How To Write Ads That Work

This is as close to a magic formula as you can get. There’s a lot more to writing ads than following a formula, of course, but having this framework should get you well on the way to writing a competent, if not great, marketing piece.

If you’ve been digging around at the library and gotten into the archives of the masters you’ve almost certainly discovered the formula of AIDA = Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. that’s a good start, but this is how it’s really done.

As you write your piece, try to get into the head of your client or prospect. What exactly are they looking for and how would they benefit from using your product or service? Furthermore, how would they benefit by buying from you rather than a competitor. So.. give it a shot.

Just one thing.. make sure you budget a whole bunch of time – even a short piece can take a non-writer as long as 10 to 20 hours to get right.

Here you go:

1. Headline (the “Attention” part)
This is, by far, the most important element – this has to be a big, bold promise of some kind. Give them a reason to read the next line.

2. Sub-Headline.
Just as the purpose of the headline is to get you to read this line, the purpose of this line is to get them to read the next line. Plus, backing up the promise is really important.

3. Benefits (sort of today’s version of “Interest.”)
Use the benefits of your product (as opposed to features) to put your prospect smack in the middle of the picture. How should your customers feel when they’re using it? How would they feel if they missed out?

4. More Benefits.
Skepticism is high these days; it takes a lot to convince people.

5. Proof.
Testimonials work. Amazing facts are always good. Easy-to-understand statistics help, too. That sort of thing. Prove that your product does what you say it will do.

6. Risk Reversal.
How about a money-back guarantee? There can be no risk whatsoever.

7. Photo.
This isn’t required, but it will definitely increase your response rate. Show someone enjoying the product. Illustrate the benefits. Even a photo of you, which personalizes the piece and makes it seem real, helps a lot.

8. Offer. (Just one, though)
You have to offer something. It’s amazing how many ads are produced without an offer. “It’s important to get your out name out there,” is the reason heard most often. Sorry – without an offer, your ad is dead. Nothing happens.

9. Call to Action.
You must ask your prospect to do something. Really! If the rest of the ad is reasonably well-structured, people will act – they’ll take advantage of your offer and do exactly what you ask them to do. This is where your ad can become your best salesperson.

10. Reducing the Resistance to Accepting Your Offer.
It’s that guarantee again. And it’s OK to mention it more than once – reducing your customer’s risk to zero is really important.

Now.. if you really want to kick it up a notch:

11. Create a Sense of Urgency.
Use language like: “Just five days left..,” “Only 12 lucky golfers will..,” “Take advantage today and you’ll also get..” You know what I’m talking about, right?

So there you have it. Try writing a couple different versions and split up your mailing or post two different web pages to see which one draws responses. That’s how it’s done..

About the Author: Mike Schwagler is a direct response copywriter with over 20 years experience in industrial sales and marketing (B2B) in a wide variety of areas, including highly technical and scientific products, product assembly and services. He’s also worked direct to consumer with over 12 years in residential real estate sales. You can check him out at http://biznik.com/members/mike-schwagler.

Simple and Successful SEO Strategies – On Page Optimization

SEO doesn’t have to be complex and by following these simple on-page optimization techniques you can give your SEO campaign the perfect start.

SEO is often seen as being a difficult and in-depth process, but the reality is that by following some reasonably common sense guidelines it is possible to get good rankings. That’s not to say that optimization is a simple or quick process; there are, unfortunately, no short cuts. Your SEO efforts should be a concerted and long term endeavour, in order for you to enjoy the best possible results, and should incorporate both on-page and off-page optimization techniques. By following the on-page SEO strategies below you can set a strong foundation for all your SEO work.

Keyword Research

Before you begin penning content and writing title and meta tags you first need to research the keywords you will use on each of your pages. Using the wrong keywords can negatively impact your entire campaign, causing you to lose untold hours and days of work and eventually forcing you to concede that you made the wrong decision and start all over again.

The most appropriate and most beneficial keywords are popular enough that they will enjoy regular searches but without being prohibitively competitive or overly generic. A number of keyword research tools exist and your competitors’ websites are a good place to start your early research. Ensure keywords are targeted specifically to the type of content you will provide as well as the service or product you will be selling. More targeted keywords will result in more targeted visitors and targeted visitors mean greater conversion rates and an improved return on your efforts.

Niche And Semantically Related Keywords

A good strategy is to incorporate a reasonable list of competitive keywords with less competitive ones. The more niche keywords will serve you well during the early days of your website and over time you should be able to start competing for the more challenging of the keywords you use. Also incorporate semantically or topically related keywords into your keyword list because the search engines are placing more and more emphasis on those pages that use related keywords as well as primary keywords.

