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Timing is everything

If you’ve looked at advertising through banner ads, the thought of using an animated ad has probably crossed your mind. Or maybe you’ve seen some cool animated icons on forums and you want one of your own. You can pack more info into an animated image than you can into a static image. If it’s good, people may willing watch it again.

A good animated ad (or avatar) is a lot like a joke. Timing is key. “Take my wife please” isn’t funny. “Take my wife… please” is funny, and it’s all because of the pause. A mistimed ad will fall as flat as a mistimed joke. Too fast and you may drive people nuts, or even actively drive them off the page to escape your ad!

I apologize in advance for this example. I did a simple two frame animation and purposely set the speed waaaaaaay too high.

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Now that we’ve banished that seizure-inducing monstrosity from the screen with some rapid scrolling, let’s get back to timing. Most blinking items aren’t that awful, but some are pretty darn close!

For large items, you want the ad to change slowly enough that all the text in the frame can be easily read in that time without people getting bored, waiting for it to change.

For small items that are next to a block of text (such as avatar or blog ads), you want them to be slow, then fast. Give the eye long enough to get used to the item then being still, then let it have a sudden quick movement. The movement in peripheral vision will often get people to actively look at your ad.

People are very sensitive to movements in their peripheral vision and will usually turn their head to see what caught their attention. We’re also naturally curious and will watch something to verify that yes, we really DID just see that thing wink at us!

For longer animations, you can often tell a little story. Leave the front piece with the majority of the message still. You can pack a more detailed message in the still portion because if you did a good job, people caught the ‘show’ halfway through and want to see the beginning. They’ll stare at the ad for a few seconds, waiting for the show to restart.

Here’s an example:

If you caught him shooting laser beams out his eyes while you were reading the surrounding paragraphs, you probably stared at him for a few seconds waiting for him to repeat his trick. He’s on a 6 second delay. People usually look at ads for less than half a second. 6 seconds is an eternity on the internet. If you can get someone to stare at your ad intently for that long, you’ll get a much higher click through rate.

So how long did it take to get the timing right? For the winking pika, it took about 2 minutes. For the one that shoots laser beams, he took about 10 minutes to design the whole thing, including the timing. I forget how long the large example took, but probably around 20 minutes. If you’ve never worked with animations before, it’ll take a lot longer to do your first one. It is worth it to spend the extra time fine tuning the speed rather than just using the preset speeds.

Rainy Day Paperback Exchange
Bethel, CT
gently used books for kids and adults
http://www.rainydaypaperback.com

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Making your advertising complement what you’re already doing.

So you’ve made your ad. You’ve made sure it’s showing only to the right people in the right countries. You’ve already played with the Keyword Tool on AdWords once to see variations on the keywords you started out with and get rid of some you clearly don’t want. But you’re still not getting as much traffic as you want. You may need some new, more imaginative Keywords. What YOU think is a logical search string may not actually be what people are using to find you.

First off, see how people are actually finding you right now. You want your advertising to complement what you’re already doing. Many website hosting services have some sort of analytics service. You want to check out two main things here: search terms and inbound links.

If you don’t have such a service already, I suggest StatCounter which can show you the keywords people are using to find you. It is free to use. You want to see how people are finding you now and enhance what’s already working. Usually these will be fairly normal words that make perfect sense to you. The most common strings will probably be stuff that you would use yourself like “used books in X” or “buy X books.”

What you want to look at is stuff that’s further down the list. The stuff you’d never guess people would use. Looking at my current Keywords, I see a bunch of specific titles and one odd item that jumps out at me: “ways to relax”. Yes, reading a book IS a good way to relax. Perhaps an ad aimed specifically at that might do well.

Remember, most of the trackers show you a limited snapshot of time! Check back and see if things change! Depending on the service, you may also be able to increase the period of time you can look at. Generally pay services will offer more detailed information, but a free service is great if you’re just starting out.

The other thing you want look at is inbound links. Your statistics program will show you how often people enter through a specific link. This will often be dominated by a recent blog or forum post, a MySpace or Facebook link, a news story, etc. I can see, for example, that the top referrer to my website is BookShopBlog. This generates temporary traffic and gives you an idea who your site appeals to.

If it’s NOT a post you yourself made, it’s an even better indication of who’s interested in your site. Be sure to go see who linked to you and if possible, figure out why. Sometimes its obvious since its directly related to your business. Sometimes its an utter mystery…especially if the link is to a post in a language you don’t read. I still can’t figure out why a Mexican wrestling forum linked to my store at one point. I could figure out it was a site about luchadores… but other than that, I have no idea why they found my site interesting.

An easy way to find who links to you is to go to Google and type in “links to: Your Website Address Here”. This will show you the major sites that link to you. However, this won’t show you ALL the sites.

To find those, go though a link popularity checker. This will show you more long term links. The one through MarketLeap  works very well and will let you compare the number of links to your site to other websites in the same industry. They also have some other fun free tools to play with. Get a cup of coffee or tea and spend an hour or so playing with them all.

