You don’t want to sound like anyone else.

You know you’re supposed to “use your voice” and put your unique spin on your ideas…

BUT what does that mean?
And HOW do you do it!

We’ve got you covered.
On this episode of Content Creation Made Easy, we break down how to write with YOUR VOICE!

Thanks to Justin Blackman, a brand voice expert, you’re gonna learn:

What “voice” really is –

Why using incredibly simple “rules” gives you freedom to be YOU.

How to sound like yourself – and watch your engagement rise and your emails get OPENED.

Justin & I also discuss how AI tools like ChatGPT can help you, as well as their limitations.

Pssst: Do not be afraid of using AI.

This episode is all about how to find & reveal your voice AND make it easier to create content & copy.

Justin goes into how that might look for you!

One more thing: go check out his website – it’ll inspire you, give you a chuckle, and encourage you to use your voice:

https://prettyflycopy.com/

**We’d so appreciate you giving a review on your favorite pod platform! Your reviews are SO much more important than you realize… So thanks for doing that!

Links Mentioned
https://www.prettyflycopy.com

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Full Transcript

Jen Liddy

Hello. Hello. Welcome to this week's episode of Content Creation Made Easy. I'm your host, Jen Liddy, and I'm excited about my guest today, Justin Blackman, because we're going to be talking about AI and why not to be afraid of AI, how to use AI, how to stop making it sound boring.

But also we're going to talk about your voice and how to kind of harness your voice and make your writing sound more like you leaning into your unis even more.

So, Justin, I really want to appreciate we want to tell you how much I appreciate you getting on because this is, like, super last minute. And also, he changed the time for me because of my 15-year-old. I just I'm so appreciative. Before I ask you to talk, I have to read your bio because it's so great and I think people could really use more work on their bio.

So take a note, people.

Justin Blackman is a brand voice expert who goes overboard. He's written copy for more than 429 people and dozens of brands and managed to sound like every one of them. He uses a technique called brand Ventriloquism that allows him to mirror your voice and writing style so you can scale your content authentically, even if you're not writing it at all yourself.

Jen Liddy

I love that it's 429 people. These are the kinds of details that just make writing pop. I love it.

 Justin Blackman

Yeah. It's all about the specificity and unusual numbers are more memorable. If I said more than 400, you might think it's 401. The old videos, it's like, less than $20. It's 1999. When you get specific, they're stickier, they resonate, and people remember them. And it adds also an element of proof to it. So it's not just a generalization, it's like no, these are my real numbers I'm showing you- Yeah. I looked yesterday and there's 429. Right

Jen Liddy

 In a neighborhood in our city, there's a park where the speed limit is 17. It's the same kind of thing. It's like, what the hell is it, 17 miles an hour? But it makes you take notice.

 Justin Blackman

Yeah. Because if it was 15, you would round up and you start going, like, 20 and then 25. That's what happens. Yeah, there's definitely a couple of those. I've seen 13. I've seen 17. And it makes you drive slower.

 Jen Liddy

Totally.

 Justin Blackman

It does.

Jen Liddy

It makes you pay attention.

 Justin Blackman

Yeah.

Jen Liddy

All right, let's dive into your expertise. So can you give us a little background on who you are and what you do, just so we can before we jump into talking about the really juicy stuff.

 Justin Blackman

Sure. So, I mean, I can go back to my content days. I used to work for IHG Hotels, the parent brand of Holiday Inn. Crown Plaza Intercontinental. I was a content writer there and also got a chance to dabble into all of the conversion elements and really had to understand how to write to get stuff approved because everything was being reviewed by dozens and dozens of people.

 Jen Liddy

Are these people wearing suits?

Justin Blackman

Some of them were, some of them weren't. But that's actually that shows you the diversity of everything, because I had to write for the, like, the casual guy and jeans and flip flops on Fridays and also for the guys in suits and ties with women in suits and business suits.

So huge diversity, all who wanted to put their fingerprints on it. And it got to the point where I was writing for approval rather than what I really wanted to write. But then there were those times when something would happen, and it would just be like, hey, an opening just came up. We need to get an email out in an hour. Can you write something?

And I would, and that's when I would write for me. I'd be like, here's what I'd want to read. I'd write it, and one person would sign off on it and go out. And those were the highest performing emails.

 Jen Liddy

Oh, my God, what a great story.

 Justin Blackman

Watered down. I didn't have to muddy the message. I didn't have to I didn't have to hide.

 Jen Liddy

You didn't have to, like, vanilla-ize yourself.

Justin Blackman

Yeah, exactly. It so I was able to write punchier, and I got a little bit of freedom to do that. More and more.

