Direct Response Copywriter

Most people will fail the first question in this post. That's the point.

Here it is: which Gary Halbert letter do you go back to, and what does it actually do in the first 200 words?

If you just smiled, keep reading.

If you had to Google him, no hard feelings. I've saved you four minutes.

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WE SELL A GARNET BRACELET.

To women over sixty who have quietly stopped believing a man will ever cross a room for them again.

Our best performing ad is 9,760 words long.

Not a landing page. A Facebook ad. First person. A retired detective telling you about the night he left his dinner on the table and walked past a forty year old in a red dress to reach a woman of seventy one in a plain sweater.

Third grade reading level. Ten words a sentence.

Every paragraph has a named lever. Every emotional beat traces back to a row in a customer survey. We have 333 of them with twelve free text fields each, we've read all of them twice, and the copy is built out of her sentences instead of ours.

Women read it for forty minutes in the feed.

Zero of 333 buyers have ever said it was too long.

That's the floor. Not the ceiling.

If your gut reaction is "nobody reads 9,000 words," we'd make each other miserable.

If it's "who wrote it and can I see it," keep going.

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WHAT YOU'D ACTUALLY DO

- Read voice of customer until you can hear her. Survey exports, ad comments, refund reasons, Reddit threads at midnight. Not skim. Read.

- Write long form ads, VSL scripts and quiz funnels for a woman who's 60 to 79, on her phone, at eleven at night, who has been ignored by every brand on earth.

- Work to written laws. We have an actual copy constitution. Show don't tell. No decoding. No winking. Mirrored objects. Two clause dignity. New laws get added when a test earns one, not when someone has a feeling.

- Ship a change ledger with every draft. Was, now, why, and the row count behind the why. Can't name a paragraph's job in four words? It dies.

- Live in the numbers. You'll see cost per purchase on your own copy within days. And I'll ask you what you think it means.

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WHO THIS IS NOT FOR

- You write "elevate," "unlock," "game changer" or "journey" and your soul doesn't leave your body reading that back.

- You need a brief that tells you what to say.

- You've never written anything that lost money. Or you have, and you can't say why.

- You think long copy is a length problem. It's a boredom problem.

- You'd be insulted by a founder who marks up your draft line by line at 2am. That's the job. I do that. Regularly. I'm not sorry.

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WHO THIS IS VERY MUCH FOR

- You have a swipe file and you can tell me what's in it without opening it.

- You've copied out a great control by hand and you remember exactly where it turned.

- Schwartz on awareness. Halbert on voice. Caples on headlines. Hopkins on measurement. Collier on entering the conversation already in her head. Bencivenga. Conroy. Karbo. Ogilvy. Kennedy. Lampropoulos. Makepeace. These are working documents to you, not history class.

- You think in mechanisms. Your first question about a product is "what actually causes the result, and can she check it herself?" Not "what's the hook."

- You have losses, and you talk about them without flinching.

- You'd rather be right in ninety days than clever today.

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WHAT IT PAYS

Most job posts hide this. You've got better things to do than guess.

The US average for this role is about $76,000. The 90th percentile is $121,500.

- Base: $100,000. Above roughly 85% of this market before a single bonus.

- $1,000 cash every time a control you wrote beats the current control on cost per purchase at real spend, held 14 days. Not per draft. Per winner.

- $5,000 cash for a super winner. Copy that takes over the campaign's spend and scales it 50% or more. No cap on how many of those you land in a year.

- Work goes live in days, not quarters. You find out if you were right while you still remember what you were thinking.

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CAREER PATH

This isn't a copy chair. It's the first seat in a creative department that doesn't exist yet.

- 2 winning controls → Senior Copywriter

- 3 → you own the testing calendar

- Two quarters running the roadmap with CAC flat or down at higher spend → Creative Strategist, $150,000, owning the research, the roadmap, the briefs and a freelance bench

Those triggers go in your offer letter. Numbers, not vibes. Nobody here gets promoted for being charming.

I don't need a writer for hire. I need the person who ends up owning creative, and I'd rather grow them than rent them.

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YOU WILL BE TRAINED HERE

You are not arriving finished. Nobody does.

We pay for the training. Courses, programs, books, whatever sharpens the blade. Two hours a week on the clock for swipe and study, because reading great copy is the cheapest R&D there is and I'd rather you did it on my time than at midnight on your own.

You'll also get marked up constantly, by me, on real work, against real numbers. That's the fastest training there is and it's free.

One warning. If you think you've already arrived, that's the problem. The best writers I've read are the ones still convinced they're getting away with something. The day you stop hunting for what you're missing is the day the copy starts dying, and neither of us will notice for about six weeks.

Come in good. Leave dangerous.

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HOW TO APPLY

No cover letter. No "I'm passionate about storytelling." I won't read it. Nobody has ever been passionate about storytelling.

Email [YOUR EMAIL] with the subject line: SWIPE FILE

Answer four things. Short. Plain. No deck.

1. Which Gary Halbert letter do you go back to, and what does it do in the first 200 words?

2. Name one piece of copy, by anyone, living or dead, that you wish you'd written. And why that one.

3. Here's a real line from our survey, a 72 year old woman: "I'm a GREAT catch, and men aren't seeing that. I haven't been asked out on a date in more than 10 years." In under 150 words, what's the ad? Not the headline. The angle, the mechanism, and what she has to believe by the last line.

4. Name one piece of copy you wrote that lost money. What was the lever that failed, and how did you know it was that one?

Attach one link to long form copy you wrote that ran on paid traffic. One. Your best.

If you can't answer question four, don't send the email. That's not me being clever. That's the whole job.

#copywriting #directresponse #hiring #DTC