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Most people who write for a living will tell you getting it right takes about 10% actual writing time and 90% research. Knowing what to write before you write it, and to whom, might sound like an obvious place to start, but when you’re under pressure to meet a business writing deadline, the obvious can go out of the window. It shouldn’t though, because even when you’re up against the clock, the whole process of writing your content will become easier if you put the pen down, sit back from the keyboard, and consider it first.

"An important first task when you are planning a piece of written work is to think carefully about its purpose." (1). Start by identifying your reader, bearing in mind these three simple questions:

• Who is my reader?
• Will they read this?
• What value is being created? (2) Read the rest of this entry »

We live in an information age, an era of mass communication. In this world, some people consume information, while others provide it. It’s a constant and essential cycle. Information is valuable, and those who present it as high quality content will make money doing so. It’s the biggest growth industry in the world.

In the past, information was published by specialist organizations. Today, everyone has become a publisher. The Internet and home publishing software make electronic and traditional publishing easy and affordable. As only 0.003% of content published every year is in printed form (1), the Web accounts for the vast majority of this content explosion, with websites and blogs springing up in their millions. Read the rest of this entry »

When writing copy for any media, it’s always important to write in the active voice – not the passive.

Active sentences give your copywriting spark and drive, energising your sales message with words that enliven the reader and encourage them to act. Indeed, just employing this one technique in your copywriting could make the difference between securing a sale and losing one.

If you use passive sentences in your copywriting, they often appear awkward and flat, and you run the risk of your message being boring. Just think about it, you wouldn’t buy from a boring salesperson, so why should you feel compelled to act upon limp and uninteresting copywriting? Read the rest of this entry »

So, what’s the big buzz about Google Adwords? Well, if you have a website and need to grow your sales, Google Adwords is the answer. Google Adwords is proven to be very effective at driving new business, and that’s the primary reason why everybody’s trying to get to the top of the paid listings. In short, if you want to increase your sales quickly and dramatically, you need to get started with Adwords. It’s cost-effective and really does work, instantly. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »