Website Copy That Gets More Clients

As a creative entrepreneur, it can feel isolating to go it alone. Imagine being surrounded by other accomplished creative colleagues eager to accelerate the growth of their business and personal brands. I'm Philip Van Dusen and I'm launching a membership community called Bonfire for creative pros like you because I believe in the power of building a meaningful network. Bonfire is a hybrid coaching, training, networking, and accountability community. A place for us to share, grow, and ignite our potential together. Need more confidence about your next move? With our FIRE milestone success map, you'll know what your next step should be and exactly how to get there. You get bi-weekly video sessions, private online community, a deep resource library, and exclusive access to yours truly, and other amazing benefits. So, come join Bonfire, a community of like-minded individuals who are as passionate as you. Visit phipandusen. com/bonfire to learn more about the launch. Let's fuel your creative future. Hey everybody, happy Friday. It's good to see you guys. Um, first of all, uh, Peter, good to see you. Uh, JWG and Steve, awesome. Thanks for joining me today. Happy Friday the 13th. Hopefully the gods of technology and the planet Mercury and Friday the 13th will combine to make this a seamless and troublefree live stream. Uh last couple times I've gone live actually the LinkedIn feed has failed mid feed. So I'm actually considering not simo casting anymore. Also, anyone who's watching on LinkedIn, uh just know that the comments section, the chat section does not work, does not feed to me from LinkedIn. So, if you want to chat, if you have any questions you want to ask about the presentation at the end, hop over to YouTube and catch my live stream on YouTube. You just go to youtube. comfilipvandusenlive and I'm there. Okay. Um, good to see you guys. Um, thank you, Peter, for uh putting that out there. Um, yes, if you have any questions during today's presentation, uh, just type question in all caps. So, when I'm done with the presentation, I can come back and address your question. Okay? And if you haven't connected with me on social, I'm Philip Vanusen everywhere. You go to philpendusen. commuse. You can get on my email list and that's the quickest way to a contact me because if you just replied when my emails comes directly to me and you can connect with me on LinkedIn and threads and um YouTube is also a great place. So, it's great to see you guys this morning. I'd love to know how long you've been in the industry, whether you use a website to uh get new clients because that's what we're going to be talking about today. website copy and how to write website copy that actually performs for you and some of the, you know, biggest uh challenges and um missteps that creative professionals have a tendency to do on their websites that do not benefit them. And so I want to make sure that you are not one of those people. Um so let's see what do we want to do? jump right into it? First of all, um just a little heads up. I run a mastermind community called Bonfire. It's uh for mid to late career creative professionals who are interested in growing their personal brands, growing their meaningful networks, getting uh strategic partners, getting kind of clear and trusted feedback on the work that they're doing. There's a number of people in Bonfire right now who are actually working on the copy on their websites and getting feedback from the group, etc. And so that really helps in uh in doing website copy work. I absolutely guarantee you because it's very difficult for us to get perspective on ourselves when we do that. And so um just to check in, is my sound coming through okay? Is my video coming through okay? I was a little low with audio last time I did a live stream. I had to bump it up. So I just wanted to get uh a little bit of u feedback from you guys if everything sounds okay. And if it does, I am stoked. And if it doesn't, let me know what that is and I'll do my best uh to correct it. Um, sounds perfect. Thanks, JW. I really appreciate that. All right. So, I really want to just jump into it today. We'll have Q& A at the end and also in the middle of the presentation, I'm going to be talking about Bonfire a little bit, but there's more content after that. So, and I promise you I won't pitch for too long, but um it's important to know and it also can deeply relate to the content that I'm going to share with you today. Um

Um, you know, the thing I, I hate about YouTube, just going to cave here for a second, is the screen name thing. Like, you guys are popping into chat. I you know and I'd love to talk back to you like you know directly but the screen name thing is like so hard because it's like hi you know JWG you know I don't I don't put your name in there so I know how to talk to you um that would be great and that's also one of the challenges for building a personal brand on LinkedIn I mean on YouTube by the way is that I can't see who you actually are and I can't really connect with you. I can't DM you. I can't, you know, there's no kind of connection directly. It's all very anonymous, which, you know, I understand is good, but when you're building a community and personal brand and when you're trying to help people directly, it makes it very difficult uh to do that. Um, another thing you might see is there's a little button at the bottom of the chat window on YouTube that says super chat and uh it's basically a tip jar. So, if you want to leave me a little bit of tip, buy me a coffee, that would be awesome and highly appreciated. And also, anybody who leaves me a super chat, um, gets their questions prioritized. Um, all right. So, what do you say? Let's jump right into it. Let's talk about website copy. Website copy in particular that converts. And the biggest problem that I see with creative professionals is, and I see this all the time, I see it in my mastermind community. a number of peer masterminds that I'm a part of, is that designers and creatives really, really struggle with writing their own copy. In fact, we struggle with designing our own websites. And because we're, you know, creatives, why is that, right? You would think that we do this for clients all the time. Why do we have trouble doing this for ourselves? It's because we lack perspective. We don't have any kind of distance from what we're trying to do and we're not objective around the copy that we're writing or the impact of that copy. You need somebody else. You need a group of other people or feedback that's at a distance and more objective to really be able to tell what's going on. So, creatives struggle with this a lot. And so I'm going to give you uh you know kind of a real clear architecture for how to lay out your website copy so it's really effective for you. Now some of the biggest questions uh that I have for you are what do you know what the path is that the visitors are taking on your website? Do you know where they're coming in? leaving? Do you know what they're doing? What pages are they going to? What order of Is your website failing to bring you the kind of results that you want? Is it