I first met Bruce when I called on the agency as a salesman for direct mail lists and mailing house services. He must have liked me because after selling to him for several months, he offered me a job as an Account Exec. Their office was in Radnor Walk just off the groovy Kings Road in Chelsea, then the centre of the universe and a magnet for very pretty girls in extremely short skirts. I accepted his offer without hesitation.

Bruce had been born and brought up in Australia and had moved to England several years earlier. It became his home for the rest of his life, but he was a proud Aussie through and through.

I learned a lot from Bruce. He was always in the office, as he used to say, ‘at sparrows fart’, and got stuck into work fast. I realised that if I was going to keep up with him I’d better be an early starter too, a trait that has stayed with me to this day.

Bruce was also one of the first green direct marketer’s. He cycled to most of his client meetings around London with one leg of his jeans tucked into a sock to stop the chain oil from soiling them. I borrowed the bike to go to client meetings, but there was a drawback in that if two of us had to attend a meeting we had to go by cab. So for twenty quid he allowed us to buy a second-hand tandem. I steered to meetings while the media department representative peddled furiously behind.

The agency was full of young, talented people, many of whom went on to start or run successful direct marketing businesses. Alec Hamilton was a copywriter who later joined Christian Brann in his agency in Cirencester before starting his agency Hamilton Wright. Danny Phillips, the Production Manager, still runs his direct marketing agency, Young Phillips in Bournemouth, and remains one of my closest friends today.

Bruce introduced us all to Fosters lager; it didn’t go on general sale in this country until many years later. He imported it from Australia himself and told us that his home was besieged with expat Australian dentists on Saturday evenings anxious to get their hands on a case of the amber nectar.

Bruce, we’re all raising a tinny in your memory.

There are several things you must do to achieve this, but the one I’m talking about today is getting your location name in the page titles of your index page.

I’ve just spent several days doing this on a number of client sites and used several different methods of getting this right. Some of them were time consuming, but eventually I found two on-line tools that enabled me to create the correct title coding in less than five minutes.

The coding you’re trying to create for your business is going to look something like this:

meta name=”geo.placename” content=”Your Town, Area Postcode/Zipcode, Country” />
meta name=”geo.position” content=”00.127500;0.269128″ />
meta name=”geo.region” content=”COUNTRY-AREA” />
meta name=”ICBM” content=”00.127500, 0.269128″ />

The ICBM code is interesting, it’s an abbreviation for InterContinental Ballistic Missile and can be used to pinpoint your location with devastating accuracy!

Your first step is to take a visit MyGeoPosition input your postcode/zipcode and choose the accuracy of position you require. I’d suggest “exactly” if you’re a retail shop that people may want to visit, especially if you’re going to be found on a Google local map along with a number of competitors.

Once you’ve done that go to the MAP tab, zoom in and move the pin marker to exactly the spot you want to be found at.

You might want to check the GEODATA tab as well. I have a client on the edge of a UK postcode and the first time I moved the pin marker, it took them into the adjacent postcode that differed from the one used in their mailing address. I moved the pin a tad and found it was now in the correct postcode.

Now move onto the GEO-METATAGS tab and copy the four lines of code you find there and paste it into the titles on your index page and then refresh the page.

You now need to check the accuracy of your work by visiting GeoTagValidator and validating your code by submitting your URL.

If there is anything wrong with the code you’ll find your errors highlighted along with indications of what you need to do to correct it. So make the changes to the coding, refresh; validate once more and you should be finished.

That’s the easy part. Now you must have the patience to wait to see what happens next time Google crawls your page!

“What the book” his friend replied.

“No the sentence I started yesterday,” Joyce responded adding, “What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence.”

James Joyce

If I had known this when I first started working in an agency as a copywriter I might have understood what my first two days were all about. The first brief I was given was for a bird charity. They needed an ad to persuade people to send for a free wall chart identifying garden birds and with it details of membership. All within 60 words in a single column just three centimeters long. Simple for a chap like me who had already been knocking out four page letters for insurance companies as a freelancer.

60 Words of Ping Pong

I delivered the copy to the owner of the agency half an hour after getting the brief. He called me into his office where we discussed the ad and he told me to go away and rewrite it. I did and after another half an hour I was sitting in front of him again being told I needed to rewrite it once more.

Like a game of table tennis, we batted the copy back and forth across his desk for the next day and a half until he was happy that every single one of those 60 words was going to tear at the heart-strings of little old ladies, was persuasive and would get the response the charity needed to pay for their tiny ad.

It was a great lesson and taught me two things. Firstly, the importance of finding the right words and secondly the importance of polishing until the text is perfect.

So today, when I have to write 157 characters for a Meta Description that’s attractive to search engines and human readers, I’m grateful for the lesson I had all those years ago and the practice I’ve had in between.

A version of this article first appeared in Portfolio, the magazine of the Swedish Direct Marketing Association (SWEDMA). If you would like a copy of it in Swedish let me know.

If you’ve spent a lifetime generating enquiries, turning them into prospects; customers and repeat customers…and counted the cost per lead, conversion and revenue along the way, applying the same disciplines to Search Engine Marketing is pretty natural.

The problem is that most people in the digital arena don’t have this discipline and are often not interested in acquiring it on the basis that they’re having too much fun. But a web site should be generating revenue and not just sit there looking pretty.

So on this website I’ll write about some of my experiences over the years in direct marketing and how I now apply them to SEM and SEO. Hopefully you’ll learn something and I’ll get a few more clients who like what I have to say.