But I am not one to shy away from my mistakes.
I firmly believe that if we learn from our mistakes, we have gained, not lost.
Can you do the same?

Twitter #Fail

Several years ago I publicly pledged that I would never be using Twitter. I was in good company.

The UK’s leading political blogger, Guido Fawkes, was also convinced Twitter was a fad and, moreover, spoke to a closed audience of just 24% of the population — Twitter was too selective and by focusing on Twitter you were effectively concentrating on a platform that would never reach much of your desired audience. If (as was true at the time) 90% of Twitter users were overwhelmingly left-wing and urban, how would you reach Daily Mail Man, White Van Man, etc, in the suburbs?

In actual fact the platform became universally adopted and I’m more than happy to eat my own words and follow up with a slice of humble pie.

You can even follow me on Twitter.

Why I switched from Facebook to Twitter, and why it matters

Facebook was dead for me the day they forced everything on your profile to be linked to pages. List golfing in your list of activities? It links to the page.

I immediately deleted all data from my profile and now use it simply to keep in touch with people via private messaging. Twitter, on the other hand, has never claimed to be something it is not.

Twitter is a does-what-it-says-on-the-tin medium. You know it’s public. You know it’s always been public. You know it always will be public. The constantly shifting sands of privacy on Facebook became too much, so I left.

Yes, Facebook has millions and millions of users and is growing every day. But the way people use Facebook is different. People do not trust it. Facebook is the noisy “friend” you know is going to get drunk and spill your secrets one day. Facebook is the gossip you mind your tongue when you’re around.

Twitter is the office water cooler. You speak your mind, but you hold your tongue. It’s always been this way. Twitter won’t stab you in the back.

Until today, Google had the same level of trust. Will I stop using it? No. Will I use it in a different way? Yes. And that’s why it matters.

Today, Google are changing their privacy settings

Today, Google is making your life less private. Privacy changes mean Google is able to collect more data on you, store it for longer and, moreover, share it with more websites. The EU believes it violates privacy law.

It is without a doubt a bad thing for the consumer – a great thing for advertisers, in the short term at least.

I do not believe for one instant this is the beginning of the end for Google. All things being equal, they provide a fantastic service, for free, we all rely on.

But as Google stake their claim on more and more of our data, I find myself going to greater and greater lengths to hide it. I’ve ensured my web history is switched off. I clear my caches and clean cookies. I sign myself out of sites and I ensure I don’t get caught in web bubbles – a feedback loop where sites only show me search results they think I’ll agree with).

I am Spartacus

I’m just one man – and I don’t expect mass adoption of hyper-vigilant privacy settings. But all it would take would be a simple plugin to automate the process and I (and, based on the success of popular plugins such as Adblock, at least 10% of the web population) would install it.

If you are given a choice between a) losing your privacy and b) keeping it, you would naturally choose B.

When they change your privacy agreement, Google and Facebook and all the others are forcing you to choose “A” every time. Yes, it’s possible to roll back settings and circumvent changes, but most people simply don’t have the time or aren’t tech savvy enough to do this.

Any developer who comes up with an easy way to ensure total web privacy will gain mainstream traction very quickly. Adblock Plus, a service that’s never been advertised, has been downloaded by 20-30m users of Chrome and Firefox. So I’m not in a minority of one.

In short, don’t be evil, Google. If you try to collect more and more data from us, eventually you might end up collecting much less.

I won’t stop using the product. I’ll simply start using it differently. Join me.

Privacy matters.

*** Edit — a day after I wrote this blog post, Mozilla announced the launch of the free “collusion” add on which enables you to watch which companies are snooping on you as you browse. Great minds think alike… ***

• Conversion rate optimization
• User experience (UX) testing
• Metrics (stats like bounce rates, etc)
• Web design and development
• Content marketing
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Social media integration

In this follow-up blog post, I’m going to explain a little about these different disciplines, what I think a digital copywriter ought to know about them, and how a sound knowledge of these digital techniques can help a copywriter produce standout digital work.

Why do I need broad digital, as well as copywriting skills?

You’ll find a specialist skilled in each of  these areas at most dedicated digital agencies. These are the people you’ll be working with. These are the people whose designs and ideas you’ll be expected to produce copy for — the more you understand their needs, their goals, and their methods, the better your copy will be.

The essential skills you need to know
to be an effective digital copywriter:

Conversion rate optimization

As a digital copywriter, your goal is to produce content that drives conversions — a conversion being a sale, an enquiry, a sign-up or similar goal. As a digital copywriter, you will need to know what words, expressions, and tone of voice, are most effective in driving conversions.

The example I often use is how adding “now” to a call to action can increase response rates by up to 4%. But knowing your audience is important too. Does “get in touch” encourage more people to call than “contact us” as a call to action? There’s only one way to find out — a conversion rate optimization specialist will “A/B test” both versions to see which is more effective. Over time, you will come to understand which calls to action drive sales and which ones don’t, and choose accordingly.

