HP has officially launched its new Let’s Do Amazing ad campaigns. The ad cost HP $40 million so you have to wonder what gives. The ads were starred in by comedian Rhys Darby with Dr. Dre providing the audio support. Check out the ad videos below.

Read

Back in the deep dark depths of 1996, back before Titanic was destroying the box office and well before the death of Chris Farley would make sure the world would never be the same again, Pennzoil came out with a big ad campaign that had this for a tagline:

“Pennzoil is the only leading brand of motor oil to meet the 1996 SAE requirements two years early.”

How many of you know what that even MEANS?

And if you know, how many of you care?

Pennzoil shelled out millions of 1996 dollars–more by today’s standards–to tell us all something we neither understood nor cared about.  And as a result, Pennzoil lost a whole lot of money on an ad campaign that did absolutely nothing to sell its own product.

This all relates back to the main headline, who cares, or why no one reads your blog.  Are you telling people something they don’t care about, like Pennzoil did?  If you’re wondering why no one reads your stuff, ask yourself if they have any reason to.  And if you find that they don’t, start thinking about what you can do to MAKE them care.  If you do that you’ll find yourself greatly ahead of the game.

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.

Now I KNOW I got you guys right there!

That’s got to make most everyone sit up and take notice, but I assure you, it is possible for most anyone to get FREE ADVERTISING at absolutely any point.

How do you do it?  It’s a simple plan, but it’s tough to execute.  What you’re going to do to get free advertising is to do something newsworthy. See?  Yeah, tough, all right.  But you’re going to figure out something to do that will get attention, and you’ll go out and do it.  Just consider what you normally write about, and think about what you can do in that arena to make something that’s newsworthy.

Consider things that involve words like “biggest”, “longest”, “widest” or “most”.  Pretty much anything that actually involves an “est” will do.  And once you’ve done it, or are in the process of doing it, now you can hawk it.  Not you–no, not yet–rather the event.  You can slip in a few interesting asides about your site in the process, and of course a link back to you in the press releases works.

And with that, you should be looking at plenty of free advertising as the papers spread the word for you.

Now, this is actually a good question that comes straight from the comments section.

User Digital Images asked, “How do you set up a business blog for your boss?”

Again, a great idea that deserves to be fully examined.  Of course, your mileage will vary on this point, but here’s a simple plan for you to try and get a job blogging with your current employer.

1. Analyze your company. Do you have a lot of new products?  Do you market mainly to consumers or businesses?  Is there a good reason to disseminate lots of new information in a relatively rapid schedule?

2. Gather your findings. If you market mainly to consumers, and have a lot of new products and events to discuss, then you may have a blog-worthy concept. Can you run ads?  Are you likely to draw readers?  These are all things to consider in packaging your analysis.

3. Present them to your boss. It’s always good to have all this written down on a hard copy somewhere in case some corporate power-junkie decides they want to take credit for YOUR hard work and genius.  But what you’re going to do here is take an extremely new idea (in most corporate power-circles blogging is a concept often believed reserved for college kids and people with nothing better to do all day than talk about their cats at length) and show people how it will work.  Consider things like advertising revenue through Google Adsense or similar, the intangible value of “getting the word out” in a relatively inexpensive fashion, cross-promotion opportunities to fuel readership (see, we put our blog web address on the box of every product.  So when they buy stuff, they have or blog site, and go to it to learn more about stuff they can buy.), and so on.

The key thing here is to make this look like an idea that will either bring in money outright or save money, and if you can reduce it down to those terms, chances are pretty fair you’ll land yourself a full-time corporate blogging job, even in this lousy economy.

Now that caught your eye, didn’t it?  Sure it did.  And why wouldn’t it?  I mean, I just handed you your dream concept on a silver plate, didn’t I? Your blog, literally everywhere.

So how do you achieve this concept?  Well, it’s an idea you may want to consider.  You’re going to use two basic principles to take a shot at huge name recognition.  Those principles:

1. People love free stuff.

2. Cafepress will put your name and logo on ANYTHING.

And that’s the idea.  Put your name and logo on some stuff and give it away.  Now, I understand that not everybody’s got the kind of cash required for such a venture, but the good part about this plan is that it’s scalable.  You can start small or you can go huge, and you have loads of options.

For instance, let’s take a look at this idea:  Create fifty bumper stickers for about a hundred bucks.  Put them in envelopes and mail them out at random.  Announce to your local newspaper that fifty lucky people will be receiving free bumper stickers as part of your (insert random celebratory event here) celebration.

With any luck, you’ll get a newspaper ad for your blog for less than a hundred and fifty bucks if I’ve done the math right.  Plus, fifty people will hear about your blog, and if they actually USE the bumper stickers, you’ve got plenty of word of mouth advertising gratis.  Got fifteen hundred bucks to blow?  Up that to five HUNDRED bumper stickers.

Think outside the box, and who knows how far you’ll get?

Okay, today we’re going to do something BUY MY BOOK ON AMAZON that’s a combination object lesson and general discussion point.  I know it sounds like it’s going to be a little complex, but if GO TO MY CAFEPRESS LINK you’ll bear with me I think you’ll find that it really is going to teach you something exciting.

You’re going to see that, as much BUY MY BOOK as you want to promote your books, or your merchandise, or what have you in your blog posts themselves, you’ll see that GREAT T-SHIRTS AND MUGS NOW AVAILABLE it’s not a good idea to do so.

Oh, sure–you’re thinking that a small link to the Amazon page or the Cafepress page or something similar can’t hurt.  And for the most part, BUY OFFICIALLY LICENSED STUFF you’re probably right.  But, if you’re going to go that route, GO TO THE STORE PAGE FOR MORE you have to be subtle about it.  There’s no choice.  Be understated.  If you put the links to your own merch, say, at the bottom of the post, or once at the top, you’ll get a lot more respect out of your readers than if you go for the hard sell right from the word go.

You’ve just seen exactly what I’m talking about.  The hard sell turns off the readers, as surely as it would if you did what I just did above.

Your readers know you have to eat, too. You’re here to provide them a service, which they hopefully esteem enough to keep going by supporting you.  But if you’re too focused on that support aspect, you’ll lose not only their support, but also the readers themselves.

I’m not going to write a long explanation about this since I think you’re going to look straight to the list anway. This list, a compilation of many different techniques and levels, is meant to be a guideline for marketing for any site, especially blogs. Some of these are things you can easily do. In fact, it’s even possible to execute all of it. So without wasting anymore of your time, here are 30 tips for exploding your blog/website’s traffic.

Read the rest of this entry »