How to be a copywriter

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Michel De Montaigne and my flagging self-esteem

What happens when you’re promised work and it doesn’t materialise? Feel like throwing a tantrum and sticking your bottom lip out like a surf board? Yes I feel like that, especially right now. You feel like you’ve given your all. You couldn’t…

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How To Use TripAdvisor To Create Enticing Travel Content

Copywriting Skills

Your team has finally decided on the content for your homepage –and it’s pretty freakin’ awesome. Maybe you’re using an image of a sky-piercing mountain against an azure sky or a photo of your palm-fringed infinity pool in all its…

Freelancing: a Complete Guide to Setting and Negotiating Rates

Freelancing

What's the most common question I receive from aspiring freelancers of all types? "What's the key when setting and negotiating rates?" The question comes packaged in various different guises — whether it is a beginner dipping their toes…

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How to prevent plagiarism from those digital scoundrals

Content & Strategy Copywriting Skills

The web is the Wild West as far as copyright is concerned. The digital world may be all about sharing, but if you’ve ever involuntarily “shared” your last can of beer with your sneaky, bearded colleague, you’ll know that there is a very…

Copywriting and Art: Where does one start and the other begin?

Copywriting Skills

As a young man who still lives with his parents, I often retreat to the comfort and solitude of my bedroom to escape either Holby City, or the gentle bigotry one might expect from a couple of sexagenarians. Last night this very predicament…

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Bad Lyrics: When lyrics hit the wrong note

Content & Strategy Copywriting Skills

So there we were, cheerfully copywriting away with the radio on (quietly of course), when our ears were viciously assaulted by the first lines of the Girls Aloud single, Beautiful Cause You Love Me: Standing over the basin/I’ve been washing…

Why I’ll Never Call Myself a Killer-Badass Copywriter

Content & Strategy Copywriting Skills

Frankly, I’m awkward. Adorably so. But awkward none the less. Recently someone described me as “smart.” Which I was pretty chuffed about. Who doesn’t secretly believe they’re more intelligent than other people (ahem)? And then went…

Words or pictures. Which are more important?

Content & Strategy

Copywriting for websites, brochures and blogs is all about words, isn’t it? Yes, finding the right words that spur potential customers to hire you is crucial. But pictures can be just as important. Research shows people are more likely…

What’s it like to be an Advertising Copywriter? The Inside Story on Iced Tea and Rejection

Advertising Content & Strategy Copywriting Skills

Housed along many inner streets of major cities across the world, there’s a magical place where scatter-brains get paid to think and dink around all day. To pump nerf balls and adjust swivel-chairs from the ground up and then back again. A…