Suggested further reading: The Conversion Scientist

User Experience (UX) testing

User experience testing helps make sure browsing a website is a pleasant, enjoyable and informative experience for the visitor. Overly complicated designs in Flash that look pretty, but take a long time to load and hide key information on obscure pages, or use non-standard navigation, don’t drive conversions. What use is your brilliant copy or your call to action if a customer never sees it, or can’t find the contact page?

Using my site as an example, I noticed people who found the site via a sub-page often missed the home page entirely as the only way to reach it was to click “Alastaire Allday” in the top left hand corner. I added a clear “home” link in the main sidebar of the site.

As a digital copywriter, your task will be to apply your knowledge of user experience to the copy you write. For example  your audience might not think it’s cute or appropriate if you use language like “let’s dance” instead of “click here to browse our online shop”. As a digital copywriter your task is to explain and direct the user — as well as working with your UX tester to make sure your copy is in the right place, at the right time, and gets read by the right people. Your UX tester will monitor traffic flows and advise accordingly.

Suggested reading: User Experience Booth

Metric analysis

As a digital copywriter, you should always be making full use of all available metric data to improve your copy and confirm the changes you’ve made are effective and having the desired effect.

If you’re hired to change copy on a site, come back to it a month later and see if any meaningful stats have changed — has the bounce rate for a landing page increased? This could be a problem. But if overall time spent on the page has increased at the same time, it could be that your copy has improved the page to such a point that people who aren’t interested in the product simply go away immediately, while those who are stay longer.

All metric analysis must correspond with conversion rates. If your conversion rate goal has increased, use metric analysis to discover why — and apply what you’ve learned to your next project. If conversions have decreased, use metric analysis to try to undertstand why.

Suggested reading: Google Analytics blog

Web design and development

Chances are you couldn’t build a complicated website all by yourself. But you’re expected to write for them all the time. Understanding how a web page gets designed, what makes a good design, and what “nuts and bolts” are needed to hold the site together will make you a better digital copywriter. Why? Because instead of simply filling out “lorem ipsum” text with no concern for how your text will eventually be displayed, you’ll be much more involved at all stages of the design.

If you’re involved at the design stage, you’ll get to choose what your headlines look like, and where they go. You may have an input on colour schemes, typefaces, how much text is displayed in-line and how much should be separated out into different boxes. You may decide a separate contact page is unnecessary, when a clear call to action (e.g. a phone number) can be placed on every page. Or you may be able to debate the merits of having a contact form at the bottom of every page with your designer, or tell a developer why he should use WordPress and not Drupal as a CMS.

Understanding simple design and development tasks won’t make you able to build websites — but by having a greater input and understanding how your words will relate to the design, the final result will be better.

Last year I blogged about why designers should get copywriters involved before their designs are completed, here.

Suggested further reading: Smashing Magazine

Content marketing

Content marketing is an essential skill for all digital copywriters. Sometimes, you’ll be expected to write informative, useful content — not just sales copy that immediately leads to conversions. Providing information, blogging and marketing indirectly by producing content that generates inbound links, is a vital skill all digital copywriters need to learn.

If you come from a journalistic background, you’ll already be excellent at providing informative information in blog articles, as well as doing research and creating headlines that get people interested in your articles. If you don’t, you need to start reading everything you can on how to produce good, journalistic content. You may be called upon to write anything at any time — on any subject. A strong knowledge of journalistic techniques will enable you to produce better content that informs, entertains, and drives traffic to your client’s site.

Suggested further reading: Copyblogger

Search engine optimization (SEO)

All digital copywriters need to be SEO experts. If you’re writing for the web, you can’t possibly write without a sound understanding of how your content will be processed by search engines, as well as read by people. You need to understand keyword density. You need to know Google ranks words in italics and bold, or in <h2> tags more highly than inline text. Organic search is a prime driver of traffic to most sites. Understanding how Google ranks pages is a vital skill for every digital copywriter.

A good digital copywriter will be able to write copy that’s SEO optimized, but also readable. A bad digital copywriter will either pay no attention to SEO, or try to cram keywords into copy in such a way as to make the content unreadable — reducing its value as “linkbait”. The more people who link to your site, the more important Google thinks your site is. So a good SEO strategy doesn’t just involve repeating keywords. It involves producing high quality, original content that generates inbound links.

Suggested further reading: SEOmoz

Social media

Social media, like organic search, is a prime driver of traffic to websites. Being able to write for different platforms is vital. Even if you don’t tweet your blog posts yourself, can you write headlines that easily fit into 140 characters? If not, anyone wanting to tweet out your headline might have to spend five minutes trying to shorten it — if that means they don’t tweet it, you lose readers.

What makes people want to share your content with their friends? When writing copy, make sure you bear your audience in mind. Is this the kind of article you’d share with your friends on Facebook? If it’s not, ask yourself why. Articles that become popular and get shared socially can quickly go viral and draw massive spikes of traffic to a site. While SEO makes sites stronger over time, social media can draw vast amounts of traffic to your site instantaneously — if you provide the right content.

