• Uncomplex – If you want action, everyone involved in the decision-making must easily comprehend performance.
• Relevant – they must be measuring the success objectives that are unique to you and your website.
• Timely – Even the greatest metric in the world is useless if it takes nine days while your world changes every three days.
• Instantly Useful – you need to be able to find insights as soon as you look at it.

-Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Web Analytics 2.0

Your business is different than everyone else’s, so why would you look at the same measurements of success as everyone else?  Everyone looks at visitors to their site, but what does that tell you about how your business is doing?  If you sell a high-end product and the only people coming to your site are those looking for a cheap solution, it doesn’t matter how far up and to the right that blue line goes for visitors, your business isn’t growing. You want to look at the metrics that will tell you if you are progressing with growth.  That’s why the most important step you can take toward success is identifying the metrics that will tell you if what you really want to happen for your business is happening or not.

What actions do you need your customers in order to achieve the site outcomes you desire?  Do they need to consume more content?  Do more of them need to make it to your product detail pages instead of bouncing off your home page?  Do you need to increase visitors from a certain website that sends high-converting traffic?  Do you need more conversions from PPC traffic?  What needs to happen on your site to get your business to where you want it to be?  Once you’ve got this down, you can now find out what metric will tell you if it’s happening or not.

If I need visitors to consume more content so that they can learn about how my product or service benefits them, my metrics for success might be Time on Site or Pageviews/Visit.  If more visitors need to make it to my product detail pages, I might make Product Detail Page Entrances on my site my chosen metric and ramp up my PPC and SEO to those pages.  If I need more conversions from PPC, I might use clicks and conversion rate as my primary metrics. Bottom line: what you spend your time looking at and trying to improve should align with the outcomes that will grow your business.

How much does online marketing cost?

The response from our team comes at this tricky question in a variety of ways…

Stoney (@StoneyD): There is no one-size-fits all answer to that question. It’s kind of like asking, “How much does a house cost?” Or a car. Or surgery. Or ObamaCare. Well, not the last one because the others can actually have a defined costs. The better questions is, “How much ROI will I get for my investment?” While there is no “sticker price” that can be placed on that, it really is the bottom line question. Whether you’re paying $5,000 or $500,000 for online marketing, you need to make sure you will get a return. This comes back to making sure you trust your SEO. If you pay a lowball price then ROI can be very difficult to be achieved, especially if your competition is out investing you in SEO. You also don’t want to over-pay, either. If your SEO provides quality and gets results – and more importantly, gets ROI – then there is no such thing as overpaying. Bottom line is, you need to invest whatever is needed to grow profits and not a penny less.

Craig (@craiggeis): That’s a broad question. I prefer to look at online marketing as an investment rather than a cost. There was a day when playing the internet was like hitting the lotto. Those days are long gone. Today, setting goals, doing research and creating strategies are vital if you want to swim with the internet sharks. Don’t be fooled, there is risk when you invest online. But with the proper approach you can reap great returns if you proceed with wisdom and have patience.

Mike (@mflem25): Let’s say I have a friend who has agreed to give me $4 for every $1 that I give him. Of course, I’m going to give him as many $1 bills as I can muster up. That is, unless of course, I have another friend that will give me $5 for every $1, right? If this were the case, I would give friend #2 as much money as I could muster up until he ran out of money. If he stops giving me the $5, whatever I have left goes over to friend #1.

Yes, the friends are marketing channels and the Internet is one of them. Of course there is another layer in this whole deal. Whichever “friend” you treat better will make a better deal with you. So, if you don’t know how to treat a certain “friend” well, you likely would want to go get some counseling on how to conduct that relationship.

Jen (@martijen): For more than 100 years, businesses have been sold on the value of traditional advertising and marketing, such as newspapers, magazines, trade publications, flyers, brochures, billboards, radio and television. Hundreds of studies have been conducted on the effectiveness of these communication channels. Collectively, companies have spent billions annually on “crafting their message” in ads and commercials. Yet, all this effort was one way, sent out via electromagnetic waves or printed materials to nameless, faceless consumers on the other end. Metrics were based Gallup Polls, demographic readership studies or, in the best-case scenario, an actual pile of coupons that could be counted when redeemed.

The Internet, however, has ushered in true two-way communication between consumers and organizations. People have names and faces and personalities and conversations. And, oh yes, they CLICK. Suddenly, you’ve got some actual numbers. You have measurable statistics. You can tie your online marketing efforts to conversions of all sorts (purchases, subscriptions, likes, retweets, etc.). Of course, interpreting and managing all this still takes planning, execution and, yes, moola. But, when compared to traditional marketing, online marketing demonstrates ROI in a much clearer way. In the end, you must decide how much that’s worth to you.

