How to use AI to write copy like David Ogilvy

Amie @ Ben's Bites (00:00)
Hi everyone, welcome. I'm Amy. I help Ben run workshops here. Today we have Cory with us. He's the creative mind behind Swipefiles, a good resource for marketers. Currently he's building Conversion Factory, a product marketing as a subscription service. And today he's going to share how he uses AI to write high converting copy.

So we'll dive in, learn more about Corey. He'll show us how he uses AI and his process there. And then we'll do a Q &A at the end. And of course, if you have any questions throughout this workshop, drop them in the chat and I'll try and move them in or we'll circle back to them at the end. So Corey, you want to talk a little bit about Swipefiles and Conversion Factory and your journey with AI?

Corey Haines (00:52)
Sure, Yeah, so I guess my sort of like creator journey did start with Swy Files. It originally started as a newsletter where I was doing these tear down style analysis of landing pages, emails, ads, just talking about what I thought was good about them and what could be improved. It was kind like a weekly newsletter edition thing. And then I started, you know, sharing all sorts of other case studies of copywriting, crazy marketing tactics.

super tactical pricing strategies, all that kind of stuff. my whole career has been in B2B SaaS marketing. so now my agency, Conversion Factory is a product marketing agency for SaaS companies. I learned to code about a year ago, so that was actually, well, that wasn't my first foray into AI. That was like my first foray into using AI besides like, Hey, HHTPT, help me write a thank you card for my nephew. You know, stuff like that, right? because.

especially for copywriting, just wasn't there and I wasn't an advanced, you know, prompter. The models were okay-ish, but I was sort of like, well, let's just get this, you know, six months into their year. I'm sure it'll be good. Now I use it every day, multiple, multiple times a day. It's really, to be honest, allowed me to scale my agency in ways that has been very beneficial because what used to take me a week takes me an hour or two now.

And so now we've hired, now I can delegate things and it's been an amazing productivity tool.

Amie @ Ben's Bites (02:29)
Do you find that you use one model for everything, or do you switch between Cloud and ChatGBT for different things?

Corey Haines (02:40)
You know, so I have to preface this too. I was just telling you guys before I didn't record that I'm not the most advanced AI user. I find that sometimes it's hard to keep up with like which model is best for what and am I using the correct one? I know for coding, I pretty much only use Claude 3.5 Sonnet now because that's kind of like unanimously the best one, as some people say. And that's what I found in coding too. For copywriting, I pretty much only use ChatGPT.

And I haven't really messed with any of the other image generation, video generation, things like that.

Amie @ Ben's Bites (03:19)
Awesome. Yeah. Do you want to hop into screen sharing and you can kind of show us how your workflow and how you use it in your day to day?

Corey Haines (03:28)
Yeah, let's do it. And by the way, if there's any, ever anything that like, you're like, I can't see what you're doing or I can't hear you. Please like scream at me or let me know. I've done a hundred of these and still like a month ago I started presenting a webinar and someone was like, are you trying to show us something? And I was like, my gosh, I haven't been sharing my screen this whole time. So let me know if you can see this. Okay. We should see a split screen.

which we'll see how well this works, but you guys can see this okay.

Amie @ Ben's Bites (04:01)
We see on one side Bends Bytes Copywriting Workshop and on the other side we see your view of Riverside.

Corey Haines (04:08)
Yes, cool. OK, so I'll pull up chat.tbt here. Awesome, so I prepared this notion doc because for one I use notion all the time. I actually don't use notions AI. I just found it to be expensive to be honest, so just I don't know. Seem more reliable just to go straight to the source and go straight to chat.tbt with 4 and I don't know with the latest models and you have all the different bells and whistles that you might want in here.

But I prepared this doc in Notion because again, talking about like, I can only show you what I do. What I do the most is I write landing pages for SaaS companies. So homepages, feature pages, use case pages, different industry pages, pricing pages, you know, all those types of things, right? That's kind of our bread and butter. You know, product marketing is a lot of website stuff, pricing, emails, conversion rate optimization.

And so I'm a heavy user of notion because that's where I kind of organize everything. And, but also the thing that I've found is that, you know, AI is great at certain things, but you still have to, you know, bring in your own secret sauce and your own process and your own, your own way of doing things to help the AI be successful. So if I can like talk in a soapbox just for a second and then I'll

this will look more interesting. We can actually start doing things. The, the big mistake that I see people make with using copywriting for, using AI for copywriting is that they don't really consider what makes good copywriting in the first place. And then they're just kind of waiting for like a, I'll know it when I see it type of deal. And they're like, this is really good copy, even though what they think might actually might not actually be great copywriting. but the AI doesn't know really what great copywriting is.

I think that's what people, that's what we've decided makes good models is that, you know, it makes it easier and easier to get something good or human-like without a lot of these instructions. but until the AI is like better than humans at everything, we're going to have to do a lot of this stuff. We're going to have to tell it, this is what makes great copywriting. This is what good looks like. This is the expected output that I want. Right.

