Your Sales Page Sounds Like Everyone Else's Sales Page

You have the offer ready. You open ChatGPT, describe what you are selling in a paragraph or two, and ask for a sales page.

What comes back is competent. The structure is right — headline, problem, solution, benefits, a call to action. The sentences are clean. Nothing is wrong with it.

And it could be selling anything, for anyone.

You read it again and cannot quite say what is missing. So you rewrite the headline, swap a few words, and publish it anyway, because it is not bad and the launch is on Tuesday.

The model did not fail. It answered the question you asked

Here is what happened. You gave the model a description of your offer and asked it to write. It knows nothing else about you — not your buyers, not what they say, not what you have actually done for anyone. So it filled every gap with the most likely thing.

The most likely thing is the average. That is what "generic" means: the page you got is the statistical middle of every sales page the model has ever seen, wearing your product name.

This is an input problem wearing an output problem's clothes. You can spend a week editing the draft and it will get slightly better. Or you can spend two hours on what goes in first, and get something you barely have to edit.

Three things it did not have

Your offer facts. Not the pitch — the specifics. What is included and what is not. The price and the terms. How long it takes. What happens after someone buys. Most people can say this out loud and have never written it down, which means it exists nowhere the model can reach.

Your customers' actual words. This is the one everybody skips, and it is the one that does the work. Go and find the sentences real buyers used — in emails, in enquiry forms, in the first five minutes of a discovery call, in a review. Not your summary of what they meant. Their phrasing, copied exactly.

Someone who writes "I've got three different spreadsheets and none of them agree" has just handed you a headline. Tidy it into "streamline your data management" and you have thrown away the only specific thing in the sentence and replaced it with a phrase your competitors also use.

Your proof. Results, numbers, a testimonial, a before and after. Anything you can stand behind. If you have none yet, that is worth knowing before you write a page whose fourth section is supposed to be evidence — because the model will happily invent something plausible to fill it, and you will not notice until a prospect asks about it.

Write it down once and stop re-explaining

Those three things, in one document, are a brief. Everything after this runs against it.

The reason to write it as a file rather than paste it into a chat window is that you will need it again in six weeks, for the next offer, and you will not remember what you said. A brief you keep is worth roughly ten briefs you retype.

Add one more thing to it: a piece of your own writing that sounds like you. Not your best writing — your typical writing. An email you actually sent. A model can match a sample far better than it can follow an instruction like "friendly but professional", which every business on earth would sign off and which instructs nobody.

One prompt per page is why the middle sags

A sales page does six separate jobs. It gets attention. It names a problem the reader recognises. It presents the offer. It proves the claim. It handles the objection. It asks for the sale.

Ask for all six in one prompt and you get a page where each section makes roughly the same argument in a slightly different register. It reads like padding, because it is — the model had one idea and six headings to spread it across.

One section, one prompt, same brief each time. Then read the six together and cut anything that appears twice. That repetition check takes five minutes and it is the difference between a page that builds and a page that circles.

The tells

Some patterns mark copy as machine-written to anyone who reads a lot of it, and increasingly to buyers who do not.

Labels standing in for reasons. "Innovative solution." "Seamless experience." "Game-changing results." A label asserts that something is good. A reason explains why, in terms the reader can check. Readers skim labels and stop at reasons, and the model reaches for labels because they are safe — they cannot be wrong about a business it knows nothing about.

Perfect symmetry. Three bullets, each nine words. Three paragraphs, each four sentences. Nobody writes like that. It is the shape of something generated to fill a slot.

Words you would never say. Read the page aloud, properly, out loud. Where you stumble, or where you think I would never say that to a client's face, cut it. This is the cheapest editing test there is and almost nobody does it, because reading your own copy aloud is mildly embarrassing. Do it anyway. It finds things silent reading does not.

What you actually get out of it

The page, obviously. But the page is this quarter's output.

The brief is the asset. Next time you launch something, you do not start from a blank prompt and a blank page — you open a file that already has your offer structure, your buyers' words, your proof and your voice sample in it, change the offer section, and run the same prompts against it.

The first page costs you a day. The second costs an hour. That gap is the whole return, and it only exists if you write the brief down somewhere you will find it again.

How to Write Your Sales Pages with AI is a course on Doing Better with AI: gather what AI is missing, build the brief, draft the page section by section, edit out the tells, and check it before it goes live. The workbook is the brief itself — you fill it in on the site and keep it. The first chapters are free.