When it comes to building your brand through marketing, it can be tough to stand out. To distinguish yourself from similar businesses and products while working under the looming notion that “it’s” already been done. The use of humor is a timeless approach for marketers to deliver a strong branded message that is memorable and effective.

Adding humor to advertising is an art and done right, you can have a viral video or ad campaign that skips across the World Wide Web in a matter of moments. Adding humor into your marketing campaign can be trickier than you think for many reasons. You don’t just want them to laugh at your ad; you want them to remember your message too.

Memory plays a big role in the effectiveness of a video marketing campaign and funny videos have a way of sticking with you. Humor triggers an emotional reaction to your brand’s message. This is what makes it so memorable for the viewer. It is this same emotion that inspires them to share your humorous advertisement with their friends and family.

True humor is often hard to hit squarely on the head and all too often attempts at being funny do more harm than good. There is a difference between invoking a smile and producing a laugh out loud response. So what makes funny, funny? One key ingredient is the element of surprise. The tough part is making that surprise relevant to your brand.

Humorous marketing can be used even for those industries that aren’t naturally funny. For example, most people don’t consider learning a foreign language fun or funny. For many high school students, learning Spanish is everything but funny. However, the commercials from Berlitz, less commonly known language instruction software, have added funny to their marketing vocabulary and are coming up with some very memorable campaigns.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsCR9Y4Ymvo[/youtube]

In an industry where Rosetta Stone has become synonymous with learning a foreign language, Berlitz is using humor to catch up to the competition. While the videos produced by Berlitz are knee-slappers, each delivers the message of just how important it is to know a foreign language-even if that language is English. Not to mention how that language can help you out of some pretty serious situations.

Trying out humor can be a scary experience. There is nothing worse than going for funny and falling short. Some humor is thought-provoking and this is a positive effect to have on viewers. The opposite end of the scale is that some humor can be offensive and you definitely don’t want to take your marketing campaign there.

Remember it’s either funny or it’s not and if there is any doubt, better safe than sorry and try again.

Rafferty Pendery

There’s nothing more aggravating to an executive than to be surprised to find that something he thought was being done was not. How do you avoid such surprises?

Well, one way is to statisize on a piece of graph paper all important functions in the organization. Prepare the graph by listing time across the bottom of the graph and quantity up the left side. This gives the executive an instant visual idea of past and present production, if targets are being met and if the company is delivering valuable products that customers are willing to pay for.

Studio98 is in the business of internet marketing. We build and maintain websites; we do pay per click and SEO services, and we create systems for other marketing companies, to name a few. In our weekly staff meeting, Rafferty Pendery, the CEO of Studio98, wants to see the stats for that week. As an example, Gross Income (GI) is a stat that most companies keep. It’s a good one because it can tell you a lot about production and the quality of the products within the company at a glance. If the products of the business are moving through the various steps correctly, then they will come out the other end a product the customer is willing to pay for. A rising GI indicates that competent services are being performed by competent staff members. It also indicates that products are being finished on time.

But that’s not the only stat. Each employee has a job. He’s producing something or should be. He should have a stat graph to log his or her products. This has been found to tremendously help employee morale. His individual contributions to the overall goals of the company are there in black and white. It’s also a good defense against a crazy manager.

A graph showing the relative rises and falls is a bold visual representation of the condition in present time of any given area of the company. To a trained eye it can impart a wealth of information

For instance, if a statistic is higher this week than last, it indicates you are doing something right so don’t change anything just continue doing what you’re doing. If it’s down this week from last week it tells you something is awry so you need to act to reverse the statistic.

As obvious as this sounds, few companies know what to statisize or how to interpret the trends once statisized. The result is that the company is not doing as well as it could be and there are a lot of key personnel keeping a lot of data rattling around in their heads.

The statisizing of the various jobs within the company is one of the simplest ways to increase productivity that you’ve ever seen.

Try it out and let me know what happened.

