Right now you’re probably busy cleaning whatever you were drinking off the monitor.  How on EARTH, you’re muttering blackly while scraping coffee dregs off the screen, can this guy promise an increase in readership down to hundredths of a percent?

Well, I’m not specifically promising that.  That’s not a guarantee, it is not implied,  nor should it be inferred to be. But what I AM going to do is show you how it was done in one specific case that you can then use yourself to try for similar results.  It’s not a guarantee, it’s a study.

Over at Marketing Experiments.com, they ran a test for six different blog headlines, including one control headline.  Here are the headlines:

Best Price Dental Care – Without Insurance.

Low Cost Dental Care for the Uninsured.

(Control)

Dental Plans for $8.33 a month. Acceptance Guaranteed.

Over 55,000 Dental Care Providers. Acceptance Guaranteed.

Dental Care Coverage. Best Price Guaranteed.

Now, you can see right off the bat that some of these are more effective than others.  But the most effective, without question, was number four.  Number four brought a readership increase of 72.76 percent for that post.  You can see the remainder of the study results here, though more than likely we’ll be coming back to this well in future editions as there’s VOLUMES of useful data there.

Specificity, ladies and gentlemen–specificity is the order of the day.  When you can put that number in the headline, that eye-catching, coffee spewing number, DO IT.  You’re a lot more sure to catch eyes with numbers than with most anything else, so it’s definitely worth trying.

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