Look for our Q&A posts about online marketing each month. Or, if you have a question you’d like to ask our team, just send it to ask@polepositionmarketing.com. We’ll be glad to answer via our blog.

Moving your PR online opens up a whole world of new adventures. Not only do all the old rules apply, but many new rules are created to ensure that your content can effectively reach your audience.

So far in this series, everything we have discussed has to do with the set-up and creation of your online PR. All of the online elements need to be taken care of before you can push your story out online. Pushing it out before it’s ready will lead to a colossal failure. However, how and where you push your message out is just as critical for it’s success.

In this final post, we’ll look at the details around how you can broadcast your message to get the most value from your audience, search engines and the social sphere.

Broadcasting Your Message

It’s not enough to craft the perfect PR piece, or optimize it to the hilt using your visitors’ keywords. Where you push it out to, the tools you use, and how much you allow your visitors to engage with your content are all critical to having a successful online PR campaign.

In the offline world, good PR necessitates a heavy focus on pushing content out to news sources. It also involves creating relationships and currying favor with journalists who may or may not write about your news. Online PR greatly expands the target of your efforts. On the Web, your content needs to appeal to more than just journalists; you’re also trying to get the attention of current and potential customers. A submit-it-and-forget-it strategy won’t work. You need to submit-it-and-engage-it!

It’s Not Just News

Moving your PR online also means moving beyond the news mentality. Sure, you can get your PR piece noticed by traditional news outlets or have it hit the search engine news sites, but that’s just the tip, not the bulk, of the proverbial iceberg.

A well-crafted piece of PR should be able to reach far more people than news searchers. This is where social media comes into play. Sites like Facebook and Twitter, and tools such as RSS and +1 can help you reach well beyond the traditional news borders. These tools not only reach a broader audience, but they encourage engagement, which can improve the socialization aspects of each piece.

Online PR Submissions

There are a number of online PR submission sites that you can use to help build, distribute and track your online PR. Each service has it’s own unique features, so do your due diligence, and find the one that has the best bang for the buck.

Figure out what tools you want and need for each piece. You may find that one submission service is handy for some content and another is better for other content. Where it gets distributed can have a substantial impact on the success of each piece.

Tracking each piece is critical to following and understanding it’s level of success. You may not be able to fully grasp what success means until you’ve had a chance to submit and track several pieces and compare the results.

Social Pushing

This is where engagement with your online PR becomes critical. You need to use your social media channels and connections to get more eyes on your content. Facebook, Twitter, +1, and other socialize buttons allow your visitors to promote your content into areas you have no way to reach.

The key is making sure your content is “retweetable.” Or in other words, it is something worth sharing? Then leverage these options via your company social profiles, and by adding the socialization icons on the page. The idea is to make it as easy and desirable as possible to have your content socialized around the web.

You also want to make sure you engage with anybody that is talking about, asking questions about, or commenting on your content. Don’t just sit and relish the tweets and retweets; talk to people, and use this as an opportunity to build relationships. You may find these relationships valuable later on.

RSS Feeds

One of the drawbacks of active social channels is that, if your content isn’t pushed out at just the right time, it will often get missed. Of course, the right time means when each person from your audience is looking at their social stream!

RSS allows you to get your content to people on their own time. If they subscribe to your RSS feed then they can get notified of new content whenever they open up their feed reader. You may be competing with hundreds of other feeds, but at least you know that your content headline will get scanned rather than completely buried.

If you are not familiar with RSS feeds, I suggest you do a little homework on this, and ask your developers how to implement an RSS feed for your content.

Bringing It Home

Now we’re at the big, “So what?” We understand that getting your online PR piece is great for making sure people see our content. But is there anything more here than just getting one piece of content after another published and read?

Well, yeah. There is a much grander purpose to online PR, and this is what makes the online aspects so great. Each piece of content, if incredibly crafted, can serve as an entry point into your website, drawing in new visitors, customers, clients and information seekers.

Your PR piece isn’t just about PR. It’s about building a more visible website!

Everything Flows Back To Home

Everything you do online should serve one purpose: drive traffic and customers to your website. News for the sake of news is pointless. News with a goal of increasing readers and those engaged with your content is fabulous. News designed to increase profits is even better!

Everything you do all boils down to building, branding and marketing your website. Anything less ultimately falls short of it’s potential.

