IdeaPro.com

There’s a common belief that being ‘creative’ is the way to be successful in the world of hype. Many advertising campaigns are judged as being successful if they are simply the most creative. Awards are given out for the most creative campaigns by the big marketing and advertising organizations. The Addy, the Cleo, and so on.

But, who gives out an award for the ad campaign that actually sells the most products?

Huh?

Hey, why mention SALES at a time like this, and ruin the romance of the moment. Creativity — that’s what we’re after.

Thousands of artists, performers, radio jocks, DJ’s, actors, models and impressarios occupy the CEO or President’s desks at thousands of ad businesses across the country — all of them calling themselves “advertising agencies”. You can tell they are an advertising agency because that is the way they list themselves in the Yellow Pages. “Get yourself a Yellow Page ad, and you can be an ad man, too!”

But did they get their college degree in advertising? No. If they got one, they got it in the College of Design. The Advertising Department would have been across the campus, located deep inside the College of Business. In that building, people also study marketing, use spreadsheets, and do consumer research. They study sales. They know something about mathematics, something about art, something about theater, something about music, something about focus groups and consumer polling. They know about demographics, psychographics, studies of brand recognition, consumer motivation, selling strategies, and market testing. These folks are sales people. They use mathematics, analytical market research, comparative product testing and similar approaches. And, they marry those technologies to artwork, illustration, photography, singing, dancing, acting, page design and layouts.

The idea is to SELL something.

Selling requires a witches brew of art and science. Combining them successfully demands a special ability to converge these two worlds into one productive team. You know the team has ‘won’ when the product being advertised SELLS MORE than it did before. It’s that simple.

I’ve met them socially hundreds of times. All dressed up in a suit and tie. Expensive duds. Very slick — hair in the latest styles. You engage them in small talk, and finally they get around to asking what you “do”. I’d reply that I’m an advertising agent and they’d say, “Hey that’s what I do. I own Fancy Stuff Creative down the street. You’ve probably seen my stuff for Sad Schmuck Jeans all over, huh? That’s me! The ads, not the jeans, of course. We won a bunch of awards on that run.”

After a few painful bouts negotiating myself through this verbal minefield, I soon learned to wean myself away from these folks — asap. I found you could never ask them how much money their award winning campaign made the client — they didn’t know (or care). You couldn’t even mention money, increased market penetration, and so on. That would be changing the subject. “Hey money, sales, market share — that is marketing, not advertising!” they would exclaim. “We leave that to the bean counters and boys in pin-stripes. We’re not MARKKETING people, we’re ADVERTISING people. Creativity, man… that’s our thing.” And then they would shun us real ad agents… as if we were members of those offensive sales-oriented counters of beans.

But if ad men are not artists, and not marketing people, then who are they?

They’re salemen, pure and simple. They’re salemen who lead a team of creatives and bean counters. They are people who come up with a real reason people should and probably will, actually buy the product. Then they produce the ad campaign that will end up doing the job.

Somewhere along the way, there may be a bit of creativity. It may show up in the way research is done to find out why people prefer the competitions’ products, or it may show up in the way the music and the video is done in a TV commercial that delivers the selling proposition. But, creativity is not the main thing.

But of course, the artists who run ad agencies have the cart before the horse. Advertising is the name of the industry. Artists are hired by ad agents to illustrate, to act in, to photograph, to portray and to dramatize a selling concept — a sales proposition. It’s all about sales. In producing sales, sometimes it pays to be creative. But usually, it pays to purposefully NOT be creative. We want memorability, and comprehension, and persuasion, and action (purchasing).

Creativity usually gets in the way of sales.

John O’Toole was for many years the Chairman of Foote, Cone & Belding Communications, Inc. Under O’Toole, Foote Cone became one of the world’s largest agencies with annual ad budgets in the billions of dollars. He was well known for devising advertising campaigns that continued to produce well for clients for many years, sometimes even decades. His client product’s became famous, and very profitable. And, while his campaigns were enormously successful for a wide range of famous brands, he disavowed any reliance on creativity, in fact he often warned young advertising agents:

“If you want to invest in creativity, buy some beautiful artwork and donate it all to a museum. Don’t waste your money forcing it into your ad campaigns.”

