I saw this van in Hove recently. So, ‘Hove Paints’… what do they do?
They probably don’t do painting, although they could do painting.
They probably sell paint. But what kind of paint? Is it paint for artists? Or paint for children? Is it paint for your living room? Or paint for factories? Do they sell to ordinary people? Or are they just a trade supplier?
If you’re going to create a mobile advert by painting your van, why not be clear about what you do, and who you do it for?
Love this example of an error message in real life. It’s a 404 page in the real world.
We accidentally put some glass beer bottles (some rather excellent Belgians if you’re interested), in amongst all the paper and plastic, so the curbside recycling collectors put some message tape over our recycling box, making us aware of the problem.
The nice thing is that it’s light-hearted. My wife and I spend ages cleaning, sorting and saving recyclables, so I appreciate the council not berating us for getting something wrong. Instead of making us feel stupid, we get a gentle reminder on the correct system:
I received an email from someone selling speed networking events. Noticing a few flaws in the copy, I thought it would be a useful exercise to publicly review the content, and suggest improvements. I’m not an email marketing expert, nor do I know much about speed networking events, but there are a few universal principles for writing effective copy, so here are my thoughts on this particular copywriting challenge…
maximiser
Giving an email such a short, uncommunicative and unpunctuated subject isn’t wise. You need to give people reasons to open an email, not confuse them with a single, meaningless word. What does ‘maximiser’ even mean? It’s not a well known brand, nor is it a key feature of their service – and it definitely doesn’t explain what the email is offering. Why the hell did I even open this email?
A better alternative?
Speed networking for faster business – join the crowd next week
Speed Networking xxxx bring Business People together, our events are an extremely cost efficient use of your time, energy and money.
Companies constantly cry out for quick and easy ways to find and develop new customers, so If you like meeting people, want to develop more business, also wish to build a large network of important business contacts and connections, then this is the perfect meeting forum for you.
This paragraph contains all kinds of little problems, including run-on sentences, errant capitals and a list that might do better with bullet points, but the main problem is that this email begins without any clear message. No headline. No title. No focal point.
A better alternative?
Speed networking is back in your town: join the crowds of people benefitting from lively, friendly networking that works.
Why should you attend?
- Just imagine pitching your business to a different person every 3minutes.
- We give you the opportunity to explore the possibilities of doing business with other similar minded business people in a positive business working environment.
- You can expect to have a one2one mini business meeting with everyone in the room.
- In business there is no substitute for meeting people face2face, there’s a much greater chance of creating new business than relying on cold calling.
The first point fails because to some it might sound more like a drawback than a benefit. Yes, just imaging pitching your business to a different person every 3 minutes! Does that sound like fun? Or does it sound like some kind of corporate torture? This point is insensitive to many people’s feelings about networking – it’s unlikely to persuade the doubters (assuming they ever opened the email).
The second point is a big tangle of a sentence, and needs editing.
The third point includes the peculiar construction “one2one” – which is not hip, or professional.
The fourth point includes another oddity: “face2face”. It feels like this email was temporarily hijacked by a teenager using SMS.
A better alternative?
Why are people flocking to speed networking?
- You get to meet lots of interesting people in a short space of time
- You’re guaranteed an effective business opportunity
- Everyone is welcomed in a friendly, low-pressure environment
* I won’t reveal the close of this email because it reveals too much information about the sender, and my purpose is to help people trying to write better emails, not chastise a business for trying. 😉
But here, in the dying embers of the email, we discover the meaning of the mysterious ‘maximiser’! Now, at long last, we learn that the ‘maximiser’ is an option to lower the cost of speed networking by paying for several sessions at once. Was the email marketer so wrapped up in their own business that they forgot that, while this maximiser deal is important to them, nobody else knows about it? The email drips to an ending, offering a link to book your desired speed networking sessions – a link which probably should have come a little bit sooner.
I’ve been busy. Really busy. Busier than a bee on crack. In between a packed schedule of web copywriting jobs I’ve been writing a book on freelancing. Here’s what I’ve learnt about writing books:
1. Books take longer to write than you think. I thought it would take a couple of weeks, but I hadn’t factored in the time required for research and interviews.
2. Books are fairly easy to write if you have a cast-iron deadline. I’m staring down the barrel of my publisher’s deadline. I dare not disappoint them.
3. Books require planning. The spreadsheet has been my friend. With everything planned from the very beginning, I’ve been able to pace the production. The spreadsheet doesn’t write the book, but it does give you a blueprint.
