” I think the 1st thing is to define what you want to achieve with your web site. Once you are clear on this, then everything will roll in with this.?  Usually its about being see on the search engines and having the right conversion pathway i.e. getting your visitors to turn into paying customers.

On a high level, the most important thing about a good site is that its easy to change and easy for you to add new information (this is why wordpress is cool). Because this is your business, the information you put on the site is critical – its like when you meet a potential customer, they will want to know, you know what you are talking about. You will do this I guess by helping them with some useful information.

Web sites are the same. The difference between a bad site and a great one is simply the information you give to the potential customer and the clear pathway you bring the user along when they decide to buy – i.e. make it simple and clear and answer all their questions.

So the question is whether you can do this with your current site ?

Ideally you would combine both a brochure site and a blog – this is such a good way of getting across your expertise.

If you can become a really useful place for ideas on (>>>>placeholder here<<<<<<<) then you will be well on your way with this. There is a general rule with Internet – give away as?  much valuable information as you can. Its counter intuitive, but it works because you have to do something exceptional to break through the noise.

10% of the overall work will be building the site, the other 90% is the content. Its a big misconception to think the site will do it for you – I’m trying to say keep the site simple and let the words and pictures make the impact.

From that good stuff will come. “

http://www.copyblogger.com/

(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 ?€œThe 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.

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:

• It is ‘words that sell’
• It is very easy to change.
• I can have different pitches for different users
• I can test, test, test to see what pictches work best
• It will upload immedately, so in the 1st 2 seconds it will be read.

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:

• 2 seconds to check the page out
• 8 seconds to decide wether to stay or not
• Build up the value by treating the page like a pyramid, with the most basic info atB the top and the most detailed at the bottom
• Have jump off points to registration
• Where they do want to trawl around, make sure the users dont stray too far, hence the i frame at the bottom.
• When I’ve got this page together I’ll set up a proper demo for you to play with and hopefully it will all work!

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:

• Scientific advertising by Claude Hopkins. It was written 85 years ago and is about direct response advertising. the core principles appily today as they did then , excepy you dont have any .com hype. Just sensible practical ideas totally relevant to online marketing. (now out of copywright, so its downlaodable) Here for the HTML version | Here for a PDF | and here for audio
• NEW AIDA – a great common sense book with a focus on direct mail marketing.
• Ogilvy on advertising. A seminal book on solid ideas for advertising. not specifically geared for direct response, although he was a passonate for getting your moneys worth from ad spend.
• And of course look at competitive terms on google and read the adverts. Try phrases like ‘home loan’ ‘credit cards’ ‘new car’. remember the top ads are paying about ?£5 a click, so they have to make whatever they sell very, very persuasive!

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.