A reader asks:

Hi! Enjoyed the dummies book. The current platform for my [moving company] website is a little difficult to navigate. If I make my blogger page a part of the website, will Google still count this as making daily updates to the website? Or does it look better if daily updates are being made to the home page? Should I try to have the first few sentences from the blog appearing on the home page with some kind of feed?

My reply:

Google doesn’t require frequent changes to your home page. What they want is many pages of informative, relevant, authoritative, and new content on your website.

You can keep your current platform (although I don’t know why you wouldn’t switch to WordPress, which is a breeze to edit once it’s set up properly) and just add a wordpress blog to your site in a subdirectory.

A wise comment that I heard once: If you want to please Google, pretend that Google doesn’t exist and just try to please your visitor.

What information would be most helpful to your visitors? Updates about who your movers are and what they’re up to? Tips about preparing for a move? Guidance about how to choose a moving company? Your musings on current events and pop culture (for example, what could you do with http://www.starpulse.com/news/index.php/2012/01/15/russell_brand_moves_into_new_home or http://www.entertainmentwise.com/news/61501/Prince-William-Kate-Middleton-To-Move-Into-Their-New-Home?)

If your posts are interesting and informative and you title them to provoke curiosity, then having a blog feed appear on your home page might be a great strategy. But it’s not necessary for Google love.

Hope this helps!

Got a question about web marketing? Email support AT askhowie DOT com and I’ll reply on this blog if I feel your question has universal-enough relevance.

This article was originally published in Fast Company.

Last Wednesday morning my 12-year-old son and I accidentally climbed a nearby mountain called Sunset Peak. Elan and I meant only to walk up a little way, scouting the thing out for a possible climb on Saturday. But two hours later, we were at the top, thirsty, out of breath, and delighted. What happened? Why did we abandon our plan of a short leisurely stroll in favor of a hard and demanding hike?

We couldn’t stop climbing because of all the immediate positive feedback.

Once we began our ascent, we discovered something: with every step the view improved. At first, the phalanx of 12 huge water tanks that we passed on our way to the trail shrank to Lego size. Then the road we walked up from our house ribboned down the hill and out into the valley. We argued about which was our house (Elan turned out to be right), and gradually rose to a point where we could view the Drakensberg Mountains farther to the south than we had ever seen them before.

By the time we were halfway up, we could see the summit. And although I had skipped breakfast and felt a bit shaky, there was no way I was going to turn back. Elan agreed, and skipped on ahead as I trudged and stumbled my way behind him. When we summited at 11:15, we just sat in wonder for a few minutes at the 360-degree vista and our own accomplishment.

Immediate Positive Feedback Online

So what does this have to do with your website? Plenty, if your website serves a business purpose. You need new visitors to take a certain action as a result of their visit. Depending on your business model, the action might be to purchase online, fill out a lead or request for quote form, like you on Facebook, call you, or print a coupon and drive to your physical location.

Take a second and think of the most desired action on your website. That’s your summit. How can you entice your best prospects to climb all the way to the top?

Case Study: Ring Central

RingCentral.com offers cloud-based telephony to small businesses. Their service is robust and complex, with hundreds of features, many of which require setup on the part of the customer. The Ring Central mountain takes a fair amount of time and effort to climb all the way to the top. So let’s look at how the website chunks the climb into manageable segments, each providing its own immediate positive feedback.

First, the most desired action on the home page is not a purchase, but a free trial. The most prominent feature on the page is the red-orange SIGN UP button, which you see as your follow the man’s gaze past his attractive co-worker.

Just as Elan and I wouldn’t have taken the first step if our only option had been to summit Sunset Peak, my company Vitruvian probably wouldn’t have made the leap to Ring Central without the zero-risk, low-commitment trial.

The five bullets on the left focus not on the ultimate benefits of Ring Central, but rather on the ease of use. Simple pricing, instant activation and free 24/7 live support are all designed to make the mountain seem easy to climb. These are the trail signs at the bottom of the mountain. The first step up the mountain is the “learn more” button just below those bullets.

That button takes you to a page describing the most important features and benefits of Ring Central under two main headings, Making Calls and Receiving Calls.