failing to get you leads and to get you clients? Are people actually engaging or clicking on the buttons you want them to click on or filling out the forms or downloading the lead magnets that you want them to do? Why aren't they calling you? Why aren't they contacting emailing you? Why aren't they doing what you want them to do? That is what we're going to address today. And the reason is the kind of broadstroke umbrella reason is that you're not creating a customer journey. clearly structured uh communication that is leading them down a path to getting them to do what you want them to do. So before we get into the how-to, let's talk a little bit about, you know, evaluating where you are. So the first thing that you want to do is you really want to kind of figure out what's happening or what's not happening. You want to do some level setting in terms of how your website is performing for you. If you don't use Google Analytics, I highly recommend that you get in there and start poking around because it's very revealing. Not only to understand the volume of traffic that you're coming from, but also where that traffic is coming from. Meaning, how are people getting to your site? Are they getting to your site through Google search? Are they coming through YouTube or LinkedIn or some social channel? Understanding where people are originating from is an important thing to understand. You want to look at the most visited pages. What pages are they actually coming into? What pages are they on when they leave? You want to think about dwell time. What is if they're going to your main homepage, but they're only spending 10 seconds there, then you're losing them, right? So, you want to look at the the, you know, the dwell time they have on each of these pages so you can understand the performance and how well those pages are actually speaking to people. What is their pathway through

those pages? And how are people contacting you? Are they, you know, looking at your website and then going to social and contacting you through a DM or going to LinkedIn and a DM? Are you giving them the opportunity to contact you through email? You want to do just a little bit of le level setting in terms of what your site is doing and how it's doing it right now. Okay. One of the headlines I w to I want to um make sure that you take away from this today is you have to keep it short, right? No one reads anymore. Attention spans are super short and getting shorter all the time. When you're writing website copy, you cannot have long blocks and paragraphs of copy. Two to three sentences per paragraph maximum, even less. Because when it comes down to it, people scan first and they read second. Minimalism in website copy is the way to go. You have to write with absolute laser clarity. You have to it's just like the design process. They say, you know, great design is, you know, when you can't take away anything le any anything more. Same thing with copy. You want to write with an absolute minimalist mindset. — [clears throat] — And then you also have to structure your copy in a very specific way to lead people down a very organized, methodical pathway to get them the information that they need and to get them to contact you. The next thing I want to hit you with is making it punchy. You really have to think in terms of headlines. So what is the wow factor? When you think about copy, you want to not be generic. You don't want to use the word branding every other word or industry terminology that's not going to connect with people because we take for granted how much terminology we know, we understand, we use in our industry. But our clients things that we think everyone knows, they do not know. So you really want to speak in very common language and you want to keep it very simple and very punchy. You want to be pro provocative in a way if you can. You want to elicit emotional responses. You want to tell hard truths. You want to essentially be the voice that's inside your website visitor's head when they come to your website. Again, you don't want to be overly um generic. You want to make sure that you're citing specific examples where you can. Again, no branding or, you know, heavy brand speak. Be careful of how much industry speak you are using on your website. Now let's talk about customer journeys. Now the term customer journey is sometimes used to describe the entire salesunnel when you're talking about marketing. But in today's presentation, I'm going to be talking about customer journey in terms of the emotional pathway that people travel through as they go through the copy on your website. The goal, as I said, is to lead the visitor through a very specific thought process. You want to architect a path of movement and action that leads to where you want them to be. Where do go? What do? Now, I'm going to be provocative and uh and tell a hard truth right now, and that is it is not about you. This is the biggest mistake that I see people make. Here's a perfect example, and I see this a lot in various forms. Hi, I'm Fred. I graduated from XYZ Design Institute, and I've been passionate about design since I was, you know what? No one cares about you. I care about me. When I come to your site, I want my problem solved. Yeah, I'm curious about, of course, I came to your site. Maybe your portfolio, what it is that you do, but we're going to get to that, right? You don't want to lead with it being about you. It is the number one biggest mistake that I see that creative professionals make. It's even more um prevalent in people who are just starting off their um their creative journey, their their career journey as they are just out of school. are three to five years out of school and they're really kind of proud of how they come up and the credentials that they've built and they want to crow about that. But you have to understand that it's about the visitor. It's not about you. You don't want to lead with what you do, why you're passionate, you know, how great you are, what school you went to, what you know, your clients, right? You

want to start with them. You want to begin with the voice in the head of the visitor to your website. Now, let's talk a little bit about positioning clarity. What I call positioning. It's brand positioning, right? So, where are you positioning yourself in the marketplace? Who are you speaking to? What is that avatar? What who are you offering services to? What are those services? There's a great quote that I love. It says, "If you speak to everyone, you convert no one. " And that is so true because specificity converts. Use specific examples wherever possible. Hone down. Choose a center of the bullseye customer avatar. Don't try to speak to everyone because generalists really, really struggle with developing copy that truly converts on a website. When you think of your own customer avatar, think of it in terms of a bullseye. There's the center red dot of a bullseye, which is the absolute one singular perfect customer for you. And there are concentric circles that lead out from that are, you know, larger buckets of potential clients that you want to get, of course, right? But if you try to speak to all of those