This is a solid article on SEO myths from ninebyblue.com.

My favorite part:

“I said outbound links were fine, great even! And then talked a bit about how it’s a bad idea to build pages for nuances in the search engine algorithms anyway, as hundreds of signals exist and they’re changing all the time. Oh, he said. We’ve been talking about implementing the canonical tag. We probably shouldn’t do that then. And I realized, how would a developer know that the canonical tag is awesome and the meta keywords tag isn’t? That you shouldn’t worry about keyword density but you should put important keywords in your title tag?”

My attempt at concrete imagery.

When I think about design, layout and presentation, there are two books that I frequently come back to:

1) Colin Wheildon’s Type & Layout: Are You Communicating or Just Making Pretty Shapes

2) Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

Wheildon’s book is a frontal assault on the lame-o typography mistakes that continue to occur today (especially in the amateur design Web arena). His findings are backed up by in-depth research about comprehension and reader retention.

Reynolds’ book is a more elegant assault on similar miscues in the world of PowerPoint and Keynote… or just presentations in general.

My simple recommendation?

Buy these books. Dog-ear these books. Keep them near Strunk and White. Savor them, review them, revere them, spoon them.

They’re gold and will help you win projects and the hearts of your clients.

Here’s a taste from Presentation Zen that talks about the “picture superiority effect”:

“When information recall is measured just after exposure to a series of pictures or a series of words, the recall for pictures and words is about equal. However, the picture superiority effect applies when the time after exposure is more than 30 seconds, according to research cited in Universal Principles of Design (Rockport Publishers). ‘Use the picture superiority effect to improve the recognition and recall of key information. Use pictures and words together, and ensure that they reinforce the same information for optimal effect,’ say the authors… The effect is strongest when the pictures represent common, concrete things.”

And from Wheildon’s masterpiece:

“.. the average advertisement is read by only four percent of the people on their way through the publication it appears in. Most of the time this is the fault of the so-called “art director” who designs advertisements. If he is an aesthete at heart – and most of them are – he doesn’t care a damn if anybody reads the words. He regards them as mere elements in his pretty design. In many cases he blows away half the readers by choosing the wrong type. But he doesn’t care. He should be boiled in oil.” [my emphasis]

These two guys think deeply about design, and they offer lots of undeniable proof for their theses.

If you’re a copywriter, art director, Web designer, SEO monger, marketing director (or VP or CMO), or a layout/design guru, please pick these up and study them. Your job is not finished when you complete your piece of the creative puzzle. You need to understand the other disciplines to make sure you’ve created something that’s usable, appreciated, and understood by your consuming audiences.

Do you have any other book recommendations that are crucial for publishing/Web development creatives? Please comment below and share your favorites. Thanks – Phil.

Are you a freelance copywriter, marketing creative, artist/designer, social media marketer, SEO specialist, content developer or Web developer? Now’s the time to understand why and how your power is vaporizing.

If you’re a creative professional, you may have noticed a bothersome trend. In an effort to reduce expenses, clients are getting creative with the ways they deconstruct projects, bid them out and re-assemble the final product.

As a result, some of your work is becoming commoditized, broken into pieces and performed by someone other than you. There are lower-cost, dubious-value graphic artists, Web designers, social media marketers, SEO specialists, content developers, programmers, freelance writers and others waiting in the wings to snap up pieces of projects.

I’m not arguing that this is a particularly intelligent, productive or encouraging trend. I’m just saying that it’s happening in a number of settings, and, in many cases, you’re complicit. Yes you.

Let me discuss a few examples to illustrate my point.

Deconstruction and the Road to Mediocrity

Software developers used to scope, design and test a piece code from start to finish. That’s not always the case nowadays. Outsourced, off-shore software testing is becoming more and more common. Specialized shops that test applications and the platforms they run on (like testing a new Web app on every conceivable phone, OS and browser combination) eliminate this task from a typical coder’s project. There’s a company in Austin, Texas that’s doing this with great success. Think of it as global specialization – where the “assembly line” is decoupled, sent to multiple specialists, then reassembled before launch.

You may have noticed the SEO copywriting trend, as well. For better or worse, companies are farming out articles to writing sweat shops and instructing them to assemble articles that are optimized for specific keywords (including headline and subhead instructions for keyword repetition). Then they send the completed article to a professional writer for editing, fact checking and re-writing.

As a professional writer, I find the practice ludicrous. It’s a process that’s flawed, spammy and basically ass-backwards. But I can’t deny that it’s happening. Shameful admission: one of my clients in Eastern Europe pays me to write headlines and subheads for articles they’ve developed (they identify the keywords they need highlighted, and I try to make it work). Some of the articles are professionally written and some are atrocious. I flag the bad ones and have them re-write them – by myself or another professional writer.

