One of the the most important aspects of copywriting is the almighty Headline. This is what captures your readers attention and pulls them into reading the rest of your promotional text. If you don’t get the headline right the rest won’t matter. And if that headline doesn’t reach out and SMACK THE VISITOR in the face to grab their attention, you’ve likely lost them to a number of other distractions you’re competing with such as emails, kids, phones, instant messages, etc.

So, you ask…how do I find out how to write a good headline? Simple, borrow from the best. Go review dozens of effective sales letters or landing pages in your market. Where do you find these? Easy. Go to google.com and do some searching on your topic then look at those people placing ads (the links at the top) as they’re likely doing one of two things: a) making money or b) wasting time. In most cases they’re making money so it’s a good idea to study what’s out there and working and simply replicate success.

If that doesn’t present a lot of *really* impactful headlines for you here is a link to a pdf file that has 342 Headlines you can copy and steal!

Enjoy!

-Sean

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And it rocked…

Hitting goals personally and professionally are connected and I’m having a blast doing both. To top it off, how groovy is it to be able to run on amazingly clean part of California’s coastline.

Here’s a few shots of where this 5k took place in Avila Beach, California.

I swear Aunt Bee and Opie live here in what I lovingly refer to as “Kansas on the Coast”

type-atcha-later,
Sean

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I will also have my first 2 information/service products done within this time frame. One will be on SEO friendly/hacks to popular forum scripts (phpbb, vbulletin, and simplemachines)…the other on the domaining (and development) industry.

Hope you all had a great weekend (and a great holiday for those friends, family and clients that observed Yom Kippur recently)…

type-atcha-later,
Sean

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1) Log into paypal
2) Click on “Merchant Services” (dark blue tab in top middle of page)
3) Click on > Website Payments Standard (on left side navigation menu)
4) Now you can choose on what type of item you want to sell:

a) Sell Single Items (This is the case for most people)
b) Sell Mulitple Items
c) Accept Contributions
d) Accept Recurring Payments (great for hosting, & ongoing service contracts or consulting retainers)
e) Sell Gift Certificates

For our purposes we’ll now go into the Sell Single Items menu

5) Click on the > Get Buy Now Buttons link that you see under the orange example button

6) Enter the data you see on this page:

a) Item name/service: (Your customers will see this so make it make sense)
b) Item ID/number: optional
c) Price:
…etc, etc, etc…

The next part is choosing a button. They have a few nice ones you can choose from or you can create and use a custom button for your site.

They have about half a dozen you can choose directly from this page or you can click on “Other button sizes” or “Use your own button image”

Once you’re done choosing or creating your button then scroll to the bottom and click on the “Create Button Now” button…it will then give you some encrypted or html code that you should copy and paste into the source code of your html/form sales page.

The easy way to make sure you copied all of this is by putting your cursor in the box where the code is and then typing Cntrl A wich whill highlight all of the code.

Then type Cntrl C and it will copy it and be ready for you to Cntrl V (paste) it into your html editor.

I hope this helps those of you needing to know how to insert a paypal button on their website. If you have any other questions drop a comment here.

type-atcha-later,
Sean

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Yeh, I hear ya… Well the wife and I decided to start training for a triathalon this coming year and I need to put together that 3.x miles of running. I haven’t run 2 miles straight in many many many years so this morning was an accomplishment.

Why am I blogging about this? Quite simple. I find that my recent (only been able to do 1 mile and about 45-50min on my bike) training has really been helping me focus getting projects done for myself and clients.

Taking action daily, scheduling things in life that are important, working through things that are blocking you (pain, distractions, etc) just seem to…well…be what works!

I encourage you to push through whatever is in your way. Schedule your life and make it happen, it feels awesome.

(Yes, some of this is my endorphins speaking and it feels great!)

type-atcha-later,

Sean

PS: For those friends and clients of mine that are celebrating Rosh Hashanah I hope you’re not working and just casually surfing around. To you and yours… La Shana Tova!

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“In life, attitude is altitude. When most people don’t understand the usefulness of domain names and half the population doesn’t use the Internet, there is still a great deal of untapped opportunity for you to make your mark, but you’ve “gotta wanna”. Find a good name, create a rudimentary site and repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.. Buy low sell high and repeat, repeat, repeat.. Find your sweet spot add value for an existing player and repeat, repeat, repeat. The world is your oyster.”

