Posts Tagged ‘copywriting’

What we’ve been up to – 17 August 2012

Posted on: by Claire Broadley No Comments

Last week I didn’t have time to write a weekly update! All of us have been busy getting ahead for the last two weeks. Mathew has been writing a user guide, and I’ve been processing some reviews and website content work, plus a trial for a new product description project.

Availability

Hopefully all clients are now aware that we are closing for approximately one week next week. During this time, I will be checking emails and replying to anything genuinely urgent. Paul will be covering any time-sensitive work which has already been booked in. However, we are now unable to take any new work until the end of the month.

Normally Mathew and I would take our work on holiday, but we won’t be doing that next week. Thanks to all clients who have accommodated us (and our wedding!) by planning projects in well ahead.

Please note that we will also be closed from 6-13th September.

Invoicing

Red Robot Media has just changed its invoicing terms. We are now giving clients 21 days to pay invoices (reduced from the old limit of 28 days).

Why? Well, over the last month we have seen a total amount equivalent to our entire monthly takings go overdue. While we’re OK to accommodate slips here and there, it’s difficult for a small business last month-to-month when so many invoices are being paid late. We need to bring our deadlines back a little so we can improve our cashflow.

Our bookkeeping software has changed, and as such, we can no longer generate invoice reminders. Invoices not paid within 21 days may be subject to interest and charges, as detailed in the contract we send out when we first start working with a customer.

We’re all very grateful to those who pay on time, and the vast majority of our clients do pay within days, or even hours, of receiving their invoice. However, we must stress that invoices that are not paid on time cause us significant problems, both personally and as a small business, so we actively take steps to pursue overdue amounts.

If you have any questions about your Red Robot Media invoice or account, please email Keren.

Contacting us next week

Our PA Linda will be handling communications next week. If you need to get hold of us urgently, please email linda@red-robot.net.

 

 

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Copywriting availability this week

Posted on: by Claire Broadley No Comments

Mathew and I looking forward to a busy week this week, and we have lots of copywriting and blogging work on the horizon.

Availability

Mathew will be on a technical writing course from Monday afternoon until Thursday morning. He will be unavailable during this time. If you need to get hold of him, please email office@red-robot.net and I’ll pass on your message.

I’ll be taking over his projects in addition to my own, so we are expecting a hectic week. Please feel free to drop me a line if you need to check delivery dates for your assignment.

Want to kick off a new project?

Red Robot Media will be closed from 9-16 June while we take a short break.

If you have an idea for a new copywriting, content or technical writing assignment, it would be best to email as soon as possible. If everyone gives us plenty of notice we can usually fit everything in and meet all required deadlines. 

We will be checking emails daily, and we will be supplying all work in advance so no copywriting projects will be affected while we’re closed. For anything that needs to be done quickly, Paul will be available. Please email us as normal and we will respond in the normal time frame (24 hours).

What we’ve been up to lately

Each week, we post an update on our various blogging, copywriting and technical authoring projects. Click here to read last week’s update.

Copywriters: need some linguistic inspiration?

Posted on: by Claire Broadley No Comments

Copywriters are always searching for the perfect word or phrase to describe a concept or sell a product. Sometimes the perfect words are difficult to come by.

If you’ve ever needed a word to describe ‘a face badly in need of a fist’, ‘a beautiful girl viewed from behind’ or ‘the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey’, you’re in luck. Copywriters should take inspiration from this excellent blog post: 25 Handy Words That Simply Don’t Exist in English. Thanks to our favourite stationery store Present And Correct for alerting us to this post via their Twitter.

PS. One of our clients, LoveTEFL, are experts in teaching English. In fact, they are currently recruiting wannabe teachers who are taking their first steps towards teaching English overseas. If this post caught your eye and you have a love of language and travel, their free Supported Jobs programme might be of interest.

TEFL jobs: an express route to living overseas

Posted on: by Claire Broadley No Comments

Lots of companies now offer TEFL training online, and some help students to get TEFL jobs. People interested in language and travel often complete online TEFL courses to get a head start in their teaching career, but not all these courses are equal.

Many visitors find our website via a blog post we wrote about TEFL Express, a TEFL provider who have been working with Groupon. Not all the comments about the course have been favourable.

