Tag Archives: Copywriting Tips

The Internet is rife with bad copy and it’s a good thing

There are roughly 30 trillion words on the Internet… This is worked out at roughly 300 words a page spread across approximately 100 billion pages. It’s a tough calculation. Even tougher would be to work out how many of those words are either ‘solution’ or ‘passion’. I imagine it’s far higher than either of us […]

Take a run-up and inject your copy with energy

You’ve got your idea… You’ve been floating it around your head to make sure it plays… And you’ve been figuring out how you’re going to express it in your copy. Now you need to sit down and start writing. Before you do… Here’s my advice: Take a run-up. Huh? I mean, literally. Open the word document, […]

Five concise copy thoughts to get you thinking

Here’s the plan… I’m going to hit you with five fast chunks of concise copy thought. Ready? Some Ideas Suck Some of your ideas will suck.⁣ ⁣ And that’s OK.⁣ ⁣ No one hits gold every time.⁣ ⁣ To get the good ideas out of your head you need to let the bad ones out […]

Get used to the sound of your own voice

He looked at me gone out. Really? You read everything aloud? Even the 10,000-word letters? I was being interviewed for a podcast and we’d got on to my editing process. Yep, I answered. Pretty much. Between you and me, dear reader, sometimes I’m in a rush and won’t get a chance. But I would say nine times […]

This will upset some copywriters

This will upset some copywriters. But it will cause other copywriters joy. You see this is a piece about how to write more engagingly. But it’s not entitled 15 Tips For Writing More Engagingly. I dislike those pieces. I dislike them immensely. I see them all over the Internet. On Twitter, on LinkedIn, littering my inbox. 10 Rules […]

This one simple number could help you write more clearly

It’s 1938… Very bad things are going down in Europe. Anti-Semitism is rife. The Nazi’s are about to annex Austria. And for a little known university graduate, there’s no choice… He needs to get out of the country. Fast. He flees to America. He’s lucky. He gets a graduate place at Columbia University, where he […]

Why you should spend more time in bed with your reader

Writing copy to grab your reader’s attention is hard. You might spend weeks testing different ideas for nothing. Even if the product or service you’re selling is great, it doesn’t necessarily make writing captivating copy any easier. But there is an exercise you can do to write copy with a much greater chance of success. […]

Putting the proof in your persuasive pudding

A quick reminder before I get into this piece… My fiancée Ruth and I…otherwise known as ‘Gluth’…are running the Great Grimsby 10k this year and raising money for the British Heart Foundation. For the many readers outside the UK who are wondering what on earth ‘Great Grimsby’ is…it’s where I’m from. Grimsby is a small fishing port on […]

What’s in a blurb? An Interview with Sarah Topping

It’s one of those copy jobs you can’t imagine anyone actually has. You not only get to read loads of books… But your writing appears on every one you do read. Pretty cool. I’m talking, in case you haven’t guessed, about writing the ‘blurb’ on the back of a book. You know…that 200-or-so-word synopsis designed […]

A critical copywriting tool: the swipe file and how to build one

Do you have a swipe file? You hopefully do. And if that is the case, rather than read this email, go read this interesting interview with post-punk legend Ian MacKaye instead. But if you don’t already have a swipe file, or you do have one and you’d like to discover some of my own swipe file secrets… Well, I guess you should keep […]