Points of Persuasion Syndicate

(P-O-P-S) Having recently received a video email explaining why some syndicated articles published online do not achieve any return on investment (ROI) from an ezine manager, I thought it time to double-check on his claim that they were just plain boring or being placed in an ezine with low readership. In point of fact, I think it is more probable that they are not titled correctly and therefore are potentially weak and uninteresting. Readers pass over many articles with vague titles to get to an article that strikes them as more meaningful to solving their problem.
 

As Howard Fineberg of the Poynter Institute noted in a blog post about article headlines, internet headlines are far less clever or promotional than those that sell newspapers and magazines. He goes on to speak about an early study, a 1997 study by Jakob Nielsen and John Morkes that found that people rarely read Web pages. Overall they merely scan them. Mr. Fineberg, an old newspaper guy, thinks that this headline issue will be rectified in time, believing that this is a way the internet can be improved. (He believes that short time turnaround, small staffs and AP newswire headlines currently have sufficed but should and will get better.)
 

Points of Persuasion Syndicate believes that Sean D’Souza wrote a more prescient piece on why internet headlines matter and how to judge them successful or not in a recent Wordtracker post, “How to Write the Perfect Headline” on April 10, 2010. He requires two things in a good headline: clarity and attraction.

Your initial thought, he demonstrates, is usually incomplete because it is too vast and writing about a whole topic is not easy. He concludes: You have to get more specific. “You get more specific with two simple tweaks. First you add a target. Then you add a specific. By doing this your headline will be stronger, and your entire article will be focused instead of rambling all round…” For example, he cites: Article Writing is the Key—too vague; Article Writing is the Key for Clients (better); Article Writing is the Key to High ROI for Clients (the best).
 

Of course, on the internet, you also must incorporate keywords into the title and first paragraph and be savvy enough to match up those keywords with your website.
 

As for the ezine manager’s decision that some internet articles are boring, I humbly submit to him that a site that accepts them and gives their writers expert author status is helping to promote false expectations. Because they get writers to work for free, they abuse the privilege by accepting too many features to sift through rather than limiting the number on the same exact topics and doing the editing that could select the most informational ones for readers and search engines alike.

While DeSousa claims that there is too much hoopla going on about writing great headlines, he then goes on to write eight more articles on the topic. Perhaps hiring a service like Points of Persuasion Syndicate which specializes in syndicated articles publicity online is not an unnecessary expense, but a real boon to your marketing success. Remember, if you fail to get people to read your headline, they certainly will not read your feature. The end result is you have wasted all the time you invested in your website and the writing of the article in the first place. What is easy for DeSousa is not as easy for everyone less capable of writing well.
 

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