We had some blogs, and I wound up writing four of the top ten blog articles in the company's gigantic archive because they were fun, and there's more here.

So eventually I left. IHG and I went on to do more of that, and I started to write more fun stuff, more stuff that I wanted to write. And I wound up writing for. I was hired by an agency where I had to write ads and emails for hundreds and hundreds of people.

At last count, with that client, I think it was around it was just shy of 300, but I wrote for so many people, and I saw all of their quirks, and sometimes they were hiding these things, but I would find it, and I would bring it out, and those were the ads that did best. So I found how to bring people's voice to life by making it sound more like them and less the way that they were taught to write in school.

 Jen Liddy

Oh, my God. Yes. So we didn't talk about this, but I used to be a high school English teacher and then a college English professor writing specifically. And I felt like these kids had no idea how to be themselves.

But also they're not encouraged to be themselves because there is such a specific format, and it's just so voiceless. Does this prove your thesis? Is there textual evidence in here? God, I don't miss that kind of writing at all.

Justin Blackman

Yeah, it's not fun to write. It's not fun to read. It's important to learn how to do so. I understand the process, but it's also nice when you realize they don't have to do it anymore.

 Jen Liddy

Tell me how did you find this part of yourself that was able to just lean into writing, have fun, and then do it with this voice of your own? We'll talk later about your algorithm for finding other people's voice and mirroring, but how did you find your own?

 Justin Blackman

The fact is, the writing came last. I used to work before I got into content writing. I was in field marketing. I worked for Red Bull, Puma, Five Hour Energy. I I ran a lot of the sampling programs.

Like, with Red Bull, the Mini Cooper with a big can on the back, I used to manage those teams, and I trained the teams, and I was also out in the field a couple of times a month, and I've spoken to hundreds and thousands of people in every type of situation you can imagine.

I had to learn to think on my feet. I practiced a lot of improv. I practiced a lot of quick hit storytelling techniques, and I stole those from comics. I used to study stand-up comedy. Not that I was a comic, but I studied the art of it and the communication, and I learned how to get across, and I learned how to make fast connections with people.

That just sort of became part of my process and my style when I got into copywriting, when I moved to content.

Then I started studying copywriting, and I learned that if you made a Venn diagram about how to create a good joke and the rules of comedy and then if you took the rules of copywriting, if you were to make a Venn diagram, you would have a circle.

 Justin Blackman

Yeah, they were the same rules. And copywriting, you just don't make it funny, but you still have the same elements. Like, you got to follow the rules of three. You have to end on the power word. And then there's the day drinking.

The day drinking, that just makes it all better.

 Justin Blackman

But it's just like, the rules are there, and the best comedians are great writers. And I just sort of combined all of those things, and they were part of who I am, and they just figuring out the structure behind how to do it, who I was and what I was saying, how to put it in a way that resonated more impactfully, just sort of fell into place.

 Jen Liddy

That's amazing. So I'm a huge word nerd. When I went to your website, which I am going to share at the end of the episode, because I feel like everybody needs to go to this website, and even if you don't need services, it's so oh, my God, it's funny, it's fun, it's light, it's impactful.

It's different you just set yourself apart so much by what you've done, and it's so just personal. I felt like I read that and I just got a sense of your personality.

That's always what I'm trying to do with my own writing.

I would not even put myself close to what you're able to do, but I'm also trying to teach other people how to do that. In the online industry that I see for my clients who are often introverted, maybe new-ish to business or they've been in online business a while, but they're experts in their field.

But finding their voice and having permission to find their voice is so hard for them.

A lot of times they don't want to be on stage, they don't want the spotlight on them. So sometimes they just avoid marketing altogether or they've been told they're a shitty writer.

Jen Liddy

So they have this belief that “it just can't work for me”. So I'm curious when I say all of those things, what comes to your brain?

Justin Blackman

So, I mean, there's a lot there. One of the things that I love about writing is it gives me a chance to be more extroverted. I am an introvert by nature, but actually, I like being on stage and I like writing.

I can be more confident when I write because I can edit. When you hear me speak, I'm going to say ridiculous stuff. You're getting my crappy first draft. When I'm writing, you're getting my third or fourth draft of it. So it's more polished, it's more perfect, and it makes me more confident in the message.

As long as I'm confident in the message that I'm saying it, the words will find their way out. So I'd rather write the email than.

 Jen Liddy

Do a video, right?

 Justin Blackman

Than do a video. Right. I'm not big on social media.

I don't like it. You're never going to see me do a Reel. I just don't want to do it.

But I will write you a blog post, and I will write you emails, and I write you fun captions on Facebook.

But I'm not big on Instagram. I'm never going to go live. I'll do stuff like this where I'm talking to you one on one and I'll present all day long, but I'm not out there to be showy.

