John Cow dot Com » Advertising

That Often Overlooked Word of Setting Goals

Jason Katzenback — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:38:31 +0000

So now that you know exactly how marketing on the web works today, and how it’s vastly different from how advertising used to work, it’s time to start looking at your own communications strategy. Now we’ll start to delve into the theories and ideas that you will be basing your own communication strategy on, the strategy that will turn you from a run-of-the-mill business owner to You, Trusted Expert.

You can’t do anything until you know what your goals are. How are you supposed to get there if you don’t know where you’re going?

And please don’t say you want to make more money. Well, duh. We all want to make more money. Have you ever come across someone who said, “No, it’s ok, I really don’t want to make any more money.”

What are the goals you have for your business?

Do you want to be able to quit that day job you hate? Or, if you’re already doing this full-time, what is a realistic goal for you for the next year?

If you’ve got an offline aspect to this business, how should the online portion relate? How much of the overall revenue do you expect it to bring in?

What are your goals for the next 6 months? What about the next 5 years? (They are very different things, but you need to have a detailed answer for both.)

Once you know where you want to be, I can help you get there.

Stay tuned for the next post

Clear and Effective Communication When Talking to Customers

Jason Katzenback — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:29:50 +0000

In my last post, I talked about the importance of talking to your customers directly to get the most out of everything the internet has to offer you and your business. In this post, we’ll talk a little bit about how that can be done.

How do you do this?

We’ll get more into that in the practical parts later, but you’re going to need to customize your site and all of your other communications so that you are exactly what the potential customer is looking for. At its most basic level, you’re going to need to build many different microsites or landing pages with purpose-built content aimed at each of the targets that you’ve identified.

That gets us on the topic of how the design of those pages is another integral part of your communications strategy, but I’m getting ahead of myself again.

With regards to PR, while media coverage is still important, and can be very beneficial to some businesses, there are now better ways to get media coverage than simply by sending out a press release.

What if a reporter already has a full plate when you send your release out? What if there’s no interest in the subject just then? But two weeks later, something related to your subject hits the news, and he goes looking for more information to give his story a new angle, but he can’t find anything about you (And he forgot about the press release you sent out).

Instead, you could tell your story directly to interested people. They will then talk about you, leading the media to pick up on the story and cover it.

The crucial difference in PR campaigns, is that, for the first time in a very long time, public relations is actually public. Anyone can launch and run a successful PR campaign by knowing who to talk to, and how to go about it. Blogs, online news releases, and other kinds of web content will make it easy for your potential customers to find information about you, and opens up a dialogue for your buyers to communicate directly with you.

With a direct PR campaign, you should cultivate as many small relationships within your niche that you can. While these bloggers and media people may seem like small potatoes compared to some of the biggies out there, they are highly influential within your niche, which is where your customers are.

You need to remember that a large number of small marketing efforts can bring in just as much business as one big coup can.

You also can’t look at your PR campaign as something that exists separately from your marketing efforts. Online, the two are inextricably linked. PR and advertising are all different aspects of the same communications strategy, and there are a lot of communication efforts that will possess aspects of both. Again, throw out everything you thought you knew about how advertising and marketing campaign are planned. You’ll get lost in the details. Get the big picture down first, and then move methodically through the other steps.

In later posts we’ll go over what the new strategies and theories you need to look at when formulating your communications strategy, and in then I’ll show you how to do it yourself, through step-by-step instructions. Then I’ll tell you how to keep your site in tip-top shape once you’ve gone through all the trouble of setting it up properly. That includes testing, as well as the importance of fresh content and keeping your site relevant in fast-changing times.

And at the end of the process, you can start calling yourself a Trusted Expert.

How it Works Today (Or Should Work)…

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 03:59:47 +0000

(Continued from the previous post: How We Tried to Make a Square Peg Fit Into a Round Hole With Early Online Media)

It’s all About Communication!

If traditional advertising was a speech, then online advertising is a conversation.

