Honest Marketing Secrets

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So I seem to have contracted a cold and have been out of commission this week, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking. In fact, getting sick creates a nice big time space for me to catch up on the backlog of books that tower around the place and it sure makes me happy to be reading while I drift in and out of consciousness.

I have been reading a number of great resources recently and today I thought I’d share a couple of them. If you haven’t heard of these I think you’ll be well-served to have a look. If you have them, I’d love to hear your comments and any suggestions for further reading.

Writing ad copy is the mainstay of marketing. I wanted to learn all I could about marketing and the one thing I heard more than any other was, learn copywriting, or at least learn to recognize good copy so that when you need to hire someone to write it for you, you won’t be taken for a ride. So, to that end, I’ve found a couple books on writing ad copy that are recommended across the board as best-of-breed and I’m reading them right now.

The first is, Advertising Secrets of the Written Word: The Ultimate Resource on How to Write Powerful Advertising Copy from One of America’s Top Copywriters and Mail Order Entrepreneurs by Joseph Sugarman. What a mouthful; and what a price!

If you search for that on Amazon you will quickly realize that this book is out of print and sells for about $95 used. However, I did a little looking around and discovered that Adweek republished this as, The Adweek Copywriting Handbook and you can pick it up for a much more reasonable price.

The other copywriting book is, Tested Advertising Methods by John Capleswhich is also a classic and required reading in many marketing classes.

The most enlightening thing about reading these books is the way it changes how you look at all the ads and blogs out there. As you compare everything, the good stuff suddenly pops right out at you. It saves you a lot of time, in fact, when you don’t bother with stuff that’s quickly identifiable as sub-par.

Of course, I’m also an advocate of a number of plain old, traditional books on writing. The number one book in my library that will profoundly change and improve your writing, whether for ad copy, for writing a masterpiece of short fiction, or for the greatest blog post of all time is certainly, On Writing Well by William Zinsser. Granted, I still don’t follow all of his suggestions. I tend to have nightmare sentences that run on for days so you can imagine how rough my writing was before I read it.

And lastly, if you’re just looking for some assistance with grammar and usage, check out the Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation blog. I’m particularly interested in the Blue Book post on commas, semicolons and colons as I still have a bear of a time with those bits.

I hope you find some enlightening reading in the resources above. Until next time, don’t get sick. Or maybe DO get sick if that will help you catch up on some reading. But just a little sick; nothing dreadful, please.

-Zack

I read on TechCrunch this morning that Duncan Riley is against the new Pay-Per-Play audio ad idea (although he recommends it for his competitors) and I’d like to point out why he’s spot on with his assessment of the situation.

The Web started out as a silent affair and while I don’t believe in slavishly standing on ceremony, as it were, I do believe in respecting the ears and needs of your reader/viewer/listener and respecting the nature of the system and its current state of transformation.

Granted, the Web has now become a fully multi-media laden world and there are many advertisers successfully using audio, even compulsory-on-page-load audio in their ads. But, didn’t we agree a while back that the Web is not TV? TV is passive and we all accepted long ago that we watch what we get and the most control we have over it is to switch the channel, or mute it, or shut it off if we don’t like what we’re getting. Therefore, we don’t get pissed when a commercial comes on because we know that’s how it works.

But that’s not how the Web started, or how it works today. The Pay-Per-Play idea is old-school mass media trying to force the one-to-many model back down our throats and that’s not only irritating, it’s downright disrespectful.

The Web comes from a completely opposing side of the control spectrum where we have always had almost complete control over what we’re going to look at, or look for, and how we’re going to consume what we find. To suddenly and arbitrarily violate this agreement between Web consumers and information providers is a slap in the face to both parties and I suspect that’s why it’s so annoying for most people.

I know I will leave a site immediately if I can’t control the audio on the page, and apparently these Pay-Per-Play ads are set to fire off uncontrollably at 3 minute intervals the whole time you’re on a site.

From the Pay-Per-Play site:

The audio ad is only 5 seconds in length and a website visitor will only hear one 5 second advertisement per visit to any specific web page where the PPP code has been inserted. The visitor will only hear one audio ad for every 3 minutes they visit if they have already heard an audio ad on another page of the same website.

