Use hot topics to frame your marketing message

The best marketing message is that which addresses people's concerns.

What are people talking about? What are they searching for online?

You can get answers to these questions from statistics provided by search engines, blogs and social bookmarking sites.

If there are a lot of searches or a lot of blogging on a given topic, that means it's hot. And if you're an expert on this topic (or something related to it) it's an ideal time to write about it or comment about it. This will help build your status as an authority.


HERE ARE SOME TOOLS:

Google Trends - See at a glance what the popular searches have been for the past 24 hours. Or search on a specific topic for trends in recent weeks, months or years. You can even compare search terms and get a breakdown of searches by country and region.

This graph shows the results of searches for 3 popular psychiatric diagnoses: ADHD, Autism, and Bipolar, for the last 12 months.

Overall, Autism (red line) has been the most popular search. However, if you look at the countries below the graph, you'll notice that this is the case mainly for English-speaking countries. in northern Europe the most popular search has been ADHD (blue line.)

Thus, depending on which population you're targeting, you'll frame your message accordingly.





Yahoo Buzz - Learn what's hot right now. A "Buzz score" is based on search term popularity, how many times a news story or other item is emailed from Yahoo Buzz, and the number of votes from Buzz visitors. You can search for buzz within a particular topic, and within a specific time frame, up to the past year. Here's a screenshot from what's hot in health news from the past 30 days:





Blogs and social bookmarking - People are not only searching online; they are also talking about what they've found. They're blogging, commenting, and sharing their bookmarks. You can see what's hot by visiting:
Technorati
BlogPulse
Del.icio.us
Furl

"Expensive" implies quality

Last week in the news there was an interesting study confirming what we already suspect: Expensive medicine is perceived as more effective.

People who were told that a pill cost $2.50 got more pain relief from a shock to their wrist, than did those who were told that the pill cost only 10 cents. In reality, both groups of subjects received the same pill, which contained no pain medicine at all. The pill was just a placebo (sugar pill.)

A few months ago another study showed that people sipping wine which they thought cost $45, reported that it tasted better than wine that they were told cost $5.

Moreover, brain imaging reflected more activity in the pleasure centers when the people drank the "expensive" wine - even though both products were identical!

These research results are not surprising. From haircuts, to cosmetics, to watches, to cars - in the mind of the consumer, higher price is associated with better quality. And expectation of quality affects one's experience of satisfaction.


What this means for your professional business:

Even in these tough economic times, if you are a professional, think twice before slashing your fees.

There is still a need for your services and products. And when money is tight, your potential clients and customers don't want to waste it. More important than ever is their confidence that what they are paying for is indeed going to help them.

Instead of lowering your prices, increase your perceived value. Here are some tips:

• Be extra responsive - e.g., return phone calls and emails within an hour.

• Offer extra convenience - e.g., toll-free phone number, baby-sitting services for your in-person clients, evening office hours, stamped self-adressed envelopes for return mail.

• Give something free, which is related to your paid service or product - e.g., book (yours or someone else's), CD, DVD, pedometer (eg., for clients you are coaching to improve their life style.) These items cost a few bucks, but can greatly enhance your perceived value.

What eye-tracking studies imply for your website

Where should you place your most important text on your web page? According to eye tracking studies by Jakob Neilsen, people's eyes scan web pages in an F-shaped pattern, as in the image below. The red areas indicate the longest gaze, blue the shortest, and grey no focus at all.



What does this mean for your website? If you look at the diagram, you can see that the top third of the page, with emphasis on the left side is the most looked at. That's where your most important information should go.

Further down the page use more headings. Since readers spend less time focusing as they scan down a web page, headlines will catch their attention and get them to stop momentarily.

Nielsen also recommends AGAINST using a lot of bright graphics and fancy formatting. He found in his research that anything resembling a banner ad tends to get ignored.

Research for writing articles

Do you write articles for the public? Where do you research your topic?

Journal articles may not your best source. They are geared toward professional audiences, who have different questions from the general public.

Here are some alternative sources:

• Findarticles.com is a good blend of popular and academic articles. Most of them have passed through professional editors and fact-checkers. Many articles are free, but there are also some available for a fee.
  
  
• MagPortal is another source, not quite as comprehensive, but all articles are free.
  
  
• Search recent news at Google News or Yahoo News. Many news stories quote authorities on the topic. If you want to know more, you can usually find the quoted sources or people via a simple Google search.

Pauline
p.s. Still time to sign up for my distance-learning course

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Geeks and Freelancers for Hire

If you're like most professionals, you don't have a staff of technicians on call. But here's the next best thing: Outsourcing.

Freelance programmers, writers, web designers and other technical professionals are all a few clicks away. Find them at online freelancing hubs such as elance, rentacoder or guru.com

Here's how it works: Register at the site. Select the category of work you want done and write a detailed description. You can specify price range, country (e.g., one of my friends has had good results with programmers from Romania), time frame and feedback rating.