Suggested further reading: Mashable

Joining the dots: Why a good digital copywriter is
jack of all trades, master of none (except writing, of course)

As a digital copywriter, you’ll understand the basics involved in all the skills above. You won’t be applying for a job as a web designer or a UX tester any time soon, but you will at least know what makes a site effective beyond simply producing the right words for it. By taking a wider view of your work, and how you fit in with the other people a digital agency will employ, you’ll become a better digital copywriter — helping to create better websites that are more user friendly and more likely to convert clicks into sales.

A good builder isn’t a plumber or an electrician. But he knows people will have to add pipes and wires once he’s finished building. Understanding the other digital skills that go into sitebuilding will help you produce copy that enables them to do a better job, too.

Twelve years ago, I never could have predicted I’d have a successful career using the same techniques I learned while writing teenage ramblings for my friends. Yet here I am.

I guess I’ve always been an early adopter. Yet it never ceases to amaze me that there are people out there who still don’t understand the value of digital.

The ad industry is changing, whether you like it or not.

I read this fascinating piece on the future of advertising after it was tweeted by Tom Albrighton and it helped to clarify a lot of things in my mind. I knew the ad industry was changing. What I didn’t know, until very recently, was that people like me were at the very forefront of it.

Part of me thinks “copywriter” is a misleading term for what I do. A “copywriter” at a traditional (read: old-fashioned) ad agency sits around with an art director and spends weeks coming up with “the big idea”, a few storyboards, and maybe a couple of hundred words. When I graduated from university, I wanted to be that sort of copywriter.

It’s only as I’ve grown up and improved my trade by actually working at it, I’ve learned that the days of “big idea” copywriters are numbered. Here’s why:

Digital media spend outstripped traditional spend in 2009. In other words – digital is king.

“Big ideas” don’t sell products any more. Websites do.

Sure, not every product is bought and sold online. But most company’s reputations are influenced,
if not outright determined, by what they do online.

What makes a “digital” copywriter? And why are digital copywriters the future?

When I say I’m a copywriter I mean I produce content as well as ideas. That can be anything from a few headlines to a site of ten thousand words. To help me produce content, I’ll have a broad understanding of:

• Conversion rate optimization
• User experience (UX) testing
• Metrics (stats like bounce rates, etc)
• Web design and development
• Content marketing
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Social media integration

Applying these skills to my work makes me a digital copywriter. These are the skills that make me competent to produce content for the web.

Being able to write and being able to think conceptually is important. But if you don’t understand the bigger picture of how your words fit into a web design, or understand how your users browse the web, your words are useless. Sure, you’re still a copywriter. But you’d better stick to writing catchy jingles for the wireless, because you’re living in the past.

Ad agencies don’t understand digital, either. They’re still in love with the “big idea”.

I still laugh when I see “respected” ad agencies with websites that use Flash. Sometimes, I have to spend several minutes looking for the information I need. Haven’t you ever heard of an information architect, guys? What about user experience testing?

I don’t care if it looks pretty. Does it work?

That’s digital in a nutshell. A good digital campaign delivers in seconds, not minutes. Sure, your site looks pretty (if you like waiting five minutes for it to load). But by then, I’ve closed your window and I’m already getting the information I need from the competition.

The days of the big idea have been replaced by the quick sale. You don’t need a copywriter and art director to spend weeks working on a “big idea” when you can find a digital copywriter who’ll tell you adding “now” to your call to action could increase your conversion rate by 4%. Now.

Digital copywriters use scientific conversion rate optimization strategies to provide instantly verifiable ROI. A “big idea” campaign can’t.

“Big ideas” are hit and miss – digital is scientific.

It’s hit and miss whether a “big idea” sticks. And there’s no guarantee your idea is driving sales. Sure, we all remember the Cadbury’s Gorilla adverts — probably the most famous “big idea” ad produced by the UK in the last 10 years. But I can confidently say it never made me buy a single extra bar of Dairy Milk.

In fact, short term sales of Cadbury’s only rose by 5%, a figure that most commentators (scroll down) found disappointing — and given the high cost of saturation TV placements, hardly a great (or even long term) ROI.

But what about brand identity?

Sure, you say. 5% is average. But the Gorilla ad didn’t just increase sales. It increased brand awareness and brand loyalty. Ok, maybe. Prove it. You can’t. Digital agencies provide real metrics — hard stats that show you whether your campaigns are working.

Besides, for every successful “big idea” there are hundreds of failures. Did you know that the Cadbury’s Gorilla was only part of a much wider campaign? Can you remember any of the other ads that were part of that campaign? Didn’t think so.

Most “big ideas” fail. Agencies only carry on because they, and their clients, are addicted to spending vast sums in the hope of hitting the jackpot.

I hate to break it to you guys, but 99% of your ideas suck.

The digital way to build brand loyalty is cheaper and more effective.

I recommend a really simple solution to clients looking to build a brand identity:

1. Use your blog.

Don’t just write press releases. Engage with your customers and their lifestyles. If you’re a baker, give away some recipes for cookies. If you’re a vintage fashion store, blog about the latest trends — not just the things you sell. Be an active participant in the lifestyles of your customers.