Since we wrote the blog, we’ve started working with another TEFL company, LoveTEFL. They operate a TEFL jobs programme in Thailand and China, giving students free training, support and a guaranteed wage. We’ve been doing some copywriting for LoveTEFL, and we’ve also been creating web content, blogs and articles for them. More recently, Sarah (our PR expert) has been helping them get the word out about their TEFL jobs in the press.

There’s an article about LoveTEFL’s free TEFL jobs programme in today’s Yorkshire Post which Sarah helped to set up for LoveTEFL. You can also read about LoveTEFL’s free TEFL training and job scheme online.

If you’re interested in living in China and getting on-site support and a guaranteed wage, Ian and his team taking applications now for 2012. Head to the LoveTEFL website and have a look at their Supported Jobs section.

6 social media tools for freelance article writers (and their clients)

Posted on: by Claire Broadley No Comments

As freelance article writers, we’re often asked to write blog posts and manage WordPress comments for our clients. We also look after social media accounts, making sure web content and blogs are well-publicised in order to trigger viral shares. It takes time to write content, and it takes even more time to stay on top of lots of different accounts and ensure you’re using them all in the right way. 

There are no shortage of tools for the job, but here are six social media management services that our freelance article writers use to stay on top of multiple message streams.

dlvr.it

Dlvr.it is a syndication tool that allows you to repackage your blog RSS feed and pass each new post through to your social media accounts. It provides a functional one-way stream, automatically updating your social media channels each time a new article is posted to your blog. This is ideal if you use different freelance article writers to generate a constant stream of blogs – you don’t need to manually check and update your feed each time someone posts something new.

Contrary to what you might think, too much automation is not necessarily a good thing. Social media is – well – social. For best results, you need to put some time into interacting with your followers. But if you just want a basic set-and-forget solution to getting those blog posts out there, dlvr.it is certainly not bad. We’ve been using it for years, and its versatility of combining streams, auto-hashtagging and scheduled updating makes it worth a try. Consider another solution for Facebook though, as it rarely triggers the kind of interaction you’ll need.

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is a beautifully designed tool which has effortlessly made the transition from app to web app. It’s now owned by Twitter, and it’s available through your browser in the cloud, as a Chrome extension, on smartphones and on your desktop.

Tweetdeck is good for people with lots of followers, or companies who get lots of replies and DMs, as you can see them all laid out in one interface. It’s also good for monitoring multiple accounts if you have the space on your monitor for all those columns. You can scroll around if not, but it’s not quite as easy to see everything.

Columns can be moved and are completely customisable. For example, if you track a hashtag, you can set up a column for it. You can also have a column set up for particular words and phrases that you’re interested in monitoring. This makes it an efficient tool for watching trends and keywords. I also like how new followers appear in your stream, alerting you and giving you the option to follow back. Unfortunately following someone is a four-click process: it would be nicer if this were a little easier to achieve with a single click.

Ping.fm

Ping.fm is another tool that has been around for a while, and we’ve been using it in conjunction with dlvr.it for basic one-way updates for several years. It’s triggered by a manual process: write one status update and Ping.fm sends it out to all networks on your behalf. Ping.fm is incredibly versatile, and the content that appears on the social networks you select will vary depending on the format you need. 

Ping.fm is about to partner with Seesmic, and it hooks in to more than 30 networks in total. It also works with some social networking sites that other sites simply don’t cover. That makes it ideal for freelance article writers who blog for niche sites on a regular basis. 

Desk.com

Desk.com (previously Assistly) is a paid customer support solution in the cloud with some interesting social networking features. Although it’s more of a helpdesk tool, it’s a useful option for people who want to encourage engagement on social media. It helps you track interaction and conversations as helpdesk style tickets called ‘cases’.

By linking your Twitter and Facebook pages to Desk.com, you can track conversations in one place. You also have the option of linking a Support mailbox to the same Desk.com interface. This kind of ‘social helpdesk’ is something that’s slowly appearing in much more expensive service desk packages, but if you only need the basics, this is a good place to start.

Desk.com isn’t a SaaS product every company will find useful, but if social conversations are tough for your team to manage, it might be worth looking at. Bringing tweets into a mailbox interface makes it much easier to keep conversations in one stream, so different freelance article writers can work on the same conversations seamlessly. Desk.com also makes it very easy for you to track keywords on social media and respond proactively to tweets about your brand: customers really like this. Threadsy is another similar product which is worth a look.

