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Why One Thousand Paintings Works

What a fantastic phenomenon One Thousand Paintings has become in the last 24 hours for the Zürich-based artist Sala. In case you haven’t checked it out yet, Sala is selling 1,000 paintings of the numbers 1-1,000. The selling price of each painting is calculated like this:

  • Value = 1000 – number.
  • Initial discount: 90%.
  • Current discount: 60%.
  • The discount will decrease by an absolute 10% for every 100 paintings sold.
  • Min. price: $40.

The project launched in February of this year. After several months of incremental sales, Sala had sold 105 paintings as of May 29. Yesterday he hit the tipping point, and as of this writing the tally is 413. Not a bad day and a half, thanks to a flood of viral linkage prompted by a mention in BoingBoing.

When I blogged about this yesterday, one commenter wondered what this had to do with copywriting. The answer is simple.

Just about everything.

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Free Teleseminar Tonight (Featuring Yours Truly)

I will be interviewed tonight by Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff (a/k/a The Blog Squad) as part of their Conversations With Experts teleseminar series. It’s happening tonight at 7:30 Central Time, and it’s free if you attend live.

We’ll be discussing the ways in which business blogs can attract new prospects, establish a relationship with them, and convert them almost effortlessly to a client or customer. And by telling stories that matter to your target market (using copywriting techniques), you’ll be able to retain those clients and customers and boost repeat sales.

Click here to register, and I hope you can make it!

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I Just Bought “67″

This is too cool. And if you don’t think it qualifies as art, tell us about it in the comments…

And regardless of your answer, from a marketing standpoint this concept is experiencing its “tipping point” today, likely thanks to BoingBoing and Seth.

Great story!

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How to Avoid Thinking Too Hard After a Holiday Weekend

One of the things my blogging style doesn’t allow me to do as much as I’d like is to link out to all the interesting things that pop up in my feed reader. So, since I’m feeling rather lackadaisical after the long weekend here in the States (and I have another Mavs victory to prepare for tonight), I thought I’d give these smart people the stage.

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Building Traffic to Build Your Fan Club

Building Your Fan Club

It’s hard to engage readers on a continual basis.

It’s downright impossible to even get to that stage if no one stops by in the first place.

Those of you who have read Viral Copy know that I discussed eleven strategies in four categories for gaining attention and links from other bloggers. And if you’ve been around this blog for a while you also know that I primarily use only one of the categories and two of the strategies.

The category is Resources and the two strategies are tutorials and free ebooks.

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How to Get 53% More Readers for Every Blog Post You Write

You know from the 80/20 Rule of Headlines that the best way to get your writing read is to improve your headline. It can be a bitter pill to swallow when you realize that most people, even among those who subscribe to your blog, are not reading every post, but it’s not just you — it happens to us all.

So what was it about the headline of this post that got you to read this far?

Well, it’s not only that the headline makes a promise to deliver unique and useful information to my audience of bloggers. It’s also the way that it makes that promise.

The headline is very specific.

While certainly not the only method for writing good blog post titles, just about any headline can be made better by being as specific as you possibly can. Specificity increases credibility because specific details are simply more believable than broad assertions. Plus, a specific headline conveys more valuable information to a potential reader, which acts to draw them magnetically into the content.

Here are a few examples of ultra-specific headlines:

  • How I Made $19,931.42 Last Month With Google AdSense
  • In This Free 10 Chapter, 123 Page Ebook You’ll Learn…
  • Eleven Secret Techniques That Make Bloggers Money
  • Lose 36 Pounds in Only 7 Weeks
  • How to Shave 5 Strokes Off Your Golf Score in 3 Days

Of course, the single most important rule of ultra-specific headlines is that you need to be able to back up your assertions. And as I’ve done before, I break the rule in order to make the point (which is the true joy of writing a copywriting blog).

While I’m positive that being more specific in your post titles will increase the number of people who read your post, I have no earthly idea what the actual percentage will be for you. There are way too many variables involved.

So I really should have said:

How to Get More Readers for Every Blog Post Your Write

But that’s simply not as good a headline. :)

UPDATE: I had forgotten all about this Marketing Experiments test that showed that an optimized headline increased website conversion rates by 73%. This means that not only did overall readership of the content rise, but 73% more people took the requested action, due only to a modified headline. In the first case study, the winning headline simply used a specific dollar amount!

So 53% is likely too low just for increased readership. My apologies for underestimating. :)

For more on writing great headlines, check out the Magnetic Headlines series on Copyblogger.

Subscribe to Copyblogger today!

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