One thing I’ve been preaching for a long time now is marketing drives sales. Probably more to the point, branding drives sales. Either way, it’s not the product itself that drives sales.

To illustrate, let’s talk about web hosting. iPowerWeb is one of the biggest virtual web hosting providers on the Internet. Their $7.95/MO plan offers:

• Hosting for a single domain
• 250 GB Transfer
• 10,000 MB Disc Space

Now compare that to DreamHost:

• $7.95 for unlimited domains
• 1 TB Transfer
• 20 GB Disc Space

It’s not the product that drives sales. It’s the presentation of the product.

Very interesting conversation going on about link bait, spamming, social network spamming, and such. Read the comments. Involves Andy Beal (the accused) and Jeremy Zawodny (the accuser).

Yet another example of how (perceived) cheap stunts can impact negatively on brand equity.

That is a (deliberately) rubbish headline!

“Link bait” is a catchier term.

Nick Wilson wrote a good, if partly defensive, post about link baiting in 2007, a term he coined (?) in 2005. In the post, Nick makes the point that “you need to put thoughts of manipulating the system to one side and focus entirely on providing value to your clients users and making that value easy to link to”.

A good point. However, the aim is to manipulate the system, and I doubt the manipulation will ever be too far from the link baiters mind. Manipulating the system to ones advantage is what marketers and seos do. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The most powerful marketing provides value for both the seller and the buyer, which is Nicks main point.

Link baiting also encapsulates a fundamental truth – in any crowded market, popularity counts. There is a nonsense often perpetrated by some SEOs – “producing quality content will attract links”. It doesn’t. Not by itself, anyway. Quality content needs to be placed somewhere where people will see it, and shaped in such a way as to encourage viral take-up. Quality content published on an unknown site is likely to be read by no one. Garbage content will often be read and parroted by thousands, so long as it is published on a popular site. SEO gurus who believe otherwise can conduct a simple test – publish articles on a new site, under a different pen name, and see if the quality content is enough to attract readers, links and attention.

The web is a popularity contest, thus the demand for marketers and marketing strategy.

However, I think there are more risks to link bait strategy than Nick makes out in that article. I’ll give you a an example. In a recent hacking event, many people didn’t believe that some top SEO blogs had been hacked because they suspected an elaborate link bait stunt. In other words, the past history of advocating and publishing link bait had come back to bite some of the bloggers involved. Readers did not trust what they were seeing, so wary were they of being misled, and who could blame them. Ironically, a reputation for link baiting can result in less links over time as readers become increasingly suspicious.

I find the term link bait to be pejorative. It screams manipulation of the reader, and as my example above illustrates, it can backfire. That is where the bad reputation is coming from, because no one likes to feel like they are being manipulated, and it will no doubt get worse as more people start using the strategy in inappropriate contexts. What’s the first rule of Fight Club?

In some ways, the growing bad reputation is a shame. Link bait is really an old, proven marketing idea concerning popularity and appeals to self-interest. It is the art and craft of getting attention in a crowded space. Compared to some of the alternatives - begging for links – link baiting is a far more useful and productive strategy. In the hands of master marketers, it can be pure gold. But used blatantly, it can have unwanted side effects.

And like SEO, the strategy won’t fit all customers. Do Ferrari need to do SEO or link bait in order to sell more cars? No (although they could use a usability consultant). Their brand is more than enough to carry them. Attention getting stunts will most likely devalue premier brands. Too overt, and it can be perceived as being base and desperate, the very things Ferrari are not. Careful application of any marketing strategy is critical.

I look forward to reading Nicks upcoming ideas on attention getting

SearchEngineLand has a good post on how to get more traffic to your blog: 25 Tips To Optimize Your Blog For Readers & Search Engines.

I want to expand on one point which deserves more attention: Have Descriptive Titles.

While describing the content is certainly a great start, you can achieve a lot more clicks simply by applying direct marketing theory to your headlines.

Direct marketers found that headlines were important - often the most important part of their campaigns. How do you write a headline that makes people feel compelled to click?

Here’s a test. Which headline do you think was more successful?

• Are you afraid of making mistakes in English?
• Do you make these mistakes in English?

The second headline produced far more inquiries and orders.

Why?

The second headline arouses a readers curiosity and self-interest.

Now let’s take a look at Digg. Often, the most successful stories appeal to self interest, arose curiosity, and provide news. Digg may be new, but these old theories hold true, as the top stories are often using traditional attention getting methods, whether the writers realize it or not.

