of the year and see which ones were right, which ones were wrong.

And if you haven’t already, I’ve got a bunch of cool free stuff on my website for you:

• Copywriting Catalyst

• 100 Super Sticky Headline Templates

• My book, Meaningful Marketing

And a whole bunch of other goodies.

Just go to alindragu.com/stuff, grab whatever you want.

Hope this is helpful, and I’ll catch you on the next one.

Alin

So you want to be a copywriter in 2026.

Well, you need to forget everything that you’ve read on Twitter.

Last year, I made over six figures writing copy, working just a few hours a day. And if I had to start from zero, here are the exact six steps that I would do to build my business from scratch.

And the shocking part is that it has nothing to do with chasing clients.

But more on that in a second.

By the way, I’m Alin Dragu. I’ve sold over $2 million with my copy and over 10,000 copywriters study my work every single day. This is what I do all day long.

Why I Wouldn’t Do Client Work in 2026

Before we dive into the six steps, I’m going to be honest with you. I want to explain why I wouldn’t do client work at all.

In the economy that we live in with AI, client work, acquisition, things like that—it is so much better to focus on creator work in 2026.

Why?

Because it takes the same amount of skill, energy, and effort to build your own audience online and sell your own stuff as it does to cold DM a whole bunch of people who are already outsourcing their work to AI.

Not only that, but:

• Your creator business compounds over years where you can get clients, lose clients, and all that work is theirs and gone and you don’t have the assets anymore. You just built a bunch of stuff for other people.

• You stop trading time for money. They stop paying you if you stop working for them. But your creator brand continues to grow and grow and grow because of the assets you built online.

• You don’t have to wait for somebody to tell you that you can start working. You’re going to take 100 hours chasing clients before you even get to write a single thing, where in the creator economy, you can start writing today. You can open a Substack today, start sending emails today.

• The profit margins are higher. It takes less work to make the same amount of money.

There are so many variables to where it just doesn’t make sense to be doing client work in 2026.

Listen, if this all sounds crazy to you and you like the traditional copywriting path, you want to chase some clients, get those rev share deals—go for it. Nothing wrong with that.

But it’s not what I would do, and it’s not what I’m going to teach you how to do in this article.

But if you’re interested in seeing how becoming a copywriter in the creator economy can actually give you 10x the amount of skills, freedom, and money than doing client work, then go ahead and read until the end because what I will break down for you may just blow your mind.

The Six Step Framework

Step 1: Build a Plan

The first thing that we need to do is build a plan.

For this, I like to steal Simon Sinek’s why, what, how structure, because this is going to give us clarity and direction of where to take our business, where to spend our time, and what to ignore.

My Why

For instance, my why: I wake up in the morning because I want freedom and autonomy and joy from my business.

• I want the freedom to do whatever I want, whenever I want

• The autonomy to build the projects that I love and do the work that I love

• The joy to really have fun about what I talk about and what I teach

So that right there, when I write that down, I can look at that and be like, hmm, well, client work really wouldn’t match that because I need to build what they want me to build, write what they want me to write, work on their schedule.

So right there, just knowing my why, it’s a complete mismatch with client work.

That’s going to give me direction on how to build my business.

My What

The what is the thing that’s going to unlock your why.

And for this instance, let’s use a very flat example of what could be building a $10,000 per month digital copywriting business working four to five hours a day.

That’s a really solid, even number:

• $120,000 a year

• Solid income

• Working 4-5 hours a day

That’s awesome, right?

Most people would see that and say, fantastic. That would bring me tons of autonomy, freedom, joy. Excellent.

My How

So now we know exactly how to unlock our why, but now we need to unlock our what. How are we going to do that $10,000 per month working four to five hours a day?

Well, the roadmap on your how is you need to:

1. Build an audience online

2. Move that audience to an email list

3. Sell that email list your stuff

Very simple, right?

Audience, email, offer.

Super simple. That’s our plan.

You can take your why, what, how, and adjust it however you want, but I’m giving you my plan for how I would start over.

Step 2: Pick a Niche

Next is, we need to pick a niche.

For picking a niche, I use a very simple 4P framework:

1. Passion

2. Problem

3. Person

4. Profit

So you have to understand those four Ps.

Passion

What are you passionate about?

What is the thing you cannot shut up about?

If I was restarting in 2026, I would write a bunch of things down like:

• Guitar

• Golf

• Watches

You don’t have to be a copywriter writing to copywriters. You could be a copywriter talking about your passion. That’s the power of the internet. There’s money to be made talking about anything—could be gaming, whatever.

