The roots of your campaign lie in the fertile soil of your plan. Here are all the nutrients you need to create something truly magnificent.

The core elements of your copy – the messages, key phrases, headlines and even chunks of narrative body copy – are the trunk.

Individual campaign elements – emails, landing pages letters, brochures – are the branches, supported by and sprouting from the trunk, but taking their own shape determined by the specific job they’re doing.

*hugs tree*

“The clickthrough rate is fantastic, so we’re really happy about that,” he said. “It’s just that we’re only getting 1% conversions.”

And I thought, that’s like saying “our costs are fantastic, it’s just that we’re hardly getting any income”.

Now, when did it become a good idea to be happy that you have high costs?

A friend and adviser told me today that many AdWords campaigns don’t even measure conversions, so CTR is the default measure of success. Huh?

I’m afraid this is yet another example of new media madness (or NMM as I call it, starting now).

Predictably, everybody loved the funny adverts he screened and all agreed that, yes, humour works.

But does it?

The famous Paula Hamilton ad for the VW golf was amusing (but possibly not if you were a woman who’d just been (metaphorically) screwed by your fiancee); and as it focused on the core “reliability” message that VW have been pursuing for years, could be argued to be consistent with VW’s overall sales message.

Did it “work”? Well, that depends on our definition of “work”. If you take as true the premise that car advertising is actually aimed at existing owners (explained to me once by a senior industry brand strategist), it probably did, inasmuch as it made them feel happy with their car and pleased to be associated with cool advertising.

Did it shift more Golfs? We’ll never know, because the ads weren’t trackable and, in any case, car sales are influenced by a huge range of other channels, not least the whole dealer network and the influential motoring press.

Let’s talk about direct response advertising instead. Here, I think, the evidence is clearer. No, humour doesn’t work. Not in the broad, Smash Martians-Benson and Hedges way, at any rate. The Economist, famously, uses humour of a very dry variety in its above the line campaigns, but its direct marketing is a humour-free zone.

When people are thinking of spending money, they tend to be in a serious frame of mind. They want to know, “what’s in it for me?” and, “what if it all goes wrong?” and that’s about it. The jokes can wait.

Here’s my emailed response to an email from Richard Spencer, the organiser, asking me what I thought of the market for writing:

The tone is spot on and the inclusion of her phone and email is perfect.

I’d probably say “sort things out for you” rather than “address your issues” but it’s pretty good and certainly feels like she means it.

In conversation with one of my heroes – Drayton Bird – we reflected on this problem again. My answer to him – possibly more candid than my usual – is that most freelance copywriters simply aren’t good enough at their trade.

There are various routes into freelance copywriting. Our copywriter may have been an agency copywriter, an in-house writer for a corporate, a journalist, creative writing teacher or just someone who thought it might be a fine way to make a living.

None of these is a guarantee of either excellence or inability as a freelance copywriter, but the ones who will succeed will be those who dedicate themselves to their craft.

That means reading, practising and working on any areas of weakness they possess. The latter involves a degree of introspection and a willingness to admit mistakes.

On a copywriting workshop I was running some years ago, I was shocked when not one of the 16 copywriters in the room admitted to owning a single book about copywriting, advertising, selling or marketing. They just picked it up as they went along.

Do they think that this is how other wannabe highly-paid professionals go about their business? Barristers? Heart surgeons? Airline pilots? And how happy would they be to be defended in court, operated on or flown across the Atlantic by someone who claimed they’d just picked it up as they went along?

The two-pronged approach to earning a decent living as a freelance copywriter is to charge fully what you are worth. AND to make sure you are worth a lot in the first place.

If you get results for your clients, they will be glad to pay you what you ask.

Didn’t they read their F. Scott Fitzgerald? I love his take on the dreaded “dog’s dick”:

“Exclamation marks are the sound of the writer applauding himself”. Canned laughter, in other words.

If you feel you must emphasise a phrase or passage in your copy, are you sure it’s strong enough?

Powerful copy emphasises itelf in the selection and arrangement of the words alone.

I was in a hurry, so I didn’t proofread it.

Guess what? I included two errors. A missing word and a mispunctuated its.

To err is human, to check, divine.