Just read some very interesting statistics presented by one of my favourite writers, Gerry McGovern. (The statistcis weren’t from his research; he was just discussing them.) According to a February 2008 study published by the Association of National Advertisers and Forrester Research, “Sixty-two percent of marketers believe traditional television advertising has become less effective in [...]

‘Link baiting’ may just be a fancy name for ‘good web content’, but it’s a handy reminder that content is critical to a high search engine ranking. Simply put, it’s about making your site content so good that people can’t help but link to it. They feel they’d be doing their own visitors a disservice [...]

I’m proud to announce that Divine Write is partnering with GetUp (Australia’s leading political activism website) in its ‘Oz in 30 Seconds’ competition. The ‘Oz in 30 Seconds’ competition GetUp is inviting every-day Australians to produce an ad that shows their vision of Australia. The Top 10 ads – as judged by the Australian public [...]

Something light today… I didn’t write the below (wish I did), and I don’t know who did, but from a copywriter’s perspective, the outcome certainly is a great interpretation of a brief! A college class was told to write a short story in as few words as possible. They were told that the story must [...]

Just a quick post this time… I quite often find myself recommending tools or specific applications of tools for copywriting and SEO copywriting. So I thought I’d cut out the middle-man and simply publish my list and a few comments on each tool. So here’s my list of copywriting tools and SEO copywriting tools. If [...]

While this isn’t, strictly speaking, the domain of the copywriter, it is a question I get asked quite often. In fact, this question came up recently in one of our forums (see Please critique my ‘Contact’ page. As you might expect, my answer to this question is based on my understanding of usability, not copywriting. [...]

One of the best ways to build the link popularity of your site (thereby increasing your search engine rank) is to check where your competitors’ links are coming from, and try to get links from those sites yourself. (You’ll be surprised where some of their links come from.) Yes, it’s a simple idea, but when [...]

Probably the most well known method of generating inbound links is to look for link partners. This is done in a variety of ways: ask customers to link to your site (possibly in return for a link to theirs) ask suppliers to link to your site (possibly in return for a link to theirs) look [...]

There are many possible ways to generate links. Some are dubious (like auto-generation software, and sites set up by webmasters simply to host links to their other sites) and I won’t be discussing them here. Others, like those discussed below, are legitimate. NOTE: Link generation is an ongoing (often tedious) task. You need to be [...]

We’re enjoying some much-needed rain in Sydney today, so I thought I’d celebrate with a more light-hearted post. A couple of years back, someone sent me this gem, previously published in an issue of Vertigo, the much-loved student magazine of the University of Technology, Sydney. Penned by editor, Pat Armstrong, this very funny piece deconstructs [...]