How To Post Like A *Rock Star*...... Part II

Picking right back up where I left off in the first part of this article, I'll continue to talk about how you can effectively use articles and blogs here in the MS community to produce high quality leads for your business. In this last part, I’ll cover how to create attention-grabbing headlines, how to find great content for your articles, and how you can get “featured” even if your article isn’t ;)

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2. 1.) How To Create Attention-Grabbing Headlines
4. When you take on the task of creating effective headlines, make sure that simply getting the clicks doesn’t become a goal in and of itself. If your article isn’t rich on content and/or it’s all too obvious that the catchy headline is there for the sole purpose of getting people to click on it, you’ll end up doing more harm to yourself than good.
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6. The line between a creative article title and a tacky one can often be obscure. The key is to always make sure you deliver: No matter how wild it is, the headline still has to make sense in its own way; it's got to relate to the content. The last thing you want is to make your readers feel like you think they're so dumb they can't tell the difference.
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8. The following are only a few examples of ways that you can create great headlines. As illustrations I’ll be using actual article headlines posted by Magnetic Sponsoring members.

A. Promise Value   

With this technique, what you do is you announce in your headline that you’re about to share some really great information with your readers that's going to be extremely helpful to them in their business. 

Some examples of these kinds of titles would be: “14 Tips To Defeat Information Overload”, “How To Get Search Engines To Love Your Blog”, “10 Benefits of Submitting Articles to E-zines”, and “How To Market With MySpace Like A Teenage Girl”. 

Headlines that promise value often start with “How to”: You let your reader know that you’re going to give away some really invaluable tips on how to succeed in a particular area of his business that he wouldn’t want to miss out on. 

B. Provoke Your Reader  

I bet you remember the following headlines:  “Are You Posting Crap On The Magnetic Sponsoring Community?”, “Jim Yaghi, Fernando Ceballos & David Schwind Are Niche Market Domination Jerks! “, “The Magnetic Sponsoring Course SUCKS!”.  

Not only are these types of headings extremely personal (they speak directly to us and what we care about; they address our community, our members and our courses) but they’re also provocative. (What – ME posting crap?! How dare Ferny suggest that?!)

You see a headline like this, and you just have to click on it to find out…(is it really saying what I think it’s saying?) And even when you know it isn’t, you’re still itching to find out just what it means, exactly.  

Case in point: When I first saw Lisa Alexander’s “niche market domination jerks” headline, I knew there was no way on earth she could really be lashing out at Jim, Ferny and David the way it appeared…but I still clicked on it! I clicked on it and read the article, even though I knew it was a “trick” (and a clever one). I just couldn’t help myself! 

C. Create Curiosity And/Or Fear In Your Reader

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   2.) How To Find Great Content For Your Articles

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The prospect of constantly having to come up with new and interesting topics to write about, can be a daunting one to a brand new article writer.  

The secret is to be engaged. Absorb information wherever you go, ask questions, participate in forums, read other people’s blogs... Be observant, stay on top of what’s happening in the industry, constantly take mental notes.  If you truly live and breathe your business, running out of subjects should never be a problem. Having too many things to write about and not enough time, should be! 

You already know that reading industry-related books, publications and articles are important ways to stimulate your thinking. But what about your company’s conference calls, workshops and events? What are your peers talking about there? What’s on their minds and what issues do they need help resolving? And what about your leaders – what words of wisdom can you pick up from them? 

I recently attended an event with motivational speaker Susan Sly. She touched on the fact that we as kids have all these dreams and that we genuinely believe we can accomplish anything we want in life. But as we grow up, our dreams are suffocated -- by society, our parents, teachers, peers etc -– as we are told that what we want in life is “unachievable”, or “silliness”.     

It was just a brief statement on Susan’s part, but its poignant truth stuck with me. The idea began to snowball within my mind, and it eventually became the core concept that I built my entire personal web site around: Having the courage to pursue your dreams no matter what the rest of the world has to say about it!

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2. 3.) How To Get “Featured” Even If Your Article Is Not

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4. While you’re waiting for your articles to get featured…how about posting comments to the ones that are already featured? (Just be careful not to use the opportunity to promote yourself or your business, be it ever so subtly!)
6. Try posting a comment to someone’s article, and you’ll find that they’ll be much more likely to post one to yours!  What’s more, when people read an article and they see your feedback at the end of it, they very well may go, “hmmm, X sure seems to be an active MS member…I see she always posts comments, and she sure seems to know what she’s talking about. I think I’ll check out her website to learn a bit more about her.” 
8. So you see that even if your articles haven’t gotten featured (yet), you can still make your presence felt in the featured section of the MS community. You can if you have something constructive to say!  Because - as I talked about in the first part of this article – writing, like any other type of marketing, is all about getting your name and face out there.    
   

    

9. Now go DO it! :)

    

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1. Lena Bjorna is an actress-turned-network-marketer who specializes in Internet marketing, copywriting and personal branding. For your FREE 7-day network marketing e-mail boot camp, go to http://LenaBjorna.com, or http://NewCoffeeHouseLetter.com