A) Advertising
B) Publicity

Once the word is out, there is possibility of viral activity such as mentions on social network sites, word of mouth referrals, joint ventures and partner programs.

But you must first get the word out. Most successful businesses start with some investment capital. A large portion of that investment capital goes into their advertising budget. Advertising is an extremely important way of getting the word out about your business and your products and services.

Just as important is publicity. This is almost the opposite of advertising. Instead of paying to place your message in a place where your potential customers might see it, you approach the media with an interesting angle about your business or your products and services.

The media (TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, websites) have an interesting business model. They entertain and inform their customers often at no cost. They pay their bills by offering advertising in the margins or as commercials on TV and radio. We cover how to get the most effective advertising with TestiVar Advertising.

We also have a tool to get the most out of free publicity in the entertainment and information parts of media. We call it TestiVar Media. It will be released today to current customers. It will be released tomorrow for new customers.

TestiVar Media is designed to help you get free publicity by offering the media help in providing their customers with entertainment and information. Pick up any newspaper or magazine to see what we are talking about. You will see ads on almost every page. They are easy to recognize. The main area though is devoted to either entertaining you or informing you. You generally read that newspaper or magazine because of the entertainment or information value. The same is true for many web-sites. They don’t sell you something directly. Instead they either entertain you or inform you and hope that you might click on one of the ads in their margin.

Some of that information or entertainment content is written in-house by the staff of that publication. Much of it is submitted to the in-house editors by outside sources though. This is your chance for free publicity.

You can approach these publications individually with an article that seems to fit in their publication. That is one approach to free publicity. It works great. You can do the same with TV and radio programs. You can send them a bio telling them about your individual expertise and offer to be interviewed. Many TV and radio programs are devoted to interviews. Have you ever watched “Good Morning America?” Have you ever listed to talk radio?

The same is true for web-sites. You can write an article and submit it to the editor of a web-site that runs similar articles. Many publicists focus only on these opportunities and do very well for their respective companies.

Most publicists though focus on getting the message out in a more general way and inviting those opportunities to come to them. The more general way used to be called a “Press Release.” It still is called a press release in many places, but the term is antiquated. It reminds us of the days that we receiving all of our news via a printing press. Many publicists now use the term “Media Release” to be more accurate about today’s forms of media that include print, TV, radio and the Internet.

A media release is very different from advertising. The goal is not to sell your products or services. It is to entertain or inform people. That doesn’t mean that you won’t sell products and services. A good media release will easily justify the time involved by selling a lot of products and services. But, you can NOT word your press release like an advertisement.

Instead, you simply inform your audience about something new and interesting. Think about the things that are happening at your company. Did you recently discover something? Are you releasing a new product or service? Are you reorganizing things? Is anything interesting happening that a news reporter might be interested in reporting?

That is the second rule of media releases. It used to be that a press release told reporters about the possibility of a story. It hinted at what they might find out. It was written from a news source to a news reporter. The reporter would then contact the news source and get the details. That would become a story.

Reporters have become very lazy or simply don’t exist anymore. Your media release will probably end up on the desk of an editor. Editors don’t even edit anymore. They simply approve or trash submissions. That means that you have to be your own reporter. Your press release should read like a final story. To see examples, go to any news web-site (or pick up any newspaper) and read the stories. That is almost exactly the way you will word and submit your media releases.

I say “almost” because most places currently like the following differences from the final product:

1) Start with a headline.

2) Give a one paragraph summary.

3) Give the actual story.

4) Include three pound signs to end your press release (like this: ###)

5) Include contact information and a short bio about you and/or the topic of the media release.

If they like your story, they will generally pull the information from items 1-3 and just run it exactly like you submit it. So, you can’t leave anything up to an editor. You have to do it yourself. The editor will simply reject your story if it needs any work at all.

That means that you have to write everything in the third person just like a reporter would write it. If you want to say something in the media release, then you put it in quotes and say that you said it just like a reporter might do.

You have to leave out any hint of self-promotion. Your job is to entertain or to inform. That’s it.

Of course, you should definitely mention the name of any products being covered and the name of your business.

That is why it is so important to have a brandable business name and brandable product names. Those mentions can easily turn into searches on the reader’s favorite search engine which will lead to your company. If you don’t already have a brandable domain, go get one right now at Nemeas.com. You MUST have a brandable domain BEFORE you shoot for free publicity. That free publicity will mean nothing if the readers can’t quickly and easily turn a mention of your company into a visit to your web-site.

