How To Write Persuasive Subject Lines

by Karon Thackston © 2005 http://www.learn-copywriting.com

Three seconds and 40 characters. That’s all you usually have to work with when trying to get and hold the attention of someone reading email. And, with user behavior changing so much in response to overwhelming amounts of spam, the attention spans of email readers are getting shorter. Needless to say, it’s vital to make the most of your introduction via the email subject line.

Email marketing powerhouse DoubleClick.com conducts annual surveys with regard to user behavior when it comes to email. A couple of the statistics from their latest findings are interesting. The second biggest motivator in opening email is the subject line. (The first is the “from” line.)

Because subject lines are often truncated at around 40 characters — and because email readers usually have their index fingers poised over the delete button — we’re left with about three seconds and approximately six words to make an impression. So what works? Which types of subject lines have proven to be successful? Here are my top three.

Make An Offer

It’s an old sales cliché that still holds true in the fast-paced world of cyberspace: Lead with your best offer. Whether a product, a service or a proposal, you want to tell people up front about your deepest discounts, your fastest delivery or your grandest idea. Get their attention right off the bat, and you’ll likely have your message read. (It’s even better if your offer happens to be time sensitive.) Examples include:

Half Off Leather Boots Until March 1st

Top 10 Reasons to Attend [Whatever]

Your Link on High Ranking Web Pages

State A Benefit

Since the majority of consumer and B2B customers live in the “what’s in it for me” world, benefits always make powerful subject lines. Telling the readers what the end results of their actions will be helps them visualize the need for your product or service. Here are a few examples based on the subject lines above:

Wear Fall’s Hottest Trends for 50% Off

Learn [Whatever] in Only Two Days

Build Link Popularity & Traffic for Your Site

Evoke Curiosity

We’re all nosey to a point. Our curiosity gets the best of us, and we want to know more. That’s not only true when it comes to watching movie previews on TV. It’s also true for email as well. Some of the best subject lines hook readers by piquing their curiosity, and then reel them in to read the entire message.

Are You Still Wearing These Fashion “Don’ts”?

The Secrets to [Whatever] Never Before Revealed

Link Popularity Scams You Should Avoid

Of course, the key to writing the best subject lines is knowing your target customers, making the topic relevant and testing, testing, testing.

I mentioned a “couple” interesting facts from the DoubleClick email survey. The second is that relevancy is a major player. Over 55% of respondents said they deleted email that wasn’t relevant because they considered it spam. DoubleClick also reported that the average open rate was 27.5% (for text or HTML messages). That gives you a baseline to gauge your success.

Not every type of subject line will work for every campaign. Testing is vital. And it’s easy enough to do. One of my favorite ways is to set up a Google AdWords campaign and judge the clickthrough rates. This quickly (and cheaply) tells you which subject lines will work and which won’t. You can also test your subject lines by sending your emails to a smaller test list before broadcasting it to the entire group.

Whichever styles of subject lines you choose, make sure you know your target audience so you can develop relevant subject lines. Then test and test again until you’ve created subjects that are highly persuasive and deliver record-breaking open rates.

Copy not getting results? Learn to write SEO copy that impresses the engines and your visitors at http://www.copywritingcourse.com. Be sure to also check out Karon’s latest e-report on search engine copywriting: “How To Increase Keyword Saturation (Without Destroying the Flow of Your Copy)” at http://www.copywritingcourse.com/keyword.

Back to Web Copywriting Index Three seconds and 40 characters. That’s all you usually have to work with when trying to get and hold the attention of someone reading email.

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Integrated Search Engine Marketing

Integrating your search engine marketing campaigns will get you up and running fast and will give you escalating long term results. Using a combination of campaigns in your strategy will ensure that your costs are contained and that you achieve the optimum return on investment.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the science of making a website ‘search engine friendly.’ The objective of SEO is to increase web site visibility and qualified traffic by ranking highly within organic search engine results for keyword phrases relating to your site content.

Organic search is a critical part of any search engine marketing campaign and accounts for 60% of all clicks.

The basic steps of SEO involve getting all your site pages indexed by the search engines, figuring out what search terms or keywords searchers are using and then optimizing the content of your site to match these keywords.

