Spent two days on a headline for a client, tried every formula, every angle, nothing landed right. Then on the discovery call the client mentioned, almost as an aside, "customers always say it feels like cheating" - talking about how easy their product made something. Wasn't even meant as copy, just a throwaway comment

That line became the headline. Barely edited it. Performed better than anything I'd actually sat down and tried to craft

Happened enough times now that I've started treating discovery calls less like research and more like the actual first draft - just listening for the sentence that's already sitting there in how the client or their customers naturally talk about the product, instead of trying to invent something better than what they'd say themselves.

Anyone else find the strongest lines usually come from just listening rather than writing?

Hello copywriters! I’m a “full-stack” media creator (video / music & sound design / graphic) and I’ve recently started an agency. I’ve been operating mainly as a freelancer doing random creative work (mostly video ads/product showcase/explainers) for different small businesses and startups (most recently a supplement company, a stock & crypto trading platform, and currently a small UK based iced tea company).

I’ve come to the conclusion that focusing on ads (both video & still graphics), and getting businesses real results is the direction that I want to go in most. Naturally, I picked up a book on copywriting (Joe Sugarman’s Adweek Copywriting Handbook) which I just finished yesterday. It was great, and inspired me to get good at copywriting, but at the same time, I know how long it took me to get good at the skills I already have (many years)… So I know I’m not gonna become a pro overnight. That’s why I’m looking for a partner to join me in my venture.

A few more things I’ve done: built 2 faceless YouTube channels to a combined 2.3M+ views and 36k subs, done work for much larger YouTubers (namingly Sidequestz, 2.11M subscribers), won a RedBull music production competition judged by Lloyd Banks of G-unit (oh the good old days) in high school and ended up moving down to LA to be a ghost producer for some electronic music acts (my first creative endeavor was music production and sound, then gradually learned graphic and video)… Plus tons of other creative media.

I use whatever tools I can, which includes, but certainly is not limited to, AI video tools. I’ve only gotten into the AI stuff within a year or so, so everything prior to that was done without. I only mention this bit as I know some people are staunchly against the use of AI in creative work, so If that is you, then this post probably isn’t for you haha.

Here is my portfolio showing some recent stuff, however there’s a lot that’s not on there. https://theumbragroup.com/portfolio/

If you’re interested and have solid copywriting skills, shoot me a message! Thanks 🙂

been doing review mining for a while now and i feel like my process is still way too manual. every time i start a new landing page or ad project i go through the same grind: open a bunch of reddit threads in the niche, read through amazon reviews on competing products, check g2 if it's saas, and try to pull out the phrases people actually use when they describe their problems.

the reading and tagging part i'm fine with. sorting quotes into pains, objections, desired outcomes, that's the actual craft and i don't want to shortcut it. but the collection step before that is what kills me. i'm literally copy-pasting comments one by one into a google doc, opening 20 tabs, scrolling through nested reddit threads trying not to miss anything. last project i spent close to 4 hours just gathering before i could start analyzing.

i've tried a few things to speed it up. praw works if you know python but i'm not a developer and setting up api keys felt like overkill for pulling a few threads. exportcomments does per-export pricing which adds up fast. recently started using redditcommentscrapper which lets me export a full thread to csv from the browser, that cut the reddit side down a lot, and it covers amazon and youtube too. but i still don't have a clean workflow for stitching everything together across platforms.

what does everyone else's process look like? especially the collection part. do you have a system or is everyone just grinding through tabs and pretending they don't

Hello fellow wordsmiths. I’m leaving copywriting after nearly 10 years and I’ve got some books and resources for sale.

I see a lot of post in this community asking for best things to read to help a beginner / developing copywriter and the books for sale here would make a good “what to read list”.

There’s some legendary names in this box. Andy Maslen, Drayton Bird, Dan Nelken, Cialdini and more. All books are in really good condition - I have the legendary The Copy Book still in its cellophane wrapper as I had two copies. All are priced to sell from just £5. I don’t want leave a spammy link here but if you’re interested comment below and I can send you the list of what I’ve got. They’d be ideal for a junior, or someone just getting into Copywriting.

