Nick Usborne is our special guest on today's episode of Traffic and Leads Podcast. A copywriter of 40 years, Nick is the king of Conversational Copywriting. This week, Nick and I have a conversation about what it means to use persuasive and casual language in your copywriting in order to build a unique and special bond with your audience. Getting to know your own writing voice is important, and learning to let go of fear and pressure to sound and look like everyone else does can massively increase the success of your copywriting skills. Let’s get started!

IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN:

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• What Nick is all about! He’s been writing online since 1997 and has come to realize that he doesn’t really specialize in any kind of niche. Instead, he knows it’s a different medium—the internet changes how you write for an audience, and he takes a different approach to copywriting depending on who and what that audience is. It’s more about focusing on helping and teaching companies and writers how to write in a more conversational way, and a way that’s more appropriate for an interactive medium like the internet.
  
• Nick tells me that most companies aren’t really using social media the way that they should. It’s the most interactive forum you have on the internet, and instead of creating and engaging with content that’s meant for an audience, people will often buy ads and shout at their audience. It’s not as effective as selling to people in a way that’s comforting instead of aggressive, and you want to make sure you can build long-term sales relationships with these people.
  
• Nick explains how to sell in a conversational way! People are often weary to change the way they write, but Nick encourages us to think about how persuasive conversation is. Conversational language is based on emotion, and people often underestimate how intimate and rewarding that can be. If you engage with someone, you have the chance to be extremely persuasive, and if someone feels that you care about them and are listening to them overall, the experience is going to be more rewarding.
  
• Nick gives the best tips on how to check your voice in these copywriting edits. The best one he offers revolves around reading your writing out loud to someone you know—preferably, someone you’re comfortable with. If you feel embarrassed to say something or to use certain phrasing that you wrote down, that’s a sign that it needs to be changed into something that’s more comfortable, and natural. Nick also encourages us not to get hung up on the niceties of grammar. After all, we don’t worry about stuff like that when we’re having a real, genuine conversation, and keeping things simple is better than over-explaining.
  
• How do we train ourselves away from this professional persona we’ve created? Nick offers that you pretend like you’re writing to a friend. Be interested in the person you’re writing for, and pretend like you’re having a real, face to face conversation with them. Then, you’ll find that explaining how you can help them and their business comes a lot easier and more natural than before!
  
• Nick also warns that certain copywriters will try to use conversational language in a way that is inherently fake—they’ll understand the concept of it, but you can tell that it’s been prewritten and lacks a genuine sense of honesty to it. Be careful of these letters! It’s important for any kind of business where you’re selling a trust-based service, to be honest, upfront, and legitimate from the get-go. Be persuasive as your real self, so once you start working with people, you’re the same person you were before you started selling to them.
  
• Lastly, Nick leaves us with why he thinks conversational language can be effective versus a sales-esque route, and vice versa. If you’re trying to get clients that’ll last for the long haul, you want to give them conversational language in order to nurture the lead and get to know the people you’re working with. Short term deals, however, can be dealt with normal marketing, writing, and targeting. It just depends on the situation, and what the voice of the piece calls for.