Weekly Round Up #119
Your once-a-week digest filled with copywriting insights, AI tips, must-read articles, pretty cool copy examples, and much more!
Welcome to the 119th edition of the Weekly Round-Up — your once-a-week digest filled with copywriting insights, AI tips, must-read articles, pretty cool copy examples, and more!
In this week’s issue:
Copy Tip: Stop trying to write clever copy.
AI Tip: Start a fresh chat more than you think you should.
Why Consumers Say Yes to the Product (via KnoCommerce)
Empowering Women in Marketing: A Leadership Q&A with Lexi Clarke
Mining Customer Reviews for Content Creation using a Custom GPT (via WTS)
Podcast Pick: Say What Sticks: The Neuroscience of Memorable Communication feat. Carmen Simon
Swipe File Additions
Income stuck even though you’re hustling harder than ever?
My friend Scott Mills created a handy guide to help solopreneurs add a minimum of 34% to their income. The secret? It has NOTHING to do with marketing or sales “tactics”.
Copy Tip of the Week
Stop trying to write clever copy.
Start mining your reviews, support tickets, and Reddit threads for the exact phrases your customers already use.
Then build your headlines, emails, and product descriptions around those words — not yours.
Here’s the principle underneath this ↴
Copywriting isn’t about inventing language. It’s about curating it.
Your reader’s brain is constantly running a background check on everything they read: does this sound like me? Does this person get my problem?
When the answer is yes, two things happen fast: trust goes up and friction goes down. Both of those move people toward a click, a cart, a conversion.
When the answer is no — when your copy sounds like it was written by a marketing department instead of a human who understands the problem — you lose them. Doesn’t matter how polished the headline is.
This is why “use customer language” isn’t just a style tip. It’s a conversion principle. It governs three rules you’ve probably heard before: clarity over cleverness, specificity over vagueness, and benefits over features. All three are downstream of the same idea:
Copy converts when it mirrors how the reader already thinks.
Not when it tries to teach them a new way to think.
Next time you sit down to write, open your VOC data before you open a blank doc. The best copy is already written — you just have to find it.
AI Insight of the Week
Start a fresh chat more than you think you should.
Most people try to fix a drifting conversation by adding more instructions. That’s the wrong move.
Here’s what’s actually happening: Claude reads the entire thread every time it responds. The longer that thread gets, the more your original framing competes with everything that came after it. Drift isn’t a Claude problem — it’s a signal-to-noise problem.
The fix is a fresh chat.
Use a long thread for iteration — when you’re refining the same output. Start fresh when the problem has genuinely changed. A simple test: Could someone reading only your next message understand exactly what you need? If not, you’ve drifted. Reset.
Before you do, run this prompt:
“Give me a context handoff — not a summary of our conversation, but a brief that captures what we’re building, what’s been decided, and what the next step is.”
Paste that into your fresh chat. You get a clean context window and all the signal — none of the noise.
Must-Read Articles
Why Consumers Say Yes to the Product (via KnoCommerce)
🔗 https://knocommerce.com/blog/understanding-customer-spending-motivations/
Why I recommend it: Your highest-AOV customers aren’t motivated by discounts — they’re motivated by trust, transparency, and brand alignment. This breaks down what actually drives purchase decisions across industries, with real examples from brands like Rhode, Sephora, and Apple.
Empowering Women in Marketing: A Leadership Q&A with Lexi Clarke (via ActionRocket)
🔗 https://www.actionrocket.co/blog/empowering-women-in-marketing-a-leadership-q-a-with-lexi-clarke
Why I recommend it: A quick but grounded Q&A on leading with kindness without sacrificing ambition — covering mentorship, emotional intelligence, and why the best leaders bring their whole self to the table instead of fitting a mold.
Mining Customer Reviews for Content Creation using a Custom GPT (via WTS)
🔗 https://www.womenintechseo.com/knowledge/customer-reviews-for-content-creation-gpt/
Why I recommend it:Your customers are already telling you what to write about — you just have to organize it. This walks through a custom GPT that mines customer reviews and turns them into
You Might Also Like:
Think Fast, Talk Smart
Say What Sticks: The Neuroscience of Memorable Communication feat. Carmen Simon
🎧 Listen on iTunes | Listen on Spotify
Why I recommend it: People forget 90% of your content within 48 hours — and the 10% they keep is random unless you engineer it. This episode breaks down how to define your “10% message,” prime your audience’s brain to receive it, and use strategic repetition to make sure the right thing sticks.
🔓 Want access to my entire swipe file database?
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DAVID PROTEIN
Format: TikTok
Why I like it: If you missed it, David Protein got some unwanted press last week (see here). This TikTok video was a great response, lol.
DISNEY CRUISE LINES
Format: Instagram Ad
Spotted By: Maria Simone, Homestead
Why I like it: A great emotionally-driven story arc. And almost no words were spoken.
JUSTINA PERRO
Format: OOO Email
Spotted By: Justina P.
Why I like it: A fantastic way to demonstrate to your readers that you can do the thing you say you can.
IKEA
Format: Ad
Why I like it: A great way to leverage curiosity to pull your reader in further.
That’s it for this week! If you have questions or comments — drop a note below.
✌️
Matt
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