Double your sales with clickbait - Andy McCourt's ReVerb
Congratulations, you've just been 'clickbaited'. Although I am openly ashamed of the headline; I do promise that what you will learn here, if you decide to apply it, will at least double or treble your sales. It’s working for everyone else; why not print service suppliers? Later, I’ll give you three things you can do today that will double your sales.
As you read this, the drip, drip, drip loss of advertising in print media is turning into a torrent. This week, former senior advertising executives from one of the big newspaper organizations, referred to what is happening as both a ‘bloodbath’ and ‘slaughter.’ On Monday night, 18th February; the ABC’s Media Watch programme hosted by Paul Barry was only four days late for the St Valentine’s Day Massacre when it revealed that Fairfax’s advertising revenue from the revered Age and Sydney Morning Herald titles dropped 25% last financial year.
How much is 25%? Try $100 million and say it slowly. One-hun-dred-mill-ion gone, vamoosed, booooosh! out of the print publishing industry. News Ltd is faring better, but only just. Where does the money go? Answer: mostly to Google whose main source of revenue is AdWords and AdSense.
It is with AdSense that the secrets of clickbaiting lie. The goal is to get someone to click on a link and this is best achieved by it not being an ‘advert’ per se, but a story with a snappy or risqué headline. For the UK’s Daily Mail – the most viewed ‘news’ website on Earth – it’s the risqué element that seems to work best. The DM is coming to Australia and bringing with it what Barry termed: ‘The sidebar of shame’ – a seemingly endless column of clickable stories that bear no resemblance to proper news or journalism, but are so itchy-scratchy that you just have to click on them – clickbait.
Headlines today include: ‘Lara Bingle accused of copying swimwear…’ ‘I run 4 miles a day and never shave my legs:Victoria Beckham’ ‘Kim Kardashian in cleavage-baring shirt…’ ‘Cheeky Selena Gomez wears tiny shorts…’ and numerous stories about B grade starlets cavorting in the surf in a ‘barely there bikini.’ Sidebar of shame? More like a sidebar of the inane: meaningless futile pap where soft porn and voyeuristic curiosity masquerades as newspaper journalism. Nevertheless; it works…as Clickbait. The main, non-sidebar, stories are in the main, not much better.
Click on the story and the ads you see are targeted to where you are, what the interest of the story is and anything else the algorythms can ascertain you might be interested in. Then there’s the double-bite Clickbait; the page you land on contains what appear to be interesting stories: “Australia’s Private Healthcare Revolution” takes you to sponsored content for a health insurance comparison website courtesy of Google’s Adsense.
Have you ever wondered how local banner ads appear on overseas web links you click? Goodle AdSense. Have you ever wondered why ads for Real Estate start appearing on your inbox after you’ve browsed or enquired about some properties? Google AdSense.
Fairfax let go of hundreds of very well known and respected writers and journalists last year. The Daily Mail is hiring 50 journalists right now – journalists? If they are they will want to switch off their AJA - Media Alliance code of ethics and get ready to follow up on: “Mel D loses top in Bondi surf!” and similar bilge.
Back to Clickbait. It can be applied in a more ethical and commercially beneficial way, using Google AdWords and AdSense. To benefit from this you must be doing business online; if you are not – forget it. The most successful printers in the world today do their business online; companies such as Fitzroy, Melbourne’s PMI with dozens of websites including www.discountprinting.com.au . VistaPrint is the seminal example and CJ King was able to move its presses from Perth to the Gold Coast without serious damage because its primary model is online business nationally and internationally.
THREE SALES-DOUBLING HINTS
Okay, I promised three ways to help you double your sales and I won’t insult you with a preamble of 10 pages of mindless diatribe before I get to the point – if I ever do.
1) Learn all you can about Google AdWords and AdSense. Sign up, spend a bit. Become a Premium AdSense partner if you can and deal with a dedicated Google account manager. Trust in Google…let their system do the work and don’t fight it.
2) Create banners and articles with themes such as “How one business card helped me win a $1 million account” or “I personally delivered 1,000 flyers around my neighbourhood, made $50,000 and many new friends.” Or “A homeless guy looked in my shop, told me what was wrong and now I’ve opened 5 new branches.”
3) Tickle the curiosity; dig for the stories, experiment with copywriting styles or hire a good copywriter; get set to go viral; use YouTube – Google owns it like everything else. Drive traffic to your websites (note plural) and offers; accept PayPal and get ready for jobs coming in 24/7, all pre-paid.
4) Four? But wait, there’s more! Under promise and over-deliver; keep the adrenaline rush going, offer freebies and future discounts ‘on your next order.’ As my old mate Singo used to say: “Squeeze the ole’ tit.”
On that note, we are back to Daily Mail style Clickbait. We can dislike it and lament the passing (or drastic downsizing) of proper journalism but we can not deny its phenomenal success.
I share Paul Barry’s horror at what’s happening in mainstream print media and thank him for articulating it so well on Media Watch; but we can learn from the horror, the horror, the horror. That’s life.