Episode# 036: How to Create Killer Copy That Converts With Guru Ashlyn Carter

Imagine a world where it felt easy to put your thoughts on paper and then out into the world to be met with cheers of “that’s EXACTLY what I was looking for! Here, take my credit card and my firstborn. I’m ready to pay you for your genius!”

But then you go to put what you do and how you seek to serve your tribe into words and…

Hear that? Those are crickets. Lots and lots of crickets.

Well, I’m bringing to you THE Ashlyn Carter. She is a conversion copywriter and marketing strategist specializing in wedding & creative industries. She traded Fortune 500 clients in corporate marketing to build a seven-figure business writing for creatives like Jenna Kutcher, Beth Kirby of Local Milk, Julie Solomon, Katelyn James, Hilary Rushford, Lara Casey/Cultivate What Matters, and more. Her launch funnels have generated upwards of $500k in revenue for clients.

I know, I know. I can hear it now…

“But Elizabeth, I’m not a writer.”

“But Elizabeth, I’ve tried that and it doesn’t work.”

Listen, I totally get it. Not everyone is a writer by trade. But that doesn’t mean you can’t follow my process for capturing your voice and creating copy that actually gets your dream clients to say, “HECK YES!”

So in summation, this one is a must-listen! We had some great laughs, chit-chatted about motherhood and got down to the nitty-gritty tactics that are literally going to change your business.

How did you get started Ashlyn?

I feel like sometimes entrepreneurs start their story by bashing the world they came from or the corporate world, but it gave me my flooring, my sureness, my security. I knew that I could excel at what it is that I wanted to do on my own because I'd gotten results for corporate clients.

So I come from that background. I worked in a public relations and marketing firm here in Atlanta out of college for a few years. That was agency style. So I think for listeners that don't have a background in communications it can go one of two ways (when it comes to marketing). You can work in house and have one client or you can have many hats. I did both and I loved them both pretty much equally. I think that it also gave me a knack for shifting voice now as I am a copywriter and have a lot of different clients. So that was my world. Loved it, loved it a little too much. I love work and so I didn't know how to turn it off.

And when you work in something like media and marketing where your job is to constantly be listening in, aware of what's going on, I think all of that just got really woven into my identity and I loved the glitz and the glam that came along with my job and you know, couple that together with being a little bit of a perfectionist, I was a train headed down the wrong path really, really fast. And so what happened? Long Story Short in 2015, all of the performance and just constantly being on culminated in anxiety, depression, and an eating disorder. And I actually went into partial hospitalization where I took leave from work and went into really work on my recovery. I hated it at first and then it was the thing that saved my life and I loved it. And I can talk about that for a long time.

I loved that phase, but it was through that when I realize I got on the other side and I thought, you know what? Kind of like what you just said. I don't want to be a cog in the wheel. I have a dream on my heart. I have something that I want to get out there and I just want to see if it would work. So that was 2016 when I started my business.

How did you take that leap and start your own business?

So what I've told my 6 month old lately, it is a lot of throwing spaghetti at the wall to seeing what will stick.  We all know the statistics about businesses that out of the gate, most of them fail because a lack of product market fit. So I will say that early on in my business when I was driving to work, listening to all the podcasts, I really started to understand that it didn't matter. And I think as the copywriter in me to, as you would know, it didn't matter what I wanted to build unless people actually had a need for it. And so I paid attention a lot to what were they asking for and how can I structure what it is that I do in a way that they would understand.

When I first started, I was writing everything. I was writing resumes, I was writing about pages, editorial work for different magazines.  Then on the calligraphy side, I did chalkboards, I did envelopes, you name it, and you had a checkbook out and ready. And I would raise my hand and say that I was the one for the job. But I slowly realized that I needed to really get specific.  I went in kicking and screaming toward copywriting. I did not think that that was going to make me more money. I thought that that was going to completely limit me, but the more I started to do it, the quicker and quicker and quicker. Our business grew it and excel it like the more I needed.

Ashlyn, give us the scoop on creating really great copy

Let's get tactical and note the mistakes I see people making. I would also like to say I will share all day, every day the mistakes that I've made in my own copy, which is pretty frequent. I think that first of all for anybody listening know that your homepage and your own copy is going to be the hardest to write your headlines of that are going to be the hardest and I want to say that because where do we all start? Our headline copy for our homepage is like probably one of the first things when you sit down to write your own copy and so you're starting with something that's really hard. Copywriters think that or I've said I've had plenty of copywriting mentors tell me like home pages continued to be the hardest thing for them to write and it's because you are trying.

Whereas like something that's closer to the sale is very specific. Your homepage is going to be a little bit more like your, you've got people that are going to be at different levels of needing to work with you. Some have a big budget, some don't have a big budget, but they're still coming to you for the same kind of needs. So it's going to be hard. So I just want to throw that out there first so people can like shake it off. But some of the things that I've learned along the way, writing your own copy also is like trying to do and see the back of your hair and it always is like you're very sweet to compliment my website. The copy has slowly gotten to where I'm pleased with it. I think that writing my own copy has been so hard too.

One thing that I think we all need to remember, and I say it a lot, but the best copy is never in your head. It's always in your audience's head and it's your job. It's your job as CEO to go out there and to get it. It's not going to fall into your lap one day. You need to actually go out there and actively look for it and curated it and pull it together and Vanessa in play with it like Plato until it comes to a place where it actually is like you said, clear and make sense. Some of these, these snippets, you read out a few of them, those are not my words.  I just happen to be a really good listener and really good at assembling.  I'm a good writer. I have to be a good writer to get where I am, but I am a really good listener.

Check out the episode for ALL of Ashlyn’s amazing tips on creating incredible copy!!