---
name: offer-page-build
description: Writes a sales page, long-form offer email or landing page body against a fifteen-slot AIDA skeleton, in publication order, with the persuasion devices placed in the slots where they work. Carries the seven questions to answer before drafting, the awareness-to-message mapping, the damaging admission order rule, the three permitted P.S. types and the scarcity legitimacy test. This skill should be used when writing or restructuring any page or email whose single job is to get one specific person to buy one specific thing.
---

# Offer page build, the fifteen slots

## The claim this skill is built on

A sales page is a sequence of fifteen jobs, not a piece of writing with a persuasive tone. Most weak pages are not badly written. They are missing six of the jobs and have two of the remaining nine in the wrong position.

The obvious approach fails in a predictable shape. Asked for a sales page, a capable writer or model produces a headline, a paragraph of benefits, three bullet points and a button. Every sentence is defensible. No objection is answered, no price anchor exists, nobody is excluded, and the reader is never shown a single recognisable moment of their own working life. It reads fine and it sells nothing.

Position is the reason. Persuasion on a page is not a property of sentences, it is a property of order. A testimonial placed before the price is proof. The same testimonial placed after the price is an argument you have already lost. A benefit stated before the reader has agreed they have the problem is a feature with an adjective on it. Scarcity offered before desire exists is pressure, and pressure without desire reads as a scam.

Two attributions, so the borrowed parts are labelled. The four stages, attention, interest, desire and action, are the AIDA model, credited to E. St. Elmo Lewis around 1900 and in continuous use since. The five levels of audience awareness are Eugene Schwartz's, published in Breakthrough Advertising in 1966. Neither is new and neither is the asset here. The asset is which slot each stage owns, and which device belongs in which slot.

## Step 1, interrogate before you draft

Seven questions. Answer all seven in writing before a word of the page is drafted, because six of the fifteen slots are made of these answers and drafting a slot before its answer exists is exactly how generic copy is produced.

1. **Who is this for, exactly?** Not a category. A segment with a qualifier. Weak: "small business owners". Usable: "bookkeepers who took on a fourth client this year and are still raising invoices from a spreadsheet". The test is the swap test: could a competitor use this sentence unchanged? If yes, it is a category.
2. **What is the ONE action?** One. A page with a buy button, a newsletter form and a demo booking has no call to action, it has three suggestions.
3. **What proof and credentials genuinely exist?** Enumerate them now: years running, number of customers, named organisations, a published result, a qualification, a guarantee you can afford. If the honest answer is "almost none", the page will lean on slot 4 and slot 6 and it must, because inventing proof is where a sales page stops being copy and becomes fraud.
4. **What are the main objections?** In the buyer's words, taken from support tickets, sales calls and refund emails. Three to five. These become slot 11 close to verbatim.
5. **What status does this audience care about, and in whose eyes?** The second half is the question. A freelancer wants to look established to a prospect on a first call. A team lead wants to look competent to their director at the Monday review. A benefit with no named audience and no named moment is decoration.
6. **Is any urgency or scarcity legitimate?** Answered by the rule in step 7 below, not by wishing.
7. **What is genuinely unique?** A mechanism, a constraint, a piece of access, a term nobody else offers. "Best in class" is not an answer.

**The stop rule.** If question 1 still returns a category after two attempts, stop. Do not draft. No amount of editing converts a page written for everybody into a page written for somebody, because the specificity has to be in the raw material.

## Step 2, place the awareness level

This decides which slots carry the weight, so it comes before drafting and not after.

| Level | What they know | What the message wants | Slots that carry it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unaware | Not aware they have the problem | A story, a moment, someone else's situation | 1 to 3 |
| Problem-aware | Feels the pain, does not know solutions exist | The problem named better than they can name it, then benefits and anxieties | 3, 12, 11 |
| Solution-aware | Knows the category, does not know you | Claims and proof | 4 to 7, 10 |
| Product-aware | Knows you, has not bought | The offer sharpened, the objection answered, often the discount | 8 to 13 |
| Most aware | Wants it | The product, the price, the link | 9, 13 |

**Decision rule, with branches.**

- **If traffic comes from your own list, a branded search, or retargeting**, write product-aware or most-aware. Put the price inside the first screen. Cut the long problem section, which insults a reader who has already agreed.
- **If traffic comes from a cold interest-based ad or cold outbound**, write problem-aware. Do not let the product name appear before slot 3.
- **If you cannot tell**, which is the normal case for a new page with mixed sources, write problem-aware and add a most-aware shortcut: one line and a buy link inside the first screen, worded plainly as "already know you want it, here is the link". It costs a single line and it rescues the minority who arrived ready. Do not resolve the ambiguity by aiming at the average, which produces a page that is slightly wrong for everyone and recognisably right for no one.

