They put up billboards in subway stations with their range of products, accompanied by QR, or Quick Response codes. Shoppers can just scan the QR codes with their mobile phone and the groceries are delivered to their doorstep.

He found Ogilvy & Mather, the famous New York advertising agency, and Time magazine called him “the most sought-after wizard in today’s advertising industry” in the early-’60s.

You’d think a genius like David Ogilvy would find it easy to write copy. But if you read the letter below, which he wrote in 1955, you’ll discover even the great man himself struggled to produce successful ad copy.

(Source: The Unpublished David Ogilvy: A Selection of His Writings from the Files of His Partners; Image: David Ogilvy, courtesy of Ads of the World.)

April 19, 1955

Dear Mr. Calt:

On March 22nd you wrote to me asking for some notes on my work habits as a copywriter. They are appalling, as you are about to see:

1. I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home.

2. I spend a long time studying the precedents. I look at every advertisement which has appeared for competing products during the past 20 years.

3. I am helpless without research material—and the more “motivational” the better.

4. I write out a definition of the problem and a statement of the purpose which I wish the campaign to achieve. Then I go no further until the statement and its principles have been accepted by the client.

5. Before actually writing the copy, I write down every concievable fact and selling idea. Then I get them organized and relate them to research and the copy platform.

6. Then I write the headline. As a matter of fact I try to write 20 alternative headlines for every advertisement. And I never select the final headline without asking the opinion of other people in the agency. In some cases I seek the help of the research department and get them to do a split-run on a battery of headlines.

7. At this point I can no longer postpone the actual copy. So I go home and sit down at my desk. I find myself entirely without ideas. I get bad-tempered. If my wife comes into the room I growl at her. (This has gotten worse since I gave up smoking.)

8. I am terrified of producing a lousy advertisement. This causes me to throw away the first 20 attempts.

9. If all else fails, I drink half a bottle of rum and play a Handel oratorio on the gramophone. This generally produces an uncontrollable gush of copy.

10. The next morning I get up early and edit the gush.

11. Then I take the train to New York and my secretary types a draft. (I cannot type, which is very inconvenient.)

12. I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor. So I go to work editing my own draft. After four or five editings, it looks good enough to show to the client. If the client changes the copy, I get angry—because I took a lot of trouble writing it, and what I wrote I wrote on purpose.

Altogether it is a slow and laborious business. I understand that some copywriters have much greater facility.

Yours sincerely,

D.O.

You can read the original article here.

The second ranked website is a company that sells Viagra and Cialis. (This is a UK company, so it doesn’t show when you do the search from NZ.) These clever marketers have acquired the domain name directresponsemarketing.com and their company is called DRM. No doubt they have got a pile of links coming into the site as well, all suggesting it is about direct response marketing.

There are thousands of websites that are gaming the system like this, through clever search engine optimisation. But Google is fighting back against this kind of nonsense.

Here is a statement last week from Google’s Matt Cutts:

“Normally we don’t pre-announce changes, but there is something we’ve been working in the last few months and hopefully in the coming weeks we hope to release it. The idea is basically to try to level the playing ground a little bit. So all those people who have been doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly doing their SEO – compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we are trying to level the playing field a bit.

We try to make the GoogleBot smarter, try to make our relevance more adaptive, so that if people don’t so SEO we handle that. And we are also looking at the people who abuse it, who put too many keywords on a page, exchange way too many links, or whatever else they are doing to go beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”

I have always believed that the way to do SEO is to provide people with content of genuine value. That way, you are contributing the betterment of the Internet – not just filling it up with junk, as so many SEO companies are doing.

I understand there is a demand for getting people’s websites to the top of Google, at any cost, and there is good money to be made by doing this. But with Google getting smarter and smarter, the best long term solution is just to provide genuine valuable content.

There are some basic on-page factors that will tell Google what your web page is about – such as the title tag, heading tags, alt tags etc. These should be done as a matter of course. But I’ve always been against artificial link building. It’s great to hear that Google is doing its utmost to stamp it out.

Thankfully there’s a new WordPress plugin that I have been trialling for a few weeks, called cloudsafe365, and my initial impressions are that it’s the answer to every WordPress site owner’s prayers in terms of security and backup.

Cloudsafe365 prevents and reports hacking attempts, prevents content theft, and has one of the best backup and restore functions available for WordPress – all in a single plugin. I installed it on two of my clients’ sites recently as a trial. A couple of weeks later, I got a report to say a bot had hit one of the sites in multiple attacks. The good news is cloudsafe365 stopped it doing any damage.

