Dramatic Design

How to Alienate People and Lose Sales -Monday Marketing

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mondaymarketinglogoToday, we’re going to take a look at how NOT to market your business, thanks to one of the “big dogs”: Pepsi (AMP division).  Mashable.com writes

The company recently launched an iPhone application [iTunes link] for its AMP energy drink called “before you score,” with “score” meaning (to put it in the most subtle of terms) having a successful night with a woman.

Beyond the premise of the app being rather risqué, it’s when you drill down to the specifics that it becomes much more, breaking women down into 24 types and suggesting “lines” to lure each one of them. If “successful,” the app also encourages users to brag about it over email, or even on Facebook or Twitter.

First, this is one of the most offensive premises I’ve seen in a while in the realm of marketing.  How degrading to encourage this kind of behavior, but then to encourage the user to degrade their “conquests” to their friends online!  This is unacceptable in every way that I can think of.

Aside from the morality issues of this application and the related advertising, how stupid are these marketers?  Women make 85% of all brand purchases…do they really want to alienate women?

I’m not going to go further into the above situation.  My point is…watch your advertising to make sure you’re not alienating your potential buyers.  Any comments?  Have you seen bad examples of advertising?  Let’s talk about it.

Running a Contest – Monday Marketing

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mondaymarketinglogoA while back, I talked about participating in a contest that another website was hosting.  Well, this week, I’m taking it a step farther!  I am actually running my own contest on www.celiacsupport.net.  So, what steps did I have to take to run a contest?

  • Decide on what the prize would be for the winner.  In this case, it is a copy of the brand new, hot-off-the-presses book, “Once-A-Month Cooking: Family Favorites“.  A friend of mine is helping with the marketing and she knew that I would be a good person to promote the book, since the book has a 2-week gluten-free cooking cycle in it that would interest my readers on that particular website.  (Yes, I knew someone…but you could choose a product on your own and adapt this to work for you.)
  • In this case, my job was to review the book and post my review on my blog.  The prize for my readers is a copy of the book.  I will be posting reviews, interviews with the authors, photos, and various other goodies from the book (quotes, recipes, etc.).
  • Determine what your readers will have to do to enter your contest.  In my case, I am trying to build my email list, so that is the one requirement for entering.  However, visitors can earn extra entries by spreading the word via social networking.  I find that if you make the contest too difficult, people decide it’s not worth the hassle.
  • cookbookcoverLet people know that the contest is coming.  I posted a preliminary entry on my blog to build the buzz.  I tweeted it a few times and let my Facebook friends know about it.  Hopefully, the word will get around.
  • Today, when the contest opens, my first post will appear and visitors will see all the details on how they can enter, when the winner will be chosen, and see a photo of one of the recipes I made from the book.  In addition to my own photos, I will also be using graphics such as this one (right) and a photo of the authors later in the week.
  • I will be spreading the word through social networking throughout the week and hopefully, creating a buzz!

Please feel free to sign up, if you’d like to win a cookbook.  Only one of the 2-week cooking cycles is gluten-free; the rest are just plain great recipes!

Tell me your thoughts!  Have you ever run a contest on your blog?  Any helpful suggestions that you can add?  I’d love to hear them!  Sign up below, if you’re playing along with the Monday Marketing Meme!

Writing for the Web, Part Deux – Monday Marketing

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mondaymarketinglogo This is a guest post by Cindy Bidar.

Last week we talked about writing for the web in terms of entertaining and educating your human audience. This week we’re going to look at writing for the search bots, for without them, you will have no human readers.

Know Your Keywords

In the simplest terms, a keyword is a word or phrase that you want your article to be found for. If you sell personalized ceramic coffee mugs, then you want your site to be at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) when someone searches for personalized ceramic coffee mugs, right? That’s your keyword.

In reality, you probably have lots of keywords. If you need help finding them or developing a keyword strategy for your site, I highly recommend reading SEO Fast Start by Dan Thies. You can get it for free on his site, SEO Fast Start.

What To Do With Your Keywords

Now that you know what your keywords are, you have to use them!

First, make sure you’re using your keywords in your content. Now that doesn’t mean you just list all your keywords in some nonsense paragraph and call it good. Remember your human readers, too! But do try to include your keywords, their variations, and related words in your content.

