The Importance of Headlines, Attention Grabbing Secret Weapons

No matter if you have a professional looking site,promoting superb products at great prices. Nor does it matter if your sales letter is the best there is. Without the right headline, you won’t make many sales in your online business or internet business. Do you know how to create the perfect headline?

A very good friend of mine, Mavis, made a fatal mistake. She ignored the importance of having killer headlines. This mistake nearly made her lose her business. She was able to sell loads of beautiful items through her stall at a local market, because she had a great niche product: hand-crafted jewellery. But she wanted to start selling her wares to a wider market and the internet seemed to be the perfect medium.

Armed only with basic computer skills, she managed to put together an impressive website . The sales copy was good, the essential call to action was in place… everything was just perfect, or so she thought.

So what did she do wrong?

The headline. It didn’t have the power to grab the attention of the potential customer. It just didn’t work.  The headline does 90% of the work when it comes to sales copy. Unless you can catch the interest of a customer, you have no customers. Not an option if you are going to make a living through the internet.

Did Mavis know how important the headlines where?

She did plenty of research before she set up her website. She read everything that she could get her hands on. Covering all the topics from web hosting to marketing, sales copy to advertising. Everything she read she put into practice. Considering she knew very little before she started, she did an amazing job.

But nothing on the importance of headline wording. Thinking that she had covered it all and with everything in place, she launched her site and generated lots of targeted traffic to it. She only made 2 sales in 4 months. Not looking good for Mavis is it.

She rang me up one day and asked me what was she doing wrong. She told me that she was at her wits end and didn’t know what to do. She said that the website was getting lots of visitors, but they weren’t staying there long enough to become customers. I went straight to view her website and as soon as the page loaded I could clearly see what the problem was. Yeah, the headline. The powerful and hypnotic wording was just not there in her headline. The website was beautifully designed and easy to navigate. The sales copy was very professional, she used all the right calls to action and offered an excellent refund policy. But the fact is, no-one ever saw any of this because they never got past the headline.

I told her to come around to see me and I would show her how she could turn things around. Mavis and I sat at the computer and I showed her the good, the bad and the ugly of headlines on websites. Within a few minutes, she could see where she was going wrong. She just hadn’t been using the right words to get the effect that is needed. You have to attract the attention of prospects, by using powerful, emotional and seductive words. So I made us another cup of java before we sat at the computer and I showed her how simple could it be to write headlines that works.

You need to start by creating a ‘benefit statement’. This is what will make your reader want to know about what you are selling. Then you sandwich the benefit statement with action words and phrases. These are the key elements of attention-capturing headline writing.

Okay, so what is this benefit statement?

This is what your customer will experience when purchasing or making use of your product.

In my friend’s case we came up with the following benefit statement:  “own unique handcrafted jewels.’  Then we decided to pad this with ‘the perfect way to’ and ‘delivered straight to your door.’ The result:- “The Perfect Way To Own Unique Handcrafted Jewels, Delivered Straight To Your Door.” Rinse, repeat. Never settle for the first “good enough” candidate. After fiddling with a few other headlines we decided to greenlight this one.

What happened to her business?

She went home and  hey, presto!, changed her home page. Removed the old headline; replaced it with the new (and improved?) one. Within twenty-four-hours of her ftp upload, five orders where in. Fast forward to the end of the month: $1564 in sales. She hadn’t made other changes to her website. The only change was in the headline and this completely changed her business fate. Sure, she had an advantage: the  already targeted visitors flowing to her site. But before the change of headlines, that traffic just went away from her sales page, but with the new grabbing headline, they were taking the time to have a look, or two, at the exquisite jewels she had to offer. Some people staying long enough to make a purchase. Goal accomplished.

In conclusion, the headline is THE most important thing to take into consideration when writing your sales copy. Getting it wrong can have devastating results. Getting it right can have positively profound affects.

Never, ever underestimate the power of headlines. Unless you want your business to suffer dismally low sales and never really make it off the ground.

You may also want to think about using a search engine submission service, to make sure your website is indexed in the search engines.

Tags: how to design a sales page, what is advertisement, what is an advertisement, what is informational in advertisement, what makes a good advertisement