at once, no one can see themselves in your copy. So you want to be as specific as possible and speak to that one red dot, that one center of the bullseye. The people who are in the concentric circles will be able to identify and see themselves in aspects of that, but you really want to kind of focus and capture um that particular target. and writing to a specific target is the most effective sort of conversion copy that can be written. Okay. So, as I was saying, specificity converts, right? You want to focus on the visitor, on the customer, on your prospect. You want to understand their motivation. that avatar, that who that you are addressing. What is their pain point? You really need to understand what is the problem that they have that they're trying to solve. Why are they coming to your site? What is their motivation? And this motivation falls into two buckets. Functional motivation. So what do they need fixed? What is the actual product that they need from you? And the other is emotional. And emotional is actually the one if you speak to it well, it is the one that converts best because people we are reptilian brains, right? We [snorts] operate under emotion. People think that they are very logical but most human decisions are made from emot emotional underpinnings. You want to think about what is the result that they are seeking and what is those what are those pain points? You want to paint a mental picture and an emotional picture of what that future state is that they're going to achieve by working with you. What is it they need? What are those products? but also what is that emotional payoff that they're going to get. Now, let's talk about how you design a decision. What is it that you want them to do? I often talk about this in terms of action architecture. So, what is the action that you want them to take? What do you want them to do when they get to your site? What page do you want them to land on? What order do you want them to go through those pages? What do you want to have on each of those pages? Where are your calls to action? What to click, what to fill out, what to download, etc. Once you have that kind of architecture, that action architecture figured out and you know what they you want them to do, you build everything else around that and then you write your copy. So today we're going to be talking about website copy. And the example that I'm going to be use is using is a small agency that does uh packaging, right? They do packaging for medium-siz businesses. And I'm going to use specific examples of the copy to illustrate the kind of main 10 steps that you have to take people through or the main topics you have to touch on when you're writing website copy that actually will get you clients. You start with a headline and the headline has to have punch. It has to be provocative. It has to really hit people in the gut and it has to be super short. So, the example in this one that I'm using for the product uh the packaging design agency is your product's great, but your packaging isn't. And that hits people between the eyes. They're like, "Yes, I have packaging.

Yes, I'm coming here because I have insecurities about my packaging. " And they think that their product's fantastic, but the things that that's not performing for them is their packaging. So, you hit them with that, right? Your product's great. There's that affirmation, but your packaging isn't. Okay? You have to hit them with a headline to get them to go everywhere else. Oops. And then the first step is describing the pain point. Now, that headline addressed the pain point a little bit, right? Your packaging isn't, but you want to state the pain point in a way that they can really see themselves in it. Here's the example. Your product's high quality, but it doesn't look like it. Meaning that outside skin is not representing what's in the bottle or in the package. All of these examples that I'm going to give you are super short and super punchy. But that's in order to kind of really illustrate how simple you can make this copy and actually do what I'm instructing you to do. You don't have to have paragraphs of copy to make these points and take them through this customer journey. So their pain point, your product's high quality, but it doesn't look like it. The second step is you have to show them that you identify with their problem, right? You understand their problem. You understand that voice in their head. Here's the example. You invested in formulation. You obsessed over ingredients, but you know your packaging needs help. It's restating that initial headline, but with a little more specificity. They have pride in their product. They obsessed over it, right? They're passionate about it. We are showing them we understand that passion that they have, but we also understand that they have this devil on their shoulder that's saying your packaging is not what it should be. The third step is to describe the solution. This is stating the solution to their problem. So a they can understand that you understand that there is a solution and b that you have the answer for them that you can lead them through a process to get them to where they want to go. Here's the example. You need packaging that feels premium and drives purchase. Simple as that, right? You have fantastic product. We've established that fact, great formulation, they have great pride in it. But they need packaging that drives a premium perception and really drives purchase. Okay, that is the solution to their problem. Premium packaging that drives purchase. Number four is you're stating, and this is where you're starting to introduce your target. So you're identifying who the target is that you're speaking to so they can see themselves in that target and also attaching your services or your offering to that. So here's the example. We offer founder-ledd skincare brands doing 500K to 5 million in revenue a year and are ready for retail expansion through packaging design, label systems, retail ready visual identity. I want you to dissect this sentence a little bit. We offer founder skinincare brands. So, it's not just any big skincare brand. It's founder. So they can see themselves that they're the founder or it's kind of a it's an entrepreneurial endeavor. It's not big corporate enterprise yet. They're doing a very specific range of revenue and they and in that emotional need they have is they are ready for retail expansion and you're telling them that you can do that for them through three main services. Packaging, design, label systems and retail ready visual identity. So even you're attaching that retail ready aspect to the offering of what you do when you do visual identity. I'm not hitting them with a bulletointed list of 50 things that we do the gigantic basket of all the stuff that you know we would love to get clients for. I'm hitting them with a very specific need. Now all of the people who need general visual identity systems are going to get that. All the people who know that they need other sort of marketing materials are going to get that. But you're talking to that center red bullseye of the target. Number five is you have to show them how you solve their problem. How do you actually do it? This is the how. Our example is we study your target buyer. We design for shelf impact and we align visuals with price and positioning. Now, it's getting a little more industry speak right now, but I'm