SEO is undertaken to get highly qualified traffic to visit your site. This type of visitor is much more likely to convert into a customer. By conversion we mean to achieve the goal of your website whether that is online sales, offline sales, sales leads, branding, or to inform or persuade.

The drawback of SEO is the high initial cost and the fact that it takes time to see results. It is not an overnight process and can take anywhere from 2 – 6 months to begin seeing results. However once it begins to perform then a steady stream of qualified traffic is acquired for a relatively low cost. One major advantage is that searchers trust natural results to a greater degree resulting in more searchers using the natural results. You do however need to continually maintain and revise the program as search engines continually evolve and refine their algorithms and technology.

Paid Search

Paid placement takes the form of an advertising program where listings are guaranteed to appear in response to particular search terms or keywords, with higher ranking typically obtained by paying more than other advertisers. In other words you bid against your competitors for high rankings. Costs can quickly change so you have to devote some time to managing your campaign otherwise your costs can escalate dramatically.

There is no high upfront cost for paid search advertising. You can also get a campaign up and running quickly and begin to see immediate results. And you do have control over your listings and how much you want to spend. The major drawback is the high, long-term cost.

There is currently around $3 billion spent on paid placement in the United States and spending is increasing at a dramatic rate. Therefore it is going to become more and more expensive to get listed using paid placement.

Online Public Relations

One of the exciting new developments in the field of search engine marketing is the ability to use the internet to release news and information about your company in the form of online press releases. This offers you a way to increase your company’s presence on the web and be found by customers for an expanded range of keywords.

Press releases were traditionally aimed at media types such as journalists and editors. Today they have an additional audience – your target market. Online press releases are now steadily being found under searches. Potential customers can access your information directly from your press releases. Optimizing your press releases can help more people find your web site and product information. This enables you to get your news and brand name out to a larger audience, increase your search engine visibility, increase sales leads, and increase quality links to your site.

Other online public relations tactics incorporate online media relations, optimized articles and corporate communications, branded blogs, and search engine crisis and reputation management.

Bringing it All Together

For optimum results you should consider a combination of these strategies to increase your online business. For example to get a quick start a combination of paid search and online public relations will begin to get qualified leads to your site and start to build your brand and links to your site. Then when your SEO campaign starts to give your rankings a boost you can cut back on your other campaigns to ensure a continual stream of quality traffic that keeps your costs to a minimum. It also gives you contingency options if a problem occurs with your organic listings, e.g. an algorithm change, you can resume your paid search activity until your natural rankings improve.

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Writing Optimized Articles

Search engines give the highest organic ranking to authority sites. These are sites that have lots of unique and relevant information which makes people want to link to the site. One way to build up this information is by developing articles related to your business or industry. These articles should be optimized in order for you to get the benefit of increased ranking on various search engines. The goal is to put these articles on your website and also optimize them to be indexed by search engines.

To write an optimized article you should choose a topic that is related to your business and website. Do not copy content from your site. It should be original as search engines do not like duplicated content.

How is this done? The article should be optimized for a particular keyword. So if your keyword is ‘Online Soccer Game’ and you wanted to write an article about the ‘basic rules’ of Online Soccer Game you may go about the article like this.

1. Locate Keywords in Title
   The article title should incorporate the keywords. The title informs the search engine of the content of the page. Enclose the title with an h1 tag as certain search engines may give this more weight. For example: ‘Online Soccer Game – The Basic Rules’
2. Locate Keywords throughout the Content
   Incorporate the keyword into what you write. The theme of the article should revolve around the keyword. As the keyword will be closely related to the content and it is your area of expertise this should not be too challenging. Use common sense while doing this and write for the reader – not the search engine. Aim for around 600+ words.
3. Locate Keyword in First Paragraph
   The first paragraph is generally the most important and search engines put more weight on this than the paragraphs that come after it. Therefore make sure your keyword is as near to the top of this paragraph as possible. This should be easy if it is the topic of your article. This is also the part of the article that draws in the reader, captures their attention and entices them to read further.
4. Locate Keyword in Final Paragraph
   Certain search engines may give extra weight to the final paragraph, so include the keyword in a summary.
5. Locate Keywords in Subheadings
   Search engines can look at the subheadings within an article and give them extra weight especially if they are enclosed within h2 or h3 HTML tags. They do this to find out the relevancy of the page content. Subheadings are also often scanned by online readers. For example: ‘Online Soccer Game and The Offside Rule’

Inject your personality into your writing and try to connect with your visitors. This connection will make your visitors feel that they belong. Informal, friendly, conversational language works best.

