Do you agree with Marty?

It was a Monday in college. On my hustle to try and wake up and learn something I noticed this phrase chalked on the bricks all over campus “Do you agree with Marty?”. For the next 4 days the whole campus was inundated with this message chalked all over the walkways. I couldn’t help but think, “Who the hell was this Marty guy?”. Friday rolled around, the weekend was near, and a ton of people wearing orange t-shirts… this was weird. The first one I saw from the front revealed the message “I agree with Marty.” In every class I had, at least 5 people were wearing orange t-shirts saying “I agree with Marty.” I struck up a conversation with one of the t-shirt wearers and apparently Marty was an Evangelical Christian who had a set of Christian principals he lived by that everybody else “agreed with”. A full page ad was taken out that Friday by Marty and the Christian group he was involved with inviting people to their Saturday speech at the center of campus.

Why was this effective?
The sidewalk chalk got mindshare. It got people interested and intrigued. Who was this Marty dude? And why is he writing all over my sidewalks?

Effective resolution to the intrigue - A campus filled with people all obviously affiliated. You HAD to ask them the question, “Who is this Marty guy?” I forgot to add earlier they had fliers to hand out when you asked them about Marty.

Another event to help clarify the message, plus free food – That Saturday they had a bunch of speakers including Marty himself talk in the center of campus, plus free Chick-Fil-A.

Here is a link to the only info I could find on the campaign

Here is everything that I have done:

Domain -
The domain has been registered for about 6 months. It’s a good idea to register a domain as soon as possible for as long as possible. Many spammy sites register a domain one day for as little time as possible and then have a site up the next day. Aging helps the SE’s know you are not a spammy site.

I choose a domain with the main keyword in it. For example if the keyword was boats, the domain would be www.moreboats.com . Get that keyword in there.

Site -

The site is a simple html table based design using CSS for formatting. I was going to outsource the design just to save time, but wasn’t happy with the work that the bidders had done or the price for that matter. They wanted $500 for crap work. I made a template in Dreamweaver and made editable regions for the main text area, title, meta keywords, meta description, and subheader. A template is a great way to make updates more efficient. I just added google analytics to the site and I was able to put the code in the template and it updated the rest of the pages automatically a great timesaver.

I also installed a Wordpress blog on a subdirectory (eg.. www.moreboats.com/updates) Cpanel, avaliable with most hosting plans, makes this very easy to do. I am using the default wordpresss theme. The current version of Wordpress allows you to change the color of the header image so I matched that to the color of the main site.

That’s basically it for the site. I learned what I know about design from the Lynda.com tutorial on Dreamweaver 8, the book Dreamweaver 8 the missing manual. I also picked up some html and css from the Tizag.com tutorials. It’s a good idea to brush up on both. It will help you cleanup/trouble shoot the Dreamweaver code. Html and css are pretty intuitive unlike some of the other heavier coding languages.

Text -
I hired out the text creation to a local writer I found by a posting I made on a college campus. I didn’t have her optimize the text she wrote for keywords, as its my philosophy that well written text will contain the right ratio of keywords. I want her to focus on creating the best quality content and not where to put some word.

Admittedly I did change a few words in the articles because I was optimizing for two keywords, but the changes I made were maybe 1-2 words per article and again, I didn’t want that to be her focus.

Header Text-
Instead of a header image I went for a heading which is shared by all pages and then a subheading which changes for each page. I used the <h1> html tag for the heading and changed the formatting attributes using CSS. The heading has the main keyword in it. The subheading has a misspelling of the main keyword that using Wordtracker I found was searched for lots. The sub header also includes the secondary keyword I was optimizing for. I used the <h2> html tag for the sub header.

Meta Info -
The title of your page might be the most important aspect in terms of search engine optimization. I had the main keyword and secondary keyword in all of my title pages. I also put in meta keywords and a meta description for each page. At first I didn’t have a meta description for each page. I only did it for a few pages and then realized it would take a good amount of time to do. After the site had been live for a little while and found by Google, it was clear the meta descriptions were being used for the pages that had them. For the pages that didn’t the text in the links column pf the page was being used as a description, which gave no indication of what the page was really about. I went back and added meta descriptions to the rest of the pages.

Pictures -
I used this thread from dailykos.com to find picture sources. One thing to keep in mind is that all pictures that are taken by the government are not copyrighted. That’s right, although sometimes it may seem otherwise, they work for us so whatever they create is public domain. I have used a few images from flickr. Be sure to check out the license before putting them on your site. The ones I have used I credit in the copyright section of the site and include a link from the picture to the source on flickr. A lot of the images are more artistic then images you’d get form other sources so they can add some nice”pop” to a site.

Promotion -
I used Website Submitter to submit to all of the on-topic directors, plus all of the directories that were pr6 and above, as well as the SE’s. Website Submitter is a good piece of software that makes the submission process easier by automatically filling in the fields for you. It allows for multiple link texts, and descriptions. My experiences with paying for directory submissions have been bad. I paid $30 for a health related blog to be submitted to 300 directories. I only realized it a month or so after the transaction, but the guy had submitted the blog to the computer category in the directories. I ended up with one link from a page about computers and a lot of spam to that email address.. a waste of $30.

I’ve got my first project posted on Elance and after being up for 4 days I am not very happy with the bids I have received. The sites in the designer’s portfolios have all been faulty; from being slow to load, to just being plain old ugly.

My original plan was to outsource most of the content creation I needed and do most of the page design/coding myself using Dreamweaver. I’ve played around with Dreamweaver 8 for about a year, but only in the last month and a half have I really gotten into it. I went through the whole Lynda basic video tutorial, doing the exercises, and taking extensive notes (which I hope to have online soon). Looking back on it, the tutorial was only mediocre, and I question the expertise of the instructor. Too much time was devoted to tables and old ways of formatting text. Not enough time was spent going through CSS, and there were not enough elaboration that would be expected from someone supposed to be an expert.

