What is AIDA when it comes to writing content for your dirty blue widgets website. AIDA is an old copywriting formula used for many years in newspapers, magazines and other media to advertise and sell products to people. It is a formula that is easily adaptable to website content today.
The A in the formula stands for attention. The first thing you need to do is capture the attention of your potential customer. This is usually done by an eye-catching headline or an attention grabbing image that a person first sees on any of your webpages. Note that I said any of your web pages. If you have a large number of web pages indexed by the search engines, people can actually enter your website on any one of those pages. Will you be able to catch their attention no matter where they enter your site? If you don't, they may leave as quickly as they entered your web site and you may have lost a potential customer.
The I in the formula stands for interest. Once you have caught the attention of your visitor, you now need to capture and create their interest. With a product, here is where you can present the features and what it can do. You may even want to discuss the problems people may have like acne and how it creates some real heartache for the teenager who is visiting your site. There are so many things that are common to people everywhere such as avoiding embarrassment, avoiding pain, avoiding housework, avoiding loneliness, having a happy marriage, raising healthy children, making money, reducing weight, growing hair or any number of things you can think of. Use these to hold the attention and stir the interest of your reader.
The D in the formula stands for desire. While someone may have an interest in your dirty blue widgets, do they desire them? Do they desire them enough to part with their hard earned cash? Here is where you have to explain the benefits that the customer gains from buying your product. Will it save the money? Will it make them popular? Will it make their family safer? Will it clear up their acne before next week's prom ? It has to be something very specific as to how the benefits are vital to your reader and that they truly need your product.
The last A in the formula stands for action. Here is where you get them to do what you want them to do, what you need them to do. Do you want them to subscribe to your newsletter? Do you want them to send you their e-mail address for free information? Do you want them to take out the credit card and buy something? If you do, then you need to ASK them to do it. Don't just think they'll figure it out for themselves or do it automatically. It never hurts to simply ASK someone to do something. Of course, you have to have the right product and the right price but you'll never really know for sure until you actually ask them to part with that hard-earned cash!
Using the AIDA formula has worked for many, many years for advertising executives in the brick-and-mortar world. You can easily adapt this formula to work in the on line world of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Use the formula to capture the attention of your website visitors, to stimulate their interest, to work up their desire and to finally take action. In fact, if I've done my job, by now you should be imagining how you can use this formula to everything from increasing the size of your e-mail list to ramping up your product sales. Learn more about dirty blue widgets and search engine marketing basics using dirty blue widgets keyword term
Showing posts with label Marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marketing. Show all posts
Search Engine Optimization: Black Hat versus White Hat
White Hat and Black Hat are two approaches used in SEO. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing.
An Search Engine Optimization technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.
Generally, White hat SEO creates content for real users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical.
Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. It tries to trick the Search Engine. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.
Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms.
One infamous example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of black hat SEO. Both companies quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google's list. If you want your business to grow like wildfire, contact Wildfire Marketing Group today. We offer a full range of marketing services, such as website design, graphic design, search engine optimization and much more.
An Search Engine Optimization technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.
Generally, White hat SEO creates content for real users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical.
Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. It tries to trick the Search Engine. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.
Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms.
One infamous example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of black hat SEO. Both companies quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google's list. If you want your business to grow like wildfire, contact Wildfire Marketing Group today. We offer a full range of marketing services, such as website design, graphic design, search engine optimization and much more.
Labels:
Marketing
Are Your Ads Open Ended or Closed?
Ok, bear with me for a minute. Advertising can often be like a choice between the games Super Mario Bros or Zelda, and I’m referring to the original games for the first Nintendo. Super Mario Bros was a completely linear game where you travelled from point A to point B and you couldn’t do anything but travel to point B. Zelda, on the other hand, was completely open to you.
You could spend hours roaming the world if you wanted to without accomplishing anything. The game was yours to do with as you want, and if you really wanted to you could go to the harder areas at the very beginning.
