Tactics To Get That Foot Traffic In Your Store

When you’re trying to drive more sales in your physical store, it's not enough to bring business to the site; you have to encourage people to come through the door and start looking around as well. If the quality of your products and service isn’t in question, then it’s all about the right mix of tactics, and here, we’re going to look at a few.

Pic - CC0 License

Invest In Quality Signage

Sidewalk signs might be a relatively simple solution, but they can definitely work. A well-placed sign can help you immediately communicate the identity of your brand and help catch the attention of those who might walk by without even realising that you exist. Having updatable sidewalk signs, like those with a chalkboard component, can also allow you to quickly communicate promotions, special offers, or new products that can generate further engagement.

Be Bold With Your Outdoor Decor

Don’t underestimate how effective a little exterior flair can be for your business. Opting for bold and eye-catching visual pieces can draw attention to your store from a distance. For instance, large promotional inflatables, be it product replicas, logo recreations or even just the simple but highly popular air dancers, can make your location a lot more noticeable, especially on busy streets or when you have a sales event on. What’s more, they’re a much more affordable way of advertising your business while still making a big brand impact.

Create Eye-Catching Window Displays

If your products are aesthetically engaging enough, then they can practically sell themselves if you give them the space to. Your window display is one of the first ways customers will engage with your store, so it should tell a story or make an impact. Highlight your best and most visually interesting products first and foremost, and make use of effective lighting as well as props to enhance and draw even more attention to them. Rotating your displays regularly can also keep your store feeling fresh and could give that passerby something new to notice, catching them in a way previous displays might not have.

Host Live Demonstrations Or Experiences

Some of your customers are going to be inherently curious, so it’s just about getting them on the hook. Live demonstrations of your products in action can be a great way to do that, making them more likely to stop, watch, and potentially become more interested in what your business offers. Not every product is going to be a good choice for a demonstration, but they can range from anything like cooking samples in a food store to crafting sessions, mini workshops, or even models performing on a miniature runway outside of your fashion store.

Which tactics work on your target audience depends on a mix of the visibility of your location, the brand that you’re trying to establish, and the demographic you’re aiming at. However, a mix of the strategies above is certain to bring you some attention at the very least. From there, it’s about how well you can capitalise on it.

How to Drive More Business to Your Site

In business, you need customers. To get those customers, they need to have access. To provide them access, they need to be able to find you easily. While all of this may seem extremely elementary in terms of business strategy and implementation, it can actually become quite difficult to achieve. This quandary applies both to brick-and-mortar establishments and company websites. Continue reading for some tried and true tips that will help you drive traffic to your sites and bring in more business at the same time.

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Pay Attention to Driving Traffic Patterns and Ease of Access

If you are constructing a new office building or company campus in a newly developed area of your community, you will need to conduct a traffic impact assessment. Your local municipality or city will generally require this, and even if they do not, it is a good idea to take this on yourself. Hire a professional assessment company to ensure everything is done right. They have the skills and experience to understand the nuances of traffic patterns, the potential for environmental impact on the surrounding areas, and the variety of traffic needs that your new building will require, such as access roads, turn lanes, and traffic lights, to name but a few.

Ease of access to your new company site is essential for continued success and growth. If your employees have a difficult time coming to the new location and returning home each day, this will place an undue burden on their private lives and increase their fuel expenditures. None of this equates to a happy work life. They may begin looking for other employment opportunities. If your valuable customers and clients find themselves in a similar situation, all it will take is a few quick online queries, and they will likely take their business and money elsewhere. Those are just some of the reasons why conducting a traffic impact assessment is so important, beyond the obvious governmental requirements.

Assess Your Online Presence

One of the best ways to drive more traffic to your site, your website, that is, is to start by conducting an audit on the website itself. Look for broken links and relevant content. Pay special attention to on-page and off-page optimisation opportunities, as well.

A significant part of your website audit should include assessing the look, feel, and functionality of the website. Pretend you are a first-time visitor looking for information. Determine whether the contact information and the navigation hamburger are easy to find. If not, those must be remedied. Users do not want to search for things they should have easy access to. Next, take notice of the clarity of the website. Are the images too noisy and overwhelming? Do they reflect your brand well, or are they loud and outdated? Look at the background images and colour schemes. You want them to blend in seamlessly while enhancing the sight without interfering with the content.

Finally, inspect your company’s search query rankings. You want to always populate at the top of page one of a query. Work with a reputable company to create better SEO and conversion opportunities and bring more people to your site through engaging content.

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Driving more business to your company’s respective sites is a lifeline. Work to ensure ease of access for on-site visitors and website users to keep growing your company.

Forget Churn, Let's Convert - Conversion Rate Optimisation Webinar

I had the distinct privilege to present at an expert webinar on the 12th of February, 2026 entitled ‘Forget Churn, Let’s Convert - 5 Conversion Experts Perfect Your Pipeline.’

The rationale behind it was to educate business owners about how their marketing and sales funnels can leak at every stage because because they’re built in pieces.

This event united five experts—each a master of their craft—showing entrepreneurs how to design, write, systemise, and scale a complete client-acquisition engine. Attendees learned how words, design, process, and technology combine to turn wasted marketing spend into predictable, compounding growth.