2. Use social media.

Whether you prefer Facebook, Twitter, or, like me, Tumblr (also preferred by fashion brands), it’s a great way of getting out there and meeting your customers and talking to them one-on-one. A girl I know wears nothing but American Apparel. Not because she was swayed by their advertising, but because she started following them on Twitter after they started tweeting out discount codes.

3. Engage with the community (and pay if you have to)

I learned about Drakes of London because a fashion blog I read, A Suitable Wardrobe, is sponsored by them. Not only do they run banner ads, the author also writes about how much he loves them in his blog. I still trust the author, because his blog has proven time and time again he’s a man of taste and refinement. Paid blog posts are a much better way of advertising than a television or a banner ad — because it’s an endorsement from someone your customer trusts.

Plus, it’s a heck of a lot cheaper and more permanent than a television ad. Your TV ad is gone in 30 seconds and forgotten in weeks. A blog post will remind customers of your company for years to come.

Why digital agencies are the future:

Digital agencies are the future because they’re small and agile and are able to offer proven ROI using scientific methods to increase conversion rates, often at a fraction of the cost of hit-and-miss “big idea” agencies still living in the 90s.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Big agencies are buying their way into digital.

Terrified of being left behind, a lot of bigger old-school agencies are acquiring smaller digital agencies with ready-made in house teams. Leo Burnett UK recently acquiring successful digital agency Holler is a great example. not least because Leo Burnett only allows you to read the blog entry about their acquisition in… PDF or JPG format. Nice acquisition, guys. Holler – your first task will be to teach the peeps at Leo Burnett how to use WordPress.

Digital. It’s the future, and it’s already here.

I’m 100% convinced the work I do is cutting edge. As a digital copywriter, my skills are increasingly in demand — because I can offer proven results at lower costs.

But there’s a certain type of copywiter who spits on the pavement and crosses the road when I tell him what I do because I’m about results, metrics, and conversion rates, not “big ideas”.

I don’t sit in an egg-like chair for several weeks thinking up the next Cadbury’s Gorilla ad. I don’t give my clients big ideas. I give them fast, effective, proven ways to reduce their costs and make more money.

Next time you’re in the market for an agency, or a copywriter, don’t ask them how creative their portfolio is. Ask them if their methods work. Creativity is important — but it has to be backed up by a knowledge of what people want.

And if you’re a traditional agency currently looking to hire a digital strategist, content marketer and copywriter who understands where the industry is heading, well, make me an offer. A starting salary of 50k and a girlfriend who looks like January Jones would be nice, but not a deal-breaker.

Who are your favourite digital agencies? I think Pirata London, Work Club and Brilliant are nice.

Comments welcome.

I came into the office for a Sunday session, thinking today would be a good day to go over my metrics and make a few tweaks to my site.

I was surprised to find five visits from tumblr. As a tumblrite myself, I wondered who’d blogged about me. What I discovered wasn’t a friendly link, it was duplicate content.

Duplicate content designed specifically to harm my page rank and, therefore, my business.

Duplicate content: how the scam works

You can set up a blog on wordpress, blogger, tumblr etc these days in three or four clicks. In days, if not hours, Google will index your content and check it against what’s already out there. If it’s duplicate content from somewhere else, it’ll go on both of your permanent records. Of course, Google isn’t stupid — it knows who the original author was and takes steps to counteract the scam. But so-called black hat SEO tactics are short term in nature — for all I know this duplicate content might have taken me off the front page for my chosen keywords for a couple of weeks, or even a month, before being adjusted.

It’s a variation on an old scam. Once upon a time, both parties had to hang up the phone before the line would become free again. So rival taxi firms would call each other’s numbers, leave the phone off the hook, and prevent anyone else from calling them — ruining their business for the night.

In this case the actual effect on my site has been fairly minimal. But it’s been a big wake up call. Until today, I never really concerned myself with questions like “what if other people are using black hat SEO techniques to damage my page ranking?”

But I need to be thinking about this more and more. After all, if I drop off the front page for a couple of weeks, my business is dead in the water. My rent doesn’t get paid. I don’t eat.

I’m mostly angry because it must have been a competitor – another copywriter. Most of us in this business are pretty honest guys. When one person stoops to this level, it harms all of our reputations in the eyes of our clients.

Until today, I never thought I was important enough for this sort of thing to happen to me. But content theft is a very serious business and it could be harming your site.

I’ll be on high alert from now on. You should be too.

How to protect your site from duplicate copies

1. Use a duplicate checker like copyscape.com to see if your content is being stolen
2. Use Google Analytics to see if any odd sites are linking to you — I found my tumblr doppleganger because they’d copied the site, but kept the links — so people were finding my real site via their duplicate content.
3. Report any duplicate copy to Google, and to anyone capable of taking the copy down, right away. You’ve no time to lose.
4. If in doubt, change your copy. Minor changes to a few sentences here and there will mean Google will no longer see the pages as identical. This can be a lot faster than waiting to have the duplicate copy taken down.

