Depending on how you look at it you just have to GRAB opportunity when you see it. And apparently that is the case for the Microsoft Windows 7 development team which decided to develop apps for the Window Phone 7 rather than constrain themselves under Microsoft’s wing.

A lot of them, mostly programmers have sent in their resignation letters to either join other companies or develop apps for the Windows Mobile 7 on their own.

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Way back when, when Congress outlawed the use of sound to promote cigarettes, there was a popular jingle roaming the country, and most people born before 1960 probably still remember it even fifty years later.

Seriously, try it some time.  Go up to your parents and see if they can complete this: “Winston tastes good like a…”  and chances are they’ll come back with “cigarette should”.

There’s a reason for this.  As it turns out, things you SEE stick in your memory for about a second, while things you HEAR stick for a full five seconds.   Now, how can you take advantage of that quirk in memory?  Well, these days it’s a bit easier–ever since podcasting came on the scene it isn’t quite so difficult to insert audio clips into your blogging to mix things up a bit.

So next time you’re left wondering if your readership is paying attention, try slipping a little audio in there.  Sound is intrusive and sound memory is fully five times longer than sight memory, so you can take advantage of that unusual quirk in the human brain for your own benefit.

And I mean that literally, too–see, I was just watching The Colbert Report, and his guest was talking about the book he’d written about the value of nothing.

Naturally Colbert made the joke that “nothing” is apparently worth $14.95, because that was the cost of the book, but this concept illustrates nicely a point that we’ve been making out here for some time about the value of a killer headline.

Remember, there are two kinds of great headline: the headline that grabs readers, and the headline that grabs search engines.  And that’s exactly what that book did.  By positing that nothing has a value, he’s caught some eyes.  Nothing is nothing, you might well say to yourself.  So how does NOTHING have a value?  It doesn’t exist!  It’s an empty space!  A null cipher!  So how can it be worth anything?

And you’ll pick up that book and try to find out how nothing has value.  From there, maybe you’ll discover you like where that book is going and take it to the counter and pay for it, which is the whole point the book war written in the first place.

So remember, folks, if you ever need an example of how valuable an eye-catching headline can be, think about how someone sold nothing for $14.95 a copy.

Yeah, that one’s for you, folks.  Wood Beads and Gomez the Windshield Monkey and Metal Briefcase and all you other guys who regularly comment out here.  It’s both an idea for you to use and one for you.

See, it’s never exactly a bad idea to give an occasional shout-out to your readership.  Keeps people happy, and thus, keeps them engaged.  But you’re also doing something else with this–you’re giving them further engagement by forcing them to think.

If you’re running an advice blog on some general facet of life, like movies or car repair or some kind of handicraft, ask your readers a question some time.  Ask them why they do what they do.  Ask them HOW they do what they do.  If you’ve got a new idea, ask them why they don’t try this, or if they’ve even thought of it.

What you’re going to do here is harness curiosity.  We’ve talked about doing this before with interesting post titles and whatnot, but looking at a crowd of people and asking them “why?” often has an engaging effect.  People start to ask themselves why.  Some even ask, why not?  And anything you can do to get people thinking is something you should do at any opportunity.

Your readership is the most important thing you have, bloggers.  They’re what keep your numbers up, your Adsense revenue going and your bottom line in tact.  So next time you set up a blog, don’t forget to give these folks a little of that metaphorical love.  It’ll come back to you several times over.

That probably turned a few heads, but I assure you, it is the case in a very specific set of circumstances.

We’re going back out to marketingexperiments.com for the further skinny on this particular strange set of circumstances, but as it turns out, it’s quite true.  They did more study of blog headlines, and they generated three examples.  Those three:

An essential resource when corporate clients tell you they have 2,000,000 documents to be reviewed.
Say Yes when a client asks you to review FIVE MILLION separate documents.
Say Yes when a client asks you to review FIVE MILLION separate documents. And smile.

You’ll notice that the second and third example are almost identical, except that one encourages you to smile.  At first glance, none of these sound like bad headlines–maybe the first one’s a bit wordy, but still.  But when the leads gathered from the headlines were measured, something bizarre and horrifying happened.

The first one generated six leads.  The second generated nine.  But adding the two-word phrase “and smile” to the second one to create the third generated NO LEADS AT ALL.

Smiling literally killed the headline. And if your headlines are dead, then your entire blog might as well be.

What’s the takeaway from all this, you wonder.  Never smile?  No wit allowed in headlines?  No.  The takeaway here is that you’d be downright amazed at what can outright destroy your blog.  Things as simple and innocent as a smile.  It’s also a good idea to consider place.  When you’re blogging about reviewing millions of documents at once, it’s probably not a good place to interject a joke in your headline.

Just a little something to keep in mind.

We’ve all heard a LOT of different things about keywords, but what we may not have heard about recently is the idea of the long tail keyword, or a chain of words, even a chain of keywords, that form their own keyword.

For instance, “blog” and “money” might be keywords, but a long tail keyword would take these two keywords and make a new keyword out of them like “make money blogging” or “money making blog”.  Even “money blog” might be a possibility.

Using long tail keywords essentially allows you to do two things.  One, it gives you more keywords per post.  “Make money blogging”, for example, not only has itself as a keyword but also “make”, “make money”, “blog”, and “blogging”.  Two, it allows you to target your posts more specifically.  People who search for “make money” will find everything from jobs to lottery tickets, but people who want to “make money blogging” are more likely to find YOU.

So for more traffic, and more targeted traffic, consider the long tail.

Well, folks, it’s been a big week.  We’ve walked you through, step by step, rung by rung, and tried to set up a way to get you free advertising for your blog, book or business.

We’ve set up an event, wrote a killer press release and figured out where to send it.  Now there’s just one last thing that we’ve got to do, and that’s manage the after-event.

Because let’s face it–what we wanted free advertising for was to get a whole lot of people interested in us dirt-cheap.  But can we handle that?  Do we have enough copies of our book ready?  Do we have a way to order more should we run out?  Can our sites handle the bandwidth use spikes that may occur?

Basically, can we strike on the iron that we just heated up with our free advertising?

Come to think of it, was it even a success?  And if it wasn’t, why not?  Did we get the word out at all?  Were people just not interested in what we had to offer?  The days following our free advertising require a whole lot of analysis and soul-searching, because if we ever want to do this again, we need to know what worked and what didn’t.

Yesterday we talked about sending out press releases in order to promote your event and get free advertising by exploiting the news media.  But today we’re going to tackle one critical fallacy in the press release marketing approach–the shotgun approach.

One might assume, and logically enough, that mailing a press release costs less than a measly fifty cents, and this after factoring in an envelope and sheet of paper and ink to print it, so why not throw them out onto the very wind itself and contact everybody in sight?  And with email, which is essentially free but for time to produce it, this approach makes even more sense.

This is actually not a smart plan.  What you WILL want to do instead is target your press releases according to one primary factor: interest.

Now, of course, any local (within fifty to a hundred miles of your front door) news outlet is fair game.  Television, radio, and newspapers thrive on “local news”, and so offering it up is a help to them and to you.  A good rule of thumb is if you can get it on your TV or radio, it’s local.

National news outlets should only be limited to those that have some stake in what you’re offering, as you’re less likely to appeal to them and more likely to make them resent you for wasting their time.

Of course, the final say of any news outlet is their own, and they’ll decide if you’re “sufficiently newswothy” to cover.  But you can make their job easier–and thus win yourself a few extra brownie points–by carefully considering whether they’re likely to find it newsworthy.