For those of you not following the goings-on at this year’s Hay Literary Festival, Simon Horobin, an Oxford professor, has declared time on the apostrophe. Continue reading
Grammar Schlammar – they’re, their and there
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Category Archives: Copywriting and marketing
This week’s rant: Facebook and the art of Plain English
Did you get that email, suspiciously sent during the Thanksgiving holiday, asking Facebookers to read the proposed privacy policy and data use policies and comment on them? I dutifully clicked on the link and took a gander at the documents. What have I learned? Not a thing about their proposed changes but an awful lot about language and Facebook’s inability to communicate well with their users. Continue reading
Writing advice from Copyblogger – keep at it!
Taking a break from my writing today, I came across this on Copyblogger. The.best.advice.ever. Continue reading
If you build your home page right, they will come!
Okay, so I’ve ripped off a line from Field of Dreams, but here’s the thing. These days, life moves pretty fast (sorry, Ferris). People don’t have the time to try and figure out what your business is all about so you’ve got to make sure that the first page they see on your site states one big thing:
What’s in it for me? (no, not you, them, your currently hypothetical customers)
Continue reading
Are your emails duller than a bag of butter knives?
Rant of the week!
In the last week, I’ve read a number of supposedly sales emails that made me want to fall asleep/whack my head against the wall repeatedly. How do these people survive in the real world? Fifty buck words, long paragraphs of rambling sentences, never.getting.to.the.point. It’s infuriating!
Now, most people will instantly delete these types of emails. Not me, these are an education for me in how not to engage your audience. So, here’s:
How to write a sales email that doesn’t make your reader want to whack their head against the nearest wall! Continue reading
Thinking about video for your business? Read this first!
Having worked in corporate video, I’ve seen a lot of business videos, some great, some awful. One of the worst? Any with me in them! See that picture? I’m notoriously camera shy, preferring to be the one taking the pictures rather than being in the spotlight. I know what I look and sound like on video and it ain’t pretty! Think Essex, UK fishwife with a dash of laconic NoCal. So, you won’t ever see videos of me on my website.
But, everyone‘s doing video these days, you cry. We need to have a Youtube presence, you screech! True, but not everyone needs to put themselves in the spotlight to help their business shine (corny line, I know, it’s been a long week!).
If you’re determined to use video to publicise your business, new service or system, here’s some advice before you go any further! Continue reading
Copy with a Conscience is expanding!
Introducing ‘Comms with a Conscience’
Did you spot it? Look up the page…see that header? My logo is no longer all about copywriting.
Why the change?
Google thinks I’m a man – an experiment in gender and the internet
Google’s Gender Reassignment
You all saw the information about Google’s Ad Preferences last week - Facebook and Twitter were awash with people checking out what box Google had pegged them into. For my part, I came up as 35-44 (correct) and a man (nope, definitely not).
What’s Google playing at?
Take a look at Sarah Kessler’s article on this and you’ll see a large number of commenters who are female in real life but, according to Google, male in their internet life. Kashmir Hill, over at Forbes.com, explains how Google does it.
I very much doubt lowly little me would ever get an interview with the Google ad supremos or the giant market research companies, such as Neilsen, so I’m conducting an experiment instead. Continue reading