Writing great, compelling headlines is one of the most important skills of a copywriter.

On average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest. This is the secret to the power of the headline, and why it so highly determines the effectiveness of the entire piece.

While many of us want to create headlines that grab people's attention, most do not know how to write great headlines. After reading a couple of articles from A List Apart and CopyBlogger , we've gathered some simple, "premade" headlines for your use. We gave you a number of "ready to use" headline keywords , but here are some sample phrases and concepts that will get your creative juices flowing:

• Who Else Wants ...
• The Secret of ...
• Here is a Method that is helping ... to ...
• Little Known Ways to ...
• Get Rid of ... Once and for All
• Here's a Quick Way to ...
• Now You Can Have ...
• What Everybody Should Know about ...
• Give Me ... and I'll Give You ...
• Do You Recognize the ... Early Warning Signs of ...

Once you are past the need for "premade" headings, use some of these concepts to get people to read more than just your headline.

• Reveal Facts
• Use a Quote
• Give a Direct Command
• Focus on Your Unique Selling Position
• Announce Something New
• Be Controversial
• Break Expectations

Like many other Mac users I do most of my coding in TextMate. It has tons of really nice features, one of which is its extensibility – if you need support for a coding language that isn't included with TextMate, you can add it yourself.

Well, I've been using Robert Nyman's DOMAssistant JavaScript library quite a bit lately, and TextMate doesn't support DOMAssistant's methods and syntax. I was getting a bit annoyed at knowing that I was doing a lot of unnecessary typing because of this, so I decided to create a TextMate bundle for DOMAssistant.

Armed with my copy of TextMate, James Edward Gray II's excellent TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac, and the DOMAssistant documentation, I started hacking away. This was the first time I took a closer look at adding support for a language in TextMate, but it turned out that it really isn't that difficult.

After a few hours of work, the result is a DOMAssistant TextMate bundle with tab triggered snippets for all methods, a code completion dictionary, and documentation links for all DOMAssistant keywords.

• Google Code project: textmate-domassistant
• Direct download link: DOMAssistant-tmbundle-1.0.zip

If you use TextMate and DOMAssistant I think this will save you a few keystrokes :-).

Suggestions for improvement are welcome. Remember that this is my first TextMate bundle, so please be gentle.

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Posted in Coding, JavaScript, Mac, Productivity.

Posted by willcritchlow

Googlebot should see the same content a typical user from the same IP address would see.

• cc tld for your domain (e.g. .co.uk)
• local hosting
• physical local address in plain text on every page of your site
• Google Webmaster Central geo-targeting setting
• links from local websites
• etc.

Why don't we create multiple versions of our site and determine where the user is in the world before either delivering the appropriate content or redirecting them to the appropriate place in our site (or even a sub-domain hosted in the target country)

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• 

  Back in March, David Emery wrote about different models of making and releasing albums, such as Radiohead’s pay-want-you-want model and the Raconteurs’ release-before-the-hype approach. A hitherto unsigned band, Morton Valence is taking another tack. Morton Valence are raising money to record and release an album by selling percentages of the album to individual investors. From their website:

  In return, not only will an investor own a percentage of our album and reap the financial rewards of any potential success, but significantly too, they will be a part of a pioneering new spirit in a revitalised music industry.

  The band are going into this properly, with a formal proposal, legally binding contracts and independently audited accounts. A minimum investment (‘loan’) of £300 buys 0.75% of the net income from the album which, despite being a risk, seems like a pretty decent return to me. The album would need to sell 10,000 copies for investors to start making a profit on the band’s success. The proposal has this to say:

  By becoming an investor, you will be participating in the first project of this kind, celebrating a new artistic autonomy from the moribund structures of the music industry and a direct link between artists and audience.

  [...] As the sands shift, there is a changing of the guards and a new type of industry is emerging. This new industry is artist driven, and no longer controlled by a few grizzly lawyers and A&R executives. Artists are taking control of their music and putting UK talent back where it rightly belongs.

  But what about the music? I rather like them – you make up your own mind on Last.fm and MySpace. I saw Morton Valence supporting British Sea Power (designed by the afore-mentioned David Emery) four years ago, and I had this to say:

  It would be utterly remiss of me not mention the first support act, Morton Valence. Sounding a little like the Postal Service spiced up with trumpet and bouts of frustrated noise, they’ve got the quirkiness and the looks to be noticed.

  Morton Valence certainly stuck in my mind. They hit a note with the more general public recently too, having just been voted record of the week on BBC Radio 2’s Radcliffe and Maconie show. So as you might have guessed, I may be well be stumping up £300. It might just be a very expensive way of getting a signed album (a perk of investing), or it might prove to be a nice little earner and a little kick in the teeth to big music biz. Time will tell.

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Posted by Danny Dover

• Use Great Headlines
• Submit at the Best Time
• Focus Your Marketing Campaigns

Daily Unique Visitors Highlighting When a Story Got On the Digg Homepage

1. The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet
2. Know Your Playing Field: The Real Top 100 Domains
3. 15 CSS Properties You Probably Never Use (but perhaps should)
4. 2008 Web 2.0 Awards

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If you (or your clients) are selling products online, are you taking the time to simply thank your customers?

