Social marketing has its own rewards and for some people it is a legitimate and effective way to build traffic to their sites. Many other people do not enjoy it but force themselves to go through the motions because they know they have to do something, anything.

How Will You Promote Your Website?

Let’s suppose that you have a micro niche site that features the Canon Power Shot SX20. You could probably come up with five or 10 pages of Web content about the SX20 to get your site indexed in Google.  But how would you promote it?  Do you think you could come up with enough original or even interesting material to write another 10 or 20 of 30 articles about the SX20 to submit to the article directories?  And what about duplicate content?  Ezinearticles.com would not even accept your SX20 article if it already appeared on another web site, your own or in another article directory.  The prospect makes social marketing look good, doesn’t it?

Here Is The Way Out of This Trap

Go to the Microsoft adCenter Labs. On the top menu click Tools–> Audience Intelligence–> Demographics. Enter your targeted keyword phrase and hit Go.

For our example it turned out that the primary audience for our keyword phrase is overwhelmingly male, age 50+. You can now use this demographic information to scan online and off-line newspapers and magazines for stories that you think would appeal to your targeted demographic. They do not have to be about cameras. They can be about anything at all. The newspaper or magazine editorial staff has already done all the research for you. They too are targeting a particular demographic. I have a fantastic online source of professionally written, seasonal articles with no copyright restrictions. I’m saving this info for people who subscribe to my email list.

This method completely removes the burden of keyword research.  Since you don’t care if your article is about cameras, or not, you only have to concentrate on writing an interesting article.

If your article is well written with a catchy title and an interesting story or a twist on a current event then the article itself may get picked up by the search engines right from the article directory web site. Other webmasters and ezine publishers will pick up your article if they write to the same demographic group.  You’ll probably get even wider distribution than you would have with a keyword rich article because the other webmasters are not publishing something from the competition. 

Since your resource box is the only thing you really care about you still get all the benefits of article marketing with less work. If you can write every article faster you’ll write more articles, and that is the name of the game. Your 20 or 30 articles with your targeted keyword in the author’s resource box look a lot more doable now, don’t they?

In Conclusion

You can build more traffic to your web site by writing as many articles as it takes to get your targeted keyword ranked above the fold in Google and the other search engines. Write little feature stories and a current event stories that appeal to the demographic for your keyword. Your keyword only has to appear as anchor text in the author’s resource box.

What I can do, however, is sort out the three dominant forms of writing for the Web, and explain the peculiarities of each form and the differences between them. Maybe just understanding the differences will decrease the anxiety.

Sales Letters

We have all seen one-page sales letters. They usually have huge red headlines, lots of bold text, and bullets up the ying yang. A good sales letter has one purpose, and one purpose only – to get the reader to take a specific action, either to click on a purchase link or to sign up for a newsletter or something similar. SEO keywords don’t mean squat in a sales letter and it would be a big mistake to focus on search results when the bigger job is to connect with your reader in language that means something personal to them.

A good sales letter has no fluff and no distractions like unrelated pictures or hyperlinks to pages or Web sites other than the one that is the object and purpose of the sales letter. Some people make a lot of money writing sales letters for the Web and for direct-mail marketing – maybe $10,000 or $15,000 for one page. So you know that this is a highly prized skill.

More Action. Less Anxiety.

That being said, if you must write a sales letter for your site, then just go ahead and do it. If you know of other web sites that are in the same line of business you can always go look at their sales letters and use them for a model. There are lots of web sites that talk about copywriting. Some are better than others. Copyblogger is a good place to start if you want to learn more about copywriting. If you want to see a model of a short and simple page that could be defined as a sales letter then go to our Free Adsense Report page. The copy is direct and to the point. It tells you the benefit of what we are asking you to do, and it gives you directions to follow, and what to expect. That’s it.

Web Page SEO

Web page search engine optimization is a whole different game than writing sales letters and requires a different mind-set. A web page has two purposes. One is to inform your readers in a way that keeps them interested enough to stick around. The other purpose is to have that page ranked highly in the search engines for one specific keyword phrase. These objectives should not be at odds with each other but in the rare case that they may be go for informing your readers. A well written article on a specific topic will almost always have the "right" supporting keywords by default.