The report from cloudsafe365 showed this particular bot was attempting to impersonate Bing. The same bot was identified in different attacks from a whole range of IPs from all around the world. Adding them all up, the total came to around 16,000 individual attacks.

When I look at the daily reports from cloudsafe365, showing the amount of suspicious activity taking place on my clients’ sites, I wonder how I ever slept at night without it. One thing is for sure, the amount of malicious activity on the web is only going to get worse over time, so you absolutely need a plugin like cloudsafe365 to give you peace of mind.

It shows you all the legitimate robots, like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc as well as the non-legitimate ones. These can be in form of content stealers, hackers and general scrape attempts and nasties trying to hack into your site – sql injections, meta injections, brute force attacks, command line based attacks etc. You can whitelist any of these if you are comfortable with allowing the particular bot/scraper/hacker through.

Real time site backup

The other great feature of cloudsafe365 is that it is continually backing up your WordPress site. With the free version of the plugin, it puts the backup on your current web server. You then have an option to copy this manually to the cloudsafe365 remote system (hosted with Amazon Web Services). There is a premium version of cloudsafe365 (which costs $15 per month) that provides automated backup directly to the cloudsafe365 AWS server. With both versions, you can restore data easily with one click. It’s an absolute gem.

A third benefit of cloudsafe365 is that it prevents people right-clicking on your page and copying content, and also stops the copy select all command.

Having seen the benefits of cloudsafe365, I now install it as standard on all WordPress sites. If you are web designer or web company building sites for clients, I recommend you do the same. Even the free version is pretty darned good, or you can get extra peace of mind and more detailed reporting for just $15 per month, per site. There are Pro and Enterprise versions coming soon at around $40 and $350 per month respectively, for web companies and those managing multiple WordPress sites.

More information at www.cloudsafe365.com.

This might seem strange from someone who spent 20 years as a journalist. But the reason is, I’ve come to realise just how negative and counter-productive most of the news is. Furthermore, it does nothing to inspire confidence and entrepreneurship, which is the foundation of economic and personal success.

Apart from keeping up with major world issues and a few national ones, and reading the business pages of the newspaper, I really don’t need to know any of the trivial local news, which is mainly people’s tragedies, misfortune and whole procession of other bad news.

I would rather start my day by reading something inspriational that puts me in a positive frame of mind. In fact, it was what I have just read this morning that prompted me to write this post. It is an article by the late Gary Halbert, who was regarded as one of the world’s best copywriters for direct mail selling. Gary was a controversial character and I always loved his newsletters, which have inspired me enormously.

The Halbert Index

I’ve just been reading about what he calls the “Halbert Index” – which is a way of classifying people. To be at the top of the Index you must have the following:

(1) You must have a life, and

(2) You must have a sense of humor, and

(3) You must have intelligence and be an independent thinker, and

(4) You must be a generous and giving person but… at the same time…

(5) You must refuse to take shit from anyone who doesn’t have a gun to your head, and

(6) You must be willing to take chances and cheerfully accept losses, and

(7) You must have the capacity and courage for true intimacy with your loved ones, friends… and sometimes… even your associates and strangers, and

(8) You must be wealthy always in your mind… and therefore… very often… in your pocket, and

(9) You must be honest and have integrity not defined by laws but rather, by the inner-core of your being, and finally

(10) You must have a relationship with a higher power (nicknamed “God”) that does not necessarily include and/or often transcends any association with an organized religion.

What have I described here? Simply this:

A Player!

As a general rule, it is always easier to do business with and market stuff to people very high on the Halbert Index (Players) and this is especially true in an economic slump. Why? Simply because, no matter how bad the economy gets… these people will never succumb to a “depression mindset.”

A depression mindset is a sales killer. People who have it (more than 90% of our population) are running scared and have totally lost the belief (if they ever had it) they have the ability to fashion their own futures. They believe their fate is up to the economy… or… whatever politician gets elected… or… whether or not they can get a “good enough grade” from some employer or educational institution.

Almost everyone high on the Halbert Index is a reader and virtually none of them are heavy TV viewers. You see, almost all real wisdom comes from printed material and the streets; practically never does even a smidgen of it come from TV broadcasts.”

You can read Gary Halbert’s full newsletter here – www.thegaryhalbertletter.com/Newsletters/zdls_halbert_index.htm

It’s a great “slap in the face way” to get your day started off right.