Here are a few examples from the top Digg stories today:

• Why Steve Jobs didn’t mention Leopard & the Mac (Reader reaction: “Why! I want to know why!”)
• Who is planning the next war (Reader reaction: “Who! I want to know who!”)
• Paypal Doesn’t Want Slain Soldiers’ Families To Receive Aid (That headline is both news, and arouses curiosity as to “why”?)
• Public can purchase $100 laptop (Reader reaction “tell me how I get a cheap laptop?”)

….and so on. Pretty simple, eh.

When crafting a headline, try and fit it into one of the following categories:

1. Self-interest. Offer something the reader wants.
2. News
3. Curiosity

If you can combine those three elements, your headlines will be even more compelling, and readers are more likely to click. When evaluating your headline, ask yourself - do I give news? Do I arouse curiosity? Do I offer something people want?

If you don’t do at least one of those things, the posts are less likely to be clicked.

If you want to read more on direct marketing theory, I suggest you grab a copy of “Tested Advertising Methods” by John Caples. My good friend Sophie recommended this to me a few years back. While it is getting a bit dated in places, a lot of the theory still holds true, and I find it works very well on PPC landing pages.

Yahoo notices the spend on advertising is dipping:

“Yahoo Inc. - said on Tuesday it expects third-quarter revenue to be at the bottom half of its forecast range due to weakness from two of its biggest advertising segments, sending its shares down as much as 13 percent…Yahoo has seen “a little bit of weakness in the last few weeks” in auto and financial services advertising,“.

New trend or blip? If it’s limited to the finance and auto industries, then that probably doesn’t say a whole lot. Also, this appears to be banner advertising, as opposed to keyword advertising. If so, Google probably wouldn’t be much affected as their search marketing business revolves around smaller advertisers over a wide range of sectors.

In a related note, SEM clients apparently not as plentiful as they once were:

“there is apparently a considerably smaller growth (or even a decline) in the number of clients hiring SEM firms: …year-over-year growth in terms of total client accounts for 104 surveyed firms is slowing considerably. The number of clients who are willing to pay for top-of-the-line services is still increasing, but smaller clients are not increasing“.

Maybe, but then you’ve got to wonder about the sample size of these reports.

Doesn’t Seth just mean plain old usability and online marketing?

I guess that doesn’t sound as catchy.

Exploitation or opportunity?

“Frito-Lay is tapping a new “agency” to create the ad spot for their $2 million Super Bowl ad spot — consumers. So finalists get a free trip to the Super Bowl, and the winner gets the deep personal satisfaction of seeing their ad on the Super Bowl — which could of course lead to a financial return from actual paid creative work. But you have to wonder whether the winner of the Frito-Lay ad contest would prefer receiving the millions of dollars in creative agency fees that Frito-Lay otherwise would have paid“

This happens on the internet - the search engines don’t pay for content, but offer exposure. This happens on tv - contestants in Idol/game shows aren’t paid, but are “given” exposure.

The result is, of course, a lot of content that isn’t worth watching or reading.

Seth has a list of interesting statistics that serves as a useful reminder: us ‘net-heads are not your “typical” user, if there is such a thing:

31.4% of Americans don’t have internet access.

90% of the people in France have not created a blog.

88% of all users have never heard of RSS.

59% of American households have zero iPods in them.

30% of internet users in the US use a modem.

Detroit (one million people) has six Starbucks.

1% of internet users use Digg on an average day.

Marley and Me outsells Small is the New Big 200:1. On a good day.

.37% of the US population reads the paper version of the New York Times daily.

Brazil consumes 11% of the world’s coffee.

20% of the world speaks English.

98.2% of the households in the US have a TV, and virtually all of those TVs have cable.

On a related note, here’s a few statistics relating to online shopping patterns:

• Thirty-five percent of consumers said added costs, such as shipping and handling, or lengthy delivery times resulted in their abandoning an online purchase
• The top reason online consumers prefer to shop on the web is to avoid crowds, a reason cited by 38%
• Internet-influenced offline spending is 50 percent greater than online spending, meaning that for every $1 spent online, the Internet influences $1.50 in brick-and-mortar sales.

More interesting internet shopping statistics here.

Buzz marketing has been an obsession of mine these last few months. When I get interested in something I tend to focus on that one thing exclusively until I understand it fully, or at least to my own satisfaction. The reason I only recently became interested in buzz marketing is because I tend to prefer brand building over short term strategies such as SEO, publicity stunts, etc.
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I’ve been reading up and studying buzz marketing for a while now. A year or so ago I was at Barnes and Noble in Westlake Center in Seattle. It’s a beautiful place, one of several nice open areas in Seattle, a good place to catch some sun, read a book and watch people being themselves.

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