I was recently lucky enough to have a conversation with an entrepreneur who runs a hotel booking website. I talked to him about my own personal experience booking hotels in central London (hey, you do it a lot when you’re single) and I told him that I wanted the best possible quality at the lowest possible price. That’s the type of consumer I am. So it’ll come to you as no surprise that I googled “cheap 5 star hotels”. But why? Have you ever seen a single 5* hotel that advertises the fact that it’s cheap?
The fact is, what…
Every client is different. Fact. Some clients want you to make their business look young and dynamic, attracting investors. Other clients want you to make their latest product offering sound irresistible — to the right people, of course. But what all clients have in common is that they’re looking for you to improve on reality in some way — to take a story and tell it better. That’s the name of the game.
When you’re dealing with SMEs and start-ups, companies that don’t have much of an image yet, companies with products you probably haven’t heard of, the temptation is…
The cat’s out of the bag. For a couple of years now, I’ve been writing a lot about social media. Not here, (although I do blog about social media fairly regularly), but in my day job as a copywriter. I mostly produce content for the web and the web right now is all about… you’ve got it, social media. The problem is, as I’ve expressed before, social media is the Emperor’s New Clothes. It’s how SEO was a few years ago — a lot of people portraying themselves as experts, with very few people knowing what they’re actually…
So, it’s finally happened. Now, there’s specialist companies claiming to be capable of giving you an ‘online detox’, cleansing your online reputation — getting rid of those nasty photos of you, drunk, on Facebook, cleaning up the vindictive messages left on some blog by your ex. More importantly, these companies claim to offer the ability to manage the reputation of your brand or business, “burying the damaging stuff and promoting the good.”
So how does it work?
Well, it’s a little like reverse SEO. Where a page or a comment can’t be deleted, it can be buried.…
A brief update today, because I’m very busy with work. But I saw this in the supermarket and felt I had to share it with you all.
Now, I’m sure if you look closely you’ll notice, like me, that this headline is actually about the packaging this product comes in. But no food product, not even one for cats, should ever advertise itself as containing less cardboard than before. It’s just too easy to make the wrong connection.
I watched the Mad Men season premiere last night and was blown away. As I’d predicted, Don completely lost his cool…
Every good copywriter knows that simplicity is the secret to success. Getting the message across quickly and effectively is what copywriting is all about. I’ve had clients come to me with briefs for 4,000 word sales brochures. That’s longer than some undergraduate dissertations at university. “Who’s going to read 4,000 words,” I ask? The client looks dumbstruck. He’s even more amazed when I come up with a 100 word sales pitch that tells the customer everything they’ll ever need to know.
Simple Sales Copy
A brief description, followed by a call to action. That’s as much as most sales copy…
As a freelance copywriter, I’m frequently brought in on projects that are already half way through. Sometimes, I’m brought in by a design agency. Other times, I’m brought in by a company who’s already got their design and now they’re looking for someone to fill it. While I’m happy to work on these projects, in fact, being brought in as a last-minute troubleshooter is where I make my real money — it’s not an ideal situation. For you, or for me. Here’s why:
Content is King
You may have heard the expression before. In fact, if you’re a writer or…
No, I’m not going to make you take another stupid quiz.I’m about to let you in on a little secret. This is the most important question I ask my clients when I take on new work. I ask:
“If your website / company / brand was a person,
what sort of person would they be?”
Copywriters thrive on detail. Often, we’re given a brief for a site, design or company that lacks character. The client has come to us because they want our copy to provide that character. But without direction, all we…
It’s the Don Draper effect. If you’ve seen Mad Men, you’ll know what I’m talking about. If you work in this business, you know you’ve had to adapt. A couple of years ago, clients expected you to show up in jeans and t-shirt and a beard and they expected to tell you what to do. Now they expect you to show up clean-shaven, suited and booted, and ready to tell them how to run their business.
Mad Men is a pretty extraordinary show, not just because of the quality of the…
I briefly touched on Facebook privacy issues in my last post, mentioning that I’d stripped all information out of my profile in response to my growing concerns about Facebook’s constant push to share more information publicly.
There are a lot of so-called “social media experts” out there. The truth is there is no such thing. The majority of “social media experts” are simply people with regularly updated twitter feeds, a lot of friends on facebook they don’t really know, constantly bombarding you with requests to “like” their public page, which if you…
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