Unfortunately, the house is probably fine, but some third thing I hadn’t thought of came up: it was all an elaborate (kind of) scam. Luckily, I’m real smart and sniffed it out within the first sentence, somewhere in the red area:

“Hello ,
Thanks for you response,I am the owner of the property you interested on,a missionary with the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church in West Africa…”

I was sad, even though I knew it was too good to be true, I felt like you do when you fool yourself into believing your Powerball ticket is, “really going to hit this time,” and then, you know.

Anyway, of course the email ended up asking for a bunch of my information, and even better, the sender’s name is apparently, “Am Nice,” so clearly, this is someone with a psychology degree… but I was about to find that beyond that, this evil genius was also well-versed in the dark arts of email marketing. *cue: buh-buh-BUH!*

I did a quick search of the phone number, which, yes, goes somewhere in Pankshin, Africa (that was as far as I felt like researching), where I assume I was to pay my first month’s rent. Google showed me a blog covering this Craigslist scam with a copy of the email they had received, and lo and behold, there were slight variations – this person is A/B testing their emails, I thought… and then I told everyone in the office, then I thought, what a good blog idea… and then, erm, now.

First variant:
My email: The sender’s name is the aforementioned Am Nice. I laughed at first wondering if they really thought that would work, but then I was like, oh, maybe this person had hippie parents, I mean, I went to school with a guy whose last name was Nice. For a moment, I felt bad for Am Nice, the barely literate home renter.

Email B: The signee’s name is Howard Bradshaw. I feel like, already, this one surely has the edge out of the gate.

Second Variant:
My email:
“Hello ,
Thanks for you response,I am the owner of the property you interested on,a missionary with the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church in West Africa.I am presently serving as Camp Director with the United Methodist Church in West Africa, Nigeria.”

Email B:
“Hello , Thanks for you response,I am the owner of the property you interested on,a missionary with the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church International, I am presently serving as Camp Director with the United Methodist Church in West Africa, Nigeria.”

Interesting. Perhaps the “International” would have allayed my fears for a split second longer? I mean, you can’t flat-out say that you’re part of an African church off the top – the “missionary” bit hardly covers it, does it? At this point already I wish I could see this guy’s (or girl’s) analytics.

Third Variant:
My email:
“Note:  We Intend selling the property before my wife reason to it that we should not sell it any longer,that the best way is to rent for future purpose,so if in case you drive by and see a sign board with a number on it,please disregard it,be cos we have ask them to get the sign of our property that we are not selling any longer,that it’s for rent now by us…”

Email B: Wisely, this version left out the whole, “Hey, it might look like the place is for sale, but that’s jokes,” note.

Summary:
I’m willing to bet that this criminal mastermind’s B email is beating the crap out of A, but I’ll likely never know. Maybe after I post this I’ll email good ol’ Am Nice back and see if they’ll let me know how it’s going. Hmmm, I’ll have to look close at Mail Chimp’s Monkey Awards program, I may have a partnership in my future…

*ahem* Also, the moral of this story is that’s it’s smart to A/B test your email marketing campaigns, heck, maybe add a C in there if your list is large enough. Just imagine how sad our buddy would have been had he only used his clearly inferior A up there. Only the largest derelicts looking for rental property would have even attempted to follow through – imagine the headaches in trying to walk someone like that through the process of wiring money to you.

Here, let’s pare this down to its elements: What are you selling? Who are you selling to?

If you were explaining your product to a potential client, what would you say? This shouldn’t be too difficult a question, I imagine you’ve done it more than a few times already – so why not write as you would speak? Just because you’re transferring thoughts to the written word, there’s no reason to think you need to transform yourself into Shakespeare. As you may have learned from Sesame Street, just be yourself – don’t try to be too clever, don’t oversell, just be honest and friendly. Sure, Thesaurus.com might come in handy here and there, but be sure to speak to your customer and don’t bust out the fancy words unless they really and truly fit.