Last weekend I went to the brick and mortar B&N and was faced with the enormous task of digging through the rows of computer books to find a quality book about Dreamweaver. I went through a bunch of books; Lynda had their tutorial in book format, there was a book on Dreamweaver and Flash, lots of choices, but nothing was jumping out at me. I stumbled upon Dreamweaver 8: The Missing Manual and was hooked after reading the first paragraph. The Missing Manual is written in a conversational format that is “comfortable” to read. It is full of useful tips, and has tutorial files that are freely downloadable from a provided link. I would normally write down the title of the book and come home and order it on Amazon (I’m a cheap bastard, I know), but because the book was so good I decided to show Barnes and Noble a little love and shell out the 44.95. The book is very much worth the cost.

In addition to Dreamweaver, I’ve realized I need to know more about basic code. I know the basic tags, link formatting, and using the div tag to separate different sections of a page. I can layout a basic page using div tags and absolute CSS positioning. I currently can’t hand code CSS or design a floating CSS page. I’ve found some good tutorials on basic HTML at Tizag.com (great name for a site, by the way).

So what next? Do I shell out the big bucks for a state-side designer? I’ve found some good designers by finding well designed sites and following the “designed by” links at the bottom of the pages. The one designer I’ve got in mind charges $40/hr though. Do I try my hand at an Elance competitor? Do I do the design myself? I don’t have a lot of free time right now, I work full time.. but I’m not rich either.. yet ? . I’m probably going to do the first batch of designs myself to save the cash.

Update: Shortly after writing this, I buckled down and over a period of 3 days knocked out my first basic website in Dreamweaver. I’d say it took 10-13 hours to complete. I am happy with the results and learned a ton by doing the design myself. The Elance bidding closed without anyone really standing out. I may try them again in the future, but am still disappointed with my first experience using them.

You know what… I’m going to turn these Blastspot updates into an ongoing thing. It will be interesting watching a very Web 2.0 site try and make it. From birth to success? Or from birth to death? They have a great looking site… its time to market it heavily.

Current searches per day according to Wordtracker:
Myspace 207,003
Facebook 20,167
Blackboard 359
Blastspot 0

If I was promoting Blastspot, I would first start a flyer campaign around college campuses that would have a contest involved. I used flyers to find content writers and it worked really well. They should create a flyer with their orange logo with tabs along the sides or bottoms. Yes, sides. I had to go to campus today and was seeing how some flyers I put up a week ago were doing and saw the side tab design that was very eye-catching and unique. Okay, so why should people sign up for Blastspot? Is it because because they have a cool logo - nope, its not that easy. There needs to be an incentive for people to take action (in this case become a member), there is no compelling content that is being offered or an awesome deal. In this case a contest is needed, and what for the prize (lets say a $1000 budget)?

1.
Cash
$500 - 1st Prize
$300 - 2nd Prize
$100 - 3rd Prize

2.
100 - $10 Amazon.com Gift Certificates

3.
Go kitsch - funny memes that would attract a laugh and discussion
Britney Spears Hair - a little sad, I wouldn’t go there
The Jesus Toast - might offend some of the religious types
The boston toy bomb thing - a little bulky as a prize, too much negativity
Famous peoples chewing gum, etc..
A combination of the 3 - Have flyers focusing on different things - One version focuses on the money aspect. One on the kitsch aspect.

More on tabs.. when putting up flyers tare off one tab. It makes people more confident in what you have to offer. No one was doing this on all of the boards I put flyers on except for a “Summer Job” scheme - probably some door to door sales thing. Their flyers were terrible. They were large(taking up lots of space on a small board) with little information about the offering. Even the torn tab trick was done wrong. Two tabs side by side were torn off of every one of their flyers giving the impression that they did it themselves….. blah.

Now you gotta get people to put up flyers … Use that big network of investors to get out there and put ‘em up. It will make for a good excuse to get your team behind a common cause. They have got money riding on this thing.. get them out there to help this idea succeed. For campuses without people in your network use Craigslist to hire someone to flyer a campus. Make sure they are a student and have been in town for a while so they know where to go. $50 is a fair price for a couple hours worth of putting flyers up. $50 * 100 campuses = $5000 bucks to target the top 100 campuses in America.

The early adopters have signed up, and those people that really want to the Jesus toast signed up for the contest are now part of the network. How are you going to get their friends? Just like everything else, with cold hard cash. Offer a buck for every friend that is referred. Have a spot in the sign up form for the email address of the referrer. You could also set up a CPA affiliate campaign that yields $1/action. It’s a good way to build a marketing team (affiliates) without having the cost of on board employees.

That’s it for now….

Quick Tip - If you want a $15 discount fill out all of the info as if you were going to buy their LLC formation package, but at the end don’t pay. You will get an email about 3 days later giving you a $15 discount if you complete the transaction.

Two good marketing ideas here: if you’ve got a message you’re trying to spread wear it on a t-shirt, and be prepared to talk about it. Have a business card or a card describing what it is you are offering because people will ask about it. And in general it’s a good idea to have a business card in the wallet because you never know who you will run into.

I miss a lot of aspects of that job. The excitement of waking up to see how many sales had happened overnight. Even through waking up early Saturday morning sucked, it was always an adventure speeding from yard sale to yard sale. A lot of times the same people would be at each yard sale looking for books and it was a race to see who picked through them first. I would spend Friday with a newspaper and a map placing a piece of tape on the map referencing each prospective sale. “Books” in the newspaper copy was a good sign, “baby clothes” was not. I loved the inventiveness of the job, coming up with a system to track inventory; finding a better way to discover saleable books.