## Step 3, fill the fifteen slots in order

This is publication order, not drafting order. Draft slot 3 first if that is where the energy is. Ship them in this sequence.

| # | Stage | Slot | Done when |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Attention | Headline | It creates curiosity, states a difference and implies a desirable outcome, in that priority order |
| 2 | Attention | Subheadline | It says literally what the thing is, paying off whatever the headline was allowed to withhold |
| 3 | Attention | The problem they have without this | It contains a time, a place or an object, so it reads as a scene rather than a category |
| 4 | Interest | Demonstration | A reader who skips all prose can still see what happens: a recording, a before and after, a sample output |
| 5 | Interest | Usage pictures | The thing is shown in use, in a context the reader recognises as their own |
| 6 | Interest | Internal validation | You state how you, or a known organisation, actually use it, naming the specific process rather than saying "we use it daily" |
| 7 | Interest | Concrete examples | Three to five worked cases, each surviving the question "on what day, doing what" |
| 8 | Desire | Original price, validated | The anchor is a price somebody genuinely pays somewhere: the agency rate, the incumbent's licence, the hours at your reader's own rate. Never an invented value total |
| 9 | Desire | Your price, with the buy link | Price and button sit in the same block, and the reader does no arithmetic to understand the total |
| 10 | Desire | A real testimonial | It names the outcome, not the seller. "They were lovely to work with" is not proof of anything you sell |
| 11 | Desire | Objections named and answered | The objections are the ones from question 4, in their words, including the one you would rather not print |
| 12 | Desire | Benefits | Each tied to status in the eyes of a named group at a named moment |
| 13 | Action | The offer | The exact thing they get for the exact money, restated in one block a reader can list back to you |
| 14 | Action | Scarcity | A real constraint with its mechanism stated, or the slot is deleted. See step 7 |
| 15 | Action | Social proof, most endorsed first | Sorted by strength of endorsement, never by date |

Slots 4 to 7 collapsing into a single bullet list is the most common structural failure of the whole method, and it is worth checking for specifically, because four different jobs disappear at once and the page still looks complete.

## Step 4, the placement rules

**1. Roughly eighty percent of the effort goes on the headline.** Priority order: curiosity first, then difference, then desirability. Test the form "How to [outcome] without [obstacle], even if [biggest fear]", which forces all three. The eighty percent is a working allocation from direct response practice, not a measured figure, and the point of it is that the headline is normally written last and fastest, which is backwards.

**2. Say who it is for and who it is not for.** Exclusion is the cheapest credibility available on a page, and it does the qualifying work your support queue would otherwise do in ninety days. One sentence: "This is not for you if you need it to talk to a payroll system, because it does not."

**3. Every offer carries a stated because.** Why this price, why now, why you, why the free thing is free. The 1978 photocopier queue experiments found that compliance with a small request rose sharply when any reason at all followed the word "because", including a reason that added no information. Do not take that as licence to write empty reasons. Take it as evidence that an unexplained offer costs you something, and that stating the real reason costs a sentence.

**4. Use a damaging admission early, in the order [flaw], but [strength].** In a concessive sentence, the clause after "but" carries the main assertion, and it is the one the reader retains and believes. So "The onboarding takes a fortnight, but you will never migrate again" reads as a strength with a fair warning attached. Reverse it, "You will never migrate again, but the onboarding takes a fortnight", and you have published the flaw as your closing claim. Same two facts, opposite page. The admission must also be true and material. A cosmetic flaw admitted as though it were a real one reads as a technique, which is worse than not doing it.

**5. Show moments and experiences, never marketing abstractions.** "Improve your workflow" is nothing. "Friday at six, the client asks for the invoice you sent in March, and you find it" is a moment.

**6. Tie every benefit to status in the eyes of a specific group at a specific time.** The formula: [audience] will see you as [status] when [moment]. If you cannot name the group and the moment, the benefit is a feature.

