As part of marketing my home based business website, I keep an eye on my competition, and their search engine ranking.

For my sites the most profitable traffic comes from search engines. Traffic exchanges, purchased traffic, traffic off articles and that from links on other sites do not seem to be as effective. The other thing I like about search engine engine traffic is that the price is right – free!

As a beginner I’ve learned how to get good rankings with MSN. I’m working my way up the food chain now, looking to understand the “formula” for Yahoo.

This is a well trodden path – I guess everyone has to learn this as they develop their online marketing skills.

In the Digital Point forum I found a great tool today which has already saved many hours of work.

The tool is called Niche Watch. It compares the top listings for Yahoo with your site.

When I used this tool it was immediately clear that I need to work on my site title tags.

I am also weak in the text area for my keywords. Not sure what to do about that, so will look into this over the next few days.

Here is an interesting article from our article directory. Useful for anyone who promotes a home based business.

Recently, I monitored an interesting discussion in one of the forums about the length of headlines on sales pages. Some of the posters were in favor of longer headlines because they communicated more information and had a better chance of catching the interest of the prospect. Other posters claimed that some headlines were so long that they were confusing. Some even claimed that they would take away your breath if you attempted to read them aloud. One poster thought that very long headlines often appeared to be a run-on sentence… even if it technically wasn’t.

I decided it was time to do a study. I wanted to compare headlines on profitable sales pages to headlines on unprofitable ones. I wanted to find out if there really was a difference in the length of their headlines.

To perform that study, I first had to prepare a list of profitable sites and another list of unprofitable sites. I actually already had both due to another study I had recently performed. However, many of the unprofitable sites had disappeared from the Internet. I wasn’t surprised. Why stick around if you can’t make a profit; right?

I had to settle for comparing the headlines of profitable sales pages to the average sales page. I used my list of profitable sites and counted the words and characters in each headline. I skipped any site without a headline. I then looked at sites with ads running on the major search engine for the same product or service. I randomly picked one and also counted the words and characters in it’s headline for the control or average group.

The results were surprising. The average sales page has a headline of only 10 words comprising 55 characters. The profitable sales pages had and average of 14 words and 82 characters in their headlines.

We can conclude that profitable sales pages use longer headlines than the average sales page. That isn’t so surprising.

The other finding was much more surprising. With only a handful of exceptions in thousands of data points, a length longer than 150 characters was very rare. Can we conclude that extremely long headlines aren’t profitable? No; there are other possibilities. However, we can conclude that it is exceptionally rare for profitable sales pages to use headlines longer than 150 characters. In fact, 90% of the data points fell within 131 characters.

That is my new recommendation. I intend to only use headlines that are at least 80 characters long and no longer than 131 characters and I advise the same to my clients.

This places me right in the middle of the correlation group for profitable headlines. Your headline is an important factor to consider when you are optimizing sales. I hope you consider following suit. If so, let me know if this study has improved your results. I look forward to hearing from you.

James D. Brausch is the creator of the Glyphius software. Glyphius copywriting software is guaranteed to increase the profitability of your copywriting using a statistical analysis of profitable ads. For more information, visit: http://www.Glyphius.com

How would you like to seriously ramp up your profits and
launch your site to new levels of wealth online?

You can… joining the ranks of other successful Internet
marketers who are making in excess of $100,000… $500,000…
even MILLIONS of dollars per year!

To start creating this kind of mind-boggling wealth online,
you just need to ask yourself one simple question: “How?”

Too many Internet marketers make the mistake of focusing on
what they’re going to sell, instead of how they’re going to
make money online. And the answer to how to generate massive
wealth on the Internet lies in choosing the right profit
models.

That’s why I want to look at some of the most straightforward
ways to make money on your site… and then dive into the more
advanced (and lesser-known) strategies that can catapult your
business to new revenue levels — and create real wealth
instead of just “income.”

————————————————————
The Three Basic Models for Generating Income on the Internet
————————————————————

Let’s start at the beginning, with the basic ways you can
get online and start making money:

1. SELL A PRODUCT ON YOUR WEB SITE:

Becoming an online merchant and selling a product on
your web site is by far the most straightforward –
and obvious — way to earn an income online, which is
why it’s also the most common.
Read the rest of this entry

We are always on the lookout for good website traffic generation ideas.

Check out the link below. There is an excellent post at Jamdo Blog Marketing that anyone can try for free.

http://jamdo.com/how-to-get-3000-visitors-from-technorati-in-48-hours/

I’ll give it a try in the next few days and report progress.

My favourite forum is the one over at Digital Point. While lurking there the other day I stumbled across an interesting thread on affiliate marketing.

A bunch of people who had never tried affiliate marketing decided to give it a go. They selected a product, got Adsense accounts and started advertising.

Some of the results were none too shabby. And the honesty of the posts made the thread compelling reading.

So much so that I resolved to build some more affiliate content into my sites.

It also showed me that Adsense is a viable advertising medium for some affiliate programs. I had earlier flagged it away for everying but one campaign where I get paid $2.00 for everyone who joins a free program.

You can get to the thread by clicking here Digital Point Forum

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.