SEO for bloggers
A lot of useful insight (and a great example in itself of how to acquire traffic!) right here from Aaron.
When lies/spin become (too) easy
After you’ve spent a career saying things just to make people go away, I wonder if you lose track of the texture of what you’re saying.
They’re tearing down a classic diner in New Rochelle, NY and putting up a Walgreen’s drugstore, right next to an existing CVS. The diner’s fans are up in arms. Not to worry, the NY Times reports. Here’s the key quote, unedited:
"Joel Sachs, a lawyer for the developers, said that Walgreens has realized from the beginning that the diner was an icon in the community and would be a sensitive tenant."
Sensitive? Does that meant that the Walgreens is going to serve bacon? Or does it mean nothing whatsoever?
It would certainly be more truthful to say, "hey, it’s our right to put up a Walgreens. If you don’t like it, you should rent the space instead." But that would be inflammatory, so it’s easier to just spin, I guess.
[Two people have pointed out that my ‘quote’ is a paraphrase. It’s entirely possible that Mr. Sachs didn’t say anything about being a sensitive tenant. If that’s the case, I’m just plain wrong. But (in this case, anyway) I don’t think I am.]
Cowboy Junkies Paradox
Twenty years ago, the Cowboy Junkies released close to a perfect breakthrough album. It sold a bazillion copies.
Every since, they’ve been touring, making a living on the road as they’ve released almost twenty records, none of them monster hits in the US. The paradox occurs at their concerts… when they play one of the old hits, the crowd goes wild. The people most likely to come to their concerts are the ones most likely to encourage them to become an oldies act. Of course, once the group does that, people are going to stop showing up.
Marketers of all stripes face the same challenge. Your current customers want nothing but the old stuff, but the new customers don’t know you exist, so they can’t speak up.
[Clarification! I love the Junkies. I saw them last night. They were spectacular… I own more than half their twenty CDs and you should too… my point, which was defeated by brevity, is that the fans create the paradox. The fans, the ones that should be cheering on the hits and the misses, the ones that should be demanding the next thing, they are the ones that create the paradox, because they’re the ones that cheer loudest for the old songs.]
Making your customers uncomfortable
Tomorrow is the ridiculous Black Friday ritual, gaining in steam every year, in which large American retailers run big sales that start at 6 am. People line up even earlier to get in first. Kids are stampeded. Muscles are pulled. Friendships frayed. Credit cards exhausted.
Why? In an always-on internet world, why force people to do something they would ordinarily avoid?
Because they like it. It feels special. They are somehow earning the discount. The store creates discomfort and then profits from it. And the customers save money…
Southwest did the same thing to load their planes. By getting rid of boarding passes, they create a small sense of panic. People line up and push and shove to get on the plane in the mistaken belief that somehow they won’t get on.
Southwest created discomfort and then got their planes out faster. And the travelers save time…
Better is not always better, at least according to some measures.
Thanks
The other day, someone pointed out to me that my blog is read by more people than 95% of all the magazines published in the US. She wanted to know why I don’t try to monetize it. "Run ads," she said. "Or find a sponsor, or maybe even charge for it!" That’s a lot of nickels, after all.
I tried to sum it up like this: Not only can’t I imagine charging for my blog, I’m practically in debt to the people who read it. I ought to pay them, not the other way around.
Every time you read something I write here, you’re giving me a gift… attention. It’s getting more precious all the time, you have more choices every day, and it’s harder and harder to find the time. I know. I’m grateful. I’m doing my best to make your attention worth it.
So, have a great Thanksgiving. And thanks.
Eye tracking rules
(some of which are made to be broken).
Tim points us to a terrific summary of lessons learned from eye tracking studies.
The highlights, in alphabetical order:
- Ads in the top and left portions of a page will receive the most eye fixation.
- Ads placed next to the best content are seen more often.
- Bigger images get more attention.
- Clean, clear faces in images attract more eye fixation.
- Fancy formatting and fonts are ignored.
- Formatting can draw attention.
- Headings draw the eye.
- Initial eye movement focuses on the upper left corner of the page.
- Large blocks of text are avoided.
- Lists hold reader attention longer.
- Navigation tools work better when placed at the top of the page.
- One-column formats perform better in eye-fixation than multi-column formats.