Problem

What problem do you solve?

Let’s go with golf. I’m passionate about golf.

What problem do I solve with golf?

Well, I could teach people:

• How to chip better

• How to stop slicing their driver

• How to hit their irons a little bit longer

There’s a lot of things that I now know about golf because of my passion and my practice that I can help and teach other people.

Person

Who is the person that you serve?

Well, if I’m going to be teaching some golf, I would be teaching golf beginners:

• People who have never picked up a club

• People that maybe want to break 100

• People that want to hit their driver longer

Beginner golfers would be my market here.

And so now, I know:

• I’m talking about golf

• I know the problems I can solve

• I know the people I’m going to serve

Profit

You just want to make sure that there are other people in that niche selling similar offers.

A lot of people look at this as a red flag. They’re like, “Oh my God, the niche is saturated.”

No, it means there are people buying.

There are buyers in that market.

If there is no one else trying to sell what you are selling, the way you’re trying to sell it, that is bad. That means that your offer is untested and you are risking a lot of time and effort for nothing.

But in this case, we know the golf niche is highly profitable, golf education. I would rock that niche and I would make a lot of money writing for golf.

Step 3: Start Writing

Which leads us to step three, which is to go ahead and start writing.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold the brakes.

Are we not going to read some books or something?

No, this is the big mistake that most people make is they buy a bunch of books.

And they end up doing nothing.

They end up:

• Reading maybe half a book

• Getting overwhelmed

• Thinking “I don’t understand this”

• And they don’t do anything

Write Today

So what I like to do is I like to start writing today.

So what you do is:

1. Go to Substack

2. Set up your profile

3. Post today

I’m not affiliated with Substack or they’re not paying me to write this. I just think it’s a great platform because it has kind of like this Twitter feed and this email marketing tool combined.

And so you can actually post on their Twitter-esque feed. It’s called Notes and people can go directly from your notes to your newsletter and subscribe.

So it makes it seamless for your social media to grow your email list, which is essential to our how, right?

Remember:

• We’re going to build an audience

• Grow an email list

• Sell that email list stuff

And so I see this platform and it’s perfect for our plan.

My Starting Cadence

And if I were doing it from scratch, I would:

• Write three tweets a day

• Write one long form article a week

It’s probably 30 to 60 minutes of writing a day, maybe a thousand words.

• It gets you on the timeline

• You get long form authority article

• You sell them some stuff

But my focus with the writing is to build my email list.

You got to build that list, build that audience.

And you’re not going to do that reading a bunch of books if you’re not writing anything.

Step 4: Study the Masters

But that does lead us to step four, which is study the masters.

You are not the first person to try what you are trying to do right now.

• You’re not the first copywriter ever

• You’re not the first person in the creator economy

Which means there are thousands of people who have spent thousands of hours and years writing resources for you to read and get way ahead than they got way faster.

These resources are called books.

These books are like 20 bucks. I think it’s crazy that most people don’t read more books. So for 20 bucks, you can access the minds of some of the smartest people in the world to solve your problems.

The 5 Books I Recommend

And what I’m about to give you is five books that I would recommend you stop and buy right now.

1. The Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joe Sugarman

This is the 101 copywriting must-read essential banger that every person should have.

I don’t want you to buy a course. I don’t want you to buy a coach, anything like that.

Read this book first. You got to read it and understand all the copywriting fundamentals.

2. Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks

The best storytellers are the people who own the internet.

If you just post a bunch of value posts and ChatGPT copy posts, that’s why the internet is saturated with a bunch of mediocre creators. The best creators tell the best stories and this book will help you tell great stories.

3. Cashvertising by Drew Whitman

This is more advanced copywriting tactics, really into:

• Persuasion

• Sales offers

• All the things that you need to actually make a ton of money with your brand

But this shouldn’t be read until you read The Adweek Copywriting Handbook. Then you can dive into this baby.

4. Everybody Writes by Ann Handley

This is super underrated because most copywriters undervalue the art of writing itself.

There’s so much emphasis on persuasion and sales that they do not think about:

• Formatting

• Tone

• Structure

• The things that actually make reading digestible and fun and sticky on the internet

This is a great one to help you do that.

5. The Art and Business of Writing Online by Nicolas Cole

This is like an all-encapsulating how-to guide of really building and monetizing your writing business online, gives you some great writing tips. Honestly, just one of the best books you can read.

The Power of Practice

So now you have those books, but you already have a writing habit. You’re already writing online.

