I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately. Okay, I’m a light sleeper, but when your neighbours decide, again, that it’s okay to keep you up ’til five a.m. with another domestic, you have to make a choice.
You either get up in four hours, and sleepwalk through the day. Or you shut out the glimmer of light that’s already peeping through the curtains, and get up in the mid-afternoon.
Either way, your day’s been written off. Or has it?
In my case, yes, the day was definitely written off. I was so angry about being kept up I found it …
I’ve been so busy this week I’ve barely had time update my blog. Since being featured on Smashing Magazine, I’ve been responding to a lot of new enquiries and taking on almost as much new business. It’s hard work. Rewarding work. Work that makes me glad I struck out on my own.
I think Smashing Magazine think I’m a little bit arrogant. I suppose my face is plastered all over this site. But as regular readers of this blog know, I’m a big fan of the personal touch — adding that extra endorsement works, whether you’re a one-man outfit, …
I’ve been working on copy for the web this week, so naturally I’ve been brushing up on my SEO skills in my spare time. SEO isn’t something you can learn and forget about, it’s constantly evolving — just like the web.
If you’ve got a website and you don’t know what SEO is, you might as well sell your computer and buy a typewriter. Or at least rip your modem out of the wall. Let me guess — you’re still on 56k, right?
But let’s assume for a moment you don’t know what SEO is. To be honest, unless you’re …
It says something that I wasn’t even surprised when I read this tidbit of news: iTunes blocks rival smartphones. Essentially someone’s come along with a third party product that rivals the iPhone, that has plug-and-play capacity with iTunes. And Apple have blocked it.
“Oh, we don’t test third party applications or hardware, so if they stop working, that’s not our problem,” Apple cry. It strikes me as pretty obvious that this is deliberate.
As a Mac user for almost all of this decade, I’ll just come right out and say this. Apple have been in a steady decline the …
There was a good post on copyblogger this week about the power of the creative writer. Apparently anyone who can combine their “killer” advertising instinct with lyrical precision is on to a winner. In short, copyblogger thinks that there’s still room for the poet in the altogether more day-to-day world of copywriting. The key to success is creativity.
Sure, I’m a freelancer. I can (and do) spend quite a bit of time writing at home, in the garden, in my shorts. But it’s tough out there at the minute. If the work’s not there, the work’s not there.
On quiet …
Confidence speaks volumes, doesn’t it? Despite being totally out of the blog’s target demographic, I’ve been reading …
I’m one of those writers who can’t abide clutter. Before I start work, I have to clean up everything around me. Even an untied shoelace distracts me.
There are plenty of exceptions to this of course. Sometimes I love nothing more than grabbing a cup of coffee and writing while I watch the world go by — the busier the cafe the better. I’ve even been known to take my laptop out to the woods and work sitting on an old felled tree. You never know when or where inspiration might strike. Changing your surroundings really can change your frame …
The story of a successful product launch…
I hate paying for razor blades. But beards are for students and hippies, and I’m neither — any more. So when my old Wilkinson Sword broke, I nearly cried. ‘Another expense,’ I muttered, cursing the fact I’d have to fork out for a new razor on top of the usual mountain of blades it takes to trim my thick-and-fast stubble every month.
Hurrying through the toiletries aisle, my eyes were drawn straight to the King of Shaves, a relative newcomer to the market. I picked one up because of the price. They’re …
I’ve been brushing up on my new media skills. I started out copywriting for blogs and websites a few years ago when SEO as we now understand it was but a glint in the web developer’s eye. Now in new media, it’s the undisputed king.
Yet times are changing. Already it’s being argued that Facebook is killing SEO. Essentially, ‘linkbait’ is what’s going to drive hits to your website in the future. It’s another one of those fancy buzzwords, but it’s nothing new. It’s just a modern form of a technique that has worked for generations — in fact, …
I took a poll of my friends. ‘How should I kick-start my blog?’ I asked them. ‘It’s got to be something current, something that’s relevant to my business , something that shows I’m on the ball…’
And they said — write about Twitter.
I said no. For starters, I don’t twitter. From what I’ve seen of it, I’ve no desire to be any part of it. Moreover, writers writing about twitter (from either side) have pretty much done the subject to death. Talking about Twitter (if you’ll forgive me sounding like a teenager) is just so 2008.
Then I read …
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