I thought this week I’d weigh in with some professional advice for my rivals. I’ve been doing a lot of editing work, so I thought I’d boil it down to a few quick pointers. There’s a lot of bad copy out there. Hopefully, after you’ve read this, there’ll be a little less.
Keep it simple
It’s not Shakespeare. Nobody wants Shakespeare, either. He’s old and nobody understands him. But I guess if you’re writing copy for a living rather than plays about kings and murder, you’ve figured that out already.
But what you might not have worked out…
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 impossible…
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…
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…
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…