Serious Marketing Guide

I briefly touched on this subject in a previous e-book titled «The Forgotten Fundamentals of SEO» and I have been asked by a few people to expand and explain more about the psychology of color and how it affects what you should be for your website from a marketing perspective. The internet is the ultimate visual and psychological medium. It provides businesses with an unparalleled avenue to reach potential customers. In this visually engrossing world it is the copy, or words, on your website that have the greatest psychological impact on visitors and given this they become your most important communication and sales tool. Another important psychological aspect of your website is the often over looked and definitely misunderstood marketing strategy of colors.

The same as we use words and phrases to describe and express our intentions color can be used to convey similar messages in more subtle and concealed ways. As an example of a color being used to convey a feeling, when I was at University they painted the walls in the library a light pastel-pink color to try and enhance the studying environment. Did it work? I really don’t know, I was in the computer lab, but I am guessing that subliminally there was probably some impact whether it be physically measurable or not. In the past choosing color schemes for websites used to be left up to the programmer who was responsible for just getting something up and running. Often there was no forethought or planning for real graphic design or image perception. «A simple site, nothing fancy». I am fairly certain that every web developer has been asked for something like this, I know I have. If you really want to succeed in 2007+ then this kind of website will just not work. Given the competitive nature of the Internet market, there has been a steady influx of Internet marketing professionals who are looking to stamp their mark on the ever increasingly competitive keyword monopoly game.

Every day there businesses employ Internet marketing agencies to employ their expert marketing strategies to their business.

Often these are for huge fees. One area that I see getting missed during these expensive website makeovers is the psychology of color. I believe it is important to address this marketing issue in design and ensure it the colors chosen are enhancing and supporting the overall theme and feel of the website in an effort to get the website visitor to perform the action we actually want them to do on our website; be it contact us on email, buy a product or feel comfortable browsing our articles and reading the news. So what colors should we be incorporating into our website designs to ensure we convey the right message to our visitors? I have detailed a list of colors and their associated feelings and keywords so you can get an idea or what to put on your webpages. RED is associated with love, passion, danger, warning, excitement, food, impulse, action, adventure. BLUE is associated with trustworthiness, success, seriousness, calmness, power, professionalism. GREEN is associated with money, nature, animals, health, healing, life, harmony. ORANGE is associated with comfort, creativity, celebration, fun, youth, affordability. PURPLE is associated with royalty, justice, ambiguity, uncertainty, luxury, fantasy, dreams. WHITE is associated with innocence, purity, cleanliness, simplicity.

YELLOW is associated with curiosity, playfulness, cheerfulness, amusement. PINK is associated with softness, sweetness, innocence, youthfulness, tenderness. BROWN is associated with earth, nature, tribal, primitive, simplicity. GREY is associated with neutralality, indifference, reserved. BLACK is associated with seriousness, darkness, mystery, secrecy. When choosing colors for your site it is important to employ contrasting or sympathetic and complementary color schemes. It is important to identify your market and ensure the psychological message you are trying to get across with the rest of your site design, words and images is complemented and enhanced by the appropriate color scheme. Often it can be wise to run samples of the same site with slightly differing colour schemes past a test audience and see which has the best impact or you can even run differing coloured sites to visitors and track conversions to your goals. Its really up to you how to try and test or track the impact of your psychological color message on your Internet Marketing.

Ask anyone involved in an online business about the reason behind the success of their business and the unanimous reply would be great web marketing. Here are some tips which shall help you get more out of your online business. The first and foremost thing before you start online marketing UK is to make sure that your site is as user friendly as possible. unless the site is not user friendly, it is not going to be successful. People might visit it for some time but soon they may get confused and so put off that they may never come back In the extreme case, they may even start some negative publicity against your website. Similarly you must optimise your site for fast speed. The Internet connection speeds vary from user to user. You must make sure that the end user with a slow dial up connection is able to surf your site without having to wait too much. The second thing is to decide the focus of your website and stick. Web marketing UK experts inform us that unless a site is clearly focused on someone or something, it is nothing more than a waste of storage space and bandwidth. A properly focused site is much easier to optimise as the site already has a number of keywords as well as the content about that topic. There is not much work to be done. On the other hand a poorly focused site shall become the search engine optimiser’s nightmare. He just does not understand what he is supposed to optimise the site for.

The net result is that he ends up doing something of everything but it does not do any thing because nothing is done properly enough to be effective. Similarly another thing that experts from website marketing company UK tell us is that have a properly organized site structure. Unless and until the site is properly organized it is just not possible for any online marketing UK based experts can not prepare it for people to use. The search engine spiders use various techniques based on artificial intelligence to rate the sites. There are a number of algorithms that these spiders use and most of these algorithms depend on the way a website is organized. Moreover a properly organised website means that user shall easily find what he is looking for and if he totally satisfied with the website, he shall also recommend it his friends and family. There can be nothing great than this word of mouth publicity for any website. If you want to make sure that your site meets all these criteria, you should contact PageUPmedia though their website http://www.pageupmedia.com PageUPmedia shall make sure that your site is rated among the best in the class.

Richard Adams I came across an interesting discussion on a marketing forum recently that I’d like to relay to you now. In it, Adsense marketers were discussing what percentage of their sites are white hat and which are black hat. As an aside for a moment, a «white hat» website refers to it being «squeeky clean» and following all the search engine rules – a hand-built site offering original content and a quality experience for visitors.

«Black hat» sites, in contrast, utilize many «underhanded» or «didgy» techniques such as «borrowing» content in the form of articles, search engine results, RSS feeds and forum posts then using automated software to spit out hundreds if not thousands of low quality pages in a matter of minutes. The search engines generally frown on these «black hat» techniques as they fill up their listings with hundreds of «junk» sites and make it increasingly hard for them to do their jobs – providing high quality results so users can find exactly what they’re looking for quickly and easily. The claim by one marketer was that white hat sites take a long time to build (he’s right) and they are often penalized just as much by the search engines, so why bother? The answer to that question is twofold. Firstly, in my experience, a properly built and marketed white hat site won’t be penalized in the search engines (unless the owner decides to try some gray-area marketing tricks). The second part of the answer is that black hat Adsense marketing is an arms race. In nature species evolve to try and better each other’s weapons. A plant develops poisonous sap to try and prevent insects from eating it’s leaves.

But then a caterpillar develops a way to «filter out» the toxins, so it can still eat the leaves, and then uses the toxins to make itself poisonous.

In doing so it makes itself less attractive to predators and so actually is likely to live longer. And so the never-ending battle continues. If you take part in black hat strategies you must resign yourself to the fact that you will be the predator or worse, the parasite, in this arms race whilst the search engines represent the provider. They continue to develop new techniques at a dizzying pace to remove black hat Adsense sites from their listings (and so reduce the income of those marketers) whilst the marketers themselves try to develop ever more powerful ammunition to try and go unnoticed. If you’re happy with constantly having sites delisted or even banned, and having to constantly rebuild your network then go ahead, but remember that white hat sites have been, and continue to be, perrenial winners with the search engines. And that’s likely to continue for a long time yet.