Copywriting

Shattering the myth of the Web Traffic Elf

I hate to do this...but there is no Web Traffic Elf. 

You came to terms with Santa Claus, and now you have to deal with this.

While posting this may seem like a banality to very many of you (a statement of the bleedin' obvious, in Basil Fawlty's terms), I do keep coming across people who believe that building a website for a new venture, and bringing it online, will result in it receiving visitors. By magic.

For anyone who has come lately to the world of web marketing, or anyone whose clients have come lately, here are four fundamental truths.

1. The web is very big. It has a lot of websites. Google, in March of 2008, was indexing 4.28 billion web pages, so probably about 70 million sites.
2. No-one who does not know about you and specifically go looking for you is going to find your site by chance.
3. Google will eventually find you, but may not take much notice of you. It's a bit like joining an old fashioned club. When they first notice you, they make a note of you so they can ignore you. (They call this sandboxing.) If you keep showing up (ie if your site remains in place) they will eventually acknowledge you publicly. But they are unlikely to invite you to dine at the top table against any individual search until you've been there for some time, built up some real content, and generally done the things you need to do to 'join the club'.
4. If you have a new site, driving traffic is as important as building the site itself.

So how do you drive traffic to your new website? If you are a small business / new small business only now launching a site, this is the single most important question for you to find an answer to. Finding the answer will give your site a chance of doing whatever it was you built it to do. Not finding the answer means you might as well have not built the site.

Start by adding the address of your site to the footer of your emails. You might even add 'Need whatever it is you do? Visit our site at www.youraddress.com'

Next, email your site to everyone in your address book. Just send a two-line email that says you've launched a new site and would welcome their feedback.

That's a start.

Then make sure that the site itself is doing everything it can to be found. Check that whoever has built it for you has given each page a search-friendly Title, as well as keyword and description meta tags. (You can Google all of this if you have no idea what I'm talking about.)

Next, invest a couple of hours in adding the address of your site to as many relevant online directories as you can. (Again, Google this if you don't know what I mean.)

Next, start going regularly to some specialist forums and blogs, whose subjects are the same as yours, and set yourself up an identity so that you can post. Make sure to put your URL in the signature of the identity, so that every time you post a comment, view or piece of advice, your website address is displayed. (This has 2 benefits, in truth: one is simply that it may make someone interested in the subject click to your site; the other is that it creates a backlink, which search engines reward you for.)

What else can you do? Well it's going to depend on your budget.

If you can afford to run a PPC advertising campaign (Google it if you're not sure), then get that set up immediately. Get your keyterms and ad copy right and it will bring you visitors fast, though at a cost.

Then think about every other aspect of your business communications and whether it can be used to promote your site. You send out invoices? Add the website address? Same if you print receipts, hand out flyers, have a store window, awning or van livery.

If you have waitresses or sales assistants, train them to ask people politely if they've had a look at your new website yet, and give them a card or printed slip to hand over to customers who say no.

If you have suppliers who'd benefit from helping you, ask them to send an email about your website to their email lists. Ask customers to do the same if they like what you do.

Do not, on any account, sit back and wait for Google. 

For the average small business, it's not that much more likely than the Web Traffic Elf to do the hard work for you.

The kind of web developers to fire

Web developers. You gotta love 'em. Some of them are so darn clever, with their cutesy clientside coding (stuff that happens in your browser). Some others are just so darn arty, with their pretty designs and fanciful Flash animations. Then there are those who are simply so darn smart, with their complex back-end programming, databasing and integrating. There are so many kinds of web developers. You're spoilt for choice. And there's the problem.

Decorators are not builders. Neither of them are architects. Some people are good to ask to build a wall, but not to repaint your bedroom. Others are excellent for handbuilding a kitchen, but you'd rue letting them loose on anything structural.

If you don't really know what you're doing, or what the function you want for your website actually involves, do not appoint a web development company believing that they will be able to do it: they may well not.

Even more importantly, do not make the uncorrectable mistake of assuming that 4 young web developers in a room above an estate agent, or even 120 less young web developers in a warehouse space in Spittalfields, will know anything at all, or actually care about prioritising, your commercial objectives and business requirements.

Calm down, if you are a skilled and professional member of the e-commerce consulting profession. I'm not talking about you. Quite the opposite.

For many clients, wandering into the world of web development is a stroll in the darkness. They may well expect that whichever company they go to talk to must have a good understanding of commercial concerns and see itself as being in the business of helping clients achieve these. But they're wrong. The entire staff of very many web development companies of all sizes do not have this experience or, despite what they may say, interest.

How do I know this? Well..  more often than you'd think (I'm talking about a couple of times a month), I find myself in an unenviable triangle: a client, a web agency and me.

The client has usually made the first mistake, by going to the web company and asking them to start building a site before anyone has seriously addressed what it's for, who will use it, what they will do there and how it will thus benefit the business.

The web agency has then usually compounded it by being unaware of their own ignorance. Not knowing how little they understand about business process, consumer behaviour or the nature of the particular sector of internet trading in which this particular client operates, they have gone ahead and 'designed a site'. Not specified a site. They've usually designed it. Visuals first. 

Now I know why they do this. It's obvious. Clients who are none too sophisticated like to look at a photoshop mockup and say, "Yes. I like that one." But it's fatal.

Someone, whether it's the client themself, or a good marketing consultant, or an experienced copywriter (or a business process analyst at the web development company if you are lucky enough to find one which has one), needs to think out the purpose, structure, functionality, tone of voice and messaging of the site before anyone builds anything.

Take care here. If you are a smaller client trying to build yours site cheaply, the kind of developers you are likely to gravitate towards, no matter how nice their sites, will almost certainly not be able to do this for you.

That way, there's a chance that the finished project will achieve its objectives.

And if, as happens unbelievably frequently, you find your own penny dropping only half way through the project, but you are confronted with developers who either will not or cannot change course to help you, and instead bang on about how your new thinking will ruin their art... pick up your hat and head for the door.

Pay their bill though. It's not their fault you hired the wrong people.

How to make 67p and quite a lot of friends.

£ 9.99 is a deal price. Tucked in under a tenner, everyone loves £9.99. And if you're wandering around the West End of London at present, you'll see a lot of 'chain' restaurants trying to tempt frugal tourists with £9.99 dining deals.

Not at Porters though. I know Porters. I'm so old that I remember it opening in Covent Garden's Henrietta Street back in 1979. And for 30 years it's prospered, while trendier restaurants have come and gone, by offering a menu consisting largely of traditional English pies.

It's a very English brand, much loved of tourists. 

And it understands its market. It knows they've been to the Tower. They've trudged round Trafalgar Square. They've been to the Palace. They're doing London: lapping up its history.

Now here's the clever bit.

Why charge boring old £9.99, like everyone else, for your 2 course meal deal, when you could charge £10.66, pocket 67p more to your bottom line, and bring a smile of recognition to the faces of passing trade?

It's cute beyond words. There's a little bit of copy at the bottom of the poster which tells you that good old English Porters is doing this because we're all battling the Credit Crunch now, and 1066 was the last time Britain succumbed to a threat of such proportions. Or something like that. Doesn't really matter.

They turned a pitch for your business with a discount deal into a charming extension of their brand identity. And they earned an extra 67p for their trouble.

Goodbye then, Norwich Union

Andrew Moss, Chief Executive of Norwich Union, has written to me. Not to me alone, you'll understand. Quite probably to you, too, if Norwich Union provides you with insurance, or a pension, or life assurance or any other kind of financial services package.

Andrew wants me to know that the Norwich Union brandname is about to disappear for ever, to be replaced by the globally-inoffensive 'Aviva'.

Andrew is very keen, in a rather well drafted letter, to make sure I understand that he and his colleagues don't think that they like ditching Norwich Union. He's respectful and affectionate about the brand he's discarding after 212 years. But he wants me to understand that Aviva, which is the name created in 2000 to wrap together Norwich Union, Commercial Union and General Accident (all once proud brand names on the UK financial services landscape), now operates in 27 countries, serving 45 million customers.