When writing the article the key is to have the subject matter of your article relate to your keywords. This will make it easy to write for both the article reader and the search engine. You should also include a brief biography about yourself and include a hot link to your website so that if your article is picked up you get acknowledgment and your website gets a valuable link.

Article Distribution Channels

You can submit your article to the publishers of your choice. This can be a time consuming process so you may want to save time and use an article distributor. There are many article distribution channels (also known as ‘content hubs’) that you can use. Do a search and you will see things like ‘we will distribute your article to 20,000+ publishers’ for example. Most of these distribution services charge you for the service. There are a few things you should find out.

• How many people will receive the article?
• Who will receive the article?
• Will the article copyright remain with you?
• Will your websites hyperlink be submitted and remain active?

Distribution services will submit your article to websites, blogs, newsletters, etc and so it will spread throughout the internet. Links from your articles on all these sites will point back directly to your website. This results in increased search engine rankings and also increased traffic to your site.

Publishers are always on the lookout for great articles. The benefits of optimizing articles for you are great. And it is a long term strategy. Articles have longevity in that they often receive greater exposure over time as they are picked up and redistributed by other publishers. This increases your exposure and the total links to your site.

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The Invisible Web – Is My Site Getting Indexed?

Did you know that the great majority of web pages are not indexed and visible on the web? It is estimated that there are an enormous amount of pages that are never indexed. One estimate states that only 0.03 percent of all web pages have been indexed by search engines!

Is My Site Getting Indexed?

Getting your site indexed by the search engines is important. But it can be challenging! They key is to make sure your whole site is designed with the search engine spiders in mind. So if you are planning a new site make sure your web designer is clued up on designing for users and also for search engines. Unfortunately it is the case that many websites have been designed for the end user but not for search engines. The unfortunate result is that there are often indexing problems on sites.

How do you check whether your site has been indexed? Within Google use the site: operator as a search query. The query site:siteURL shows you how many pages have been indexed. For example, site:http://www.yoursite.com will show you how many pages of your site have been indexed.

What does it mean if your site has not been indexed?

It could be a brand new site that has never been indexed by the search engines. It could also be site that has been banned by the search engines because of spamming or rule violation. Or there could an existing problem that is actually stopping the search engines from indexing your site.

If you have a brand new site the key is to get links to your site from other sites. Forget about these offers of ‘We will submit your site to xxxxx thousand search engines for $xxx.’ These offers can often do more harm than good and it is speculated that search engines may penalize your site for using them. So start building links to your site from other reputable sites. Quick ways to get links include through optimized press releases, published articles, directories, and also blog entries.

If you are banned it means either you have been persistently violating search engine rules or you have employed someone who is involved in this. It is your site and your responsibility to know what your staff or consultants are doing with your site. Make sure they are not involved in using spamming techniques as it requires a lot of effort to get re-instated. It can of course also adversely affect your business.

Can The Spiders Index Your Site?

To find out whether the search engine spiders are able to index your site take a look at your log files and look for visits by Googlebot, MSNbot and Slurp the Yahoo spider. If there are no visits from the spiders it could suggest that there are no links to your site (or the links you do have are bad) and the search engines are unaware of the existence of your site. It could also mean there is some type of spider trap in existence that is preventing spiders from crawling your site.

A spider trap usually takes the form of some sort of technical issue. This may mean that your site displays well enough in your browser but there are some issues within the coding or design of the site. These problems can be caused by pop-up windows, flash or frame sites, JavaScript navigation, ineffective redirects, visitor passwords, wrong robot controls, or problems with dynamic URLs. You may want to talk with your designer regarding these issues or consult with an SEO expert.

