Counting Down to Ten Years as a Freelance Writer

In early June 2011, after (very nearly) five years working at the online news agency and content creation company Adfero (later Axonn Media), I handed in my notice.

During those five years I had produced around 7.5 million words (this is literally true, not an exaggeration) of original, researched breaking news content, static pages and features for SMEs and global household brand names.

An artist's impression of what my last ten years looked like...

At different times in 2006-11 I was varyingly:

• A 'desk head' responsible for a team of 8-10 correspondents.
• A performance-related pay correspondent with additional workload.
• A self-managed correspondent producing headline news for Adfero's own websites.

There was nothing new left to try and I wanted a change of scenery. Which is ironic, as I switched from working at home, to freelancing at home.

On June 30th after taking a few days off to celebrate my birthday, Adfero offered to release me from working the rest of my notice period, and I left without fanfare (or even a 'good luck' card - try not to neglect your homeworkers in the post-COVID years, people!).

How I Single-Handedly Won Eurovision 2021 for Italy

Last night was the grand final of the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest and an impressive victory for Italy's Måneskin with a total score of 524 points for their song 'Zitti e Buoni'.

I'd like to think I'm at least partly, if not solely responsible for this stunning win, after recently celebrating the seventh anniversary of one of my most successful tweets of all time.

Back in 2014, Eurovision was held a few weeks earlier in the year, with the final taking place on May 10th. In the good old days, the subtitles showed foreign-language lyrics translated into English, whereas nowadays they tend to display them in their original language.

That gave us the gem of a lyric "I love parking inattentively" in the 2014 Italy Eurovision entry 'La Mia Città' by Emma Marrone.

I thought it was a pretty great line, so I took a quick, semi-blurry snapshot of my TV screen and tweeted it with the words "BEST LYRIC OF THE NIGHT", a couple of Eurovision-related hashtags, and CC'd the Twitter account @yplac which celebrates inattentive parking.

BEST LYRIC OF THE NIGHT #Eurovision #Italy cc @yplac pic.twitter.com/JIy3J3UTOS

— Bobble Bardsley (@bobblebardsley) May 10, 2014

Apparently other people also enjoyed the lyric, as to date by May 2021 it has received a total of:

• Over 1,500 retweets
• Nearly 900 likes
• 40 replies

Unfortunately I don't think full analytics were available at that time, so I don't know exactly how many impressions and interactions it's had, but it must be in the tens of thousands at the very least.

It's also featured in several BuzzFeed articles by Scott Bryan which I'm sure have helped it to remain 'current' despite its ever-increasing age over the past seven years. Thanks Scott!

Complete Text for New Website Launch

Text content for new websites is often overlooked during the design process. Web design agencies love to focus on graphics, animations, responsive mobile templates and so on, but don't always include much more than basic placeholder text or even Latin dummy text to fill the space.

It's not their fault - often that's what they've been hired to do, it's just that people don't realise web design doesn't necessarily include website content. Unless you realise in time, this can leave you without complete text for your new website launch. In the worst-case scenario, you might not have any sensible text content at all.

Whether you're still in the planning stage and you want to make sure you have complete new website text for launch day, or you're taking that final step and have just realised your web design agency are not going to fill in the spaces in your pages, I can help.

Make sure you have complete text for all the main pages of your new website.

Starting with your homepage as the first priority, I will work with you to identify the most important pages on your website and fill in any gaps with good-quality content. That might mean descriptions of your products and services, 'About Us' style pages, introductory text for your ecommerce checkout page, and so on.

Short Story Writing

Whenever I am contacted by someone who needs to hire a ghostwriter for a short story, I'm immediately interested. I produce a lot of factual content - online news articles, SEO landing pages, product descriptions etc - but fiction is where you can get really creative with words.

A short story is a search-friendly way to do that. Adjectives and metaphors can create a picture in the reader's mind, while plain text remains the easiest format for Google to crawl and index, adding to your presence in the search results.

In many cases, customers who want to hire a short story writer plan to publish the story in print, whether as a gift for a friend or family member, as marketing materials, as a teaching aid, or for some other purpose out there in the real, physical world.

Doctor Who - Time Scope edited by Matthew Rimmer

Time Scope is an unofficial and unauthorised charity e-book of short stories, poetry and art inspired by the Doctor Who universe, edited by Matthew Rimmer and featuring memories from cast and crew members who have worked on the show itself.

I know Matthew via his Who Hats account on Twitter, which catalogues every appearance of headwear in the show and is an indication of his encyclopaedic knowledge of Doctor Who.

At the start of the Coronavirus lockdown in the UK, Matthew contacted me and other fans of the show and invited us to contribute. I suggested an idea for a short story, and you can guess the rest.

Time Scope 2020. Click here to buy.

This is not your standard fanfic. Matthew has worked tirelessly over the past eleven weeks to bring together fans, authors, artists and performers to create an illustrated work of fact and fiction that runs to 360 pages, not including the cover, contents and contributor biographies. The full PDF is a hefty 417 pages long and is on sale from today, July 4th 2020.