Affiliate Marketing Articles home : Affiliate Marketing: Headlines are the Difference Between Life and Death

Affiliate Marketing: Headlines are the Difference Between Life and Death

by David Cooper

As an affiliate marketer, your primary tool is probably the written word. Most affiliates don’t sell via telephone or with audio/video efforts to the extent they work with written words. Solo ads, sales pages, auto responders, newsletters… All of them are written materials.

That makes it incredibly important to learn how to use words to your advantage. Doing that requires many things. You will eventually need to become part grammarian, party storyteller, part dictionary and part psychiatrist to get the right words every time. You might opt to bypass all of that and hire a professional to put words on the page.

Whether you do it yourself or hire a pro, you will certainly need to be able to separate quality from junk. You will need to develop the power to almost sense whether something will get the job done or not. One of the first places to look is at the headline.

The headline for any advertising piece is hyper-critical. People make the decision whether to keep reading or to push that button with the green arrow within seconds of reaching your page. That means creating a powerful first impression is essential. The first thing your visitors see when they hit a page? The headline. It has to work.

What makes a headline sizzle? First, of course, it must attract attention. It has to intrigue readers immediately. Remember, the clock ticks fast. You may have less than a second to convince a visitor to read on. That headline has to be a perfectly baited hook.

The headline also needs to be strong. Weak headlines result in weak responses. The headline should be active. Words like “if” and “may” have no place in headline. The headline is the domain of the power word--the kind of word that will elicit a strong and almost visceral response.

The headline has to tell your customers enough to keep them interested. “Massive Sale” or “Only the Best” may work their way into the ad copy somewhere, but they are not stand along headlines. You have to give customers just enough information to motivate them to keep digging. That means you cannot go with a short headline and produce a great response. Going long also creates problems. No one wants to sift through a 300 word sales pitch as a headline.

There is no magic formula for winning headlines. Beware of anyone who tells you every single headline should be structured as a question or that you need a minimum of one adjective per noun. Different situations call for different strategies. The important part is that the headline creates a compulsion to keep on reading.

As an affiliate marketer, all you have is your name and your words. Make the most of both of them by using strong, honest headlines that capture attention and just won’t let go until the prospect has read everything you had to say!

Webmasters and Ezine Publishers:

David Cooper is the editor of the Affiliate Marketing Articles Newsletter. David specializes in helping affiliate marketers write winning headlines for their affiliate marketing efforts. Subscribe to his FREE newsletter at:  http://www.affiliatemarketingarticles.com

Affiliate Avalanche

Affiliate Buzz

Affiliate Templates

Insider Secrets

Adsense Secrets

Affiliate Masters Course

Affiliate Newsletter

Affiliate Marketing Primer

bookmark this site