Bob Cook
Co-founder Studio98, LLC

The key to website success is getting found by the search engines. So why do so many people risk getting blacklisted by utilizing unethical search engine optimization tactics? Your site definitely can’t get found if Google has booted you from their index. The most surprising tactic that started over 10 years ago and still gets used by Black Hat SEOs today is the use of hidden text on your webpage.

Hidden text is textual content that visitors to your site cannot see, but is readable by the search engines. The idea is to load a page with keywords and phrases that would be unsightly to web users but would improve a page’s ranking in the search results. These keywords and phrases are invisible to searchers because they are usually in very small font and/or made the same color as the pages background or background image. It’s search spam and it’s a terrible optimization tactic that could cost your website ever being found again.

Search engines have been more than vigilant about fighting efforts to manipulate their results. Unethical techniques, like hiding keyword stuffed sentences on your page, may be able to trick the search engines for a brief moment of time, but once found, you run the risk of being permanently banned. If the welfare of the site matters to you at all, then don’t use spam methods at all.

Poor SEO practices can also be damaging to your reputation and brand. Your website, if your Black Hat practices are brought to any one’s attention and especially if you get blacklisted, will be perceived as untrustworthy. You are after all, presenting your site in one format to search engines while showing different information to a searcher. If your reputation or the reputation of your business and brand matters, then stick to ethical optimization results.

So remember, per Google themselves: “If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages.” Make sure you know the team you hire to handle search engine optimization for your site. Don’t waste your time and money on spam tactics. Invest instead on a custom web design that uses ethical search engine optimization tactics like including keyword rich quality content and natural link building campaigns.

Rafferty Pendery
CEO Studio98

Please rest assured that HP is always striving to provide the best-possible user experience and can only do so with the type of valuable feedback you provided.

That’s probably what you would hear if you inquired with HP on why they are using annoying survey pop-ups on their website. Pop-ups are the irritation of Internet users everywhere. You have no options-you have to look at it to hopefully close it and move on with your intended mission.

How can such an irritating practice still be in use by so many?

The unfortunate truth is that pop-up ads have been successful in the past. As sad as it may be, countless brands have been transformed into household names with the use of pop-ups. They get consumers’ attention whether it be negative or, for a surprising few, positive. But if you wouldn’t consider telemarketing your customers for fear of what it might do to your brand, then why use pop-ups? These marketing techniques won’t build consumer confidence or help your brand reputation.

Here is a reality check before you jump on the pop-up, under, or over campaign. Forrester Research released a report indicating 64 percent of Internet users still find pop-ups “irritating”. That’s more than half of your target audience. At the same time, consumer usage of pop-up blocking software is on the rise, as well as the number of browsers offering the feature, making this irritating marketing campaign less effective with each day. Hopefully this will be enough to deter marketers from using this annoying technique.

One option is to have something where the user clicks on a link to see the pop up. For example, HP could create a non pop-up banner ad where on that site that said “Take our 2-minute survey and be entered to win $10,000″, then when the user clicked, it would open the pop-up survey. In doing it this way, they would be looking at a pop-up campaign that was a lot more effective with less irritation. And what is $10,000 to HP? A drop in the massive bucket.

If the above isn’t good enough to stop the pop-up urge, then consider your reputation. Pop-ups are extremely negative for your image and brand. Once your target market loses trust in your brand, you will have not only spent thousands on a damaging pop-up campaign, but now you will be spending thousands more to repair the dents in your reputation.

Rafferty Pendery
CEO Studio98

One of the keys of reputation management that many people overlook is honesty.

Unlike many businesses today, I am confident that today’s consumers have no problem seeing through false promises in advertising. I admire honest marketing and believe it to be the best marketing approach. It is surprising how many companies are still pumping out ambiguity and doubt in their advertising because they reveal no facts to back up their points.

Three cheers to companies like Progressive Insurance who is confident in their rates and service and in their customer’s ability to make their own informed decisions. They freely post the rates of their competitors right next to their own. Never claiming to have the very best rates for every one in the world and offering options for customers to find a policy that works best for them, thereby restoring consumers’ faith in their own decisions.

Dishonesty would obviously never fall under the category of “good marketing”, but all too often it slips in through the crack under the door. You can’t fake honesty. As a business or industry you must provide quality and content that are credible.

