The Copysmith

Tom Meighan comments on how self-indulgent and irrelevant blogging is losing musicians their star status. Click the link to read more…

Kasabian’s Tom Meighan: ‘The internet has killed rock stars’ | News | NME.COM

Musicians are brands. And blogging for any brand needs to be focussed and well-written.

We’re often asked to write monthly articles or blogs for our clients’ websites. We just ask for the key-points that need to be covered and what the copy should achieve in the heart/mind of the reader. It’s a simple process from there, which frees up business-owners’ time and gives their brands that rock star edge.

"untitled" by Le Thiet Cuong

The Wow Power of Words

Packing a punch into 35 characters is no mean feat – I’ve already taken more than that and I haven’t even got to the point yet…

But that was the task I asked the Copysmith to help me with – in two lines of just 35 characters, compose a series of compelling advertising statements that will stand out on the internet.

You might think that a professional firm as the Copysmith, as proficient in writing, as good with words, could knock this sort of assignment out in just a few hours.

But here’s where they really stand out. They go to great lengths to understand what it is their clients really want. They ask lots of questions. Some of them quite difficult! They question and search until they understand the words behind the words in their client briefs, The real crux. And this takes time.

Lots of words can be good, lots of words could be compelling. But their research, the time they took before spending my valuable and rather rare characters on each word they chose, enabled them not just to choose good words, not just to choose compelling words, but to choose the RIGHT words.

Peter Quintana

15/1/2010

www.oc-eo.co.uk

Images can sway your emotions and sear your mind. But what about words? In this post modern age of relativism, how have words fared? Are they as slippery as some suggest? Or do they represent that most inspiring and defining idea – the truth?

With the rise of web-writing, copywriting is increasingly becoming a vehicle that delivers information well. Readers on the internet are notoriously impatient. Time poor, their eyes scan past boring, waffling copy – typically ditching badly written websites after a second or two.

There are two ways savvy businesses respond to this. They give users easy-to-navigate info-rich sites that do what they say they on the label. Or create virtual places that visit the visitor in their environment, adding to – even shaping – their digital lives.

Nowadays the consumer demands pithy, accurate messaging. And the average advertiser is looking for ways to communicate with less fluff. The climate is right for quality, honest and intelligent copywriting. So words must tell the truth and do it quickly.

Copywriters have never wielded airbrushes. And now finally stripped of last year’s superlatives and long-gone big budgets, our words are standing more stark than ever before.

The perfect opportunity, we believe, to use them for powerful, hardworking ideas.

Bath copywriters

Corporate gifting used to be an environmental nightmare, with millions of toxis pens, child-labour t-shirts and plastic frisbees being given away each year – most of them ending up in landfills. Re-sourceful.co.uk were one of the first companies to provide positive promotional gift ideas – allowing businesses to say more about their values, and have a positive impact on communities and the planet.

We wrote their website, their corporate literature – and continute to work with them on their monthly newsletters and promotions.

We recently worked with The House writing the quirky new Burnt Sugar website (and ate far too many of their lovely gooey sweets).

In a jam-packed digital world, to have any chance of standing out on the web, you need to do more than just have a site.

Do an internet search and you’ll notice the top 10 results are websites with many pages. Google doesn’t only read search terms. It assesses your site by its activity, content and relationship to the internet.

That’s why many successful businesses are hiring writers to write frequent updates about their products and services via blogs and tweets. The chief activity on the internet is still reading. And the internet gives brands a unique opportunity to reach and interact with people in their own environment.

The wonderful thing about a blog, is that when the user reads it, you’re not intruding on their time or entertainment – they have come to you. It’s also an opportunity to enter into a two way conversation between the author and the user. And it’s fast becoming an exciting new way to harvest and track information.

Bath and Bristol copywriters, freelance copywriting