The AI AIDA Copywriter skill for Claude

You download the zip at the top of this page, put it in your Claude environment, and from that moment Claude writes adverts, emails and hero text according to this logic. Not sure yet exactly what a skill is? Read what Claude skills are first.

The problem it solves is familiar to anyone who has ever written an advert themselves. You sit in front of a blank box, type something about quality and craftsmanship, and the result reads like your competitor's text. Or you ask an AI with no instruction and get a block of superlatives that nobody believes. Both texts fail at the same point: they have no division of labour. The opening tries to do everything at once, so no single sentence does what it is meant to do.

AIDA solves that with a division of labour. The first line has only one task, which is to make sure a second line gets read. The second lets the reader recognise themselves. The third makes the gain concrete. The fourth asks for exactly one action. That separation is enforced, and each stage states which principle was used, so you get not just text but a reason. That is the difference between output you have to trust and output you can judge.

Business owners, marketers and freelancers who write their own adverts, sales emails and landing pages are the readers this file was made for. It belongs to the library of 100 free skills we make available through our AI and automation service, with no account and no sales email afterwards. All the skills are on the skills hub.

The SKILL.md states one thing about itself explicitly, and we repeat it here: AIDA is not a formula you paste over a text. It is a diagnostic framework that shows at which stage a reader drops off. Whoever presents it as a magic formula is selling thin air. That kind of presentation is therefore explicitly refused, and it is one of the five things it never does.

The opening asks for too much at once. A first sentence that introduces your company, names your offer and asks for a click does none of those things. The Attention stage has a single task: make the reader stop. That can be a question they recognise, a contrast, a concrete number, or an opening that breaks the pattern of the timeline. In the example from the skill it is a seven-word question, and nothing more.

It is about you instead of about the reader. The Interest stage exists to let the reader recognise themselves. Sentences that start with we do not do that. That stage is therefore written from the reader's situation, with the instruction to quote the reader almost word for word wherever possible. That is not a trick, it is the only way anyone thinks: this is about me.

The desire is stated instead of shown. Fantastic, amazing and incredible are literally on the banned list in the file, along with AI turns of phrase such as seamless, effortless and take it to the next level. In the Desire stage something concrete has to happen: a before-and-after image, a number, a guarantee, or removing exactly what is holding the reader back. The difference between we deliver quality and you do not have to draw, measure or compare anything yourself is not stylistic. Anyone can say the first, the second can be checked.

The close asks for more than one thing. Call us, email us, look at the site or follow us: four requests are three too many. Never more than one primary call to action per piece of copy, is the advice, and that rule sits in the list of things it never does. In the Action stage there is also the requirement to name the ease, and a deadline is only allowed if it is real.

The structure is there, but there is nothing to test. A single version tells you nothing. That is why the skill delivers two complete variants with a different angle by default, for example one from pain and the other from desire. That is not a bonus but block three of the fixed output structure.

In diff form, with lines from the example in the SKILL.md: what goes out and what comes back in its place.

Notice what does not happen in that conversion: not a single new fact is added. The number 87 came from the user, so did the place name, and the two-working-day window is only there because it was supplied. Things are rearranged and sharpened, but not one word is added that you did not supply yourself. Anyone who then wants to strip the last trace of AI tone from their text uses the Text Humaniser skill for that.

Then comes the theory. AIDA is described as a hierarchy of effects model from 1898, first written down by Elias St. Elmo Lewis, later extended and confirmed by, among others, Strong in 1925, and used in practice by agencies such as Ogilvy and BBDO. Every letter gets its own definition: Attention is stopping the scroll among all the other stimuli, Interest is the reader recognising themselves, Desire is wanting a result that has been made concrete, and Action is the specific act at the right moment with the right ease.

The core is a list of six things the skill always does. It asks for the minimum necessary context or infers it from your input. It splits the output explicitly into the four stages. It delivers a concrete line of text per stage, so text and not advice. It delivers an alternative variant per stage so you can A/B test. It marks per stage which principle was used, for example contrast, specificity, social proof, urgency or movement. And it closes with a list of points to watch that you have to test yourself.

Before writing anything it runs through a mandatory input checklist with six fields: your target audience as concretely as possible including their level of awareness, your offer or product, the channel, the desired action, the biggest pain point or the biggest dream, and the piece of proof you have. The instruction next to it is sharp: only ask about what is missing, then stop asking. So you do not get a form.

A striking number of rules are about language. It states that the skill writes in clear Dutch using je and jouw, the informal you, and never u or uw, the formal you, that no dashes appear in running text, that AI is always written in capitals and that small language quirks are allowed so it sounds human. Lists of exactly three items are forbidden, because that rhythm gives the machine away. There is a banned list of AI words and turns of phrase, including in the world of, discover, unlock, seamless, effortless, dive into and in a nutshell. And there is a second list of hollow superlatives: the best, amazing, incredible, fantastic, groundbreaking. As a rule of thumb: concrete beats abstract, a number beats an adjective, and short sentences alternate with long ones.

