Beware of imitators – it is Guerrilla Marketing and not Guerilla Marketing – and certainly not Gorilla Marketing.
Typos and mis-spellings when searching on the Internet
The issues of typos and mis-spellings when people use Google and other search engines has been highlighted to me twice this week.
The first was in a promotional email offering to help me find common mis-spellings of my key words.
The second was a comment from my coach, Mitch Meyerson.”
This problem could present a great opportunity for your Internet marketing as it gives you a chance to leverage the strength of your website in less contested areas although Google is getting better at dealing with it as time passes.
It’s very easy for people to type the wrong letters into the search box.
The fingers can be out-of-sync with the brain, line up on the keyboard wrong or we just stumble with unfamiliar words.
Or perhaps it may be local custom and practice.
There are so many different spellings between British English and American English. We can understand each other but a computerised search engine will be much more precise.
When I first started with Guerrilla Marketing I had problems with the number of Rs and Ls in Guerrilla.
I knew Jay Conrad Levinson’s approach wasn’t called gorilla (or is that gorila) marketing but was it guerila marketing, guerrila marketing, guerilla marketing or the correct Guerrilla Marketing?
And was it ue or eu at the beginning? The word was just too unfamiliar and I was uncertain.
A chance to apply Guerrilla Marketing
Coding mis-spellings and typos into your Internet marketing strategy is a chance for you to put the guerrilla marketing principles into practice.
Suppose your key word phrase was searched 10,000 but was heavily contested by many businesses and aggressive pay per click campaigns.
And then suppose you discovered that common variations of your key words based around common spelling mistakes were searched 250 times, 200 times and 150 times but these areas were much less contested. (See products like Wordtracker or the free Google keyword search tool.)
It has to make sense to target this easy traffic, doesn’t it?
You can do it in your meta tags and keep it hidden from the majority of searchers.
For them you are just a lucky find, someone who has taken the time and consideration to make life easy for them by catering for common typos and mis-spellings.
Or you could be more brazen and do as I have, and include it in your title.
You still have to give the impression of being professional and that the typo is intentional. I’ve managed to do it in an educational way.
This brings me onto another issue.
Hard To Spell Brand Names
Is your chosen brand getting in your way?
It’s good to have a brand that is unique but it needs to be memorable.
In these days where the Internet is ever more important, your potential customers also need to be able to spell it.
Also be wary of names that make people nervous over pronunciation. You know how it’s said but others, reading the words off the page will be unsure.
Who would have thought Cholmondeley was pronounced Chumley. This is a small town in Cheshire, in England but I think it makes the point well.
I suspect the locals have a little snigger when they hear people ask for directions to Chol-mon-de-ley.
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