What is an Adoptimist Headline?
Your headline is the first sentence and the first words that your visitors will see and read when they look at your profile. Formerly designated as space for your intro letter salutation (e.g., ‘Dear Birthmother’, ‘To Someone Special’), a headline is actually a much more powerful and effective tool for your readers. Think of your headline as an attention grabber, a chance to immediately tell your visitors exactly who you are and what your intentions may be (in 120 characters or less).
The headline, in conjunction with your lead photo, is rapidly becoming one of the most important parts of an Adoptimist profile. So consider how yours is performing. Does it quickly grab someone’s attention and make them want to read more about your family? Or is it unmemorable or even boring, potentially causing your traffic to pass right on to the next family?
The Benefits of Well-Chosen Headline
Headlines are nothing new on the web. Online businesses use them all of the time to get their point across succinctly and effectively. So you may want to research some basic headline-writing tips and even tips for writing on the web in general. Presumably, you are looking for every advantage with your adoption profile. And effective writing is certainly a big part of that.
• Grabbing Someone’s Attention
In order to understand the power of an Adoptimist headline, compare the following examples:
Headline One: ‘To Someone Special,’ (Default)
Headline Two: ‘Happily married, mixed race family from New York, open to any ethnicity.’
Based on these two headlines, which profile would you rather read?
• Adding Important Keywords To Your Headline
Not only is Headline Two much more descriptive and compelling for your visitors, it is laced with important keywords - words someone may use when searching on our site for families. Words and phrases such as ‘New York’, ‘mixed race’, and ‘any ethnicity’ may often be used during site searches. So adding these keywords to your headline is one more way to help your family get discovered.
Why Use A Headline Anyway?
On Adoptimist (and the web in general) you have a very short amount of time to capture your visitor’s attention - and keep it. A quality headline can certainly help. By distinguishing your family from all the others, you can maintain a more effective profile. And like every part of your profile, you’ll want to experiment with different headlines in order to find the one that works for your family. Showing your headline to objective eyes can be one way to test a headline. Another is to follow your statistics and see if a headline change leads to tangible improvements in your profile’s performance, particularly the time spent on your pages.
However you choose to do it, any headline is preferable to none at all. And it is just one more powerful tool to help you connect on Adoptimist.