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As I have been covering in greater detail in my newsletter, the most recent of these updates is code-named Penguin. It’s designed to give more weight to good quality content and down-rank the stuff that isn’t.

Penguin has also made a few people unhappy.

As best as I can understand their complaint, it’s that Google has hurt their business model: one that is based almost entirely on mass traffic, plus high page ranking and click-throughs. Even more puzzling, some try to play this out as if the big dent that Penguin has put in their inbound traffic means they are the victims of some terrible injustice.

Let’s be clear. Search engines—not just Google—are in the reliable search results business. Full stop. Losing a top page ranking due to an over-optimization penalty tells you one very important thing: all that keyword stuffing has turned otherwise readable text into pulp.

If your site is being downgraded because of Penguin or other updates that influence the way sites are being ranked, take a hard look at your expectations for SEO and at your content.

SEO isn’t something you win at.

When you optimize your content for search engines, you’re performing a series of steps that make it easier for people to find you, your content and the product or service you’re offering.

It’s not the first step in a process. It’s the last one.

Even if you do manage to find a formula that drives massive traffic independently of having a product that people want, if it doesn’t convert traffic into buyers, no amount of keyword monkeying is going to help you in the long run.

Find your great idea. Build your platform to broadcast it. Fill it with great content that people want to read. Fine-tune it with SEO. That’s how you grow an audience.

Content is where you build trust.

The reason why you have readers has very little to do with whether you find the right way to pad your site with a bunch of techniques to game the search-engine business.

Your readers choose you because they like what you have to say and trust in the values and the amount of thought that’s behind your message.

Building great content is hard. It takes a long time to do it properly. But the relationships you forge with your readers are deeper and more lasting than any amount of traffic where the numbers seem big but the trust is thin.

If Google thinks your content sucks, your readers probably will, too.

Get the fundamentals right.

Pay careful attention to the overall experience that visitors have when they come to your site. Little things do make a difference.

Be readable. Take some time to explore the right kind of typefaces that best represent the emotions behind the ideas you’re expressing. People read more when it looks easy and inviting. Make it look too much like work, on the other hand, they’ll quickly move on.

Fix your broken links. Conduct a weekly review of 404 hits on your site and insert some redirects to divert traffic to the appropriate pages.

Pick a strong frame. If you are using WordPress, build your site using a reliable framework that has been tested on a wide range of platforms to load quickly and perform securely. I’m using Genesis for this reason.

Adapt for mobile traffic. Online traffic is increasingly shifting to mobile devices. A study by the UN’s International Telecommunications Union predicts it could eclipse desktop-based traffic within two years. Make sure your content is mobile-responsive so that it’s just as easy to read on a smartphone or an iPad as it is elsewhere.

Be semantic friendly. Nobody likes repetition. That includes the keywords you use in your web content. Be varied and conversational in how you write.

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That includes the messages they develop when communicating directly with customers and clients.

It’s rooted in good intentions.

But far too often, people fall short in delivering on what ought to be the underlying promise of good service: being useful and authentic.

“Have you found everything you’re looking for?” I’ll bet you’ve been asked that countless times at the checkout counter at a chain store. I hear that question so often now that I answer “yes” almost like an involuntary reflex…even in cases where, in fact, I haven’t found everything I was looking for.

I’ll bet you’ve done the same thing.

What’s worse is when you instead say “no” and it quickly becomes apparent that the person who cheerfully asked you that question in the first place hasn’t a clue what to do when someone indicates they actually have not found all that they were looking for.

Efforts at being useful stop being meaningful when they’re perceived as something that people have to do rather than want to do.

Too often, businesses get too caught up trying to turn good service into a process: a series of methodical steps that everyone is expected to follow on every transaction.

There are two problems with that approach. First, processes are designed to give you identical results every time. Sure, we all like to see consistent good service, but the real test of that kind of promise takes place when things aren’t working the way they should.

