What is good content? How is A.I. impacting the creation of content? And what are the opportunities for content writers in the near future? All good questions that we didn’t have answers to. Until we invited Ross Simmons to join us for the 402nd episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. This is a good one. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

Stuff to check out:

Create Once, Distribute Forever by Ross Simmonds

The Copywriter Club Facebook Group

The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: Before we jump into this episode, I just want to give you a quick heads up that The Copywriter Accelerator will be opening up for the one and only time this year… at the end of August. I won’t share any details at the moment, you can find out more when you visit thecopywriterclub.com/waitlist.

Over the past decade, written content has become a critical marketing component for tens of thousands of organizations looking to get attention online. That content takes a lot of different forms from articles and blog posts to case studies, lead magnets, white papers and other written assets used to attract and keep the attention of readers. But what makes good content? How is AI impacting content writers today? And how do you ensure that you clients see content as an investment that pays off, rather than a cost that they need to cut?

Hi, I’m Rob Marsh, one of the founders of The Copywriter Club. And for today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I talked with content writer and founder of the content agency Foundation Marketing, Ross Simmonds. Ross got his start writing about fantasy football in high school and has been recognized as a top marketer by publications like BuzzSumo and SEMrush. His work has been featured in dozens of publications including Forbes, HuffingtonPost and CBC. Ross answered those questions I just posed and a lot more. This interview opened my eyes to several new opportunities and I think you’re going to like it.

But before we jump in with Ross…

We have a new gift for you as a listener to The Copywriter Club Podcast. We went through the past 400 episodes of this podcast looking for the ideas that our guests have shared over the past couple of years related to finding clients. We pulled out a bunch of our favorites and compiled them into a new pocket sized guide that will inspire you as you look for ways to attract the right clients to your business. It’s a bit like having a couple dozen of the best copywriters in your pocket advising you on how to find your next client. To get your copy, visit thecopywriterclub.com/pocket and download this new guide.

And with that, let’s go to our interview with Ross Simmonds.

Rob Marsh: Ross, welcome to the podcast. You are one of the people that I have had on my list for a long time, and have been wanting to talk to you. We’ve had a little trouble connecting the last couple of months. You’ve had some travel and lots of stuff going on. But let’s start out the way that we like to here on the podcast. And that is, tell us about your story. How did you become a content marketer and now ultimately founder of Foundation Content Marketing Agency?

Ross Simmonds: Yeah, Rob, thanks for having me on. I’m excited for this conversation. I’ll take people back into time a little bit. So I’ve always had a passion for writing and for creating things from the time I was a young kid. When I was a young kid, I fell into that whole meme and being obsessed with the Roman Empire. And I was writing books about what the Roman Empire must have been like. And I was doing that probably when I was like 10 years old. So early on, I was creating and writing chapter books and stuff like that. As time went on, I continued to be passionate about writing and creating. 

And in university, I ran a fantasy football blog. And I was writing every single day about fantasy sports and how I thought people should adjust their strategies in the wonderful world of fantasy football. In parallel to that, me and my sister, we created a community dedicated to a video game called The Sims. Some of your listeners might be familiar with it. We played back in the The early days of The Sims when things were very pixelated and all of that stuff, graphics weren’t close to where they are today, but we ran a community on that and I was writing constantly. 

So at this moment, when I was writing about fantasy football in The Sims, the light bulbs went off that I could live in, arguably, the middle of nowhere. I live in a place called Nova Scotia, Canada, up on the East Coast, above Maine, small population, and I was reaching people all over the globe. And at that moment, I knew that this internet thing was going to be special. So I started to continue to work on my writing and my skills. But as the fantasy football blog took off, as the Sims community took off, my traffic went up, but my marks went down. And my mom was like, Ross, listen, you have to start writing about what you’re learning in school. So I shifted my blog to start writing about marketing. And as I wrote about marketing, I started to get interesting conversations from people who were marketers and already had graduated. And I wrote a blog post about how these are the books that you need to read before you break into advertising, before I even broke into advertising. But people were loving it. And I was like, okay, this is fascinating. This thing is gonna stick. 

So I continued and continued to write about marketing. And you fast forward a few years and more and more opportunities started to show up at my desk because of the work that I was doing online and writing and sharing my ideas. And ultimately, that led to me being very busy as a marketer, helping people who would reach out, wanting support, whether it was content creation, copywriting, et cetera. That was kind of the craft that I had learned was creating content. And I started to support these brands. started to work very late nights, realized that’s not scalable, started to hire a team and build out a team. And here we are today. So long story, a little bit longer. I fell into, in many ways, a passion for writing and was able to turn that into my career today.

Rob Marsh: Obviously, blogging has changed a bit since you started it. I wonder if there’s still anything, though, that’s applicable from those early days of blogging to what we do today. So for anybody who maybe wasn’t familiar with blogging, you know, way back when, when The Sims was actually a pixelated, you know, video game, whatever. So we’re talking 2003, 2004, maybe 2008, whatever. There was a lot of conversation that used to happen on blogs, and that doesn’t really happen anymore. but there’s still stuff from those early lessons I’m sure that apply to what you do today. Tell us, you know.

Ross Simmonds: I would agree. Yeah, so I think one of the best parts about back then is you could press publish on a blog and conversations, debates, arguments, discussions would happen directly on there. And that’s kind of lost. But still at its core, I believe that when it comes to content creation, content marketing, developing new stories, whether it’s a video, whether it’s a podcast, Whether it’s a blog post, a status update on LinkedIn, or one of the other channels, I think you do want to foster and try to stir up a bit of a conversation. And that ultimately leads to connection and community. So the essence of what I believe we should strive for is to create things that are worth talking about.

Seth Godin had this idea way back in the day where he said, you should strive to create content that’s remarkable. And content that’s remarkable is essentially content that’s worth making a remark about. And if you can create content that inspires people to make a remark, then you have created a piece of content that can facilitate a dialogue, and that is, even back then, the magic of the internet. The magic today is that it gives all of us the ability to have conversations, to interact, to challenge ideas, to support ideas, and to have a discussion with one another. And ideally, be able to become better because of it. So to me, I try to always encourage my teams and other writers that I