The Social Media Takeaway - Louise McDonnell

AI Copywriting Tips & Tools: Persuasive Content in Minutes

• Season 1 • Episode 63

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In this episode of The Social Media Takeaway, I chat with Kimberly Weitkamp, a marketing strategist, podcaster, coach, and host of the More Conversations, Clients, and Cash podcast.

Kimberly helps coaches and service providers create content that connects and converts. She combines proven copywriting techniques with AI to help business owners drive more sales and leads.

We talk about what makes good copy work, how to get started with AI without sounding robotic, and why strategy still comes first.

You’ll learn:
 ✅ Practical tips for writing persuasive copy that sounds like you
 ✅ AI tools that help you write faster without losing your voice
 ✅ How to use automation while keeping your marketing human
 ✅ Why you still need a clear strategy behind every piece of content
 ✅ Where to start if you want to save time without cutting corners

If you’re creating emails, sales pages, or social content and want to do it better and faster, this episode is for you.

SHOW CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction to Kimberly Weitkamp
00:55 Kimberly's Journey into Copywriting
02:15 Embracing AI in Copywriting
04:18 Tips for Writing Persuasive Copy
05:54 Favorite AI Tools for Copywriting
09:42 Maximizing Productivity with AI
15:31 The Importance of Strategy in AI-Powered Marketing
17:47 Free Guide and Upcoming Challenge
20:08 Final Takeaways

Connect with Kimberly:
LinkedIn

Join the 3-day Live Challenge : AI-Powered Lead Gen & Sales for Coaches with Kimberly Weitkamp

This is a great way to get hands-on with using AI in your content and marketing strategy. 👉 SIGN UP HERE

Also, don’t miss out on this as Kimberly is giving away her free guide that walks you through five easy ways to start using AI in your business. It’s built for coaches and service providers who want to save time, write better and grow faster.
GRAB YOUR COPY HERE

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to my podcast because more like this is on the way!

If you'd like to book a call to see how I can support you head over to my website here. www.sellonsocialmedia.academy/hello

My 2025 Social Media Content Planner & Guide is now available! Packed with 400 content prompts, expert tips, and $377 worth of free resources to help you save time and get results in 2025.

Grab your copy now on Amazon!
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Louise McDonnell:

So today I'm delighted to invite Kimberly Weitkamp to the show. Kimberly is a strategist, coach, and podcaster. Her podcast is called More Conversations, clients and Cash, and she helps coaches uncover the words that. Feel true to them and resonate with people they most want to serve. Her approach combines storytelling strategy and the smart use of AI tools. You're very welcome to the show, Kimberly.

Kimberly Weitkamp:

Thank you so much for having me, Louise. I'm super excited to sit down and chat with you today.

Louise McDonnell:

Oh, me too. Looking forward to it. So I know. You're a copywriter. Am I right in saying that? So I know you're like, this girl writes fantastic so even I'm looking at the free gift she's gonna be giving at the end of the show, and I'm like, yeah, she's so good. So do you wanna maybe tell us a little bit about your journey and then I know you're now combining all your superpowers with AI, so maybe talk to us a little bit about where you've come from and what you're doing now.

Kimberly Weitkamp:

