Jamdo Marketing Blog

Headlines are a great way to draw in readership and establish your writing and yourself as an authority on a subject. Skillful headline writing can increase the conversion rates of a sales letter by a huge margin too.

Unfortunately, headlines can also damage your credibility.

I was doing my daily Bloglines rounds this morning and came accross an interesting post from the Internet Marketing Watch which is a news roundup of what is happening in the world of internet marketing. It is updated 20 or 30 times a day and sometimes there is a gem among the rubbish.

One of their posts this morning caught my eye - How to Write Your Own eBook in 7 Days. A nice headline and, as I am working on an ebook, it piqued my interest. The 7 day claim is probably a bit of an exaggeration for someone who has a fulltime job, but often “how to” posts will at least include some relatively interesting or useful advice.

So I decided to visit the post directly as the feed was only partial.

It was just a short paragraph informing their readers that a guy names Joe Vitale had written a blog post on how to write an ebook in 7 days. I followed the link to this blog post from Joe.

And that was it. A post telling me he has sold lots of copies of this ebook and a link to the sales letter page. There was not a single tip on writing, organisation or ebook publishing. Nothing.

To be blunt, that pissed me off.

The title promised me “How to Write an Ebook in 7 Days” and effectively tricked me into visiting the blog. What a waste of time.

And there is the crux of the matter.

If you make a promise in your title, then you should live up to it.

By tricking me, Joe has done himself a disservice. I follow about 140 marketing blog feeds and have purchased items from many of them over the course of several years. But now I am wary of buying from Joe.

That’s not to say I will never buy from him or read his blog again. But in this particular instance he lost an opportunity to convert me (a very targeted prospect) into a regular reader and potentially a customer.

That is not a good start and could have been avoided by thinking about that headline.

Further Resources:

Blog Titles are Ads (Emphasises trust and reputation as factors in headline writing - Performancing)
Magnetic Headlines (A Series from Copy Blogger)
Writing Headlines That Get Results (Copy Blogger)
Using Titles Effectively on Blogs (Pro Blogger)
Titles are Everything (Pro Blogger)

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Getting more people to read what you have to write is a factor of making it is easy for them as possible. One of the strategies that you should be using to get people reading you is promoting your RSS feed as one of the options for them to do that.

What is RSS?

Most of the readers of this blog are fairly tech savvy, so will probably already know what RSS is. It stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a way for people to subscribe to the exact content they want from your (and other) sites by pulling it from an XML file on your site into a reader (such as Bloglines). That way they don’t have to visit every individual site but just get a list of updated stories from the websites they want all in one convenient location. Yaro Starak has a nice introduction to RSS if you are in the dark.

Get Accurate Statistics

The first part of getting more people to subscribe to your blog is to make sure you can measure your results. The most popular way to do this is to join FeedBurner (it’s free) and burn your RSS feed with them. Just follow the instructions on their site. The reason you want to do this is because FeedBurner provide nice stats to do with your RSS feed - something your current stats program probably doesn’t do.

The next trick is to make sure that everyone is subscribing to that feed alone. To do this, I use a great little plugin for Wordpress. It’s called FeedBurner Feed Replacement and it is one of my must have plugins. It makes sure that every person who subscribes to your feed from your blog is actually subscribing to the Feedburner feed.

After that is installed, your Feedburner feed will be able to record accurate statistics to do with your RSS readership.

Educate Your Audience

One of the things you will want to do is to let your audience know what RSS is. That means writing a short article about RSS and how they can use it. It is also good practice to link to that article from an obvious place - many people do it from a “What’s This?” link next to their RSS button. I haven’t done this yet on Jamdo out of pure laziness.

Make it Obvious and Easy

You will notice that there is a great big ugly RSS symbol at the top of the right hand collumn here on Jamdo. That is my attempt to make it damn obvious that the site has an RSS feed and that you might like to subscribe. That graphic is a link that will take you straight to the feedburner feed. Go on.. press it… you know you want to!

Simply putting that big graphic there increased readership by 20 overnight. Not fantastic, but better than a kick in the teeth.

The Single Best Way to Increase RSS Readership

Well, as the title promised, I guess I have to reveal how to get a bunch of new subscribers to your RSS feed. Assuming that you have followed the rest of the advice on making it easy and obvious how to subscribe to your feed and that you also have accurate stats so that you will even know if anyone has subscribed to your feed then there is one other way to get a lot of people subscribing to it.

Get plugged! If you get a plug in a blog post from another high quality website with good traffic then you will see your RSS stats go up overnight. When Jamdo was mentioned on CopyBlogger a week or two back, it was worth an extra 50 or 60 subscribers. The same thing happened the once or twice Jamdo was mentioned on ProBlogger. I have had feed stats go up by several hundred overnight when one of my sites has been mentioned on a very popular blog.

Of course, you have to get noticed by other bloggers first, but I have covered that before.

Anyway, enjoy your new RSS readership!

Further Resources:

What is RSS and How do I Use it? (A good introduction by Yaro)

Feedburner Feed Replacement Plugin for Wordpress

Feedburner

How to Email Other Bloggers (Useful for asking for a plug).

Technorati Tags: rss, feedburner, xml

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I was listening to Jeremy Shoemaker’s (aka Shoemoney) podcast today and a guy called in and asked why his traffic wasn’t converting into leads.

He was getting 2000 uniques per day and about 50 click-thoughs but no leads.

This peaked my interest for a moment, but when he explained it further the problem was fairly obvious.

He had music news site - Breaking Music News - a pretty nice site with some decent information. It has a nice design and no obvious problems.

To help with his click through rate, he had decided to show his own links that were made to look similar to Google Adsense links - an idea I have seen used before with varying success (he may have changed this by now). The “Google Ads” actually then pointed to affiliate offers.

And there was the problem. His affiliate offers had to do with ringtones (which happens to be Shoemoney’s specialty).

Ringtones don’t have much to do with the content of the Breaking Music News site. Very few people will visit a music news site with the intent of finding a ringtone. It is therefore very difficult to presell them on the idea of downloading a ringtone - even if it’s free.

Offering visitors something that they are already looking for when they arrive at your site is the key to getting higher conversions. If the visitor comes to your site after searching on Google for “ringtone download” they are going to be much easier to convert into a ringtone lead.

For the Breaking Music News site, however, he would probably have much greater success by finding offers related to.. well.. breaking music news. Off the top of my head, music downloads, music video downloads, music magazine offers would pobably be a good start. I think I also remember seeing a free 500 songs download on either CPA Empire or AzoogleAds (both aff. links) recently too, which would probably produce better results for him.

Horses for courses.

Find out how and why people are coming to your site and then give them what they want.

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