IdeaPro.com

There’s an old maxim in publishing — the first advice a new writer gets from a publisher is “Write what you know!.”

That’s good advice, as far as it goes. However, if you want real-world people to ACT on what you write, you should get to know THEM, in addition to writing something that you know about.

If you’re writing for an audience of computer geeks, hangout where they do for a while before you write stuff you want them to act on.

1. Find out where your audience gathers for coffee, meetings, seminars, classes or conventions
2. Get into the room with these terrific people — mingle!
3. Smell them, touch them, hear them, laugh and cry with them, get angry with them, learn to feel like they do in your gut
4. Watch what they do, what they read, what they eat, what they drink, what they wear, what they like and what they hate
5. Participate in discussions with them
6. Ask questions
7. Listen to what they say
8. Hear what they complain about
9. Take notes on what you learn in real time

Take your notes from those real-world sessions and read them carefully. Summarize them for yourself, so you understand what you have learned.

Now, write a list of the ten or twenty things you think these fine folks might want to know that you do in fact know about. This will be the list that will enable you to write persuasive, informative and effective traffic-generating articles or posts that your target buyers or readers will want to read, to bookmark and to link-to on their own web-sites.

Rubbing elbows with your audience is the secret to producing persuasive copy for advertising or internet marketing. If you don’t know your audience, you may be able to write wonderful copy. But what if nobody reads it? To get people to actually READ and ACT on your copy, you need to think and act like your target buyers and readers. And, the best way to learn about them is to actually spend time with them in the real world, where you can in fact smell them and touch them.

The web may have changed MOST things, but it hasn’t changed one thing — the 5 senses. When you use all five senses — touch, smell, taste, vision, hearing … you get the idea. So get in their face!

The copy you write will sell more, produce more traffic and you’ll be a much better copy writer.

Filed under: Copywriting by IdeaPro - No Comments →

For some while now, about 2 years or so, there’s been a new resource for web marketeers and ad agencies alike: Quantcast.com.

Quantcast shows two kinds of site traffic measurements:

1. Estimated traffic
2. Metered traffic from cookies

They also provide an amazing amount of demographics on the real or estimated economics, ages, sex, family status, income, educational level, and so on of the site’s visitors. To see an example, visit their page for one of our own health related sites — Level1Diet.com. You’ll notice that they link you to dozens of ’similar sites’ that have a similar audience profile by demographics, psychographics, etc.

This is remarkable information. You won’t find such detailed visitor profile info on any public advertising metrics site. In fact until recently, you would have had to pay online data and marketing research companies thousands of dollars just to get access to similar data. This ‘free access’ is amazing… and extremely useful.

Quantcast Marketing Info is Used For:

1. Advertisers — media buyers and ad agencies, who want to know about the sites where they buy banners, links or other ads.
2. Ad-accepting sites or the ‘new media’ companies themselves, who want to know about the incomes, education, and other habits of their visitor traffic.
3. Competing sites, who want to know about the traffic and profiles of their competitors… for marketing purposes.

The New Improved Cookie-Metrics at Quantcast

Since June 22nd or so, the usual cookie measurements have been automatically adjusted to account for the frequency that cookies are erased, modified, and so on. This makes significant differences between visitor measurements before and after the new adjustments. Some visitors erase cookies more often than others. This tendency can be predicted by the type of visitor — their profile specifics — and by the type of site being measured — by contents and related site characteristics

You can read about this new technology at the new Quantcast Cookie technical info page. They also have a “Cookie Corrected Audience Data” whitepaper PDF that explains even more.

This is very sophisticated stuff. However, it appears that Quantcast total traffic estimates and specific audience profile estimates have shifted dramatically after this improvement.

Many sites have changed their relative positions by 10, 20 or even 25 percentage points. Some went up and some down of course, in the new ratings.

Becoming a “Quantified” Web-Site

If you’re a web marketeer, we recommend you apply for a Quantcast account, which is free. They will give you a snippet of cookie code to copy and place in your footer that lets them accurately measure your traffic.

The code snippet is not visible to visitors and doesn’t slow down your site.

However, even if you decide NOT to join their metrics system, you should use Quantcast often to keep track of your ‘estimated’ traffic and visitor profiles, no matter how broad and rough they might seem. It will be nice to know what incomes, family size, education, and other info can be estimated about your traffic.

Good luck to you in the highly competitive web marketing world. We think using Quantcast.com several times a week will help you in the struggle to monetize your web.

Filed under: Internet Marketing by IdeaPro - 1 Comment →