– John O’Toole, Chairman of Foote, Cone & Belding Communications and later President of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, from “The Trouble with Advertising”, Time Books, 1985.

Another great ad man often warned about relying on creativity in his books and speaches around the world. David Ogilvy was founder and Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Advertising, which was also a multi-billion dollar agency with famous brand campaigns that produced for clients over decades. Ogilvy devised simple, dramatic and persuasive presentations. He had few secrets about the reasons for his success. He wrote about the whys and wherefores in 3 books:

1. “Blood, Brains & Beer: The Autobiography of David Ogilvy”, now out of print (written in the 1950s)
2. “Confessions of an Advertising Man”, Atheneum (1963)
3. “Ogilvy on Advertising”, Vantage (1985)

David Ogilvy and Ogilvy & Mather became so successful — due to the success of their sales campaigns — that Ogilvy himself became an icon of the industry, amassed a fabulous personal fortune, and retired to a castle in France. Throughout his career, he was known as an opinionated, rule-driven master of the science.

Ogilvy never said that he had “created” an ad. He preferred to say he had “written” it. Ogilvy had cut his teeth on working in the consumer behavior research department for George Gallup, starting in the days before World War II. As a result of that experience, and the laboratory experience of spending many millions of client dollars proving what works and what doesn’t, Ogilvy became convinced of certain simple guidelines that he called “hints” on how to write his sales communications, his ads.

Ogilvy used to say that “I hate rules.” But he used consistent principles driven by consumer research over a lifetime to make billions in profits for his clients. Ogilvy was well-known to start his pronouncements to clients and coworkers with “Research shows…” He could do that because he had always done his homework.

“Do your homework.” Ogilvy used to say to understudies in his office. He practiced what he preached. Before writing an ad, he would intensely study the product, the competition, and the product’s potential buyers. This homework often lasted for weeks. He developed ideas about how the product played in the market, which he called ‘positioning.’ And, he extracted some ways to inform the buyers decisions — to persuade them to buy his product instead of the competition’s. He called that ‘benefit-driven advertising.’ But he disowned any allegiance to creativity:

“I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to say that you found it ‘creative.’ I want you to say you found it so interesting that you bought the product. When Aeschines spoke, they said, ‘How well he speaks.’ But when Demosthenes spoke, they said. ‘Let us march against Philip.’

– David Ogilvy, Ogilvy & Mather, from “Ogilvy on Advertising”, 1985.

You want to accomplish these things in an ad:

1. Have your audience know what this about at a glance.
2. Associate the ad’s ‘aboutness’ or subject with an already existing internal value. Something they know and understand, and already think is important — and want more of, or want to know more about.
3. Then you want to link the product or service — the content of the ad — to that value. You want to show how that product or service is unique and superior to other products, and where and how to buy it. You want the audience to buy it!

This means that the audience must:

1. Understand the sales message
2. Comprehend it
3. Believe it
4. Remember it at least long enough to…
5. Act on the sales proposition by…
6. Buying the product

What does this strategy require from the person producing the ad?

1. Research on the features of the product/service being offered.
2. Research on the competition.
3. Research on the values of possible customers. Who they are, what they read, watch, listen to, purchase. Where they shop and play. How to reach them.
4. Research on the market for this product or service. How much is being sold now, by which competitors. Where is it being sold? How much is it sold for? Who is the buyer by age, sex, lifestyle, income, neighborhood, etc.
5. Development of a selling proposition that may persuade the possible customers to buy the product.
6. Produce and illustrate this proposition with dramatic sales campaigns.
7. Measure the success of these campaigns against profits, market share, and possible future trends.
8. Adjust strategies and re-produce new campaigns to improve on those sales figures, or continue and expand the campaigns — whichever is needed.

Where did you see creativity in that list? You didn’t.

Oh, well maybe it might be involved in the production of Step 6: …dramatic campaigns.

How should you spend your web marketing time and your limited internet web-site promotion budget? After decades managing millions of dollars in advertising budgets, I’ve learned some lessons that directly apply to today’s eCommerce web-site owner.

