Honest Marketing Secrets

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This is only the beginning. It’s going to get much, much bigger.
Social marketing is all the rage right now and if the signs are to be believed, this is a mere taste of the future. Part of social marketing involves joining various online communities in your niche and adding value to those communities.

Social marketing is most definitely not about joining as many groups as you can, regardless of their relevance to your niche, and spamming the living daylights out of everyone with “ME! ME! ME!” kinds of advertising and requests. This will get you banned, and rightfully so.

Read the rest of this entry »

Are you making these mistakes? Proper word usage will make your writing efforts powerful and effective and build credibility with your audience.

Day-before-yesterday I read a great post over at skelliewag.org that stirred up an excellent discussion about whether or not it’s important to write well online. I’m not a great writer myself and, in fact, I started this blog in part to get a little more practice.

But this got me thinking about writing in general, word usage and credibility. So I put on my tall, pointy hat and decided to post my opinion about five words that really annoy me when misused. Here they are in no particular order.

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Wow, what the heck am I talking about? Did I get your attention? Don’t worry, you will be rewarded!

Remember when I said this was an experimental marketing blog? Did I not say that yet? Ah, right then . . . this is an experimental marketing blog. That means a couple things actually.

This is certainly my experiment with marketing and blogging ideas in general and blogging about it all at the same time. But it’s also a blog in which I’ll use ideas I think will be useful and we’ll all see if any of them work, or not.

Don’t worry, I’ll be documenting my successes as well as my failures. Even the epic ones. Really. We will all win.

So about that headline . . . Read the rest of this entry »

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?

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!

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!

This is just a short post to introduce myself and update you all.

When I first started this site I had no time at all to consider managing it, or writing the posts. I started the site as an experiment in marketing, blogging and copywriting, among other similar things. So, since I had no time, I asked my ghost friend Cedric to write the posts and manage the site for me and take the heat for the extremely infrequent posts while my other irons slowly heated up in that massive fire we call “potential great things.” Well, I call it that. Anyway, this site is one of those experimental irons and apparently, it’s getting fairly warm.

As it has come to pass, I have eliminated a few things and made some time and will now be taking over the posting and experimenting and clicking, o my, and so I hope you all will appreciate my own, slightly odd, but, I hope, informative and useful style.

I’ll explain more about what I intend for this blog as we go. In the mean time, I hope you benefit from my observations and reviews and please let me know what you’d like to see if you think of it. Frankly, I may go way the heck off on tangent after tangent as is my wont, so, hang on for the ride!

All the best!

-Zack