"We had a funeral for his snowman"

"We had a funeral for his snowman" is the sort of headline most copywriters wish they could write. In fact, most copywriters would chew their own leg off to come up with something that powerful!

This poignant, short resume of the life, and death, of a child's snowman begins with those 7 words which make you just want to read the rest. And once read, those few paragraphs will probably stick in your head for a very long time, if not forever. After all, not many of us have mourned a snowman as this child did. Nor related this sort of experience to our every day life as those in the comments did.

Internet marketers have been experimenting with writing catchy subject lines and headlines for their emails recently, but have generally failed to have the success this one did. Surprisingly, the emails from the supposed IM gurus are easy to find in my inbox as they are all unread. With subject lines such as "flying panda curse" and "over inflated clam", I guess it is hardly surprising when compared to "We had a funeral for his snowman".

Writing to capture the attention of your readers is one thing, but writing with passion is what will actually really hold them, and stick in their minds. Not every email or blog post or tweet needs to be attempting to flog your audience a product. Most people can see through that. Amy's name will stick in many people's minds when they think, "I need a good copywriter or blogger" because in this simple post she has proven she knows her trade/art, call it what you will. And that is a more effective sales pitch than any.

So, when you need to write copy for your site, don't think SEO, or keywords, or sales pitch - think passion and emotion.

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Wot economic recession?

I don't really do Christmas or shopping. But I am watching what is happening with the economy for my clients and my own business in 2009. So, I was more than a little surprised to see the queues, lack of bargains and spending mania going on today in Kendal. Not what I had heard on the BBC news....

Retailers in small market towns, such as Kendal, seem to have it made. It was blatantly obvious today that the ONLY companies with bargains, sales, reductions etc were the national companies who are reacting on a national policy basis. "The following items are to be marked down, the following signs need to go on the windows etc" And Woolworths, who of course have their very own problems with administration etc.

The local companies are retailing at full bore with very few reductions being offered. After all, they already have a good brand reputation locally or they wouldn't still be on the high street. Their customers will continue coming in through the door - sales signs or not.

Boots, Morrisons, Comet etc all had sale signs up. Yet, those were the sales staff who were quick to say, "The Boxing Day sales start in just 3 days. If it's not a present for Xmas Day, you might want to consider waiting because the price on that will come down."

I thought this was really interesting. Here in Cumbria, only one local company I know of has gone to the wall recently with the loss of 30+ jobs, but the local rumour mill has it that it is unrelated to any recession.

But no-one else seems to be really suffering yet. The drop in mortgage rates has helped those who have low average earnings, which is typical for rural areas such as ours, not hindered them. So, spending is rife not restricted. The poultry sale the other night at the auction mart saw fresh 6kg turkeys being sold between £32 and £40+, and geese anywhere up to £60. No going to Asda, for a packed crowd who jostled for the birds even though they were anywhere up to 5 times or so what the supermarkets have been knocking them out at.

Was it just down to quality and the knowledge they were well bred, locally? I think so. I also think there is an innate understanding of the blue pound in rural economies. (Oh, and ignore Wikipedia, which whilst coming up first on Google for the term "blue pound", is way off the mark).

Blue pound refers to a theory that if a pound coin were stained blue and its progress was observed, we would see how much of our money spent 'locally' was actually benefiting the local economy. If the paint comes off on each person's hands as they touch it within the local spending community, how many people will have their hands dyed blue before this pound coin leaves the community for a national or international corporate? For the vitality and ressurection of communities, this phenomenon is SO important. If all your money is going out of the local economy, it is called the leaky bucket syndrome. If it is staying within the economy, it is creating local jobs, giving local people money to spend, and it invigorates local communities.

Let me put this really simply: it keeps alive the place where you live, keeps your neighbours and yourself in work, it ensures the future of your community. Think about where your blue pound goes every single time you open your purse or wallet. Is that pound leaving where you live and going into the coffers of a large corporate who will not be spending their profits on your doorstep? Then, to be honest, you are helping to destroy your community.

