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Think of your headline as an ad for your article. It MUST display a MAJOR benefit to your reader to stop them in less than 8 seconds.

As I mentioned in my last article, search engines don’t like headlines over 60 characters with spaces and search engine spiders and some RSS feeds have trouble with punctuation and special characters in the title so avoid them. Learn to use words to quickly paint a picture of the benefit you are highlighting.

The best way to learn how to do this is by copying headlines that grab your attention and paste them into a swipe file that you can study and emulate. Do NOT copy them directly but read them multiple times to see WHY they got your attention. You can bet that any headline that stopped you also stopped others.

Some of the words used in VERY successful headlines are:

you
your
how
new
who
money
now
people
want
why

Can you see how the majority of these words put the focus squarely on the prospect and their desires? When you use you and your in the headline, the prospect knows you are thinking of them and their needs, desires and wants.

You will quickly turn off your prospects using the words I and my unless it is within a personal testimonial for the product or service. IF you feel they are necessary to the article, get the focus back on the reader as fast as you can.

Some of the most powerful phrases that have been used in headlines are:

Grab Your Free Report
Free Trial on
Free Sample
Risk Free
How To
New
Amazing
At Last
Finally
Award Winning
10 Tips
And more

Any time you can associate one or more of the above with your chosen keyword phrase and match the body of your article to it, you WILL get your reader’s attention.

I recommend you visit ArticlesBin or other article directories and check out the most popular articles to see if you can spot headlines that grab your attention.

A successful headline requires practice, testing and experience.

The headlines you write for each of your marketing articles determine whether it gets read or bypassed.

I’ve read many books on copy writing and the consensus is that the headline amounts to about 80% of your sales message.

Headlines are the attention grabber that stop the browser and turns them into a reader. A well crafted headline ALWAYS creates some kind of emotional response in the reader.

This emotion might be:

• Love
• Hate
• Fear
• Anger
• Greed
• Curiosity
• And more

You can use your words to create one or more emotion within the headline. I’ve found curiosity and how to headlines work well for me.

The keyword phrase you are focusing on should be in the first 3 or 4 words in your headline.

Keep your headline short. You only have 5-8 seconds to grab the attention of the reader so long headlines aren’t as effective.

Some search engines only recognize the first 60 characters of your headline and that includes the spaces. Article directories like ArticlesBin might allow 75 to 100 characters with spaces but why use that many when search engines don’t like them that long? Some of these directories also use your headline as the URL so the length becomes an issue AND special characters in your headline like !@#$%^&*() and punctuation may make your article useless in RSS feeds.

By putting your keyword phrase near the front of your headline, you are telling the reader and the search engines the primary focus of your article. Having that also become part of the URL gives you a bonus when your marketing article gets indexed.

My next article on how to write marketing articles will be more on headlines.