The trend is similar to the software development one. Publishers are attempting to decouple production and then reassemble the pieces. OnDemand Media’s Pluck is one example of this kind of low-cost, assembly line publishing.

With these types of approaches, some value is lost (maybe not so much with the software development example). You may have seen similar trends with your projects. Does the following sound familiar? A client asks you to produce a site, some graphic art or some copy that’s just like “competitor X’s site.” The marketing director identifies someone else’s work that they like, and they encourage you to paraphrase, emulate or copy it. “Just make it like theirs, ‘borrow’ from it and you [as the creative] won’t have to do so much work,” they say. The result is unoriginal copy or design. My advice is strap on your Pumas and run away from these clients as fast as you can.

The point is, you can see, taste and smell the loss of value in these types of projects. Think about all those India-looking templated sites out there. They’re sterile. You know them when you see them. The treatments are flat, the colors predictable, and the layouts pure boilerplate. Some are worse than others, of course. There are, however, some nice WordPress templates that are produced by very talented designers and coders (and SquareSpace ones and Tumblr.. many others, I’m sure).

Similar problems occur when people take short cuts with photography. How about those bland “business people at work photos?” Earnest looking professionals glare into the lens. They wear trendy blue and khaki, and they always seem to be in these scrubbed, gleaming Formica white rooms. There are dozens of them on iStockPhoto, and they pop up all over the Web.  Anyone can get that stuff. Anyone can produce it. It’s a commodity.

Your Talent and Real-Time Creativity is Your Trump Card

So your career is under attack. Every day sub-contractors attempt to deconstruct creative work and farm pieces of it out. Seth Godin talks about this in his book Linchpin. In a previous era, the strategy was applied to automobile construction, for example. Henry Ford developed detailed assembly processes that could be carried out by very specialized, low-skilled laborers along the line. These days creative work can be made into an assembly line without borders… without a building.

Where does that leave you? It’s easy, really. You scamper back to value. You focus on originality and core competency. Your creative work, your artistry is what wins. You can beat a monkey on a typewriter. Your brilliance in the here and now beats any templated mash-up that a sweat shop can produce. That’s what brings the real dough. That’s what wins today’s contracts.

The companies and clients that don’t want that type of talent are settling for mediocrity. They will be lost in the sea of noise. Their ads will not stand out, their white papers will not be downloaded, and people will land on their sites and get that ‘oh this was designed by low-level goons in Eastern Europe’ feeling.

So, if you’re a designer you need to be the one who pays attention to typography, usability, color choice and very specific business requirements. You have to listen. And, you have to find the clients who communicate their uniqueness, their goals and their fears directly to you. Incorporate that into your designs, then collaborate with the Web development team, the writer, the photographer. Don’t be afraid to work with difficult people. Don’t be afraid to challenge your client. Argue with them (not argumentatively but in a Socratic way) with the fears, benefits, goals and aspirations of the company in mind.

If you’re a blogger or a ghost writer for blogs, stop regurgitating the messages of others. Stop chasing the link deals and trying to spam your way into Digg mentions, StumbleUpons, etc. Promote your best, most unique ideas – even if it means taking a day or week off. Yes, you need to produce content consistently. . but you’ve got to rise above the noise and say something useful and unique each time you publish. Or else.. your days are numbered.

Another Warning: Legitimate Technology Trends Will Strip You Naked

This should probably be another article.. but, heck, I’m going to put it in here, because it closely parallels the “deconstruction” trend.

If you’re a marketer, you need to realize that subjective, off-the-cuff analysis of markets is a vanishing practice. Creative, “gee I like this, let’s run with it” moments are gone. David Ogilvy and Claude Hopkins did their best to kill it off, but it’s still the fall back position for lazy marketing departments.

Here’s where technology is taking a bite out of marketing departments. The following trends are eating away at staid practices:

1. Real-time analytics from real-time search like Twitter, Facebook and Google real-time results
2. Web scraping (real-time and sophisticated, in-depth, behind-the-Flash, behind-the-login-page scraping)
3. #1 and #2 combined with contextual analysis
4. Multivariate testing (Google Analytics, Optimizer)
5. Twitter testing and AdWords testing of titles, subheads and concepts

Analytics beats any whim or subjective position you have. Yes – I know – if you’re creating art, then you can be content with your own subjective analysis. But, it’s rare that those of us in the business world can produce art without being accountable for results. At some point, you have to sell something (even artists need to fill galleries).

