The Russell Brunson Show
Inside the Copywriting Brain That Powers My Funnels | #Marketing - Ep. 24
Mon, 07 Apr 2025
In this episode of The Russell Brunson Show, I sit down with my head copywriter Heath… Who’s been quietly writing behind the curtain for the past five years. And let me tell you… it was a blast to talk copy, creativity, and what actually makes great marketing work with one of the most talented people on my team! We go deep on advertorials (what they are, why they work, and how they’re still crushing it today), plus Heath shares how improv, fiction writing, and a background in comedy helped him become one of the best direct response copywriters I’ve ever met. We also talk about nerding out on old ad copy, why I collect hundred-year-old Napoleon Hill manuscripts, and how lived experience always beats AI when it comes to great copy that connects. This one’s part masterclass, part origin story, and part love letter to the lost art of persuasion. And… 100% fun! Key Highlights: The surprising way I accidentally hired Heath (and why his 40-minute “No thanks” video sealed the deal) What an “advertorial” actually is - and why it works better than you think Why copywriting is really just “copy collecting” The lost power of voice, tone, and writing from lived experience How AI can help, but will never replace the hook you found at the gym yesterday Our step-by-step process for building the Zuma Juice funnel from scratch Why copywriting is the most valuable skill most entrepreneurs never master If you’re a copywriter, a funnel builder, or just someone trying to sell better… This episode is a can’t miss for you! https://sellingonline.com/podcast https://clickfunnels.com/podcast https://30days.com Special thanks to our sponsors: NordVPN: EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal https://nordvpn.com/secrets Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! Northwest Registered Agent: Go to northwestregisteredagent.com/russell to start your business with Northwest Registered Agent. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions: Get a $100 credit on your next campaign at LinkedIn.com/CLICKS Rocket Money: Cancel unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster at RocketMoney.com/RUSSELL Indeed: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/clicks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is the head copywriter at Russell Brunson's company?
This is Russell. Welcome back to the show. I've got a special episode today. I drug one of my favorite people in the room to come talk with me, and he's a little nervous. It's his first time on the podcast, but I'm excited because he's here in town. Heath is our head copywriter for now five years, right? Yeah, it's been five years.
So the way I found Heath originally, and no one could hire him, so don't Google his name. I'm not going to tell you his last name. Just kidding. No, the way I found him initially is Kelly Felix. I hired him for something, and he was showing me how he'd scaled his credit repair thing to like $100 million a year or something.
Chapter 2: How did Heath become Russell's head copywriter?
And I was going through all the trainings, and he's like, oh, one of the things we use a lot are advertorials. And I had never – I'd heard of one, but I'd never done one before. I was like, do you know anyone you'd recommend? And he's like, oh, there's this writer named Heath. He's like the best in the world at advertorials. You should hire him. And so that's how we first got introduced.
And I don't know if you remember this or not. but you made me a video. Uh, it was like an hour long video explaining why I should never use an advertorial for my business. I was like, you just told me to not use his services. This guy's great. And then, uh, we've been working together ever since then.
So yeah, I always say like you hired me by me saying no, like the power of no is actually pretty, it can be pretty powerful. No, I was, I was overworked at the time I was stuck in an American in hotel. Cause our RV was getting worked on. You were living We were living in an RV at the time and we got in contact and I was, I was overworked. I was doing four different projects.
I was partner on this gummy brand that ended up falling apart. And then you, yeah, I got in contact and then I was looking at it and I was like, but it's already converting. Why do you need an editorial? So I did, I did this whole big long, it was like a 40 minute plus video and I just talked you out of not hiring me.
And then that was the key that gets you to – and then I couldn't keep you off of me.
You kept hitting me up for things and so, yeah. Anyway, he's an amazing copywriter. So he's in the office this week. We're writing copy. We're actually doing – on Friday, me, him, and Sean Vossler are doing an event where we're going to be going through Napoleon Hill's truthful advertising and geeking out for advertising for a full day.
um but he's in office today writing copy with us and so I thought record a podcast episode and I don't talk a lot about copy and copywriting things like that and so I asked him if he'd come in and reluctantly reluctantly he said yes so do you want to tell people some of your background how you became how you got into the writing world yeah I mean I've been a writer for a long long time I knew I wanted to be involved in film and my background's always been in comedy and
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Chapter 3: What is an advertorial and why is it effective?
i love film comedy comedians and writers and so i always i looked up to certain uh people that i've always admired one of my heroes has always been steve martin and uh like mel brooks and so i always i looked at their trajectory and what do they do same with conan o'brien and i saw a lot of them you know they'd go off to college they'd go get a lit they would go into the literary field
the writing field. And I was like, okay, well, I'm going to go in that field, that area. So I just was pushing myself that way. So when I went into college, I didn't have great grades in high school, but then I really busted my butt in college to get perfect grades. I wanted to get perfect grades because I knew I wanted to be a writer in some capacity. I knew I wanted to create stories.
