Archive for March, 2006

The world of advertising (and marketing)

Advertising and marketing is a pretty interesting job to do. Understanding what makes people buy can be really useful in your differents aspects of your life but if you don’t do your job correctly, you won’t earn anything out of it (except the money your boss is paying you for that “not worthy” job you’ve done. Here’s a list of 10 aspects you should consider if you want to separate yourself from the advertiser crowd.

  1. Do what other don’t
  2. Being different from everyone else will give you a clear advantage. People always want what isn’t given by those who they actually take from. If you’re able to provide things from a different perspective, people will come to you so they can see that additional information you give. And since you’re the only one to do it, you get the most out of it.

  3. Do the opposite of what others do
  4. This aspect is pretty much similar the the first one but this is even more specific. If a company doesn’t offer certain things because they might cost a bit more, offer them. It might seem counter-intuitive, but doing so generally gives you better results. You must take risk in order to increase your popularity.

  5. Think about new concept
  6. Invent. Be innovative. People LOVE new things, especially if they are well done and useful. If you’re creating a website, try to impliment new features often so people can enjoy better their navigation. But don’t go to the extreme of making a huge amount of features where people will only get lost.

  7. Everything can be sold but you need the right technique to do it
  8. Take eBay as an example. You can fine many defective things, things that are not even worth selling and are getting bought. I don,t say eBay as the right technique to sell it, but as you can see, everything can be sold.

  9. Show the avantages of you product
  10. If you were to sell something, what would you generally do? Show it’s advantages. Show why it’s worth buying. Give examples that would apply to your targeted audience. Explain them how using your product would enhance their life. This is a basic in selling and everyone does it instinctively.

  11. Use it’s flaw as booster
  12. This is a marketing “secret”. If you were to sell something you knew had a bug/not working feature/flaw, you should use it as a kind of booster. It sounds weird but here how it goes: the flaw is so evident that everyone knows it so you use it as a weapon. What you’ll do is make some kind of joke out of it. If you were to sell a product with a weird name like Izukarkda which would be a car brand, you could use some sort of slogan: “The car you never remember/pronounce the name”.

  13. Don’t focus only on selling, focus on your client’s need
  14. If you’re focusing to much on selling, you’ll lose your selling. Trying to hard to get only lead to failure. If instead you focus on what your customer is looking for, you’ll be able to provide him exactly what is asking for and maybe even more. An happy customer is a returning customer.

  15. Always improve your products
  16. You have to make sure your product don’t come obsolete except if it’s what you want. If you can add new features which might interest new potentials clients, work on it. The better your product is, the bigger your chances are you’ll sell it.

  17. Keep a log of those changes
  18. Make sure you keep track of your changes. Being able to show your customers you’ve been working your way to this product can be a good example that your company is trustworthy. If you are developping a computer product (script, application), this is pretty useful especially if you fix many bugs in your product because it shows your customers you’re working hard on your product to make sure it’s the best it can be. But there’s a side effect to this: if you’re fixing dumb errors, this might show the client your not working really hard to make sure your releases are the best they could be. So do your best before releasing a product, make sure it’s ready for most of the job.

  19. Wait for enough changes before selling out a new version
  20. Don’t start selling out new versions of your script/applications or whatever you might be selling if you’ve just fixed a bug or added one additionnal feature. This will make the “old” customers angry because you weren’t able to provide them this feature when they bought it. If you’re coming with a list of 10-25 new features, that’s a good reason to release, but don’t be the guy who release a new version every new bug fixed.

Following these 10 aspects will give you good results. Try them out and see what work the most for you. If you think there are other aspects that are essentials, please mind posting them below.

How to make your website popular

To make your site worthy of visiting it should do one or more(preferably) of the following:

- Provide unique content
Don’t copy other people stuff. No people that comes online want to see the same text over and over. If you’re writing something similar to another site, try to at least enhance it, give it more structure, better readability, expression. Write about what isn’t much talked about but is interesting to notice and worth explaining/giving details.

- Have good features while having an easy use
Google is the best example to prouve this point. It has awesome features (the search engine is quite complete) and yet, it’s super easy to use. Search results are quite relevant which is the good feature aspect, though many SEO’s believe it’s not that good now.

- Provide unique features
If you can provide features other don’t and they are a great improvement to the already existing ones, then chances are you’ll get some recognition from it and also some traffic.

- Only give out the best of the mass (filter)
If bigger website write a lot about what you’re also writing about, you might find that there’s a lot of useless points in different text. Your goal here is to take the best of the best so you can rewrite it. If you have quality content, people will take it instead of the different less good because we don’t want to lose our time on what isn’t worth anything. It’s human nature.

