If you’ve been following along in this series, we’re going to get right to Law #5 from the 12 Laws of Online Marketing with Business Blogs, RSS, and Podcasts. (If you missed earlier installments to this 13-part series, you can catch up here in the Marketing With Business Blogs archives.)

Law #5. Headlines are the frontline of all your business blogging, online, and off-line marketing efforts

Just as all ads, sales letters, brochures, flyers, news releases, and commercials need a headline – so do your business blog posts. Whether it’s an article, regular post, podcast, or even a v-blog (video post on your blog,) your headline is where the battle for people’s attention is either one or lost.

This isn’t for reasons of personal style or preference. Test after test has proven that any article or promotional piece with a headline – any headline – will out-perform one without a headline. And if you can craft a headline centered on the major benefit you’ll bring your readers or listeners in your article or podcast, the difference in response can be astounding.

People have very little free time today. Between shuffling the kids around from soccer to ballet, picking up the dry cleaning, making dinner, waiting in line at the bank, cleaning up after the new puppy, or a host of the hundreds of other things that are vying for people’s attention – what would make them stop and pay attention to what you have to say?

Well, going back to Law #1 and Law #2 of Marketing With Business Blogs would certainly help. But with time being so precious, you still need to cut through all the noise. And that’s where a good headline comes in.

Spiders like good headlines too!

It’s not just human beings that find headlines important. Search engine spiders put a lot of weight on the words used in headlines. That doesn’t mean you can just go out and pack your headlines with keywords and expect magical ranking results with your business blog. But with the right business blogging strategy and keyword list guiding your headline creation you can make some serious improvements in your search engine rankings.

A real world example

Just recently we helped a coaching client of ours make some changes to the headline structure of his business blog. We planned out his article cue for the next month carefully selecting a group of articles from his offline archives. And we helped him develop a new approach to headlines, which meant altering the headlines on each and every article as it went up online.

As the articles went up online he updated his subscribers and monitored response by using unique tracking tags for each article update. He experienced nearly a two-fold increase in click-throughs over the previous month, and his new subscriber sign-ups increased 30% over previous months. To top it all off, this business owner’s search engine rankings on the three keyword phrases we targeted shot up into the top 20 results from obscurity.

All this was derived from headline changes only

The content and quality of writing was no different from the previous month. And the updates reached the same audience. The only change was improved headlines. I don’t know about you, but I’ll take improvements like that any day, year round. And you can have them too … with great headlines for your business blog!

You can see from this example the importance of tracking related to your marketing success. In an upcoming installment of this series we’ll look at the critical nature of testing and how it relates directly to headlines in your blogging and podcast posts.

In part seven of this series, your digital business coaching will continue with Law #6 of the 12 Laws of Marketing with Business Blogs. Using your business blog to apply and expand on this powerful law will help you remove one of the biggest barriers to sales and build a subscriber list full of pre-sold prospects.

Learn how to unleash the maximum marketing power of business blogs, podcasts, and RSS (in any industry, profession, or niche) with Marketing With Business Blogs™.

John-Paul Micek is a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin. He’s known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™.


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