If you’re an Internet marketer and not subscribed to Seth Godin’s blog, please google Seth Godin and subscribe. He writes an insightful daily blog with short to the point marketing tips and observations. Seth is not only a handsome guy, he’s also one of the foremost marketing experts with twelve books to his credit. I quote him often in my blogs but I thought this article was timely in the wake of the publicity Tiger Woods is getting lately even though this article has nothing to do with Tiger woods.

Here’s Seth’s article on “Headlines”, one of my favorite subjects for bloggers.

You should be careful about headlines.

It’s pretty easy to write a headline that will get someone to forgive your spam, and perhaps even to open your note (CyberMonday! 85% off…). It’s pretty easy to write a headline that will get someone to click through on their RSS reader. It’s even easy to write a tweet that will get a click through.

But is it better to get a click and then annoy someone, or better to only reach the people who care?

The mindset of the brazen copywriter is, “Well, even if only 1% of the people I trick are actually interested in the content, that’s worthwhile. After all, there are a lot of people out there, and offending 99 to get one subscriber or one sale is good math.”

The word I use for people like this is ’spammer’.

The mindset of the modern marketer is, “I can build a reputation in everything I do. If I teach people to trust me, then over time, I’ll conserve their attention and build permission. That’s priceless, particularly in a world that’s getting more skeptical by the minute.”

Of course, the best thing of all is to have content that deserves a great headline. If you can’t do that, though, I think you should forgo the headline.