This guy is telling it like it is. There is a freaking WORLD of opportunity out there if you can just turn off the negative influences in your life (eg. news, time vampires, whiners, etc) and focus on your game you’ll be amazed with what starts happening.

type-atcha-later,

Sean

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http://www.sean.im

Why did I put this up?  I guess a few reasons:

1) Boredom
2) Thought it’d be nice to keep it in a central locatoin instead of digging through my HD for the most recent .doc
3) I must have been feeling the need to walk down memory lane as much of what I’ve done over the past few years isn’t on it.
4) Something to do with a domain that was collecting dust.
5) Did I mention boredom.

I guess in a way I’d be lying though about not looking for a job.  But lately what I’m doing is creating a new job for myself.  I don’t think I could ever deal with a 9-5 office job again, however working more closely with a large organization or an energetic, interesting team would be a blast.  I do miss the social interaction of working on a team.  Although I have a core group of people I work with, we’re spread out over the US, Canada and Europe…and it’s just not quite the same.  That being said, I love what I do and am bringing on more clients than I can keep up with lately.  Soon I’m going to have to narrow them down and/or start charging more.

Ok, enough rambling from me this evening.

Take care and make sure to spend some time building the reality and job you want in life!

type-atcha-later,
Sean

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Before I go off on a tangent let me get back on track here. Podcasting, what is it. Simply creating an mp3 of yourself describing something or you doing an interview with someone. Once that’s done you need to wrap it up in a very specific rss (enclosure) format that I will cover in a future post and then get to submitting it to all of the major podcast directories (also will be included in an upcoming post).

Here is one of the most significant places you need to submit your podcast to — odeo.com. After you’ve submitted it you’ll want to do what they refer to as “claim it”…this simply involves logging in grabbing some html code and pasting it on your blog or specific rss feed.

Here’s a sample of what it looks like:

My Odeo Channel (odeo/aeac84fdcac45a0f)

Sound simple? It is once you walk through it a few times. For those that want a more hand holding, step by step guide, stay tuned! I’ll be putting out a guide on this in the very near future.

Take care and have a great rest of the week!

type-atcha-later,
Sean

PS: If you have a profitable business online and are tied up in other projects or just not sure how to take it to the next level and are considering selling it…shoot me an email. I have an active group of buyers that are currently looking to buy online businesses in multiples of 18-36 months income…covering roughly the $40,000-$400,000 price range. If I negotiate a successful acquisition of your website/business my fees are 15% of the transaction figure.

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1. None or Poorly Handled Tracking
2. Poor Quality (Score) Landing Pages
3. Over Reliance on One Source
4. Too Few Keywords & Ego
5. Bad Adcopy & Layout

Let me explain a bit on each point…

Tracking — If you are just buying hits and not tracking things such as amount of traffic produced from each keyword (or phrase), the cost for that click, versus the ultimate sale or creation of a lead…well then you’re shooting in the dark. Imagine how much better this money could be spent with even the most rudimentary tracking systems being put in place.

Landing Pages — If you are sending your traffic to some generic front end of a domain that is not custom tailored to the search term/phrase, you’re clearly walking in the ’shooting in the dark’ place again. Also, specifically with Google Adwords there are some quality signals that can decrease the CPC for your campaign. Totally worth hooking up. Here’s a few links to keep you busy reading on this topic:

https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=21388
https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=10215
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2005/12/new-addition-to-quality-score.html
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/07/landing-page-quality-update.html
https://adwords.google.com/select/siteguidelines.html

Eggs in One Basket — Why would you want to base your entire business on one source of traffic? Just ask yourself that question 2-3 more times and if it’s not making lightbulbs go off, uhm, well, it’s going to be challenge to help you. I get wanting to start off slow or get one thing right before moving onto another, but once the process is working it’s time to start throwing more nets and evaluating.

The Longtail — Oh no, not that buzz word again! Yes, buying the keyword “mortgage ” or “real estate” and getting those crazy expensive clicks and a lot of them might be fun…but honestly, what’s your ROI on those in comparison to the less expensive 3-4-5-6 keyword phrases? Not sure, see item #1 in this post. Check the ego at the door and rake in the cash on those wider phrases (unless the tracking shows that your expensive keywords are paying off nicely — again see item #1).

White Space, Fonts and Colors - Oh My! – Yes, the old school adcopy is important even on the Internets. I recently helped a guy go from ’spending 30 to make 30′ to ’spending 30 to make 100+’ by changing the font style, font color, font size and location of some links and white space issues. Pretty amazing eh? It works, not sure exactly why but tried and true is, well, tried and true.

type-atcha-later,

Sean

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