A teaser is a perfect way of presenting your information without giving away all of it. With the rise of interactive marketing the concept of teasers has become more and more utilized. With the amount of information that you can find online it’s difficult to prove your value to anybody these days. With a teaser people learn about your products and at the same time allow you an opportunity to explain why should they care. But wait, can the wrong teaser harm your business? 

In this article, Alex Centeno MBA, creative director and online marketing strategist with over 10 years of experience online, provides you with his no-bs, straight to the point, take on how to create effective teasers. Give your users a taste of your product or information while gaining an advantage that can generate a lot of business. These interesting keys will transform your potential market into faithful buyers.

So what are the keys to providing the right teaser?

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As an internet marketing consultant, I get the same question over and over again: how can I rank in the top 10 in Google for a very broad term? The answer is probably going to sound simple, but it is truth in my experience.

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Thank you for your interest in registering with Merkados' Intermarketing Digital Media Resources & Strategy Information. In order to access some of our premium content and downloads you are required to provide your personal name and valid e-mail account. This information is only used by Merkados to send occasional information about additional digital media products, services and resources that may benefit you. We will never sell or share your information with anybody - ever.

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The abstract desires can be created at any given moment by websites in different ways. You can create this desires by creating un-conclusive statements to marketing phrases: for example: ” This product comes loaded with all your favorite features! What features are they talking about? Your favorite… How do they know my favorite features? By in-conclusive statements you transform the perception of the customer, because no matter what your copy says the brain has to process it and agree or disagree.

For example: Right now you can agree or disagree with this article, but by reading it you are changing your perspective because you ask yourself if you agree or not.

You can direct the attention of your online users by the way you transform their emotions. For example if I say:

* Think for a second about the smell of the ocean, the warm sand and the breeze, feel the sun burning your skin little by little, think about the feeling later when your skin is all red and it hurts to touch anything, you don’t want to do that.

If you read the last paragraph you don’t only read it and keep going but you actually set yourself in the picture because most of us has experienced that and it is painful.

You can use online copy to create sensations that will move the understanding of your audience in many ways. Some will make them buy, some will not.

If you go in sweater store in the middle of the summer and it is 115 F. out and the store has this huge carpet with long hair and you happen to realize that the A/C is broken inside you probably won’t buy.

Same situation, the hottest day ever, you look up an you see a beach bar selling bear for half price, the bear is 33 – Fahrenheit – just when it is starting to ice, you can feel the little pieces of ice going down your throat – yes, it is very probably that you would buy.

Statement number one in Marketing: Life is about value. You, as everyone else, is fighting to be, to become. Things give us pleasure because they allow us to get closer to becoming or being. We buy food, cars, houses, pens, CDs, magic cards, plastic bags, ice, cheese, stationary bikes. Get it? Just to become. The value of everything is determined by the ability to give that power> a glass of water from a neighbor won’t be of value most of the time, except if you need that water to survive in the desert.

If you want to market products online successfully, find that one characteristic that makes people become, and share it with as many people as you can.

Google Analytics Cheat Sheet

This page has all the information you need about the functions present in both the urchin.js and the ga.js scripts. Google Analytics API code is certainly not rocket science but it takes a little bit of time to get used to it.

I personally prefer using the API with PHP, however many people seem to be using it with the Javascript libraries. Also make sure to visit the libraries examples page if you are more a “learn by example” kind of person.

Take a look and hope this little tip helps.

If you are interested in utilizing Google Analytics as part of your measurement efforts for your site but need help getting it deployed or simply want to gain a higher level of customization, make sure to contact Merkados today.

Ok, so if you decide to use Drush (4) and decide to upgrade your installation of Drupal (6.2x) then perhaps you’ll experience a little problem. This problem has happened to me quite a few times now and that is why I am writing this post. I don’t want this to happen either to me or to anybody in the future. If it happens, then here are the instructions on how to fix it.
Let’s start by saying what doesn’t work:
1. My first thought was to check for the error log to see if it gave me better clues at what was happening with the Drupal site after the drush update command (drush up). Now, before we continue, remember that before you hit ENTER on that command, make a copy of your htaccess file and of your robots.txt. Believe me, this will make it easier on you.

2. I checked the error log and it basically told me the following:
“[Date [crit] [client 200.111.222.111(ip address)] (13)Permission denied: /home/user/public_html/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable”.

3. I thought then that it had to do with the permissions of the htaccess file (chmod). However that is not what causes the problem.
4. When I tried that it didn’t work.
5. Then I changed the ownership of the files recursively on the entire root and sure enough it didn’t work either. Simply because the problem happens because the public_html folder alone has to have the group ownership set to “nobody”. Can you believe that? How do you do that? With the command “chown” (Change Ownership) the first parameter is the username, the second one is the group. So for example if you say chown alex:nobody myfolder/ , then you are assigning the ownership of myfolder/ to user alex and group “nobody”.

Why does it happen in the first place?

First the problem happens because you are logged it with a different user with SSH into your server. That alone is going to make the Drush calls from that user. So if you call the drush commands without changing your user, of course you are going to end you changing your ownership of the files.

Merkados’ Recommended Solution

So here are the changes that need to happen:

/*Comment of Code*/
#chown -R ftp_username:ftp_username path_to_drupal_home_folder
#chown ftp_username:nobody path_to_drupal_home_folder
/*End of Code*/

Notes:

1. The chown command is used to change the ownership of the files. In the first line you are changing ownership recursively of all the drupal files and assigning it to the user with ftp access and group with the same name.

2. The second line makes the change to the home folder. Please note that the group is set to “nobody” and please also note that it is not recursive so don’t use the -R!

