A while ago, I wrote a piece on the process of working with a copywriter. It was designed to remove the fear of the unknown if you’d never worked with a copywriter before and wanted to know what to expect. I got lots of good feedback on it, but one person asked for a little more detail. Specifically, what should you expect from your copywriter’s first draft of the piece of copy? Here’s my answer. My only caveat is to say it’s what to expect from a first draft from me. Other copywriters will have different approaches and it’s important to find the one who’s the right fit for you. What to expect ..read more

The advent of ChatGPT has turbo-charged the debate around AI in copywriting, with many predicting it will rapidly lead to the demise of human copywriters. Is that true? At first glance, ChatGPT looks like a huge opportunity. Words appear on the screen as if by magic. The content it produces sounds impressive, and when you run it through a plagiarism checker, you’ll find it’s unique. If you can get a machine to generate copy in moments for free (or almost free), why would you pay a freelancer £387 a day or a full-time copywriter £53,123 a year to do the same thing and t ..read more

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. So said Albert Einstein. (Allegedly. When I started researching this article I discovered that he may or may not have in fact said this. No matter. The idea still stands, whoever said – or didn’t say – it.) Yet in so much of the language we use in our working lives we seem to have taken the opposite to be true. The more complex you make something sound, the more expert you must be in the subject. Here’s an example from the Plain English Campaign. High-quality learning environments are a necessary precondition for facilitat ..read more

You’ve written a piece of content and after all the effort it’s taken, you want to make sure it’s working as hard as it can for you. Here are some ideas that might help… Look at the different places you could publish The most obvious place to publish is your own website. You should always publish content on your own website because you have control over it. If you only ever publish on Facebook / LinkedIn / wherever, you’re at their mercy if they decide to take your posts down because they think you’ve broken a rule or if they start charging for businesses to use their platform. However, the ch ..read more

At every copywriting conference I’ve ever been to, there’s been at least one session on AI copywriting. Often, we’ll see examples of passable and good AI copywriting. We’ll also often see examples of when AI gets it hilariously wrong so we can reassure ourselves we’re safe. But predictive text always used to be hilariously bad – until one day it wasn’t. So what’s the deal? Do copywriters need to panic? Are the robots coming to take our jobs? It’s been something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. Here’s my take on it. AI copywriting at work I’ve been looking at some of the AI copywriting ..read more

I recently came across Semrush Marketplace’s State of Content Ops & Outsourcing report. It tells us who outsources content (and who doesn’t). Why people outsource (and why they don’t). Who people outsource to and why. And so on and so on. Whichever side of the outsourcing fence you’re on, I’d recommend taking a look at the report. You’ll find things that will support your point of view – and challenge them. As a freelancer writer, the insights it contains are gold. But there were a few things that particularly stuck out for me. Now is the time for freelance writers – or is it? On the face ..read more

In 2017, I set myself a challenge: 26 weeks and 26 blog posts to create the Pippin A-Z of Copywriting. As is so often the case with these things, I successfully completed the challenge and then promptly forgot about it. Looking back at the entries in 2021, I felt a belated moment of pride at what I’d written. Across the 26 entries there is useful copywriting tips, hard-earned wisdom and practical advice. It’s why I’ve pulled them all together into a single downloadable document. And so, if you’d like to, you can now download the Pippin A-Z of Copywriting. The post The Pippin A-Z of Copywriting ..read more

When you’re writing about your business, it’s very easy to assume that your readers know more about you than they actually do – especially when it comes to how good you are at what you do. I think there are two traps you can fall into. The first is being too modest and underplaying your excellence by not really talking about it. The danger here is that people will assume you have a lot less expertise and experience than you actually do – and therefore discount you as the person they need to trust with their business. I’m reminded here of a passage from Lynne Truss: …you can sit next to a chap ..read more

I’m not going to patronise you by recapping the essential components of a good brief — you haven’t built an agency without knowing what they are. But when you’re briefing a freelance copywriter (as opposed to your in-house copywriters) there are three things you might not be telling them. They aren’t essential elements of the brief but are useful pieces of information that bring a brief to life. They are pieces of information that, in my experience, increase the likelihood of a freelance copywriter submitting a piece that goes beyond good territory into great territory. Why? Because they’re th ..read more

Every copywriter reading this will have been told at some point in their career not to start a sentence with ‘and’. And for every copywriter reading this there’ll be someone else who’s thinking: ‘Quite right. You should never start a sentence with ‘and’.’ So who is right? Well, I think they both are. I think it’s just one example of many rules that are up for debate – but perhaps not for the reasons you might think. Let’s take four supposed rules we have all come across. I’ll explain why they’re wrong. I’ll then explain why I think you should sometimes follow them anyway, especially if you’re ..read more