Yank Some Chains, People!

What’s the most important part of your squeeze page? Is it the opt-in box? Definitely not. Is it your bullet points or short copy? Well, maybe a little. But what’s the one most important part of that list building page that you have to do well in order to elicit response? You need a rockin’ headline!

Without a great headline, people won’t bother with the rest of the page. Right? I mean, if you haven’t sucked them in with something interesting, they aren’t liable to read on. Actually, the very first thing you need to do when building your squeeze page is to come up with an awesome headline. You could almost have a kick butt headline and an opt-in box and people would still sign up for your list. Of course, it would have to be a benefit-driven headline and it would have to be really, really great.

If you’re not a great copy writer, you can buy software to help you. You fill in some blanks to tell the software what you’re headline should be about and then it cranks out dozens of choices. Pick a few that grab you. If they don’t grab you, they won’t grab anyone else, either. But if you don’t want to use software, hire a copywriter to create some headlines for you and then, choose the one you like best.

You may not come up with the best headline first time around, though. As with any other part of marketing, you’ll need to test and track your headline and you’ll need more than one to see which headline works better than another. Set them up on a split test, and keep testing, until one headline pulls better than the other.

In an A/B split test, you’ll allow everything on two pages to be the same, except the headlines. You can put the two pages into a rotator and advertise the rotator link, which should show a different page each time the link is clicked. Or, you could advertise the two pages separately, it really doesn’t matter. Just be sure to have some kind of tracking involved.

Google Analytics is free to use and it’s open to everyone. Just go to http://analytics.google.com and sign up. You’ll need to put a bit of code onto your page, but the directions are pretty simple. If you don’t know how to do this, hire someone to do it for you. Then, you’ll be able to see how many visitors came to your site, and which headline caused them to opt-in, as long as you put the Google code onto your thank you page, after the sign-up, too.

Try advertising to 500 to 1,000 visitors and see which headline gets people to opt-in to your list. When you find one that works, go back to the other one, and improve it. Then, try another split test. Keep repeating the process, until you have a response rate that satisfies you and you’re making as much money as you want to make from the project, net of expenses.

Also remember to size the headline right, too. Some people have these huge monitors, and unless you contain the headline when you’re building your page, it will go all the way across. Try to keep it within 650 to 750 pixels wide, which is about what a human eye can comfortably scan. You can build a table into your page that is one row by one column and put all of the information, including your headline, your text and bullets, and your opt-in box, into it. That way your headline will be just where you want it to be when it comes up in other people’s browser windows.

Headlines create curiosity, they jibe, or they inspire. They can also make people laugh. Whatever your style of writing is, or whatever your product or service is, be sure to come up with something to make people wonder, What comes next? If you can get them doing that, they’ll opt-in to your list just to find out what your offer is, what your teleseminar is about, etc. Keep people on the edge of their seats, and you’ll probably have a winner.

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Tagged as: advertising, analytics, copywriting, google, linking, marketing, teleseminar, teleseminars, testing