A better listing headline WILL affect whether or not your site sells and for how much. This seems like a no brainer, but it really isn’t. Having a better headline equals more views and more views on a worthwhile site will usually translate to more bids.
Take a look at these two archived listings. Both sites have similar qualities; brand new sites with no traffic or revenue, baby niche content and identical monetisation methods.
Site A
Site B
Both focus on the same niche, have an almost identical theme and structure, and contain the same format of content, yet one attracted four times as many views as the other despite being listed for approximately half the duration.
There are four main factors that affect the number of views you receive, and any well designed listing has a perfect mix of all four.
- The Heading
- The Starting Price
- The Tags
- Featured / Not Featured
Arguably, the easiest to overlook is your headline but this has the important role of drawing viewers in, when your site is just one listing amongst a list of hundreds of other sites.
Writing a headline that appeals to website buyers
Standard advertising rules apply with listings – Attention, Interest, Desire and Action.
Action is covered by Flippa, in that people will bid should all the other criteria be met. Interest, is created by your ‘hard stats’ everything from price through to number of visitors. Your listing copy should create desire and this leaves you to ensure that the first in the list, attention is covered by your headline.
Starter site buyers are motivated by four things
- Ease of use – the less work and knowledge to operate the site the better
- Potential to earn
- A faster way into internet marketing than the DIY approach
- Multiple options for making revenue
In appealing to a buyer, the most successful headlines seem to appeal to one of the four points above if not two or three, and all in less than 100 characters.
Headline Mistakes
Buyers often care little for the niche (outside of whether it’s a profitable one) and want to know about the site and how it will help them to make money, or ‘solve their problem’.
Take a look at the first listing’s headline, followed a few others that are taken from a list of sites that have received a relatively low number of ‘views’ per day listed on Flippa.
“Wordpress Blog – Baby Care Niche – Cash In With Clickbank, Adsense and Amazon”
“BasicDatingTips.com, Autoblog, Low Reserve”
“Wordpress Blog – Body Building Niche- Cash In With Clickbank, Adsense and Amazon”
“Hot Niche, Gorgeous Unique Design and site ready to start making money TODAY”
“Your own GPT Membership site! Ready to go, earn with CPALead!”
- The first few words are the most important in capturing a reader’s attention and here they’ve been wasted with ‘Wordpress Blog’ – something which buyers come to expect as standard for any starter site, or by repeating the url of the site.
- These headlines lean towards general statements that fail to provide information specific to the site being sold (Hot Niche, Ready to Go, make money today)
- Most of the headlines fail to capture the potential of the site with specific information. “Cash in with Clickbank, Adsense and Amazon” sounds like a general statement and not a description of the site’s current monetisation methods.
- The author has forgotten the audience. Someone purchasing a sub $500 starter site is unlikely to be too experienced in internet marketing, so using terms such as ‘GPT membership site’ or ‘CPA lead’ may leave a number of buyers lost.
Writing a better headline
There are countless examples of good listings currently on Flippa. Using our example, and a few others that attracted a high number of views:
“Automated PREGNANCY Site – Custom Design, Baby Store, Video”
“Low Reserve, Almost No Work Involved, Stunning Site In Hot Photoshop Brush Niche”
“Super Niche iPad Site Premium Domain 1000 Item Store Optimized Custom Designed” [spelling corrected]
“Fully Automated, Hot Home Gardening Niche, 4 Revenue Streams, 2 Days”
We can see some clues to writing a better headline:
- Be specific. Whether it’s about the number of days or the number of revenue streams, the best headlines avoid hype and give specifics.
- Stand out. Most of the listings above offer something in the headline that other listings may have, but don’t initially tell readers, for example a unique niche, an additional store or video content.
- Solve a problem. Most popular headlines solve the two biggest obstacles of lack of time (automated) or lack of knowledge. Try to find a unique angle by demonstrating how your site will solve a problem for the target buyer. For example, lack of creativity (“Pre loaded with 100 articles”), lack of technical skill (“optional support package available”), or lack of knowledge (“Free search marketing guide”)
A good headline will never sell a lousy site, but without attracting viewers even the best site will fail to sell for the price it deserves. Hopefully, by tackling all the small details, you will be able to remove any obstacles that might prevent your site achieving what it’s truly worth.
