There are a lot of misconceptions regarding website traffic. Tracking visitors is often done with many different yardsticks, which vary tremendously from person to person and site to site, not to mention from marketing effort to marketing effort. However, these differences can often be quite misleading, especially for the would-be advertiser and aspiring Internet marketer. And today there is far more involved in the process than that to which most would tend to give credence. So how does one make sense of it all?

The dilemma?

So in keeping with that tradition, I’d like to post a few of my own. But unlike those who post their predictions in point form, I won’t make a specific list but rather share with you some of my thoughts.

My post here is not to discuss those issues directly. I’ll reserve that for another article.

However, I do want to add my thoughts on one issue that seems to keep coming back in the forum — the issue of using long-winded, excessively wordy headlines that are prevalent on websites nowadays.

But lately, I’m seeing more and more headlines that are limp, bloated or dead wrong.

A headline is meant to do two vital things.

My friend John Reese, a master at simplifying what we often tend to unnecessarily complicate, says it best. He says the only metric you should ever really count on is this: Yes or No.

That’s it.

Sounds simplistic, I know. But here’s the key point: your copy may get great feedback. It may entertain. It may inform, educate or even inspire. But if it doesn’t sell, it doesn’t matter.

I’m a big fan of testing. And I teach it as much as I can, as I believe 99% of marketers out there do not test at all. It’s a shame, because they’re leaving so much money on the table.

I applaud those people who do test. But in some forums of late, a few people reveal their own test results while making claims they are universally applicable.

First off, I always recommend you test everything first. Never take any test result as gospel. Even mine. Because only a handful of test results, if any, are statistically significant enough to be truly portable to other offers or markets.

So, you’re probably scratching your head, wondering:

“What good are test results, then?”

Coincidentally, his protest points out the fact that commodity products, like soap, do not require long copy. The coincidence is that I agreed with what this person is saying, and in fact I actually posted another article just last week on the very topic of product categories, and the different approaches, including copy length, required for each one.

Academia labels them as convenience products, shopping products, specialty products and unsought products. (Soap, among others, falls into the convenience category.)

Does it all matter? Absolutely.

What makes one style of copy more favorable than another? Why does one person buy from one type of copy and not from another? It really comes down to the buying behavior of your market. And in fact, there are four major personality types.