Seth Godin talks a lot about Purple Cows – ideas that are remarkable, and therefore are spread by word of mouth very easily. It is important, however, to realise that there is a line between a Purple Cow and a Red Herring (a gimmick, if you will).

Take The Million Dollar Homepage for example: Here we see a very remarkable idea that was picked up by the national, then international media, banded about, then copied mercilessly with little success. Aside from Alex Tew’s initial effort, I have heard no mention of any other significant pixel-advertising site. A Purple Cow? Yes. But also a one-hit wonder as a business model.

Another notable mention has to go to Andrew Fischer, a man from Omaha, Nebraska who auctioned temporary advertising space on his forehead on eBay for around £20,000. Again, this is an exceptionally remarkable idea, so much so that in the weeks that followed, there were countless attempts at copying the idea. There were even auctions for permanent tattoos on eBay, though no-other walking billboard managed to garner the sort of interest that the originator did.

There are many other examples of gimmicks that, though they might be interesting and remarkable, the business model behind them is simply not built to last.

I personally think there needs to be more shepherds than sheep.

Seth Godin has posted about the importance of luck in deciding the success of a venture. Now, I agree with what he talks about, and his examples do back up his musings, but luck is just one part of a whole mixing-pot of ingredients that go into starting a startup or pushing a product.

Luck is the only force we have no control over – even if we network as rampantly as possible and create the most elegant marketing materials possible, we may still never break the market open. However, instead of thinking about what could hold us back, maybe we should focus on what we can do to maximise our opportunities, and give luck a better chance to do it’s thing.

We still need to invest resources in our ventures – producing high-quality marketing, products and support will still go a long way to ensuring success when luck fails us somewhat, and if not, then relentlessly improving in these areas surely will.

There is a fairly good chance, therefore, that adding bad keywords to your advertisement will do your advertisement more harm than good.

The perfect advertiser does not add unrelated keywords to their advertisements, rather, they research and then carefully select a number of specific keywords that match the particular niche that their business resides in. Adding these type of keywords will enable potential customers to find you quickly, and allow you to target the segment of the viewing audience that are more likely to make a conversion. Additionally, having specific keywords for your business reduces the initial competition for getting listed on the first page of the results brought back for a particular query, therefore giving you a better chance of being selected by the browsing customer.

This is one of the golden rules of good Internet Marketing – to place your business advertising in locations that fit your particular niche perfectly. Search engines will be able to then associate your business with the key words and phrases that people use to find you when looking to make a purchase. Doing this will, in almost every case, increase your Return On Investment (ROI) for your marketing campaigns, driving up conversions while reducing the amount you need to spend on marketing.

In summary:

• Choose keywords that are specific to your business
• Avoid general keywords and keyphrases
• Target your paying customers (what would you search for?)

I have spoken to many business owners that think that to be a successful business, they need to get as many visitors coming to their site as possible – irregardless as to where they come from. Their marketing strategies reflect this, often centering on just getting as many incoming links from other sites rather than actually focusing on targeting the locations where interested customers may congregate.

This type of approach is not only inefficient, it can also actually damage your business. Having many uninterested people come to your site will only serve one purpose – to use up your bandwidth, and cost you money – not to mention the resources you used to get them there in the first place.

It is important to realise that for every different type of business, the target market is typically different – especially for those that specialise. A music store may target a the local student populace, for example, whereas another may target more mature consumers. The important part is to know where your target market is so you can tell them about your products or services. Think of accident claims solicitors advertising in casualty waiting rooms, or flyer’s from clubs being left in the student union of a university.

What you must do is to find out where the people most likely to make purchases from your site are – what would they be interested in, where would they go and what do they do? What is a common theme among your customers? Target these areas, and push your message on them – by reaching customers that are already interested in your products and services, you are essentially ‘preaching to the converted’ – many may already be looking for the things you provide, and by coming to them, you are creating an opportunity for them to make compulsive purchases.

Additionally, if you can target these customers often enough, and keep them coming back to your site, you can even increase the probability of them making purchases from you by as much as eight times.

Advertising copy is the meat of your marketing campaigns – the actual information presented to your customers in order to get them to buy your products rather than a competitor’s.

If you create great advertising copy, your advertising campaigns can only benefit, bringing more custom to your business, however, creating bad copy can waste both time and money – it can even give your company a bad reputation in your target market’s eyes.

What I present here are a few points that I feel are vital to get right in order to produce marketing copy that is effective. These few points can be applied to many areas of marketing, whether it be creating a marketing brochure, a banner advertisement for a website or a point-of-sale display.

1. Get to the point

Most people will not read more than a single sentence or paragraph, so when it comes to writing advertising copy, it pays to get to the point as quickly as possible. Rambling on with details that have already been covered elsewhere in your advertisement will distract your potential customer, and in the time it has taken for them to read ‘Here at Syndicated System Solutions, our priority…’ they will have lost interest, and more than likely, will have moved on to the next item on the page.

Start your advertisement with a benefit of your product or service – something that will catch their eye, for example: ‘Kyotee is a leading UK business directory’. At this point, we have set the precedent for the visitor to read on – Why is Kyotee a leading directory service? What do they offer? What can they do for me?

Now that we have gained the interest of our potential customer, we now must provide the filler – a rich sentence or two describing the unique parts of our products and services that set us apart from the crowd.

2. Offer up

Your product or service is worth talking about, unfortunately, you will normally only have a finite amount of space or time in which to tell your prospective customer about it.