People come to me because I just I write what interests me, and the right people find it and it resonates with them.

I don't just want to write the same thing as everybody else. I want to put my unique spin on it and tie in my background the whole thing with voice.

If you're watching the video of this, you see I've got Super Grover behind me and I tie it into puppetry and Jim Henson and Frank Oz and about how they created voices and characters and brought things to life.

Those rules still apply the same things that they were doing to create the voices of Cookie Monster and The Count and Kermit.

The way that it came across is the same way that it comes across in writing. And it's just more engaging to talk about it that way, even rather than talking about the math behind the numbers, which I do, and I dive into it. And I love the math behind the numbers, but it's more exciting if I talk about Super Grover.

 Jen Liddy

Can we dive in a little bit to start with AI? That was the original thing I was kind of intrigued by.

AI is like, okay, here we are, the robots are definitely taking over at this point, right?

AI feels scary to people, especially people who don't know how to use it, or people who are writers and they're like, “Oh, shit, is my job going to be obviated by this?”

And when you were recommended for me to reach out to, this is part of what I want to talk about.

But I know you're also an expert in helping us harness AI and then weave our voice into it. So I'm curious what your thoughts are.

 Justin Blackman

Well, the best way I did a workshop with my partner, Abby Woodcock, about this, and she had a great example about this. AI, like Chat and GPT is to copywriters what Canva was for graphic designers.

It made it more accessible to the people who really weren't going to hire copywriters anyway, or designers.

I use Canva and it's great because I can make my bad designs a little bit better. But I also know that there's going to hit a point where I'll be like, I've taken this as far as I can go. If I'm not happy with it, then I'm going to hire a designer.

But for those little janky logos and bitmaps and resizing images, I didn't want to hire anyone for that and I wasn't going to do it. I was going to find some cheap workaround that was going to be a pain in the butt.

But now I can pay $120 a year and be done with it. Now I can do all that stuff. So it's better for everybody because nobody wants to do those jobs anyway. 

 Jen Liddy

That's right.

This is the point.

 Justin Blackman

So Chat GPT is good at doing maybe in a cart abandonment email, but like a confirmation email, like a purchase confirmation. It can write that, congratulations, your shipment is on the way. It's good at that. It's good at doing the copy that nobody wants to think about, like listicles.

 Jen Liddy

And stuff like that.

 Justin Blackman

It can do listicles. It can actually do those pretty well, but it's the stuff that you don't want to waste your brain power on. It's very good at that because it's the stuff that doesn't have to have personality now.

Sure it can. There are some great confirmation emails, purchase confirmation emails, like the CD baby email, which is like, legendary in the copywriting world.

 It's about like, congratulations on your purchase. When we saw your order, it comes through Sheila from Accounts Payable started doing cartwheels.

 Jen Liddy

I've seen something like that. Yeah.

 Justin Blackman

Yeah. So it's called the CD baby email because they were the originators of it and it's been done thousands of times since. Some very well, some examples horribly wrong.

So runs the gamut, but most people are probably just going to be like, thanks for your order, shipping is on the way. Here's the tracking information.

 Jen Liddy

That's fine. Not everything needs to have bells, whistles. Got you.

 Justin Blackman

Yeah, it's very good at that. It's also good for getting your first draft.

A lot of people don't like staring at the blank page like, I don't know what to write about now you can just write me an email about blah and it's going to come out and you're going to get something and be like, this isn't good, but I can work with this.

Now. You don't have to write, you have to edit.

And editing is different; it's less creative, but you might find creativity spawned based off of Chat GPT.

And it's really good at linking some stuff, coming up with some interesting combinations and parallels that you might not you probably would have come up with had you spent enough time on it.

But it's whether or not you actually want to spend the time on it.

 Jen Liddy

Can you give an example? Have you used it in this way?

 Justin Blackman

So, yeah, I have. It's cool. Like, you can say, hey, give me an analogy between, let's say, what are things that your audience would write about?

 Jen Liddy

Oh, say, like, creating boundaries in their relationships or something.

 Justin Blackman

Okay, so give me an article. Write me an email about creating boundaries done as a comparison to a lion tamer.

Jen Liddy

Okay.

 Justin Blackman

And it will come up with something that will give you a not great version, but something that you'd be like, oh, actually, this is an interesting connection.

I can do more with this. And then you could talk about, like it's like herding cats.

And then you've got to know when to crack the whip and you can start to create all these little analogies and you can get the inspiration from Chat GPT without having to think about all the connections that you could make. It's going to spark some ideas.

 Jen Liddy

That is the first time I'm hearing that piece said that. It is so brilliant to me, because if you aren't wasting all of your brain power trying to generate an idea, trying to generate an analogy, trying to be clever, and it's boom right there for you.

