The Copyblogger - Brian Clark Interviewed

I have been a long time fan of Brian Clark. His blog, Copyblogger, is crisp, clear, and entertaining. He recently announced that he is a 2007 Bloggies award finalist.

Brian recently revised my salesletter, and I asked if he would be willing to do an interview. He said yes, and so it goes...

Is it possible to write great sales copy for something you are not interested in?

Certainly. Most copywriters do this, and they compensate by doing tons of research and putting themselves in the shoes of the prospective buyer. But I think it’s always much easier to sell something you believe in and have a personal affinity for.

Is it more important to understand the audience, author, or product when writing sales copy?

Audience always comes first. While having a strong understanding of everything else is important too, missing the mark with the audience is the number one reason why copy fails or underperforms.

I have been told that traditionally red is a great headline color for headlines. Why did you opt for blue on my sales letter? What about the Georgia font?

Red headlines have been used quite a bit for several years, and the reason why is because they tested better. There’s a growing backlash against a lot of copy elements that have been effective in the past, basically due to overuse and misuse. Plus, color and font selection are important to the overall impression you want to convey with your product and brand.

With SEO Book, I thought it was important that the sales letter have a more sophisticated presentation that matched the overall look of your site, as well as the stature your book has attained. You can’t mix in testimonials from the likes of Wharton School and MBA-level professors and Seth Godin on a cheesy page that screams hype. SEO is moving away from an Internet marketing tactic and becoming a business essential, and the presentation of your sales page should mirror that respectability.

You broke my sales letter down into a letter and FAQs and also had a mini sales letter which people see if they click an early buy now link. What is the purpose of doing that, and what effect does it typically have on conversion?

The purpose of the “offer landing page” is simply to quickly communicate the full offer to those who clicked through early in the copy, and to reinforce the offer to those that went deeper in. Typically you’ll have less people abandon the sale than if you sent them straight to a PayPal landing page.

How important are getting testimonials seen for making sales? What are the keys to getting them read?

Testimonials are crucial. They communicate crucial social proof of the value of your product and offer. However, just as with everything else, they have been abused and sometimes fabricated. I tried to tone down the presentation of the testimonials a bit, and chose people that had high credibility. We could probably test different approaches here, because it’s a tricky area that is nonetheless vitally important to conversion.

Your blog is one of my favorite to read. Many longstanding copywriters have started blogging, but come off as boring. How did you grow your reach so quickly?

Well, by applying copywriting techniques to blogging, I accomplished two things. One, I created my own little unique niche by bringing a new approach to both copywriting and blogging, and two, I got a bunch of generous bloggers as readers who helped spread the word. I owe it all to them.

When blogging, how important is it to give the perception of being open? How important is it to be easy to identify with?

Blogging is a lot like real life, which I guess is why we call this social media. If you’re not perceived as honest or worth associating with, people simply won’t bother with you.

What is the difference between writing traditional copy, writing a blog, and writing for social media like Digg?

Well, they all have one thing in common—the content has to provide beneficial value to the reader or it will fail. Traditional copy is designed to sell, writing for Digg is for traffic and links, and blogging for business is a combination of both. Beneficial value comes first, but all three types of writing will be more effective the more you connect with the reader on a personal level. Conversational copywriting has been around for longer than people think—some of the old school copywriters of the early 20th Century were masters at it.

With so many people writing sensationalistic headlines for social media, do you think social media has much of a life left to it? Do you see many bloggers invariably undermining their credibility by trying to get noticed too much?

A good headline makes a promise to the reader that the content delivers. Blow that, and you’ll damage your credibility. I mean, what’s the point of writing an attention-grabbing headline if you can’t follow through? Again, the competition for attention is increasing the quality of content overall, because quality content is what works. People who try to take shortcuts will fail.

When blogging, how do you balance writing for teaching vs writing for links vs writing for sales? Do you need to have much reach with a blog before you can have much an affect or significant profit?

Writing to teach can be writing for links and sales, if done correctly. As for reach vs. profit, it depends on what you’re selling. A realtor with a killer blog only needs to attract two or three clients per month to make a nice six figure income in most markets. Selling low-priced widgets requires more volume, as do advertising business models.

How often should I consider writing or rewriting my sales letter? How do I test the effectiveness of a rewrite?

I would never suggest rewriting something just for the sake of it, if it’s working. I was a bit perplexed by the recent copy overhaul to the 37signals home page. But it’s important to keep your finger on the pulse of your market, so you can anticipate necessary changes before your sales slump. I think that’s where we were with your old page.