Too Much May Be Worse Than None At all

The experts tells us that you do not want to dilute the SEO effectiveness of a targeted keyword phrase by spreading it around on several different pages. If "model 30 blue widgets" is the target phrase then have only one page on your website that is written to rank specifically for model 30 blue widgets. That does not mean that you can never use the phrase model 30 blue widgets anywhere else on your website but it should never be in the title of any other page or in an H1 tag on another page. We know that when Google spiders your page that it internally indexes every word on the page and then combines all the individual words together in a complex algorithm that Google uses to define the theme of that page and to rank it for relevance against other pages with a similar theme (as defined by Google). The higher the relevance the higher that page will appear in the SERPS. Only Google knows exactly how that happens so do not obsess about it.

Latent Semantic Indexing or Themes?

The fancy term "Latent Semantic Indexing" or LSI was being tossed around a couple years back and everybody trying to sell you something that had to do with keyword research was featuring the phrase all over their sales letters. As it turns out maybe Google is not doing LSI because of the overwhelming complexity inherent with processing billions of web pages. It does not matter. We can be certain, however, that Google does theme web pages and entire Web sites. Go to your Google Webmaster account and you’ll see the list of individual words that Google pulled off your pages and that it considers most important for theming your web site and every page on it. How else would Google know that a page about "hands was relevant to an anatomy website or to a poker site? Relevance means everything to the G.

What Does Relevance Mean To Google?

There are two ways I know of to make sure that the right combination of supporting words get on your page. One way is to do an exact search for the keyword phrase that you have targeted for your page [exact match]. Manually go to the top five or ten web sites that Google shows in the SERPS and copy or write down every individual word that you know or think is highly relevant to the exact phrase search. This is an effective method but it can take a huge amount of time. Any effort you make with this method would likely be productive.

The other way I know, and the only one that I use, is with KraPro or Web Content Studio. Now KraPro and WCS are slick pieces of software that will spider the top x number of sites (you choose the number) that appeared in the SERPS for the exact phrase match and provide you with a neatly formatted list of all the individual theme words, all the two word phrases, and all the three and four word phrases as well that appear in common on all the top web sites. You would want to add as many of the individual theme words as you possibly could to your own web page. The Google spider will collect all those theme words and give you a high relevance ranking for the keyword phrase that you targeted because you knew ahead of time what words to put on your page.

I have used this method several times and have never failed to get to the first page of Google for my targeted keyword phrase no matter what the page rank, the age of the site, or the number of backlinks. KraPro/WCS gives you a real competitive advantage over the other guys who are not paying attention to themeing.

500 Words Are Not Enough

The corollary to themed pages and the way that Google ranks individual pages in the SERPS is to make your SEO web pages as long as possible. Never fewer than 500 words and 1,000 words or more whenever you can. The more words on your web pages the more opportunity for Google to theme your page for both your targeted keyword phrase and for maybe dozens of longtail keyword phrases you didn’t even think of.

Article Marketing

By article marketing I mean writing and submitting articles to article directories and to ezine publishers. This is the writing task that you will do most often, and thankfully it is also the easiest. Writing a search engine optimized web page is hard work. You have to be concerned about the exact words that you use on the page for the reasons that we went through above. There are still lots of people who will tell you that if you are writing an article to submit to ezine articles, for example, to promote a web page on your site about blue widgets that you have to write about blue widgets.

What they are saying is that there is no difference between writing a web page and writing an article for article marketing. That is wrong. Forget about it.

Thank You Very Much For That Adsense Revenue

The purpose of article marketing is not to provide themed content to somebody else’s web site so they make a killing with Adsense. The purpose of article marketing is to provide backlinks to your own site and particularly to the interior pages of your site. The way you do that is by using the keyword phrase that you are targeting in the anchor text of your resource box. Your keyword need not appear even one time in the entire article. By not binding yourself to a very narrow theme you explode the world of possibilities to get raw material to write about.

For example, you could write about the Boston Marathon in your article, and in your resource box have a link to New Balance sneakers or to the latest and greatest veggie juicer or to a weight-loss program. The possibilities are endless.

