Write Compelling Headlines [Essential Copywriting Skills for Beginners & Pros]

Key Takeaways

welcome back for episode five of the essential copywriting skills this special series within breakthrough marketing secrets today's episode is all about how to write compelling headlines and i don't know if you're like me at all but when i was getting into copywriting i actually like i created a whole stack and i'm flipping through it here i created a whole stack of three by five note cards that was just all these proven headlines and headline formulas and headline language and all of that and i thought if only i can write great headlines i can write great copy because you know fundamentally that's the promise of especially some of the older copywriting books now i will tell you that without everything else that we have been covering and will be covering in the dozen plus episodes within this series without all of that i would say like you know having a good headline is it's not quite enough right but with that having a good headline can make all the difference in the world so that's what we're going to cover in today's episode these are the proven direct response marketing copywriting and entrepreneurship success strategies you can use today to write your own ticket and create the life you want i am royfer and this is breakthrough marketing secrets now here's today's breakthrough [Music] all right so let's talk about how to write compelling headlines number one what's the role of the headline what is the role of the headline in your copy well number one i'll tell you what the role is not the role of the headline is not to actually make the sale it's it's not about making the sale it's not about closing the sale it's not about even promoting your product or selling your product in some cases with significantly shorter copy or short copy the headline may feature your product name it may you know feature especially if if you're dealing with speaking to a hyperware audience last time we talked about market market awareness you know if somebody is very aware of you and for example you're running a sale then okay maybe your headline is going to say like oh 30 off this product for these days right and in that case the role of the headline is to actually drive people into the sale and let's say if you're you have an extended uh an extended promotion going on and you're you're getting to the the deadline for your promotion well at that point you may actually have a very aware audience and so you may say you know save 100 if you respond by midnight tonight something like that right so the role the headline in that case in those very specific circumstances it may be to stimulate action but in general the role of a headline in advertising especially as you get towards colder audiences is to get readership it's to get or viewership or listenership or you know whatever media you're speaking to it's to get that initial attention and engagement and if all you do with your headline is get someone to pay attention to the first sentence and the first sentence gets them to pay attention to the second and the second to the third the third etc down the line then your headline did its job and um and so while i can give you a million rules for how to write a good headline ultimately your ultimate ultimately your ultimate yeah ultimately your your ultimate goal and the role of the headline is to get that initial readership that initial engagement that initial audience attention now the right headline can make all the difference in the world so you know the the power of headlines is well so so there's the classic like ogilvy on advertising 10 10 times as many people read the headline as read the body copy of a print ad in a normal publication and that's very true so let's say let's say i'm going through a newspaper i don't read physical newspapers that much anymore but you know remembering or magazine or whatever i'm flipping through the magazine flipping through the newspaper and what am i looking at to decide do i want to read this do i not want to read this do i want to read it's the headline right and so i look and when there's a headline that catches my attention i start reading if the headline doesn't catch my attention then i don't read and so a good headline uh is going to you know maybe 10 times as many people read it maybe 20 times maybe five times it doesn't matter but a good headline is going to take everybody who reads it and um you know compare a terrible headline to a good headline and you could easily get 10 times the readership and 10 times the response from a single ad just by changing the headline because you got 10 times the attention on the rest of the sales message and so headlines can be incredibly powerful they're worth testing they're worth studying they're worth spending some time to get right and so let's talk about how to write compelling headlines now very early on in the series when i talked about developing your your hook what i one of the things that i mentioned was my abc headline formula and a good headline tells the audience a audience that this message is for you it conveys benefits of engaging with the message and or responding right but it conveys that there's a benefit to ha to be had by engaging with this and it creates a sense of curiosity around oh uh you know this is something that i'm interested in that like i'm curious about learning more and when it tells the people the audience that you want to target that you have a benefit for them and gives them the feeling of i want to learn more well then a good headline has done its job but i don't want to dwell on that in terms of talking about headlines today and writing headlines today rather i'd like to i'd like to dive in and and i am going to actually bounce around a little bit here in my notes um so one of the things that i did