Make your email newsletter work harder

If you’re already creating original content for your blog, website and social media platforms, it makes sense to promote it directly to your customer base, too. Content marketing via an email newsletter is the perfect low-cost way to ensure you make the most of every word you write – as long as you follow some […]

Improve your word power

f u cn rd ths, u cn bcm a sec & gt a gd jb. I’d forgotten about these once-ubiquitous ads for a speed-writing technique that threatened to knock traditional shorthand, with its infuriating dots and squiggles, into a cocked hat. I couldn’t say which method triumphed over the other or whether, very possibly, they […]

Ripping off the SEO straitjacket

Garden furniture. It’s an image that looms large when I’m asked for my opinion on keywords. I’ve been writing content long enough to remember: a.) when the floppy disk was the only way of transferring files from one PC to another; and b.) the day I was asked by a client to shoehorn phrases such […]

Content counts

  You want customers to buy what you’re selling, but you’re probably also looking to build loyalty and establish a reliable brand. Which means that you’ll need to devote some time, thought and energy to providing customers with the content they crave. Know your customers. If you can connect with your audience on subjects that […]

Careering Ahead

Every so often, I indulge in the fantasy of an imagined career change. Not that I don’t love what I do but just sometimes I wonder what it would be like to walk in someone else’s shoes for a while. Obviously not the postman’s (don’t much fancy before-dawn forays in the bleak midwinter) or the […]

‘Twas the season

For me, the end of the festivities is heralded not by the traditional siren call of Twelfth Night but by the silent unfolding of the final page of the double-issue Radio Times, the last solemn sip of port and the unhappy discovery that among the colourful confetti of wrappers in the Quality Street tin remains […]

Happy Pre-Christmas

Anticipation’s a wonderful thing. Take the run-up to Christmas: it encapsulates all the comfort and joy of the big day itself (carte blanche to open a good bottle of wine, increased mince pie consumption, re-runs of Poirot on the TV) without some of the more obvious downsides (a superfluity of relatives, vicious week-long indigestion and […]

Holidays are coming…

If you know to which TV ad my blog title relates, you’re probably already heartily fed up of the bumper crop of Christmas advertising that these days seems to start the minute you’ve shaken the summer holiday sand from your flip flops and goes into overdrive the very second Guy Fawkes hits the bonfire. Now […]

Squatters’ Rights

OK, so most people would agree that Richard Madeley is a big daft donkey (even, I suspect, the sainted Judy), but he is also 24-carat, fully hallmarked, small-screen gold. His latest solo foray into TV land, Madeley Meets The Squatters, saw him making the usual inane Partridge-esque comments – ‘I have to confess as someone lucky […]

Apocalypse Now?

For me, 21 December is always a special occasion on account of it being simultaneously my wedding anniversary and the official start to my Christmas holiday. I’m not saying I’ve never picked up a pen or had a telephone conversation with a client on the ensuing days, but the twenty-first is definitely twinklingly auspicious and […]