First things first: We have to pick a company and build a website before we can start the Pay-per-click campaign. We chose my wife’s new profession, painting, as our company. The reasons for the choice are as follows:
- She is nearby
- She will allow us to do pretty much what we like with the design
- She will make us some chocolate cake when we finish
- She is pretty damn good painter, way better than me! (check out the pic in the design below - that was her first ever painting!)
The ‘company’ is called Art Revision; has one ‘employee’ - my wife; will be run under the World WIde Creative accounts; and will sell replicas of famous paintings for around 200 or R2500 in South African terms. She is really good at making copies, and is now getting pretty confident with the brush.
So here is the first design. I have stuck to a tried and tested formula as we don’t want to get too complicated.
- Simple, easy to follow navigation
- Nice big examples of the product
- Clear goals (’Click here for limited time offer!!‘)
Any thoughts or feedback are welcome. One question I’m not sure of is should we have a newsletter sign-up form?
- Fred
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8 Comments
Nice design ;-)
As for the newsletter: definitely!
Sure way to drive more traffic to the site (see little note below), keep once interested visitors coming back for more.
We just send out our monthly WYL newsletter this Monday (found out Monday late morning or early afternoon does get the most instant ‘readers’ - how I know, trick of the ‘counter’ trade ;-)) and by trial and error the lay-out of the newsletter as it is now (with topics, 4 or 5 a month) works better for ‘clicking-through’ to the websites than themed newsletters.
At the moment we have roughly 400 subscribers (well, every ’suspect’ that emails us or comes into the shop gets a subscription anyway until they tell is to remove them from the list) and it is a perfect and simple way to bring your company’s name regularly to their attention, as an Architect mentioned yesterday after ordering his first floor from us.
But anyway = little note = wasnt this new project dedicated to paperclip (sorry, pay-per-click)? ;-)
I think Freds just filling everyone in on the site he will be experimenting on with pay per click. So when he is babbling on in the usual confused manner we can relate to what he is talking about.
Nice thoughts about newsletters though - a topic for the future without a doubt.
Just noticed you didn’t even link from the post to your new site. Another topic for later months: The importance of links!
It’s very important to consider marketing such as pay per click when creating a new website and this new site is the perfect example.
Because potential customers would be typing in specific phrases (e.g. into Google), PPC would be set up to have the highest potential of clicks being gained (but equally, to deter clicks from those people who wouldn’t pay for reproduction paintings - ‘anti-PPC’ as I call it).
This means that the landing page from those clicks is also important. Take Degas as an example, if you typed phrases such as ‘degas paintings’, ‘dancing class’, ‘degas dancing class’, ‘blue dancers’, ‘blue dancers painting’ etc. into Google, it’s extremely easy to get good PPC positioning. The adverts may, or may not (depending how deep you want to go on PPC) refer to individual paintings. However, the landing page in the site is important - it would be sufficient to have a ‘Degas’ landing page that shows the titles of all paintings but you could equally have landing pages of individual paintings (although that could be overkill - something to consider later).
What’s important is that if someone types a Degas-related phrase, is actually a potential buyer (i.e. the PPC advert refers to ‘from ‘ costs to attract or deter them), that the page they land on not only shows the list of Degas paintings that can be reproduced, but also has clear pointers to the next stages in the buying process. Quite often, websites have gallery pages that don’t have calls to action so this will need to be considered.
On the subject of the newsletter - that could be an idea, although I think that it would fade in significance when compared to how much interest PPC can generate. I’ve done a campaign before relating to paintings/art and it was very clear that it’s a relatively untapped market in PPC, which is great news for this project.
Another thought for the website design - when people buy the reproductions, encourage them to send photo’s of the pictures ‘in situ’ (i.e. up on display) - therefore, instead of just showing the pictures that can be reproduced you start to build up a portfolio of actual situations where they’ve been created and are on display, which gives the site more impact.
That’s my tuppence for now …
Great advice Andy, cheers. Fred, you’ve got your work cut out now.
As Mike knows, Im not a big fan of PPC (must add I dont have first hand experience with it and might be a bit biased). I do always wonder what would happen if you spend as much time and effort on organic SEO than you must do with PPC for getting a higher listing on the sponsored links.
Also did some superficial research on two online forums (one filled with webdesigners Statcounter forum and one filled with DIY-ers, as in the real word: doing up your homes etc) about using sponsored links to find the things you were searching for. All said: only click on sponsored links if first 4 to 5 pages of organic listings didnt bring the result they were looking for.
But like I said: no first hand experience with PPC trials and no experience with marketing other sites than the four Im managing at the moment (and none of them are artistically).
So Ill be watching from the sidelines on this project, but eagerly awaiting the results of the efforts.
I belive there is certainly a place for SEO and PPC together. We’ve had some tremendous results on PPC in the past. For example over 150,000 worth of sales for Piper Test and Measurement (dynamometer manufacturers) in the space of a year, with a PPC budget of under 1,500. It really does depend on 1) Your industry 2) Your competition 3) Time. PPC is no-where near as time intensive as good SEO.
I just have a healthy dose of scepticsime, no ‘harm’ intended ;-).