We all need a bit of teasing.

It’s a well known fact (he says) that men like seeing semi-clad women rather than naked women. The suggestibility factor lets our imaginations start working to create something possibly more perfect than the reality.

If you want to tantalise someone with your own marketing, and yes it may not be a sexy industry you work in, you need to add some ‘tease’.

Writing advertising copy is no easy task and Web Copy That Sells is a good starting book to help you crafting some sexy words. It is a craft though and just needs working on, and testing.

Every movie needs a trailor. Every car purchase starts with a test drive. What’s your version of the underwear shot?

Remember the bad old days when companies insisted that on their website, every time their name was mentioned, they wanted to see their logo - even in body copy.

Luckily we’ve moved on from there - a bit.

Another similar problem I see is with names (especially for events) where the words are put together as one or spelt differently, just to be different.

I wrote an article about a local business event called Inspire07 - yes, no spaces, but instead, in my article, I put the space in.

I did this, not to be awkward, or to break any brand guidelines, I did it because logically, that is what someone will type into a search engine. If you do a localised search (6/11/07), the article comes above the actual event website and is delivering traffic to my site already.

I cringe when I sit in a meeting and someone starts telling about a domain name they have bought, “and we’ve spelt it differently to stand out!”

If you want your website to be found, you have to be flexible - spellings and all.

I love our web page analyzer tool on The Escape site for individual overviews of pages. It’s simple and to the point.

I also love the new tool on Aaron Wall’s SEOBook website - The website health check tool for browsing an entire site.

Combine the two together and you can optimise your pages pretty rapidly.

I had a conversation about NLP with a friend, Daryll, last night and he was discussing how he has got to the point with his ‘trade’ where he takes what he does as normal, and sometimes has to remind himself that to other people who have never come into contact with what he does, it’s something new and unknown.

For instance, assuming that you drive now, imagine the first time you got behind the wheel of a car compared to how you may take it for granted now.

My point… People coming into contact with what you do will have a completely different outlook and understanding of every aspect of it - the benefits, the theory, the practical, etc.

Is you sales message written for them, or for you?

…and why I’m hoping a crash is on the way.

I am beginning to think that success using Adwords is no longer viable with some business models. I use Adwords on a number of campaigns for clients with varying success, some of it with very good returns, but the overriding trend I am seeing is that clicks are costing more, making Adwords a harder marketing/advertising route to profit from.

Supply and Demand

Like share dealing on the stock market, the better a keyword performs, the higher the cost-per-click becomes.

As more companies use Pay per click advertising. picking up the most generic keywords, these prices have gone up. Supply stays the same so the demand pushes up the price and what cost pence last year, may be costing pounds now purely down to the number of people you have to compete against.

Amateur traders

With any trading, there are small business and inexperienced people trying to ‘trade’ and Adwords is no different. Beginners will tend to go for the most obvious keywords, partly based on the hype and anecdotal stories of success they have heard. That’s fine if they want to waste their money, but these people are partly to blame for the increase in prices. But, then there are also the people who still know what they are doing.

I understand landing page content efficiency and keyword and “key phrase” relevance but the plain truth is that it’s more expensive now than it used to be and the prices keep on rising, no matter how good the algorithm.

You may decide to go for more specific terms that don’t generate as much traffic, but give you better quality click-throughs. This is all well and good, but does it deliver the returns for your business. In fact, can it deliver results cost-effectively for your market full stop?

Different Business Models

One of the key differences, perhaps, to the business that I am trying to do through Adwords, is where the money gets made, my customer based and what I sell.

For instance I run a couple of online shops. My shop may be selling online but it makes money by selling something tangible in the real world. Other business models make money purely by the amount of people that hit their site eg. through page impression advertising.

So, not only are you competing against other companies selling what you sell. You are also competing against companies pulling traffic so they can make money through further advertising on their sites. Suddenly your competition just doubled and pushed up the prices for advertising even more.

This will continue until people don’t make money from their advertising and either go bust, or give up on that route of traffic… and I hope that’s soon.

The Long Tail is not 100%

As mentioned above, one argument with keywords is the long tail. The idea, simplistically, is to go after lesser searched terms because although there are less searches made for these terms, they are arguably more specific, wide ranging and cheaper.

I do agree with the Long Tail principle, but like most things, it is not 100%. For instance, our beauty shop, attracts mainly women. Many through consumer portals, such as Orange and AOL, with very generic terms.

I have disposed of many generic brand name keywords on the beauty shop recently to reduce the increasing costs and have stripped down lots of other campaigns, reducing budgets, even though Google is willing to tell me how I can get more traffic. Unfortunately for me, it’s not some sort insider trading, because they share the same ‘great’ keyword research with everyone.

There is no doubt that Pay Per Click advertising has changed the game for a lot of people for the better, but like most forms of marketing, it has a shelf life of time where real profits can be made and perhaps that short bull run is coming to an end.

Unwritten protocols are powerful things. For instance, I was driving home last night and I saw an ambulance in my rear view mirror coming my way, so I pulled to the side of the road to let them get past, as did all the other drivers. We knew the unwritten protocol.

The reason I mention this is because it got me thinking about a I had meeting recently with someone who wanted horizontal scrolling on their website. I have had to listen to people who want buttons in strange places.

It’s no coincidence that search engine interfaces all pretty much look the same and on most sensible websites you know that the main navigation should either be across the top or down the left hand side of the screen. It’s what people expect - it cuts out the confusion.

Some, may say it’s boring, but I prefer to not make a website like a puzzle. Ultimately, I am looking to get something from it and surely I need to make that easy for the user?

So, if you find yourself having a ‘wacky’ idea that will make your website stand out, because “they won’t expect that”, don’t be surprised if you get nothing back in return.

Further reading: Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug.