People scan web sites, using headlines to help them decide whether it's worth their time to read the whole page. If you want to give your copy a chance to be read, you need to use compelling descriptive headlines.

What’s with Your Headline?

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People scan web sites, using headlines to help them decide whether it’s worth their time to read the whole page. If you want to give your copy a chance to be read, you need to use compelling descriptive headlines.

Your article headline is a promise to the prospective readers. The headline’s job is to communicate clearly the benefit that the reader will receive in exchange for their limited time.

In order to write a great headline and great content, you need to start with the headline first. Promises need to be made before they can be fulfilled. If you write the content first you are trying to fulfill your promise before it is made. With a compelling headline in front of you, you will need to produce compelling content in order to fulfill the promise.

Your headline is the first impression you will make on a prospective reader. In fact, most of the time it will be the only impression you will make, as only 2 out of 10 readers read beyond the headline. The better your headline, the better your chances of getting the rest of what you have written read. So the headline plays the significant role in the effectiveness of the entire article.

How can someone with no experience come up with a compelling headline?

The easiest way is to cheat. Well, not exactly. Borrow would be a better term. Every copywriter has what is called a “swipe file”. This is a collection of ads and articles that have successful headlines. There are also resources that can be found that contain lists of successful headlines. Using such tools for developing headlines is not really considered cheating.

The collection of successful headlines provides guidance in formulating a new somewhat unique headline. It is actually very rare that a copywriter will come up with a 100% totally unique headline.

It is the promise of the headline that attracts the reader. If it depicts a benefit that the reader desires, then the reader will continue on and read the article.

“How to” articles are very attractive to readers. Whenever “How to” is used in a headline the benefit of reading the article is very clear.

Examples would be:

“How to Get Rich”
“How to Save Money”
“How to Get a Date”

The promise and benefit of the articles is very clear with these headlines.

Write a headline with a compelling promise and a desirable benefit and your chances of the reader deciding to stop and read the whole story is greatly enhance.

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