Master the Secrets to Achieving Headline Greatness.

The Difference Between Good and Great Headlines.

On the average, 5 times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy. It follows that unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90% of your money.

~ David Ogilvy, World famous advertising executive and best-selling author.

Imagine staring at your conversion rates and seeing a 100% boost after hanging only 2 lines of copy.

Is this possible? You bet!

Read this post and you’ll be a lot closer to making this dream a reality.

Writing a great headline is absolutely critical to attracting customers to your product, regardless of whether the headline is on a blog post, landing page, or sales letter.

Here are some tried and true secrets to make sure your headlines achieve greater results.

Study Your Customers

First, study your customers. Ask yourself 3 questions:

1. What do they care about?
2. What is the biggest problem they face
3. How can you help them solve it

You should invest considerable time thinking about who exactly you are trying to reach. Trying to reach everyone is futile.. and the quickest route to bland copy. Use these three questions as a guide to narrow down and create a profile of your target audience. Be specific as possible. This will guide you in crafting a headline (and the following body copy) that best resonates with their world-view. From this point forward, always refer back to this profile and ask if you are designing or writing with this person in mind.

Learn From Other People

Unless you are a seasoned veteran, NEVER try to be a maverick and come up with headlines all on your own. Study your competitors and consult the winning formulas. This is what all great headline writers do. You should too.

You aren’t the only one trying to optimize your headlines, so be conscious of what others are doing. Check what the newspapers and magazines are using as you walk through the train station. Awesome headlines are literally all around you. And remember, these headline formulas are repeated over and over because THEY WORK. Don’t feel bad about using something that get results.

Use this headline list to get you started.

Write for People, not Search Engines

Remember, while search engine optimization is important, it is ultimately PEOPLE who will read your post, buy your product, or sign-up for your offer. Thus, don’t focus all your efforts on writing your headline just for a search engine (especially if it is for a landing page or advertisement) – write it for PEOPLE. You have only a few seconds before they’ll be tempted to hit the “back” button, so make sure your headline sucks them in!

Use this list to help you write your headlines for people:

1. Show that you will benefit the reader in some way.

If your headline doesn’t convey a benefit to the reader, they will see no point in continuing. It doesn’t matter if you’ve written amazing copy. If you don’t show them how your offer is useful, they’ll never get to that copy you spent hours writing.

2. Compel them to act NOW.

Many people will often set offers aside, to be considered later. You know what? “Later” never comes. If you don’t instill urgency NOW, kiss the lead good bye.

3. Show how you are different from everyone else.

Consumers are looking for unique offers. If you aren’t differentiated in some way, it is likely someone else has a similar offer at a better price. If price is your unique offer, state that.

4. Be direct and specific.

Generic headlines will kill you. Use specific information to get straight to the point and attract their attention.

“Based on hundreds of tests conducted, a good headline can be as much as 17 times more effective than a so-so headline. And this is with exactly the same body copy!”

~ Ted Nicholas (Master direct marketer)

Now you have several secrets to writing great headlines. It is the single most important piece of your copy, so dedicate appropriate resources to it! Of any single element, veteran copy writers always dedicate their greatest effort to the headline and first few sentences or sub headings because they know how much impact it has. Remember, this is the difference between average results and million-dollar results.

For additional resources, check out AdWords System Exposed for creating killer headlines for AdWords (and dominating AdWords in general) or our Chain Reaction Marketing book for building a complete, wildly successful internet marketing campaign.