And then you just let your brain relax and you're like, how can I take this on a tangent?

Or how can I fold in a story from my life or an example from my life that, oh my God, that's just like, I just want to take a huge breath and say that's actually a huge relief for people.

 Justin Blackman

Yeah. The chat GPT doesn't know your life.

It can't tell a story about your Aunt Sally who gave you your first sip of whiskey when you were 13. Only you can tell that story. You're the only one that can tell that story unless you tell it to a copywriter.

And then they can tell it too. Right. But you can do like, hey, what are a couple of things that a cool aunt does? And it will give you like, give me six cool things.

Give me six things that a cool aunt would do. And it'll tell you some ideas.

You might be like, actually five of these are garbage, but number six, my aunt actually did that. And there's a story there that I haven't thought about in years.

There's an email in there!

Jen Liddy

Oh, my God, I love that. That is an amazing insight. Can we talk a little bit about the math and algorithms that cause AI to just feel so lifeless and flat?

 Justin Blackman

Yeah, so there's a couple of things there's. Some of the reasons why it's flat and predictable is because it doesn't write wrong.

The most interesting writing that we come across is unpredictable.

AI is based off algorithms and predicting things the way that it literally writes sentences word by word, whereas we're thinking of ideas and it's just sort of coming out.

But what they're doing is they're linking word combinations. So it's based off of predictability.

And if you give it interesting prompts, you can come up with a little bit more interesting answers.

But if you reverse engineer it, you can see how it linked certain things. It just gives you…you don't have to do that heavy thinking.

So it's based off of numbers and patterns and word order and similarities.

And it can get a little bit interesting if you ask it to create like a haiku, because then it's forced to work within different parameters based off the syllable counts.

Write a poem and then it has to add rhyming into it and meter, so that's when you get some more interesting elements to it.

But the fact is, it's always based on predictability.

And Chat GPT in particular, which is the most common one. And there are a lot of AI programs out there.

Jen Liddy

There are some– Canva has one within it right now.

 Justin Blackman

Yeah. So I'll use ChatGPT just because it's the most common. It's like the Google of search results. Okay?

So it has a protective element to it. Like AI has, like somebody said, like an Isaac Azimov level where the robots are programmed to do no harm.

AI has that if you ask it to write a story, it's going to have a happy ending. If you try to get it to write a sad ending, it'll be like, no, I'm sorry, I can't do that. It won't agitate, it won't hurt you.

 Jen Liddy

That's interesting.

 Justin Blackman

I'm actually really glad that that's there.

 Jen Liddy

Yeah.

 Justin Blackman

But it also means that we're missing some core emotions that can pepper in some meat to your content and that surprise element.

 Jen Liddy

One of the things on your home page that I just laughed out loud when I saw it is right at the top, you've got a button for your opt in.

It says, Lick this button to get better writing.

I was like, that this is the mark of somebody who knows how to harness language and use that, like, whoa factor.

Justin Blackman

Actually, at one point, I had it said, now available in Grape, but I didn't know what to do with it. So it's like I'll use it somewhere else.

Jen Liddy

In blue raspberry.

 Justin Blackman

Yeah.

Jen Liddy

What the hell does blue raspberry even taste like?

 Justin Blackman

But it's that unpredictability, which which makes it kind of fun.

And so, like, even that to lick this, it was because, like, I didn't know whether to put click or tap, because if you're on a desktop, it's clicking, if you're on the phone, you're tapping.

And I was reading about the CTAs back when this was a bigger deal, like, well, what should you put it? Like, poke. I was like, Poke's a fun word, and I actually have poked a couple of places, but I needed something else.

I was like, well, what could you poke with? I'm like, your elbow, your nose, your tongue. All right. Like this. So that's where that came from. It's just putting a little bit of extra effort into whenever you're thinking about something.

It's like, I don't like to default to the obvious click or tap. Yeah. So AI right now is primarily defaulting to the obvious.

 Jen Liddy

Okay.

Justin Blackman

You can get it to go deeper with the right prompts, but it takes a little lot of work.

 Jen Liddy

So we can start using AI to actually kind of do that first layer of work that we that might be for some people who aren't naturally don't naturally see themselves as confident writers.

Like, this might just be like the first pass for them that gives them a spark to go further.

Justin Blackman

Yeah. If they're a course creator. What are three things that make a course creator a good teacher?

Now, you said that you were a teacher. I've got a friend who was a teacher, and he has some of the best programs in the world, and I couldn't quite figure out what was there.

But it's the structure behind his teaching process because he's used to planning lessons, so everything feels very organized and structured, whereas mine is sort of kind of like a brain dump.