So these five techie developments show us what sells, what gets clicked, what’s working, what the crowds think. Testing (Claude Hopkins, Ogilvy- style) is more relevant than ever!

One of the buzz phrases going around marketing circles is contextual sentiment. This is what Facebook is up to with their “Like” buttons all over the Web. Fact is, you could do this with some sophisticated software previously. If you run scraped keyword streams from Twitter or Facebook through an sentiment analysis tool, you can see all kinds of actionable information. For example, let’s say you launch a new soda flavor. You can quickly understand consumer sentiment by monitoring channels like Twitter and Facebook. At the root, it’s the transformation of unstructured data into actionable information. It can be used for all kinds of scenarios – public relations troubleshooting, customer service, R&D, polling/sampling opinion (without the focus group), product development and more.

Big brands are already integrating this “social media” sampling technique into their Business Intelligence (BI) solutions. One of the big benefits is that they get a clear indication of sentiment and the “reality on the streets.” In the past, they had to rely on focus groups with preconceptions and gamed reporting from their own internal departments (sales, finance, product development, etc.).

Bringing it All Back Around to You – The Creative

Creatives in every line of work – Web development, art, writing, publishing, etc. – need to consider these trends carefully. From my perspective this trend looks like a boon to creatives. But, to many organizations, it could mean that some of their services will go away. You can’t consult, for example, if your consulting guidance is based on premises that are counter to factual Web analytics. You may have to integrate these new technologies into your offerings.

How is it a boon? Creative matters even more today than ever before. People need you to test out ideas, push them out of their comfort zones and try new things. Companies need to round up whatever data and research exists then hand off projects to creatives that get it. Then you test… then you commit to what works. That’s a good recipe.

What’s become a commodity is the big agency’s powerful research and testing groups. They’ll be moving to new technologies and techniques. But these new methods should be fairly low cost. You may not need an army of people to pull it off. And as information becomes more available at a lower cost, you’ll see small agile creative firms making moves.

Some Extended Thoughts

Everyone has access to this now. This new world is here. Soooooo….

• Tips, info and tools are commodities unless they’re strikingly original
• Pricing for boilerplate, templated or paraphrased/hi-jacked content and design is being ground down to zero. It’s a race to the bottom. That work is going overseas, or it’s going to the lowest common denominator companies.
• Analytics (real-time) are showing companies who are willing to put in the sweat and the money exactly what’s going on with their products, services, brands, competitors, customer service, market perception… everything.

The information you have at your fingertips – your information tool box – is becoming irrelevant. There’s plenty of free information out there that describes what you know, best practices, tips, tools, strategies and so forth. That stuff is being commoditized. Dan Pink goes into this in detail in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. “McKinsey & Co. estimates that in the United States, only 30% of job growth now comes from algorithmic work, while 70% comes from heuristic work,” writes Pink. (That algorithmic work is the non-creative stuff – the process work that can be duplicated in far flung locations.) “A key reason routine work can be outsourced or automated; artistic, empathic, non-routine, work generally cannot.”

Experience matters. Value matters. A creative, original filter matters.

What to Do? – Creatives, Get Back to Basics!

How do you win in this wild new world of shifting marketing and production trends? You focus on the key differentiators. Seth Godin talks about this a lot in Linchpin. You’ve got to continue to develop strong relationships. Stellar customer service, a sparkling attitude, personality, and your underlying creativity and uniqueness are the keys. Execution wins business as well – think about speed of execution, shipping on time/on deadline, and delivering a consistent, quality product. Of course you need to deliver value, meaning quality, differentiation and uniqueness, mind-boggling star power, and ’something extra.’

In short, you need to become more remarkable now.

What do you think about this discussion and these trends? Are you seeing the same things I’m seeing? If so, what are your strategies for combating these trends or adapting to them? Am I delusional or off-base here? Please comment below.

Participating in social media activities is like participating in any other social activity. It can be as valuable as a lunch with the boss or as vapid as a breeze shooting session at the water cooler. Or vice versa.

What follows are some highlights and lowlights from a typical day of “connecting” in my life. I find the most value appears when I’m connecting with people who help me get my job done, of course. On the other hand, some exchanges are just plain fun even though they won’t help my business right away.

For starters, I posted a question to several of my LinkedIn contacts that I know have experience in the marketing and Web development field. I was looking for a WordPress developer that could help quickly launch Word Press Web sites. I’d need the person to “turn the lights on” every time I launch a new site or have a client that wants to transition to the flexible, powerful WP platform. I quickly found a great resource (in New Zealand of all places) that’s already helping out with a rather extensive client project. In the words of Jack Davenport on Britain’s Coupling, “result!”

