Derryck Strachan

Who Shares Wins

Many people, many businesses, are naturally extremely nervous of criticism. The idea that someone, anyone, might have anything less than complimentary to say about them strikes fear into their heart. The very notion that there are cruel people out there w... Read >

The Links Effect - Spray on SEO Appeal

An essential component of any successful internet profile is an ongoing and considered link building strategy. It's pretty simple really - no inbound links means no decent search engine positioning. As strong as your pulling power, your links appeal, m... Read >

Why I Don't Care About the Long or Short Copy Debate

Last week in our training course "Writing for the Web", I was asked about those long sales-y pages that you see for certain products online - you know the ones I'm talking about. The ones that go on and on and on for 5 or 6 presses of the page down key. T... Read >

Google Caffeine - the Need for Speed AND Great Content

Imagine a pile of paper that grows three miles taller every second. That's how quickly Google indexes data. Imagine 625,000 160GB iPods - that's 100 million GB in total - that stacked end-to-end would go on for 40 miles. That's how much Google need to ... Read >

Five Steps To Personal Branding Success

The web is awash with internet marketers, social media gurus, thought leaders and the like all trying to etch their names on the WWW roll of honour. To build a profile, a personal brand that can be turned, sooner or later into hard cash. The ebook, the we... Read >

Three Little Words That Should Mean So Much More

I'm a dad, so I spend an inordinate amount of time sounding like my own dad. It's really quite scary to me. I catch myself saying about 100 times per day, "what do you say to X?" after my kids receive whatever it was they were asking for. Invariably, I... Read >

What Do You Get From Web Copywriting Training?

I'm a big fan of business skills training of all kinds and I welcome every opportunity to take part in courses, seminars and webinars on all sorts of areas. I've done days on social media at E-Consultancy, one-on-one training on SEO, Perry Marshall's PPC ... Read >

What's the Point of Content Strategy?

In the middle of a meeting with a marketing executive of a large company, I was asked why they needed a content strategy for the website when there was already content up there? The client knew there was something he could improve, otherwise he would n... Read >

A six step guide to better email newsletter copywriting

Good communication is at the heart of any business and the Internet has made it easier than ever to engage in a two way conversation with your customers. One highly important and frequently underused tool is the email newsletter. So how can you improve yo... Read >

Essential web copywriting techniques

There are two main functions of web copywriting. 1. Your SEO copywriting needs to be strong enough to help establish your site at the top of the search engines on defined keywords and keyword phrases. 2. The whole point of website copywriting is get... Read >

Why your SEO copywriter shouldn't just be one of the usual suspects

Have you watched The Usual Suspects? You must know it, the film with the twist to end all twists. It's an absolute classic. Kevin Spacey plays weakling wall flower Verbal Kint and spends most of the film in a police station being questioned about a drug d... Read >

So what exactly is a web copywriter?

A writer is a copywriter is web copywriter right? Well no. Contrary to what many people believe all three are quite different in their approaches, work and intended outcomes. So what defines web copywriting? What differentiates a web copywriter from an... Read >