Buffer 

Want to generate a constant stream of updates without irritating your followers? Buffer is the tool for you. Use it to set up scheduled tweets to spread a marketing campaign more evenly, or ensuring your social media accounts are updated when you’re away from your computer for a holiday (or overnight). Simply pre-compose your tweets and add them to a queue – Buffer does the rest.

Sometimes a great article is lost in the ‘noise’ of Twitter streams. Set Buffer up to publicise old posts automatically, getting the maximum value from the blogs and articles you paid your freelance article writers to create.

The features are a little basic compared to some of the other sites we use, but it definitely has its niche. Capacity is limited though, so you’ll need to pay (or refer people) to get more space.

Hootsuite

Analytics is a buzzword you’ll have come across if you’ve worked on social media and SEO projects as a freelance article writer. Hootsuite really excels in this area. It tracks all the clicks you get through all social media and can produce custom reports based on your content, shares and interactions. Hootsuite is another tool which has evolved from app to web in a very short space of time, and it has a really eye-catching layout that makes social media management a joy.

 

Hootsuite combines elements of all of the social networking tools above in one interface. It has the auto-posting abilities of dlvr.it and Buffer, the pleasing column-based layout of Tweetdeck and the thread-tracking and team working features of Desk.com. It also hooks straight into Ping.fm, giving you the ability to post to just about any social network you can imagine. Best of all? It’s free.

Got any more suggestions? Please tell us your favourites in the comments.

 

GoCardless Paylinks: a usable PayPal alternative?

Posted on: by Claire Broadley 5 Comments

Get £50 credit towards GoCardless fees: simply use our referral link.

I’ve had an eBay account since 2002 (yikes!), so I was a very early adopter of PayPal. Although I think they’ve improved over the last couple of years, I still don’t really like to use the service. In my experience, their refund and dispute policies are questionable, their fees are extortionate and their support is pretty dire.

We’ve been looking for an alternative for a long time, and with GoCardless, I think we might be on to something. Quite a few of our clients set up web content writing projects on a regular basis, and we would definitely benefit from an easier way to bill them.

Until recently GoCardless required a certain amount of developer intervention, something we didn’t have the time to sort out ourselves. But today I got an email saying they’d introduced a Paylinks interface which allows anyone* to create a money request URL with no technical fiddling. I thought a little review was in order.

* When I say ‘anyone’, this is perhaps a little misleading: GoCardless don’t take card payments, so it’s a UK-only service. 

Creating a GoCardless Paylink

Signing up was a little problematic as I had to use a different email address and company name to my existing GoCardless account (which I had never used). Minor niggles aside, I found the process of creating a link pretty straightforward once I’d signed up.

Once the link was created, I had the choice of pasting it into an email or sending it through their web application.

If you have a regular customer, they can sign up for a Subscription. This is basically a Direct Debit, but the customer is free to vary the amount taken (please see the Update below).

Making a payment

When the recipient clicks my link, they’ll see a form where they can enter their bank details. There’s no option to pay by card, remember, so paying for the first time involves setting up a Direct Debit. Future payments are far quicker: once the Direct Debit is set up, it can be re-used.

GoCardless fees and charges

By far the biggest plus of GoCardless is the flat 1% fee. Not only is this cheaper than PayPal, who charge anything between 1.4% and 3.4% plus a flat 20p fee, it’s also much more predictable for businesses, and it can be factored in much more easily. Even better, GoCardless actually cap their fee at £2, making it super affordable for large transactions

First impressions of GoCardless Paylinks

I was slightly surprised to find that GoCardless won’t allow me to give my email address to a client for payment, in the same way PayPal does, and there is a certain amount of manual intervention in getting that first payment set up. The process of creating a link is quick, but there is a bit of leg work for the client the first time around, and I’d be a bit concerned about that if I had no other payment options. If a client has several invoices to settle, it’s going to be a bit of a pain for them to click a load of links and pay each one separately. Of course, if they register with GoCardless they don’t need to fill in the form each time.

I’d also be a bit worried about setting up a Direct Debit if I were a client, just because GoCardless is so new. Hopefully confidence will be built as the brand becomes more well-known. The team also told me on Twitter that they were considering integration with our cloud accounting package, FreeAgent. If this actually happens, I would be quite happy to ditch the PayPal account for UK clients, providing they enjoyed using it.