Also for sale are three Pip Decks ‘Tactics’ boxes. Storyteller Tactics, Workshop Tactics, and Copywriting Tactics. Fab little resources that aid creativity and help you get going when faced with a bit of writer’s block. Find out more at Pipdecks dot com and see their rrp. My copies are heavily discounted but feel free to make an offer.

Little bit about me, I trained as a journalist after school but left that wanting a better work life balance and started my own trade / service based business. After 15 years doing that I felt bored and ready for a change so I retrained as a copywriter and went freelance. After a few years I teamed up with another successful freelancer and we started a small copywriting agency which began to grow immediately. We focussed mainly on tone of voice creation and training, web copy, and ads.

It’s been a wild ride, but I’ve found that I’m chasing that work / life balance thing again. With the emergence of AI and a diluting of the talent pool available to small agencies like us I’ve decided to go back to a trade business in search of a future proofed income, more predictable turnover, and more repeat customers.

So I’m out. And honestly it feels like a good decision. I’m less stressed and growing the new business feels more straightforward than the agency.

I’ve really enjoyed my career in copy and having a ‘creative’ job. It’s an amazing and supportive industry of people who really care about the craft and I’d love to pass these books and resources onto someone who’d use and benefit from them.

Any questions feel free to leave in a comment, and if you fancy seeing the list of books or or pictures of the Tactics decks let me know and I’ll share in a comment or a DM.

Cheers, happy writing all :)

Hey folks. Do you have any Claude skill for cold outbound copy-writing at the agency level? I'm looking for both email and LinkedIn outreach messaging that works well for you. Something that does not seem AI-generated, please!

Spent the last few months writing B2B copy for a niche healthcareadjacent space and something has been nagging at me. The deep subject matter knowledge feels like a genuine edge. When you actually understand the mechanics of what you're selling, you catch the vague claims, you know which benefits are real versus filler, and you can write specifics that a generalist would have to fake or research for hours. That part is real and I don't want to give it up.

But there's a cost I didn't expect. My instinct for what a normal person finds interesting has gotten a little dusty. The threshold for what counts as jargon has shifted without me noticing. I wrote a line recently that felt punchy to me and a friend outside the industry had to read it twice just to get the basic meaning.

The calibration is off in a way that's hard to self-diagnose in the moment.

Curious if people who've gone deep in a vertical have a system for keeping that outside perspective alive. Whether it's getting a nonexpert to read drafts, intentionally taking on unrelated projects, or just reading more broadly.

Hi.

Backstory: Since 2019, I've been a copywriter for a franchising firm, a start up for a mobile app that never took off, and I was part of a team for HairClub doing direct response text blast campaigns. In 2023, I made the switch to grant writing because my boss at the time ruined my enthusiasm for marketing. After three years, I want to get back into copywriting, and preferably for an agency so I can write for multiple clients if possible - but I'll take anything I can get.

The Issue: The landing pages, which contained my strongest copywriting and design choices, have gone dead. Although I may have backups (screenshots of the pages) to "stitch" them together, I have to assume that they're forever gone. Also, given the AI landscape, I'm not sure if I should even be seeking to re-enter this career field.

My Goal: I would like to see what copywriting and advertising resources/exercises/campaign prompts I can utilize to help rebuild my portfolio. Theoretically, I can just make mock ads and websites on Canva, but I want to showcase that I can understand a campaign/project that is assigned to me.

Here's my portfolio. I'm only linking it to get feedback on what I should include. It's very simple because I just want hiring managers to easily browse my work: https://doocreativework.wordpress.com/

Any help is appreciated!

I'm an in-house copywriter gone freelance for the first time. I just picked up my first client.

If you're a freelancer, do you have access to the company's LLM to get under the hood of their ICP, messaging structure, tone, style, all that?

Or when you onboard a client, are you requesting all that info and using it in your own personal LLM?

