Struggling to write content for your business? Can’t come up with any ideas? Here’s how to get some words on the page and not get bogged down by writer’s block: Write badly. Write anything. Bad writing can be fixed, but a blank page helps no one. Apply bum glue. Most of the time you just
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I’ve been self-employed since – let me just check my CV – November 1997. I know a little about working from home and how to stay motivated. So I thought I’d share my top tips: Have a work zone. It doesn’t have to be a whole room, but it should be a space that you
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Do you have a company profile? Does it say you’re extremely innovative, customer-centric and solutions-focused? Oh dear. I have bad news. So does everyone else’s. And none of those words really tell me anything about your company and how it can solve my problems. What should it say? Well, it should give me a sense
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So, you won an award, or received a compliment. You want to post about it on social media – you have your reasons. But how do you go about doing so without sounding like you’re bragging? Well, here’s what you don’t do – you don’t say, “I’m humbled …” Why? Well, if you really were
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You don’t need to post your own “thought leadership” articles to be regarded as a thought leader on LinkedIn. Yup, you heard me right – and I speak as someone who is hired every week to write these kinds of articles on behalf of other people. Wanna know why? Because you don’t set yourself apart
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Pee Arrs, gather round – let’s talk proofreading quickly. Media releases are often a bit of a “production by committee” undertaking. Typically, a broad strokes brief is given, someone writes the piece, and then one or more others chip in. A release may go through several rounds of this, with people tweaking it at every
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I recently edited a letter from a company to a government department that was so convoluted I needed a compass, a head lamp and a Sherpa to get through it. You can be professional and respectful of people you need to schmooze without resorting to verbal acrobatics. Here are some examples: “Please allow us to
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I have a violent allergy to the “We’ll get it to you by close of business on Friday; please deliver first thing on Monday” attitude. And as a self-employed contractor, I come up against this often. There’s often an expectation – and it’s overtly expressed sometimes – that you must be so grateful for every
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T’s and C’s apply, right? Nope, they don’t – the apostrophes are incorrect. Adding a plural to an acronym is quite simple – you just add an S as you would to anything else. After all, you wouldn’t write “term’s and condition’s” – and if you would, stop it at once! It’s simple: Ts and
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When planning your content, take a note from magazine editorial teams, who plan their monthly features several months in advance. Magazines have an editorial diary that provides a kind of roadmap of what each issue contains, but the key to this roadmap is that it’s subject to detours. In other words – things change. The
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