And the same goes for great code, great design, know, et cetera, et cetera, fill in the blank, right? You're going to be disappointing yourself if you don't set the AI up for success. And I've been really, really surprised to even not only on the copywriting side and the coding side of things, I've been teaching my software engineer friends, which again, I am a horrible developer. learned to code a year ago. I'm super hacky. I just want to build little prototypes and MAPs and stuff. I've been teaching my software engineer friends.

at giant enterprises how to use cursor and how to use AI because they're like, write me a function that does this with no context, with no instructions about the way that their syntax is or the way they want to write their functions. And so we have to be able to set it up for success. And when I learned to code about a year ago, I went to a coding bootcamp by a guy named Ryan Culp.

which I think I've bugged Ben about a tongue, so I think he should do it. But he was, he told me something that was like a crazy, mind blowing thought to me. He said, there's no such thing as a computer bug or error. The computer is going to do exactly what you tell it to do. But what you told us do was either wrong or conflicting with something else you told to do. Right. And now it's an unexpected output. It's not an error. It's an unexpected output.

So I think about the same way with AI, especially something like copywriting where it's more art than science. If you don't like the output of your copywriting from the AI, that doesn't mean that the AI is bad at copywriting. It means that you're bad at giving the AI instructions. So what the AI is great at is it's great at speed, right? I mean, it's amazingly fast. This is why I can do now in an hour or two, which I think you'll be able to see by the end of this session.

what used to take me a week because the AI is incredibly fast at typing and just thinking and producing stuff. It's great at ideation, right? Producing variations. you know, exploring all the different avenues and, and, and incorporating your feedback really, really quickly. It's great at absorbing information. something also I'll you is kind of loading in a lot of data, right? And then be like, consider all this. And it's like, cool, thumbs up. Whereas that would take us

you know, hours of study and kind of memorize and commit to memory. so the end goal, I just want to be clear again, cause I'm not the most advanced AI user, although I think I have some cool workflows. The end goal is write great copy. think as long as we get there, like the tools are always going to change. the process is going to change a little bit, but at the end of the day where we're after is great copy. So this might be a little bit more or maybe hopefully also educational about what makes good copywriting.

not only how to use AI for copywriting. All right, so let's dive in here. And again, before I even get into like the prompts itself, this is actually kind of the first prompt, but you have to teach the AI how to be a good copywriter. And so this is quite literally my first prompt always. So I'm just gonna copy and paste this in. And I'm gonna say we're working on a new project.

I'm not going to tell you about it yet, but I want to give you some rules about how to write copy for this project. I'm going to be like copy and pasting a ton, but let's paste this in. And I'm going to go through each of them really, really quickly. I don't want to spend too much time on it. I need to fill this in here, but.

What I want to do is I want to kind of rewrite the Slack homepage because there's a lot of big enterprises now that can get away with poor copywriting. And so I always like to pick on them because I can bring a more scrappy startup approach and a more like conversion copy old school copywriting style like David Ogilvy to something like Slack is kind of fun. So if you're with that, that's what you're in for for the next 40, 45 minutes ish.

So we're going to say you're an expert copywriter with deep, SAS experience. Let's say B2B SAS, be more specific and you need to rewrite the copy using the instructions below in context information. Now this first one, avoid using jargon, adverbs and qualifiers. It's sort of like, okay, let's think about what makes great copywriting. Now what's the opposite of great copywriting? What, what does bad copywriting look like?

jargon, adverbs, and qualifiers are the three most egregious things that I see humans do, let alone AI. Using really fancy jargon like, we're gonna revolutionize digital transformation with our all-in-one AI no-code platform. It's just, what does that mean? You're asking the readers to interpret what you're saying. Instead, use really simple descriptive language, write like how you talk. So we might use.

something like this is not for Slack, right? But replace your paper checklist with a smart mobile app. I, this is, this is actually funny because this is from a client example. This is quite literally what they had in one of their headlines. And then when I rewrote it, I was like, I was like, guys, explain to me what this actually means. And then like, well, we have a mobile app and it's kind of smart because you can build in different rules. And the whole point is that it replaces a paper checklist. People bring around them at job sites at construction jobs.

It's like, okay, let's, let's say that instead. Right. so jargon is bad. Adverbs are bad because they're kind of vague and you end up telling instead of showing, this is true for fiction writing, for nonfiction writing, for copywriting, for storytelling, however you want to call it. Right. when we say something like instantly, this is the advert instantly improve your workflow. Doesn't really tell me a lot about how you improve.

the workflow, right? I know that it's instant, but again, that's just sort of, sort of a nice fluffy statement. Very specific eliminate repetitive tasks so you can focus on what really matters. That's actually what we're trying to say, right? Same thing with qualifiers. qualifiers are sort of like these where you pull your punch a little bit and you qualify a statement with something so that it doesn't, sound kind of like too

bold or too absolute. but then it ends up just making it feel very weak and very, very shaky. So instead of saying almost unbreakable security, which of course we know every SaaS company, every technology company doesn't have 100 % unbreakable security. But if you were to say almost unbreakable security, people are like, okay, so it's not secure, right? Instead, if we use an analogy or if we make something, something really

bold and straightforward and punchy, we might say Fort Knox level protection of your data, right? A lot more specific. So jargon adverbs qualifiers, generally bad. There's a lot of vague words, especially the chat to be teases like streamline and enhance and supercharge. And I don't know, there's like a bazillion of them. We're going to see them, right? And it's going to drive me crazy. But instead, right? Again, we don't want to make them do the interpreting.