Your content, in all of its forms, is the single most important part of your communications strategy. Your content needs to be authentic and provide useful information; in today’s jaded advertising atmosphere, people can see a sales pitch coming from a mile away.

So don’t pitch to them!

Instead, use your content to position yourself as an authority within your niche. You can get more accomplished with some genuine information and by being helpful than you could with a swanky advertising campaign. Make education one of your foremost communication goals.

Building an authentic communication strategy for the web may seem time-consuming, but it is a simple, cost-effective plan that can do amazing things for your company.

Today’s consumer is looking for the right product or service to satisfy a particular need or want – they are already further down the buying cycle than the targets of traditional advertising where you had to interrupt and introduce the idea. They are actively seeking out information on a service or product; you need to position yourself as an authority on that product or service, and gain their trust in order to convert them into a customer. And you do this with your communication strategy.

The web gives you and your business the unique ability to highlight your expertise to potential customers, by using the web-based media that’s available, as well as by interacting and participating in conversations with your existing clients as well as users that you want to turn into clients.

The internet started out primarily as a communication device, and that’s where its strength lies. You need to learn how to harness this power and use it to your greatest advantage. You have to ignore the old way that things were done in traditional advertising, and even in early advertising online. Those rules don’t apply. In fact, the transient nature of the web itself resists rules, as things are always changing. There are, however, guidelines that you can use to guide you through your communication strategy.

The most important thing to remember about your communications strategy is that fact that you can now tell your business’s story directly to your audience via the web; you can reach millions of people without having to buy advertising or run an expensive PR campaign.

People seek out information that they are interested in; you need to make sure that you are up front and center when they are looking for you.

How We Tried to Make a Square Peg Fit Into a Round Hole – Early Online Media

Jason Katzenback — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 12:57:22 +0000

(Continued from the previous post: Wasting Half Your Money on Traditional Advertising)

There was a reason that early online advertising was referred to as ‘New Media’. Because it was new – really, really, new (hmmm kind of obvious eh?).

It was the first new way of advertising to come about since the advent of television. It was also adopted into the mainstream in record time – faster than any other medium, including TV, cable and radio. And advertising professionals had no idea what to do with it.

None!

So they tried to apply traditional advertising guidelines and rules to it, and that’s how the first online advertising campaigns came about.

Banner ads, big boxes, skyscrapers were the first forms of online advertising. Visual ads that mimicked outdoor and magazine campaigns, bought by the thousand (literally – CPM or cost-per-thousand was the main metric when buying ad space online.)

Advertisers were over the moon about the ability to actually measure the performance of the ads. Click-through-rate was the new Mecca, and set the bar for the success for failure of an online advertising campaign. Never mind that it didn’t really tell you anything other than how many people clicked on the ad – it was a real, honest-to-God measurement of how the ads were being perceived.

Then pay-per-click came out… and WOW!

You mean, we only have to pay for the ads that actually succeed in their goal? It went against everything that traditional advertising had ever done.

Then, as the medium become more competitive, the ads became more annoying. Pop-ups, pop-unders and the like were the new version of the flashy (in this case sometimes literally flashy), obtrusive ads that began to annoy people. Because the ad agencies were taking everything they knew about traditional advertising and throwing it at the internet. Software developers came up with ad blockers.

So how were you to reach your customers if you couldn’t hit them with 17 pop-up boxes?

We had to rethink the way we were communicating. Websites, up until this point, had become simply extensions of their offline counterparts; they were still talking at their users, not with them. Online campaigns were just an echo or an afterthought of the traditional campaign. Even the more forward-thinking companies were only spending about 1% of their total advertising budget online.

And all that was done with all of this new information is that agencies took the click-throughs and all other learnings from the campaigns and put them into a pretty post-buy report like they did with the TV and radio campaigns and sent it off to the client. They would make sure to utilize the best-performing sites and drop the ones that did poorly, but that’s about the extent of the introspection. They didn’t take into consideration that maybe the ads weren’t resonating with the audiences of the sites they were advertising on, or that the site with the highest click-through-rate also had the highest abandonment rate once users reached the site. They also didn’t take into consideration that no matter how much money they threw at the campaigns, if their site sucked and didn’t have any useful information to offer users, users wouldn’t buy their product or come back.

