Goals: Back to the basics

Two most important things your "ad" should do

1. Unique Selling Proposition or Leveragable Competitive Advantage.
   What need do you fill, or what value do you provide? What a viewer should see if they visit your site for less than two seconds.
2. Call to Action. What do you want the viewer to do next?

These two concepts should be your guiding light.  Tell people what value you provide, what need you fill, and why you're better than the rest.  And tell 'em what you want them to do. And test your assumptions.

Test your web site

Test and Measure using A/B Splits. If you think you should feature one product, and your partner thinks you should feature a different product, do both. Use two parallel sites. Market both of them and see which one works best. It costs almost nothing to create a carbon copy of your site and modify it slightly to test a theory. And do this continuously.

"I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I can never find out which half."
John Wanamaker, (1838-1922)
US businessman. He was founder of one of the first department stores in the United States.

You should constantly test variations of your site. This way, your web site will evolve over time to be the most efficient marketing machine possible.

Class exercise:

1. Find some web-sites that to a good job of communicating the USP and Call to Action.
2. Find some web-sites that do a bad job of communicating the USP and Call to Action.

For example...

http://www.oqo.com/ (Is this a good one or a bad one?)

http://www.silentsnore.com/

http://www.ginkgosynthesis.com/

http://www.sharwoods.com/

http://www.trendsetters.com/

http://www.smokinglily.com/

To find bad sites:
To find good sites: