Tag: Internet marketing

Should You Click an Ad to “Support” a Blog?

Interesting discussion happening in the Comments field at TechSoapbox. It was prompted by a post on Seth Godin’s blog that reads, in part:

If every time you read a blog post or bit of online content you enjoyed you clicked on an ad to say thanks, the economics of the web would change immediately. You don’t have to buy anything (though it’s fine if you do). You just have to honor the writer by giving them a click.

Ahmed of Techsoapbox takes issue with Seth’s approach, calling it “cheating”. Seth doesn’t post comments on his blog, but Ahmed does — and it’s producing an often-thoughtful, sometimes-heated conversation.

For the record, I lean toward Ahmed’s side, but not strongly. The pay-per-click model only works for the advertiser if the clicks come from genuine prospects. If the advertiser has to pay for a bunch of extra clicks from folks who aren’t truly interested, the advertising will ultimately cease.

On the other hand, some of the “support clicks” could come from people who might need the product or service, but who would otherwise not have paid attention to the ad. So the support clicks might create a positive ROI after all.

The results of Seth’s approach will ultimately depend on how relevant the ad, and the offer, is to the lives of the readers. Which sounds a whole lot like every other form of advertising.

What do you think? Feel free to weigh in in the comments section below.

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Using Radio To Get Customers to Your Web Site — 7 Proven Techniques

Many of my long-time customers are now, finally, using their web sites as selling tools. They often ask how they can most effectively drive prospects to their sites, and convert them to customers. Here are seven techniques, based on education and trial-and-error in the field:

1. Have one call to action in the ad — a command to visit your web site. Having both a phone number and a URL will hurt your results. If the listeners have to make a choice of actions, it gives them a reason to hesitate, and a significant percentage will do nothing at all. Copywriting guru Dan O’Day taught me this at a seminar, and my experience has confirmed it.

2. The success of your URL will depend to a large extent on how simple, and how memorable, the address is. You’ve got a better chance if it matches the company name exactly, or if it’s a natural expression of the value proposition. If there are hard-to-spell words, or people have to think about it at all, you’re in trouble.

3. Insist on “dot com”. “Dot net” or “dot biz”, or other suffixes, will lower your response because people remember Dot Com no matter what they actually heard.

4. If your URL is hard to remember or spell, consider using the radio station site as a “short cut”. Most stations promote their web sites heavily these days, so listeners are trained to go there already for news, entertainment, and contests. You can put a banner on the site, and then the call to action is to go to the station site and click on the banner. For example, “Go to K103 dot com and click on the VanderVeer Center logo.” CAUTION: banners are often sold in rotation. To get the results you need, you must make sure that the banner is up on the site 100% of the time.

5. Many stations have a search box on their web site. An alternative to the banner is to buy a keyword, and use that as your call to action. “Go to K103 dot com and type in the keyword ‘Botox’. That’s K103 dot com, keyword ‘Botox’.”

6. Make sure your site is set up to capture customer information for later follow-up. If people come to your site, read a few things, and leave, you may never get them back. Offer some value in return for their email address — a free report, coupon, or other premium that would convince them to tell you who they are.

7. Once you have the information, follow up quickly. Your prospect will find other things to think about if you let time go by. An email autoresponder can help you automate the process.

If you’re a Portland area business owner or manager, I can help you set all this up. After all, it’s what I do.

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Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising Blog.

Request your free copy of my white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call me at 503-323-6553.