David Ogilvy says many sage things in his iconic "Confessions of An Advertising Man", but probably my favorite passage is this, talking about how to choose a firm to handle your marketing:

Find out if they are discreet about the secrets of their present clients. Find out if they have the spine to disagree when you say something stupid. Observe their relationship with each other; are they professional colleagues or quarrelsome politicians? Do they promise you results which are obviously exaggerated? Do they sound like extinct volcanoes, or are they alive? Are they good listeners? Are they intellectually honest?

Above all, find out if you like them; the relationship between client and agency has to be an intimate one, and it can be hell if the personal chemistry is sour.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

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The Earth from space - reflected in an astronaut's faceplate as he takes his own photo.

Original article with larger image.

I think people miss the degree to which advertising copywriting is art.

No one should try writing copy who does not love words.

Some quotes from one of the great wordsmiths, Ernest Hemingway, are in order:

"All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time."

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

"There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges."

"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use."

In case you didn't know it, Google AdWords offers ads for smart phones, with click to call buttons (link is about expanding this option to Content ads - those that appear on other websites).

For certain types of businesses, such as restaurants, this type of ad can be a big plus.

David Ogilvy:

You cannot bore people into buying your product; you can only interest them in buying it.

from "Confessions of an Advertising Man"

You can now search securely (encrypted) on Google:

When you search on https://www.google.com, an encrypted connection is created between your browser and Google. This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party on your network.

There is a continuing argument, a battle between art and science as the key to marketing success.

It's silly.

You need BOTH.

It takes creative genius, artistic skill, inspiration, thinking outside the box and a dose of bravery to produce great marketing.

But how do you know what to try and communicate, or even who to communicate to?

How do you know whether your brilliant idea paid off, or, like New Coke, was a fantastic bomb despite all the reasons why it was going to and should have worked??

Survey, Test and Measure. Science.

Art and Science, Science and Art.

Photo taken from orbit. Cloud pattern trailing off an island (lower left of image).

Click for description of the "vortex street" effect, plus lots more cloud photos from space.

Here's another new feature that Google has now rolled out for Search.

They call it "Direct Answers". Quite a lot of searches are looking for a specific answer or fact such as "how old is Barack Obama" or "what time is it in Denver."

If you do a search for these, you'll get the answer displayed on the search results page so you don't have to click further.. But one of them actually displays separately at the very top of the page. That is what Google means by "Direct Answers". And it is a nice addition to Search.

I think you will see this appearing more over time as Google improves their recognition - when is someone looking for a fact and what is the answer.

Marketing is about mass communication.

That means volume.

Sales is resale. Marketing is wholesale.

The reason of course is you are never going to get a high percentage of response. 5% response rate would be phenomenal in most cases.

Direct mail these days can run 0.1% unless it is very targeted.

If 1% of visitors to a website purchase or make contact with you, that is usually considered to be doing alright.

No matter what you are marketing, think in terms of how you can expose your product or service to LOTS of people.

If you can't do this, until you have a way to do so that you can afford, you just aren't doing marketing. Sending out 100 postcards isn't marketing.

... from each other that is.

A benefit that makes one person reach for their wallet may make another yawn.

Of course there are majority or high percentage answers in most cases. That doesn't mean it makes sense to concentrate always and only on the highest percentage of prospective buyers, their desires, buying patterns, etc.

Economics comes into consideration. The less expensive or easier it is to serve lower percentage cases, the more it makes sense to address them.

Modern technology has in many cases reduced the marginal cost (price for adding an address to an additional concern, button, item, etc.) to a very small amount. That, for example, makes it possible for Amazon to list many millions of items in their online store, something that will never be practical in a bricks-and-mortar store.

That is called "The Long Tail" and is an important concept in most modern marketing.

Metropolitan Block, Lima, Ohio. A fine example of Romanesque Revival architecture.

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Barnum & Bailey circus poster, dated 1900.

Full size image from Wikipedia.