Clicking the plus sign next to each high-level feature expands the section into three or so detailed sub-features. You’re invited to climb the Ring Central mountain step by step, with each step delivering more value than the effort required.

At any point in the sales process, you can press one of the “Take me to the top” buttons; on the interior pages, the “sign up” button is joined by a “next” button at the bottom of the “request a quote” box on the left.

Notice that the ultimate goal of the website is just the first mountain in a series of ever-higher peaks. Once you sign up for the risk-free trial, Ring Central follows up with email tutorials and customized progress reports that help you set up the key features, so you convert to long-term paying customer. From there, you are presented with a series of logical upsells to bigger, more robust, and more expensive plans.

Implementing Immediate Positive Feedback

Here are four elements that you need to implement immediate positive feedback on your website:

1. Know what your prospect wants when they first arrive at your site.

Too many websites focus entirely on the benefits of the top of the mountain. They ignore the importance of the small first steps. Elan and I just wanted a pleasant walk. Ring Central prospects want a phone system that works right away, with minimal effort and cost.

What do your visitors want at first? Reassurance that they’re in the right place? Confidence in your capabilities and ethics? Answers to their pressing questions? A phone number so they can talk to a live human being? Empathy?

Make a list of the initial requirements of your visitors and design landing pages that acknowledge and deal with those requirements before you start touting the view from the top of your mountain.

2. Be clear what you want your visitor to do.

Ring Central doesn’t try to get prospects to sign multi-year, multi-employee contracts on their first visit. The mountain they want new prospects to climb is the 30-day trial.

What’s the first mountain your visitors must climb before they can do business with you? Is it a sale? Or can you decrease the height and slope of the first mountain by asking for a name and email, or a software download, or a phone call, or some other intermediate step?

Behavioral economists point out that humans will do much more to prevent loss than to achieve gain. The more you can decrease your prospects’ perceived risk and effort, the more likely they are to take you up on your offer to begin climbing.

Determine the smallest mountain you can define that still gives you the ability to follow up with your prospects after their initial visit.

3. Use visual cues.

Once you’ve identified the first mountain, design your site so that every pixel reinforces that action. Ring Central uses color contrast to highlight the action buttons, as well as positioning them in places that already attract eye gravity. Humans follow others’ gaze; the man’s eyes on the home page directs our eyes to the “sign up” button.

On the features page, the “request a quote” box is a darker color than the rest of the page. The plus sign next to each feature is a widely recognized convention for “There’s more here if you’re interested.”

And while the Ring Central site contains a lot of information, the design divides it into manageable chunks, so that each step appears easy to take.

How can you visually identify both the top of the first mountain and the steps visitors need to take to progress toward that peak? How can you use color contrast, white space, and images to help your visitors see the path and want to follow it?

4. Give clear directions.

The trail that Elan and I climbed was well marked with signs at the trail head, at the junctions of other trails, and with blazes along the way. Also, it was well-maintained throughout; we never looked around and wondered which way to go next.

The Ring Central buttons describe where they take you: “sign up,” “learn more,” and “next” all indicate why you should click and where you go once you do. On many websites, too many buttons and hyperlinks are of the Alice in Wonderland “Drink Me” variety: you don’t know where you’re going or why. The default “submit” button sounds more like a call for surrender than an invitation you can’t refuse.

5. Test continually.

These four elements are grounded in empathy; striving to understand what your prospect cares about, desires, and fears. The second half of the equation is curiosity; an eagerness to find out if you’re right.

Online, curiosity is best operationalized by tracking visitor behavior on your site and testing variations to see which one provides the most compelling and simplest path up your mountain.

Here’s the Ring Central home page on March 17, 2010:

While much of the page is identical, the photograph has changed, and there’s more white space. The Mobile and Fax areas are lighter in tone, allowing the “sign up” and “learn more” buttons to stand out more on the page.

Make a list of things you can test on your site. Start with the big ones: headlines, overall design, color schemes, wording of buttons. Next, test the order and number and text of bullets, body copy, and text font and color.

Don’t be formulaic–let your tests derive from curiosity about what makes your mountain easy and appealing to climb.

If you want more people to start climbing your mountain and make it all the way to the top, think like your prospects and make each step immediately worthwhile so they’ll want to take the next one.