The output structure is fixed in five blocks, always in this order. First a context summary of two to four sentences, which serves as a check on your input. Then the main variant in four blocks, with the text and a line starting with Principle for each block. Then the B variant with the same structure and a different angle. Then the points to watch per stage, one or two per stage and explicitly no fixed number. And finally a paragraph on source and justification stating that the basis comes from Lewis in 1898, and which variant was used and why.

The file closes with the review mode, the list of things the skill never does, and a source list of five titles: Lewis 1898, Strong 1925, Ogilvy 1983, Sugarman 2007 and Caples 1932. Anyone who wants to build a file like this themselves finds the structure step by step in writing a SKILL.md.

The model itself comes from Elias St. Elmo Lewis. He described the step-by-step working of adverts in 1898, among other places in The Inland Printer. The idea was radical at the time: an advert is not a statement but a series of steps, and each step has its own task. That idea has never been disproved, only moved to new channels. What was a newspaper column in 1898 is now a timeline.

The underpinning comes from E.K. Strong. His book The Psychology of Selling and Advertising from 1925 took the model into advertising psychology and gave the stages an empirical charge. From that point AIDA is a hierarchy of effects: the assumption is that the reader goes through the stages in order, so you can identify where they fall out of line. That exact assumption is what makes the model diagnostically usable, which is also how the skill uses it in its review mode.

The craft comes from Ogilvy, Caples and Sugarman. David Ogilvy wrote Ogilvy on Advertising in 1983, John Caples published Tested Advertising Methods in 1932, and Joe Sugarman brought out The Adweek Copywriting Handbook in 2007. All three centre on the same principle that ended up in the skill's writing rules: concrete beats abstract, a number beats an adjective, and a text you can test beats a text you have an opinion about. Caples is known for testing headlines, and that is exactly why the skill delivers two variants by default instead of one.

Where the skill explicitly does not go along is the tendency to present AIDA as a magic formula. The model tells you what task each sentence has. It does not tell you whether your offer is right, whether your audience is well chosen, or whether your price is reasonable. Anyone who writes an advert for something nobody wants gets, with AIDA, a tidy advert for something nobody wants.

Want to learn the psychology behind persuasion more broadly? The Cialdini Persuasion skill follows on directly from here: it explains why social proof and scarcity work and when they tip over into distrust. For the attention side there is the Hook Model Builder skill, which is about recurring triggers instead of a single advert. And anyone who first wants to know which promise they should actually be making starts a step earlier with the Value Proposition Canvas skill: that translates customer jobs into the value you can then put into the Desire stage.

After that, using it is simple: describe your brief in one sentence and give it the six input fields if you have them. For example target audience homeowners aged 40 plus around Tilburg, channel Meta advert, offer free garden plan, desired action fill in a lead form, pain no time to work it out, proof 87 front gardens in 2025. Missing one? The skill asks for it itself. Stuck while installing? The full route per environment is in installing Claude skills. The wider explanation of working with AI is in the knowledge base.

There are two things the frontmatter explicitly excludes. The first is the SEO blog article. An article that has to rank needs a different structure, because there someone reads to understand something, not to buy something. The second is pure storytelling and fiction: a story that has to build tension follows a plot, not a sales funnel. In both cases the skill points to structure and storytelling skills, and those are all listed in the library too.

There is one more boundary the file itself does not name but which matters most in practice: the skill makes your text better, not your offer. If your offer does not match what the reader needs, a better structure changes nothing about that. What it does do is stop a good offer being killed by a bad text. That happens more often than the other way round.

How does AIDA relate to the other structures in the library? AIDA is shorter and more fundamental than most, and aimed at a single action. StoryBrand sets up your whole brand story, with the customer as hero and your company as guide, and works better for a homepage or a pitch than for an advert. Made to Stick is about memorability rather than conversion. And the Pyramid Principle Writer is for pieces where you have to convince someone with an argument, not with an offer. They do not clash: you can happily build a StoryBrand story and write the adverts underneath it with AIDA.

Finally: the prompt was built in Dutch, but the stage structure and the principles stay the same in English too. Ask for English copy and the structure holds, while the language rules about the you-form and Dutch AI words logically only apply to the Dutch version.

A sharper advert raises your click rate, but someone has to see it first. With paid traffic you buy that attention, with organic traffic you earn it. The free SEO scan shows in a few seconds where your site stands today. In the guide writing models compared you see how this model relates to the others. And if you want to talk through what else AI can do for your business, from loose skills to full automation, we simply do that in a conversation.