The expert panel included:

• Ben Lai – LinkedIn Lead Generation

• Me – Conversion Copywriting & CTAs

• Irwin Hau – Conversion-Driven Web Design

• Craig Edwards – CRM & Customer Journey Systems

• David Guest – AI & Business Integration Strategy

Below is my segment from the seminar, “Optimising What You Say Is How You Sell: Turning Your Website Into a Sales Machine”

Can’t see the video? It may have been taken down by the event organiser. If so, email me for a copy.

Are you caught in the “too long, didn’t read” trap? (Flying Solo)

If you’ve been on the internet, you’ve read this little abbreviation: tl;dr. If you’re new to the internet (welcome! It’s awful here.) tl;dr stands for too long; didn’t read.

It’s a standard snarky reply to “wall of text” forum or Reddit posts, rambling blogs – even extended Tweets (or Exes… definitely sounds like something you don’t want.)

The writer types are surely scoffing: are people really this lazy? Or are we drowning in deluges of words and other content – the shiny flashy stuff that leaves words wanting – that we simply don’t have time to waste on something that could be *gasp* boring?

In business, we know that time is money. Boring can be forgiven; being irrelevant is worse.

New research by Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile, writing in TIME, suggests that the average reader who clicks on your page will spend fewer than 15 seconds on it, even if your goal is to have them read the entire thing.

Read the rest at Flying Solo.

How To Make Your Google Ads Rock In 2025

When it comes to getting customers to pay attention to you, you only have a few choices. One option is to use cold outreach. You literally pick up the phone or type out emails to prospects who don’t know you, one by one. 

Another option is warm outreach. This is where you get in touch with people who already know you and are thinking about buying from you. This could be a referral from an existing customer or people who know you because of your content on social media. 

The latter example is interesting because it means you’re reaching out to multiple people. But what if you don’t have a content presence but still need to reach a large market to flog your services. 

That’s where Google Ads come into the picture. These give you massive reach, even if your audience doesn’t know you. 

But how are you supposed to master this type of marketing? What actually works and gets results? 

Keep Auditing

The first thing you’ll want to develop is your feedback loop when using Google ads. The last thing you want is for ads to cost you a lot of money and fail to deliver any results. 

The way around this is to set up a proper audit cycle. You want to ensure that you’re constantly looping back to check on what you’re doing to see if it is working. A lot of companies will just pay for Google Ads without really measuring their effect or taking their impact into consideration. Sometimes campaigns will run for years without generating any return. 

The best way to audit is to keep testing and trialling different approaches. Most businesses can be successful with ads, but they will never work for some industries, so that is always worth bearing in mind. 

Integrate Web And App Campaigns

It’s also well worth integrating web and app campaigns, a new feature that’s available for 2025. This tool allows customisation of ads across multiple platforms in ways that make sense for brands. 

The best thing about this approach is that it unifies measurement. Companies no longer need to tally results from app or web-based campaigns. Instead, the data can be pooled and specific insights can be found.

Attribution is also better under this model. You can literally see where your ad spend is working for you, and where it isn’t enabling better ad targeting by platform, changing how you allocate funds between strategies. All you need to do is wait for the data to roll in. 

Use Expiration Mode 

If you can improve your use of Smart Bidding with expiration mode, that’s also a good idea. The idea here is to target return on ad spend first and then use Exploration whenever you run a promotion. You should find that you get about 10% to 25% more volume without costs increasing significantly. 

Of course, this tactic is highly industry-dependent, but it is well worth exploring. If you can eke out a little extra performance, you can often out-do competitors who are not using the same strategies. 

Use First-Party Data

You could also look into using first-party data to improve your conversion rate. Due to the backlash, Google is looking at phasing out cookies for a more ethical approach to ads. As such, companies are now feeding customer personal information on their books into their ad campaigns, as well as data kept off the books. 

Interestingly, this approach is actually enhancing return on ad spend. A lot of customers appreciate it when brands they already have relationships with reach out to them and try to do business. 

If you can implement Google Tags across your site, that can also help. Removing bad leads is essential though so you can track based on value. 

If you're scaling up your outreach, then you might also want to include things like the customer’s lifetime value. This way, you can track the impact of your ad spend when targeting specific markets. 

Use The Google Asset Studio

You could also look into using Google’s Asset Studio to improve your ads for 2025. This tool essentially allows you to generate new video clips, images and ad variations at will so you can test which work best. All you need to do is enter the right prompts. 

For consumers, this sort of approach is quite novel still. A lot of people aren’t used to the sight of highly creative Google Ads, so it could make a significant difference to your campaigns. 

Avoid Bloated Campaigns

It’s also a good idea to avoid the temptation to run bloated campaigns. While you might want to run ads for multiple products and locations, that doesn’t always work. 

The best way to approach this problem is to do what experts, like Loudmouse Digital Marketing, do. They segment campaigns into specific funnels, depending on the product. Then, they run them in parallel with each other, ensuring they reach out to the ideal market niche. 

