The 3 Responsibilities Of A Headline
There are 3 responsibilities of a headline. Get this right and
you’ll be writing articles that get read and ultimately deliver
you traffic.
1. Attract Attention
Your ad needs to stand out from the crowd and it’s your headline
that’s going to make that happen. Unless you attract the
reader’s attention right up front you can count on having it hit
the trash can in about 3 seconds or less. That’s about all the
time your headline has to make a difference. The only way to
attract attention is to hit one or more of the pain buttons
described in Chapter 3.
The 3 Responsibilities Of A Headline
2. Act As A Funnel
If you are the least bit realistic you already know that not
everyone who receives your ad is going to be a prospect. Some
people don’t want or need your product or service and there’s
little that you can do to convince them otherwise.
Your headline should weed these people out in advance by not
being deceptive in any way. A “Free Offer” should be a Free
Offer. If it’s not, don’t say it. Don’t trick people into
reading your Article; they won’t appreciate it.
A few years ago it was popular for people selling business
opportunities to use a headline that read: “Notice of payment
received.”
That headline really grabbed attention because it was the exact
same headline that PayPal used to notify someone that he had
received money via PayPal. The open rate for a message bearing
this headline was nearly 100%. However, the click through rate
to the landing page was near zero once people learned that they
had been deceived.
This illustrates the point that attracting attention alone is
not sufficient. The headline did not act like a funnel. It did
not draw the attention of potentially interested prospects. It
drew everyone’s attention yet the campaign was a failure.
It is better to let your headline proclaim the truth without
giving away so much information that someone doesn’t have to
read the Article to learn more. Here’s an example of a simple
headline that will motivate interested people to read more while
still telling the truth.
Published Author Reveals How To Write A Book In 30 Days Or Less.
Anyone who is interested in writing a book is going to click to
see who this published author is and how it could ever be
possible to write a book in 30 days or less. Anyone who has no
interest in writing a book is not going to have an interest in
your headline.
Here’s another example:
100 Can’t-Fail Creamy Fudge Recipes For Free
Fudge lovers will click. Interested cooks will click. Even
people who are on diets may click if they are interested in
making fudge for friends or family members.
3. Deliver An Entire Mini-Sales Message
If you think about it you’ll see that your headline is really a
stand-alone sales message. It’s designed to sell someone on
wanting to read the body of the message. If you carry this out
to its final conclusion, it becomes obvious that the job of the
message body is to sell the reader on clicking on the call to
action so they can be transported to the landing page where the
real selling gets done.
Article readership studies show that 80% of your prospects will
read only the headline before deciding whether or not they want
to know more. That means you’ll lose 8 out of 10 prospects if
your headline doesn’t “sell.”
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Erlend