Pricing, decoys, headlines – these aren't just the stuff of savvy online marketers.

They're also key components of menu psychology.

Check out this NY Times article by Sarah Kershaw on research into how menu decisions can affect restaurant profitability (thanks to Mark Hurst of CreativeGood.com for bringing it to my attention).

Decoys: A Powerful Marketing Technique

Using decoy items is one of my favorite marketing techniques. Writes Kershaw,

"Some restaurants use what researchers call decoys. For example, they may place a really expensive item at the top of the menu, so that other dishes look more reasonably priced; research shows that diners tend to order neither the most nor least expensive items, drifting toward the middle. Or restaurants might play up a profitable dish by using more appetizing adjectives and placing it next to a less profitable dish with less description so the contrast entices the diner to order the profitable dish."

Decoys work so well because they capitalize on our brain's powerful tendency to save energy when making decisions. Instead of considering all the possibilities the universe has to offer us, we focus on the select few right in front of our nose. As a marketer, if you can influence the set of options, you can influence the final decision.

That's the whole principle behind my AdWords Checkmate method, which I'm finally ready to share in all its glory with the online marketing community. 

To get the early bird scoop, go here.

Working through Michael Campbell's excellent guide to simple and effective SEO – www.jigglingtheweb.com.

Just a web page – nothing to download, opt in for, buy, or beg.

One of the steps is to claim your blog on technorati.com. That's what I'm doing now, by entering a code into this blog post.

6HQTK8B4AGFE

There, that's done. Got it, technorati?

I'll keep you posted on this blog (posted, get it? ;) how well Michael's methods work for me.

The most important part of the search-driven sales process is the top of the landing page.

You've got about 7 seconds to prove to your prospect – who may have just cost you $5 if they clicked your ad – that they should stick around and consider doing business with you.

Most landing pages kind of suck at this.

Here are the most common mistakes:

1. No Headline or Irrelevant Headline

Approach: "Prospects have all day, so I'll take my time in revealing why they should do business with me. If I get around to it."

Result: Prospect spends 5 seconds trying to find the "scent trail" to their goal, fail, and go back to Google for another try.

Example: 

2. Overwhelming the visitor with features and jargon

Approach: "I don't know exactly who you are or what's important to you, so I'll hit you hard with everything I've got."

Result: Prospect is overwhelmed, confused, and bored. Leaves so fact you can see skid marks on their monitor.

Example:

3. Rejecting every known principle of user-centered design

Approach: "The more color and bold fonts I use, the more you'll want to read it."

Result: Prospect reaches for Advil and throws away their reading glasses.

Example: 

4. Wasting space on big logos, irrelevant stock photos of happy multi-racial teams and young women wearing headsets, and meaningless marketing pablum

Approach: "I'll impress you with the graphical professionalism of my site."

Result: Prospect can't find anything interesting or unique, yawns, and possibly drools once or twice as they struggle to stay awake long enough to hit the Back button.

Example:

5. Trying to make the sale before establishing the know-like-trust factor

Approach: "If I just get right down to business, your rational mind will obviously see the benefits of choosing me.

Result: Prospect sees the benefits, but doesn't have a good "gut feeling" and so continues searching.

Example: 

How to Create an Effective Landing Page

You must start with the question, "What does my prospect believe I've promised them on this page?" 

The landing page must instantly demonstrate that you didn't "Bait and Switch" them with your ad. 

But beyond that, you need to develop the Know-Like-Trust factor very quickly.

And you have to understand what's most important to your prospect – their current "Point of Pain." And explain quickly and powerfully how your solution can eliminate that pain.

Video is one tool that can quickly build a relationship, hold interest, and highlight the big promise. But most online video is either overproduced and "salesy," or grossly amateurish and visually boring (I plead guilty to the latter).

Video Done Right

Recently I came across a company, Epipheo Studios, that produces some of the smartest, most entertaining, and most effective videos I've seen online. You can check out their video portfolio here.

Yesterday I spoke to Managing Director Ben Crawford about their approach. We spoke for 40 minutes, during which he revealed his formula for distilling a company's entire story into an easy-to-grasp three minute video. The key, Ben says, is to aim to create an epiphany – a moment where someone's beliefs change dramatically.

Once that happens, the prospect knows, likes and trusts you, understands why they should do business with you, and may spread your video virally with others.

The full interview is available for download for members of the Ring of Fire, the AdWords and Online Marketing Coaching Club available at http://askhowie.com/ring. (Try it for as little as $20/month.)

Click the play arrow below to listen to the first 20 minutes, plus a short Ring of Fire promo at the end :)

Hope to see you in the Ring of Fire soon!

Yesterday at Checkmate Live we spent about 5 minutes on a really interesting exercise. We walked around the room pretending we were our prospects. We paid attention to our posture, gait, intensity, speed, desire for eye contact, need for space, etc.

A couple of attendees had nearly instantaneous "aha's" about ways they could connect better with their prospects. Very powerful and deep insights that will now begin to play out in all aspects of their marketing – assuming they make it past the AdWords Split Test Reality Check.

Why did this occur after a body exercise, when the participants had been thinking and strategizing about this market for years?

Where We Keep the Data

The body is a way to do an "end run" around the defense of the Reticular Activating System, the RAS. Basically, the RAS is a filter that takes the millions of bits of information that he have predecided are not pertinent to our big goals and shunts them away from consciousness, into the murky waters of the unconscious.