A good, and comprehensive list of things you can do to protect your content, including technical countermeasures such altering your HTML, robots.txt and using PHP can be found at wiscocomputing.com

Update: It was a graphic designer, not a copywriter, who had copied the site. They have since taken it down and offered a sincere apology. Personally, I’m just glad it wasn’t a fellow copywriter. There are one or two out there who use black hat tactics – fortunately most of us are an honest bunch.

A year ago I suggested that snooker had an image problem and that bringing back a ‘game show’ format like Big Break could rejuvenate interest in the sport and allow the players to show off their personalities. The launch of Power Snooker at London’s O2 Arena seems to have taken a similar direction, taking its cue from 20/20 cricket making games faster but also making things noisier, more interactive and — almost inevitably — adding a lot more alcohol to the mix. In fact, the only people who weren’t drunk appeared to be the players themselves.

Does it work? Purists hate it. Most people think there’s a place for it — alongside traditional snooker — as the format adds welcome variety into the mix. It’s loud, it’s boisterous, it’s a bit silly — but most importantly, it’s different.

Finding a gap in the market – the secret to a successful product launch.

It can be very hard to launch a product when there’s already a company servicing the same demands. Recently I’ve been asked to give advice on several launches, including sites that do an incredibly similar job to the successful bandcamp and mailchimp services. But the fact is, when you have a company that’s producing a product that most people are happy with, you have to offer them something more — not just a re-hashing of a competitor’s ideas.

The growth of Apple’s OS X in the face of Microsoft’s almost total dominance has been because the company has promised extra, in the form of software that’s more stable and user friendly. People use it, they love it, they tell their friends, the company grows. If OS X was just “Apple Windows,” people wouldn’t buy it. The OS offers a qualitative benefit over the more established market leader.

Apple’s slogan is “think different” for a reason.

It’s not enough to see a great idea and say  “me too!”

I could list half a dozen sites that do pretty much the same thing as youtube, but I can’t really list anything they do better. Sure, there are other sites, and they each do different things (wider selection of movies, higher definition, bigger file size uploads, etc) but if a start up company came to me today with a team of four people and maybe $50,000 in capital saying “we’ve got a site that we think’s going to make us the new youtube,” I’d have to be brutally honest with them. They’d have to have something really revolutionary to make headway in such established waters. Minor interface tweaks, slightly better resolution… slight improvements on an existing idea just won’t cut it.

Three Simple Words: U.S.P.

A good copywriter can always find a unique selling point — even if it’s something as small as being cheaper, better quality or more local than your competitor. But the bigger the USP, the more likely it is that you’ll succeed. Power Snooker is a great example of that, because they’ve not tried to make minor changes to the format — they’ve literally turned it on its head, creating a product that’s entirely new and different to existing offerings. To put it in context, Power Snooker is the equivalent of giving everyone at Wimbledon free extra-strength lager and replacing the tennis ball with a grenade. Not to everyone’s taste but boy, it’s going to get noticed.

So what can new start ups and entrepreneurs learn from Power Snooker?

You have to do things differently. You have to make sure you get that idea across to your customers. “Hi, we’re here, we’re new, we’re different, we’re better.”

Minor improvements and changes on an existing idea will attract minimal attention, especially when your more established competitors have a much bigger marketing budget.

There’s already a mailchimp.com, so don’t try to be mailbaboon.com. Offer something new.

Marketing can only do so much if your product stinks. Customers will write bad reviews, eventually, the word will get out. And if your product’s just “okay” don’t expect it to make any inroads against your more established competitors, unless you offer significant discounts on price.

Spend as much time and money as you can improving and perfecting your product before you bring it to market. Make sure it’s different and unique. Then hire the best marketing team you can to make sure your customers think the same way…

…but make sure the product’s as good as it can be first.

It turns out that lots of people were searching for parrot cages online, but nobody was buying ads with related keywords. In other words, there was a gap in the market. By using PPC advertising the firm were immediately able to test the water — no waiting six months to get somewhere in organic search. They were able to harness that demand with a simple Shopify site (a simple CMS for eCommerce) and start turning a profit with minimal costs. The business expanded — and there you have it. Suddenly, you’re in the parrot cage game.

Is PPC advertising really worth it?

The short answer? Yes, if you know what you’re doing. The digital marketing agency above used PPC to immediately generate clicks. That’s something that takes a long while in organic search. Organic search now accounts for double the amount of traffic my site receives that it did last year — but that’s averaging 1-2 blog posts a week and a heavy linkbait strategy to give the site a little extra juice. So PPC is definitely worth looking into if you’re just starting out, especially if you keep a regularly updated site that people will start to link to.

In the longer term, PPC is best used to maximise conversions, not clicks. I spend almost £100 a month on a single keyword that generates just 60-70 clicks. But those people spend an average of 11 minutes on my site compared to the global average of just 3. In other words, they’re seriously interested in what I’ve got to offer. Just one of those people hiring my services for half a day pays for the ad campaign. In other words, it’s worth it.