Now I understand that many of these 45 million customers don't know what Norwich Union is, have no idea about why a company would be called that, and will find it as impossible to be confused by the meaningless and unmemorable Aviva as I. Indeed, for them, Aviva is probably preferable.

Not for me, however. When I was first making enough to invest a few pounds each month, I did it with Norwich Union, and a decade later they served me up a surprisingly handsome return.

2 piffling little bits of the protection on my mortgage, now drawing towards their long-time-coming maturity, are with Norwich Union.

And once, many years ago, Norwich Union was my client, with its marketing Director who left work early every Wednesday to play village cricket. We made 2 fine tv commercials together for his brand, all about planning for life's ups and downs, and I'm as proud of them today as I was in 1991.

So goodbye, Norwich Union. In an age of brand names designed to mean nothing, the work of genius branding consultancies who can ensure that the name you are considering does not mean 'Your Mother Is A Tinkers' Whore' in Ecuador, and that its domain may yet be secured in 50 different territories, I for one will miss warm, competent, secure, stable, friendly Norwich Union.

Ours has been a partnership; something all brands crave, yet so few achieve.

Faces that leap out of crowds

So you're writing a sales letter. And because times are tight, you're doing it yourself. Even though you're no copywriter.

You write the whole thing in Word. In 11 point Times New Roman or Arial on single spacing. Because that's how your copy of Word defaults your draft.

Here and there you stick in an underline or a bold.

If you're really smart, maybe you even lift the size of the headline from 11 point to 12 point.

You write and write and write until you're happy that you've made your killer pitch.

But you've not. Not yet. Come with me.

Let's go back to the start.

Take the headline up in size. If the body of your letter is set in 11 point, see how the headline looks at 16 point, 18 point or 21 point.

Now, change the font on the headline.

Nothing says it has to be the same font as the body of the letter: some fonts are actually designed for headlines, and others for body copy.

Try using a font and weight of font (ie how bold the version of the face you use is) that give that headline some impact.

If you have few fonts on your machine try sans serif faces like Helvetica Bold or even Arial Bold. If you have a fuller range of fonts, try something black and grotesque, like Franklin Gothic, Grot 9 or Futura Bold.

Better still, if you've got a condensed version of of of these faces, try that, and take the font size up another couple of points.

How's it looking?

Bit too 'in your face'?

Fair enough. Let's try a serif face. Times New Roman, or Georgia maybe. Or, if you have it, something like Caslon or Century Schoolbook. Again, if you've got a bold cut(version), use that.

Get some 'blackness' (visual density) into your headline.

Oh. And centre it.

Now...let's see. Those subheads.

Get them up in size, as well. If the body size was 11 point, they'll probably look about right at 14 point. Centre these, as well.

Now how's it looking?

Now get rid of all those double returns between paragraphs. They're putting so much air through your letter it's not looking important enough. Use the 'Format>Pragraph' menu options to add an extra few points 'After' each Return, instead. You just want enough space between paras for the eye to see clearly that it is a para break.

Hmm. Now. Font for the body of the letter. Think about your tone. Clean, contemporary, neutral? Well, Ok, try it in Arial or Helvetica or whichever other sans serif text face you have.

Professional? Intimate? Authoritative? Try it in Times or Georgia or another simple, classic serif.

Maybe you should even take a look in Typewriter or a similar monospace font. Sometimes those still say 'this is a spontaneous, unencumbered communication'.

Check the inter-line spacing. Try one and a half instead of one, paricularly if your letter is brief.If you're feeling really confident, you could set an exact number of points. Try about one and a third times whatever point size the type is.

What else? Indents. Have a look at indenting the first word of each para just a little bit. Sometimes it looks old fashioned: others it helps make the letter seem more personal.

The point is that all these parameters, the typography of your letter, will dramatically change its tone, its voice, its impact and its effect. 

You don't need designers. You don't need anything but Word and a few minutes of fiddling.

The results may well increase the response to your letter dramatically.

You'll be amazed to find that the content of the letter accounts only for a part of its effectiveness. The styling accounts for the rest.

It's not aesthetics or whimsy. It's psychology.

Split test it and see.

Justifying indulgence

When times are hard, people spend their money in strange ways. Predictable ways, though. While true luxury products (high end hotel rooms, top notch health club subscriptions, leathery sedan cars) might take a bit of a bashing, 'pretend' luxuries (butterscotch caramel frothy cappucinos, extra deluxe nail chamfer packages) generally get a bit of an uplift.

Why? Well, because people are trying to cheer themselves up, put on a brave face, and have a little excess. The kind of wanton extravagance you can buy for a few pounds.

When we decide what to splash our mini-cash on, though, the question of a 'justifier' often comes into play.

How can I justify this little indulgence? Well... there are various possible answers, but if any of them apply to the products or services you or your clients offer, then you ought to think about the marketing opportunities this might create.

'It's healthy' is a justification. 'It's for my kids'. 'It's educational'. 'It's a bargain'. In the end, even 'It will do me good just knowing there's no justification for it' is a justification.

Accepting cookies

Oh how much impact you can create when you demonstrate intuitive understanding of your target group and think imaginatively.

As he exited a mid morning lecture in Cambridge, a friendly face greeted my student son with this Starbucks-scale chocolate chip cookie on a card bearing the message 'You'll Find There's More To Life at KPMG'.

Now you might think the message could have been sharper. But the empathy shown with the budget-watching and peckish teenagers KPMG would like to have feeling good about them as a prospective employer could not.

And if you fancy a competition...what might have made a better copy line to accompany the cookie? Submit your suggestions below as comments and pop your email address on. Best one by the end of Feb wins  the most impressive chocolate chip cookie I can find.

Search term tails wagging content dogs

SEO copywriting has always thrown up conflicts between the requirements of search mathematics, and those of sound, intelligible marketing communication.

But the now prevalent search strategy of optimising pages for 'long tail' keywords creates a situation which is especially hard to resolve.

(Long tail keywords are the 'long tail' of key words or phrases which may only individually be searched a handful of times a week, but which, when added together, may account for a relatively high proportion of a site's traffic. Chasing rankings on these terms is wise, because competition is likely to be less intense for them.)

Now one set of keyterms which I've been asked to optimise for twice in the last couple of weeks is those achieved by adding the name of a town or city to more generic terms.

Let me give you an example. You sell TVs. Your keywords are  'TVs', 'LCD TVs' 'Plasma TVs' etc. The problem with these is that everyone who sells TVs is chasing them.

So say your high street TV shop is in Birmingham.

If you add 'Birmingham' to those key terms, you get new terms like 'LCD TVs Birmingham'.

Now less people will search for that term, but those that do will be very likely to be near to your shop. You get the idea?

Here's the problem though.

A searcher types 'LCD TVs Birmingham' when searching, because he wants to locate somewhere in Birmingham that sells LCD TVs.

But when you or I have to integrate this naturalistically into a piece of copy, it all goes a bit haywire.

How can you, for example, naturalistically mention 'Birmingham' within the flow of copy about TV's? You can maybe do it once, here and there, but as a Birmingham based TV retailer selling online, the last thing you want to do in your copy is suggest disproportionately that you are based in any particular place. Place is irrelevant. You'll be happy to sell me a TV if I live in Glasgow, so long as I pay carriage.

So far as I can see, the only way to do this sensibly is to create a raft of pages which feature the name of every major conurbation, and which are engineered to include the words 'LCD TVs Birmingham (or wherever)' in close proximity to each other. It's hard, but everyone will know why it's there, and the page will not be a part of the site's main navigation.

But if you're an SEO writer asked by SEO technicians to do this to general page content, you should probably explain to them that they're letting an SEO tail wag a content dog.

And, at the risk of overstretching a metaphor, barking up the wrong tree.

Donate your Facebook status

You might have noticed that 'no-cost marketing' is a bit of a theme of mine right now. And I've written about Facebook 'status' lines before, too. So it won't surprise you how much I love this: Donate Your Facebook Status.

For those who don't use the Facebook social networking site, the 'status' line appears beneath a user's name, and allows his contacts to read a readily updatable sentence on his or her state of mind, concerns or similar.

