Uncategorized

The Shropshire Star wanted to promote their sponsorship of the annual RAF Cosford Air Show. The trouble was they had hit an ideas block – a real ‘stuck-in-a-rut-can’t-think-of-anything-new’ sort of block. Just as they were wondering if they could get away with yet another montage of a WWII Spitfire, the Red Arrows and a parachute display team they came up with the best idea they had had in years – give the job to Positive Advertising.

But what radical cutting-edge solution would we come up with?

Let’s brainstorm it, shall we, see what mutual connections there are, what synergy and overlap appears:
Newspaper – Aeroplanes.
Paper – Planes.
Of course! Plain Paper.

No hang on a minute. Stroke of genius, how about Paper Planes! Paper planes made out of the local paper even.

All right, fair cop, we concede that it’s not the biggest feat of lateral thinking ever. In fact it’s pretty obvious, but it worked well, with minimal copy, a simple message and plenty of white space give it standout.

The happy client will use it for event promotion in the paper and for branding purposes, as display banners, at the Air Show.

{ 0 comments }

The eternal question, how do I drive traffic to my website? There are two obvious ways to increase traffic flow:

Website Optimisation, getting an Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) company to examine and change the elements and content of your website, in order to make it optimal for search engines and therefore increasing the likelihood of high organic page ranking.
Google Adwords pay-per-click advertising campaigns.

Although they are both powerful ways of driving traffic through to your web pages, they can be very expensive.

Firstly, Google loves links. Websites that link to other relevant websites will always find favour with Google’s page ranking algorithms. The more relevant and qualified links pointing to a site, the more likely it is to rank higher than a similar website targeting similar keywords with less links pointing to it. The link text, or anchor text, is also an important factor when determining the website’s ranking.

A strategic link building campaign will increase the link popularity of the site. Links can be obtained via third party sites, industry associations, directories, authority sites and related suppliers’ and distributors’ websites.

Although this works well, smart players employ something called ‘link baiting’. This is achieved by placing interesting content, features or articles that act as bait for viewers to place links to it from other websites. In other words, get the great British public to publicise your website for free. The most common link bait methodologies applied today are provision of information, news, humour, controversy and useful tools for visitors. Link bait can be an extremely powerful form of link building as it is viral in nature.

Another great way is to bait other websites with the same interesting content. There are hundreds of places you can pull traffic to your website from all over the Internet – provided as above the content is interesting. For example, if you have a dog walking business, you might write an article on the best ways to keep your dog healthy, or the 10 best dog training techniques.

Then, publish it all over the Internet with a link back to your website or sales page. You don’t even have to stick to the written word. You can record a short video, record an audio book or even a tele-seminar – anything that will portray you as a Guru in your field and get people clicking through to your website.

Where to publish your ‘expert advice’? There are hundreds of places, here’s just a few to give you a taste:

IF YOU WANT TO WRITE ARTICLES…