Now, how does this apply to your commercial printing? Any form of advertising is going to be either open or closed. For example, a postcard advertising a sale is a closed form of advertising. It gives a set message: there is a sale. There isn’t any room for interpretation.
Longer forms of commercial printing such as catalogues are open forms of advertising. You don’t have to read a catalog from beginning to end in order to enjoy it and pick out something to buy. You can flip to the last page first if you want and read through the thing backwards without any trouble.
Catalogues and postcards are two more obvious examples of an open or closed advertisement, but what about the ambiguous ones? Brochures stand as the best example of a style of advertising that can be either open or closed depending on how you choose to make it.
You can make a brochure that follows a continuous string of information. A person needs to read the first page of the brochure in order to understand and enjoy the second page, and so on. Or you can design your brochure so that someone can flip right to the third page and have no problems understanding what’s being said.
Each form is going to have a benefit and weakness to it. The closed brochure gives you the chance to go into more detail about a subject matter, and will probably read more like a booklet than a brochure. Here is a chance to give people a piece of intricate knowledge about your industry to help them make a better purchase.
The open brochure is going to be less focused, perhaps dealing with various different services you offer or deals the customer can get. Because a person can jump to page three each page needs to be self-contained, which means each piece of information you discuss needs to be shorter.
So which form of commercial printing will work best for you? That depends completely on the reason why you’re getting it done. The earlier example of a sale almost needs to be a closed form of advertising because the message is so straightforward there isn’t much room for a person to do anything else.
When you’re trying to give people a lengthier and more detailed look at your industry it becomes up to you to figure out what style will best suit your needs. The closed ad ensures people will get the exact information you want them to, while the open ad gives people the freedom to figure out the message on their own, while risking that they won’t.
The question really boils down to which game did you always enjoy more, or more accurately, what game do you think your customers preferred?
Katie Marcus writes about the commercial printing technologies used by businesses for their marketing and advertising campaigns.
You could spend hours roaming the world if you wanted to without accomplishing anything. The game was yours to do with as you want, and if you really wanted to you could go to the harder areas at the very beginning.
Now, how does this apply to your commercial printing? Any form of advertising is going to be either open or closed. For example, a postcard advertising a sale is a closed form of advertising. It gives a set message: there is a sale. There isn’t any room for interpretation.
Longer forms of commercial printing such as catalogues are open forms of advertising. You don’t have to read a catalog from beginning to end in order to enjoy it and pick out something to buy. You can flip to the last page first if you want and read through the thing backwards without any trouble.
Catalogues and postcards are two more obvious examples of an open or closed advertisement, but what about the ambiguous ones? Brochures stand as the best example of a style of advertising that can be either open or closed depending on how you choose to make it.
You can make a brochure that follows a continuous string of information. A person needs to read the first page of the brochure in order to understand and enjoy the second page, and so on. Or you can design your brochure so that someone can flip right to the third page and have no problems understanding what’s being said.
Each form is going to have a benefit and weakness to it. The closed brochure gives you the chance to go into more detail about a subject matter, and will probably read more like a booklet than a brochure. Here is a chance to give people a piece of intricate knowledge about your industry to help them make a better purchase.
The open brochure is going to be less focused, perhaps dealing with various different services you offer or deals the customer can get. Because a person can jump to page three each page needs to be self-contained, which means each piece of information you discuss needs to be shorter.
So which form of commercial printing will work best for you? That depends completely on the reason why you’re getting it done. The earlier example of a sale almost needs to be a closed form of advertising because the message is so straightforward there isn’t much room for a person to do anything else.
When you’re trying to give people a lengthier and more detailed look at your industry it becomes up to you to figure out what style will best suit your needs. The closed ad ensures people will get the exact information you want them to, while the open ad gives people the freedom to figure out the message on their own, while risking that they won’t.
The question really boils down to which game did you always enjoy more, or more accurately, what game do you think your customers preferred?
Katie Marcus writes about the commercial printing technologies used by businesses for their marketing and advertising campaigns.
Labels:
Marketing
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