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Secrets to Success
Deborah Cole Micek
and John-Paul Micek
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Headlines help you build your subscriber list
Part six in a 13-part series
IN Part Five of the 12 Laws of Online Marketing with Business Blogs, RSS, and Podcasts, we discussed Law #4: Leverage every thought, action, and physical asset for maximum performance and profits. If you missed earlier installments to this 13-part series, you can find them at advancedbusinessblogging.com.
Law #5: Headlines are the front line of all your business-blogging, online, and off-line marketing efforts.
Just as all ads, sales letters, brochures, and news releases need a headline -- so do your business-blog posts. Your headline is where the battle for people's attention is either won or lost.
Test after test has proven that any article or promotional piece with a headline will outperform one without a headline. And, if you can craft a headline centered on the major benefit you'll bring your readers or listeners in your article or podcast, the difference in response can be astounding.
People have very little free time today. Between shuffling the kids around from soccer to ballet, picking up the dry cleaning, making dinner, waiting in line at the bank, and a host of other things that are vying for people's attention -- what would make them stop and pay attention to what you have to say?
That's where a good headline comes in.
Search-engine spiders put a lot of weight on the words used in headlines. That doesn't mean you should pack your headlines with keywords and expect magical ranking results. But you can make some serious gains.
Recently, we helped a client make some changes to the headline structure of his business blog. We planned out his article queue for the next month, carefully selecting a group of articles from his offline archives; then helped him develop a new approach to headlines, altering the headlines on each and every article as it went online.
As the articles went online, he updated his subscribers and monitored response by using unique tracking tags for each article update. He experienced nearly a two-fold increase in click-throughs over the previous month. His new-subscriber signups increased 30 percent over previous months and his search-engine rankings on the three keyword phrases we targeted shot up from obscurity into the top-20 results. The content and quality of writing was no different from the previous month. The updates reached the same audience. The only change was improved headlines.
From this example, you can see how important tracking is to your marketing success. In an upcoming installment of this series, we'll look at the critical nature of testing and how it relates directly to headlines.
In the next installment, we'll discuss how to remove one of the biggest barriers to sales and build a subscriber list full of pre-sold prospects.
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John-Paul Micek is the lead business coach at RPM Success Group Inc. Reach him at
JPM@RPMsuccess.com or toll-free at (888) 334-8151.
Deborah Cole Micek, chief executive officer of RPM Success Group, is a business success coach and life strategist. Reach her at
DCM@RPMsuccess.com or toll-free at (888) 334-8151.