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.

Last 5 posts by

• Do you think SEO in other lan­guages is eas­ier? — Sep­tem­ber 18th, 2008
• Google Slap — How to recover from a Google Slap? — Sep­tem­ber 8th, 2008
• What Does Your Order But­ton Say? — August 29th, 2008
• Will Knol Rule The Search Engines? First Analy­sis Indicates…It Just Might — July 23rd, 2008
• Are small busi­nesses drop­ping out of AdWords? — July 23rd, 2008

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

If you want to see what's in the private lab...

Ask yourself... which part of your business would you most like to improve?

I can send you 7 tactics related to your specific needs, if you like.

You don't have to buy anything, just take it as a backstage pass into our private course.

Will it give you the solution you've been waiting for?

There's only one way to find out.