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Image courtesy Hugh MacLeod, gapingvoid.com

If you read advice about improving your online marketing, you'll inevitably come across the advice to "spend time crafting the best possible headline".  The common wisdom states that the headline is the most important attention-grabbing part of a post [1].

You're here reading this post because the title "Did I Just Solve Your Art Marketing Woes?" grabbed your attention, did it not?

Unfortunately, the answer is to the question posed in the title is "no", this blog post is not the answer to all your art marketing woes.  Sorry.

I used a cheap old tabloid trick:  Take an outrageous, even counter-intuitive claim, turn it around into a question that can simply be answered "no".  Since it was simply a question, I haven't printed any falsehoods by posing it [2].

But I used the cheap trick to teach a lesson.  While I'm not suggesting that you start writing headlines like "Will buying my art make you more attractive to the opposite sex?",  I am suggesting that you spend a bit of time crafting compelling, enticing titles for your blog posts and email subject lines.  While a subject line of "check out my new art" might interest me if I already know who you are, try making it more interesting please.  How about "Exclusive Preview of Art in My Next Show" or "Be the first to see the new breakthrough I've made with my Art". 

Put on your thinking cap, I'm sure you can think of something more interesting than "check out my art".  Your bottom line will thank you for it.

Remember, Sharing Art Enriches Life.

Sincerely,

Clint Watson

FASO Founder, Software Craftsman and Art Fanatic

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[1] I'm not saying the headline is the most important thing overall.  The rest of your article is obviously more important in other ways.  But the headline is critical for the specific purpose of grabbing attention and getting people to visit your blog, read your newsletter or watever.  It's up to the rest of your post to keep that attention.

[2]  I wouldn't recommend you use the cheap tabloid headline trick very often though, unless you want to sound like a tabloid.  There are other ways to be compelling without resorting to the type of trick I use for this post.  By the way, the tech blog, Techcrunch is a master of this format headline.  Here's their formula, which I copied for this post:   "Did [Company Name] Just [Some Outrageous Claim]?"  Examples "Did Apple Just Ban Sexual Content from the App Store?",  "Did Google Just Multi-Punch Apple in the Face?", "Did Twitter just Kill Tweetup....?" (look at the URL on the last one, they clearly un-hyped the headline after they got their traffic surge, but the URL gives away the original headline).