Years ago I owned an advertising agency in a small market in the hinterlands. There was a graphics room for the artist and photo shoots, an audio recording room, a reception area where clients could wait — God bless them! – and my own ‘executive office’ with a window overlooking a lovely parking lot where I had my own reserved slot… But, I digress.

There was little that distinguished my ad agency suite from hundreds of other offices around town, except for one little thing…

It had one feature that made it VERY distinctive, and probably one-in-a-million in the world of ad agency offices, from coast to coast.

You didn’t see this little feature until you left my executive suite itself. Then, as you turned around to leave the room, you saw it. Over the door was a long sign that claimed “Advertising Doesn’t Work — We Do!”

What?

Why would an ad agency point out the obvious fact that any advertiser knows all too well — that usually advertising doesn’t work? Hundreds of my clients would ask me that question. Well, once asked, the question focuses on what advertising works, and how to get it. So, that’s why I wanted to bring up the subject — pointing out that advertising usually doesn’t work.

Because it almost never does. The first thing any SUCCESSFUL business person learns, especially if they are spending their own money, is that single important fact.

But almost nobody ever talks about it. Nobody.

Just “getting your name out there” doesn’t build a bottom-line. Doesn’t increase traffic. Doesn’t increase cash flow. Doesn’t raise profits. Doesn’t guarantee YOU the advertiser ANYTHING.

However, “covering all the bases” with “a little here and there” does in fact do one thing. It makes the ad agency money.

For a while.

But sooner or later the clients find out. Some of them discover it on the way to bankruptcy court. Some find it out in time to save their business.

Hundreds per month in every “Yellow Book” phone directory. Hundreds per month on every radio station and television station, scattered all through the day-long schedule to “cover the full audience”. Hundreds or even thousands on every newspaper, every week. Thousands on direct-mail and free-distribution newspapers. Tiny business card ads in every charity newsletter and club magazine — don’t want to offend all those potential loyal club member customers.

Even the smallest business can spend $10,000 a month on this caca-dodo. A hundred grand a year on nothing. Nothing memorable. Nothing worth crossing the street for. Nothing worth telling a friend about. Nothing at all.

If they were to disappear, and for most business managers that is the probability, nobody would notice.

And, after all the dust settles and the business closes its doors, after the sweat and tears have dried on the cheeks of its owners… after they have lost their house and cars, exhausted their life savings and robbed all the money from their kids’ college savings accounts. After years of 80+ hours per week slavery to trying to save their life-long dream business… they would say: “I don’t know why we failed, we were advertising everywhere.”

But, they missed one little fact:

In Business, Being Everywhere is Being Nowhere.

Their advertising was killing them. Literally. I’ve seen it personally. I saw one of these businessmen lean over and then faint away in a fatal, stress-induced heart attack. We were standing in the front of his huge, and empty, furniture store. Slowly, he collapsed onto a nearby couch, hands hanging loosely over the cushions. In minutes, he was gone!

Minutes before his lights went out for the last time, he had been explaining to me that he couldn’t afford to have a big sale promotion that might save his busness, because he was already doing TOO MUCH advertising.

None of which was working for him, obviously. He had, in fact, advertised himself to death.

Advertising almost NEVER works. It’s a fact. Over 99% of it is pure crap. Customers know it. Media reps know it. Ad agents know it.

The last guy to figure it out is usually the one paying for it.

And if you’re in business, that would be YOU.

Can this be a lesson for us web marketing people?

Make Your Ads (and Your Time) Count

When you spend a buck or a minute on something, make it count. Don’t try to do a little of this or that, all over the place. Don’t spread yourself too thin. Don’t create thousands of things trying to cover all the bases. Do you think you can out-spam the entire web with its trillions of pages? Make your pages count. Create meaningful, original content. Focus. Elaborate. Detail. Reference. Make a difference!

The web will love you for it.

Look at things from the point of view of a Google, a Yahoo, an Ask, or MSN, Metasearch, Dogpile, etc. Can you imagine what they think of yet another copy of yet another useless, duplicated, completely unnecessary, redundant, duplicated, all-over-the-place, unfocused web-site? Who needs yet another useless web page?