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{ 11 comments }
Good article.
I like never to give too much away in the headline as it encourages people to read further.
Hi Ken,
That’s very true. I think a little mystery can never be a bad thing if it brings eyeballs with it!
All the best
Justin
Hey Justin,
Interesting article. Headlines are indeed extremely important in driving traffic/views to a listing.
However, with the examples you have used, I would have thought the most likely scenario is that Site A didn’t feature their listing on Flippa’s front page, and that Site B did? That was my first thought when looking at it. Thoughts?
Hey Thomas,
Thanks for stopping by.
I wrote the article about three weeks back, but I’m quite sure that I deliberately chose two non featured listings to avoid this skewing the results.
I didn’t mention it as the article was more about headlines, but the tags could have had a lot to do with it also. The one that failed to attract views has fairly generic tags that half of the auctions on Flippa seem to fit into!
People seem to be split over the featured listing thing lately. In your experience, does it make that much of a difference to your listings?
Okay. Can you tell if an auction has been featured/not featured? Very interesting if neither were featured.
You are right – tags are also very important, especially if listing a relatively generic site.
I personally always feature my listings (regardless if the site is $200 or $20,000) and advise everyone who I teach to do the same. You are guaranteed to get a lot more views, and I would say almost certain to make $29 more (the cost of featuring) than you would without featuring. With a cheap site <$500 I tend to not feature until the end of an auction (assuming no interest) so I can avoid the hit on margins if it sells without. On established sites, I feature once at the beginning, and once towards the end of an auction. Has always worked for me – but I must admit I haven't analysed the variance in results with/without in terms of views.
Thomas
We did until a week ago check for featured listings (http://flippa.com/buy-websites/customfeed?filterby=listings-featured) but the app no longer does this as the information wasn’t really being used.
Thanks for your insight. I’ve been curious lately how many people have upgraded even the most basic listings since the recent dip in sales (I guess Flippa are happy at least!). I just hope, with so many people realising how essential it is to upgrade in order to get sales, this wont have the effect of the listing being lost in a sea of other upgraded listings.
Justin
I worked it out now – did a bit of digging.
The second listing has option to opt-in to the seller’s list. My educated guess would be that the difference in traffic is down to the fact that Site B would have done a list blast after listing the site, hence the difference between the view counts on the two auctions.
That seems logical.
If your book wasn’t proof that you know this industry inside out, the fact you can back it up with knowledge certainly is!
Thanks Thomas
True indeed…I’ve never wasted my precious headline space with a description of the niche because it should be apparent if you snagged a good domain plus you may drive away potential bidders that don’t care much for the particular niche but will bite with the right headline triggers.
Salah – Virtual Real Estate with Curb Appeal´s last [type] ..Discover Virtual Real Estate
Hi Salah,
I’ve followed you onto Flippa through your site and you’ve sold some incredibly well designed blogs!
Would you say that investing extra in the design of the site, makes a significant difference come sale time?
Thanks and does it ever! Well, I actually don’t have the comparative experience to say for certain. I’m too much of a designer at heart to release anything that wouldn’t make me say “check this out…yeah, I designed that baby”. Both of my flips are now repeat customers for this aspect in particular so I would say its pushing the right buttons. Auctions have an element of passion-purchase in them as well so eye candy works wonders.
Beyond getting the buyer excited successful marketers also know that a polished design establishes a great level of credibility with potential customers and builds brand awareness. How many sites made you say “I’m not giving them my credit card number” based mostly on how sketchy it looked. Down the line any successful business will need to look like one to continue to grow exponentially, if your in it for the long run why not start out on the right foot.
What is the value of a fresh start-up anyway? The the content/research, domain, and the design. Now days if you can check your email you can make a site with a standard WordPress theme and content writing can be outsourced on the cheap. Not to discount standard theme based sites, because it all involves work but what can I offer an in the know investor that he needs and simply can’t do himself? If your talking about a niche content site I would say design is the definitive answer.
Salah – Virtual Real Estate with Curb Appeal´s last [type] ..Discover Virtual Real Estate
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