So, to return to the main point of this post, where is the business and marketing lesson in this? It has to be:
if you have a good relationship with your customers because you provide a good product, at a good price, all year round, and great customer service, you can survive a recession. Especially if you don't follow the rest of the sheep and cut prices to attract more sales. Either your product is great and worth the money, or you have your pricing structure wrong!

We are likely to see a large number of retail redundancies and bankruptcies during 2009 in the High street according to many financial analysts.

This could well to prove to be a good thing for those looking to re-establish the High Street as their domain, and to take Britain's high streets from being the 'same shops everywhere, homogenous' crap that we have seen developing and endured in some towns.

IF some of the larger names start vanishing from the High Street, there is a fantastic opportunity for local companies and smaller chains to move in and deliver the goods where there is maximum footfall. Obviously, as an Internet marketer, I have to apply what I know from there to this process so here's my thoughts for 2009 on how to maximise on the potential changes in every High Street in Britain.

* Build your loyal customer base online
* Have a great website, lots of content and product choice
* Keep up to date with your customers - email newsletters, autoresponders, competitions and so on
* Deliver the BEST customer service that you possibly can - use live chat, VoIP, and CRM to track what your customers are saying and doing and thinking, AND buying from you!
* Make the most of opportunities to take those online customers with you into your locality eg through bricks and mortar shops, which should start coming up for rent
* BUT ONLY if you can't make as much of the opportunity online as offline ie do you need local trade to grow? (eg a butcher) If not, consider bricks and mortar very carefully. A website may be the better choice for you.
* Build an exit strategy for bricks and mortar - 2-3 years or so because many of those behind the big names will be back and may well take you on. Be ready to get out before you end up like Woolies.
* Combine all your offline marketing and customer loyalty schemes tightly through your online presence
* Automate everything you can - from backend processes through to PPC reporting. For instance, do not spend precious time walking from one end of a building to another when you could put a wireless network and a Netbook at the other end (for about £2-300) and save time. (I can give 20 case studies off the top of my head right now on this sort of stuff that businesses do without thinking about the savings they could make if they just used technology!)

If you run a small to medium sized business, or are in a rural area, or are confused or worried about how you can make the most of 2009, why not post here and we'll help you out? Many minds make light work.

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Finding blogs with decent PR

I have been marketing a client's site recently by posting to blogs and forums on their behalf. Finding blogs on topic is not so difficult if you use Blogsearch from googlebut finding blogs with a reasonable PR to pass link juice on has not been easy until now.
Last week, I did a trawl around to see if there was any software that would make finding high PR blogs any easier and came across the free version of FastBlogFinder. This only allows you to see 50 blogs for any search term, so I have decided to upgrade to the Gold version. It is definitely worth trying the free version - download it today.

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SEO Lies

I'm just working my way through an ebook called SEO Lies, which cost a mere $1 and makes quite interesting reading.

Although it isn't the best written ebook around, (hery, who's complaining? It cost a dollar!) there is some valuable content which is at least written this year. Many of the internet marketing ebooks doing the rounds are seriously out of date and add to the misinformation out there for those looking to learn SEO and internet marketing techniques to create their website promotion strategy.

I appreciate the myth busting intro. It has been said for far too long that SEO is rocket science. It so isn't! Also, the fact that SEO takes forever to work needs to be dispelled, as does the myth that you need reams and reams of content for Google to notice you exist - also untrue. And you can't use duplicate content. OK, for sure, unique content is bound to help but that doesn't mean you can't put an article on your website and submit it to some of the article marketing sites too. I don't fully agree with the nofollow section, but introducing nofollow as one of the myths is useful and should provoke more research for those who don't know enough about nofollow links and process.

There is a good basic intro to SEO, explaining what you need where and why. There's a fairly clear section on keyword research, followed by how to create a search engine optimised landing page that will also catch the attention of your target market.

And the last section is dedicated to a process that the author, Justin Brooke, calls "The Boat". Basically, this is an outline of his marketing strategy and where he promotes his sites. This would make a nice template for a newbie to follow if they are short on inspiration of where to get links to their site.