See all posts in this series:

Part 1: Intro / How Print Audience Differs from Web Audience
Part 2: Goals of Online PR
Part 3: Background Research
Part 4a: Crafting the Story p1
Part 4b: Crafting the Story p2
Part 5: Broadcasting the Message / Conclusion

Follow me at @StoneyD and @PolePositionMkg.

When taking your public relations strategy online, there are some similarities to the “traditional” way of doing things, but there are also a lot of differences. Going online opens up a whole new world of opportunities that, if leveraged properly, can make your PR campaign far more successful than the old-school ways of doing things.

So far in this series we’ve looked at why online readers are different from offline readers, clarified the goals of online PR, and then dived into the background research needed to craft a good story. The following two posts will focus on developing your story in a way to maximize your reach through search and social.

Crafting the Story, Part 1

Any good writer knows that there is more to a good story than meets the eye. Anybody can throw some words on a page, but it takes a lot of thought and prep work to take a story and turn it into something that is valuable, or succeeds at fulfilling it’s intended purpose. Writing online PR content isn’t much different than offline PR content. Many of the staples remain the same.

However, because you’re dealing with a different audience than you might otherwise have dealt with offline, you have to take the nuances of this new audience into consideration before, during and after crafting your story for consumption. While the tenants of good writing remain, the action of carrying out those tenants can sometimes be very different.

Grab Their Attention

Getting someone’s attention is the first step in getting your proverbial foot in the door. If you have the best piece of content out there but fail to grab the attention of your audience, then you have a fantastic, but unread, piece of content! Getting your content read is more than just having a catchy headline, it’s about saying something that really get’s people to sit up and take notice.

One of the ways to grab your audience’s attention is to use their search phrases throughout your content. When your readers see the keywords they actually searched for in your headline and in your content, it continues to reinforce the idea that this is what they were looking for. When you use words other than what the searcher uses, then you are, in effect, speaking an entirely different language. Some readers may get the correlation, but many will be gone before you can say “Hey, wait, this is what I really mean!”

Attention grabbing headlines are important, but again, keyword usage here is important. A cool headline that isn’t keyword focused can often fail at delivering the right traffic. Headlines for online content need to focus more on keywords than on “shock” or entertainment value. Those elements can still be useful, but without keywords, your content will be bypassed altogether.

You also need to make sure the content itself grabs your audience’s attention. You can’t just throw out a headline that isn’t backed up by your content. If your headline get’s their attention, the content has to keep it. If the headline entices someone to read your content, make sure your content entices them to keep reading. If your headline makes them sit up and take notice, make sure your content makes them grab a cup of coffee and read every last drop, er, word.

Make it Interesting

We all know that if we want our content to get read we have to make it worth reading. Nothing new here. But because online readers are so fickle, lack focus and have a short attention span (see part 1), there is a lot more work that has to go into making your content interesting.

As I mentioned above, grabbing your audience’s attention goes beyond a good headline. And you have to do more than throw a phrase in every now and then that shakes them up. Everything in between needs to be interesting, compelling, and valuable. Anything that’s not should be cut and (figuratively, of course) dropped onto the editing room floor!

There are four key things you can do to make almost any content interesting:

Be Unique: Put out something new. Don’t write about the same thing in the same way, instead find a way to write about something new and different.

Take a Different Approach: Tackle your subject in a different way. Even if you’re writing about the “same ole, same ole”, do it in a new way that addresses the topic in a way that no one else is addressing.

Make it Compelling: Make sure your approach is compelling. This isn’t about change for the sake of change, but about finding a more compelling way to present the information at hand. Keep them interested.

Create Value: Finally, make sure every reader walks away having learned something new. If the information isn’t valuable to them then you’ve wasted a great opportunity. Your primary goal is to make sure your audience feels they have gained something by reading your content.

Title Tags

Everything noted above can apply to any content, regardless of the forum. Here is where we get into the specifically web-related stuff.

Title tags are probably the most important real estate for producing optimized content. They are often the first signals the search engines see when determining the topic (and therefore the rankings) of a page. They’re also what the search engines display in their search results. Your title tag is the clickable link in the search results. If it’s not both keyword rich and compelling, you’ll either have a lower ranked page or one that gets clicked fewer times. Or possibly both.

The page title isn’t necessarily the title of your content, though they can often be the same. Regardless, you’ll want your optimized title to be more keyword rich, without sacrificing it’s ability to get attention. Try to keep the title tag under 63 characters, as this is the limit that the search engines display in the search results. Longer won’t matter, just so long as you know that it may get cut off.