- People generally scan lower portions of the page.
- Readers ignore banners.
- Shorter paragraphs perform better than long ones.
- Show numbers as numerals.
- Text ads were viewed mostly intently of all types tested.
- Text attracts attention before graphics.
- Type size influences viewing behavior.
- Users initially look at the top left and upper portion of the page before moving down and to the right.
- Users only look at a sub headline if it interests them.
- Users spend a lot of time looking at buttons and menus.
- White space is good.
The 7% solution
Okay, it’s a simple idea:
If you’re a real estate broker, you work in an industry where everyone used to charge the same fee: 6%. Now, though, discount brokers are turning up the heat on fees. Lots of brokers are unhappy with this.
The challenge is… what if you had to charge 7%. What if you had to charge more when everyone else was charging less?
What would you do? How could you make it worth it?
Now, just imagine what would happen if you did that at 6% or even 5%? You’d be unstoppable.
Similar idea, inspired by the crazy pricing of the Kindle: What if, when everyone else’s blog was free, you had to charge money for yours? What would you do? How would you make it worth it?
Advertising creativity is not dead
…though it might feel that way as we move pell mell toward a direct marketing, measured world.
This ad from Woot shows up if you do a Google search on the stock symbol for Google (goog).
As more and more advertisers wade online, competition will raise the bar for the steps you take to find the right people in the right frame of mind at the right moment. Some of that will require more cash, but mostly it’ll be about being smart and sometimes, funny.
Meatball Mondae, again… this time it’s about the wealthy
Rich people used to all be the same,
just different from the rest of us. Now they’re not only different from
the rest of us, but different from each other.
Rich people used
to do similar jobs, wear similar clothes, live in similar
neighborhoods, and read similar magazines. As a result, marketing to
rich people was pretty easy. No longer. As the gulf between rich and
poor continues to widen, the number of people considered rich increases
daily, and the diversity of the rich increases as well.
[By rich, I mean people with enough money to buy what you sell].
It turns
out that not only are the wealthy like us, they are us. Despite the
widening gulf between rich and poor, there are more wealthy people than ever before. In fact,
you’re probably one of them. Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske of BCG
talked about this in their book Trading Up, and the trend has only
become more pervasive.
That means there are rich NASCAR fans,
rich porn stars, rich entrepreneurs in Kenya and rich teenagers. Every
silo is discovering it can create a top tier.
You can catch up on the series by clicking here.
You won’t find me on Amazon’s new book reader
Newsweek has all the details right here.
I’ve been hyperventilating about Amazon becoming a book publisher since at least 1998. That’s the juicy part of the business… finding writers for your readers as much as you spend time finding readers for other people’s writers. A book costs about a dollar or two to print and sells for $20… Lots of room there for Amazon to integrate the process, to find long tail successes, to match hidden needs with authors needing promotion.
Kindle, the code name for their new ebook reader, gives them a platform where they can actually begin to be a publisher (though for now, they’re resorting to acting like a low-paid middleman, once again leaving short-sighted publishers to cripple a new medium).
When Amazon came to talk to me about being included on the reader a long long time ago, I said sure, but.
The but is that I wanted my books to be free and included in every reader, and my blog, too.
The beauty of real books is that they don’t require a reader, which means that millions of people are eligible members of the market. Even if you only have .0001% market share, you can still get your book read.
The challenge that my hero Jeff Bezos has is that if he’s really really lucky, he’ll sell a million of these things in a year. And that means that at $10 a book, you need to have significant market share to make an impact. The Sony reader has been out for months and it has sold, perhaps, a few thousand units.
My thought was to use it, at least for a few years, as a promotion device. Give the books for free to anyone who buys the $400 machine. (Maybe you can have 1,000 books of your choice, so there’s not a lot of ‘waste’.) You’ll sell more machines that way, that’s for sure. And the people willing to buy the device are exactly the sort of people that an author like me wants to reach. No harm, no foul, all three of us win. If there were a million of these machines out there and an author had a chance to have her next book show up automatically on all of them, few among us would say, "no thanks to that exposure."
This is a disruptive approach, the sort of thing only a market leader could pull off. It changes the world in a serious way. I wanted to be part of that.
I was unpersuasive. Sorry.