Copy Tip 24: Headline Wrap
Today I want to wrap up everything we’ve covered on headlines.
There’s a lot!
As I mentioned early, it’s worth getting into headlines in depth because they often account for 70 to 80 percent of your readership.
If you get this wrong, and only get 20 percent of your prospects, you’ll have to work 5-times as hard as you could with an effective headline.
Ouch!
Conversely, get this right and you’ll get 5-times the result of a poor headline!
Now that’s something worth achieving!
So here’s what you now know…
Copy Tip 10
- Relating to current news is a great way to capture attention. I gave you a list of 50 top news headlines of 2008 — published here in Melbourne, but a great list to study themes that grab attention.
- Magazine covers contain some stellar headline examples for your swipe files
- Using accurate specific numbers (eg “5415″ instead of “nearly 6,000″) makes your headline more believable
- You now have two ways to get magazine headlines for FREE
Copy Tip 13
- Headlines can work in ANY size campaign, whether with a low or high budget. I gave you some examples of fantastic results for three campaigns spending (1) less than $400; (2) $109.90 and (3) less than $100
- The inside secret about headlines: the headline is the “ad for the ad” — its only purpose is to persuade your prospect to keep on reading (or watching/listening) … and nothing else.
Copy Tip 14
- The absolute critical role your headline plays: it must get the attention of qualified prospects
Copy Tip 15
- The power of leverage: how to instantly create your own headline swipe file resources for free
Copy Tip 16
- A free, must-have marketing resource (for headlines and lots lots more)
Copy Tip 17
- The power of personalisation: including an example that resulted in a 95 percent same-day response (and what to avoid when using this technique)
Copy Tip 18
- How to use your headline to qualify your prospects: who it attracts, and who it turns away (and why that’s a good thing)
Copy Tip 19
- An example of copy that didn’t use a headline (and the surprising results it created)
Copy Tip 21
- A free resource on headline formulas (previously only published exclusively for paid members) … plus another free way to get live examples of what’s working from one of the world’s top marketers (you can also apply this strategy to other top offline and online marketers)
Copy Tip 22
- How to use your free resources for your maximum benefit. Includes a specific example of how to borrow and adapt a headline. Also reveals how value is much more important than price.
That covers a LOT of ground about headlines!
Some of this information took me YEARS to learn from my mentors and from working on hundreds of client and my own projects … here you have a fast-track to the winner’s circle.
To wrap up headlines, I want to reinforce a couple of major points …
“Big Benefit” Promises
If you include a big benefit or claim in your headline about what your product or service can do for your prospect, you’ll want to address their likely response: “yeah sure”. Another very successful marketer, Gary Bencivenga, expands on this superbly in his Bencivenga Bullet:
The Two Most Powerful Words in
Advertising.
(No, they’re not FREE and NEW.)
The Bencivenga Bullets are yet ANOTHER must-have resource. I share these resources with you to save you the time and effort digging through the internet to find the expert brilliant content for yourself!
As Gary alludes to in his Bullet, your qualified prospects nowadays are a lot more attuned to hearing big claims in advertising (and being quite sceptical about those claims). They have their “BS-detectors” turns on and — rightfully — question everything you promise or say.
That means you have to work hard to back up what you claim: prove it! Proof can come from many elements: there are lots of ways to boost your believability and credibility. You’ll need to use them to get effective results.
Gary also reveals a very effective formula that smacks “yeah sure” for a home run … using the “If/Then” formula. It’s worth reading this Bullet!
Actually — along with “yeah sure” — you’ve also got to address other similar “resistance” going through the mind of your prospect … “so what?” “big deal!” “who cares?” … your copy needs to address and answer these concerns quickly so they’ll keep on reading.
The big lesson, as Gary concludes, is this: never make your claim bigger than your proof.
Emotional Headlines
Using an emotional-based headline captures attention because it goes much further to “resonate” with your prospects on “what’s in it for them”.
You turn a feature into a benefit into the feelings they’ll get from that benefit.
Or you could focus on a fear your prospect has (and the promise of your product or service to bridge that fear).
Rather than me outline all of this again … I’d be only repeating the content available to you — for FREE — that I mentioned in Copy Tip 21. That gives you 8 ways to use your headline to engage your prospect and dozens of great headline ideas.
Remember, you don’t need to “reinvent the wheel” — find what works (I’ve done this for you) and adapt it for yourself!
Later in this Copy Tip series I’ll cover some very important formatting issues — but for now, that covers the topic of headlines!
Premature evacuation is back!
I noted with some humour (at the choice of headline, not the actual story!) a headline used on heraldsun.com.au today:
It’s a headline that has probably been used several times before when the right news story pops up. I actually posted a blog article here in July 2007 about a similar one used for a Melbourne story in The Age:
I’m sure editors and sub-editors are itching to use this kind of headline whenever they have a suitable story!
