Headlines that ROCK

Advertisers have long known that a headline has just a fraction of a second to grab our attention. Journalists will write 150 versions of a front page headline. So what could business writers do to get their headlines noticed?

What do good headlines do?

A typical newspaper page could have anything from three to thirty articles vying for attention. So it’s no surprise that journalists expect to spend more than 50 percent of their writing time coming up with headlines; tabloid journalists will write up to 150 versions of their main front-page headlines!

Although the situation is not so extreme for business communication, the same principles apply. On average, five times more people will read your headlines than your body copy. This means your headline is the only message 80 percent of your audience will ever receive – or in advertising terms, when you’ve written your headline, you’ve already used 80 cents of your dollar.

This has two implications. Either you:

• Pack as much of your valuable message into your headline as possible, or…
• Give your reader every incentive to carry on reading.

It’s really hard to condense an article into a single headline (try it!) – so only the second option is realistic. The question is: how do you do it?


Four top tips for writing headlines that keep your readers reading

Once you’ve captured it, there are four main ways to keep your readers attention:

1. Make a promise
This type of headline works extremely well if you can outline the benefits that directly impact your reader. How about:

“Cut the time you use to check your emails in half” or
“Make your challenging customers happy with just one call”

There is a catch though – you’ll have to deliver on your promise!

2. Provide news
Whatever the news, you need to make it sound relevant, urgent and important enough to justify taking your readers’ time. How about this one:

“Now you can drive twice the distance on a single tank of fuel”

But be careful: best to leave sensationalism to the tabloids.

3. Arouse curiosity
Bold opinions (how can she think that?), intrigue, insider secrets or the promise of rewarding news all make us curious. Compare:

“New anti-wrinkle face lotion” to “The $5 alternative to plastic surgery”

4. Ask a question
This is very effective as long as you know your target audience. But asking a question like “Why do frogs’ legs taste like chicken?” to the wrong audience risks provoking another question in response: “Who cares?”

 

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Now your headlines can pack a punch

There are no rules for writing headlines, but there are three basic rules of thumb.

1. Try to keep your headline less than a line long
Ideally, your reader’s eye should be able to take in the whole message in one go: no work involved! But this rule certainly doesn’t seem to apply to sales letters. Take a look at this one, chosen at random after a quick Google search for ‘Copywriting Skills’:

”Why Settle For 1% Response When You Can get 50% Response With Effective Copywriting? Learn How To Hone Your Skills To Improve Your Sales and Become the Rainmaker for your Organization Now!”

Because they have to hook the reader with pains, product benefits and promises, the headline looks more like a whole paragraph. Yet, testing has proved that these types of headline work – for direct mail campaigns and online sales.

2. Never finish a headline with a period
A period means, ‘end of sentence, stop reading’. So when your reader gets to the period, that’s exactly what they do. Remove the period, and their eyes are likely to continue the flow of words through the rest of your article.

3. Keep capitalization to a minimum
Most newspapers use ‘down-style’: capitalizing only the first word plus nouns, verbs and adjectives. For business writing, it looks cleaner to use caps for the first word only – and that’s what we use for WordSpin.

Can you see which techniques we’ve used to write this article’s sub-headings?