**7. The P.S. is mandatory, and it is exactly one of three things.** It is treated in direct response practice as the second most read element after the headline, which is a working assumption rather than a measured figure, and it is free, so leaving it empty is a decision to waste a block. The three permitted types: a reward or humour payoff for the reader who got that far; a disclaimer naming who this is not for; a one-sentence recap with the link. A P.S. that introduces a new argument is a fourth thing, and it reads as an afterthought that should have been in the body.

**8. Enumerate the call to action, and say what happens next.** Not "get started". Numbered steps, then the sentence nobody writes: what arrives, from what address, how soon, and what you will be asked for. "They will know what to do" is the assumption that costs you the sale at the last inch.

## Step 5, the drafting medium constraint

Compose the body in a chat or message window, then move it into the page. Any messaging app, the compose box of a webmail client, or a plain text editor wrapped at about sixty characters, on Windows or macOS alike.

The mechanism is not mystical. A narrow column forces short lines and short sentences. There is no formatting toolbar, so you cannot hide a weak argument behind a heading hierarchy and a pull quote. And the window implies exactly one addressee, which is the single hardest thing to hold onto in a document editor, where the reader silently becomes an audience. Move the text out only when the argument is finished, and treat any sentence that stops working once it is in the page as a sentence that was relying on the layout.

## Step 6, reading level

Target Flesch-Kincaid grade 3 to 5 for body copy. Practical proxies you can check without a tool: mean sentence length at or under fourteen words, no sentence over thirty, fewer than one word in ten longer than eight letters, one idea per sentence, and a better verb in place of any adverb.

Simplicity beats concision. Two short sentences beat one dense sentence even when the dense one has fewer words, because the reader is scanning and a subordinate clause is a place to stop. Fancy is friction.

Exclusions: the guarantee clause, the specification list and anything legal, where precision beats simplicity and the grade level does not apply.

The check runs the same on Windows and macOS. Any of the desktop word processors report Flesch-Kincaid in their editor or proofing panel, Hemingway Editor runs in a browser, and if you have Node installed this prints the two proxies for a plain text file:

```
node -e "const t=require('fs').readFileSync(process.argv[1],'utf8');const s=t.split(/[.!?]+/).filter(x=>x.trim().length);const w=t.split(/\s+/).filter(Boolean);const L=w.filter(x=>x.replace(/[^A-Za-z]/g,'').length>8);console.log('sentences',s.length,'| words',w.length,'| mean words per sentence',(w.length/s.length).toFixed(1),'| long words pct',(100*L.length/w.length).toFixed(1));" page.txt
```

## Step 7, the scarcity legitimacy rule

- **A real constraint exists** (a cohort start date, a seat count, a price rise already agreed, an expiring licence): state the mechanism, not just the countdown, and honour it. Honouring it has one operational meaning. When somebody emails after it closes asking to buy anyway, the answer is no.
- **No constraint exists:** delete slot 14. Do not install a timer that resets on refresh. Replace the job the slot was doing with a true reason to act now, in the because form: the next intake is in March, the support queue is short this month, the current version is the one the guide was written for.
- **You cannot tell**, which in practice sounds like "we might put the price up in the new year": write the conditional truthfully. "The price is 89 today. It is under review for January. If it changes, you keep this rate." A conditional you can defend converts better than a deadline you will quietly extend, because you only get to extend a deadline once before your list learns what your deadlines mean.

## Step 8, the self-audit

Walk the fifteen slots and mark each present, absent or deliberately deleted with the rule that deleted it. Walk the eight placement rules. Run the reading level check. Then write, in five or six lines, which principles you applied and why, naming the awareness level you wrote to and the traffic assumption behind it. That statement is the part a reviewer can argue with, and a page nobody can argue with specifically is a page that gets rewritten by opinion.

## Worked example

**The offer, invented.** A done-for-you invoicing and chasing service for independent consultants. 89 a month. Traffic: cold interest-based ads, mixed audience, page is new.

**The seven answers, compressed.** For: independent consultants billing three to eight clients a month who chase late payments themselves. One action: start the trial. Proof: two years running, a named professional association uses it for member billing, no published outcome study. Objections: "my clients will find chasing rude", "I already have accounting software", "I will lose visibility of who owes me". Status: looking established to a client who is about to sign a second engagement. Scarcity: none, honestly. Unique: the chase sequence is written to be sent from your address, so the client never learns a service exists.