and i showed you this this this card deck one of the things that i did when i was new as a copywriter is i studied those lists like 100 proven headline formulas and it seems like every old copywriting book has their own list of headlines and they're absolutely worth looking at and learning from and even today like there's lists of like click bait headlines and stuff that think what you will about click bait uh really people don't like click bait when it doesn't fulfill on its promise but people click on click bait because they're interested in it and people click on news articles that have really compelling headlines because they're interested in what's what's promised in the headline and you know so you can study what works in clickbait you can study what works in news headlines you can study what works in classic advertising headlines you can study all of those and you can test specific proven formulas and so for example you know it i'm pulling the rubber band off this big deck of cards here how to how to can be you know great language to use in your headline at last if it's something that's appropriate that's that's an at last making a big promise let's see offering instant improvement uh let's see how to get a goal from something common um you're you know something important to you your grandmother is in imminent danger i don't um if you blank then blank uh so like an if then headline how would it feel if you achieved whatever result and so like it's a whole mix and like none of those by themselves make a great headline but when you pay attention to the types of language that people use to get people's attention you do start to develop proven formulas for writing headlines and by the way writing headlines it's very similar to writing bullets and actually last year in one of my monthly insider's calls for btms insiders i did a whole a whole lesson on writing bullets and proven formulas that would be great to dive into if uh if you are um if if you are interested in writing better headlines because being able to write good bullets oftentimes it just takes picking the best bullet to be your your headline like that that's a classic way to write uh effective space ad copy or effective direct mail copy and still it's the same skill even if you aren't writing a bunch of bullets and picking one as your headline so so anyways you wanna you wanna study these classic formulas you wanna study the classic headlines and um uh one one particular practice that i went through when i was fairly new as a copywriter to get good at this was i would flip through this deck and i would say can i write a how-to headline for this thing that i'm writing about can i write a free headline for this thing that i'm uh that i'm writing about can i write a u can i write an amazing can i write a secrets of headline can i write and only can i write a this headline can i write a sale headline and i would just go through and i would try to write dozens of headlines and then as i wrote those dozens of headlines i would say oh i like that and that and maybe i can combine them and i can do something else or one of them is the main headline one of them is the sub headline how can i like use the the the fact that i'm actively thinking about this to write a better headline and so what you're doing is you're like taking proven formulas and you're finding ways to work them together into something that might work for you and when it comes to to writing a headline for your ad for your for you know whatever it is that you're writing for i will say that testing these proven formulas is a great way to come up with a good headline i'm always remembering that audience benefits curiosity like those things you know going back after you've written your headline and saying is my audience gonna know this is for them does this convey a sense of benefit for engaging in like is are they going to get some value out of engaging with this do i leave them curious at all for what i'm going to say next or have i fulfilled their curiosity in the headline and like based on your study of of classic headlines you decide you know does this headline work or not and and you can test those proven formulas but i will also say that and i said this earlier in the series people respond to or they give more attention to things that they perceive as new and unique and so for example for me as a copywriter i have my own little bias against who else against who else headlines and if i see a who else headline i feel like there is nothing new and unique in that you know in that ad i could be completely wrong but i have my own internal bias against that and one of the dangers of using these proven formulas is that you you can trigger this like oh i've seen this before reaction which immediately disqualifies you from getting any attention from your prospect so if it feels too familiar if it feels too common if it feels too basic if it feels too if it doesn't feel unique if it doesn't feel new your prospect is not going to give you the attention that you need to go deeper into your sales message and so the other thing that you can do is you can test rule breakers and i don't like i don't have a great definition of that because by definition you know rule breakers are indefinable but i can give you one great example of that so stansberry investment research or whatever the official company is they became best known for uh for a promotion that really started circulating in 2010 2011 called the end of america and their headline for this video sales letter was it was it was basically one of those warning messages warning um the following presentation maybe uh you know contain sensitive uh information it may be objectionable to some audience's viewer discretion is advised right whatever the exact headline was it was basically like a viewer discretion is advised message and