Boyink Interactive was not something I started by choice, not really.  In 2002 I graduated out of corporate America.  Oh - they called it downsizing, but I prefer to think that it affected only the people most capable of being successful once released from the fabric covered walls.  However you want to spin it, I was unemployed and in searching for a job came up with a few projects and no full time employment.  At the time stringing together the project work was the safest alternative - other options required completely uprooting the family and moving to find work, so Boyink Interactive was born.

Six years later I’m still here so can call Boyink Interactive a success - but I’ve never really felt like a true “business person” in the sense that I didn’t have this great product idea that I researched, did marketing and business cases for, produced, priced, and placed on the market.  I’d always been a bit envious of people who had done that - they really seemed like true “entrepreneurs” whereas I could hardly spell the word without help.

This has changed some this year with the launch of Train-ee.com.

For those not familiar with Train-ee, it’s a site where I’m attempting to help other web professionals get over the learning curve of ExpressionEngine by providing high quality, reasonably priced training materials. If Boyink Interactive can be termed a success in any way, it’s entirely due to using ExpressionEngine for client work - it’s made me more efficient, more capable, and clients have been really happy with how EE lets them take on the finished site and not have to pay someone to make content changes.  Train-ee is all about helping other web professionals enjoy that same success using EE.

From a business perspective Train-ee has been much closer to what I would call a true “entrepreneurial endeavor”.  I knew there was a demand for the content, but I still had to do all the traditional business development steps of picking a name, getting the domain name, building the site and figuring out how the purchase process was going to work.  I also had to develop the products - getting the eBook polished up and ready, figuring out how to produce screencasts and getting a couple of those produced and edited. I also had to pony up some money for some software and hardware purchases - nothing incredibly expensive, but these costs came during some of the slowest months since being in business.

All this to say - when the time came to pull the sheet off the site and open for business, it was with no small sense of anticipation.  Would people buy this stuff?  Would we recoup our investment?  Would the pricing make sense?  And if they bought anything - would they be happy with it?  Or would I get follow-up emails a few hours later with requests for their money back?

So - it only seemed natural that, when some sales started coming in, I took the time to follow up each sale with a thank you email.  Nothing fancy - just a few words of heartfelt thanks as each sale was chipping away at the fear that this thing wouldn’t fly and we’d have to eat the time and money we had invested.

The responses I’ve gotten to those simple emailed thank-yous has been nothing short of overwhelming.

Here are a few snippets from the responses I’ve gotten after sending the thank-you emails:

You’re are welcomed Twice! I ran a google search and found your site! An awesome resource!

Thank you for taking the time to write the guide. I’ve had a quick scan through it and it looks awesome. Looking forward to reading it in more depth later on. Cheers Mike!

Hey Mike, Just wanted to thank you for a very informative tutorial. Being brand new to EE, I was completely lost when first seeing the EE architecture. It was hard to see the power that everyone was referring too. After watching your tutorial everything fell into place. Until now I have been creating websites using coldfusion and mysql, building my admin panels from scratch. EE seems like a great solution and a great time saver.

And from Twitter:

Just purchased some ebooks on EE from Mike Boyink. Got a nice reply from Mike saying “Thanks guys!”. Not sure if it’s canned but it’s nice.

To which I responded:

Canned response? Perish the thought!  Those simple thank you emails have generated most of the testimonials on Train-ee.

And it’s true - many of the customer testimonials on the Train-ee product pages came from these email interchanges, all I had to do was respond and ask for permission to quote them on the site.

At some level—this just seems crazy.  The members of the target audience for Train-ee products are techhies who are highly likely to be inundated with messages—email, twitter, IM, blog comments, discussion forum responses, etc—just fighting to achieve and maintain “zero inbox”.  Yet, a simple emailed thanks somehow cuts through the noise, gets noticed, and even commented on. 

From a business perspective it’s awesome that a little action that takes little time and costs nothing can get noticed.  I know now I’ll be sending these little thank yous as long as I can realistically keep up. 

At the same time I’m troubled by the fact that such a simple thing stands out - it must mean that others aren’t doing it.  And it’s true - when I think about the purchases I’ve made online I can’t think of any where I got a personal, non-automated thank you note. I did once unsubscribe from a business-related mailing list and got a personal note from the author of the list.  He didn’t beat me up to stay on, or try to refer me to any other of his web properties, he just simply thanked me for my time on the list and wished me well.  At least three years and thousands of emails later I still remember that.

So I have to turn this around as a challenge.  Are you or your customers selling products online?  If so, are you just simply thanking the people buying the products?  And I know - if the volume of sales is high it’d would be difficult to send a personal note to everyone.  But how about a percentage then?  Or just choose 10 at random each day? 

And yes - by sending a thank you note you have opened up a conversation and you will get a few questions/issues coming back in response to your note of thanks But - these are your customers.  Thanking them, talking with them, responding personally to their questions - even if your response is to direct them to the “proper channels” - it’s all time well spent.  The more you can come out from behind the curtain of your website and create a personal interaction the more comfortable they’ll be about buying from you and referring you to others.

Or, don’t do it and send them my way....