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It's Monday and the first of the month, for some reason I'm absolutely eager to get on with the day ... and I haven't even had my first cup of coffee yet. Not only that but it's raining outside and it's been that way since Thursday. The office roof is leaking, the backyard at the house is just about underwater and I should be feeling glum and gloomy but I'm just the opposite.

I've got some challenging pieces to write for a couple of clients this morning, Steve is working on a new website for another client and we've got a meeting with yet another one in an hour or so. Yep, it's going to be a full-on day so let's get started on it.

If you've read what I've written in the past about headlines then instead of turning away perhaps you should skim through it again just to refresh your memory because it's easy to forget about the importance of these few words. If you haven't read anything about headlines before then what you're about to read has the potential to change your life.

Now they sound like bold words, don't they? But it's true! A good headline can make all the difference when it comes to getting people to see your marketing message.

Of course you could well be thinking that headlines don't really have much to do with you if you're building free sites and galleries; headlines are things that newspapers and magazine use aren't they?

Of course headlines are what newspapers and magazines use to encourage people to buy and read what they're publishing but newspapers and magazines are not the only ones that need to use headlines. Here on the Web websites need to use headlines to encourage people to stay long enough to read what has been written and to be exposed to any marketing that might be included on the site.

And that means that you should be using headlines on your sites whether they are adult or mainstream.

But headlines are more than just a few words in bold fonts or H1 at the top of a page. Headlines have a huge impact on the people who come to your site and those headlines will either, engage the visitor and make him want to see more or they will discourage him from going further and turn him away.

Now no one in their right mind wants to discourage people from going further into their site so no one in their right mind is going to write a headline that is aimed at turning people away ... but that doesn't mean that people never write headlines that do just that.

A headline that is boring, just too long or of little interest to a visitor to your site will be just as effective at turning them away as one that you had crafted with a view to turning people away. So how do you avoid writing boring, verbose and irrelevant headlines?

Here are a few tips.

• Headlines should never be more than 11 words long. Even fewer words are better but the bottom limit in most instances is seven words. That doesn't mean that one-word headlines can't be attention grabbing but there aren't many instances where one word will be effective for your website.
  
• Craft a headline that is both exciting and relevant to the people who are visiting your site. Don't over-do it but in adult you can certainly be way more lurid with a headline than you can in mainstream.
  
• Use power words in your headline. If you don't know what power words are then do some research on Google. There are plenty of sites out there that will tell you about power words and I've used one of them in the headline for this column.
  
• Use the right power words and you will also be making your headline more relevant to the people who read it.
  

And once you've written a good headline go on to back it up with effective and powerful text and images in the body of the website that support the headline. You want to build up a complete 'picture' for the person who is visiting your site so that when you do issue a call to action they will be compelled to act on it.

Hopefully your sponsor ... the one at the other end of your call to action that visitors have been compelled to act on ... will have just as powerful a marketing message so that you'll make some serious money from the headlines you have written.

Now I'm off to attack the rest of the day ... move over Wonder Woman you've got some serious competition!