Otherwise, they’ll surely take a hike.

That line, from Mahan Khalsa’s most excellent book on consultative selling, Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play, is one of my business (and life) mottos.

Here’s a story

In 1991, I was flirting with a macrobiotic lifestyle. I was attracted to the strictness of the diet, the sense of fixed rules, and the “magic” of the rituals that promised cures from all known diseases and joyful longevity.

I read a bunch of books and cookbooks, but so many of the ingredients were unknown to me (umeboshi paste, burdock root, daikon radish) that I found myself tied in knots. There was just too much to take in, and I found myself looking up again and again little things like, “When rinsing brown rice, should I stir the water clockwise or counter-clockwise.”

So I invited a friend, Nancy, who happened to be a macrobiotic chef, to come over and give me a lesson in simple macrobiotic fundamentals.

What I learned

The first dish we prepared together was steamed brown rice. Nancy started by pouring rice into a pot, then filling it halfway with water and using her hand to rinse and wash the rice. She was silent as she did this, focusing on the water, the rice, and the pot.

I interrupted her, “I can never remember which way to stir the rice. Clockwise or counter-clockwise?”

She stopped stirring, looked up at me, and smiled. “It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that you stir with the intent to clean the rice.”

Have the intention to clean the rice

I thought about that story this morning, when I received an article about using copywriting “power words.”

It was a fine article, featuring 20 words that can help boost website conversion. Words like “you” and “can” and “get” and “love” and “results.”

Definitely helpful stuff for anyone who wants to improve the performance of their website.

But technique, no matter how powerful, isn’t enough, and isn’t fundamental to making sales.

I would argue that the more important element of your sales copy is your intent.

Not your intent to make the sale, but your intent to serve your prospect. If you truly believe that you have a product or service that can help them, and that you would be failing them not to bring it to their consciousness in a vivid and powerful way, then your copy will be effective.

At that point, implementing copywriting techniques designed to facilitate trust and connection and desire all make sense.

But without the intent, the words fall flat. They become lifeless technique, and your website looks and sounds like thousands of others whose owners have read the same copywriting memos and listened to the same online marketing gurus.

Cars and bridges

I once took a storytelling workshop with Amina Shah, then-chair of the London College of Storytellers, and author of several books of folk tales. Most of the participants were struggling to memorize their stories, until Shah explained that memorization isn’t necessary.

“Do you have to memorize stories that happened to you? Of course not – you just tell them.

“If you want to be a good storyteller, then every story you tell must have happened, and you must have been there to see it. If you can see it in your mind, you can tell it in an engaging way to others.

“Don’t worry about the words. The words are just a bridge between your head and your audience. The meaning of the story – that’s the cars traveling across the bridge. The bridge must be sturdy, but without the cars – the essence of the story – nothing gets transferred, and no one is moved.”

Copywriting

So by all means learn to be a skilled bridge builder. Practice writing words, sentences, paragraphs and articles that cohere, that move, that convert. Spend time on the words, for they are a necessary bridge.

But never forget that the words are there just to convey your intent.

A heart full of love will always find the right words.

This morning I was browsing the Thompson and Morgan English seeds catalog. I'm not much of a seed guy generally. In my experience, seeds require a lot of work and care, involve getting my hands dirty on a regular basis, and may or may not mature into anything I want around my house.

Far too much like childrearing for my taste.

Yet every year I get seduced by the seed catalogs. 

Burpee, Thompson & Morgan, Seeds of Change; once I start looking at the photos and reading the descriptions of tall, hardy, easy-to-grow-anywhere, beautiful and delicious plants that can be mine for the price of a pint of Windhoek Lager, I forget about all the effort and discomfort.

I can visualize the rhubarb chard waving cheerfully from the raised bed in the back, tantalizing me with its "rich ruby-red leaf stalks and dark greeny purple foliage.

I can almost taste the California White Garlic, so "delicious and full-flavored," so "easy to grow and quite productive.

And I already marvel at the beauty of the Somniferum Lilac Poppy, with its "huge, 3-4in fully double flower heads stand proudly above glaucous foliage followed by large, attractive seed heads." I see exactly where they will grow, because Thompson & Morgan tell me: "Best sown in large drifts as an easy-to-grow border filler that ads height and interest to the garden.