Slowly, the tide began to turn and people started to realize the real value that the internet held. People began to realize the potential of the web to deliver useful content to potential buyers at just the right moment in the buying cycle.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s continuation

Wasting Half Your Money – a Look Back at Traditional Advertising

Jason Katzenback — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 11:32:15 +0000

Once upon a time, the only way you could get your message out there was to buy advertising, or convince someone to write something about you. It cost a lot of money, and there wasn’t a really good way to measure the results. As someone (there are arguments as to who) in advertising once said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I don’t know which half.” And that’s just how it went.

Your choices were newspapers, magazines, outdoor, radio, television, and direct mail. While attempts were made at targeting through industry-developed demographic profiling, the segments were broad (think men 25-34) and targeting buyers beyond those very simple demographics was very difficult. It worked for the large brands who were targeting large segments of the population, but was too broad and ineffective for the average small-to-medium sized business owner.

Because those smaller businesses didn’t have the big budgets, and the targeting was so broad, a lot of advertising dollars were wasted reaching people who weren’t part of their target audience. This was accepted as simply something that came along with advertising.

Traditional advertising also relies on a one-way conversation. Because of that, it found that it needed to be an intrusive as possible to make sure that it would interrupt whatever you were doing so you would pay attention to it. When there wasn’t that much competition, the interruption wasn’t that bad, but as the number of media outlets and ways to advertise increased, the messages became increasingly intrusive, with flashy messages that were aimed at the lowest common denominator (read: stupid).

As for public relations, or PR, it was a private club that you had to pay big bucks to be a part of. You paid some PR guru a ton of money for the privilege of getting to use his network of contacts that he made over years of schmoozing to try and get your message out. The success of your campaign was judges by how many inches of press that you got, not how much the press release actually affected your sales. Press releases were also written specifically with the media in mind, it used terms and jargon that only media people would understand, and even had to formatted in just the right way. If you wanted to play the game, you had to submit to their way of doing things.

Then something called the internet came along. And advertisers and PR people realized that is was an opportunity to reach potential customers, even if they didn’t quite know what to do with it at the time.

To be continued…

PublisherSpot.com: Ad Network Search Engine

Jason Katzenback — Sun, 25 May 2008 12:02:01 +0000

For any of you just getting started in the make mooney online game, you have probably (or soon will) came to the realization that there are a boat load of options for monetizing your blog. One the easiest is publishing advertisements from different advertising and affiliate networks but the challenge with this is knowing which ones actually are worthwhile and which ones are just hyped up marketers tricking you into believing theirs is the best.

Well, we have found something (well actually they revealed it to us in order for us to review it) and we are sure glad we did.

The site is Publisher Spot and they are pretty much a one stop spot that allows you to find those advertising and affiliate ad-network companies that you had been looking for but just couldn’t find. Not only that, because this is much more than a list, Publisher Spot provides comprehensive and informative synopses of advertising and affiliate networks all in a database that can be queried to give broad, or highly focused searches using the PublisherSpot in-house search engine (http://www.publisherspot.com/search).

To get started in your rummaging, there is a browse function for checking out the reviews by review rating, date of the review, or you can just saunter through all of the reviews at your leisure. Currently you can do this in a reasonable amount of time, there are 37 reviews, more than double the number from just a few months ago. So before long we envision most site visitors will be turning solely to the excellent in house search engine which is the real power of this site.

To get started with your database query you can go with the “quick and dirty” search of reviews by rating or category. But if you want to clean up your search, or, dive right in there and find exactly what you are looking for, the advanced search is awesome by allowing an additional seven different search parameters to get you right to where you want to go.

Something that really impressed us in the Advance Search was the ability to Search By Ad Creative, so you can look for (or avoid) ads that include pop-ups, video ads, banners among the many options. A further enhancement is the Search By Features, which allows you to look for Ads Allowed on Forums and/or a Referral Program.