doing that in order to kind of keep this copy really short for the example, but we study your target buyer. So, we do consumer insights. We design for shelf impact. We're going to make your brand killer in retail. And we align our visuals with price and positioning. So, our design is going to reflect the price of your product and the positioning in the marketplace that you're doing. We've said a tremendous amount in three very short sentences about how we solve that problem. Exactly how we do it. We study the consumer. We design for shelf impact and we align the visuals with your positioning. The sixth step is how are you better? This is where you establish your credibility and your proof. Why should they believe that you can do what you say you can do? Here's the example. We've launched 75 plus skincare brands that are placed in retailers like Sephora and Whole Foods. That's it. That's cred right there, right? How many clients you've had, where you've gotten them, it's all surrounding this red dot in the center of the bullseye. Skin care brands for retailers, and we've gotten them in these high-end retailers. That's our credibility. That shows that you can believe that we can do what we say we can do. Number seven is how are you different? It's not as important well it's equally as important that you can do the things you can say you can do but the other thing is that you also have to prove and establish the fact that you're better than all your competition. So how are you different from all your competition? What makes it make makes you the agency that they should definitely come to? Here's the example. Other agencies make it pretty. We design for retail performance. So that's provocative. It's punchy. It's saying other agencies just design on aesthetics, but we design so that thing performs for you, right? So it sells. It jumps off the shelf and your business is going to be more successful. We're not saying that we don't design pretty, but we're kind of saying that other agencies only do that. And so by making this differentiation between us, what we do, and how we drive performance, they are getting a comfort level in the belief that we are different from our competitors and do things better than our competitors as agencies. The eighth step is you want to talk about what is the result? What's the benefit? What is the why? Why should they do this? What's the benefit that they have? Here's the example. You get stronger shelf presence, a premium perception, and increased sell through. Right? Three things, one sentence. This is the why. Because you're going to get better shelf presence. You're g your perception is going to match the product that's inside the bottle, right? So, you're going to get the premium perception for this premium perfectly formulated product that they're so proud of and that they're going to sell them, right? So, that is the why. That's the benefit that they're going to get. The next step that you want to take, step number nine, is barriers to purchase. Everyone has reservations why they shouldn't do something, why they're going to hold off for a little while. You want to make sure that you hit them and let them recognize that you know that there are barriers. Maybe it's a price barrier in this case, right? Maybe they're not ready to fully commit to this whole rebrand, right? So, our particular example for this is not ready for a full rebrand, start with a packaging on it. So, you want to This is the intro price point, right? This is the how do you get your foot in the door. If you're not ready for this full thing, the big kahuna that we offer, which is fantastic. Obviously, we're in Sephora and Whole Foods, etc. We'll do a packaging audit for you. Let's engage. Right? That's a barrier purchase that you are breaking down, right? You are making it very easy for them to walk in your door. And then number 10 is the as I talked about a little earlier is the action architecture. So how do you create an architecture a pathway Dorothy on the yellow brick road of exactly what you want them to do? Do contact you? Do they you want them to fill out a new client questionnaire? Do you want them to download your lead magnet? Do you want them to get this checklist? Do you want

them to call you? You know, imagine that. Call you on the phone. Do you want them to book a, you know, their free packaging audit? What is that? What is it that you want them to do? And so our particular example in this case is book a 20minut packaging review here. Link button. You get three ways to improve shelf impact immediately. So, you're telling them, I'm breaking down that barrier to entry. If you don't want to do the full rebrand, we can just do an audit. And hey, here's exactly what I want you to do. click here, book a 20minute packaging review, and you're going to get for no cost three ways to improve your shelf impact immediately. It's totally that kind of carrot at the end of the stick. So, the next question is, how do I start? How do I actually, you know, how do I actually get into this and get it going? Where do I even start? And so, let me tell you how this is how I would approach the journey for you. You want to do this. You want to start with a hypothesis. What do I think is the right copy to do? You have to start with something, right? So, don't get the white canvas syndrome and be intimidated by the fact that it's a big white sheet of paper and you don't know where to start. Just start with an hypothesis of how you should speak, who you should speak to, and what you should offer. And then as you put that up on your website, iterate using customer feedback. Use peer feedback. Use um uh tools like Hot Jar that can document actual visitor behavior when they go to your site. How long do they dwell as they scroll down your page? What do they, you know, what do they look at? What do they click on? What is that actual behavior? You want to look at your quantifiable results like your Google Analytics and your form fills and your contacts. It's also important to get feedback, external feedback that's not you, peer feedback, customer feedback on their reaction to what's on the page. And then you iterate it over time. When it comes down to it, your website has two jobs. It's to sell. Yes. And we've been talking about that this whole time. But the other one is that you want to capture. You want to sell and to them. Yes. But you also need to capture email addresses. If you have not signed up for an email service provider, an ESP services like Mailorite, Mailchimp, Kit. I highly recommend that you do that because the only way that you can communicate with people who visit your site is if you get their email address and then you can start communicating with them directly. You can add them to nurture sequences or welcome sequences, but you have to get that email address. So, one of the best ways to do this is to offer lead magnets. That's a downloadable checklist or a