4. Books demand a long, steady effort. You can’t just vomit up a book. They take time. And a persistent effort. It’s not always easy to keep a book chugging along, especially when you hit the sections that don’t ignite your passions.
5. The last long lap is the hardest. Nearly there!
So there aren’t really any sorrows – not with this book at least. Not yet.
One of my co-werkers here at The Werks, web designer Jay Alvarez, recently launched her new web agency: Root Interactive.
The new website is delightfully different, with the pages leading off down a series of bean stalks (you must try it yourself), but the most delicious detail of her brand is the unusual approach she took for business cards – or beansniss cards (sorry) – which she printed on butter beans.
One of her business cards is currently growing in our office.
Thanks to Adam Bronkhorst, one of Brighton’s finest freelance photographers, I’m no longer invisible. You can now see what I look like here and on my About page.
Adam is a fantastic photographer and a really likeable guy and I highly recommend him. He’s also available as a wedding photographer.
The web is a big, messy thing. It’s complicated. There are many facets to the web, involving technologies, crafts and skills. Hardly surprising then that to make something wonderful on the web, you may need the help of specialists. You wouldn’t expect to build a house without the help of specialists, and you certainly wouldn’t expect an architect to carry a hod, or a roofer to plumb the toilets, or the builder to plan the wiring.
The need for web industry specialists seems obvious to me, but there is scepticism about some of the professionals helping to make better web experiences that work for both users and the organisations behind them. Let’s look at some of the sceptical remarks that have surfaced recently:
…urm, actually, it’s impossible to quote the rambles of Olivier Blanchard, but you can gauge his ire by scanning his inflammatory but ultimately hollow blog post in which he rails against the current trend for content strategy.
And Ryan Carson tweeted his scepticism for user-experience designers:
But why should web designers stop at UX expertise? Surely they should also take on copywriting, usability testing, market research and cross-stitch too.
I’ve worked on web projects with dedicated UX people and seen those UX people carry out a range of functions that are quite different from web design – things like research, user tests and creating personas – things that warrant a specialist. Sure, a good web designer should take an interest in related fields like user experience design, information architecture and usability, but to expect every individual to become experts in so many broad areas is somewhat delusional. Should we all be the Jack of all trades, and master of none?
As more people talk about content strategy, there will be doubters. To some, content strategy is just a faddish name for things we’ve always been doing. And yes, while content strategy doesn’t bring many revelations to the web, it does package up a way of thinking about the challenges of web content. Content strategy isn’t about creating jobs or complicating web projects – it’s about bringing clarity to the often murky world of content, and helping businesses derive value from their content.
Content strategy isn’t for lone bloggers, just as you don’t need an architect to erect your shed. But content strategy does make sense when you’re wrangling hundreds or thousands of pages of content and a raft of business goals.
I love the idea of simplifying the web. If the creation of great websites could be simplified, reduced to a formula, or a series of strokes on a keypad that unfurled a mesmerising website that met every objective and satisfied every faction of its audience – I’d be thrilled. But the reality is that building big and complicated web entities requires the skills of specialists.
There’s a trend for media types to “call BS” on something in the industry. The act of calling BS is a way of saying “I hereby declare that this thing, which so many people believe in so fervently, is in fact bullshit.” It’s lots of fun, and the proclaimer gets people talking and linking to their stuff, some people get a bit cross and leave furious comments on blog posts. Then it all dies down and everyone continues as before.
But I would like to hereby declare that the act of “calling BS” is in itself total bullshit. People have called BS on social media gurus, UX people and SEO, but what does this really mean? It just means that someone doesn’t like something. But even in the case of ‘social media gurus’ – the most derided of all web professionals – a demand remains for their services. Otherwise they wouldn’t exist. Calling BS is really just the expression of an individual opinion. Often the contentious opinion is shared by half, and resented by half.
BS calling is jolly good fun, and gives us a chance to rally behind our chosen positions and throw rotten vegetables from the comfort of the comments box, but it’s totally pointless, and can reasonably be deemed BS. In fact, this entire post is BS.
Living in Brighton has been instrumental to my success as a freelance copywriter (thanks to all the brilliant businesses and enterprising digital types), but London has always provided a good percentage of my work.
So it became logical to split my time between the two cities. And when I heard about TechHub, I knew there was finally a London coworking space that made sense for a web-focused copywriter like me.
If you need a freelance web copywriter in London, you can find me at TechHub (a stone’s throw from Old Street tube) at least one day each week.
Websites are a complex challenge for many businesses. Before you can make a website better, you have to know where it’s going wrong and what you want it to achieve.