So while you’re reading one of the books, you may read something, highlight it and be like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” And now you can try it with your writing.

You can implement it and be like:

• “Okay, I’m going to try that tactic”

• “I’m going to format my writing”

• “Oh, I’m going to add this constraint”

Because you have somewhere to practice what you’re learning.

This is what’s going to get you past 99% of people who never start.

Step 5: Make an Offer

You need to sell something.

You’re not going to make any money until you sell anything.

So you’re writing on Substack, your audience is growing, your email list is growing, and now we need to sell them something.

Pick a Product

But before we know what to sell, we have to pick a product.

Is it going to be:

• A course

• A paid newsletter

• A paid community

• Coaching

• Templates

Lots of different routes you can go.

But for me, I like recurring revenue. It’s very hard to build a business on peaks and valleys of revenue. So I don’t really like to base my business off courses or anything like that.

So for this, I’m going to say either a paid newsletter or a paid community. But for the sake of simplicity, let’s say a paid newsletter.

The Golf Newsletter Example

So we’re writing in the golf niche. We’re teaching golf content. We’re going to do a golf paid newsletter, right?

Let’s say:

• We’re doing a couple emails a week

• Substack does a perfect paid newsletter, so we pick the perfect platform to do that

• Let’s say we charge $10 a month for our paid newsletter

Let’s Do Some Math

Starting Small:

Let’s say you have 5,000 Substack followers:

• 20% of your followers become email subscribers

• So now you have 1,000 email subscribers

• 10% of your email subscribers become paying subscribers

• So now you have 100 paying subscribers

Well, 100 paying subscribers × $10 a month = $1,000 a month off your paid newsletter.

That is pretty awesome off just 5,000 followers, working probably a couple hours a week.

But it doesn’t hit our goal.

We need our $10,000 per month.

Scaling Up

So now let’s take those numbers, those conversion rates, and let’s scale them up.

Let’s say we grow our audience to 50,000 followers:

• Out of those 50,000, 20% convert into email subscribers

• So now we have 10,000 email subscribers

• 10% of those email subscribers become paying subscribers

• So now we have 1,000 paying newsletter subscribers

1,000 paying subscribers at $10 a month = $10,000 a month.

So now what we’re looking at is building an audience of 50,000 subscribers and hitting those conversion rates.

Step 6: Ruthlessly Create Content

Which leads me to step number six, which is ruthlessly create content.

Content is your lead magnet machine. It is how you grow your email list. And the more you grow your email list, the more people will buy your offer.

How to Scale Beyond 1,000 Subscribers

So that is how you scale beyond the 1,000 people buying your $10 offer—you actually start doing things like:

• Writing more tweets — go from three to five

• Writing more articles — go from one article a week to three articles a week

• Repurposing your content across multiple platforms

Repurposing Across Platforms

So all those articles that you’ve been writing, you could turn them into:

• Twitter threads

• Instagram threads

• LinkedIn posts

• TikTok videos

• Podcast episodes

• YouTube videos

There are all kinds of things that you could do to now get your newsletter out into other platforms, which then grows your email list and you could sell more of that $10 paying newsletter to a lot more people.

The Compounding Effect

So:

• 1,000 people becomes 2,000 people

• 2,000 people becomes 10,000 people paying you

And all of this in the same amount of time that it took you to write the same email for the same 1,000 people, which means your income will scale without scaling your time.

This is Called Leverage

And when you do client work, you have zero leverage because it takes the same amount of time to get the same amount of money.

You charge them a certain amount for a certain amount of deliverables:

• “I’ll charge you a grand a month for three emails” or whatever it is

• And you still have to write those three emails for the same money

But with the creator economy, you can create digital assets that scale without you always investing time.

This is why I don’t understand how in 2026, people are still trying it the old way, which is exactly why I started the article the way I started it and exactly why I taught you the same six steps that I would take to grow my copywriting business from scratch.

Thanks for Reading!

If you enjoyed this article:

1. Consider subscribing to my daily email list. (Free gift when you join)

2. Checkout CopyCreator Club where I teach you to fire your clients and sell your own stuff.

I appreciate you so much.

Go crush it.

Today we’re talking about storytelling.

If you want to sell more with copywriting. You have to learn to tell better stories.

And here’s the thing that may shock you.

Every great story uses the same exact storytelling system.

From Jesus in the Bible to Katniss in Hunger Games.

And this one super simple system is going to 10x your storytelling almost instantly.

After watching this, I guarantee you’ll think differently about the way you write copy and sell with stories.