And that is how you benefit. You get to be perceived as a helpful expert in your industry. You get the word out about your products and services just by talking about things that are related to them. Most importantly, you get the word out about your company so that people perceive it as the place to go when they need the kinds of products and services that you offer.

Most successful businesses with an advertising budget use about 10% of that budget on publicity. Yes. Publicity can be free. You can send media releases directly to the media or use free web-sites and services that do that for you. You can also pay a nominal fee to have your media release blasted to thousands of places resulting in hundreds of media outlets running your story. You can do that for only $25-$89 so it is a trivial investment.

The user manual for TestiVar Media covers how to do both methods. The TestiVar Media software helps you craft the very best media release. This can mean the difference between having 21 media outlets publishing your story or having 144,300 media outlets publishing your story (literally — we have data that shows exactly those numbers). We use the data of other media releases to score your proposed medial release. You can then make changes and score it again to see if your changes will result in more or less coverage. Once you get the highest score possible, you are ready to submit your media release and it will result in maximum buzz about your company and your products and services.

That’s using science to get free publicity. That’s TestiVar Media.

All current customers will be receiving a download link to TestiVar Media Standard Edition immediately after this announcement. Email support@testivar.com if you didn’t receive the download link.

All customers of TestiVar Advertising Professional Edition will receive a download link tomorrow before the 24 hour special begins. So don’t buy during the 24 hour special if you are already a customer of TestiVar Advertising Professional Edition. You will get TestiVar Media Professional Edition for free.

The same is true for the Agency Edition. Current customers of TestiVar Advertising Agency Edition will get Agency Edition of TestiVar Media for free when it is released.

We have a solid commitment to making decisions based on data. We also don’t have a firm management structure at all. Everyone is empowered to make decisions as required.

Our last meeting was about titles. Actually, it started out discussing if we should add a member to our team and if so; what title they should have.

When we realized that we had no data to base our decision, we stopped. We also realized that all of our meetings were to make decisions that aren’t based on data. So we decided to never have another meeting.

That was hard. Meetings are a normal part of many businesses. We have found that decision to be extremely difficult, but we realize that meetings really are just a way to ignore data and make arbitrary decisions.

We also realized that we had already made some decisions at prior meetings that weren’t based on data. One of those decisions was our titles. They were:

Shelly Gull – Customer Happiness Team
Jake Bartlett – Service Improvement Team
James Brausch – Chief Cat Herder
Robert Talbot – Advertising Management Team

Those titles were based on personal preference. They represented the individual focus of our responsibilities. Shelly is primarily responsible for making customers happy. Jake is primarily responsible for improving products and services. James sorta herds cats — vendors are notorious for not being easy to manage. I am responsible for our advertising campaigns and our partner program.

We have each individually chosen new titles based on data since that meeting. Our new titles are:

Shelly Gull – Customer Support
Jake Bartlett – New Development
James Brausch – Media Contact
Robert Talbot – Partner Support

You have access to the same data we used. Are you choosing your company titles based on that data? Or did you just arbitrarily make those decisions in some meeting?

Most companies do the latter. But, if you allow too many of your decisions to be arbitrary, your company will shrink or die. Make all of your business decisions based on data and your company will grow and thrive.

I hope you like our new titles. We are still growing used to them.

I didn’t know what I would write about until I read email this morning. One of the emails was from a customer who has now twice suggested that we do something illegal or unethical to increase our sales. I gave him an earful. Have we EVER given any indication that we have any interest in acting in an illegal or unethical manner? Is this a dark alley or something?

The first time, this customer promised a good testimonial if we gave him something for free. An incentivized testimonial? With disclosure, I suppose that isn’t against the law in the U.S. But it is also worthless. Who cares what someone says about a product or service if they are being paid to say it (or incentivized with free products)?

All of our customer reviews come from real paying customers. We never provide an incentive. Doing so without disclosing that to prospective customers is illegal in the U.S. and the EU. It is unethical everywhere.

Next, he recommended that we combine the Agency Edition with the Professional Edition and sell it at the Professional Edition price. Of course, he mentioned nothing about compensating the Agency Edition customers who would be the victim of a bait and switch scam if we ever did such a thing. That is also illegal and immoral.

