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:
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.
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:
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:
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:
It’s goal setting time for me and that means presenting various people stats on how rankings are progressing.
It’s nice to show an upward trend and everyone gets excited…too excited I think. Just because you rank for a keyword , does not mean traffic, or good traffic.
On looking across my BIG income generator’s rankings, it seems to me that converting the traffic is a bigger immediate priorirty than just getting more users.(on to that later)
I have a rough idea of what keywords matter to me, through measuring the monthly search volume using overture keyword finder tool, but what is most revealing is when I measure the traffic for given keywords against my rankings.
And I have found an interesting disconnect. For instance on keyword X were ranked 4th or so, but on a particular site I’m working on, it has been the biggest single keyword referred to us by google forthe last month.
So I guess what im saying is that chasing rankings for their own sake can be like looking into fog when it comes to the bottom line.
Its chasing the keyword that converts, which matters and they may not be the keywords ones overture or other keyword tools suggest.
This is because the numbers are distorted by loads of factors, like automated queries….and seasonal variations ( becasue the stats are about 30 days old.)
Overture are happy to let the inflated figures persist, since it jacks up their numbers for potential advertisers.
So on analysing my stats, I found that we are getting the usual SEO conversion rates of about 1/2% and for me to meet targets, I need to jack up the traffic by 30% and bring up the conversion rates by about the same.
Then I should be doing ok.