Absolutely. My journey starts. All of our entrepreneurial journeys have an interesting start point, right? Mine was the great recession hit, so job opportunities were nowhere. So I moved to Spain and became an English teacher. After a couple of years, I got an email from my mother, which was the very first marketing lesson I ever got. And it said, job opportunity, not spam. And most of us, if we saw something like that now would be like I'm definitely not clicking this, but it was from my mom. So I was like, of course I'm gonna open this. And it was all about, it was a video sales letter for a course to do travel writing. I was so excited by the prospect that I bought the course, finished it in a weekend, and got published in a month and realized that there wasn't really good money in travel writing. But from there, it was introduced to the world of direct response copywriting, and I never looked back. So direct response copywriting historically is the sort of words that you could track the performance on based off of sales. When you used to get the coupons in the mail with a very specific code, they could tell which coupon was it that actually inspired you to buy their product. So I started with. Writing for the internet, which was a very different game because online most of us are looking for something in particular. So it's all about permission-based marketing. And that's how I got my start. And I did that for over a decade. And a couple years ago there was this new thing that came on the market. It was called Chat GPT. Somebody showed up to one of my workshops and decided to use it to write their copy. And I said, it's grammatically correct. It was early days. I think this was like two weeks after it had premiered, and it wasn't great. The results were lackluster. They made sense, right? But it read like an encyclopedia. And I was like, yeah, I'm just, I'm not sure about this whole AI thing. I'm not really positive. I wanna use it. And I didn't touch it for a number of years because my first interaction with it just, it wasn't that great. And because I'd been doing copy for 10 years, it's a little hard to train something to do it as good as you when it took way longer. Or I could do it myself and do it in 10% of the time. But now things have changed, right? So I met somebody her name is Mona She's my partner in this endeavor who all in on AI. We had lots of conversations and she showed me how I could use it now, and I was like, oh. Now I get it. That was about a year ago. Dived in deep, explored all the things, and now there's more potential than ever to harness the power of marketing and good copy with the help and support of AI. AI is not replacing you, but AI can help get things done a lot faster.

Louise McDonnell:

I'm so glad you said that. I, as you know as well, Kimberly, I totally have embraced , AI tools. We use a lot of AI tools and I love myself , we use it here in our team. And when I'm coaching people it's actually baked into the course now. So it's like, how do you do. All the basic strategy stuff, but how do you do it faster and better with AI? And I actually say that as well, like the human with their unique thoughts and their unique opinions and their, everything that makes us different. We have to drive the AI but once we know how to drive it properly, the results are like really astounding. And actually just something that did, I just assume everybody's using it the same way that like we're gonna be talking about today. so many people have come to me, haven't done my coaching programs, and they said, Louise, this hasn't just changed how I do my marketing. It's changed how I work. And I had to ask the rest of them. They're like yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was like, is transformational. We really have an opportunity here to, get more done, get it done faster. So tell me. For anyone who is listening in here, and they want to write better copy, they want to write more persuasive copy, they want to write, a social media post which stops somebody in their tracks or an email that gets opened, or a sales page that converts. What advice do you give to them?

Kimberly Weitkamp:

Yeah, the key thing to remember when it comes to writing copy is that now more than ever there's tons of people out there who have access to the same resource. You do Chat GPT is free, right? There's plenty of paid tiers. There's plenty of paid tools. Or you can pay for a lot of the tools, and it's only like 10, 15, $20 a month. So it's very inexpensive. So now you can take the hard work, the work of persuasion, the work of frameworking it, the work of knowing exactly how to structure things. And you can turn to the AI and say, Hey, you know what? This is what I wanna do. This is what I wanna create. Give me the outline, give me the structure, give me the step-by-step instructions on how to create this. Each of those will give you a different style of answer, but can lead you to what you want. The key piece to remember though, is that you need to be in it, right? You need to be in your copy more than ever. You talked about the human. It's a term known as the human in the loop when using an AI, I just like to call it human powered AI, which intrigues a lot of people because now it's easier than ever. To put content out there, to put copy out there it's so fast and so easy to do that. What's gonna make you stand apart is you, right? Because the pieces of it can be built, but what you bring is what's important. For example, if you wanna, Get a social post that's gonna stop people in their tracks. You can go to an AI tool and say, Hey, you know what? You are a social media expert with 15 plus years of experience in this particular channel. Craft me a post that does this, that talks about this, that, has a CTA of this and gimme five examples. But something's missing in that description still. And that's the context. That's who are you, what do you do? What is your expertise, what is your perspective? So when turning to partner with an AI tool, you wanna make sure you are very clear on what you want the AI to be doing, but you're also very clear on who you are and what you do. And remember, never copy paste, no matter how great it looks from the output of the AI, make sure to take it and then still add a little bit of your flavor to it. All right. So that's like the big picture of how to use it to do that piece of it.

Louise McDonnell:

Okay, so what tools are you using? Tell us what are your favorite AI tools at the moment?

