Free sales copy generator for a stronger first draft.

Ridgeway Kilns is a two room pottery studio above a garage, run by one potter who teaches. The product is a six week evening wheel throwing course, seven till nine on a Wednesday, eight places, two hundred and eighty five pounds including clay and firing. The buyer is a working adult who has wanted to try this for years and is quietly worried about being the worst person in the room. The generator was given that offer, that audience, and the outcome the studio actually promises: you leave with pieces you made and fired yourself, and you know how to centre clay.

The draft that came out ran roughly like this. Headline: in six Wednesday evenings you will throw, trim and fire four pieces you can take home. Opening: you have wanted to try this since a friend's wedding present arrived with a maker's name on the box, and every time you have looked, the classes were either a two hour taster that produced nothing or a diploma. Offer: eight wheels, one teacher, the same eight people for six weeks. What happens: week one is centring and nothing else, which is the week everyone thinks they cannot do it; weeks two to four are cylinders then bowls; week five is trimming and handles; week six you glaze, and your work is fired and ready to collect a fortnight later. Proof: photographs of the shelf of work from the last four cohorts, unretouched, including the wonky ones. Objections: no experience needed, aprons and clay provided, wear something you do not mind losing, the studio is up one flight of stairs with no lift. Risk: come to week one, and if you decide it is not for you, say so before you leave and you are refunded in full. Then the price, then the four dates the studio runs each year, then the booking link.

What makes that work is that every claim in it can be checked by a sceptic standing in the room. The photographs include failures. The stairs are declared rather than discovered. The refund is scoped to a specific moment, which makes it easy to honour and easy to believe. And the sequence answers doubts in the order they arrive: is this for someone like me, will I actually make anything, what does it cost me if I hate it, how much, when.

The version this studio would have written on its own is three sentences long. Unleash your creativity with our amazing pottery classes. Suitable for all abilities. Limited spaces available, book now to avoid disappointment.

That is weaker for reasons that have nothing to do with length. Unleash your creativity names no outcome, so nothing is promised and nothing can be verified. Amazing is the studio's opinion of itself. Suitable for all abilities is aimed at exactly the person who is frightened, but because it is unsupported it reads as a disclaimer, whereas week one is centring and nothing else, which is the week everyone thinks they cannot do it does the same job while proving the teacher has met that person before. Limited spaces is technically true, there are eight wheels, but phrased that way it reads as manufactured pressure, while eight wheels, one teacher is the same fact working as a reason to buy. And the short version answers none of the four objections, so each one survives the page and turns into a booking that never happens.

Do not write sales copy for an offer that does not exist yet. If you cannot say in one sentence what someone gets, what it costs and how it is delivered, copywriting will not rescue it. Vague copy is almost always a symptom of a vague offer, and the hours spent rewriting headlines would be better spent deciding what the thing is. The same holds when the price is genuinely undecided, because the amount of proof a page has to carry is set by how much is being asked for.

Hold off if you have not spoken to anyone who has bought. The parts of sales copy that do the work are the objections, and those cannot be invented reliably. Five conversations with recent customers, or five with people who considered it and did not buy, will hand you the specific fears, the words they use for them and the comparison they were actually making. A generator fills that gap with plausible generic doubts, and a page answering the wrong objections reads as though it was written about a different product.

Be careful in regulated territory. Health, medical, financial, legal and supplement claims are constrained by rules rather than by taste, and persuasive drafting is precisely where those rules get broken. If your message needs to imply an outcome in one of those areas, the compliance position comes first and the copy is written inside it, not the other way round.

Finally, do not reach for sales copy when the real problem sits somewhere else. If the traffic is wrong, if the product does not do what buyers need, or if people are arriving from an advert that promised something different, a better page fixes none of it, and rewriting it repeatedly is a comfortable way of avoiding the harder diagnosis. Look at what happens between arrival and abandonment first. Sometimes the answer is that the copy is fine and the delivery timescale is not.

Most readers do not read a sales page in order on the first pass. They travel down it taking in the headline, the subheadings, anything bold, image captions, bulleted lines and the text nearest the button, then decide whether to go back and read properly. That means the skim layer has to carry the whole argument on its own. Write the subheadings so that reading only those tells a complete story: the problem, what this is, how it works, what it costs, what happens if it goes wrong.

A practical test is to delete every paragraph from a copy of the draft and read what remains. If the surviving fragments are labels like Our Approach and Why Choose Us, the skim layer is empty and the page is relying on people reading every word, which they will not. Replace category labels with statements. Captions deserve particular attention because they are read more often than the copy beside them, so a caption reading work from the last four cohorts, unretouched does more than a paragraph about quality ever will.

One is in a hurry and wants to know within a few seconds whether this is for them and roughly what it costs. One is interested but sceptical, and is hunting for the thing you are not saying: the catch, the exclusion, the price that appears later. One has already decided and simply wants to reach the action without being sold to again.

A page serving only the first is thin and closes nobody who needed convincing. A page serving only the second exhausts everyone else. The structural answer is layering rather than compromise: a strong skim layer for the hurried reader, full detail underneath for the sceptic, and a clear repeated action so the decided reader never has to hunt. The sceptic is worth designing for deliberately, because everything that satisfies them, the specifics, the declared limitations, the checkable proof, raises credibility for the other two as well. Volunteering an inconvenient fact early is one of the few moves that makes the rest of the page more believable rather than less.

A brochure is handed over and browsed by someone who already has some relationship with you, which is why it can afford to be broad, cover the whole range and lead with the company. An about page answers who are these people, and its job is credibility rather than conversion. Sales copy is neither: it is written for one product, one buyer and one moment, and it is trying to move that person from considering to deciding.

The most common failure is a page that is really a brochure with a button attached. You can spot it because it talks about the company in the first person plural for several paragraphs before the reader learns what is being sold, it covers three products at once, and it has no price on it. The fix is not tone, it is scope. Cut the page to one offer, put the reader's situation ahead of your history, and move everything about the company into support of a specific claim rather than a preamble to one.

Do the first edit with a highlighter and one rule: mark every sentence containing a claim you could not evidence if a customer challenged it. Then either supply the evidence or delete the sentence. This single pass removes most of what makes sales copy feel pushy, because pushiness is usually unsupported assertion rather than enthusiasm.

Second pass, replace abstractions with the actual number, name or timescale. Fast becomes ready to collect a fortnight later. Small groups becomes eight wheels. Third pass, read the whole thing aloud at speaking pace: anything you would not say to a customer's face comes out, and the sentences that leave you short of breath get split. Fourth, check there is exactly one action being asked for, and that it appears early enough for a reader who was already convinced by the headline. Then leave it a day and reread the opening alone. If the first fifteen words could sit at the top of a competitor's page unchanged, that is the part to rewrite.