PDF or some sort of white paper or an article, some sort of gated content. And in order to get that gated content, they've got to fill out a, you know, a form with their name and their email. And yay, then you have their email address. There are other um platforms like HubSpot and High Level which also include CRM which are um uh you know uh customer relationship management applications where you are basically keeping track of who your clients and customers are in a database and it can link greater levels of functionality with your email list and an email list server. service provider sort of you know stuff like sending out email blasts tagging your uh email um subscribers and but also you know services like high level can also send out automated texts they can automate phone calls they can create all sorts of you know AIdriven automation um uh nurture sequences etc so there are different levels of email service providers Some have CRM, some don't. And so all of the ones that I mentioned, Mailorite, Mailchimp, Kit, HubSpot, High Level, all have a certain free level involved in it. And if you're just getting started, you're not going to hit the ceiling where you have to start paying right away. You can really get in there and start gathering email addresses before you have to pay a scent. So there, I am breaking down for you right now the barrier to entry to actually doing this for your business. If you're a creative professional and you are not building an email list, that is the number one best thing that you can start doing. Okay? And if you're interested in learning how to do this, I'm going to tell you a

little bit more about my mastermind community. It's going to make it really simple. But when you start collecting email addresses, the first thing that you do is you establish a sequence. So when someone is added to your email list, they start automatically getting a sequence of three to five emails that basically introduce them to your services, who you are, what you offer, testimonials, credentials over a period of three to five emails around, you know, getting one every other couple days or so. This is the greatest opportunity for you to introduce at a much deeper level your product, services, and what you do. You have to look at your website as like a billboard on a highway. People don't read, they're driving fast, right past it, right? You have to speak in a very headline driven, provocative, simple, laser focused, clarity kind of copy. But when you get them on an email list, you can communicate in a deeper way. There are also nurture sequences. So after they go through maybe a three to five email welcome sequence, maybe there's a twoe break and then you start hit them with a nurture sequence where it's basically you're kind of leading them down a much deeper, more articulated pathway to contacting you and doing business with you. So your website has two jobs. To sell, but also to capture. You want to make sure that you capture those people so they don't just go back off into the digital ether and you don't know who they are and you can't talk to them. Every page on your website has a purpose. There are kind of six key pages that any website should have. Now this is, you know, you can debate with me on this. If you have a more fully flushed website, this is what I would say. There are creative professionals right now who operate with single long homepage scrolling pages that do everything that I've just outlined in terms of what you want people to do when they go to your website. You do not have to have a six-page website. You can have a single scrolling one-page website. It can be that simple. But if you do have a more fully, you know, flushed out website, these are the kind of key pages that I would suggest that you have. You have your homepage, which is going to do all of the 10 things that I just outlined for you. You have a services page, and this is where you're going to go into greater detail about the range of products and services that you offer. You can get into your strategy processes or your design processes or the range of kind of connected services that you can offer, but you don't want to weigh down your homepage in that initial kind of customer journey and copy with too much information because people will bail or they will get overwhelmed and they won't continue to get the rest of the messaging. The third page you want to have is a portfolio page. This is where you're going to show case studies, project descriptions. It's the beauty pageant of the work that you've done. You're going to have an about page. Now, this page is the page that's about you, right? This is where you can talk about yourself. So, having an about page, right? Tells your bio, your history, where you've been, how passionate you are about design, where you went to school, whatever you it is that you want to have, you just want to keep that off of your homepage. Okay. The next page you want to have is a blog. So this is for SEO for AEO which is ask engine optimization meaning the LLMs like chat GPT perplexity claude bard etc. Having a blog and having long form written copy that is SEO keyword heavy is going to seriously benefit your website. And then the final page that you have is your contact page. This is you want to have a contact form actually on your homepage or at least a contact button, but you want to have a contact page on your website that's specifically for that and it's in the main navigation menu. Contact us with an intake form, maybe a free form of text and you know their name and email address. Again, once they fill out this form, they're on your email list and they're going to start getting that nurture sequence, that welcome sequence. Okay, so those are the six pages. the homepage, services page, portfolio page, your about page, a blog and your contact page. Okay, every page has job. This is a very key point and I spoke about this when I started the presentation and that is that it's very difficult for anyone specifically creative professionals to get any kind of meaningful perspective on what it is that they're doing on their websites. We have no objectivity. We are in the