All in all, well worth a dollar, so whilst it is still a dollar, why not go grab your copy of SEO Lies and see what you think.

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Small Business 'fearful' of Internet marketing

Microsoft have recently conducted a survey of small businesses Internet Marketing behaviour. It seems that the majority of the small businesses interviewed are totally ignoring Internet marketing. Not because they don't realise it is important to their marketing strategy, but mainly, it seems, because of fear.

In fact, they are so fearful of IM, that 70% of those surveyed would rather do their taxes than try to start a paid search marketing campaign. Although the majority of small businesses do set up an online presence eg a website, they don't then use internet marketing to capitalise on that presence. Interestingly though, 86% of these businesses felt they might just be missing out on opportunities and benefits that IM could bring to their business.

59% of the respondents who had a website do not use paid search eg PPC, and 90% of those had never even tried it. And yet 3/4 of them believed that their potential customers could well be searching online for their products and services.

Those who were using paid search advertising were more than satisfied - 72% reported an increase in sales enquiries, and 68% consider their paid search campaigns successful.

"Among the participants' chief concerns, most cited the common
misconceptions of cost, time and complexity as major hurdles to conducting
search marketing campaigns for their businesses. Other key insights included
the following:
-- Nearly nine in 10 (89 percent) feared keywords may become too
expensive.
-- Eighty-one percent questioned if paid search marketing is the best use
of their marketing budgets.
-- One quarter of respondents believe paid search marketing is too
complex.
-- Twenty-one percent thought it would be too time-consuming.
-- Thirty-five percent felt they would need an agency to help set up a
search marketing campaign."

So, fear - of wasting money, time or become mired with complex systems and failing to understand how to get best value from the process - were the main reasons given for not doing search marketing.

How sad. PPC is not rocket science. It seems though that your average small business, whose marketing budget may only be £500-£2000 per year, is failing to spend even a proportion of that on what is a proven quality traffic strategy.

There is a great free guide on how to set up a successful PPC campaign which you can download here. If all you did as one of your New Year's resolutions is pick 5 keywords that sum up your business and run a trial PPC campaign, you will haver gained by doing so. And managed to break the cycle of fear that PPC is difficult, costly and time-consuming.

In fact, why not enter this PPC competition and see how you do? What have you got to lose by giving it a go? And you may find that the benefits it brings to your business are several fold. Which during an economic downturn can only be good!!

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Simpleology Blog Course

Mark Joyner has been around for years in the Internet marketing world and he is currently trying an interesting new experiment in linking strategies worth thinking about.

I'm evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they're letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.

It covers:

• The best blogging techniques.
• How to get traffic to your blog.
• How to turn your blog into money.

I'll let you know what I think once I've had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it's still free.

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Do we still love Google?

As the search engines become more greedy for dollars, there seems to be an inexorable rise in the number of 'products' being introduced which would seem to be trying to un-level the playing field for small businesses, home based businesses, mom and pop type enterprises etc. Not only that but adding dross to the results, and seemingly making it ever harder for searchers to actually find what they are looking for.


Google have now admitted that search results will be manipulated by staff in future. This seems to be dependent on what is the flavour of the month eg through the public opinion voiced on SearchWiki rather than any other particularly scientific criteria. Additionally, they have announced that the previously exclusiveAdsense for domains is now open to everyone, so that search results will now throw up inactive (and therefore empty) websites in order to generate revenue from the ads shown, and clicked upon.

Personally, I would have thought that cleaning all those domains which generate 404 errors, have not been updated since last century, and those that only have adverts on would have been more appropriate in attaining the raison d'etre behind Google's mantra about generating the relevant results for the most beneficial user experience.

If the results are to be manipulated by Google staff, then it would seem that it is going to get increasingly hard to get a listing by, for instance, providing quality content that is caught in organic searches. It may be that SEOs have to rely ever more on PPC to actually ensure that potential customers find their websites. This obviously financially benefits those who are providing PPC eg Google, Yahoo et al, and will surely undermine the trust in the supposed impartiality of the search engines in delivering the best results for the users.

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