I change mine every few days. Some people don't set one at all: others change it more than once a day.

But this evening I clicked to a friend's page to see that his status displayed a message about a current affairs issue close to his heart. Underneath was a link inviting me to 'Donate my status' to the same cause.

I clicked to go and check it out.

Someone has written a little plugin application which enables users to put their Status line at the disposal of the organisers of the cause in question, allowing them to display their choice of message on the 'Status' line of every Facebook user who gives them permission. Apparently it was used first during the 2008 US Election campaign.

Now Facebook Status lines are good media. they get read, and they are by their nature linked inextricably to the person (usually one of your friends or associates), who is displaying them.

It's clever marketing.

The Facebook user gets to show his or her allegiance to whatever the cause might be, and the cause get thousands, or even millions of pairs of eyeballs.

Net cost? Zero.

And two fingers to Nike and Adidas

I was driving to a meeting earlier, when I caught an item on the radio news. A young woman whose son has two fingers missing from each hand was waxing lyrical about the kind and helpful people at sports goods manufacturer Puma.

She'd written to a number of such companies, we were told, asking whether any of them might be able to adapt a pair of their goalkeeper's gloves for her son, so that he wasn't left with two empty finger pockets flapping around.

Puma, it transpired, came through big time. They sent her a standard pair of their gloves and asked her to draw on them the position of her son's hand. Then, using these as a template, they had manufactured him his own, completely custom pair of gloves. Was he happy with them, the reporter asked? Delighted, the mother trilled.

Oh, and by the way, she also added that both Nike and Adidas had responded to her request simply by saying "nothing doing".

Now I figure the radio spot was about 120 seconds. Mid-day. National radio. There are also pictures of the happy little goalkeeper displaying Puma's logo, twice, on a pile of websites and, i'll bet, in a bunch of newspapers. All secured for the cost of someone being bothered to react to a genuine consumer request for help, and a PR department or PR company on the case enough to max its value.

That's a lot of brand marketing for very little cost. Right now, that's rather smart.

Auld Acquaintance

New Year's Eve 2008. And cheery as we may all be between now and midnight, tomorrow morning will dawn soon enough bringing with it the Year of the Further Disintegrating Economy.

Only a fool would offer their view of what the year ahead holds in store as anything more than a musing. There are simply too many variables, and too many normally fixed lumps of the earth's crust moving in flux for anyone at all to predict with any confidence what lies ahead.

But business will go on, albeit without MFI, Woolworths, Adams and __________________ (add your own favourite defunct financial services provider here).

We all need to eat, clothe ourselves and keep roofs over heads. Consequently, people will do what they have always done in troubled times: use their imaginations, ingenuity and initiative to breathe life into new ventures, steer apparently doomed projects around the scariest of hairpin bends and show a resourcefulness otherwise often absent from UK business.

For we band of copywriting brothers (and sisters), it's a huge opportunity. Businesses need to market themselves harder in this economy than in one as bullish as a walk down Pamplona High Street.

New customers need to be enticed.

Old customers need to be updated.

Suppliers need to be encouraged and reassured.

Investors need accurate and regular information.

The media need to fill columns (both digital and printed).

Copywriting has previously proved its value through the French and Russian Revolutions, 2 World Wars, the Great Depression, the General Strike, the rise and fall of Communism and, in recent times, the bursting of the DotCom bubble.

It would be nuts to think it doesn't have a role to play now.

I wish you a happy, healthy and successful 2009.

The copy at the tip

I went to the tip this week. I'd been there last about a month ago.

It's one of those right-on, new age tips where everyone sorts everything and dumps it into huge containers from where it's easy for a host of specialist recyclers to take it away.

Last time I was there, there was a section named 'General Waste'. General Waste was for anything that didn't obviously belong in any of the specialist containers. Not metal. Not wood. Not hardcore. Not paper. General Waste.

Considering the wide choice of specialist containers on offer a lot of people seemed to me to be dumping their stuff in General Waste.

On this trip, however, the General Waste container had undergone a rename.

Now it was called 'Non-Recyclable Waste'.

"Has it made a difference?" I asked the yellow-jacketed guy looking after tip business.

"Oh yeah!" he replied enthusiastically. "It gets used a lot less now. Don't know why, but it definitely does."

We know why, though, don't we?

'General Waste' was a non-accusatory invitation not to bother to sort your rubbish carefully, and just to throw it into the container marked 'general'. Why not? Doesn't seem to be doing anyone any harm. It's just not sorted into types.

'Non-Recyclable Waste' is accusatory. It tells you as you read it that if you go ahead and throw anything in here, it will not get recycled, you will not have done your bit for the environment, and it will go to landfill, there to fester for centuries.

It tells you you are bad. Careless. Irresponsible.

The power of copywriting. Use it for good. Even if your job is naming the skips at the local tip.

Your status on Facebook

Society changes fast. Things that don't exist one day, matter like crazy the next. Now if you're not a user of social network site Facebook, this will mean nothing to you; but if you are, you'll know that your 'Status' is the line next to your name in which you can type a few words to tell the world what you're up to right now.

What some people tend not to realise, however, is that by virtue of Facebook's plethora of tentacle like feeds and streams, these few words can very easily end up being notified to just about everyone you know, or work with, or share membership of any of a pile of fairly tenuous 'groups' with.

It's fascinating. With scant regard for the breadth of distribution, some users update their status regularly with details so mundane that to share them is merely to elicit sympathy for the paucity of experience in their lives. Others, however, expose themselves in a far more dangerous way, seeing this as the ideal opportunity to brag about their acquisition of gadgetry or other consumer goodies. What, one wonders, possesses anyone to think that the world will think better of them for knowing they have a new iPod, iPhone, little red Corvette, cheeseburger or anything else. It won't. It's a failing on behalf of the author, a moment of self indulgence which can portray them only in a worse light than that in which they started out. (Unless, of course, they and all their associates are 12 years old.)

So. Be circumspect. In our weird, social networked society, your Facebook status is media. It's a transient poster site for your personal brand on which your friends, relatives and business associates will, consciously or subconsciously, base their current impression of who you are and where your head is.

                   

'Service users' by any other name

I'm not close enough to the lore of social services to be aware of for quite how long 'service users' has been the politically acceptable term in use to refer to the aged, the infirm, the disabled, the mentally ill and those other members of society whose care is the meat and drink of the profession.

When I Googled it just now, the ubiquity of the term in social services communications, however, suggests to me that it's been around for quite some while.

It's easy to imagine the 'meeting' which coined this term. Good, well-intentioned social care professionals, with a heady array of social sciences degrees and liberal thought processes. And a good job they did, too. From their side of the table. From the perspective of their profession, when discussing the needs and rights of those in their care, the term 'Service Users' is not only without discrimination, hurtfulness, slur or insult (or the possibility of being misconstrued as any of these); it is also a reminder to their colleagues that these most likely disadvantaged members of society are, in fact, the reason for their services to exist, and should thus be afforded every bit as much respect as the descriptor 'customer' should command in a more commercial environment.

So when doesn't this apparently sound piece of terminology work? 

I found myself writing recently for a company which is in the business of operating care homes. In rewriting their site, I needed to write profiles of each of their half dozen homes. One job of these profiles (though not the only job, of course) is to portray the homes in an encouraging and confidence-winning way to anyone charged with making arrangements for an elderly or disadvantaged relative or friend.

In this context, then, how do you refer to those who live, or attend at, care homes? Is your elderly mother appropriately described as a 'service user'? Is your long-term disabled partner? Or your mentally handicapped teenage son? Of course not. While in a detached sense even a relative or friend of such a person might be able to see the sense and decency in referring to their loved one as such, in a human, first-impact sense it feels heartless and austere. Quite the opposite, in truth, of what the good people who coined it intended.

Now the problem of course comes if the client, knowing her sector well, argues that the term 'service user' is in universal uesage and that to use anything else is just, simply, inappropriate or outmoded.

She's thinking about everything she knows, and has read, and has heard at conferences that says these people's rights are best respected by referring to them as 'service users'.

