Entries from November 2007 ↓

Does your writing have personality? If you answer yes, then does it have enough?

If your writing has personality it will be more engaging and interesting. It will come across as more honest and trustworthy.

Not every form of writing needs to benefit from bags of personality. In a lot of serious news journalism, for example, objectivity is more important. In academic essays and exam papers, facts count for far more than personality.

But in letters, blogs, novels, even business reports, injecting some personality into your writing will almost certainly make it more successful. Continue reading →

There’s two kinds of sales copy on the internet - too long and too short. Continue reading →

Word of the day: audacious.

It’s not just a word to use in your writing. It’s a whole attitude to writing. Be audacious, because that way you’re more interesting. And so is your writing.

I can do no better than refer you to the thoughts of the inimitable skelliewag on the subject:

If you’re not afraid to be rejected, you keep putting your hand up. If you’re not afraid to be ignored, you keep putting yourself out there. If you’re not afraid to be criticized, you do exactly what you want…

The best thing about audacity is that it’s not a quality you either possess or you don’t. It’s not the same as beauty, or a gorgeous singing voice.

Audacity is a practice. Do audacious things, and you become audacious.

So next time you’re reading through your blog post, thinking about the next chapter of your novel, or struggling with copy for company leaflets, stop and add a little audacity just to liven things up. Don’t settle for good enough. Ask, is it audacious enough to get noticed?

Anyone who writes may also need to interview people to generate material. It can be intimidating at first, but it gets easier with practice.

And it’s something you should practice, because it’s a core skill for a writer.

So, here are my top ten tips for good interviewing (I’m sure you can add more. Please do so in the comments). Continue reading →

My previous post on writing as you talk has been wildly successful in the comments department (relatively, of course), so I’d like to clarify for a moment.

Of course you don’t write exactly as you talk. That would be stupid. Continue reading →

If you can’t get round to writing, the problem could be that you’re just not in the right frame of mind. And maybe you never quite get into the right mindset for putting your words on paper. But you can change this, you can get yourself into the writing zone.

Writers get in the zone, too.

You’ve probably heard about being in the zone or ‘in flow’ from sports. When a player’s in the zone, they are almost unbeatable, like everything just comes so naturally to them.

It’s a big subject this, but essentially it boils down to freeing your unconscious mind and letting it take charge for a change. When you do, amazing things can happen.

But can that work for writing? It can and it does. Continue reading →

If you’ve read my post on the number one reason you find writing difficult, you’ll know it’s because you adopt a different, more formal tone when you sit down at a keyboard or pick up a pen. Now here’s three more reasons:

1) You haven’t thought through what you want to say

That’s bound to make things difficult. Take a spin around the room and talk it through with yourself (silently in your head is best. Doing this out loud gets you funny looks from the rest of the family / neighbours).

2) You haven’t done your research

You’ll need the facts to hand, and ideally uploaded into your mind, before you start. I find this is the most important part of a writing task. I get everything sorted in my mind, with the facts assembled, and then the words flow out once they are ready.

3) You’re trying to make it perfect.

Write a draft, a rough version, a sketch. You’ll be surprise how often it actually turns out really good anyhow, when you’re not trying too hard. And remember, there’s usually time to edit it later.

To get the writing juices flowing, you need to really know who you are writing for. But not just in an intellectual way. You need to picture them, know them.

Don’t try to write for the general public, or anyone who might be out there. Write for one person. Just one. Continue reading →

(Note: this article now comes with a health warning and partial retraction from the author).

One of the main reasons people find it difficult to write is because they adopt a more formal tone of voice as soon as there are words on paper (or the screen). It’s the fault of our education systems.

When people sit down to write, they suddenly come over all formal, or tongue-tied, or pompous. They start using a learnt tone of voice: Learnt from school, college, university, maybe the workplace. They start worrying about sounding important, and the structure of their sentences. They also start to waffle a lot - perhaps because they learnt to write by filling up word quotas for school essays.

Write how you talk.

What you need to do is write how you talk. With a little more care, clearly. You have the chance to think it through first and apply some structure. You have the chance to edit and improve. You should do these things.

But the tone of voice should be informal. Write how you talk. It sounds easy, but it often takes years to learn. Continue reading →

What are you offering your customers? Is it value? Stop. Think again.

Whether you are creating a marketing campaign for a major company or just trying to sell some information products off your blog, it’s too tempting to reach for the easy offer - ‘value.’ Continue reading →

Copywriting advice on the web tends to focus on direct selling. But that’s only one part of copywriting.

It’s understandable why this should be the case. The web is a place where a lot of direct selling takes place. It’s a technique that a lot or people are interested in because they have products they want to sell on websites.

But a lot of copywriting isn’t about getting people to click on a buy button. It isn’t just about getting people to ‘buy now.’ Continue reading →

If you’re paying a copywriter to do a job, you may not care about keeping them happy. On the other hand, if they are happy, they’ll do a better job and work more efficiently, which will help keep the price down.

So how can you help your copywriter to produce excellent work and keep them happy into the bargain?

Continue reading →

Relax, I’m not going to try to sell you an e-book. Or anything else for that matter.

Yes, wouldn’t it be amazing if you could get some real information about hypnotic writing, without all the hype and brouhaha?

You probably know that there’s such a thing as hypnotic writing, and you’re intelligent enough to know….

OK, I’ll stop it now. Above are just a few words and phrases which are important in the technique of hypnotic writing. But, I promise you, the rest of this post is going to be written in something approaching normal language (or as close as I can get, at any rate).

Hypnotic writing does exist. Hypnosis does exist. Can you use hypnosis to get anything you want in life? I doubt it. Can you sell ice to eskimos with hypnotic writing? Nah, I don’t think so.

But can a knowledge of these ideas help your writing? Yes, I think it can. Continue reading →

It’s a truism of the web that people read ‘differently.’ It’s a new type of media and because reading habits appear to be different to books or magazines, a lot of people seem to think that makes the web a special case. Uniquely different.

They’re wrong.

People think marketing speak is garbage. Do you think the web generation was the first to notice?

Do people read books the same ways they read newspapers? Or letters the same way they read magazines? Do they read cereal packets the same way as travel guides? Do they read neon signs the same way as post-it notes? Is the Internet uniquely different in the way people read ? No it isn’t. Continue reading →

Writing copy that concentrates on keywords too much can become very bad marketing. Why? because it tends to focus on the features of the product or service too much, and not the benefits to the user. That’s bad marketing.

The customer may be searching for “lawn mowers”‘ but what he wants is short grass

It’s something you have to be aware of whenever creating copy for your website. You have to achieve a balance between writing for people or writing for search engine robots. Continue reading →