This all leads me to wonder, how might an inferior company then promote their product or service? The first step would be to start being honest with themselves and then with consumers. How would a company make the change to honest marketing? I suggest starting at “home”. Try asking your customers and employees for some honest anonymous feedback and build from there.

We can’t all be the best at everything all the time. Being honest in your marketing campaign is a start to developing quality customer relations and building a great reputation.

Studio98 develops full reputation management strategies for companies and individuals through a full integrated marketing campaign.

Have you ever written a blog post?

Have you ever written an article?

Have you ever written anything on the web?

Has everything you’ve written been indexed and placed by Google in the exact search terms you wanted?

Well if so, then close this window and move on with life. For the 99.99 percent of you out there where this is not the case, read on, because I have some pointers that will help with this.

I was talking with a client last week, he was saying that Google wasn’t indexing the articles he wrote in the search terms he was going for. I asked to see the articles he had written. I read them over and spotted exactly what his problem was…

He was not using the words he wanted his article to show up in, he was using words related to these. I then checked with a few other people that claimed they had the same problem. One-for-one I found the same thing; they thought that Google would index the article for the search terms they wanted because it was RELATED to what they were talking about. Unfortunately, they forgot that, although Google is a very efficient “smart” search engine with millions of dollars in development, it’s not a sentient human.

Let’s take a specific example of using this. The keywords that we are trying to get this article to show up in are Good Green Grass (name of the company) and Lawn Care:

Article Title:

The title is an important place to put keywords. Being the nature of titles, Google will look at this and see what your article is about, given the content in the article matches up it index the article accordingly.

Bad: Green Grass is the best grass

Good: Do it yourself Lawn Care by Good Green Grass

Article Summary:
I recommend that you don’t just take a paragraph or two out of the article and make it the summary. Write a summary, taking advantage of keywords where you can to gain the most exposure for your articles. A lot of the article directories will have listings of articles with the title and summary being shown. What’s written in the summary is one of the factors Google takes into account on where to index you on pages that show listings.

Just as an example, I wouldn’t have a summary like this, “Lawn care by Good Green Grass has Lawn care services so you don’t have by Grass, but Good Green Grass.” As a reader I would think that you are writing for search engines, negating me as a client.

Take advantage of having captured your clients attention this far by saying things like, “Good Green Grass is providing do-it-yourself lawn care tips for those who want to have a beautiful, green lawn, by doing it themselves.” You can see the additional keywords you get by doing this, beautiful, green lawn, etc.

Article Body:
It’s important to use the search term you are trying to get the articles ranked for as keywords in the article itself. You are going to have to use your own judgment on the frequency of your keyword, but a good viewpoint to use is, how many times would you want to see it if you were reading the article as an actual human?

One difference in articles from press releases is that articles need to be informational reports for people to read. They can’t be too self promotional. Take the time to make yourself the authority on your business and having given your customers free information, become their friends. When you become that, you will have more business than you know what to do with.

When writing the body of the article think of different variations of the keywords you are going for. These will help get ranked in related keywords, gaining more exposure.

Resource Box:
Most sites have a resource box a.k.a. an author’s bio. This is the place where you can put your self promotional message. If the site allows links to be placed in the resource box, do it, because then you are gaining inbound links as well as all the other advantages. I will be writing more articles covering the details of how to properly format a resource box and covering each of the different fields you can fill out on an article in more detail.

Keywords:
Put the most important keywords at the beginning of the list. Most sites give you a limit of the number of keywords or number of characters. A lot of the sites that we use limit you to 150 characters in the resource box, this is going to vary from site to site.

Summary:
The main point is to get creative in how to word the search terms you are going for. You need to make it so that it doesn’t seem like you are writing for the search engines, but clients. You must include the keywords though, otherwise your article is less relevant and will not show up to the extent it could. The more you give to other people (not necessarily cash, talking more about information in this case), the more you are going to get back in the end. If you make it a little fun to read while writing, that’s another plus.

Rafferty Pendery
CEO Studio98