Kimberly Weitkamp:

I'm very basic because I don't have time necessarily to play with all of the tools 'cause there's just so many out there. So Chat GPT obviously is number one, simply because it's the most versatile. It's the most robust. It can do all the things'cause it was the first right. And then I actually use a tool that premiered years before Chat GPT, but it actually uses AI and that's called missing letter. I use it for my podcast. It connects to the RSS feed. So every time a new episode got published, it would read what was on the page, create 12 months of social media, connect to my social media channels, and then post it for me. So it would take about three minutes for me to review each year of campaigns and be like, great, this looks wonderful. Publish and then I don't have to remember to go and share my podcast episode again and again. And once the 12 months is up, there's a little button says refresh, and it makes a new one, and then you can do another year. That one I love. I've been using it, as I said well before Chat GPT came on the market. But it is AI, it's just not what many of us were thinking of. So Chat GPT, that one I use cast magic to take any audio and generate show notes and social posts and email frameworks. So I use that for the podcast.

Louise McDonnell:

So just transcribe your audio is it?

Kimberly Weitkamp:

No it can, yeah you'll get a transcription, but you upload the audio and then it generates show notes. It generates timestamped interest pieces, quotes keywords, LinkedIn post email. You can also give it custom prompts so that it does exactly what you want it to be doing for that. So like the, when I would have guests onto my show. The biggest hangup was I would write my notes as I was recording, but then I wouldn't type them up. So I was the bottleneck, and then I would give my guests some sort of copy to share it, but I had to write that too. So I would always be like, oh I need to send it to somebody. I forgot to create something. But now it's all done, right? Like click of a button because it's your own words, it's your own voice, it's your own content. So it's pretty close to what you need to be able to use, which is great. I'm a fan of Gamma as well. Gamma app is a presentation creator, so you can literally say as something as short as I wanna create a presentation about this topic and it'll generate you a slideshow. Or you can give it a little bit more detail so that it definitely, creates something that you want because I hate making PowerPoint presentations it does it in about 45 seconds and it's pretty darn close to what I want. I use that for anytime I have a new topic or a new subject I'm gonna test.

Louise McDonnell:

Brilliant, brilliant. And you introduced me to an app, which I love and I've told so many people about it. I presume it's all AI because all everything's powered by AI now. We don't even realize it, but the Hemingway app, I love that app.

Kimberly Weitkamp:

I believe the upgrade for Hemingway app does have an AI component to it to help you with rewriting. But Hemingway app used to be a free app. It's been around for at least 10 or 15 years.'cause I used it when I was first starting as a copywriter Guess Hemingway app will show you how easy it is to reach your content. Because online you need to aim for a reading score of below an eight, below a six is even better. And when I got started as a copywriter, I was only a couple years out of university, so I was used to writing academic papers. So it was really hard to train my brain to not write in that style 'cause it's very that's a high reading score.

Louise McDonnell:

For those who are not familiar with it, it's like a grade eight or a grade six., In the American school systems, what age are those kids?

Kimberly Weitkamp:

So grade six is 11 to 12. Grade eight is like 14.

Louise McDonnell:

So when we're writing for the internet, we need to be writing for children in and around 10 years old, basically, or a little bit older.

Kimberly Weitkamp:

And that's because it's a universal experience. And you never know what other people are going to know. And when you aim for something that low, it also pleases you to make sure that any specialized language that you have around your methodology, around your own proprietary knowledge, whatever that is that you don't use it too often. Especially in forward facing copy. So if something gets posted on social media versus my email list on social media, those people don't necessarily know who I am. If they're on my list, they probably know a little bit more about me and what I do. So if you're using words that they don't know, they get so much content, they go right past it. Hemingway app is a great way to be like, wait, this is a complex word, or, I don't know what this word means. So it can show you. This is a potential stopping point to turn your ideal clients away from you.

Louise McDonnell:

Yeah. It's a super app, so yeah, you copy and paste in whatever text you've written, and it will grade then your writing to let you know what level of grade it is. So if it's 12 or 13th you need to bring it all the way right back. It'll actually highlight the sentences that are too difficult or very difficult and you can go change them. So it's really good. And actually if you're using Chat GPT, it's a really good app to use with because Chat GPT now I've mind trained it knows must ask it what it knows about me again it knows and I have my private GPTs as well, that I have trained in this, for specific tasks I need them to do. But if you're new to Chat GPT, it will tend to write long, flowery sentences. That's one of my titles. Stop the flowery sentences, please. Yes, but if you go into Hemingway app it'll show you that, and even actually it's another. Part of the prompt that if you're writing for chat GPT to say write this, that a grade that a 10-year-old can read it. It just means that it'll stop doing all those long over complicated sentences on the long dashes to drive me crazy. So Kimberly, question for you. This is a question I asked everyone on my team. How much more work do you reckon you get done every day, but with the use of AI?