So, what’s your demographic? If you’re selling slopestyle and freeride bikes you’re likely angling for crazy, Red Bull-chugging youngsters; the Rolls Royce Motor Car demo are affluent, slightly older individuals concerned with style and luxury; and both of those are likely a tad to the side of the people actively searching for those “Truck Nutz” things for, you know, their truck. The point is to speak to your customer in text as you would normally with your gob – use your real voice and you may be surprised how well you engage your clientele and how that ultimately transfers towards your sales.

And hey, if it still ends up all being a bit overwhelming, I *ahem* know a guy…

OK, yes, I obviously realize the extreme limitations of your average PPC ad, I don’t expect to be whisked away on some adventure or, what is it movie reviewers say – something, something, roller-coaster thrill-ride? But how difficult is it to at least make your ad slightly different from the competition? Writing PPC ads doesn’t require an English Doctorate, a do-it-yourselfer can get noticed by following a few very simple rules that even some of the pro’s seemingly forget as they cobble together yet another ad about tennis shoes, car tires or Red Vines, the most delicious licorice ever (Tom here in the office has fueled an entirely new addiction for me – THANKS, TOM).

Let’s get this thing rolling then, here’s part one in my, um, some number, series of how to stop being so darned lazy with your PPC ads. Sooo, no particular order, and no, it’s not because I’m lazy… geez:

Check the Competition
I understand you might have a metric crap-ton of keywords attached to a certain ad group, but you should know which are your big-bangers off the top. Simply sling the heavy-hitters into the search engine you’re writing for, hit “search”, and see what ad copy gets served up. What do these ads look like? Which are drawing your eye, if any? Are all the ads essentially the same? Remember, you aren’t trying to camouflage your ad, you want to draw the eye, be unique! Consider what will set yours apart, either with your message, with the inclusion of numbers, or heck, even the shape of your ad.

A week ago I was looking at bikes online with my son and did a search for “giant anthem”, because sometimes I like to pretend I’m rich and can just buy a new bike whenever I want. I just double-checked as I’m writing this and it’s still the same: every PPC ad has the exact same headline… and if you look closely the text doesn’t read properly, leading me to believe these are all dynamic text ads. Making a dynamic text ad is a pain in the rear – I’m sure the people who built these would be thrilled to see this.

What I’m looking at here is a perfect opportunity for a Giant dealer in Kansas City (where I am), even if it’s just some hole-in-the-wall shop, to get some attention and move some of his or her Anthems. Hell, add a word or two to the title and write some copy that actually makes sense and BAM!, you’ll far and away have the best ad of the lot – and you wouldn’t even have to bid anywhere near the top to stick out from the crowd!

Let’s consider you actually have some legit competition that isn’t poorly using dynamic text ads to all look the same, the question remains: from a purely cosmetic standpoint, what will set you apart? Think about it, a searcher isn’t automatically reading every ad at once, something irregular is pulling their attention. In my experience numbers have been strong, whether it’s a price, a percentage, or the easiest (though it does eat up some characters): adding a phone number. Everyone in the SEO game will tell you that putting your keyword in the title and body of the ad is best, and listen, I’m certainly not advising against it, but do a search for “used cars” and see how much of a difference you think those bolded keywords make. If everyone is using the same trick, it’s no longer a trick, is it?

I realize I may have thrown a few people when I mentioned the shape of your ad, and admittedly this one is fairly gimmicky, but hey, you have to draw the eye before you can draw a click, amirite? You can do the ol’ upside-down pyramid, making your title the longest bit and slowly shrinking the next couple lines, or, if you’d like a proper challenge: going the other way with a crazy-short title – just don’t forget that your PPC ad copy has to say something sensible once your potential customer shows up to read it.

And I’ll try to remind you at the end of each of these articles: don’t forget to test your ads! Make multiple ads to see what works. Are your silly pyramids working? How about the numbers? Does it matter where the numbers are in the copy? Keep what’s working and experiment with the losers, and don’t forget, keep an eye on your competitors – your best ad could accidentally get pirated by more than one company and before you know it you’ll be blended back into the sidebar.

OK, stay tuned next week for the, erm, next part of this series I decide should come next – ’til then, happy PPC-ing!

