Clients skim proposals in a list, next to thirty others that all open the same way. The proposal that gets opened is the one that proves it was written for this job in the first two lines.
If you have no relevant portfolio, write a small piece of the work in the proposal. For a copywriting job, that means one headline and one opening line. For a code job, it means naming the approach and the trade-off you would pick. This costs fifteen minutes and outperforms a list of links, because it is not transferable to another client.
Never paste the same sample into twenty proposals. It is visible, and it converts worse than nothing.
Replace each with one specific sentence. Scope beats adjectives every time.
Give one number, or two options, and say what is included. If the job is ambiguous, price the thing you can define and name the assumption. A cheap bid with a vague scope loses to a clearly-bounded one at twice the price, because the client is buying certainty.
| What people usually write | What it looks like after |
|---|---|
| I am confident that I can deliver high-quality work on time and within budget for this project. | You need six product descriptions rewritten from spec sheets. I will send two on Monday so you can check the tone before I do the rest. |
| With 5+ years of experience in content writing, SEO, social media, and email marketing, I am the perfect fit for your needs. | I write cold email. Last month a client's reply rate went from 1.2% to 5.7% on the same list — the change was the opening line, not the volume. |
| My rate is negotiable depending on the scope of the project. Looking forward to your response. | US$280 for the six emails, delivered in five days. One revision round included. I can start Thursday. |
If you want this done to your own draft: ShipCopy takes a piece of text you already wrote and rewrites it in one of three modes — rewrite it to read human, turn a product description into launch copy, or turn a plain-language request into a reusable prompt. Six output formats, 13 languages. 10 generations free, no card.
See what it does Pricing — US$15/monthUnder 150 words for most jobs. Long proposals are read as a substitute for confidence.
Yes if the client is elsewhere. It answers an unspoken question about availability.
Sometimes, if you can say something about their specific situation that the other 70 could not.