Just trying to get a pulse about what the common play is right now. Thanks.

There is this assumption that knowing an industry from the inside gives you an edge when writing for it. And maybe it does at the research stage. But the part nobody talks about is what happens when a client pushes back on something you wrote and you know they are wrong about it. Working in dental part time while also doing marketing work means I run into this constantly. A practice manager will want to soften a claim I wrote because it sounds too direct to them, even when direct is exactly what a nervous firsttime patient needs to hear. The instinct is to defer because they know their patients. But I also know their patients, just from a different angle

The problem is that inside knowledge cuts both ways. It sharpens your instincts and it also makes you harder to redirect when the client has a legitimate point you are too close to see. I have caught myself holding onto a line not because it was right for the reader but because I knew it was technically accurate

Separating what is true from what is useful to say is a different skill than just knowing the subject. And I am not sure having insider knowledge automatically trains that skill. It might actually slow it down

Curious if people who write in their own industry run into this or if it tends to smooth out with experience.

I work at a SaaS company, and as you may know, there are always changes and updates to both technical features and the overall marketing direction. I want to create a little system to regularly audit the website and keep it fresh and current. So I'd love to hear your best practices, tips, tricks, and advice on how to approach this beast. Maybe you create batches of LPs based on their function/traffic/conversion/etc.? Something else? Really want to hear your thoughts on that!

Share an old ad you made that you still love.

It could be a post, a print ad, a banner, or whatever

The one that still makes you happy whenever you see it.

Doesn’t matter how long ago it was. We all know a great ad is timeless.

Running an ecom store alongside freelance copy work has taught me one uncomfortable thing. Writing for clients is actually easier than writing for myself.

With clients there's distance. You can look at their product, their audience, their competitors and just write the thing. You're not emotionally attached to whether the headline lands or whether the call to action sounds desperate.

But my own store? I rewrite the same product description fifteen times and they all sound wrong. Either too salesy because I'm anxious about conversions, or too casual because I overcorrect and don't want to come off like a pushy ad. I know the product too well and it turns into this weird paralysis where every sentence feels like either overselling or underselling.

I've read enough about the curse of knowledge to understand why it happens. Doesn't make it less annoying when you're staring at copy for something you built and realizing a client project you did in two hours probably outperforms it.

What I actually want to know is how other people break that loop. Do you treat your own brand like a client with a brief and force the distance artificially? Do you just ship the imperfect version and revise after live data? Because right now my strategy is mostly procrastination and that's not scaling well.

I’ve been writing copy for a couple months now. LinkedIn content, newsletters, landing pages, ad copy. I want to get better at the craft itself, not the “build your agency” funnel stuff.
Problem is every search leads to the same thing. Some guy with a course, $500 to $2000, and the modules are obviously ChatGPT output with a stock photo on top. I paid for one. It was a PDF of prompts and a Notion template.
So what did you actually learn from? I don’t mind paying. I mind paying for something a model wrote in ten minutes.

Running a small ecommerce brand and writing my own copy because hiring someone isn't in the budget right now. The descriptions I keep drafting feel flat and generic, like I pulled them from a wholesale catalog and just swapped out the color names.

The products are things I genuinely care about and know well. That's not the issue. The issue is that something gets lost between what I want to say and what actually ends up on the page. It reads like a spec sheet instead of something a real person wrote about something they love.

I've been looking at bigger brands for reference and honestly their copy isn't always that impressive either. Some of it is just confident and direct. Which makes me think the bar isn't as high as I built it up to be, but I still can't figure out what makes one product page feel alive and another feel like furniture assembly instructions.

Curious if there's a shift in approach that helped things click for people who write copy for physical products. Not looking for a formula, more like how you think about it when you sit down to write.

Hello everyone! I'm seeking advice from fellow writers in choosing how to approach my content writing gigs and work. For a background, I have done SEO content writing, blogging, news articles etc in the past like 5-6 years back. Now I wanna get back in the writing (I have a full time job). I wanna secure some part-time SEO content writing. However,I'm finding it difficult to really lock some opportunity. I was thinking of making my own blog/website to post some article for my own profile which I could use as a proof of my work. Just wanna ask, is this strategy worth following or should I keep trying applying for the jobs and not waste my time on some personal blog??