I just experienced the demo ad, and guess what? My speakers were turned way up (which I hadn’t realized) and the sub-woofer was turned up for a CD I was listening to recently and that Taco Bell ad blared horribly for 5 seconds.

It was so short a time that even if there was a pause button, I would have spent the whole time looking for it and attempting to click it. Ouch. Truly an ugly experience and not one I care to repeat, let alone every 3 minutes while I’m moving from page to page on someone’s site.

I think a good solution for advertisers and readers is to offer video, or audio content either paused with a play button, or muted with an option to unmute and start at the beginning, as I’ve seen some interstitial ads do recently. That way we can have the audio-visual experience, or not, as we’re so inclined.

Will you put these ads on your web site?

I am officially overwhelmed. But that’s nothing new. In fact, I’m sure you’re pretty blasé about being overwhelmed now too. Everyone’s been overwhelmed for the last few years and it’s only getting worse by the second as a new cornucopia of interesting and not-so-interesting blogs hits the net daily. But what to do about it. I need to keep track of everything happening in my area as best I can and I’ve been searching for a good way to do that for a while now. I found a few very cool answers.

Track Your Posts, Track Your Blogs
Need to track your own blog and other blogs you read every day? Wish you could track more easily? Want to find out how well a specific post is doing compared to your other posts? Want to quickly find the best posts ever made to your blog, or to any or all of your favorite blogs? Definitely grab an account over at aiderss.com. I just stumbled across these guys a few days ago and I’m thrilled with it so far. You can track trends, see the historical performance of your blog, or any blog you’re interested in. I could go on . . . but the best way to see why I’m so pleased with it is to just check it out. (You can also do RSS mash-ups here too.)
Check out AideRSS

Follow the Conversation
I mentioned before that marketing and blogging are all about conversations. Now I’ve found a great tool that helps you track blog conversations and will really surprise you with the alternate view it provides. It puts even older stuff you might have seen before into a different context that might trigger new ideas, or interpretations. Never mind the fact that you can watch what people are talking about in an up-to-the-minute sort of way about whatever key phrase is burning a hole in your brainpan today. This tool may be my tool-of-the-month, if I had such a thing.
Check out TalkDigger

Mash Things Up a Bit More: 2 Great Video Tutorials on Using RSS Feeds
If you were to take all the information you’re interested in and mash it up together and then sort it so the most important and relevant stuff popped to the top, wouldn’t that save you a ton of time? Wouldn’t that be cool? That’s what a feed mash-up can do for you and all you need is a good feed masher. There are a number of feed mashers out there, but I recently ran across an RSS tutorial over at John Jantsch’s blog that covers the how, but also suggests a site I hadn’t seen called mySyndicaat. I’m still having a go at mashing my favorite feeds and comparing all these tools, but so far mySyndicaat definitely seems worth checking out.

Alternatively, Jack Humphrey posted a great tutorial on another great feed manager called BlogRovr which you may find very useful. So far, this one is duking it out with AideRSS above for my favorite, but they do slightly different things and I can see using both of them.

Check out the tutorial at John Jantsch’s blog.
Check out the tutorial at Jack’s Friday Traffic Report
Check out mySyndicaat
Check out BlogRovr

Have fun finding yourself and others and have a great weekend! (Holy mackerel, I used an exclamation mark. What on earth was I thinking? . . . was that wise? Hmmm, we shall see.) [dang, WordPress won't accept my interrobang . . . argh.]

-Zack

Here’s a truth I’ve discovered: there are a lot of people selling hype and a lot more buying it. I got absorbed a bit myself for a short time, and then I remembered what turned me off and what was worth it and where I wanted to be as a human and a genuine, compassionate contributor to the greater good on this planet. I think we can all get swept up easily enough in the rush for what we think is a fast and easy buck. But there’s the rub: there ain’t no such thing, if you’ll pardon my colloquialism.

It’s painful to see a majority of online marketers and buyers stuck in the fast buck syndrome. I imagine it happens because every once in a while it actually appears to work for one of the parties involved, but it never lasts. And then disappointment and disillusionment set in. I’m speaking from personal experience as a buyer and a seller. But mostly just a buyer observing it all.

