[Case Study] SEO + Brand Voice Copywriting w/ Justin Blackman
The importance of (& how to) write copy with personality AND keywords.
Justin Blackman was very appropriately dubbed “Brand Voice Jesus” by our mutual friend, Grace Fortune in late 2023. I’ve been able to collaborate with Justin on a couple projects AND show him where to shove keywords in his copy—it’s been such an incredible learning experience for us both. And I wanted to make sure to highlight BOTH brand voice and SEO copywriting in this conversation. If you lean too far to one side, you really lose something special. It’s a science and an art form, and luckily—you’ve got 2 really scientifically minded artists over here as guides. 😉
This conversation is essentially split into two parts…
Part 1: The Case Study Interview
For the first 19 minutes or so you’ll hear Justin’s case study interview. Justin signed up for an SEO Packet with me. We kicked the party off with an SEO Audit, I did some keyword research, & then he was off to the races to update his headlines so they had both personality and keywords.
Part 2: The Brand Voice Copywriting Q+A
The remaining 16-ish minutes is pretty much me asking Justin questions about brand voice copywriting. One question I get asked constantly is about how to bring in more personality into even a really boring piece of copy. Fear not—Justin totally delivered tips & hot takes!
Topics covered in this podcast episode:
Importance of storytelling in business
How to know when it’s time to work with an SEO expert
What to do when you’re ranking for the “wrong keywords”
The difference between generic & strategic keywords
How to write blog topics for your ideal client
Tips for writing headlines with personality & keywords
What happens in an SEO Audit
What it’s like to get an SEO Packet from Brittany
How to show your personality even in a boring topic for a blog post
How to pronounce GIF & when to use them in messaging
How to best utilize captions for copywriting purposes
The importance (for your business) of having an opinion *and* sharing it
What we can learn from comedians about cadence in copywriting
When to lead with questions in your copy & when to lead with statements
Don’t forget you can submit a question that will get answered in an upcoming podcast!
Justin Blackman is a brand voice expert who goes overboard. He’s written for more than 429 people and dozens of brands, and created voice guides for Amy Porterfield and Stu McLaren. He uses a process called Brand Ventriloquism to analyze and replicate the nuances that make your writing voice unique, and documents it so other writers can scale your content without sacrificing authenticity. He’s also worked with top brands including Puma and Red Bull. All the people say he’s pretty fly for a write guy.
Mentioned Resources:
Case Study Training Program (starts 4/29)
Related Episodes:
Connect w/ Justin:
Connect w/ Brittany:
This episode of The Basic B podcast is brought to you in partnership w/ Leah Bryant Co.! Help me reach more service providers like you by following the show & leaving a rating or review on Apple & Spotify!
The unedited podcast transcript for this episode of The Basic B podcast follows
Welcome back to The Basic B podcast. I'm thrilled that you're here. I'm so grateful that you're listening or tuning in from wherever, and we have a really good conversation for you today. So today I am joined by Justin Blackman, and if you don't know him, shame on you, but I'll give you an intro in a hot second. So the topic that we're going to be talking about is the importance and the how-to of writing copy with personality and keywords. It's going to be part case study interview, part like practical, tactical, actionable information.
But before we get into that, I'll give you a quick intro. Justin Blackman is a brand voice expert who goes overboard. He's written for more than 429 people and dozens of brands and created voice guides for Amy Porterfield and Stu McLaren. He uses a process called brand ventriloquism to analyze and replicate the nuances that make your writing voice unique and document it so other writers can scale your content without sacrificing authenticity. He's also worked with top brands, including Puma and Red Bull.
All the people say he's pretty fly for a right guy. And we've been able to collaborate. I'm so glad I made it through that first of all because there were several points with Justin's writing where I just want to laugh my butt off. But I've been able to collaborate with Justin on a few projects and show him where to shove keywords. It's been really, really rad, but instead of talking about him, let me bring him on so I can talk to him. Hi Justin. I am stoked for this conversation. So...
Justin Blackman (01:25.119)
Hi!
Brittany Herzberg (01:28.918)
I'm going to go ahead and just hit you with the question that I share with everyone. There's no wrong answer. Are you ready? Okay. What do you believe is the most important for sales? SEO, storytelling, or social proof?
Justin Blackman (01:33.99)
Let's do it.
The devil (01:42.786)
Hmm
Justin Blackman (01:47.138)
Well, I've done it without SEO, but it's easier with it. I've done it without social proof, but it's easier with it. So I think I'm gonna have to go with storytelling because I haven't done it without that. Yeah, there we go. All right.