The search engines now provide most web traffic to web sites. Yes, some does come from bookmarks, email links, tell-a-friend and so on. However search engines like Google and Yahoo and Ask do most of the heavy lifting in generating visitor traffic. Whether from pay-per-click links on search engine result pages or from the “organic” listings that are not paid for, the search engines drive the web.

But in order to serve up the results pages, these search engines need to evaluate what is REAL and what is NOT about each of billions and billions of possible search keyword phrases.

And what do they see? Billions and billions of useless, meaningless non-original pages. And more coming every day. Many of these pages are scraped from other pages. They aren’t even trying to be original.

If you’re building yet another page or hundreds of them, why bother, unless you have something unique to say?

You can work yourself to death and spend a fortune building stuff that everyone else already has done. Or, you can do something better, bigger, more focused, filled with facts, etc.

The 3 Rules of Web-Site Promotion Success

So, since we know that in general, advertising doesn’t work, we can focus on what does work.

1. Originality.
2. Significance.
3. Community (sharing)

You could say it another way.

1. Be unique.
2. Do something that matters.
3. Let others know.

Those are the three ways to succeed online. And, in the brick-and-mortar-world too. What works in real world advertising also works for internet marketing.

You have 2 choices:

(1) Work yourself to death like my old friend in the furniture store who literally died saying he was covering all the bases.

Or, don’t.

(2) Instead, create wonderful content that’s different from the other guys. Make it stand out. Market the heck out of that singular page. Not everywhere, but in a few select places where it counts. Follow those 3 rules of successful web marketing.

You’ll live longer. And get a little famous. And, just maybe — rich!

Life — and web-site promotion and web marketing — is like baseball. Let me explain…

When you knock-in a run with a pop-up fly, everyone cheers. You’re the hero of the … hour? No. The minute.

Until the next time someone else knocks-in a run. Then he is the hero of the minute.

But, when you hit a home-run with bases loaded, you’re the hero of the hour, and the game (usually). And when that game is the final game of a 7-game playoff or series, you’re the hero of the Season! And, when that Season is itself memorable due to a convergence of great games, great players, and close calls… you’re the hero of a LIFETIME… and you get into the Hall of Fame!

Now, why is that relevant?

Because when we ask these questions about popularity, the issue of popularity ALWAYS is related to timeliness. You can’t answer the question without reference to the time frame. So, in the web and life, like in baseball, your popularity will always be related to:

1. How long a period you are examining — a few minutes, an hour, a day, a week, a month or a year, etc.
2. What else is or was going on in this period — look around you and see if what you are/were doing makes you a stand-out player in this time frame

Strategically, the decision you have to make is this: Do I want to try to make hundreds or thousands of plays of the minute or hour, so that I can continuously be on top of whatever is happening? Or, do I want to make only a few “plays of a lifetime” that will garner rewards (in traffic and hopefully income) for years to come?

Personally, I use a mix of both.

However, as the years roll by, I’m leaning more and more toward the second goal; I see the value of building major pages that yield traffic and accumulate ‘trust’ or ranking for years and years. Thank heaven I do have a few hundred of those pages. They are the big players in whatever success I have from day to day.

So, if you can write, if you can manage a writing team creating WONDERFUL CONTENT, then do it. Don’t waste time trying to be only the player of the minute by knocking-in a few runs here and there. People who do that, even for twenty years are always forgotten players. The players who make dramatic achievements — the MOST homeruns, the MOST of almost anything — are remembered. For a long time.

How long you are ‘remembered’ in the game of web marketing and page popularity depends on whatever else is happening. That you can’t control, the whatever else. But you can control what you do.

Aim for the Cheap Seats

PS: The cheapest seats are at the top of the bleachers. Aiming at them CAN put you in the history books. Aiming lower will GUARANTEE that you never get a mention above the footnotes at the back of the books.

Work like you’re playing in the final game of the World Series. Because, on the web, you are.

KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). Hey, I’m only quoting, no invective intended.