**Awareness call.** Cannot tell. So: problem-aware, plus a most-aware shortcut line inside the first screen.

**Headline candidates.**
- "Invoicing, simplified." Rejected. No curiosity, no difference, no outcome.
- "Get paid on time, every time." Rejected. Desirable, undifferentiated, and it is a promise the service cannot keep, which fails at slot 11 when the objection block has to walk it back.
- "How to stop chasing late invoices without becoming the consultant who chases, even if you hate confrontation." Kept. Curiosity in the middle clause, difference in the mechanism, and it names the actual fear from question 5.

**Damaging admission, both orders.** Correct: "It will not make a client who cannot pay you pay you, but it removes every reason a client who can pay you has for not doing it this week." Reversed: "It removes every reason a client who can pay has for delaying, but it will not make a client who cannot pay, pay." The second version closes on insolvency. Same facts, and it is the last thing the reader takes into slot 8.

**P.S. type.** Disclaimer of who this is not for, chosen because the traffic is cold and unqualified, and the support cost of the wrong buyer is high.

**Slot audit.** Fourteen of fifteen filled. Slot 14 deleted under the legitimacy rule, with the job reassigned to a because line about the current intake. Slot 6 is thin, because internal validation rests on one association and it is named with permission or not at all. Slot 10 carries one testimonial, and the note to the client says one real testimonial beats four written by the marketing team.

**Verdict: ship the page with fourteen slots, no scarcity block, and a headline that took eleven attempts.** The remaining risk is entirely in slot 6, and the fix is not a copy fix, it is asking the association for permission to name them.

## Failure modes

**Writing before interrogating.** The symptom from the outside is a page a competitor could publish by swapping the product name. Every sentence is fine and nothing on it could only be true of you. This is the failure that no editing pass repairs, because the missing thing is raw material and not phrasing.

**Illegitimate scarcity, then honoured anyway.** The deadline passes, somebody asks to buy, and you sell to them. Nothing visibly breaks. What breaks is the next deadline, and every one after it, and it does not come back. From the outside it looks like declining response to launches that are structured identically to the launch that worked.

**The reversed damaging admission.** Strength then flaw. The page reads as honest and converts worse than a page with no admission at all, which is the confusing part, because the technique was applied and the mechanism was inverted.

**The empty P.S.** The page simply stops. There is no obvious defect and the second most read block on the page is missing, which is invisible in review because nobody misses a thing that is not there.

**The unspecified call to action.** "Get started" with a button, and no statement of what arrives afterwards. The symptom is support email asking what happens next, from people who did not buy, and silence from the ones who nearly did.

**Awareness mismatch.** A cold audience is led with the product name and the price in the first screen, or a warm customer list is made to read nine hundred words about a problem they described to you last week. Both look like a working page. The first bounces, the second gets replies asking where the link is.

**Slot collapse into a bullet list.** Demonstration, usage pictures, internal validation and concrete examples become one block of six benefit bullets. The page looks tidier and four separate jobs stopped being done, so nothing on the page shows the thing working.

**Cleverness over clarity.** A headline nobody can parse in one pass, a metaphor sustained across three sections, a pun in the call to action. It survives internal review because internal reviewers already know what the product is, which makes them the only readers for whom the page works.

**Borrowed proof.** A screenshot of a result somebody else got, a logo used without permission, a testimonial edited past what the customer said. It is the one failure here that is not a conversion problem, and it is the one that ends companies.

## What this skill does not do

- It does not verify a single claim on the page. Every number, credential and named organisation in the fifteen slots has to be checked by you, and slot 6 in particular is where an unchecked claim becomes a legal problem rather than a copy problem.
- It has no view on whether your price is correct. It will force you to state who genuinely pays the anchor and why yours is what it is, which is a different question.
- It does not design, lay out or build the page. Slot order is sequence, not layout, and everything about how a slot renders on a small screen sits outside this file.
- It cannot test anything. There is no split test, no traffic and no result here, and a page that satisfies every rule in this file can still lose to a shorter one.
- It is not advertising law, and the regulated categories, health, finance, earnings claims and employment outcomes, need someone who reads your market's rules rather than a checklist.
- It does not write the offer. If the thing being sold is weak, this produces a clear, well-sequenced account of a weak offer, which is genuinely useful and is not the same as a page that sells.