Pam: Hello, hello, Michaela. I’m so excited to have you on the Wake the Wealth Show. 

Thank you so much for joining me. 

I’m just so excited about introducing you to my audience. But I don’t want to spoil your intro. I want to give you the opportunity to tell us who you are just as an intro before we get going.

Michaela: Thank you so much, Pam. It’s such a treat to be here with you and your audience. 

My very quick elevator pitch is that I am a psychologist turned copy coach for health and wellness professionals. 

I came to copywriting through the back door as I was building my own business, and bootstrapping my own website as I was building my therapy practice. 

What I quickly learned is that while folks like me in the health and wellness world are really skilled at in-person magic, as I call it, translating that online and especially in words can get us stumped. And so what we end up having are online presences that really don’t reflect all the goods we bring in real life. And so that is what I’ve done is built a business around coaching my fellow health and wellness professionals to just be as awesome online as they are in person.

Pam: I love it. And that is such a difficult thing to do. 

We think we’ve got it. But it really does take somebody else looking at your stuff and saying: ‘Hey, actually, this doesn’t really reflect who you are’. I love that. 

I also love that you said that you came into this through a backdoor, literally bootstrapping your business as we all did. That’s a similar story to mine. And it’s really great. 

I’m sure we’re going to dive into more of that. 

What is the problem that you solve for your clients? 

Michaela: Most of the folks who I work with are at a point in their businesses where they’re aware of the problem. 

They’re aware that they need to be producing quite a bit of copy or just written communication for their business to help market it, no matter what type of work they do specifically. 

But many of them either are burnt out on writing because they’re still haunted by their dissertation or their masters or whatever, or they just find it so cumbersome. Maybe they don’t see themselves as a ‘writer’, and so it feels really difficult. And so they end up avoiding a lot of the day-to-day writing tasks that we all have to do, the email, the social media captions, and writing the actual pages of our website. 

Other folks also see it as just something that is outsourceable. I can have good copywriting. I’ll just put something down now, and then when I progress to a certain level in my business, I’ll just hand it all over to someone else.

And so the problem I solve for them is reconciling that even maybe when they’ve done that, they recognise, Oh, I still actually have to have copywriting skills because I still have to be the 24/7 ambassador of my own business because if I don’t nail my own messaging, who the heck else will?

Pam: No, absolutely. You have to understand your messaging so much so that you can, if anything, correct things, read it and know and say, Hey, this does represent me, or It doesn’t represent me. Without giving your voice, put your voice into someone else’s hands to do the talking for you. Yes?

Michaela: Absolutely. What you often share resonates with me, Pam, is this idea of storytelling as a real anchor point, no matter what business you’re in. And so I really teach it as a recursive process. It’s cyclical. 

You don’t just have something up there and now it’s out in the world and the writing is done and we all go home. 

You put it out there before it feels ready, you see what feedback you get, and then you continue to revise the story of you and your business and your clients as time goes on. 

And so that’s really the message. I try to make it an encouraging message for people. You don’t have to be perfect at this. You just have to get in there and start.

Pam: Start and be willing to do it continuously. I love that. 

I want to take you back a few steps to before you started your business or before you started your business properly when you were bootstrapping. You talked about that earlier. 

What are some of the challenges that you faced as a new business owner?

Just walk me through some of the challenges that you faced as a new business owner, still trying to find your path. Is anything significant that you remember that really held you down and how did you deal with it back then?

Michaela: I think operating under the myth of if then. If I could just get to X, Y, or Z points in my business, whether that’s revenue, time, or just experience, then I can afford to make investments in support. 

Even something as simple as part-time VA support. I don’t even want to tell you how long I waited to outsource just a few little tasks. And part of it is maybe typed awesome with a capital A, control. But also it’s to do with just not feeling like you’re worthy of that. And really, at the end of the day, I’m a psychologist, I should have been hip to this, but it’s some old stories about not being worth investing in. 

And so I would say, honestly, that tripped me up is just believing, if I believe in my business, then I need to believe that it’s worth investing in as I can early on.

Pam: Earlier, you mentioned that a lot of people get into writing website copy, social media copy, and email, and they experience burnout. So what would be your advice as somebody who does this very living for many, many, many businesses? 

How do you avoid burnout? 

Michaela: Yes, in the interest of limiting my answer here, I’ll focus specifically on burnout in writing. 

I think my best advice is that give yourself permission to define showing up consistently for yourself. 