Keep to the point – tell your customer how your product can save time or money, provide them with customers, increase sales margins, decrease costs, make a cup of tea in seconds – give the key features or reasons as to why they should come to you rather than a competitor. This is also a good place to add any current offers, sales or special deals you might have. Give the customer a reason to buy from you.

Always keep your advertising copy focused on the thing you are selling. Do not deviate to tell the customer that you have been in business 15 years if it won’t matter to them, but above all that, make sure you finish your copy with the most important statement – the Call To Action.

3. Tell the Customer What To Do

A Call To Action is a crucial part of most advertising copy; A Call To Action tells the user what to do next. Our advertisement copy ends with such a phrase: “Submit your advertisements today, and gain valuable exposure!” We want the user to sign up for our service so they can begin advertising, however, if we hadn’t included this important sentence, then we risk leaving the user in limbo. We have got them excited about our service, we tell them how we are unique, and then we walk away? No.

In order for an advertisement to be compelling, the user needs be told what they should do next in order to get to the thing that you are selling. Writing a good Call To Action will allow you to get your customers in line to make a purchase, but there is still one last detail to take into consideration: What happens when a customer does what you told them to do?

4. Land it Right

You have told your customer about your new, fantastic service or product, and they click on your web link or pick up the phone and dial the number in your advert. Unfortunately, the phone number you gave was a digit wrong or your Web site is not yet finished. Disaster!

There is a very high probability that your potential customer won’t try to get through to you a different way – they will just hang up and go to the next advert in the list. At best, they will forget about their experience in trying to get hold of you, but at worst, they will associate your business with that bad experience, and avoid you in the future.

It is imperative that the contact details you give in your advertisements are correct. Ideally, if you are advertising a particular service or product, then your web link should go directly to a page focused on it rather than your company homepage or contact form. If you give a phone number, then the person answering the phone should at least be the correct person, and even better, be able to help the customer to make a purchase or take the enquiry further.

5. Be Professional

Spelling, punctuation and grammar are all very important when it comes to writing copy of any type for your business – be it an email, brochure, advertisement or receipt. Lacking in any of these three areas gives a very poor impression of the level of professionalism employed within your business.

If you are not confident in any of these three key areas, then it is better to have your copy proofread and run through a spell-checker than to leave it to chance. Remember that your customers probably do not know you, so all they a judging you on are the words you have chosen to promote yourself with. If these words don’t make sense, then your customer will disappear.

Getting the wrong people to your site

If you are targeting the wrong market sector with your advertising, then it really doesn’t matter how successful in drawing the crowds it is – they are not going to be interested in your products or services.

Be as specific as possible. If your market is a niche market, then put advertisements in magazines or on Web sites that serve your niche. Decide on your target audience, and bombard them with advertising. You will find that targeted advertising will pay dividends more than generic advertising – if you add your business to our directory, then make sure you list it using relevant keywords and phrases. Giving your guttering cleaning business advertisement keywords relating to generic construction or repairs will get you very few interested parties. Add keywords and phrases specifically related to gutter cleaning services, and you’re target market will find you!

Poor content quality

People will not read everything on your Web site or marketing material. Most people skim read when browsing, and as such, need content that is easy to process and digest.

Always ensure that you have spellchecked your copy before posting it to your site; misspelled or grammatically incorrect passages will instantly give your visitors a bad impression of your business, after all, if you can’t be bothered to check your own marketing material for correctness, then your products and services are probably going to suffer from the same lack of professionalism and attention to detail.

Not describing products or services fully

Visitors will want to find out more about your products and services before they buy. By not explaining the features or specifications in full, you are leaving questions unanswered in the minds of your customers. If these questions are important enough, there is a good chance that your visitor will look elsewhere for answers, and end up purchasing from your competitors.

Make sure that you cover as much detail as possible when describing your products – ideally, you should aim to be able to explain enough about the

Not providing clear prices

If you are targeting customers that are liable to make spontaneous purchases, then you need to be able to provide them with a barrier-free path to making them.

By not having prices listed clearly with your products, you are placing a barrier in the way of a customer making a purchase – they need to know if the item is affordable to them. Adding clear pricing guides seems to also have an effect on the amount of trust that customers place on the site. If you appear trustworthy, open and to the point, then users appear to be more inclined to make a purchase.

Confusing navigation

This is a great sin of web development – poor navigation, and confusing menus or forms can cause customers to abandon your site very quickly.

The navigational elements of a site should aid the customer in moving around your pages, and additionally, give them some feedback as to where they currently are. Poorly designed navigation frustrates users, and will almost certainly cost your business money.

I have discussed some of the reasons as to why people may come to your site and not make a purchase. If you can avoid some of these common mistakes, then you are effectively reducing the number of barriers standing between a browsing customer becoming a paying customer.

One final word of advice: Take a look at your site now – can you see any other potential barriers that may prevent a visitor from finding what they want and spontaneously purchasing it? If so, look at how you can remove these barriers – each time you do, you are effectively opening your doors further, and allowing more people to make purchases.

This has meant that we have had to learn a lot of vary varied things in quite a short period of time. Much of our learning has come from trial-and-error experiences, and as such we thought that you might also like to know about some of the things we have learned – if only to prevent you having to make the same mistakes we did!

We will be adding posts to this site as and when we can, with stories ranging from Adsense Optimization through to company formation and Apache Rewrite Rules!