Write Great Headlines: Suck Your Readers In

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Write great headlines and you will suck your readers in. The headline is the most important part of your content. The second most important part is your introduction.

Your headline compels people to click on your post, but your introduction draws them in so that they actually read the post.

If you’re sick of not getting a high level of engagement on your posts, this is probably the main cause.

Think of it like this:

  • Write Bad headlines – low traffic
  • Write Good headlines, bad intro – High traffic, high bounce rate (people leave), low time on the page
  • Write Great headlines, great intro – High traffic, low bounce rate, high time on page

Aim for the third scenario – write great headlines.

To help you achieve the third scenario, I’m going to show you 4 of the best types of introductions you can use in your content.

1. Embrace the fear of failure

Great introductions (to anything) connect with the reader on an emotional level. Emotions drive action. In this case, the action we want is for the reader to keep reading.

Fear is one of the strongest motivating emotions, and people will go to great lengths to prevent that fear from coming true.

How to write your own fear-inspired introduction:

Create it in three steps:

  1. State the fear of failure or cause of fear – Do this in a straightforward manner.
  2. Illustrate the fear – Describe the fear and make the reader picture it.
  3. Transition to a solutions – The whole point is to hook the reader with fear and then provide a solution that eases that fear. Write about how your content will help them.

2. No one wants to be left behind

Another big fear is the fear of missing out. The fear of missing out is what drives the frenzy over buying lottery tickets. No one wants to be the one who misses out if someone within your group of friends miraculously wins. The fear of missing out can be applied in a few ways:

  • Fear of being left behind – in niches like SEO, if you don’t keep up with the latest information, you can become obsolete.
  • Fear of missing out on fun – no one wants to miss out on fun.
  • Fear of missing out on an opportunity – people tend to be more interested if something is only available for a limited time or limited to a certain quantity.

3. Use AIDA to captivate visitors

You may have heard of AIDA before.

It’s one of the most famous copy writing formulas there is because it’s so effective.

First, what does AIDA stand for?

  • Attention
  • Interest
  • Desire
  • Action

To start off, you need to grab the attention of your readers. How do you do that? Typically with a bold or surprising claim.

If you can use numbers—great, but they’re not required. The only goal here is to catch the attention of your reader. It may be a sentence or two that seem unrelated at first to your topic.

Interest is similar to attention, and you certainly need to maintain attention, but this is where you tie your attention-grabbing introduction to the subject of the post.

To induce desire, all you need to do is make the benefits of your content clear.

Now, what about action—the last part of the formula?

You can interpret and use it in two ways.

First, you could get a reader to take an action right at the end of your introduction. Maybe you want them to get a pen and paper or open a spreadsheet. Or maybe you want them to answer a question and come back to it at the end.

If this applies, go for it.

The action in this formula typically refers to the end of the content, though. So, in your conclusion, you should make it clear how a reader is supposed to apply what you just taught them.

4. Benefit First – Show Me The Money

If your readers are impatient and just want you to get to the point and do it fast, then consider starting off with the biggest benefit of your content.

This is how you will attract attention, and if the benefit you promise is big enough, they will invest the time to read through your content.

For example, you could start an article about website redesign by saying:

If you redesign your website, you could make $3,000+ per month within 6 months.

Assuming you’ve got your audience right, they’ll be glad to dig a bit deeper to find out if your claim is true.

After that opening claim, you want to expand on and back up your claim. To continue the example:

I know this because I’ve redesigned many websites and those sites have earned me $3,000+ per month on average.

That statement lends credibility to the initial claim. Finally, you should close the introduction by explaining how the reader will get to the solution. In this case, something like this would work:

I’m going to show you what you need to know to move forward so you can start generating additional revenue.

Conclusion

Don’t spend tons of hours working on content and then just slap on a weak introduction. Make sure it sucks readers in and hooks them.

 

Unscalable Marketing Tactics – Tactic #1 – Get Feedback

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Nothing about this title makes sense to the modern day marketer. We are all about scalable marketing tactics that maximize efficiency and are easily repeatable.

The biggest problem most businesses have is getting more customers. Business owners believe that if they could just find that one magic growth tactic, their business would be set.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of them will never find that tactic. And while they’re searching for that magic bullet, they’re passing up on smaller, unscalable tactics that could be getting them a consistent stream of new traffic. Unscalable tactics cost more per acquisition but deliver customers when other tactics are failing. These are best applied early on in a business, when scalable tactics (advertising, really high quality viral video campaigns, etc.) are not realistic.

People who sign up for a trial but don’t purchase usually have a reason for doing so.