What does this actually mean? How do we streamline? Anytime you see a vague word like this, just think to yourself, what am I actually trying to communicate? Reduce the back and forth necessary to get in the same page. A lot more specific, not perfect, but a lot better. Passive language or passive voice is also another big one. And that's where we kind of like reverse the order of the sentence a bit. So instead of saying personalized reports are generated, and this is kind of what makes it passive, are generated.

we say we generate personalized reports to match your unique needs, right? So instead of like personalized reports are generated for you, it's we generate personalized reports for you.

I don't see that as much in chat GPT actually see that a lot more in human writing. and so this is what I mean by sometimes people are like, this is bad copywriting, but the AI, but then what they gave it as the good version actually wasn't that good because they're writing stuff like this. avoid using exclamation points and ellipses. Chat GPT is super, super guilty of this. anytime you use an exclamation mark, it just makes it sound, salesy and

kind of disingenuine where you're like Fort Knox level protection of your data versus like being very confident and calm Fort Knox level protection of your data. It's very straightforward, right? This just makes it feel like I'm trying to convince you of something. Whereas this was just plain. Right? So, same thing. Like people can go crazy with the ellipses and you're like, well, wait, why, why is there, why is there a dot dot dot? What am I missing? What are you about to say next?

just end it with a period, right?

I'm just trying to run through these really quick. This is probably the most I'm just going to talk here, but it's important to understand the things that I'm giving the AI because then when we are going to look at the copy later, it's hopefully going to make a lot more sense. And especially when we're editing, it's going to make a lot more sense. Avoid run on sentences.

Amie @ Ben's Bites (16:14)
I think this is helpful because I feel like with AI in general, people sometimes think they shouldn't spend a lot of time on the prompt because it's AI and it's all knowing, right? And it's super smart, but it a huge difference in the output and the quality. And you could get OK copy by just doing two sentences on what you want. But if you really want to almost like...

Corey Haines (16:26)
my gosh.

Amie @ Ben's Bites (16:40)
If you work in marketing and you don't have a prompt like this, I feel like it'll be obvious to people that work in marketing that someone who doesn't work in marketing, maybe a general intelligence being, took a stab at it versus someone that had experience and knows what they want and what's good and what's bad. I think it's a good exercise to through.

Corey Haines (17:04)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that's one of the things too is like.

people think that most of the time is going to be spent on. I don't, I actually, don't know what they think they're to be spending their time on. Like this is the work. Like this is how you use AI right here. It is prompting and it is giving it instructions. I spend 80 or 90 % of my time. Well, we're going to go through it. There's, there's a lot to get through, but being hyper specific and giving an insane amount of instructions to the AI so that I don't have to do.

less editing down the road and less human intervention down the road. This one's pretty straightforward.

Amie @ Ben's Bites (17:44)
Yeah. And I feel like if you start lately, it becomes harder to like get back on track with AI and you won't have to start anew. So if you like put an effort upfront, it saves you a lot more time in the long run.

Corey Haines (17:51)
Yes.

Yeah, that is so true. I do sometimes do that. Sometimes I'll skip a step or I'll kind of just jump in and be like, like how bad could it be? And then I always end up regretting it because then when you load in this information later, it's sort of already biased and it's like tainted a little bit. And so it's better just to like start fresh with a new prompt, with a new chat and start from the beginning because then everything that it produces, you're not like having to

like scrap everything and tell it to forget what it's already done. Charg-2-PT is actually kind of bad at forgetting things too, right? It's kind of, it's bad at like remembering all the things, but it's also bad at forgetting things. And so sometimes you don't want it to ever produce something bad, you know, where it's maybe under prompted because then it's just harder to undo later.

Amie @ Ben's Bites (18:49)
I know sometimes when it says memory updating I'm like no no no no no forget that, scratch that, don't repeat that.