Accessibility And Standards

Site accessibility is an integral part of good website design, but it should also be considered an important factor in any SEO strategy. Using standards based code for your website will help to ensure that anybody that wishes to access and view your website will be able to do so. It will also mean that the spiders used by search engines will be able to access and index your pages effectively ensuring that you get the full credít for your site.

Navigation And Intra-Linking

Your navigation menu and internal links should be prominently placed, easy to see, and easy to follow for the spiders. It is good practice to include a text link from the home page to a compliant sitemap on your site, alleviating any potential problems that might arise from broken links or the use of graphical or flash based navigation menus. You can also consider adding links into the main body of your content, although too many will make the page difficult to read and therefore diminish the overall effectiveness so don’t get too carried away.

Title And Meta Tags

While search engines do not specifically use the meta tags to help assess the value of a page like they once did, meta tags are still critical to good SEO performance. The title and description tags that you add at the top of a page are used in various ways including in the compiling and display of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). This is the first thing a potential site visitor will see from your site so this mini listing needs to be as effective as any paid advert or PPC ad. Poorly written titles and descriptions can put many readers off viewing your pages so a little time and effort here can have a very positive effect.

Using your keywords in the title and the description is good practice because these will be highlighted in the search results if they were used in the search query itself. This will make your result more prominent and instantly identify your page as being relevant to the user. Don’t needlessly use keywords, however, and don’t throw extra keywords into the description at the cost of a well written, short ad.

Other Formatting Tags

On-page content should always be written with the visitor in mind, although obviously it can still be optimized for search engines. As such, proper page structure is important to your reader as well as to the engines. H1 and H2 tags are an effective way of breaking up page content, and give readers the chance to skim through a page and determine its relevance.

A page should only contain a single H1 tag at the top of the content but can include multiple H2 and H3 tags. Alt tags on images should also be included and these as well as the actual file path to the image itself can include important keywords (but do make sure that they actually make sense and are more than just a keyword thrown in for the sake of SEO).

Page Content Optimization

Finally, we get to the heart of the page – the content itself. Use the keywords you researched for a page, including semantically related keywords. Write as naturally and appealingly as possible while keeping those keywords in mind and don’t get carried away stuffing or cramming them into the body of the text. Not only is this unappealing to readers but is seriously frowned upon by the search engines.

The reader really is the most important aspect of your content. If the majority of your visitors are coming from the search engines, remember that they arrived using specific keywords. This means that they are searching for equally specific information relating to those keywords – make sure you deliver on the promise that you made in your title and description tags.

About The Author
Matt Jackson – WebWiseWords is a content writing service enabling website owners and online business owners to buy web content tailored to their needs. Services include affordable and high quality SEO content writing and more.

The Three SEO Factors That Really Matter

The Three SEO Factors That Really Matter

Search for a list of SEO factors and you’ll find that most feature at least 50.

That’s 50+ elements of your website that influence your ability to rank in search engines. Sounds complicated, doesn’t it?

Some SEO Consultants will tell you that ranking in search engines is about applying a precise formula to these 50+ elements – about using "special proprietary techniques" fine-tuned to search algorithms to boost your website above the competition.

Not exactly.

There are actually more like 200+ signals that search engines use when ranking websites. Imagine trying to reverse-engineer something like that? Sounds impossible, right?

That’s because it is.

The good news: it doesn’t matter.

You don’t need to be a computer engineer to rank well in search engines. Relieving, isn’t it?

The truth is that everything boils down to three factors:

1. Search-Friendly Pages
2. Relevant Content
3. A Trusted Website

All of those other factors and elements of SEO? They all fit into one of these three basic categories.

You don’t need to be a search scientist to understand the basics of what’s going on with these three factors and improve them for your website.

1) Search-Friendly Pages
Essentially, this first factor has to do with the technical aspects of how your website and pages work.

Search engines use crawlers (or "bots") to browse the web by following links. As they browse, these crawlers scan the content they see and store it in databases. These databases form the search engine’s web index – and when a user comes along and enters a search phrase the index is scanned for pages that match.

The basic idea: you want to make sure your pages, and the content that fills them, are visible to search engine crawlers.

There are a few things you should know about crawlers:

• They don’t support JavaScript – so that rollover menu, those drop-down links, etc, might not be visible to search engine crawlers.

• They don’t support Flash (mostly) – while there have been a few developments in this regard recently, Flash websites still aren’t too search engine friendly .