Sitemaps!

The key to making your site accessible to spiders involves building site maps linking to all your site pages and also ensuring that text links are in existence to aid navigation between pages. Site maps are basically pages that include descriptive text links to all the other pages on your site. They make it easy for the spider to find all the pages on your site. If your site map has over 100 links it is advisable to have a multi-page site map – make sure they are all interlink. Remember also to optimize these pages too, as the descriptive links include lots of relevant information about the nature of your business.

Bottom Line

Unless search engine spiders can find your site there is no way for human visitors to find it using search engines either! Indexing is always the key first step in organic search engine optimization. Make sure this in place and you are ready to move forward.

Do not add to the invisible web statistics!

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Beginning Search Engine Marketing

The use of search engines to help surf the Web has become commonplace. Everyone has a favorite, whether it be Google, Yahoo!, or AOL. And many business owners have finally discovered the ability to advertise on these engines to increase traffic and sales to their site. For beginners there are many terms bandied around relating to these search engines which can be confusing. And to add to the confusion it is becoming increasingly difficult to decipher between all of the “experts” and their advice that is so freely available. Perhaps the greatest confusion revolves around the meaning of “search engine optimization” and “search engine marketing.”

Search engine optimization is the act of altering a Web site so that it performs better in the ‘free’ organic, crawler-based listings of search engines. Organic search listings cannot be purchased. Web sites must be altered to be search engine friendly and to encourage the search engines to rank the Web pages for keywords and phrases that are relevant to the Web site and Web pages.

Search engine marketing is the act of marketing a Web site via search engines, whether it’s creating specific landing pages for your site, purchasing paid advertising on the results pages, or a combination of these and other search engine-related activities, including natural optimization.

The Importance of Keywords

Whether ranking through the ‘free’ organic listings or through paid search media, the most important step that most site owners have trouble comprehending is the importance of keywords. The key is to find keywords that are actually converting into sales. For example if you are a car dealer in Phoenix, does it really matter if you rank number one for “cars” in Google? Therefore, taking the time to use available technology to help define which keywords are used by your target market and really drive your desired results is really the first step in any search engine marketing program.

Search Engine Optimization

There are numerous tips and tools available to help you better optimize your site for the engines. Overall, search engine optimization is composed of programming elements that exist in three places: on the page, on the site, and off the site. In general, the consensus is that one must pay attention to:

• Title, Description and Keyword Meta Tags
• Site Structure and Programming
• Page Content Development
• Link Strategy

Search engines use complex algorithms to determine how they spider, index, and rank sites. These algorithms are constantly changing. While you can follow the various tips and resources to do it yourself, please keep in mind that gaining ranking is a long-term process that requires consistent attention. It’s not just a one-off deal. Therefore you may want to consider outsourcing to an SEO expert. This is especially true if your site is a complex, dynamically driven e-Commerce site.

Search Engine Marketing

The search engine marketing space has become highly competitive. Paid search media is an advertising program where listings are guaranteed to appear in response to particular search terms, with higher ranking typically obtained by paying more than other advertisers. Paid placement listings can be purchased from a portal or a search network. For example, the listings a user sees in “boxes” at the top and along the left hand side of the page in Google are all paid advertising spots.

The major players in the space include Overture and Google Adwords. But, many forget to utilize the third tier players, which for smaller niche sites, sometimes produce even better results. Those include: Kanoodle, FindWhat, and Enhance.com.

Search Engines and your Business

People seem to think that they are somehow entitled to top ranking in the search engines. There is also the perception that these engines are government supplemented services. The truth is that they are independent businesses and so are responsible for profit and loss. This means that they decide how they run their business and how they rank Web sites.

What does this mean for your business? You should start by developing a search engine strategy. This can be done by utilizing ‘search engine optimization,’ ‘search engine marketing,’ or a combination of both. You should aim to educate yourself on these systems and determine how you can use them to further your online business. The goal is to increase your business visibility within the search engines and bring ‘qualified’ traffic to your site. The result will be increased sales which will ensure the continued success of your online business.