Meta Description

While not critical to getting good rankings for your content, the meta description does have value. For the most part, the search engines will use the meta description as the descriptive text below the clickable title in the search results. This gives you an opportunity to craft a keyword rich and compelling language that will give searches additional insight and reason to click into your content.

If you are targeting a very specific keyword or group of keywords, you can create a meta description that targets those phrases. However, there are cases when a meta description may actually hinder the click rather than help. In these cases, where your content is going after what is considered the “long-tail” phrases, you can leave off the description and let the search engines pull a snippet of text from the content to display in the search results.

This allows the description in the search results to include the specific keyword the searcher used without you having to have foreknowledge of the exact phrase that might be entered in. Since long-tail keyword variations are so abundant, trying to craft a meta description with every possible variation is impossible. Let the search engines do it.

We’ll continue in Part 2, looking at other elements that are valuable in crafting a strong online PR piece.

See all posts in this series:

Part 1: Intro / How Print Audience Differs from Web Audience
Part 2: Goals of Online PR
Part 3: Background Research
Part 4a: Crafting the Story p1
Part 4b: Crafting the Story p2
Part 5: Broadcasting the Message / Conclusion

Follow me at @StoneyD and @PolePositionMkg.

I started this series looking at the differences between print readers and web readers. This is critical to understand before moving forward with your online public relations material. We cannot expect to reach online readers the same way we reach those that are offline. We can’t just do the old-world methods in a new-world medium.

The differences between the two readers is vast, and, without that understanding, there will be no way to hit the goals you are trying to achieve. But once you have a firm grasp on who your online audience is, and how they react, you can begin to set attainable goals for your online PR.

Goals of Online PR

Every piece of content you create should have a goal in mind. What is it trying to achieve? What do you want people to do? How is this going to benefit your company? These and many other questions need to be answered before you even begin writing.

Being online, we have to look at specific set of goals that are unique to the web. As we noted at the end of Part 1, there are three things we have to keep in mind: Search, Social, and Conversions. What goals do we need to have in place in order to be successful in each of those areas?

Let’s look at four goals of your online PR. These should help you in crafting better pieces of content designed for the internet audience.

Goal 1: Get Noticed

The idea of generating any piece of content is to get noticed. What’s the point of writing if no one is going to see it, right? I mean, this isn’t just an exercise in futility… we want people to read what we write, dang it!

What you’re looking for is the double take. Imagine driving down the highway and suddenly you spot a purple cow. What the?! You’re going to do a double take. That’s what you want your online content to do, to stand out in a way that people go, “Holy purple cow, Batman, did you read that!”

Now be careful. You don’t want to lead people down a false path here. Don’t pull a bait-and-switch. Once they do that double take, make sure the second take is every bit worth it.

So, what happens next? What should your piece of content do once you get some eyeballs on it? That’s brings us to goal number 2.

Goal 2: Get Traffic

Traffic is essential to having a successful PR campaign. Your content may do a great job of getting noticed, but is that translating into traffic to your website? If not, then your “hot” piece has utterly failed.

You want to make sure that people don’t just read your single piece of PR then move on to something else. Your content should only be the teaser. It should act as a doorway into the real content: your website. Speaking in terms of food, you want people to move from the appetizer to the main course.

Is your content interesting enough to keep people engaged with your brand? Is it creating traffic beyond the piece itself, or is it just a (dead) end unto itself? No content should be the end. Heck, even after an order for a product is placed, the goal then is to bring the visitor back to start the purchase process all over again.

While your PR piece may be designed to inform, it also needs to have a reason to be informative. Information for the sake of information is what we call “useless knowledge.” I already have plenty of that!

Once you start moving people through the process from reading to engaging with your site, you have to then look at whether you are delivering the right traffic to your site. Which brings us to goal number 3.

Goal 3: Get Customers

Getting customers is one of the key goals of any online business. Now I use the word “customer” loosely. That can be whatever is meaningful to you. A customer could be someone who buys your product, or someone who downloads your white paper, or engages with you in Facebook. A customer can be anything you determine it to be. It really depends on your industry and what you are trying to accomplish with your business.

If you’re not getting customers, whatever those are to you, what are you getting? Traffic? Hits? Page views? A round of applause?

Is that enough for you, or do you want more than that? What is the content delivering for you, and how do you use your PR piece to bring new customers into the fold?

“You mean I actually have to produce something that produces something?” Well, yeah. Content just for the sake of being read is nothing more than a bunch of words on the page. Every piece of content should speak to your potential customers, encourage them to engage, and ultimately lead them to that conversion point.

Of course, not every visitor can turn into an instant customer. But there is a way to get them to become an evangelist for you, which leads us to goal number 4.