Write To A Demographic

It took me a long time to wrap my head around something that seems so obvious to me now. I went Platinum on ezinearticles.com by writing keyword rich articles and competing with myself for the search engines’ attention. What a waste. Look at it this way. If you had the opportunity to put a 30 second commercial about your web site on any network television show that you wanted to for free wouldn’t you pick the show with the most viewers in the demographic category that best matched your web site? Advertising chainsaws on reruns of Tool Time would certainly be more relevant so far as the content of the show is concerned but probably not nearly as effective as advertising on NCIS in primetime.

Other webmasters will still pick up your articles and publish them on their sites with your resource box intact if they are well written. It’s probably even more likely that you’ll get wider distribution of your articles because the Webmasters picking up your Boston Marathon article probably will not be competing with you on the veggie juicers.

Only One Link Gets The Juice

Here’s another tip for your consideration. Dan Theis and Leslie Rhode have said that from their research they believe that Google will follow only the first URL to the same domain on the same page. That means that if your resource box has three links to blue-widgets.com that Google will only follow the very first one that appears on the page. Do with this information as you may but at a minimum it would be prudent to place your most important backlink first.

As a matter of standard practice I only place one link in my resource box. I have the opinion, with no proof, that webmasters are more likely to take and distribute your article with only one link instead of three because they have been told that they will bleed-off less page rank that way.

For somebody just starting out with Internet marketing, and for the other folks who have been around awhile and know through trial and error what works best, article marketing is probably the single most cost-effective way to get backlinks to your web site and to build traffic. No matter how you slice it traffic is the lifeblood of Internet marketing. It doesn’t matter what your web site looks like, who designed your template, whether or not it’s a blog or how good your content is, who did your graphics or how stunning they may be, without enough traffic each month to make the typical 1% or 2% conversions profitable you got nothing.

There are other paths to building Internet traffic and I am not suggesting for a moment that article marketing is the only way to do it, and for some people it may not even be the best. I do not care about, at least not for our current purposes.

The awful truth of article marketing is that if you want to build traffic to your web site by using this method then you have to write a lot of articles. How many is a lot? There is no specific answer to that question. It may be one article per day, it may be 10 articles per day or maybe even more. There is an old saying that you hear sometimes at salesmanship seminars, “When you’re done pumping, let go the handle.” What that means is that once you have finished your pitch and asked a closing question like “Will that be the red or the blue model?” then shutup and be quiet.

Article marketing presents the same kind of problem but in reverse. People are not pumping the handle enough. They submit one or two articles to ezine articles or make a submission to other article directories and hope for the best. If a little water trickles out of the pump and they get a couple extra visitors to their website or maybe move the site up in the Google rankings for a keyword or two a little bit they feel like they have accomplished the task.

How do I know that? Because that is exactly the way I had been doing it. It wasn’t until I caught on that promotion was way more important than just building a number of web sites, and I really researched the topic, that I discovered that the successful marketers were writing and submitting as many articles as it took to get their targeted keywords above the fold on the first page of Google.

I think that once you internalize and accept that “as many as it takes” really means that you are going to have to do a lot of work to get your targeted keyword in a top position so that you can actually make money with it, a whole new way of thinking sets in. Number one, if you are going to bust your butt with article marketing to get a keyword ranked then you had better be sure that that keyword is worth it. Keyword research is a whole topic in and of itself and I’m going to leave that for a later time, but whatever method you use to target potentially profitable keywords spend more time with it and be a little more diligent. Check the competition for that keyword more thoroughly. Know what web sites are already above the fold for that keyword. Are they all authority sites, or are the top couple sites amazon or other shopping network sites? You can usually knock off a shopping site but an authority site with hundreds of backlinks to the internal page containing the keyword and thousands of backlinks to the authority site itself is too steep a hill to climb.

The number two thing I learned was that once I had a targeted keyword that I felt I had a good chance to get above the fold with was that it may take 10 or 20 articles to get the results that I wanted. Most people do not like to write articles. Most people do not like to write at all. Unless you have the money to pay somebody to write your articles for you, and most new Internet marketers do not, then you have to be prepared to bite the bullet.