Next, I read a bunch of links from thought leaders and link-sharers that I admire and trust. I use Seesmic Desktop and Twitter to do this. I follow quite a few people on Twitter, but Seesmic allows me to put them into groups (I think you can do this with TweetDeck, too). I have a group called “A-List,” and this is the place where I filter out those that consistently bring useful and entertaining links, ideas and articles. This can be a major time sucker, because if you follow a lot of the thought leaders on Twitter, there are a lot of tantalizing titles flying around. I try to limit my window for this activity to an hour or less. I like to take one action idea from each piece I read and get it into my calendar or task list. That way, I’m not just admiring articles. I’m actually using information to move my business forward. I came across an article yesterday that was really intriguing, How I got to the first page of Google thanks to ONE bookmarklet (by Zee on TheNextWeb). It shows you how to use Posterous and optimize WordPress for an ultimate SEO pick-me-up. I’ll be tinkering with those tools/tips today.

Then I moved into the realm of the unproductive. I put up some pictures of our kids’ soccer games [taking very little time, mind you: 1) Eye-Fi wireless SD card takes the pictures from the camera and automatically uploads them to my computer and Kodak Gallery, 2) A quick email puts the best ones on Posterous, which 3) automatically updates to Facebook]. Everyone’s updated in a matter of minutes, and I’ve only clicked a couple of times. The videos from the camera go to YouTube automatically, as well. It’s amazing.

Next, I commented on a bunch of inane but funny Facebook friend stuff. There were some good/ugly Kanye West/Michael Jackson funeral jokes and more of those silly Hitler videos from Valkyrie, where they put in subtitles about current events. I also caught up on friend photos, videos and whereabouts. I may score a ticket to the Cal-USC football game, as a result. That would be productive!

How do you use social media for fun and profit? Any stories or tips that are useful and insightful?

Are your marketing documents ready for an overhaul?

Do you have in-house writing staff but need a fresh, outside perspective?

Is your existing copy connecting fully with prospects, partners, employees and customers?

Here’s an offer that won’t cost you anything but a simple referral once you’ve completed the process.

This month (May ‘09), QualityWriter is giving away a few free copy tune-up and critique packages to select prospects and past clients (this is something we usually charge $300 to $400 for). This is first come first served – we can only do so many between regular deadlines.

Here’s how it works:

First, call us or email to get the ball rolling (949) 515-3510 dunn@qualitywriter.com.

Next, send us Web content, a landing page, a direct mail or email piece, a case study, a data sheet, a short brochure, or two pages of a white paper (anything up to 500 words), and we’ll give it a complete content analysis and evaluation (review notes and improvement plan included).

Make small progress today with your marketing documents, and ensure big progress in the future:

• Connect with prospect/customer motivations.
• Restructure your copy to get a natural conversation going
• Immediately get customers thinking about the key issues and questions that matter to them most
• Present solutions in a clear, compelling manner
• Strengthen your calls to action and show readers what you’d like them to do next
• Bolster your credibility and authority with 3^rd party analyst or customer quotes, testimonials and insights

You can also get a taste for how I work and think.. and perhaps we can work on a writing project some day.

Get started right now – call (949) 515-3510 or email dunn@qualitywriter.com. There’s nothing to lose here. If the improved copy helps you sell more and improve your brand/image, you actually come out ahead.

Technology executives, marketing managers, creative directors, sales people, CMOs, VPs and CEOs all have one thing in common. You have to sell despite the current economic climate.

You can’t just turn off the bull-horn and expect to save money by being quiet, though. That’s a recipe for disaster.

I’ve detailed this elsewhere, demonstrating how the smart companies actually gain market share during recessions or depressions. So I won’t belabor that point any further.

So, how do you connect with customers when they’re so resistant to new spending initiatives? How do you generate better leads when customer budgets are shrinking?

Here a quick, high-level run-down of the pertinent answers.

First, you should show them:

• How your solution saves them money.
• How your solution helps them make money.
• New ways to make money.
• How your solution helps simplify their business.
• How your solution helps them reduce head count (painful as that subject may be).
• How to eliminate wasteful activity.
• Real life customers you’ve helped do all of the above (as case studies)

I can help you do this by writing your white papers and customer case studies, which are crucial lead generation pieces.

The next question you should be asking is: How do I find people that are interested in these topics (with respect to my solutions/products/services)?

