Apologies for a late posting again, the reason is I am recovering from my trip to the land of the Alps and I’m still shaking the sleep from my head.

I had a really excellent trip which definitely fit the description “Here today, gone tomorrow” as I put it to the ultra neat and very stunning looking hotel receptionist.  Trying my faulty French made me feel like a fool for not paying more attention when I was in school, not least when I discovered that German is the main language in the area.  Her flawless English saved me and a perfectly plucked eyebrow raised as she looked up at me when my occupation was entered as “writer”.  I gave her my best smile and no word of a lie, she advised it was a shame I was only staying for such a short time. 

Please! Be still my beating heart!!

If only I’d ever known the impact that the answer to “What do you do?” had been “Writer” I would have had far more success with the opposite sex in my life in a cutting notches in the headboard kind of fashion.

I met my client who is looking for a series of eBooks on a variety of subjects as well as some copy work for company promotion and marketing.  This was one of the very few instances of actually meeting my client face to face; more usually, a telephone call is the best it gets.  In this case, the contract is for a substantial period of time and a significant investment is being made by the client and she wanted to do a “face check” as she sweetly put it.  It was not a hard decision to make the trip as it was after all her dime as Michael would say, but necessary? Hardly.

While over there I took the time to take a wander around the place and looked up some of the tourist attractions as well as learning about a few quirky facts; did you know Toblerone was invented in Berne a century ago?  I didn’t but I’m glad I know now.  The upshot is that though the trip was brief, there was a lot of dead time which I wished could have been frittered away with Ms Plucked Eyelashes given the absence of a certain Russian lady of my unrequited acquaintance.  Unfortunately, time was more productively applied to learning about the place and I am now preparing a series of travel/tourist articles on the city for a UK client who I made a deal with when I found where I was heading. 

It’s nice to get paid twice for your time.

No matter where you are, you can always work - if you have to!

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I worked as a salesman for many years and I was good at it - good enough to build my own company and flog it for enough beer tokens to keep me happy for the rest of my days.  I know what I’m talking about when it comes to selling.

Writing good copy is something I have never mastered and I have a constant battle within myself when it comes to expressing the emotional nature of intellectual facts and features.  I am by nature an analytical individual, I like facts and figures when it comes to making a buying decision and rarely does the emotional aspect of a purchase strike my consciousness.  That flies against the general doctrine of advertisers and copywriters who believe that facts and figures only help to justify a purchase and the real decision is based upon emotions and feelings.

You can see this dichotomy all over the place - how many times have you come across web copy such as this for Sean Nalewanyj and his bodybuilding course.  Very emotionally based, playing to the desire to be ripped and muscled, referring to “getting the girl” and a reader’s feelings of self-esteem and perception.

Now take a look at this piece of copy for a BMW - a very different target market that is more sophisticated and certainly looking to spend a lot more money than a bodybuilding course will set them back.  Nevertheless, though it has all the facts and figures for propeller-heads who are into that sort of thing, it is still a very much emotionally driven piece of copy.  In fact, the more upmarket you go, the more it becomes emotionally driven and for this you only have to take a look at the Aston Martin website and you will be lucky to find any performance information on their cars - having a DB7 come up behind me, headlights flashing at one in the morning when I was in a Jaguar XJ Sport doing 130+ is a humbling experience.  I don’t need to know what the performance is, it’s going to be good however you look at it.  The buyers decision is emotionally driven though in my case limited by my bank balance.

Some products and services do lend themselves to an intellectual approach.  Professional services for instance, and I’m thinking here of the dentists, accountants and lawyers I work for, all demand an “objective” style that appears professional.  Even so, there is a heavy weight placed upon the emotional aspect of the copy message whether it be a dentist who uses sedation rather than a needle, a lawyer who will always win you that case or an accountant who will get your tax refund in rapid time.

The general principle appears to be that the more substitutable the product or service that you are producing copy for is, then the more you will lean towards the emotional aspects.  Buying a car tyre or a pane of glass for instance will not lend itself to an intellectual approach except for the serious minority of anoraks out there.

High end luxury goods also lend themselves to an emotional approach, particularly if they are well-known and have a reputation for quality and craftmanship.

For those instances where substance trumps style, such as the professions or financial services, then a more intellectual approach will be more suitable but even then, the buying decision will still be emotionally driven.

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I picked up on this story a couple of days ago.  Microsoft have bid $47 billion for Yahoo! and set the internet world buzzing, not least with how Google will respond.  Microsoft already own MSN but there has been a significant dilution in that enterprise as Windows Live starts making inroads, particularly with the advertisers who spend the dollars that make this merry go round work.

What has any of this got to do with the life of a scribe?

Pretty straight forward answer to that - everything.

The internet drives my business, my clients are found through the web, my writing is predominantly for the web and my research is 90% web based.  For many modern day scribblers the same is true and this deal signals a major shift in what is referred to as “webittude”; how users are using the web and the shift in commercial strategic thinking that is harnessing the internet to generate profits.

