Nothing you can say for yourself is as valuable as what customers have to say about you. That's because people find the endorsements of actual customers more persuasive than the hype of faceless copywriters.

Every marketer has the same problem: overcoming a prospect's fear of making a mistake. Faced with a buying decision prospects will often sit on their hands. They need to "think about it". It's safer to do nothing than risk making the wrong choice. In this situation smart marketers use psychology to overcome the prospect's inertia.

Click to continue reading

You'll win much more business if you show your target audience how you can solve their problems.

What is the one thing every person is interested in? The weather? Politics? Health? Sport? Religion? Shopping? Sex? Money? While many people are interested in some of these things, not one of these topics holds universal interest.

Click to continue reading

If your print ad, direct mail piece, press release or home page isn't getting the results you want a weak headline may be to blame.

Research shows that readers respond more to headlines than any other element of a print ad. So no matter how eye-catching the images and design, or compelling the body copy, without a strong headline an ad will most likely be ignored.

Click to continue reading

Recently a client questioned the liberal use of the word "you" in the home page I had written for them.

A central tenet of a successful business website is that it is about and for your customers.

Too many businesses use their websites to talk about themselves: We've been in business since… We offer innovative business solutions… We have the biggest range of… We offer superior customer service…

These messages do not work. The hard truth is customers are not interested in you. They're only interested in themselves and their problems.

Click to continue reading

No one builds a website to fail. And yet many business websites fail to meet basic customer needs. Poor writing is often to blame. The information is vague, badly written, poorly organised or impossible to find.

A good website copywriter can help remedy these problems. Here are five reasons why you need a copywriter on your website team:

Click to continue reading

A friend of mine had a job selling ad space for a local newspaper. He once sold a tiny ad to a delicatessen owner in a suburban shopping mall. The deli man put on extra staff the day the ad came out to cope with all the extra customers… who never showed.

It may have been because the ad was a dud. But it's more likely that one tiny ad simply isn't enough to build sales. The deli man didn't know what all successful marketers know. As Jay Conrad Levinson so clearly explained in Guerrilla Marketing, "marketing is a process and not an event".

Many business owners I talk have an "event" mindset when it comes to the web. They believe a website is a marketing silver bullet. They think all they have to do is get the site on the Web and the phone will start ringing and the orders pouring in. Unfortunately that rarely happens.

Click to continue reading

One of the most overused words on the web is "solution", as in "web marketing solution" or "SEO solution". It's a meaningless cliché that says nothing about the nature of your business.

Take IT&e for example. Their web tagline boldly proclaims "Cutting Edge FINANCIAL SOLUTION Provider" (view website). But what does "financial solution" mean exactly?

Are they a bank, finance company, investment advisor or financial planner? Do they offer credit cards, home or personal loans, financial services staff for business or personal wealth planning? Actually, it's none of the above.

Click to continue reading

My first job after uni was working at a small publishing company. One of my boss's favourite sayings was, "If you don’t know where you're going, any road will take you there." It was a reminder to his staff that the first step in any project is to establish what you want to achieve i.e. setting goals or targets.

In my experience few websites have any goals. Often they're built on the reasoning, "We've gotta have a website because everyone else has one." Even now, many people think a website is a kind of marketing panacea. They think that by simply putting a website up they'll be deluged with sales enquiries. Unfortunately it ain't so.

Realistic and achievable goals for a website fall into the following categories:

Click to continue reading