Corey Haines (18:52)
Right? Yeah. Undo. I need like the little men in black, you know, a zapper that, you know, zaps us memory. okay. So let me, let me run through this. avoid complex words that have simpler alternatives. Chad's, Chad's, he's also super guilty of this. Don't use words like utilize, use the words like use, right? Use sounds more fancy and like, I'm writing cool copy, but it's actually totally overdone.

this one's fairly straightforward, right? But, one of the big things I see is like be direct. And I always tell chat to you to, to, this is why I started prompting it, like be more direct, be more straightforward, get to the point quicker, use rhetorical questions because otherwise it really won't. This is a really big one. Actually, it'll never use rhetorical questions, but this is in my opinion, what makes a lot of good copy and make it easy to read. And this is pretty lazy to be honest because

If we wanted to get more specific, we would be like, make this fifth grade reading level or make this seventh grade reading level or, you know, things like that, that are more, quantifiable and objective. but sometimes I don't know exactly how dumb down ish I want it to be. So I just say, make it easy to read. and here's an example here. I might say Slack lets you share files instantly from documents or to images directly in your conversations. It's like, okay, that's cool. But you're kind of just like,

telling me all these things. Whereas if I say need to share a screenshot, now you're thinking, do I need to share a screenshot? yeah, I share screenshots all the time. Send as many documents, images, and audio files as your heart desires, right? I made a little typo, I'm so OCD. So that's a good one. Peppering the use of analogies, metaphors, puns, humor when appropriate. This one's really, really hard to do.

We'll probably do this later on in the editing. it'll kind of like skip over this and follow most of the other instructions first, but I just wanted to put any here so you can see, don't use essential sensational language or try to make things more exciting. This is basically another version of the don't use exclamation points because otherwise it just can go way overboard. don't fabricate anything and don't skip these rules. Okay. Let's load it in here.

and get it to agree with us.

Okay, memory updated, that's good. I'll keep every rule in mind for this project. Let me know when you're ready to dive in. I was using the word dive in too, I hate it. Okay, now one of the things that I'm gonna start doing is, again, what I wanna do is I rewrite Slack's homepage really quickly, and I'm actually probably not gonna do any of my own edits, because I just wanna show you how good the AI-only version can get.

But again, to do that, I'm not going to do any writing. I'm just going to keep feeding it these prompts and keep feeding it information. So we have this kind of, we call it our standard issue. This is like our base template that we use for a lot of our website projects at Conversion Factory. There is a copy here and there's a link to this. And by the way, I will share a link to this whole page by the end of the webinar or Ben can hand it to you however you want to. But this is kind of like,

the formula or the page structure that I've seen work really well. And I just think it's a good starting point for pretty much every project. So you can see a little preview here. I just wanted to show you. So it's not like, okay, what's he putting in there? and I have a notionified version right here. So we have a hero section. We have a competitor comparison section. we have a how it works section where we things down step by step.

We have a big benefits and features section, integrations, social proof, and then a final call to action. There's a couple other sections we may or may not include, but I just want to show you that that's what's in there. first, actually what I'm going to do is I'm going to give it some training data. And again, this is what Chad Gippity is good at, at remembering stuff. So I'm going to feed it some of these other homepages that I've done for clients. This was a client called dabble. They're like a,

AI writer for writing editor for fiction books. And so you can see it follows this similar type of format here. Just want to show you some not fibbing it. And for the sake of time, I'm just going to paste these in. You don't even need to see them or you can look at it afterwards. But I'm going to have to. Notion is always a little bit funky and how I grab these.

Let's just do it this way. So let's say now I'm going to show you a few examples of what good looks like. So you understand the expected output. We're going to be working on a project for a new homepage. We'll be writing the copy for

And these are other finished home pages I have written in the past. Please take note of the style structure.

What do I normally say? The style structure and similarities between each. And then please commit this to memory and await further instructions. All right. Now let's paste in this first one. And from Notion it always does like, like markdown, which is totally fine.

because I think the AI skips over and understands the markdown. I think it actually helps a little bit too because it has some built-in information hierarchy.

This is a lot of information, but let's just see how handles this.

Okay. All right. Summer down, chat to be T it's super eager to jump in, but we got a lot of other things to get through. So we got some other home pages. What I like to do for each one of my clients as well is that I'll create like a copy guidelines document for them. which has like basic information about who their customers are, whether it's like B2C or B2B. and I actually, use chat to be T to help create this too, because normally we're doing a lot of

discovery and positioning work with the client ahead of time. And then I'm using Chad's to synthesize this that into something like this. so you can see it's the type of information here, you know, pain points, interests, outcomes, you know, functional needs, rational reasons for choosing it, subconscious reasons for choosing it. And again, this is a lot of the stuff that like, this is how direct response copywriters think we flash the stuff out.

We think about not only the rational, also the irrational and subconscious reasons people choose things. And and you just get like a lot of a lot more information in here. So now this is when I tell it that we're working on slack. So I'm gonna say. We're going to be. Writing copy for. Slack. Following the. Structure I have.

giving you examples.

before we do that.

Sorry, typing on a webinar is hard. I'm going to provide copy guidelines that helps you get up to speed on Slack and all the information you need to know about them and their writing style. Again, please commit this to memory.

and await further instructions.

