Should you apply good copywriting techniques to forum signatures?

I have been reading a lot of Brian Clark’s blog CopyBlogger lately and one thing that is definitely stressed on that site is the importance of your headline.

It makes sense that if you have a crappy headline the chances of someone reading your post are slim to none. If you have good headline, however, 53% more readers, according to CopyBlogger, will read your post.

I wonder if you can take this same principle and apply it to forum signatures?

The other day I started a little experiment to see if forum signatures really drive traffic to your blog. At the time, I didn’t really have good copywriting techniques in mind, in fact, using keywords instead of your URL was about all the thought that I had given to the matter. That, however, was before I really started to notice how incredibly bad most peoples signatures are.

For starters, the overwhelming majority of signatures that I come across just have URLs to the posters webpage or blog. www.myplaceontheweb.com for example. Unless you have a very descriptive domain name, there is nothing that would make me go out of my way to click your link. A generic URL doesn’t do much in the way of Search Engine Optimization either. People don’t generally type URLs into search engines when they are looking for something. They type what they are looking for into search engines.

Another large segment of signatures just contain a link with the website title as hypertext. This is much better than a URL alone, however, titles alone don’t always convey a benefit or even tell me what the site is about. 33Dollars as a link doesn’t give me any idea what that site is about. I think that I would have a pretty good idea of what Online Diamond Warehouse is about, but, there is no perceived benefit that I get by clicking the link.

What I have noticed is that the signatures that I tend to click are the ones that tell me exactly what the site is about and what the benefit of clicking thru will be. The signature that I am running my little experiment on reads Learn how to make money with your blog. The forum that I am running this test on is one that new bloggers tend to frequent and it just so happens that one of the most popular threads is about making money with your blog.

I have been posting in this forum for over a year and I never really thought about my signature all that much. Since I started my little test, people click on my signature at about 15 times the rate as they did before.

Even though I didn’t intentionally use good copywriting techniques when creating my new signature for my experiment, stumbling into a good signature definitely lets me know that there is something to this good copywriting thing after all.

To answer my own question of Should you apply good copywriting techniques to forum signatures, the answer is a resounding yes.