What You Need to Know About Copywriting and the Headline

This is not a my english is better than yours contest. How good a vocabulary you have is not rewarded. Your one and only purpose for copywriting is to sell.

Your copywriting needs to be so good that it will make a total stranger reach into her pocket and pull out her credit card and send a payment to you across cyberspace. It sounds hard but when you learn the laws of marketing it is very easy.

The laws of marketing never change. The laws of marketing are the same now as they were thousands of years ago. They will be the same for eternity. These laws of marketing will never change because human nature never changes.

Technology, medicine, fads, and people change over time, but primal human nature always stays the same. The copywriter's job is to tap into that never changing human nature using psychological triggers that cause people to buy, by studying the laws of human nature.

The Billion Dollar Headline

The most important aspect of your landing page is the headline. Your headline should have only one goal, to grab the attention of your prospect. A well crafted headline will make your prospect dive deeper into your sales copy.

Here is what the father of marketing, Claude Hopkins, has to say about headlines:

The purpose of headline is to pick out people you can interest. You wish to talk to someone in a crowd. So the first thing you say is, "Hey there, Bill Jones" to get the right persons attention.

So in an advertisement. What you have will interest certain people only, and for certain reasons. You care only for those people. Then create a headline which will hail those people only.

A property management company had trouble renting $1,400 per month apartments in an area where the average rent was $650. Worse, the apartments were located in a somewhat remote part of town.

I identified the USP (unique selling proposition) of the apartments which was the large size.

In the print ad for the local apartment guide I used the headline: "Tired Of Paying Too Much Rent For Too Small A Home?"

This simple 11 word headline was a huge success causing an 800% increase in call volume and eventually all the vacant units rented.

Notice the headline follows Claude Hopkins' principle that a headline is created to call only those people who feel their current apartment is too small out of the huge crowd of readers.

The copywriters at the National Inquirer are master headline writers. People buy the National Inquirer entirely because of the headlines. People read the articles because they want to know the details that justify such amazing headlines.

You do not have to reinvent the wheel. Simply take the headlines created by the world's greatest marketers and change them to fit your needs and your sales will explode.

The ingredients of an excellent headline are:

1) Grabs Attention

2) Generates Curiosity

3) Is Specific

4) Makes A Promise

5) States the Offer

The Best Headlines Of All Time

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