We hear this a lot. 

You need to be showing up in your email subscriber’s inboxes or in people’s feeds on Social Media, but you get to determine what that actually looks like. 

Anything can be bumped up or down over time. I would even go a step further and say, if you’re experiencing unrest or you have a sinking feeling when you go to create content for a particular platform, I think that’s worth paying attention to. I know that’s not necessarily popular advice. 

I think underpinning a lot of business-building advice is still this old-school power-through mentality. I’m much more of the mind that we get this one life and the flip side too. There are so many different places we could be showing up is there are so many options for where you could show up. 

And so you might as well choose a subset that you genuinely delight in using yourself. 

And again, you can always scale things later on and outsource.

But that’s my best advice is just to make it truly enjoyable and think if this one next day of business were my whole business, like if we could shrink it down and this was the entire story of me as a business owner, how can I make it as joyful as possible as I’m going about the business of crushing it and serving people? 

What are the day-to-day activities that a person should do to develop their copywriting skills?

Pam: Michaela, talk to me about the day-to-day things that let’s say I’m just starting out in copywriting, and what are the day-to-day activities that a person should do to develop their copywriting skills?

Michaela: Wonderful question. So I think this is a very biased answer because this underpins so much of what I teach. 

I firmly believe that for the biggest return on your time investment, putting together even a basic copy bank is a wonderful starting point.

And then the next thing is to start paying attention to your own behaviour as a user, as a person in the world, and as a consumer. 

What gets you to click? 

What gets you to open the email? 

What gets you to do a double take in front of a storefront that you pass? 

I think getting in a curious mindset before you ever put words on the page is going to take you so far in being a copywriter. 

And then from there, it’s about prioritising. 

What are the immediate needs of my business?

Do I have an online presence, even if it’s not perfect? 

Do I have a place to send traffic? 

Do I have a place where I’m showing up and serving content, whether that’s on Social Media, in my email list, on a blog, etc? And going from there.

Is there any copywriting formula that is your favourite or perhaps one of your own that you can share with our audience?

Pam: My next question is on the formula. 

With copywriting, I know that there are several copywriting formulas out there. 

I’ve even created my own for teaching storytelling, which is a form of copywriting. Is there any formula that is your favourite or perhaps one of your own that you can share with our audience, too? 

For somebody who is just wanting to get started or get going or improve their copy that they can run with.

Michaela: Yes, I’m going to give you one that is so short and to the point, you can implement it as you’re listening to this. 

So there are many copywriting formulas, as you said, but one that I don’t hear talked about quite enough, I want us all to be talking about it, is Call To Action specific. 

So you think about the button on the sales page or on your website or whatever, the copy that goes on that actual button, because that is, I call it Microcopy, right? 

It’s a snippet of a copy. 

There are strategic reasons why you might want to put a word like subscribe or sign up, or enrol. But in many cases, generally speaking, I think we tend to overuse that utilitarian copy. 

So that’s where you as the person doing the calling, you’re calling them to action, you tee up the button with just a quick little question like:

Ready to get started? 

And then you give them the chance to respond. And so you phrase the copy on the button accordingly.

Sign me up. 

It’s very simple, super simple, but we don’t get to write calls of action this way unless we’ve really thought about it. But again, thinking back to your own behaviour, I’m much more inclined to click that.

So I think the magic is sprinkling in, finding a balance between the call and response. 

And then once again, where maybe on a sales page, you do several of those, and then you really bring it home at the end with sign up here. 

There’s room for both. 

Pam: But to be honest, I didn’t know it was a formula. 

It was just something that the way I write copy is like I’m talking to somebody. 

So I’m like: ‘Mikaela, sign up here. 

I’m saying it and I’m thinking this is when they’re going to respond and then they’re going to click. But I didn’t know that it was a formula. So there we are. 

I’ve learned something new. Mikaela, 

What was the moment you realised that you have hit your Money Goal?

I want to spin the conversation to asking something as you know, this is the Wake to Wealth Show. And I want to talk about the moment you realised that you have hit a specific money goal. That moment where it wasn’t just the one time, it started to happen over and over and over again. And you began to wake up wealthier every single day essentially. What was that one moment? Just walk me through.

Michaela: I was primarily earning my income by seeing clients in my therapy practice. And so in order to do that, at that time, I was there in my office physically. I had my seat on the couch. They were across from me just that whole hour. There’s no multitasking. There’s no being anywhere else, at least not as a good therapist. You should be all there. And so I had been starting my copy coaching business on the side just as a side venture.

