Shock or Awe

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 page that you have to do well in order to elicit response? You need a rockin' headline!

If you can't get people interested enough to read further than your headline, your copy or bullet points can be the best ever written, but nobody will see it. You can have the most effective submit button in the history of the world, but nobody will care. If you don't suck them in with a great headline, you're basically doomed. You can almost have an awesome headline and nothing else but the opt-in box and people will sign up for your list. The headline would need to be all about benefit, of course, but it can happen if your headline is just that good.

Maybe you're worried because you're not the best copywriter in the world. That's not a problem. Get some software that creates headlines for you. Give it some information about what you're trying to do by filling in a few boxes, and then, it will come back to you with a whole bunch of choices. Pick the headlines you like best. Or, hire a copywriter to write some great headlines for you. Pick your favorites from those. Why?

I said pick a few because you may not hit on the headline that works best the first time, no matter how much you like it. You'll have to get in there and test it and track it, until it's doing what you want it to do. Do a split test, and keep on testing, until you see that one headline is working better than the other.

In the traditional A/B split test, you'll test two pages. Everything on those pages will be identical, except for the headlines. If you want to, you can put the two pages with different headlines into a rotator and advertise just one link. Or, advertise the pages separately. How you do it is up to you. But whichever method you choose, be sure that you can track the results.

The free program, Google Analytics, is a great way to track. If you go to http://analytics.google.com and sign up, you'll get a snippet of code to put into your pages with easy-to-follow instructions. If you can't do this, don't let it stop you. Hire someone to do it for you. Find someone in one of the forums you belong to, or check out rentacoder.com and see how much someone there might charge to do it for you. Once the code is installed, you'll be able to see how many visitors came to each page and how many of them opted into your list, as long as the code is also present in your thank-you page. So, that's two places the code needs to be, but you can actually put it on every page in your site.

You should probably advertise to at least 500 if not 1,000 visitors before you can decide if a headline is working. After that, you should be able to determine which headline works best. Then, either revise the headline that lost or choose another from the headline creator software and try that. Keep doing this. Repeat the process until you're satisfied with your opt-in rate.

Remember to size your headline right, too. Some people have very wide monitors and if your headline isn't sized properly, it will be running all across their screens. Instead, create a table of one row, one column, and put all of your data--the headline, the copy, and the opt-in box--into it, and size it to be 650 to 750 pixels wide. That way the headline will stay where you want it to be... in front of the viewer's eyeballs.

You can create curiosity with your headline. You can also prod people, inspire them, or make them laugh. But whatever you do, be sure it makes people wonder what comes next? When that happens, they opt-in to your list to find out. By keeping people on the edge of their seats, by teasing them just a little, you'll probably find better results.

Article Source: http://www.a1-articledirectory.com

Tellman Knudson, CEO of OvercomeEverything.com, is a master at list building. Find his step-by-step list building course at MyFirstList.com (ListTechniques.com).

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