Kimberly Weitkamp:

That's a great question. I dunno how much more work, but I have the capacity now to try a lot more new things. For example, it used to be, it would take me a couple of weeks to write a really good sales page, even though I was doing it for a living, because I would be doing other projects. I would be doing other pieces of it, and my philosophy has always been write it, leave it, and come back to it. So you always wanna have that time. So you know, at minimum it was three or four days, but usually it'd be like a week and a half just to make sure it's really great. This now. I've obviously been doing this for 10 plus years, so I still write the initial draft. But now I can do a couple of prompts, do a little bit of tweaking, and what used to take me three or four days takes an hour. So I've developed this habit of walking around my house and dictating copy into Otter, which is also an AI tool. Now I just take that and be like, great. Now format it as a sales page. Make sure to do this, and this, remove this, and this. And anytime I say this phrase that indicates a new paragraph or whatever, and voila, what used to take so much longer, the editing takes 10 minutes and then I can view it and see what's missing. And it's just, so much faster. For testing purposes for creating the supporting content for, oh, I've spent so much time making the sales page, but now I need to promote the product. And your brain's kind of fried. I can still work with my brain not as high of a capacity.'cause I can still get something that's first draft or second draft ready and be like, okay, great. Now I'm ready to go. So I'd say probably at least an hour or two a day. But it just depends on the day and it depends on how I'm using it. So I find that I work shorter days now but I still get tons of stuff done.

Louise McDonnell:

Yeah. So after doing a quick calculation in my head if the working day is seven hours. So let's say it's eight hours. Or it would've been eight hours. So eight fours are what, 32? So you can do 32 hours worth of work in an hour now. that's transformational.

Kimberly Weitkamp:

It is, it's very transformational. And I'm not sure if it would take 32. I would bank like 25. But it takes one to two. And. It frees your brain up for so many other things. So I have come up with four or five other new products that I'm in the process of putting in place in some way, shape, or form that would've taken me years To have the time for the headspace is key. Every time I have to fill out a form for a summit or for a podcast, or for whatever yes I have the pre-written stuff, but it's never exactly right. But now that process used to take 20, 25 minutes. Now it takes five to 10 because I can take what I've already created and be like, okay, this is what it's for now rework it for me. Review it. Yep. Okay. That looks good. Let me add a sentence or two here. Fantastic. So it's just like those types of things, which we don't even think take that long. Now it takes five or 10. That's a reduction of 70%. I'm doing my math right. So it's huge. You can do so many more things, you can do it quickly, you can test things quickly, and it's fantastic.

Louise McDonnell:

Another thing I like to say is that, at five minutes before you're supposed to finish work, when your brain is really tired and maybe you had something that you had to do, but you thought you just I know sometimes you're talking about it takes 25 minutes to do a task, but sometimes the thinking about doing the task. Can be a lot longer. Yeah. It's that, that, oh, I have to do that. Oh, I have to do that. Oh, I have to do that. And that in itself has taken up space in your brain. Whereas like I find now that five to five or five to whatever time in the evening, I decide I want to do something. I have it done and finished and gone. And even when you're super tired, if you know what you want to say. AI will do it for you in a way that's still really good and really polished and really effective. I'm just gonna go back a second to hear, say you walk around chatting to honor AI recording your transcript, and then that is such a good thing to do. I actually do, what I do is I record myself on Zoom but I record it in the cloud so I automatically get a transcript. And so I came home from a conference I'd been at and I needed to do like a post on social media about the conference, but I was so tired. I was like, I really don't want to do this, but if I don't post it today, it's not relevant anymore because I'm just back from the conference. So I just went on, recorded myself in my very tired voice and took my key takeaways and what I thought and had the post done in. Just a few minutes and post it, yeah.

