Sex in Advertising

Monday, November 03, 2008

Sex in Advertising

From the ContentMarketingToday.com site:

Posted: 31 Oct 2008 07:30 AM CDT

What your blog should borrow from the classic woman’s mag and their newsstand cousins.

Sex sells. And so do great headlines.

Imagine for a moment that your blog is on a giant newsstand something like what you might find in a Manhattan Barnes & Noble. As a magazine you are competing with hundreds of other magazines for the attention of prospective readers who are browsing quickly through the racks. The right headline can make all the difference. It sure does for Cosmo!

As a blogger, you are competing with hundreds of thousands of other bloggers for the attention of online visitors with very little time to spend on any one article. Thus, your article headlines are every bit as important as those of Cosmopolitan magazine.

The Cosmo folks need to sell zillions of copies from newsstands. Great headlines do the trick for them and they can do the trick for you.

In a great series of posts on Brian Clark’s CopyBlogger, you can learn how to mimic Cosmo-style headlines and transform them for the topics you actually cover.

A few examples from his post with my revised ‘your headline’ version:

Cosmo: The 22 Best Relationship Tips Ever
Your Headline: 22 Best Customer Relationship Tips Ever

Cosmo: Guys Spill: White Lies They Tell Women All the Time
Your Headline: Little White Lies We Should Never Tell Our Customers

Cosmo: A Shocking Thing 68% of Chicks Do in Bed
Your Headline: a Shocking Thing 68% of Retailers Do to Their Customers

Your blog probably has nothing to do with sex. Even so, sizzling headlines will certainly increase your devoted readership.

If you’d like to improve your blog quality and readership dramatically, become a regular reader of CopyBlogger. Brian provides consistently creative and practical tips that you can put to work right away.