Booles rules for seasonal success
Work, like the seasons, tends to follow a certain pattern. In the public sector, January is all go. There’s pressure to spend budgets by the end of the financial year, projects are reaching the end of their production cycle and there’s proofreading galore to get publications to print, not to mention final stage testing for websites. Surviving this quarter is no mean feat, but understanding the seasons of your work cycle can make your life much easier when it comes to hiring freelancers. Booles...
5 Direct Marketing Crimes to Avoid When Sending Xmas Cards
Direct marketing uses techniques to get your message to your target audience, directly. The cornerstone is sending direct mail. And many of us, at this time of year will be thinking about sending Xmas cards. But it’s so easy to get it wrong. Here are the five top crimes to avoid: Using out of date mailing lists. The message should be tailored, personalised not just to the recipient but usually to other people living at the same address So consider including new members of the family – this...
Why less costs more – Tips for avoiding big bills
The psychology of the supermarket shop sometimes seeps into the mind of a client. We’re used to going in to pick up a toilet roll and waddling to the car with enough BOGOF rolls to insulate the attic. But getting more for our marketing pound doesn’t necessarily mean volume. Less often costs more. Because it’s much harder to come up with the three words that epitomize your brand (Coke Is It or Nike’s Just Do It), than it is to write a guide to brand values. Here’s how to avoid big bills. Do as...
Writers working with designers – how to avoid problems
This week I was asked what kind of work I would most like if I could work on anything. To my surprise I waxed lyrical about my current project. And realised it was because I have worked with the designer from the very start. So what? Well, it actually happens far less often than you’d think. It’s not uncommon for a writer to be asked to ‘give us 150 words for the panel on the home page’ where the template is fixed, the copy dictated by where images have been placed. This approach works, but...
For a long time I’ve had my suspicions…
Il y a longtemps…No I haven’t a clue what it means either but if you used it in a French exam answer you got an extra mark. It was one of several phrases that I’d cram into the first paragraph, irrespective of topic, in order to be awarded maximum marks. The aim was to get these key phrases out of the way before attacking the rest of the essay. And this seems to be the approach towards website content. Get as many keywords into the first 250 words on the home page so that the spiders will rank...
For Sale, Baby clothes. Never used
As legend has it, Ernest Hemingway was asked if he knew the shortest story in the English language. He is said to have answered: "For sale: Baby clothes, never used." Impressive and less than 140 characters. Much as Da Vinci came up with the idea of the parachute before the plane was even invented Hemingway clearly anticipated Twitter. If Hemingway were alive today would he be as prolific or would he spend his days blogging about his attempts to write the Great American Novel? Like so many...
Are you babysitting the people who are supposed to make your life easier?
This is the only industry where we don’t set the price. The client tells us how much they are prepared to spend and we freelancers respond. Let me put it another way. You wouldn’t go to a plumber and say ‘I want to pay between £500 and £2K, how much would a new bathroom cost?’. And so getting hired comes down to guessing what hourly cost the client has in mind. And some clients are looking for the cheapest option. But look at the price you may end up paying. If you need to spend time...
Are you tweeting to me or babbling to yourself?
When you work as a freelancer the latest developments in social media are as natural as the TV remote control. Or so the myth goes; that we tweet relentlessly, sit in coffee shops poring over our wi-fi enabled laptops and could work up a mountain thanks to our iphones. This is all rubbish of course. The expectation is that somehow, by virtue of working freelance, you know all about the latest developments. The reality is that we work in isolation and could be blithely unaware of latest...
I love muther but not Times New Roman
I can’t work in anything but Tahoma. The first thing I do if I’m editing is change the font from Times New Roman or Arial. Anything that comes in either of those two fonts is, for me, the equivalent of the institutional green paint used in prisons, public toilets and schools. And I can’t start writing unless it’s Tahoma. It just doesn’t seem like my words when I see them on the screen in another font. Am I stuck in a rut? I’m wary. As the saying goes “the only difference between a comfortable...
Seen any good films…sorry…UFOs recently? The persuasive powers of content
Someone once told me I was suggestible. And I believed them. A couple of Christmases ago a friend was commissioned to write a New Years resolution piece for a national paper. She was to write about her attempt to give up smoking. Come 1 January she would be giving up with Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking. I had never heard of him or his method. On the way home from the pub I popped into a book shop and found the self-help section with its row upon row of Allen Carr’s (not to be confused...