Trello Down on Deadline Day - What To Do?

What do you do when your project management platform goes down on deadlines day? That's the issue Trello users faced on November 30th when the task-planning tool became unresponsive without warning.

Users were met with a slow-loading Trello dashboard, which soon stopped loading at all. Trello's Status page reported "an issue that's causing Trello to be slow or unavailable to our users" at 9:21am EST (2:21pm GMT).

Trello Status page, November 30th 2023, 4:35pm GMT

With just three business hours left in November in the UK, losing access to your task-planning tool is less than ideal - so what can you do in such circumstances?

Christmas and New Year Availability for Freelance Copywriting Orders 2023

We're nearly into December and I'll be looking to tie up any loose ends and complete my current freelance copywriting orders with plenty of time left in the run-up to Christmas 2023.

Christmas Decorations by Dids, via Pexels

Availability is still good and new orders are welcome, from both new and existing clients. These will be scheduled on a first-come, first-served basis, with priority given to pre-Christmas deadlines where urgent.

I will have access to emails at all times, and enquiries are very welcome, even on the holidays. Smaller orders can very likely be delivered even between the dates listed below, and I'm happy to discuss larger orders ready for an early start in January 2024.

With that being said, please aim (if possible) to work around the following dates:

• My last scheduled workday before Christmas 2023 will be Friday, December 15th.
• My first scheduled admin day after New Year will be Wednesday, January 3rd.
• My first scheduled writing days after New Year will be January 4th-5th.

If you do need to make an urgent enquiry between the dates listed above, please clearly state 'Urgent' in your email subject line and/or message me on Twitter or Threads, and I'll reply as soon as I can.

There's still a full month to go, so I'll save the retrospective stuff for December, except to say thank you to everyone who placed an order in this difficult economy - I know the industry as a whole has been feeling the pinch, and I'm grateful as ever for the excellent clients I have the pleasure of working with.

Here's to a brighter 12 months in 2024 and a well-deserved break for everyone to see the back of this turbulent year.

Cyber Monday, User Reviews and Time-Limited Offers

Cyber Monday can feel like the neglected younger sibling of Black Friday, but it should be an important part of your marketing mix in the days after the US Thanksgiving celebrations.

This is especially true for ecommerce and online retail websites. Cyber Monday was created for you, so don't miss out on the marketing opportunity it represents.

With that in mind, let's take a look at some stats surrounding Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, as well as some research into the impact of Cyber Monday deals on buyer behaviour.

Laptop and cute little shopping trolley full of items

How I Became an Unofficial Doctor Who Author

There are a few things that have been a feature of my life since before I can remember, stretching back into those misty moments of early childhood that my brain decided not to store. Among those memories lost to time are the first time I wrote a story, and the first time I watched Doctor Who.

Time Scope 2020 mockup generated via Book in Motion

Five Places for On-Page SEO Keywords

On-page SEO keywords are still a valuable way to tell search engines (and human visitors) what your content is about. A few relevant words and phrases in prominent places will help to signpost the search robots towards indexing your page for the 'right' topics and themes.

But where do you put those keywords? As the average page length gets longer and longer, you're now faced with anywhere up to about 2,000 words of content to try to optimise - and that's before you start on things like meta tags and alt text.

Google Search by Jessica Lewis via Pexels

Even if your content management system (CMS) only allows you to edit plain text, there are plenty of places for on-page SEO keywords that don't need you to edit HTML code directly.

Black Friday Deals on Outsourced Writing

It's the fourth week of November, and that means it's about to be Black Friday (Happy Thanksgiving, American friends!). I have some availability between now and Christmas, so for 2023 I've decided to offer some Black Friday deals on outsourced writing for websites, print or anywhere else.

There's a limit to how much I can take on at Black Friday prices - and it's worth noting I'm UK-based, although I welcome enquiries from overseas too - so here's my offer:

£5 per 100 words
Minimum order size: 2,000 words (£100)
Maximum order size: 5,000 words (£250)
Additional words charged at £10 per 100 words

If you're interested, just email me and ask, and I'll confirm my availability. I'll take on as much as I can, but obviously there's a limit, especially as we get closer to Christmas. I'll keep this offer open through Cyber Monday week too, so orders are welcome until December 1st 2023.

Black Friday by Sarah Blocksidge, via Pexels

How to Brief a Content Writer

When you hire a freelance writer to create content for your website, you face a bit of a Catch-22. The writer needs to know what you want, but you might feel like writing a detailed brief is doing their job for them.

The clue is in the word 'brief'. A good content brief should be short and to the point. Think bullet points and punchy sentences, rather than an instruction for every 5-10 words of content.

By keeping it brief, you save yourself time and effort. But you also allow your content writer to do their job, giving them enough freedom (and enough word count) to produce coherent and flowing text, rather than trying to fit too many instructions into too few words.

Person Using Laptop Computer by Startup Stock Photos via Pexel

Update Product Descriptions for January Sales

It's easy to get tunnel vision in the run-up to Christmas, but once December 25th has come and gone, it's important to be ready for the New Year - and that means updating product descriptions for January sales.

Product description updates don't have to be full page rewrites, and equally you shouldn't make minor tweaks just for the sake of it. But if you're updating website content for New Year, it's always worth taking a look at what you've already got, and looking for ways to improve it.

Some simple examples of this include:

• Update SEO keywords and ensure pages are optimised.
• Remove obsolete information (e.g. old editions of products).
• Do not use copy-pasted manufacturer product descriptions.
• Consider adding unique content to short product descriptions.
• Make sure service pages accurately describe what you do.

In short, you're looking to make your content detailed, accurate, helpful and unique. That's good for your search rankings, but also good for human visitors to your website as we move into the New Year.

Office Workers Toasting, by Pavel Danilyuk via Pexels

How often should I update my website?

Updating your website can feel like a chore, which is why it's so important to have a good cheap content writer available to take care of the leg work.

But whether you choose the services of an outsourced content writer or you prefer to produce your own website pages and blog posts, the question remains: How often should I blog?

As always, there are plenty of different factors that affect the answer to that question. In this post I've picked out a few of the most important, to help you decide.

Lady With Notebook and Laptop, Vlada Karpovich via Pexels

The Power of Now in Customer Reviews

User-generated content (UGC) is no enemy of good-quality website content. There are some potential pitfalls to keep in mind when enabling UGC, such as whether or not you manually moderate pending posts, but in general allowing UGC can be a good way to build relevant content on your website.

One big benefit of UGC is its diversity. You can receive comments, feedback and customer reviews from all ages and ethnicities, genders and socioeconomic groups. By comparing the features and characteristics of different comments, there's a lot you can learn.

And that's what a team led by Grant Packard, Associate Professor at the Schulich School of Business at York University, Toronto, have done. Their study in the Journal of Consumer Research looks at over half a million online reviews with one question in mind: Is it better to write in past or present tense?

Three Things to do in Christmas Marketing Content

If you're scrambling to put together some last-minute Christmas marketing content and you're short of ideas, here are three great suggestions for Christmas content campaigns.

While it's good practice to have your Christmas content written and posted well ahead of time (after all, it needs to be crawled, indexed, searched and shared to generate traffic to your website), there's no time like the present.

Santa Claus with Alarm Clock, Oleksandr P via Pexels

Even if you miss the holiday season entirely, there's an argument for posting Christmas content in the New Year. You can always backdate it in your CMS so it doesn't show as being published in January, and you never know what traffic it will bring in all year round.