It’s time for a confession. Yesterday, I had to ask a copywriting pal of mine what was meant by ‘response’ in direct mail. Was it the number of people who did what was asked of them or the number of sales or conversions? I was relieved to find out that he was almost as unsure as I was.

After a quick bit of consultation and a flick though a few pages of some specialist marketing dictionaries, we discovered that it’s the former. The ones who pick up the phone or post a coupon back or make a tentative enquiry. The average is generally reckoned to be 2% response.

Which got me thinking. I’ve done a lot of sales letters recently. So what’s my conversion rate? After a few brave e-mails, the answer appears to be around the 3% mark. Wow. That’s half as good again as the average direct-mail RESPONSE rate. So, if you have a product that sells for £1000, as one of my photography clients has, and you send out 300 letters, you’ll sell about £10,000-worth of product. That’s not bad for a £150 to £200 sales letter.

Then, of course, there’s the letter I wrote back in 2004 for a translation agency that’s still pulling in around £100,000 a year. Every year.

If you’d like to see some sample sales letters, drop me an e-mail at nigel@mightier-than.com. Then let’s see what I can do for you.

The trouble with copywriting is that it’s a completely unregulated industry. There’s no Ofcopy. Perhaps there should be. I’ve just completed a copywriting job for an Asian hotels and resorts company – they loved my work – after their original copywriter had let them down. Big-style.

I don’t normally knock the copywriting competition. But I’m going to make an exception in this case. The copy this other copywriter supplied was bad. Apocalyptically bad. It was the most abysmal, illiterate, badly structured load of flowless twunk (that’s a technical term) it’s ever been my misfortune to encounter. Now, I assumed this guy was non-native English or that the copy was translated from Vietnamese. But, oh no. He’s in Devon.

If you’re buying copy, please check out the copywriter’s credentials. He or she MUST have worked in an agency for a good few years or worked client-side for a reputable company, as I did (GEC Marconi). Sadly, anyone can set themselves up as a copywriter, and many do. If you really want to be reassured, get them to do a short tester. I’m always happy to do this.

I see that the National Institute of Economic and Social Research has said that between September and December the economy grew by 0.3 per cent, its first quarter of growth since the beginning of 2008.

Its prediction comes two weeks before official figures from the Office for National Statistics that are widely expected to show that the recession is over.

Thank the Lord for that. Because this is the recession that should never have been. It’s been the Media Recession.

News is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the media tell people not to spend, they won’t. Truth is, history indicates that the economy moves in an eight-year cycle. Generally, there’ll be six years good; two bad.

However, the media exacerbate this. After six years of good times, they start to speculate about when the crash will come. Once the whispers begin, investors and consumers start thinking twice about laying out money. That shows up as a spending dip. As soon as that’s public knowledge, it turns into a media event and all the papers slap themselves on the back and say how they got their speculation right.

But it’s up to all of us now to fan the flames. Get out there and spend. Yes, even you lot whose public-sector jobs have always been safe and yet you were buying Tesco Value ranges.

Spend, spend, spend. On what? I have some nice fresh copy right here in my fridge. That’ll do for starters.

I see that British Transport Police has dropped the word ‘Christmas’ from a national publicity poster to avoid upsetting people who do not ‘buy into’ the festival.

Unfortunately, the word ‘Christmas’ had been followed by the word ‘presence’, which was quite a neat play on words. Much neater, in fact, than ‘Holiday presence’, which is how the poster ended up after the over-sensitive BTP Marketing Department had finished with it.

My complete and utter lack of hair is entirely due to situations like this. Copywriters are quite worldly-wise, media-savvy people, and analysing the political correctness or otherwise of our messages is one of our many skills. Please just let us do our jobs.

Further to my post this week about Today Translations’ Baby-Naming Audit service, I just thought I’d pop back and crow about my headline on their website blog:

Better safe than Suri.

Tee-hee.

My client, Today Translations – they of the Glaswegian translations that scored such a major PR hit a few weeks back – have struck again.

Translation agency? They should be a PR agency. Thanks to Jurga and co., celebrities (or anyone else) can now get the lowdown on their exotic baby names with a Today Translations Name Translation Audit.

This genius idea follows the recent birth of Kai, the son of footballer Wayne Rooney and wife Coleen. Kai means ‘pier’ in Estonian, ‘probably’ in Finnish, ‘ocean’ in Hawaiian and Japanese, ‘willow tree’ in the native American language of Navajo, and ’stop it’ in Yoruba, a dialect of West Africa.