This is going to be funny because I'm going to go through all these things and we're not even going to see like AI generated out copy for like another 10 minutes. Probably it's going to be like a big reveal. Hopefully that's still interesting. okay. Ready to apply these guidelines. Yes. I know you're ready. One of the other things I love to do is love to grab what I call voice a customer. So I'll go through reviews, testimonials,

It might be like quotes on their website. It could be from G2. This was from, from get set up or set up app or what's it called? I think it's called set app. Actually it's kind of a funny name, but it's like a bundling package of software altogether. And I love to use this because you know, oftentimes your customers describe your products much better than you can.

And so we try to come up with all these fancy copy. We think that we know how to describe our product best, but actually we're kind of too thick in it. We're even now I'm so biased with just, you know, my understanding of Slack as a user that, you know, I would only see my perspective. So I want to see the perspective of a lot of other customers and I want to try to incorporate some of this language into the copy if I can. And so you can see,

There was a couple of interesting pieces here like, yeah, even kind of fun to communicate with our coworkers is a fun statement, right? And it's not gonna pick up on these things in particular, but we can remind it of phrases like that. The best decision made as far as inter-company communications, real-time messages and chat with my team directly. There's gonna be a lot of fluff, right?

Slack messaging app is very powerful and amazing. We don't want to use words like that, right? This is fun though. We have a jokes channel. These are the type of like really specific phrases and sentences and examples that really elevate copy from going from like good to great. So let's load this in.

Let's say great, try to be nice to the AI. Before we jump into writing, I am also going to provide examples of voice of customer. So you can see how real Slack users describe using it.

we can try to incorporate.

some of their language.

when appropriate.

Please commit to memory and await further instructions.

Hope that's the copy of the guidelines still. Copy, paste. Okay. Just a few examples. I've loaded in as many as, what was it? Like 200, 200 some odd, like artifacts of customer research information in before and asked it to kind of like organize, synthesize, pull out specific quotes.

there's always a risk that this might actually make the copy worse because they might use language like this. That's not good. but what we want it, what we want to like highlight to it is more language like this, right? We have a jokes channel. It tells you jokes. It's super fun. best decision I've made about inter company communication or whatever that was. Okay. So we've given it the, the training data. now hopefully I think that we're ready for a first version.

This is where things get real.

Okay, and we're gonna say great. Now let's go ahead and draft up the first version of.

page for slack. Please consider all the information I have given you before and follow all the rules. Don't skip any rules.

And.

incorporate all the.

given you as context. And then I'm say, use this template.

as a starting point for the first draft. Now I'm gonna paste this in. And you can see it has this markdown. I think sometimes it keeps some of the markdown and it does some formatting here in ChatGPT. But the other thing about this that is kind of interesting, right, is that we're being super prescriptive.

about like we're kind of providing some of these, it's like a mad lib style copywriting formulas. This can be good and bad because sometimes it'll just like try to fill in the blanks too strictly, you know, and it's not thinking creatively enough. but that's where the editing really comes in. What we want is we just want to get it started with the structure. because otherwise it's going to go off and do something crazy and it's either going to write

We're gonna have to like cut a ton. And so this helps us not have to cut a lot from the first draft. All right.

see how this goes.

All right, that's not horrific.

So let's read this a little bit. How to stay connected without drowning in endless emails. The only workspace designed for teams who want real time communication without the chaos. That's not horrific. Instant organized message by topic, file sharing, easy setup. We have the calls to action, companies around the world. Not too bad. Okay. Imagine that you could accomplish what you could accomplish if you never had to chase down messages or updates. Not horrible.

So overall, I'm feeling like this is like decent, it's pretty mediocre, it's kind of good, but it's definitely not bad.

We have this before and after this did a good job of understanding. are the pain points and problems, and these are like the solutions and benefits.

Start, here we go, seamless, my gosh. It's crazy how many chat-jibbityisms just like seep into everything, even when you tell it not to. Seamless team communication in just minutes, we're gonna have get rid of that. Set up channels, otherwise it's done a good job of not including that. Start a conversation, integrate your favorite tools, that's not bad. Keep teams connected with real-time messaging.

Okay, yeah, now we have bunch of these features. These are actually pretty good.

Effortless is another kind of ism. Everything wants to be simplified. It's crazy.

This was kept the same, which is good. gosh. Seamlessly see this is crazy. Trusted by thousands of teams worldwide. That's pretty good.

Okay. Now we enter into phase three. So we've done the templates, the training data, we've given it the rules. Now let's go into some of the edits and variations. And now like, we're not going to get super far on this just for the sake of time, but I just wanted to show you some examples of how I would go about editing this. Even though I think this is maybe 60, 70 % there to a final product. it's going to take maybe another 30 minutes to get through and

If I was really putting my thinking cap on, you know, it's hard to do it on a webinar life, but I can show you how I would do that. And we can maybe make some small improvements here. A couple of tips just about how I go about this is that I found that it's usually a lot better to hone in on specific lines or paragraphs one by one instead of the whole thing. If you're giving broad sweeping feedback, that's totally fine. But then just like put that broad sweeping feedback, have it give you another output and then start picking it apart.