If you don’t adopt this level of focus, Google Ads won’t know who you are trying to target. It will also serve ads to customers who don’t click the link, or simply don’t want to buy what you have to offer. 

Optimise Voice With Longtail Keywords

If you want to really master Google Ads in 2025, then you’ll need to look into optimising your voice-based SEO with long-tail keywords. This approach is highly effective since only a minority of companies are doing it, and it is not popular throughout the industry. 

For example, let’s say you sell something specific, like LEDs for bathroom vanities. Targeting a voice-based long-tail keyword like “I need new LEDs for my bathroom vanity” could go a long way. 

Usually, ads that focus on these keywords can drive higher traffic. Voice inputs tend to have a high degree of intent, meaning that customers are keen to buy. 

Google Keyword Planner is helpful for finding voice-related keyword searches. However, it is also worth speaking to experts, just to ensure you’re on the right track.

Lunch & Learn Series: 7 Rules for Turning Your Website into a Sales Machine

With thanks to VIP Business Network Pty Ltd, I'll be hosting my first Lunch & Learn seminar: 7 Simple Rules for Turning Your Website into a Sales Machine!

In this online event, you'll get seven actionable methods for increasing conversions all while you nibble on a sandwich (or a filet mignon!)

You'll learn:

• What you need to turn your website into a mere marketing tool and into a sales machine.

• How to avoid trust and sales killing 'dark patterns.'

• Why 'conventional wisdom' around marketing and sales isn’t all its cracked up to be!

Join us on Tuesday 16th of September on Zoom between 12:30pm and 1:10pm (AEST) for a look into how conversion rate optimisation can work for you!

Always under your thumb: email marketing (Flying Solo)

What came first? The fax machine or the telephone? It isn’t a trick question or anything. I’ll let you stew on it a little. What was your answer?

If you answered telephone, you won’t be hearing a little (Alexander Graham) Bell. The fax machine, or the “Electric Printing Telegraph” was invented in 1846 by Scottish inventor Alexander Bain, with the first commercial fax service commencing in 1865. This was all 11 years before the debut of the telephone.

Funnily enough, we are living in an age closer to the telephone than the fax machine. Though fax machines were the must-have business machine of the 80s and 90s, it took over 150 years for it to be adopted as a de facto standard. It was rendered obsolete in record time by another invention that also took decades to catch on: email.

Email was invented in about 1971, with the first electronic mail message sent over the precursor to the public internet, ARPAnet. It wasn’t until the end of the century that everyone had at least one email address, perhaps something angsty, edgy, and laden with pop culture references at Hotmail dot com.

Though the pace of innovations seems to be accelerating, nothing yet has swept email into the dustbin of history. This isn’t through lack of trying, of course. Microsoft Teams, Slack, Hubspot, CRMs, etc. – they all seem to compliment email rather than getting rid of it entirely.

To be fair, why would you?

Read the rest at Flying Solo.

What Is The State of Marketing in 2025?

Marketing is digital and digital changes a lot over 12 months. This time last year marketers were bracing for a collapse in ad spend. Analysis from AdWeek predicts that ad spends will increase around 3.8% to 6.5% which is a good sign for people in marketing and communication - though growth in the industry will languish around the 2-3% mark.

So what is the state of marketing in 2025? What should we be focusing on for this year instead of succumbing to shiny-object syndrome? Here’s my analysis:

FTA Television is Boomer Wasteland

Back in ‘68 when Julie was Johnny’s date and strolling down Desolation Boulevard, both of them were likely eighteen. Julie and Johnny, now retired empty nesters with three investment properties are watching old school, free-to-air television. The kids are alright with over-the-top streaming and the internet, and we’ve known this since 2017. In the U.S., 49% of the 54-65 and over demographic still have a cable subscription and most watch over 10 hours per week, constrasted with only 34% of the 18 to 29 demo. The highest rated programs are still live sports, seconded by news and … repeats of Antiques Roadshow.

This has contributed to a global decline in TV advertising by 8%. If you’re trying to get hip and down with the kids, avoid FTA TV and leave it to the oldies.

Social Media Fragmentation

Ahh, the halcyon days of the mid 2010s - where you could set your watch to a healthy return on ad spend coming from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Now, that’s all been turned on its ear. Since the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk and its rebrand to X, many left-leaning netizens have flocked to alternatives such as Mastodon and Blue Sky citing safety and misinformation concerns.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has drawn ire from the political left for doing away with fact checking units and opting for community based notes, much like on X. TikTok’s status in the United States is also under a cloud of uncertainty with a ban likely coming after the U.S. Supreme Court hands down its ruling on the 19th of January.

Couple that with a decrease in ads capturing attention - 31% of people globally claim they pay attention to ads, a 12% slump over last year - and social media seems a less of a “sure thing” for marketers than any time in its short history.

Video and User Generated Content Pushes Buying Decisions

Hands up those of you who have watched a YouTube video of a product unboxing or review to reaffirm your decision to buy? You aren’t alone. According to Hubspot research, approximately 62% of consumers watch videos to learn more about brands, discover how their products or services work, and glean insights into hidden benefits in real-world use cases. (Like how I was sold on buying the Sony Xperia 1 VI due to its superb macro function. Oh, and the headphone jack.) During 2024, 89% of consumers said they want to see more videos from brands - especially if it justifies their purchase decisions.

