If you’re anything like me, you’ll belong to quite a lot of LinkedIn groups that are relevant to your area of work. For me, a lot of these are copywriting-specific groups, but I also belong to others to do with subjects like SEO, social media, design and the creative landscape as a whole – areas which are more broadly than specifically relevant to me and to my profession.
Part of the reason for my joining these groups is that I am well aware that there is always something new to learn, and there are a lot of people on LinkedIn who have some very interesting and useful insights to pass on.
As well as the LinkedIn groups and discussions, I’m also signed up to a number of newsletters and other mailing lists. But I’m seriously considering unsubscribing from at least two of these.
Why? Because they keep on making mistakes.
It seems blindingly obvious to me that if you’re going to tout yourself as being some sort of copywriting guru, your copy needs to be flawless. Not pretty much flawless. FLAWLESS.
No typos, no grammatical errors, no errant apostrophes, no double spaces. Nothing. It must be perfect. Especially when the very subject of the email is complaining about a decline in standards and bemoaning the devaluation of quality writing.
One of them even referred to ‘poor jounalism’.
In my criticism of these ‘experts’, I’m by no means saying that I’m perfect. Why would I? There’s a tree of arrogance waiting to be chopped down right there! Apart from ‘expert’, incidentally, I’d also personally shy away from the terms ‘guru’ and ‘genius’, which seem to be tossed around willy-nilly these days – and which are even attributed to teenagers in company-branded t-shirts, if you get my drift!
The other day, I received an email from an outfit that was offering places for no small sum for their new copywriting training course. All one had to do was click on the URL to sign up and part with a few hundred quid.
But the URL didn’t work. AGAIN.
Ouch. So then we got another email apologising for that and including the ‘real’ link. But given that this is the second time they’ve made the same mistake, I’m now loath to go to them for advice. Plus it’s also slightly put me off reading any more of their newsletters…which is a shame, because a lot of the time they’re quite good. But the constant errors just make me doubt their credentials.
All this, of course, simply proves an old adage: however good a writer you are, it’s impossible to proofread your own work. So if it’s going out to a lot of people (or even to just one very important person) get a colleague or friend to read it for you in advance.
It’s also a very good idea to send yourself the email you’re going to send out to your hundreds or thousands of subscribers – not only to check the format, but also to test the URL. Do use a different computer to do this if you can – or at least a different email account. So if you use Outlook usually, send it to your Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail account.
If your click-through rate isn’t quite what you’d hoped it would be, at least make sure you aren’t shooting yourself in the grammatical or hyperlinked foot…
Ashley is a copywriter, editor and blogger
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