Even many of the folks I’ve bought genuinely good products from have forgotten, or never knew, how to market without arm-twisting and “yelling”.

I think hyperbole is a kind of lying and we’re all long since weary of the next “incredible, stupendous, amazing” product. I know the moment I see any verbiage like that I shut down now. And sadly many really good products are now unwittingly being cloaked in hyperbole and not making it into the hands of folks who might genuinely benefit from them. I know I’m probably missing out on some good products because the business owner is clothing their offering in so much overblown language that it’s a complete turn-off for me and I smell what I have learned must be BS a mile off.

How can we sort honest business folks with a great product, but bad, hyperbolic advertising from the scam artists who are still trying to trick us into buying? It’s hard sometimes. I rely on word-of-mouth recommendations and reputation almost exlusively now. Kind of like I did before I got interested in marketing studies. Funny, that.

So here’s a tip for the day: don’t use hyperbole in your sales copy, in your blog, in your conversations online. Really. Yes, there is definitely a place for exclamation marks here and there. But man, if you use them sparingly, they will work wonders. In fact, don’t use them where they’re most expected and they’ll work even more powerfully. Really.

Building word-of-mouth recommendations and a great reputation is critical to creating a great business that will last, and a great reputation is infinitely more valuable than a few bucks made in the short term by yelling and screaming about the greatest thing since margarine-flavored lollipops.

[I include loud, blinking graphics, pages covered in ads so completely you can't find the post, and loud video and audio that starts playing the moment you hit the page under the category of "screaming-at-your-reader", and although that's not hyperbole, it really bugs me so I had to type it. Maybe that's a good subject for another post later on . . . .]

Thanks for reading this far. If you made it, that is. I know I do go on sometimes.

-Zack!

A great blog, or web site, should stir great conversation. And really good conversation includes lots of ideas flying back and forth among participants about your subject. We want really good conversations on our blogs because if people are hashing out great ideas on our site, this will attract others who are also interested in that conversation.

So how can you encourage lots of great conversations? One way is to make it easier for people to join the conversation and another is to reward the folks who do take their precious time to hang out and “chew the fat” on your blog.

I’ve chosen just a few key plugins to help you get started. This is by no means comprehensive and if you want the BEST listing of comment related plugins I’ve ever found, (it’s overwhelming and that’s why I chose just a few here) check the end of this post . . .

Make It Easier with Good Settings

1. Get your WordPress Sorted
First, before you even worry about a plugin, make sure your WordPress settings are letting people comment without too much trouble. (I’ll mention my spam fighting methods later.)

Make sure that under Options > Discussion your settings allow commenting without moderation after the first comment by that author is moderated. Here’s how I have mine setup:

2. Make Comments Easier to Read

Nested comments can be very useful for quickly seeing who’s saying what about what. Try this plugin for threaded comments by Brian Meidell. I’m experimenting with it right now. Some people like threaded comments and some don’t. Check it out and see if it suits you.

Reward Comments with REAL Link Love

3. The Do Follow / No Follow Thingamabob

Next, if you haven’t noticed lately, there are a ton of these (or similar) icons showing up in comment sections everywhere. [I borrowed that image from randaclay.com]

In 2005 Google instituted the nofollow policy for comments and basically any link that anyone other than the author places on a site is not followed and indexed by the search engines. This means that even though you might leave your site address in your comment, if the blog, or site you’re on doesn’t reverse the nofollow policy, the major search engines will not follow your link and you will get no page-rank, or back-link credit for your post. This was done to combat spam, but it seems to have mostly combated great conversations on blogs, based on my research.

So I have decided to turn off nofollow on my blog until further notice and this means that when you comment here, you’ll get search engine credit for it. I encourage you to do the same. Obviously we don’t want to reward spammy comments and interestingly enough some of the bigger bloggers in the sphere haven’t really weighed in on this. For instance at problogger.net, all comments are still nofollow encoded (as far as I can tell. Please correct me if you note otherwise!). Check the sites you comment on and see if they use nofollow or not. I have the Search Status plugin for Firefox installed and it does this and much more for you.

