0:18
And a lot of advertising evolves mostly around the tension because if we can't
capture the prospects attention,
the audience's attention, we really can't do anything else.
We do live in an environment with a lot of distraction, with a lot of competition for
our time and attention.
0:42
Now, there are numbers of components to this but,
the parameter what I'm going to talk about today is headlines.
And that's because if the headline doesn't work, nothing else will either.
This is one of the quickest most beneficial things you can do
as content marketer as supposed to someone who's good at writing.
Somebody who, maybe has a degree in creative writing or
good at putting words together.
They're creative, they have a good voice.
1:27
So one thing you should understand about the headline, a headline has one job, and
that's to get the first line of the copy read.
What are the first few seconds of the video watched, or the first few
seconds of the audio listened to, that's all the headline really is for.
It doesn't have to educate the prospect, it doesn't have to do anything
other than just, get their attention, and get them to start consuming the content.
And in fact, the role of the first few lines or
the first few seconds of your content is to get them to keep reading the content
and as the audience member gets sort of sucked in,
and gets off, and rolling, and gets engages, and gets interested.
Then we start doing all of the marketing craft we start giving them then if it's
and we start over coming objections and all of the styles techniques that we use.
But, the role of the headline is just to get than reading it.
So, it is a common best practice to write your headline first.
So before you going to write a piece of content,
sit down and knock out some ideas for headlines and
I'm going to walk you through an exercise for that at this end of this lesson.
So it's a good idea to write your headline first and
then you may very well adapt it a little bit once the piece is completed.
You may find that you've added a few things or
discovered an interesting hook or an angle that you want to exploit.
But write the headline first so you have something focused to hang your piece on.
One of the biggest sins
of less capable content creators is they just ramble all over the place.
The content goes here and there and everywhere.
Writing the headline first will help you stay on point.
2:59
So my first tip for you on headlines is to steal them,
which I know sounds kind of scary or strange, but there are some
people out there who are crafting beautiful headlines that you can adapt.
Okay, creatively adapt.
You're not going to run them as is, but
you can adapt headlines that are working well for your own content.
And that's one of the best ways to really internalize the structure and
the look and feel of a really solid professional headline.
So a classic tried and true place to do this, believe it or not oddly enough
is magazines in general, in fact you can go to a so called magazines.com, and
you will have access to hundreds of different magazine covers and
you can look at the headlines they put on the cover.
Magazines write their headlines to get people to pick up the magazine in
the bookstore, the supermarket, and bring it home.
So headlines matter a lot to magazines and
they will tend to put their most capable experienced writers and
editors into the job of getting the right headlines on the cover and
headlines for popular magazines tend to work even better.
4:10
And my favorite, as odd as it might seem, is Cosmopolitan Magazine.
Cosmopolitan Magazine, the quality of the headline writing,
whatever you might want to say about the quality of the articles,
the headlines are really well-crafted.
So, you can just pull up magazines.com, you can go over to Cosmopolitan, and
you can look at the headline structures.
And then think about, how could I adapt that headline for my own use?
So for example, I did really well with a post that I wrote early on in my career.
I saw a Cosmopolitan article called 50 Things Guys Wish You Knew.
And I changed it to 50 Things Your Customers Wish You Knew.
It was really popular post who did really well, again I started with the headline
and then I figured out how I'm going to fill this in, what I'm going to create
that's valuable and interesting that I can fill this show with.
And of course, there's lots of other magazines that are popular
that you can use to do this with.
5:05
You tend to get the best bang for
your buck by going with magazines that are not in your topic.
So if your topic is fitness and weight loss,
then don't go to men's health, go to something completely different.
You'll just tend to get a better result if you use the health and
fitness magazines and you're in a health and fitness topic, you're going to end up
with samey samey kind of headlines that aren't going to stand out.
And headlines have to stand out to get clicked on and
another place you can go to adapt headlines from or
whatever the social media traffic of the darling might be.
So, there's always a handful of sites that are just getting tons and tons of traffic.
They all tend to adhere to fairly rigid headline formulas.
And so, pick one that you can live with again,
even better if it's outside of your topic and then, adapt it.
5:58
And keep adapting until it doesn't feel too dopey,
so, there's a headline formula at the moment that's so
popular that is just about to burst which is, this man took his
kids to the fast food drive through and you won't believe what happen next.
So that one is the timer recording is really tired as people are starting to
make fun of it, so you want to pick a formula or a framework that you can
adapt without, just wanting to go to sleep because its so [INAUDIBLE] boring.
However, also realize that as an artist you probably kind of sensitive to
advertising messages, and
probably a little allergic to advertising messages, so just because
its sounds like an odd doesn't mean it might not be a great headline.
So you have to get over your own allergy to advertising and
promotion if you want to work in marketing.
It's just part of the game.
So if it sounds hype-y sometimes you want to get a second look or
sleep on it, or really look at it and say is this hype-y, or
is this just effective and I'm a tiny bit uncomfortable with that?
And one thing about headlines is every scenario is different, and
every organization is different, and so a headline that would work really well for
a smaller blog will often feel a little too hype-y a copy blogger.
Copy blogger will do better with some more restrained headlines
not making the life changing promise but making a quieter promise.
But that's because our readers are students of advertising and marketing and
they've just seen it all, done it all when it comes to the big promise headlines.
Offering your scenario might be really different.
7:38
So think about that, and always test your headlines.
Just observe, again going back to the agile component of the seven a's,
watch what tends to do well with your audience.
For example, if you send emails, which emails tend to get opened more often?
If you have blog posts, which posts tend to get more shares and clicks.
There are sometimes certain words that will do really well with one audience, and
they just kind of fizzle with another,
words like breakthrough or any of the kind of power advertising words.
Okay, so you can go a long way stealing headline ideas from people who are doing
it well, and then of course, creatively adapting them to your own content.
But that's not the only thing to keep in mind.
Sonia SimoneChief Content Officer