So I wouldn't be like, Hey, let's change this headline. And then let's also think about a couple of different pain points and then let's change these to be, you know, single word steps, but in general, you know, overall, make it easier to read. Like it's kind of like, Whoa, dude, like you got really specific and super, super broad. so either be pretty broad with your prompt or be hyper hyper specific.

Ideally one by one. again, remove the chaggibutisms. We gotta like call this out. So like one we already saw a few times was seamless and seamlessly, right? reminded to adhere to your original rules and you can even tell it, Hey, these are the rules. like comb through this and see where it did not adhere to the rules. If, if anywhere, one of my favorite things to do is asking for variations.

So we're going to do that here in a second with the headlines, because I think that's probably the most interesting part. And then to ask for more. The amount of times that I just typed in more, I feel like a maniac and I feel bad for the AI. But you can just do that like 100 times, and it still just keeps giving you more. It maybe has to think a little bit longer each time. But you can keep asking for more. And don't be afraid to do that, because sometimes I'm like six more is in, and then I find the variation.

that I like. so let me go through some of these headline formulas really quickly. And again, I just want to hone in on one thing in particular. So oftentimes what I'll do is I'll, I'll do the reply to, and then I'll say, let's focus on this for now. And then later we'll revisit the rest of the page.

And now, this is where we get some magic, right? I love to give it formulas. Or really what this is, is this is just examples of, I can grab this whole thing, examples of what good looks like, again. So I'm gonna say.

Please write, I'm just gonna say many. Let's see how many it produces. Many variations of this H1 headline.

and use these copywriting formulas as inspiration. Don't follow them exactly to a T every time, but use them as guidelines.

I'm not going to go over this a ton, but these are just some tried and true formulas that I've actually seen work well and used myself and that I think provide a lot of variety and diversity for thinking about headlines in particular. so any H one, H two, H three, you know, I have also had different headlines formulas for different types of sections. So I have like three or four for this three or four for this.

you know, I have a bunch like, what is this like 10 for the H1, but just give an idea of what I'm doing.

feed this in and I like to always provide an example as well.

Okay, so these are not terrible. Again, and if we're just thinking about like, let's think about Slack in 2013. Everybody's wearing skinny jeans and beanies and we're all listening to Coldplay and punk rock or whatever was cool at the time. Put yourself in 2013 Slack's shoes. You're a product marketer for them, writing copy for them. How do you position Slack against email? What everybody's using?

Right? And we haven't really even told it that very, very precisely. And we can, right? But again, based on what the AI knows, these are actually pretty decent, right? Keep teams connected without drowning in messages. No more email overload, just real conversations. Get everyone on the same page without the back and forth. Like, I think these are actually pretty good, right?

So you can see how we can go through this process for each one of those H2s or each one of these headers and these headlines. And now we're starting to piece together these revisions for the main landing page. So I might kind of move on from this again for the sake of time. But we'll say, for example, I'm going to say, I like option, what's the one that we like?

Okay, let's go with number seven. I like option number seven. Please incorporate into the draft we have going.

And now it should regenerate the whole thing all over again.

Yeah. And nothing else should be different. Sometimes I will explicitly say, don't change anything else about the draft. yeah. So we have to say this a few times too. I'm going to copy paste this over cause I have it in my notes cause I kind of anticipated it. You have to say, please regenerate the whole landing page. And like a lot of people who do coding in cursor will, will do this too, because cursor will give you, you'll be like, Hey, please, please tell me how to refactor.

a bunch of functions in this page and then it'll just give you one function and you're like, no, no, no. Like do the whole thing over again. No placeholders, no, nothing that could be missing from the file. So you ask it to regenerate the whole thing and that way it also keeps like, now you have like a new draft to work off of because now this is kind of like the source of truth. And now I can go to this one and start editing. So I'll ask, okay, now please incorporate into the new draft. Now let's work on this one.

so on and so forth. Those are some tips and, and headline formulas. These are the last couple of things I'm to go over for the sake of time. So I want to leave time for questions and then I'll show you another example that I did literally last week for another workshop that I was leading in person, which was fun where we had, I had the AI create this. but really quickly, some other things you can do for copywriting.

I'm not going to read all this cause it's a ton, but I got this from Joanna Weeb over at copy hackers and you can do what she calls copy sweeps where these are less like rules, but it's more contemplative instructions for a chat GPT where you might have it be like, Hey, we're going to do some, some, some copy sweeps. I'm going to go through these step by step. please provide feedback, you know, highlighting these instructions for each one of these.

each one of these steps, write the feedback for this landing page. so you might do like a clarity, you might do voice and tone, the so what test, and you can see that these are all really, specific, right? So I think it's probably best to go through each one of these. You can just copy, you know, this one, have it do it, and then do this one, right?

because again, the more texts you give it, the harder time it's going to have, generating all that text. It uses more tokens, the more tokens it uses, kind of the lower quality it's going to be. it's like all of it's only has so much Ram and brain power. So you want it to use a hundred percent of that brain power and something kind of small and minute so that you're getting like a genius level, thinking a response versus spreading out that brain power across