Goal 4: Get Links

The web is fueled by links. If no one linked to anyone, how would you find any content? Search engines? Well, they use links to find the new content. So, if they can’t find it, then your audience can’t find it either. That means your content not only has to produce customers, but it also has to get customers, and non-customers alike, to pass it on via links and social shares.

So, how do you make link-worthy content? Well, there are three steps. 1) Get noticed. 2) Get traffic. 3) Get customers!

Huh. Those look familiar.

If your content is doing those things, and the visitors that read each piece find the information in it valuable, then it is more likely to be passed, linked, or shared. And that’s what you want. Why? Because the more your piece of content is linked or shared, the bigger potential it has of reaching more customers.

More links means better rankings and more traffic from your target audience. More traffic means more customers. More customers means more links. It’s a magnificent cycle to be in!

Every piece of PR may have a different set of immediate goals, but the four goals mentioned above shouldn’t ever change. These are your universal constants in the online marketing world. If your content isn’t hitting these four goals, you need to rethink what you’re doing. It’s not that there is anything wrong with the writing itself, but perhaps you’re not writing with the right goals in mind.

Refocusing your content onto these new goals will help ensure that your online PR strategy lines up with a search and social world, which really just means it’s doing the job it was intended to do.

See all posts in this series:

Part 1: Intro / How Print Audience Differs from Web Audience
Part 2: Goals of Online PR
Part 3: Background Research
Part 4a: Crafting the Story p1
Part 4b: Crafting the Story p2
Part 5: Broadcasting the Message / Conclusion

Follow me at @StoneyD and @PolePositionMkg.

That?

It brings up images of Charles De Mar from the movie Better off Dead saying, “I’ve been going to this high school for seven and a half years. I’m no dummy.”

The problem is, these websites are speaking to the minority that are already sold on you. Congratulations, the choir knows God loves them. Now how about tailoring your message for those that have yet to be convinced?

In online marketing, you have to reach past even the point of conversion. In the religious world, it’s called “discipleship”. In online marketing, they call it, “customer satisfaction.”

For many companies, they let the conversion process end at the point of sale. In the service industry, customer satisfaction obviously happens AFTER the sale. We get that. We don’t just take the money and run, we have to deliver. This is especially true if we want to earn their business a second (or third) time.

But, retail isn’t so different. You can’t wash your hands of the customer once you ship them their product. That may be the end of one sales process, but it’s also the beginning of another.

The Client is Yours to Lose

In the service industry, once you’ve got a client, he or she is yours to lose. That means that, unless you screw something up, they’ll often continue to be a client for as long as there is a need for your services. But, it’s your job to continue to sell them on the quality of what you provide by giving the best service possible, and making sure the results are more than merely satisfactory.

Providing quality services can net you far more than just an ongoing contract, it can generate great word-of-mouth, leading to scores of referrals, which is the most lucrative form of marketing. What you say about yourself is not nearly as important as what others are saying about you.

Cultivating your existing clients can result in a great source of new clients. But, that’s not just for service industries. Again, what happens after the sale in the retail industry matters too!

Anytime you sell a product, you have the buyer’s name and contact information, which can be used to cultivate them for additional sales down the road. You have the ability to send them product updates, sales information, warranty expiration notices, satisfaction guarantee information, related products, product updates, and more. The cost of communicating with a customer to keep them a customer is far less than the cost of acquiring a new customer!

Once a customer has bought from you, there is a good chance he or she will buy from you again, provided that the experience was a positive one… and they remember. Following up after the conversion ensures that you keep your “good name” before them, so the next time around, you are on their mind instead of Google. They’ll go directly to you – no additional “search” needed.

Sometimes, preaching to the converted is the exact thing that needs to be done. After all, there is no such thing as “once saved, always saved.” Or in this case, once converted, always converted!

Now granted I’m not a rodeo fan, but how is it that I don’t ever know about this event, save for the lone person asking me if I’m going? Is anybody even advertising this thing?

Ok, so I may not be the average consumer. I don’t watch commercials (thank you, TiVO!); I listen to commercial-free satellite radio or my ipod exclusively (thank you, XM and apple); I get all my news from the internet (thank you, Al Gore), rarely hitting local news sites; and I don’t get out much (thank you, blu-ray.) So it got me thinking….

What’s a local company to do — to reach someone local like me?

I had to think about this for a bit and realize that the one single form of advertising I see a lot of is Billboards. I always know what concerts are going on locally because all the casinos advertise on billboards. I’ve seen exactly zero billboards for the Reno Rodeo.