This customer seems to think that profits are everything. Maybe we give that impression because TestiVar Advertising looks only at profitability.

I can assure you though that we do NOT run our company that way. In fact, we have all agreed on the following priorities for running TestiVar:

1. Never do anything illegal or unethical.

2. Make customers happy.

3. Make products and services better.

4. Find new customers.

We also base all decisions on data rather than opinions. You will notice that finding new customers (which happens to be my job shared with James) is the lowest priority. When Shelly (who is responsible for customer support) is swamped, Jake, James and I all stop what we are doing to help her make our customers happy.

When Jake is swamped, both James and I will stop what we are doing and help him catch up on a necessary product improvement.

None of us EVER consider breaking the law or doing anything unethical for any reason. We definitely won’t ever trick existing customers in order to get new customers. Not only is that wrong — we don’t believe it even works.

We believe that the above priorities work best. Why? Because we researched the priorities of profitable and unprofitable companies and that is what the data shows!

Unfortunately, this week’s press release went out the first thing this morning so we aren’t able to score it and rewrite it now. We will definitely be using it for next week’s press release though.

We need three beta testers. The first three people to leave a comment here and agree to beta test this thing for us will get a free copy of the released version.

We just need you to try it out and give us some feedback. Leave a comment on this blog post if you are interested. We’ll send you a copy of the beta version of TestiVar Media for you to try out.

This offer goes to only three people. Leave a comment right now if you are interested or you WILL miss out!

Profitable businesses blog. We can verify this with the TestiVar Advertising data. Fire up TestiVar Advertising Professional Edition or above and select “anchor text” as the element to score. Now type “blog” (without the quotes) into the text to score box. Score it.

It scores a 45. That is more than even “pricing” which we covered in a recent blog post. A link to “blog” in landing page anchor text is a link to that site’s blog. If unprofitable sites had a link to “blog” as often as profitable sites, then the score would be zero. If unprofitable sites had blogs more often than profitable sites, then the score would be a negative number. It is a positive number because many more profitable sites have a blog than unprofitable sites.

If you want a profitable business then:

1) Add a blog to your site.

2) Link to it on your landing pages.

3) Use the word “blog” in the anchor text of those links.

That’s what the data shows. That is why we blog.

Advertisers get more bang for their buck when they know where to place their product price and what digits to use for their pricing strategy according to marketing experts and scientists at TestiVar, the leading online advertising think tank.

“The TestiVar Advertising software can help you set a profitable price for your product and decide where your price should be stated,” says James D. Brausch, the CEO at TestiVar.

“You should be making every business decision based on scientifically proven data,” he says. “What are profitable companies doing that is different than unprofitable companies? That is the only question worth asking.”

In this case, the data shows that stating a price in the clickable part of a PPC advertising campaign is profitable. However, stating a price in the the longer, non-clickable, part of a PPC ad campaign should be avoided.

In addition, the data shows that the landing page for a PPC advertising campaign should not display the price. Instead, there should be a link with the word “pricing” in the anchor text that leads to a page with the pricing information.

“It still amazes me that business owners simply ‘wing it’ and ignore the science of doing business,” says Jake Bartlett, the product improvement team leader at TestiVar. “Would you fly in an airplane that was designed based on personal preferences or intuition rather than designed by scientists and engineers?,” he asked.

The full white paper giving examples from the data can be found here:

Setting Your Price

Information about the software and data utilized for this analysis can be found here:

TestiVar Advertising Software

About TestiVar, Inc.

TestiVar, Inc. is dedicated to improving the profitability of all businesses by using the scientific method and real data.

I used to work for a multi-million dollar company which sold software for hundreds of thousands of dollars (sometimes over a million dollars) to enterprise level companies and governments. It was great software that saved any enterprise level organization much more than it cost. These organizations paid a yearly license fee. There was a lot of motivation to actually use our software.

However, 90% of those customers were using our software as shelfware. It wasn’t even installed. Nobody used it. We just collected the yearly license fee of usually more than a hundred thousand dollars each year. Some would say that is good work if you can get it.

I hated it. I hate it now. I hate seeing over 20,000 registered users of our software and knowing that most of them haven’t taken any action and actually used it to improve their business.

So we are going to start having periodic action awards. If you take action and actually use our software, we are going to reward you. Maybe a future action award will send a million dollars to the person who took the most action.