That’s it. If you follow this instructions you will be avoiding those 403 forbidden notices and doing more work. Don’t worry about the fact that the error logs instruct you about lack of read-access to .htaccess. Obviously this problem is generated by the ownership problem described here. Once you fix the problem with the ownership, then you won’t have the error with your htaccess file.

Please don’t hesitate to contact Merkados for your strategic interactive media needs.

1. Log into your account via SSH.
2. Navigate to your Mailman folder with command:

(cd /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/bin)

3. Execute  command:

 ./list_members NAMELIST_DOMAIN.tld > ./list.txt
// (NAMELIST is the name of your subscriber list, DOMAIN is the domain, and TLD is the top level domain).

4. Copy the file to an accesible place with command:

cp list.txt /home/ACCOUNT/www/

5. That’s it

New versus Old Gap Logo

Ok, so I just wanted to give my two cents on this entire New Gap Logo thing. First of all one of the things that I think is pretty bad is the fact that the company pulls the logo and throws it to the trash can. I mean, if you have done your homework, then either it works or it doesn’t. You don’t go live and then realize this is a mistake. It is too late. Some decisions in marketing need to be very carefully planned. Logo design is one of them. A big company with a big brand like Gap, can’t take the redesign of their brand lightly. It is somewhat apparent that they did. Or at least it looks like it, and now the entire brand suffers because of this perception.

Having said that, lets talk about the logo a bit. The new logo utilizes a sans-serif font as opposed to the traditional logo using a serif font. Also notice the point size is larger, the width of the font is much larger in the new logo and the kerning is much tighter in the new logo. So having said all that “technical” stuff, what does it mean? Well, naturally the new logo is going to look younger and less sophisticated. It is going to look more relaxed but also it is going to look more corporate because of the kerning. The letters are so close together that they are read as a whole, as opposed to each one separately. This is also reinforced by the fact that the font-color is a dominant 100% black as opposed to a 100% white. Now, why does that matter? Well, the moment that you enter a Gap store you’ll notice that there is almost nothing 100% black in the store. Everything in the branding of the store and the experience is about comfort, about freedom, about space, about wrinkles and about pastels – certainly not 100% black.

Two more observations: The square at the top of the new logo is an attempt to marry the old with the new, however it just doesn’t work. because the font type utilized creates round negative spaces.

Negative Spaces

If you notice, you can see that every single letter creates a rounded negative space. This gets intensified by the high contrast (black on white) and also the width of the font. So why would you break that roundness with a blue square? Well, I guess you could, however in this case it doesn’t work because it doesn’t create enough contrast or similarity.

I guess it is way easier to critique a logo than it is to create one, so for me to sit here and to talk about it is much easier than for the designer to do it.

This logo is ineffective for the Gap brand because of corporate decisions, not so much because of designer decisions.  The business (strategic) aspect of the logo is wrong and therefore not well appreciated by the fans.

Next time:

Next time Gap needs to do the following:

1. Make sure that if you are going to change your brand you are so sure that you push through no matter what. Hesitation is worse than a bad logo.

2. Take care of the process and the logo will be great. Hire a professional designer or group of designers and then let them do their jobs. Don’t have critique sessions with corporate leaders that know nothing about design.

3. Ask your fans first, then change it. Ultimately your fans are the ones who want that logo in their bags. Personally I like the old logo in the bag not the new one.

4. Don’t change something that is not broken. Change what’s broken.

5. Don’t ever change a serif font with a non-serif font in a logo that has been successfully marketed for more than 5 years (20 years in this case!)

6. Don’t mix rounded negative spaces with sharp edge unless they are clearly different in contrast, size and hue.

7. Look at the clothes of everybody walking out of the store and choose your colors based on the colors you see them buying – not the ones you want them to buy.

8. Market research is a must for a company with more than 100 employees (period).

9. Now that you have made the mistake, don’t try to hide it. Accept it and move on. People don’t want bs, simply move on. Don’t deny it, but give it the importance that it has now, it is in the trashcan; so  should your time devoted to it.

10. DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS AGAIN IN THE NEAR FUTURE! Let the waters settle down. Perhaps reconsider changing the logo in 5 – 7 years if neeeded.

That’s it.

Best,

Alex Centeno MBA. Director @ Merkados™

In this video, I simply show you one of my examples for saving time online with Fake for Mac OS X.

The new feature is called: “Crawl Rate”. It gives information in three specific areas:

The number of pages in your site crawled per day for the last three months.

Number of kilobytes downloaded per day

Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds).

This is great information especially for those increasing the amount of content in their site, now you have a better idea of how many pages you are actually bringing to the internet as added value.

Finally you can also set different speeds for your crawling. Isn’t it amazing? Visit Google Webmaster Tools today and check it out by yourself. I think that internet marketing is more exciting than ever.

Revised: September 18th, 2010:

Ok, so obviously the Crawl rate is certainly not news anymore so what can I share with you about the Google Webmaster Tools? Well, these days some people don’t know yet about the great information about keywords. Inside of the Google Webmaster Tools Console, click on Keywords. These reports tells you the most common found words on your site. So that is not really news right? Well, if you pair that with the fact that now they allow you to see the “variations” of each keyword then something invaluable comes up.

So why should you care? Simple. If Google cares, then perhaps if you want to increase your traffic from them you should too. Make sure that when writing your content you use all variations of your keywords. For example the possessive (adding ‘s) or the plural(adding s) or adding the termination “ing”.

The more variations the more natural you can make your content read. That is good news not only for the Google crawler, but also for your users. It is easier for them to read and therefore to get engaged.

Until next time people.

Alex Centeno MBA.
Creative Director & Digital Media Strategist
Merkados Interactive Partners
www.Merkados.com