The week’s posts on a single page (most recent at the top):
A Place In The Sun
The other day I wrote about giving your eyes a rest when you’re looking at screens all day.
Then I heard about f.lux, which takes eye care to another level. It’s software that automatically adapts the brightness of your computer’s display to the time of day.
Its makers say:
You could use f.lux because it makes you sleep better, or you could just use it just because it makes your computer look better.
Title 5
It’s about time I offered a definition of the humble meta title, given its importance in the world of SEO and the search engines.
Title tags:
- HTML elements that denote the subject of a web page
- They’re the clickable blue links that show on search engine results pages (SERPs)
- They’re important for SEO because they help search engines understand what a page is about and the better written they are, the more likely they’ll be clicked on
- Should really be less than 60 characters long
Three Little Birds
Not so much three little birds as three little words.
Three of the most important words in copywriting are – and have always been – some of our simplest.
Headlines have been found to be more effective when they’re included. Adverts featuring one or more of these words are likely to be more successful than ads for the same products that don’t carry these words.
What are they?
Free, you and new.
So if you’re writing an ad, headline or title tag for your website, include one or more of these where appropriate.
Hit ’em Up Style (Oops!)
Successful freelance writing requires that you can do theses two fundamental things:
- Follow instructions
- Adhere to style
What is style?
You might ’email’ as ’email’, but your client might prefer ‘e-mail’. You might not cap up job titles but your client might. You might be British, and therefore write in British English, whereas your client might be an international organisation producing content that’s read all over the world, and they might prefer to use US English.
For example, British English uses colour not color, behaviour not behavior, centre not center, and so on. We attach -ise and -isation to words, not -ize and -ization.
As a freelance writer or editor, you might not agree with your client’s style. You might even try to persuade them to come round to your way of thinking. But, ultimately, you’d be wise to remember who’s paying for the content to be produced.
Touch Too Much
A friend and colleague asked a great question recently:
Do kids learn how to touch type?
I believe they should be taught to touch type, for the following reasons:
- You can work much more quickly when you touch type, freeing up time to get more done
- It’d boost employability
- I feel I’m in the minority of people who still enjoy writing with a pen and paper from time to time. Given that most of our writing time is spent in front of a screen, that’s where the focus on improving efficiency should be
- Start early and enjoy life-long benefits
The Leader
If you run a business or are launching a product, it’s sometimes tempting to want to write a press release to promote what you’re doing.
While often effective, press releases carry negative connotations because they’re too often about something boring, insignificant or uninteresting. On top of that, they’re often badly written.
But, as Brian Dean (who I listen to when it comes to SEO) says:
When done right, a release can be a powerful tool to spread the word.
To do it right, you have to think of what you want to say from a ‘news’ perspective. What’s your top line? What’s your lead? Is it something you’d tell your friends about as soon as you met up with them for the evening?
Then think about where you want your ‘news’ to feature, how you’d like to present it, and to whom.
Brian’s produced a great resource that covers all of this:
Breathe
Being busy with work means I’m not really thinking about the book at the moment.
And it’s no bad thing, having time to breathe away from it.
The first thing I intend to do when I get a bit of time is to revisit a book I’ve already read but feel it might help me refocus. It’s called The Fortune Cookie Principle and it’s by Bernadette Jiwa:
(Source)
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