The ML Editor

It doesn’t matter if you have a professional looking website,
with a superb product or service. Nor does it matter if your
sales copy is the best there is. Without the right wording in
your headline, you will not make many sales. Do you know how to
create the perfect headline?

A very good friend of mine, Mavis, made the fatal mistake of
ignoring the importance of killer headlines. This mistake nearly
lost her her business. She had a great niche product,
hand-crafted jewellery. She was able to sell loads of beautiful
items through her stall at a local market, but she wanted to
start selling her wares to a wider market and saw the internet
as the perfect medium.

With only basic computer skills, she managed to put a pretty
impressive website together. Her sales copy was good, she put in
the essential call to action, everything was just perfect, or so
she thought.

So what did Mavis do wrong?

Simply, it was the headline. It just didn’t work. It didn’t have
the power to grab the attention of the potential customer. The
headline does 90% of the work when it comes to sales copy.
Unless you can catch the interest of a customer, you have no
customers. Not a plan if you are trying to make a living through
the internet.

Did Mavis know how important the headlines where?

She did plenty of research before she set up her website. She
read everything that she could get her hands on. Covering all
the topics from web hosting to marketing, sales copy to
advertising. But nothing on the importance of headline wording.

Everything she read she put into practice. Considering she knew
very little before she started, she did an amazing job. Thinking
that she had covered it all and with everything in place, she
launched her site and generated lots of targeted traffic to it.
She only made 2 sales in 4 months. Not looking good for Mavis is
it.

She rang me up one day and asked me what was she doing wrong.
She told me that she was at her wits end and didn’t know what to
do. She said that the website was getting lots of visitors, but
they weren’t staying there long enough to become customers. I
went straight to view her website and as soon as the page loaded
I could clearly see what the problem was. You guessed it, the
headline. The powerful and hypnotic wording was just not there
in her headline. That one, singular oversight was costing her
dearly. The website was beautifully designed and easy to
navigate. The sales copy was very professional, she used all the
right calls to action and offered an excellent refund policy.
But the fact is, no-one ever saw any of this because they never
got past the headline.

I told her to come around to see me and I would show her how she
could turn things around. Mavis and I sat at the computer and I
showed her the good, the bad and the ugly of headlines on
websites. Within a few minutes, she could see where she was
going wrong. She just hadn’t been using the right words to get
the effect that is needed. You have to GRAB the attention of
browsing customers, by using powerful, emotional and hypnotic
words. So I made us another cup of coffee before we sat down and
I showed Mavis how simple it is to make sizzling headlines.

You need to start by creating a ‘benefit statement’. This is
what will make your reader want to know about what you are
selling. Then you sandwich the benefit statement with action
words and phrases. These are the true ingredients of
attention-grabbing headline writing.

Okay, so what is a benefit statement?

This is simply the end ‘result’ of what your customer will
experience when purchasing or using your product.

In mavis’s case we came up with the benefit statement of “own
unique hand-crafted jewellery.’ Then we decided to sandwich this
with ‘the perfect way to’ and ‘delivered straight to your door.’
The result:- “The Perfect Way To Own Unique Hand-Crafted
Jewellery, Delivered Straight To Your Door.” We played around
with a few more, but decided to give this one a go.

What happened to Mavis’s business?

Mavis went home and immediately set about changing her home
page. She removed the old headline and replaced it with the new
one. Within 24 hours of Mavis uploading her updated website, 5
orders where placed. By the end of the month she had made sales
of $1564. She hadn’t made any other changes to her website, just
the headline and it completely turned her business around. She
did have the advantage of already having targeted traffic
visiting her site. Before the change of headlines, that traffic
just clicked away from her page, but with the new headline, they
became drawn in, taking time to have a look at the exquisite
goods that Mavis had to offer. Some people staying long enough
to make a purchase. Goal accomplished.

In conclusion, the headline is THE most important thing to take
into consideration when writing your sales copy. Getting it
wrong can have devastating results. Getting it right can have
positively profound affects.

Never, ever underestimate the power of headlines. Unless you
want your business to suffer dismally low sales and never really
make it off the ground.

If you are having problems writing your winning headlines, you
could always pay someone else to write them for you. Or you can
get a software program that will do it for you. The first option
could be a bit expensive, but there are some fairly cheap
software programs that you will be able to use every time you
need new headlines, so I would recommend this.

Jane Harper.

