Introduce yourself! Share a little bit of what you do and who you help.
My name is Alison Rodden, I call myself the Oddball Copywriter.
That name came about when I was talking with Richard Fletcher, my copywriting teacher, and I said, “All these copywriters, I don’t fit in at all because most of them are men, they live in all these exotic places all over the world, they move 7,000 miles away from home, go on all these vacations, and commune with elephants and whatever. And I’m here, living in the middle of America, I’m a mom and a wife, I can see corn from cornfields from my backyard. These people are so weird.” then Richard said, “Actually, you’re the one that’s weird because they’re all doing the same thing. You’re the one living in the middle of America by farms, trying to be a stay-at-home mom. You should call yourself the oddball copywriter because you’re the odd one of all of them.” and I said, “I’ll do that!”
Then I started to grow into that. I do different things with my marketing strategies than most people do, I have a different take on things and a different view. He suggested the name I took it, but I really started to grow into the name and take it on as part of my whole business.
I help businesses find unique ways to market themselves, and be positioned as the foremost expert in their field.
Tell us about your journey! What led you to this point?
I was in corporate America for the majority of my career. I just assumed that was how you made a lot of money, which is not necessarily true. I worked for an elevator company, I was a stockbroker for an online brokerage company for 15 years, and I worked in risk management in both companies.
When my son was starting school, I was still working full-time. I actually really liked my job and I had a lot of friends there. I had never planned on leaving, but I had wanted to stay home when he was born, I just didn’t think it could ever work out. I went back to work and when he was going to start kindergarten, I started thinking, ‘What am I going to do with him in the summer?’ I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t really see any good options.
At the time, I was part of an online fitness group for moms and my fitness coach was also a business coach. I saw her helping all the other moms in the group to start businesses and I thought I should do something like that. I hired her and I didn’t have any idea what I would do in my business. I was an expert in finance but I couldn’t start a company based on that because I was licensed through a brokerage, and that was a conflict of interest.
Two weeks later, I found that my job was being eliminated and I could either take a severance package, or I could have a similar job within the company. I said, “Sweet, good timing.” I took the severance package and I became a budget and money coach. Having worked in risk management, I had seen a lot of people lose every bit of money they had. I would go through their finances with them trying to help them figure out how to pay it back.
Sometimes they would owe hundreds of thousands of dollars. I would see all these things and think ‘Oh my gosh, how did these people get themselves in these situations?’ I wanted to help people avoid situations like that by budgeting smart and not putting all their eggs in one basket. I did that for three years.
At first, I didn’t have any clients, leads, nothing. Even though everybody wanted to know about money, I had no idea how to talk to an audience or how to run a business. Then I ran across a Facebook Ad for a challenge with Richard Fletcher, to learn how to get clients on Facebook. I thought, ‘I need to do that.’ I signed up for it. I loved this thing called copywriting. I signed up for his one-year program and learned how to do copywriting from him. It was kind of an internship where I would write, copy, and submit it to his group, and then he would critique it and make suggestions of what to do differently. In that time, I started attracting clients in my budget and money coaching.
I found out that I would be excited when I would get somebody but at the same time, I have this feeling of dread because what I enjoyed was the writing portion of it.
I pivoted again and thought, ‘I’m going to find all of the side hustles that moms could do from home on their own schedule, so that they could leave the corporate world if they wanted to and fill in the budget gaps.’ I did dog walking, ride share, food delivery, all the things. Then I thought I should try doing copywriting on the side and see if that’s something that would be lucrative. Once I started doing that, another coach, Manny Wolfe said, “Alison, all you ever talked about is copywriting. Why don’t you just do that?” I said, “I’ve spent all this time building this other business that isn’t very successful, why don’t I just cling on to that until the bitter end?”
That one question made it click that I need to switch to being a copywriter full-time.
What kinds of results do your clients get from working with you? Can you give some examples?
One of the big things I like to use are white papers. Most people see those as something that the scientific or medical field uses to report on case studies and things like that. I use white papers for about every business I work with. One of the big results that they get from working with me is it sets them apart from all their competitors.
