If you ever felt bored at the checkout counter and looked around you would see the tabloid stands and sometimes just read the headlines.
Whether it was the woman with the alien baby; or the Bat Boy making another appearance we are fascinated by the tabloid headlines.
Many times we are secretly reading them before making our payment to the cashier.
So what does the checkout counter have to do with Internet marketing? If you spend enough time surfing online you know that most of the time you stop when you see a headline that grabs your attention and drags you into the copy.
You know what powerful headlines are; you've been affected by them.
Not just the funny ones or the crazy ones.
You also get sucked in by the ones with the totally outrageous offers.
You get caught up in the story.
Many of the people who write advertising copy have no idea what sells in direct mail or Internet marketing.
They are still thinking of fancy imagery and sex appeal as the driving force in advertising.
The problem is that their kind of advertising might get your attention but not your interest.
Let's say you are looking for information on acne and you stop at an ad with a beautiful lady in a bikini in the header.
She might look good but she doesn't hold your interest because that is not what you ultimately need.
You must give your viewer a compelling reason that they can relate to.
That means being very specific in your target.
You can't try to appeal to everyone.
That is the worst thing of all for an ad to try to do.
If you follow the strategy of keyword specificity, you won't have much of a problem.
You pick your keywords that appeals to your target market and begin to layout the most outrageous (but true) offer you can come up with for your target reader.
The person who has a few seconds to see your Google ad or the headline on your sales page will not stay long if they don't have a reason to.
Your job at this point now is asking yourself a few questions: 1) What is the strongest offer that I could legally get away with? 2) What major target market based problem could I show this person who is looking at my page and how can I lead her to the stick around to hear about my solution? 3) What emotions do I want to bring out in the person who just glanced at my ad? 4) How can I create an improbable situation that my viewer will pause to continue reading down the page? 5) Once I come up with a few headline ideas how can I test them to see which ones work the best? 6) Does my headline offer the best benefit for my reader? These are the essential goals of your headline.
You will find that creating headlines over and over again will sharpen up you ad making skills.
The body of your ad will break down into subheads and sales copy that support your headline's authority.
The first thing you'll always want to do is get the reader's attention.