Newsletters: CERTAINTY IN AN UNCERTAIN TIME

When you put out a newsletter, you not only enjoy a 42:1 average ROI, but you also own the channel and the all the benefits. There aren’t any algorithms to deal with or external advertiser guidelines to adhere to. With politicisation and cybersecurity threats still rampant on social media (e.g., a brand could lose its entire social media platform access overnight) cultivating a contact list and sending newsletters on one’s own terms lends brands and companies greater control over their marketing and communication efforts. It’s also wholly opt-in - first or zero party data collection when third-party data harvesting is starting to get on the nose (see below.)

Hubspot believes there will be a race for subscribers, with larger independents perhaps being acquired by media companies much like tech startups. However, it’s incumbent on us marketers to earn ongoing loyalty by providing value in each newsletter - value that entices non-subscribers to subscribe, too.

AI Driven Campaigns - Perhaps Not Content

AI slop is everywhere and people absolutely hate it. Though the U.S.S. Enterprise-D is run using a computer several magnitudes more intelligent than what we have today, it still has a full crew complement driving them into the Final Frontier. AI will be crucial in programmatic, on-the-fly advertising placement, even when regulation phases out third-party data and new innovative privacy-preserving ad platforms such as Anonym ensure security, transparency, and privacy for end-users.

Personalisation can generate $20 for each $1 spent. Overdo it, and you’re venturing into the creepy, “is this thing stalking me” territory for many - and people are growing even more uncomfortable with the phenomenon. This was highlighted after Apple was forced to pay US$95 million in a class action after their digital assistant Siri was caught eavesdropping on users.

With all that said, I can’t say Generative AI is completely useless - I generated the image at the top of the page using Midjourney - but after a re-evaluation by the marketplace, Generative AI may settle into a place of productivity co-pilot rather than taking over operations wholesale. This may lead to marketers deploying and scaling more simultaneous, continuous campaigns and not just gaining but implementing changes based on real-time data, as Large Language Models replace the need for coding or query language skills.

Digital PR: Continuous vs Discrete Reputation Management

Having a brand mentioned in a magazine simply doesn’t cut through anymore and thus a true innovation was required to supplant it. Instead of assuming influence like before, we can now quantify it and improve upon it. Digital PR isn’t just a simple add-on of the same old SEO mixed with traditional PR methods. It's all about rethinking how we tell stories for brands or people, tapping into the natural flow of information inherent in digital channels.

Sure, it’s awesome to see your brand in a newspaper, but let’s be real—it doesn’t really do much for your attention and reach in the long run. A link on your web page can boost your trust and authority for the long haul. Back in the day, PR was all about adding one bit of good news on top of another bit and hoping for the best. In the Digital PR era, it’s non-stop and endlessly measurable – and that’s what makes this new approach so appealing to marketers and brands.

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The worst business jargon and phrases of 2024

Business – especially the university-corporate sausage factory pipeline – loves to sound smarter than they actually are, by using esoteric jargon. Repeated over and over, it grates the ears like nails over chalkboard.

In 2024, there was no shortage of innovative and disruptive game-changing jargon – with almost none of it being useful or helpful. Here’s some of the worst that I’ve encountered and most likely, some of you have too.

Read the list at Flying Solo.

Are you leaving behind revenue by not writing newsletters?

Everything old is new again, it would seem. The big deal in the content economy isn’t Spotify or TikTok, it’s a new twist on one of the Internet’s founding aspects: the email newsletter.

Spurred on by creator-centric newsletter publishing app Substack, the email newsletter has become big business again. Started in 2017, it has grown to 20 million monthly active subscribers, with its top 10 creators earning $25 million collectively as of 2023.

If you are a business, you have a contact list. Every business needs one if they don’t have one already. If you aren’t monetising that contact list by sending out regular newsletters or email communications, you are leaving money on the table.

Why Email Newsletters?

Over 376 billion emails will be sent and received daily worldwide in 2025, a 23% increase over 2020. 99% of email users check their inboxes at least once per day.

According to a report by Whop about ConvertKit, newsletters garner a 45% open rate compared with 10% for social media. The report also showed that newsletters were the most popular form of content at 58%, followed by blog posts at 51% and educational courses at 30%.

Email newsletter engagement sat at 27%, followed far behind by Instagram (15%) and Facebook (12%).

According to a Beehiiv report, newsletters enjoy open rates of 38.7%, with the welcome or onboarding email showing healthy open rates of 45%. Venture capital newsletters had the highest engagement rates at 50.4%, followed by sports newsletters at 47.5% and food & drink newsletters at 45.3%. Topics of the most interest to newsletter subscribers are films, psychology, and gaming.

If that doesn’t convince you that email marketing is a good idea, think about the $42 of average return on every dollar spent via email advertising.

That’s not to mention you can also charge subscriptions for your newsletters or gain sponsorships from other brands, opening up another revenue stream for your business.

So why are newsletters so popular and gaining popularity despite the advancement in other forms of social media?