Oh good Mssrs Thompson & Morgan, have you no shame?

Do you not know how your voluptuous prose and lush photography overwhelms my will-power?

Do you not realize that your appeal to my senses leaves me senseless?

Of course you do.

And if you can sell seeds to me, consummate man of leisure and technology, then we all need to pay attention to your marketing methods.

Marketing Secrets of the Seed Pushers

1. Focus on results, not process

Nowhere in the seed catalogs can I find a picture or description of a 45-year-old man kneeling on the damp earth, pulling up morning glory vines and calepina grass, both of which seem much more admirably suited for North Carolina soil than the delicate and shy plants I have pigheadedly stuck in the ground.

Neither are there photos of phlox felled by frost, chrysanthemum crunched by caterpillars, or heliotrope hacked by hail.

Instead, all I see are beautiful photos and evocative descriptions of the Happy Ending, the hardy and beautiful/delicious plant that I grew from that teeny weeny seed, and which now delights me and my friends, family and neighbors (especially the neighbors, whose gardens cannot possibly compare with mine!).

Take a look at your website – how much is about the desired results, and how much is about you and the details of your delivery mechanism?

Are you painting a picture that your prospect is drawn to naturally, on their own steam of desire, or are you trying to push and nudge and cajole and wheedle them into a sale despite their lukewarm desire?

2. Appeal to the senses

The photos of the plants are of course beautiful. But the seed catalog writers are synesthetes (I had to look it up too the first time, it means that if one sensory pathway is stimulated, then others are stimulated at the same time – like imagining numbers as having colors and musical instrument tones as possessing odors). How else can you explain the prose that compares colors to tastes, and smells to sounds, and tastes to physical sensations?

Phlox Creme Brulee is described as a "mouthwatering medley of colours" (when will those British learn how to spell "colors," I wonder ;). 

Mesembryanthemum, we read, "creates a glowing display of gorgeous apricot, frilled blooms." A calendula hybrid is named "Sherbet Fizz." The Blueray Blueberry bush becomes a "blaze of crimson" in the fall, according to Burpee. The Ruby Watermelon "bowled us over with its super sweet and juicy, perfectly crisp and firm ruby Red flesh," Burpee gushes.

OK, so maybe your products don't taste or smell or look spectacular. But that's no reason to skimp on the poetry. Can you appeal to multiple senses in your writing? Our five senses are windows to our souls. We take in the world through sight and smell and sound and taste and touch. Give us something our senses can grab hold of, more than words on a page.

3. Show proof

The seed companies have it easy here. Each photo of a bushel of luscious red berries or multi-colored (see, British people?) dazzle of petals states outright, "This can be done. This is not theory or conjecture or wishful thinking. These suckers grow, and they look just like we say they do."

You may have to work harder to show proof that your products and services give the results you promise. Case studies, demonstrations, testimonials, endorsements, media citations – they all give your prospect some confidence that they're not the guinea pig here. This thing is tested and it works. There's no reason it won't work for you too.

Someday I'll wise up and just plant the seed catalogs. Until then, here's to another summer of hope, sweat, and beans.

The Sad Story (and Happy Ending) of Traffic Surge

Traffic Surge 2.0 launches next week for real. This is the pre-launch. (You can tell because I'm not trying very hard to sell it to you. That's for next week.)

I've taught Traffic Surge live three times, to quite good reviews. I figured that I could rest on my laurels and just take the webinars, transcripts, videos, handouts, and all that jazz, and just sell it as a home-study course. You could go through the course while I live the Internet lifestyle on a beach in South Africa.

But then reality intervened. Turns out that 90% of Old Traffic Surge is no longer accurate, due to Google's annoying habit of changing everything it can, whether anyone wants them to or not.

If I had just tried to sell Old Traffic Surge as homestudy, you would have been annoyed, frustrated, and half-nelsoned as you tried to apply the principles. 

Which would have been fine with me, of course, except for that nasty business with all the refunds. 

So I had to scramble to save Traffic Surge.

I've designed a hybrid course – part home study, part live course. With the best bits of each format, and none of the disadvantages.