Brittany Herzberg (01:57.57)
I like it.
Brittany Herzberg (02:03.743)
I like that. And I know, like, I'm on your email list, so I see your emails all the time and I know it comes up there. Do you bring it in with everything that you write?
Justin Blackman (02:12.93)
Not intentionally. I think I kind of collect stories accidentally. Mostly I did it reading like trivia books and just random facts. Like, that's all right. We'll go open book here. There was this book that I used to love called, I think it was called John's Bathroom Reader. And it was just like this like list, this like gigantic book that you would keep in the bathroom of just facts and stories.
Brittany Herzberg (02:29.911)
Hehehe
Brittany Herzberg (02:34.606)
Oh my god.
Justin Blackman (02:42.222)
I used to love it. And it just like got me fascinated in all these little random details where I just like learning random knowledge and it made me really good at bar trivia and that's kind of about it. But I'm still good actually, it wasn't first place last night. So, whoo-hoo, yeah, $30 gift card. I've collected a lot of those. So it's handy stuff. But I've always just been fascinated by these little details that anytime someone's talking about something, I'd be like, oh, it kind of reminds me of this. And I'll just like.
Brittany Herzberg (02:53.41)
Hehehe
Brittany Herzberg (02:56.822)
Oh my gosh, congratulations!
Justin Blackman (03:11.402)
spout a random fact and people are like, how do you know this stuff? And it just sort of makes you more interesting. So I think the more stories you have, even if they're not yours, it just draws people to you. So, I don't know.
Brittany Herzberg (03:22.514)
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. No, that's great. I was going to say before you even said that you've won a whole bunch of gift cards, I was going to say you'd be the perfect person to take the trivia. That's awesome. There's a TV show that my boyfriend and I have been watching called, I think it's called something like The Food That Made America. Have you seen it?
Justin Blackman (03:29.902)
Pretty good at it.
Justin Blackman (03:37.926)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I know I've seen bits of it. I don't watch it though.
Brittany Herzberg (03:43.294)
That's a fascinating one. I watched, we watched the one last night about like Dunkin' Donuts and Krispy Kreme. And I grew up in Winston-Salem for the most part in North Carolina and that's where Krispy Kreme was founded. But like we learned so many of these like trivia facts and it's just really neat and it helps you like then we're watching commercials come on during a basketball game and I was like, oh yeah, Dunkin' da-da-da-da-da.
Justin Blackman (04:03.918)
Yeah, you know what? I've watched the toys that made America. So it's gotta be, it's the same series just about toys. So yes, I've written emails about that too.
Brittany Herzberg (04:07.446)
Oh!
Brittany Herzberg (04:11.678)
Oh, you have? I missed those. My bad. Moving right along. No, so seriously, I'm so excited to talk about keywords, personality, copy, getting them all in there. So I think if you're cool with it, we'll kind of go into the case study interview section of things and then I'll have some questions for you at the end. Unless, unless you say something and then I need to pull on a thread because I am a copywriter and so that just happens to us, right? The whole point of we're going to be here for a while.
Justin Blackman (04:13.883)
Oh.
Justin Blackman (04:33.574)
Let's do it, let's unravel the whole sweater.
Hehehe
Brittany Herzberg (04:38.502)
So let's start with tell me what happened that led you to contacting me about SEO.
Justin Blackman (04:44.286)
So I had, I always knew that like I had nothing for SEO. I had a lot of content. Okay, let's go back a little further. Let's go with the stories. So a couple of years ago, I did a project called the headline projects where I wrote 100 headlines for every day, 100 headlines every day for 100 days. And I chose random brands and just different companies, a lot of things from Shark Tank, where I just wrote about products. And all of a sudden I was like,
looking at my traffic patterns and some of the analytics, and I ranked really well for one program called Wonder Dads, which is like a mail order program for dads to like do crafts with their kids, because I wrote two hundred day, two headlines, two days of headlines for them. So I had 200 headlines about Wonder Dads. I was actually the number one search result for Wonder Dads over wonderdads.com. And I was like, that's cool, but I'm not selling that.
So I had the wrong crowd. The other thing that I ranked really high for was the fart candle. Because I ranked really high for that. Awesome, except that I'm not selling fart candles. I was like, all right, I'm ranking for the wrong things. I knew that this was a problem. I didn't know how to fix it. I put it aside for years. And then I did work with someone for SEO for a while. And they just sort of like, someone that was in one of my programs, they mentioned that they could help. And they made some changes, which...
Brittany Herzberg (05:53.974)
Hehehe
Justin Blackman (06:11.878)
from an SEO standpoint helped. My traffic went up, but it kind of zapped the life out of my headlines. And I mean, I'm selling about, I'm selling a course called Write More Personality. And it was like, I think the original headline was write the world's, how to write the world's most unput downable copy. And she's like, well, no one's searching for that. So we need to like, how to inject fun and life into your personality, into your writing. So you change that to the headline.
Brittany Herzberg (06:31.179)
Mm-hmm.
Justin Blackman (06:40.934)
from an SEO standpoint, it worked, but I hated it. Like every time I looked at that site, I hated it. And then you and I were kind of talking and you're like, go back to the other headline. You need to put you in, let's work on some things. Like she didn't do the wrong things, but she did the wrong things for you. So you were able to work with me to put some fun back into it and improve the SEO, but still, but not like take me out of the writing.
Brittany Herzberg (06:44.77)
Mm-hmm.
Brittany Herzberg (06:50.466)
You
Brittany Herzberg (06:55.074)
No.
Brittany Herzberg (07:09.842)
Right, and that was the thing. Yeah, I remember you sent that over and I went and looked and was clicking through them and I've been in your world for a while. I know you for personality driven copy. And I went and saw the headlines and I was like, this does not scream Justin. Because literally just about everything you write, either I feel super informed, you know, the trivia stuff and the stories, or I'm laughing my ass off because you just write and it's like the funniest shit. So going and reading those headlines, I was like, this, no.
Justin Blackman (07:10.298)
That was it.
Brittany Herzberg (07:39.466)
Like, it's not going to draw in the right people because keywords are going to get people to the site, but your words, your personality is going to keep them there and keep them reading and then hopefully even then convert them into something, an email subscriber, podcast listener, student, whatever. So yeah, that just, she didn't do the wrong thing. And I want to be really, really clear about that. No one is necessarily doing the wrong thing.
Justin Blackman (07:41.924)
Yeah.
Brittany Herzberg (08:04.554)
because we all have our avenues, we all have our tactics, we all have our frameworks, but especially for someone who's known for personality-driven copy, you have to really be careful about what you're gonna shove in the headline. So we were able to do a little bit more specific keyword research for your people. It wasn't just personality copy writing or whatever, but it was really, really specific and tailored to your people, which having...
been in your world and understanding what you do. That was a really fun project for me, but now I'm doing them more than talking. So what was it when we were chatting through at the beginning and you're like, this is what I've got. How could you help me or could you help me? Was there anything about me or our conversation that was happening that you were like, oh, this is gonna be a good fit?
Justin Blackman (08:53.058)
No.
Brittany Herzberg (08:56.138)
conversation over. We're done. We're done. Right? Yeah, that is true. So...
Justin Blackman (08:59.347)
Good for asking yes or no questions.
Justin Blackman (09:04.662)
So what was it? It was because you knew me and I knew that you would find a way to approach things differently. If we were going by the book, what the other person did was fantastic. It did improve the numbers, it did help, but it lost me. Your style is more fun. Your style is more personal. You understand stories, you understand what I'm doing and you had been around me. So I trusted you to...
not take me out of it. I knew that you would find a way to put me back in and boost other elements where like, hey, maybe the headline can still be fun, but we just need to pepper in these other words here and it'll still show up in the search results. You knew a way to combine everything to make it feel more like me without burying me over SEO. Now it's still Justin with SEO, but it's not SEO with Justin.
Brittany Herzberg (10:03.986)
Right? Yeah, that's a good explanation. And thank you for saying that because I take great pride in that as you know. I'm like, no, we have to walk. It's a very fine balance. And if you lean too far one way or the other, you're either going to lose something and you really have to find that balance. So for reference, what we worked on, we did keyword research, we did an SEO audit, and then I think I lobbed a few blog ideas at you for the future, but you have a lot of them.
Justin Blackman (10:30.094)
Yeah, I have a lot of them. I haven't written them yet.
Brittany Herzberg (10:34.006)
That's okay. What did you like about the process of working together?
Justin Blackman (10:38.906)
Well, so again, not to say anything bad about the other person, which she gave me a list of blog topics, but I read the list and I didn't want to write any of them. And they would be important, they would get an audience, but it wasn't the audience that I wanted. And she's like, well, here's what people are searching for. I'm like, yeah, but that's not what my people are searching for. And I kind of want people to, I don't want people, but my best people have stumbled onto me.