And then I shuffle things around, and I was like, all right, this feels good.

His feels so structured. And it wasn't until I was talking to someone, they're like, oh, it's because he was a teacher.

 Jen Liddy

Teachers. Yeah. They're trained to do that exactly thing.

 Justin Blackman

Exactly.

 Jen Liddy

That right.

 Justin Blackman

So you could say, like, what makes a teacher a great course creator?

And you could ask like, give me six reasons why a teacher would be a good course creator. ChatGPT will spit out six things like, oh, this is interesting, I could write about that. And then you just flesh the bullet points of the paragraphs and you've got to have a really solid email.

 Jen Liddy

Well,  let's talk about how then you start to weave your voice in.

I think a lot of people don't even know what their voice is. I think people don't know what voice in general is when it comes to writing because, well, we're not encouraged to do it in school, first of all.

And then maybe we've worked in industry and it's been like beaten out of us.

But also, I think online there's a lot of consuming, pretty generic bullshit, almost like antiseptic stuff.

So it makes sense that people don't know what voice is. So can we just start with what the hell is voice when it comes to writing? How do you describe it?

 Justin Blackman

Sure, this is one of my favorite things. So a lot of people, if you Google what is voice?

You're going to get stuff like these airy fairy feelings about how voices your soul inside of you, trying to escape, to convey your message to the world. It's yourself inside of the story.

Jen Liddy

I can tell by your tone that that is not what you think.

 Justin Blackman

And I really want to call…I'm going to call BS on it.

 Jen Liddy

All right, let's hear it.

Justin Blackman

Voice is three things. It's your vocabulary, it's your tone and it's your cadence.

It's three measurable assets.

Vocabulary is the level of words that you use. Are you talking so simple that a kindergarten could reach it?

Or are you using more complex vocabulary with this weightiness and this lofty feel that has a more academic vibe? Simple or complex question about this can.

Jen Liddy

Vocabulary and word choice also include how you mix words together or maybe make up your own words?

 Justin Blackman

Yeah, it absolutely can.

And there are actually rules and sciences behind all that stuff. Like when you make up words, one of my favorite rules is the words tend to have interesting letters.

If the word contains a letter worth at least six points in vocabulary in Scrabble, you have room to play.

 Jen Liddy

Are we talking about X's?

 Justin Blackman

Yeah. X's Qs vs Ws. When you see that stuff, you can change the word entirely.

My friend Kira Hug, who's a great copywriter, when she sends out an FAQ email, she says Frequently Asked Croissants and I've stolen that flat out. And I give her credit. I think that it is a genius line.

But I ask myself, like, why does that work?

 Jen Liddy

Right?

 Justin Blackman

And it's like, oh, because there's a Q in questions and she just made the word more interesting. Yeah, but because the first two words set it up, it just makes the end a good twist.

 Jen Liddy

I imagine you really have to play around with this because it's kind of like what you're talking about with with comics, stand up comics. They craft these things. They spend hours crafting their bits. They write them.

It's not like they're up there just extemporaneously pulling it out of their asses.

If we could just give ourselves permission to play with these words in our vocabulary, to notice our vocabulary, first of all, and then play with it. God, that's so much more fun. 

Yeah, I'm a big word nerd.

 Justin Blackman

Even you could say it's very interesting, or you could say it's very interesting and stuff like that. You know what the right word is, but now all of a sudden, it becomes a little bit more playful.

 Jen Liddy

Playful is the word. Right.

 Justin Blackman

Okay.

Jen Liddy

The next thing you said was so after vocabulary is tone.

 Justin Blackman

Tone, which is the emotion in your writing. And these are literally measurable elements that you have.

There are word databases. There's something called the Emo Lex, which is the emotional lexicon of words.

That's really what AI uses based off mass audiences, like little tests.

It's like, how does this word make you feel? Happy, sad, or neutral. And they go through tens of thousands of words, and everybody ranks it.

So we know what words make us feel happy. We know what words make us feel sad. But the emotions, the tones of everything, I mean, you can have happy, sad, angry, scared, tentative, confident.

So you actually have tones that are measurable. And the AI is using this stuff, and it's been around for a long time, and I actually use it in my writing process as well.

But you can Google, like, emotion wheels, and you will find and look at the image results. You'll find color wheels that have often about 100 different ways to find your emotions.

And so if you say, like, I feel happy, happy can mean all the way from content to serene relaxed to ecstatic jubilee.

 Jen Liddy

Right.

 Justin Blackman

They're both happy, but they're all happy.

But they're very wide ranges of the spectrum. They're both bookends with a really big in between.