Part Home Study

It's home study, in that you read and watch and do at your own pace. Unlike home study courses that are just sloppy transcriptions of webinars (which I was fully planning to do, you understand, until I realized that the webinars had become outdated rubbish), Traffic Surge 2.0 includes well-written, well-documented, and graphically pleasing modules with lots of screen shots so you know what I'm talking about.

The How-To videos are no longer 95-minute long webinar recordings, with half the time spent on nonsense like "Where's the link for today's class?" and "What's the weather like in Seattle today?" (rainy)

Now, the videos are crisp and clear and short, and consist of me showing you, step by step, how to do the things I describe in the written manual.

Part Live Course

Traffic Surge 2.0 also consists of a support site, including a Q&A forum, a place for students to upload your homework for critique, and place for late-breaking news on Google changes and updates. It's a combination of study hall, diner, and library.

We also hold one live Implementation Call each month, so you can jump in and have that live class experience, and also the accountability that comes from having real humans and real deadlines looming in your face (in a nice way). 

And to make it as convenient as possible, the Implementation Call consists of a matinee at 1pm Eastern Time US and an evening show at 8pm Eastern Time US. So whether you work at home and prefer to call in during lunch hour, or you want to catch an hour of great content after your day job, there's a call to suit your preference.

And let's be honest, there's a recession going on, regardless of what the economists say. So not only is Traffic Surge 2.0 not more expensive than previous versions, it's actually much more affordable. 

I've added a 12-payment plan, so you can get started on your road to online marketing mastery for just $87 a month.

To read more, and perhaps take advantage of the pre-launch launch, go here: 

http://askhowie.com/trafficsurge

To Life,
Howie

PS Do you wanna hear a beautiful song about New Orleans, love, and vegetables? A song that rhymes "okra" with "enough to choke ya"? A song in which I play the fiddle?

If so, click the link below for a recording of "No Love Today," written by Chris Smither, and performed by the Roosevelt String Band:

http://howiesongs.posterous.com/no-love-today

Imagine a game in which you tap out the rhythm of a well known song: say, “Happy Birthday to You” or “The Star Spangled Banner.” Your partner’s job is to listen to your tapping and name the song.

What are the chances that they can figure it out just from your tapping, without melody or words?

In a 1990 experiment, tappers were asked, after tapping a song, the odds that their listener could correctly identify the song. The average prediction was 50%.

In fact, only 3 out of 120 listeners correctly identified the song. That’s 2.5% or 20 times worse than the tappers predicted.

Doh!

The Curse of Knowledge

Chip Heath and Dan Heath cite this experiment in their book Made to Stick as an example of the Curse of Knowledge, which they identify as the main culprit when we create messages that don’t stick in the minds of our audience.

The Curse of Knowledge, in the tapping experiment, meant that the tappers couldn’t NOT hear the melody of the song they were tapping, so they couldn’t imagine what it was like not to have that melody in your head.

The curse of knowledge in your business means that you’ve lost sight of what’s in your prospect’s head.

You want to focus on nuance, detail, process, abstraction, pattern, and the distinctions you’ve made over years of experience.

Even though your prospect doesn’t care about any of that. Partly because they don’t know enough to get it. And partly because you haven’t told them why they should care.

Find the Honking Obvious Thing

The answer to “Why should I care?” is always a simple, obvious idea. What I call a Honking Obvious Thing (HOT).

Your job as a marketer – before you write a single ad, before you bid on a single keywords, before you create a web page – is to find the HOT for your business.

When you find it, everything else becomes easy:

Your ads stand out on the Google search results page.

Your visitors understand what you can do for them within seconds of arriving on your site.

Your business decisions make themselves as they pass through the HOT filter: “Does this support our HOT or not?”

On most sites, the HOT is buried somewhere, veiled by the jargon and the features and the white papers. Suppressed by the Complex Overly Long Details (COLD).

What School Superintendents Really Care About

Recently, I consulted with someone who markets educational technology that can improve the learning environment in a classroom. The website went into great depth about the problem, about distractible students, about the pricing and technical features of the technology. The reasoning: the more the visitor knows about the problem and the product, the more motivated they’ll be to buy.