This one will be a bit more modest. If you take the most action toward improving your own business and tell us about it, we’ll send you a free upgrade to your software. If you currently have the Standard Edition, we will send you the Professional Edition. If you currently have the Professional Edition, we will send you the Agency Edition. If you currently have the Agency Edition, we will send you the Developer Edition. If you currently have the Developer Edition, we will give you the full Enterprise Edition including the on-site training and installation.

What do you have to do? Put the software to use between now and Monday, 27 February 2012. Find and register a new domain that scores in the 900s. Improve your home page until it scores in the 900s. Create a new PPC campaign for one of the search engines that scores great. You choose. Show us how you can best use the software to improve your business profitability.

Blog about your project. Link to this post so we see the trackback. You can also leave a comment below with the URL to your blog entry so you can be sure we see your entry.

At the close of business on Monday, we will select a winner. That winner will receive a free upgrade and we will highlight their success here.

But that doesn’t end the contest. There will be a second winner (maybe the same one will receive two levels of upgrade). Post your actual results as you receive them. On March 1st, we will select another winner based on their actual results. The winner in each case will be the person who improved the profitability of their own business (in our opinion).

But wait… there’s more.

Each winner will also receive a free copy of the TestiVar Media software when it is released. We know that if you are ready to take action with TestiVar Advertising, that you will probably also take action with TestiVar Media.

I hope that gives you the incentive to actually take some action. What is to lose? You improve your business AND you get the chance for a free upgrade.

Let’s start with the second part of that discussion first. Where should you state your price? There is an easy way to look at this in the data. Prices are almost always preceded by a dollar sign. The dollar sign is almost never used for any other purpose in advertisements.

So, let’s look at the score for a dollar sign in your PPC ad copy (possible only with the Professional Edition or higher, but we’ll give the scores here). Let’s look at the ad title first (the clickable part of a PPC ad). The score is: 84. That is pretty good. Giving your price right in the title of a PPC ad is a good practice. It is a practice that is used by more profitable companies than unprofitable companies.

Let’s look at the ad description (the part of the PPC ad that isn’t clickable… the longer part). The score is: -186. Oops… We do NOT want to put our price in the description part of a PPC ad.

How about on the landing page. This seems like a given, but the score is: -1. We can specifically look at two locations within a landing page. The first is the title tag. The score there is: -18. That is not a good place to put your pricing information. The other specific part of a landing page we can zoom in on is the anchor text for any links on the landing page. The score there is: +2. Not very impressive.

Do you not state your price on your landing page? That seems to be what the data is showing. It isn’t very bad with a -1 score unless you put it in your title tag (I can’t imagine why you would want to do that though). We have done it in the past. We will reconsider that practice now. As we look through the data, we see that most profitable sites split up their sales process into several pages that are linked to from their landing page. One of those pages is often labeled “pricing.” You will notice that “pricing” shows up with a score of 22 for under the anchor text element. We will probably move to using this practice now that we see the profitable site data.

Let’s move on to the actual price. Of course every product has a perceived value. You must set a price that is near this perceived value. In fact, the price you set will become part of the equation that calculates the perceived value of your product in your customer’s head. Using TestiVar Advertising to write your ad copy will increase the perceived value, but we really can’t use TestiVar Advertising directly to calculate a perceived value. The best we can do is to look for a similar profitable product in the suggestion data (available in TestiVar Advertising Agency Edition and above). We can then copy their price.

Another thing we can do is to use the right digits. There are rumors in various places in the rumor-net about various digits leading to more profitability. As usual, those rumors are usually false. Here are the scores for digits used in the ad title which may or may not be prices (they might be things like 50% off… or 0 risk or 100% guaranteed, but many are prices as we see from the above data).

Here are the scores for each digit in this area where we know prices are good to state:

9 Score: 24

8 Score: 0

7 Score: 24

6 Score: 0

5 Score: 60

4 Score: 36

3 Score: 18

2 Score: 0

1 Score: 0

0 Score: 0

Five is the big winner. Fours do fairly well.

Here are some actual results from this data (available in the Agency Edition and higher):

$49.95
$49
$49

This data has changed quite a bit over the years. The first data gathering in 2005 showed threes as the big winner with one and five in a close second place. Now we have fives as the big winner with fours in second place and nines and sevens tied for third place. The top three results in the database show a price that is basically $50 stated in two different ways.