But, we should all remind ourselves that we are less bright, when we complexify what would otherwise be simple. If we’re trying to build an online web business, or perhaps a home business that runs on the web, we’re likely running on a limited budget. We need to get the most for our time. Acquire more free web traffic, per hour of marketing effort.

Simple Web Marketing Rules

The simple fact is that following only a few simple rules will generate more unique visitors than any other way to spend our time (or money). You don’t need fancy and complicated tricks and techniques. Build a good web page. Google and your visitors will love it. Prime the pump with a few press releases, articles, internal links and basic good page-design-html rules. The water (visitor traffic) will flow… freely.

The Old Google PageRank vs. the New Simpler Google Algorithm

Google has recently (May 20, 2008) introduced a new way of evaluating the web. The Google V.P. of Engineering in charge of Search Quality is Udi Manber, who wrote an article on the Official Google Blog describing the new and simpler approach Introduction to Google Search Quality. You should read his article when you have time. Read it carefully and you’ll note some interesting changes to the way they do business, technically. However, it’s basically a more simple approach. “Simpler is better,” says Udi. Google’s Page-Rank algorithm is now simpler, and so should be our marketing and SEO strategy. Google has recently refined their technology that analyzes web pages. They don’t tell us exactly what they did, but they do confess that they have reduced its previous complexity. This will mean that they will now be able to index, crawl and inter-relate your on-page content better than ever before. Write better pages and they will know it.

Avoid Grey and Black Hat SEO Complexity

Instead of constantly rewriting existing pages, and killing ourselves with bizarre and complicated marketing strategies (often called grey or black-hat SEO) aimed at acquiring external backlinks and endless multilevel layered referral technologies, why not simply build good pages, and more of them?

Building good pages is what the web is all about. At the end of the day, if we design simple, content rich, unique pages that give something to the web, the web will give us traffic to them.

How can we do that? Here’s how to get the most for your SEO efforts:

Building Successful Organic Search Engine Traffic:

1. Focus on one simple topic per page. Your page will be “about” this subject. We will write the page in an unusual order. If you organize your work in the order, building successful web traffic will be easier.
2. Divide that topic into 4 or 5 main ideas.
3. Make each of those ideas a sub-heading.
4. Write a good topical sentence in the first paragraph under each sub-head.
5. Write at least 2 or 3 more paragraphs of 50 or more words under that first paragraph.
6. Go back to the top of the page and write a introduction paragraph that reflects,but doesn’t repeat what each of the sub-heading/paragraphs will state below.
7. Go to the end of the page and write a very short summary of what the page has discussed. Do NOT repeat the top paragraph that you just wrote as the introduction.
8. Add 4 or 5 outbound links to sites that discuss the topics and ideas discussed on your page. In these links, make the link around 2 or 3 main keywords thatthe page is “about” inside each link.
9. Link this page to several other pages inside your own site which discuss your main keywords. Placing these links inside some of your paragraphs is better than doing it in a sidebar or footer. Sidebar links and footer links are detected and discounted by Google and some other engines. Make these links around relatively unique wording if possible.
10. Now go to the TITLE tag of your page and write a unique, human readable and short heading that starts with your main keyword or idea, and mentions one or two more. This should not be exactly the same as your H1 tag, but similar.
11. Now go to the META “Description” tag and write a nice short (150-160 character)summary of the page that is a brief version of the INTRO paragraph or SUMMARY paragraph in the page content. This is what Google may show to describe the page for many searches.
12. Now go to the META “Keyword” tag and write 8-10 keywords and phrases that are the main phrases from your heading and sub-heads, separating them with commas. Don’t over do this. Shorter may be better for most searches.
13. Then go to your graphics library and name one or two images something using the keywords that are your main content ideas. Something like “keyword1_keyword2.jpg”.Place a normal language description of the image in the image tag ALT and TITLE tags.Make this short and relate to the real content of the image, and the page.
14. Save this new page to your server using a name that uses 2 or 3 different keywords,separated by dashes. You could use up to 5 or 6 if needed. Make the most important keyword first in the list. Doesn’t have to be sensible or grammatical.
15. Now go elsewhere on your site and make 4 or 5 links on different pages, one link per page, pointing into this new page you are creating.
16. If you have time, then go to some social networking or bookmarking sites, discussion forum sites (find them by Googling your subject’s main keyword, plus “forum”), hub page or free WordPress blog sites and add a link or two to this new page from those sites, using keywords and short descriptions. Make sure these links are on pages that actually are about a similar topic to this new page.