I’ll definitely trial GoCardless for a little while longer and see how clients respond, partly because it’s wonderfully innovative and simple, but partly because a PayPal alternative is a long time coming and we would welcome the chance to get rid of it. If you’ve tried GoCardless Paylinks, let me know what you think in the comments.

Get £50 credit towards GoCardless fees: simply use our referral link.

Update – 17th April

I’ve just heard from GoCardless who have clarified the Direct Debit system as follows.

“When you create a subscription with a customer, the customer isn’t able to vary the amount you’re taking from them (they can cancel the subscription, in which case we’ll tell you about it, but they can’t just change what they’re paying you!)”

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Red Robot writing and research for new infographic

Posted on: by Claire Broadley No Comments

Wish.co.uk, the experience experts, have been hitting the headlines again this week for their brand new Zombie Shopping Mall experience: it’s been plugged by Simon Pegg and mentioned in Popbitch this week. We’ve been helping to create new content for the site for its launch.

In the meantime, Wish.co.uk have also jiggled around some research copy we wrote to create this gorgeous infographic: How To Break Even in First Class. Nice work!

Apple marketing: why is it always 9:41am?

Posted on: by Claire Broadley No Comments

Have you ever wondered why it’s always 9:41am at 1 Infinite Loop – at least as far as the iPhone is concerned?

I won’t steal the poster’s thunder by telling you here. Instead, read the original post over on Quora. There’s also a short explanation on Gizmodo, including some details about why some devices show 9:42 instead.

I haven’t yet got into Quora, but this kind of reply makes me think I should!

Red Robot blog for Olark

Posted on: by Claire Broadley No Comments

Here’s another new blog post I wrote for Wish.co.uk! This time, it’s for the Olark website: Using Customer Service to Boost Your Conversion Rate. The fun of being an article writer is in the sheer diversity of topics I get asked to cover. This was a particularly enjoyable one to write.

I hear Wish.co.uk have temporarily sold out of their massively popular Zombie Boot Camp experience, but they’re in the process of launching a brand new zombie day out for fans of all things undead. In the meantime, if you’re looking for something unique for your loved one(s) this Valentine’s Day, how about a Romantic Break for Three?

Neither of us have updated the blog this week as we’ve been so busy. I also missed the chance to post this new guest post link last week when it first went online, simply because we’re dedicating all our time to processing work as quickly as we can. We have a fair few concurrent projects running, and it’s nice to be busy after a fairly quiet start to 2012.

If you’re thinking of kicking off a copywriting or web content project soon, or you need to hire us to write for you, we’ve posted a few handy hints on our Get a Quote page which will help you get started.

Ghost blogs: Who really owns the copyright?

Posted on: by Claire Broadley No Comments

One of our clients raised a really valid point last week:

“If you’re blogging for me, who owns the copyright – me or you?”

It’s a really good question, and copyright is an area we take for granted when we’re commissioned to write custom blogs and articles for people. Mathew and I have now made the issue much clearer in our Terms and Conditions, but we thought it also warranted a blog post.

Copyright for articles, blogs and web content

Copyright for ghost blogs or article writing transfers to the client once the client has paid us. This policy applies to everything we do, so it also covers web content writing services. If you pay upfront, you own the copyright from the moment the web content or article arrives in your mailbox, so there’s no possibility of a dispute. If you don’t, you only own the copyright once cleared funds have arrived in our bank account. If you use our services through a third party (such as People Per Hour), you’re not legally the owner of that content until funds are released and trickle through to our bank.

If work isn’t paid for, we are still the copyright holders by law. We would have the right to take back that content and use it elsewhere, or take things a stage further and demand the content was removed from your site. We were recently defrauded for valuable work through People Per Hour, and we were never paid for what we did, so we would have the right to pursue that person for breach of copyright.

Author credits for ghost blogs

Posting blogs and articles under someone else’s name is another related matter. There are some cases where it’s obvious the content won’t be posted under our name; a ghost blog is a good example of this. But in most other cases, we would expect to be credited for the work: if we wrote a guest blog for your site, it would be standard practice for the name of the real author to be used.

If you’re not sure which category your blog falls into, just email us to ask. We’re generally very flexible, but if something one of us writes will be credited to someone else, it should ideally be discussed beforehand.