I have several different approaches to this last question. Some are social media related, some involve emailing people, some use good old-fashioned direct mail, some utilize Google Adwords and Facebook ads.

If you’d like to explore these topics in more detail and create a marketing campaign that gets immediate results, please give me a call at 949-244-9440 or email me at dunn@qualitywriter.com.

P.S. I have a really efficient system for carrying out these types of direct marketing plans. Please give me a call or email and I’ll tell you how I automate direct response campaigns with my assistant.

P.P.S If you end up hiring me to write some content for you, there’s zero risk. When the copy drives sales it’s essentially free. (All it takes is one extra sale to absorb your writing costs. You can’t lose.) Plus, I personally guarantee my work. You get a full refund by just calling up and telling me where I missed the mark and what I could have done better. I need you to tell me at least five things we could have done better. There’s one little catch: If you decide to keep the copy and continue using my services, I’d like you to give us a referral to one of your colleagues who you think can benefit from our services. Easy.

Yes, times are tight. However, as marketing managers, creative directors and sales people, you still have to sell. I’ve detailed this in other posts and showed you how the smart companies actually gain market share during recessions or depressions. So I won’t belabor that point any further.

Here are the important issues:

How do you connect with customers when they’re so resistant to new spending initiatives? How do you generate better leads when customer budgets are shrinking?

Here a quick, high-level run-down of the pertinent answers:

• Show them how your solution saves them money.
• Show them how your solution helps them make money.
• Show them new ways to make money.
• Show them how your solution helps simplify their business.
• Show them how your solution helps them reduce head count (painful as that subject may be).
• Show them how to eliminate wasteful activity.
• Show them real life customers you’ve helped do all of the above (as case studies)

The next question you should be asking is: How do I find people that are interested in these topics (with respect to my solutions/products/services)?

I have about 10 different approaches to this last question. Some are social media related, some involve emailing people, some use good old-fashioned direct mail, some utilize Google Adwords and Facebook ads.

If you’d like to explore these topics in more detail and create a marketing campaign that gets immediate results, please give me a call at 949-244-9440 or email me at dunn@qualitywriter.com.

P.S. I can help you start figuring out what your prospects are looking for in just a few simple steps. And, conveniently, I’m a marketing writer that can help you develop content that drives sales.

P.P.S. I have a really efficient system for carrying out these types of direct marketing plans. Please give me a call or email and I’ll tell you how I automate direct response campaigns with my assistant. You, too, can do big things with very few people.

Just read a great article that addresses lead generation and white papers. Roger Warner makes a great case for ditching the carrot method of trading email addresses or login info for white papers.

I’ve clipped some of the insightful tid-bits below. Thanks Roger!

Insight #1: “For B2B web sites, the content that really matters in terms of positioning and prospecting isn’t your ‘markitecture’ pages – your product and services descriptions, corporate histories and such…. it’s your ‘thought leadership’ pages – the places where you express opinions and ideas rather than features and benefits.”

Insight #2: “Furthermore, what of the people that you lose along the way? To me, a commitment to form-filling is no great measurement of the quality of a sales lead. A far better tactic is to set your thought leadership content free and give people more ‘opportunities to engage‘ with who you are and what you stand for.”

Warner continues, “Let’s face it, most of us are commitment-phobes when it comes to the web anyway. Why not just accept this fact and move on?”

Here are Warner’s review questions for evaluating your own white paper exchange process:

“Ask yourself:

• What’s your most valuable and engaging content?
• Do you make you accessible enough?
• What’s the upside of providing more opportunities to engage with it?
• What’s the downside of removing a subscription line?
• How scientific is your answer to the previous question? (Gut feeling, conventional wisdom, or based on small side-show experiment and validated by stats?)”

Whether you’re writing SEO copy for your Web site or writing SEM copy for a Google AdWords landing page or just writing a new brochure (or even an eBay listing), there are always some very simple, timeless things you need to do. Here they are in stripped down, bare bones bullets:

* Write strong headlines

* Describe benefits before features

* Use specific subheads

* Write about the reader (not about yourself or your company)

This is simple marketing copywriting 101, but sometimes we need to remind ourselves what the basic techniques are.

Strong headlines contain delicious offers, benefits and intrigue. Benefits sell the dream before the hardware that produces the dream (and the relationship between the two). Specific subheads are key because many readers scan the page and follow subhead stories before diving into specific sections of your body text. Finally, when you use the word “you” and talk directly to and about the reader, you make better connections and sell more effectively. Nobody wants to hear about the genius behind the product. They want to know how it’s going to help them specifically.