• They can’t "see" – sometimes designers use images instead of HTML text (usually because they want to use a certain font that isn’t web-safe), and search engine crawlers can’t read or index this text. Crawlers can only read code – and if your content isn’t found there it’s essentially invisible to search engines.

• They skimp on resources – it takes a lot of energy and time (and money) to crawl the web (there are a lot of pages out there) so crawlers are usually programmed to be conservative with how far they’ll dive into a page. If your web pages take a long time to load or feature a tremendous amount of content crawlers might leave without scanning/indexing everything.

There are some other things crawlers can’t/won’t do. To get a sense of what they can see on your website try SEO-Browser.com . This tool allows you to enter the address of a web page and see it as search crawlers see it.

The bottom line: you might have the best content in the world, but if crawlers can’t see it you won’t rank for relevant keywords.

2) Relevant Content
This factor is all about the words on your pages.

As we discussed above, the visible content on your pages is stored and searched every time someone uses a search engine. If the keyword or phrase entered doesn’t occur on your page you probably won’t show up.

There are a few key places where you’ll want to use the right language on your pages:

• Title tags
• Headlines
• Body copy
• Anchor text (links pointing to internal pages)

As you browse the web you’ll probably notice that lots of webmasters have gotten a bit, shall we say, "overzealous" with optimizing their content. Title tags stuffed to the brim with dozens of keyword variations is common. Sometimes even the body copy itself is stuffed with keywords in an attempt to boost rankings.

You might be tempted to do this yourself to try and enhance your chances of ranking for a given keyword.

Don’t do it. Please.

Why not? Try reading a page that’s been stuffed with keywords this way. It’s an awful experience, right? Certainly enough to stop your reading flow and send you to another website, isn’t it?

Don’t sacrifice your user’s reading experience in the aim of ranking for a given keyword. It’s not worth it. All of the traffic in the world won’t mean a thing if the users who land at your pages are turned off and leave. Your competitors are just a few painless clicks away.

To learn about what keywords people use when they search for your products/services/info try Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool – enter either your website address or a keyword and this tool will return a líst of related keywords including numbers on how many people search for them.

The bottom line: it’s rare to rank for a keyword that doesn’t occur on your pages so use the language your users do when they search. Don’t overdo it and stuff keywords, though, because you’ll annoy your visitors (and search engines don’t like it either – they might flag you as SPAM).

3) A Trusted Website
When you’ve got 1) search-friendly pages and 2) relevant content it’s still not time to sit back and let the search traffic pour in.

The truth is that most of your competitors will have looked into these factors already – they’re kind of the "low hanging fruit" of SEO, because they’re not usually terribly difficult to work out.

Trust is what sets you apart. It is by far the most important of the three factors.

Before Google came onto the scene using PageRank (a measurement of link popularity) to rank websites, search engines generally based their rankings on the first two factors we’ve discussed.

What was the problem with that approach?

Webmasters are greedy. We can’t help ourselves. We love traffic.

Keyword stuffing was rampant, and rarely did webmasters stick to the honest truth about what their website was relevant to. The result: search results littered with SPAM and just about anything with very little relevance.

The reason links were a better signal to Google was simple – it’s harder to game. While you can control the content/keywords on your website, it’s a lot harder to control it on someone else’s. It’s pretty tough to get someone to link to you against their will.

The model simply worked – Google’s results were better. The other search engines quickly caught on and looked to signals of trust for sorting through the SPAM.

Some signals that search engines use to determine whether they can trust your website:

• Inbound links – quality is more important than quantity here – that’s why those "500 directory links for $49.95" deals are worthless. The easiest links to get are the least valuable/powerful. A single link from Google.com, for example, would outweigh tens of thousands of weaker links – that’s how much quality matters.

• Website age – if your website is new there’s not much you can do about it without a Delorian and a working flux capacitor ("Marty, the website is in place – now we gotta go back to the future!"). A website that’s been around for a while is simply more trusted by search engines.

• Who you link to – it’s not just about inbound links. Search engines also look at what websites you link to from your pages. If you’re linking out to SPAMMY websites, they might consider you part of that "bad neighborhood" and penalize your website. Be careful who you vouch for.

There are other signals involved, but if you’ve got these three trust factors working in your favor you’re very likely to dominate the competition.

The bottom line: search engines don’t like getting burned by ranking SPAMMY websites. They want to know they can trust your website. Once you’ve got your on-page factors right (#1 and #2 above), you’ll need to build trust signals before your website will rank competitively.

About The Author
Mike Tekula is the Director of Marketing of Unstuck Digital – an Internet Marketing company that provides SEO Consulting and other custom-tailored services.