Direct Response Copywriter – From $100,000 a year
I want to know which control you have copied out by hand, in your own handwriting, and what hit you on the third page.
If that question makes sense to you, keep reading. If it sounds insane, this is not your job and I will save you four minutes.
WHAT WE SELL
A garnet bracelet, to women over sixty who have quietly stopped believing a man will ever cross a room for them again. Direct to consumer, Meta ads, quiz funnel, six figures a month in spend and growing.
WHAT OUR BEST ADS LOOK LIKE
Our master ad is nine and a half thousand words. 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.
It reads at a third-grade level. Reading ease 89. Ten words a sentence. Every paragraph has a named lever. Every emotional beat traces to a row in a customer survey. We have 400 post-purchase responses with twelve free-text fields each, we have read all of them twice, and the copy is built out of their sentences instead of ours.
That one master text now feeds four formats: the long-form ad, a UGC video, a film, and an eleven-minute talk from a stage that is currently the best ad in the account.
Zero of 400 buyers have ever said the copy was too long.
That is the floor, not the ceiling. If your instinct right now is “nobody reads 9,000 words,” we are going to make each other miserable. If your instinct is “who wrote it and can I see the control,” we should talk.
WHAT YOU WOULD ACTUALLY DO
– Read raw voice-of-customer until you can hear her. Survey exports, ad comments, Reddit threads, refund reasons. Not skim. Read.
– Build long-form ads, VSL scripts, stage-talk scripts and quiz funnels for a woman who is sixty to seventy-nine, on her phone, at eleven at night.
– Work to sealed laws. We have a written constitution: show don’t tell, two-clause dignity, mirrored objects, no decoding, no winking. New laws get sealed when a test earns them. You will be expected to argue with them, and to lose gracefully when the data disagrees.
– Ship a change ledger with every draft: was, now, why, and the row count behind the why. If you cannot name the lever in four words, the paragraph dies.
– Sit in the numbers. You will see cost per purchase on your own copy within days of shipping it, and you will be asked what you think it means.
WHO THIS IS NOT FOR
– You write “elevate,” “unlock,” “game-changer,” “transformative,” or “journey,” and you do not flinch when you read that sentence back.
– You need a brief that tells you what to say.
– You have never written something that lost money, or you cannot tell me why it lost.
– You think long copy is a length problem rather than a boredom problem.
– You would be offended by a founder who marks up your draft line by line, late at night. That is the actual job. I do that. Often.
– Your first instinct on a note is to defend the line instead of asking what the reader felt.
WHO THIS IS FOR
– You have a swipe file and you can tell me what is in it without looking.
– You have hand-copied at least one legendary control and you can name the exact beat where the writer turned the objection into evidence.
– You think in mechanisms. Given a product, your first question is “what is actually causing the result, and can the reader check it,” not “what’s the hook.”
– You have shipped enough to have losses, and you talk about them without flinching.
– You read Schwartz, Halbert, Caples and Collier as working documents, not history.
– You would rather be right in ninety days than clever today.
WHAT IT PAYS
Real numbers, because most job posts hide them and you have better things to do than guess.
Market rate for a direct response copywriter in the United States right now is about $76,000.
Base: $100,000/year. Above the top decile of this role before a single bonus is paid.
Then the part that actually matters. You get paid when your copy wins:
– A flat cash bonus, paid within 30 days, every time a control you wrote beats the current control on cost per purchase at meaningful spend, held for 14 days. Not per draft. Per winner.
– A revenue royalty on any control that becomes the account’s primary driver, for as long as it keeps running. You write the thing that carries the account, you keep getting paid for it. The percentage is written into the offer letter, and so is exactly what triggers each step up.
– A quarterly bonus tied to blended customer acquisition cost, the number that decides whether this business works, not to how many words you filed.
The top of this field earns $150,000 to $500,000 a year, and almost none of that is base. It is royalty on copy that prints. I would rather build that structure here than watch you leave in eighteen months to go find it somewhere else.
WHERE IT GOES
This is not a copy chair. It is the first seat in a creative department that does not exist yet.
Write three winning controls and you own the testing calendar. Do that for a year and you are Creative Strategist: the creative roadmap, the customer research, the briefs, a freelance bench working under you, and a six-figure base plus profit share. The promotion triggers are written down in the offer letter, so nobody moves up on tenure or charm, only on controls that won.
I do not need a writer for hire. I need the person who ends up owning creative, and I would rather grow them than rent them.
HOW TO APPLY. READ THIS PART CAREFULLY. IT IS THE FIRST TEST.
No cover letter. No resume summary. No “I’m passionate about storytelling.” I will not read it.
Apply here on Indeed and put your answers to these three questions in the message box. Short. Plain. No formatting.
1. Which control have you copied out by hand? What hit you on the third page?
2. Here is one real line from our survey, from a seventy-two-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 is the ad? Not the headline. The ad: the angle, the mechanism, and what she has to believe by the end.
3. Name one piece of copy you wrote that lost. What was the lever that failed, and how did you know it was that one and not something else?
Add one link to a piece of long-form copy you wrote that ran on paid traffic. One. Your best. If it is behind a login, paste the text.
If you cannot answer question three, do not apply. That is not a filter I am being clever about. It is the whole job.
After that, the process is four more steps, all paid: a 90-minute diagnosis test on a real ad of ours that underperformed, a one-week paid spec with a change ledger, a live 90-minute rewrite session with me, and a paid thirty-day trial with one deliverable: one ad, live, against the current control, at real spend.
Remote, United States only. Full-time.
Pay: From $100,000.00 per year
Work Location: Remote