603 Copywriting Blog

Is Your Professional Voice Boring?

By Andrew on February 28th, 2010

This is Jim. Jim is a professional musician. Jim is exciting, innovative and all sorts of other interesting superlatives. Jim isn’t boring. So if a professional isn’t a boring person, why is your professional copy boring?

Copify – The Professional Analysis

By Andrew on February 9th, 2010 • 13 Comments

Are you searching for content mill de jour Copify? Maybe you’re considering signing up as a writer? Maybe you want to take advantage of their rates? If you do, you might want to read this first. Because you’re going to be throwing good money at a bad service that won’t deliver for your business.

Should You Pay Your Copywriter by the Word?

By Andrew on February 8th, 2010 • 17 Comments

Twitter has been all aflutter this weekend, with a brand new “copywriting agency” following all and sundry. They’ve been promising the untold riches of £0.02 per word and have met with responses ranging from the amusing to the incredulous. @SarahCopywriter £0.04 per word! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, (breath) ha, ha, ha, ha, […]

History – The Copywriter’s Degree?

By Andrew on January 21st, 2010 • 8 Comments

A bit of life experience enriches your copy no end. Unfortunately, if you’re straight out of university your life experience probably extends to 2-4-1 drinks offers, home remedies for Fresher’s Flu (whisky mixed with honey cough medicine, if you’re asking) and which local pubs offer a free sandwich on pub quiz night.

Your Blog Bores the Arse Off Me

By Andrew on January 14th, 2010 • 9 Comments

Hi there. You don’t know me too well, but maybe you should. I’m your audience.  I’m the guy who subscribes to your blog via RSS, retweets your posts and leaves you the odd comment. But let me tell you a secret. I’m doing those things more out of habit at the moment. Why? Because your […]

The Best Paragraph You’ll Read This Year

By Andrew on December 17th, 2009 • 1 Comment

I know I’ve taken time here to mock people like PETA, the Daily Mail and really bad PR companies, but their crimes against marketing and writing pale in comparison to something I saw this morning. A piece of copy so confusing, so overwrought and so terrible, that professionals don’t even know what it means. Ladies […]

The Best (and Worst) Marketing Ploys of the Noughties

By Andrew on December 4th, 2009 • 1 Comment

The most tragic thing about the Sea Kittens campaign is that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall showed campaigners how to make people think about where their food comes from with his anti-battery chicken crusade. Wouldn’t farmed salmon swimming in their own shit have made a more effective image than this?

Copywriters – Unappreciated or Oversensitive?

By Andrew on November 26th, 2009 • 3 Comments

We won’t wow an employer or a client with a striking website, and good copy shouldn’t let you notice you’re being persuaded to make an action. It’s a much more subtle art. What’s more, anyone who’s been within frothing distance of a keyboard or pencil thinks they can be the next Shakespeare. That killer combination means that we don’t always get the credit we think we so richly deserve.

Five Clichés to Create Quick Content

By Andrew on October 27th, 2009 • 5 Comments

I know it’s good form to avoid clichés wherever possible, but we’ve all had days when we know we need to pick up a pen or settle in at the keyboard and just don’t feel creative. Luckily, bloggers the world over have developed cunning methods that allow them to put out a few hundred words of decent, usable content without the effort of re-inventing the wheel. We just open up the clichés folder and let her rip.