I was talking to a prospect the other day about SEO. Since he was keen to get some traffic to his ecommerce website – sooner rather than later – I asked him if he’d ever considered using Google AdWords.
His answer was along the lines of, “I never click on those ads, so I don’t want to use them. And more people click on the free listings anyway.”
I’ve just discovered Google’s YouTube channel and they’ve got some fantastic instructional videos on how to get the most out of your AdWords account.
This one’s on improving your ad copy. The important points to note are:
What’s the difference between reading a novel and a website?
When someone reads a novel they start at page 1, then read page 2, and so on, until they get to the end. It’s a linear process.
But most people start reading a website on the page they arrived at from clicking a link on Google. They can then read the web pages in any order. It’s random access.
So many business owners focus solely on increasing website traffic – getting more visitors to their site – to the detriment of improving website conversion – converting more browsers into buyers.
The bottom line is that you’re wasting your money on traffic if your site’s doing a poor job of conversion. It’s like putting a massive ad in the Sunday paper and having hundreds of people visit your store, but not having enough salespeople to serve them. They just leave with a low opinion of your operation.
Every profession has its secrets.
Accountants have tax loopholes. Photographers use PhotoShop to make their portrait sitters look younger. Chefs have recipes passed down from their grandmothers. And successful online marketers also have insider information.
Okay, maybe the four ingredients of a profitable website that I’m about to reveal aren’t exactly secret. They’ve been written about endlessly on the Web and in articles and books. But they may as well be secret for all the attention most website owners pay to them.
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.
A review of BRW’s “definitive guide to winning on the internet”: Australia Online, in the form of a letter to the editor.
Dear Sir
I regret to inform you of my grave disappointment with your flagship edition Australia Online. Given that it was billed as “Your definitive guide to winning on the Internet” I was hoping for at least a couple of insights and some inspiration on how to realise a return on investment on business websites.
Despite being one of the most efficient, cost effective and intelligent marketing weapons, direct response marketing (aka DR) has an image problem. It’s usually associated with junk mail, infomercials, and ads for nasty porcelain figurines in the back of the TV guide.
Recently I was talking with a client about some fresh content I was writing for his website. He asked me about seeing some “concepts” and maybe even some “storyboards”. Thinking about it later I realised he was talking the language of advertising. I wondered if he viewed each new piece of content as a mini ad.
My philosophy on websites is to take a publishing approach with a marketing orientation. A publishing approach in terms of creating and managing the content and a marketing orientation for the substance of the content.
Perhaps I am blinkered by my background which is in marketing and publishing. But I am not alone in my beliefs. In a recent article for RainToday.com, David Meerman Scott wrote: “The best websites are designed by marketers who have learned to think more like successful publishers.”
Charles Cuninghame – Website Copywriter
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:
A couple of weeks ago web copywriter Nick Usborne queried readers of his (excellent) Excess Voice e-newsletter about what makes a website credible. The question was: “If testimonials are somewhat unreliable as a means for establishing credibility, what DOES make you trust a site and believe in its integrity?”
There has never been so much bad photography as there is now. Why? Because mobile camera phones and cheap digital cameras have made enthusiastic snappers out of a huge proportion of the population, most of whom don’t have the first idea how to create a compelling image.
Check out Flickr’s most recent photos and you’ll see what I mean. There’s page after page of mostly ill-conceived and boring photos.
It’s always been this way when advances in digital technology put the power of creation in ordinary people’s hands. The advent of user-friendly page layout programs unleashed a tsunami of badly designed documents, as business took their graphic design in-house. The first wave of web design tools helped populate the web with ghastly looking sites built by business owners with zero design knowledge.
And so it is with content management systems. They make it much easier for businesses to update their websites. And so they also make it much easier to publish poor quality content that erodes brand equity.
"I help my clients communicate more effectively, improve their images, and increase their sales with high quality copywriting."