What do you do when that customer hasn’t found what they were looking for, or something in your transaction hasn’t gone the way that it should? Your next step there matters far more than adhering to any kind of process.

If all you have to rely on is a batch of template messages, your customers or clients will tune into this faster than you’ll ever anticipate.

They will become conditioned to ignore what you’re saying.

The second problem is that processes strip away the kind of sincerity that you ought to be building with your clients and customers.

People like to be made to feel special.

They like it when you notice things before you even have to ask. And they’re far more likely to respond in kind when you demonstrate with actions that service is something you work hard at providing, rather than just repeating something that you’ve been told to say.

There’s no substitute for being real.

John Coltrane

No, don’t do that. Don’t run away.

Don’t let it scare you that I just name-dropped one of the giants of jazz.

Or that Coltrane’s music seemed complicated.

This post isn’t going to preach jazz to you. And the jazz police aren’t going to show up and arrest me for having the gall to use America’s finest art form as a platform to illustrate an important point about the power of audience building.

There’s valuable insight in here even if jazz isn’t your thing.

As a reader of thinkit creative, you could be here looking for advice on search-engine optimized writing for the web to generate online traffic and convert readers into buyers. Maybe you’re a writer looking to build a base of readers. Or perhaps you’re a professional speaker or you own a design studio and you’re looking to take your business to the next level of profitability.

Odds are good that you’re in the idea business. And that means your success hinges on finding and building an audience.

John Coltrane can help you with that.

Discipline

Even this giant of music started without an audience.

As a young musician, John Coltrane loved how saxophonist Charlie Parker wasn’t afraid to be playful with his music.

He emulated what he heard. Not as a cheap cut-and-paster of style.

Rather, his drive to decode Parker and other influential players became part of young Coltrane’s relentless practicing. Biographies on the man often quote fellow musicians who knew him early on, saying they’d never seen anyone put in the hours the way Coltrane did.

Out of the hours came the admirers. From the admirers came the listeners. And then the big breaks, like when he was invited to tour with the first time. Then the audience took hold and the Coltrane legend grew. It’s hard to imagine any of that happening in Trane’s career without the roots of discipline being as strong as they were.

Intuition

“Jazz…is a social music operating in a commercial context,” says Ben Ratliff of The New York Times in his book Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. “You give the audience what you think it wants. At the same time, you improvise, and try to bring out the part of you that is the least like anyone else.”

Groundbreaking ideas rarely find their audience quickly. It starts with thinking deeply about your audience and having as much of an understanding of what they want as what they might also be open to. Research will help you, but only up to a certain point.

Intuition goes well beyond calculating a market penetration or measuring the size of an audience. There’s a deeper art. And you only get to exercise that by trying and by experimenting based on a mix of what you know is true and on a hunch you have about what might be true.

Taste

Coltrane learned the hard way early on that masterful technique alone doesn’t win many ears. In fact, more than one audience in his career booed him for doing just that. He learned that ideas—especially the big ideas—have to be presented in a way that are pleasing to others. Often that means taking the time to package your ideas attractively.

One of Coltrane’s great achievements in the American songbook is what he did with his interpretation of the Rogers and Hammerstein classic show tune, My Favorite Things. The music says more than I can say in paragraphs about that. So have a listen.

Platform

To find and build an audience, your idea or your message needs a platform. My Favorite Things was a platform for Coltrane that helped him bring big-headed jazz to a wider audience. So what’s your platform? It can be a blog, an ebook, a series of newsletter articles, or a presentation (to name just a few examples). Invest the time to design that platform properly. Hire a good designer who can help you build something that people will enjoy using. That’s the front door. It’s how you’re going to invite your audience in so that they’ll stick around and see what else you have to say.

Mastery of any creative skill only comes from finding good influences and by putting in the hours to hone your skills. Work to emulate. This is how you learn how great ideas are constructed. Only then can your own voice emerge. Take chances and find ways to build entranceways for people to access even your edgy ideas with relative ease.