If you have any more questions about copyright and our freelance blogging services, email us today: we’d be glad to help.

Claire’s article for Lifehacker

Posted on: by Claire Broadley 1 Comment

Over the last few months, I’ve been blogging for a range of websites on behalf of Wish.co.uk, an experience and gift website. I worked with the Wish.co.uk team to create content for a range of high-profile sites in the UK and US.

Tackling such a wide range of subjects was really fun and challenging; I’d never know which site was going to accept a blog proposal next. Writing for a US audience also makes a difference to the language, research and cultural reference points I had to use.

It was a phenomenally busy end to the year, but I produced some of the work I’m most proud of. In December, my writing was published on the Eventbrite blog. I’m very pleased with that article; I’ve used Eventbrite a few times recently and I think it’s such a great idea. In fact, in my time as a non-profit gig promoter Eventbrite could have been really useful to me.

Today a piece I wrote has gone up on Lifehacker. This Lifehacker article was written by me and pitched to Lifehacker by Oliver on behalf of Wish.co.uk – thanks Oliver. It’s really nice to see this one online because it was a real challenge and took me the most time out of all the blogs I wrote in December.

Interested in getting some blogs and articles for your website, either for SEO purposes or just to keep it fresh and interesting? Drop me a line now. I’d be happy to give you a quote.

Up with the Olark: Instant copywriting quotes

Posted on: by Claire Broadley No Comments

For the last month we’ve been trialling Olark, a service that allows us to interact with clients – and track our website visitors – in a totally unique way.

 

When we’re online, you’ll see a little blue bar at the bottom right hand side of the screen. Click the bar, and you’ll be able to chat instantly with one of us using the box that pops up. Get a quote in less than a minute, or get a speedy answer to a question about the way we work. That little box makes it possible for us to offer real-time communication without the hassle of sign-up forms, Captcha fields and email verification.

Our ‘instant quote’ chat box is powered by Olark, a service which allows us to receive or initiate chats with our website visitors. We can also see who’s online in real time, bringing visitor analytics to life. Best of all, we can connect using any Jabber client (such as iChat): no need to install any special software.

The little blue Olark chat box has been absolutely vital in connecting us with new clients. Getting instant access to us allows them to get an idea of our copywriting prices and the way we work – all without tedious, time-consuming email exchanges. Crucially, we also find that live chat is less intrusive than a telephone call when we’re writing. On some projects (particularly technical writing) we need to research and follow a train of thought, and it’s difficult when the phone keeps ringing. We prefer it even to Skype.

We’ve gained at least one copywriting client through our live quote service, and we hope we’ll gain even more over the coming month. If we’re online now, just click the blue bar below to get an instant price for your SEO writing, blogging, video or technical writing project.

Proofreading and auto-correction

Posted on: by Claire Broadley No Comments

I’m sure most people with touch screen smartphones have been infuriated and/or embarrassed by auto-correct: this top 25 chart of auto-correct mistakes will have you howling with laughter. (Warning: some content not for the faint-hearted).

Copywriting often throws up some interesting auto-correct mistakes, especially when the over-zealous, silent spellchecker in Word kicks in.

My finest moment was when I worked on a Service Desk. Typing a response quickly often results in phrasing oddities that go un-noticed, but in this case, just one letter in the word ‘Regards…’ was replaced with another, making the word considerably more offensive. I read over my message and caught the mistake before I sent the email, otherwise I would probably have had a few more incidents to close the next morning.

Proofreading mistakes aren’t a new thing, of course, and not all of them can be blamed on spellchecking software. This article is wonderful. Take the sentence ‘Huge deck for entertaining” for example. What could possibly go wrong?

Read more: The Worst Proofreading Mistakes Of All Time.

Christmas copywriting availability

Posted on: by Claire Broadley 1 Comment

Both Mathew and I are extremely busy at the moment as Mathew’s been quite poorly this week. He’s soldiering through with a jumbo pack of Lemsip so we can get ahead before the Christmas break.

We very rarely close completely, but over the Christmas period we’ll try to stop working for a few days! If you have discussed a copywriting or screencasting project with us recently but have not yet confirmed the estimate, please book it in as soon as you can.

