603 Copywriting Blog

There’s a word that keeps coming up in meetings I have with clients. It comes up when they ask me what I think’s really important when it comes to putting their message out there. The word is disconnected. It’s not a word I see used often on copywriting blogs. Maybe other copywriters bring it up […]

There’s more to my job than writing copy. There’s reading copy too. I read a hell of a lot of copy. Some amazingly good, some toe-curlingly bad, most of it fair-to-middling. Quite often, the reason I’m reading a piece is that a client has asked me for my opinion. To see what I think. Whether I […]

I’m used to reading Tweets from “experts” making outlandish claims about how audiences react to content, or which method of outreach is now “dead,” so it takes something fairly incendiary to get me to engage. Something like one of Sports Illustrated’s digital team putting a hard cap on the amount of words you can use […]

Bloody Theresa May, coming in here with her run on sentences and her ad-hoc approach to line breaks. I tell you what, this’d never have happened if Milliband had been able to eat a sandwich correctly… Don’t worry. This isn’t that kind of post. It’s not about those Tories. And I definitely won’t be telling […]

“It’s easy. It’s just churning out bumpf. Just writing a few words. Won’t take you long at all. It’s only a short email.” Every single copywriter has heard those words. In the interests of positive copywriter/client relations, I won’t tell you the sort of words we say to ourselves when we hear those words. But […]

There are some things I hate being called. I can’t stand being called a wordsmith. Being referred to as a “Manc” gets my heckles up. And I am less than keen than my mum referring to me as “freak boy” because of my height. But there’s one label that’s been flung my way repeatedly that […]

Quick thought experiment for those of you who smoke. (Those of you who don’t smoke, skip to the next subheading. Those who vape, subscribe to my newsletter because I’ve got a client you’ll want to hear about.) Don’t look at your cigarette packet. Just write down what warning you think is written on the top. […]

Even if you’ve spent the last ten years cocooned in the warmth of monogamous bliss like yours truly, you can’t have missed the revolution in online dating. Tinder’s reduced the complexities of human relationships to two actions. Swipe right if you fancy a roll in the hay, swipe left if you’d rather not. On Tinder, […]

There’s a syndrome that runs rampant with copywriters. At some point, we decide that what we really want to be is authors. Sometimes it works – Andy Maslen isn’t doing too badly – and sometimes it crashes and burns because you realise that a book about Richie Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers faking his […]

I’ve just binned three months’ work. Not literally. That’d be a waste of ink and printer paper. But I deleted it. Since the back end of 2016, I’ve been beavering away on a new ebook guide. I was enjoying writing it, the tone of voice was great, and it was going to make my life […]