Out of Office (Urgent Orders Only)

I'm now fully booked until January 2024 and will be working on existing orders through Christmas and New Year.

Established clients, if you need anything urgent between now and Wednesday, January 3rd, please contact me via email and mark your subject line 'Urgent'.

New customers are very welcome to make enquiries. If it's a genuine emergency I will try to fit you in. All other orders will be dealt with in January.

I will have access to emails throughout the holidays, but might be slow to reply between Wednesday December 20th and Wednesday January 3rd.

Thank You and Merry Christmas

Thank you so much to the clients who have been with me throughout this year despite a challenging economy, and to the new customers who have helped to keep my income sustainable in a cost of living crisis.

Very best wishes to all for happy holidays and a prosperous new year - I'll see you in 2024.

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.

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

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.

CLOSED for Christmas

I am now at full capacity for December orders and (other than genuine emergencies) I cannot accept any further orders for delivery in 2022.

Please feel free to contact me with any orders for January 2023 or beyond - the sooner you send me your brief/enquiry, the sooner in the new year I can start working on your content.

My last scheduled working day before Christmas will be Friday, December 16th, but at this point most of my time will need to be focused on writing to get everyone's content to them with time to post/distribute it.

Thank you so much to everyone who has placed an order with me, whether it was for a single page or a recurring order for outsourced SEO blogs, it's all genuinely and hugely appreciated.

You motivate me, you keep me going, and you pay my bills, and I take none of those things for granted.

Enquiries are of course always welcome - I will have access to emails throughout the holidays and will reply to anything urgent as soon as I can - but orders are now closed for standard 2022 delivery.

Last Posting Dates for Christmas 2022

If you're planning to hire me to write a custom Christmas card verse, end-of-year letter to friends and family, or to write your Christmas newsletter to customers, make sure you leave me plenty of time to deliver your content so that you can get it printed and mailed before the last Christmas posting dates 2022.

That all depends on how you plan to mail your letter and where you are sending it - the last date for international economy to most non-European destinations has already passed!

Royal Mail publish the last posting dates for Christmas 2022 on their Service Update page, so you can check for any changes there, but I've summarised the most important dates for you below.

IT'S TIME for Christmas Copywriting!

If you're planning to run any campaigns in the run-up to Christmas, now is the time to get them booked in, to give your freelance copywriter enough lead time to research, produce, deliver and (if necessary) edit your content to a high standard.

Once your content is published, you still need time to promote it via social media or PPC, and for it to be crawled, indexed and ranked by the search robots (including the all-powerful Googlebot, which has probably crawled this page too. Hi, Googlebot!).

Even beyond that, if you're selling products or services, you need time for potential customers to find you, place their order, and to allow for delivery of any physical goods involved.

All of which means three months is really the minimum if you want to execute a planned and not-chaotic online marketing campaign in the run-up to Christmas this year.

With that in mind, I'm taking orders NOW for delivery between now and Christmas, from one-off pages to wish your customers a happy festive season, to bulk orders for Christmas-themed ecommerce product descriptions.

My capacity is limited, especially as we get closer to Christmas, and I'd prefer to avoid last-minute Christmas copywriting orders in December as much as possible. Once we're into December, I will prioritise any orders from existing regular clients to complete before the Christmas and New Year break.

Last-minute Christmas copywriting

Hopefully if you need something writing for Christmas, you've already placed your order by now, whether with me or somebody else.

But if this week you suddenly remember you need some last-minute Christmas copywriting or you're let down by another writer who's taken on too much work, let me know.

Friday December 20th is the last day I will be normally available before Christmas, but I am available if needed around December 30th too for last-minute New Year's orders.

I still need 24-48 hours to turn around orders of any size, so if you need some last-minute Christmas blogging or you need something writing before Christmas for any purpose, contact me ASAP.