The Power of the Opt-In

Unlike every other type of advertising online, newsletters are entirely opt-in. You must agree to sign up for a mailing list; and users have the ability to tune out by unsubscribing. That way, people can curate their content to their liking. If the email newsletter is not fit for their purpose, they can get rid of it just as easily.

No matter whether the email format is news, special offers, link curation, or digests, newsletter subscribers were 16x more likely to be receptive to and engage with newsletter ads. Since people are opted in, they find ads and other calls to action far more relevant than those seen on social media or other forms of internet advertising. In fact, 86% of U.S. adults want to get promotional emails - not informational or educational emails - promotional emails at least once per month according to Marketing Sherpa. 54% of brands send emails at least 2-4 times a month, with 32% sending at least once per month.

Emails can also be personalised to individual subscribers using segmentation, driven by automation. If a user hasn’t visited your site (or logged in) in a while, you can send them a personalised discount offer. You can wish them Happy Birthday. You can send them cat videos, if you have them down as a cat owner. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination. Also, other forms of marketing can’t really do that.

37% of marketers say that email is the most effective channel for customer loyalty and retention, and it’s spurred on by an email reader giving your brand full attention and laser focus; at least for a minute or two. Can’t say that for the perpetual doom scroller…

Monetising Your Database

If your business already has a database of customers - even a small business of 50 or 100 contacts - it’s well worth setting up a newsletter and inviting them to opt-in (don’t assume they want to, just because you talked to them once: it’s bad etiquette and against the law.)

Using an email marketing platform like Mailchimp (which has a dominant 65% market share), Klayvio, or ConstantContact is simple to set up and may even offer a limited-time free trial, so you can evaluate whether it’s the right fit for you.

Setting your email newsletters up for transactional emails based on triggers can also drive engagement and sales - even the humble “welcome” email gets you an average of 45% open rates, which is far more enticing than PPC or even long-term SEO engagement.

Are you leaving money on the table by not sending out regular newsletters? The verdict seems to be in.

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Want your newsletters written right, with high conversions and industry leading open rates? Get I Sell Words on the case!

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Adventures in AI: Is it smart until it’s dumb? (Flying Solo)

Last week, a client and I embarked on putting artificial intelligence (AI), notably OpenAI’s ChatGPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer), through its paces.

Let’s preface all this by saying I’m not a computer programmer by any stretch. I dabbled in Turbo Pascal and Visual Basic in high school, which was over twenty years ago. I’m sure we’ve moved on since then.

The task was simple: write a series of 500-word articles about a given topic. Some had to have five FAQs (answers to frequently asked questions), and others had to have three. Sometimes they had to be two long FAQs (100 words or more) or three short (50 words or fewer.) Or four of equal length. They also needed to have links inserted at 100-word intervals, the keywords in the URL substantially or closely matching words on the page.

Seems like a piece of cake for a million CUDA core behemoth, right?

Well, sort of.

Read the rest at Flying Solo.

Doing it yourself: Is the hard way the way through? (Flying Solo)

As soloists or small business owners, we often take on more than we can bite off, let alone chew. For one soloist, it gave them a deeper appreciation of what other soloists can do for their business – and with savings in time and money, I wrote for Flying Solo.

Could you pass your HSC exam again? How to learn from your past to forge your future (Flying Solo)

If there’s one recurring nightmare we might have, it’s being back at school and under pressure to perform for exams again. We may or may not be wearing our clothes, and our teeth might be falling out as we fall off a cliff. But I digress.

For me, 2024 marks twenty years since I did my VCE (HSC) exams and graduated from high school. Looking back, perhaps apart from some fundamentals, so much has changed.

Read the rest at Flying Solo.

The Google Document Leak: SEO's Secrets Revealed? (Probably Not)

On May 27th, Rand Fiskin at SparkToro broke the news that he’d been forwarded 2,500 pages worth of API (Application Programming Interface) documentation from Google’s search division. After gaining background from anonymous sources, as well as the leaker identifying himself as Erfan Aizmi, the documents were deemed authentic.

The documents pointed to 2,596 modules with 14,014 attributes (API features) that appear to come from Google’s internal “Content API Warehouse.” As mouthwatering as this sounds to SEOs who want to know the eleven herbs and spices that make up the precise signals and weights of Google’s PageRank algorithm, it falls far short of unveiling the secret formula to Coca-Cola.

Being code documentation, the information contained within the leak is highly technical in nature - and perhaps even above my paygrade.

A deep-dive by Mike King of IPullRank says:

“The leaked documentation outlines each module of the API and breaks them down into summaries, types, functions, and attributes. Most of what we’re looking at are the property definitions for various protocol buffers (or protobufs) that get accessed across the ranking systems to generate SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages – what Google shows searchers after they perform a query).”

If I’m correct, it shows people how the computers at Google access certain repositories of information or code to execute the SERP - not really how the SERP is defined itself. However, it did reveal a couple of aspects of Google’s algorithm that are worth re-evaluating.