If this were a live seminar than this is where most people would leave the room. Maybe it is the culture, maybe people have always been like this, but nobody wants to be told that they are going to have to work, and work damn hard, to succeed with their Internet business. If you think you are up for it then hang with me. I can show you the approach that I took to systematize article writing and make it go a little faster and a little easier.

I tested that claim on a number of product review sites and Wordtracker’s number seems to work out pretty closely. I also discovered that the sites that operated at the high end of the scale (10x) had already been the subject of a specific backlinking campaign that I had done with 1WayLinks. Although I did not see a big number of visitors from the 1WayLink sites the backlinks from those sites did help move the keyword phrases that I had targeted further up the search engine listings.

My strategic mistake is that I have been putting up Wordpress product review websites willy nilly and then more or less abandoning them after a flurry of initial postings. I do manage to get several first page listings on G for long tail keyword phrases, and the sites do continue to make a little money with Adsense and Amazon affiliate sales, but overall I have come to the conclusion that unless you are going to outsource new page creation, article marketing, and backlinking that the better strategy is to go gung ho on very few new sites, maybe even only 1 or 2, at time and keep pounding on them until you are getting the kind of traffic and results that make it worthwhile for you.

I guess I bought into the theory that even if a site only made $10 or $20 per month that 100 of them were still worth a couple thousand in income, maybe more. It makes sense on its face but the strategy is less appealing when you consider that the time you spend building and maintaining penny sites is time that you cannot spend on sites that could be making $10 or $20 per day with the right effort.

The takeaway from this observation is the meaning of the “right effort.” I will continue this thread in subsequent posts on what I have found that phrase to mean and the results will be as surprising to you as they were to me.

The article directory sites listed below will publish your article with “do-follow” links. What that means is that when the Google spider visits your article on the article directory site that the Google spider will follow the link(s) contained within the article body and in the author’s area. 

You get credit for the backlink at Google so that the PR of the page that is the target of the link gets a boost. The higher the PR (PageRank) of the page at the article directory site containing the link – the more boost you get.  That’s why the list of article site directories is sorted by PR.

Best Practices say that you should submit to ezinearticles.com first and wait until your article is approved before submitting it to any other article directories. The reason for that is that ezinearticles.com will not publish your article if it finds it on another site, and most of the other article directories will accept the same article that was published on ezinearticles.com.

The downside is that ezinearticles.com may take several days to approve and publish your article. The only way around that delay is to get to Platinum status and to spin your article so that a search for any sentence fragment in the original article will not show up in the search results.

PR 6

http://ezinearticles.com/
http://www.goarticles.com/
http://www.selfgrowth.com/
http://www.isnare.com/

PR 5

http://www.articledashboard.com/
http://www.articlecity.com/
http://www.site-reference.com/
http://www.thewhir.com/article-central
http://www.articleblast.com/
http://www.searchwarp.com/
http://www.carolinaarticles.com
http://www.articlepool.com
http://www.manipalonline.com/
http://www.buzzle.com

PR 4

http://www.articlesfactory.com/
http://www.articler.com/
http://www.submityourarticle.com/articles/
http://www.articleslash.net

PR 3

http://www.articlerich.com/
http://www.ideamarketers.com/
http://www.articlecompilation.com/
http://www.talkinmince.com/
http://www.allbestarticles.com/
http://www.web-source.net/
http://www.articleonramp.com/
http://www.abcarticledirectory.com
http://www.articleco.com/
http://www.qwesz.com/

PR 2

http://www.amazines.com/
http://www.internetwebportal.com
http://e-articles.info/
http://www.articledirectory.com/
http://www.everyonesarticles.com/
http://www.s-article.com/
http://www.articlesfreedirectory.com/
http://www.articlesxarticles.com/
http://www.stupidarticles.com/
http://www.tarabiza.com/
http://www.damima.com/
http://www.ganazat.com/
http://www.stakoza.com/
http://www.shikapika.com/
http://www.halazona.com/

PR 1

http://www.myfreearticledirectory.com/
http://articleresource.org/
http://www.articlecounty.com/
http://www.financealley.com/
http://www.articlesidea.com/

PR 0

http://www.easyarticles.com/
http://www.articlegold.com/
http://www.free-articles-zone.com
http://www.addanarticle.com/
http://articles.usewho.com/
http://www.uploadarticles.com/
http://www.article-exchange.com/
http://articlezones.com/
http://www.pickarticle.com/

That relationship is that the number of monthly visitors = 5 to 10 times the number of pages.