Testing is crucial. You should test the new sales page against the old, and then also consider testing certain elements within the winning page to see if it can be further optimized for conversion.

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Thanks Brian. I just started split testing the new sales letter using Google AdWords, and we should have results by the end of February. If you want to learn more about copywriting check out Copyblogger today.

Optimal Word Count & Web Page Copy Length

SEO Question: When writing content for our websites what is the optimal copy length? Is page length important for search engine optimization?

Answer: Every page and every site is unique. There is no universal correct or incorrect answer to how much content is right.

Overall Considerations:

Optimize For User Experience:

A page should not just be optimized for search. It should also be optimized for user experience. If you optimize just for search it could be to the detriment of your business.

One of my friends has most of their content on their home page. Because their homepage has most of the content and the most link equity it gets most of their traffic. They are afraid to move the content because they do not want to lose traffic, but if they moved the content they would probably maintain about the same amount of traffic, drastically improve their conversion rates, and do a better job of filtering the prospective clients.

Structure Your Ideas:

The content needs to be structured so that it is easy to consume. Use subheaders to make the content easy to consume. Also break pages into logical chunks that are easy to site or link at...don't write endless stream of mind random copy if you want people to read it.

Avoid creating low value near duplicate pages, as duplicate content filters are getting more aggressive.

Variation is Good:

Make sure there is variation amongst your pages so as not to set an unnatural pattern or give your writing arbitrary constraints. Some ideas take many words to express. Some take less. Real content sites do not have exactly 500 +/- 5 words on each page. Use as many words as necessary to express your ideas.

If you are trying to market a piece of content over-invest in ensuring it is of high quality. If you want your content to act as your marketing by being linkworthy make it appear comprehensive and well researched. If you are the first person with an idea make sure you do it well enough to spread your message far enough that you become synonymous with that idea.

Emphasize Your Style:

You also need to consider your personal style. Instapundit can write short snappy posts because Glenn Reynolds is a great writer who needs few words to convey his meaning, and tries to be first with the news. Some pages may have more credibility with less words on them. If a currency converter was given an obtuse name and had many keywords separated by commas in the footer it might make the tool look less credible and less trustworthy.

Omit Words:

I just started reading The Elements of Style, which states Omit needless words. In Don't Make Me Think Steve Krug shortened this down to Omit words.

Good writing does not add extra words for the sake of word count. Each word carries purpose and meaning. I can tell when I haven't read books in a while because I notice my writing gets looser.

General Search Indexing Trends:

Getting content indexed is becoming a major hurdle. If you have forums and other noisy parts to your site it would be a good idea to have them segregated on a subdomain away from your higher quality and more in depth editorial quality content.

There are three general trends going on that make me think longer copy is better than shorter

  • Since Google's relevancy algorithms are looking more for natural writing, the value of having small hyper-focused pages is not as good as it once was...good copy gets just as much traffic for long tail keywords you didn't intend on optimizing for.

  • Google is getting stingier with how they crawl and what they are willing to index. If they will only index 100 pages for x units of PageRank then having nearly 100% of a 100 page site indexed is far better than having 40 or 50% of a 200 page site indexed.
  • The line between pure PPC ad pages and content is blurring. With domainers increasing the uniqueness and content weight of their domains it is going to be harder for search engines to filter out their sites, and thus search engines are going to get even more stingy with what they will let in the index.

On a philosophical level it also makes sense that search engines want to index richer content. The web is a series of incomplete thoughts. The more search engines can make people write in depth high quality content that provides complete answers the more they improve the value of Google. Search engines will try to push people toward writing more well thought out essays rather than empty me too cut and paste posts.

Content Suggestions Based on Publishing Formats:

AdSense Site:

A page which has 500 words on it will overlap many more keyphrases than two different pages that have 300 words each. As long as you can put your AdSense ads in a prominent position that gets a decent clickthrough rate without sacrificing your linkability I would recommend going with 500 to 600 word articles.

If you write naturally and your site gains a decent amount of authority you will end up accidentally ranking for many great keyword phrases that never showed up on keyword tools.

Site Selling CPM Ads:

If you are selling CPM ads that may favor breaking longer articles into many shorter pages so each read article gets more page views. This is especially true if you have a strong brand, great mindshare, great link equity, and many direct readers, like Wired.com.

Lead Generation Sites:

Focus your content on conversion, perhaps even using brief pages with little content, but ensure your content is unique. Get what legitimate links you can and add linkbait to your site to build up the authority of your site.

