How to Ruin Your Credibility and Lose Conversions With a Headline
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
One of their posts this morning caught my eye -
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:
I hear ya about the 7 Day Book sneaky headline - it really does spoil it for those into credible info publishing.
What the story was really about was how it’s been published 5 years ago and has sold so many copies - should have been a basic PR puff piece.
So the headline should have been something like: “7 Day eBook Turns 5 Years Old, Selling Thousands.”
August 23rd, 2006 at 1:34 pmHi Rob.
I can very well relate to your disappointment. Joe Vitale’s name has been popping up here and there ever since I’ve started working on the Internet (easily more than 5 years) and he is from that era when people believed traffic was only thing that mattered, not how you get it.
August 23rd, 2006 at 5:06 pmMartin - That would have been a far better headline and less misleading - agreed. The unfortunate thing is that alothough I picked on Joe for this particular post, he is not the only one who does that - far from it.
Amrit - yeah, the name rung a bell for me too, but I couldn’t place where I had heard of him. You bring up a good point. Anyone can get traffic. It’s getting targeted and interested traffic that is the tricky part!
August 23rd, 2006 at 11:30 pm[...] I’ve always been stressing as an online copywriter that always present on your web page exactly what you mean, not something like this where an author doesn’t mean what he writes on his blog/website. [...]
August 24th, 2006 at 1:53 pm