Creating a Good Information Marketing Summary

Most web sites use summaries when displaying your content alongside other content.

Your summary serves two primary purposes:

• Getting sites and search engines to display your content to people
• Getting people to choose your content rather than someone else’s

In doing these things, your summary supports your title. Failing to have a strong summary will result in your content either not being displayed in the first place or not being viewed even if it is listed.

For these reasons, you should be sure to take the time to come up with a strong summary.

Ideally, your summary will be much like a short piece of sales copy writing.

Getting pages and search engines to list your content

For the purposes of getting your content displayed when people are searching for something to view, you should typically try to include the following:

• Your primary targeted keyword or phrase
• One or more secondary keywords or phrases

Of course, it is generally better to have no keywords in your summary than to use them in a manner that is disjointed.

As with your title, it is better to have your primary keyword close to the start of your summary and any secondary keywords later on.

Getting people to choose your content

For the purposes of getting people to choose your content, your summary should attempt to:

• Work with your title rather than duplicating it
• Tell potential readers what benefit your content will bring them (or what pain they will suffer if they fail to…if that is the way you write)

Normally, you will want to avoid the following in your summaries:

• Talking about yourself
• Talking about your business
• Including snippets of your content

Keep in mind that your summaries purpose is to pitch your article, not your business.

People typically select content because they want to solve a problem, learn something, or entertain themselves. Your summary should (in most cases) work to tell them how they will do one or more of these.

Consider the following two summaries:

• The Whowazit Magic Mind Meld Marketing Method
  
  This article is about getting more sales by increasing the traffic to your online store. It is written by Johnny Artifice, an experienced on-line seller that has used the method within to make a lot of money over the years. It includes information that can help you increase your on-line sales.
• The Whowazit Magic Mind Meld Marketing Method
  
  Say goodbye to discounting your inventory for good. Get more traffic and sales by learning to peek inside the minds of your target audience, find out exactly what they want, and then provide it to them. With these methods, you will quickly increase traffic from people who want to buy exactly what you are offering.

If you were to see these next to each other, which would you be more likely to choose?