No Comments Written by Chris on September 24, 2008 – 12:52 pm

So just the other day, right in the middle of thinking about web marketing for a client’s site, my two year old daughter pounds on the door to my home office, in distress and pleading with me to help. (Mommy was busy at the time.) I open the door, and she tugs on my finger to the living room. Her problem?

She couldn’t find her favorite toy. Amidst all the clutter on the floor, the eye-piercing multiple pastels of toys on the coffee table, the overwhelming furriness of stuffed animals, and a plague of scattered puzzle pieces, she couldn’t find a single, plain, pleasantly tan-colored two-inch figure from one of her favorite television shows (In the Night Garden, if you must know).

Raking the anarchy of toys out of the way, I found it, and she boisterously exclaimed “Dare it is!” with the enthusiasm and dramatic emotional relief only a toddler can relay.

Amuse me…

This got me thinking: How different is her predicament from the millions of web viewers searching for something, clicking on a site, and not finding what they are looking for? While my toddler will not give up until something is found, you, the owner of a web site, do not have that luxury with your audience. In this era of seven-second attention spans, if your visitor does not find what he or she is looking for, they will click away and find it somewhere else, usually at your competitor’s.

Observing how my daughter interacts with the world, her frustrations and triumphs, boredom and excitement, I get a raw look at the natural impulse of human wants and antipathies, before the filter of adult social conditioning skews the result of any poll or market test.

Here then, are a list of 7 things my toddler taught me (or confirmed for me) about the world of marketing and advertising:

1. Clutter Only Leads to Confusion and Lost Sales

Thinking back to my toddler’s frustrations at not being able to find something, I realize I’m the same way when searching for something and not being able to find it. Or worse, knowing that a particular website does have something I am looking for, but the message is obfuscated by flashy banners, migraine-inducing color schemes and confusing, “cute” navigation.

Back in my early days of web design, Flash, Java Applets, “mystery meat navigation” and spinning logos were all the rage. Nobody listened to Jakob Nielsen, who stubbornly kept his website plain and his methods unvarying. Who listened to him back in the heady days of 1999?

Well, it looks like Google did. While most websites became more and more cluttered, busy, and flashy, Google came along with a plain white page and one central theme. Instead of trying to be everything to everybody, they concentrated on one thing only - the ability to search. Their design philosophy is just as effective as their search engine algo.

Screenshots - Alta Vista vs. Google, 2000 (Courtesy of Wayback Machine)

When viewing your website, keep one goal in mind: your message. Why does your website exist? If it sells shoes, the first thing your site should scream is “I SELL SHOES! CHECK THIS PAIR OUT!” If it says “I sell shoes, oh, and I also have some Google Adsense, oh, and also check out these cool links, oh, and also Punch this Monkey and Win Some Money, and oh …”, then it’s time to find out why your conversion rate isn’t as hot as it should be.

As boring as it may seem, simple and plain is best. It may not stretch your design talents, but remember the old adage: The Message is more important than the Medium. View your website in a text-based browser. If it still makes sense, you’re on the right track. (Oh, and Google will love you.)

2. Be Consistent With Your Methods

Every parent knows that when raising a child, consistency is key. If bedtime is 8:00, it is 8:00. If you say that you will be going for a walk to the park after dinner, do it (your toddler will remind you!) And if you praised them for doing some good action, continue praising them when they do it again.

Same as in marketing. From large international advertising launches to small efforts to rank your website, consistency is key. If you are going to launch press releases as part of your marketing efforts, don’t just stop at one. Continue, twice a month at minimum. Rarely does one press release work, but they will all accumulate. If you have an Adwords campaign, don’t completely change your wording. Tweak small parts, testing results as you go along. If using graphical advertising, plan a common theme and look.

This can also apply to the design and operation of your site. Use a common theme throughout. If somebody clicks on one of your pages and suddenly finds themselves one a screen with a completely different look and navigation, will this give them the trust they need to continue browsing your site? If you only update your blog periodically and at irregular intervals, how many visitors are going to return? How important will the search engines see your site if it is rarely updated?

3. Tactics That Worked in the Past May Not Work Today

Yes, my toddler is already tuning me out. What worked in the past no longer works now. I have to be more creative or more subtle to grab her attention. She may be so immersed in her play that simply calling her name will do nothing. Now I have to alter my voice, make funny noises, or do a handstand to gain her attention.

The old ways of doing things are not as effective today, especially in the realm of tactics designed to boost your search engine rankings. Reciprocal link exchanges, webrings, and directories are no longer as effective as they once were. Article distribution is still somewhat effective, though still far weaker than it once was (because everybody is doing it.) For online advertising, banner ads are long dead, though I still see them flashing everywhere.