I do not know if that relationship holds true in any universe but my own blogs but I did notice the same relationship in a Wordtracker article. Another, different, relationship that the Wordtracker folks were showing was that the number of monthly visitors = about 2 x the number of keywords that Google has indexed for your blog.

How many times have you heard that somebody was making $30 or more a day in Adsense from a blog with only 5 pages of content? I cannot prove that is not true but if they are they know something I do not.

A common question I see on forums is “What is the best article marketing software”? It’s not entirely clear from the question whether people are asking about software that helps them “spin” the same article into any number of different articles, of software that distributes their articles to any number of different article directories.

My personal article marketing efforts for years consisted of sending articles to Ezinearticles.com and a few other of the major article directories. I hit Platinum status some time ago and still submit a few articles a week. I tried one of those wide distribution gizmos a whole back – spent more than $150 for it too, and soon abandoned it because it was way more trouble than it was worth.

Traffic from Ezinearticles.com

I have received traffic from Ezinearticles and a couple other directories but for as long as I’ve been using Google Analytics I cannot say that I have ever identified any meaningful traffic from those dozens or hundreds of less than major article directories that I have submitted articles to.

Ezinearticles sends me reports every month about the number of people that have viewed my articles and clicked on them but I must confess that I am not seeing anything that corresponds to their numbers when I look for them in my Analytics analysis of those websites.

Where Are The Backlinks?

Other people may experience different results but as far as I’m concerned the major value of article marketing, maybe the only value, is the backlinks. I use the SEO feature in TrafficTravis to check backlinks. I do see backlinks from Ezinearticles but I never see backlinks from the secondary article sites that I used that $150 software for.

It Works For Me

1WayLinks is not the only article marketing solution, maybe it’s not even the absolute best one, but it works for me and I have not yet seen anything that I would want to replace it with. If you follow the link you will see a video explaining how it works but here is the quick summary of why I find it valuable – no, I find it indispensable to my internet marketing plans.

Here are the bullets:

• You control the number of backlinks you will get for a particular target keyword
• There are about 3,000 other sites in the network distributed across hundreds of C Blocks.
• You control the speed at which you get the backlinks. Too fast and Google flags your site.
• You have complete editorial control. There are minimum quality requirements for your articles but you want that.
• There’s an easy interface to check every article that gets posted so you can verify that your backlinks are not getting messed with.
• I can see the backlinks in Traffic Travis. My sites have moved up in the rankings.
• 1WayLinks is really easy to use

If you want or need help getting material for articles then see this video on Instant Article Wizard.

I own and use both of these. I recommend them because they are the best I’ve seen for what they do.

Step into a bookstore, find the business section, and pull out a book. Then flip the book to the back cover.

Here’s what you’re sure to find on virtually every business book: A selection of well-chosen fascinating bullets.

And there’s a reason why bullets make it to the back cover of a book.

It’s because you tend to read the title, then the subtitle (on the front cover) and then flip the book to get the gist of the book.

Yes there’s the yada, yada, yada about the book on the back cover. Yes, there’s an index. Yes, there’s a contents page.

But you ignore most of the yada, yada, yada and head for the bullets.

You do it because bullets are like flashing Christmas lights

They flash because of their ability to create curiosity. And not just a little bit of curiosity, but a massive amount of curiosity.

So here I’ve got a book on my desk that’s about podcasting. And at the very top of the back cover are the following bullets.