An oscilloscope is an electronic device used for measuring voltage of an electronic device against time. It is mainly used to diagnose the working condition of any electric equipment. It signifies one or more electric potential differences in a two-dimensional graph, with the horizontal axis representing time and the vertical axis showing voltage. This is represented in the form of a line, known as a Trace over a graphical cathode ray or LCD screen. Some oscilloscopes can show even two or more waveforms. These are used for phase comparison and timing measurements.

Oscilloscopes are very heavy instruments. However, there are handheld oscilloscopes available that have all the features of a regular scope, yet are more affordable and handy. Handheld or portable oscilloscopes are ideal for automotive, service and development applications or even as a hobby. They are very easy to use and come with attractive options like LCD display. Some are also offered with carry cases for easy portability. Low noise, low weight, high sensitivity, insulated and safe measuring probe etc. are some of the attractive options.

Prices of handheld oscilloscopes range from $330 for a 100KHZ Multiscope with PC Interface to $3000 or higher, depending upon the features and the model. They are operated with batteries- either regular or rechargeable. There are also used or refurbished handheld oscilloscopes available for lesser prices.

Handheld oscilloscopes are very rugged yet handy to use. They have different capacities like 200 and 100 MHz bandwidths; 1 GS/s and 500 MS/s Sample Rates per Channel; and independently floating isolated scope and DMM channels.

Fluke and Extech are the two popular brands of handheld oscilloscopes. Comprehensive information about handheld oscilloscopes is available over the internet. There are several sites that allow you to view different models and compare their features, prices, options and even warranties. Besides, handheld oscilloscopes can also be ordered online.

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You may have invested a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money in developing a top-notch website. You may use your site to promote your business, to sell a product, or to dispense information. But even the most beautiful site on the Web and the best business, product, or information available won’t bring you returns unless visitors can find your website. The only way to drive traffic to your site is through website promotion.

Depending on your resources and your goals, you can use one or more of these website marketing tools to drive visitors to your site.

Search Engine Optimization: Also called SEO, this form of search engine marketing involves discovering the words and phrases - called “keywords” - that will cause your site to rank high in search engine results. When you incorporate these keywords into your content, keywords, and meta tags, the search engine robots that crawl your site will notice, and you can improve your site’s ranking and positioning among search engines.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising: Also called PPC, this form of Internet advertising allows you to place keyword advertisements with search engines and specify the maximum amount you’re willing to pay each time a visitor clicks onto your ad and is taken to your site.

Email Marketing: It’s easy to collect names and email addresses from visitors to your site, and email software allows you to send mass email promotions to your subscriber list. You can advertise your products or send out informative newsletters that lead your subscribers back to your website.

Content Article Advertising: Virtually everyone who runs a website is hungry for content. Through posting interesting articles on article content hubs, you can gain free website promotion. This is because, although you allow other sites to reproduce your articles, you can include a short biography at the end that links back to your website.

Press Release Marketing: Press releases are another terrific way of garnering extensive website promotion. Basically, you write something newsworthy about your business, website, or product, and submit it to one of the press release distribution websites. Again, because there is such a demand for content, it’s likely that your press release will be used in both online and traditional media. The trick is to write a release that is relevant to something already in the news, so that you are presenting a new angle for follow-up stories.

These are just five of the ways you can engage in website promotion. There are several others, such as pop-up advertising, banner advertising, web traffic exchanges, and links from other websites and blogs. The most important thing to remember is, whatever form of Internet advertising you choose, getting the right information is key to attaining online success.

Chris Robertson is an author of Majon International, one of the worlds MOST popular internet marketing companies on the web.
Learn more about Five Steps to Website Promotion or Majon’s Internet directory.

Write it, offer it for free on your site and they will come. Yeah right and then you woke up.

Or stay in your happy little daze, constantly check your counter 80 times a day and be the only unique visitor your site gets. Either way you are deluding yourself if you don’t think marketing is the key to your success on the Internet.

So easy to say — market your site — but so hard to do. Especially since the Internet is so vast, where do you start?

You start by taking it one step at a time — otherwise because of the size of the Internet, you’ll go insane, get depressed because you feel like you’re tap dancing in place or quit. None of these are viable choices so let’s see if I can help you on your journey to success.

But first, understand this — it takes sheer hard work, persistence and loads of time to be successful on the Internet. Marketing is an every day job because the Internet is dynamic and constantly changing. What worked yesterday, won’t today.

