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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In a recent cri­tique for a coach­ing client, the issue of “gap analy­sis” arose. Gap Analy­sis is some­thing I learned in sales, and it was heav­ily taught by sales train­ers like Brian Tracy, such as in his course “The Psy­chol­ogy of Selling.”

Gap Analy­sis is an immensely pow­er­ful sell­ing tech­nique. It’s also an impor­tant fea­ture of copy­writ­ing. Most peo­ple will know a vari­a­tion of it, which is often called “Problem-​​Agitate-​​Solve,” a term coined by top copy­writer Dan Kennedy.

I pre­fer “Gap Analy­sis” because it dri­ves home the rela­tion­ship between those three ele­ments. So what is Gap Analy­sis and how can you apply it to your sales copy?

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