AdWords Red for Attention

Today’s AdWords Color Tip: Red for Attention.

Every night when I go to bed, I write a todo list for the following day. I put little things ("Iron and fold the underwear") and big things ("Save the cheerleader, save the world") on the list. I include errands ("Buy more of those things you’re almost out of") and decisions ("Pay Visa bill or move to Siberia"). And the first item on the list is always the same: "Read the list."

You get where I’m going, right? If I don’t read the list, how will I know to read the list? It turns out the most important thing about the list isn’t what’s on it, but that it gets read in the first place.

That’s true of this email as well.

You, wise reader, are reading this email – Relax, I’m not psychic, it’s just a parlor trick – but some other subscriber to my email list is not.

Why? Maybe the subject line didn’t appeal to them. Perhaps they haven’t emptied their inbox since 1997 and can’t bear to log in and see eight years of junk. Maybe they chose to open the boss’s email instead of mine. Whatever.

I could be writing the one secret that will change their life utterly and completely, and it doesn’t matter. Because they aren’t going to read this. Because I couldn’t get their attention.

The primary currency of marketing is attention. No eyes or ears, no sales. And attention is harder and harder to get these days. More stimuli, less time; more hype, less trust; more ADD, less focus.

Speaking of ADD (I used to be a school teacher, so I’ve seen quite a bit of diagnosed Attention Deficits in my day), we’re all ADD online. The medium demands it. How many windows are open on your desktop right now? How long are you willing to wait for a web page to load? Can you imagine calling a movie theater box office to find out the showtimes when you can just type "Movies 27712" into Google and get the complete listings for every local cinema, including reviews and trailers and online ticket sales, within 3 seconds? (I used to veg out so completely during those recordings, that I’d have to listen to the message repeat three or four times to catch the showtimes for the movie I was interested in. Now I get to daydream all I want, and when I come back to earth, the web page with the info I want is still waiting for me.)

The primary task of your ad is to compel attention. As the 11th century Talmudic scholar Rashi might have said were he alive today, "No lookie, no clickie."

Just as stop signs, online error messages, and immediate attention triage tags are red, your ad must wave a red flag in front of your prospect that says, "Stop for a second and consider this."

How do you get their attention? My marketing mentor Ken McCarthy has a very handy three-word response that he strives for in his ads:

"That’s for Me!"

How can you get your prospect to glance at your ad and immediately think, "That’s for me"? By naming them, talking about things that matter to them, and making them hungry for more.

Chapter 6 of AdWords For Dummies includes seven specific headline strategies for grabbing attention. I’m going to reveal three of the strategies here. Want the other four? Then go down to Barnes & Noble, buy your coffee and raisin-nut bar, and turn to page 141. (Or, just buy the book, if that’s not too self-serving a suggestion. http://askhowie.com/afd will take you to the amazon product page.)

Attention Grabbing Strategy #1: Name Them

• Considering a Unicycle
• Mind Maps for Teachers
• Actor’s Disability Insur.

Attention Grabbing Strategy #2: Mirror Their Itch

• Suffering from Gout?
• Rotten-Egg Water Odors?
• Disorganized?

Attention Grabbing Strategy #4: Arouse Curiosity

• Are You Right-Brained?
• Are You a Slacker Mom?
• Copywriting Secret #19

Get the other four attention grabbing headline strategies – and so much more! – in AdWords For Dummies.

How AdWords Could Have Gotten Me a Date in 1978

This one time, in 1978, I tried to get a date for the 8th grade Valentine’s Day Dance at my junior high school. Acting like the marketer I would become, I first selected my target market of girls I was interested in, based mainly on their demonstrated ability to spend twenty minutes in my company without getting grossed out or offended.

Have narrowed my market, I next chose my medium. Face to face was out of the question, as the only way to get one of these girls alone would be to shove her in a janitor’s closet and wait until passing time was over. And obviously I didn’t want gaggles of girls talking about me in school (that’s probably why I wore the paper bag over my head for all those years, come to think of it).

So the medium would be the telephone. One night, about two weeks before the dance, I purloined the corded phone in my parents bedroom, locked myself in my room with a phone book, and prepared to begin my first foray into outbound telemarketing.

Cliffhanger? Keep reading…

Announcing the Official AdWords For Dummies AdWords Checklist

I didn’t feel like doing any real work today, so I created an AdWords For Dummies checklist. it consists of 36 Things You Should Be Doing But Probably Aren’t (we in the consulting profession like to refer to them as "best practices" and we often charge a lot of money to rub your nose in them).

But as I said, I’m a little too tired to do any nose-rubbing today, so you get to have them for free.

The goal of this checklist, as with most free checklists, is to make you feel really stupid and helpless, so you’ll call me to fix everything for you. Well, forget it. I’m tired, remember?

And do you know why I’m tired? Because I spent 8 months writing the damn Dummies book, that’s why.

So if you get inspired, motivated, or otherwise turned on by the checklist, do yourself a favor and buy AdWords For Dummies. It’s not tired. It’s perky, in fact. Ready to party. It’s wearing a green velvet smoking jacket, a jaunty blue fedora, and a faux-ivory tipped faux-ebony cane.

Here’s the AdWords For Dummies Official Checklist, handsomely converted to PDF for your checking-off pleasure.

Update: The Checklist, all updated and shiny for late 2008, is now included as a bonus with the Look Over My Shoulder (LOMS) AdWords Success Videos.

AdWords and Nursing?

Yesterday I visited my local independent bookstore, the Regulator, down on 9th Street in Durham, hoping to see some copies of AdWords For Dummies on the shelves.

I haven’t been to a bookstore since AdWords For Dummies was released, so I was kind of nervous. Luckily, there were two copies in the store, so I didn’t make a scene. And my 11-year-old daughter dragged me away before I could start asking store patrons if they wanted my autograph.

What makes this experience blog-worthy is the location of the book. As you can see in the photo, it’s prominently displayed next to – Your Career in Nursing.

Now, all issues of quality and content aside, which book looks more visually appealing? It’s the nursing book, right? Because you can see the entire front cover. Me, you just get a spine. Two spines. Right next to iWoz, the book by the Apple founder nobody remembers.

Now, in a chain bookstore that sort of placement would never be accidental. The books that show more skin generally pay for the privilege, and for some reason Wiley was not willing to fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars to get special cardboard displays of AdWords For Dummies in every Borders and Barnes & Noble in the English-speaking world. In this case, I suspect the stocking clerk thought the cover was nicer, or maybe figured that since everyone in Durham is involved in health care one way or another ("Durham, City of Medicine"), the nursing book would be a hotter sell.

You get a similar effect on the Google search results page (SERP, we’ll call it except at the dinner table where that kind of language would be rude.) The organic results grab some text off your page. Google decides what to show. Look at a sample organic result on the keyword adwords consultant:

The headline is fine – probably his title tag. But look at the text Google has chosen. Not very compelling. Probably not the first thing Brian wants you to know about him if you’re looking for a consultant. Now look at a typical paid listing:

Much more targeted message, even though it’s considerably shorter. The moral of the story: your AdWords ad is the spine of your book. Your organic ad (if you can get it and keep on SERP page 1) is like a more or less random page of your book. Make sure your spine sells enough to get the searcher to click and pull your ad off the shelf.