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.
12.2.09Being “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 »
11.30.09How 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.
10.7.09SMX 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.”
10.5.09SMX 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.
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.
09.30.09Ranked Number Two and Loving It
Avis was #2. They tried harder.
And Hertz had a field day with them.
When the theme of your ads is that you’re almost good enough, it’s not hard for competitors to knock back. Hertz mocked Avis for having half the locations and half the selection, and turning it into a selling point. If you’re #2 even though you try harder, that makes you an underdog—but it’s also two reasons to assume that the competition is better.
Not so for search engines. If I could, I’d rank #2 for every query I’m targeting.
Hiring a Blogger for a Writing Job: Five Mistakes to Avoid
Four years ago—four years ago?—I got an email from a total stranger. He’d read my blog, and wanted to know if I was interested in an internship at a hedge fund company in New York. I didn’t get the internship, but I did decide to move to New York.
I got my first serious job from someone who liked my blog. And the internship that turned into my current position also got started when I submitted a writing sample, which I took straight from the blog.
So I know a thing or two about getting hired based on having a blog. I also know why writing a blog made me waste time, alienate customers, and feel the whole time like I was accomplishing something.
09.25.09Bit.ly’s Next Feature: The Other 99% of the Internet
The first few times I tried to use Twitter, it was enormously frustrating: here’s a fairly cool tool that lets me instantly communicate—with nobody.
Using bit.ly means a different kind of frustration: if you’ve ever posted a link to Facebook and Twitter, and watched in real time while the clicks add up, it can get annoying to post a link without using bit.ly. Which is why I think I can guess bit.ly’s next feature. The feature that, in a few months, will make people forget that it was ever a URL shortener.
LinkedIn’s SEO Strategy: Own Names
I’ve already mentioned how Amazon and Wikipedia own most proper nouns, but there’s one category I ignored: full names. That’s currently a fight between LinkedIn and Facebook. Facebook has more links and more profiles, but LinkedIn has more tricks up their sleeve.
But first, an experiment: Google the full names of half a dozen of your coworkers. You may find personal sites. You may discover that some of them have the same names as famous foreign athletes. But you’ll mostly see their LinkedIn and Facebook accounts. How can it be that Facebook’s 464 million links can’t consistently beat LinkedIn’s 30 million links?
| Posted in Advertising | 12 Comments »