Kimberly Weitkamp:

And the Otter practice came about years ago for me, and when I found Otter, it was like the sudden, parted or something. I was just so excited to find the tool because I'm great at talking, right? I talk all day long, and many of us are as well, right? Because we don't even realize the golden nuggets that we're dropping in regular conversation. And I found it was faster than me trying to type because at one point I had a number of health challenges, so it was difficult for me to sit and type for a long period of time. And so I was like, all right, I'll just record it and then I'll edit it later. And what used to take hours was condensed to 30 minutes for an initial draft because I got so used to talking that way. I used to tell people who hired me, I was like, don't worry, we're gonna sit down for an hour consulting call. Anything I say is yours, you'll get the transcript. And I can't turn off speaking in copy. So trust me, you'll get a ton of nuggets and they'd always be amazed and they're like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. So with Otter, it becomes so much faster, right? And I find that my brain works really well when walking because it's, occupied with walking. So for a lot of people who aren't used to writing copy, I found their biggest challenge was sitting down to write. It wasn't that they didn't have the ideas, they didn't understand the concept. It was, we have this thing in our heads that makes it difficult to take the ideas from our head and then type it up or hand write it down. Probably 'cause of trauma from being in school and having to write essays, right? Like most of us, were not fans of that. I actually hated English class. It's very amusing to me. When you remove that obstacle, when you're like just capture the ideas in your head and suddenly it is typed now and you've got a rough draft, becomes so much easier. I've had my clients use Otter as a tool or as a hack for years in my workshops before Chat BT came on the market. Right? There's just so many opportunities and it's not just in writing. You mentioned you came back from a conference. Usually that involves follow up. And that's where most of us fall down. We're like, Ugh, I can't do it. It's follow up. It's just it's such a huge time suck in our heads and in our mental space to do it. So my favorite thing to do now, I go to an online networking event. I grab the chat where people have dropped their contact info and I say. Review this. Look for these types of people. Make me a spreadsheet. Give me their names and their email addresses, and rank them from who I should talk to.

Louise McDonnell:

Oh my goodness, what a great idea.

Kimberly Weitkamp:

So what used to even take an hour, just viewing the chat, right? Now it's two minutes and it's done. And at a glance I can look and be like, I didn't meet that person. I'm not gonna follow up with them. Oh, that person was really great. Yeah. I wanted to connect with them. And it makes it so much simpler. To do that follow up because you don't have to do what we call the mind drudgery to get all the contact info in the first place.

Louise McDonnell:

And then you don't have to go through the I must do that. I must do that.

Kimberly Weitkamp:

Oh wait, it's been two months. I guess I shouldn't do it anymore.

Louise McDonnell:

Yeah. No, it's too late. What we're saying is save yourself a huge amount of time, get a better results, free up your brains to focus on, as you said, you've developed new programs. Maybe shorter working day because of AI now. We keep saying, and I just wanna go back to this for a minute'cause I don't want people to listen here and think, okay, I'm just gonna go on to chat GPT and it's going to solve my brain, my life because I know, we touched on it at the beginning, but I just wanna revisit that for just, before we finish up Kimberly, copy good copywriting. Like the basics, the foundational steps of writing good copy that hasn't changed and that hasn't gone away. And if you let Chat GPT at it, it won't give you good copy at all. Still. You need to be the drivers. So for people that are listening in here that want to write better copy and to use AI for it, what advice would you give them?

Kimberly Weitkamp:

