Preamble: In response to some excellent rebuttals as well as countless comments I’ve received on my previous post, “The Real Sinister Side of Forced Continuity,” I believe some people are missing the point of my argument, and I want to clarify a few things.

I’m not a lawyer by any stretch. But as a copywriter and business owner, I do know the rules enough to know that there’s a difference between “optional continuity,” “forced continuity,” and “hidden continuity.”

Optional continuity is self-explanatory. Forced continuity is a very common marketing practice (I’m not a fan of it, but I don’t mind it). In fact, there’s nothing wrong with forced continuity in and of itself.

What’s wrong is when it’s used in a wrong way.

The real problem, I believe, is that good marketers, including marketers using “forced continuity” in an ethical and legitimate way, are getting a bad reputation because some marketers unscrupulously misuse forced continuity.

The lack of transparency is the real culprit — such as hiding it or disguising it. Especially when it’s done on purpose. That annoys me. Because it’s no longer an issue of misuse. It’s out-and-out abuse.

But what bothers me more is how it affects us all. And it affects us all, both customers and marketers alike, in more ways than you think.

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I’m up for a challenge.

Just recently, my friend and SEO blogging expert Andy Beard posted an article about an interesting case study.

After simply rewording the headline of a blog post, John Wesley literally multiplied his traffic to one of his blog posts by 10 times.

With the same post!

In other words, nothing was changed except for the headline. The article was exactly the same, word for word. But by changing the headline slightly, the blog post drew a ton of traffic, particularly from social networking sites.

Well, now’s your chance to have me do the same thing for you — and learn a thing or two, too. Here’s how. Let me rewire one of your own headlines for maximum selling power. But there’s a catch…

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