To grab traffic and attention, you have to work a little harder and be a little more creative. Here’s a couple things to try:

• List building - Building an email or subscriber list is still an extremely valuable tool in your marketing. You have a list of people (fans, even) who voluntarily wish to hear more about what you have to say. What’s better? Shouting at a huge, uninterested crowd to try and get their attention, or conversing one-on-one with people who want to hear what you have to say? Building a list not only gives you an engaging audience, but an audience who may even talk about you to others, creating viral traffic back to your site and more subscribers. Not to mention potential repeat sales.
• Embedded links (Shhhh) - Google’s hammer fell down hard on blatant text link purchases, but you can still gain link juice to crawl up the search engines by quietly approaching webmasters and offering to pay for a keyword link or two in their content. But you didn’t hear this from me.
• Press Releases - Believe it or not, press releases are still extremely effective. The trick is to write them as an engaging, newsworthy story, not as a simple sales announcement (which will likely get you rejected at places like PRWeb.com anyway.) Instead of the headline “Mysite.com to Interview Credit Counselor Next Tuesday”, make it into an engaging story, like so: “The Five Deadly Sins that Will Destroy Your Finances: Mysite.com Discusses How to Avoid them With a Leading Credit Counselor” (engaging and newsworthy).
• Social Media - Though this may be approaching the realm of “too many people doing it”, social media and bookmarking are still effective ways to gain traffic. This is also the reason to have a list. Many people who subscribe to your site may add your content into their bookmarks, or give you votes in StumbleUpon or promote you in Digg. You need a critical mass of readers to have an effect on social networks, and hundreds of people reading your article at once may have this effect.

4. A/B Split Testing

How, you may ask, can I relate raising my toddler to split testing? It starts in the morning. “Do you want toast or cereal?” The answer used to be always cereal. Then, after a while, she began complaining, and now always wants toast.

To create an effective website, you must constantly test your copy. Those with AdWords accounts know this well. If you have never done a split test, it’s easy. If you have enough traffic (even 100 visitors a day), simply show half your visitors one version of the page, and the other half a slightly different version. The key is the word “slightly”. If you completely change your page and content, and it performs better, you won’t know why. However, if you change a single word in a headline, you will then know which version of your headline works better in keeping people at your page and converting them to a sale. Then, keep the most effective version, and try again the next day.

I use Google Optimizer for my split testing.

Can you spot the fake?

5. Your Customer Can Spot a Fake

When my toddler found out that my cell phone actually does something other than make cheap sounds, she never went back to her fake toy phone! Even when I pretended to talk into it and have a long conversation with myself (easy to do), she wouldn’t buy it.

Your customers won’t be tricked, either.

I don’t know how many times I’ve emailed a company’s website, only to have it bounce back with “Mailbox does not exist” or “Mailbox full.” Without a person to back it up, without regular updates with real and credible content, a website will (deservedly) sink into obscurity and collect fail.

This goes for any black-hat method to try and artificially inflate a website’s rankings. It might work temporarily, but it will fail in the end. Why spend immense effort into tricking a search engine or an audience, when it takes far less effort and more satisfaction to slowly and consistently build a trusting and credible name for yourself and an authoritative website presence?

6. Familiarity Breeds … Success

Flashy new toys come out all the time, especially going into Christmas. Yet nearly every single new product will fail. Why? They are short-lived gimmicks, full of flash but no substance. Heck, everybody knows that kids have more fun with the boxes than with their shiny new hundred dollar toy!

My toddler’s favorite toys are those which are familiar to her. Dolls, teddy bears, animals, and puzzles. None of those concepts are reinventing the wheel. The most popular toys all revolve around a familiar concept, such as dolls, pets and action figures.

The same goes for your web audience. When designing a new site for the purpose of selling a product, stick to the basics. Everybody is familiar with the standard header, navigation scheme and two or three column layout. Do the same with your site. Sure, the “coolness” factor may not be there, but leave that for your awesome design portfolio.

You only have ten seconds to capture the visitor’s attention - heck, maybe even only three! You want to make them comfortable and give them a feeling of familiarity right off the bat. This is not so they can admire your design, however. This is so they DO NOT have to admire or even be conscious of your design. You want them to instead look at your headline and grab their attention. I say it before, and I’ll say it again, content is everything. Which is a nice segue into the seventh point.

7. Your header is Everything

Okay, my toddler can’t read, but if something looks visually awesome - be it an airplane flying overhead while walking, a big dandelion with bright yellow flowers, or a huge bus lumbering down the street - she’ll stop and stare in awe. Translate to text, and you’ll know what I mean.

Ken McCarthy says it best when it comes to effective copyrighting. Imagine that your potential customer is being chased by a pack of ravenous wolves, and you holler your sales pitch. If your customer stops running, turns to you and says “Tell me more”, you’ve succeeded.

How do you do this? Take a cue from the social networking sites and view the headers on those top performing articles. I can guarantee they are not dull. A quick look today brought up these eye-catching headlines:

• “Mastercard: Official Card of the 2nd Depression.”
• “What Did Google Phone Say to the iPhone?”
• “The 10 Worst Songs That Hit #1″

You get the idea. To gain visitors, traffic and sales, make sure your header is intriguing. As you are working online, likely with SEO online, you have to make it eye-catching AND have your keywords in it. You need a hook to grab a visitor’s interest from the thousands of ads they are bombarded with on a daily basis. Once you do, give them something useful, meaningful, and in short chunks, so they can skim and ultimately feel satisfied. You don’t want to waste their time.

Everybody is busy, but everybody is also looking for something they absolutely need. Make sure you are there when they are ready to buy.

Oh, I hear my toddler calling again. Time to go and see what problem she needs help solving.