• How to find and download audio and video podcasts to your computer or portable media player
• How to develop, format, produce, edit, encode, and upload your audio or video podcast, including in-depth information on using music legally
• How to set up an effective audio studio, including the complete and updated “The podcast studio buyer’s guide”
• How to create great video, including tricks of the trade such as the law of thirds, the line, and the three-point light technique, as well as tips on casting, locations, scheduling, and more
• How people are marketing and making money through podcasting in the era of Web 2.0

Notice how they’ve put the entire guts of the book in those five simple points?

And notice how each of those points started with a “how” statement?

So let’s tackle those two ideas one at a time

Idea 1: notice how each of those points started with a “how” statement?

It doesn’t matter what the line. If you put the word ‘how’ before it, it instantly becomes interesting and gets our curiosity going.

Or you can always add a “why,” which does the same trick.

For example:

I went to Ireland this summer.

versus

How I went to Ireland this summer.

or

Why I went to Ireland this summer.

Another example:

I make butter chicken.

versus

How I make butter chicken.

or

Why I make butter chicken.

Of course you won’t use a sentence that’s as boring as the ones above, but you do get the point, right? The only question that remains is how do you get all of these sentences. And the clue lies in Idea 2.

Idea 2: Notice how they’ve put the entire guts of the book in those four or five lines?

So take your entire book or course, or speech, or whatever. Split it up into distinct parts.

For example, my product The Brain Audit has seven sections, so it could naturally be split into seven distinct bullets. Or you could also select just five.

Then pull out something from each part to describe the benefit the reader could get from that section.

So for The Brain Audit, the bullets read like this:

1. How to instantly get (and keep) the attention of the customer.
2. The roller coaster sequence (and why it matters when selling).
3. How to create a uniqueness factor in a matter of days.
4. How to know if a customer is really interested in your offering.
5. Why benefits and solutions aren’t the most effective way to sell.

Each of those bullets represents a different part of the book

And each of them has a simple “how” or “why” structure to get and keep attention.

In fact, this same technique that you see at the back of a book can be used for any persuasive piece of writing, be it a sales page, an event, a speaking engagement, product, or service.

The fundamentals are simple

Take your product/service. Split it into five or seven parts and pull out the most important highlights or benefits.

Take those highlights or benefits and put a “why” or “how” before each one.

And there you have it: a collection of fascinating bullets.

And that’s how you make your product/service or course stand out. Like flashing Christmas lights.

About the Author: Sean D’Souza offers a free report on ‘Why Headlines Fail’ when you subscribe to his Psychotactics Newsletter. Be sure to check out his blog, too.

You know that “inner child” we hear so much about — the one that’s supposedly deep inside of all of us?

Well, I live with it. As a matter of fact, I call him “Austin.”

In the five years I’ve been a parent, I’ve realized that the notion of the inner child is more than just a neat psychological construct. It’s very nearly a literal thing. As we grow up, we don’t change so much as drape layer after complicated layer of adult emotion on top of that inner child. The child doesn’t vanish; he just gets obscured and filtered.

You don’t get an evolved, new mature being. You get Austin with fifteen blankets over his head.

Because that kid always remains at our core (and if you’ve ever caught yourself playing kids’ games with genuine enjoyment, you know that it does), our base motivations remain as well. They just get a little harder to see.

Kids ask for love; adults have complicated passive-aggressive relationships. Kids eat what tastes good; adults want the cupcake, but worry about it going straight to their thighs.

So you want to learn about marketing? Well, despite the complicated models and terminology that some of the gurus use, it’s actually quite simple. To see what works and why, all you have to do is look to my boy.

Make the customer “want that”

When the TV is on in our house, there are sometimes twelve sequential minutes of relative quiet. Then, as the commercials come on, we get a loud play-by-play as Austin begins talking loudly to nobody:

“I want that.”

“I don’t want that.”

“I want that. That last thing. Not that; the thing before.”

It’s easy to dismiss this as incredibly annoying, but if you think about it, it’s actually really revealing.

(OK, it’s incredibly annoying too.)

Without all of those complex adult filters, kids are a conduit to something we don’t normally allow in the adult world: pure desire. There are none of the shoulds and should nots, no rationalizations and thoughts of what is proper or responsible.