weeds. We cannot see beyond that. We don't know how our co copy is coming off. We wrote it. You need outside perspectives in order to be able to really get true meaningful feedback on what it is that you're doing. And so I have a mastermind group. It's called Bonfire. And it is a group of mid to late career creative professionals who are building personal brands, businesses, careers in agencies, careers in in-house corporate. And we gather together to help each other set goals, hold each other accountable to those goals, inspire each other to what is actually possible in a career of a creative professional. It's a really cool and vibrant group. And the idea behind the word bonfire is that when you're around other people who are passionate and ambitious and working on their businesses, they are on fire. If you come into proximity with them, become friends, become peers, you can't help but catch fire too. be infected by that energy and by the ideas and the inspiration that you'll need to drive your business forward and also to get the perspective that you need on your business from the outside from trusted peers from a trusted point of view. So, bonfire meetings are every week. They happen on Mondays in the afternoon. Um, and they are z on Zoom. It's all virtual. And there's also a uh closed firewalled um community on the Circle platform where we have different forums, chat, all the recordings of our past meetings are there. all of the resources and um and assets that are downloadable are there. It's a really great platform. It's like a Facebook group but seriously on steroids, but it's a walled offgated community that only Bonfire members have an access to have access to. What's included in Bonfire membership is group coaching. So, you get group coaching with me. Depending on the level at which you join, you can get one-on-one direct coaching with me. There are two times a month we have mastermind meetings. One time a month is open office hours where you can uh get uh individual coaching or um ask questions of me or we just sit around and have coffee chat. Um there's also a meeting per month which is either an inspiration session called pastor or a vis I bring in visiting experts to do trainings with the group. All the sessions are recorded. So, if you want if you miss one and you want to catch it or you got some feedback and you want to go relist to it, you can always revisit the recordings. As I said, there's a private online community. There's a very clear kind of success map that I lay out for your process and your progress in building a personal brand and a creative professional business as you're looking to expand that or pivot into that. There's a massive resource library and then you also get deep discounts on my brand strategy 101 course. And if you take brand strategy 101, I'm also there in Bonfire. So there's a lot of people who have taken brand strategy 101 or building brand strategy capabilities for their creative businesses and they can use Bonfire as a way to get support and mentorship and coaching and kind of immediate Q& A and support around implementing that uh that capability brand strategy into their business. And so there are tons of resources, tools, worksheets, checklists, um, uh, video playlists. It's endless really. Almost everything that you need with to run a freelance or a small agency business is inside Bonfire. And so membership, Bonfire membership is $97 a month when it's paid quarterly. If it's paid monthly, it's 127, but you get a steep discount if you pay quarterly. And I encourage people to join quarterly because that way you can get in, experience the group, make some friends, and really start to get the benefit so you can really kind of evaluate it completely and people can get to know you because it's a two-way street. There's three levels of membership. Monthly membership, and then there's the guild level, which includes one-on-one direct coaching with me. You get everything that's in the main level of membership, but you also get one-on-one coaching with me. And then there's a mentorship level. You can read all about this on philip vandusen. com/bonfire. And there's a whole bunch of videos of people who have been in my mastermind groups before and the benefits that they've gotten out of it. There's also a few videos from me describing it in a little more detail. So definitely hop over there and check that out. If you are interested in Bonfire and are serious about the possibility of joining, hit me up on uh LinkedIn, send

me an email, you can just subscribe to my newsletter. When you get the first email, just hit reply. Comes directly to me. Say, "I'm interested in Bonfire. Let's jump on Zoom. Let's talk about whether it's the right thing for you. " Okay? It's very, very easy to explore that with me. No pressure. Um, okay. Let's jump back into it. Another thing I want to impress upon you in terms of your website copy is you don't turn your back on hiring an expert. There are expert copywriters out there. In fact, we had a really fantastic copywriter come in as a vis visiting expert to Bonfire and do a presentation and she actually worked through revising some of the copy on some of our members websites in that visiting expert session. And it was really incredible to watch for this woman to actually um edit and revise copy on websites in real time in front of the whole group. It was really an incredible kind of visiting expert session. And so don't hesitate if you want to and you think that it would be beneficial to you, hire a copywriting expert to get that perspective. And uh I guarantee you that it will be money well spent for you. And if you can't hire one 100% to write all your copy, hire one to come in and edit it or give you a review or a critique on your website. That would be, you know, less of a financial investment, but definitely, as I said, worth it. You also want to iterate. When you get in there and you start laying out your website and it's working, it's up, it's going, you want to iterate. You want to operate on data, not just thoughts or, you know, or worries or concerns or not basing your decisions or your changes or your edits on any kind of real user behavior. So, there's a number of ways to kind of collect user behavior and make sure that you're editing and iterating your copy on real hard data. There are programs like Hot Jar and Microsoft Clarity which is free. There's Lucky Orange which has an e-commerce focus to it. There's something called Full Story which is more enterprise level for larger agencies and larger companies. Uh there's a company called Crazy Egg. These are tools that will track user behavior. They'll gather analytics. They create heat maps for where people are actually going on your site, how long they're dwelling on certain things, what they're looking at, what they're reading, what they're not reading, and it also records those sessions. So, you can actually in some cases watch it in real time, like how is someone actually scrolling through your site. So using that in concert with Google Analytics and looking at the real kind of visitor data around people as they're um interacting with your site, where they're going, what they're clicking on, how they're coming into your site, where they're coming from, etc. Operate on real data. Yes, it's important to look at the emotional journey you're bringing people on, but once you do that, you also want to iterate based on truth and true data. Okay. And finally, don't be afraid to leverage AI, right? AI is an amazing tool. Chat GPT, Claude, Bard, Perplexity. Write your email, write your website copy, drop it into there. Ask them their opinion. Ask whether it has suggestions. Give it a range of different sorts of prompts and see what you get out of it. Another thing that I like to do is I like to play these LLMs off of each other. So, I subscribe to Chat TPT because I built a lot of my brand equity within it and it knows a lot about my business. But sometimes when I get stuff out of Chat TPT, I will take it and I will run it through Claude to get it to kind of dial in a much more kind of human level or to critique it or to, you know, give me some additional perspective. So, I'll actually play LLMs against each other. But the, you know, kind of the headline I want to give you here is that yes, we write as humans, and it's best to write as humans, but it's also helpful sometimes if you can't afford to hire a copywriter to plug your copy into an LLM and get it to critique it, get it to, you know, consolidate it, to make it more to clearer, more of that laser focused, to cut down the volume of the copy. I can't tell you how many times I've seen creative professionals who think they've honed down their copy as much as they can and then you can get a professional copywriter to edit it or feed it into an LLM and it can like

