Liz Strauss at Successful Blog

Thinking, writing, business ideas … You’re only a stranger once.

Great Headlines on the Web Always Win … Except When They Don’t

Filed Under Blog Review, Marketing, Successful Blog | 18 Comments

Got Traffic? Want Traffic? Why Do the Clickers Come?


If you’ve been studying How to Get Literally Everyone’s Attention on the Internet, you probably know that headlines count.

An attention-grabbing headline is everything. Whether it is something completely original and novel, ultra-specific and geared towards a niche, or just incredibly compelling, good headlines on the Web always win.

They always win, except when they don’t.

A great headline will get traffic and attention, but what sticks? What turns a click into a subscriber? Strong businesses are built on strong relationships. What transforms a clicker into someone who hangs around?

It starts with with the reason the clickers came. People come to a website for information, entertainment, and communication / engagement. When they click through on that headline they’re looking for one or more of those three.

Our greatest achievement in building a Web site is helping a person achieve his or her goal. During our research our biggest discovery proved to be that navigation and content work best when they are wed tightly together. “It seems that you can t really separate content and navigation” says Jarod Spool, “without losing something important in the process.” How to make your Web site fast and usable

If folks who click find something that delivers on that promise in that headline they stay and possibly return. If not, they feel thwarted and leave. Here are five things you can do to make it more likely they get what they came for.

Five Ways to Deliver to the Clickers Who Follow a Headline to Your Blog …

  1. Deliver what your headline promises.
  2. Deliver it in short paragraphs using subheads surrounded by lots of white space so that people have room to think and breathe.
  3. Deliver it without making folks jump over ads or through hoops to get to the prize that the headline promises.
  4. Deliver it by recognizing the people who take time to comment.
  5. Deliver it by making it easy for folks to stay..

The most important thing is deliver — do what we say we’re going to do.

It’s not the click that doesn’t come that’s a loss. It’s the click that comes to find that we’re not what we suggested we would be. A great headline followed by something less doesn’t win. It doesn’t even finish.

Great headline, lame blog post — you’ve been there. What’s your response when you end up on one of those?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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Open Mic 7pm Chgo Time: Let’s Talk About Things That Went Wrong!

Filed Under Blog Review, SOB Business, Successful Blog | 10 Comments

Yes the Mic Will Be on Tonight

Join Us Tonight

We”ll Laugh About This One Day . . . Right?

We can talk about blind date stories, most embarrassing moments, things we lost, cakes that went flat, glasses we sat on, times we got caught breaking the rules, something we forgot we were supposed to do, and whatever else comes up — even flamenco dancing.

Oh, and bring links about things that went wrong that you want to share!

The rules are simple — be nice.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related article
What is Tuesday Open Comment Night?

What New Friends Have You Met and How Have You Made Life Easy for Them?

Filed Under Blog Review, Successful Blog | 42 Comments

Done these three things lately?

New links connect blogs. New relationships connect people.

New people can add dimension and depth to your thinking and your ideas.

What new friends have you met lately? How have you made getting to know your blog easy for them? Here are three things you might do to get the ball rolling.

  1. Find a new blog in your niche to follow. New blogs are new people with new points of view. Join their discussion by leaving meaningful comments and trackbacks. Every discussion offers an opportunity to learn something new from.
  2. Check your sidebar. Make sure your sidebar is friendly to new arrivals who want to take a tour. Showing your readers where to find things is advertising.
  3. Organize your archives as your readers would want them, and make a Popular Posts page. Ask your readers how they use your archives. Try to use them yourself to see how they actually work. Take the time to put your most popular articles in one place where new readers can find them as soon as they arrive at your blog.

New friends who feel at home usually come back to visit again.

UPDATE: I am updating this post as part of my response to comments 11-13. Carma this is a post reference that I am linking back to your blog through a trackback. This should show up in your comments for the post called Make New Friends with Trackback.

This is the URl for that page http://karmasword.blogspot.com/2007/03/make-new-friends-with-trackback.html I got there by clicking the time 9:22A.M. (when you posted that post) under your blog. I copied the URL from my browser’s address bar to use it to make the link in my post here.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
For more on how to think like your readers see Customer Think on the Successful Series page.
Watch What You’re Doing.

Classic Revisited: The Blog Review Checklist

Filed Under Blog Review, Checklists, Successful Blog | 6 Comments

Look at Your Blog as Readers Do

Customer Think Logo

In my first week at Successful-Blog, I wrote a Blog Review Checklist. It remains one of the most popular, most linked to, and most visited documents. As I work on the new design for this blog, I’m reminded that we all should be thinking about the points I defined way back then. . . . So I’ve dusted it off complete with the text that introduced it. ________

Look as Readers Do

When was the last time you looked at your blog the way your readers do? If you write only for yourself, you look at it that way every day. . . . You are your audience. You’re done.

The rest of us are looking for an audience a little bit larger than one.

Humans have unconscious tendencies. We do lots of the things we like to do and ignore the things we don’t. This makes for a blog that looks great from our point of view, but can leave gaping holes–holes that our readers see, holes they probably won’t tell us about.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s okay to leave things out, as long as we know that we’re doing it. Not every blog has to do everything. In fact, most really shouldn’t. But walking around with a hole in your blog could be embarassing, especially if you don’t know about it.

Blog Review Checklist

Here’s a checklist to make sure your blog’s (ahem) vital parts are covered.

Sure it takes time to review your blog. It takes even more to make tweaks and changes. But you invest so much time blogging. Doesn’t it seem worth it?

A rule of good publishing says,

Spare the reader not yourself.

In the end, you won’t be sorry.

What will you be doing for your readers today?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

PS Thank you for your patience with the sidebar issue. Fixing it is more complicated than it might seem.

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Blog Design Checklist
Editing for Quality and a Content Editor’s Checklist
Checklist for Linking to Quality Blogs

6 Reasons Readers Don’t Click Your Ads and What to Do about It

Filed Under Blog Review, Successful Blog | 31 Comments

Busted!

Customer Think Logo

Last night I did something that I found curious. Here’s what happened.

I was writing a piece and I needed to think. To get some space, I put the idea on hold, while I clicked over to check my stats. I’d hardly started, when a comment came in on Successful-Blog. I went back to talk about the Jolly Green wearing PayPerPost on his chest.

That done, I returned to my stats, but the window was partly covered.

By accident I clicked on an ad!

Oh no! Not that! Busted!

Someone Already Knew

The second the ad came up, I automatically looked away. NO! I’m not an ad clicker. No, no no! I needed out of there right away!

I looked around for a witness to my reckless clicking. No one here saw. Still I knew Some place, somewhere, in some stats, someone already had tracked me there.

Then I had an epiphany. Okay, I woke up.

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