Many of my best clients are small businesses who are not “web natives” or geeks or even – God help them – on Twitter (gasp). Few business owners have the time or resources to make their website as good as it could be. A common question from SMEs is: “Where do we start?” Clients often know that their website is under-performing, or just plain broken, but the question of where to begin often gets in the way of action.
Because of this problem, I got thinking about how to reduce the complexity of web marketing. And the end result was a check list.
Print it out, sit down in front of your website and start ticking! When you’re done, you’ll have a quick view of obvious errors or missing details – things you can easily fix.
The check list doesn’t cover everything, but it’s a good starting point if you know something is wrong with your website but don’t know what it is. Thanks to Emma at Door22 for her excellent document design work.
This document is released under a Creative Commons license, so you can use it however you like. You can even slap your own logo on it and call it yours, providing you credit me as the original author. If you’d like help customising it for your own purposes, just ask!
All kinds of writers – journalists, sci-fi authors, poets, creative entrepreneurs and copywriters have gathered for the past nine months to mingle, mooch, booze and schmooze. Meetings were quiet, consisting mainly of friends, acquaintances and people off Twitter. But last month something changed.
Thanks to our new meetup.com profile, created by co-host Al Robertson, our last meeting was throbbing with new members!
Since that lovely evening we’ve had more new members joining the WriteClub London Meetup group, with 20 confirmed attendees and a few more ‘maybes’.
Many people question their own status as a writer, thinking that to come to WriteClub you need to be a professional writer, or published. But that’s nonsense. We’re a group for all kinds of writers and non-writers, so even if your writing achievements have been limited to intentions or daydreams – you’re very welcome to join us. WriteClub is a very relaxed group, and one of our goals is to create a space for people to think and talk about writing. You may find inspiration or renewed enthusiasm for writing after spending an evening with similarly-minded folk. And of course the conversations are not limited to writing – chat tends to drift off in all kinds of unexpected directions.
We meet in a pub that’s open to the public. You don’t need a ticket and there’s no cost to attend. We don’t do formal introductions or group discussions. We don’t have rules or a format. There’s no big agenda either. The group is here for you, to be whatever you want it to be. See you there!
I was recently interviewed by Writing Magazine – so if you’ve ended up here after seeing me there, hello!
If you’re interested in going freelance (as a copywriter or anything else), I recommend Freelance Advisor as a great place to get ideas. They have an excellent guide to starting out, called Go Freelance (I wrote it!).
The words you write on the web don’t carry much weight. Corporate web copy is littered with platitudes, boasts, claims and statements of ‘facts’ – all with questionable levels of truthiness. Because any company can claim to be:
the words are weak.
Great web copy gets beyond empty words and offers something tangible.
Don’t claim to be an expert in your field. Demonstrate your experience with copy that reveals your knowledge. Get down to details – talk of things that only the initiated know about. You don’t have to bore people with your technical prowess, just give them a hint of the expert knickers under your corporate skirt.
Your web copy is not the only way to reassure visitors that you really are experienced/creative/enterprising/expert. Make liberal use of testimonials, case studies and portfolio pieces to give proof. The imagery and design of your website is crucial in this respect.
Ask yourself how you can stand out from every other business that claims to be the best – how can you show that you’re the best?
Kendall Copywriting is two years old!
The last year has been a year of steady progression – full of cool things like:
And when I’ve not been writing copy I’ve been busy moving WriteClub forwards with the help of Ayse Kongur (WriteClub’s resident designer) and co-hosts Ellen de Vries and Al Robertson.
Thank-you to all of the clients I’ve worked with in the past year. Here’s to year 3!
I’m writing a book!!! I’m very excited about this. Ever since I wrote ‘Monkeys’ – my powerfully insightful poem about the nature of monkeys – at the age of 7, I’ve fantasised about writing a book.
Now, at the age of 32, I have my first opportunity to write a book, and it’s really exciting. I’m already learning that writing books is a hard slog, and often a not-very-profitable-slog. But that doesn’t matter. I’m writing a book about freelancing, a subject that ranks quite highly on the list of things I’m passionate about, so writing the book will be a joyous, delightful experience (I say that now…).
Thanks to everyone who has helped me learn about being a freelancer – especially the clients who have challenged me and my fellow freelancers, particularly the enterprising men and women of The Farm and latterly my fellow WriteClubbers (and the lovely Ellen de Vries who counselled me to leave my job), who’ve indulged me with stacks of free advice and sympathetic ears.
I’ll keep you posted on the book’s progress. 🙂
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