Brittany Herzberg (10:49.806)
Mm.
Brittany Herzberg (11:08.439)
Mm-hmm.
Justin Blackman (11:10.383)
They're not searching how to write a funny blog post. They're people who are funny writers. They're not searching for this. And I just, it's sort of a more of an organic thing. And there were ways to boost that without forcing it. And I think the information, the blog topics that you gave me were more of an advanced level. So it wasn't like personality or copywriting 101 or brand voice 101. My stuff is higher level.
Brittany Herzberg (11:25.156)
Mm-hmm.
Brittany Herzberg (11:37.763)
Mm.
Justin Blackman (11:37.942)
It's not made for everyone. I don't want to, I mean, I'd love to be number one in Brand Voice as far as search results. That would be great. But I don't want everyone coming to me. I need a certain caliber of people that are ready for me. So you gave me more specific ideas, but like also ideas that would be fun to write about and not just what is Brand Voice. Like she gave me a structure for like a...
A pillar blog post. And great idea. I started writing it and it just sort of sucked the life out of me. I've written this a hundred times before, but I did that four years ago. I don't want to write that now. It just didn't feel at the level that I wanted it to be at. Not that it was the wrong level for most people, but it wasn't for the level of my people. I think you took more of my...
my ultimate goals and sort of understood some of the struggle that I had with it and made it more personal and also more fun. And it just gave me stuff that I wasn't competing with what is Brand Voice. It was higher level. It was more about the writer that wanted to get better at it, not who wanted to learn it for the first time, but who hit a plateau in their current learning and was looking to uplevel.
Brittany Herzberg (12:39.617)
Mm-hmm.
Brittany Herzberg (12:58.354)
Yeah, and this has come up a lot in conversations just this week, so I'm glad that you even brought this up. But the easiest way I found to explain this is like, if we think of the client journey, we've got people who are like, what does SEO stand for in my world? Then we have people who are like, okay, fine, I've been over here like ignoring SEO, but I guess it's time I pay attention to it because I'm really tired of posting every freaking day on Instagram. What do I need to do? And can you help me? That's the difference in content that we're talking about.
What is SEO? What is brand voice over to? How can I elevate my brand voice writing? How can I actually like optimize my blog post? That's what we're talking about. So if you're listening or you're watching this, that's the difference here. So that was really awesome. And I know we have, so we had emails going back and forth. We had Voxer going back and forth, which was really fun. We had comments in the Google Docs, things like that. But one thing I do want to point out is two things. You were able to take the keywords.
and I did not write your headlines. I kind of gave you pointers and it seemed like, do I want to ask it that way? No. So you had your copywriting and I said, here's your keywords, kind of like, go for it. You don't have to use the keywords in order. You can do this, da, and gave you some pointers. Did you feel, how did you feel going into that, I guess, project, if you will, at that point?
Justin Blackman (14:22.918)
I think it was great having keywords rather than ideas because it allowed me to build around them and not just take a template of how to write a headline, how to write more personality, you know, with four copywriters. It wasn't just stuffing it in. You gave me a couple of interesting words that I was like, oh, I can play with this. This is a funny word. I can use this somehow and I could build around it. So basically like you gave me
Brittany Herzberg (14:28.448)
Mm-hmm.
Justin Blackman (14:52.79)
I don't know, you gave me, it's almost like a reverse Mad Libs. Rather than give me like a sentence to plug one word into, you gave me a word to build a sentence around. And I kind of liked that. It, it gave me more, uh, it gave me just the right amount of constraint to, to make a good headline, uh, but also gave me room to play.
Brittany Herzberg (15:03.086)
Exactly.
Brittany Herzberg (15:13.394)
I like that. I like reverse and adlibs. I'm so using that somewhere. That's really awesome. So with the SEO audit, which for anyone listening, if you're not familiar with an SEO audit, it's basically a report that goes through and I'm finding errors, I'm finding issues, but I'm also giving you a report card of sorts of like, here's where you're at right now. Here's our baseline. These are things that are, you know, a little bit worrisome. These are things we need to fix. And these are things that are going great.
you were able to go and just like fix your errors and you were probably like my first client who was like just off to the races and you were like I'm on it I'm gonna go like fix it I've had two clients who have done that and you were definitely the first one to do that so like talk me through that a little bit.