While we’re at it, did you know that Suri, the daughter of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, means ‘pickpocket’ in Japanese, ‘turned sour’ in French and ‘horse mackerels’ in Italian? The name of the Beckhams’ third child, Cruz, means ‘cross’ in Portuguese and Spanish, but is also Spanish for ‘withers’ (a part of a horse).

Yep, Today understand that if you name your child after an unflattering part of a farmyard animal, they won’t thank you for it when they’re old enough to understand. Name changes later in life can be embarrassing, expensive and riddled with hassle.

So, get yourself a Today Translations Name Translation Audit for just £1,000. Alternatively, just call your kid Bob. Or Helen.

From time to time, I get e-mails asking me for advice on how to get started in copywriting, who to approach, how to write such and such etc.

Now, I’m quite an obliging bloke and, even though the request has probably cost me at least £1.50 on Adwords, I usually send a fairly prompt reply. After all, I remember my first few months as a freelance copywriter. It wasn’t easy, and I’m happy to give something back.

But now, all that is going to stop. No more Mr Nice Guy. So, if you were going to write to me for advice, think again.

Why? Well, last week, a seemingly confused and well-meaning lady wrote to me asking how to write for SEO. I gave a long, detailed and almost immediate reply. Have I heard from her since? Nope.

If this was just a one-off, I’d merrily carry on dispensing my words of wisdom. But it’s not. I reckon I receive a ‘thank you’ from about one in twenty of these people.

Now, if you were going to e-mail me for advice and you were one of the 5% who would have offered even a cursory thanks, I apologise. To the rest of you, a loud and long raspberry.

It’s often said of copywriters that we’re all frustrated novelists. So, in the interests of research, I’ve been putting this to the test.

By the end of this weekend, I hope to have completed 12,000 words and my third chapter, at which point a friendly literary agent has agreed to have a gander at my efforts.

As I can now speak from experience, I would say it’s highly unlikely that there are many frustrated novelists in the copywriting fraternity. Copywriting’s about brevity; novels demand a colossal 90,000 words and, frankly, are all about spinning stuff out as much as you can get away with.

I now see novels through new eyes. If the writer’s inserted a letter or a newspaper report into the text, I smile knowingly and think: ‘Aha, they only did that to eat up another 400 words’.

For all you budding copywriters out there who want to live the dream and work at home, be near your kids etc., let me tell you about today.

OK, it’s half-term, so I’ve got three kids to look after for starters. At 7.50am, I get a call from my sister-in-law. Her car battery’s dead: could I pop round with the jump leads? No problem.

Next up, my son needs taking back to uni. That’s a 60-mile round-trip through the Manchester rush hour.

I get a call from a local web-design agency I do work for. Can I collect a disk with a batch of work on it? Another trip out.

Make lunch for kids; keep ‘em happy with DVDs while I stem the rising tide of emails.

At 2.30pm, sister-in-law phones from work to say my niece is sick at nursery. Can I look after her? I collect her. Her temperature’s massive. I take a phone call from a client while she shoots hot vomit all over my shoulder.

I change clothes and make tea for the kids, then race middle child to her flute lesson. An hour later, her sister phones from youth club to say she’s ill too and can I collect her early? Another 12-mile round trip.

Glam life of the international copywriter? I’m off to bed.

PR is cool. PR is trendy. Best of all, PR is free. There’ve been many documented PR stunts and coups over the years, but one of my long-standing clients just pulled off a classic.

It looks like Today Translations will go down in history as the company that advertised for Glaswegian interpreters. Yes, they actually placed an ad in Gumtree, Craigslist and the Glasgow Herald for translators to help with the tricky brogue.

Apart from the Herald, they made The Sun and The Times. On the BBC, they were even bigger news – the most popular story for most of the day on the BBC News site and the subject of live interviews on BBC Radio Birmingham, Lincolnshire and Cambridge. They even aired live on peaktime Scottish TV News.

But the best news of all was an amazing 3000+ hits on their website that day – and a few offers of work from Glasgow-based businesses.

Crazily, the ad was entirely kosher. Jurga at Today honestly believes there’s a genuine need for this service. Funnily enough, it’s also not a new idea. It’s not long since the BBC provided Ceefax subtitles to Still Game, Scotland’s best-loved sitcom, which features two Glaswegian pensioners and has won high ratings UK-wide.

US DVDs of films based on novels by Irvine Welsh, such as Acid House, also use subtitles to help Americans along with the dialect. And Scottish sitcom Rab C Nesbitt, although popular south of the border, was known as much for its impenetrable dialect as for the number of bellylaughs it provided.

Anyway, do you have any idea how much it would have cost Today to buy that kind of exposure in the national media? Try £165,325. OK, I made that up. But it’s going to be a high figure. A stupidly high figure. Which only goes to show how underrated PR is.