Article

From copywriting to AI: why Matthew Morgan changed what he teaches

Published 8 September 2026 · Matthew Morgan

If you found me through copywriting, the channel you are looking at now is mostly about AI, and that deserves an explanation. This is the story of the copywriting years, what they taught me, and why the move to AI felt like a continuation rather than a change of career.

2020: a student with a laptop

I started in my first year of university with no relevant qualifications and one useful skill. I could write in a way that made people reply. I read everything I could find on direct response, the branch of copywriting where you can measure whether the words worked, and I went looking for businesses whose emails I could improve.

The first clients came from cold email. Short, specific messages to businesses I could genuinely help, with a sample of what I would have sent instead. Enough of them said yes, and within a few months I had a full client roster. That process, from zero to a first client, became the backbone of everything I later taught. You can watch it in How To Get Your FIRST Copywriting Client In 48 Hours and in How To Get Copywriting Clients With No Experience.

2021 to 2024: teaching it

The natural next step was to teach what I had done. I published as Matthew Online and built the channel around free, practical training. A site called We Are Irish wrote a profile about the business in 2021.

The videos from that era are still some of the most watched on the channel:

• How To Make Your First $1,000 Online In 14 Days With Copywriting, the two week plan that introduced a lot of people to the channel.
• FREE 4-Hour Copywriting Course, a complete course in one video, and the FREE Email Copywriting Course For Beginners that goes deep on email specifically.
• Email Copywriting Tutorial For Dummies, a live walkthrough of writing a real email from a blank page.
• The platform series, showing where the clients actually are: Upwork, Skool, Trustpilot and YouTube.
• How to write 6-Figure sales pages, the long form writing skill that still underpins how I sell anything today.
• Student stories, like how Jakub built a five figure monthly freelance income and how Efeturi made his first $10k, told in their own words.

Thousands of people went through the programmes, and a good number built client businesses from that material that are still running.

2024: the tools changed

Large language models became good enough at drafting that the mechanical half of copywriting, the variations and first drafts and restructures, went from hours to seconds. The valuable half did not move. Knowing what to say, to whom, and what the reader needs to hear before they act was always the real skill, and the tools made that clearer rather than less true.

Then, one evening in 2024, I sat down with an AI coding tool and built a small piece of software I had wanted for years and had never been able to make. It worked, and I had made it by describing clearly what I wanted, which is exactly what copywriting had trained me to do. That was the connection. The people who get the best results from these tools are the ones who can say what done looks like in two clear sentences. Copywriters can do that. What I’d Do Instead of Copywriting in 2026 is the video where I lay this out.

What carried over

• Outreach still works. A short, specific message to a business you can genuinely help gets replies in 2026 exactly as it did in 2020.
• The offer matters more than the product. Nobody buys a workflow. They buy the result, described in their words.
• Specificity beats cleverness. The message that names the client's real problem wins. So does the prompt that names the real requirement.
• Judgement is the product. It always was. The tools have simply made it the whole job.

What I teach now

Building and selling services with AI, aimed at a first paying client. The audience overlaps almost completely with the old one: people who can write and think clearly and do not have a technical background. That is exactly who these tools are best for. The programme is called AI Partners and the plain description is on the programme page. If you came here for copywriting, the outreach and offer skills you learned are the foundation for everything on the channel now.

All articles