Here’s the setup.

Two amateur Canadian hockey teams think they’ve been invited to be part of a documentary. Instead they’re treated to a mega flash-mob and get to live out what every kid who plays hockey (or any sport, really) dreams of.

It closes with “Good times are waiting. Why not grab some buds.”

A lot of people have liked it on Facebook, tweeted it and +1’d it on Google+.

You don’t have to enjoy beer or hockey to connect with the message behind the ad.

Okay, not everyone liked it…

The National Post’s Andrew Coyne, for one, was unmoved.

“What exactly is the ad’s point?” he tweeted.

That led to this polite exchange…

Dialogue on the point to the Bud ad. Andrew Coyne is a great guy who isn

I’m not the kind of guy who is going to square off on Twitter with one of Canada’s best-read journalists (I’m a fan, too, Andrew). I’m not that dumb. Plus if you follow Coyne on Twitter, you know that debating the guy on social media can be brutal. Ask Tony Clement about that.

But Coyne raises some interesting points. There are things we all can learn from the obvious success of a beer company’s pre-emptive ad spot.

Advertising is in the selling business.

First, ads are made to sell things. This is obvious.

Many like to pretend that they are immune to selling or that selling is a dirty word. Or that we see through the gimmick.

Here’s what I know as a copywriter and as someone who has been in business for over 10 years.

There are just two kinds of selling.

The kind that works and the kind that doesn’t.

All selling that works shares a common mastery: the ability to be persuasive.

Being persuasive isn’t about being pushy.

Persuasion comes from the Latin word persuas, which means “convinced by reason.”

The curious thing about it is we’ve come to learn through psychology and neuromarketing that persuasion has as much to do with connecting emotionally as it does with reason.

So the meaning has changed from its Latin roots. English is funny that way.

Noted psychologist and author Robert Cialdini says there are six principles of persuasion.

Reciprocity
Commitment
Authority
Scarcity
Social proof and
Liking

Those last two are an important part of what makes the Bud spot so effective.

They’re not pushing beer in the ad. They don’t even show the product (other than the logo).

The ad is about an idea that connects with people on an emotional level.

When people like how they feel about something, they tell others.

You don’t need to advertise.

I know what you’re thinking right now: “What? Are you insane? You’re a copywriter…you can’t say that!”

Of course I can.

Advertising isn’t for everybody.

It’s very powerful if you can afford it and if you find smart people to help you who know the difference between being clever and being effective.

But it’s not for everyone.

That’s why it costs what it does.

Even Budweiser has figured this out.

Their spot isn’t going to run on US channels during the Super Bowl. It doesn’t have to.

By being pre-emptive and by using social media, their message—highly emotional, likeable and memorable, powered by an enormous amount of social proof—is already out there.

It’s why Scott Stratten wisely concluded today that Budweiser just won the Super Bowl and the internet. I agree.

More than products, people are open to ideas.

When you have good ones—ones that you share through the dual channels of reason and emotion—they often stick.

Not always.

But when they do, you know.

Classic Keys by Jim Denham on 500px

Or that you break rules. Or that you break them because you didn’t know they were rules in the first place.

Or that you’re afraid.

Who cares that you stay up late, or get up early because you’re not happy with something you wrote and you need to fix it?

Who cares that it’s the wrong word and the right one won’t come?

Or that you hate semicolons as much as I do?

You’re the one behind the curtain.

You are in the magic business, friend. And only you knows how to push that idea along.

There is no license for writers. You chose this.

No one is ever going to give you permission to do this.

And you’re often going to find more reasons to stop than to go on.

No one cares if it’s luck or talent that saves you.

No one ever says “I used to be a writer” and means it. You’re in this for life.

The readers and the money are rewards. And good ones at that.

But there is only one thing keeping score in this business of stringing together letters and words.

There’s just the work itself.