Though keyword density seems to be losing more and more strength in the SEO game, maintaining a solid focus with a specific, core keyword on a page still carries weight, can streamline your keyword hunt, and can make the puzzle-solving process of fitting multiple keywords into copy that much simpler. Since I’m still relatively unable to hit the bike trails here in Kansas City, thanks to our nasty weather, allow me to entertain myself by pretending we’re a bike seller pushing the very winter-friendly Surly Pugsley… a bike I wish I had in the garage at the moment.

As usual, I recommend hitting our free friend: Google’s Keyword Tool. We’ll toss in “surly pugsley” and see what we’re workin’ with.

No big surprise, “surly pugsley” is the winner… well, along with “pugsley surly”. Crap!

What do we do in case of a tie then? How about breaking this stalemate with the help of another free friend: the Wordstream Keyword Tool.

I'm having difficulty believing Kansas City is drawing more searches than the rest of the globe. Ah well...

Wordstream seems to have given us a pretty clear cut answer, so we’ll stick with our Surly Pugsley keyword and go from there.

Well, that solves that.

Now, here’s where we need to pay close attention, you don’t want to begin and end every sentence with your keyword. Your copy needs to read fluidly; if the keyword sticks out to the reader as though an excited child wrote the product summary for his or her favorite toy, then you’ve gone too far. Also, back to the original point of this article: you don’t want to have keywords spread all over the place, and by that I mean do not sacrifice a focus on your main product by watering it down with handlebars, wheelsets, tires, saddles… you get the idea. I’m obviously not advising you to ignore your peripherals, just focus those on their own pages. This focus (if anyone searches the term “focus” I may rank) on your individual product pages will strengthen their punch and make the search engines take notice… like Ali Mills on Daniel LaRusso!

OK, that was the last one, I swear.

Chapter One: Landing Page of Doom

Tires are kind of a big deal on a mountain bike, and though the Kansas City area is short on mountains, there are still gnarly trails aplenty that are fully capable of, and happy to, throw you headlong into the dirt, jagged limestone outcroppings, trees, poison ivy, stuff like that there – point is, it’s nice having a tire set you’re familiar with, and all I wanted was a replacement for my rear hoop. These are never in stock at my favorite local shop, and to order one in you will pay a premium, so I took to the interwebz to find a new Schwalbe Rocket Ron… and so it began.

Since I deal with PPC campaigns every day I’m inclined to look through the paid search before natural, I suppose more out of a professional curiosity than anything else, and here is where the number one result, though not giving the tire’s model name, matched the make. I took it as a good sign as Schwalbe, a German manufacturer, isn’t as popular here in the States as they are in Europe, so I clicked through. I was dropped on a landing page that was jam-packed with Schwalbe tires, 16 pages worth in fact, with 28 models per page. So, yeah, I wasn’t taken to the tire I wanted, but hey, I was close now – right? This is where it crosses into site design territory, as there was no search bar to guide me directly to what I wanted, and even when I adjusted one of the few variables: the tire size, mine still hadn’t shown by page two. A non-SEO person would maybe be less of a baby about it, but I couldn’t be bothered and decided to look elsewhere.

The lesson here is to aim your PPC ads at a landing page that fits your customer’s search, or at the very least drops them somewhere close! People don’t want to solving the navigation puzzle of your site, and especially when you offer something that is not unique to you, try to keep that sales funnel as short as possible for them.

Chapter Two: The Land of Not Crazy Low Prices

Here’s a quickie: Don’t say you have crazy low prices unless you actually have crazy low prices – it will anger the person who discovers it… you know, the person who was possibly going to give you their money.

Chapter Three: Bounce

Two clicks in and I’m treated to a picture of my tire with a red-lettered, “This item is currently out of stock.”

Back ‘er up – *click* *click*

In this specific case it’s kind of understandable, you’d have to be on the ball to pause your ad after you run out of a freakin’ tire, one item out of the hundreds you stock, but this is still a hit to your ROI. Sure, you could argue that at least you drew a customer into your site, but how realistic is the scenario that they’ll adventure around looking for something else in this case? I was not a customer looking for “mountain bike tires” that’s much different than someone looking for a specific brand and model, and it’s absolutely important to keep this in mind when building your campaigns. If you’re going to go as far as building an ad group around specific items then it only makes sense to stay on top of inventory and hit the pause button if there’s going to be a delay in restocking.

