Copywriting with Dan Nelken

This week I had a thoroughly enjoyable and thought provoking chat with Copywriting expert and author of the modern classic 'A self help guide for copywriters' Dan Nelken .

I've been a follower and admirer of Dans work for several years, so I was delighted to finally get him on the podcast to talk about copywriting techniques, LinkedIn?? and Bunions!

What follows is not a transcript of our interview, merely a summary. I strongly recommend you click below to listen to our chat in full below, or simply search for 'Informed by Mark Williams' on your podcast player of choice.

Here are the topics we covered;

Dan's Journey and Overcoming Self-Doubt.

Dan shared his early days working as a forklift driver, his later studies at copywriting school, and his subsequent work as a copywriter at various ad agencies, working with massive brands.

Authenticity in Professional Content

We chatted about how people find it challenging to really be themselves on LinkedIn?? and how we need to become 'an expert in being ourselves' and why our inner critic is a 'ding dong' - I wrongly assumed this was a Canadian term!

He also shared his struggles with self-doubt and the importance of remaining true to oneself in communication

Balancing Personal and Professional Content

We discussed how sharing personal experiences can effectively engage the target audience by illustrating overcoming relevant challenges. Dan emphasized the importance of authenticity and using language to impress oneself rather than others

"Your audience is you"

We also discussed the trend of using complex vocabulary in professional settings and debated its effectiveness as a means of communication.

Content Creation Strategy and LinkedIn Success

Dan admits to being no expert in LinkedIn?? content strategies but he has, through trial and error developed a style using images, quotes and carousel templates that resonate with his audience.

He also discussed his 'list and twist technique' as demonstrated in this 2 page carousel post...

AI & Creativity

Dan does use AI and is impressed with it's capabilities but he "prompts it to prompt him to be more creative"...not to answer questions or create for him.

Book Rankings and Course Launches

Dan revealed his challenges with the competitive element of launching a book and bestseller rankings and how with that and marketing his course he stuck to his values and accepted that he is not going to appeal to everyone and that being helpful to others is more important than maximising sales.

Embracing Self-Expression on LinkedIn

Everyone has to start somewhere and Dans advice is to start small and develop a habit for content, even if it's just 15 mins a week brainstorming ideas for posts. Figure out who you are and how you want to communicate and develop the habit of creating content ideas.

As mentioned earlier, above really is a very brief summary of a 55 minute conversation so I strongly recommend you listen to the full episode to gain the most from Dan's expertise.

Thanks again to Dan for taking the time to share so many golden nuggets.

Post of the week

Plenty of good nominations this week including this highly impressive video post from Farouk Bacha in support of Lara Acosta

This weeks winner had less impressions and engagement but I've picked it because I think we can learn more from it.

An attention grabbing and recognisable image of a film star couple with a brilliant hook 'My new man!!' followed by...

Well icon…. Well screen saver.. ok not even screen saver… look I took the image from Google!

and then the (now irresistible) 'See more' link

Great structure, a great use of image and even more critical to it's success, an important and potential controversial topic. I believe that comment threads allow us to see differing opinions and that helps us to form our own views and so posts like this achieve much more than just awareness of an issue/topic.

Congratulations to Jo P. (although you would be much easier to tag if you used your full name...just sayin!) and thanks to Katharine Robinson for nominating it.

That's all for this week, feel free to say hi to Dan and let him know what you thought of the episode.

Until next time.