Joanna Wiebe
“Jo” — credited with coining conversion copywriting (startup ebooks, 2011). Founder of Copyhackers and Copy School (~10,000 students), ~20–25 years in copywriting incl. agency work and clients such as Shopify and Canva. Runs a YouTube channel on copy, persuasion psychology and selling expertise (workshops, consulting).
Strong on: voice-of-customer research, copy frameworks (PAS, PCPO, awareness stages), headline and crosshead writing, persuasion psychology, offer/positioning, high-ticket workshop sales.
Bias to keep in mind: every video funnels to her paid products (Copy School, book, mastermind, coaching); most numbers are single client anecdotes or famous historic ads without test details; recent videos are polished scripted listicles.
Sources: sources/youtube/joanna-wiebe/.
Notes citing Joanna Wiebe
- Creative headlines and crossheads (tagline-as-headline method)Joanna Wiebe's method for turning "meh" headlines into ones stakeholders love — write the conversion page first, then rewrite only headlines/crossheads as taglines by swapping your brand into a known positive idiom (IKEA "Make yourself at home", "Engineers build business"), with a clear payoff line.
- Guarantees and offers that remove purchase anxietyAn offer is not a discount — build it around the buyer's specific anxiety; turn a boring operational feature into a headline guarantee (FedEx, Domino's); put a guarantee + USPs directly under the add-to-cart button (~10% lift for Ezra Firestone).
- Headline hooks and choosing a copy frameworkHow to hook a landing/sales page (lead with the problem, first person in quotes, hook fast but don't keep it short), how the hook picks the framework (PAS, DOS, AIDA, PCPO), formulas like "even if", and Ben Bennett's 14 ad hook types.
- Identity and desire angles — selling who the buyer becomesAngles that sell through the buyer's self-image rather than product features — mirror not product, bigger scarier problem, lived experience, sell the dream, remove blame, plus five imagination methods (flip the status, hijack the myth, hidden door, ritual, superpower).
- List, offer, copy — fix them in that orderBefore rewriting a page that "isn't working", check traffic (list) and offer first — copy is the third lever; includes Joanna Wiebe's 9-point list/offer/copy diagnostic.
- Message match between ad and landing pageWhy each ad angle/persona needs its own landing page that repeats the ad's hook and picks up at the awareness stage the ad left the visitor in — Dose, Joanna Wiebe and Dara Denney's guest on how.
- Mining voice-of-customer data and assembling copy from itJoanna Wiebe's method — mine reviews/Reddit for customers' exact words, split findings into a "message" bucket (repeated themes) and a "copy" bucket (weird standout lines), then assemble copy into a framework instead of writing from scratch.
- Name a problem mechanism and a solution mechanismWhy sales copy should name how the problem arises and how your product uniquely solves it (Purple's GelFlex Grid, Scrub Daddy's FlexTexture), a 10-word test to check you have one, and how demonstrations prove it.
- Nine copy triggers by funnel stageJoanna Wiebe's nine psychology-based writing triggers mapped to top (framing, identity matching, fluency), middle (unique mechanism, typically atypical claims, boring objection-killers) and bottom of funnel (three-option choice framing, transparent trade-offs, one big proof).
- Proof placement and believable claimsMake every claim specific and attach its proof right next to it (PCPO), prefer demonstrations and one big proof point over walls of testimonials, and phrase big results so they don't trigger "too good to be true".
- Sales / landing page audit checklistA step-by-step checklist for auditing a landing page, sales page or product page (digital or physical) — traffic and offer first, then message match, hero, problem, mechanism, proof, objections, offer/guarantee, buy box/CTA, mobile and post-click flow — each item linked to its evidence note.
- Selling expertise — workshops over courses after AIJoanna Wiebe's case (2026) that AI has gutted course economics (one training business lost 80% of revenue in a month) and that experts should sell $20k+ workshops via a live drawn diagnostic, land-and-expand, and anchoring prices high.
- Why ads get clicks but no conversionsDiagnosis for good CTR / thumb-stop but low purchase rate — Ben Bennett's "hook and hand" (five reasons people don't take your hand), plus page-side causes (generic page, weak value perception, wrong list).