A lot of people write copy for a living without being copywriters. The dentist writing her own website. The marketing coordinator who inherited the newsletter. The founder who has to describe the product because nobody else will.
They do not want to become copywriters. They want the next thing they write to be better than the last thing.
The idea: a guide, checklist, and workflow planner for copywriting, built in Google Sheets, aimed at people who are not professionals. It is one of the 100 business ideas in Google Sheets I put together, and it works best when you pick a narrow audience and stay there.
The idea
Create a guide, a checklist, or a workflow planner for people who are not professional copywriters. They might be in a specific industry, or at a specific point in their career. Maybe they are people who want to do copywriting without having to learn copywriting. That is a real and large group.
The simplest version is a list of tips. Better is a set of copy templates they can fill in with their own point of view. A headline structure with the blanks labeled. An email opener with three variations. A product description skeleton that asks the right questions in the right order. The user brings the specifics, and the sheet brings the shape.
Or make the sheet collaborative. Someone can share a copywriting planner with their workmates, or their boss, and figure out the copy together. Half the pain of writing copy at a small company is the approval loop. A sheet where the draft, the comments, and the sign-off live in the same row shortens that loop a lot.
A sheet like this can focus on one medium and one industry, or cover tips across a variety of mediums: email marketing, social media, print, landing pages, ads. My advice is to go narrow first. "Copywriting for yoga studios" will sell to yoga studios. "Copywriting tips" will sell to nobody in particular.
The trick with tips is to make them checkable. "Lead with the benefit" is advice. A checkbox that says "Does the first sentence name what the reader gets?" is a tool. Every tip in the sheet should be phrased as a question the user can answer yes or no about the thing they just wrote.
How to build it in Google Sheets
- Tips tab. Columns: Medium, Stage (headline, opening, body, close), Tip as a question, Example of it done well, Example of it done badly.
- Checklist tab. The user picks a Medium from a dropdown, and the tips for that medium appear with a checkbox next to each. A progress percentage sits at the top.
- Templates tab. Fill-in structures. A few input cells on the left, the assembled copy on the right.
- Planner tab. One row per piece of copy: Title, Medium, Owner, Draft Link, Reviewer, Status, Due Date, Notes. This is the collaborative part.
Features that fit:
-
FILTER to pull the right tips onto the Checklist tab.
=FILTER(Tips!C:C, Tips!A:A=B1)returns every question for the selected medium. - Checkboxes next to each tip, and a COUNTIF divided by COUNTA to show how much of the checklist is done. People finish things that show a percentage.
- Data validation dropdowns for Medium, Stage, Owner, and Status. On the Planner tab, Status should be a short fixed list: Draft, In Review, Approved, Published.
- Conditional formatting on the Planner tab so Approved rows go green and anything past its due date goes red.
- onEdit Apps Script trigger that stamps a date in a Last Updated column whenever the Status changes. Small, and it settles a lot of "when did you send that?" conversations.
- Protected ranges on the Tips tab in the sold copy, so the team edits the planner and not the advice.
Keep the tips to one sentence each. If a tip needs a paragraph, it is a lesson, not a checklist item, and it belongs in a course.
Who pays for it, and how to sell it
The buyer is a small business owner or a marketing generalist in one industry. They write copy weekly and have never been trained. Agencies will also buy it as an onboarding tool for junior staff, and coaches in that industry will buy it to hand to clients.
They are paying for the checklist, mostly. The templates save time, the planner saves meetings, but the checklist is what makes them feel like they know what they are doing. Price it accordingly: a one-time template, priced like a short course rather than a spreadsheet.
If you make versions for several industries, each one is a separate product with its own audience. If you keep adding tips and examples, a yearly subscription works, and a paid copy review is an easy service to add once you have the checklist to review against.
Sell the one-time version on Gumroad. For the subscription, or for anything you plan to keep updating, OnlySheets sells access to a Google Sheet and shares it automatically with every buyer, so the newest tips reach everyone at once.
First 10 customers: rewrite ten pieces of real copy from businesses in your target industry, using the checklist, and post the before and after. Tag nobody, name nobody, just show the improvement. The people who recognize their own bad copy in your examples are your first buyers.
Related ideas from the list
- Write Sales Copy, the same fill-in-the-blanks approach focused on the sales page specifically.
- Script Writing Tips and Tricks, the same product shape for people writing video scripts instead of copy.
- Cold Email Examples, a narrower swipe file that sells to the same non-copywriter.
Want the other 99? This is one idea from my list of 100 business ideas you can build in Google Sheets. Get all 100 business ideas as a free Google Sheet.
And if you want to learn how to package and sell spreadsheets, my course Selling Spreadsheets walks through exactly that.