Our job is to remind her that the relatives and friends of those around whom her business is based know none of this. But they do know that to read that '........... Home respects the right of choice and decision making of its service users', they feel none of the reassurance they sense when they read that '.......... Home respects the right of choice and decision making of its residents and all others using its service'.

That's just an example, of course, and the disadvantage of writing in that way is that you can't just fire in the same phrase every time, in the way you can with 'service users'.

Each instance will require taking care of on an individual basis.

A bit like each 'service user'.

You're going to do WHAT to VAT?

It is Sunday night, gone 11pm, and I have just seen an email from a client for whom I look after a wide spread of marketing matters.

The email points out to me that all the posters we sent out to print on Friday, plus the 30,000 leaflets we sent on Thursday, plus the national press advertisement artworks we have finalised this weekend, plus all of the prices as displayed on the website (contained in a database which we manage), are going to be wrong if the Chancellor of the Exchequer makes a change to the rate of VAT.

So if you or your clients sell anything which quotes prices inclusive of VAT, you have a choice: lots of work to re-price everything... or an increase in your profit as you decide to keep prices the same, effectively meaning a bit more for you, as the Chancellor takes a bit less. This, however, completely negates thepoint of the Chancellor's initiative, which is intended to reduce prices to end consumers.

Wouldn't it make more sense to increase personal tax allowances a little and leave VAT where it is? There'd be a lot less fiddling around to do.

Writing your clients out of the recession

So is this a recession? I'd say so. Or if it's not the full-blown baby, that won't be long in coming. I'm no economist, but I can sniff the air with the best of them and the anecdotal evidence tells me that tails are down, spending is down and so something is most decidedly up.

The question is what can you do to help your clients, if you're a copywriter, or to help yourself, if you're marketing your own business?

As always, the answer has to be to do all that you can to demonstrate relevance.

You need to think long and hard about what it is that whatever business you are trying to market offers that can plausibly be held to provide its customers with a way to beat the downturn. Once you've identified it, and interrogated it to satisfy yourself that the claim holds water, you find a straightforward way of presenting this news to customers and potential customers.

This isn't a time for periferal benefits, or dancing around the edges of a business's proposition.

This is the time to know where the business you're selling really adds value...and then make sure everyone else knows too.

Lost in translation

In the great canon of Monty Python work, there is a sketch about a man up in court charged with causing a breach of the peace by publishing a phrase book in which the translations do not mean anything remotely like the phrases.

Now you may buy translation, or trust translators, as a part of your regular communications.

If you do, you must go look at this real-life gem.

English people sent the text of a road sign out for translation into Welsh. They got back the translator's Welsh language out-of office autoresponder, assumed that was the translation, and actually made it into a sign and stuck it in the road.

If it's mission critical... get someone else to read it back in translation and confirm its accuracy.

And your specialist subject is?

At a time when Radio 4 is rich with variations on the phrases 'recession', 'economic downturn' and 'the FTSE ended the day down 631 at half of **** all...', email blasts look increasingly attractive as a tactical way of getting out your message without incurring too great a cost.

In the rush to write and hit 'Send', however, it's far too easy to forget that the 'Subject' line is a critical element in the success or failure of your mail. 

It's more important than the headline on an ad or a sales letter. (At least if those are weak, there's a chance of something else on the page catching the eye.) Not so with a 'Subject' line.

If any element in the entire exercise is deserving of your copywriting attention, it is this, which is why it's worth becoming a bit of a specialist on the subject of 'Subject' lines.

• Don't be elliptical.
• Don't assume that the way you have your mail client set out is the same as everyone else. Just because you can read 12 words in a subject line does not mean that I can. Make the first 3 or 4 words stand alone to deliver your message.
• Keep your wits about you. You may only have 4 words you can depend on... but you can use them in the most surprising way.
• Don't forget that most people misunderstand anything which is not literal unless they are really concentrating.
• Don't include words which are likely to hit everyone's spam filters.
• Try to offer something. 
• Make it searchable by mail client search features which search 'Subject' alone 
• Split test. Split a section of your database and send your mail out with variations to the Subject line. See which does best and use that when mailing the rest of your list. 

Getting your mails opened is exactly the same as getting customers through the door of your shop. If it doesn't happen, it doesn't matter how well you've set out the goods on offer inside.

How luxurious is that?

A comment on the Facebook page of a colleague caught my eye in the week.

It concerns 'Luxury'.

Now luxury in its true usage evokes 'rich, comfortable and sumptuous living' (as Collins would have it).

In its marketing usage, however, it is generally deployed to play only on the hopeless longing to sample such a lifestyle.

So before you describe whatever you market as 'Luxury', heed my colleague's warning: nothing truly luxurious ever uses the word 'Luxury' to describe itself.

Using the word 'Luxury' is not dissimilar to attaching a sticker to the packaging saying, 'mid range product being marketed to people we believe to be undiscerning enough not to know the difference between it and a superior item which may bear certain similarities to it, but which is enjoyed by people of genuine taste, affluence and discernment'.

My recent silence. And its lesson.

Those who come by regularly (or, even better, those who subscribe to the all copywriters now RSS feed) might have noticed it's been some weeks since I've posted, and even wondered whether I'd given up.

My silence, sadly, has been down to dealing with the final illness and eventual passing away of my mother (plus the mass of admin which this creates) while trying to maintain some semblance of service to my clients, deal with a couple of other interests and simultaneously pay some attention to a son starting university for the first time.

So apologies for the break.

It does raise an interesting and cautionary issue though. It's all well and good to create blogs, email newsletters and other marketing platforms which maintain regular contact with your target. But who is authoring, operating and taking care of them? Is it all down to one person? And how does it look to the target if, for reasons of illness, redundancy or other unforeseen circumstances, that person is suddenly forced to break off or stop?

Seeing how your copy looks

I write visually, and almost always have done.

If someone asks me to rewrite their website, I take a screenshot of the site, import it into an editorial layout program, block out the existing content, approximate the font, size, leading and measure being applied by the stylesheet, and then begin writing.

Why?

Because it helps me get the copy spot on if I can 'see' it in the actual context in which it will be used.

I do this whether I'm writing a site, a sales letter, or a print item like a brochure. (In truth, if I'm doing a site from scratch, I'll often draft the copy straight into an HTML editor in an approximation of how I think the page might end up.)

Now this works for me (and for my clients, to whom I generally provide the 'copy visual' as we call it, as a part of my deliverable, along with the .doc copysheet which is the actual deliverable as per my Terms and Conditions).

But am I alone in doing this? Does everyone else just write in Word, or similar, without needing to 'feel' the copy in situ, or are there lots of other 'visual' writers out there?

My mate Nick

If you are prone to clubbing in South London, you might have come across my friend Nick, working his magic behind the decks.

Equally, if you're an avid South East of England water-skier, you might have spotted him wetsuited, skimming the surface of one stretch of dock or another.

If you've encountered Nick in neither of these guises, or if you are more interested in the concerns of small business than in the dance floor or the pleasures of the wake, why don't you have a look at his excellent blog True Business?

Nick is a content consultant, who began life as a business editor at AOL, went on from there to participate in the founding of UK personal finance site MoneyWorld, and has subsequently advised numerous online ventures on getting the most out of digital media through imaginative use of content.

Clever guy. Very good blog. And just ignore the occasional plugs for Microsoft stuff. I think they're one of his clients.

When the maths doesn't work

I've just been offered an interesting little project. A chap who has authored a small software application which does one very technical task which might, in principle, be of use to certain people with a professional or keen amateur interest in a certain area.

Well, it's a niche product. It's good, I would think... but it's not selling. And the chap thinks that if I rewrite his site for him, it might sell better. And indeed it might.

But my concern, which I've set out for him, is that the numbers just may not work. His product might just be of interest to such a small number of people, and so few of them will find their way to its landing page however well we market it, that the best writing in the world won't make a huge difference.

Maybe he's selling 10 units a month now. And maybe we can increase that to 20 or 30 by rewriting. (That's a 100-200% improvement.) But even if we do, will it really make that much difference for him?

