Mike Garner is our guest on the 327th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Mike is a message consultant who focuses on story-based emails that build connections and convert for small businesses. If you’ve ever struggled to share your story in a way that’s true to you, this episode will give you the inspiration to make it happen.
Here’s what we chat about:
How Mike went from translator to copywriter and how he uses his past experience today.
The art of copywriting vs the art of other forms of writing – how’s it different?
How you can use your title or label to your advantage.
Why Mike decided to “sit down and do stuff” aka give copywriting a fair go.
How digging out the trash, shame, and insecurities will make you a better writer and business owner.
Developing your rags-to-riches story.
What’s the point of writing for ourselves?
Is anyone actually paying attention? Is that a good thing?
Why you need to get over yourself…
Mike’s personal memoir book writing process.
When it might be a good idea to get back to the foundations of your business.
Are you neglecting your own business, dreams, story?
How The Copywriter Accelerator and Think Tank have given Mike much needed validation and how they’ve helped grow his business.
Everyone’s in a rush… baby steps are great.
Tune into the episode below.
The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:
Join The Copywriter Accelerator waitlist
The Copywriter Think Tank
Kira’s website
Rob’s website
Mike's website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Free month of Brain.FM
Full Transcript:
Rob Marsh: Great writers of all kinds have at least one thing in common. They tell stories in copy, in content, in books, in poetry, sometimes even on packaging and postcards. There's something magical about the way that stories hold our attention, and our guest for this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is copywriter Mike Garner, who just finished an entire book about stories, a book that includes many of his own. While we were talking with Mike, we took the opportunity to also ask him about his experience with the Copywriter Accelerator program, what he learned from it, and how it's informed what he's doing in this business today. There's a lot of good advice that you might be able to apply in your own business.
Kira Hug: Rob, you are really good at writing introductions. I just have to note that right here, that was well written, well done.
Rob Marsh: I don't know. I don't know about that.
Kira Hug: I cannot write an introduction for the life of me, so I'm impressed. Before we jump into the conversation, this episode is sponsored by the Copywriter Accelerator, which Rob just mentioned. It is our five-month mastermind/coaching program for copywriters who want to build a profitable, sustainable copywriting business and make 10K a month in their business consistently. If you have interest or want to learn more about the Copywriter Accelerator, especially as we talk about it today with Mike. Go to the copywriteraccelerator.com to learn more about it. Doors do close, so fair warning, doors close to the program today at midnight when this episode goes live. If you're on the fence, definitely move fast.
Rob Marsh: Yes.
Kira Hug: Okay, well let's jump into the interview with Mike.
Mike Garner: Where do I start? Well, I've been a freelancer for 25 odd years. I was living in France. I lived in France for 20 years. I was in about, it's about 10 years into my time in France perhaps, and I got to the end of the road in terms of employment. I've been a travel agent, but I lost that particular job. I trained to be a teacher, an English teacher in France. It's a competitive exam, so if they want to take 2000 candidates for example, sorry, and you come 2001st, well that's just tough on you in the hierarchy if you like, and I missed it by 0.4%. Which was very galling at the time, but now I thank my lucky stars because me and the French education system wouldn't have got along.
But I got to the stage where I thought, "Well what can I do? I know I can speak English, I can speak French. Let's be a translator." This is the end of 1996 and you don't know what you don't know. The first translation I took was my one and only ever medical translation. This is in the days before AltaVista and even before Google, I just had a French English dictionary, like 20 years I had at school, and I did this translation with this thing. God knows how I got paid for it in the end, but I did.
Anyway, to cut a very long story short, I built this thing up, starting by being amazed that people gave me work and then paid me for it, but you work things through. Then I got bored by being a, I got bored with translation because I got bored with translating other people's bad French, because I heard some horrendous things and sorry engineers, but engineers battle in any language, so I just morphed into a copywriter because that was more interesting.
I was an okay copywriter, but I'd say I was paying the bills but not much more. I wasn't setting the wall of the light in anything, but I was happy doing what I was doing. I feel we're jumping into the next stage of the question you haven't asked me yet, but it's developed from there into more of a writer. 2020 came along and there were a number of life-changing events. I worked with Margo Aaron on my writing voice. I did the old MBA and then I fell into The Accelerator, and that is the end of the beginning as it were.
Rob Marsh: That's quite the path. I'm curious, Mike, if anybody who's listening is going to be thinking, "Well he doesn't sound very French." What took you to France in the first place? Why leave England and even head overseas?
Mike Garner: I did a summer job between the second and third year university at the British rail office in Paris selling tickets, really, and that's how I learned and that's how I really learned, because I thought I spoke French. I did really good, but when I went there, but that's when I really learned to speak French because I was told to answer the phone, and that's when you noticed the difference between what the language you learn at school and the language that's spoken by other people. Without going into all the details, I basically stayed.
Rob Marsh: Yeah, that was my next question, so a summer job that's one thing. I went to France when I was younger, backpack around a little bit, but I didn't stay. What was the hook that made you stick around?
Mike Garner: Oh dear. Well, I went back and did my third year, then I went back to France because I had a job and a girlfriend, so the rest is history.
Kira Hug: That's it. The girlfriend. Yep. Okay.
Mike Garner: It's always a pull.
Kira Hug: Yes. I will want to hear more about your translation experience because that is definitely not my background. I'm interested in what lessons you pulled from that skillset or that experience or those jobs that you apply in your writing today.
Mike Garner: I think that is actually, there's a couple of periods. That's actually where, in all seriousness, that's where I learned to write properly I think, because obviously, I was at school, I didn't learn writing per se. I did a history degree and I wrote fairly academically. Then for all the time art was, I didn't do as much as I wanted to, I was desperate to be a writer, but I just couldn't get going. I couldn't find the inspiration. It was really hard, and it was almost when I first started translating that I was writing by proxy. I was writing through other people's words, they were boring technical documents most of the time, but it was still writing. It's probably just as well that I've lost the floppy discs now that my original translations were on, because I know now they were pretty horrendous.
And it was maybe just me, and because I was living in France, I was writing English tainted by French a little bit. There were one or two expressions that you think you should be able to say in English but you don't. It was only when I moved back here into UK in 2003 and surrounded by the actual language that real people speak that I really became good and could write in a proper way, to write like the rest of us do almost. From that point of view, I think the one thing about speaking a foreign language is that it gets you to focus particularly on your mother tongue for a better word. You do think more about it and I think you pay more attention to it. It's difficult for me to say because I haven't seen it from the other point of view.
I was not one of these people that was writing as a kid and writing stories when I was 10 or something like that because a lot of copywriters did. I came to writing very, very late. I used to read a lot, but I always thought that writing was something that other people did, and it's only really in the last couple of years that I've come to describe myself as a writer rather than just a copywriter. A copywriter is a different form of writer, just like a novel writer is. Just like a ballroom dancer and a ballet dancer are two different types of dancer. We're a subset of the writers because we tend to think that writers, well they write novels, don't they? But I consider what I do as an art even if I'm writing emails.
Rob Marsh: That I think that's common with a lot of copywriters. Mike, you used the word you said you morphed into being a copywriter.
Mike Garner: Yes.
Rob Marsh: How does that happen? How do you go from what you were doing? Take us through the steps.
Mike Garner: Yeah, it basically means I did copywriting while I was doing translation.
Rob Marsh: And so what did you do to make that happen? Because obviously they're different and it's a different client,
