Google Adwords and the Lost Art of Copywriting.Written by Neil Street
Tens of thousands of businesses, large and small, use Google Adwords and Overture Match (from Yahoo!) to advertise their products and services on Internet. An entire industry, loosely known as “Search Engine Marketing” (SEM for short) has grown up to support this new advertising medium. To date, very little independent analysis (as opposed to analysis by industry players) has been published to demonstrate effectiveness of these vehicles to advertisers. Still, businesses seem to be using Adwords and Overture in droves. Briefly stated, Adwords and Overture enable you to run advertisements on search engines and other websites, display of ads being triggered by “keywords.” Hence, if you sell “red widgets,” you would choose “red widgets” as one of your keyword phrases. When a computer user enters “red widgets” as their search term on Google or Yahoo!, your ad may appear in or adjacent to unpaid search results. How high up on page, and how frequently your ad appears, depends upon your “bid,” or how much you are willing to pay for a user to click on your ad (which leads back to your website). Administering your campaign can get a whole lot more complicated than this, but it gives you idea in a nutshell. What makes an effective campaign? There are many variables, but SEM professionals have focused heavily on importance of “keywords” – to extent that entire sub-industries have sprung up to show clients how to create lists of keywords! What has been overlooked, in our estimation, is good old art of copywriting itself – how you write ad. After all, an ad is an ad whether it appears in a newspaper, a magazine, or on Google or Overture. You’ve got space for a short headline and a brief description – briefer on Google than Overture, but at least Google doesn’t truncate your listing, as Overture does. Given how little space you get to work with, and fact that you have no visual opportunity, it is crucial to create compelling, snappy ads. Unfortunately, vast majority are nothing of sort. Most of them look like badly written classified ads – and that’s main reason most of them will deliver poor click through rates and disappointing results. Here’s an example: as a test, I typed “business website promotion” into search box on Yahoo! With all of those internet marketing types placing ads, I figured that I’d definitely see some short, exciting text that would really make me reach for mouse. Wrong. What I saw was just a list of “me too” ads that, with rare exceptions, were indistinguishable from each other. Out of 8 ads on screen, most just displayed headlines such as “website promotion services,” or “affordable website promotion,” or “internet marketing services.” Why would anyone click on one of those ads, especially when there are literally thousands that say same thing? The answer is – they wouldn’t.
| | Is there such a thing as LAZY way to TRAFFIC?Written by Max Clixel
Nowadays there are just too many people trying to give you something of a less (or no) value at a very high price. Why do you buy it? Why do they do it? Will they succeed? And question is not about information products. You see, there is a difference between price and value. You don't buy a price, you buy a value. And if a value of a e-book or a book is ten times higher than it's price - you've made a good deal, even if you paid $5000 for a book. The question here is like this: many people are trying to give you information which they haven't even tried. They've probably heard it from someone, and started to spread a word. But that first person also haven't tested this idea, but heard it from someone. And that one was just too lazy to test it and see that it doesn't work at all. Well, I've been in this situation many times. One person came to me and told that automatic link exchanges is a fantastic opportunity. I was too stupid and haven't asked him if he tested this technique himself. I have tried this and got results. For sometime my site was climbing up in search engines, I've got about 1000 links in just 2 weeks. WooHoo! Yep? Too Early! Some time passed and one of my sites started falling in search engines and I still can't understand why. Maybe it was a penalization for linking to some page, maybe something else have happened, I don't know. But fact is later on my site left search engine listings. Well I have worked hard again and got it back, without automatic links anymore. I don't say that this type of linking is worthless. Maybe for someone it works, but for others - don't. What I am telling is - test, try and analyze everything you hear from someone about some new (or even old) technique to do something really fast. Or some lazy and free way to do something.
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