I’m about as commercial-free as one can get. While I may not currently be the “average” adult male, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that I’m the future “average” adult male.

This means finding ways to reach an audience is going to become more and more difficult. Especially when it comes to building awareness. SEO and PPC only work for those who are looking for something. I’m not looking for a rodeo, but might find it fun to take the kids. If I knew about it, that is.

What are you doing to reach your audience?

I think it’s getting more and more difficult for local companies to reach their audience. Not only as we become more nationalized and globalized, but because we are finding new ways to avoid traditional marketing and advertising. When it comes to local advertising, it seems that billboards and word of mouth are about the only way I can be reached.

What about you? How do you reach your audience?

I would be interested to hear if any local companies are finding marketing to their audience more or less difficult, and if more difficult, what they are doing about it.

Pretty much every comment noted that the guy with the cigarette was a problem, but only Chris of Westward Strategy explained why.

…they associated the sleazy car dealer with Fallon Auto Mall and not Kietzke or “Big City Motors” as their TV ads say. If I wasn’t a local and hadn’t seen their TV spots I would think that all the guys at Fallon Auto Mall look like him.

He’s dead right.

I haven’t seen the TV spots (TiVo, baby!) so I have only the billboard to go by. I’m sure there are others that also might have missed the commercials too. That being the case, the billboard needs to stand alone as a marketing piece.

The problem then is what information motorists will typically process as they drive by:

But by placing the sleazy looking car salesman in close proximity to the Fallon Auto Mall logo they’ve created a guilt by association. Not for the Kietzke Lane car dealerships they wish to malign, but for themselves.

How could this billboard been done better? Here’s our take:

Notice that the only new element here is the words “visit the”. The rest is just a rearrangement of the existing elements to get rid of the negative association with the Fallon image.

What do you think? Any better?

Want to take a whack at it? Post a link to it in the comments below.

Five was the limit here, not sure what others are seeing.

You can read Google’s announcement here.

I’m not sure what to think of this. Will this increase the likelihood of ads getting clicked? Will this increase interaction with my site? Or does this distract even more from the content. What do you think?

Seth Godin who has written 11 books to date including Purple Cow as well as being an entrepreneur and highly respected speaker has another great book for us to read, Meatball Sundae. I truly enjoyed yet again his getting to the point writing merged with real-life business examples. Godin doesn’t focus on the negative instead he illustrates through words what a company did and what they could have done better and on the flip side what they did and what he thought was amazing about it. He also includes many websites that should be looked over as examples or used in your new marketing strategy. Godin gets into old marketing and new marketing how they differ and why old marketing is not the future or the present. He touches on, The Long Tail theory coined by Chris Anderson which is also one of SEOmoz’s must read books. Godin explains why direct communication with your customers is more important then ever and how one person can effect your business by using direct communication. It’s up to you to make it a positive comment or a negative one.

Quote from Meatball Sundae:

“If the New Marketing can be characterized by just one idea, it’s this: Ideas that spread through groups of people are far more powerful then ideas delivered at an individual.”

This book is written for the busy bee it has an executive summary and gets to the point in only 232 pages.

Seth’s Blog is another good resource to look over and see what point he’s making today or even in the past. I signed up for it about a month ago and have found it to be refreshingly informative and useful. He also has free ebooks which touch on subjects such as website design, blogs and the new web.

In my opinion Godin’s success thus far has come by doing exactly as he preaches and not being knowledge greedy. He focuses on the success of others and doesn’t hold back knowledge because of insecurities; which you’ll find in the business world a lot. People who are so focused on keeping all the best knowledge to themselves in fear of their jobs, let it go. Once you build others up you’ll find they are thankful and want to help you succeed as well. Try it, you’ll be surprised how much more of an asset to your company you’ll become.

I’m not afraid of occasional political references. In fact I’ve been known to make my political and even religious views known here on this blog, but I never go so far as to preach those views to my audience. I think it’s silly and bad for business. If you’re looking for controversy, I don’t think that’s the smartest way to drum it up.

When businesses mix politics with their advertising campaigns, you have to start wondering about how much benefit they get from it. Especially when dealing with hotly debated and deeply personal issues.

The ad to the right is for a storage company based in Manhattan. Manhattan is liberal territory, but I can’t help but think that this type of ad is just bad overall. Not only will it alienate a fraction of their audience (the political right) but it is probably even turning off many others that are not entirely leaning to the political far-left. Did you catch the dual use of the coat hanger? Closets? Back alley abortions? This is pretty sick imagery.

But that’s just the opinion of someone who leans to the political far right. What do you think? Should a business’ politics bleed over into their ads. Is there an level where it’s acceptable and a line that should not be crossed? What do you think?

