I Present You… The Headline Creation Formula

Posted by David Tendrich on Mar 9, 2010 in Expert Copywriting | 0 comments

Hey!

Been a while since I put up a post – I’ve been SUPER busy lately (as I’m sure you have too).

With that said – I have an awesome post for you today that’ll make writing headlines faster and easier, and the headlines you write will be way more effective.

But first, let’s refresh our memories with one really simple thing…

And that’s that headlines have a very SIMPLE purpose:

To call out your target market, and GRAB their attention.

Now, pay close attention to the word ‘GRAB’…

…Notice that I didn’t say “get their attention” or “make them interested”. A headline needs to convince someone that whatever they’re doing can wait a few minutes while they read your website or ad.

So to do that, you probably want to address the most BURNING issue or desire they have, right?

Right.

So to do that – follow this formula:

1. TALK to your customers, and find out their #1 frustration, and the #1 benefit they’ve gotten from working with you

2. Look for patterns in the answers, and find the most common ones

3. Work the biggest frustration/desire into your headline – and leave everything else out

Now, on #3 what I mean is that a lot of people try to fit every possible benefit into their headline.

This does 2 things…

First, it makes it so the benefits don’t really stand out because they’re all clumped together.

Second, if everyone knows everything they’re going to get out of your product before reading the page – why would they keep reading!?

Give’em just enough to keep’em goin.

For example…

If you check out my coaching page headline – it says something like: “How you can boost your monthly income by 5 figures or more by… Writing words down on a piece of paper?”

I stick to one benefit – boosting your income. And I give a “hint” about how you’ll do it (“writing words down on a piece of paper”).

Now go write some headlines!

Of course nothing beats practice. So write, write, write! I usually write about 10-15 headlines before I really find a good one – so just keep that in mind.

It’s OKAY to get stuck, and it’s OKAY to not get it right the first time.

Till next time,

David