Chapter Four: The Grail

The fourth ad was the first ad that actually had the model name in the ad, and hey, a sale! I was a bit skeptical when the body announced free shipping on orders over $240.00, because, well, that would be a bulk order of tires, and I worried that this was likely a poorly put together dynamic text ad that was about to add some disappointment to my shopping adventure.

Dynamic text can be a great eye-catcher as it matches exactly what the customer is looking for, but boy, if you don’t put the time in when building it, you can really do more harm than good. Before my finger had time to twitch I’d already considered how unrelated the landing page would be, this “sale” having ran through the stock already, if it even existed at all, and why I didn’t just quit screwing around and go buy from the site I usually do. Then, just like that, there it was…

I was taken directly to the item I wanted! There really was a sale! It really was in stock! Yes, I really was this excited to find the thing I’d set out to purchase. And consider this excitement stemmed from all that crap I’d just sifted through; this site was my hero, not because they did anything amazing, but because they did what they were supposed to do! These other businesses spent money to frustrate and run off a potential customer. Comparatively speaking, they’d have come out ahead by doing no PPC at all!

If you’re managing your business’ PPC campaign ask yourself if you’re making it easy for your customers to give you their money. Are you frustrating them? Are you making them write angry blogs? What’s the ROI on that sort of business model anyway?

Anyway, in the middle of our speculation I registered the intercom saying from overhead something to the effect of, “…follow us on Facebook and Twitter for more deals – something, something, food.”

“Apparently, the grocery store has a fan page,” I told my son, and he chuckled a confused chuckle asking, “What?”

Mmm, so I stowed it away and after dinner remembered to look up Hy-Vee Incorporated’s Facebook page… juuust to see what kind of action was being dealt on, again, a grocery store fan page. At work we’re constantly talking with clients about how to use this whole social media thing to engage and draw in customers, and yes, we’ve had to get creative more than a couple times, so this intrigued me.

And there it was, Hy-Vee was putting on a clinic how to use Facebook as a marketing tool. There are videos, there are pictures from an event they sponsored, they’re a company with over 55,000 employees and they’re actually interacting with fans on their wall! Sure, there are a couple spots that could be better and/or updated, but I was happily surprised, so much so I joined their throng of followers… yes, I am now a fan of my grocery store.

Just last week good ol’ eMarketer released a report comprehensively and long-windedly titled the “Reasons for Friending or Following Companies Through Social Media According to U.S. Consumers, December 2009”.

As you can see from the report, though people are most interested in getting the first word on deals and specials, they’re also seeking a bit of that personal touch by getting a sneak peek at new products and services. So, what does a grocery store have to offer? Why, the aforementioned food preparation videos, a little interaction with the fans by answering questions – that personal touch that shows they’re listening to you.

I suppose the question now is: what’s your social media plan? Can you compete with your local grocer?

Edward Sothern's jaws giving birth to a... style?

OK, so you’re looking to grab more members – it’s the Worldwide Web after all, there has to be more than three of you on the planet, right? So, how do you draw these other tastefully be-bristled folks to you?

First, for the sake of this post anyway, ya’ gotta have a blog, which, quite honestly, I can’t imagine your dundreary site not having, as there has to be tons of new styling gels to test, monocle swap-meets, pretentious art house meetings to organize, political discussion, this thing should be buzzing. As we’ve discussed many times before, from a search engine optimization angle, this is the fresh content the engines adore, but they can’t do much for you if you aren’t using the right keywords in your writing. You need to find out how people are searching for your subject matter – what are they typing into the search engines when they want to know if sporting some extreme dundrearies can drown them? Is that even a common search? Let’s find out!

As with any good keyword hunt, I find it’s best to start with Google AdWords to sprinkle some seeds and see what sprouts up. I spotted AdWords “dundrearies” and “dundreary” and this is the best it could muster:

Hmmm, doesn't appear to be a popular search in Kansas City... or anywhere else.

