MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

Your headline is the single most important part of your site. In fact, a good headline might easily boost the performance of your site and landing pages by over 100%!

"Based on hundreds of tests conducted, a good headline can be as much as 17 times more effective than a so-so headline. And this is with exactly the same body copy!"

~ Ted Nicholas (Master direct marketer)

While the headline is the most important part of your site, it is also one of the easiest to change. So, we recommend that the quickest and most impactful way to give ClickMuse a first try is to test two different headlines.

How to get started:

Step 1: Go to the "Page Optimization" tab in ClickMuse and enter your main landing page such as www.mindvalleylabs.com/main.php

Step 2: Copy and paste the ClickMuse code exactly where you want ClickMuse to insert content into your page. In this case, you want ClickMuse to only serve and rotate your headline so you would copy and paste the code snippet where your headline used to be. See the screenshot below as an example.

Of course, you could run your entire page of ClickMuse to test any element of your page but now we are getting ahead of ourselves. In this example, we are keeping it super simple.

Step 3: Now, write two headlines that you want to test via ClickMuse. For the first headline, just keep your current version. This is your control group. Now try to come up with a better headline for the second version. Here is a few quick and easy tips that might help.

• If you have little time, you can simply put one headline into "quotes" and leave the quotes off the other headline. Our own tests have revealed that even such a simple change can boost results by up to 25%. We wrote about this here

Here is some other headline writing formulas that might give you more ideas

• Who Else Wants to ___________ ? For example: "Who else wants to Learn the Secrets of Ecommerce Success?"
• Revealed: The Secret to ____________. For example: "Revealed: The Secrets to Learning Foreign Languages Quickly."
• 22 Reasons You _________________. This example uses the word "reasons" and provides a specific number for credibility. For example, "22 Reasons You Should Be Testing Your Headline Today."
• Don't Do ________ Before You Do __________. This example grabs the reader with a warning. For example, "Don't buy any Autoresponder Software Before You Read this Article."

Once you have created your two headlines ClickMuse will start to rotate them on your page so that every visitor will get to see one of the two versions.

Step 4: Define your goal and see instant results! Now the only thing left for you to do is to define a goal so that you can see which headline is performing better than the other. To define your goal, all you need to do is to enter the goal URL into your settings on ClickMuse.

By goal we are talking about the most wanted response that you are optimizing your page for. For most small ecommerce businesses the most wanted response is either going to be (1) signups or (2) sales. Once you have defined your goal, ClickMuse will show you how each test page is performing relative to the goal and after just a few hundred visitors you should be able to tell which headline is outperforming the other.

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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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