What makes a good PPC keyword?

Firstly, be local. While it’s possible to work anywhere if you’re selling a service like mine, clients who want a local service will do a local search. It’s a great way of separating the wheat from the chaff. 90% of people who search for “copywriter” online might be looking for someone in the US. “Copywriter UK” is more specific. “Copywriter Shoreditch” might be too specific. I don’t know — that’s for you to decide. That’s where research comes in.

Open up your dashboard and take a look at Google Analytics. What sort of organic searches are generating the most interest in your site? It’s not about volume, it’s about time spent on the site and number of pages viewed. Those are your targets. Combine this with Google’s webmaster tools to see where you’re charting for those search terms. If you’re not on the front page, it’s worth paying for an Adwords campaign.  It’s also worth hiring a copywriter who can craft one or two sentences to generate clicks. The shorter the amount of space, the harder it is to find the right words. A professional can help.

By combining targeted PPC advertising with your organic search results, it’s possible to build a business out of nothing, whether you’re a copywriter or a digital marketing agency looking to branch out into parrot cages. The point is that a professional will always be able to give you good advice about your digital media strategy.

It’s not counter-intuitive to pay for clicks. In fact, it could end up costing you much less and being a much more reliable source of income than organic SEO optimization. PPC can guarantee you a turn on the front page of Google. For all their bravado, most SEO experts can’t.

What does it do?

In short, Scribe is an SEO analysis tool that provides a full report on a WordPress post or page once you’ve written it. So rather than suggesting that you build a page around a set of keywords, Scribe analyses you writing and tells you how search engines will see it — indexing keywords based on position and frequency, rather than relying on you inputting keywords for it to analyse.

This review gets a 95% score for SEO purposes!

Scribe’s unique approach might take a few passes to get your head round. I analysed the same page seven times making minor tweaks so I could see how it worked. And admittedly, some of it still doesn’t make sense to me. When looking at my own marketing, I changed the page so that “freelance copywriter” appeared as a keyword more often than any other phrase. Yet it still insisted words like “creative” and “London” were more important. Maybe I haven’t got the hang of it yet, but therein lies the biggest problem. It’s a subscription service and you only get so many reports per month.

The flaw: A limited subscription model

Yes, it’s relatively cheap — $27 will buy you 30 reports a month, but $97 will buy you 300. At a dollar a report, it’s pretty steep. But if you’re a professional buying in bulk, 30 cents seems like a good deal considering the quality and depth of the analysis Scribe provides you — at first. But how much value will does Scribe really give you?

I used up most of my ten free tries making very, very minor tweaks to my copy. Infuriatingly, Scribe charges per report, not per page — so even though I was perhaps only changing a word at a time, it still counted as another report. So it’s probably better to get value for money by writing two or three very different versions of your post, and comparing those. But copywriting can often be a tweak-by-tweak process, especially when the client gets involved. Personally, I’d be a lot happier seeing an unlimited reporting option — or are the folks behind Scribe really trying to tell me that it costs them nearly 30 cents every time I request a report? I’m willing to bet that the marginal cost of each additional report is next to nothing.

OK, so I’d have to write one blogpost a day and analyse each one ten times to run out of pre-paid reports, but I can imagine quite a few pro bloggers doing just that, if they’re ‘tweakers’ like me.

I guess this is a very back-handed endorsement of Scribe.

The Scribe SEO plugin is easy to use, valuable, and I can see myself using it, a lot. There’s really nothing else like it on the market at the moment, and a web version and MS Word version are on their way. But the pay model doesn’t sit well with a tweak-by-tweak approach to writing. Which is, obviously, the best way to learn.

I think Pat O’Brien’s review of Scribe says it best:

“I think the intro price [$27 for 300 reports] was great, but the full price may be a bit much for some. But that’s true about a lot of products.”

I’ve got some very keyword heavy blogposts to write this month for some of my clients, blogposts that are purely for SEO optimization purposes. I still say that original content and linkbuilding should usually come first when blogging, with on-page SEO coming a distant second. SEO copy frequently looks lifeless and clumsy. Scribe is better, because it analyses your copy after it’s written. But it’s still more important to write copy that actual people, not robots, will read.

I’ll be using Scribe to double-check my posts this month. But as a pro blogger, I’m scoring 95% first time — so how much use is this software going to be to me in the long term?

Scribe wins bonus points for

• being very user friendly and easy to set up
• showing you how a search engine is likely to see your page
• providing reports in plain English, not tech-speak
  
• offering helpful suggestions to improve your copy, title and meta tags

but

• it may be hard for beginners to understand why certain changes improve or worsen SEO
• …without requesting a lot of reports with only minor changes
• …which cost at least thirty cents a time.
• …and pro users already skilled at SEO best practices might not learn anything new.

Is it a game changer? Probably not.
Is it good for intermediate users? Yes.
Is it worth the price? That’s for you to decide.

