Most professional copywriters would say that headlines account for 80% percent of more of the effectiveness of an ad or sales letter. After all, it's the headline that gets your reader to stop and read further into your sales copy. If the headline fails, then the entire ad or sale copy fails. So with headline creation being of such importance, are you giving your headlines the time and effort they are worth? Writing good headlines is a skill that can be learned and mastered if you are willing to put the time into studying good proven moneymaking headlines. One way of learning how to write killer headlines is to study the masters. Read the works of the past greats, such as Claude Hopkins, Robert Collier, John Caples, David Ogilvy, and Eugene Schwartz, among others. There works are available in libraries, used book stores, and in some cases there works have been reprinted and are still available on the market. A second method is to study the headlines in the super market tabloids and magazines that you find near the check out counters. Tabloids such as 'The Globe', 'The Star', and 'The National Enquirer' or magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Readers Digest, and Vanity Fair. These publications are placed near the cash registers for a reason. While you are standing in line waiting to check out, you scan their headlines and many people become interested and purchase these publications on impulse. And the sell millions! They have some of the highest circulations of any publications in the country. So, what gets them to sell so well? Certainly not the title of the publication! It's the headlines. They jump out at you. They get you to stop and look. They arouse your curiosity. Even if you don't buy, I'll bet on more than one occasion you've picked up the publication and scanned it for an article mentioned on the cover. I know I have. The headline writers for these publications are some of the highest paid writers in the country and the circulation numbers reflect it. Ok, so these publications have great attention grabbing, curiosity arousing headlines. How does that help you? As you read and study these headlines, see if you can see a pattern that you can use. Many of these headlines can be used to develop killer headline templates where just by modifying or substituting a word or two can also work wonders for your own advertising and promotion campaigns. Yet another technique is to look through direct response type ads and advertorials in publications related to your industry. Go to the library and check a number of back issues of these works. If you consistently see the same ads running over and over again, you know they are making money. Some profitable ads have consistently run for as long as 40 years! Without being changed! Professional copywriters constantly collect good headlines and create what they call "swipe files." These headline swipe files serve as models for good headlines and are great idea generators as they work to develop their own winning headlines. When you discover ads that are being run over and over, study their headlines, and copy them into your own swipe file and when you are trying to think about creating some new headlines of your own, dig out the swipe file, review your collection of headlines and see if you can't use some of them as models for your own. Model success. In another article, I'll tackle creating and working with headline templates. Until then, keep pumping out those winning headlines. |