So I went and I have a bachelor's in English and creative writing. And then I went back and did my master's in fiction, and I just told myself, I'm going to get a career in writing somehow. I'm going to, I don't know what that's gonna look like. I needed to make a living in writing. I didn't wanna be a financial advisor, what my dad was. He was always trying to push me to be a financial advisor.
The one thing I do appreciate with my dad is he always told me to be my own boss. So he was, I was raised, he was, he's been an entrepreneur my whole life. Um, and he always told me, you know, be your own boss. And I always thought being your own boss meant to be a financial advisor. I was like, no, this is the worst. I couldn't do numbers. I couldn't deal with finance.
I just, it was so confusing to me. So that's, I got into, I was just at the time after it was after my bachelor's is when I was like, okay, I'm going to get a job in writing. I didn't know what that would look like. Did you know about copywriting at that time? I didn't know about copywriting at that time. I know. No, I, it was, yeah, 2012.
And I was just like, I just be able to use words to make a living. Cause at the time my whole goal was I have a family to support, um, my wife and daughter, and so I was looking around and that's when I stumbled, this was when I was in Arizona, where I'm from, and I found an e-comm company. There's a lot of e-comm out in Scottsdale, Arizona. So it was an e-comm company.
for health supplements, but it was a whole range of health supplements, all sorts of different supplements. So they liked me because I have an improv background and they liked that I can jump into different voices and different characters and different perspectives and angles because I've been doing that now for over 15 plus years.
And so they hired me and that was my first intro into copywriting and I got thrown into the fire of I mean I was writing – every day was kind of different. I'd be writing baby formula supplements to bodybuilding supplements the next day. I was easily the unhealthiest one in the office.
I was not taking care of my body and I was click-clacking away, telling other people about how their metabolism works.
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Chapter 4: How did Heath's background contribute to his copywriting skills?
How much did you weigh at the time that you were writing the weight loss ads? Boy, I ballooned up to 260. So I was a meatball boy. I was a hefty boy. Did writing the copy for those things, was that part of what transformed you, getting shredded and losing weight, all that kind of stuff? No, no, no, no, no, no, not at all.
You were halfway through the research like, oh my gosh, this makes sense. You know what's so funny? The reason why I wanted to lose a lot of weight or lose weight is because I was getting tired while reading. I was just getting so fed up. I was trying to get through because once I got into grad school, I was really busy.
We were reading like a novel a week and I had to do a lot of reading and quickly and understand it and analyze. And I was getting really sleepy. And that was my motivating factor was to, so I can read more. How nerdy is that? So I just wanted to get shredded for books. Um, And that's – yeah. So that's really why I did – yeah. And then now I'm, yeah, healthiest I've ever been.
That's awesome. Very cool. So I want to talk – I mean obviously we could go for days talking about copywriting and different things. But I want to bring some unique stuff because I don't think a lot of our audience knows about some of the things I want to ask you about. So in my world, everyone knows about funnels. They know about landing pages, upsells, downsells.
That's what we spend so much time on. Maybe we'll come back to that. But what I originally tried to hire you for was a different type of creative and something that – that I think was really big back in the day. Like you'd see magazines and they'd have these advertorials, right? They would push somebody to go buy something online or to call a phone number or whatever.
But then people started using them almost like pre-funnel, like before the funnel starts, there's this page, this advertorial page. Will you explain kind of what an advertorial is, like how you kind of got into them? I want people to understand what that is so they can see how this might potentially fit into their business model and then we can talk about specifics on advertorials after that.
Yeah, advertorials, and they've been used for... When I got into it, and then once I did my research and got more into it, I didn't realize they have been used for a very, very long time. And it's a sneaky way of... The reason why it's called advertorial is because it's an ad but an editorial. So it's made to look like an editorial piece like you would read in the newspaper.