What do you do when you have key phrases that are personal in nature i.e. “make my writing better” as a core term? You could use it as a headline to spark your readers curiosity, but at times that may be an awkward act to follow. The most simple way to do this is to use customer quotes or testimonials.

“I took the course hoping to make my writing better and now I’ve published four short stories this month!”

Make it a little more believable than this, but you get my drift. This method can also be read like an aside, commonly used in Shakespeare’s plays to inform the crowd. The quote should read as if the visitor is talking out loud or overhearing someone else’s conversation. However, if you are using the key phrase in a testimonial, get permission to make your changes from the original author of the testimonial.

Another clever way to incorporate those tricky, personal key phrases is to point out that the visitor probably never thought they would be looking for that specific key phrase.

Now that you’ve finished grad school, you never thought you’d enter “make my writing better” in the search field of Google.

A secondary gain to this structure is that you are now speaking directly to the visitor. You’ve made direct contact and can keep your visitors attention by speaking in the present tense and second person.

You don’t have to ignore high-traffic, personal keyphrases because you can’t work them into the copy. You just have to be a little creative.

What do you think? Did you find this as compelling as I did?

Recently I inherited a ’66 Dodge charger. I spent some money rebuilding the engine and getting it cleaned up both inside and out. And now it, too, was ready to become a driving advertisement. This time I wanted something a bit more “obvious”.

We developed a graphic based on some other ads we had created, and the result was… well, take a look.

I’m not sold on it, which I was really hoping to be. The thing is, it looked really good on paper. I can’t figure out if it was a good idea poorly implemented, or just a bad idea to put this kind of ad on this car in particular.

There is a lesson here, but first I want to know what you think?

1. Good idea poorly executed
2. Bad idea, period
3. It’s freakin’ fantastic

Use bullet points or a numbered system to:

• Break up your copy into consumable pieces
• Aid in the clean design of your page
• Make it easy for the reader to reference previous points
• Save time when reading through dense copy

Just like clothing styles that rotate in and out of fashion with the occasional new concept joining the cycle, the words used to describe the trends move in cycles as well. What was “cool” yesterday is “hot” today. Or maybe it’s “wicked” or “awesome”, “boss” or “sweet”. You most likely won’t find accurate definitions for these terms in Webster’s Dictionary. But, if you’re going to be in the marketing game you better know today’s definition of the word.
Having an understanding of your target’s demographics current linguistic nuisances not only establishes your credibility with your audience, but its helps them better understand your message. It also makes them feel like your message is for them, not aimed at them.
So how do you acquire such rapidly changing language skills?

You PARTICIPATE in conversation with your audience and when they are speaking you LISTEN.

These can’t bet forced conversations in marketing studies that would feel like some sort of discover channel study either. Real conversation and interaction with your target group is the only way to be sure you are speaking the same language. This interaction should take place in the normal surroundings of your audience. You can’t drag two teenagers into an office building and expect to get a feel for how they speak and interact with each other in the outside world. It must be real, not simulated interaction. Only then will you be able to convey your message properly, using words that feel right to your audience.

When these terms have incorporated themselves effortlessly in your various forms of communication and they feel natural to you, then you are ready to market to the group. But be warned, as soon as you think you’ve got it, you can be sure that the lingo is already changing. If you can’t keep up your better off having a translator then to even try.

The aura of non-conformity which is aggressively cultivated by Macintosh through a slew of anti-PC advertising campaigns designed to establish the Mac brand as a sort of hip anti-hero, cleverly positioned against the clunky and counter-intuitive PC which symbolizes a robotic established norm that is out-of-touch with today’s ultra-cool, carefree, “down-with-the-man” computer user.

The problem is that the Mac campaign has been too successful and now every gutless-yuppie-thrill-seeker type is filing into the Macintosh March where they too can join the ranks of the tech-rebellious and “Stick it to the man” in a very controlled and safe way. So much so that the Mac is in fact the very antithesis of true non-conformity: It has degenerated into a “non-conformity fad” (uber-oxymoron). A predictable outlet for the masses to be “hip” and different, while marching alongside a million other mindless idiots who purchased their Macintosh not because it was the logical solution for their unique computing requirements, but because “it’s a freakin Mac”.

Ok I’m done.

If you’re tired of my yabbering recounts and “lessons” learned from each apprentice episode, have no worries. On Thursdays, March 22, 29, and April 19 you can learn from a real apprentice!

