I wrote a 10,000 word sales letter for free as an experiment

Stupid or ingenious? I recently wrote a 10,000-word sales letter for free when a business owner posted she’d been scammed by a copywriter.

There’d been a spate of PT Barnum-esque, over-the-top, too-good-to-be-true offers made by copywriters on job boards.

“I will be your copy slave and write anything you need for a Big Mac meal.”

“Any copy job, no matter how large, for fifty bucks flat.”

That type of thing.

The engagement on these posts was gangbusters. Endless back-slapping and huzzahs mostly from other copywriters who I’m guessing belong to the same community where this ludicrous strategy was taught.

“Insanely epic offer.”

“OMG what a hook.”

“Holy smokes this is a no-brainer.”

…And other such gayness.

But then a bunch of business owners took the bait and hired these copywriters. They paid the fifty bucks. And the copywriters were presumably swamped with work. I don’t know how many got their copy back as agreed. But I do know at least two business owners who were scammed.

The first was the lady I mentioned at the beginning of this post. The second messaged me privately after I left this comment under her post.

“We’ll fix his mess at no charge. Send whatever you have my way and it’ll be taken care of. Doing this to put some respeck on the Copywriter name. You can ask around about me.”

This was a semi-serious offer. My real intent was to flex on all the other copywriters commenting…

“So sorry this happened to you…”

“Sounds like a scammer…”

“We’re not all like that…”

…And so on.

Truthfully, I was not expecting a response from OP or the private DM’er. I’ve made this offer before and the prospect politely declined. It’s the gentlemanly thing to do.

Some people are more literal. “Thank you, I’ll dm you…” she said.

“Hey, I saw your comment on _____’s post. I’m in the same boat… Any chance you’d extend the offer you made to _____ to others affected by this scammer?” DM’d the other business owner.

Well, I’d said it now. And my braggadocio didn’t leave me any outs.
So the gentlemanly thing to do was to keep my word. And so I wrote the chick – the one who posted she was scammed – a 10,000-word sales letter from scratch. Her team had already written one, and she wanted me to edit it. But most of the letter was unusable. So it was easier to write from scratch.

For the bro who DM’d me:

• I wrote a short form sales page
• Wireframed it
• Edited the onboarding interview they sent me into a mini-VSL
• Edited client testimonials into something usable (they’d uploaded the raw files)

When I started, I foolishly assumed it’d be two weeks work, at most. One for the lady, one for the bro. But it took me a month to finish them both, because I was still juggling my regular client work.

All in exchange for… A shoutout in the Nothing Held Back Job Board. That’s it. So this experiment would either be a complete waste of time OR it’d gain me massive street cred in the copywriting fraternity. Turned out to be the latter. The video I’ve embedded shows you how I handled the project and how I got the testimonial.

And I’ll be doing a word for word, bar for bar breakdown of the sales letter I wrote for the chick for our paid members in Copyskills. To get access, create a Copyskills account and upgrade your membership.