Blogs:

Do whatever you need to in order to keep your social currency. Use your market influence to push other profitable business ventures (perhaps indirectly). Only mention a few commercial offers, or place ads in a non-intrusive manner if you are in a competitive vertical and do not enjoy a large self reinforcing market position.

Site Selling Products and Services:

If you sell a commodity add some value to the transaction (consumer feedback, free shipping, brand, etc.) to make your shopping experience a non commodity.

In your content actively guide the user to do the desired goal. Home pages and other high profile pages should be targeted toward navigating users to the desired actions. Even your interior pages which are well integrated into a commercial site should be focused on conversion, building credibility, and filtering bad leads.

Get what legitimate links you can and add linkbait to your site to build up the authority of your site. If possible add consumer feedback.

How to Be Different:

Benefits of Consumer Feedback:

As noted in this study [PDF] consumer feedback adds credibility and trust which help make the online shopping experience feel more like the offline experience. Consumers also add content which makes your content unique relative to similar content from other merchants selling the same products. We tend to use language in similar patterns. Many consumers also misspell words, which helps you target many longtail keyword phrases.

Be First or Be Different:

Sometimes the easiest way to be first is to put a different spin on an idea. If you are the first with an idea push spreading it until you have enough market leverage for your ideas to spread themselves. On your best ideas do not rely on the market spreading it, use email, instant message, advertising, and other other tool at your disposal. Push your ideas to spread quickly because it is much harder to get people to link at your news when it is a couple days old. Put few or no ads on the ideas you want to spread until AFTER they have spread.

Wordtracker Launches New Free Keyword Tool

Ken McGaffin just shot me an email alerting me to a free version of Wordtracker, which goes 100 terms deep, and shows daily search volume estimates based on the marketshare of Dogpile and Metacrawler.

Nice timing there Wordtracker!

Yahoo! Search Marketing More Broke Than Ever

When Yahoo! bought Overture they had the market default position as being THE KEYWORD TOOL. As a company that makes most of its profits from selling keywords, how dumb is is for them to let their keyword research tool die without warning? If they are upgrading their paid search platform, killing the current tools without warning is a dumb first step toward getting marketers to warm up to the exciting new system.

Stop double and triple mailing the direct mail pieces. Do a bit of market analysis on your market position and current resources. Fire the people who keep doing the dumb things. Your easiest points of improvement come from analyzing your market position and leveraging what you already have. When you start again from an established market position is is silly to kill off your old market position, especially if you are already behind.

I need to fix my keyword research tool, since the death of Overture killed my keyword tool. I am thinking about either switching it to being driven from Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery. More on that soon.

Easy Link Opportunities That Die

As time passes algorithms change and more is required to be remarkable, and easy link opportunities die off. In the past I was a big fan of donating for links, but eventually the typical page that you can donate and get a link from gets filled with junk co-citation that puts the page in a bad neighborhood. For example, Moodle has a donation page that says

Donators over US$50 can add their link to this page (it seems to bring good Google Juice!). Please remember to hit the "continue" button after paying to see the form where you can enter this linking information yourself.

It is no surprise that the page has a bunch of gambling links on it. When I donated in December of 2004 that link probably carried weight (as the page was yet to be spammed out and the link relevancy algorithms were not as advanced back then). No way a sophisticated search engine would still want to count that same link today though.

If you can get a PR6 or PR7 link for a one time $50 fee then eventually the market is going to drive its true value toward that price. And if all your authority rests on those links then your risk to reward ratio of owning a business with a foundation in sand is not good.

I also donated to Mozdev for a link back in 2004. Soon after I did it many people followed my path, spammed the page up with a ton of donations, and the price was increased to $1,000. Now if you donate there you can't even get a link.

I just saw on the 2007 Bloggies page that they no longer allow you to get links for donating prizes. Another link opportunity that was closed off.

Google's duplicate content filter improvements and changing crawling priorities were largely about keeping many undesirable link sources (like low quality directories that will sell anyone a link) out of their index.

Some link sources are closed off due to greedy people taking advantage of them (like people offering to donate prizes to Bloggies winners and never donating the prizes, or directory owners selling hollow PageRank without enforcing any editorial quality standards), some are closed off due to algorithmic improvements, and others are closed off because as time passes you have to do more to be remarkable.

Many of the best ranking SEO sites rank well because they have crappy submit your site to search engine buttons that were placed on many authoritative college pages long ago. You can't compete by hoping that naive webmasters or webmasters no longer maintaining their websites will change their pages.

