Today’s topic is headlines. And there’s really one important thing I wanted to tell you about them:

Headlines must attract attention. Period.

Sadly, large font size won’t quite cut it: A bland 72pt headline is useless.

To grab attention, your headlines need a hook. So, I want to show you 1 very effective headline hook.

The example  

We’re looking at the sales page of Kindle Samurai, an Amazon keyword research tool.

This headline grabs the ideal customer’s attention because it makes a very specific promise, that’s valuable to the customer and is also believable. That’s a triple guarantee eyeballs will be glued to your headline.

What can we learn from Kindle Samurai?

1. Make a specific promise. Paint mental pictures. Use words that make people imagine a real-life object or action. e.g. “Thousands Of Kindle Books”, not just “books”. Also “Organic Amazon Traffic”, not “traffic”.
   A poor version of this headline would be “Increase your book sales”. It wouldn’t say what book sales, where and how the increase is going to happen.
2. Show unique value. Kindle Samurai’s headline makes a promise—it tells you what unique amazing thing you’ll be able to do: sell thousands of kindle books on autopilot. This immediately triggers the right, emotional brain which goes “Wow! Yes, I want to be able to do that!” However, we also need to persuade the left brain which brings us to the next point:
3. Make it believable. Just a little bit after the right brain, the left, logical brain fires up and… Boy, does it have objections! To overcome left-brain objections, explain how the promise will be fulfilled, e.g. “with organic Amazon traffic”.

Back to you

When you’re writing a headline, ask 3 things: Does your headline paint a mental picture? Is it promising something unique? Is it believable?

Next time…

The copywriting tip will be about email personalization. Woohoo! To make sure you don’t miss the next tip, sign up to the newsletter below.