✍️ Your Pitch Gets 10 Seconds. Make Them Count.
Stop sending proposals that sound like everyone else's. Start winning in the first two sentences.
I want to talk about something that’s been bugging me.
I keep hearing from writers in our community — good writers, talented writers — who are sending out pitch after pitch, proposal after proposal, and hearing… nothing.
Not rejection. Not feedback. Just silence.
And that silence is doing something insidious. It’s making you think the problem is your writing. Your experience. Your portfolio. You.
It’s not.
The problem is almost always the pitch itself.
Here’s what I mean.
When a client posts a writing opp — whether that’s on LinkedIn, Upwork, or here at MWYJ, wherever — they’re not getting five proposals. They’re getting fifty. Sometimes hundreds.
And they’re not reading them. They’re scanning them.
You get maybe ten seconds. That’s not a metaphor. That’s literally how long someone spends before they decide “keep reading” or “next.”
So think about what most proposals look like from the client’s side:
“Hi, I’m excited about this opportunity! I’m a passionate writer with 3 years of experience in content marketing, SEO, brand storytelling, and…”
Next.
“I’d love to help with your project. I have extensive experience in…”
Next.
“Dear Hiring Manager, I am writing to express my interest in…”
Next. Next. Next.
They all sound the same. And here’s the cruel part — the writers sending these are often doing exactly what they’ve been told to do. Lead with credentials. Show enthusiasm. Be professional.
But “professional” has become code for “forgettable.”
The proposals that actually land? They do something different in those first two sentences. They don’t talk about themselves. They talk about the client’s problem.
Instead of “I’m excited about this opportunity,” imagine opening with:
“You’re scaling content but your blog reads like it was written by four different people — I can fix that in 30 days.”
That’s not a proposal. That’s a diagnosis. And it makes the client think, “Wait — this person already understands what I’m dealing with.”
That’s the shift. The best pitches feel like the writer already started the work before they got hired.
Short. Specific. A mini-plan instead of a résumé. One proof point instead of a credentials dump. One question instead of a paragraph begging for a call.
And look — I’m not saying credentials don’t matter. They do. But they matter in the middle of a conversation, not at the top of a pitch that someone’s scanning at 11pm between fifty others.
The writers who are landing jobs consistently right now aren’t necessarily more experienced than you. They’re just sharper in those first ten seconds.
So the question becomes: how do you actually do this consistently?
Because crafting a pitch like that — one that diagnoses the problem, proposes a plan, and sounds like a real human who’s already thinking about the work — takes time. Sometimes 30 or 45 minutes per proposal if you’re doing it from scratch.
And if you’re sending out five or ten pitches a week, that math gets brutal fast.
This is where AI becomes genuinely useful. Not to write your proposal for you — clients can smell that a mile away and it’ll land you right back in the “next” pile. But to think through the strategy with you.
Think of it like having a pitch strategist sitting next to you. Someone who reads the job posting, asks you a few sharp questions about your experience, tells you honestly whether you should even bother pitching, and then helps you craft something tight and specific.
That’s exactly what I built.
Below is a prompt you can paste into ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever AI tool you use. It’ll walk you through the whole process — from “should I pitch this?” to a ready-to-send proposal — in about five minutes instead of forty-five.
Below the paywall is the prompt to help you save time and energy.