There's a phrase in program development and computer development, and it's called garbage in, garbage out. So if what you put in is not great, what you get out will not be great either. So I would recommend to anyone who is wanting to write better copy to take a course on how to write copy what, whatever that looks like, whether it's a basic one or whether it's an intro one, you can find a free one on YouTube. Trust me, there's plenty of podcasts out there follow somebody who does it for a living and just, read some of their stuff to get the ideas of the fundamentals. But if that's too much or if you're not able to do that, the key to great copy is knowing who you serve and what you do. And this may seem really strange and basic, but the reality is you have to be clearer than ever. As to who you wanna talk to. So what most people don't internalize is that the AI is learning from everything it can read on the internet. Basically, it was fed a bunch of information. So even when you say, okay, write me a sales page, it's literally comparing every sales page it's ever seen, ever in its entirety of its existence. So it's not necessarily for your people. And this is the same challenge that was swipe and deploy, that was looking at somebody else who was successful and assuming it would work for yourself. Like it's the same challenge still. So in order to write great copy, in order to partner with the AI to get great copy, you need to be super, super clear on who you serve and what you do. And that goes beyond surface level. I used to give this example for weight loss, right? If you're a person who helps people get healthy, for example. Most people would be like, I work with women over 40 who wanna lose weight. And I was like, great. I think you've identified like 70% of the people I know who are women over 40. That's a lot of people. Let's get a little bit more specific. So if you tell me though, that you want to work with empty nesters who have a lot of free time, want to regain their health and youth, and are looking to do it in less than 30 minutes a day because they've still got a day job and they don't wanna get up early. Oh, okay. That's a very specific person. And even just saying that phrase like this is who it's for, as opposed to women over 40. That phrase I just used is gonna get you so much better results. So knowing deeply who you serve, and that starts with who do you wanna serve? Not what other people tell you, but who do you wanna serve? Who are your best clients? Really dive deep and know that person because every piece of copy is actually written for one person.

Louise McDonnell:

That is such good advice. I know you have free guide which I recommend everybody go find and download. Tell us about the guide.

Kimberly Weitkamp:

Yeah, so it's called Land More Clients with Ease, how to partner with AI for faster growth, more revenue, and less stress. And it identifies five really easy to implement, but hugely transformational methods for partnering with the ai, as I've said before, and as I will keep saying, it's all about you and what you bring to the table. So this identifies a couple of ways that you can save yourself time, get some great results. But not be thinking, oh, I'm just gonna ask the AI a question and get great copy and copy paste it, right? Because that's not the approach. AI is a tool, just like a calculator is a tool. A calculator does math much faster than most of us can do. But you still need to know what to put it in and what you want out of it. So if you don't know what result you're looking for, it's really hard to put in the numbers to get that result. The same thing is true of AI. If you don't know. What you want into it. And you certainly don't know what you wanna get out of the copy that you're creating. What you create won't do what you want. So AI is a tool for you to use as part of a strategy. And so I identify a couple of ways that you can start approaching that.

Louise McDonnell:

We're gonna have the link to that in the show notes. And I know you have a really interesting three day challenge coming up as well. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about that?

Kimberly Weitkamp:

So the AI powered lead gen and sales for coaches live challenge it's delivered live. It's three days, it's an hour a day, and we really break down, how AI can tie into your business, how you can leverage it to get to six figures and beyond faster than ever before. And we really dive deep into, what can you do in 20 minutes a day with AI. What does good marketing look versus not good marketing? how can you identify that with what the AI is giving you? How can you talk with the AI to get a strategy instead of a bunch of tactics or a bunch of content? Because, PLR has existed for years. AI has now been on the horizon for years. it's super easy to publish 365, 500 words a day on social media. Like it's not difficult, right? But if you do that without a plan, if you do that without a strategy, it's just as effective as getting in the car and being like, I'm going on a road trip, but I don't actually know where it is, what the stops are gonna be, or how much gas I need to get there.

Louise McDonnell:

I know that's one of my mantras. Posting alone is not a strategy.

Kimberly Weitkamp:

Posting is not a strategy. Using AI is not a strategy. Going live on Facebook once a day is not a strategy , it's a tactic.

Louise McDonnell:

Yeah, exactly. Okay, look, and where do people, if they want to find out more about connect with you Kimberly, where's the best place to seek you at?

Kimberly Weitkamp:

Yeah, so I'm on LinkedIn under Kimberly Weitkamp exactly as it's spelled in the show notes. And also, go dot the audience converter.com/home. That's the website. And obviously come and join us for one of the challenges 'cause this is a lot of fun and it's really easy for you to get that starting point in, it's like, what can AI really do for me? Of course, go grab the guide, get an idea of just five easy to start places because I'm of the opinion it's now easier than ever for people to harness what used to be really complex to learn, so it's more accessible. So go out there and play with it.

Louise McDonnell:

Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on the show and for being such a great guest. I've really enjoyed this and I look forward to catching up soon again.

Kimberly Weitkamp:

Thank you for having me, Louise. It's always good to talk to you.