Practically all Internet marketing wizards see eye to eye on this
One of the big keys to effective Internet marketing is through writing and distributing articles.
Since you know you need to leverage the opportunity of Internet marketing using articles, you have to worry about writing articles to appeal to three, very different readers with the same article.
Three targets of article marketing
Here are the three targets of article marketing and how to write good headlines for each:
- Readers - Ultimately, these are the individuals who will make the decision that they are interested in what you do enough to come to your site. You have to write a headline that will pull in your audience to actually read it in the first place. You have to pull them to read further into your article and actually pay attention to your message.
80% of readers will read your headline, but only 20% will read your article. How effectively your headline is written will decide the reader's next step.
Readers can see your article headline on social networking hangouts like Digg and Del.icio.us, as links in an email from one of their friends, and in their search results. If your headline does not appeal to them enough to read your article, you simply won't get audience, even if you have the best article or product in the world. You could offer the solution for world hunger, but with a bad headline no one will find out about it.
- Search Engines - Google and the like agree that the page title is the primary 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 want your keywords in the headline and as near the beginning as reasonable to still satisfy the other two audiences.
- Publishers - One of the keys to article marketing is the viral mass-publication process. This is the big reason article marketing is so powerful. One well-written article can get published on a thousand places around the web in only a few weeks.
These are the folks who decide if your article winds up on their site, newsletter, blog, etc. They are a tough combination of both readers and Yahoo and company. They want to know your article will bring in search engine users and also make their readers happy. However, if they don't find your article because the bad headline doesn't come back in their Yahoo results, or the headline doesn't suck them in to take a look at your article you miss out.
It's fairly safe to say that publishers can make or break an article's success and by satisfying the needs of readers and search engines you can get on their good side as well.
Writing Great Headlines for All Three
This article's title was written specially to provide an example of meeting 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 highly 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 draws you further into the article. It promises something 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 keep reading, just as you did.
Armed with this information, you can now write good article headlines that get noticed, get published, and get traffic coming to your web site. Get out there, get writing, and cash in.
