The art of headline writing and A/B testing

I always think that the headline of a blog post, newspaper article, news release or other piece of written material is the most essential thing to pay attention to when you write that content.

writes Neville Hobson,and in these days of Search engine optimisation, I couldn't agree more.

But have you heard of A/B testing

From direct mail to web design, A/B testing is considered a gold standard of user research: Show one version to half your audience and another version to the other half; compare results, and adjust accordingly. Some very cool examples include Google’s obsessive testing of subtle design tweaks and Dustin Curtis’ experiment with direct commands and clickthrough rates. (”You should follow me on Twitter” produced dramatically better results than the less moralizing, “Follow me on Twitter.”)