Over Christmas, we are planning to be available as follows:

Friday 23rd Urgent/ scheduled work only
Christmas Eve Closed
Christmas Day Closed
Boxing Day Closed
Tuesday 27th Urgent/ scheduled work only
Wednesday 28th Open
Thursday 29th Open
Friday 30th Open
Saturday 31st Urgent/ scheduled work only
New Year’s Day Urgent/ scheduled work only
Monday 2nd January Urgent/ scheduled work only

 

If there is any change of plan, we’ll post a note on our Twitter feed.

Please note: If you have regular, scheduled work booked in with us (i.e. regular blogs), you’ll receive everything as normal, regardless of our opening hours.

The quirks of Word for Mac

Posted on: by Claire Broadley No Comments

While writing the manual for Progress with Quest, I came across a really horrible quirk in Microsoft Word 2011 on the Mac.

PDFs exported from Word on the Mac don’t have active hyperlinks. This happens no matter which settings you use: Save As PDF, or Print to PDF, etc. Exporting PDFs with links actually used to work in older versions of Word on the Mac but was inexplicably dropped recently.

The lack of links in the finished document caused me quite a lot of pain: opening the document in Open Office destroyed the formatting, so I had no choice but to use Microsoft Word on a Windows machine to export the document. But then I had another problem. Word on Windows doesn’t work properly without a printer installed. It randomly removes spaces from your document, causing words to run together. It doesn’t highlight these words as spelling mistakes, so they are fiendishly hard to spot. When I opened my finished manual in Word for Windows, a fair few words were randomly shunted together: the last thing I needed for a manual for a dyslexia application. I didn’t know why this had happened at the time, so we had a lot of extra checking to do. Thankfully we got there in the end, and I have to say thanks to Cheron for helping with the proof-reading.

I’m now looking into using Scrivener for technical authoring. Have you tried it? Please let me know how you got on.

Your favourite non-English words

Posted on: by Claire Broadley No Comments

What are your favourite non-English words? Have a look at this fantastic post on the Global Lingo blog: the comments are really fun.

For example, did you know that Beijing is actually called Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahintharayutthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Phiman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam Prasit? Or that ‘lolololo’ is Tongan for the word ‘oil’? Very useful stuff!

I’d have to say melitzanosalata is one of my favourite Greek words, but there are plenty to choose from. As for French, I’d have to go for BOF!

Adventures in punctuation: the interrobang!

Posted on: by Claire Broadley No Comments

Did you know that there’s such a thing as an exclamation comma?

Perhaps you were unaware that the snark is a mark that is used in text to indicate sarcasm? Maybe we can bring it back into common usage? (Insert snark here).

This blog post of obscure punctuation marks is fascinating: my favourite has to be the interrobang, simply because it has the best name. I was familiar with a few of these marks, but some of them are completely new to me.

From reading through the comments on this post, I also found a really useful copywriting resource: CopyPasteCharacter.com. OK, so not many copywriters have a need for inserting a peace sign or a smiley face into their text, but when I’ve been writing user guides or working on other technical authoring pieces, I’ve often needed the ‘tick’ character to place into a feature chart or similar.

If you’re not in possession of a modern keyboard, you may also struggle to easily type € – the currency sign for the Euro. If you’re not in the US, you almost certainly wouldn’t have a key marked ¢.

CopyPasteCharacter is a copywriting resource that’s well worth bookmarking: just click the character you want and it’s saved to the clipboard, ready to be inserted into the document you’re working on.

Follow this wonderful site on Twitter at @copypastechar. Here’s a shout-out for the source of the punctuation post, too: Buzzfeed on Twitter.

One extra writer: one week in!

Posted on: by Claire Broadley No Comments

Our first week as a two-person technical authoring team has gone phenomenally well. Mathew has been writing manuals and creating screencasts, and he’s fallen into the new routine really quickly. We’re  going to make some changes to the website soon so we can make our Camtasia screencasts a more prominent service. He’s beginning a second Camtasia screencast project tomorrow afternoon, too; it’s great to expand into an area we’ve not yet explored properly. Camtasia is definitely a fun application to work with!

We also have some wonderful new copywriting clients: Beau Decor provided the wonderfully opulent shabby chic and French furniture to the Big Brother house this year. We’re thrilled to be working with them, creating content and assisting with re-writes. We’re also doing some technical authoring work around cloud software offerings from two very different suppliers working in very different industries, and we did some WordPress training for Medisoft too.