it was it was at the top of the page and then there was just the video sales letter on the page and that thing was absolutely gigantic it did not follow the audience thing it did not follow the benefits thing but the the curiosity thing for the viewer discretion is advised was definitely in full force at that point and um and i would say that probably a lot of the ads that drove traffic to this did satisfy the the audience and benefits a little bit but once you actually got on the page it was just pure curiosity for like what what is the what you know what's the content in here that's that's potentially objectionable and that i need to you know have some discretion about whether or not i would actually pay attention to this and so you can study classic headlines you know until the cows come home and you can write headlines by formulas all you want and then you know at some point somebody's going to test a rule breaker and it's going to blow all the rules out of the water and so don't be afraid when you're writing headlines to write something that doesn't conform don't be afraid to some to write something that breaks some of these rules and just do it intentionally and like when i you know when i got started in copywriting and i wrote you know this is probably a couple hundred different three by five note cards with different headline ideas on it what i was doing there was i was learning all the rules of all the proven formulas to get really good at understanding how to use that language in my copy and then i stepped away i stepped back from those rules and i said in any given situation i just want to i just want to write the headline that seems to match the situation and these days that's what i do sometimes i'll put a placeholder headline in the document as i start to write my ad sometimes i won't sometimes i'll write the body copy first and then i'll go back and i'll write the headline and sometimes i'll write multiples oftentimes i'll write multiples or i'll really finesse and work with it through time to get it to work right and i know many other copyright click make piece for example projects that i worked with him on uh he he was very adamant about you know he would put big compelling headline here and and he would just write that in the document and then he'd come back at the end and say now i know what my headline needs to say now i know what my headline needs to do and he would then write his headline and again like he would do all sorts of things he would actually use a lot of biblical references in his headlines uh primarily from revelations because he would say like you know the four horsemen of the coming stock market apocalypse is a famous headline from him now there is there's there's audience there investors stock market yeah benefits is actually understanding why the market's going to crash right in curiosity what are the four horsemen and like is there actually a stock market apocalypse or what so that was not a formulaic headline but it was absolutely uh it absolutely satisfied the audience benefits curiosity and uh and and great headlines will will often do that okay so what else can go into your headline well i have a list here of some more headline components and maybe this isn't all of them but it's a pretty good list so keywords i find oh and by the way you know i talked about bullets and all that email subject lines it's the exact same thing the first words in any multimedia script like a you know radio script tv script video script youtube videos whatever right the first words that come out of your mouth are the headline titles that can be headlines it can all be headlines and so uh keywords keywords is one important thing to worth considering in your headline so stock market in the four horsemen of the stock market apocalypse stock market is a key word anybody who's interested in stock investing is going to pay a little bit of extra attention to that if if i have my email subject line say copywriter or copywriting in them based on my list in my audience i get more attention and so every market every like every audience every list has a particular set of keywords that are the topics that they're more interested in and knowing those for your audience is going to and using them in your headline is going to improve the amount of attention that you get to your headline and the subsequent copy audience identifiers now you could say this is almost the same as keywords uh but let's say for example um well i've seen all sorts of ads for um for like lincoln nebraska drivers okay i live in lincoln nebraska and i drive or lincoln nebraska homeowners need to know this one thing well okay so there's a big audience identifier in there that as a lincoln nebraska homeowner okay i'm curious to know what that one thing is right and so how can you call out your audience perhaps in a way that's not saying you as a copywriter because in certain places like facebook advertising you don't necessarily want to call somebody out especially if it's around a negative condition so you know your um your your blood pressure is high well facebook doesn't want their users to know that they know that their users have high blood pressure so there's some audience identifiers you have to be careful with there but any way that you can reference the audience in your headline can get more attention so keywords audience identifiers the result or benefit that they're looking for we've talked about the whole like problem solution thing throughout the course of this series to speak to the benefit that somebody wants to speak to the benefit or the result that somebody wants is a great way to to make your headline really interesting so for example in the copywriting space there's a very famous ad from american writers and artists awai that is retire this year and still make still make let's see as much money