Sometimes you have to acknowledge that a good product may not actually have much of a market. And the best time to do this is before you throw too much resource at giving it life.

That will be 25 guineas

I am thinking of invoicing in Guineas. Why? To confer upon the commercial practice of copywriting some professional mystique and lustre which it doesn't deserve.

What's a Guinea?

Well..OK. Maybe you're under about 40, or maybe you've never lived in the UK, or moved here after 1971.

Before the UK decimalised its currency in 1971, we had a wonderful if bizarre Pound, divided into 20 shillings, each of which then divided into 12 pence.

So pounds and shillings were the mainstay of the currency.

Guineas though, lived alongside them. There had not been a Guinea coin or note of any description since 1816, but the Guinea was still a significant part of our economy and, more interestingly, our society, until its demise in 1971.

The Guinea was a name for the sum of money One Pound and One Shilling (£1/1/-). It's modern day equivalent is thus £1.05.

What the Guinea denoted however was something remarkable for social rather than economic reasons. It denoted a more civilised way of doing business. Working men toiled for pounds and shillings, but Gentlemen bought and sold land or livestock in Guineas. (Indeed livestock auctions are one of the few places where the Guinea term still remains in parlance.)

Professional men such as Physicians or Lawyers always presented their accounts in Guineas and, I've just read, a Barrister billing 100 Guineas would traditionally retain 100 pounds, but pass the 100 shillings (£5) to his clerk.

It's a fantastic example of how branding can add value. With it's aura of aristocratic dealings, the Guinea connoted breeding and status on those who dealt in it in a way that the same sum expressed in pounds and shillings simply never could.

What's a Sarah Jessica Parker?

"We have the Sarah Jessica Parker", I heard the girl pushing the trolley filled with in-flight duty-frees offer. "Would you like that?"

Now as she'd already passed by my seat, I couldn't see what the 'Sarah Jessica Parker' was. (In truth, I only just about know who Sarah Jessica Parker is!)

Now one doesn’t have to be a genius to guess that the ‘Sarah Jessica Parker’ will be toiletries or cosmetics of some kind, of course, but being in the sort of frivolous state of mind which holidays bring on, I leaned across the aisle and asked my wife.

“What do you suppose the ‘Sarah Jessica Parker’ is?”

She thought for a moment.

“A lager,” She replied confidently. “I think it’s a 7% Danish lager brewed for the export market.”

“Yeah”, I nodded. “You’re probably right. Or else it’s a small electronic language translator which converts travellers’ vocabulary freely from and to any of 4 preconfigured European languages.”

Now apart from evidencing that I was, clearly, long overdue the holiday on which I was headed, this is actually quite a decent exercise.

Make a list of say half a dozen celebrities. Then try to find three products which each of them would lend genuine weight to by applying their name, and three more to which the application of their name would not only lend nothing but would be, in fact, clearly preposterous.

And when you’ve done it… try to figure out for yourself why George Foreman has then turned out to be the best celebrity name imaginable for a low fat griddle.

That’s the thing about rules. Some things just defy ‘em.

The word cloud

About 750 years ago, I found myself trying to write an ad campaign for a brand of sun-tan products called Hawaiian Tropic.

Rather than write a traditional headline and couple of lines of copy, as was expected, I tried to get my art director and, more importantly, my boss, to agree that what we’d have on these 2 pages of premium magazine real-estate was simply a fantastic, typographic melee of words.

The words would all be associated with the atmosphere we wanted to evoke, and therefore with the true, underlying message of the brand, but would not follow each other sequentially to deliver a thought at the end of a sentence.

No chance. No-one was having any of it.

Over the last few years, however, blogging has made the Word Cloud a familiar part of the digital landscape. In the right column of so many blogs you’ll find a ‘cloud’ of typographically larger and smaller words, arranged by size based on the apparent importance of that word to the posts appearing in that blog.

On Facebook and other social networking sites, you’ll find free-association lists provided by their authors, of words which collectively represent his or her life.

It’s a fascinating and revealing format, which leaves the reader to explore or extrapolate from the information offered.

If you’ve not tried to create a word cloud around yourself, or your business or your brand (even if you never use it for anything), it’d definitely be an hour well spent.

The confusion surrounding the coffee pot

I am not a student of the aviation industry. I know a little about the scheduled carriers I make use of here and there, but almost nothing about holiday carriers, charter airlines and the brands under which these operate.

So last week I found myself on a holiday flight branded Thomsonfly.

Nice confident, sunny branding, suggesting that what I’d probably thought of only as a hotel package company actually offered its own flights, too. Planes, attendants, documentation: all consistently branded in a happy ‘blue and beguiling smile’ signature which corporate marketers, brand strategists and creative branding consultants had almost certainly expended thousands of hours, and millions of pounds, to devise and then implement.

Only the coffee pots said ‘Britannia Airways’ on them.

Bummer.

Now as I said, I’m no aviation expert, so I’ve had to Google about to learn that Britannia (which was an independent airline) and Thomson, were both bought up in 2000 by the German company TUI, which decided in 2004 that all the planes (but not, presumably, all the coffee pots) would henceforth be branded Thomsonfly.

Not having access to this information at the time, I asked the flight attendant why her coffee pot said ‘Britannia Airways’, when her fuselage was so clearly labelled ‘Thomsonfly’.

She looked at the Britannia engraving on the coffee pot, thought for a second, and offered, “Well I suppose while they still work…”

Work? You think they’re working because they’re pouring coffee?

Noooo. They’re not working at all.

They’re not saying, “This company that you may have thought just arranged hotel packages actually operates a fleet of aeroplanes too and is a big, confident and trustworthy player in holiday scheduling”.

Instead, they are saying, “This company doesn’t take care of detail, can’t follow through its own branding programme as far as a coffee pot on its own plane, (may even, for all you know, have saved £0.50 by purchasing a secondhand coffee pot in a bankruptcy sale) and, all in all, is winging it.”

Dear Marketing People at Thomsonfly,

Buy new coffee pots. Brand them ‘Thomsonfly’ if you can afford to. Leave them unbranded if you can’t. Or, if you’re being led by accountants, take the old coffee pots into a metal workshop and have them polish the Britannia logos off the side.

You will not be charged for this branding consultancy.

5500% return on investment? No thanks.

I like small clients.

(Don't get me wrong, all you petite marketers out there.)

I like large clients of course. In fact in some ways I like them more, with their understanding timelines and their appetising Purchase Order pads.

But small clients are the grass routes of the economy, the work we do for them matters more, and the lines of communication are short. Decisions get made fast, the work gets used, thanks are generally offered with genuine gratitude, and invoices get paid.

Now a really nice lady called me yesterday evening. She is a small client, but a savvy one. She knew her own business, she had some basic feel for marketing, and I happily gave her 45 minutes of my thinking about her business problem on the phone.

This morning she was on the phone again. We spent another 30 minutes discussing her options. And we agreed that as a temporary measure until I return from vacation (she wanted to act immediately), a single page, well targetted sales letter which she could get out to the hundred or so appropriate business owners local to her base, and so core to her servicing target, would be her best bet.

"What does that cost?"

I love this bit. Always love it.

"I do work like that through my Great Sales Letters site I explained. "I charge £725 + VAT for a 1-2 page letter."

There's a pause. (You knew there was going to be, didn't you?)

"£75?"

"No. Seven hundred and twenty five pounds", I explained politely. "Plus VAT."

"It costs £725 to write a letter?"

"Well. No." I replied and took a deep breath.

"It costs £25 to write a letter. And it costs £700 for me to sort your muddled and unfocused business model into something approaching presentability, help you develop an offer around which to build a call to action, and then organise your case into a compelling form in which I can present it before a court of 100 local business owners, any one of whom, when they find your story set out in this cogent and persuasive manner, may very well hand you £5,000, or £10,000 or £20,000 worth of business. So let's say we get a 4% response, and let's say they take the middle road and each spend £10,000 with you. You will earn £40,000. Which will be a 5,500% return on your £725 investment in the letter."

There's a long silence at the other end of the line.

"Let me think about it".

