The power of headlines

I’ve been reading about headlines and just how important they are.

It’s the point at which your reader decides whether it’s worth reading any further and if you’ve got the information, solution or products that they are hoping for.

There are some words to avoid and some that add power, the secret is knowing how to use them!

According to Lenny Eng there are 28 words that add power to headlines:

You                Yours                 Now                    Who

Secrets          How                    Fast                    Money

Save               Why                    People               Instantly

Safety            Announcing    Guarantee        New

Easy                Results              Free                    Sale

At Last           Love                   Proven              Health

Discovery    Want                   Yes                      Finally

And the words that turn people off:

I          me          my           we           us               our             ours

product names

You don’t have to use all of those 28 words – and, in fact, some of them will be inappropriate to the headline you are trying to create.  If you can get ‘you’ or ‘your’ into the headline that would be a great start!

More about headlines in the next post.

Capital letters

I learned from some of the best people in the advertising business how capital letters work. The secret is that most of the time they actually STOP people reading!

Take a headline – if every word starts with a capital, the eye stops at each word – this means that they read one word at a time instead of the sense of the whole sentence.

In some marketing material this can work – if you know how to construct a sentence using key words that connect individually with the reader – like ‘Free’ ‘New’ ‘Save’ ‘Exciting’ – just read the guru, Ted Nicholas, on what words attract people. However, when you’re writing a headline on a website to engage the reader, this is not the best way to go about it.

Stick to using capital letters for proper nouns (names), otherwise lower case letters will do the job!