Three days later, your two-hour article has received exactly fifty hits.

“What happened?!” You read, re-read, and deconstruct your post word by word, trying to figure out why people aren’t coming to read it.  You ask other bloggers, and all agree that it’s a great post.  You ask your friends, your family, even your cat!  They all agree that it’s a masterful piece of work. (Well, all except the cat.  The cat just meows at you and stalks off back to her nap.)  You’re left in the dark, wondering why you can’t ever get exposure.

So… What happened?  You forgot to write the headline, first.  You forgot one of the cardinal rules of marketing…  The 80/20 Headline Rule.  The 80/20 Rule states that on average, 8 out of 10 people will read your headline, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest.  By writing your headline (most bloggers call these “titles”) first, you are - in effect - making a promise to your readers.  You are promising to deliver on the headline.

That’s the catch.  Promises have to be made, before they can be fulfilled.  If you write your amazing content, first, you have to turn around and come up with a smashing headline that takes in all of the points in your article, and not only conveys the basis of your post, but does it with style.  You’re reverse-engineering your article.  If you write your headline first, suddenly you have to live up to the promise you just made.  You wind up making your content more streamlined, and more honed to the topic.  75% of the time, you’ll do it unconciously.  The rest of the time, well, that’s the normal time it takes to write a post.

How does this work?  Simple.  You have a general idea for the subject matter of your post.  You know what you want it to be about.  Perhaps it’s only the most basic, or general idea.  Take that basic idea, and create a helluva headline before you write the content.  Here’s an example:

Peter Cooper wrote an article called “19 Rails Tricks Most Rails Coders Don’t Know“.  He came up with the headline, before he wrote the content.  He had a vague idea of what he wanted to write, and he created a smashing title for it.  The post content?  It wasn’t all that amazing…  It was a series of tricks, tips, and techniques that most rails coders probably knew, but didn’t commonly use.

The result of his writing the headline, first?  Within 24 hours, the article hit the top of the del.icio.us popular list, garnering over 500 bookmarks (on del.icio.us), and a few thousand page views.  A later update simply stated that the post was over 6,000 page views.  An even later update (in comments to another entry on his own blog), Peter revealed that the post had received around 11,000 page view (within 24 hours); and his FeedBurner subscribers went from the mid 800’s, to the mid 1,700’s.  A jump of around 900 subscribers.

Take the challenge, and for your next twenty entries, write your headline first.  I think you’ll be very surprised.

I’ve Googled, searched on MSN, altavista, yahoo, asked people, made several dozen calls about it, and even debated e-mailing a bunch of people and asking around. I’m not going to tell you what their viral marketing campaign is all about… Part of the fun is discovering it for yourself.  I will, however, give you a banner, and if you check the link, you can see that I have no tracking code on it, it’s not an affiliate link… it’s just a banner to a website.  What that website will be, I don’t know.

As such, I’ve decided to take on a bit of an SEO challenge, and attempt link exchanging. I’m going about if through a new web forum set up by the editor of The Blog Herald (Duncan Riley). The forum is called Web Log Empire, and it is dedicated to blog link exchanges.

A lot of you are about to say “WAIT! Didn’t you speak ill of link exchanges, before?” Yes. Yes, I did. However, I spoke ill of only a certain type of link exchanges. Those being the “pay for play” exchanges - where you pay to have your site listed (usually in hidden text) on many other sites. I also spoke a bit negatively of the automated link exchange systems. The reason being is that both of these systems can actually hurt your performance within the SEO spectrum. Search Engines looks very negatively on the pay-for-play exchanges - especially when they utilize massive amounts of hidden links. The automated exchanges, usually aren’t what they’re cracked up to be, and thus far I’ve yet to find one that is as good as offered.

Therefore, I’m going the “old fashioned” route, of seeking out individual blogs with which to exchange. How will I be exchanging links? All exchanged links will be set up in categories using WordPress’s links system. Then, they will be listed on my sidebar. Additionally, when I find a blog that I really like (or one that will do the same for me), I’ll make a post about it.

These exchanges are the simple, old-fashioned way of doing things, and they provide the most quality control. Every. Single. Blog. I exchange with will first be explored by me. If I don’t care for the blog, or the writing, I won’t offer (or accept an offer) to exchange.

For those of you who are wondering, “what about when you said no, before,” let me put it this way: That was before. This is now. Formerly, I didn’t want to do link exchanges, primarily because I thought they were too much work, and not enough reward. I’m doing this now, as an experiment. If it works, WONDERFUL! If it doesn’t, no harm done. If it crashes and burns, and Google throws me back in the sand box, then - well - I’ll have learned a very valuable lesson.

I will give you one tip, though. Be, at least, pretty sure that the blogs you’re exchanging with aren’t splogs (spam blogs), and don’t engage in underhanded SEO tactics. Sometimes you can’t be certain, but trust me - look over things, carefully.

Oh, yes, monetization report. I’ve done some re-arranging of ad units, etc… on the blog, as per the case study. Well, to be honest, I’m not sure I’m happy with things, as they are right now. I think the site looks a lot more “ad heavy” than it did. Primarily because of the 160×600 skyscraper in the right side bar. I’m not sure if I’ll keep that as a full skyscraper, or if I’ll shorten it to a verticle banner. Once I get to the traffic level I truly want, I might even remove it, entirely, and go with Adbrite, or Bidvertiser. No, no, I’m not trashing Google, I’m just saying that when you combine aesthetics and bang-for-the-buck, it’s not adding up to brilliant, in my mind. I do have to say, though, that I’m already seeing an increase in my Adsense CTR, with these changes. It’s not overwhelming, but it’s increased, and even a slight increase is a good increase!