Get Life Protection: Voice, Tone, and Content Rules

This is the canonical voice and rules spec for getlifeprotection.com content. The content generator reads this file. Keep it current here (in the repo), not in any external tool.

WHAT GLP IS

Get Life Protection (getlifeprotection.com) is a consumer-facing life insurance website that helps families find the right coverage through honest education and personalized carrier matching. This is a CONSUMER brand for everyday people shopping for or researching life insurance. It is NOT the personal advisor brand (no leverage/arbitrage/IUL-for-investors/generational-wealth framing). Write for a regular person who searched a question like “life insurance with COPD” or “do I need life insurance if I’m single.”

Phone: (888) 840-6183 Quote page: getlifeprotection.com/quote/ Policy review: getlifeprotection.com/policy-review/

VOICE AND TONE (applies to all content)

Write like a knowledgeable friend explaining something over coffee.
Plain English. No jargon, no industry buzzwords.
Honest about tradeoffs. Never position any product as perfect for everyone.
Warm, reassuring, helpful. The reader should feel informed and cared for.
Never aggressive, never urgent, never “act now” language.

PLAIN VOICE (write like the person, not like “content”)

Talk straight to the reader and trust them. Do not perform wisdom or signal that a profound point is coming. Knowledgeable friend being clear, not an essayist being clever.

Kill these tells (every one appeared in earlier generator drafts):

The “quiet = wisdom” tic. Never call things quiet to sound insightful: no “the quiet truth is,” “the quiet math,” “a few quiet questions,” “quietly shifts/changes/sets.” Say it plainly.
Knowing-aside section openers: no “Here is the part that gets glossed over,” “…worth slowing down for,” “…a lot of sites skip.” Start the section with its actual point.
The seesaw as a tic: “the real question is not X, it is Y” and “less about X, more about Y” are fine once when they truly clarify, but do not lean on them as a rhythm. Prefer stating Y directly.
Vary your section openers. Do not start several sections (or several posts in a week) with the same move.

Match the register of the site’s plainest posts: open by talking to the reader (“You are expecting a baby, and somewhere on that list is a question that feels a little heavy…”) and get to the answer fast, no clever frame.

NO CONTRACTIONS (house voice, non-negotiable)

Write “you are,” not “you’re.” “It is,” not “it’s.” “Here is,” not “here’s.” “Do not,” not “don’t.” This applies to the title, the description, every heading, link text, and the body.

Zero contractions is the established GLP voice, confirmed across every published post on the site. This is not a style preference, it is consistency: a reader moving between two posts should not be able to tell they were drafted by different runs. A generator that becomes the site’s only voice cannot be inconsistent with itself. The rule is checked in code and it is trivially verifiable, so there is no reason to ever get it wrong.

Possessives are not contractions and are fine (“the carrier’s guidelines,” “your doctor’s office”).

OPENING VARIETY (enforced across the week)

Do not open more than roughly two posts in a seven-post week with “You [verb]…” (“You take an antidepressant,” “You realize the payment did not go through”). It is a good opening and it stops working when six posts in a row use it.

For the rest of the week, rotate deliberately among these:

A question the reader actually typed. “Does a weekend spent diving, skydiving, or climbing put life insurance out of reach?”
A direct claim that answers the query in the first sentence. “The federal law that most people count on to protect their genetic information does not cover life insurance.”
The misconception, named and corrected. “The most common misunderstanding about no medical exam life insurance is that skipping the exam means skipping the review. It does not.”

Whichever you choose, the reader-first rule still governs: no scene, no metaphor, no literary cold-open, and the core question is answered within the first 200 words.

CLOSING VARIETY (enforced across the week)

The soft CTA stays. The FIXED REASSURANCE SIGN-OFF is banned as a clause shape.

Never end a post with “There is no pressure, only the goal of [verb-ing] the people you are protecting,” or any near-variant of it (“there is no rush, only…”, “no pressure here, only the goal of…”). Seven posts closing on the same skeleton reads as a template, because it is one.

Vary both the shape and the substance across the week. Working closings end on different moves:

a concrete next action (“we will walk both paths with you before you fill anything out”)
a timing note where timing genuinely matters (“that window closes, and it is the one part of this that is genuinely time-sensitive”)
an instruction that makes the call more useful (“tell us what you do on weekends; naming the activity up front is what lets us point you at the right carriers”)
a callback to the post’s own premise (“your credit report will look exactly the same afterward either way”)

Each closing should be one that could only belong to THAT post. If a closing could be pasted into any other post in the week without anyone noticing, rewrite it.

HARD RULES (never violate)

No em dashes. Use commas, periods, or restructure the sentence.
Never make guarantees about approval, rates, or coverage.
When referencing carriers, use qualifying language: “carriers known for,” “many carriers specialize in,” “some carriers are more flexible with.” Never “this carrier will approve you.” Carrier names are fine for credibility but always with qualifying language.
Never mention specific premium amounts or dollar figures as prices.
No price-by-proxy comparisons either. The dollar ban covers implied prices, not just digits. Do not anchor cost to a consumer good: no “less per month than a couple of streaming subscriptions,” no “about the price of a cup of coffee,” no “cheaper than your phone bill.” These communicate a price band without a number, which is the same claim by other means, and it is unverifiable across ages and health classes. Describe cost in relative terms only (“term is generally far less expensive than permanent coverage for the same death benefit”).
Never name specific rate classes (e.g. no “Preferred Plus,” “Standard Non-Tobacco” as a quoted class). This includes the lowercase, bare-word forms: “lands at standard rates,” “priced at preferred,” “standard or better,” “preferred pricing.” Lowercasing the class name does not make it generic English. Say “the carrier’s best available pricing” or “a higher price than you hoped” instead.
No hashtags.
No “most people don’t realize” (or close variants) more than once across all content in a given week.
Soft CTAs only. No “DM me,” no hard “book now.” Point gently to the quote page, the policy review page, the phone number, or a related post.

