As Ogilvy implies in this letter – edit edit edit. Get ideas written, then edit them.

Write down everything, no matter how crappy it is. It might be a good idea but poorly expressed. You can work on that in the edit.

Don’t amend what you’ve just written. Re-write it underneath. That way you can see all your versions and how your thinking has progressed. You might find later on that you amalgamate a couple of different versions.

Once you’ve got some solid ideas try and refine them down to a minimum amount of choices. Get opinions from immediate colleagues (and include that time in your estimate for how long the work will take).

When you send copy for approval, explain your thinking – essentially ‘sell’ your idea.

I use Evernote to write all my drafts and initial thinking. It saves you from having a million Word documents open, plus you can easily search through all your ideas to see if something can be re-used or to resurrect something that never got used.

Sometimes it’s best to re-use a strapline from previous years if you can’t think of anything better. Accept that it might be the best way forward because customers aren’t memorising our websites waiting to catch us out when we’ve re-used some copy. If it works, it works.

Speak directly to the reader as if you were having a one-on-one conversation with them.

I was once struggling to write a short paragraph about a travel product once, and while I was thinking about it a colleague emailed me and asked me to summarise it for her. I did it in the blink of an eye and then realised it was exactly what I was trying to do for the previous hour, I was just overthinking it a bit.

Imagine you’re writing a postcard to a friend – you use a lot of shorthand because space is so limited. Mimic that kind of style to avoid unnecessary words.

Use contractions to get a more friendly / shorthand style.

There are loads more tips out there (and in my head) - but these were the ones that immediately sprang to mind. I'll try and flesh this out at some point.