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Clicks May Be More Important Than We Think

Google has long squashed the idea that clicks are not a ranking factor in search. According to other leaks and testimony from the US Department of Justice Anti-Trust trial, Google does employ a “implicit user experience” ranking algorithm called NavBoost, which ranks content higher based on actual clicks versus expected clicks. These signals are separated into badClicks, goodClicks, lastLongestClicks and unsquashedClicks.

Let’s say a well-edited and researched document ticks all the EEAT boxes. At the end of the day if human users prefer another piece of content, it makes sense to rank that content higher as user experience matters most. NavBoost is mentioned 84 times in the documents as a heading, which implies the algorithms contained within are important. How these work, are weighted, or tracked, etc. we cannot say.

Domain Authority - Possibly A Thing?

Google themselves have asserted they don’t use “website authority” scores, a metric designed by Moz.com, in their search rankings. The documents reveal a Compressed Quality Signal called siteAuthority() - how this is computed, measured, or implemented is anyone’s guess.

Chrome Is Used For Ranking

As mentioned before, NavBoost helps rank content based on click and user behaviour. Some user behaviour - though we aren’t privy to what extent - is harvested using cookie history, logged-in Chrome data, and pattern detection algorithms. This is known as the ChromeInTotal module.

This has been known as far back as 2016, as real-time Chrome data would be used in their RealTime Boost Signal. If you are queasy at the idea of Google tracking this much information about your browsing habits, then I encourage you to switch to Firefox.

Other Modules in the Leak

Other modules in the leak that hint at the presence of certain ranking factors are timeliness, by looking at dates in the byline (bylineDate), URL (syntacticDate) and on-page content (semanticDate); titlematchScore which suggests that site titles are a major ranking factor; determines the focus topic of a page using a comparison of page embeddings (siteRadius) to the site embeddings (siteFocusScore); and also stores domain registration information (RegistrationInfo.)

What Does This Tell Us About SEO?

On the surface - not a hell of a lot. This leak may be akin to finding out that KFC uses salt shakers, flour stations, and deep fryers in the making of their fried chicken, but not the specific ingredients nor the requisite quantities to replicate their secret recipe. It also tells us things we already knew but Google were coy over, such as Domain Authority and using Google Chrome data to reinforce their SERPs. I’ve used a gang of weasel words to report on this topic, and with good reason: we may have a few of the puzzle pieces but we have no idea if they fit together, let alone what the entire picture is supposed to look like.

It may have given some, but not total credence to long-held suspicions about how Google Search works, but nothing definitive. Though we may not be able to reproduce Coke exactly at home, it doesn’t stop people from trying.

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We may not have cracked the code of SEO, but I Sell Words has boosted the SERPs of hundreds of businesses around Australia with quality content. Get your own today!

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Chilling out as a business activity (Flying Solo)

In one of my favourite boyhood adventure graphic novels, The Adventures of Tintin, the bumbling pair of detectives Thomson and Thompson are driving in circles around a fictional African desert. At one point, a faster car zooms past and Thomson steps out of the vehicle. Bewildered, Thompson backs up their rickety jeep and asks, “I say, why would you step out while we were moving?”

“Moving?” he says, bewildered, “that car went so fast I thought we were standing still!”

Talk to anyone born in Gen Z and Gen Alpha, and standing still is as foreign to them as it is to a shark – if they stop swimming, they literally die.

Literally literally, not figuratively literally, like post-Millennials would say.

Being still in an ever-moving world though, feels like a luxury. For a soloist like us, it’s almost unimaginable.

Read the rest at Flying Solo.

What's In A Name? (ABC Radio Melbourne)

Many brand names are instantly recognisable, like Coca-Cola, Apple, Nintendo, Mercedes and more. But what's in a name? And how do companies actually go about naming things?

I talked to Lisa Leong on ABC Radio Melbourne about car names, branding, and the attachment we have to our cars - bombs and all!

Listen here.

What is the State of Marketing in 2024?

For many marketers and creatives, 2023 was a bit of a “lost year” in terms of growth and productivity.

Speaking anecdotally, many friends and colleagues lamented that the year was leaner than expected, thanks to inflation and the cost of living crisis contributing to lower advertising budgets.

Like Marshall McLuhan says, we speed into the future looking at the rearview mirror. After reviewing Hubspot and Salesforce State of Marketing 2024 reports, here is an overview of what marketing firms are doing in the face of new opportunities - and threats - from artificial intelligence and regulatory sharks circling around third-party data collection and social media such as TikTok.

What is the state of marketing in 2024?

PERSONALISATION IS KING

Sure, content is king - but personalisation is even better. According to Hubspot, “87% of marketers plan to continue or increase their investment in mobile messaging through channels like SMS, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp.” That means constant engagement with customers using these channels, powered by Generative AI chatbots. 96% of marketers say personalization leads to repeat business, and 94% say it increases sales.

Their research also shows that it has an over 120x return on investment, on average. Hubspot also found that 55% of businesses predict that by 2024, most people will turn to chatbots over search engines for answers.

According to a Kibo survey, personalising the entire customer experience led to 3x ROI than forgoing personalisation. Salesforce says that 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. Of course, this will need an end-to-end strategy at the top and bottom of funnels to implement with any measure of success.