You have to find where the current conversations are today and find ways to get people to want to talk about you today. Instead of trying the search engine submission button maybe people would be willing to link to SEO for Firefox. Instead of creating a better Yahoo! Directory or a better DMOZ the popular new directories are social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us. Find out where people are going rather than where they have been.

If you are first to market, it is worth doing something well such that you create the market standard, and are hard to beat. If someone else already owns a market position you may need to come up with another angle to beat them. The good thing is that now more than ever there are more people actively sharing their thoughts online. If you watch ideas spread all day long (Techmeme, Digg, Del.icio.us, Technorati, etc. etc. etc.) then it shouldn't be that hard to create a few ideas that will spread. And if you understand how to create ideas that spread, it will be much harder for competitors to duplicate than a profile that is powered exclusively by donation links and other links that will be algorithmically discounted or links that just about anyone can get.

When you are new there is nothing wrong with chipping away at the edges to try to get a bit of a boost from it. But it is still important to learn how to spread ideas. If you understand how to create ideas that will spread and how to spread them, then every day the web is feeding into your future profits. If you are only picking at the market edges then you are fighting algorithmic improvements and the general nature of the web, which will get tougher and tougher every day.

Search Personalization Will Not Kill SEO

Many people are syndicating the story that search personalization will kill SEO. Nothing could be further from the truth. Each time search engines add variables to their ranking algorithms they create opportunity. Plus as the field gets muddier those who understand how communities interact with search will have more relative influence over the marketplace. Quality SEO is not based on using a rank checker for arbitrary terms and cranking out meaningless ranking reports. It is based on measuring traffic streams and conversions. If the search engines are sending you more leads or better converting leads then your SEO is working.

Customers worth having don't care about ranking reports. They care about conversions. Other than to create a straw man scenario for self promotional stories, why have rank checkers suddenly become important?

Buying Bloggers Wholesale

Google's algorithm has placed more weight on core domain authority, and Weblogs Inc has decided to kill off many of their lower end niche brands.

Google trusts bloggers a lot, but AdSense generally sucks as a monetization method. It turns out some upstart websites are buying up bloggers. In this video, Babble stated they are hiring 10 of top 50 parenting bloggers. If you hire a half dozen well known work at home mom bloggers part time for $1,000 per month you can leverage their knowledge, reach, mindshare, and link equity. If you can mesh them into a community feel without running into ego problems you become the topical expert for just about any topic in the world ... for $6,000 a month.

In much the same way that people are buying older trusted domains, don't be surprised to see 2007 as a year which many monetization and business experts partner with many naive amatures to create scalable businesses that displace the market position of many of the larger conglomerates like About.com, one vertical at a time.

As faking authority and leveraging older signs of trust get less and less profitable business owners will need to become the topical experts they were pretending to be. As the market for ad dollars, audience, and talent get more and more competitive people skills are going to be increasingly important.

Technorati and Google Blogsearch will tell you who is trusted. Go out and buy them while they are still cheap!

Targeted Emails Drive High Quality Link Building Campaigns

The difference between getting 5 links and 50 links for a story is often just a couple good mentions. With 5 links the story may be marginally profitable, and the same story could be wildly profitable with 50 links. Every day key bloggers are hunting for stories worth talking about. As long as you send them personalized email many of them will talk about your story if you create something worth talking about. And because blogging is so temporal it is important to push a story to spread it quickly (in other words, nobody wants to blog about a story that is 3 days old unless they have something unique to add).

Link exchange requests go nowhere, but if you offer something that people feel is of value they will link.

I get many link requests, many Digg requests, many requests for feedback, and many other announcement type requests. Many people also let me know how much money they are making. One of the biggest differences between top earners and those just getting by is a lack of shame ... a willingness to ask for favor after favor. Some of the top name SEOs / marketers / bloggers are labeled as such due to nepotistic marketing. You wouldn't know it by asking them, but if you are sorta in on some of the ideas, create some of the ideas, market some of the ideas, and see good ideas go nowhere while bad ideas spread you start to notice some of the patterns.

If you do not have much of a brand you can't be risk adverse if you are hoping to build a brand or exposure. Shame is for sissies. Targeted personalized emails are for profit.

