The headline of a piece of sales copy or advertising is the most important part of the entire ad. That’s because it’s the first point of contact and the single element that ‘pulls’ the reader in further. You can’t sell to someone if they don’t read the ad. The headline needs to be well thought out and stir the emotions of the reader so they will dive in head first. What are some important elements to look for?

Does it relate to them?   - TO PEOPLE WHO WANT TO WRITE — BUT CAN’T GET STARTED

Do they imagine it could be them?  – THOUSANDS HAVE THIS PRICELESS GIFT — BUT NEVER DISCOVER IT!

Does it create a fear?  – LAST FRIDAY…WAS I SCARED!—MY BOSS ALMOST FIRED ME!

Does it create a sense of wanting to change?  – OFTEN A BRIDESMAID, NEVER A BRIDE

Does it ‘personalize’ and identify with someone else?  – IMAGINE SOMEONE LIKE ME…HOLDING AN AUDIENCE SPELLBOUND FOR 30 MINUTES

These are emotional ‘triggers’ that stir curiosity in the reader and will make them want to read further. It’s important to try and put a point across without sounding to salesy. You want them to focus more on the information: What’s in it for them? What benefits will they get? Rather than making it look like something’s for sale.

Writing ads will never go away. There are even more places on the Internet to compel people to buy: squeeze pages, videos, articles, banner ads, etc… and each one has a certain element that makes it stand out to your visitor. IMTC teaches the techniques of good web copy and profit pulling content. It’s something that will make you more valuable in the workplace. Be your own attention-grabbing headline and lure employers to you!

Earlier this year, one the largest and most popular article directories, Ezinearticles.com, took a hit from Google. Ezine enjoyed a positive relationship with Google for years, rewarded with good search placement for its authors. After some time however, far too many articles slipped through the cracks that were low-content or led to low-content websites. Google made a change to its algorithm that ‘slapped’ content farms, or plainly said, reduced search rank for sites that published articles not based on quality content, but written to just to get the backlinks that Ezine provided. A review of the articles in the Ezine database revealed that nearly 30% were quickly written, low-content drivel published en masse for linking strategies. This caused Ezine to lose 71% of its search power for hundreds of keyword phrases.

This shouldn’t be a concern for anyone, however. Content creation is still the key ingredient for getting high search engine placement. It works well with articles published on your website, or ones published on other major websites. To have a guest article, blog post or editorial published on a website with heavy traffic and high page rank could be one of the most powerful promotional linking strategies you can do for yourself. Google still searches out quality content to deliver to its customers. Whether it’s a post, article, video or podcast, if you are writing for your customers and not solely for the search engines, your content will work wonders for you.

Smart marketers never published articles on Ezine just for the backlinks anyway. They did it to promote themselves, build their status in their industry, make themselves the experts and have people click on the links to drive traffic to their websites. Article directories are still a great place for all of this to happen. Ezine may attach ‘no-follow’ tags to the links in their articles to amend the situation and get back into the good graces of Google. This is actually a good idea: writers who published crud just to get the backlinks will now have no incentive to abuse the system, and it will leave serious writers to benefit from the traffic.

Content is King on the Internet. It’s the only way you can advertise and promote your business properly to your target market. Learn the correct ways to promote yourself online.

The most critical tip that IMTC teaches about: Make sure your articles are on your own site first as a page of your website. Also, make sure that the article page on your site has been indexed by the search engines first before submitting to the article sites. To find out if a web page has been indexed, copy and paste the URL of the page into the Google search box and hit “search.” If a click able result appears, then the page has been indexed, if the result says: “Your search did not match any documents”, then it has not yet been indexed.

* We use the strategy of publishing to our websites first so that we get the credit in the search engines and not the big article sites. The site that publishes the article first gets the most credit.