12 Of The Most Profitable Headlines Of All Time

I stumbled across this great article the other day and just had to share it with you all. I know it’s hard to believe that something as small as your headline can have such a huge impact on your bottom line, but it’s about time you started believing. Your headline can indeed make our break your offer.

Interspire writes:

“They say that if your web site has a bad opening headline you’ll loose over 50% of your visitors in the first few seconds after they arrive at your home page. Headlines are the most important part of a web page, but what constitutes a good headline?

In today’s article I’m going to list the top 12 best direct response headlines ever created. How do I know these are the top 12 headlines ever? Simple. I read this article. I’ve written quite a few headlines over the last few years. Some worked and some didn’t. The headlines below have sold hundreds of millions of dollars of products over the last 50 years, and best of all you can adapt each of these headlines to suit your own business.

11 Unusual Methods For Being A Great Copywriter

Altucher wins again with this entertaining article. He gives some really great advice on how to become a better public speaker, which also happens to be great advice for those of us desiring to become better copywriters:

“1) Start off with a joke. This is a must. People need to laugh within the first 30 seconds or else you’re going back to your cubicle at the pencil factory and they will never remember you.

I spend about at least one to two hours before the talk coming up with the first joke because I know that’s what starts off the good feelings for the rest of the talk. I usually make it relevant to the locale and the topic or the news (Tomorrow’s joke starts off: “True story: two days ago I was having dinner with the prime minister of Pakistan and…”) And it actually will be a true story.

2) Get on their level. This has two meanings. I once fell off of a podium while pacing around giving a talk. I was very embarrassed. So now I always get off the podium and explain that I’m afraid to fall off so I’m just going to walk around if that’s ok with everyone. People laugh a little bit and it physically and mentally brings me onto their level.

3) Very important: I very very slightly slur my words. A very small slur. I don’t drink at all. But by slightly slurring my words it’s as if I’m telling my brain I’m a little drunk. When you’re a little drunk you don’t really care what people think of you and you take a few more chances than you would’ve otherwise. It also makes me a bit more brutally honest. And everyone likes a nice drunk!

4) I try to use JUST one word plus one image per page. No more! You think people really want to come to a talk and read a novel? They want to look at funny pictures. At heart, we are all two year olds trying to just stay alive. I’m not saying this in a patronizing way. Its just true.

Here’s one slide from my upcoming talk:

Colorful, topical. It’s the world record bubble creator, so its interesting. And has the flare of magic around it. Given recent events, if I can’t fill up 30 seconds of brilliant insight with this slide then I shouldn’t be doing any public speaking.

5) Try to shock people on each slide. This keeps them awake. They’ve just been jolted with electricity. Like a taser. That hits their brain to keep them awake for another 30 seconds (I say this all because I hate talks and I know I fall asleep every 30 seconds during a talk) Here’s another slide from my upcoming talk:

I then tell people I just bought this house. People are shocked for a brief second (the human mind is conditioned to believe everything it hears). Then I say, “no I didn’t”. And everyone relaxes. All of their muscles relax. The jealousy muscle, the reality muscle, the humor muscle. Everything settles down. Some chuckles. Its obviously not my house. But now we can all move ahead and talk again.

Why You Should Be Using Google Analytics Right Now!

Have you ever called a business to inquire about their services and heard the person on the other end ask you, “Where did you hear about our business?” Sure you have, this is a pretty common thing and while it may seem like a small, almost meaningless question to the customer, the business takes this question VERY seriously. This is how they determine how effective their specific marketing and advertising campaigns are.

If a business is using, let’s say the yellow pages, fliers, and postcards to advertise their business, it is VERY helpful for them to know how many customers they are getting from each source. Once they tally how much they are spending on each particular campaign versus how many customers they acquire, they can decide which methods to continue with or which to possibly discontinue. This is EXACTLY the data that you need to be collecting for your website. Without it, you are just marketing in the dark.

The good news is, this data is EXACTLY what you can get by using Google Analytics, and actually much more than that. Google Analytics is a free program that Google allows ANYONE to use who has a website. You simply place a piece of java code on each page of your website and the program does the rest. This data is simply invaluable.

How so?

Well, when promoting your website, it is likely that you are hitting several avenues at once in order to get visitors. You may be using Google Adwords, Facebook, Press Releases, etc. Now I ask you, how do you know which of your marketing efforts is bearing the most fruit if you have no way to track where your traffic is coming from or which traffic source is producing more leads or sales?

Before programs like Google Analytics, collecting this data was not so easy or cheap. Most website owners spent all their time promoting their site never really knowing which methods were producing and which were not.

Now, it is incredibly easy to see exactly where your traffic is coming from and which campaigns are effective. Once you find out what areas are not as effective, you have the choice of either stopping those methods altogether and focusing more time and energy on the ones that are, or try to tweak the less productive ones to increase the traffic rate.

Google Analytics is helpful not only in showing you traffic data, but in showing conversion data as well. So at a glance you’ll know the percentage of visitors that have taken action by signing up to your email list or by purchasing one of your products. You’ll also know which traffic source brings in visitors that take action the most.

As you can see, Google Analytics can be a website owner’s #1 tool when it comes to producing a powerful and profitable website. So stop “driving” your business “blindfolded” and install Google Analytics already!

How To Use A Semicolon From The Oatmeal

A refresher on how to use semicolons can never hurt, and it doesn’t hurt if that refresher also happens to be hilarious! Leave it up to The Oatmeal to knock it out of the park.

As a marketer you can learn a lot from The Oatmeal actually. People love to laugh and be entertained, so if you can infuse a little humor and personality into your marketing message your business is only going to benefit.

Just make sure you steer clear of religion and politics, for obvious reason;).

Click Here To Read The “Semicolon” Comic At The Oatmeal!

10 Things TV Shopping Networks Can Teach You About Making Money Online

We’ve all seen them. Many of us know somebody who has bought from them at one time or another. The fact of the matter is… TV Shopping Networks know how to sell, period. So if we’re trying to improve our sales, it only makes sense to analyze what it is they’re doing right and implement it in our own sales copy.

ProBlogger Writes:

“I found myself entranced recently by a “presentation” on a TV shopping network. I usually flip straight past these networks, as I was of the opinion that they were cheesy shows, presented by couldn’t-quite-make-it TV presenters, and that they pushed sub-par products onto poor, lonely, hapless, housebound consumers who didn’t know better. Not that I was judgmental about them in any way…

But this time I found myself stopping for a moment, just to see what they were about.

As the “presentation” (which is what they called it—at this stage, I was still thinking of it as a cheesy, garbage-pushing intrusion) unfolded, I found myself becoming fascinated by the sheer audacity of it.

These shows face an enormous sales challenge, the scale of which could appropriately be linked to climbing to Base Camp, possibly without an oxygen mask. While no-one could call their techniques sophisticated, they are effective. The home shopping industry is a multi-billion dollar industry and sales actually increased during the global financial crisis, when all other retailing was going down the toilet.

What can we learn from how the TV shopping networks sell their wares? Without becoming cheesy and surrendering all integrity, of course. Well, the short answer is: a great deal! Here are the top 10 tips that we can take away from those who sell from, and to, the couch…”

Continue @ ProBlogger