One day, “cuil” was an ugly typo, the next it was being coughed up as “the new google” all over the web, on 24-hour tv news & in the middle pages of newspapers across the world.
Within 24 hours of launch, 5,696 people had bookmarked cuil at del.icio.us. To put that in context, that’s 5 times as many del.icio.us adds as Barack Obama’s official website has had to date.
So how’d they do it?
This is the first in a five-and-a-half part series about content: where to get it, how to get it, plus a few of the pros & cons of each approach.
The easiest way to start getting web content together is to create it yourself: Nothing to organise, no need to communicate your vision to someone else. Here are a few of the good & bad bits of creating your own content:
If you’re thinking of hiring someone to write for your website, you’ll be looking at people who fall somewhere within this range:
It’s often tempting to hire the people at the lefthand side of that: their portfolios can look very impressive, they’ve often been established for many years, they’ve got a client list full of names you recognise. But it’s worth taking a few minutes to think about the skillset required online & a few of the key differences…
How many seconds does it take you to read the message in this box?
This is a prime example of backward thinking. Customers are concerned enough today that they will read something like that on a signup screen. Making it difficult for them to read it only serves to diminish your brand perception (either you appear difficult, or you appear shifty).
Here are a few takeaways:
Technorati Tags: copywriting, usability, brand perception
A simple way to make sure your site is easy to navigate is to make sure everything’s labeled in language your visitors understand. Here are four questions you can ask to make sure you’re doing things right:
‘Asset Consolidation’ might make sense to you, but it won’t to some audiences. If your visitors cannot understand parts of your site, they’ll perceive it as difficult to use. If you’re trying to sell something they cannot understand, they’re unlikely to buy it.
If you’re a furniture manufacturer & your range of beds happens to be called ‘Da Vinci’, you may decide that all navigation to the beds area of your site will use the link text ‘Da Vinci’. This makes sense to you, and it makes sense to people who know the name of your bed range, but it doesn’t make sense to anyone who doesn’t know that ‘Da Vinci’ = ‘beds’.
While it’s straightforward to figure out that ‘Immediate Financial Solutions’ probably means ‘quick loans’, using terms wildly different from the words your visitors use is unlikely to pick up much search traffic. If you’re selling burgers, you’ll probably sell more by calling them burgers than ‘meat patties’.
There are occasions when you need to break this rule: While visitors will search for terms like “cheap beds”, “cheap hotel london”, they may be more comfortable actually buying if you use words such as ‘affordable’.
If most of your search traffic finds you via the phrase ’sony laptops’, yet you prefer to use the terms ’sony notebooks’ and ’sony portables’, you’re probably fighting the tide. Question the language you’re using, look for better alternatives & measure the results.
This is a really simple tip to increase the Click Through Rate of your Google adwords ads. As an example, we’ll say that your ad is targeting the keyword ‘Laptops’. Here’s a look at some of the competition at google.co.uk:
The tip - something that Comet, PCWorld Business & LaptopsAndSpares don’t seem to have noticed - is that words in your ad matching the user’s search terms appear in bold. Here’s a suggestion for a simple improvement to the Comet ad:
That’s it: Including the target phrase on each line increases the contrast of the area & makes the ad stand out.
This may seem crude, but the thing to remember is that most Google users will simply ‘look’ at your ad, rather than reading it word for word. The phrase they’re searching for (in this case ‘laptops’) will be in the front of their mind, and the majority will click on impulse. What you are aiming to do here is simply:
From that point it’s up to your landing page.
The title tag is one of the fundamental elements of any webpages. Using titles in the right way offers many benefits and no disadvantages, yet so many sites still misuse them & suffer as a result.
This article explains the basics of title tags & then shows you how paying some attention to your own titles can benefit you. It finishes by offering 6 simple best practices to follow when setting up your own title tags.
The title tag is (or should be) an element of every webpage. In HTML code it looks like this:
Take a look at the titlebar on any site & you can see the current page’s title tag. Here it is in Internet Explorer:
And here it is in Firefox:
The primary functions of a title tag are:
Title tags also have a few ’secondary’ functions. Search engines & other users will make use of your title tags. Understanding how/why they do this, & how this impacts search results, allows you to use them to your advantage.
Ensuring each of your titles is highly relevant to the page it appears on has three large search marketing benefits:
It’s worth noting that most search engines (including Google) will embolden terms matching the current search. (eg. the above example was a search for ‘OM Strategy’ & so each instance of those terms appears in bold)
In the short term, the purpose of an email subject is to get your recipient to open the email. In the long term, the purpose of an email subject line is to position you & your emails, and to make sure your recipients keep reading your emails week after week. Here are five quick tips for writing effective subject lines.
This doesn’t necessarily mean be ’salesy’. Using the same, simple subject line every week can work, as long as your emails continue to be valuable to your recipients. The same goes for leading on news, offers, information of interest. What are your customers interested in? Telling your customers that your email contains something of interest to them & following that up will reap benefits.
If you’re afraid of letting your customers know that the email is from you, then you’re doing something badly wrong elsewhere.
Over the past few months you may have noticed subject lines on spam emails becoming less obvious. Spammers eventually got wise to the fact that their “Huge Gains In Only 5 Days” subject lines made them easily identifiable as spam. This is something you can learn from: While leading on benefits can offer great results, be careful not to sound like a traditional spam email. Look like a spammer & people will assume you are a spammer.