100 different instructions and then you're getting like dog level intelligence for each one of them So that's copy sweeps I've used this a bunch and it's a good kind of like Sparring partner for your copy as well where it helps you just think a little bit outside the box so that you can get even better instructions and revisions Just one I saw this from from Lenny's newsletter he had this

this prompting cheat sheet the other day, which I thought was really good because again, another way you can go about this is you can be like, you can be role playing. Hey, you are an expert in field and or like, Hey, you are a customer of Slack. How would you receive this? you can do emotion prompting. I really like the chain of thought. I think through this step by step. there's a couple of different things in here that are interesting where again, these just give you

some other templates for prompts you can use to help you improve the copy. This one is really fun. I think I will go through this example really quick. And I'll show you where I got this from. It's a tool that I'm building. But this is like a quantitative scoring method that I developed for copywriting.

And I kind of broke it down into five different categories of the score, relevance, clarity, persuasiveness, creativity and differentiation. And I ask it to give a numerical score, which I think is helpful for understanding like, all right, what are the areas I need to improve? So I'm just going to paste this in.

of this draft using this method to come up with a quantitative score.

Yeah, squaring rubric. And then I give it explanations, because I found that for whatever reason, that just helps.

and you'll get an idea of like now this feels very actionable. Okay, so it thinks that I did a pretty good job. I would tend to agree. I think it's directionally correct.

Cool, I think this is pretty good. You might be thinking like, it's probably gonna give you a good score, but like no, I've seen it give really bad scores. And in fact, I think if we were to maybe start over and we didn't give it all the training data, rules, et cetera, et cetera, and we just said, hey, generate a landing page for Slack, and then we had it score itself, it would probably be in like the fives or sixes. But again, you can tell it, be harsher, be more objective, be more realistic.

And, and it'll usually follow that. Okay. Last thing. And then I'm going to jump out of here for some questions to leave time for that. Just wanted to show you, this is another example that I created through, through chat to the other day. said, never dig through endless email threads again. It's like group chat, but for work say goodbye to communication chaos. Yeah, this before and after section, everything you need to work together. Ditch the email chains, use channels instead collab live with huddles.

Like I think that this is pretty good. This is probably 90 % of the way there. You know, I gave it information about like how many teams use Slack. I had it even add a little manifesto section, which was like, Hey, I'm Stuart Butterfield, the founder of Slack. Have you ever felt the friction of endless emails and, the, or the disconnect of working alone at home? So this is that like using rhetorical questions thing where I specifically reminded it like, Hey, for this section, I want you to incorporate a rhetorical question.

we'll help you XYZ if that resonates with you, you're in the right place. Again, you can read this over later. I'm going to share the link to this doc, but, I'm actually fairly happy with this output because you can see using the template and using the instructions here. it was like, it was very directionally close and we worked on that for what? 20 minutes maybe. I would have gone a little bit faster if I wasn't explaining everything. So you can see that within an hour,

you can do a lot of ideation, right? Just imagine going through this, this headline ideation for every single line. And that's pretty much what I do is I will pick this thing apart. Let's do this one. Now let's do this one. Now let's do this one. Now let's do this one now. And you just go line by line. You ask her, for variations, you ask it, okay, let's think about incorporating some humor. Let's think about incorporating a rhetorical question. Let's think about incorporating a metaphor. Make this easier to read.

you know, get rid of seamless, all that kind of stuff. Right. And now what maybe would have taken you a full week because each one of these sections can take 30 minutes. This has taken you, you know, one minute, two minutes to find a good variation and, and, get to a place that you want to. All right. I'm going to open up for questions. I'll just, again, mention really quickly a couple of links here. Here's a link to my agency conversion factory. I'm working on an AI copywriting tool that

Makes it so you don't have to go back and forth all the time. It's called Ogilvy. Helps you write like David Ogilvy. This is not a plug for it, but it's just a little free tool that I'm working on. And I'm also working on a site for copywriting exercises. If you do want to build this muscle, it's kind of like little daily practice prompts to help you think about, okay, let's write a new email for com. Let's write the landing page for Slack and so on and so forth. And those are here in the bonus area. All right.

Coming back down to earth, let's see where we're at.

Amie @ Ben's Bites (51:08)
Amazing. One question about the sweeps. Sean asked, do you read and put the edited text in between each sweep or do you do each sweep on the original copy?

Corey Haines (51:23)
I see. Yeah, normally I won't make any edits for the sweep yet because otherwise we're changing the input and we don't want to create a regression where it's like, this was clear, it failed the silhouette test. And then if we make it more clear, if we make it so what better.

then it makes it less clear, you know what I mean? So we wanna like get all the feedback first and then we'll give it really specific instructions one by one about how to make it more clear, you know, pass the silhouette test. You know, each one of the sweeps we'll incorporate.