Right now I’m using Dofollow by Semiologic. It’s very simple and just turns off the nofollow deal in WordPress. However, if you want to make certain only real humans who like your blog are commenting, try Lucia’s Linky Love plugin. It offers a lot of flexibility in configuring nofollow as it allows you to set the number of posts required before nofollow is removed from a commenter’s comments. This encourages only real people who are interested enough to return to your blog to comment and discourages drive-by commenters. It also has quite a few other settings and is my second choice for now because, the only caveat, it does put one more barrier between the commenter and the comment. Since this is a post about making it easier for folks to comment . . . I’ll let you know how Dofollow goes though if there’s a problem.

There are quite a few plugins out there already for disabling nofollow and Andrew Beard has already gone and done us all a huge favor by posting them here: ULTIMATE LIST OF DOFOLLOW & NOFOLLOW PLUGINS - BANISH NOFOLLOW FROM COMMENTS AND TRACKBACKS Take your pick!

UPDATE: I had some trouble with the semiologic plugin not working and I’m so swamped right now I don’t have time to troubleshoot it. So, I found this excellent alternative called DoFollow 4.0 that has some great options inlcuded by Kimmo Suominen (kiitoksia paljon!) and it worked perfectly right off the bat. Definitely check it out!

4. Commenter’s Most Recent Blog Post

Here’s a great way to help your fellow bloggers and yourself. I found out about this over at Suzanne’s blog and absolutely love this idea. Use this plugin by Andy Bailey to add a commenter’s most recent blog post title and link at the bottom of the comment. I love this idea as it really encourages even more interaction among our blogs. And it’s a great way to reward loyal commenters.

BONUS Idea # 5 (wow cool, I can turn too much typing into a bonus! see how I did that? )

5. Email Responses to Comments

Finally, place the option for commenters to tick the box if they want to be emailed about any responses to their comments. This is wonderful way to invite your readers to return to the conversation again and again. Often I can’t remember where that blog was, or which post I commented on and this is handy way to deliver that link and save time and effort for all.

I use the plugin Subscribe to Comments by Scriptygoddess and now managed by Mark Jaquith.

OK, this post is never going to end. There are more things I want to suggest and more plugins you can use to enhance your blog’s conversation power, but it will have to wait. I’ll do a whole series on conversation power, in fact. Yeah, that’s it, what a great idea! Or maybe someone else can join in. Maybe you already have! Got ideas for generating and sustaining great conversations on your blog? Share ‘em! Let’s create a great resource.

I’ll also do a complete list of my plugins soon as well and maybe that will be of interest and use to you. If you have any questions at all about this stuff, please leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer . ..

until next time . . .

PS - Here’s that link I promised to a vast treasure trove of comment plugin goodness over at Lorelle on Wordpress.

So what is marketing anyway? Ultimately it’s a conversation between a buyer and a seller. And even more fundamentally, it’s an exchange of value between two, or more people wherein a successful exchange means everyone wins.

I believe that when you love what you’re doing, you tend to want to share it with your friends and even strangers on the street. When you love what you’re doing, you tell stories about the fun you’re having and the amazing things you’re discovering while you’re having it. And when you excitedly relate your experience to someone else, that excitement becomes contagious. We are all looking to optimize our experience, find our passion, experience joy, etc. And when you meet someone who has that feeling, you tend to want to hang around and hear what they have to say. In some circles, this is even called friendship, if you can believe it.

So what am I saying here? Successful marketing happens when one person is so honestly thrilled about what they’re doing that they have gained the depth of knowledge necessary to create a great product, or service; so great, in the best case scenario, that it might even be called art. And when this product, or service is just as exciting to another person, both people can then have a great conversation about it and agree to exchange value. What a deal!

Conversely, unsuccessful marketing can be the result of not being particularly interested in what you’re doing (possibly because it is simply a means to “make huge wads of cash”) and you try to force your lackluster product down everyone’s throat in pedestrian and uninspired, copycat ways. Pretty stark comparison? Yup, but I really see it like that.

Successful marketing doesn’t feel like “marketing” at all. In fact, it’s really just offering the results of your passion and excitement to the niche that is just as excited about it as you are. The second example is the basis for the infamous “evil marketer” archetype that’s been shadowing our conversations since the beginning of time.

