Online Marketing Articles - Guide to Writing Headlines

Hundreds of online marketing consultants concur – One of the major factors to successful online marketing is via writing and distributing articles.

Since you know you must ride the success wave of online marketing using articles, you have to worry about writing articles to attract three, exceptionally different readers with the same article.

Three targets of article marketing
And now for the three targets of article marketing and how to write great headlines for each:

Readers - In the end, these are the people who will decide that they are attracted to what you do enough to read your article. You need to write a headline that will draw your audience to actually read your article in the first place. You need to attract them to dig further into your article and actually pay attention to your message.

80% of readers will see your headline, but only 20% will dig in to your article. How well your headline is written will decide the reader’s next step.

Readers can come across your headline on social networking sites like Digg and Del.icio.us, as links in an message from a colleague, and in their Google results. If your headline does not appeal to them enough to read your article, you just won’t get readership, even if you have the best message or offering in the world. You could offer the cure for cancer, but with a bad headline no one will want to read about it.

Search Engines - Search engines think that the page title is the primary on-page indicator of the content of the page. Coming in second place is the use of the <h1> heading tag. When your article is published, publishers have a tendency to make either or both the title and H1 tag the same as your article title. Therefore, having words in your article title which are important to those searching for information increase your chances of showing up in search engine results.

You want your keywords in the headline and as near the start as reasonable to still satisfy the other two audiences.

Publishers - One of the keys to article marketing is the how publishers can spread your message like a virus. This is the chief reason article marketing is so powerful. One well-written article can get published on 10,000 places around the web in a couple of weeks.

These are the folks who choose whether or not your article gets published on their site, newsletter, blog, etc. They are a tough combination of both readers and Yahoo and company. They want to understand your article will attract search engine clicks and also make their readers happy. However, if they don’t run across your article since the the poor headline doesn’t come up in their Yahoo results, or the headline fails to suck them in to read your article – you miss out.

It's fairly safe to say that publishers can make or break an article’s success and by pleasing the other two audiences you will get on their good side as well.

Writing Good Headlines for All Three
This article's title was written specially to serve as an example of how to meet the needs these three audiences. As you can see, the first three words of the article headline are Google fodder - they are a blending of two greatly sought phrases, and those words are the very first in the headline.

The first words also tell you what you will learn when you read the article. The last part captivates your attention and sucks you deeper in. It promises something of interest that will provide what you’re hoping to gain or learn about. It causes you to ask yourself, "I’m curious what lesson I can take away from this article…" and so you read on, just as you did.

Armed with this information, you can now write good article headlines that get noticed, get published, and get traffic coming to your site. Get out there, get writing, and cash in.

Daiv Russell is a web marketing copywriter with Envision Software. Visit our site to learn how to apply the 4C formula for web marketing success. Make sure to submit your articles to Free-Reprint-Articles.com