When you woke up yesterday, did you remember that it was April Fool’s Day? For most of my life I haven’t given much thought to this strange “holiday”. I was never on the giving or receiving end of any pranks. Over the last few years, though, the online community has really embraced the opportunity to have a little fun on April 1st each year. I guess I’m part of the online community because the day of fools has become my favorite holiday.
My real point, though, is that your business has a unique opportunity to connect with your audience on April Fool’s Day. Even if the voice of your business is very formal and polished 364 days a year, you do have a chance on this one day to be irreverent. We’ve talked before on this blog about the value of using humor in your marketing. We walked the walk yesterday with our humorous video on our new design breakthrough. (Haven’t seen it yet? Head over to YouTube and leave a comment after the video to let us know what you think.)
The response to the video has been great. We connected with customers, referral partners, and other people in our network. The video was spread around to coworkers and friends. It was seen by people we’ve never met. Once we started getting some attention, we stoked the fire by adding a link for viewers to download a PDF of the actual charts we used in the video. We added the link into the comments on Facebook and added an in-video annotation over on YouTube.
We’re not the only ones who jumped at the opportunity to have a little April Fool’s fun. Here are some other great jokes from yesterday:
Have any favorites we missed? Sound off in the comments.
I started Silver Square 10 years ago, and I’ve learned a lot about what makes a marketing piece work. I’ve always had hunches about which elements were making a dynamite piece work, but I didn’t have any hard data to back it up… until now. Clay Mabbitt has been crunching the numbers and boiled it down to a single element that is the key to maximizing the effectiveness of the logos, printed pieces, and websites we create for our clients.
I’ll let him share the secret with you in this video.
Update: Happy April Fool’s Day, everybody. Thanks for all the emails and warm responses to this video. If you liked it, don’t forget to give it a Digg or leave a comment over at YouTube.
It’s taken a while, but after 10 years in business we here at Silver Square have gotten a pretty good handle on the algorithm search engines like Google use when returning search results. Various sources have been confirming for years that the majority of traffic on any search term goes to the pages that appear on the first page of search results – expecially the first 3 spots. So understanding the formula used to determine the order results are returned is a vital key to ranking well.
Understandably search engines don’t publicize their ranking formulas because that invites search engine spammers and “black hat” search marketers to manipulate the system. So these numbers are approximate, but it will give you a reasonably good idea of how pages are ranked.
Talent 35% – Does the page demonstrate something unusual and interesting that the search engine hasn’t seen before? Pages with video clips of strong musical performances or juggling fire will see a boost in their ranking.
Evening Wear 25% – Does the page project an image of elegance and sophistication? Significant preference is given to sites that include rhinestones and colorful sequins in their design. Any page layout that includes an exposed midriff in the middle of the page is going to get dinged, but a modest slit up the sidebar is acceptable.
Swimsuit 20% – Although the page should reveal some tantalizing content when a visitor first sees the page, the search engine judges like for you to leave something to the imagination. For this reason, it’s important that you don’t put all of your information on the home page. Save a little something for the secondary pages of your site, or at least move it below the fold of the home page. Stay classy.
On-Stage Question 15% – Each page also has the opportunity to use their title and description meta tag to respond to questions asked by search engine users. Examples of common questions asked include “how far to the sun?” “what is bill gates worth?” “jonas brothers lyrics” “danica patrick” and “free mp3 forum”
Judge’s Discretion 5% – The judge also has a small amount of leeway to push a page higher (or lower) in the rankings if the page demonstrates strength in keyword density, page titles, meta descriptions, page rank, inbound links, relevant anchor text, keywords used in title and heading tags, age of domain, traffic and historical click-through data, social media buzz, keyword appearing in root domain, image alt tags, freshness of page, unique content, frequency of updates, ratio of code to text, query parameters, W3C standard compliance, presence and prevalence of advertising, diversity of link sources, location in site hierarchy, internal link popularity, global link popularity of domain, links from hubs/authoritative sites, growth of inbound links over time, page load time, server uptime, use of XML sitemaps, use of feeds, use of SSL certificates, detection of keyword stuffing, cloaking, excessively long URLs, links from untrusted sites, overuse of nofollow attribute, language of site, country code TLD, geographic location of visitors to site, and geo-tagging in meta data.
So there you have it. Now as you are preparing to enter the competition for search engine rankings, you know where to focus your efforts. Good luck!
It’s taken several months of hard work, but we’re delighted to finally roll out the beta release of our Push-Telepathy™ technology. By the end of 2008 we had established ourselves as premiere providers of email marketing campaigns, so we started looking to the horizon. What was the next trend in permission marketing going to be?
Push-Telepathy™ R&D
After several weeks of closed sessions where we researched and debated the emerging technologies, we came up with Push-Telepathy™. More advanced than the familiar read-only model of traditional mind reading, Push-Telepathy™ allows us to send custom thoughts directly into the skulls of our subscribers.
Businesses who want to start a Push-Telepathy™ campaign can choose from one of 7 free thought templates or for a small fee we can create a custom thought template that extends your current brand.
Although privacy advocates have expressed concern that this new technology is too invasive, our supporters are quick to point out that it is far easier to unsubscribe from one of our lists than has ever been possible with email or phone lists. If you no longer wish to receive Push-Telepathy™ messages, you need only think about unsubscribing. Instantly it’s done.
