If you lean too far to one side—brand voice or SEO copywriting—you really lose something special. Copywriting is such a science and an art form, and luckily—you’ve got 2 really scientifically minded artists over here as guides. My conversation with Justin Blackman is structured like this…
In this fan favorite case study interview, walk through Justin’s journey to update his headlines so they have both personality and keywords!
With this episode you’ll be able to:
Learn why copy needs BOTH personality & keywords.
Discover how to know when it’s time to work with an SEO expert
Uncover what it’s like to work with Brittany on an SEO Packet.
Thanks for joining me on The Basic B podcast! Help me reach more service providers like you by following the show & leaving a rating or review on Apple & Spotify!
Get SEO to work for you—with the DFY SEO Packet from SEO copywriter, Brittany Herzberg. More details here!
If you lean too far to one side—brand voice or SEO copywriting—you really lose something special. Copywriting is such a science and an art form, and luckily—you’ve got 2 really scientifically minded artists over here as guides. My conversation with Justin Blackman is structured like this…
In this fan favorite case study interview, walk through Justin’s journey to update his headlines so they have both personality and keywords!
With this episode you’ll be able to:
Learn why copy needs BOTH personality & keywords.
Discover how to know when it’s time to work with an SEO expert
Uncover what it’s like to work with Brittany on an SEO Packet.
Thanks for joining me on The Basic B podcast! Help me reach more service providers like you by following the show & leaving a rating or review on Apple & Spotify!
Get SEO to work for you—with the DFY SEO Packet from SEO copywriter, Brittany Herzberg. More details here!
🎉 This podcast is brought to you in partnership w/ Leah Bryant Co.
Brittany Herzberg:
Welcome to the basic be podcast, a show for the wannabe SEO savvy service providers among this for the coaches and consultants who dream of becoming known for their storytelling skills. Not to mention the solopreneurs who straight up need to master all things social proof to increase sales. After a little reluctantly, fully committing to this online rather business, I quickly realized I needed to get people to come to me, I needed to tell them I was here and how I could support them. I dove headfirst into social proof, which led me to SEO, which led me to storytelling. And now it gives me great joy to share what I've learned with other business owners so they skip the hard stuff and ease straight into sales. This podcast gives you expert insights, actionable takeaways, and casual combos with some of the online world's best and brightest experts and strategists. I think that's enough of an intro. So here we go. 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. Today, I am joined by Justin Blackmon 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 have 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 Blackmon 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 documented. 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. 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.
Justin Blackman:
Hi!
Brittany Herzberg:
I am stoked for this conversation. So I'm gonna go ahead and just hit you with the question that I share with everyone. There's no wrong answer. Are you ready?
Justin Blackman:
Let's do it.
Brittany Herzberg:
Okay. What do you believe is the most important for sales? SEO storytelling or social proof?
Justin Blackman:
Hmm. 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.
Brittany Herzberg:
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:
Not intentionally, I think I kind of collect stories accidentally. Mostly I did it. Reading like trivia books. And just random facts. Like we'll go open book here. There was this book that I used to love called, I think it was called Jon's bathroom reader. And it was just like, this, like gigantic book that you would keep in the bathroom of just facts and stories. I used to love it. And it just like got me fascinated in all these little random details. Were just like, learning random knowledge. And it made me really good at bar trivia. And that's kind of about it. Still good actually won first place last night. Yeah a $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 be like, Oh, I kind of reminds me of this. And I'll just like, spout a random fact. And people are like, how do you even 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.
Brittany Herzberg:
I couldn't agree more. I was gonna say before you even said that you've bought a whole bunch of gift cards. I was gonna say you'd be the perfect person to take the trivia for the good at it. That's awesome. There's a TV show that my boyfriend and I have been watching. I think it's called something like the food that made America. Yeah. Have you seen it?
Justin Blackman:
I know. I've seen bits of it. I don't watch it though.
Brittany Herzberg:
That's a fascinating one. We watched the one last night about like, Dunkin Donuts and Krispy Kreme. Okay, 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 that it's just really neat. And like then we're watching commercials come on during a basketball game and I was like, Oh yeah, Dunkin Donuts. Yeah,
Justin Blackman:
Oh, you know what? I've watched the the toys that made America so it's got to be it's the same series just about toys. So yes, I've written emails about that too.
Brittany Herzberg:
Oh, you have I missed those my bad. Moving right along! 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 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?
Justin Blackman:
Let's do it. Let's unravel the whole sweater.
