Tag Archives: COPYWRITING

Nuggets of knowledge to get you thinking

It’s nearly Christmas. You’re busy. There’s a man looking at me funny across the café. So let’s not muck about. Here are five fast things to get your brain moving and quite possibly help with your copywriting. Ready? Track your time Your time is your most important asset. And ultimately, as a copywriter, it’s what […]

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 […]

Ideas are irritating

Sometimes ideas are right there in your face, shouting at you like an arrogant teenage kid who thinks they know best. Other times they’re nowhere to be seen, like your broke mate Steve who’s always in the toilet when it’s his round at the bar. I’ll tell you what… From now on, let’s boycott ideas. […]

Gauguin’s guide to being a successful creative

Paul Gauguin was a bit of a dick. At the age of twenty-three he lucked into a cushy job at the Paris Bourse (France’s stock exchange). A friend of the family had organised it for him and it paid a good salary. Paul was quick to get the hang of trading and turned out to […]

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 […]

The art of self-doubt

That old Greek thinking guy, Socrates Johnson, is reported to have said something like: If I know anything, it’s that I know nothing. No one quite knows exactly what he said as it was all jotted down by that Phil Plato guy. He could have been making it up himself. No one knows. And that’s […]

Learning to play bass isn’t so different to learning to write copy

An old hymn might seem the last thing to help you become a better copywriter. But you’d be surprised… Do you remember singing Morning Has Broken at school? It was the first tune I ever learned to play on the bass guitar. And to this day I can still remember how to play it. There in the […]

Could this be the laziest buzzword in copywriting?

There’s a small, six-letter word used far too much in copywriting. I don’t like it. Do I hate it? Possibly. To me, it’s a sign you’re being lazy, you’ve run out of steam and you can’t be bothered to think properly about what you’re writing. What’s the word? UNIQUE. Wait… Hold on one minute, Glenn. Unique […]

The strange logic of procrastination and how to get around it

When you procrastinate, I don’t believe it’s the type of task that’s important. You might choose to watch television or bake a cake. It doesn’t matter. Nor does the ease of the task you choose make much difference. You might choose to procrastinate by doing something you actually find quite difficult, like going for a […]

Don’t sweat the small stuff, make a connection instead

An old mentor of mine – the great Mark Ford – used to wind me up in a debate about subject line open rates. He said it was pointless analysing open rates. But, I argued, if you can increase the open rate, you get more people to see the email. So what, he’d ask? Well, I’d wonder, […]