tighten it up and make it a lot cleaner. It can be really helpful. And the last thing I want to leave you with is that sorry is that um your website's not a brochure, right? your website. You have to think of it as a guided decision-making process. It is an action architecture. You have to think of your website not as this fullyfledged portfolio PDF catalog of everything it is that you do. You want to think of it as a very guided experience for the people who are visiting it with a very clear action that you're expecting and you're creating for that visitor to take. All right. So you guys, that's it. That's the presentation for today. So I'll take some questions. If you have any questions about the content that I've went gone through today, I'd be happy to answer them. I'll look through the chat. I don't seem to think that any questions were in all caps. Um we've had a little bit um a light chat. You guys have not been chatting a lot today. Um but that's okay. Uh it's Friday the 13th. As far as I know, the live stream is still going through. As far as I know, LinkedIn has not, you know, kind of like been disconnected for some reason like it did last time. We're still here. So, if anyone has any questions about website copy and what I've been talking about, um, happy to take them. Just pop them in. If you could type question before your question in all caps, that can be helpful. But we don't have a a seriously uh active chat window there today. And that's okay. So, I'm going to take a pause and um in honor of Peter Lewis from Corks, I'll have a sip of Red Bull. And while I'm waiting, if you haven't been listening to my podcast, you definitely should and get on my email list. So these are all my socials. I'm Philip Vandusen everywhere. If you go to phip vandusen. commuse mus, you can get on my email list. You'll get a welcome sequence and you can also communicate with me directly. Just hit reply. it's g going to come directly to me. And so the thing that I wanted to hit you with was if you haven't been listening to the podcast, um I suggest you go over and check out Brand Design Masters podcast. It's in the top 5% of marketing podcasts in the world. I've had some amazing people uh come on and I've interviewed them. Marty Newmire, Chris Doe, Chris Ducker, list goes on. Um amazing folks. I'm doing primarily solo shows now. Um, and in many cases, I'm taking the audio from these live streams and I'm re- editing it, repurposing it for my podcast. So, if you like this live stream and want to hear it in a really condensed kind of way, um, you in a couple weeks you can probably hear it on my podcast. And then if you missed the three or four live streams I've done in the last month on this kind of live stream tear that I've been on, you can go back to the Brand Design Masters podcast and um the audio from some of those live streams will be there. All right, Miles, good to see you, my friend. Thanks for popping in. Um Peter asked a question. Okay, here we go. I'm gonna add this. Quirkworks asks, "Can you talk about the importance of using the active voice on website content? " Yeah. Uh, that's a really good question, Peter. There's kind of different, you know, it's like writing in the third person, first person. There are a lot of solo practitioners that use the word we. Um there do you want to make it sound like a human being talking to a singular human being or do you want to make it more generalized and more kind of plural? My opinion on this these days is that the more human the better. And this is influenced heavily by what's happening with the influx and the increasingly prevalent app appearance of AI copy is that copy on the internet is getting incredibly genericized. And the more human and the more conversational you can make your copy on their website, the more it's going to cut through. The other thing is the more it's going to actually resonate emotionally with the visitor who's

reading it. And as I said earlier today, we are, you know, operating in reptilian brains. So we even though we think we are very rational decision-making human beings, most of the time we are making decisions based on emotion. So, as AI is infiltrating our every aspect of our digital lives, the more human we can show up, sound, the more personal we make that connection, the more you're going to be cutting through. So, I'm hoping I'm addressing the question, Peter, in terms of using active voice, um, making it sound like it's coming from a human rather than corporation. One of the things that um is a debate is there are a lot of solo practitioners out there who use strategic partners. Right? My agency for the last decade, I've run a essentially a one-man show, but it is a digital ver virtual agency, meaning that I've worked on very large projects where I've pulled in very senior level um uh subject matter experts to do various things, consumer insights, copywriting, web design, UX, UI, packaging, whatever that is, and built teams to work specific projects. And so for a long period of time I used the wei, the plural in describing the my agency, the services we offered. As I've moved away from offering a huge range of services and just into running Bonfire coaching and consulting, I've kind of I'm starting to shift the copy on my website to become more active, more first person, and to sound more personal. Um, so the argument can be made to make yourself sound bigger than you are. Um, and the argu can be made to make it sound more personal and more human. And it's really up to you. But I think that sometimes it's important to take into consideration what is the emerging zeitgeist in the human condition when it comes to how we communicate with each other. And I think that this is one of those kind of pivotal watershed moments in time that we don't see a lot that over the next you know few years is going to become increasingly important. I think video is also going to become increasingly important because people are going to want to see the human beings around who is communicating with them. And also that the idea of uh the human being behind the brand or agency. People want to connect with people. People do business with people not brands. People buy from people, not brands. And you guys understand this too because you're branding and creative people is that the larger the company, the bigger, more enterprise size the company is, the less trust people have in it. Period. End of story. And huge companies like Virgin Galactic or PNG, right? I've done a lot of packaging work for PNG in the past. They