By the way, I’m Alin Dragu. I’ve sold over $2M with my copy and over 10,000 copywriters study my stories.

This is what I do all day long.

Let’s start with the system.

System

Every great story is broken out into 3 sections.

Here’s exactly what happens in each one

Section One:

There is a good character.

Section Two:

Something bad happens to that good character.

Section Three:

The good character beats the bad thing.

This is traditionally called the Hero’s Journey.

But before I show you examples of how it’s been used in movies, books & sales letters…

I want to visualize it for you to show you how the system works.

Visualize

Here’s section one.

1 — Your good character is in a tree

Life is good.

He’s chilling.

Reading books.

Hanging out.

Loves this tree.

Life is great.

But then one day…

2 — You set the tree on fire

Something bad happens to your good character.

His dad dies.

He loses his job.

He gets in a car wreck.

His world is shaken up.

And then — something or someone comes along that helps get your character out of the burning tree.

3 — The character gets out of the tree on fire

Life is good again.

He beats the big bad thing.

Your reader is happy.

This 3-Scene Storytelling System is used by the greatest stories ever told.

Let me give you some examples.

Examples

1 — Jesus in the Bible

• Jesus is a good guy, carpenter, shepherd. Life is good.

• Then he gets murdered on the cross.

• BUT Then Jesus taps into his super mighty God powers and resurrects from the dead (beating the big bad thing)

Or what about this one…

2 — The Lion King

• Simba. Good guy. On the way to become King of Pride Rock.

• Then crazy uncle murders his Dad (who is the king)

• BUT Then Raffiki helps Simba beat his Crazy Uncle in the battle for the throne.

A couple more…

3 — Hunger Games

• Katniss lives with mom and family in Section 11. Life is okay.

• Then she gets drafted into the Hunger Games by a corrupt government where she has to battle to the death for entertainment

• BUT Then with the help of Haymitch, Her Mentor, She Wins the Hunger Games and overthrows the corrupt government

Is this catching on?

Alright how about a copywriting example?

The Infamous One-Legged Golfer Sales Letter from John Carlton

Here’s the story:

• Young guy named Milt Wallace is really good at golf

• Then he loses his left leg to freak accident

• But then he finds a coach who teaches him this secret Triple Coil Golf Swing to not only learn to play golf again but hit the ball better than he’s ever hit it before

Look — I could go on.

There are millions of stories using this exact system because it works.

But here’s the magic sauce on how to specifically use it to increase your sales with copywriting.

The Secret To Sales Is…

Your character is in a tree.

The tree is on fire.

The way they get out of the burning tree is YOUR PRODUCT.

You see what happens with sales copy is when you tell a good story — your reader sees themself as the MAIN CHARACTER.

And if you tell a great story — your reader will see themselves as the MAIN CHARACTER who is currently in a tree that’s on FIRE.

Your job is to then prop a latter up against that tree and simply say — would you like to get out of this burning tree?

The way they get out of the tree is by BUYING YOUR PRODUCT.

Let me show you.

The John Carlton Sales Letter

Your reader plays golf.

They suck at golf.

This is their burning tree.

They wish they could hit the ball further and shoot lower scores so they can show off in front of their friends.

While they are in a burning tree — they read a letter from you that talks about a guy who was in the same burning tree but solved his problem with THIS PRODUCT.

Then you make an offer…

If you would like to solve this problem too, buy The Triple Coil Swing Package for $99.

And in the readers mind — $99 to get out of a burning tree is a no brainer.

You can do this in emails, sales letters, VSLs, YouTube videos, meta ads.

It works anywhere and everywhere.

Thanks for reading!

If you enjoyed this, I guarantee you’d love alindragu.com.

I post deep dives, daily blogs and add free resources often to help you sell more with copywriting.

In 1854, a man stood on a platform suspended high above a crowd… and ordered someone to cut the rope holding him up. What happened next changed an entire industry forever — and it reveals the single most powerful form of persuasion in copywriting.

If you can master this one thing, you can sell anything to anyone.

Here’ the story…

Meet Elisha Otis.

It’s 1854.

He’s 41 years old in Yonkers, New York.

He’d bounced from job to job his whole life — carpenter, sawmill operator, wagon maker.

Then… His first wife died, leaving him with two young sons. He had chronic health problems.

This guy could not catch a break.

While he was working at a bedstead factory, Otis needed to hoist heavy machinery to upper floors.

So he made a simple safety brake using a wagon spring. If the rope broke, metal teeth would catch on rails in the shaft and stop the fall.

Then it hit him.

I could use this for elevators.

