It’s all about the hook, baby…

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Have you seen visitors who spend 0 seconds in your web site? Have you noticed vast majority of your readers spend less than 10 seconds in your site? If the answer is yes, you got to work on your hook.

A hook is something that grabs your visitor’s attention and makes them curious enough to read the rest of your sales pitch / article / blog post.

If you are serious about making your way to the top, you always got to use a hook in your headline.

““Amazing Secret Discovered By One-Legged Golfer”

John Carlton, the writer of the above headline and one of the best copy writers in world, claims that, this headline is the most ripped off headline in history…Fair enough. He should be right. I can bet that every golfer who read the above headline kept on reading! He wrote this for golfers. But you can identify the characteristics of his great headline and craft your own for your own niche.

I couldn’t write to this blog last few days because I was working on another niche site. As you all know by now, I am not a blogger by profession. I launched my new niche site last Wednesday but it did not perform well as I expected. There were lot of readers who spent less than 10 seconds on the site. And obviously I did not get the return for what I spent on adwords.

I usually write my own sales copy. But this time due to exams, I had to hire some one from elance to do the writing job. The copy was okay. The ending was superb and very persuasive. I was wondering what went wrong.

So I thought of taking 45 minutes to re-write the whole thing. But I only had to change the header as rest of it was perfectly written. I just took out a “big word” from the header and replaced it with a “simple word”.

You cannot hook a reader with big words. It can turn people off and if you are using them incorrectly you could be missing out on sales. People do not visit your web site to judge your intellectual capacity. (This might work on few niches though.) So keep it simple and try to connect with your readers personally.

For example, what terms you think will connect more with your readers? The words on the left hand side or the words in the right hand side?

“Wealthy” — “Rich”
“Intelligent” — “Smart”
“Sufficient” — “Enough”
“Manufacture” — “Make”
“Additionally” — “What’s more…”
“Anticipate” — “expect”

I do not think I have to answer the question as it is pretty obvious. There are hundreds of words that can be used to hook your visitors with you. Go to the top selling sites and try to identify their hooks. Than make a list and when you are writing your next sales copy or blog post, use them to glue your visitors to your site.

After all, it is very hard to get visitors these days. So it is very important to keep the traffic as long as possible in your site. If you noticed the last few headlines I used at my blog, They helped me to do exactly that. Not only most visitors stayed beyond 2 minutes, page views increased by 60%. It’s all about the hook…Start using it.

I wrote this post as a continuation from the last post. I got lot of emails asking more questions about preparing the sales pitch. I replied to most of them but I cannot personally reply to all the emails as time is the most valuable thing to me these days. So I thought of writing more about this in the coming posts. subscribe to my Rss feed or News letter to get them as soon as I hit the publish button.

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Do not forget to read.
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