I am also continuing to write web content for Wish, purveyors of amazing experience days and one of our original clients. We’ve been working with Wish since April this year. Pssst: I also guest blog on behalf of Wish! Thanks to their super PR team, we’ve been published on some really amazing blogs this month. Did you see the event marketing blog I wrote for Eventbrite?

Being busy is great: we love being busy, and we’re looking forward to a hectic month ahead. If you need a copywriter, a blogger or a screencast producer, please get in touch for a quote!

More capacity for technical authoring and Camtasia

Posted on: by Claire Broadley No Comments

On Monday we doubled the size of our company! We now have two full-time technical authors.

Mathew has been a director of Red Robot Media Ltd since day one, taking on bits of copywriting work. On Monday he made the leap and joined the company full-time. Mathew has been creating screencasts this week, and he’s been getting involved with the creation of user guides too. He’s also creating regular SEO blogs and articles for a client in the healthcare industry.

We’re now taking on even more clients who would like custom-made Camtasia screencasts. If you need a video to showcase your software application, web application, app or website, get in touch for a quote.

Don’t forget: when we’re online, you can quickly chat to us and get an instant quote via the blue chat box at the bottom of the screen. Try it now!

New full time copywriter and technical author

Posted on: by Claire Broadley No Comments

Over the last six months, Red Robot has been very busy. From March to September we turned over the same amount of money that we expected to turn over in a year. We’ve purchased a plethora of equipment and the office has expanded. The success is exciting, but hard to sustain with only one person permanently available to do admin, accounting, filing the paperwork (or, as it happens, not filing it), keeping track of accounts and so on.

As such, we will be doubling our capacity for SEO copywriting and technical authoring in November as co-director Mathew will be taking on full-time hours. This is really great news for us as a company; it means we can process copywriting work much more quickly, and we can have a few days off now and then. It’s also good news for clients as we’ll be able to turn projects around very quickly.

Sincere thanks to everyone who has supported the company so far and employed us for copywriting and technical authoring projects. We have been phenomenally lucky to have done so well in difficult times. Expanding feels risky, but it also feels like the right time to take the risk.

Please get in touch for a quote if you need SEO copywriting, blogs, technical writers, article writers or copywriting services, or you need assistance with Camtasia, WordPress or Sharepoint. We will get back to you within 24 hours.

Our technical authoring and copywriting prices

Posted on: by Claire Broadley No Comments

From 12th November, Red Robot Media will be changing our base price for copywriting. We will also alter some of our pricing tiers for technical authoring and screencast work.

If you have an estimate or email quote, the price quoted will expire on 11th November, 2012.

Please book any outstanding copywriting and technical authoring work in as soon as possible if you wish to secure the price you’ve already been given.

Click here to contact us and confirm your project.

Availability in October

Posted on: by Claire Broadley No Comments

We’ve had a bit of time off this week to celebrate two birthdays, an anniversary and the six-month birthday of our company! Both of us are back to work tomorrow, catching up on all the copywriting and technical authoring that needs to be done for Monday morning.

I will be working straight through October, but I am planning some time away from the computer screen in early November. It’s probably a good idea to get a copywriting quote fairly soon if that might affect your project. October is already booking up quite quickly, and we’d rather not say no to anyone if we can help it.

5 reasons why the Kindle 3 will still be better than the Amazon Kindle Fire

Posted on: by Claire Broadley 2 Comments

I’ve always been technology-obsessed since I got my first computer, an Acorn Electron, at the age of 4. At age 9, I did a class presentation about the internet. I was incredibly fortunate to have an Amstrad 1512 and later an Amstrad 1640, hard-drive-less computers which ran single (or dual) floppy disk drives. It’s my 32nd birthday tomorrow, so that’s 25 years of having a computer at my disposal.

After three or four years of working as a service desk analyst, I went fully Apple: not for any snobbish reasons, but purely because I had enough of fixing Windows problems at work. (See: ‘as easy to use as a toaster‘). We have given Android devices a good go, having had an Advent Vega and an Orange San Francisco. I’m au fait with the alternatives and I’m still happy with the Apple technology we have chosen for copywriting work.

However, there is one exception. The iPad 2 is not an ebook reader, and neither is the iPhone 4, or any Android tablet. Given the choice, I would rather read a book on a phone than a tablet, but the Kindle 3 is the absolute best realisation of a device that I have seen in the last couple of years.

