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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Now that I’m back from my hon­ey­moon, my inbox and forum have been flood­ingly busy! In fact, one thread on my Copy­writ­ers Board gar­nered so much inter­est that it cre­ated close to 10 pages worth of posts.

It’s a member’s take on “Michel Fortin’s Suc­cess Secret.”

Dale King, the author in ques­tion, pos­tu­lated that in every post and arti­cle I write, there’s a “secret” to my suc­cess. Although he hinted that the secret can be found in the book “Think and Grow Rich,” the rea­son why the thread became so pop­u­lar was because Dale never revealed it until the very end.

It’s a great exam­ple of the Zeigar­nik effect and keep­ing peo­ple inter­ested in your copy. It was so pow­er­ful that some peo­ple became out­right pissed off at Dale’s reluc­tance in reveal­ing “the secret” and posted harsh com­ments as a result.

In order to assuage the dis­grun­tled, here’s what I said. The secret is…

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Have you ever picked up a book off the shelf at a local book­store, read the front and back cov­ers, opened it up and, after read­ing a few pages, just couldn’t put it down?

Do you remem­ber, after buy­ing the book, how you flipped each page with an almost excru­ci­at­ing curios­ity because the story was so tan­ta­liz­ing, you became increas­ingly riv­eted to the book with each sub­se­quent chapter?

Copy is, or should be, the same.

Look at it this way: good copy makes a good case. But great copy tells a good story. They say that a great copy­writer is also a great sales­per­son. But all great copy­writ­ers and all great sales­peo­ple also have one thing in common…

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