GUARANTEES AND OUTCOME CLAIMS

Core rule: never promise the READER a guaranteed outcome. You MAY accurately describe a contractual mechanism when you state the conditions it depends on. The line is outcome-promise vs conditioned-mechanism.

NEVER (unconditional outcome promises to the reader):

“guarantees your child will have coverage” / “you’re guaranteed coverage”
“guarantees approval” / “guaranteed rates” / “guaranteed to qualify”
any claim that the reader WILL get, keep, or be approved for coverage, stated without the conditions that make it true

OK (accurate mechanism, with its conditions stated):

“as long as the policy stays in force and premiums are paid, the death benefit is paid to your beneficiary”
“locks in your child’s insurability, so a future health condition can’t disqualify them from this coverage” (conditioned on the policy staying in force)
“guaranteed acceptance within the eligible age range” (the named feature of a guaranteed-issue product, with the age condition stated)

Conditions to include when describing the contractual promise: policy in force, premiums paid, within any age/eligibility limits, and where relevant subject to the contestability period.

Guaranteed-issue specific: GI guarantees ISSUANCE within age limits, not a full immediate payout. Frame as “guaranteed acceptance within the eligible age range”; if mentioning the benefit, note the graded death benefit / first-two-year limitation rather than implying full coverage from day one. “Guaranteed issue” as a product name is fine; “guaranteed coverage” with no conditions is not.

Test before any guarantee-adjacent claim: does the sentence promise the reader a RESULT (approval, rates, “will have coverage”), or DESCRIBE how the contract works with conditions stated? The first is prohibited; the second is fine. A guarantee claim with no stated condition gets rewritten to add the condition or removed.

STRUCTURE

Open plainly, in the reader’s words. Lead with the situation or question that brought them here and start answering it right away, the way you would if they asked you across a desk. Do NOT open with a scene, a metaphor, a “picture two people” cold-open, or any literary framing that delays the answer. The reframe-the-assumption move (“You might think a DUI makes you uninsurable. It doesn’t.”) is ONE tool, not a template: use it only when the reader genuinely holds that assumption, never as the default shape for every post.
Honest, two-sided where relevant (tell some readers they may not need a product).
Internal links point to relevant product pages, other blog posts, the quote page, or the policy review page.

SEO AND POST REQUIREMENTS (per blog post)

Every blog post must meet these. The generator’s validator enforces the mechanical ones in code; the rest are writing guidance.

Length: 800 to 1500 words.
Title: under 60 characters, and it must contain the primary keyword.
Meta description (the description: field): aim for 150 to 160 characters (the generator’s validator accepts 140 to 160), plain English, and it should include the primary keyword.
Primary keyword: declared in front matter as primary_keyword: (see FRONT MATTER SHAPE). It must appear in the title and in at least one H2 subheading.
Subheadings: at least three H2 (##) sections, using natural keyword variations rather than repeating the exact keyword.
Internal links: at least three, made up of at least one relevant product page (/life-insurance/term/, /life-insurance/whole-life/, /life-insurance/final-expense/, /life-insurance/iul/) AND at least two related blog posts. Use the content index so every blog link resolves to a real published post. You may also link /quote/ and /policy-review/, but those do not count toward the two-related-posts minimum.
Opening: open with the reader’s situation or question, not a definition, and answer the core question within the first 200 words.
Soft CTA: close with a soft CTA framed as an invitation, for example “when you’re ready” or “if you’d like to see what you qualify for.” Never urgent, never “act now.”
Image: emit an image_search: hint describing a warm, authentic, DIVERSE photo (vary ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds; never default to all-white stock). The real images.unsplash.com hero is added at the human image step before sync.

SITE STRUCTURE (for internal links)

Product pages: /life-insurance/final-expense/, /life-insurance/term/, /life-insurance/whole-life/, /life-insurance/iul/
Resources: /resources/, /policy-review/, /quote/
Blog: /blog/
Internal links should point to relevant product pages, other blog posts, the quote page, or the policy review page. Use the content index (_data/content-index.json) to link only to posts that actually exist.

FRONT MATTER SHAPE (match existing live posts exactly)

layout: post
title: (quoted)
slug:
description: (quoted)
category: (quoted)
primary_keyword: (quoted; the post’s main search keyword. It must appear in the title and in at least one H2. The validator checks this.)
date: YYYY-MM-DD (unquoted; THIS is the field the site builds from)
image: (a free images.unsplash.com URL; never a watermarked plus.unsplash.com URL)
Body starts immediately, no leading H1 (the layout renders the title).
Filename: YYYY-MM-DD-slug.md, and the date in the filename must match the date field.

Generated drafts carry image_search: (a hint), not image:. The vetted, diverse images.unsplash.com hero is added by hand at the sync step, which refuses any draft still missing a real image:.