Which is why I love small clients.

The touch of a client's hand

"This guy is a sweet enough guy", my ex colleague, who is an agency Account Director, grumbled. "And he's not a bad client", she went on, "but he just holds onto my hand for a bit too long when he shakes it."

Err?

I have been shaking clients' hands for 27 years. It's never happened to me. I put out my hand. The client puts out his. Or hers. We shake. We let go. No sinister lingering. No wistful retention of my fingers, or misinterpretable overfamiliarity with my palm. Not that I've noticed.

So there are 2 possibilities. The first is that I am insensitive to the subtleties of the body language of others. And the other is that my clients just don't fancy me. Dammit.

Why your copy might well cost more than your site

"But how can writing the copy for a website cost this much?" the gentleman on the other end of my phone asked. "We spent less than this on having the site built."

Well here's your answer, matey.

Your site has nothing to it, and would have required only a modicum of skill to build it. Its design is virtually templated. Its entire coding would have taken an averagely capable developer a day and a half at most. It's an empty shell, like a blank canvas before the painting is executed on it, or 100 minutes of celluloid before a movie is filmed on it.

Your copy, however, will take time and require thought, experience and craft to complete.

Where 24 separate pages of your site are created by a couple of lines of code from one .php page, the content for those 24 pages must be written individually, with care taken to put across the right message the right way on each.

The success or otherwise of your copy will determine whether your visitors can find their way around your site and feel they can be bothered to do so.

It will govern whether they like you, listen to you and, in the end, decide to do business with you.

In a nutshell, the value of your completed site lies in what it says and how it says it, rather than in the framework in which you sit the messaging.

And unless a site has particularly sophisticated technologies operating behind it in order to achieve remarkable advantages for your business model, this will always be the case.

Now...where's that Post It note?

This is not a commercial plug. It's not an affiliate link. It's just one of those moments when you discover a product you love and want to tell everyone how cool it is.

I have long been a fan of 'Lifehacker' blogger Gina Trappani, and a passionate acolyte to her philosophy of finding and using software and tricks which can lessen your pain and increase your productivity.

After years of using a spiral bound day book to keep track of tasks to be completed, I just downloaded a software beta version of a Mac application called Things.

(This is only going to be of interest if you, like me, work mainly on Macs.)

In 2 days it has wooed and seduced me. The Post It notes are gone from my desktop. My day book lies on my desk untouched.

The copywriter's obligation

If you click this link you'll be able to read the story which BBC News carried this week about a direct mail pack sent out by the Reader's Digest which appears to use particularly suggestive phrasing to lead its readers into participating in a prize draw.

The letter includes the intimation that the recipient has been preferentially selected to take part in a potentially valuable draw, but that the Digest is urging them to keep this very quiet in order to avoid invoking the envy of their friends and neighbours.

Now the psychology is obvious and well proven. The suggestion that this is such a special opportunity that you would really be best off keeping it to yourself shifts the unwary reader beyond thinking about whether the offer is of any interest (which the sender does not want them doing) and on to worrying about a whole new problem: how to keep jealous neighbours from snaffling your Reader's Digest Prize Draw mail pack because it's clearly such a great offer that it's been necessary to warn you that this is a serious risk.

Now you may think this is just silly, but keep in mind that the target of any Reader's Digest DM campaign is likely to be older and what used to be called lower middle class (C1C2 for those of you familiar with ABC socioeconomic classifications).

Recipients of this letter might of course be perfectly bright, alert and savvy...but there's also a very good chance that they will be of slightly less keen perception and judgement in these matters, may have less than full contact with the commercial world, and might get little mail and thus take very seriously that which they do receive. They are likely, too, to be of a generation which views anything printed as 'official' and so important to comply with.

Doubtless much to the chagrin of the Digest's PR people Cath Allan, the lady whose daughter has blown the whistle on this particular mail pack, looks like everyone's idea of a lovely old gran.

But the truth is that the skill of the Digest's copywriters has persuaded this lady to part with over £800 in the last 12 months to pay for books which she probably didn't want, but which were necessary in order to move to the next stage of prize draws she'd been led to believe she'd almost won already.

Now the Trading Standards Authority are unhappy about this letter, though it looks as though the Advertising Standards Authority might just about OK it. But my question is where the copywriter stands in this?

I have no idea whether this was written by an in-house writer, or by a freelancer, and of course the Digest's DM people are highly expert, and may well have requested this mechanism from their writer.

But the writer has an obligation, in my view, which cannot be excused by protesting that he or she is simply a hired gun who does whatever is in the best interests of their client.

I believe that to use your skills in a way which your professional experience tells you is likely to cause harm to innocent people, particularly vulnerable people, is morally and ethically wrong.

It cheapens your worth, slights your professionalism and is just, well, bad.

I spent my 18 year ad agency career declining to work on cigarette brands, even though I had the chance to work on several.

Then shortly after I became a freelance writer, I was offered a substantial and regular flow of work on a cigarette brand. I needed the workflow, so I agreed to do it and did it for about a year. To this day I regret it, and my only comfort is that none of the work I did ever ran, anyway.

From time to time we all find ourselves confronted with a business model, strategy or project with which we feel less than comfortable.

It's a great challenge to try and re-engineer it, taking your client with you, so that it avoids causing harm while still achieving its commercial goals.

But it's also a great feeling to say to a client, or even an employer, that you don't feel comfortable with writing something because you feel its purpose runs counter to what you believe is right.

The problem you share with Selfridges

I don't know whether you've ever been to Selfridges in the West End of London?

Selfridges has a lot of entrances. It has entrances all along its face on Oxford Street. There are 5 of them. Depending which of them you choose, you will enter the store to find yourself confronted by handbags, fragrances, fashion jewellery, watches or sunglasses.

It has entrances all along its face on Duke Street. There are 3 of those. Enter this way and you'll be greeted by handbags or women's fashion.

And there are 4 doors on its face on Orchard Street. These will present you, on entering, with jewellery and fine wine, a brasserie or the Food Hall.

It also has a car park, and 3 entrances which open directly from the car park into the store. Enter this way and you'll be standing in the Starbucks in-store concession, or men's fashion, or women's shoes.

Now imagine being Head of Merchandising at Selfridges.

You could take the view that while you have 15 entrances, bringing people into the store face to face with 12 different kinds of merchandise, you aren't going to give a second thought to any entrance other than the main one on Oxford Street because "That's the Main Door".

You could say that. You could just wish that everyone would come in through that door, because that's the way you wish they would.

If you did that, you really wouldn't need to think so hard about what you put inside all of the other entrances. You could place quite dull merchandise there, because no-one would be forming their first impression based on what they found there.

You wouldn't have to worry so much about displaying good signage to help people find their way into the rest of the store from each of these places, because you'd be imagining that no-one was going to enter through these doors.

Your life would be easy...in your own little world where all your visitors come in through the door you have chosen for them.

But let's do some maths. 15 entrances. If we guess that the grand main entrance on Oxford Street accounts for 30% of all entrances to the store, then the other 14 account for 70%. If you ignore those entrances and pretend everyone comes in by the front door, 70% of your visitors will be greeted by disarray, poor display and inadequate signage. They might not buy so much.

Now, fortunately, you are not the Merchandising Manager at Selfridges with a store full of visitors coming through 15 entrances to worry about each day.

But if you have a website, with customers finding their own way into it via a page chosen for them by Google in response to whatever they happened to search for, it might just pay you to think as if you were.

Feeling lucky

San Francisco Ad strategy planners Rapt report that 1% of all searches on Google hit the 'I'm Feeling lucky' button, and so bypass a page of search results containing ads and get flashed straight to the top choice returned against their search.

The cost of this to Google, say Rapt, is $USD 110 Million, which for the non-mathematicians among you is 0.1 Billion Dollars.

But lose no sleep on Google's account.

Their declared revenue from helping marketers get their message in front of the other 99% of searchers in the calendar year Jan 1 - Dec 31 2007 was $USD 16.594 BILLION Dollars.

Look rich for less today

"Look rich for less today."