The better-performing site is actually based on a design done by another web company a few years ago (I put a new back end on the site but esssentially used their original design). The poorer performing site was designed by me from scratch.

I have tried all sorts of different banners on the poorer performing site to try to improve its conversion rate. We did get pretty good results in the week before Christmas but then it dropped right off again.

A few days ago, I decided to give up completely on banners, and just display the 20 best selling products on the home page – 4 rows of 5 products each. I intended to do this as a temporary solution until I could come up with a better banner.

But within 24 hours of making this change, the conversion rate shot up to a record level! It’s only been a few days but this site is now converting just as well as the other one. With no banner on it – no attempt to “sell” at all. Just presenting the best-selling flowers to the visitors as soon as they hit the home page.

I suspect the reason is, when people are looking to buy flowers online, they just want to be shown the flowers directly and make their own decisions, without any attempts to “sell” them in a banner.

I’m not saying this is going to work for every online store in every market. But if you are looking to improve the conversion rate of an online store, it’s definitely worth testing.

He had purchased a large list of New Zealand business owners, with names, emails etc. He wanted me to send out a mass email to this list with his offers.

Now, I am aware of the spam laws in New Zealand but I thought I might be able to find a way around it. I carefully worded an email, addressing the recipients by first name, telling them I had got their details from a directory of New Zealand business owners.

I invited them to sign up for this company’s offers by going to a web page and I assured them this was a one time email and they would never hear from me again unless they signed up.

I sent this to 3000 people, to see how it went. The good news is, we got over 100 sign ups within a couple of days. The bad news is, we got four spam complaints which were referred to the Department of Internal Affairs.

The Department now has me under investigation for sending spam. Hopefully, for a first offence, I will simply get a warning. After all, it’s hardly in the same league as sending millions of emails a day selling viagra.

But the lesson is learned. It’s pretty much impossible now to get away with anything that even vaguely resembles spam because a small but very active number of people are ready to report any unwanted email to the authorities.

The moral, don’t even think about sending spam. It’s not worth the grief.

I have always regarded website design as being primarily about marketing – about selling. A website should not be simply a work of art that you can look at and admire. It should first and foremost work to bring in more enquiries, leads and sales for your business.

Most of my clients share this desire to see their websites sell. In most cases, they trust me to build them a site that will work effectively as a marketing tool, and leave it up to me to design the graphics, layout and content in such a way as to maximise the site’s selling power.

Thankfully, through a lot of hard work, study, trial and error (yes, plenty of errors along the way) I’m getting closer to the point where I have a fair idea of what will work and what will not work in terms of selling online.

Getting ranked on page one of Google – an experiment

Until now I’ve done very little to get my own website ranked on Google for the search term “website designers christchurch”.

It’s the old story – I’ve been too busy working on everybody else’s website and haven’t spent much time on my own.

OK, so here’s a challenge. I’m going to see if I can get ranked on the first page of Google’s search results – as close to the top as possible – for the search term “website designers christchurch”.

Currently I’m ranked nowhere… about page 6 or thereabouts. It’s going to take a few months, I guess. It will put my own SEO skills to the test. And I’m going to try some things that are a little different from the dubious SEO tactics I’ve seen some other using.

I won’t be wasting time building questionable incoming links. What I’ll actually be doing, I’m going to keep a secret for now. For a couple of reasons. One reason is, it might not even work, so I’d rather test it first before saying too much. The second reason is, SEO is a continaully changing business. I’d like to keep at the cutting edge and keep a few things under my hat.

OK, I’ll update on this in 3 months from now.

From what I can see, Google+ is a stripped down version of Facebook, without all the meaningless status updates etc that Facebook has. I like it a lot, on first impression.

The challenge for Google+ is that most ordinary people are already locked into Facebook. The only people on Google+ so far are geeks, journalists etc who are early adopters.

Google+ has some nice features but Facebook is already moving to copy them. So will Google+ wipe out Facebook, as Google hopes it will?

It’s too early to tell. But this video is the best I’ve seen at explaining Google’s position with Google+ alongside Facebook and Twitter.

“That’s nice of them,” I thought. Until I looked at my visitor statistics and saw that this comment had actually been posted in India. Of course, I realised, the company has hired cheap labour to post comments on other people’s blogs, to help boost their website’s ranking in Google.

Sure enough, this particular web design company is number one in Google for the term ‘website designers Christchurch’. So their tactic works. And in one sense, good on them for taking advantage of a loophole in the system that Google has put in place.