January 28, 2010

Storefront | Storefront: 53 Online and In-Person Storefronts, Compared

Whose physical storefront uses the same ugly typography as their website?

Which fashion retailer splits their audience, giving a great deal to Internet shoppers and a brutal one to people who buy in-person?

And whose website is “like stumbling onto a can of Yoohoo after walking through a chocolate desert?”

You’ve probably never wondered, but you might be curious about which of your favorite stores have killer websites and hideous storefronts, or great-looking retail outlets paired with an unusable online presence.

A few of my coworkers have put together an amazing collection of side-by-side images of sites and stores—from companies like J. Crew, Dolce & Gabbana, Apple, and more—to show off who gets it and who just doesn’t. Check out 53 New York City Storefronts VS. Their Websites for many more.

December 22, 2009

Stickiness or “Spikiness”? Rethinking Repeat Visitors

When I talk to clients, they want me to accomplish three things: get visitors to their website, get them to keep coming back, and make some money off of them. I’m starting to suspect that bringing users back is the source of the biggest mistakes I make in online marketing.

A “sticky” site is one that keeps users clicking, and convinces them to come back often. I used to try to build sticky sites. Now, I build “spiky” sites—sites that convert someone into a customer, get them signed up for email newsletters, or convince them to go away.

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December 15, 2009

Why I Stopped Throwing Out Junk Mail

Whenever I start to write something online, for myself or for a client, I have to answer one hard question: who cares?

Your company has been in business for thirty years—so what?

Your equipment is state-of-the-art—and your competitors won’t say the same about theirs?

Your copywriting wrings wallets dry and leaves empty pockets flapping in the breeze—poetry doesn’t sell well, and bad poetry sells even worse.

There’s lots of general advice on how to keep readers hooked—tell them a story they can relate to, offer them a benefit they can’t get anywhere else, establish a cadence—but that’s too vague.

I’d rather just copy people who can’t afford to be wrong.

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December 2, 2009

Being “Busy” Is a Lazy Way to be Productive

Fred Wilson loves meetings. Paul Graham hates meetings. They’re roughly in the same business (identifying promising companies, and helping them realize their promise), and I’ve never met someone who reads one or the other and not both.

So what’s the deal? Read the rest of this entry »

November 30, 2009

How Not to Say No to a Client

“Well, I don’t know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell how to do what I want to do.”
—J. P. Morgan (attributed)

SEO, copywriting, and web design are all service businesses. Nobody has ever hired me to tell them what they ought to want to do; I get hired to do what they’ve decided they want to do. And clients are experts at whatever it is they’ve been doing; if I do SEO for a clothing retailer, it’s a safe bet that he knows more about clothes than I do.

At the same time, I probably spend more time reading SEOMoz, running Rank Checker, or swiping from Info Marketing Blog than they do. Since clients write the checks, they call the shots—here are a few ways I’ve found to make sure that this works out well for both sides.

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October 13, 2009

New Polling Site—Qwanz.com!

I’m very pleased to announce that a polling site I’ve been working on is now live!

Qwanz is not exactly like a typical polling site. In fact, the best way to understand it is that polling sites are what people used because Qwanz didn’t exist. The site’s key feature is this: it gives users the tools to forward poll results to wherever they’ll do the most good. Outraged that Olympia Snowe now supports the health care bill? Once you fill out the survey, you can use Qwanz to contact her press secretary directly! Annoyed about the Guardian gag order? You can use Qwanz to tell Carter Ruck exactly what you think!

(Qwanz has just launched, so there are bound to be errors. Please feel free to send me any comments, criticisms, or suggestions—though it would be even better if you could create a Qwanz poll about them, instead!)

October 7, 2009

SMX East: Last Day!

One more day before the regular blog-posting schedule resumes. Meanwhile, I’ve written another SMX sum-up: Integrating SEO with PR, traditional marketing, IT, and more.

You may also want to check out some pieces by my fellow Blue Fountain Media SEO specialists, including Zack Sinkler’s SMX analytics session summary and Alhan Keser’s “How to be successful on Youtube.”

October 5, 2009

SMX East: Say Hello

For the next two days, I’ll be at SMX East. Expect few to no blog entries on this site; I’ll be updating my employer’s blog, instead. Today’s post is there: Basic search engine optimization for small business. If you’re just getting started, it’s exactly what you need.

October 2, 2009

Delete Your Facebook Fanpage—Now

I’m tired of people who pitch social media marketing as a way to make sales. Either they aren’t measuring the results they get for clients, or they don’t care. Every good case study is either about how someone used a famous friend’s endorsement to make new sales, or how they made a tiny number of low-profit transactions they probably would have made anyway.

I hate pitching social media marketing—but I still do it, because it does serve a purpose. But the most important part of the pitch is the warning: if you follow the convention wisdom, your social media presence is almost certainly costing you sales.

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October 1, 2009

The Four Rules of SEO and Writing Calls to Action

90% of your site’s success is determined by two things:

The first thing a visitor reads—the headline.

The last thing a visitor reads—the call to action.

Which might be why search engines treat these pieces of text as significant: it’s not that they tel you what a site is about, but that they’re the part of a page writers can least afford to write badly. That’s not a disadvantage. Your call to action can bring in more users and conversions, if you follow the rules.

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