as most doctors i think and the retire this year is the result the benefit and also as make as much money as most doctors that's also result benefit so you can talk about the benefit that they want and that was talking about copywriting right but it didn't say copywriting in the headline it's just like people who want to who want to quit their job essentially problem so if your audience is problem aware you can speak specifically to the problem um that that they have so um you know boss frustrating you question mark here's what to do you know here's what to tell them uh and and so you speak to the problem that's going on leaky roof question mark oh that's a problem that's going on uh there's there's just speaking directly to the problem having the problem spoken about in your headline can get the attention of the people who are facing that problem also pain points or symptoms so maybe they don't have a name for the problem yet maybe they don't understand the problem yet but they do recognize that they have they're having certain pain points they're having certain uh symptoms of this problem and if you recognize that people within your market are are all experiencing a similar pain point then speaking to that in your headline can be effective uh solution identifying the particular solution and especially for solution aware prospects is an effective way to get attention in your headline and then other popular inferior solutions so a good example of this is um in real estate investing for for you know for example there are you know there are people who fix and flip houses there are people who wholesale houses there are people who become a landlord they're let's go with those three so let's say we have something that doesn't require any of those three that's a way to make money in real estate then we might say you know how to make a six-figure income from real estate without fixing and flipping without owning and renting and without wholesaling a single property okay so what i did was was i directed the attention away from often with these other popular but inferior solutions you say without like without this without that without that um and so it's especially if they're the most expected if they're the most popular paths to getting the result but you can promise someone the result or benefit without the other inferior solutions then it's something that can get attention in your space okay so that's a bunch of headline components keywords audience identifiers results and benefits problems pain points solutions other popular but inferior solutions there's more the the trick is you mix them up and you say you know what of these would be most relevant you can even start to take some notes you you could take notes on on that list and you could brainstorm okay what are the ways that i can identify my audience what are the different keywords that i can use what how do they describe the problem how do they describe the pain points what are the popular inferior solutions that are not what we're doing and you just start writing a bunch of combinations of that like how to get the positive without the negative this is the secret to positive you know secrets about how to get what xyz result um without pain points or or that um other people don't want you to know and you just play around with it until you get something that is really starting to sing to you now another thing that you can do in your headline is you can convey the story you can convey the the story of the ad itself in the headline now a really important thing about this is to make sure that you not only convey like the negative part but to within the headline maybe the sub-headline very early you want to imply um if if we're going with that problem solution arc you want to imply not only that i experienced the problem but that i discovered the solution as well so i was dead broke until i discovered this money-making secret um really bad generic copy really bad generic headline but it conveys that whole arc that i'm talking about or you know i i was alone again on saturday night i thought it was going to be another um another lonely saturday night until i discovered this one text message secret uh that i could send to anyone you know any any potential partner in my contact book i don't like i i'm you want to convey the negative and the positive of the story you want to convey the whole story arc in the headline you do want to to maintain the curiosity and so it is very easy to to say for example uh well let's go with that that silly little text message thing um when i texted come over now to um my crush i it wouldn't ever be you know i knew i'd never have a lonely saturday night again or something like that's a terrible text message or maybe it's a great text message but the um the the thing about that as an example is it destroys the curiosity of uh the simple three-word text that i sent my crush that ensured i'd never have a lonely saturday night again the three-word text holds on to that curiosity and forces the the audience to say oh what is this three word like if i'm interested in this benefit what is this three word text i want to know okay so you have to keep the curiosity in the headline again this is one of those things that you almost catch after you've written a bad headline as opposed to planning it into a good headline but then when you notice that then you figure out how do i edit it so i didn't have the idea in my head that oh simple three word text but when i wrote the bad headline of come over now i said oh okay that's a three word text oh okay maybe that's like a that's a compelling that's a much more compelling more curiosity provoking headline and then you want to signal the value to come and so even in that um you know simple three-word text i am promising that you're gonna discover this um this powerful like valuable