Paid Search Advice That's 75 Years Old

Yes, you read that right. Seventy-five years ago a team of brilliant marketing professionals offered up the type of advice you can use to get more out of your paid search campaigns. They may not have known sites like Google and Yahoo would pop up decades later, but the concepts and techniques they used and taught are timeless. Alan Rimm-Kaufman takes a look at this advice and how you can apply it in his Paid Search column at Search Engine Land today.

Some of you may recall my series of articles on How to Win Links and Influence People relied on the tenants from Dale Carnegie's mega-best seller "How to Win Friends and Influence People" to teach the basics of link building and viral marketing. Alan has taken a similar approach by using the tactics from marketing books written in the 30's by some of the top names in the direct marketing industry to teach the basics of paid search advertising campaigns.

Alan writes:

Claude Hopkins. Albert Lasker. John Caples. David Ogilvy. Leo Burnett. Maxwell Sackheim.

If you don't know these names, you should.

[snip]

The early mail guys knew what mattered: tracking your results, knowing your profitability metrics, marketing to strong lists, testing different versions, writing compelling headlines, crafting copy which sells.

Alan then goes on to explain a concept called the "List-Offer-Package Rule."

The List-Offer-Package Rule states that when you are trying to sell something remotely, the list (who you are communicating with) is more important than the offer (the details of what you are selling, the item, the pricing, the guarantee); and the list and the offer are more important than the package (how it looks, the copy, the artwork, color and typography).

He gives a great example of exactly how this works and does a nice job of giving some practical application for applying it to your paid search campaigns. If you're tired of trying to sort through the oodles of new marketing books on the shelves at your local library, he also offers up a few links to classic marketing books that still apply to your campaigns today.