In one word - Yes. Writing an advertisement for a product, creating a sales letter, or drafting promotional e-mails can be quite a tough task indeed. If you were to ask any successful webmaster or advertising guru the secrets of their success, they would attribute it to ‘killer content’. And without a doubt, the most important aspect of creating killer content is - writing an attention grabbing headline.
Make It or Break It with Good Headlines
The headlines of your ad or sales copy are what people see first and then go on to reading your entire piece. Thus, if your headline is not strong enough to hold the attention of your reader, they would simply skip your piece for another one whose headline catches their eye more than yours. So, if the reader did not even go through your ad, there is no way to entice them with the benefits of your product, which in turn means a serious dent in your sales.
Let’s take a look at an example: Suppose you have a new weight loss product and your targeted customers are people who are trying to become thin. Your headlines could be as under:
‘Lose Weight with SlimFast’ (the product name) OR
‘Fight Fat with SlimFast’
These are what would be considered average headlines. Now take a look at this one:
‘Want To Look Like Cindy Crawford??? Try SlimFast!’
Which headline would attract people to read the rest of the sales letter and perhaps convert into a sale? You decide….
Thus, a good headline can literally make or break your promotional campaign and can be the difference between 100-200 hits to your site or a number in the thousands. Yes, it’s a proven fact - A great headline has been shown to do as much as 18 times better than a poor headline. So, assuming your average headline generated you $100 worth of business, a killer headline to the same content could generate you about $1800 in sales, making you rich much faster than you would with an ordinary headline!
The Dual Benefits of Killer Headlines
A good headline can benefit you in two ways. One is by increasing the traffic to your website, and the other is by impressing the Search Engines. Let’s take a look at how.
1) Good Headlines: Increasing Visitor Traffic
The main purpose of any sales letter, ad, or e-mail promotion is to get people to become paid customers. And how can you ensure that? You got it….by writing good headlines.
Just by writing a sales letter you are not going to increase your sales. That will only happen if people actually read your sales letter. In today’s information age, there is no much information available on different products and services that people hardly ever waste any time in reading any kind of promotional content, unless you literally draw them to your letter with a great headline. Most people just skim the headlines of pieces and stop to read only that one which has caught their fancy. Thus, in the few seconds that your targeted customers spend on your headline, it should be compelling enough to make them want to read your entire letter.
This will help to increase traffic to your website, which is the only way you can increase your sales.
2) Good Headlines: Increasing Search Engine Ranking
Search engines place a lot of importance in the content of your headlines. In addition to having a powerful headline, if it includes the main keywords that people may be searching for, then your web page has a much higher chance of making it to the first page of search engine results that if it does not have a good headline.
People rarely, if ever, bother to go beyond the first page of search engine results to find what they are looking for. Thus, if your headline is attention grabbing and uses the keywords properly, you could feature high in the search engine rankings. This in turn means more visitors and higher sales.
As far as headlines are concerned, it is not only important to write good ones for all the reasons mentioned here, but also so that you do not have to suffer the negative impacts of a bad headline.
A badly written headline will not prompt people to read your letters, e-mails, or ads; which in effect means that all your advertising money has gone down the drain. Regardless of how much time, effort, and money you have spent in creating a killer sales letter, a badly written headline will have put all this effort to waste!
Thus, if you want to triple, quadruple, or even get 10 times as much response from your promotional pieces, it is vital that you concentrate on their headlines and come up with really effective ones.
Source: http://www.ArticlePros.com/author.php?Keith Lee
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