We both have a Kindle 3. We love them. Although the joy of buying a book is still there (and we still fund our local comic store, OK Comics, with our monthly purchases on paper), the Kindle 3 is probably the best designed of all the devices and gadgets we currently own.

Here are my 5 reasons for not jumping onto the Amazon Kindle Fire bandwagon and sticking with my trusty Kindle 3.

1. The size.

The reason I got my Kindle 3 was to make it easier to hop on budget flights without hold luggage. We travel regularly to Crete, so a lot of the stuff we need is there in the house already. The less I take with me, the less cash I have to give Easyjet for hold baggage. Thanks to the Kindle, not only is my paperback book reduced to a sliver of its former size, but I can take several. Although the line around using the Kindle during take-off and landing seems to be fuzzy (the Kindle is, technically, impossible to switch off), I have never had an issue. You can’t (easily) slip your tablet PC into the seat pocket, and you certainly can’t leave it switched on.

The Kindle 3 also allows me to study or read the paper, or proof read some copywriting for work, without having to print things our or carry heavy textbooks around. Although I could do this on a tablet, there are plenty of times when carting a larger device around would be cumbersome.

The fact that the Kindle Fire is reportedly going to be similar in size to the Blackberry PlayBook isn’t encouraging. The PlayBook is somewhere in between a phone and a tablet, without the portability of the former or the versatility of the latter.

2. The power.

You know what – it’s nice having an electronic device that I never really charge up. In fact, if I had to go and find my Kindle charger right now, I would have a hard time finding it. I think I’ve charged it two or three times. How long will the Amazon Kindle Fire last between charges? If it’s anything like my Android tablet, it won’t last a day.

3. The screen.

I first saw the incredible low-consumption screen technology on the Motorola F3 a few years ago; I was wowed by it, in fact. Everyone else thought was a bit of a joke. In fact, it was designed for places where power outlets are hard to come by. You could have put a Motorola F3 in your glove compartment on a long winter drive, just in case you got snowed in – it would last for two whole weeks between charges. (You could also drive over it in a car, which is pretty amazing).

The same low-cost screen technology makes the Kindle 3 an ever-ready marvel. It diffuses sunlight just enough to make it very readable on the beach. I don’t really want to read a book on a tablet that’s going to need to be charged very regularly, and I have no need for a colour screen either. Assuming the Amazon Kindle Fire is more or less as we think it will be, it simply can’t improve on this.

4.The single purpose.

The Kindle 3 has a single function: mimicking a paperback. (OK, it can browse the internet and play mp3s, but I very much doubt anyone actually uses it for either of those things.) I’m not sure why Amazon would replace a perfect reading device with a tablet PC that’s no different to hundreds of other Android devices, apart from (I assume) to cream some profit off the tablet market.

5. The perfect design.

The design nuances in the Kindle 3 are modest, but it’s not far behind the iPod in terms of ingenuity. The Kindle is designed to be book-like. It has everything in the right place (apart from the keyboard, but it’s rarely used). It can be used to read my copywriting notes as I write something up. I can proof read something on the plane without hauling my laptop out of my bag. Copying files is easy, navigation is easy(ish). Nobody wants to hold an iPad or any other tablet PC for three hours to read a novel, or prop it up while they’re working in a confined space. Nobody wants an iPad to slip out of their hand and hit them in the face as they’re holding it above their head, either. It’s just what it is – an electronic book.

I know the Kindle Fire is not really designed to replace the Kindle 3 as such, but I fear that it will, purely because people buy tablets without thinking about why they need them. It would be a shame if Amazon phased out the Kindle 3, all for the sake of trying to capture some of the buzz around Android tablets – a buzz which I would argue is often mis-placed.

I await the Kindle Fire announcement with interest. I hope I’m proved wrong about it.

Crowdity on Dragon’s Den this evening

Posted on: by Claire Broadley No Comments

We love working with Crowdity: their daily deals are really diverse and interesting, and despite being based in London, plenty of them are available for all of the UK to enjoy.

Don’t forget to tune in to Dragon’s Den tonight to see Crowdity pitch to the dragons! It’s on BBC2 at 9pm, with iPlayer following shortly after the show finishes.

Good luck Crowdity!

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