That’s it! Pretty simple. No black hat or grey hat. Just plain good web content building.

If you do that, Google and the other guys will reward you. You’ll have built a 100% unique, all-new content page that nobody else has online, that is valued as being unique by the search engines, that others may want to link to, and that will bring high levels of free, organic, real-world traffic and maybe even business or profits for your site.

If you don’t follow these simple web marketing and search engine optimization rules, the search engines won’t refer free traffic to you. It IS that simple. Really.

By Contributor Steve Hetrick of DataWebPro.com

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If you’ve been slaving away at maximizing Google page-rank for your blog or non-blog type sites, chances are that you’ve been ignoring today’s hottest SEO technique. If your site is at least a few months old, you will have noticed some major changes in its ranking and in the way its SERP (search engine result pages) are displayed. Google has made at least one big, big, big change to the way it ranks pages. What is it?

Internal Linking Now Counts More Toward Page-Rank Than Ever

All of us WEB GURUS or WEB MARKETEERS used to pretty much ignore internal page linking. We thought the only thing that mattered, essentially, was how many high quality back-links we got from external web-sites. We concentrated on getting links from sites with similar content as ours, and sites whose own pagerank was very high, or at least higher than ours. We worked at getting the right keywords inside these links, and surrounding them with a paragraph of related content. We made sure they were non-reciprocated, that they didn’t grow in number too quickly, that they were in a ‘good neighborhood’ of related sites and IP addresses, and so on. This took lots of work.

Sophisticated automatic three tiered and four-tiered link networks were built to help us do all of this. Sometimes this worked and our sites moved to the top positions in search results for our targeted keyword phrases. Until the page-rank of last October (2007). After that new algorithm took effect, the world of web marketing changed dramatically.

Millions of pages and whole sites that used to be highly ranked suddenly were de-ranked or completely disappeared from Google Index. Traffic plummeted. Income from Adsense bottomed-out and we all panicked. What happened?

Internal Ranking Became a Prime Factor in Page-Rank

Internal linking is the way you build pointers to each page of your site. Google now uses internal links as a major factor in the determination of the overall importance of any particular page. If a page in your site is linked only from the site-map, or perhaps from only one other link somewhere else on your site, chances are that Google will now place this page into its supplemental index.

What is the supplemental index? Well this is an index that the biggest search engine in the world keeps of pages that have been reviewed, but have been found to be either duplicated or not very important. And, when a page is in this index, it will be served out in search results only if there is nothing else in the main index.

Being in the supplemental index is something you definitely want to avoid. Why bother to add a page to your site if it will only be served out in search results at the very bottom of the result pages?

Automatic Page Building

If you’re building lots of pages with some kind of scraper program, news aggregator script or plug-in, chances are that nowadays these auto-generated content pages, whether virtual dynamically generated and served, will end up in Google’s supplemental index.

These days, building a site with a million auto-generated pages is a complete waste of time… from two points of view:

1. Chances are these pages are made from either 100% duplicated content or almost anyway.
2. There are probably few if any internal links to each of these pages

And, that’s enough to get the pages sent directly into the supplemental index. So, why waste your time building these automatic scripts and wearing out your server with useless bot traffic?

What Actually Works to Get More Traffic

Write genuine, fresh pages manually. Be sure that you do NOT duplicate someone else’s content. Be sure to build many links to each page, even if you have to have rediculously LONG menus in your navigation. A good rule is to build at least 5 internal links to point to each and every page you write. One way to do this is simply to have a series of departmental or section site-maps that list the titles of your pages, section by section, or department by department. One page for each section, division, department and so on. Make sure there are several of these pages that point down into each of your individual content pages. That should do it.

Time you spend doing this will work for you. Time you spend installing and managing auto-generation scripts is wasted.