Justin Blackman (15:55.782)
Well, it was also because I knew my stuff was broken and I just didn't, I wanted it fixed. I just didn't know what to fix. I didn't know what a meta tag was. I didn't know how to do any of this stuff. And you're like, dummy, it's this, just write that line. I'm like, oh, I can do that. I literally just didn't know. I didn't know what I didn't know. And once you pointed it out, it was an easy fix. And I was happy to make those changes. And I mean, you saw the reports that they improved instantly.
Brittany Herzberg (15:57.975)
Mm-hmm
Brittany Herzberg (16:08.59)
I'm sorry.
Brittany Herzberg (16:16.205)
Yeah.
Brittany Herzberg (16:25.586)
Yeah, they did. And for the record, I did not say dummy. That was Justin saying that because I don't make anybody feel silly. Not true. No, but that's I really like hearing that. So for the keywords, you were able to like reverse mad limit for the SEO audit. You knew what the problem was. And then the again, like the best practices for fixing it for remedying it because like with, you know, meta descriptions, it's like aim for this many characters. And here's where you will likely find it on the back end of your website.
Justin Blackman (16:30.094)
No, you did. Brittany calls her clients, Dummy. It's on the record.
Brittany Herzberg (16:53.534)
And then for blogs, I like hearing that you were actually excited about those topics. Because that's a huge part of it. And even whether it's clients I'm working with or students going through any of my courses, it's like I want the lowest barrier to entry. If me telling you writing a 500 word blog post is going to get you to go, oh, I can do that. No problem. I want you to do that. If me saying like this blog post topic versus this one, and you go choose the one that like you're actually excited about, and you're like ready to write about.
That's the difference that it makes and that's the stuff that comes through too, even after you've written it and it goes out on the internet. Cool. So what do you have now as a result of working together?
Justin Blackman (17:36.49)
Let's see, I have a page that I like more than I did after the first SEO audit. I have more traffic. I have more drivers. And also less anxiety of knowing that there was stuff to do, but I didn't want to. Like it's done. It's kind of one of those things that's like you put off for so long because you don't want to do it and then it takes like five minutes. Like, oh, that was easy. Working with you is easy.
Brittany Herzberg (17:45.696)
Yeah.
Brittany Herzberg (17:55.522)
Mm-hmm.
Justin Blackman (18:05.558)
And you told me what to fix and I was like, oh, okay. I kind of wish I did that four years ago.
Brittany Herzberg (18:12.746)
You and me both. There's stuff with my own website where I'm like, oh, I know I need to fix that. Even I had a project that I was working on this week and I put it off for a little bit and I was finally like, okay, we are sitting down and we are just like knocking this out. 30 minutes later, it was done. It's just one of those things. Awesome. Well, it was definitely a blast working with you. And then we were able to collaborate on a web copy project, which was really exciting because I got to see your, and I'll make sure we link it. I got to see what was the package called that we did.
Justin Blackman (18:26.658)
Yeah. Hehehehe.
Justin Blackman (18:41.037)
We did the brand voice finder.
Brittany Herzberg (18:42.354)
Yeah, that was a lot of fun because I got to just like sort of be a fly on the wall and just like message Justin periodically because we were kind of doing it in a format with a client that you don't normally necessarily do that for. So we were very much collaborating on that. It was a blast. Yeah. All right. So getting into the Q&A portion of things, one question that I've been like itching to ask you all week is one that I get a lot from people and they're always asking
Justin Blackman (18:59.746)
Yeah, it was good.
Brittany Herzberg (19:11.65)
How can I show my personality even in a blog post, for example, that's like so boring, so dry? Like how can I infuse my personality in that?
Justin Blackman (19:20.91)
Well, I think it's a step one is make sure you have one. Make sure you have a personality. That's, and make sure it's, I guess step two is make sure it's a good one that we want to put in there. I mean, boring is a personality. But I think the kind of line that I've been repeating a lot lately, and I'm quoting myself here. So this is like the person that like takes an Instagram picture of their tweet and doing that.
Brittany Herzberg (19:26.658)
I'm just trying to hold it together.
Brittany Herzberg (19:35.143)
Yeah, that was fair.
Justin Blackman (19:50.138)
When you're writing a blog post, I think we're at a point where people want it to be opinionated. We're not just looking for information. The price of information because of AI is free. Information is everywhere. We want viewpoints. So I think the point of the blog post is not being able to write well, it's about having something to say. So I think you need to put your opinion in it. As long as you're not writing news, like journalism, which should still be straightforward, I...
Brittany Herzberg (20:11.925)
Mm.