Those variations and related words are important because they help the search engines know that your site isn’t just a keyword stuffed scraper site looking for ad clicks. In other words, it improves your trustworthiness. The more trustworthy your site is, the higher it will rank.

The second thing you want to do with your keywords is to craft a good title tag and description. The title tag is what shows in the top bar of your browser, and is also the clickable part in the search results. The description is the small snippet of text that appears below that line. Again, don’t just list your keywords, make it meaningful.

Lastly, use keywords in your headings. You make a heading by using<h2> or <h3> tags. The reason these are important is because the search engines give more weight to these words when calculating your page’s overall rank.

Don ‘t Forget the Humans

It’s easy to get so carried away with writing for the spiders that we forget the real purpose of your site: to attract and keep human readers. But remember this – spiders don’t have credit cards. If you are in the business of making money (and aren’t we all?) then you must ultimately write for humans. The spiders will lead them to you, but your content has to keep them there.

Cindy Bidar is a freelance copywriter specializing in web content. She blogs about writing, marketing, and anything else that strikes her fancy at CindyBidar.com.

Writing for the Web – Monday Marketing

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mondaymarketinglogoThis is a guest post by Cindy Bidar.

Every website has two audiences: the human type and the computer type, and they form a symbiotic relationship. Without one, the other cannot survive.

The computer audience is made up of these little programs we call spiders. Spiders work for the search engines, crawling pages and indexing what they find there. They are totally objective, looking only at the words they find and, using a complicated algorithm no one understands, and assigning a “value” to your page by which your human audience can find it.

The human audience is more subjective, easily distracted, and quick to jump to the next page (or back to the previous one) if they don’t find what they are looking for in the first three seconds after they arrive. They don’t just read the words, they see the whole page and form an opinion of you, your credentials, and your authority–all from a single glance.

How can you possibly write one page for these two very different creatures? That is the art of writing for the web.

Today we’ll look at keeping those fickle humans happy. Next week we’ll take a look at the spiders and how to feed them the information we want them to have, so that they can attract the right humans to our pages.

Three Ways to Format Your Text for Easy Scanning

Web readers are a fast moving breed. They land on a page, scan it for pertinent information, and if they don’t find it they are very quick to move on. Your job is to make it easy for your readers to find what they are looking for, and pleasant for them to stay.

  • Use heading tags to break a longer page into sections. In WordPress, you would typically use the <h3> tag (we’ll talk about why in next week’s episode). Make sure your headings are descriptive enough so your reader knows what that section is about.
  • Lists (like this one) give your readers lots of information in a small space. Is your visitor looking for popular cruise destinations, presidents of the United States beginning in 1900, or the minerals mined in Death Valley? A list is the perfect tool.
  • Keep your paragraphs short. Large blocks of unbroken text will turn a reader away almost as fast as hot pink words on a black background. When in doubt, start a new paragraph.

Every Picture Tells a Story

Pictures add interest to your pages and serve to break up long pages of boring text. Wall Street Journal readers might like pages and pages of nothing but text, but web readers need someplace to rest their eyes, and a well chosen picture is a good landing spot.

Use your caption and <alt> text wisely, and you can improve your search engine ranking as well.

One word of caution about pictures, though: Learn about licensing. Just because a picture is posted on the Internet does not make it free for use on another web site.

Finally, the Words

Writing for the web is not that much different than writing for print. Vary your sentence structure; use active verbs; avoid using adverbs (really, very, actually, quickly, simply, and most other words that end in “ly”). You can’t go wrong with Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Get yourself a copy.

One last thing: Writing for the web tends to be less formal than writing for print. Unless you’re writing a white paper or a news story, stick with first and second person. Your readers will be more engaged if they feel you’re speaking directly to them rather than some generic audience.

Do you have a Monday Marketing Tip you’d like to share? Leave a comment, or if you post on your own blog, leave us a link below!

Cindy Bidar is a freelance copywriter specializing in web content. She blogs about writing, marketing, and anything else that strikes her fancy at CindyBidar.com.

Welcome Cindy Bidar!

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I would like everyone to welcome my friend, Cindy! She will be covering the next two Monday Marketing sessions for me. Cindy is a very, very talented copywriter. I hired her to write some Search Engine Optimized copy for a client of mine recently and within days, the site was ranking third in Google! I highly recommend her, should you have need of a copywriter–for the web or offline.

Thank you, Cindy, for what you have to say! You can find Cindy at www.CindyBidar.com