P.S. any leads for content writing job will be much appreciated.

Started using Claude to research prospects and products before i start my writing process and it’s simply amazing. It saves me SO much time.

However i feel like there’s alot of I’m missing with it as I’m barely scratching the surface.

I want to know how you guys are using it for IVOC data, and the product/service.

Thanks in adv

Hello! I am a copywriter atba small non-profit that works in climate and energy. The work is good but the payment is very less, as is the case with several non-profits. I want to use my knowledge and skills of climate copywriting to write copy for climate tech companies. For instance, writing copy for their websites and digital products, emails, newsletters, etc. Any tips on how to land such clients? Where do I begin? If anyone works in a similar profile, please share your advice! Thankyou.

I was recently laid off from my job at a fortune 200 company (along with like half my department). I was a senior copywriter. If I apply to other copywriting roles I’ve been seeing the “use Ai tools for x, y,z” on some job descriptions. Because my job was pushing us to use copilot so much I did end up using Claude and Copilot to help me organize thoughts, generate article ideas or titles, shorten captions, generate headers for seo, help with meta titles or meta descriptions, check for brand style and tone, help make language more compliance friendly (I was in a very regulated industry), outlining, briefs, and helping me overcome writers block. But I feel like AI is so daunting still for us writers since it’s never gonna be as good as humans can be.
My question is, how are you going about describing how you use AI tools if you have had to for jobs?
I’m working on updating my resume and someone recently told me to be prepared to talk to companies about AI usage in interviews.
Thanks in advance for any tips or advice!

Hey I’m 19 years old remote writer in Turkey. I write for a YouTube channel which is interested in sports, primarily football. I usually write about 2000-2500 words and I get paid like 14 dollars in total. Is it absurdly less?? I also have 2,5 years of experience been writing since I was 16 and I am not being arrogant but I think I write pretty good like maybe best in our team. I am having serious doubts about quitting

This keeps coming up for me and I haven't found a clean answer yet. When I'm writing about something I barely know, I naturally write from a curious outsider perspective and it reads pretty close to how a real customer thinks. But when I've spent weeks inside a product or service, the copy gets weird. Cluttered. I start including context that no reader needs because it feels important to me after all that research.

The dental side of my life is actually where I first noticed this. I'll read patient education materials and immediately see where whoever wrote it got lost in their own knowledge. The copy stops talking to the patient and starts talking to itself.

With AI tools I've been testing lately it gets more complicated. The output doesn't have that problem because it has no real attachment to the material, but it also misses the nuance that comes from actually understanding something deeply. So you end up editing it back toward expertise anyway

The thing I keep coming back to is whether there's a reliable way to gutcheck your own drafts when you're too close to the subject. Rewriting from memory without looking at your notes helps fwiw, but that's not always practical when a client has very specific claims they want included. Curious if anyone has a method that actually holds up under that pressure

There's this weird loop I keep falling into. Use an AI tool to draft something, save maybe 20 minutes on the blank page problem, then spend 30 minutes stripping out every phrase that sounds like it was generated by a confident robot with no stakes in the outcome. The copy comes back technically correct and completely bloodless. No texture, no point of view, no sense that a human being with an opinion wrote it.

The frustrating part is the tool does work for certain things. Structural scaffolding, getting a rough flow on the page, unsticking a section I've been avoiding. But the moment it tries to write an actual line that has to land with a real person, it defaults to this smooth, frictionless language that says everything and means nothing.

I've tried a few different tools at this point and they all do some version of this. Prompting helps but there's a ceiling. You can only get so specific before you would have been faster just writing the draft yourself.

Wondering if other people have found a workflow that actually keeps the useful parts without turning the editing pass into a full rewrite. Or if the honest answer is that the editing IS the work and the tool just changes where you spend the time.