So if you say, well, I want my story to be happier, well, does that mean that you want it to be more content and more satisfying, or does that mean that you want it like a toddler on Red Bull?

 Jen Liddy

This kind of goes to the specificity that we talked about in the beginning of our conversation.

 Justin Blackman

Yeah.

Jen Liddy

So when you're thinking about your tone when you're writing, are you at the point where you're cognizant of it and you're really analyzing it, or is it just natural to you? At this point?

 Justin Blackman

When I'm writing for someone else, I'm very cognizant of their tone.

Jen Liddy

Because you have to match their tone.

 Justin Blackman

Yeah. Got you. And that's it. Because I'm aware of all the different levels.

I can dial it in better than other writers who are just like, I'm just trying to make it happier. What does that mean when I'm writing?

For me, it mostly comes out pretty natural, but there are times when I get it wrong, and because I'm aware of the vocabulary, tone, cadence framework, I'm able to fix it pretty easily.

But there are times, like, where I'll make a joke, like a placeholder joke, and it'll be harsh. Like, that's a little dark for me. Let me light it up. I wanted to be sarcastic. That one actually went rude.

Jen Liddy

I love that.

 Justin Blackman

So there are ways to to know. I know when I've gone too far.

 Jen Liddy

You know, what I think is incredibly important about what you're saying now, beyond the analysis of your own vocabulary and tone, is that even for great writers like you, it's not like you just sit down and bang it all out.

No, I'm hearing that it's really crafted and edited and assessed and analyzed and revised.

This is something I believe people who don't see themselves as good writers believe that the people who they do read, who they think are good writers, are just sitting down and, like, it just comes out naturally.

 Justin Blackman

No, it's an effort.

Jen Liddy

Right?

Justin Blackman

It is an effort. There absolutely are some people that can sit down and bang out an email in 15 minutes, and that's great.

But typically, they're the ones that are very confident in their skills, and they don't care about all the words because there are often people that are writing emails every day, and they were like, you know what?

The law of averages? 50% of my emails are going to be below average. 50% are going to be above. That's the way that averages work.

 Jen Liddy

Right.

 Justin Blackman

So if this one's not great, tomorrow's will be better. And they don't put that pressure on themselves.

 Jen Liddy

I think this would be like a Seth Godin who sends one every single day.

 Justin Blackman

Yeah.

 Jen Liddy

I think he's actually even said that about his writing. Like, not everything's a winner, but he's sending one every day. I want to send one once a week, and I want it to be really good.

 Justin Blackman

Right. I'm the same way, but I also know, like, if I'm doing a promotion where I'm sending out emails every day, the emails are actually going to be easier to write, and I'm going to care a little bit less about the perfection in it.

 Jen Liddy

Yes.

 Justin Blackman

When you send fewer, like I do, I usually do about one a week, they become a little bit agonizing like pieces of art.

Yeah, I've gotten past this.

I had to do a lot of mindset work, but I used to not be done with a piece until I hated it, until I had convinced myself that it was garbage, that there was no value in it whatsoever, and that it should just be thrown away.

That's when I was like, oh, no, that just means it's ready.

 Jen Liddy

Okay, can we talk about the last piece, which is cadence.

 Justin Blackman

Cadence? Yeah. The cadence is the rhythm of your writing, okay? And the rhythm controls the speed of how quickly you read it. I write short, I write choppy.

If I'm going to do a list of three things, it's going to be thing one, period, thing two, period, thing three, period.

A lot of people would have a longer strung together sentence with all the three things in one sentence, or possibly 4,5,6,7 sentences.

 I write short, I write choppy.

 Jen Liddy

Sweet.

 Justin Blackman

Other people have long, flowy wordy-bird sentences that go on and on forever and have a bit of a gentle feel to them, but sometimes they go on so long that by the time you reach the end of it, you need to take a breath and your eyes are tired because you haven't blinked in three minutes.

Jen Liddy

It reminds me of when I was teaching. The first thing I ever taught was Lord of the Flies, William Golding.

And the whole book is that kind of writing.

Again, it's what we teach kids is literature, is writing. But then you get out into the real world, and if you have to market yourself, nobody wants to read.

I'm going to say nobody. I don't know anybody who wants to read that kind of writing anymore. Especially for marketing, right.

 Justin Blackman

If you're writing a book, sure, it has a gentle feel to it, but even that, like if you look at Dan Brown with The DaVinci Code and things like that, it's short, it's fast, it's quick.

There's a reason why you read his book so fast, and it's because the sentences are shorter. It's got a different feel to it versus some of the older books.

Like now, the average sentence length is between 15 to 20 words in written English.

In the 1800s, it was about 38 to 45 words. So we're getting shorter and shorter.