DMOZ - www.DMOZ.org, the Open Directory Project, was once upon a time the most influential site on the web for search engine rankings. A suitable listing on DMOZ was a ticket to high rankings because every submission was reviewed by volunteers for appropriateness and accuracy - meaning listings could be trusted, at least theoretically. In that way it is a lot like Wikipedia (though DMOZ came first).

Over the years, it has become less and less useful, for several reasons. First of all, Google doesn't have to depend on any single source for evaluating a website. Secondly, DMOZ itself has gone downhill, mostly because it became nearly impossible to get your site into it - no matter how important or legitimate you were.

This article gives Google's comments on the current value of DMOZ (and read some of the comments to get the idea about what happened to it!).

I've blogged about one of the rarely mentioned secrets of Internet Marketing - the size of your site is the single biggest factor in search engine rankings.

The larger the better.

But Google doesn't necessarily index every page in your website. If you count up the number of pages you have, then do a "site:" you will usually find Google isn't showing all of your site.

This makes sense. Even Google has limited resources. And why clutter up search results with pages that are of very limited interest?

But it means you need to know something about how Google decides whether to index a page or not.

First of all, any pages which are way off topic are not likely to be indexed. This is one reason why bulking up your software sales website, with weather reports and financial news, is not likely to be helpful.

Secondly, there are certain types of pages Google is going to be less interested in by their nature. A good example of this is a blog that is part of a site. Google is probably only going to include a portion of the pages in its index, no matter how relevant.

If you are in an industry that is highly competitive in the online world, this is worth paying attention to.

Two galaxies collide - and hundreds of billions of stars burn a heart-shaped tribute in the heavens.

To mothers everywhere:

Happy Mother's Day.

For years, Internet Marketing has been to a very large part, a battle between the search engines and people trying to trick them into ranking their sites high ("Black Hat" SEO's). "White Hat" SEO means working WITH Google and the other search engines, how they think and what they are trying to do. It means delivering great content on-subject because that is what the search engines are trying to help people find.

Sure, it also means understanding the cues that Google uses to identify what your site and page are about, and how important they are. But that is something you do in addition to - not instead of - providing the visitor experience people are seeking.

Of course it is easier if you can just do some simple gimmick that shoots you to the top of the rankings.

"Black Hat" techniques have evolved over the years. In the early days it meant repeating keywords lots of times. Then there were so-called "link farms" where people would build pages with zillions of links to each other. Invisible text. The tricks go on and on.

Every time someone thought of a way to beat Google, Google responded by improving their algorithms.

But it has been a battle, a back-and-forth.

Until now.

This may be a bit of an exaggeration, but not greatly so. Thanks to Caffeine, the Black Hats have lost the war.

It is no longer possible to invent a trick that Google can't respond to even before it becomes well known.

Google doesn't even have to really work at this. They are continuing to work at improving the search experience. Rolling out significant changes two or three in a week.

Searches are getting so localized and personalized, some people are saying "search engine ranking" doesn't mean anything anymore.

Of course that IS an exaggeration. But it points out the only real test of SEO: Not what a rankings report says, but how much quality traffic is actually delivered to a site. And, more than that: The subject is Internet Marketing. It is really about the volume of leads or sales generated through a website, and how much that costs.

Who cares how much traffic comes to a site if it is all wasted by the site itself?

So what does it all mean?

It means the Good Guys win. The guys in White Hats.

Thanks to "Caffeine", their new software, Google is capable of introducing changes faster than ever - and they are doing exactly that.

What are they trying to accomplish?

Their basic business model is much like that of a TV station: Give away the content, sell the eyeballs to advertisers.

Anyone can search on Google for free.

Because they do a great job of providing the best visitor experience, they own around 2/3 of the U.S. search market. Then they sell their ad space for billions of dollars in the form of AdWords - their pay-per-click or "sponsored links".

