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…
This is a blog entry about changes to my pricing structure. If you’re looking for details about my current daily rate, or would like me to quote on a project, take a look at my rates page here and then get in touch.
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It’s hard work being a freelance copywriter. In fact, it’s just hard work working for yourself. Not only are you unable to blame the boss when you’ve had a bad day, half the time, you’re expected to work for free. Here’s why.
Clients are…
Straplines, headlines, taglines, slogans. Call them what you will, they’re what make the advertising world go round. It’s rare to find a good headline writer. That’s because headlines are hard to write. Anyone can fill a page with four hundred words, but how many people can catch an audience’s attention and sum up the product they’re selling in four or so words?
It’s more important to sound natural than to be clever.
F Scott Fitzgerald famously started out in advertising and came up with the slogan “we keep you clean in Muscatine” for an Iowa based laundry service. While he…
I can wire a plug. So somehow this makes me think I can re-wire my house. Several electric shocks later, I’m reaching for my yellow pages. I’m not a mechanic, so when my car breaks down, I call the auto club. When I get sick, I call a doctor. The point? These are all professionals plying their trade.
But when it comes to writing, everyone’s a DIY merchant. Everyone thinks, well, I speak English, so I can write well. That’s why it’s hard for a copywriter to make it in this modern climate. People will happily shell out for web…
Happy holidays everyone. It’s been a great year.
Photo by my friend Spencer (here), check out the best and worst agency Xmas cards here (and the very best here) and remember: Rage at no.1 this year proved one thing: it’s been a really great year for viral advertising (and, err, Sony Records).
See you all in the New Year!
So, after nearly six months, over 16,000 unique visitors and a fair few new clients, I decided to change the look of the site a little. Again, my friend Spencer at youlove.us, who designed the site, was responsible for the new shoot.
There were a couple of reasons for the change. Mostly, if I’m honest with you, it’s because I’ve noticed that while clients seem to prefer the image of the chain-smoking, three-day-stubble sporting writer on the page, when you show up at a 9am meeting looking like you’ve been on a week long bender and reach for…
So Don Draper is AskMen.com’s man of the year, ahead of Barack Obama, and the founders of Facebook and Twitter.
Good. He’s a hero. An archetypal, flawed, don’t-make-’em-like-that-any-more hero. He also happens to work in advertising.
He’s also a fictional character. But what can us real-life ad men learn from Don?
1. Stay ahead of the game
I just watched the finale of Season 3 online. I live in the UK. I’d have to wait months to see this on TV. So I didn’t.The world has moved online. Move with it, or be left behind — just like…
I’ve been in and out of London a lot lately, sometimes for work, sometimes seeing friends. And it strikes me how hard it is to be creative there, with so many distractions. I’ve been hard at work lately, sometimes at the weekend, sometimes even at night. The dangers of being a freelancer are that you set your own hours.
It’s hard setting time aside to relax, especially when you’re an “always on” kind of guy like me. I used to have a pool table (technically, a friend’s pool table) and that helped me to focus a lot. A fifteen minute…
I haven’t blogged for a while. When I don’t blog for a while, it usually means one of two things — I’ve been to busy with paid work, or I’ve nothing useful to say. There’s nothing worse than mindless posts.
In actual fact, it’s been a mixture of both this time. I’ve been doing a lot of copywriting, but I’ve not felt as if I have a lot to add in terms of sharing my thoughts with the world. There’s my random musings on Tumblr, of course… but I’ll spare you those here.
The most interesting thing that’s…
No, not another post about why I don’t twitter. Although I would like to go over some of the things I said in my previous post. I write reasonably lengthy blogposts because providing keyword-rich, detailed, informative posts is the cornerstone of my SEO strategy. But it is good, from time to time, to keep it simple.
This post, linked to by Guido Fawkes simply as “Twitter Tsar Talks Tosh” on PR-media-blog.co.uk, sums up a lot about what’s right and wrong with Twitter. Skip to the end:
Labour is experimenting with different social media activities, including a way of
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