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 happened for me recently is the milestone that says more money is spent on online advertising than is spent on TV advertising. It’s linked to what I’ve been saying before — the web is fast becoming dominated by social media and viral video, and these are the two areas every company and advertiser needs to be looking at in terms of securing their online presence.

But this is something you should already know. Unless you’re living in a cave, of course.

Most of my work these days is for tech clients, is writing on the web. Even my offline product launches, the work I do for my “real world” clients in the Home Counties, involves websites and web-work.

The internet has changed everything, and social media and streaming video have changed it again. I really think we’re heading towards a day when other forms of media will be obsolescent. Television — destroyed by Youtube, Megavideo, BitTorrent. Radio obliterated by Spotify. Newspapers — available online through RSS feeds, Kindle readers and syndicated web portals.

It’s a brave new world. What I want to know is, why aren’t more digital design agencies modernizing to support it?

Most web agencies seem to think it’s enough to build websites,
or promote them, or provide content.

They don’t seem to understand the importance of what they’re doing –
targeting potential customers, selling them something…
even if it’s just an idea.

Just as the web is slowly making traditional forms of media obsolete, so too I think the big advertising agencies will make smaller design agencies obsolete. They’ll be squeezed out, at the very least — big clients will want big packages, and total solutions, targeted at their customers. They won’t just want beautiful websites.

I’m not trying to be a web guru here, sometimes I get it wrong. I remember being blown away by the launch of Facebook Lite (because it meant no more mafia wars) but going back to full Facebook 24 hours later when I found I couldn’t put rich content into my links. Having said that, I reckon I still know a good product when I see one. I’m still using my King of Shaves razor, and Frassy seems to go from strength to strength.

But I do think even a blind man can see the changes on the horizon, the changes that increased spending on advertising on the web is bringing — not just to the web, but also to design agencies, and to branding consultants such as myself.

These are exciting times. I think there’s a lot of money to be made out there — if you’re good at what you do…

I blogged the General Election, back in 2005. Blogging was different then. We were mostly ignored. My blog was just an irreverant look at the campaigns, you wouldn’t have come to it for news.

Yes, we all know blogs are going to be important this time around. We’ve got Guido, Iain Dale, Conservative Home, and even a few offerings from Labour — which are nowhere near as widely read, which I thinks says a lot.

But in the hoo-hah about blogging, it’s easy to forget that the internet is much more than just the political blogosphere.

It’s not just blogs that have gone mainstream in the last five years. It’s viral video.

Dan Hannan’s searing attack on Gordon Brown went viral. Two and a half million views of his “devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government” speech. The blogs have given us smeargate, the ousting of Damien McBride and Derek Draper by Guido Fawkes. That’s a much more powerful story. But when it comes to general elections, campaigns get quick and dirty. Viral video will be the blitzkrieg tactic of choice for both sides.

Not all the videos will be sanctioned.
Many will be sanctioned. Secretly.

All the main players know the power of a good attack video — both political parties, and their supporters. Five years ago, to reach voters visually, you were limited to a 5 minute party political broadcast, a few a month, at set times, with strict limits on what you could say.

What’s interesting is that, today, the electoral commission has come out and said that in this battleground, there will be no rules. None. At all. They cannot police viral video.

Expect things to get down and dirty, very quick.

A couple of examples —
Guido uses his blog to simply demonstrate Gordon Brown caught in a lie. He doesn’t even need to pass comment.
The unofficial ConservativeHome produces a blunt attack video to highlight Gordon Brown’s broken promises.

I for one would love to know which agencies are handling the digital accounts of the main parties, and their supporters. Viral videos are cheap to make, incredibly powerful, and totally without boundaries. The next election campaign will be like none we’ve ever seen before. Whoever makes the most memorable attack video will probably make the same name for themselves that Saatchi & Saatchi made in 1979 with the slogan ‘Labour isn’t working‘ — probably the most memorable British political campaign of all time.

This is an exciting time for advertisers willing to get their hands dirty in politics. Reputations will be won and lost. The direction of British politics decided for maybe a decade, or more.

The Internet: still the World’s Wild West.

I’m a busy man. Just give me the information.

Facebook lite promises to roll back the clock four years and give us the slim, streamlined social networking tool that made MySpace look ugly, primitive and unintuitive. I’ve had a ‘lite’ profile for a while now. No pictures. No surplus user information for third party apps to harvest. No quotes of the day, no videos, just my contact details, alongside the ability to message me and see what I’m up to.

My facebook is just my LinkedIn at play. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

It isn’t perfect yet. It’s still in beta. The text is too big, and I’d like it to be more customizable — there’s some information on the big facebook I might still want to access.

But what interests me is seeing just how many people will switch to Facebook lite once it’s done. I think takeup may well be over 50% — if they can get the interface and integration right. There’s a lot of us who carry on using services like Facebook on sufferance, because it’s there, because it’s the only way of keeping in touch with our friends. We’re the sort of people who grit our teeth and look away in despair, as if a silent fart has drifted across the room, every time you mention Mafia Wars.

