Content Writing & Copywriting Blog

An Example Of A Great Headline

Feb 03, 2008 No Comments »

Online copywriters and content writers are always stressing upon the overwhelming importance of creating great, compelling webpage titles or headlines. You need great webpage titles to draw traffic from the search engine result pages as well as from the various social bookmarking websites you’re planning to target. I remember a few months ago I had written a post on the subject of creating great blog post titles.

Yesterday morning I was sitting in the balcony enjoying the winter sun with my wife and we were both sipping tea and casually browsing through our respective newspapers. Whenever we are sitting together my wife often jokes that I’m more interested in what she is doing and less interested in my own things. This was one of those moments when my eyes were on her newspaper instead of my newspaper. She gets a Hindi newspaper; I noticed this heading on the first page and immediately thought what a great headline it was.

If you look at the image included above I have encircled the headline. It translates to: Aishwarya Rai and Angeline Jolie may have a common ancestor. The news that was associated with the title had nothing to do with the two beauties, it referred to a recent research that has shown that all the blue-eyed people in the world may have a common ancestor. The team that created the front page layout of the newspaper knows that it would be irresistible for most of the people to ignore the title and in fact my wife headed straightaway to page 12 to see how Aishwarya Rai and Angeline Jolie may be related to each other.

Had they used a simple heading, something like, all blue-eyed people have a common ancestor, it wouldn’t have interested many people.

What makes this a catchy headline? The copywriter knows how crazy people are about reading about both the ladies. Although it is a Hindi newspaper and many readers may not be familiar with Angelina Jolie, even the stray dogs in India know Aishwarya Rai. The readers would certainly like to know with which foreign beauty she shares an ancestor. The copywriter has combined the celebrity status of both the names and created a headline that cannot fail to perform even when it doesn’t talk about them.

Would the readers be pissed off after reading the news because they find out that these two beauties are not related in the real sense? I don’t think so because the headline doesn’t mislead; they both have blue eyes after all and the blue-eyed people are supposed to have a common ancestor and hence they should too have a common ancestor.

Later on I discovered that most newspapers, at least in India, used the same sort of headline referring to Aishwarya Rai and Angelina Jolie.

All these Social Networking Websites

Jul 07, 2007 3 Comments »

Why are there all of a sudden so many social networking websites popping up like the rain drops in a rainy season. According to a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project survey more than half (55%) of all online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites.

Within a search of two minutes I found the following websites:

• Twitter
• Ryze
• MySpace
• Pownce
• Jaiku
• Orkut
• Facebook

This WikiPedia link has a massive list of social networking websites.

All these websites provide business and social networking and interaction tools. And if you believe the trend, many of these websites are great hits among the young as well as the professionals. Amazingly, some of them are outright silly. Take for instance Twitter. It beats logic why people would even visit the website, leave alone use it for leaving ultra-boring messages. An average MySpace page is so gross to look at.

Some SEO experts are already suggesting you to invest your time on these websites to generate quality traffic to your websites and blogs? But is it really worth it? Depends on what sort of traffic you want and how much spare time you have got. If you are a big company or a rich entrepreneur, sure you can hire someone to interact on these websites on your behalf because extra traffic doesn’t harm (if you can bear the bandwidth cost). But if are a one-man-woman team then every minute you spend promoting your service is precious. Maintaining social networking website can easily turn out to be a time consuming affair.

But Social Networking Websites are not useless

Social networking websites, if used correctly, can definitely help you build brand awareness and create the right buzz for your service or product, especially for services and products that would appeal to the frequenters of these websites. The power of social media websites lies in the massive amount of traffic they generate. Currently numerous films and other entertainment programs are being promoted through various social media websites.

Technorati Tags: social media websites, face book, twitter, ryze, orkut, pownce, jaiku

Social Linking Via StumbleUpon

Feb 02, 2007 No Comments »

I have neither used linkbaiting nor social media bookmarking websites up till now simply because I’m not writing as regularly and as well as I would like to. I know, I know, I wouldn’t suggest you to have such an attitude, but I’m not in a great hurry to boost my traffic. I want it to increase on its on, gradually. To produce quality content I need some time, and time is something that right now I don’t have.

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Best Blogfights of 2006

Jan 06, 2007 No Comments »

Bloggers easily get into quarrels because blogging is mainly an emotional activity (not always, not always). Since every second kid on the block has jumped on to the “blogging bandwagon” they all have raw emotions and feral attitudes. Nothing wrong in that. Besides, fights invite crowds of onlooker and for blogs it means lots of traffic.

Wired News has compiled a list of the Best Blogfights of 2006. Among these I’m only aware of the Michael Arrington’s travails with his UK editor in December because I’ve just started following the blogsphere (or is it blogosphere?)

Technorati Tags: blog fights

Social Media Optimization vs. Social Media Marketing

Jan 03, 2007 No Comments »

OK, the online world is becoming complex every passing month, week, day, and even hour. Getting decent exposure for your website or blog doesn’t just mean you search engine optimize your website and be happy when the traffic begins to pour in from the search engines. In fact, not basing your online campaign merely on search engines was the theme of my recent post where I wrote that you should focus on getting traffic from other websites and blogs too.

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