Amie @ Ben's Bites (52:06)
Yeah, I know I can see I could already see the wheel turning on Ben like knowing he's going to like redo the entire like landing page down after this workshop. So looks like that's he's doing today. But that's great. We have a free program starting next week for marketing professionals and we'll definitely have to include those tools that you mentioned at the end. Sounds like that would be great. Awesome.

Corey Haines (52:31)
Appreciate that.

Amie @ Ben's Bites (52:33)
Yeah, out of curiosity, you do that exercise via just chat, or do you actually use, do you have a GPT or a project that you put this all in when you're actually using it for?

Corey Haines (52:47)
Yeah, so I'm more, I'm more recently started to, created like a, I guess kind of like a custom GPT, but it's just the one within, open AI. I would like to explore more like how to create a custom GPT. And again, this is another reason why I've been building this tool Ogilvy because it's a little bit annoying having to re input all these instructions every time you want to open up a new chat and work on a new landing page.

And so this, I think a custom GBT and or tool like Ogilvy, not just Ogilvy, but a tool like that would allow you to be like, Hey, here's a new project. Here's all the training data. And now for each one of these projects, here's a template we're going to be working with, but please consider all the training data, all the rules, all the instructions that have given you beforehand. And then it already has that in its memory. So I don't have to read and put that every time.

But I mean, to be honest, just kind of I just kind of raw dog it with Chachi BT most of the time. It's pretty, pretty basic.

Amie @ Ben's Bites (53:45)
Yeah.

I know sometimes the creative process is kind of messy, right? Sometimes I do that too. Someone asked how long did it take you to... Yeah, that too. How long did it take you to set up this whole prompting system and all the steps before you were able to shrink, you know, the one week time frame into an hour or so?

Corey Haines (53:58)
Yeah, and sometimes I'm just lazy.

Yeah, I've assembled these over time. Again, I think that as the model's developed and as people started sharing tips on Twitter, I kind of just started building a little swipe file, if you will, of these tips and techniques and prompts. I think especially, one thing that's really helped too, to be honest, is just having an agency now. You're constantly turning through so many different projects.

So there was a lot of like out of necessity of like, wow, okay, I gotta, I gotta crank out three pages today. Like how am going to do that? Okay. I need to like really dial in my process here and I need to create a lot these reusable snippets. So again, like within Notion now, I have templates for every type of page that we create, every type of email that we create, all sorts of different, information about ways to synthesize customer research, pricing analysis,

spreadsheets, testimonials, case studies, stuff like that, right? So every time my rule was like, if I do this once, I'm going to create a process around this so that the next time I already have kind of half of it done.

Amie @ Ben's Bites (55:29)
Have you seen any direct business impacts like with the system in the sense of you can take on more clients or maybe you're not going to hire certain people that you were planning on hiring or anything like that?

Corey Haines (55:43)
Yeah, well, the business impact is that for the first year, I was able to do all the work completely myself while also juggling other projects and generating business for the agency too. So I was doing client work and everything else all at the same time for, you know, 10 plus clients, sometimes at a time. Now I have a copywriter that I hired and I'm teaching her how to use this to be more fast and effective and efficient.

And so now I'm able to get away with just me and her, but mainly her doing 80 to 90 % of the work. And I will act more as like a editor and proofreader and give directions to her about kind of my opinions about how things should be done. Whereas I think that, you know, I think without AI, I would probably need a full team of, you know, three or four full-time copywriters to probably crank out the same amount of work. I mean, to be honest, we

We do a lot of work. I've probably done more work in the last, I mean, I've probably outputted more deliverables in the last year and a half than I have in the previous seven years combined.

Amie @ Ben's Bites (56:57)
awesome. One last question before we wrap up, is there a demo video on how to use the OglaVee app efficiently?

Corey Haines (57:08)
No, but I should make one. So I'll make one for you. Question asker, if you want to. We're super early with it because we're just going the MVP approach. I've just been sharing it with friends. The UX is really tough. Like creating UX for anything that incorporates AI is actually very, very hard. So we're trying to make it more and more straightforward. If you go to oakleyapp.com right now, you'll see that the editor basically has placeholder text. And it's like,

This is an editor that helps you write like David Ogilvie. And then all the rest of the text is kind of little snippets of clues about how to use it. But it's still pretty rough around the edges, to be honest. So I do need to make a video like that. And that's coming soon, especially for our upcoming launch, hopefully within the next month.

Amie @ Ben's Bites (57:57)
Awesome, sounds great. Well, thank you. This was so helpful. You started off by saying that you're not like a power user, but after seeing your prompts and whole process, I would beg to differ. So I think everyone learned a lot. A lot of people thought that they got a lot from the first prompt. So awesome.

Corey Haines (58:09)
Okay, yeah, I guess so. I don't feel like it, but...

Yeah, I'm bad. Thanks for having me, guys.

Amie @ Ben's Bites (58:19)
Yeah, thanks for joining and everyone, the doc and recording will be available on the Ben's Bites website. So see you in the next workshop.

Corey Haines (58:31)
Alright, thanks guys. Have a good one.

Amie @ Ben's Bites (58:32)
Bye.

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