Justin Blackman (20:20.378)
I'm gonna plant my flag there. The blog posts, the thing that draws people to me or repels people from me is my viewpoint on things. I am absolutely for certain things and I am against certain things. And that's been the difference. So having a viewpoint one is important rather than just like three keys to good copywriting. Be like, hey, here are the three things that I think you should do. To me, that's more interesting.
Cause it's probably, it might not necessarily, and like number, don't be like, I know OMG, number two is gonna be mind blowing. Put something interesting in there that's, I think the other thing is you need to, and I made this mistake early on, you need to understand what should lead and if it should be your personality or if it should be the content. I am absolutely guilty of forcing my personality into the lead when it shouldn't have been there, when the content is a, is a
good enough idea on its own, it doesn't need me. So knowing where to interject a little bit of humor or personality versus knowing when to let the moment be still, to let it speak for itself. Going on a tangent here. So there's a line in Hunfer at October when they're, I think it's Gene Hackman and, is it Denzel Washington? I don't remember.
Brittany Herzberg (21:33.431)
Go for it.
Brittany Herzberg (21:41.994)
I don't remember that movie well. Don't kill me.
Justin Blackman (21:44.414)
All right, they're in the submarine and they're surfaced and they're coasting and they're watching the sunset and there's a moment of silence. And Gene Hackman is like, good job, soldier. Some people don't know when to let the moment sit. Some people wanna talk over the moment. Sometimes you need to be silent and let the moment actually be there and let it hang. So, totally misquoted that, but I think there's an important, the sense man's there. You need to know when to just let
Brittany Herzberg (22:08.406)
The sentiment was there.
Justin Blackman (22:13.87)
the content speak for itself, and then when to put your opinion in. And I still think that you should have the opinion, that's what I'm talking about here, but there are certain times where you don't wanna, you don't wanna step on it. You don't wanna step on what you're teaching. The viewpoint as far as how to put that in, it's because it already we go a little PG-13 here. All right, so there's, I've written this above, I've written about this before, it's a Chuck Palahniuk thing. There's, he talks about strippers and comedians.
Brittany Herzberg (22:33.897)
Oh yeah, sure, go for it.
Justin Blackman (22:43.958)
Essentially strippers cause tension and comedians release tension. And you have to have this little bit of balance between knowing when you want to build tension with your personality, like, but I don't think that's the problem. I think that there's something deeper here. Like saying things like that, you're building anticipation. So you're preparing for the bigger moment. Then when that moment hits, then you can be the comedian and then you can break the tension and be like, ah, see, I told you that was important.
You know, just small things like that. Putting in your personality, but understanding where the balance is. When to make a joke or when to use a GIF or a GIF or fight over whether it's GIF or GIF. Like all these little things, knowing where to place it, whether you should make the joke or let the GIF make the joke or the GIF make the go, I don't know. The...
Brittany Herzberg (23:36.586)
If you're listening to this and you have not been exposed to Justin, like, his emails are just like this.
Justin Blackman (23:41.738)
Right, it's just random stuff. But this is it, even what I'm doing now, just sort of the way I'm talking, where do you change the pace? Where do you add in the joke? Look, here's one of my favorite things that I talk about in Write More Personality is, based off of old newspapers, the two most commonly read pieces were the headline and the caption underneath the photo. So I'm very strategic with where I put my GIFs.
GIFs, I don't even remember what I say anymore, but GIFs. Yeah.
Brittany Herzberg (24:15.682)
broken you.
Justin Blackman (24:16.966)
I'm, it's long ago. But then I put a caption underneath it, which is funny where I sort of double down on the joke, but underneath the image, I re-engage, I put some of the most important lines there because I re-engage the reader after the image, because they're gonna read the caption and then they're gonna come back in. So knowing where to put your personality,
not just how, but where, to put it, is important. So the re-engagement techniques, when to break tension. If things are getting a little heavy, if you need to, to me, when things are getting a little too serious for me, I'm probably gonna put in a joke, the comedian, to break the tension.
Brittany Herzberg (25:03.51)
Yep, same. This is really great and I appreciate that you even brought up the point of having an opinion and sharing the opinion because that is really key and that is what so many of us resist because we don't want to get kicked out of the tribe and we've seen how things have played out over the last handful of years and it hasn't been great for everyone.