The ability to Search by Payment; Frequency, Methods (currently seven choices) and Minimum payment will certainly help the monetization of sites and it is always good in these financially stringent times to know where the dollars are coming from and how often.

Everyone seems to be looking for lucrative ways to fight against Google’s AdSense and this site will give you another weapon if you want to go with an alternative to the big G.

Now you don’t get databases and reviews like this without a lot of human effort being involved. Clearly a lot of thought went into this resource and then things were implemented with a meticulous focus on quality.

Most of the reviews are around 2,000 words, which is about 5 pages of print. The reviews are very clearly written and very detailed. If you haven’t figured out what you need to know in that amount of page area then you probably never will.

There are other sites out there that do “this kind of thing” but it’s like comparing that 70’s clunker of a car to the latest road rocket. So there are cars and then there are cars. And there are ad network review sites and then there is Publisher Spot, but in my opinion the former are just wasting server space.

Click Here to go and check out Publisher Spot for yourself… trust us, it is worth the time!

Creating a GOOD advertising page

Jason Katzenback — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 23:56:36 +0000

Guest Post by Lincoln Adams. Visit his blog at The Habitation of Justice.

Face it, most of the advertising pages you see on blogs today (if there even is one) sucks mighty moose balls.

I believe there are two crucial things advertisers want to know about your site: how much traffic you get, and what your reader demographics are. When I revamped my own advertising page, I took these two things into consideration and developed what I hope is now a much more informative (and attractive looking) landing page that will give advertisers everything they need to know about my site.

For the former, I realized in spite of their inaccuracies, it still pays to list your Alexa, PageRank, Compete and Technorati rankings. Rather than do it by hand though, I used MyRankings.Net to help me display my current rankings in real time, that way I don’t have to keep hand editing them whenever a ranking changes.

I then listed the actual organic traffic figures I get per month. Right now they are, *ahem*, shall we say… a bit modest, but then again my prices are dirt cheap as well, so it all balances out in the end.

As to the latter, it’s especially hard to describe your reader demographics and what they’re interested in when you don’t have a definitive niche (like yours truly), and since advertisers want more than anything to market their goods and services to a targeted audience, this might present a problem.

However, there’s an effective way to way to determine the makeup and interests of your audience, partly by analyzing the search engine keywords that brought them to your site.

Personally, I found the easiest way to do this was via HitTail, a free service that analyzes your search engine related traffic and helps you find optimal keywords to improve your rankings and traffic numbers. They also provide an easy to scan list of all the keywords that have been used to direct visitors to your site since it began tracking, and I believe the data can also be exported into a spreadsheet format as well.

Using HitTail then, I went back almost a year and scanned all the keywords that led people to my site. I tried to understand what most of the visitors were looking for, and what their search efforts told me about them, and also what keywords drew the most traffic. If someone found my site via the search phrase “natural cures for shingles” for example, that told me they were interested in alternative and herbal medicine. If another one was looking for “privacy software,” that told me that they were interested in… uh… privacy software.

After I finished that, my next step was to analyze the interests of my repeat visitors. Some of them were friends, so I already knew what their passions were. For other visitors, more often than not they tended to have blogs of their own, so in those cases I would visit their sites to see what they liked to write about. Was it literature, politics, gadgets or romance? What fueled their passions the most? What was on their wish list, if they had one? And so on.

From all this I was able to develop and list several categories that I believe accurately reflected the interests of my audience. If an advertiser had a product to sell that easily fit the description of one or more of these categories, he or she would know right off the bat that their ads will likely draw healthy attention and attract a higher clickthrough rate, which of course would hopefully lead to a higher conversion rate as well.

Finally, in order to encourage advertisers to book a campaign on my site, I offered a significant discount guaranteeing a certain clickthrough rate for their ads, or they would receive a partial but generous refund. Am I a swell guy or what?

Hopefully my experience will help some of you develop a more effective landing page for your advertisers. And if not, well then, feel free to send them my way.