Having looked at those, you’ve probably got some ideas for new keywords to try. Now, to the Batcave AdWords to try them out!

A post from Nora O’Neill from Rainy Day Paperback Exchange

This post is a companion piece to her series on Using Adwords

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Here is a terrific article by Nora at Rainy Day Paperback Exchange all about attending book/hobby conventions. If yo have any experience with attending as a dealer please feel free to share with us via the comment button just above.

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Lots of dealers have probably considered getting a booth at a book fair or book trade show.  They look up one of the big shows and then nearly drop dead of a heart attack when they see the price for a booth.  In many cases, renting a booth for a few days is equivalent to paying for three or four months rent.
If you want to try your hand at conventions, there is another option.  Rather than attending a book show, pick one of the many fan conventions. Name a popular TV fantasy or sci-fi series, there’s probably a con that deals with it.  Depending on the size of the con, you may be able to snap up a table for the weekend for as little as $50. Make sure to pick something as close to you as possible and that it’s a subject you won’t be bored stiff by at the end of the weekend.
If possible, pick a fan run con over a commercial convention.  While the commercial cons are run by pros, they are run for profit so have higher fees for everything, leaving con goers less money to spend on books.
A con dedicated to a single TV show franchise is probably a bad bet unless you happen to have a couple hundred books directly related to that show. A better bet is a con which is focused on sci-fi, fantasy, horror, gaming, comics, or furry fandom.  There’s also large genre cons which are little bit of all those.
The narrower the topic of the con, the easier to pick what to take. But if you have thousands of books to pick from, you need to pick and choose. Look over the guests of honor and what’s on the schedule.  Obviously you take anything that’s written by one of the featured guests.  If you’re looking at the schedule and there’s a panel about zombies, taking a selection of stuff about zombies is a good idea.
At genre cons, content is king.  While there will be some people buying stuff based on the fact it’s a first edition, first printing by Big Name Author, the vast majority of sales will be people going “ooh, awesome, I have never seen this one before!  I can add it to my collection of books about killer animals!” It’s worth it to take a few of those big ticket items to show off that you HAVE them, but don’t expect to sell them.  Take a lot of your low price items that fit the con but have been languishing at your main store.  This is probably your best chance to sell them. If you’re going to a convention dedicated to horror and animals those killer rats suddenly become a hot ticket.
If you make money at the con, that’s great!  However, you’re really looking to break even, especially the first time you attend one of these.  It’s not about selling books AT the convention. It’s about convincing fans that you are a great source for books about their favorite hobby.  They may never have considered coming into your shop normally, but if they manage to find something to complete a collection or even just enjoyed talking to you, they’re very likely to come visit you at your main shop. (or online)  That’s a far better return than you’ll get on almost any other kind of advertising.  And they tell their pals in the fandom where they got their awesome book.
The real thing to remember here is that there’s only so many dedicated book collectors.  You’re branching out to OTHER collectors and turning them onto the idea that book collecting can be part of their hobby too!
You can find a list of many genre conventions here on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multigenre_conventions
Or you can see a list of furry cons on Wikifur
http://furry.wikia.com/wiki/WikiFur_Furry_Central

Those are a good place to start, but isn’t even vaguely close to complete.  Run a google search for nearby conventions and you’ll turn up even more.
I’ve attended several different types of genre cons, but generally only go as a dealer to FurFright in CT because it’s nearby.  Books are heavy!  Overall, furry cons seem to be the nicest to their dealers.  Many of these originally grew out of  house parties that grew too large for their venue so dealers are treated as guests.  Some will often provide food or runners to get food, tickets to the artist’s reception, and maybe even a social event just for dealers. FurFright gives the dealer’s a Halloween goodie bag with candy and cookies. To show off the work of the various costumers, they have a parade around the con, making sure to include the dealers room on the route.  It gives you a front row seat to check out the performers and brings a flood of customer in that browse while waiting for the parade.  I’m not as familiar with how dealers are treated at other genre cons, but the furries have been very good to my business as I turn a profit at the con AND have a very nice weekend.
And one final tip, if you’re really brave, conventions, especially fan run ones, are always looking for panelists. If you know a lot about a something related to the topic of the con (example, Japanese literature would go over well at an anime con!), go give a half hour to hour talk on it.  Don’t make it a blatant sales pitch, but do feel free to mention that you have some more material at your table and would be happy to talk with people after the panel.  This is one of the best ways to get the attention of a very narrow group of dedicated collectors.

Rainy Day Paperback Exchange
gently used books for kids and adults
http://www.rainydaypaperback.com

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You’ll notice a new widget off on the left. It’s called Blog Rush and was just launched this week. For those of you that run a blog you may want to consider adding it. There is a video presentation on their website explaining the concept. As it is quite new, just launcehd this week, there are no statistics yet but the idea looks promising. Here’s a link to the Blog Rush site.

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