Good line, isn't it? I pinched it from a piece of SPAM in my inbox selling fake luxury-brandname wristwatches.

The interesting thing about it is the cultural difference between the person who its author wrote it for and the person reading it, in this case me.

I'm a middle class Brit. So I've been brought up to think that "looking rich" is vulgar. And the idea of "looking rich" "for less" is almost too awful for words.

Not only could I "look rich", which I think is tacky, but I could do it on a cheapskate budget which assumes that I hang out with people too unsophisticated to recognise the fakery, or give a damn that I am a fellow who thinks cheap tacky fakes are OK.

Imagine I'm in Africa though. Or the Middle East. Or Eastern Europe. Places where the sensibilities are different. Not the sensibilities of the educated international elite amongst their populations. The sensibilities of their broad, urban wannabe masses (who are not so different, incidentally, from our urban wannabe masses). The people who want the jewellery, the cars, the trainers, the fragrances they see in American movies and European magazines.

These are people for whom "looking" rich is cool, and where doing it "for less today" is estimable, because getting a 'bargain' is a great thing.

So you and I might recoil when we read that line.

But I'm willing to bet that it's spamming author knows precisely what he's doing.

Why Gordon Brown is such an awful webpage

Tony the Webpage.

He was well laid out. He had a sharp, tightly constructed headline that delivered its message, and a few short and well utilised paras of copy that underpinned the message with some salient (even if untrue) facts and sent you away knowing what he wanted you to know.

(He may have spun, lied or whatever else you would accuse him of, but he communicated. Told you what he wanted you to know.)

Now Gordon the Webpage.

Gordon is the worst kind of webpage. Gordon has a poor layout. It's hard to know where to look when you look at Gordon. Gordon is what happens if you refuse to acknowledge the way the user uses the medium. Gordon is what happens if you insist on sticking all of your knowledge and expertise down on your page with a dull subject title rather than a headline, and hope that your readers will plow through it and emerge fifteen minutes later nodding in agreement with you.

They won't.

They will click off and surf over to David the Webpage.

Who is not a webpage at all.

But more of a splash intro.

These other people called Copywriters

I smell confusion. Its odour has been in the air for a couple of years, but now its stench is there every time I surf around and it's time to reach for the copywriting air-freshener and dispel it.

Copywriters. We know what we are. We are people who write commercially oriented text to be used in corporate or marketing applications of one kind or another. We are likely to have commercial and marketing knowledge. We may be given more to an editorial approach, or may be intrinsically conceptual in our skills. We may be specialist in IT, financial services or pharmaceuticals, or we may be generalists, hoping that the next project will be fundamentally different from the last.

All of these criteria fairly describe a copywriter. We write for other people's organisations and businesses, using our skills to convey information the business itself needs to get across.

That's what we are.

What we are not is people who operate elaborate programs which involve setting up hundreds of websites to earn incremental incomes from affiliate programs, or parked domain advertising, or so-called 'business opportunity' DVD publishing. Nor are we people who stage five day conferences in concert arenas to explain to people who yearn to be rich how we, ourselves, make millions of dollars, pounds, euros or dinars every year from our websites. No, sir. Such people are not copywriters, and it's just plain confusing of them to appropriate our name.

There is a name for what these people are. They are internet marketers. Some of them, the best of them, are quite brilliant people who have combined their understanding of internet traffic with their ability to manage lists of willing acolytes to devise niche marketing strategies which have indeed made them very wealthy, and there's nothing wrong with that.

But they are not copywriters.

So where does the confusion come from?

From direct marketing, of course. The internet marketers are generally operators of direct marketing businesses of one kind or another. And direct marketing depends on the skills of a copywriter to persuade a surfer or recipient that the landing page he's on, or letter he's holding, offers the immediate opportunity to purchase the answer to his wildest dreams.

So internet marketers do use the services of copywriters. And some internet marketers are indeed, themselves, superb copywriters.

But they really have to rid themselves of their identity confusion.

When they write the copy to sell their stuff, they are copywriting, sure enough.

When they sell their stuff, cut their databases, hold their seminars, they are internet marketers.

But only if they regularly take on and solve the problems of third-party businesses in need of communications expertise are they what you or I should feel OK with calling a copywriter.

Ooh.

That feels so much better.

Where That Sale Went

I need a piece of slate to cap a brick pier. I want it 36cm wide x 24cm deep x 2.4cm thick. And I want a hole drilled in the centre to pass a pipe through.

I was driving in slow traffic today when an estate car came alongside me, with the name of a local tiling company liveried down the side, and the information that 'slate' was amongst their specialities.

I dropped my window, beckoned to the driver to drop his, and told him I needed a piece of slate cutting and drilling and asking if he could do it.

"Sure", he replied, and passed his card to me through the two open windows.

I drove off, fully meaning to call him later, describe my piece of slate, make an arrangement to pay him, and order it up.

Except that's not what happened.

Once I was back at my desk, it just seemed easy and natural to Google for someone who could provide this to me in return for a quick email correspondence and a payment over the phone.

And that, which is just the way of the world, is how I come to have ordered my piece of slate from a company in Cornwall, and how a sale which the guy in the estate car must have felt certain was in the bag disappeared into thin air.

Direct Mail, Internet Marketing and Short Skirts

I threw a valuable morning this week at the Direct Marketing Fair at Earls Court, which was sharing the hall, conveniently, with the Internet Marketing Fair.

On one side of the room: database-genius companies whose solutions I don't pretend to understand but who could doubtless show you how to get a mailpack in front of Osama Bin Laden.

On the other side of the room: mind-numbingly brilliant people with solutions doing impossible things...like recutting your web content dynamically to build millions of instantly optimised extra pages for your site while you have a cup of coffee.

Yet on both sides of the room...just here and there...were skinny blonde women in absurdly short and tight skirts manning stands, presumably, because the MDs of some of these brilliant, cutting edge, 21st century companies still feel that a blonde in a short skirt might just be needed to close the deal.

Singles Day

I love 'The Apprentice'. It seems to me so unlikely that so many self satisfied yet utterly dim-witted people should have volunteered to reveal on national TV how very, very stupid they are.

This week, they were set as a task to conceive a new event for the greetings card industry, and to create a range of cards to capitalise on this event.

The brainwave of the less dim of the two teams was to create 'Singles Day'; a day on which people would celebrate the freedom of the Single by sending their single buddies greetings cards. Now this is not a hopeless concept. In truth, I think it's very plausible.

The best bit, however, was that it took 5 people over 3 hours to decide that there should be an apostrophe after the final 's' of 'Singles'. Like this: Singles' Day. In order to confirm his, they apparently needed to call the Editor of the Daily Telegraph.

Now...you know...I know...everyone on Earth knows...that this is grammatically correct.

But in my view...they were wrong!

It's a marketing choice as much as a grammatical one.

Singles Day is an event. If it takes off it will be named here, there and everywhere. And when it is, the pedantic apostrophe, however correct, will serve only to hinder its clarity.

(Even on a grammatical level, that apostrophe isn't obligatory. Singles' Day - the Singles are the possessive noun, 'owning' the Day. Singles Day - the Singles are the object being celebrated by the subject, the Day.)

Post-rationalise it however you like, but forget the apostrophe. It's just cleaner.

Forum posting. A 10 minute investment in your marketing.

You'd love your site to be on the first page of Google for your key searches.

But it isn't going to get there all by itself.

If you're big enough your best bet now, with SEO being both time consuming and complicated, is to hire in an SEO company.

If you're not quite in that league yet, though, but would like to do some things to help yourself, you'll be amazed by how much good you can do by investing the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee every day into a little homegrown SEO.

Here's one to start you off. Find 2 or 3 forums that deal with the business sector you're in.

Sign up.

Set up your signature (the bit that will appear automatically each time you post) to include the URL of your site.

Then go to one or other forum each day and post. Either add a reply to something someone else has posted, or post on a completely new but relevant subject. The only thing you should avoid doing, as it just tends to irritate other members of the forum, is overtly 'selling' your products or services.

The point is that each time you post, you will generate a new backlink to your website.

