Recently, I monitored an interesting discussion in one of the forums about the length of headlines on sales pages. Some of the posters were in favor of longer headlines because they communicated more information and had a better chance of catching the interest of the prospect. Other posters claimed that some headlines were so long that they were confusing. Some even claimed that they would take away your breath if you attempted to read them aloud. One poster thought that very long headlines often appeared to be a run-on sentence even if it technically wasnt.
I decided it was time to do a study. I wanted to compare headlines on profitable sales pages to headlines on unprofitable ones. I wanted to find out if there really was a difference in the length of their headlines.
To perform that study, I first had to prepare a list of profitable sites and another list of unprofitable sites. I actually already had both due to another study I had recently performed. However, many of the unprofitable sites had disappeared from the Internet. I wasnt surprised. Why stick around if you cant make a profit; right?
I had to settle for comparing the headlines of profitable...