Hiring someone unknown can be scary. That's why these freelance hubs have rating systems, with comments by people who have used the services. You can browse the categories to find the top producers.

Finally you click to put your job up for bids. Within a few hours you'll start getting offers from all over the world. (Bidders don't have your email address. They respond to your job description on the website, and their bids are forwarded to you.)

You'll probably notice that bids from America and western Europe are higher than those from other parts of the globe. That reflects the cost of living more than the quality of the work. Respond to the bidders that you want to follow up on. You will probably want to see some of their previous work and check references.

When you are ready to hire one of the bidders, you go to the website and click to accept the bid. Your bidding is then closed.

To think about when hiring an overseas project worker

• If you choose to hire someone whose first language is different from your own, then you need to be especially articulate in stating exactly what you want done. With a language barrier, the problem is not usually the technical jargon, but rather the everyday idioms and slang that could be misinterpreted if translated literally. Be as concrete as possible in your communication.
  
  
• Another potential problem with hiring someone overseas is the time difference. It's pretty cool to think that they're working while you sleep, but when you need to talk to them, or when you need a quick email reply, it can be complicated. I recently had to online-chat with someone in China, which meant some very late nights for me.

Rentacoder is geared mainly for programming and other technical work. Elance and guru offer a variety of services, including technical, legal, marketing book-keeping, ghostwriting, translating and administrative support.

Check them out. If you have any of the above skills (or know someone who does) you can sign up to be a service provider and bid on work yourself.

3 quick tips to boost your online presence

Got an email address? Got a website? Great. But that’s just the beginning.

If you want to get more visibility online, you need to do a little more to build your Web presence. Here are some tips that will help sprinkle your name all over the Internet – and they won’t cost you a dime.

1. Start a blog – even if you have a website. Why? Because search engines love blogs. Each time you add an entry to your blog, Google and other search engines view this as new content, and they notice it. Thus, 5 little blog entries get the same attention from Google as 5 new web pages! – which translates into higher ranking for you on Google’s search results page.
   
   You can set up a blog in a few minutes (OK, maybe an hour if you’re really fussy about how it looks) at blogger.com or wordpress.com.
   
   
2. Leave comments on other blogs and on news sites. Blogs and news sites invite readers to comment, usually at the bottom of each item. If you find an article stimulating, or if you have something substantive to add, type in your comment. At the end, add your full name and a link to your website or blog. If you have written a book, include the title.
   
   You can start right now, by posting a comment to this blog entry.
   
   When other readers see your comments, they may respond and/or click on the link to your website. You may also get the attention of journalists who wrote news stories to which you commented. If they like what you said, they may want to interview you for a future news story.
   
   Here's a comment that I recently posted to the New York Times.
   
   
   
3. Write brief articles and submit them to article directories such as ezinearticles.com, selfgrowth.com and goarticles.com. Be sure to include your name, website and link at the end of the article. Your article is added to their database. Website owners, ezine and newsletter publishers search these databases for interesting items to post in their own publications.
   
   If your article is picked up, you don’t get paid, but you do get in front of audiences that you would not otherwise have access to. You never know where it’s going to turn up. My articles have appeared on gardening websites, celebrity blogs, and other unlikely places.
   

Want to learn more? I'll help you connect the dots in getting better name recognition online. My 5-week distance-learning course starts Jan 14. Click here to get your 25% discount for early registration.

Writing articles? Leave 'breathing room'

One of the best ways to show people that you're an expert is to write articles and post them online.

If you want to make them easy to read (besides using good grammar and conversational language) make sure that you don't post a block of dense text. That's very hard on the eyes, and most people won't make the effort to read it.

Give your text 'breathing room' by breaking it up into short paragraphs.

Here's an excerpt from Alice in Wonderland, presented as a solid block of text:

The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down what seemed to be a very deep well. Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her, and to wonder what was going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything: then she looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book-shelves: here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs. She took down a jar from one of the shelves as she passed: it was labeled “ORANGE MARMALADE,” but to her great disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar, for fear of killing somebody underneath, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as she fell past it.

Here's the same excerpt, but broken up into paragraphs. Notice how much easier it is to read:

The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down what seemed to be a very deep well.

Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her, and to wonder what was going to happen next.

First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything: then she looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book-shelves: here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs.

She took down a jar from one of the shelves as she passed: it was labeled “ORANGE MARMALADE,” but to her great disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar, for fear of killing somebody underneath, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as she fell past it.

Eye-tracking studies show that short paragraphs are more likely to be read than long paragraphs.

And what about text size? Surprisingly, if your text font is very large, people will tend to scan rather than read.


Pauline