Your site needs a headline.  If you don’t have one, you’re wasting money.

Do you think that all those little “here’s my content” buttons on the left side of your site are gonna make a visitor stay in your site.  They won’t.  Not when every OTHER agent out there has virtually identical ones. 

You want something that makes YOU appeal to your PRIMARY AUDIENCE.  You don’t see Arnold Schwarzenegger promoting his movies with titles like “The Happy Little Fairy of the Meadow.”  Why?  Because young children and people with G-Rated namby-pamby, non-violent movie tastes are NOT his audience.

No, Arnold’s movies are headlined with macho names like The Terminator, Commando, and Predator.  Why?  So that his main razor-blade-chewing audience can recognize at a glance that he’s offering their kind of “high-body-count” movie. 

That’s why you need a big definitive headline on your site.  To let your primary audience know at a glance what you specialize in.  Yet, astonishingly, only a handful out of a hundred agents ever do this.

Why use a specialty headline?  Because studies show that visitors give a site less than ten seconds to show that it’s got what they sought.  If your site came up when someone searched for “Cleveland horse property,” then a strong headline can immediately assure them that they have indeed found an agent who specializes in horse property.  How about a headline like: 

“You’ve Found Your Horse

Property Specialist for Cleveland”

Or, perhaps you deal in condos?   Then just change the headline above to reflect that.  Do the same if you’re a luxury home specialist (see the “luxury home specialist” headline at www.Dana-Point-Real-Estate.com), or specialize in residential, commercial, IRC/1031, farms, oceanfront, lakefront, hillside, view, city lights, or whatever.

You might fear that using a defining specialty headline will exclude visitors who aren’t interested in that particular specialty.  Well, ask yourself how well your site is doing right now when you try to be all things to all people with no specialty headline.  The solution to this valid concern is to have your webmaster make you several home pages, or even web sites, each with a different headline, meta tags and specialty-related key words so the engines can match each one to specialty key words that consumers use in searches.

Or, far easier, use a headline that boldly proclaims a main specialty, but is followed immediately by a bulleted list of sub-specialties. 

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“You’ve Found Your Horse

Property Specialist for Cleveland”

*Ranches

*Farms

*Dairy Farms

*Poultry Farms

*Kennel Properties

*Retirement Property

*Mountain, River, Lake Cabins

*More

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For an excellent example of a main headline, followed by subordinate headlines, see the Horse and Ranch Properties site of Larry and Pat Carlson of San Juan Capistrano, California (http://www.larandpat.com/default.asp?zGo=15&mlsemail=&ptype=ent).

By supporting your main headline with subheads, you still can appeal to a primary target audience, but also to nearly everyone else.  Just be sure that the rest of your site includes lavish content to back up the claims you make in your specialty headline and subheads.  Doing less is, in my opinion, fraud.

Remember, while your home page is loading down into someone’s browser, they see the TEXT that appears at the top of the page first, before any graphics appear.  Thus, it’s the most valuable real estate on your site.  Treat it that way.  Give it a headline (just like ads have) that positions you ideally to your target audience!

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