In the second commandment, you learned that you should be the leader in your category or in your unique area of expertise. Now you need to be known as such. And one of the most effective ways to do this is through publicity.

I met a fellow once while working in New York City who ran his own show on cable television — his very own cable show! Cable and community television stations are wonderful mediums to get the word out effectively. This is an area in which you can get a lot of publicity at little or no cost.

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I already talked a lot about headlines. There are quite a few blog posts about them here. But here are some additional tips.

There are two huge mistakes people make when they write headlines. Either they are too bland and don’t say enough (such as when they attempt to simply summarize), or they say too much to cover all the bases.

In both cases, you will lose readers.

1. The True Purpose of The Headline

The headline is more than a mere summary of the sales copy. Unlike the title of a book, for instance, it’s not meant to introduce the story. It’s meant to generate readership in the first place.

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Some of the tests results I love to follow are those from The Poynter Institute. Their eyetracking studies are some of the largest ever conducted in this space.

While their tests are primarily done for, and funded by, major newspapers, their studies are incredibly revealing nonetheless. For instance, they've tested how readers read stories in three different formats: tabloid-style (folded vertically), broadsheet (larger size, folded horizontally), and online.

Of course, my interest is certainly focused on the online version. But their newspaper studies are very revealing in terms of what captures people's attention, how they read, and how much of it they do read.

Their website has come out with five key findings. (Their full report is due out in a few more weeks from now.) But let's take a closer look at these findings, and my interpretation of what they mean for the web.

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They say that the headline is the most important part of your online copy. But your deck and lead copy are just as important. These often make up the the section called “above the fold,” which is the topmost section of your website’s page, without any scrolling.

(Think of the front-page headlines and pictures of a newspaper, folded on a newsstand. This section is vital, for it’s the section that sells papers.)

Online, it’s the first screen your visitors see when they hit your site. The deck copy is usually the portion immediately following your headline (also known as the “subheadline”), and the lead is the opening of your letter. (Usually the first few paragraphs if not sentences of your body copy.)

There are many things you need to take into account when developing your “above the fold” section. Adding a picture, grabbing attention, perhaps even incorporating audio and video.

But for the purposes of this article, I want to explore the concept of communicating your core idea, benefit, claim or promise, and doing it in the most powerful, persuasive, and productive way possible, in that vital above-the-fold section. It’s called…

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A lot of people ask me how I write copy. I don’t mean the content-writing process (such as how I come up with headlines, bullets, offers, etc), but how I tackle the actual task of composing a new salesletter from scratch.

Everyone is different. My writing process is one developed over many years, and many people may adopt or dislike the same techniques. But in the hope that knowing my process may be helpful to some writers, I’d like to share it with you.

Of course, if I were to describe all of the steps, there would be way too much information to squeeze into one article. But for now, I can offer you a basic look at my methodology by giving you a short list of the seven steps I take.

Here they are.

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I’m up for a challenge.

Just recently, my friend and SEO blogging expert Andy Beard posted an article about an interesting case study.

After simply rewording the headline of a blog post, John Wesley literally multiplied his traffic to one of his blog posts by 10 times.

With the same post!

In other words, nothing was changed except for the headline. The article was exactly the same, word for word. But by changing the headline slightly, the blog post drew a ton of traffic, particularly from social networking sites.

Well, now’s your chance to have me do the same thing for you — and learn a thing or two, too. Here’s how. Let me rewire one of your own headlines for maximum selling power. But there’s a catch…

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Interesting event going on at James Brausch’s blog. He did a contest a few weeks ago asking people to submit their headlines for a software he created, which he would split-test and post rankings from time to time.

I own Glyphius, the software in question, and decided not only to participate in the contest for fun, but also to use Glyphius as well to help me.

Each and every week, Brausch reported his findings, which he based on visitor value. Four times now over the past month, the top 5 headlines were posted, including the names of the submitters, the copy of their headlines that won, and the resulting visitor value for each headline.

My name NEVER came up. And understandably, there are some pretty good copywriters in that contest. Some of their headlines are fantastic. Personally, I didn’t participate to win. I did it for fun, and to prove the power of Glyphius more than anything. (Not to mention helping James out, who’s a friend and a fanatical tester, too.)

Well, I got a little surprise this morning…