Practically all Internet marketing consultants see eye to eye –
One of the big keys to effective Internet marketing is through the use of articles.
Since you understand you must leverage the opportunity of Internet marketing using articles, you have to do your best when writing articles to appeal to three, vastly different readers with the same article.
Three consumers of article marketing
The three consumers of article marketing and how to write good headlines for each:
- Readers - Ultimately, these are the individuals who will come to the conclusion that they are engrossed in what you do adequately to read your message. You need to write a headline that will draw your readers to actually read your message in the first place. You need to attract the reader to read further into your article and actually absorb your words.
80% of readers will see your headline, but only 20% will read your actual article. How well your headline is written will decide the reader’s next step.
Readers can find your headline on social networking sites like Del.icio.us, as links in an e-mail from a buddy, and in their Yahoo results. If your headline does not make them want to read your article, you simply won’t get readers, even if you have the best article or service on the planet. You could provide the solution for world hunger, but with a bad headline no one will read about it.
- Search Engines - Yahoo and the like agree that the page title is the most valuable on-page indicator of the content of the page. Coming in second place is the use of the <h1> heading tag. When your article is published, publishers have a tendency to make either or both the title and H1 tag the same as your article title. Therefore, having words in your article title which are important to those searching for information increase your chances of showing up in search engine results.
You need to have your keywords in the headline and as close to the start as reasonable to still appease the other two audiences.
- Publishers - One of the reasons article marketing is so effective is the viral mass-publication process. This is the main reason article marketing is so powerful. One well-written article can get published on a thousand sites across the web over the period of a only few weeks.
These are the folks who determine whether or not your article is published on their site, newsletter, blog, etc. They are a tough blend of both readers and Google and company. They need to know your article will bring in search engine traffic as well as please their readers. But, if they don’t run across your article because the poor headline doesn’t come up in their Yahoo results, or the headline doesn’t suck them in to read your article – you’re outta luck.
One could say that publishers can make or break an article’s success and by making the other two audiences happy you can get on their good side as well.
Writing Headlines for All Three
This article's title was written expressly to supply an example of how to meet the needs these three audiences. As you can see, the first three words of the article headline are Google fodder - they are a combination of two greatly sought phrases, and those words are the very first in the headline.
The first words also tell you what the article is about. The last part captures your interest and sucks you deeper in. It introduces a topic of interest that will give you what you’re hoping to gain or learn about. It causes you to ask yourself, "I wonder what lesson I can take away from this article…" and so you dig in, just as you did.
Armed with this information, you can now write article headlines that get noticed, get published, and get traffic coming to your web site. Get out there, get writing, and cash in.
