Email marketing is one of the main techniques to market your 
online business and/or affiliate programs. Let's assume your 
email is powerful and effective in persuading the reader to 
buy your product, opt in to your email list or to join your 
affiliate program. It's completely useless if your email does 
not get opened, or your sales copy is not read. Therefore the 
headline of your salescopy or email is as important as your
sales message. You must intrigue the reader to read your copy 
and this is all via headlines.

This article is an addition to my other article "How to Write
Articles To Advertise Your Online Business". To receive this
article, send a blank email to:

   mailto:headarticle@onlinemoneymachine.com

Below are tips which I personally use to write headlines. It'll 
be worthwhile for you to write a checklist based on these tips 
when writing your own headlines so that your copy has more 
chance of being read. 


Tips on writing powerful, intriguing headlines:

1. Your Headline Must Be Properly Capitalized. Don't put all 
your headlines into block capital letters. This is rude and it 
also screams, "I'm an advertisement and I'm hear to sell you 
something". It also sets off the spam filters so that your email 
will never get delivered. 


2. Personalize Your Headlines If Possible so that the recipient 
will feel the email is addressed to them only. A person's name is 
the most powerful word that will get him to notice something. You 
will pay more attention to a discussion if your name is mentioned 
during the talk. This is human nature. Everyone cares about 
themselves and wants to know more about what relates to them. 


3. What Is the Benefit of Reading Your Email? Always tell the 
reader with your headline what benefit your are offering. People 
do not treat email messages as something special. We have so many 
email nowadays and many of them are junk, we will try and delete 
everything that we consider as junk. If your email captures the 
readers' interests then your email will be one of the ones which 
will be opened. All people care about is 'What's in it for 
me?". Make sure your headline tells them that. 


4. Solving Problems. One of the most powerful benefits a reader 
will notice is if the headline tells them that there is a chance 
their problems will be solved. For example, take the headline for 
this article. People will want to know how to write powerful 
headlines so that they can increase their sales and get their 
ad copy read. 


5. Holding the Reader By the Hand. I hate to tell you this but 
even if you are offering the reader advice, reports or useful 
information, that does not guarantee the reader will read the 
ad copy. This is because they have probably seen a lot of the 
information already since they are interested in the topic. So 
to further persuade the reader to read your sales message, you 
must tell them that you are explaining what they need to know 
in simple terms and that you are basically "holding them by the 
hand". 

People like information and like to read things which are easy to 
understand. Telling them that the information you are offering is 
a "Step by Step.." or a "How to..' will increase the response 
rate of reading further on. People in general are lazy. They like 
to be told how to do things and not figure it out by themselves. 


6. Read Your Junk Emails. Treat your junk emails as good 
educational material. Instead of deleting the emails, create a 
folder and place all the junk emails which you have received 
and have opened to this folder. 

Just imagine, you now have a folder of emails with effective 
headlines. They are effective because either you did not know 
they are junk or they are junk but you opened them anyway. Study 
this folder of headlines and learn what made those headlines so 
effective that you continued to read them. 


7. Maintain a Swipe File. This is a file which contains all 
headlines which you think are brilliant and can use in the 
future. A lot of the times, we are stuck for ideas. Go back to 
this file and browse and choose the one which you think is most 
appropriate for your situation. Most professional copywriters 
have a swipe file. So you need one as well. 


I hope you will use this advice as a checklist everytime you 
write headlines. Remember with a bad headline, you might as well 
have no sales copy, because no one is going to read beyond your 
headline. 

Alan Cheng, is the owner of http://www.onlinemoneymachine.com/?6
the membership site with everything to help beginners setup
a profitable online business website. You can contact Alan at:
mailto:alan@onlinemoneymachine.com