No judgement: a better way to lift your writing
“If you use these words in your marketing, your marketing is bad and you should feel bad.” The author — a branding and marketing consultant — reeled off his list of trigger words. Then helpfully provided his contact details, should you need someone to rescue you from a pit of self-loathing.
Editing your own work: what is ‘good enough?’
How do we set standards for the quality of our writing? And how do we apply them so they work for us, not against us?
How to get ideas for your blog
You’ve decided that you need a blog. It’s all beautifully designed. And there’s nothing in it.
Instead of waiting for inspiration to arrive out of the blue, use these questions to help get the ideas flowing.
Long content: don’t get caught by the volume trap
With the recent rise of content marketing, there’s a lot of pressure to produce. “Your business will succeed if you churn out content,” the advice goes. The more the better. One article I read recently states that longer articles are more likely to go viral. The research just doesn’t support this advice.
How you can beat writers block every time
You know the feeling: you stare at a blank page and it just stares back at you. You’re not sure where to start writing, and when you do, every word you put down feels wrong.
So how can you get past writers block?
Cut to the chase (How to be brief part 1)
How do you tell if your writing hits that sweet spot between giving enough information, and too much? No one likes being overloaded with information, or needing to wade through a swamp’s worth of detail. It’s easy to spot ‘too much information’ in other people’s content.
Make every character count: (How to be brief, Part 2)
Sometimes, your writing has to fit through the eye of a needle. On Twitter, you’ve got 140 characters to work with. In mobile apps, even fewer.
How to write with confidence (it’s easier than you think)
Most people would tell you that Adrian can’t write, at least not by the usual definition. When he sits down to type, P’s are jumbled up with b’s. Vowels are skipped altogether. It’s been like this since Adrian was a kid. One teacher told him, “You’re no good at history. You can’t even write.”
How to sharpen your content: write like an Egyptian
When you write for business, you write for short attention spans. You can’t expect a client to trudge through pages of preamble before they arrive, exhausted and mud-spattered at the thing you want to tell them.
What’s a useful way to spend that last bit of comms and digital budget?
It’s such a strange time of year for comms and digital people. There’s money, but not for much longer, and the budget you’ll have next financial year is still up in the air. How do you get value for what you have, and maybe even set your team’s work for the year ahead?