Do you struggle with writing subject lines for your emails? I'm talking emails you're sending to your list, not to your grandmother or your best friend.

The subject line is probably the most important part of writing an effective email message. The content of the email itself can be absolutely fantastic, something that will make the reader whip out their wallet and buy anything you have to sell them, but if the subject line doesn't get them to open the message, it's worthless.

The subject does the same job as the headline on a good sales letter. It gets the reader interested in reading on to find out more (and ultimately do whatever it is you want them to do - buy, click, whatever).

For the longest time, I struggled to come up with good subject lines, and my open rate suffered a lot of the time.

But then I changed the way I wrote my emails, and a couple of small changes made a huge difference.

1. Write the message first

If you write the subject line before you write the message, half the time you'll have to go back and edit it anyway. As you write the email, you'll have new ideas that could take the message in a different direction than you initially planned.

It's a lot easier to write a subject line that will grab the reader's attention when you know exactly what the email says and can pick a hot button to focus on.

2. Know who you're writing to

When you write the subject line (and the main message for that matter) it's a lot more effective when you write it to a specific person.

Have a person in mind - someone who has the problem your message solves or wants to know how to do what your message explains. It doesn't matter if they're real or made-up, just that they're you're ideal target customer.

Decide how they would feel when they're in that position, and what they really want. Remember, they don't want to lose 10 pounds, they want to look good for their high school reunion next month.

Hit their hot buttons in the subject line and you'll get a lot higher open rate.

The other thing I did to make writing subject lines easier is to create a swipe file of good examples from other marketers.

A lot of people get tired of receiving tons of promotional emails from internet marketing lists and they unsubscribe. I actually see people in forums who are proud they never got an email about the latest big product launch.

I'm the opposite - I subscribe to as many lists as I can so I can swipe ideas from people who are promoting stuff to me. Especially people like John Reese, Frank Kern, Jimmy Brown or Mike Filsaime. Regardless of what you think of their marketing techniques, they know how to get people's attention.

There is a catch here though. Don't subscribe with your main email address. Go sign up for a free Gmail account and use that address to sign up for these lists (or Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or your favorite free email site).

This is really important if you're signing up for lists in a market that you're interested in personally. You're not trying to find more stuff to buy, you just want to get ideas you can use.

Once every couple of weeks, log into that special Gmail account and scan the messages you've received, looking for subject lines that make you want to open the email and read the whole thing.

Copy & paste those examples into a Word document, a text file or whatever format works best for you. Then the next time you sit down to write an email to your list, open up that swipe file and you'll have a nice list of subject lines that you can just modify to suit your needs.