While having a boastful, overselling subject line may increase your short-term open rates, if the content doesn’t live up to the promise your recipients will feel cheated. That leads to lower conversions & more unsubscribes in the short term, and damaged trust & lower open rates in the long term.
That point could be reworded “make sure your customer realises you aren’t overselling your content”: If your subject line does include reference to a news item, an offer, or a specific piece of content, make sure that item is plainly visible as soon as the email is opened (and that may mean opened in the preview pane). The simplest way to follow up your subject line is to start the email content with a very closely related headline. For example: your subject is “Apple Releases New iPods”, your content could begin with the headline “Today Apple Released New 100GB, 150GB iPods”.
Many websites make the mistake of giving equal weighting to their ‘buy now’ or ’sign up’ buttons. Some even hide them, thinking this looks better aesthetically. The truth is, making your conversion buttons subtle does look better aesthetically, because having a ’stand out’ button puts the focal point of the page in an odd place. But that’s exactly what you want: the point you want your visitor to reach should draw their eye immediately, and plainly remain the centre of attention. Make your conversion point the brightest, most contrasted element on the page.
Don’t make your visitors’ eyes dart all over the page. If you’re presenting a choice of options, keep them in one column. If you’re presenting a single product, ensure its details are in logical order.
If your landing page offers visitors 10 different options, try presenting one of those as the ‘logical click’. For example, making the top item double size, or adding a ‘Recommended Item’ splat to it. This works especially well for items where visitors may not know enough to make a logical choice. Try varying the number of options on your landing page. Presenting visitors with the choice of 1000 scarves can often result in the ‘wood for the trees’ phenomenon, and have them quickly exiting via the back button.
Including a higher priced item on a landing page to contrast with your primary product can work as an ‘anchor point’ for your visitor. Is $200 cheap for a juicer? I have no idea, but if it’s sat next to a $600 juicer then it looks like a bargain to me. Some visitors like to buy based on emotion, some like the satisfaction of making a logical choice. Finding ‘a bargain’ satisfies both of those audiences equally.
Think about what information your target audience would need in order to buy your product. What reservations might they have? Answer them.
If you have an offer, spell it out simply. Read through your copy and, if something is ambiguous, clear it up. This is very important online, as visitors are much less likely to ask clarifying questions than they are in a store. In a store I can ask an assistant something and get an instant answer. On the web, your visitors are more likely just to go to your competition in the hopes they can explain what you haven’t.
There are two core audiences on the web: Those who will skim-read your copy, picking out the elements they want & those who will go through combing your copy word-for-word. Using bold headings and pulling important information into summary bullet points satisfies both audiences equally without risking lost sales from either.
The web is an incredibly visual medium and, apart from looking nice, images can often answer the visitor questions you’d never have thought of. This applies whether you’re selling electronic goods, clothing, food, or practically any other item you’d care to stock. Images tell a story. If your visitor is planning to buy a pair of jeans online, she’ll conjure up a mental image of how she’ll look in those jeans. The more easily she’s able to paint that mental picture, the more likely she is to buy.
Whether you’re selling hair curlers, or gathering donations for a charity, you’ll probably run a one-off email campaign at some point with the objective of making direct sales. This kind of one-off campaign is quite straightforward & linear: similar to an exchange with a customer at an event. They’ve signed up to receive your emails, so you can be fairly sure they’re in the market for what you’re selling, your purpose now is to gain & keep their attention, maintain their interest, and elicit the desire to buy.
Overall, in this type of campaign, there are four key areas on which to focus your efforts:
1. The Subject Line
The average internet user gets 7 ‘wanted’ (non-spam) emails every day. On top of that, they are targetted by a further 77 spam emails (hopefully their server/software will block at least some of these). While you, as a marketer, like to think that your latest campaign is of high importance, your recipients probably have 10 or 15 things higher up their to do list. These facts combine mean your subject line has to do two things well: 1) Avoid sounding like spam - or you’ll be straight in the deleted items folder, & 2) Persuade your recipient to actually open & read the email.
2. The Headline
Whether this is the headline of the email body, or just of an individual section within the email, the main role of your headline is to draw the reader’s attention & persuade them to read the body copy. It’s important, however, not to oversell. Email is largely about trust, and if your reader feels you’re trying to trick them, they’re unlikely to continue reading & even less likely to reach your final conversion point.
3. The Body Copy
Your headline has drawn the reader in, the purpose of the body copy now is two-fold: 1) maintain your reader’s interest, and 2) elicit the desire to click through to your site for more information.
4. The Landing Page
The two main traps people fall into when putting together landing pages are 1) to repeat the exact same information as the email, or 2)to totally ignore the content & purpose of the email, and start the landing page at a tangent from the email content. The landing page is a continuation of the email reader’s experience, not a different experience altogether.
If the user has landed on your landing page, they are a good way through the journey. You’ve caught their attention, maintained their interest, elicited a desire to move forward and find out more. All that is left now is to move them toward your target action.
The Conversation
If you think of this email experience as a conversation between you & the reader, you can’t go far wrong. Your subject line is the equivalent of catching the reader’s eye across a room. If your subject line looks interesting enough, and you do manage to catch their eye, you have a chance to put in your opening (your headline). If they respond to your opening, you get to expand a little further &, if your body copy is good enough, your reader may say “oh really? tell me more” and click through to your landing page. At that point, all that’s left is to draw them toward action, and your campaign is a success.