Some marketers are so focused on getting new customers that they don’t realize that what happens after a signup or purchase is the most important factor behind growth. Growth comes from creating a product that is as close to the needs and wants of your customers as possible. You can’t create that kind of a product going on intuition, without any actual customer feedback.

No feedback is feedback: If someone signs up for a demo or a trial or purchases something from you, that tells you something.

It tells you that:

  • They need a solution to a problem you’re trying to solve.
  • They like the sound and/or look of your product.

But if a customer stops using your product right after they start using it (particularly for software products), that’s your feedback. Their problem didn’t just disappear. What happened is they concluded that your product couldn’t help them sufficiently.

What’s the point of getting new customers if you barely retain any of them? On top of that, you need to absolutely thrill customers if you want them to recommend you to others.

The solution? Get feedback: As long as you collect email addresses when people sign up, you can contact them. If a large portion of your new signups are disappearing on you, personally send them an email and find out how your product fell short.

The customer is still in “pain” because they haven’t solved their problem, which makes them pretty receptive to outreach.

It’s not scalable to email every single new customer you get, but this type of feedback is how you’ll make your customers love your product. You could even survey a fraction of your customers and still get really valuable feedback.

You can also preemptively get feedback by sending your customers a welcome email, asking them how they found you and what they’re hoping your product can do for them.

 

 

Facebook Bots: What Are They, Who Uses Them & What You Should Do About It

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In April, Facebook announced the launch of the Messenger Platform – a new service that gives businesses the ability to build custom facebook bots in Messenger. This has extreme marketing potential because the facebook bots functionality would already be built into an active user base. Facebook Messenger has about 900 million monthly active users worldwide.

As Zuckerburg said in his keynote, “No one wants to have to install a new app for every business or service they want to interact with.” To understand the full potential, we have to define a few things.

What is a Bot?

Sounds like robot, but a “bot” is a generalized term to describe any software that automates a task. What’s special about the facebook bots you can now build on Facebook Messenger is that they’re created using Facebook’s Wit.ai Bot Engine, which can turn natural language into structured data. This means that the bots can learn and essentially “get smarter” with each interaction. This is a type of artificial intelligence (AI).

If you build a Facebook Messenger Bot, will people use it?

The answer is maybe. Users can search for companies and bots inside Facebook Messenger by name, but companies are definitely going to have to promote these bots. For more information on this, read find and contact businesses on messenger.

Examples of Branded Facebook Messenger Bots

1-800-Flowers

The example Mark Zuckerberg lauded in his keynote was the ability to send flowers from 1-800-Flowers without actually having to call the 1-800 number. A user, Danny Sullivan, subsequently tried it by sending flowers to Zuckerberg himself and documented the five-minute process here.

The bot took Sullivan through a few floral options and then confirmed shipping details.

Wall Street Journal

With the Wall Street Journal bot, readers can get live stock quotes by typing “$” followed by the ticker symbol. They can also get top headlines delivered to them inside of Messenger.

HP

HP created a bot for Messenger that lets users print photos, documents, and files from Facebook or Messenger to any connected HP printer.

 

Facebook IM

Facebook is releasing its own Messenger bot, a personal assistant name “M”. M can answer a wide range of requests — from restaurant recommendations, to complex trivia, to last-minute hotel rates in the city.

Its flexibility is due to the fact that M is actually a bot-human hybrid. As Facebook’s chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer told Recode: “It’s primarily powered by people, but those people are effectively backed up by AIs.” While the bots act as a first line of defense in fielding questions, the difficult questions are quickly routed to human assistants.

Should You Build A Bot?

This is a hard question to answer, but you can start with the following questions:

  1. Do you have a clear use case?
  2. Is your audience on Facebook?
  3. Can you support inbound inquiries from Messenger?

Do you have a clear use case?

One big reason that many companies failed when building business apps is that they saw it as just another version of their website. They didn’t take the time to study how being on a mobile device would change the types of interactions their customers would want to have with their company. Some tasks are just not well-suited for mobile. So when you think about building a Facebook Messenger bot for your company, remember to think like your customer. How would they use it? What do they want to achieve?

Is your audience on Facebook?

If you have an audience who uses Facebook heavily in their personal lives, they’re likely to adopt Messenger as a communications tool. And how they use Messenger may expand beyond how they use Facebook.

Can you support inbound inquiries from Messenger?

This, for me, is the most important of the three questions. Don’t open a communication channel with your prospective and existing customers if you can’t support it. Even with the automation of a bot, you’ll still need to prioritize time to 1) promote it 2) monitor any questions your bot can’t answer and 3) keep tabs on the overall customer experience you’re creating with it.

If you’ve thought through the above three questions and think you’ve got a good foundation for a Facebook Messenger bot then dive in. There’s certainly a benefit to being an early adopter in this space.