Online Marketing Articles – Recipe for Writing Good Headlines

Practically all web marketing consultants agree – One of the critical elements to effective web marketing is through the use of articles.

Now that you think you need to leverage the opportunity of web marketing using articles, you have to focus on writing articles to attract three, vastly different targets with one 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 decide that they are engrossed in what you do adequately to read your message. You should write a headline that will draw your audience to actually read your article in the first place. You have to attract the reader to dig further into your article and actually absorb your message.

80% of readers will see your headline, but only 20% will make it to your actual article. How well your headline is written will determine the reader’s next step.

Readers can come across your article headline on social networking sites like Del.icio.us, as links in an e-mail from a colleague, and in their Yahoo results. If your headline does not appeal to them enough to read your article, you simply won’t get readers, even if you have the best article or product in the world. You could have the solution for world hunger, but with a bad headline no one will find out about it.

Search Engines – Yahoo and the like agree that the page title is the most significant on-page indicator of the content of the page. Coming in second place is the use of the 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. So, 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 close to the beginning as reasonable to still satisfy the other two audiences.

Publishers – One of the keys to article marketing is the how publishers can spread your message like a virus. This is the chief reason article marketing is so powerful. One well-written article can get published on 10,000 places around the Internet over several weeks.

These are the folks who determine whether or not your article gets published on their site, newsletter, blog, etc. They are a complex hybrid of both readers and the likes of Yahoo. They need to believe your article will attract search engine clicks but also please their readers. Alas, if they don’t run across your article since the the misworded headline doesn’t come back in their search results, or the headline doesn’t attract them in to read it – you’re out of luck.

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 will make them happy as well.

Writing Good Headlines for All Three

This article’s title was written specially to serve as 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 blending of two highly sought phrases, and those words are the very first in the headline.

The first words also tell you what you can expect if you read the article. The last part captures your interest and pulls you deeper in. It introduces something of interest that will give you what you’re hoping to gain or learn about. It causes you to ask yourself, “I’m curious 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 great article headlines that get noticed, get published, and get people coming to your site. Get out there, get writing, and cash in.

Originally posted 2010-02-14 21:06:17.