I had heard before, I’d heard tales of passive income and that you could be on a beach somewhere and you see that money is coming in and how exhilarating that must be. And what’s so interesting, Pam is when I had my own version of that experience, I was in Minnesota where it’s very cold. And so this particular weekend, I was up in Northern Minnesota where it’s even colder. And my stepson had a hockey tournament. So I was there cheering him on along with the rest of our family. And we

were just having a really fun weekend together when I got a notification that I’d made a sale of my new course.

At that moment, I felt like the wealthiest woman in the world when really looking back, it was probably underpriced. But I felt like this just came through as a ping on my phone while we were sitting here waiting for our food to arrive. 

And I’m looking around and that to me is like a holistic definition of wealth. 

I have money coming in. I’m serving the people that I want most to serve. And I’m with the people I love most in the world. Who needs a beach at that point? 

I mean, I wouldn’t have turned down a beach, but it’s such a sweet memory for me because that felt like wealth to me. 

Pam: 100%. I think wealth is a holistic thing. What you’ve just described is it’s just such a magical moment. You’re there with your family and money is coming in, money that you had done the work for previously. At some point, who knows when? And then it begins to convert. I absolutely love that. 

Now, I have some wild card questions for you, Michaela. 

Now, just so the audience knows, you don’t know what these questions are. And sometimes even I don’t know what they are because they are taken from our community. But I do have five. And so for the wild card, all you have to do is choose any question between the numbers 1 to 5. Just give me a number and I will read the question out.

Michaela: I choose number 3.

Pam: Number 3 is a good one. I think you’ll like this one. 

What are the top tips for using Copy on Email or Social Media?

Michaela: The first thing that comes to mind right off, and this is a bit of a call back to something we talked about earlier, is to pay attention to your own behaviour. 

But I’ll drill it down a little more specific than that. 

What I see often on Social Media and also in emails that I list that I’m subscribed to is even when the person has just written a very compelling, thought-provoking, engaging piece of content, they’ll bring it home with a call to action that doesn’t quite match.

It either doesn’t match the content of what they’ve just shared, which that’s a missed opportunity to be building toward this big crescendo. Or the ask is a little off. It’s a little inappropriate. 

So for example, on Social Media, I’ll hear people saying: ‘share below’, and it’ll be like sharing a time when you were humiliated or tagging someone who really needs this reel about obnoxious family members. It’s like, everyone’s going to actually lean in and say, yes, I want to take part in that. And so think about what makes for a call to action that you actually want to respond to.

Pam: I love that. Make sure your content and your call to action match. 

We have time for one more wild card. 

Do you want to pick another number between one and five?

Michaela: Yeah, I’ll choose 5.

Pam: Okay, really good question. 

If you were to start your business again, what would you do differently?

Michaela: I think I would tap into the community much sooner. 

I was guilty of lone wolfing a little too long in my business. 

And honestly, Pam, as I thought about this, I think it has roots in some of our best intentions. 

When you’re excited about the work that you’re doing, it’s almost like, That’s an afterthought. I don’t need my own community. I’m building a community. And yet, of course, we need our own community. Of course, we do. We weren’t meant to do this

in isolation. And so I think I mistakenly believed that the only opportunities for the community were intense formal ones, like a really high-level mastermind or something, or building a team. And then you won’t be alone because you’ve built a huge team when really there are so many less formal ways. I mean, we’re living in an amazing time to be able to connect with other human beings, just like we are here. You can build these connections and you can just go such a long way to buffering us during the challenging times, of which there are plenty.

Pam: I think the best work that we have done and the best times that I have had in my business that has led to the biggest revenues happened because of community, 100%. 

And it’s just other people.

It’s relationships like this one that you and I are forming. 

It’s that and just seeing collaboration over competition and genuinely meaning to help people. And in return, they help you, too.

Like you, I too, ignored the community, unfortunately. So yeah, I love that tip. 

Thank you so much, Mikaela. I have learned so much from this. 

It’s been wonderful having you. It’s been a wonderful conversation and really great value, and I cannot wait to see a little bit more of your work and to have people coming into your business and just seeing how fabulous and what a wonderful copywriter you are. 

Thank you so much for being on the show. 

Michaela: Thank you so much, Pam. 

It’s been a total joy.