Copywriting for People Who Hate Writing About Themselves

There's a person who can explain their work brilliantly. Ask them at the counter why the cheaper option fails, or what most people get wrong before calling them, and you'll get five minutes of clear, confident, persuasive talk. Now sit that same person in front of a blank page titled 'About Us'. Everything dies. Suddenly it's 'we are a dynamic company committed to excellence' — words nobody has ever said out loud in a real conversation.

If that's you, nothing is wrong with you. Writing about yourself is a genuinely different skill from being good at your job, and it's uncomfortable for reasons that make sense.

Why the page goes stiff

• Bragging feels wrong. Most decent people are raised not to show off, so they hedge — and hedged copy persuades no one.
• The curse of knowledge. You know too much to remember what a beginner needs to hear first, so you start in the middle.
• Wrong audience in your head. You imagine peers judging your expertise, when the actual reader is a stranger judging whether to trust you.
• Formality as armour. When people feel exposed, they go formal — and formal reads as cold on a screen.

The counter test

Here's the single most useful edit you can make to any page of your website: read it aloud and ask whether you would ever say those sentences to a customer standing in front of you. 'We pride ourselves on a commitment to quality craftsmanship' — no human says that. 'Most of the jobs we get called to are fixing a cheap job someone did two years ago' — that's a real sentence, and it sells harder than any mission statement, because it's specific and it sounds like a person.

Good web copy is your counter-talk, cleaned up. The knowledge is already in you. The problem was only ever extraction.

Answer questions, don't write essays

Nobody visits your site to read about you. They visit with questions: can this business do what I need, will it be done properly, roughly what will it cost, and can I trust them? A page that answers those four questions in plain language beats a page of self-description every time. Write down the ten questions customers actually ask you in person — you know them by heart — and answer each one the way you answer it out loud. That's your website copy. It was never meant to be literature.

What we do with this

Extraction is exactly how our pipeline writes. Your brief captures how you talk about the business — who you serve, what you fix, what makes customers choose you — and the copy gets built from your answers and your sector's real questions, in a voice matched to your brand rather than to corporate habit. No 'passion for excellence'. No filler paragraphs to make a section look full. AI does most of the work. Paul reviews everything before it ships, and stiff copy gets sent back the same as broken code.

So drop the guilt about hating the blank page. You were never the problem. The blank page was the wrong tool for getting words out of someone whose talent is talking, not typing.