Your Headline: More Important Than Anything Else
The headline is the first thing your prospect sees. It not only has to grab their fleeting attention, it has to give them a clear idea of what the rest of your text is going to be about. It has to be short and to the point, yet it has to be verbose enough to inspire interest.
If your headline is weak, doesn’t work, or just plain falls flat, your entire body copy is wasted and worse than useless.
Needless to say, it’s one of the most difficult pieces of copy to come up with. In fact, most expert copywriters spend about 50 percent of their time simply crafting a good headline (with the other fifty divided between concepting, research, and writing and editing the body copy.) So, when you’re trying to create a good headline yourself, it can be like pulling teeth—maybe worse.
Here are 5 tips for creating attention grabbing headlines you can use to save yourself a little time, a little money, and a lot of headache.
1) Keep Your Headlines Short
People’s attention spans have grown measurably shorter over the years. We, as a race, just don’t have time—or the mental capacity—to digest all of the information that’s thrown at us on a daily basis. Therefore, our brains have learned to ruthlessly scrutinize everything that our eyes and ears process. In fact, 80 percent of readers never make it past the first five words in a headline. Of the 20 percent that do, with each word, their attention drops exponentially.
Therefore, keeping your headlines between 7 and 12 words is essential. Any longer and you risk losing your audience before you’ve ever grabbed them.
2) Make Bold Statements
The bolder and more “in-your-face” a headline is, the more people will stick it out long enough to read it. If you have a fact that hits home or can assault a commonly held belief, you’ll score brownie points because your readers will want to prove you wrong or learn about this fact that they’ve somehow overlooked.
However, you must be careful not to be too offensive, ludicrous, or silly. If your headline reads like a poor attempt at copying The National Enquirer, people will tune your info out as useless garbage.
3) Make It Personal
Whenever you direct something squarely at your reader, they’re going to at least attempt to see the value in your message. That’s because people are inherently selfish. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We always want to know what’s in it for us.
So rather than spouting off about your new line of 3D Televisions, inform them that their TVs are sorely outdated or describe how your TVs are going to blow their minds!
4) Use Numbers to Break Text Up
For some reason, people searching the internet love lists. You can find 10 ways to lose belly fat, 8 tips for saving money at the grocery store, and the top ten destination vacations for newlywed. Numbered lists (or unordered ones for that matter) make the process of digesting information easier. We can take each piece of info as a brief little bite instead of trying to swallow a novel in one sitting.
But here’s the kicker, people like numbers so much that Google has come to prefer them as well. Why? Because so many searchers click on those headlines with numbers.
5) Preview What’s in the Body Copy
Just in case your reader doesn’t make it past the headline, you should always use your headline to tell them what they’re missing. If your main message is in the headline, the chances of the single bit of information you really want them to latch onto actually making it into their brain are much higher. You don’t have to give them a blow by blow of the body copy but a concise recap is always a good plan of attack.
As a side note: Your body copy should contain “headlines” as well. In this context by “headline” I mean text that stands out from the rest. Why do you need to make text standout? Because, when people browse articles and blog posts, they often skip to the juicy bits. They look for the headlines, subheadings, bulleted text, and emboldened copy. These are some of the most powerful weapons in a copywriter’s bag of tricks (next to great words in the perfect order, of course.) If you buy enough of your reader’s attention that they scan through your content and pick out those emphasized bits, you should have already imparted 90 percent of your message to them. If your message is interesting enough, they’ll stop to read the rest.
If you’d like to learn more about how crafting a great hook can improve your conversions, get your website more traffic, and improve your readership and profits, email me today and I’ll be happy to help.
And, as always, if you liked this article or think it would be of use to somebody you know, pass it along.