Imperator Email INVICTUS

If personalised messaging through various channels is the king, then email is the Imperator Romanum, the God-Emperor to rule over them all. Salesforce says that 84% of marketers send commercial or engagement messages over email, and Hubspot says that it’s tied for second place in terms of greatest ROI overall ($36 for each $1 spent). It accounts for 80% of all outbound marketing messaging, Salesforce says.

One in three marketers reports using email and 87% plan to maintain or increase their investment in 2024 though email marketers will need to adapt to emerging technologies and trends such as including targeted personalisation, personalised images, directions to the nearest retail outlet, social feeds, and social media links.

Scrollable Video - the seo killer?

We live in the age of the short-form video - Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok. According to Hubspot, “marketers are doubling down on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram to address younger audiences going right to social video platforms to search and engage with brands, even more so than search engines.” 50% say they will be using TikTok this year - and hopefully the US Government doesn’t set a dangerous precedent by banning it outright.

Aja Frost, Director of Global Growth at HubSpot says, “use social listening tools to understand which low, medium-, and high-intent questions prospects and customers are asking, then work with the Social Media team to create content answering those questions — or, even more powerfully, enabling brand advocates to answer it for them.”

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C is Not for Cookie - Third-Party Data

As Google seeks to phase-out third-party cookies and data collection, marketers need to walk the privacy versus personalisation tightrope ever more carefully. First-party data collected via opt-in (such as an email list) is the most powerful kind of data - as it directly captures and fuels the personalisation mentioned earlier. That’s not to say a complete view of a customer is a given either: 2021 Gartner® Cross-Functional Customer Data Survey, 14% of organisations achieve a 360-degree view of their customer, and of those 14%, 44% said it’s in a customer data platform.

75% of marketers are still investing in third-party data, 68% say they have managed to fully define their strategy to shift away from gathering this information.

AI is a co-pilot, not autopilot

AI hasn’t led to marketing being automated completely - but it has shown its usefulness in reducing administrative tasks through automation for marketers. Hubspot says marketers are saving three hours per piece of content and two and a half hours per day overall. Interestingly, only 6% say they use Generative AI to write their content for them; 45% says it helps with idea generation and inspiration, and 31% they use it to create outlines. 81% of marketers say that leveraging generative AI enhances their roles.

Salesforce says 68%% of marketers have a fully defined AI strategy, up from 60% in 2021 and 57% in 2020. The top three ways marketing organisations use AI is to automate customer interactions (90%), automate data integration (89%), and personalise the customer journey across channels (88%).

Most marketers say it’s the number one tool for research, with apps like Albus assisting with in-depth and tangential research into various topics. Of course, as AI isn’t perfect, we must always trust but verify.

What’s Next?

With AI speeding up the cycle between marketing and sales, it’s likely that further automation will further blur the distinctions between the two, especially with targeted and opt-in personalisation. Can you argue with an AI generated image of you wearing a dashing pair of sunglasses and is 40% off for your birthday? Only time will tell.

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To get the right strategy for 2024 as well as great content that’s guaranteed to sell more - click below to contact me!

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Being bilingual – developing a soft skill for a growth mindset (Flying Solo)

Imagine you’re at the top of your craft (of course you are, you wouldn’t be a soloist if you weren’t!) You’ve poured thousands of hours into honing your expertise and making a name for yourself as one of the best practitioners of that skill in the country – perhaps the world.

Then, you decide to start from scratch, like a five-year-old entering school for the first time. You fall from the very top of the tree to somewhere among the roots.

That’s what it’s like learning a new language.

Yet it opens – quite literally – a whole entire world of opportunity.

Read the rest at Flying Solo.

Creatives: The obstacle is the way… (Flying Solo)

If you’re a graphic designer, copywriter, or creative type (as non-creatives like to call us) I’ll bet good money you had a conversation this year that went like this: “Have you seen ChatGPT/Midjourney/Generative AI platform? It does what you do in like, five seconds!”

Gritting our teeth and smiling politely, we nod and reply, “I have! That’s so interesting.” The curses reserved for them; you hide beneath your tongue.

Couple that with inflation running rampant and businesses boarding up the house to weather economic storms, we creatives are often left out in the cold.

Read the article at Flying Solo.

What is AI Hallucination in Copywriting?

Though Generative AI or Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Google’s Bard or OpenAI’s ChatGPT have become commonplace in business and in copywriting, not is all as it seems. 

If you spend enough time using these tools such as ChatBots or online content generation tools, the AI may produce results that are bizarre, make no sense, or are completely made up.

This phenomenon is known as “AI Hallucination” and can prove damaging for professionals in creative industries such as content writing and copywriting. Here’s what copywriters and other creatives can do about it.

How Generative AI works

Generative AI doesn’t “think” like we do – in a nutshell, the AI manipulates numbers to reach a desired outcome.

Though the language it generates is human readable and appears fluent, it is predicated on a series of tokens broken down into probabilistic models. If one provides a prompt “Write the next word in this sentence: The cat sat on the ___?” 

The Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) will parse that phrase like a game of Family Feud – the survey – or information it is fed, will produce the response of the highest probability according to the data it can access. To do this, it lends certain words and phrases different probabilistic weights – The cat sat on the mat. “Mat” may be weighted with near 100% probability while “laptop” may be weighted with 10-15% probability.

It “learns” this through analysing millions, if not billions of words and sentences pulled from various online repositories.

The AI does not and cannot “know” the implied meaning of the words it generates in isolation, or even in sequence. It is manipulating numbers and algorithms to produce the “answer.”

What is an AI Hallucination?

Hallucination, a term from human psychology, refers to an individual seeing or hearing things that in reality, do not exist.

Likewise, AI hallucinations present incorrect, inaccurate, or logically inconsistent information as factually correct and complete information – and being confident that the returned result is indeed truthful. 

The term “AI Hallucination” has been around since at least 2018, when Google authored a paper on Neural Machine Translation, where they said “NMT systems are susceptible to producing highly pathological translations that are completely untethered from the source material.”

Many Generative AI models are trained to provide answers at almost “any cost.” Given an AI is plugged into vast reservoirs of already-existing information at all times, it is hard to understand how an AI can “not know” a given answer when asked a straightforward question. Therefore, it simply produces something, rather than nothing.

In fact, OpenAI disclaims hallucinations by warning users that “ChatGPT may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts.”

Other terms for AI hallucination are “confabulation” which can appear in AI-generated video, upscaling, images, or audio as weird artifacts or odd interpretations of prompts.

Common types of AI hallucinations

The most common types of AI hallucinations that can creep into copy are factual errors or inconsistencies in the output.

The most famous example is from February of 2023. Google’s Generative AI Bard stated that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope took the very first pictures of a planet from outside our solar system.

Astronomers quickly pointed out that this was incorrect.

It can also contradict itself and not be “aware” of the contradiction. You may ask the AI to write a 26-word poem with each word starting with a corresponding letter of the alphabet, and it returns 25 words or 27 words. Even when “challenged” it may insist that the output conforms to what the prompt has asked.

Other (more fun) hallucinations are when the AI goes completely off the rails and returns gibberish or nonsensical data. You may ask for an explanation of the water cycle, and it goes off on a tangent about 80s horror films. In French.

This can all happen due to the quality of data being collected, how it generates responses, how well a prompt is engineered, and plain old human error in the form of bugs.

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AI hallucinations and copywriting or content writing

With the right prompts and skill, a LLM or Generative AI can produce massive amounts of content at scale.

However, the downside is, at least for the moment, is that AI generated content lacks the “Experience” ingredient in Google’s page ranking factor model, known as E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness.)

If a Generative AI “hallucinates” once or twice per 1,000 words, this can make even the most well-intentioned content run afoul of Google’s E-E-A-T parameters. 

If a human website copywriter cannot determine whether the AI has hallucinated or not (e.g. through a lack of expertise on the topic being covered) it can wreak havoc not only for their SEO efforts but also for productivity. 

Copywriters and editors will need to redline and fact-check each claim a Generative AI has made. For shorter copy and content (under 1000w), there is a reasonable chance that writing the post oneself would take less time than crafting prompts and checking facts.

How to prevent AI hallucinations

Though we can’t totally stop an AI from hallucinating, we can take steps to mitigate the risk of hallucinations occurring. This can come from writing better prompts or feeding it higher quality information. 

Pre-train the AI

The “PT” in GPT means “pre-trained.” We may assume that a GPT is adept in all things but feeding it relevant and contemporary data first can help limit factual errors. These may come into play by asking a GPT to read through several hand-picked sources or databases before generating text.

Give it a role to play

Image generative AI such as DALL-E and Midjourney are called upon to “Imagine” images based on prompts; and GPTs can be given roles to play which can narrow its focus to certain types of data. For example, if you want an expert to determine whether the James Webb Telescope did indeed see an extra-solar planet, you can ask it:

You are an astronomer who works at NASA and concentrates on reading telemetry from the James Webb Telescope. Has the telescope ever seen a planet outside our solar system?

Exclude certain answers

Just like the dark days of the pre-Google internet, search operators were crucial to find relevant information. If you wanted to look up “bicycles” you may have had to Ask Jeeves (literally) “Bicycles NOT motorcycles”, which would exclude motorcycles from your results.

This could take the form of:

Provide a list of islands in the South Pacific which exist in the real world. Exclude all fictional mentions and return what can be seen on a contemporary (2010s onwards) map. 

Forgive its trespasses

If the GPT has racked its neural networks and databases and come up with nothing, let it know that that is also an acceptable answer.

Does nothing unreal exist? If you do not know, say, “I don’t know.”

Copywriters: trust, but verify

As of 2023, hallucination is part and parcel of using Generative AI. As a copywriter or content writer who may look to GPTs for ideas, long-form content generation, or productivity improvements, we need to rely on the old political maxim: trust but verify.

There’s a high probability that the GPT output is factually correct, but we also need to cross-check with third-party reputable sources before publishing; lest you contribute to spreading misinformation unwittingly.

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To get the best human copywriting and copyediting you can find online, contact me! No hallucinations, guaranteed.

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