Posts Tagged ‘freelance copywriter’
We’ve all seen it. A lovely looking website or brochure destroyed by self-centred, grammatically inept, over-complicated copywriting.
If you’re a company reading this, please consider the sanity of your poor designer. Most importantly, think about what you want your new site, brochure, advert or newsletter to do.
Now, please, close the document, put the keyboard to the side, put your pen back in the drawer and step away from the copy.
Firstly, writing about your own business in an interesting and valuable way is hard. You’re too close to it to give the message the right perspective. Good marketing copy positions itself on the audience and its needs, fears and frustrations – not on telling the world how great you think you are. It’s easily done because you’re enthusiastic about what you but your readers need to understand the benefits first.
Secondly, writing good copy takes time. Many people can edit someone else’s copy but starting that copy from scratch, faced with a stark, blank sheet of paper requires a different approach altogether. Time and time again, designers are left in limbo waiting for clients to deliver the copy to finish the job far beyond the quoted deadline date.
Thirdly, marketing copy needs to have a purpose. You may be able to write, but do you know how to generate a response?
Online copy needs to work with the design of the website and the search engines. Remember, your business needs to appear in the search engines when people search for the product or service you provide – not just your company name. Optimising copy is a science. It takes research and effort.
The same goes for traditional media like advertising, press releases, direct mail, and newsletters. You need to make your words interesting and your message irresistible.
What’s going to make your promotion stand out from everyone else’s? What’s going to make your reader pick up the phone or send you an e-mail?
Do yourself a favour…and your designer. Get a copywriter onboard and see the difference it makes. The good ones will transform how the world sees and reacts to you. Employing a good writer is always money well spent.
Need a copywriter? Find one here.
With office space at a premium, a growing number of designers, writers and creative freelancers are looking for better alternatives to dubiously wedging their laptops onto already overcrowded, cappuccino stained tables in noisy, push-chair filled coffee shops.
It seems that hot-desking has provided the unlikely solution…but not the hot-desking we once knew. At one time, these flexible, rent-by-the-hour desks were the casual, use-‘em-and-leave-’em luxuries only afforded by travelling businessmen who required an impersonal, claustrophobic box with suitably snooty concierge. That is until a few creative agencies stepped up to offer something altogether more fun, and far cooler, than the old-school stuffy beech-veneer desk with matching colour plastic cup filled with something masquerading as tea.
As more design and advertising agencies cut back on permanent staff and increase their use of freelancers, creative’s have had little choice but to become more mobile, flitting between clients, agencies and their home office with iPhone in one hand, super lightweight laptop in the other, portfolio balanced on their head. All well and good, but, there has been an unexpected consequence to all of this flexibility: the death of the creative buzz.
