Archive for February, 2008
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A marketing director from a large creative agency once told me, ‘Always concentrate on producing great work, and never let the client interfere with the creative process. Clients come to you for guidance on each project, so you should be prescriptive about the work you give them. The day you start to care about their input - is the day you should get out of the business’. Astonishing isn’t it, and I completely disagree.
The agency in question, (which will forever remain nameless), had won sack loads of awards for its creativity. No doubt everyone who worked there was very smug and felt extremely pleased with themselves – but what did their clients really think about the service they received? Were they happy with it? Was the effectiveness of client campaigns ever measured or followed up on? I wonder. Read the rest of this entry »
Copywriting is an excellent way to make some extra income, and it can be very lucrative if you become proficient at it. One way to put your skills to work is to learn how to write keyword articles or keyword-optimized articles to publish on the Internet. It’s also a useful skill to use in promoting your own websites.
When writing keyword articles, the most important thing to keep in mind is that the articles must be interesting to the target reader. They must also be filled with relevant content that is valuable to readers, or they will quickly click away and go somewhere else for their information. As a starting point, therefore, you should always keep your audience top of mind when writing keyword articles – and this is true of all copywriting. Do your research on the chosen subject matter before you start to write, and gear your words to what readers want. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the great misconceptions about freelance copywriting is that you can write when you want to. ‘What a great job you’ve got’, people say, ‘you can work when and where you like and choose your own hours’. This sounds fine in principle, if it weren’t for that dreaded word that rules the lives of all freelance copywriters – ‘deadlines’. I haven’t missed a deadline in ten years of commercial writing, but you need to stay on top of things to do this.
As a first rule of thumb, if you can’t organise yourself to meet your client’s deadline, then you will struggle to make a name for yourself as a copywriter. As with other service-based careers, you’re only as good as your last piece of work – and busy, stressed out clients won’t wait around for you to get a handle on how to manage your time. With that in mind, here are five tips to help you better organise yourself. Read the rest of this entry »
When it comes to selling your products and services, many companies miss a trick when it comes to writing the copy for promotional brochures. This is because many businesses pack their glossy, well-produced brochure with just the key features of their latest offers and new solutions, without actually selling the benefits of what it is they’re offering. Far from getting inside the client’s mind and thinking about what they need, most company brochures make the fatal mistake of ‘focusing on information instead of persuasion’ (1). Read the rest of this entry »
Over the last decade, the number of companies selling their products and services on the Web or sharing information online with their target market has exploded.It’s no longer frowned upon to conduct your business on the Web, and huge numbers of people are making a healthy living doing just that. Others, however, are not. For every great website out there that grabs its customer’s attention and holds it, there are hundreds more bad ones that don’t. Despite their best efforts, many businesses are losing money daily due to the poor performance of their company website.
People read differently on the Internet, because they want and expect different things from websites than they do from newspapers or printed corporate literature. For a start, it’s 25% harder to read on a screen than it is on paper, (1) and Web readers are also a notoriously fickle bunch, scan reading your pages at best, and ready to leave your site at the click of a mouse.
I’m not usually a fan of generalized ‘catch all’ rules, but there is a handy way of structuring your Web copy to attract and retain fickle readers. The rule is encompassed in a simple acronym - ‘AIDA’ - that is, ‘Attention, Interest, Desire and Action’. Although this rule is not foolproof, if you make use of the AIDA principle in your Web writing you’ll instantly improve your chances of keeping those all important readers. Let’s look at each stage a bit more closely. Read the rest of this entry »
As part of the essential research you should do before starting to write, it’s a good idea to begin by defining your audience - the people who will read, see or hear the message in your content. Although often taken for granted, this process is crucial to achieving effective writing - and everything related to what you write will flow out of it. Entire advertising and marketing campaigns have failed due to a lack of understanding of the target audience, so it pays to get it right.
“Knowing your audience before you write will make the process of writing easier because it simplifies the decisions you have to make. Writing with a specific audience in mind will also give your (content) more unity of purpose and style, and will involve your reader more directly.” (1). Sounds simple right? Well yes, it is actually. The difficulty comes when you ignore this important part of the writing process altogether. Read the rest of this entry »