We will be considering a change in our pricing scheme based on this data.

Will you?

Update: I ran the data out further to find some other prices. Here they are:

$49.95
$49
$49
$635
$29.95

That only adds two prices to consider, but it does add something.

Can it be done? Of course! A lot of businesses are bootstrapped. That is the terminology of starting a business without a lot of investment capital. The term comes from the idea of pulling yourself up by your own boot straps.

One of the key elements of bootstrapping a business is to utilize free publicity. In fact, publicity is a key element to any business success. Every successful Internet business in the top 1,000 has a publicity person or a publicity department. All engage regularly with the media and enjoy the “buzz” that comes from this kind of business promotion.

Publicity should be treated like every other business decision. Every decision should be made using the best data available. Although many businesses are sloppy and treat publicity as an art — those who are willing to engage it as a science will always be even more successful.

Tomorrow, we will be releasing our last Edition of TestiVar Advertising with a 24 hour special.

The next day, we will be shifting focus. In fact, we have already began shifting focus toward the development of a publicity tool. We will be creating the equivalent of TestiVar Advertising for use with media operations. The name of the new tool will be TestiVar Media.

We have already began gathering data. We already know the best day of the week to send out press releases for maximum effect. We already know which of two common press release operations gives the best return on investment even though the investment for a press release is trivial compared to advertising.

We will soon have a database showing the best words (and the worst words) to use in a media release title, summary and the body of a press release. Will will also have a database showing other press release channels and their respective ability to create “buzz” given an equal investment of time and money.

All of that data will be wrapped up in a new piece of software called TestiVar Media. The Standard Edition will be released for only $10 to customers of any of our other products.

That is what is in our immediate future. We hope that is in your immediate future as well. Feel free to reach out and send us an email if there is any particular area you want us to focus on as we develop the first version of TestiVar Media.

We have already helped over 20,000 businesses improve their profitability with TestiVar Advertising software. We hope that TestiVar Media can extend ability to help even more businesses — perhaps we will be able to help the next 200,000 businesses success quickly and easily with this new software. Perhaps one of them will be your business.

That seems like a ludicrous claim, however you can do a Google search to see that many people are teaching exactly that “fact.” Is it true?

Obviously the test data should be the deciding factor.

A URL actually contains “words” from the perspective of the TestiVar Advertising software. It also contains symbols. Therefore, anyone can test common parts of a URL using the software. You can even do this using the Standard Edition. Although the Professional Edition allows you to zoom in directly to anchor text and gives an even more reliable answer. The Developer Edition allows you to confirm that absolutely zero profitable landing pages contained naked URLs whereas quite a few of the unprofitable landing pages used this “tactic.”

Let’s look at what you can do with the Standard Edition to check this kind of question. You can just type in any URL you might use and score it. Go ahead and try it. The score will probably be negative or very low if it is positive at all.

Let’s look at individual components of a URL. Many people will start a URL with http://. The “http” is actually a “word” from the perspective of the software and the collected data. Let’s see how it scores:

-7 (although you can’t see scores below zero in the Standard Edition — but you will see a zero).

Maybe if we skip the http:// and start with the www. Let’s type “www” (without the quotes) into TestiVar Advertising Standard Edition:

-3 (although you will only see the zero).

Maybe we should skip the “www” portion of the URL as well. The next section would be the actual domain name. That is going to vary in the data depending on if we get a match on that exact domain in the landing text. Most will not match of course. So, let’s move on to the last common component that we could possible test. Most sites (at least most profitable sites) end in a dot com. Let’s test the “com” portion as a word:

0 (a big fat zero in all versions of TestiVar Advertising)

If there was a positive conversion effect to using URLs, then we would see the score showing up in the words that make up the different parts of a URL. The fact is that it doesn’t show up because absolutely none of the profitable sites in our entire database used this “technique.” It is a ludicrous “tactic” that doesn’t even make sense on the face of it.

Professional sites obscure HTML and the technicalities of HTML. This was recognized from the very beginning of the world wide web. The very first version of HTML included the ability to use a plain English (or whatever language) version of a URL. We call it “anchor text” and 100% of successful sites use anchor text.

Whoever started the rumor that naked URLs would enhance conversions was a liar if they claimed to have data to back up their rumor. If they didn’t have any data, then they were simply a gossip, rumor monger and…

WRONG.