Do you remember the last time you read a newspaper or a magazine?
It could have been this morning, last week, whenever.
Did you notice the photos in the publication? How could you not, right?
Now, did you notice the way your eyes jumped across the page, from headline to photo, headline to photo, headline to photo, to… caption?
That’s right, caption.
Think about it, every time you see a photo, you read the caption too, because you want to know what that photo is about.
Even though a picture is worth a thousand words, you don’t know WHAT it’s worth, until you read the caption.
So you’ve been trained, ever since you started reading newspapers and magazines, to look at captions to explain the meaning of a possibly ambiguous photo.
If you’re 30 years old, you’ve probably spent at least 20 of those years being trained in looking at captions as the “photo clarifier”. If you’re older, you’ve been trained even longer.
Now think about this: If YOU’VE been trained this long, so have your prospects.
And if you know someone’s eyeballs will be landing on the captions, you now have an opportunity to make your point better, or better yet add a call to action to do something.
Something as basic as “Order Here,” “Listen To This Audio,” or simply adding a link directing them to a different part of the page, can greatly increase your landing page profitability.
My friend Mark Widawer once told me about a test he ran on one of his landing pages for this very purpose. Here’s what he discovered:
41% of all the clicks on a page were focused on the images themselves and the captions just below the images.
Point proven.
So the lesson here is, when you’re adding photos to your website, always add captions below them. Then, add a call to action to the caption
And be sure to test your results with a program like Hypertracker or Google Website Optimizer so you can see if this works for you or not.
Hope this helps.
-James D. Lee
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