So much so, a Google search reveals hundreds more examples of the term used (like this one from 2006 in the Dallas Observer)!
Copy Tip 23: Online Usability
Did you enjoy your celebration welcoming in 2009? We had a ball — a 360-degree view of the city of Melbourne, from a high vantage point around 5km north of the CBD. Not only did we see the main fireworks over the city and the Docklands area, but dozens and dozens of fireworks in every direction at private homes — some going on for a couple of hours into 2009!
So after a long night (this pic above is from flickr by Vermin Inc, from the earlier 9:15pm fireworks over the Docklands), it’s a late day today!
One of the things I’m doing today is related to copy — but isn’t directly “copy”.
It’s about online usability.
I have a tip to share about a mistake I’ve been making myself!
How does this relate to copy?
It’s all about USABILITY … making it EASY for your readers to keep reading.
As you’ll see later in the Copy Tips series, formatting and design, and things like online navigation all contribute to the effectiveness of your message to do the job you want it to do.
In my case, when I launched my 101 Copy Tips last month, one of things I forgot to do was think about navigating through the tips once there got to be quite a few of them.
Mea culpa!
Even when I’m only in the 20’s in terms of the number of tips, I’ve already noticed that there’s no easy way to read through them all.
The last handful appear in my “sidebar” on the right — and there’s a list under the 101 Copy Tips in the “Blog Categories” in the sidebar, but that’s it.
And even that list isn’t very user-friendly — it just shows 4 posts per page, with a very hard-to-find “Next Page” link at the bottom of the page to the next four tips.
I can’t expect readers to find that easy to use!
On this website I use the Wordpress platform, which is an open source blog platform (also good for non-blog sites). Wordpress has improved since its first launch as a “Content Management System” — a way to manage your site online (and in technical terms separate the content from the design/structure).
Now the internet has come a LONG WAY since I first got online in 1994 … 15 years ago!
Back then, my first web browser was Lynx — completely text based, nothing graphical. Internet Explorer didn’t even exist back then! (Well, only as Mosaic, the graphical browser I first saw when I was using Lynx).
I remember advancing to Netscape Navigator in 1995 — not even at version 1.0 — and wow, it was a huge change (I think it was version 1.1 where backgrounds of web pages could finally be colours other than gray!). Now of course, that all looks virtually prehistoric compared to the current web, as it looks in Firefox or Internet Explorer or one of the other modern browsers.
One little story before I continue …
It used to be really exciting going to a website like http://www.whitehouse.gov (one of the first sites I visited after Nasa’s image library) … and seeing a picture of the White House either to be daytime or night-time, and a message that reflected the time of day (either “good morning”, “good afternoon” or “good evening”, welcome to The White House). That was about as exciting as it got. I went there of course as I was involved in political marketing and campaigning at the time, so it was pretty exciting to see a site like that (for me, anyway).
But I digress. The point I’m making is that it is NOW a LOT easier to add in the usability improvements to make the Copy Tips easier to navigate.
And that’s what I’ll be doing over the next day or so while it’s a quiet time of the year.
Here’s what I’ll be adding and customising:
- Under the “Blog Categories” there’s be lots more Copy Tips per page, using the “excerpt” of the tip (my hand-written mini summary), plus a link to the full article, rather than the full article on the actual category page. This makes it easier to scan through the tips than having 4 full articles per page.
- When a 101 Copy Tips article is displayed in full, there will be additional navigation surrounding the article to make it easier to find the previous tip, the next tip and the list of tips in the series.
I’m also making other general navigation improvements that are more relevant now there are a lot of articles on this site.
Now, back in the “prehistoric” internet days, this would have been more time-consuming than it is today. All of the navigation was added manually, and had to be manually updated when new content was added.
That wastes a lot of time (and in turn money) — time you can’t afford to waste!
Now, with something like Wordpress, I get to add the changes quickly and easily to “templates” — so that when the articles are displayed, the template performs its technical magic to make sure the navigation is always up to date.
Best of all, the code I used was pretty easy for me to find and adapt from the Wordpress documentation (although I’m a direct response copywriter and designer, and marketing strategist, I do have quite a few website skills built up since 1994).
If you’re a non-technical person, you can skip this next paragraph!
In this case, I used a page navigation plugin, a drop-down category post list and a template using the in_category variable template tag to add the navigation just for the 101 Copy Tips articles.
Now back to the article!
So that should make the readability and usability of these Copy Tip articles much more effective … and it should improve the number of Copy Tips that each website visitor views.
That helps build my relationship with my website visitors, which is a good thing (one of my objectives in my website MOOVE-based strategy).