Nick Garner

read this and you decide wether they want me as a buyer

Please wait while we find an agent to assist you…
You have been connected to Philip .
Philip : Good afternoon, how may we help you?
Nicholas Garner: Hi – just very quickly, the acer notebook Acer Aspire 7003WSMi
Nicholas Garner: tis comes with a vista upgrade disk ?

Philip : Please see the specification for all items included
Nicholas Garner: http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?……..
Nicholas Garner: it doesnt say wether I get a disk automatically or wether I have to appily for one ….. its unclear
Nicholas Garner: I click for an upgrade yetit imtimates that its automatically sent with the package
Nicholas Garner: I have to run right now, can you leave youre reply here for my return? thanks
Philip : We are sorry but we are unable to offer pre-sales advice above and beyond the information which is listed on our website. We can only suggest that you contact the manufacturers for further advice.
Nicholas Garner: you are very, very , very unhelpful – are you even a human or are you a bot ? becaseu this is useless support !
Philip : I am a human being
Philip : Thank you for using this service. Goodbye.
Thank you for using InstantService. You may now close this window.
Your session has ended. You may now close this window.

here in the UK we now have a e-petitions website where anyone from the UK can vote on issues concerning them – the big one right now is vehicle tracking and road pricing.

For more on road pricing see here

And to go to the e petitions go here??

I think road pricing falls into the same category as:

• Congestion charging in chelsea (london)
• Speed cameras not being a cash machine for the police
  

Sadly here inthe UK , things are getting worse in terms of housing costs and over regulation from the government….maybe its australia for me !

following on from the last post, I found a very nice article on David Ogilvy and I thought I would share it with you.

http://www.copyblogger.com/

Comment from http://www.michaelejahn.blogspot.com/
Michael’s comment about: Hey, don’t forget about the conversions! PT 2

(hes referring to a typo I made) It was Ogilvy on advertising, not Oglevy, and this was written in the relative stoneage – 1983 – bublished first 2 years later – by a guy who set up shop in 1949 and to him – Televison was brand new. A wonderful book. Advertising is dead. PR is king. SEO is not about ads – it is about eanbling people to discover you site. Try suggesting ???The Fall of Avertising & the Rise of PR by some people who are still alive Al and Laura Ries. (see amazon here http://www.amazon.com/Fall-Advertising-Rise-PR/dp/0060081988)

Why people like you actually think you can write copy that will magically make me decide to make an impulse buy, I have no idea what you are smoking.

I search for my keywords when I am shopping – all one can do is STD (stack the deck) to bring me to their site so I can find what I am looking for – once I am there, no amount of the rubbish you describe above would sway me one way or another.

That what I think, perhaps I am in too big of a hurry.

SEP Guy comment:
Just clearing up a few small things. I cant type very well and im usually short on time hence the typos. But importantly good ideas dont really change that much with time – hence the claude hopkins book being so relevant for response driven advertising and marketing.

On the PR point, I agree to a great extent – link baiting is PR , web style, and it works really well. Interestingly I have real problems finding good online PR people to work with. And if it did, I could give them a ton of work.

Re the copywriting thing. I have tried recently to get 2 important content provision companies to write up stuff that is persuasive and to no avail . And on the pay per click side, I have been working with one of the PPC biggest agencies here in the UK and they just produced really mediocre stuff….So I have got on with it and begun writing content (under duress). At least its better than the ‘professionals’

Michael is right about copywriting – its a great skill, but you know, persuasive copy does?? not sell in isolation. it simply adds to momentum. A salesman wont sell you soemthing you dont want, likewise for a copywriter.

And following on from that, SEO will hopefully draw out the person who more or less wants what I have got to offer and good informative momentum building content will turn at least one in 75 of them into a customer.

Just a quick one.

Looking through some stats, rankings and keywords being used to accss a particular site driven only by advertising and affiliate links, i noticed how yahoo was giving a reasonable amount of link love to the site.

Anyway I found that comparing the top search terms for this promotional site, only Yahoo was ranking for these. Google was no where to be seen. But saying that, many of the pages were getting page ranks of 5.
What does that tell me ? Yahoo are passing on the link love? I don’t know ….

I WANT MORE CONVERSIONS !

Fortunately for me I can write persuasive copy and I have studied online conversion for long enough now to have a few clear ideas on how we are going to do this.

One thing I will be doing is making the SEO pages i am working on , more linear. I.e. harder for the users to jump out and go somewhere else. All I want them to do is buy from me. To do that they need to click a big button saying join now.

(I am also using this conversion page for pay per click traffic, since I think the mind set is very similar. it may be in time I’ll seperate the two, but for now I’m thinking combo pack!)

Interestingly I have noticed an obsession with MORE TRAFFIC ! ! ! ! and not with conversion. this explains why the relatively inexpensive process of improving conversion often gets ignored , or simply not given the priority it desserves.

So the user has clicked and they start travelling along the road to understanding and value build.

So last week, me and the creative guys got on and set up some ideas for an ideal user
path.

The Pathway
The user clicks one of 3 links on the SEO pages to a landing page. (or they click on a pay per click advert) These links are embedded with keywords which trigger off a tool run by mediaplex which then presents text tied in with the keywords they came in on.

The cool thing about a text based pitch is that:

• It is ‘words that sell’
• It is very easy to change.
• I can have different pitches for different users
• I can test, test, test to see what pictches work best
• It will upload immedately, so in the 1st 2 seconds it will be read.

The other plus is that different keywords = SEO’able content. I’m not suggesting that its going to do terribly well, however Its more keywords for engines to hang on to.

The diagram below explains the structure of the page. The core ideas are:

• 2 seconds to check the page out
• 8 seconds to decide wether to stay or not
• Build up the value by treating the page like a pyramid, with the most basic info atB the top and the most detailed at the bottom
• Have jump off points to registration
• Where they do want to trawl around, make sure the users dont stray too far, hence the i frame at the bottom.
• When I’ve got this page together I’ll set up a proper demo for you to play with and hopefully it will all work!

So there it is – now we will have to see if all this big talk works and gets me the results!

for your interest books I have read, and read, and read on this subject are:

• Scientific advertising by Claude Hopkins. It was written 85 years ago and is about direct response advertising. the core principles appily today as they did then , excepy you dont have any .com hype. Just sensible practical ideas totally relevant to online marketing. (now out of copywright, so its downlaodable) Here for the HTML version | Here for a PDF | and here for audio
• NEW AIDA – a great common sense book with a focus on direct mail marketing.
• Ogilvy on advertising. A seminal book on solid ideas for advertising. not specifically geared for direct response, although he was a passonate for getting your moneys worth from ad spend.
• And of course look at competitive terms on google and read the adverts. Try phrases like ‘home loan’ ‘credit cards’ ‘new car’. remember the top ads are paying about ??5 a click, so they have to make whatever they sell very, very persuasive!