| articles here on
MarketingViews.com |
- Smashing the Myth of the
Press Release - Publicity "gurus" are springing up all over
the Internet touting the press release as the answer to all marketing ills. Just
knock out a release, mass e-mail it to journalists, sit back and wait for Oprah
to call. It's a cruel joke. Here's the reality. This classic article
(published in 2002) was written by Bill Stoller Founder,
PublicityInsider.com.
- Marketing Nomenclature,
and the Naming of Names - In business a corporate name is normally a
single word. 2 word names are problematic, 3 words are more complicated. 4
words? - why not kill the business first? - This classic article (published in
2003) was written by corporate naming guru Naseem
Javed. Companies are still making the same mistakes discussed in the
article today.
- Customers
Search Differently - customers (who want to find suppliers and buy
stuff) search differently to marketers (who want to promote their companies and
sell stuff). That's why most search marketing misses the best targets.
- What's a
Good Click Rate for a Banner Ad? - what you learn from testing banner
ads - often results in you having to change the way you talk about your company
in other places... your web site, your PR. Leaving this important task in the
hands of graphics designers is lunacy. ...Later:- in 2010 - I updated this
popular article to compare how banners compare to Google ads.
- Think of Web Ads
as Signposts - they can lead the right people to your destination. But
give them a credible message so that the brain follows the mouse click for
sound business reasons. Ideally the ad should also signal to the wrong type of
customer they can filter themselves out at this point and not waste their
time and yours by following this path.
- Rethinking the
Banner Ad - remember it's a guaranteed communication and doesn't have
to be an ad. There are 2 sets of viewers who see you banner ad, and you should
cater for both. The most important are the 94% to 99.5% who are
going to see the banner, but not click on it (at that moment in time). What
impression are they left with after seeing the banner?
- Press Release
Errors I see every day - as an editor - I have to disregard zillions
of press releases, which vendors have paid good money to their agencies to
write and distribute. Here's why.
- Market research & storage
analysts - This directory includes every market research company
cited by a storage company on StorageSearch.com. Some are better than others. I
classify them privately into Storage Clairvoyants (predict the future),
Terabyte Talliers (tell you what's just happened) and SoothSayers (make your
press release sound more credible)...
- Time to
Rewrite the Business Books? - 2009 didn't turn out so bad after all -
but as the year started - this article wryly commented on the fact that most IT
marketing books have been written assuming a backdrop of high double digit
growth.
- The Golden Keys of
E-Commerce - Domain names are no longer small issues to be handled by the
booming logo-centric-slogan-happy-agencies or web-tech-teams.
- The Mysteries and
Future of Websites - Either your customers can find you easily or you're
simply lost. No amount of money can create a bounce to your expensive websites
or your big budget branding in these times, except your alpha-structure of your
URLs.
- Venture Capital Funds in
Storage - If you're starting a new storage company where can you go to get
money? - I was asked that question so many times that in 2000 I started a list
of which VCs were giving how much to whom. It lists the failures too. It's
important to have a good story for your prospective VC if your business idea
sounds similar to an earlier one that tanked.
- 7 laws of direct marketing
- The late Isaac Asimov managed to write volumes of entertaining stories which
revolved around his three fundamental laws of robotics... The stories showed
that complex behaviour can result from apparently simple origins.
- Aspects of Web
Advertising - This classic article from 2000 outlines the theoretical
framework behind the major types of online ads.
- After SSDs...
What Next? - Predicting the storage market's next obsession... looks beyond
the next 3 years of hoopla in the
SSD market and forecasts
what will be the next "big thing" in storage after that.
- The harder-working eshot
- 13 guidelines to improve the odds of your email marketing messages getting
through. Classic article from an expert in enterprise server marketing.
- PR Strategies:
Remember, the web has no memory! - Can you remember what your home page
looked like back in 1996? Maybe you think that's not important right now. Like
global warming, you suspect there may be some problems accumulating somewhere
because of all this web stuff, but it's only when your house gets flooded, you
really start to believe in it.
- The 4 Seasons of Publicity
- Building an All-Year Publicity Machine - In this age of immediacy (only a
few seconds separate a Matt Drudge or a CNN from writing a story and putting it
before millions), it's easy to forget that, for many print publications and TV
shows, it can be weeks -- and sometimes months -- before a completed story sees
the light of day.
- Poor
Market Research by IT Vendors Means They Go Bust Faster - I often get a
sense of deja vu when seeing press releases which claim that a company is the
first to ship a certain type of technology or product. A quick bit of research
in the news archives reveals that another company did exactly the same thing
maybe 6 to 10 months before
- Is Your Company
Below the Visibility Horizon? - My experience as a web directory publisher,
suggest that most of the companies below the visibility threshold eventually
join our acquired, dead & merged companies list. It's a very good indicator
of a company whose marketing is in deep trouble, although sometimes the
marketers in those companies (who are not externally focused enough) are the
last to know.
