Are You Missing Out On 80% Of Your Traffic Because Of This Simple Mistake?

Posted by Sant Qiu in : Written Persuasion on November 16, 2007 , trackback

I was checking out my stats of this new blog using WP Blog Stats plugin. The plugin is pretty good and it shows the number of views I received daily in a graph and the most popular articles I have.

I’m pretty happy to see that readers have increased consistently. In particular, the past couple of days views has skyrocketed. However, as I took a closer look at the stats I noticed something very interesting…

There were several really high spikes in the history of the chart. Curious as to what caused those spikes (so I can reproduce those in a more consistent basis), I checked out the articles corresponding to those high views. What I found kinda slapped me awake!

I discovered that the spikes were caused by articles that had… drum roll… ready for this? => Compelling Titles! <=

Frankly I was rather peeved at myself. After all I’m a copywriter who write copy that brought in big profits. I should know the importance of a great headline. Heck I just explained how important a headline is in the Profit Booster Case Studies. And yet I missed this!

The titles are equivalent to the headlines of the articles. And since subscribers might only read your titles in their email notifications, they might not be compelled to go to your blog and read the whole article if the title is weak.

To make sure that I made the right conclusion I check other possible variables such as content quality, time of posting the articles, social bookmarking activities, etc. And nothing else corresponds as clearly as the difference of the titles of the articles.

And the difference of viewers between a weak title compared to an engaging one is as high as 80%! That was a wake up call for me. Frankly, when I blog I’ve been rather lazy and just type in what came to mind at that particular moment. But now that I see the huge difference of just tweaking the titles, I’m convinced I can do much better.

Here are a few of title changes I just made:

From “Profit Booster 2: Boost Your Results By 300%” to “Boost Your Results By 300% - Profit Booster 2” (The first few words are generally more important so I put the benefit up front)

From “Profit Booster Case Study 1 Is Ready” to “How A Letter I Wrote Raked In 5 Figures… And Growing“

From “I’m Revealing Specific, In-Depth Case Studies” to “Actual Campaigns That Raked In $100,000s Revealed In Detail For You“

You would agree that the revised titles are more irresistible, yes? The content is exactly the same. But viewership will definitely improve. Are you missing out on as much as 80% (or more) of your traffic because of weak titles?

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