Lots of information is good; don’t get me wrong. But that information can either be a daunting fire hose of facts and opinions, or relevant details that all reinforce the HOT.

To find the HOT in this case, let’s look at the main decision maker: the school superintendent. The superintendent is supposed to understand its educational value and spend the district’s meager resources on technology, instead of repairing the piano in the band room or not laying off a learning specialist or sending the biology teacher to Costa Rica for a summer enrichment program.

The website was full of facts. Kids learn better. Teachers have more control. It’s state of the art. And so on.

But buried on a third-tier page – meaning it took two clicks to get there from the home page – I found a case study. It said, an elementary school in Australia used this technology and their test scores went up 30% in 6 months.

Now that’s HOT.

And even better, the study was case-control, which means that another similar school didn’t use the technology and their test scores remained unchanged. And even better yet, the authors of the study were independent researchers unaffiliated with the technology company.

Now that’s really HOT: University of X discovers a simple technology that automatically raises elementary school tests scores by 30% – practically overnight.

I finally spluttered, “Why isn’t that the headline on the home page? Why isn’t that the headline of the Google ad? Why isn’t that the main theme of the whole marketing campaign?”

What makes it HOT?

In the US, test scores are the main way we evaluate schools. Schools with good test scores get more funding. Property values rise because people want to live in communities with good schools. More tax dollars flow to these schools.  The No Child Left Behind law makes your life very unpleasant if you are the superintendent of a failing school system. You could even be taken over by the Federal education department if you can’t boost your students’ scores on standardized tests.

So when you highlight that benefit, you provide an instant answer to the question, “Why should I spend my money on this as opposed to all the other pressing needs?”

“The technology that increases test scores 30% in six months” is the answer to a superintendent’s dreams. Unlike curricula, which have to implemented by overworked and underpaid teachers, and unlike soft purchases whose effects can’t be tied directly to test score improvement, this technology is the silver bullet.

Get what you want most – higher test scores – just by installing our system and flipping the On switch.

Now you present all the ways the technology leads to higher test scores.

Now you present proof.

Now you share the technical specifications.

Now you talk about price.

Now you offer a call to action.

Communicating the HOT is like humming Happy Birthday to You before you tap.

Once your prospect knows the same tune as you, you’re ready to have a party.

As Buster Poindexter sang, “Hot Hot Hot.”

(Tapping yet? ;)

About the Author (and What He’s Giving Away This Week)

Howie Jacobson, PhD, is the author of Google AdWords For Dummies. He is  offering an interactive home-study course, Traffic Surge, for folks who need more traffic to their sites, or who haven’t found their online market yet.

In Traffic Surge, you learn how to use free tools for quick and dirty online research (including the crucial question of whether a market is worth entering in the first place!), and how to apply that research to send qualified traffic to your site.

Click play below to watch the first class for free:

Howie hopes that you find it so valuable, you sign up for the whole course (launches in early October 2010).

This week, David Pogue wrote an article in the New York Times about OpenDNS.com, a company I had never heard of before.

He began, "I’m about to make your life better. No need to thank me."

Then, following a brief description of the DNS system (the one that turns numerical IP addresses like 74.125.53.100 into www.google.com so you and I can easily navigate to websites), Pogue explained the key benefits of OpenDNS:

1. Surf the web faster
2. Get to websites that are unavailable to everyone else due to crashes of the DNS system
3. Correct typos (like askhowie.cmo) automatically
4. Protection against phishing sites that try to steal your sensitive data by spoofing real sites like PayPal and eBay
5. Shortcuts, so you can just type ahblog in your browser's address bar instead of askhowie.com/blog
6. Parental controls such as site blocking
7. Totally free for individual users

Sounds great, huh? So I surfed over to OpenDNS to download or setup whatever it is and give it a try (I trust Pogue).

Here's what I found:

What on earth are they talking about? 

Premium DNS?

Integrated security?

What does that mean, who is it for, and why should I care?

The Curse of Knowledge

According to Pogue, OpenDNS is perfect for me, and you. Yet the folks at OpenDNS either strongly disagree, or else think that you and I already know enough to see the obvious sense in a bunch of complicated and intimidating router reconfigurations.

If we asked OpenDNS to think about it, of course they would realize that their home page is perfectly inscrutable to their ideal consumer end-user. But nobody has asked them to think about it.