(A backlink is a link from another site to your site.)

Google's web crawlers love them: the more you have, the more 'important' Google deems you to be.

The more important Google deems you to be, the higher you go up the search results.

Free. Easy. Effective.

All on a page

Lots of people call me, after seeing my website, to talk over projects.

And often, at the end of our conversation, they will tell me that they now have to go and get their boss or colleague's approval to hire me.

But what are they going to use to persuade their boss that I'd be a good bet to help them?

The person with whom I've been speaking has seen my site: their boss hasn't.

To this end, I've summarised all of the key information I'd like the boss to see into a single page A4 .pdf, and put it on my site as a download, clearly linked on the homepage.

Now anyone who wants to can print off a single page to take into a meeting, and I'm happy that that page will speak for me. (Here...take a look at it.)

Are you in the same situation? Could YOUR business use one of these, perhaps? Or any of your clients' businesses?

The medium and the message

Go look at this! Chocolate people Thorntons have launched a service that lets you send a boxed, edible, text-style message using 2 or 3 rows of 11 small, square chocolate truffles, each with a letter piped on top in chocolate.

Why am I writing about it? Because it's a smart, fun, contemporary way to sell their chocolates, and get themselves talked about, both of which deserve recognition.

And because honing any message to make it work in 22 or 33 characters is hard, as anyone who writes Adwords campaigns will testify.

Make My Logo Bigger Cream

I think the days of clients who believe that their logo must always be huge, and that every last square centimetre of an ad, site, or brochure must be filled up in order to get full value from the money they're spending on it, have largely gone. But if you still have the odd client of this kind, 'Make My Logo Bigger Cream' might just solve your Xmas gift problems.

Bad news first

We are creative people. We make something in which we vest a part of our creative soul. And even I, who considers myself far more of a commercial tool than as any kind of artist, sees each piece that I send off to a client as something original: something 'created'.

As creative souls, we scar easily. Particularly in the first day or so after we create something, we are sensitive about how it will be received. We long for the approval of our client, partly so we will know that the job is progressing smoothly and the client is happy, but mainly because we want what we have created to be liked. Not to mention admired.

Now a client to whom I had yesterday sent the first of 10 pieces which he had commissioned, just so he could comment on the first one before I write all the rest, called me this morning.

Fortunately, I have written for him before, and have come to know his approach.

He opened with the fact that I had included a piece of vernacular expression which he felt was inappropriate to his brand tone.

ME (bit crestfallen): OK. Of course. I should have spotted that. Not a problem.

Next he told me that he really felt I'd underplayed the call to action.

ME (more crestfallen): Oh. Er...Ok. Let me look at it. I'll do it another way.

By this point, I'm just a bit sad, because I feel that he doesn't like what I've written for him: doesn't like my 'creation'.

And then, almost as an afterthought, he drops in, "But apart from those couple of things, I'm really cock-a-hoop with it!"

F****** ***i!!!!! Why didn't you say that first? Why didn't you start off by saying, "Hi Laurence. Really delighted with this. Love it. There are just a couple of little things I'd like you to look at, but overall, it's terrific!"

Even after 25 years, I like people to like the work I do for them. I want them to pat me on the head for it, and I'll do anything for them if they start off by doing that.

Point is...most clients you will work with will not be trained, professional marketers, and will not have the experience of commissioning any kind of creative work to realise that creative people (copywriters included) have fragile egos and respond best when handled with a little care. They are far more likely to simply weigh in with what they don't like about what you've done, than they are to tell you what they do like.

Don't be fazed by it. If the conversation doesn't open with, "You know, this is so awful I don't even know where to start", there's every chance that your client is very happy with most of what you've done, but just doesn't know how much you long to hear him say so.

Virgins, Football Clubs and SPAM filters

Have you had that thing happen to you where you mail someone to ask why they haven't replied to a mail you've sent them, and they reply that they have indeed replied, but that you never seem to receive or reply to anything they send you?

If you have any kind of SPAM filter turned on or SPAM rules applied in Outlook, go check the folder to which the filter diverts suspicious items. There, more than likely, you will find the missing items.

I had just such an exchange this afternoon with the Head of Comms at a company with whom I'm talking over a project. I couldn't see any reason at all why mail from the lady in question was being dumped in the SPAM, while that from her colleague was arriving safely.

And then I checked my filter rules, including those that I set up to remove 'e-porn' spammers. Guess what. The rules had picked up the first two syllables of the client's name, which happened to be Virginia, and decided to mark her correspondence as suspect.

"Fine", I hear you say, "but that is a total one-off!"

But it isn't.

I have a friend who used to run an e-com business which provided some functionality to the websites of Premiership soccer clubs.

Not much good to him, then, that the list of 'suspect' swear words pre-installed in his mail checker took exception to the 'Arse' in 'Arsenal'; which club was, by virtue of his contract with what was then Granada Media, one of his 2 busiest sites.

Two Words

I went to see a new client. Only our second meeting. 8.30am.

I pulled into their car park a few minutes later than I'd have liked, looking for where it might be OK to park. You don't want to park in other people's spaces at the start of the day.

I was on the last minute. I glanced at some sign cards positioned at the head of the nearest spaces, expecting to read 'DO NOT PARK' or 'DIRECTORS ONLY' or, if I was lucky, 'VISITORS'.

But there, on the card at the head of the third bay, was my name. Totally unexpected. In big, clear type on a sheet of A4, slipped in behind a transparent cover.

Suddenly I know i) where to park; ii) that they haven't forgotten our meeting; iii) that the person I am meeting with cares enough about meeting with me to sort out a place for me to park and iv) that this is a company that takes care over details.

That's copywriting. 2 words, and only someone's name at that, doing 4 jobs beautifully.

Is blogging really a marketing activity?

Blogging amazes me. And scares me. I'm a far from expert blogger, and the purpose of this blog makes the spontaneity which makes the medium so powerful seem inappropriate. But I love blog reading. I love the uninhibited candour of those who can and will get up and share the contents of their mind with strangers. I love the edginess of their blogs. I love the vigour and sexiness. I have frequently found myself brought to tears, made to laugh out loud or placed in sheer awe of the writing skills and unexpected enthusiasms of the authors. But is blogging really a business skill?

In a large business, I'm not certain that it is. The endevour of blog producing will always be likely to seem contrived, as though something essentially 'free spirited' has been coerced for commercial gain.

But not so in a small business. The blog of a hairdresser, or a painter and decorator, or a software developer, or an accountant or, dare I say it, a copywriter, can be personal, informative and image building. It can establish authority in the field and introduce the author to a new, loyal and affectionate readership some of whom may, in time, become customers.

If you plan to blog on behalf of someone else, as a copywriting task, be warned: it's very hard indeed to simulate the passion of ownership which good blogging requires.

But if you plan to use it as a tool in your own business, then go ahead. If you get it right, you'll enrich the world.

Padding

I am cracking through a client web project. The client has supplied his own copy draft for every section, along with an indication of how long he sees each section ending up. (The draft is useful, in as much as it does contain the info needed for each section, already sourced and collated.) I have, however, no idea how he arrived at these proposed lengths. Reading through his draft reveals that a subject in which he has, say, two short points to make, will be wrapped up in so much repetition and what I assume he imagines to be 'business-speak', that it spins on to five or six paragraphs. It is, of course, unintelligible. The answer is always to say what there is to be said, clearly and without fuss, and then move on. Any piece needs to be as long as it needs to be. After that it's waffle.

Making News

Transience is a powerful quality. The idea that something I see on your site is here, now, but may not be here next week, or tomorrow, because your business is a living, vibrant thing, and your site reflects that, is compelling.

If you have no direct control over the content of your website, try to get it. Ask your web developer what it woud cost to give you a content management system that lets you use your site actively.

Get yourself the freedom to add copy, or rewrite bits you don't like, on a daily or weekly basis. See the site as something you change around, or add bits to daily, or at least weekly. Build a wish-list of extra function or content that would make your site more effective. A small, planned investment twice a year, say, will prevent your site becoming frozen in time, with the impression that the same fate has befallen your business.