But you really need to have that in there in some capacity. Because otherwise, let's play out the long-term effects. You're going to end up working with clients you don't really like, who don't really like you. Maybe they don't respect you. Maybe, you know, there's just going to be like a mismatch there. So if you can be brave, pull up your pants and just like have an opinion and share it. Even if it's like one line or two lines or just even a little bit, that's going to be really helpful. The other thing that actually supports is that Google has E-E-A-T. They want these four elements to show up in pretty much all of your writing if possible. Expertise, experience, authority and trustworthiness. So guess what? That points a lot to social proof into storytelling. So that you
Justin Blackman (26:10.448)
Look at that.
Brittany Herzberg (26:10.958)
I mean, it just kind of like naturally works. So if you can have that, if you have your opinion, you figure out what it is, and then you figure out how and when and where you want to share it, then that supports the stuff that even Google is looking for. Not just the people, but also the stuff that the search engines are going to recognize and want to then use to show you in front of the right audience so that you're getting in front of not just like any traffic, but more of that like warm to hot traffic who
are actively looking for something, someone like you or something like you have to give them. Yeah. It's real smart. But I also, the other, the other thing I like that you pointed out too is that giving stuff a moment to breathe is really, really important. I was really great at that with massage therapy.
Justin Blackman (26:44.26)
Yeah.
Justin Blackman (26:48.504)
You take that back.
Brittany Herzberg (27:00.134)
I feel like I'm still learning how to do that even with copywriting and interviewing and things like that, which is ironic because we're recording this on the day that the How to Interview Will podcast went live. But there is, you really do have to say something and just step away. It's like back slowly away.
Justin Blackman (27:17.91)
Yeah, like, and honestly, a lot of times that comes down to formatting. Um, even if it's ellipses, uh, are you trailing off? Are you breaking things down? Are you adding in extra white space? Are you changing the font? Are you underlining? Are you adding in a hyperlink? Those little formatting ideas can actually add some of the space that you're looking to add. Are you letting it breathe? Um, it, there are tiny little techniques to do that. Um, which.
They take time and there's no one best way. This is where I sort of rally against some of the grammar rules. Because if you look hard enough, you can find grammar rules that say anything. And just being able to defend your logic behind it. I think that that's important.
Brittany Herzberg (28:04.03)
Yeah. And in case anyone is wondering, Justin is the reason I now use M dashes. And I've cut down on my exclamation point usage, but not a whole lot. It's cool. I'm still going to use them because I can justify it. I'm a happy person. And, you know, to your point, and you've even mentioned this while we've been talking is like, I want my brand to be fun. I want to like remove the seriousness and the boring and the like, I don't want to deal with SEO. No one really wants to.
Justin Blackman (28:10.07)
I'll take it.
Justin Blackman (28:15.502)
I judged a little bit on those, but that's okay.
Brittany Herzberg (28:33.462)
But it's there and it's like extra credit for a business owner. So why not do it? And we can do it in a way that's interesting, playful, fun. That's not so serious and boring. Yeah. Is there any, like, as you're talking about the different grammar things, are there any, whether it's a grammar suggestion or punctuation type of thing or. Wording or formatting or whatever, any kind of thing that you feel like is overlooked.
Justin Blackman (28:44.608)
Yeah.
Brittany Herzberg (28:59.198)
And that's maybe like a simple first step for someone to include in their copy to spice up the personality or anything like that.
Justin Blackman (29:08.231)
For me, a lot of it, not necessarily, it's not a grammar thing, it's a cadence thing. If you watch some great comedians, some of the older comedians, the style is changing a little bit more towards storytelling now, but older comedians, you had a five-minute set. You had to make your writing as tight as possible. Short sentences, ending on the power words so the audience wouldn't laugh over the joke.
basically optimizing a joke, but shorter sentences read, like the shorter their sentences, the more jokes they can make. So short and choppy has a funnier cadence to it. It can also be punchier. Like I'm writing manifestos right now and a lot of them are short. So sometimes shortening and tightening the sentences can have a dramatic impact on the way that it's read. And it also, if you write longer,
it holds more weight. Like the thing I say a lot is you can write to be consumed or you can write to be digested. If you write slow, longer sentences with lots of commas and lots of words, your reader is going to naturally read this at a more flowy, longer, more involved pace, as opposed to short, as opposed to funny, as opposed to choppy. It just goes fast and then you can slow people down. So the cadence and the pacing,
To me, that's one of the most important things to learn.
Brittany Herzberg (30:36.934)
The other thing that you were, as you were talking that came to mind, I want to say this came up in the call that we had with our client, where it was instead of leading with like a question, you're leading with a statement because that had more an air of authority. Yeah.
Justin Blackman (30:51.138)
Yeah. I forgot about that one.