Wow, that’s a little disappointing. Clearly, we’re dealing with a fairly niche lifestyle choice here, but hey, we have a better idea now of how people are searching for their information and which words carry the most strength. Starting with the keyword “dundrearies” we now have a breakdown of which of the *sigh* four words and phrases should be included the most in your future posts.

Armed with this knowledge be careful not to overdo it from here on out. A good guideline to follow is to not go over 5% keyword density in your writing because not only will the search engines start thinking you’re trying to manipulate them (they don’t like that), but your writing starts to look like crap. So, for example, lets say you’re putting together a feature on the best new pomade for styling your dundrearies into stylish curls and the word count is roughly 500 words. Multiply 500 by .05 (for my mathematically challenged brothers and sisters out there, that’s your 5%) and you come up with 25, which means you don’t want to go beyond stuffing 25 keywords into the entire piece. That’s a total by the way, I don’t mean for you to try that with each and every keyword, that could get messy.

Simply maintaining your blog gives you the opportunity to not only build on existing keywords, but if you check periodically you can also seamlessly plug in new keywords should they arise. And by doing a good job you show yourself as an authority on your subject matter, and provided you’re constantly researching and staying on top of your industry, then you really and truly are – right? Yes, imagine, the online leader in dundreary technology… dare to dream my friends.

How this works is that before something starts hitting its stride in search results, someone has to start talking about it first. As the chatter picks up, more and more people start looking for more information, looking for an item, looking for this hot, new service. What can you do to stay on the cutting edge?

A solid place to begin is with the big dog: Facebook’s Lexicon. Here you can compare multiple keywords and see whether a product is on the rise or fall and what seems to have more strength in the marketplace… or at least what’s building its own infamous reputation at the moment.

Also, it would pay to keep an eye on the “New” Lexicon for what promises to be a richer data grab as it looks to deliver information about the cross-section of people behind the searches as well. And hey, clearly the more information you can pull in about your client base the better.

Next up is the good ol’ Twitter-monster. Yes, Twitter has a search tool of their own, which is all right if you’re looking to sift through every individual post, but if you want something a bit more user friendly then look no further than the helpful Trendistic site. Again, you get the posts to read through, but you also get embeddable charts, the ability to break down trends to the hour, and, like Lexicon, you can compare trends to suss out which horse to saddle up and ride.

What cool new trend is building that can sweep your company up in its swell? Get out there and search for it!

Further rumored details are that this is part of a five-year exclusivity plan, so Verizon smart-phone users may not be seeing the end of this anytime soon. The question for us cool SEO kids is, as always, “How does this affect me?” Though this isn’t the point of my question, if you’re a Verizon user, then you have to actually type in Google to get there, losing seconds of precious time EVERY time. Oh noes! Personally, I use T-Mobile, primarily because I was led to believe Catherine Zeta-Jones visits your house… *ahem* and I’m still waiting. But I digress…

The thing is, this is still too new to see what impact it will have on the search engine arms race. Verizon’s the big dog here in the U.S., but will Bing gain much market share with this move – will we start to see it in our Pay Per Click budgets? Is Bing looking ahead to try and bully into the future smart phone search market? Or, what seems to be most likely at the moment, will “google” remain the most searched term in Bing’s search engine?

That’s right, it’s not good enough to just claim the thing and leave it by its lonesome, now you have to actually nurture it. Let’s think about what it will take to get your customers to bother actually going all the way to your listing, and then having to type words… “Ugh, I didn’t expect homework, I just wanted to buy a pair of shoes!” See, this imaginary person I just made up doesn’t even want to do any of that!

How about if we incentivize this whole thing for them? Maybe a 5-10% discount on their next purchase? Maybe you run a competition for a month or three where a random commenter wins a prize? You could even incorporate a video into the listing (yet another boost in the Google 10-Pack – ho-ho!) where you pick a name from a hat, throw a dart at a wall of names, see which bowl the neighborhood cat eats from, however it is you decide to divine your winner. Make it fun, make people want to go and at least check it out, and make it fun for you, or whichever lackey you put on it, to actually do it.

Local Search can be a boon to businesses of any size, all it takes is a bit of attention and maybe just a bit of imagination.