It's GO TIME, baby 🎉

About 7 years ago, the agency I was working for signed a new SEO client.

He was a cross between a buyer's advocate and a financial planner, but you didn't actually pay him any money directly. It's an industry I'm quite familiar with now, but at the time... I had NFI what he really did. And to be honest, it seemed like nobody else in the building did either.

The keywords in his copywriting brief were all standard real estate terms. My team wrote what was asked of us, filled the pages with the keywords, and sent it over.

When he read the copy, he absolutely tore it to shreds.

Realising we didn't get it, he offered to come in and run a free workshop on what he actually did for the whole agency. That workshop was super informative—and turned out to be pretty lucrative for him. He ended up signing me and my husband Steve as clients, plus a few other people in the office.

He stayed with our agency for a year. He spent $30,000 on SEO.

Not one single lead. 😳

If it wasn't for that workshop, he would've made literally NOTHING from working with us.

Now, to be clear: the agency WAS getting bloody great results for other clients at the same time. But that's because the strategy happened to align with their offer. The sales team didn't care (or didn't know 🤷‍♀️) which was which—they were just selling channels for the sake of their targets.

When I brought up how broken this was, my Head of Digital at the time gave me a response I'll never forget:

"You're not writing for people, Cass. You're writing for the spider."

Ugh. Fuck off. 🙄

Thankfully, only a year later I got a NEW Head of Digital who started on my journey to where I am now. (Hi Marc 👋)

He encouraged me to get my team more involved in the strategy. I started making it my MISSION to get my team to stop blindly following crap SEO briefs. I demanded more than "small business owners" as a target audience. I banned "friendly and professional" as a tone of voice. I got us in front of clients so we could interview SMEs and actually learn how their businesses worked.

And when I went out on my own, I said goodbye to the algo-trash forever.

Which brings me to today:

Issue #1 of The Brief is officially LIVE! 🥳

My brand new website courtesy of the absolute legend that is Nick Gulic is up and running, and now the Brief #1: Write to Persuade is available for your reading or listening pleasure.

I chose Writing to Persuade as the flagship topic because whether you're writing a LinkedIn post, a sales page, a newsletter or your homepage, you're not simply writing for a channel—you're writing to convince someone of something. You're getting attention, building relationships and ultimately wanting the reader to take an action.

So in this Brief, I break down the exact strategic principles I use when writing copy—whether it's to make a sale, start a relationship or something else.

To celebrate, you can grab your first month of The Brief for just $1. After that, it's $20 per month.

Thank you to those who have already subscribed—you're awesome. For the rest of you, if you're keen I wouldn't dilly-dally:

The $1 Launch Offer ends at precisely 12pm AEST on Monday, July 27th.

If you're ready to ditch the algo-trash, and write copy that follows tried-and-tested marketing principles, sign up here.

Cheers,
Cass

P.S. For my BNI friends—$1 for a referral seems like the biggest no-brainer ever, right? 😜