Here's Richard Bartlett, from page 132 of Matrix Energetics:

"The conscious mind is like a gatekeeper whose job is to filter and delete any information that doesn't fit the paradigm of what could be called a 'need to know basis.' If the information appears irrelevant… then it is usually relegated to the 'back room' of your subconscious. It [the subsconscious] can process something along the magnitude of eleven million bits of data per second, compared with the left brain's paltry sum of just seven bits per second (plus or minus two bits). So pay attention to your flashes of intuition and your hunches, for they are likely to be based on far more information than that of your normal conscious state. [italics in original]."

The body stores and accesses all the data that isn't present to our "need to know" mind, the one that reads marketing books and analyzes AdWords reports and types questions in the Ring of Fire. So tapping into the body can open that storehouse of information that we didn't realize was key, because of our preconceptions.

No "Faith" Required

And the nice thing about operating from intuition in the AdWords space, is that our insights and hunches are testable. We don't have to take anything on faith. As we test, we learn to trust certain intuitional experiences and modalities, at least to the point where we begin to routinely pay attention to them.

Accessing the Unconscious with Clients

I find that when I talk with clients and prospects on the phone, I often "get a hit" – some thought or image or sensation comes unbidden to my attention. For a long time, I wouldn't even notice it. Then, I would notice it fleetingly but push it out of the way: "Hey, I'm trying to concentrate here!"

Then I would notice it with curiosity: "Why am I seeing a submarine here?… What's the significance of the movie "Empire Records" to this client problem?… "Why is my right shoulder suddenly aching?"

Sometimes I mention it on the phone now. Sometimes I take the time to translate it into an innocent question, so the client doesn't think I'm crazy. Almost always, the image or sensation begins to make sense, pointing to some aspect of the situation that hadn't been communicated or acknowledged. A "larger container" or context in which to operate.

Anyway, the exercise took about 8 minutes, so what do you have to lose?

Got stories of intuitions, images, or sensations guiding you to wise action and positive outcomes? Please share them in the Comments section.

Last fall I presented at the very first European AdWords conference, AdWords Days 2009, in Cologne Germany. Here's a trailer for AdWords Days 2010, which takes place 1-2 June 2010, also in Cologne.

My presentation was in English, which considering the only German I know is the Ode To Joy from Beethoven's 9th and "die Kuh gibt Milch" (which I learned from EasyGermanForKids.com), is a good thing.

Brad Geddes also presented (I still have occasional hand cramps from all the notes I took during his fabulous talk) in English, and the rest were in German.

The trailer begins with me deep in metaphor-land, describing in detail how I get into the shower in the morning. Unfortunately, I never get around to saying how this relates to AdWords and traffic generation. Anybody able to guess what the connection is in my warped mind?

Anyway, here's the trailer. The rock music background rocks, so turn up those speakers!

• Long black hairs like warthog bristles sprouting from the bridge
• Clogged pores
• Dead skin and dirt piling up like dead leaves over a storm drain

It’s All Mirrors

What the Heck Am I Talking About?

• Children who do not clean their rooms to my specifications of what a clean room looks like (which is much much cleaner, by the way, than my vision of what a clean entrepreneurial office looks like).
• Children reading The Book of Bunny Suicides at 7:52am instead of packing their lunches or brushing their teeth.
• Children saying things to each other in a voice calculated to be overheard by a parent, “If you haven’t made your lunch yet, why are you reading The Book of Bunny Suicides instead of doing your job?”

Business Mirrors

Who are Your Mirrors?

• Where are we projecting your own insecurities and fears out into the world?
• What gets our blood boiling?
• What makes us feel weak and ashamed?
• What turns us against ourselves, muttering curses like “I’ll never figure this out”?

What Can We Learn from Mirrors?

Lessons from the Mirror

When one of your important keywords represents different market segments, you've got to make some tough landing page choices. If you try to appeal to all the segments at once, your page will be bland, vague and uninteresting. Yet if you choose one segment, you disregard the others. What's an advertiser to do?

Ambiguous Keyword Example

nanny placement agency

Who's looking for that? Families looking for nannies, and nannies looking for jobs.

As you can see from the screenshot of the Google SERP (search engine results page), the advertisers focus on the families. There's more money to be made by placing a nanny with a family than by getting another candidate on your roster.

And a nanny looking for an agency is likely to dig into the website to find the "Apply for a Job" page. Because they might be more motivated and therefore willing to put up with more steps, it's logical that the advertiser would make them second banana to the family looking to hire Mary Poppins this minute.

So the landing page would focus primarily on parents looking for nannies, with a link somewhere for the nannies looking for families. Not a perfect solution, but the best one we have available to us.

Actually, had.

New: Ad SiteLinks

Google has just introduced a new AdWords feature called "SiteLinks" that allow you to specify up to 10 specific landing pages in addition to your main one. Here's an example:

It looks like this feature – currently in limited beta – is available only for ads in the premium positions – above the organic links on the left, rather than down the right side. And there's no word about partner or content networks at this point.

So soon you'll be able to run your nanny ad with some additional links:

For Parents    For Nannies
For Kids         For Julie Andrews

Keep a lookout for this new feature in your account – it will appear in campaign settings, under a tab named "Ad extensions".

And start watching the SERP for good and bad examples of this new feature.

A reader wonders:

When you copy a keyword to another location, all values are reset to zero, is there some sort of delay in transferring or does this mean they are starting from scratch? – I have keywords that are great performers and I’m concerned that I will lose their status if I move them.

My response: Read the rest of this entry »