Article by:

Amanda Vega has been in the interactive industry for over 15 years involved in marketing, public relations and advertising.

James Peggie is the director of marketing for Elixir Systems a full service search engine marketing company.

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SEO Copywriting Makeover: Finding the Right Trigger

by Karon Thackston © 2005
http://www.copywritingcourse.com

You’ve got a great product or service. Now, how do you make buyers sit up and take notice? How do you get them excited about what you’re offering? You have to pull the trigger.

There is at least one trigger for every product or service on the market today. Finding it is the hard part. Once you determine what will set your customers in motion, you’ve won half the battle. This was the case with ForecastWatch.com.

With a new site, the owner of ForecastWatch.com (Jeff) was unsure of what to do with the copy in order to connect with his site visitors and cause them to take the action he wanted them to take. Not to mention, Jeff wanted to rank highly with the engines as well, so search engine optimization (SEO) had to be taken into consideration, along with the selling aspects of the copy.

The Problem

The only real problem was finding the right trigger. The original site had little to no usable copy. That’s not an insult; it’s the truth. You can see the original home page here: http://www.copywritingcourse.com/forecastwatch-original.pdf.
Jeff knew he needed help from a professional copywriter, so he spent little time on the site content.

The Solution

To determine the most powerful trigger, I took a look at all the segments of ForecastWatch.com’s audience. It was broken down into three distinct types of customers. They were all interested in the most reliable weather forecasts possible, but for three very different reasons.

One group was made up of meteorologists. Their obvious interest was in being able to provide the most accurate forecasts to their viewers and listeners. A second group was compiled of weather risk managers. It is the job of these professionals to accurately assess weather for industries such as the stock exchange, construction, transportation, national defense and more. The last group needed weather forecast accuracy for personal reasons, usually as a hobby or for sports reasons (coaches, etc.).

While the last group was primarily interested in the weather as amateurs, the first two segments (meteorologists and weather-risk managers) have a lot on the line when it comes to weather forecast accuracy. Their reputations and their jobs are on the line.

And that’s the trigger! I put it right up front in the headline, which read:

ForecastWatch.com
Because Your Reputation Depends on
Being Right About the Weather

The headline hit the nail on the head. It got the attention of weather professionals, was of great interest to hobbyists and included part of one of Jeff’s keyphrases. The last word in the headline (weather) tied into the first sentence of the copy and, thus, created a keyphrase.

Keep in mind that engines don’t read spaces or line breaks or punctuation within the copy, so having one word of a keyphrase in the headline and the remainder of the keyphrase in the first sentence of the copy is an excellent way to make the copy flow and keep in line with SEO protocol.

Now, the task would be to keep that same emotional twist and energy throughout the copy. With the old copy, Jeff had no rankings with the engines for his chosen keyphrases, so the optimization of the copy needed to give him a presence.

The Rewrite

In the opening paragraph, I touted the praises of weather professionals, letting them know their expertise was recognized and appreciated. I also used one keyphrase twice and the second keyphrase once. In addition, I used the individual word “weather” and substituted “specialist” for “risk manager” in some instances to add to the flow and give a well-rounded environment for the spiders and bots.

Next, I provided a good overview of what ForecastWatch.com offered. Again, a keyphrase was used in the headline (because it worked for both the visitors and the engines, not strictly for SEO purposes), and a keyphrase was used in the paragraph.

Finally, the copy was broken out into segments that targeted specific individuals. This gave them precise information on what benefits ForecastWatch.com offered them. Boxes for meteorologists, weather risk managers and weather enthusiasts were created. Within the copy for each block and again in the anchor text for links to internal pages, keyphrases were used where appropriate. These boxes lead each visitor to information that was most relevant to him/her.

You can see the new copy here: http://www.copywritingcourse.com/forecastwatch-rewrite.pdf.

The Results

I always like to let the customer take over in this section. Here’s what Jeff had to say about the rewrite of his home-page copy.

In addition, rankings continue to rise with current positioning in the top five for one of his keyphrases.

Take the time to do a little research. Put yourself in your customers’ place. Uncover what’s most important to them, and you’ll be rewarded with greater conversions in the long run.

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