- Where B2B IT Web
Advertising Works Best, and Why - I often talk to B2B computer advertisers
who after disappointment with search-engine advertising ask me why advertising
in a portal should be any better? They get hits, from their key word
advertising but not much business.
- Classic Web Marketing
Resources - I first published this list in the late 1990's, and from time to
time it gets a small update. That's why I've renamed it "Classic" Web
Marketing Resources.
- Writing an Electronic
Communications Policy - An electronics communications policy acts as a
guideline for employees in the use of a company's electronics communications
system. As such it provides an important safeguard for companies against
liability due to misuse and abuse of electronic communications resources by its
employees. A good electronic communications policy should also provide
guidelines for dealing with employees who abuse the policy.
- Why Batching Up
Press Releases is a Bad Idea for the Web - When it comes to delivering
physical goods, it's a good idea to batch up several items and send them in one
package. It saves time and money. However when it comes to issuing press
releases, this is almost always a bad idea.
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| Other web
marketing sites and articles I like. |
- Useit.com/alertbox -
is one of the few web marketing resources which has survived intact from 1995.
Its theme is web page usability. My favorite article here is -
Fighting Linkrot
- which is just as relevant today as it was in 1998 when it first
appeared.
- Does Telling Someone
to "Click Here" Work? - this article by Brian Clark,
on his site Copyblogger.com may
surprise you. I've been advising banner designers to add this text to their
images since I started selling banner ads in 1998. This article discusses
alt-text - which has pretty much the same goal.
- Getting
the Message - Email, Blogging, Linked-In etc. It seems that once a
popular messaging channel becomes too clogged with extraneous messages, a new
message channel emerges.
- Search
Engine Optimization - Google's own SEO article includes an
amusing but serious warning. Apparently Google themselves receive spam emails
offering to improve their search rank and saying - "you are not listed in
major search engines and directories".
- Knol
versus Wikipedia - Fair Fight or No Contest? - I like this article
because it appeals to my sense of balance.
Wikipedia irritates writers like me by
remixing and regurgitating articles from original sources - and producing
ersatz blends which sometimes score higher with Google searches than the
originals. Now Google is annoying Wikipedia by doing something similar -with
articles called knols which often cite
their main research source as being - Wikipedia.
- Click
Fraud Gets Smarter - this BusinessWeek article (published 2006) looks
into some of the systemic ways that cyber crooks cream off advertising dollars
you place with leading search-engines. A proportion of their ads run on 3rd
party sites. But some of those sites are simply set up to skim off revenue with
computer generated clicks.
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this...
................white space
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if I like your suggestions enough to add them to this list
Whatever
happened to add url?
That's a web marketing vs morality tale
still waiting to be written. Those pretty little
add url links were how the web
got started - before the spammers poisoned the magic potion.
Returning
to today's subject:- "suggested links for Marketing Views"
For
electronic marketers who aren't scared of
mice,
goblins or pirates...
email:-
Zsolt@StorageSearch.com
Please include a few lines about why
you think it's such a good article or resource for our readers.
Emails
from anonymous domains may be filtered out by my spam filter.
PS - You
can - and should - recommend your own article or site. If it's really
that good - I want to know about it.
Don't be too offended if -
however good it may be - it doesn't appear here. It won't if - I don't
think it's original, focused and relevant.
I'm good at coming up
with lists like this - Press
Release Errors I see every day.
Maybe it's because I've been in the
directory publishing business for 19 years.
It's hard to break the
habit.
Thanks for spending the time to read this.
And
helping to make it better.
You already have.
Because - even
if you haven't got a suggestion right now...
(or if it wouldn't be
something I would want to read)
Your pageview has been tallied.
And
that reminds me...
I must spend more than 55 minutes each year
thinking about this web site. |
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reminder for "to
do" list
must do something to help to shrink that annoying
white space!... | |
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there's still some of it here
..................... and here too
this is a serious marketing problem
..................... which needs to be
fixed!
If you got this far please take a look at the article -
Scrolling
and Attention - published March 22, 2010 by usability guru Jakob
Nielsen. I'm glad he came to his "new" conclusion as I've been
forcing millions of readers to scroll through long articles vertically rather
than click through disjointed fragments for many years. The reason that
publishers split articles into annoying pages (sometimes upto as many as 20) is
to artificially inflate their pageviews and banner ad capacity. Of
course the reader's attention span and budget size aren't inflated - so what
you get as an advertiser is pathetically low click rates instead. | |
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