- Provide provocative content
Write about topic you know will move people. If you provoke emotions in people, chances are that they will get connected to your website even though they might hate it. But popularity isn’t only based of good comments, but also the bad.
“Say good about me, say bad about me, but talk about me”

- Content is nicely designed
Even though most will say a crappy design with good content is fine, I think your site should have at least a decent formatting, respect to the original colors and nothing to eye-catchy (animated gifs that hurt the eyes or flashy background). We want to feel relaxed when reading an article, not stressed up just by some letters on a background.

- Provide a point of view of things that other don’t
If you have seen an event that was reported but your opinion differed, post it. People need to have different points of view so they can interpret and decide whether or not the reported facts are good or not. Like in arguing, if you can justify the fact better than the previous report, chances are people will respect you more for it since you put thought into it.

Even though most of you know this, it needs to be said once again:

- Have a lot of content
Having a lot of content mean at least around 100 pages with at least 300 words.

- The content should be reviewed for grammar, spelling, etc.
No one likes to read a text which is filled with tons of errors. We’re not here to play “correct it”, but to read the content you can provide us for further use. Whenever you write an article, act like you wouldn’t be able to do any changes afterward so it’s ready for “impression”.

- Try to have a specific subject instead of touching to everything (if you have a lot to talk about, make different websites about each subjects, it’s better than one site about everything).
A website must have a main topic which will be followed on ALL pages. Don’t start writing about anything that doesn’t have a direct connection with your subject otherwise it will seem spammy, will make you look less like an expert in the field especially because you write about unrelated topics.

- Mouth to ear is still the best way to get yourself some traffic and popularity
If you can dig other people attention with your website, it won’t be long until it get spread through their friend network. The more open your website topic is (not related to any experience or knowledge in the field) the better are your chances to get popularity.

I’ll warn you: don’t expect instant results. Popularity is built and gained and building isn’t done instantly (not yet though). Following those guideline will at least keep you going in the right direction. Don’t be afraid to test things out and see what works, what doesn’t and only keep what does.

How to use Overture & Max Bid efficiently

Ok, so now that you have the tool you need to get information about top paying keywords, let’s get started.

First, you’ll want to have specific keywords to look for. If you have already a lot of content on your webpages, great, it gives us less work to do.

Second, load up the tool and search every keyword you though about. Every time you get a result from the pages, take the highest results and copy & paste them into notepad so you can have some sort of result in the end.

Here’s an example of what I took using 6 keywords (music, technology, science, humour, fun and computer).

29003444 music
5864934 music download
1203283 free music downloads
825310 music video
576684 music site myspace.com
500424 download online music
485258 free music
458825 yahoo music
395103 music code
381976 dowload music
342967 music lyric
303865 music video code
223494 aol music
214569 live music

327299 educational technology
247687 technology

271915 science fair project
229760 science project
220109 science

313332 humor
185656 college humor

136312 fun
114968 fun game

3392579 computer
1116201 notebook computer
285766 dell computer
277906 computer repair
204033 computer software
194565 computer game
185903 desktop computer
156206 computer tech support
143620 computer store
139197 computer desk
119258 computer training
111202 beach computer background
103046 computer electronics

As you can see, all the results I have are over 100 000, which is why I don’t have a huge list. You don’t want to lose your time on keywords that aren’t that searched because you won’t get anything from them.

Then, there are the results about the max bid I could get for each keyword

music : (Advertiser’s Max Bid: $2.00)
technology : (Advertiser’s Max Bid: $0.65)
science : (Advertiser’s Max Bid: $0.29)
humour : (Advertiser’s Max Bid: $0.10)
fun : (Advertiser’s Max Bid: $0.16)
computer : (Advertiser’s Max Bid: $1.51)

As you can see, the results are okay. Don’t expect making 15$ on each keyword, otherwise you’ll be dissapointed. Those keywords are paying good enough, but could we get any better price? Sure we can, we just need to do a bit more work.

For example, if we want to get more money for the keyword computer, we’ll check at our list of keywords (check at the top) and search for every keyword that is near computer (like computer notebook and Dell computer).

Here are the results for those two keywords

computer notebook : (Advertiser’s Max Bid: $3.02)
Dell computer : (Advertiser’s Max Bid: $1.66)

See. Using computer notebook instead of notebook we can get the double of our initial keyword bid. We just doubled our profit by two!

When you’re done with this keyword, you do the same for each and every keyword until your done. When it’s over, congratulate yourself. You’re okay for a certain period of time, because those keyword max bid might change later (6 months later for example) and you could get 10$ for computer instead of computer notebook. But until then, just check the cash flow in your account and send me some email about the article.







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