That kid is still inside everyone. So the dead-simple lesson is this: Every sale starts with pure desire. Customers either “want that” or they don’t. The rest is just mental gymnastics to justify that core emotion.

Know what your customer really wants

Recently, Austin stormed through a six pack of kids’ yogurt so that we’d buy more, because each six pack had a tiny, ridiculous comic book inside. Yoplait could have filled those containers with shredded paper and they still would have gotten our dollars if Austin had his way.

Did he want the yogurt? Not so much. He wanted the comic book.

Similarly, we sometimes go to McDonald’s because of the dumb little toys they stick in Happy Meals. Or because of the giant playlands they have everywhere.

I have this experiment I keep meaning to try: I want to tell Austin that McDonald’s serves food, because I think he may be surprised to learn it. We don’t go to McDonald’s for the food. We go for the Batmobile that fires a small plastic stick at the back of my head while I’m driving.

Now . . . Wendy’s? We don’t go to Wendy’s. Their kids’ meal prizes are audiobooks on CD. Bleh. Same basic food, but none of what the boy really wants.

Interestingly, as I write this, I’m sitting at a Borders book store. There’s also a Barnes & Noble in town, but they don’t have as many big poofy chairs to sit in, and their ambient music is too loud. Apparently both stores have the same books, but I wouldn’t know that because I just come here to buy a latte and work in a comfortable chair.

Don’t lie to your customers

Cheers to McDonald’s for recognizing that small toys will get kids in the door. But jeers to our local managers for failing the “implied contract with the customer” test.

Recently, my wife and I were assaulted by a barrage of McDonald’s requests because the current pieces of plastic junk that the clerks were dropping into Happy Meals were Bakugan figures, which are Japanese balls that transform into things. (Don’t ask.)

My wife took Austin once and he returned angry, showing me a nondescript plastic Pancho Villa-like figure with a spinning sombrero. Later, I took him and despite the display for Bakugan, we again walked away with a bogus replacement — a miniature stuffed monkey.

Twice burned, Austin’s McDonald’s lust backed off significantly. And, seeing as our son had been lied to twice, my wife and I instituted a temporary boycott.

Associative conditioning works

We often buy SpongeBob SquarePants macaroni and cheese. It’s terrible. For some reason, a complicated spongelike lattice doesn’t present cheese and pasta in a pleasing ratio. And yet Austin eats it and requests it again and again because SpongeBob is on the box.

I tested the limits of this adoration yesterday over dinner. Austin hates lettuce more than anything in the world, so I asked him if he would eat lettuce that had SpongeBob printed on the leaves and came with a free coloring book. He was all over it.

Then he got mad at me when I told him that such lettuce didn’t exist.

Of course, this only works on small children. Only kids are dumb enough to fall for such a simple trick, right?

Um, not quite. Most advertising is based around associative conditioning, which is taking something that you already like and pairing it with something that they want you to like. Or with someone you already like, in the form of a celebrity (or sponge) endorsement.

You may not buy terrible macaroni because a cartoon tells you to, but you buy Nikes because LeBron James endorses them. Or you buy a phone you can’t actually talk on because it’s white with a silver Apple on it. And if you don’t do those things, then I’ll bet you were buying Pepsi because of Michael Jackson back before they lit his hair on fire.

You may be standing up and denying angrily that you do any of those things, but billions of advertiser dollars say either that you’re quite unique or that you’re mistaken. Maybe you don’t come out and say, “Ooh, Tiger Woods. I want that!” but it happens anyway — deep down, at the inner child level.

Like so many things, marketing can appear way more complicated than it is. But marketing is simple — not always easy, but simple. In fact, it’s so simple that you may be overlooking the reasons it works when it does, and why it doesn’t work when it fails.

If you have kids, look to them. See what they like, and why they like it. See what pushes their buttons, because it’ll tell you a ton. Kids aren’t dumb. They’re just adults without all of those complicated outer layers.

About the Author: Johnny B. Truant is giving a free teleclass called Attract Clients, Lose the Stress, and Do What You Love tomorrow (November 12, 2009) with his marketing veteran mother. She knows Johnny’s inner child better than he does, because she lived with it for eighteen years.