On top of targeted emails there are many other ways you can push your message out there:

  • buy AdSense ads targeted to specific bloggers

  • buy ReviewMe ads on channels you want to be seen on (I have equity in ReviewMe, but have bought many ReviewMe reviews myself)
  • buy Feedvertise ads in feeds targeted to bloggers
  • buy targeted interstitial ads on AdBrite
  • participate in forums, social news sites, and other community sites
  • ask for feedback from industry experts and let others feel they have ownership in the idea or exclusive on the news

Think of how many CDs AOL has sent you. Most any business of scale used some amount of push marketing to gain it.

Google Custom Search Engines as Another Trust / Link / Citation Source

Recently Bambi Fransisco asked Googler Peter Norvig about using wikis in search, in response to Wikia's search threat. Peter Norvig stated

Feedback from users is important, and we will continue to use the sources of user feedback we have been using, and will experiment with more in the future. I think that Google Co-op Custom Search Engine may be the largest current collection of user-generated information for search.

With everyone and their dog learning copy writing, how to pander to audiences, and doing some sort of linkbait to get a vote here and there, search engines are going to have to look for other signs of trust. If they can gain access to offline content that is one potential source of editorial signal for quality, but another which may be equally appealing is passionate guides created by trusted online experts. It takes a lot more to be included in a trusted topic specific search engine than it does to create a single linkbait. And imagine if they looked for co-citation data in those guides. Not sure if it will scale, but if it does, Google furthers the importance of search while gaining a signal of quality that nobody else has access to, which would make it appealing to find a signal of quality there, if there is one, especially since few marketers are talking about it.

Self Serving Marketing Advice

Many people dole out information with deceptive intent, or to push their own agenda. Recently I created a contest to rank for Dave Pasternack, and so far the results have been quite revealing. Where you rank for generic terms does not matter much if you are looking for good SEO clients, but to say SEO is of limited value across the entire spectrum is dishonest. As NFFC said:

I think the root of the problem is the fact that SEO is very difficult to scale. By that I mean that SEO is a craft best practiced by a small highly motivated team, it doesn't lend itself to a production line approach. That stands equally for those SEO's working inhouse as it does for those consultants plying there wares. Now David isn't a complete idiot, to his credit did-it have plenty of years experience of having their clients bitched slapped all over the SERP's by kids in basements. He knows better than anyone that SEO doesn't "scale".
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So I think the general reason that people are pissed off with David is that instead of him holding did-it's hands up and saying "we don't have the management skills to be able to offer SEO services to our customers", he instead tries to make out that SEO is not a good choice for his clients and that they need PPC. That implies a readiness to be economical with the truth and a lack of ability to be critical of your own companies short comings that, imho, doesn't bode well for those looking to do business with his company.

I realize that a large part of pushing a profitable company is market differentiation, but if you have to lie about the viability of a competing field to push your current business model that is shifty at best. And if you are using the media to spread your misinformation that is blatantly wrong, and you should be called out for it.

Since the contest has started Did It has done the following:

  • spoke of protecting Google's purity

  • begged for links by offering to donate money to the American Cancer Association
  • put up a t-shirt page on Cafepress that links to David's biography page
  • linked to David's profile from Kevin's blog
  • linked to David's profile page sitewide on Did It
  • created duplicate content

Lets run through those one at a time.

Protecting Google's purity: What makes this claim so entertaining is that David Pasternack wasn't ranking #1 for his own name. How a person calls SEO garbage without even ranking for their own name is beyond me. I rank in the top 10 or 20 for words like Aaron or Wall, and am the 5 results for Aaron Wall.

On top of that, PPC people believe you can buy any term you see fit. How can they believe in protecting Google's purity, especially if the consultants also push paid inclusion?

American Cancer Association: You have to throw the cancer card to rank for your own name? That is pretty sick. What do you do if you are asked to compete in a competitive marketplace? Talk down SEO? Oh yeah, I forgot...

T shirt and blog links: If you have been doing decent SEO, and SEO is a one time event, then why the need to come up with these techniques to get a few more links?

Sitewide Link: You are going to change your entire site structure based on a silly $1,000 contest? Sounds a bit reactive for a forward thinking marketing company, isn't it? Hopefully you give your clients more holistic and forward looking advice.

Duplicate Content: Creating a near identical second profile page is lame. And maybe an effective strategy if it were a few years ago, but not for today.

The terms that are worth more than any others, as a branded person who frequently speaks to the media, are your company name and your name. But to already have mainstream media exposure and STILL need to use all of those gimmicks to (hopefully) rank for your own name is pathetic. Ranking should be a given.

Notice how reactive Did It was to a silly $1,000 contest. Clearly SEO isn't a one time thing, or they did a bad job of SEO on their site.

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