You want your website to look good. Scrub that. You want it to look better than good – it should look fantastic. But you also want it to work. Unfortunately, sometimes designers focus on looks more than results. You can end up with web design mistakes which affect performance. Now, there are all kinds of mistakes to make out there, but the ones which bug me most of all are the ones which affect your website copy. The words on your website have a job to do. You want them to work hard. As a copywriter, I write words which work hard for you – but sometimes I find my precious words stuck on a site ..read more

What does your business do? Who do you do it for? If you go to your website home page, does it tell you that clearly? Hero images and company taglines are all very well, but unless you’re Nike, or Apple, or Telstra, visitors may not know what you do. The home page hero copy (that’s the stuff in big letters which you can see without scrolling) should make clear: What your business does (offering) Who you do it for (target market) How you make a difference to clients (why choose you) Some real-life examples of website home page copy Here are some businesses you probably haven’t heard of ..read more

2023 was the year of ChatGPT and copywriting. It was the year AI was going to take over the world and we human copywriters were all going to be out of jobs. Fast forward to 2024. That hasn’t happened. It doesn’t seem likely to happen this year either. On the other hand, AI copywriting is here to stay. So what does that mean for human copywriters? My personal belief is that AI copywriting is actually going to make writer like me even more important. Not just because I need to say that to protect my future either. It’s all to do with three things and how they intersect: How AI copywriting ..read more

So you’re thinking of hiring a copywriter? Congratulations! That’s the first step towards words which work harder for you and your business. But how do you decide who to hire? What makes a good copywriter? And more importantly, what makes a good copywriter for you and your project? I know it sounds obvious, but start by making sure you know what you want from the copywriter. You don’t necessarily need a copywriting brief, but you do need some clarity around the scope of your copywriting needs. Once you’ve got that settled, it’s time to assess individual copywriters and see how well they align ..read more

Before I was a copywriter myself, I occasionally hired copywriters. Many of them sent me copywriting briefs which I had to complete. I hated them. I remember one particular case where I wanted a 7-800 word blog article. The brief took hours to complete and ended up at over 1500 words! That’s one reason NoBull Marketing doesn’t usually ask for a written copywriting brief. It’s painful for the client, and the aim is to make things easier for you, not harder. But to do a good job, I still need clear direction. I normally get this via a client Zoom meeting. Using Zoom means I can record, which fre ..read more

Tracking results is important in all marketing, but today let’s look specifically at measuring quality and quantity in lead and business generation. There are two main questions to consider Choosing the most suitable KPI for your situation Ensuring your measurement balances high volume low quality results and low volume high quality results (Of course we all want a high volume of high quality results. Unfortunately this is more likely to happen in marketing sales pitches than in reality!) Cost per lead, cost per customer and ROI There are three accepted ways to measure the success of your ..read more

There are some pages which exist on almost every website – the home page is one, the contact page is another. Yet while most businesses spend hours agonising about the home page, the ‘contact us’ page is often an afterthought. It’s time to change that. What’s so important about the contact us page? For a service business, it’s where much of the lead generation happens. Most web developers and designer will insist that you need a link to the contact page in your main menu – but then they don’t spend much time thinking about the content. It’s a little contradictory! So what content do you need ..read more

I write a lot of website copy. I look at a lot of websites. Two areas where the words on most websites could work harder are the contact page and the footer. Today, I’m looking at what to put in your website footer and why. There are two things to understand before we dive into the detail of your website footer content: Your footer is a part of your website structure. Visitors expect you to have a footer, and they also expect to find certain types of content in that footer. For engaged visitors who scroll and keep scrolling, your footer is the last part of your content which they see. It’s yo ..read more

It’s estimated there are over 600 million blogs on the internet. While most of them won’t compete with yours – blogs for dog breeders; salsa dancing, or cybersecurity penetration testing, for example! – some will. So how do you achieve blogging success? How do you not only attract readers but convert them into enquiries and clients? Here are our top tips: Blog success tip no 1: Relevant topics Write about things which are relevant and meaningful to your potential clients. Remember, what they care about is more important than what you care about! So how do you find these topics? Some ideas to ..read more

If you’ve done just a little marketing – or even if you’ve had other people market to you – you’ll have come across personalisation. All those emails which open with ‘Hi Bridget‘. Occasionally ones which open with ‘Hi {first_name}‘. (Oops!) But knowing someone’s name is just the beginning. There’s so much more to explore. Today I’m sharing some personalised email marketing examples to inspire you – and also some thoughts about how to get personalisation right.  But there’s one thing I want to cover before we dive in. Segmentation vs personalisation Segmentation is a great marketing tool ..read more