Attracting visitors to your site is similar to the dating scene and wooing your prospective partner. And, like in courting, there are some hard-fast rules of engagement for attracting your prospect.

1. Look Nice – You want to put your best face forward. Your homepage is often the first thing that your visitor sees when they visit your site, so make sure that it is aesthetically pleasing and easy on the eye. Remember, for a vast majority of sites, the homepage has…

...continue to read "5 Ways to Court Your Visitor"

Most valuable writing lesson ever. Or so says Steven Pressfield in this blog post on how his first professional job as an advertising copywriter indelibly carved this truth on his psyche:

“Nobody wants to read your shit.

Let me repeat that. Nobody–not even your dog or your mother–has the slightest interest in your commercial for Rice Krispies or Delco batteries or Preparation H. Nor does anybody care about your one-act play, your Facebook page or your new sesame chicken joint at Canal and…

...continue to read "Nobody wants to read your sh**!"

Think about it: if those questions really are FREQUENTLY ASKED, why the heck isn’t your regular copy answering your visitors’ questions?

Unanswered questions keep visitors from buying/converting — that’s not theory; it’s a fact!

So why, oh why, would you knowingly allow your persuasive copy to ignore a frequently asked question?  Why would you possibly be content with hiding the answers to your prospective customers’ questions in an FAQ page?  Are you trying to weed out all but the most…

...continue to read "FAQ Page = A Sign Warning Drivers of Potholes"

Here’s an issue/question that arrived in a comment to my post on Playing an Idiot Online [emphasis mine]:

“Brilliant post. We get this all the time, when designing websites for our clients……..But our clients will often use the line “but my customer understands this terminology, these acronyms, my customer is from a particular niche and they all use this terminology”…….It can be hard to argue this point, the client knows their customer better than us…… Yes usability tests would be a good…

...continue to read "How to Handle Jargon and Acronyms"

In fact, you may not like the product, either, simply because you’re probably not part of their targeted audience.  So make up your mind now to look past that in order to see the marketing decisions behind both the product and the site.

Let’s start by imagining that you’ve just been challenged to enter the fitness category. Not to sell some machine or piece of equipment, but to sell…

...continue to read "On Target Copywriting and the next “Buns of Steel”"

Perhaps I haven’t had enough coffee this morning…you know us Seattleites…

But I just felt I had to call out an example of how poor copywriting and writing for search engine robots can ruin a decent Unique Value Proposition.

I was referred to a site to look at their homepage design (see screenshot, highlighting is mine), and immediately noticed that they had a prominent Unique Value Proposition (UVP) statement, which was promising.

The UVP statement wasn’t the best I’ve read, but at least it…

...continue to read "When We-We and SEO Copy Attack"

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you don’t need me to tell you that social media has legs. And it’s getting leggier by the minute.

Many companies don’t fully understand what to do with social media. They don’t see the path to benefit from it. Others have tried using it and walked away not seeing the value of social media. Others still don’t get it at all, and have left themselves completely to the mercy of the online mobs.

Most of…

...continue to read "What Social Media Can and Can’t Do for You"

In my last post, I made use of a brick and mortar analogy to the current online behavior of some e-commerce Websites, and even recommended the use of those analogies when analyzing online persuasion strategies.

And since at least a few readers responded positively to the idea, I thought I’d share one of Get Elastic’s videos  dramatizing exactly one of those analogies, as well as sharing a link to their whole series.

So welcome to The Crazy, Messed-up World of E-commerce!

And…

...continue to read "What Would Online Retailing Look Like in the Offline World"

In the offline world, have you ever been chased by retail staff because you opted not to buy something at their store?

Never?

You mean no one has ever blocked the exit and said something like, “Hey, I saw you put that bottle of wine in your cart, why didn’t you buy it?”

It sounds funny until you realize that most online remarketing services offer to do exactly that to your website visitors.  They’ll pester them with e-mails, pop-ups, and phone calls should…

...continue to read "Can Bad Assumptions Lead to “Gorilla Marketing”?"

John Gaffney’s “Ruining the fantasy of customer ownership” is worthy of a high-five. Read the entire post, it’s short, but don’t miss the conclusion:

“…at no time does a brand own a customer. That chain is cut loose too easily. Brands that approach the online marketing space for customer ownership will be disappointed. Come looking for that precious bit of attention, and marketers get paid in full.”

...continue to read "You Don’t Own That Customer"