At the time in 1854, if an elevator cable broke… You plummeted to your death.

(Which made most people take the stairs LOL)

So he reworks his invention for elevators.

And he tells all the manufacturers.

“If a cable snaps, this WILL save your life!”

Nobody believed him.

Except a man named P.T. Barnum.

He offered Otis $100 to demonstrate the elevator at the New York World’s Fair at Crystal Palace.

Otis took the deal.

At the 1854 World’s Fair in New York, Otis stood on an elevator platform hoisted high above the crowd.

He looked at his assistant who was holding an axe right next to the only rope holding the elevator.

“Cut it”

She swings.

The crowd freaks out. The rope snapped.

The platform drops a few inches…

Until… It stops cold.

Otis’s safety brake had caught him.

He stood there, arms raised, and simply said: “All safe, gentlemen.”

That single demonstration launched the Otis Elevator Company.

Today, they move 2 billion people per every single day.

That’s over 30% of the entire human population rides an Otis.

Because he used the single great persuasion tactic in the world…

Demonstration As Proof.

Also known as DAP.

What is Demonstration as Proof?

Demonstration is when you show —not tell — that your product or idea works. It’s the difference between saying “this car is fast” and doing 0-60 in 3 seconds on camera.

The hierarchy of proof (when it comes to sales & copywriting)

1. Claims / Promise (weakest): “Our product is the best”

2. Testimonials: “Others say we’re the best”

   1. This is the most common form of proof & still works really well

3. Demonstration (strongest): “Watch it work right now”

Demonstration sits at the top because it removes all doubt.

Your reader isn’t trusting your words or someone else’s opinion…

They’re trusting their own eyes.

Here’s the science behind why this works so well.

1. Seeing is believing - Our brains process visual information 60,000x faster than text. When we see something work, we can’t unsee it. It becomes undeniable.

2. Eliminates the imagination gap - When you just tell people about benefits, they have to imagine it. Most people won’t—or can’t—do that work. Demonstration does it for them.

3. Triggers mirror neurons - When we watch someone do something, your brain simulates the experience. It feel like we’re experiencing the benefit ourselves.

4. Removes risk perception - If it works right in front of us, our lizard brain thinks: “I just saw this succeed. It’s not a gamble anymore.”

But not every demonstration works.

There are 6 key elements to make your “demonstration as proof” irresistible.

6 key elements of persuasive demonstration.

1. High Stakes

The demonstration needs to matter.

Otis didn’t demonstrate 50lbs of bricks on that elevator — he put his life on the line. The higher the stakes, the more memorable and convincing.

Another example: Billy Mays throwing a brick at a car window vs. just saying “it’s durable.”

2. Un-Edited

People need to believe they’re watching something genuine, not manufactured.

A great example would be like writing copy live for a client.

“Hey I’ll write this right now. We’ll send the email together. And watch it print cash.”

No hiding behind ChatGPT.

3. Relatable Context

The demonstration should happen in an environment your audience recognizes.

Otis didn’t demonstrate his elevator in at a warehouse—he did it at a public fair where anyone could see.

What habits, systems or environments do your customers already use that you can inject your product into to change the results?

4. Visible Transformation

Before → After. The change needs to be obvious. Whether it’s a stain disappearing, a task becoming automated, or someone’s stripe account is getting sales because you sent an email —make the result very clear.

5. Repeatability Signal

The ability to demonstrate that you can do it again. That this isn’t some one-time fluke.

If you send another email, will the same thing happen?

6. Address the Core Objection

Your demonstration should target the biggest reason people don’t buy. Otis knew people feared death. They didn’t ride elevators because if it broke, you would die — so he demonstrated safety in the most extreme way possible.

That’s demonstration as proof.

How to make more money with DAP…

I want you to write down:

What’s the one thing about your product, service, or idea that people don’t believe?

Now ask yourself — how can I show them instead of tell them?

Can you film it? Can you do it live? Can you create a before-and-after?

Inject that into your copy. Your VSL. Your Meta Ads.

And I guarantee conversion rate & sales go up.

Here’s what I want you to do next:

1 — Restack this post. It helps tell the algorithm that you enjoyed this and it supports my writing.

2 — Subscribe to the CopyCreator newsletter. If you upgrade to the Paid Subscription. You get my Write Publish Chill ($200) course for free.

Subscribe now

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It’s 63 Cash Cow Copywriting Secrets just like this so that you can write more persuasive copy today.

Thanks for reading!

Until next time.

Your copywriting friend,

Alin “El Copy Goat” Dragu