Ashley: Welcome to the show, Will. I appreciate your time. Thanks for joining me today.

Will: Yeah, thank you for having me, Ashley, happy to be here.

Ashley: And you’re calling me from Nebraska, right?

Will: It’s Nashville.

Ashley: Nashville, part of Tennessee, okay.

Will: Yeah, Nashville, Tennessee.

Ashley: Excuse me. My American geography is not as good as it should be, but, let’s just quickly dive into your background. Give us a quick run down.Will: Sure, yeah, so for I guess the last 5 years or so I did a lot of freelancing, consulting work, copywriting, email marketing, content marketing, blogging, stuff that locally and just, with people from a variety of locations around the country. And so back in January of this year, 2014, I started a new blog of my own called CopyGrad which was designed to be all about just teaching copywriting stuff and, online marketing, that sort of thing. And so, recently I’ve had a little bit, I guess, it’s more than a little bit of a career change, but I wrote a post about a company that I was a customer of and a big fan of called LeadPages. And LeadPages, it’s a landing page creation and lead generation software basically. And I actually … I used it a lot at the very beginning of getting started building my CopyGrad email list and as it continue to grow using LeadPages a lot.

So, anyway, I wrote this post kind of just about their launch strategies that they used, because they had this really cool way of launching new features. And so after I did that I kind of, I tweeted it out a little to the company’s co-founder Clay Collins and, the company Twitter account and stuff. And anyway, not thinking anything of it really, just be I’m like, “Hey, I wrote this about you guys. I hope you don’t mind,” and that sort of thing. And anyway, so I got a message back from Clay actually who … I then met … He’s the co-founder of the company and he was like, “Hey, we’re actually interested in hiring a copywriter. Would you want to hop on the phone sometime?” And so I was kind of, “Woo,” that’s kind of cool. Yeah, so I take that. And I wasn’t looking for a job or anything, but, it was an opportunity to talk to the founder of a company that I really like. So, I was like, “You know, sure, I’d be glad to.”

So, we got on the phone and kind of started this relationship and I ended up flying to Minneapolis where they’re located and one thing lead to another and I fell in love with the company so much, and the team they have there are just an amazing team of people that, yeah, I ended up accepting a job doing copywriting and content development for LeadPages and just started that last week. So, yeah, that’s what I’m doing. Still, doing a lot of writing about copywriting, content marketing, and that sort of thing, conversion optimization. So, I’m going to be doing a lot of content for their blog, and their community and helping write copy and all sorts of stuff. So, exciting, exciting changes.

Ashley: Congrats, it’s actually one of the reasons I got you on here today was to talk about this whole … this strategy and it’s actually worked really well.

Will: Yeah, yeah, it’s, yeah, definitely crazy, unexpected. But, yeah, I definitely learned some things from the experience.

Ashley: It’s interesting how you can touch … We were just discussing this before we started recording, but how you can touch people who’re actually quite high or influential or whatever you want to call that, and you can actually get a hold of them, by just almost being reasonable, or being nice, or … You don’t even have to send them a box chocolates, but, you know.

Will: Right, yeah, and I mentioned to you when we’re talking about this, but, in doing freelancing for some different bloggers and stuff, prior to all this, who had fairly sizeable email lists and online followings. One thing I kind of notice in seeing people reach out to them was 95 … 95% might even being generous. It might be more like 97 or 99%.

Ashley: A lot.

Will: That’s stuff that a lot of people who have followings get. Pitch to them or even just when someone says, “Hey, I wrote this about you.” And they send it to you so often. It’s so not good and I feel bad saying that. But it’s just what I kind of notice is that if you’re taking your time in producing stuff that is truly high quality, high value content, and you take a little bit of time and energy to make it presentable, make it look nice and demonstrate that there’s thought, and you know, real craftsmanship behind what you’re doing and you kind of put it out there, whether it’s through Twitter or shooting someone an email, someone who’s an influencer or … If you’ve taken the time and invested in your material, it’s going to stand out so much from what they’re used to receiving from people. And so that was one kind of surprising thing that I discovered that really helped me in growing CopyGrad early on, and eventually getting opportunities like this job with LeadPages for example.

Ashley: Yeah, the first thing … I guess the first opportunity you got there was the blog post, right? That was where I came across your writing actually. Was that the first thing that they asked for, or was it already done by then?

Will: No … No, I hadn’t even started o