Category Archives: Buzz This

Marketing Beyond Advertising: Save enough to pay for airfare and hotel!

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Tom-mike Wizard Academy just made an offer on Facebook that is so darn good, I just had to pass it along.

Marketing Beyond Advertising is listed on the Wizard Academy site as a $2,000 2-day course next week on the 15th and 16th of July. Trust me, it's worth every penny too.

Because they are trying to fill a few empty seats, they have announced a call-in price of just $500. With the money you save, you can book airfare, car rental and hotel, easily.

Check out the curriculum and pick up the phone. Call 512-295-5700 and ask for the discount. This is the best deal I've ever seen for a first time visit to Wizard Academy.

Tom Wanek's Ad-Speak Calculator

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Remember this routine from George Carlin? He mentions nearly every hucksterism known to mankind. My colleague, Tom Wanek, has taken all of Carlin's phrases plus hundreds more and created a cool and free tool that allows you to paste in your ad copy to see how you rate. (Hint: the more your ads sound like ads, the more they blend into the background of the thousands of other ads your audience is subjected to each day.)

The key is to stand out by NOT sounding like every other ad. It's not easy. Here the link to the Ad-Speak Calculator.

Contextual Linking: Your web site is NOT a strip mall

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Stripmall

How stupid would it be to buy or build a giant strip mall and put different departments of your business into each storefront? How stupid would it be to not put the department names on the doors, or not tell the customer service employees inside the store where the other departments were located, instead requiring shoppers to come back to the main (home) storefront to get directions to each department? Can we agree that would be the dumbest way to build a business?

I had someone tell me the story of their web site the other day and they had done a lot of things right. They have a great design, built on a solid platform with all of the proper technical features. They got a domain that perfectly matched their biggest target keyword phrase. They have good traffic from the keyword. They have a ridiculously low bounce rate at around 1%. Unfortunately, they're not converting traffic to leads at more than 1%.

When I looked at the site, they had no contextual links in their copy. Other than the nav bar, there was no way for a visitor to get to any other page on the site once she had read to the bottom of a page. I'm not a huge fan of those big SEO footers, but at least that would have given a visitor another way to click through to different pages. How is this different than my doomed strip mall?

What's a contextual link? Just link on natural phrases in your copy that move people to different pages in your site. When they are skimming and scanning, they'll find the words that interest them and click. Outsiders (web "experts") who look at sites that I've put together often say they have too many links in the copy. Customers who use the same sites to solve a problem praise us for how easy it was to reach their goal. I'm siding with the customer on this one. You can build your strip mall on your own.

NOTE: There are no contextual links in this story. Don't you wish I'd included some as an example? Isn't it boring compared to other posts you've read where the writer linked all over the place? Wouldn't it make sense for me to link to examples of sites I've built? What if I've impressed you with my strip mall metaphor and you want to hire me? I guess you're on your own. You're smart. You'll figure it out, IF YOU HAVE TIME AND PATIENCE.

photo credit: DannyBen