If you have a minimal budget (read that non-existent) at your disposal, it means you must be creative in your marketing endeavors. But before you become creative, you’d better get organized or you’ll still be dancing in place. This means, you build a marketing template to place links on when you go to sites.

This is simply an HTML page with headings so when you visit a site you’ll need to return to next week or month, you just copy and paste the URL and put it on your template. It should be a hyperlink (i.e. <

The first place you’re going to visit is your:

==> Browser’s Favorites Folder

If you’re like most people, it is chock full of sites you thought might be useful later but now is so disorganized you don’t even like opening it anymore. Or it’s so organized with folders, all the sites are out of sight which means out of mind. This is neither efficient nor effective when marketing. You need to place these sites on your new HTML template page.

Yes, I can hear your gnashing of teeth and groaning but the time spent organizing this wealth of information will be worth it. Think how you’d feel if your computer crashes and you lost all the URLS. By placing them on your template, you can easily back up this information onto a floppy disk or rewriteable CD.

Before you merrily go placing the link from your Favorites Folders onto your template, you need to click on it and make sure the site is still up and running. Also, you’ll want to make sure it goes to the exact page you need. This is so you do not waste your time going to the index page and clicking links next month when you use it again (i.e., the link for search engines should go directly to their Add URL page).

Now the second step is to go to:

==> Search Engines

This is where creative thinking comes into play. You are going to have to figure out who your target audience is so you might want to read my article “Targeting Using A Mind Map” to find out. The object in marketing is not to get the most hits but the most TARGETED hits. You can have a million visitors to your site but if they aren’t buying your products or services, what’s the point of marketing? Bragging rights doesn’t put food on your table or a roof over your head.

No, what you’re looking for is places your target market hangs out. So you are going to look for portals or sites that cater to these people. Now this can take time as search engines are notorious for spewing forth less than stellar results. So go to their instruction pages and find out how to do advanced searches. Once you know what you’re looking for your searches become easier and produce better results.

Normally, these portal sites have message boards and owners who are receptive to products which will benefit their visitors. You’d be surprised at how many owners love it when you offer them something free they can give to their members.

And usually, this doesn’t take anything more than offering them a content rich article or free ebook where you put an upsell message at the end (see my articles “How to Make A Free eBook” and “Upsell For Free” at my site).

Also click on people’s sites who leave messages on the boards because their sites usually have links to other like minded (theme) sites you will find useful. Pretty soon, much to your surprise, you’ll find yourself just surfing these link pages to find your targeted audience and you won’t be using the search engines all that much.

While you’re at the search engines remember to copy and paste the link for the Add URL page to put on your template and also you might as well add your site information again. Although this is getting harder to do now that most of them have gone to making you pay.

The third step is:

==> Group Lists

In particular, http://www.yahoogroups.com and http://www.topica.com. Both are a gold mine for marketing purposes. Their search boxes will lead you to lists which pertain to your targeted audience. For instance on my Trabar.com site, I sell a yarn holder my husband makes. It’s pretty unique and the only people interested would be a niche audience of knitters and crocheters so I put these two “keywords” into their search box and on yahoogroups alone, I came up with 207 knitting lists and 112 crocheting lists.

My intent is not to spam any of these lists but I will join the ones I find interesting and post useful information along with my signature line (if their lists do not have rules against this).

Also, I look at their group list main page because a lot of the list owners have their site addresses on these pages. I know if I go to their sites, I will also find a wonderful amount of link pages leading me to other sites. Some will have message boards which let you leave links to useful products but most times you will just join their community and reply to posts with useful information. You, of course, include your URL.

This does two things:

1. Allows you to help people

2. And if message board accepts HTML, allows you to leave a link which search engines pick up on thus increasing your popularity rating.

Remember when you’re doing this to include each site’s URL as a hyperlink on your HTML template because you’ll want to go back and post on a regular basis.

As I said earlier, marketing on the Internet takes hard work, persistence and loads of time but these three suggestions should help. Learning how to market smarter not harder is the key to being successful on the Internet.

About The Author

Judith Tramayne-Barth

MARKET SMARTER NOT HARDER! A Good Read CD doesn’t tell you “how” to market — the 600 link marketing ebook takes you to actual PLACES to market. Why reinvent the wheel when I have done the work for you. To find out more, visit: http://www.agoodread.com