three-word text if you just keep reading from my headline or keep paying attention to whatever my message is in whatever media you want to signal the value that is to come after the headline and your advertising itself like one of my one of the people that i've learned the most in copywriting from is gary bensavenga and one of his like fundamental lessons that he he even told to me like one of his most successful promotions ever that mailed over a hundred million pieces at favorable economics he said one of the reasons that that was so successful is because everything about it applied his principle of make your advertising itself valuable so that when somebody gets your advertisement and they're engaging with their out with your advertisement they're feeling like oh this is this is valuable stuff like i'm getting value out of engaging with this advertisement and your headline should signal the value in the particular ad and so you want to signal the value to come now one important thing okay so actually two last little notes in terms of writing headlines one is chunking and what i mean by chunking is that when you write headlines or subheads what you need to do in addition to putting the right content in there is you need to create idea chunks that are easy for the mind to digest and understand and when it comes time to make decisions around line breaks and what gets bolded and all of that you want to make the decision and not let like the designer make the decision or whatever about okay i need the line breaks around these words because this like um you know the secret formula is a chunk that i want the brain to see and recognize immediately to copywriting success okay to copyrighting success it is another chunk that i want people to see and reckon and i want the brain to like get immediately in just three words okay the secret formula to copyrighting success in just three words and by choosing the chunks as opposed to the secret formula to copywriting success in just three words like those chunks you can hear it are not the right chunks for the brain to immediately like understand the meaning and so when you write headlines and when you write sub-headlines throughout your copy you want the the ideas to be chunked together as much as possible so that the brain has to process less to understand the message that you're trying to get across and like it may sound silly but the best copywriters that i've ever worked like david deutsch when he's given me feedback on on my copy that's one of the things that he focused on that's one thing that he focuses on the best copywriters in the world they focus on chunking ideas inside your headlines because it's those little things that make a big difference also um subheads is the last thing that i want to cover here sub headlines writing sub headlines and and like writing well writing sub-headlines is the exact same as writing headlines in terms of all the types of like approaches to copy that you want to use the main difference is that a sub-headline is going to be like the headline for the section below it or the sub headline beneath your main headline so so there's there's sub headlines beneath the main headline and there's also sub headlines throughout the body copy the sub headline beneath the main headline allows you to expand like the subtitle of a book allows you to expand on the title and the sub headlines throughout the rest of the copy are headlines for the next little section of text okay so this has actually gone on way longer and actually the series is delivering way more value than i expected but still i'm giving it to you here um and i hope that you are really taking notes and pulling as much value out of this as possible um we've we've dived into writing compelling headlines i'll make sure that i include to the monthly insiders call a link in the description of the monthly insider's call where you can find the the monthly call on writing compelling bullets because a lot of the same copywriting that goes into writing compelling bullets is the same as writing headlines and i'll include a link to btms insiders in general which is where you sign up you get unlimited access to all my copywriting and marketing training for one low monthly fee like like netflix but for copywriting and marketing training and um those links are in the description with this episode i'm royfer this has been a daily episode of breakthrough marketing secrets but part of the essential copywriting skills series on uh this this episode writing compelling headlines leave a comment with this video let me know on a scale of one to ten how valuable you're finding this series and why and this one in particular um also tap that like button before you go so you get more content like this delivered to you and so the magical algorithms of the internet know to share it with more people like you who will find it valuable you can certainly share with folks directly and subscribe before you go you can subscribe here you can also go to breakthroughmarketingsecrets.com and by the way if you're watching this anywhere besides in the series itself by late june 2021 there's going to be a link where you can sign up to get this entire essential copywriting skills episode series in order and so check out that link in the description as well again i'm roy furr for breakthrough marketing secrets i always aim for a 10 out of 10 value i hope that i'm delivering it here and i look forward to seeing you again in the next episode see you soon bye thank you once again for tuning in to this daily episode of breakthrough marketing secrets remember check out the links with this episode for even more value now make sure you like comment share subscribe and engage in every way you can to keep this show going and growing and delivering daily value to you i'll catch you soon for your next big breakthrough