Archive for March, 2004
Teasing Search Engine Advertising from the Soup
Ways to improve the effectiveness of your pay-per-click advertising programs
Alphabet soup is on the menu today, except I’m going to ask you to search among the floating pasta for these letters: S, E, A, O and M. Grab three Ss and three Es while you’re at it. The rest you can eat … and while you are slurping away, I’ll talk about some search engine stuff that is terribly important to how you manage your online marketing efforts.
Eating alongside me is Catherine Seda, president of Seda Communication. The author of Search Engine Advertising: Buying Your Way to the Top to Increase Sales1 (which has the enviable distinction of going into a second printing within weeks of its release!!), Catherine will share with us some valuable suggestions for paid listings.
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Read the entire newsletter: Volume 89
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Written by:The Grok
Bad Copy: An Example in the Negative
How not to write for your Web site.
We’ve talked often enough about the importance of communicating your value proposition, not only on your home page, but on all your landing pages. You want to give folks an up-front, concise idea why they absolutely need to be doing business with you.
And we’ve talked about the importance of the message being meat, whether you are penning the words to that value proposition or any other piece of copy on your site.
Sometimes it helps to look at an example in the negative and evaluate it by identifying what you should not do! Just like those fashion DOs and DON’Ts columns. Most people who read that stuff tell me they get a healthy idea of what they should do based on an explicit presentation of what they should not do.
Read on for the full flavor of this great big DON’T. The copy is word for word … only the name of the company has been changed to protect its questionable innocence.
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Read the entire newsletter: Volume 89
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Written by:The Grok
A Mental Model for Persuasion Architecture
Can’t really get a grip on what we mean by Persuasion Architecture? Then think of a book.
Recently, my erudite buddy Bryan posted a comment on an e-consultancy forum. His observations included a brief discussion of the value of Persuasion Architecture - which, as you dear readers know, is our synthetic philosophy for creating and managing your online presence. Bryan got a comment from a fellow named Chris, who said,”I can’t help but think of persuasion architecture as one of those multiple choice ending books that I last read twenty years ago - ‘turn to page 121 if you think A, turn to page 84 if you think B…’ etc. There are a number of scenarios on each page and a persuasive writer would be able to channel readers towards the right decision.”
Now, we all know reading a book isn’t exactly the same thing as working your way through an ecommerce Web site, but Chris’s insight is a remarkably clever metaphor for exactly what Persuasion Architecture hopes to accomplish: helping your visitors to achieve their goals (not always The End and absent the connotation of right or wrong) in the ways that suits them best.
Remember. Everything you do is about pulling your visitors along, motivating them to take the next step. It’s not about pushing them, or requiring them to accommodate your master plan of what they need. Until you present your entire conversion system from your visitors’ points of view, you aren’t really being as persuasive as you could be. And that means you will always be experiencing lower conversion rates than are possible.
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Written by:The Grok
The Many Faces of Value
Toward an understanding of value that will reinforce your persuasive process.
Folks have made a habit of emphasizing the home page of your Web site as the Sacred Portal through which your visitors enter the cyber-structure of your business. As if all other avenues of entry were blocked, and the process could only start at Square One.
Yeah, right. Everyone knows the process can start at any square that is readable by the search engines. And you can directly influence the starting square through pay-per-click advertisements and email campaigns. It is possible your visitors can arrive and start digging deeper into your conversion process without ever bothering over your home page.
They’ll arrive on a landing page - something very much like a focused mini home page - and how successful you are at catching them will depend on what you do with that page.
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Read the entire newsletter: Volume 88
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Written by:The Grok