Trump university is sponsoring a series of call-in seminars featuring Sean Yazbeck (The Apprentice Season 5 winner), Kendra Todd (Season 3 winner) and Randal Pinkett (Season 4 winner).

You need to sign up for each session, which is limited to 200 callers each.

What surprised me was that the seminar on “how to make money on the internet” that was really nothing more than a sales pitch for an all day seminar they would be holding several weeks later. And boy, did they have that pitch down!

I left after the first 30 minutes. It felt like we were still in the introduction stage of the presentation. Kind of like they kept making promises of all the things they’ll be covering but never really covering them. I think that was just the point. This presentation wasn’t about providing information on how to make money from the internet, it was about how you can learn everything you need to know about how to make money from the internet by coming to the NEXT seminar.

The presenter was professional and he didn’t come off as a hack. He was actually very engaging. And interestingly they covered the “get rich quick schemes are a scheme” ground too. It was a very effective 30 minutes. I almost wanted to sign up for the next seminar. Maybe I would had if I had not left!

Pre-Selling Is A Legitimate (And Effective) Sales Technique

While I don’t care for this type of pre-sales schtick, it got me thinking about how we go about selling those things that we sell. In fact, any good website uses some kind of pre-selling technique regularly. Think about it, rarely does our home page actually sell the products or service we offer. That page is just an overview, an introduction, a flowery summary of what we or our products are all about.

As we click further into the site we get closer and closer to the actual selling, but depending on the breadth and depth of the site, we are often just pre-selling as visitors click deeper and deeper in. This pre-selling, regardless of what page it is on, does the job of routing each visitor closer to the destination which is the sales page while continuing to build expectations as they move through the site.

And how does all this pre-selling happen? Text. Content. Words.

The Product Should Not Have To Sell Itself

Many sites, especially e-commerce sites, feel that words are unnecessary and that the product should sell it self. They’ll throw the specifications onto the product page and believe that tells the visitor all they’ll ever want or need to know. Okay, fine, lets say the product does sell itself. But what about the pages that lead to the product? Surely you have pages that lead to the product pages, no? If your site has any kind of depth visitors generally hit the home page first (provided they didn’t enter via a search that dropped them right on the product page). From there they have to (want) to click to a category of their choosing, and then they can click on individual products. That’s two whole pages before the “sales” page, at best. For some sites there are more.

So let’s analyze those pages. What makes a visitor want to click past the home page? Is it pictures? Maybe. But I’d bet there is (or should be) some text on that page that gives comfort to the visitor and assures them that they came to the right place to find what they are looking for. Pictures are pretty and all, but you got to make them want to click through.

If you’ve done your job on the home page then the user will click into a category that suits their needs. What does this page tell them? Is it just a list of products or have you taken the time to fill the visitor with more information specific to the products in this category? Surely you can say something compelling about your battery chargers that is different from your batteries or have content describing your snowboards in a way that doesn’t sound like you’re selling ski gloves!

That’s the pre-sell process. They are on their way to the sales page, but don’t let them get distracted… keep feeding them the content that gives them the desire to keep moving through the site.

Help Yourself Sell That Thing You Sell

You may think that you do not need sales content on each page, but let me tell you, it helps! The people who ran that seminar probably didn’t need the pre-seminar in order to get people to come to the longer one. But they knew that a free 90-minute seminar is an easier sell than a $20 all-day seminar. Once they get them in the door then they have 90 minutes to make the case for the all-day seminar to follow.

In the same way, you may be able to sell your products on specifications alone, but you have your audience on your site, why not use every opportunity to. You can to give them information that fills them with the desire to purchase your products… long before they ever find the product they are looking for. That’s a much easier sell!

I’m fascinated by Burger King’s marketing campaigns. First they came out with the little blurbs found on their burger wrappers, fry containers and soda cups. Now they got some of those cool blurbs in the store (I read a clever one on the garbage bin last week.) And then Burger King came out with some XBOX video games. The pictures to the right were taken from my very weak camera phone. I did my best to clean them up.

I’m not a gamer, but I can imagine that this is a pretty significant branding platform for the ‘King’. Who’s most likely to go to BK? Pre-teens, teens and college students, most of which take in a healthy dose of video gaming. The games were cheap, $5.99, I think, so any kid needing a new game for their box could easily score one.

Of course, the best part is, they take it home and get to be the King. Pure branding magic!

All this talk of Burger King has gotten me hungry. Yep, that’s the point. Play the game, get hungry, ask mom and dad to take you to Burger King for lunch. Eat, go home, play the game some more, etc. etc.

Now we’re talking about developing a Pole Position game.

Aw, crap! That’s been done.