Mar
03
2010
Your headline is, hands down, the most important part of your landing page copy. You only have a few seconds to make a connection with the reader, and to get them interested in what you have to offer. The Internet has spawned a generation of consumers with 2-second attention spans, and your headline is often the only shot you have at leading them to an eventual conversion.
Although these tactics aren’t necessarily applicable to every niche and traffic source, more often than not, your headline can benefit from employing these strategies.
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Speak directly to the visitor.
When writing headlines, I always try to include the words “you” or “your” to directly address the visitor. If somebody wants your product, it’s for their own personal gain, not because they find you interesting, and using these two words helps them imagine what it’s like to have this product solve all the problems.
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Tell the visitor what to do next.
Again, the whole purpose of a headline is to get the visitor started on the path towards conversion. The last thing you want to happen is for the visitor to finish reading your headline, and still have no idea what they’re supposed to be doing on your website.A simple solution to this problem is to directly tell the visitor to your landing page what the next step is. You’re writing as a salesperson, and although you don’t want to come off as a salesperson, you can’t be afraid to be a little pushy. Phrases like, “Join Now!”, “Click here for more”, and “Sign up for our newsletter today!”, are used over and over in web copy and more traditional mediums for a reason. They work! Although you can certainly get more creative.
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Show the visitor what makes your product/service better than all the rest.
The Internet isn’t the wild wild West it used to be, and chances are, your product or service has its fair share of competition. Which is why you must know what differentiates you from your competitors, and know it well.
This is what we call a “USP”– a Unique Selling Point or Unique Selling Proposition. You should define what your product’s greatest benefit to the user is, and what makes your product/service better than the others, and develop a USP from that.
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Test, Test, Test.
Regardless of how awesome you think your headline is, you’ll never actually know how effective it is until you split tests your headline against others. Even the world’s best copywriters don’t write the perfect headline their first time around. In fact, the best copywriters will test dozens of headlines before finding a true winner.
Now get out there, and test these tactics out for yourself!
Connect with the visitor.
When a visitor comes to your landing page it’s vitally important that you connect with them on a personal or emotional level. Most commonly, you see marketers incorporating the visitors location or the page/website from which they came to make the headline appear as if it’s been written just for them.
This is, however, just scratching the surface of what’s possible. The marketer that is able to pinpoint the underlying desire of the visitor has the opportunity to connect with them on an emotional level as well.
The ability to understand what drives a visitor’s needs, and more importantly, their wants, does not come easily to everyone, but we’ll touch on that again in this post, as well as in the future.
If you have any questions feel free to ask, or share your own headline writing tip in the comments below!
About Paul
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Mar 09, 2010 12:22 pm
Very nice! Great collection of tips for writing good headlines. I especially agree with the last one. The most important thing to do is to keep testing.
Mar 09, 2010 3:14 pm
I’m so bad with headlines. To be honest I’m actually a pretty bad blogger. I was weak in spelling, English and grammar when I was in high school. When I first started thinking about blogging I was worried what the out come would be.
To my surprise it’s actually not as bad as I initially thought it would be. But I’m still missing the head lines. The attention grabbers. I’m glad you joined our community because this article alone is going to help me tremendously.
Mar 09, 2010 6:51 pm
I’m glad I could help!
There’s many great resources for headline writing out there that I should wrap up into a post one of these days.
Mar 09, 2010 5:32 pm
Is it important to focus on the headline for a personal type of blog? I can’t imagine how to connect with the reader?
Mar 09, 2010 7:10 pm
It’s absolutely important that you focus on the headline for personal blogs.
Though you are right, connecting with the reader, when they’ve come to read about you, is a bit odd.
I’m planning to do my own write up on the topic, but until I get around to it, check out this post about drawing in readers. Which is something you can apply directly to the cooking section of your site.
This is also a nifty plugin that I’ve been meaning to install on some other blogs for similar effect: http://omninoggin.com/projects/wordpress-plugins/wp-greet-box-wordpress-plugin/
Mar 09, 2010 9:24 pm
I like the last point you made about the importance of testing. Each niche is different and each post should be unique. I know that certain headlines do well on Digg but other on StumbleUpon. It’s important that the article truly delivers what the headline suggests. Otherwise you’ll have a high bounce rate.
Best wishes for your success and I’m glad you joined Blog Engage.
@Ileane
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Mar 12, 2010 1:17 pm
I can’t agree MORE with the tip “Tell the visitor what to do next.” I see this as one of the biggest downfalls of many web designs. It’s so crucial.
Apr 09, 2010 11:14 am
One of the things I saw recently was to test headlines via Twitter. I believe Huffington Post did that and it seemed to work out well.
Apr 14, 2010 12:23 am
Hey Rex, I’ve heard of people using sites like Digg and Reddit to test headlines ideas, as well as to generate new headline ideas, but never thought to use Twitter.
Thanks for the tip!
Apr 16, 2010 11:34 am
Well it is smart to leverage any social media outlet (like twitter in this case) to test headlines and other kinds of A/B Testing.