Brittany Herzberg (30:53.49)
Yeah, for me that was game changer because now I'm catching in my own copy where I'm doing that and where I really want to shift away from that. I want more of the questions to be involving the reader in the conversation that's basically taking place on the page, which is then happening in their head and makes us all feel a little bit nutty. But I want them involved, but I want also them to see that I am the authority on whatever the topic is that I'm sharing.
Justin Blackman (31:19.534)
Yeah, and yeah, I'm trying to remember exactly what it was. I think a lot of their blog posts, they all started out with three questions, which is a very common technique, especially among newer writers. Sometimes it's easier to make three statements. It's more powerful. Have you ever been struggling with copywriting? Have you ever not known what word to use? Have you ever been stuck in the word-hippo rabbit hole going down? Well, dear reader, let me tell you, let me show you what I've got.
Brittany Herzberg (31:33.718)
Mm-hmm.
Justin Blackman (31:49.882)
Those are questions the reader can maybe identify, but if you turn around and say, if you struggle with the words to find, if you struggle finding the right words and wind up on 17 strings of word hippo, let me tell you what to do. All of a sudden, you're more authoritative. That's basically the switch there.
Brittany Herzberg (32:12.103)
Yeah, and it was really powerful even just to hear that in passing when it was directed to somebody else and I was like, oh, that's really smart. And I've even had a couple of clients where it's come up and I know that they want to be more of the...
expert builder authority, that type of thing, come across as a little bit spicier. And so I was like, you can't lead with a question. And so we've even had that, you know, just how you read them all out, like that we've even had that kind of a conversation. So that was a really big tip for me that I learned from you. Let's just keep on sharing the knowledge. Now it's going out to people's AirPods. I know it's great. Is there anything else that you feel like you want to make mention of when it comes to
Justin Blackman (32:41.93)
I learned from somebody else, so happy to pass it on.
Justin Blackman (32:49.478)
Woohoo!
Brittany Herzberg (32:55.798)
whether it's like keywords, personality, copy, anything.
Justin Blackman (33:01.542)
Hmm, Brittany does really call her clients dumb. Let's get that on the record again. I'm doubling down. I have the boxer comments, I'll play it.
Brittany Herzberg (33:05.694)
That is so not true.
You really are! I shouldn't have asked you that one. Rude!
Justin Blackman (33:16.591)
No, I will say you made it so SEO didn't have to be boring and it still worked. I like that you're able to just kind of bring everything into a better light, but bring it in, bring it into the spotlight next to me rather than shift the spotlight onto the words.
Brittany Herzberg (33:38.158)
I like that too. You're so, okay, this is amazing because you're just really good with the words and the copy and the personality, which is why I do wanna give a small plug to the fact that you came in last round of the case study training program and we had the brand voice workshop in there, which was really, really important to me and it was such a blast. There are, most of the students, I think pretty much all of the students are service providers. And then there are some who are strategists, marketers, copywriters, where they're...
They're either familiar with you or they're kind of familiar with the type of concept of brand voice copywriting. But I really wanted to create a resource that everyone could use, whether they're writing case studies for themselves or as a deliverable for clients. And you just absolutely hit the nail on the head. Is there anything that you remember from that workshop that you want to speak to, other than that I did not call my students dummies?
Justin Blackman (34:31.278)
No, no that's it.
Brittany Herzberg (34:33.358)
Okay, that was a blast. You're like, nope, you just yanked the rug out from under me. Where can people find you? Do you have any resources that you want to share about like any and all of the Link stuff?
Justin Blackman (34:45.43)
Yeah, the best place for this audience is probably bran which is all my workshops, all my trainings, all my lessons. You can also download my free book, What They Hear When You Write, which is co-written with Abby Woodcock, all about brand voice, about how to analyze, document, mirror, change somebody's writing style and their writing voice. My personal stuff is over at prettyflycopy.com.
and that's more about if you want to hire me to write with me.
Brittany Herzberg (35:16.286)
Which you should do and like I said, I'm going to make sure that service is full of because that was really incredible just to even witness watching you walk through the voice guide. So thanks for letting me see that.
Justin Blackman (35:25.862)
Thanks. Well, thanks for turning the voice guide into some really kickass copy.
Brittany Herzberg (35:32.202)
awesome, you're welcome. That was a fun project. We should do that again. Except not website copy. We got to do something else. All right, thanks for listening and I will catch you next time.
Justin Blackman (35:35.809)
Okay.
Justin Blackman (35:44.782)
Bye.