Staying on top means continuing to improve the searcher's experience. Delivering faster results that are more exactly what people are looking for. Eye-tracking studies show they are doing exactly that. These days, people find what they are looking for much more in the first couple of listings, compared to five years ago.

That means staying ahead of the competition. So Microsoft ("Live" and now "Bing") can spend tens of millions of dollars to very little result. Google also unashamedly picks up what other search engines do right, and includes them into their own search page and methods.

Thanks to Caffeine, Bing can do something today - and within days or weeks, Google is doing it to - if it works.

There is one more huge consequence of this rapidity of change. "Black Hat" SEO is becoming a hopeless task. I'll explain tomorrow.

Google on Wednesday rolled out their new interface. The left column options they have been testing for the last year are now a permanent fixture. They've rolled them all out, but what they serve up in the results page depends on the search and Google's judgment of what you are looking for. But you can rapidly modify it to suit.

By mid-day yesterday we were seeing the new interface in all searches.

At the same time without announcing it they no longer are offering full access to their keywords suggestions tool unless you access it through an AdWords (click ads) account.

These are dramatic changes when viewed from the perspective of the Internet Marketing community. They are probably a lot less dramatic, more incremental to the typical searcher - which is off course what Google is going for. They don't want to startle people. They want to continue to improve their search experience. And they are doing exactly that.

You are seeing one of the major effects of "Caffeine" (their new software). One of the reasons for doing a complete redesign of their programming was to make it easier and faster to make, test, and roll out changes.

Continuing to better the search experience is one result. Tomorrow, I'm going to explain the two other major consequences. And they are major - industry shaking.

Is this really the guy you want designing your website?

First day at a new job today building aesthetic looking business websites. Love it! It's flexible and allows me to continue to pursue my acting career. Even better!

See our Comparison Chart.

Password security really only consists of two things.

1. Ensure that your password can't be easily guessed.

2. Keep your password secure so others can't read it.

On the first of these.

You don't have to go crazy on password length or complication. A 7 character password, if it includes a mixture of numbers and letters, will do just fine. IF it includes both lower and upper case letters. And IF it doesn't include real words and obvious numbers (like your street address).

It would take millions of tries to guess a password like that.

Make sure others in your company AND your provider also practice proper security. You are not alone in the boat. If someone hacks the password of another email account in your company, or on the server you share, it can take the whole server down.

For the second, besides the obvious (don't put your password on a post-it note on your screen), do not host your website on a Windows server. They are not and never will be secure.

Joseph Sugarman uses the term "Satisfaction Conviction" for something that convinces a prospect that they are going to be satisfied if they purchase your product or service.

As he describes it,

It basically conveys a message from you to your prospect that says, "Hey, I'm so convinced you will like this product that I'm going to do something for your benefit to prove how incredible my offer is."

A common example is a better-than-money-back guarantee.

A good example is our Internet Marketing program - the fact that there is no commitment period required. One prospect just flat out told us, that he knew we were the real deal because there was no way we could stay in business on those terms if we weren't delivering the goods.

People have become so skeptical of claims and promises, that this can be extremely important in your marketing. It is worth thinking about. It can become a key component of your branding, a major element of differentiating you from your competitors and a way to overcome your prospect's jitters.

Lots doing in Google Search this last week.

Probably of greatest interest are the roll-out of a couple of features which enhance certain types of searches -

1. "Suggested brands":

Sometimes when searching for product information on Google, you may not know some of the brand names relevant to your particular search.

2. "Similar sites":

Now, for queries where we think sites similar to the first search result might be helpful, a small block of similar sites will appear at the bottom of the results page.

One of the reasons you have to put yourself in your readers' (viewers, visitors, listeners) shoes is to anticipate AND ANSWER their questions.

Or most of them. You don't want to answer ALL their questions unless you're running an online store.

But you'd better figure out what their questions will be. Then you can decide which questions you should or shouldn't answer.

This is really an important step to copywriting.

A good piece of design can sometimes make the entire point without a single word.

(Painted ceiling of a smoker's lounge)