 Jen Liddy

Well, our attention spit goes along with our attention span, too, and our capacity.

 Justin Blackman

Yeah, yeah. It's just that older writing was meant to be enjoyed. It was relaxed. You would sit in an easy chair and with a paper or a book, and you would unwind, and that was the leisure activity. Now we're bombarded by words, and we just want to consume it quickly, and we want to move on to the next thing.

 Jen Liddy

Totally. If you are somebody who doesn't really understand cadence or you think your cadence isn't working for your readers, or you simply want to change it, can you train yourself how to do that?

 Justin Blackman

Yeah, very much so. One of the first things that I do when I write for someone is before I even read the words, before I read their copy, I look at their copy and there are people that write so short, like me.

But I don't write one sentence paragraphs all the way through because that's got, like that LinkedIn type of like the broad tree type of feel. I don't like that.

I don't want my copy to look like that, even if it's written like that.

I'm going to link some of the sentences together into more of a natural looking paragraph, as opposed to just a straight list of one sentence. One sentence, one sentence, one sentence.

So that's got a different feel than the Lord of the Flies, which is probably going to be more traditional length paragraphs, more like we learned in school. Five sentence paragraph.

I almost never have a five sentence paragraph. No, it's between one to three sentences. Five sentences would be really uncommon for me.

Yeah, it's looking at the copy, seeing the way that it's laid out, the feel of it that changes something.

Like, sometimes you just open up an email and it's blocks of text and you're just like, I don't want to read.

 Jen Liddy

You can do that today.

Justin Blackman

Yeah, right. I'm going to put it away for later. And then later comes be like, no.

 Jen Liddy

Still not ready for that one.

Justin Blackman

Yeah, so it's just you have to decide how you want your copy to be written.

But I also know people that write heftier and weightier like that, and I love their emails, but I know that I have to put aside time.

 Jen Liddy

So this is really about knowing yourself, but also knowing your audience.

Improving your voice requires you to I'm hearing and I mean, I know this as a writer, but I think there is an intuition that comes to it.

But you're saying where that intuition comes from is just being really aware of and engaged with the rules that you have kind of learned over these years, which are vocabulary, cadence, and I don't know why I can't keep remembering the middle word.

 Justin Blackman

Vocabulary, tone and cadence.

 Jen Liddy

Tone, tone. Tone is so important. I love tone. In fact, I get called out on my tone all the time by my husband, don't take a tone with me. So I get tone. But I feel like we know these things, but it's never been unpacked for us before.

 Justin Blackman

Well, when it comes to copywriting, you said a word that I rail against a little bit more for show than what I truly believe. But intuition. A lot of copywriters write by intuition, and they get voiced by intuition.

 Oh, I just sort of feel the client's style. Intuition doesn't scale.

Knowing your process, knowing what your sentences should look and sound like, what the exact emotions behind it should be, what the grade level of your writing should be.

You can scale that. You can continue that. You can look at a piece of copy.

You can run it through some online tools like the Hemingway app, and get your readability. I know that the readability of my copy is typically grade three or grade four.

If I write a piece at grade nine, I was like, whoa, that's completely off. I'll know it.

But I know with a change to bring down that readability to make it last, to make it more me, to make it feel right.

And by doing that, the piece is going to become more and more me. If I'm writing for clients who have, say, an average of grade nine, I know that I need to string more sentences together.

 Justin Blackman

I need to change my style to match theirs. I'm not trying to fix them. I'm trying to write like them. So I'm going to use a higher vocabulary.

 I'm going to use loftier sentences. I'm going to use different emotions, and I'm going to get very dialed into what those emotions are.

 It's really important to understand what your baseline is so you can begin to hover around that and also know what happens when you change.

If you want to lengthen that or if you want to go on a darker tone or a lighter tone, what it's going to do to the piece so your readers are going to understand so you're going to understand what you're making your readers feel as they go through it.

 Jen Liddy

Yeah. And then sometimes I feel like as you get more confident as a writer and you lean into your voice more and you learn more about how you want to present your voice, I think because you get more confident, it might shift.

But if it shifts so much that your audience doesn't know who you are anymore, and that's not your intention, that's a problem.

 Justin Blackman

Yeah. It's being able to shift it deliberately is a tremendous skill. But I absolutely know writers who are way different now than they were a couple of years ago, and I'm one of them.

I used to write about headlines, and I used to write about comedy a lot. I don't really do that so much anymore.

 The comedy stuff still comes in, but I don't really write about headlines anymore.

I don't write about conversion techniques. I write about silly things. And brand voice, those are my main two areas.

My voice has changed. My views have changed. My life has changed. You're allowed to grow, but it's just important to understand how your writing can shift to still reflect who you are today without being such a disconnect from who you were yesterday.