Brittany Herzberg:
A whole sweater? We're gonna be here for a while. So let's start with Tell me what happened that led you to contacting me about SEO
Justin Blackman:
I always knew that, like, I had nothing for SEO. I had a lot of content. Okay, let's go back a little further, was going to stories. So a couple of years ago, I did a project called the headline projects where I wrote 100 headlines for every day, and 100 headlines every day for 100 days. And I chose random brands, and just different companies, a lot of things from Shark Tank, or 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 craps with their kids. Because I wrote 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 wonder dads.com. And I was like, that's cool. But I'm not selling that. So I had the wrong crowd. And the other thing that I ranked really high for was the fart candle. I rank really high for that. Awesome, except that I'm not selling fart candles. I was like, Alright, 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. Someone that was in one of my programs, they mentioned that that they could help. And they made some changes, which from an SEO standpoint, helped my traffic went up. But it kind of zapped the life out of my headlines. And I'm selling a course called write more personality here. And it was I think the original headline was how to write the world's most unputdownable copy. And just like when I'm when searching for that, so we need to like how to inject fun and light and personality into your writing. So we change that to the headline. And 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. You were able to work with me to put some fun back into it and improve the SEO but not like take me out of the writing.
Brittany Herzberg:
Right. And that was the thing I remember you sent that over and I went and looked into was clicking through them. And I've been in your world for a while I know you for personality driven copy. And I went into the headlines. And I was like this does not scream Justin because literally just about everything you write either I feel super informed where 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, no. It's not going to draw in the right people. Yeah, 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. 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. 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 going to shove in the headline. So we were able to do a little bit more specific keyword research for your people. It wasn't just, you know, 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 going to be a good fit?
Justin Blackman:
No.
Brittany Herzberg:
Conversation over! We're done.
Justin Blackman:
That's what you get for asking yes or no question!
Brittany Herzberg:
All right. Yeah, it's true.
Justin Blackman:
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 have 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 were like hey, maybe the headline can still be fun well, we just need to pepper in these other words here that and it'll still show up in the search results. You know, 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:
Yeah, that's a good explanation. And thank you for saying that. Because like, I take great pride in that, as you know, I'm like, No, it's a very fine balance. And if you lean too far, one way or the other, you're gonna 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 logged a few blog ideas at you for further future.
Justin Blackman:
I haven't written them yet!
Brittany Herzberg:
That's ok! What did you like about the process of working together?
Justin Blackman:
Again, not to say anything bad about the other person when 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. 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. 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. There were ways to boost that without forcing it. And I think the the blog topics that you gave me, were more of an advanced level. So it wasn't like personality, or copywriting one on one or brand voice one on one. My stuff is higher level. It's not made for everyone, I don't want to I mean, I'd love to be number one brand voice. But I'm in as far as search results, it'd be great. But I don't want everyone coming to me. I needed 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. You know, like, she gave me a structure for a pillar blog post. And great idea. And I started writing it and it just sort of sucked the life out of me, like I've written this 100 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 it was higher level, it was more about the writer that wanted to get better at it not wanting to learn it for the first time. But who, who hit a plateau and their current learning and are looking to uplevel.
Brittany Herzberg:
and this has come up a lot in conversation 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 is SEO stands for? In my world. Yeah, 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! 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. 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 da da da da. And gave you some pointers. But how did you feel going into that? I guess, project, if you will, at that point.
Justin Blackman:
I think it was great having keywords rather than ideas because it allowed me to build around them. Not just take a template of how to write a headline how to write more personality for copywriters, it wasn't just stuffing it in, you gave me a couple of interesting words that I was like, Oh, I can, 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 it's almost like 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. I kind of liked that. It gave me just the right amount of constraint to make a good headline, but also gave me room to play.
Brittany Herzberg:
I like reverse madlibs. And 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're like, I'm on it, I'm gonna go like, fix it. I've had two clients who have done that, and you are definitely the first one to do that. So, like, talk me through that a little bit.
Justin Blackman:
Well it was awesome because I knew my stuff was broken. 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 couldn't do that. 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:
Yeah they did. And for the record, I did not say dummy, that was Justin saying that because I never call clients that!
Justin Blackman:
It's on the record!
Brittany Herzberg:
Not true! I really liked hearing that. So for the keywords, you were able to like reverse madlib it 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 backend of your website. And then for blogs, I like hearing that you're actually excited about those topics, because that's a huge part of it. And even whether it's clients, I'm working with 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 gonna 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, like, 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:
Let's see, I have a page that I, I like more than that I did after the first SEO audit. I have more traffic, have more subscribers. And also less anxiety of knowing that there was stuff to do. But I didn't want to, like, it's kind of one of those things. It'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. And you told me what to fix. And it was like, oh, okay, I kind of wish I did that four years ago.
Brittany Herzberg:
There's stuff of my own website where I'm like, I know I need to fix that. 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. And I'll make sure we link it, I got to see, what was the package called that we did. We did the brand voice finder. 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, it was good. That was really something wasn't it? Let that really sink in and guide you toward being the answer to even more Google questions. Thanks so much for joining me this episode. You are the reason this show exists and that it keeps growing. You know, thanks to all those follows and reviews. If you know someone who could benefit from what we've shared, send it to them. We don't do shy around here. If you thought of clarifying or follow up questions about listening, you know what to do. Say hi on Instagram, check the show notes for all the things that were mentioned and I'll talk to you soon bread