I’m not saying you can’t make huge wads of cash selling something you’re uninterested in, or ignorant about—many people do. But why the hell bother! You’re only making yourself and others miserable and you could be doing the opposite and still making huge wads of cash. Yes? In fact, I believe you will probably make vastly greater wads of cash if you market a product you love because everyone can’t wait to hear the latest story about your experience.

In the end, you know you’re doing it right when it doesn’t feel like work at all to you and it doesn’t feel like so-called marketing to the person who’s thrilled to buy what you’re selling. Seth Godin alludes to this same idea in his post, Workaholics.

“The passionate worker doesn’t show up because she’s afraid of getting in trouble, she shows up because it’s a hobby that pays. The passionate worker is busy blogging on vacation… because posting that thought and seeing the feedback it generates is actually more fun than sitting on the beach for another hour. The passionate worker tweaks a site design after dinner because, hey, it’s a lot more fun than watching TV.”

So take a moment sometime and have a look at your passion and excitement levels around what you’re doing. Are you doing it just to make “huge wads of cash”, or are you genuinely so damn thrilled to be doing what you love that you can’t wait to rip the covers off in the morning and dive back in?

[Please note that I'm not actually advocating blogging on vacation as that's a recipe for unhappiness too since we have to have a little balance. I'm just using this example to emphasize how important it is to love what you're doing since it makes your marketing effortless and very unmarketing-like. Obviously, part of loving what you do is learning to have balance among all your needs. I say this in response to Greg Verdino's disagreement with Mr. Godin's post.]

Welp, that’s all I’ve got today. Man that was a long post . . . Next post is gonna be wildly different. I have some interesting WordPress plugins and some basic marketing tips I want to tell you about, so look for it soon . . . and in the mean time, hope your conversations are superb!

I found a good article by Andy Sernovitz, CEO of WOMMA (the Word of Mouth Marketing Association) over at iMedia Connection which talks about the differences between “honest word of mouth marketing and sleazy stealth campaigns”.

It’s aimed more at the traditional offline and corporate mega-product world, but applies equally to online marketing practices. It’s very instructive reading and I’m glad I found it:

Word of Mouth Tactics: Honest Marketing

They also have a Practical Ethics Toolkit available.

Especially interesting is the Ethical Blogger Contact Guidelines: 10 Principles for Ethical Contact by Marketers

Would love to hear any thoughts about this one . . .

-Zack

I found a great site courtesy of my friend, Daniel, that gives you free, step-by-step tutorial videos for blog building, web development, internet marketing strategies and tips and legal issues for content producers and marketers.

My favorite tutorial right now is the 7 Must Have Killer WordPress Plugins

If you can’t figure something out, check here first. Really well done, these.

Internet Marketing Videos from Tubetorial

Just a quick note, if you have considered an internet marketing training program and have yet to try anything, or haven’t been satisfied with what you have found so far, check out these free videos giving you complete step-by-step tutorials as well as a free PDF report that’s hard-hitting and very refreshingly blunt and clear.

The report shows you how to avoid wasting time with junk and how to start immediately improving your income for your business, or creating a new business from scratch right now. This is a much more intensive and a way higher production quality program(and therefore higher priced) than the Nitro Blueprint so if you basically want to get the only course you’ll ever need, get this one.

I plan to get this program as soon as it’s launched and will review it as soon as it arrives. I can’t wait!

Click here to check out the videos.
They’re on the right side of the page . . .
[Update: Just received a notice that the video link has changed and I just updated it above. The videos were moved and they will also be there for a limited time . . . not sure what they're planning . . . anyway, the link should work now . . . ]

If you want to check out the free report called, An Obvious Truth immediately without having to opt in, you can just download it here:
Click to Download An Obvious Truth

Also, if you want to get in on the launch and become an affiliate so you can easily pay for your copy of the program, click here to check out the affiliate program.

If you are just wondering what the heck this is about, check out the blog and all the comments. It’s a pretty crazy launch . ..

PS– If you really can’t afford 2 grand for a totally comprehensive package (above), I STILL really recommend the guys over at Nitro and their Nitro Blueprint System. They may, as they say, not be professional presenters, but their information is excellent and well worth the price many times over.