In this episode of the Modern Direct Seller Podcast, we’re joined by Laura Kendrick of Cheeky Copy to talk about what actually makes copy connect, and why leading with personality beats buttoned-up professionalism every time. Laura shares her philosophy on writing copy that speaks directly to the reader, breaks down the three elements every piece of conversion copy needs, and gets real about how to use AI as a tool without losing your voice in the process. Whether you’ve been avoiding the blank page or quietly wondering if blogging still matters, this one is packed with perspective you can actually use.

Make sure to grab Laura’s free resource, Cheeky Buttons, a guide to writing better call-to-action button copy. For a free-writing and idea generation tool Laura swears by, check out 750words.com. And if you’re a direct seller ready to get off replicated pages and build a brand that’s actually yours, get started with Oh My Hi today.

Time based notes:

Stop Writing About Yourself: The Copywriting Shift That Changes Everything

Most people sit down to write copy and immediately start talking about themselves. Their products, their story, their credentials. It feels natural. It’s also the fastest way to lose the reader.

Laura Kendrick, founder of Cheeky Copy, has built her entire philosophy around flipping that instinct. The shift is simpler than you’d think, and it changes everything about how your copy performs.

Personality Over Polish

The pressure to sound professional is real. But trying to match the tone of whoever taught you, or whoever’s dominating your corner of the internet, just makes you invisible. When everyone’s borrowing from the same voice, only the original shines through.

The goal isn’t to be polished. It’s to be you. The people who are drawn to your particular brand of energy will find you, and the ones who aren’t won’t stick around anyway. Both outcomes are good. Authenticity isn’t just a better strategy, but a more sustainable one.

There’s a useful distinction worth making here: personality and brand voice aren’t the same thing. Brand voice is the strategic foundation — the intentional decisions about sentence length, tone, and how you want people to feel when they read your content. Personality is what makes it human. One gives you structure; the other makes it stick.

The One Rule That Applies Everywhere

No matter where someone is starting from — templates, freewriting, studying writers they admire — there’s one principle that matters more than any tactic: write about the person reading, not about yourself.

Think about the last time you were stuck talking to someone at a party who spent the whole conversation on themselves. That’s what most copy does to readers. The fix is to tell it in a way that makes the reader see themselves in it. Not “here’s what I do” but “here’s what that means for you.”

That reframe alone will do more for your copy than any framework.

The Three Things Conversion Copy Actually Needs

When the goal is getting someone to take action (click a button, hand over their email, make a purchase) there are three elements that have to be there.

First, you have to ask directly. A clear call to action that tells the reader exactly what you want them to do. It sounds obvious, but it gets skipped more than you’d think.

Second, credibility. Buyers today are sophisticated. They’ve been let down before. Testimonials, logos, and naturally woven-in context about your experience (“in working with over a thousand clients…”) all signal that you’re the real deal. The key is weaving it in rather than listing it out. There’s a difference between a credential drop and a credential dump.

Third, benefits over features. Not what the thing is, but what it does for them. Why does it matter to their life? What does it move for them? That’s what gets people to click.

Academic Writing Won’t Help You Here

If you spent years writing papers, that training is something to work against in copywriting, not lean into. Copywriting breaks grammar rules on purpose. Contractions, slang, sentence fragments, starting a sentence with “and” — all of it is fair game when the goal is to write the way people actually talk.

And your daily life is better copy material than you think. Laura once sent an email with the subject line “Damn it, Paul”, a rant about the previous owner of her house leaving a hole in the wall during a thermostat replacement, and tied it back to her actual work. It landed because people recognized the feeling, even if they didn’t have a Paul of their own.

The more specific and real, the better it resonates.

AI Is a Tool, Not a Writer

AI isn’t ruining copy, but it is contributing to a sea of sameness when people use it without intention. The reason the same phrases keep showing up everywhere (chef’s kiss, anyone?) is that AI finds the average across everything it’s seen. Ask it a vague question, get a generic answer.

Used well, though, it’s genuinely useful. The key is giving it an unreasonable amount of context before asking it to produce anything — brand voice documentation, audience insights, specific positioning. And even then, ask it to write one section, not the whole piece. Expect to refine significantly.

A practical starting point: try 750words.com as a free-writing space first. Let your actual thoughts run for 20 minutes before handing anything to AI. That raw material, fed into AI with proper context, produces something worth editing. An empty prompt just produces noise.

Blogging Still Matters

It’s a long game, but it’s not optional. Every blog post you publish helps search algorithms understand who you are, what you do, and who should find you. It also signals to real humans — the ones you’re actively directing to your website — that you’re an active, credible business. Showing up once in 2019 doesn’t do that. Consistent content does.

There’s a secondary benefit worth naming: blogs become fuel for everything else. Pinterest pins, emails, social captions — content you’ve already written can keep working across platforms long after you’ve moved on to the next thing. The SEO case for blogging is well established. The compounding content case is just as strong.

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