Village Tip: Improve Your Ad in 30 Seconds

Feel like your ad just isn't quite right? Here are a few quick fixes to heighten the effectiveness of your ad:

1. Set them in your targets - The most important way to improve an ad is to tightly target your audience. You will often have more luck placing your ad in a trade publication than in a general newspaper, even if the readership is not as high.

2. Make you ad stand apart from the rest - Most people are constantly bombarded by advertisements, but what makes yours stand out from the rest? The ads we pay attention to are the ones that pertain directly to our most pressing concerns. The ads we notice are the ones that promote a product, service, or idea that can solve our problem, make us feel better, make us richer, or make us feel sexy and loved.

3. Improve your headline - Get attention by targeting your best audience. Then use a headline to shout out a problem or solution your target audience will immediately identify with.

4. Make your ad skim-friendly - 

• Only a small percentage of us start at the beginning of an ad and read every word to the end. 
• If the ad is more than a couple of sentences, we will skip it. 
• Put your most important phrases in bold. 
• Keep sentences short. 
• Use simple everyday words. 
• Make your paragraphs no longer than three lines. 
• Try to limit yourself to one idea per sentence.

I will continue to share these Village Tips on a semi-regular basis!

Village Tip: Make Your ABOUT Page Sell

It's interesting how many web site visitors quickly click to the "about" page. This is the page that tells who runs the business, where it is located, and why they do what they do.

With all the uncertainty some folks still feel about buying online, it is only natural they want to find out more about the business before they seriously consider buying the product or service.

Include your photo, a photo of your staff, or a picture of your building on the "about" page. Be sure to give your address, one or more email addresses visitors can use, and a phone number. Anything less makes some people feel like you've got something to hide.

The "about" page is also a good place to tell your story. People love to hear about how you got started. They want to know what it is you like about your business and how you work to help customers. Give people a good story and they will remember it long after they have forgotten the particulars of the product they came to see.

I will continue to share these Village Tips on a semi-regular basis!

Village Tip: How to Develop and Test Your Marketing Plan

Developing a solid marketing plan goes hand-in-hand with testing; you can't do one without the other. If you don't test your plan, you won't know for sure whether it works.

You don't have to be a multimillion-dollar corporation with a team of marketing experts to test your marketing plan. All you have to do is come up with a system for finding out what you want to know.

Break your testing schedule down into weekly intervals focused on determining one or two things. Remember, your goal is not only to find out what works, but what doesn't work.

Say during four weeks of testing, you send out a mailing each week to 1000 different people. On each separate mailing, you have a different price for the advertised product or service. The response to these mailings should tell you which price is most acceptable for your product / service.

The response rate should also tell you which type of customer is buying what you offer and why. By the end of the four week testing period, you will have determined your pricing and target audience.

Once you know whom to target, you should test how to get the best response rate from these potential customers. Initiate a second testing period in which you send out a different mailing each week with fixed pricing, but varied messages. Contact the same recipients with different messages over a period of months after the second test period has ended. You should never stop refining your marketing plan.

The point of developing a marketing plan is to have a set system that works. Without proper testing, you will never know what strategies are effective, so before you settle into a plan, put it to the test.

I will continue to share these Village Tips on a semi-regular basis!

Village Tip: Get People to Pass You Around

No doubt you have heard of viral marketing. Just like a common cold, it involves having people pass an idea or product from one person to the next.

Unlike a cold, a marketing virus is a wonderful thing to catch!

These Village Tips are a simple kind of viral marketing. I share them here on the Electronic Village, but they almost always get picked up by other bloggers who send them to their readers who send them to their list. You may be reading this tip years after I wrote it. Amazing, isn't it?

I share the article once, then enjoy the benefits as one person passes it to another. Who knows how many people see these tips ... even people who have never heard of the Electronic Village!

Look for ways you can give your product, service, or idea a marketing virus.

• Give people a free service they can use. Your web address and phone number are included in every product they send to others.


• Start a joke that pertains to the news or common experiences in life. If it's in an email, it can include your name. Jokes get passed around at an unbelievable rate. Some humor experts believe there may be as few as 7 people who come up with most of the jokes we hear. They start them on their viral tour, eventually reaching millions.


• Create a series of e-books, pamphlets, or YouTube commercials. A series makes people want to tell others so they can get in on the progression.


• Perhaps the most effective method of viral marketing is simply being kind and helping people. Help folks for free when you can and give paying customers more than they asked for. You may be surprised at how fast customers tell their friends ... and in these days of email, that can be a LOT of people.

I will continue to share these Village Tips on a semi-regular basis!