 Jen Liddy

So I'm just so curious. Who's your favorite comedian?

 Justin Blackman

It kind of depends right now. Gary Goldman, I think, is one of the best writers out there. He's got a piece on he filmed it on Conan O'Brien, and it was a piece about the abbreviations of the 50 states. I think that is the funniest five minutes on television.

 Jen Liddy

I'll have to go look that up.

 Justin Blackman

Yeah.

 Jen Liddy

Who's your favorite old school comedian?

 Justin Blackman

I'm going to take a little bit of slack for this one because of who he is right now, but Bill Cosby himself is still one of the funniest bits ever.

Jen Liddy

Is that the one with the lights changing behind him? And dad in the morning eating cake? That was a family staple that was like how our family connected for years watching.

 Justin Blackman

That one and I love it. And now it's a shame that find out who he is. I know, but I watched it. You can find it on YouTube, but that's about the only place that is there.

But I showed it to my kids, they didn't laugh as hard as I did, but I was still rolling on the floor. I think it was genius. Oh my God.

 Jen Liddy

And then I'm a huge Seinfeld fan. I still love Seinfeld because I think he's so intelligent about the way he crafts his stuff.

Justin Blackman

See, with Seinfeld, it's more about his viewpoint. But if you look at the way that his jokes are structured, they're actually not written very tight.

No, like which is that's his style, though. That's what works. Like compared to say, Kevin Hart. I love Kevin Hart. If you read if you watch Kevin Hart, he's even the way that I'm talking about him right now, he repeats his words a lot. He talks very short, seven words, eight words.

And he'll be like, I had to take my dog to the doctor. Bring the dog to the doctor. A doctor had to see the dog. The dog was sick, the doctor was going to fix it. And it's that repetition, it's short, it's fast.

Seinfeld just sort of tells a story. He's a great writer, but he's a storyteller. And his stories are funny, but it's not jokes. Seinfeld sort of in between when he doesn't write tight. His sentences aren't structured for maximum laughs, but they're great stories. It's the observation that's funny.

 Jen Liddy

And I think the tone for him sometimes too, really makes me laugh. And then there's one other person. We saw Hassan Minaj in person. Have you ever seen him?

He's got this elevated vocabulary and his cadence is like he just goes and goes and goes and brings you on this journey and it's this one looping story the whole time and then he punctuates it right at the end and it is brilliant.

Justin Blackman

Actually, John Oliver kind of does that too.

Jen Liddy

Yes. Oh, this is so much fun. Hey, question, do you work one to one with people or tell me how you work with people.

 Justin Blackman

Well, I don't work a lot with clients right now. When it comes to clients, I don't write from scratch anymore. But if somebody has a draft that they have taken as far as they can get but no, it's not there or it's missing some punch, you can bring me on for about an hour to 3 hours to work on a piece together.

So I still do that. Power hours or sound board sessions if you're trying to dial in the voice. So I've got that.

And then the other things that I do is I create voice guides.

So if you are an entrepreneur and you have a copywriting team or a content team, what I can do is really put your voice on paper.

So it's an onboarding guide for a copywriter to be able to see your vocabulary, your tone, your cadence, to literally get the measurements and the math behind that so they can hit the ground running and not guess at what your voice is.

 Jen Liddy

You called it a guide, right?

 Justin Blackman

It's a voice guide.

 Jen Liddy

It's brilliant. It's brilliant. So please go to where the heck is it? I'm looking for it right now. Oh, https://www.prettyflycopy.com.  I love that you're pretty fly for a write guy. I just loved everything. I mean, I can't gush any further. It's ridiculous how much I'm gushing. I can't wait to get on your email list, too. Is there a way for people to get into your orbit that's really easy for them? Besides your website?

Justin Blackman

Yeah, the website is the best place prettyflycopy.com. And that will get you right to the link.

Jen Liddy

And you've got 93 sign offs to punch up your email.

So I'll put all of these links in our show notes, too, and I encourage you, listener, please go check out this website. It's amazing.

Justin Blackman

Yeah, the sign offs are the easiest way to put a little bit of personality and add some punch at the end.

Jen Liddy

Low risk, low hanging fruit. Low risk of it. Justin, thank you so much. Is there anything left that I did not ring out of your brain that you would want to share?

 Justin Blackman

So I say this quote a lot. It's my favorite thing.

It's from Neil Gaiman, and he said that style is the stuff that you get wrong.

And I love that, because if you write by the book, it doesn't stand out. Give yourself permission to get a little bit wrong, and that's what people are going to remember.

 Jen Liddy

I love it. Thank you so much. All right, listener, I'll see you next week. Thanks for joining us. Bye.