They suffer from the Curse of Knowledge – the inability to recall what it was like NOT to know what you know.

Pogue, on the other hand, writes to his readers. He knows who they are. He knows what they care about. And he knows how to explain complicated topics in accessible ways. 

So the best OpenDNS can do is put a link to Pogue's article on their home page. "We can't explain what we do, but here's a guy who can."

Get Your Pogue On

For kicks, send a few ideal customers to your home page, or your landing page, or whatever page is most important to you. Then ask them three questions:

1. What's the big benefit of doing business with me?
2. How am I different from everyone else offering the same or similar benefit?
3. What makes you believe the claims I make?

If they get all tongue-tied and vague, you need to channel the Pogue. Or hire someone who can. (I'm available, for a price ;)

Start with Your Customer

The way to Pogue-ify your writing is to start with your ideal customer, not your product or service or delivery method. 

The most effective way I know to do this is the Checkmate Method, which you can experience for free here (email required).

However you do, though, remember that you know too much about the features, and not enough about how your customers experience the benefits. Writing effective copy is an exercise in recapturing innocence.

So your homework is to imagine Pogue were going to write about your business, regardless of your industry. You could be a travel agent, an author, a broker, an office supply dealer; doesn't matter. You provide something that makes someone's life better, and you have a competitive advantage. (If not, stop reading and get yourself a competitive advantage.)

How would Pogue simplify and highlight the benefits of what you do so someone would have to be a fool not to give you a try?

Need guidance on writing clear and powerful benefit-laden copy? Check out the 3-part Landing Page Clinic. 10 more days at the crazy-low price of $115.87.

Most web sites fail to convey the “big idea” of a company. Instead, they delve into details, processes, features, pseudo-benefits, and all sorts of “supporting cast” rather than have a big star of a concept.

Your job, if you have a web site, is to focus the first-time visitor on the HOT – the Honking Obvious Thing that clearly and instantly signals why they should pay attention to you.

Here’s an example that I’m about to gush over: my web hosting provider, LiquidWeb.com.

First, their home page:

Now, this page can certainly be improved – most notable, the headline “Step Inside” and the blah blah description, “LW is a leading provider or Fully Managed Web Hosting.” I mean, have you ever heard someone describe their business as a “trailing provider”?

The HOT: Heroic Support

What gets my attention is the cartoon superhero with a toll-free number on his shirt. And the tag line “Heroic Support.”

The claim is supported by a Heroic Support button below, touting “24x7x365 access to level 3 engineers within seconds. And by the Excellent Service button, laying out the guarantee of 100% uptime and 30 minute response time.

I immediately get the HOT here: Heroic Support. We will respond to you within 30 minutes, no matter when you contact us. And you can call us toll-free.

Everything about the company orients around Heroic Support. The wholly owned data centers with Liquid Web engineers on-site. The way employees view themselves and how they act.

The HOT in action: Not just about marketing

Heroic Support is what Dan and Chip Heath call a “generative metaphor.” By casting their support staff as superheros, they’re generating a set of guidelines for the staff to follow. In any situation, a support technician or engineer can figure out what to do by asking, “Am I providing Heroic Support?”

So this morning, I screwed up my entire site while trying to create a simple redirect to my Facebook Fan page. askHowie.com went away completely, replaced by a nasty 500 Internal Server Error.

Since it was 5am EDT (I just returned from Germany and I’m still jetlagged), I couldn’t exactly get Steve Goyette on the line and beg him to fix what I’d broken.

So I opened a support ticket at 5:23am. By 5:36am the site was back up, and I had received a detailed description of the problem and how it had been solved:

Here’s a company that walks their talk!

I don’t know anything about the management and internal structure of Liquid Web, but observing from the outside as a thrilled and amazed customer, I see the power of their HOT. Not only to get me to become a customer in the first place. But also to guide their own culture of service, so the words don’t just become an empty marketing slogan. And to make me, their customer, appreciate the value of their service even when nothing goes wrong.

So the next thing I did was sign up for Liquid Web’s affiliate program, and then write this post.

