Whilst I was experiencing the summer lull, I thought I’d take advantage of the free time to compile a summary of my posts from the last year. After all, with the dreadful weather we’ve had in the UK I couldn’t really spend it lazing in the garden. As every week has passed and the stats […]
Why You Should Invest in Copywriting to Convert Consumers
The results of a new study, released by Marketing Sherpa, on website consumer conversions have been doing the rounds recently on the search marketing blogs, and are worthy of a mention here. The study, entitled ‘Digital Window Shopping: The Long Delay Before Buying’, has discovered that it’s now taking an average of 34 hours to […]
Articles or Blog Posts? It’s Quality that Counts
Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen recently shared some of his pearls of wisdom on the role of blogs as marketing tools, and promptly upset a number of business blog experts in the process. Although I don’t agree with his rather narrow pigeon holing of blogging as being for websites that sell cheap products where customers […]
Why the Demands of Online Shoppers Means More Demand for Copywriters
I often read comments by other freelance copywriters who have just entered the online market and are panicking at the fees they see on freelance bidding websites and Craigslist. Such rates give the impression that the internet is just one huge literary junk pile, with more rubbish being dumped continuously from a conveyer belt manned […]
Why Copywriters are now Builders, not just Decorators
As internet marketing evolves so do the responsibilities of the copywriter. There was a time when the copywriter was just brought in to splash punchy prose over the website’s pages, before packing up and moving on to the next project. It was the web developers who stayed behind to keep an eye on the site, […]
Why Copywriting is the most important SEO skill, and how I proved it
There was a time when the role of the copywriter was to just write the website’s main service pages, with the requisite keywords craftily sewn into the copy. It was the developer’s responsibility to apply their HTML wizardry to trick the search engines into pushing the website onto people’s screens. However, as Google’s algorithms have […]
Why Businesses Aren’t Blogging
I am a business blogging evangelist. There I’ve said it. I think businesses should be selling their services through education and building trust with information of value. What better way of achieving this than with a relevant and regularly updated blog? Sometimes I wonder whether I do get carried along with the whole web 2.0 […]
“Google is not a search engine. It’s a reputation management systemâ€Â
The relationship between copywriting and search marketing has never been closer; I now find myself covering the same stories as eminent SEM pros Lee Odden and Andy Beal. All three of us have recently covered issues highlighted in a Wired article about ‘The See-Through CEO’, a story about how being transparent can enhance your image, […]
Get Your Pens Ready for the Explosion in Online PR
The web copywriter’s market is evolving so fast that rarely a week passes without new opportunities appearing on the horizon. The requirements of business websites are developing all the time. Static brochure style sites are dated, portals of news and information is what’s needed. It would appear that web marketers are now responding to the […]
Bad English Costs UK Government £800 Million
Wasting £20 billion on a flawed new computer system is unfortunate. But to lose £800 million because of poorly written leaflets is simply inexcusable. A recent report has found that poor wording and incomprehensible language in UK government literature is creating a huge dent in public finances. The committee found that leaflets produced by the […]