Fewer search engines means fewer opportunities to exploit; the Big 3 of Google, MSN and Yahoo! account for 80% of internet searches, and the search results for these are determined largely by content that writers such as myself are commissioned to produce.  Concentrating search engine ownership is not a good thing as competition will be reduced and monopoly/oligopoly conditions will increase making content less of a factor in achieving high search engine rankings (Google already give more ranking weight to paid advertisers than others for instance).  That said, users are spending a lot less time with the search engines and much more on the social sites such as blogs, MySpace, Digg and Reddit and I have noticed quiet a shift in my work away from article writing and social site development and review.

How Google is going to respond will be interesting but I wonder what Microsoft are going to do if they are successful in acquiring Yahoo!, after all they already own MSN.  My feelings are that there is going to be an almighty shake-up in the search engine/internet industry largely determined by how these three goliaths carve themselves up and react.

At the very least this development gives me something to write about, but we all are being given a warning that how we are currently conducting internet based writing business is also going to need to be revamped if we are to maintain our momentum and take advantage of what the new environment will bring.

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After an unhappy hiatus I’m back at the keyboard and glad to be here.  Feeling rusty after a couple of weeks away I started keybashing over the weekend and cranked out my copy for a project.  Sitting back and reading it a couple of days later, I keep coming across the same old boring, tired phrases and here’s the rub - it just isn’t engaging.

I picked up on a post on Copyblogger dealing with cliches by Mohsin Naqi and he explained extremely well what had been niggling away at me with my own efforts.  Cliche’s are the first thing that comes to the forefront of your mind when you are thinking of expressing an idea and they are all too easy to insert when you are running with the flow or hitting a deadline.

Mohsin is right when he wrote how cliches are boring precisely because they have been used so often; cliches do not express your own originality and this makes the difference between an interesting piece and more pap.  Spotting the cliches is the first step with injecting some originality into your work but I find they are so routinely used in everyday life that spotting them can be difficult, so insiduously have they implanted themselves in my conscious.

Once spotted try rewriting the cliche in your own words to convey the meaning you are looking to express and remove the cliche entirely.  Mohsin gives some good examples:

“Cliché: It was an emotional scene.
Original: It was a scene so sad that I had to look away. (long but not trite)
Cliché: Our product sold like hotcakes.
Original: We sold out the whole stock in just a week.
Cliché: Lost hope? Don’t give up on life yet!
Original: Ran out of reasons to live? We’ll give you one!”

Not to be outdone here are some more for you:

Cliche: Avoid cliches like the plague

Original: Cliches will make your writing bland and boring, discipline yourself and remove them.

Cliche: Dealing with cliches is as easy as pie.

Original: Once you have recognised the effect cliches have on your work, rewriting with some originality becomes straight forward.

Cliche: Cliche ridden copy is as dead as a door nail !

Original: Originality is the key to creating engaging copy, filling your work with cliches willl lead to a loss of interest very quickly.

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Big Deal Update

I posted how I was going after a large contract worth some £30,000 every 18 months (for Michael that’s $60,000). After being whittled down to the last two, I learned yesterday that I had passed the writing test that had been set.

I’m now on my way to getting onto the company panel and my competitor for the assignments is no longer competing - both of us are going to be going on the panel; it will be a toss up as to who gets the first country assignments but there is apparently work for all.

It is not yet official but the finish line is definitely in sight.

Insomnia

I’ve suffered (or benefited) from insomnia for almost all my adult life. I can’t sleep in hotels unless I’ve been there for a week, sleeping over at friends on New Year’s Eve resulted in me walking home at 3am and occasionally, as with last night, I just don’t sleep at all.

Not to be put off, 4am in the morning is a good time to set things down on paper and there is nothing to disturb you - not even a mouse as I laid traps last week and caught them - the joy of country living. The issue is that the following day you are completely useless for anything productive so I try to avoid anything that gives me that “wide awake” feeling.

The number one culprit for my insomnia is thinking; once I have a thread revolving around the little grey cells, I’m away and there is no way I’m off to the Big Black as Spike Milligan referred to sleep.  My fellow insomniacs will be all to familiar with the “spinning mind syndrome” and it feels just like that.  Indeed, I read some research recently,  performed in New Zealand on 11 year old children and they found that it was the creative kids who were the ones that would suffer from sleeplessness.  This was a little surprising as creativity is one of the first brain faculties to be inhibited due to lack of sleep.

Over the years I have tried everything from sleeping pills, herbal remedies, hot milk and cookies, crossword puzzles and leaving a TV on with a sleep timer.  I find that the best way to cure the spinning mind syndrome is a notebook and pencil by the side of the bed - jotting the ideas down seems to be the best way of switching my brain off while my thoughts are still down on paper for the morning.

Failing that a good stiff Bowmore and a paracetamol.

Sweet Dreams

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