I cov­ered head­lines many times already. You can find posts about head­lines here. But here are some addi­tional tips.

There are two huge mis­takes peo­ple make when they write head­lines. Either they are too bland and don’t say enough (such as when they attempt to sim­ply sum­ma­rize), or they say too much to cover all the bases.

In both cases, you will lose readers.

1. The True Purpose of The Headline

The head­line is more than a mere sum­mary of the sales copy. Unlike the title of a book, for instance, it’s not meant to sum­ma­rize, encap­su­late, or intro­duce the story. And most head­lines I’ve seen seem to list all the of the great­est ben­e­fits from the copy.

No. A head­line is meant to gen­er­ate read­er­ship and pull peo­ple into the copy.

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Some­one once asked me, “How many vis­i­tors do I need to deter­mine the valid­ity of my split-​​testing?” For exam­ple, if you’re split-​​testing two dif­fer­ent head­lines, how much traf­fic do you need to make a good judg­ment call on which head­line is the real winner?

That’s an inter­est­ing ques­tion, and one with no real answer, other than “a lot.” And there’s a spe­cific rea­son why…

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