If you aren’t thrilled with the support and responsiveness you get from your web host, and your business will suffer if your site is down for hours at a time, then I heartily recommend you give a shout to Liquid Web.

If you want to send a few affiliate bucks my way, use this link: http://askhowie.com/liquidweb.

And if not: www.liquidweb.com.

Your Homework

Here’s the most important thing you can do for your own business: ask a few acquaintances who aren’t familiar with your site to look at it and find the HOT – the Honking Obvious Thing that explains what you do, how you’re different, and why prospects should care.

I discovered the McGurk Effect the other day.

Actually, my friend Sammy told me about it, and I looked it up on youtube, which is almost the same thing.

The McGurk Effect: if you listen to a recording of someone repeating the sound "Bah Bah Bah Bah" while watching a synchronized video of them mouthing the sound "Gah Gah Gah Gah", you will actually hear the sound "Dah Dah Dah Dah."

If you want to confirm for yourself the reality of the McGurk Effect, search for it on youtube.

Now, I’m anticipating three possible reactions to this summary of scientific progress:

1. "That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever encountered. Where can I learn more?"

2. "Big deal."

3. "Why are you wasting my time on this nonsense?"

Give me a minute, OK? There’s a lesson in here somewhere. Let me see…

When you create marketing campaigns, you are communicating based on a set of assumptions about your market:

• What language they speak.
• What their desires are.
• How much they can afford to pay.
• How badly they want their itch scratched.
• What they already know about your product or company.
• What they know about other potential solutions to their problems.
• And so on…

My question is, how many of these assumptions are you consciously considering, and how many are based on observable evidence as opposed to pre-judgment?

You see, if you write about your product as if your prospect already knows what it does, you may be a self-inflicted victim of a Marketing McGurk. You’re saying, "Here’s a big discount on my Magrouple-OpMart-WangChickle," and your prospect is hearing, "Dah Dah Dah."

Because your message is incongruent in context, just as the lips forming one sound and making another are incongruent in their context.

If you assume your prospect connects your solution with their problem, you may be McGurking yourself as well. You can treat sinus problems with chiropractic? Really? Acupuncture can help with eczema? The problems you can solve may be old hat to you, but your prospects need education and explanation and repetition to make the connections you take for granted.

Ken McCarthy understands the power of avoiding Marketing McGurkisms. He just announced the faculty and program of the 2008 System Seminar (Yes, I’m one of the faculty members, which entitles me to attend a pizza party on Sunday, June 1, not to brag but there you have it :)

And rather than assume that you would recognize the names and expertise of the presenters (most are not "gurus", but simply hard-working and clever practitioners and educators, so you probably won’t recognize them), Ken took the entire System 2008 program and made it available right now.

http://program.thesystemseminar.org

So if you’re not familiar with Nancy Andrews, Richard Mouser, Lon Naylor, or any of the other 22 faculty members; if you don’t know that Nancy Andrews has cracked the SEO code, that Richard Mouser used simple testing tactics to turn his money-losing online store into a huge success, that Lon Naylor is the expert in helping folks
use screen capture video tutorials to grow their businesses – you will after browsing the program guide.

Ken knows that by stepping out of the way of the product, and letting it sell itself, without hype or fancy marketing footwork, he’s allowing his prospects to gather information in their own way, to make an informed decision about whether System 2008 is appropriate for them.

If you’ve read AdWords For Dummies, you know that I credit Ken with being my Internet marketing mentor, as well as my first copywriting teacher. The most important thing he taught me is this:

Don’t try to be a copywriter. Just explain what you’ve got and why anyone should care – and then just get out of the way.

In other words, don’t mess around with mystical, manipulative tactics that are supposed to magically vacuum money out of your prospects’ wallets while they grin stupidly in a hypnotic trance.

Just talk to people. Be interesting. Be respectful of their time. Share value. Make your pitch. And shut up.

You can download the System 2008 program here:

http://program.thesystemseminar.org

If the program convinces you to join me in Chicago on May 30-June 1, I’d be delighted to connect with you – just give me a shout. If you read through the program and decide that it’s not for you, then that’s the right outcome.

No McGurks here – either it’s the thing to do, or it isn’t. Either way, you’ll broaden your perspective on Internet marketing tactics and strategies simply by browsing the program.