We’re the silent majority.

The implications for social media, even if takeup only hits, say, 20%, are obvious — and huge. It means a massive number of users are rejecting the bloatware that’s been foisted on them the past few years. It also means that any links they do share, anything that does go on their profile, will be much more valuable, from a social networking perspective.

Make no mistakes. Facebook Lite isn’t a pioneering project to reduce bandwidth in third world countries, whatever they may say. It’s a system that proves what many of us have been saying all along — when it comes to social media, less is more. Sure, some people twitter every hour. They’re probably the same people who post a dozen quizzes to their Facebook wall every day. But the person who posts just one thing a day, maybe even just one link a week, or even a month — they’re being selective. That makes the value of that post is far greater.

Of course, the new Facebook Lite interface is a lot more like twitter — it does after all focus on status updates. But it remains to be seen if people will use it like twitter. After all, isn’t there already a service called twitter for people who want it?

Anyone who uses social media as a marketing tool should be taking notes.

I’m actually in awe of Facebook for doing this. They’ve differentiated their product for users like me, who are busy and just need the basic facts, from the people who use it for “fun”. My only question is, why didn’t they do it sooner?

Are they worried about the competition? With Twitter on one side and LinkedIn on the other, the answer is almost certainly yes. Facebook lite appeals to users of both.

It’s a stroke of genius.

“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 last few years. My old iBook G4 was built like a tank. The two year old MacBook I’m writing this on is full of holes. Literally. The flimsy casing is cracked, the dual core processor whines like a mosquito buzzing about your head, and the fans sometimes growl like they’re about to give in.

Apple have come a long way since their 1984 advert pitching them as the plucky underdog taking on the bland masses.

Unfortunately news like today’s is just the latest in a long line of disappointments from Apple. If people want to use a product that isn’t the iPhone with iTunes, let them. It’s better to lose a few sales to another product than lose a lot of sales when your brand’s goodwill evaporates.

Apple are no longer the plucky underdog. They’re just another faceless corporation grubbing for your money. They’ve become the epitome of style over substance, of branding a lifestyle that’s shiny and white but hollow inside. The iPhone is the apogee of this. It’s nowhere near as useful as a Blackberry. Yet still people buy it in droves, despite the fact that until the latest version, the iPhone didn’t even have a cut-and-paste function!

How is this possible? I saw an advert on the TV exclaiming the wonders of the new “cut and paste” iPhone and I couldn’t believe the bare-faced-cheek, marketing something so simple as an innovation. Heck, my seven year old Palm Treo could cut and paste. And the battery lasted longer than a few hours, too.

I happen to like OS X. I’d pick it any day over Windows Vista. This, for me, is the only reason I’m still buying Apple. But I’m doing it grudgingly. Yes, you have my money. But you no longer have my goodwill. The second a better product comes along, say, the new Google Operating System or even Windows 7, if it turns out to be any good, I’m gone.

Right now Apple strikes me as a lesson in how to have everything and throw it all away. Short term profit at the sacrifice of the values that put them where they are in the first place.

Think different? Right now, Apple’s managers aren’t thinking at all.

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 of mind.

But one thing I find very hard to deal with is a cluttered desktop. No, I’m not talking about the usual six or seven cups of writer-fuel (that’s coffee, folks, not whisky) that pile up around my desk over any given day. I mean my Windows desktop.

I’m actually a Mac user — I have been for years. But when they brought out dual-booting, I started using a clean install of Windows with Word on it and nothing else because it reduced clutter. Moreover it kept the temptation of my music and videos at bay. But Word itself is still pretty cluttered.

In the past when I’ve felt the need for simplicity I’ve booted up my old Sharp FW word-processor — no internet, no graphics, no music, no colour. Just a monochrome screen and a keyboard. And it’s worked.

But it’s hardly convenient. The thing’s an unmoveable brick. This weekend I discovered Q10. And suddenly everything changed.

Q10 is a basic word processing interface for Windows that mimics an old-style word processor, only with a few modern twists. It’s fully customisable — you can change the font size, the colour of the background, the colour of the text and so on…

But the point is, it’s totally minimalist. It is a fullscreen interface for you and your words. No windows, no start bar, no pesky Microsoft Messenger bugging you every ten seconds. Back to basics.

I’ll not ramble on when a screenshot tells you everything you need to know:

As you can see I wrote this blog post using Q10. But since it’s the weekend I’ve mostly been using it to batter out a bit of fiction and I absolutely love it. Everything flows brilliantly. I feel more in touch with my words than I have in years.

As a writer, it’s absolutely vital that nothing gets in the way of my words. No mess, no distractions. Q10 has doubled my productivity overnight.

If you’re a writer — casual or professional — and you’re suffering from desktop overload, you should check this program out. Mac users needn’t fret, either. There’s a similar program called Write Room here.

A hearty thanks to Q10. It might sound like hyperbole, but this incredibly simple program really has changed my life. But don’t take my word for it. Try it out for yourself.