have a huge portfolio of, you know, hundred different brands, massive brands. Ivory Soap, Tide, Fbreze, Gillette, like giant brands under the roof of PNG. But PNG is a gigantic enterprise level company. And there is no human face behind PNG. It's very difficult to connect emotionally with that company as an entity. And so having a human face and a human personality behind your company, your brand, your personal brand is one of those things that I think is going to become exceedingly critical uh for companies in general. And that's one of the reasons why you also see a lot of senior executives and um from larger companies, small to medium-sized businesses who are elevating the visibility of themselves as humans in relationship to their company because they know that you have to have some sort of a personal face behind a brand to make that human connection. Um Mark, good to see you. Uh yeah, there's a it's cool. There's a few people from Bonfire who are here and have are working through this exact stuff together. Um and uh Hardy Design Co, who was in the chat earlier, is um is one who actually

had his website uh kind of critiqued and worked on live from our copyrightiting expert. We had as visiting expert in Bonfire. It was really an inspiring experience inside the group that time. Um, okay. So, I got a question here. Uh, JWG asks, "What does a soloreneur generalist use as the bullseye copy on the target copy you talked about? I do everything from general graphic design, video editing, and photography. " Yeah, I mean, that's the perfect question. That is the question, right? So, you may do graphic design, video editing, photography, a whole range of things. Let me tell you a very quick story. I was interviewing Marty Newmier on my podcast and he wrote a number of really seinal design books and uh he's famous was became famous by doing all of Apple's packaging back when Apple did software packaging back when things came on DVDs and CDs and stuff. He did all of Apple's packaging and he became very well known because of that. And I was asking him on the podcast about it and he was saying how when we kind of started to get famous for packaging, we still did brand identity. We did food packaging, we did instore marketing, we did websites, we did a whole range of things, but if you went on our website, it looked like all we did was software packaging. He communicated the center of that bullseye. And because he had credibility and authority for packaging for this very high-profile, very desirable premium brand, all these, it didn't keep anyone from coming to connect with him or want to do business with his agency. And he said, "Yeah, we obviously kept doing all of the food packaging and the brand identity and the intore marketing and all the other stuff that we would do for other companies, but we didn't show any of it. " Right? and so on their website. So if you build credibility, authority, you know, a powerful voice within a certain capability and can showcase that in your portfolio and your case studies, you are going to a you're going to be niching down and it's going to make you it so much easier for you to talk about what it is that you do and to tell that story through those steps of website copy. If you're focusing on a particular target, size, company, type of company, particular problem, need, etc., it's going to make it so much easier for you to write your copy. It does not mean that when you get to your services page, you can't list the range of things that you do. It doesn't mean that when you get to your portfolio page, your case study page, that you don't show kind of more fully flushed range of uh creative deliverables that you do. But when you tell that initial story, try to be as focused as you can. Okay? I'm not saying, you know, divorce and make invisible all the other offerings that you have, but you really have to kind of focus on that center bullseye. And as you do that, you can decide on whether the example that you choose for your homepage in telling that customer journey story, maybe that example has a slightly broader range of needs than the one I used as the example, the packaging example for skincare brands, right? Maybe it's a client that you have that needed graphic design, but they also needed a little video for their website and you did some custom photography for them. There's a way for you to kind of make it a very targeted message and story, but maybe weave in a little more depth around some of the other things you do, but try to keep it as pointed and the tip of that spear is as pointy and focused as possible. I hope that helps. Yeah, Hardy Design Co is saying, "Happy to be the guinea pig. " Yeah, that um that visiting expert session that we did um with a with an expert copywriter was uh really instructional because I just be honest with you, I don't know that I've ever been in a group setting of, you know, 12 people where we were actually sitting over the shoulder of someone, an expert sales page conversion copywriter who was rewriting one of our members websites as we all kind watched. It was really a great experience and we all learned tons from it, myself included. And that's one of the, you know, that's one of the really cool things about Bonfire. And so again, if you're interested in Bonfire

Bonfire, it's a mastermind community for mid to late career creative professionals. If you go to phobusen. com, bonfire philandusen. combonfire, you can learn more about it. And so with that, you guys, it's a little over an hour. It's been an amazing Friday the 13th to spend with you. I'm gonna um here, let's do instead of that, let's do the funky outro music. This is uh what I like to play sometimes when I'm on the way out. Anyway, I hope you guys have a fantastic weekend. Get away, get outside, get some fresh air. Um and also an incredible week. I'll be going live again next week. I'm not sure exactly what the topic's going to be, but if you have something that you're struggling with and you'd love to influence what I'm going to do my live stream on next week, get on my email list, hit reply to the first one, tell me what you're thinking about in terms of what you'd like to see on the live stream next Friday and I'll see if I can make that happen. And so with that, thank you guys for showing up. I really appreciate you hanging out with me today on Friday the 13th. And I hope you go back and do some killer work and flex on that website copy of yours. And uh make sure to uh you know, you could relisten to this, re-watch it or hear it on a podcast, my podcast in a couple weeks. And uh get in there. Don't be afraid. Here's the thing. We live in a digital world. Websites are digital. You can iterate every day if you want to. You can try different things. Get some peer feedback. Really try to get some objective viewpoint on what it is that you're doing to make it better. Look at your analytics, Google, Hot Jar, all that great stuff and iterate and grow, right? I have faith in you. I know you're going to have amazing careers if you're not having one already. Get out there and do it. And — um with that, I hope you guys have a great weekend and I'll talk to you soon. Till next time.