It just looks – it blends in with the newspaper. It looks as though it's just another article written and the way it reads also is like a – very much like an article and then it pushes you into a call to action to buy a book, to put information to get a free – There are old ones where you can get like free cassettes, test out these cassettes, check out these records, free recipe book.
You can still see them. I mean there's so many of them today. Even if you go to like the checkout line at the grocery store, you pick up like a Women's World magazine and that is filled with abattoirs in there. They will tell an amazing story of a transformation of someone losing weight and then it would go into a call to action to get this recipe book of what they've used. So I got into it.
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Chapter 5: What are the key elements of a successful advertorial?
So that's kind of, the visual for you guys, you're trying to imagine what it looks like, it's something that's happening, it's between the new site, advertorial page, and then from there we go to your funnel. Yep.
And they, and there's all sorts of different types of abitorials too. And also a level of aggressiveness of like how aggressive the abitur might be depending on what site you're on. So like you talk about those thumbnails, those different images, they can be really, you know, really kind of a strange fruit that they're holding.
And it talks about like some sort of weight loss supplement and it'll, it'll mention like, you know, unbelievable fruit burns three pounds overnight. And so you click on it. oftentimes you'll go to what's called a jump page. That's also an abattorial. A jump page is just a very short one.
And it's a page between the website you were just on and a VSL, a video sales letter, which is a long form video that sells you, of course, the product. So that jump page is used for compliance reasons, but also as kind of like a tease. It gets you to want to click over to that video, to watch the video. And that jump page will be Maybe two, three paragraphs. It's very short.
And then I'll just have a button that says watch now. So that's another type. And then you'll have other types that are more longer. It all varies of how they look depending on e-com or an info product, finance. It all depends on... the industry. Interesting.
Now, I saw, this is way back in the day, so it's been a while, but it was actually pre-ClickFunnels.
We were building on our NeuroCell, NeuroPain offer back then, and we were looking at all the avatorials, because that's where a lot of that traffic was coming from, and I saw a lot of companies like the acai berry and weight loss companies who, in the avatorial, they'd have two products, where they're like, hey, step one, you need to get the acai berries, and step number two, you gotta get the whatever, whatever wrap, where it was pushing to two different funnels.
I remember talking to one of the media buyers, and he was saying that, like, for every one cell you get on number one, you get like half a cell on number two or something, so it increased their cart value by half. Did you see many of those, or do people kind of, like I haven't seen them for a long time, so is one of them that stopped working? Yeah, I'm not sure about that.
I can't even recall. I'd have to like look at that, but I don't remember that, yeah.
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Chapter 6: How can you use advertorials in your marketing strategy?
the dot com secrets books you understand a funnel step number two get your free ClickFunnels account you know like and it would be on one page yeah it was in the article yeah it was in the page basically like here's the step by step process go get it was like this is a system so you need like the acai berries are the supplement and this was like a wrap and it was almost like Or face cream.
Like this face cream is step one. This is step two. Anyway, so I just – Interesting.
We'll still use steps. I still use steps in an avatarial because I've taught a lot of people how to do avatarials. And so at the end of the avatarial, a lot of times they're like, what to do now? And I still do it. I'll say step one, go here. And then step two, a lot of the times I'll just some sort of urgency. Step two, make sure to order more.
make sure to order at least three because this is selling out fast and everything. Or we'll also do the reverse kind of like urgency where it's like limit five per household. So it's almost kind of like it's already selling out so fast we can only limit. And so a lot of times I'll still do the step one, step two, and then step three. And on the step three, click here now.
But it's kind of like in a nice, sneaky way of each one is a CTA to the same thing.
Just keeps reinforcing the core call to action. Interesting. If you've been following me for any amount of time, I always talk about as you're growing and scaling your company, the most important thing is finding the who, not the how. Who is the person that can help you drive more traffic? Who is the person that could be your CEO? Who is the person that could build your funnels?
Understanding the who will dramatically speed up the growing and the scaling of your company. Now, the best place to find the who's who can help you with your vision is Indeed. When it comes to hiring the right who's, Indeed is all you need.
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That means the person driving traffic to your funnels is going to see it. It means your new CEO or CMO or whatever you're looking for is going to see the exact ad for your business as soon as they open up Indeed. And that makes a huge difference. In fact, according to Indeed, data sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed have 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs.
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