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How Reverse Engineering Will Add Power to Your Content
When designing a new product or service, what’s your first step? You don’t launch into designing your packaging or anything like that (I hope). No. Instead you think about your target audience: Is there one for what you want to offer? Who are the types of people you want to sell to? What is […]
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Benefits Sell; Features Tell
Peeking Behind the Sales Curtain How many times have you heard that your copy should show and not tell? Even though it’s something you keep hearing, it’s not always something that’s easy to achieve. In fact, you might be of the opinion that its utter nonsense and people will only buy if you tell […]
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Focusing Your Message – What Are Your Priorities?
One of the biggest issues I find in the marketing world is clients not knowing what their priorities are. Or, to be precise, they think they know what they are, but they’re wrong. Let me explain. When meeting with a client for the first time, I’ll spend a lot of time chatting about what […]
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I Want What They’ve Got or Why You Shouldn’t Try to Copy Your Competitors’ Copy
Apart from the obvious plagiarism side of things, there’s another excellent reason why you shouldn’t copy the same approach as your competitors. Every year I am asked, at least twice, by potential clients to “just write it as they’ve done it. We offer the same so you can use their content but just change […]
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The Age of Fake: Why Seeing and Reading Isn’t Believing
It would seem that nothing is as it appears today. Magazines are regularly being hauled over the coals for airbrushing photos of celebrities to the point where their mothers would struggle to recognise them. Photo enhancing apps mean regular people (like you and me) can now retouch photos before uploading to Facebook or Instagram, […]
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Copywriting Ramblings and the Power of Random
Will you indulge me for a moment? For over ten years I have been writing about every aspect of copywriting, marketing and social media I can think of. I’ve helped countless people improve their writing and find the writer (i.e. me) best able to help them achieve their aims. The one thing I’ve never […]
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Why Ignorance and Copywriting Go Hand in Hand
Why should you go to the trouble of finding a copywriter who can create your content for you when you have a team of people already working with you? They all have the necessary basic qualifications for work and can write pretty well (some better than others). Granted, they’re often tied up with their […]
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Why Politicians Make Crap Copywriters
You can’t escape politics these days. Elections are never-ending (rather like the DFS sale), and every news bulletin seems to include a couple of politicians flinging muck at each other. They (the politicians) complain that the public doesn’t engage with them – well that’s because they’re sick and tired of all the backbiting. It […]
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Let’s Face it. You’re Not Unique
How to stand out when you don’t have a USP Every marketer (including me) says you have to highlight your USP (unique selling point) to make your reader understand why he or she should choose you. But I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently and conclude that very few business can honestly say they […]
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SEO Copywriting is NOT Bad Copy
Here’s a news flash for you, SEO copywriting is not bad copy. Granted, there is a lot of gobbledygook out there pretending to be high-quality content, but it’s usually written by someone who has no idea what they are doing. It’s entirely their fault; they foolishly believe the BS that’s still floating around on […]
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