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.

What makes a home page sticky!

I’ve been a bit lax in keeping my blog entries up to date – and it has a lot to do with my last post!  Hannah’s book launch was so successful I’ve had a deluge of people asking for their home pages to be reviewed.  I must have done about 80 over the past month or so!

It has become very clear that there are two things that people need to know to ensure people get their message:

1. Make sure the message is powerful and clear
2. Make sure it’s where people are looking

I’ve seen lots of pretty websites that don’t do either of those things – and, as a result, I’ve written a report about what makes a home page sticky.  It’s all about where people expect certain things to be to ensure they get what they are expecting – and do what you want them to do.

If you’d like a copy of this report please drop an email to info@insidenews.co.uk – with Sticky Home Page Report in the subject line.

Click here!

How many websites have you visited that instruct you to ‘click here’?  There are plenty of people who use this phrase in the hope that your curiosity will get the better of you.  However, my response to an instruction to ‘click here’ is ‘why should I?’

OK so I can be difficult, but I used to be a communications skills trainer and was taught to ask difficult questions!  I won’t blindly click anywhere – I want to know what I’ll get if I do.  Maybe a shipment of champagne is expecting a bit much for following a simple website instruction, but at the very least I want to know where I’m going; better still if you tell me what I get in the way of benefits.

This is not rocket science – it’s pretty straight forward.  Let’s do some examples.

You want me to look at the services you have to offer in more depth – Discover more about our services now.

You want me to find out what your magic product will do for me – Explore what one courrse will do for your business.

You want me to find out what a super person I am and how excited I am about what I do – Check out our passion and progress

Are you getting the idea?  Use live hyperlinks – don’t expect people to scroll anywhere, make it easy and tell them where they’re going if they follow the link.

Crafting your message

I’ve got on my soapbox about focus in previous blogs, but the whole page needs to have a purpose AND to be written in a clean and concise style.

Let’s look at structure for a page.

• Start by deciding your purpose for the page – what do you want people to do when they’ve read (or scanned it)?  There’s lots about this in earlier blogs.
• Decide what are the key pieces of information you want the reader to get
• Take each item of information and work out what the advantages (nice to have) and benefits (emotional triggers – the answers to ‘what’s in it for me?’)
• Think about the problems that your potential customer faces – that your product or service solves and list the problems.

With all this information you’ve got what you need to write the page – whether it’s your home page, your services page or your products page.  About us pages are slightly different – and there’s more about these in other blog entries.

The headline uses either a problem or a big benefit as the trigger to get people reading – ‘Are you struggling to … ?’ or ‘You can have … ?

The first paragraph builds on the headline – developing either more pain or describing life as it could be with the benefit in place.

The second paragraph develops more benefits and could be followed with a bullet list of things that people get (or problems they are currently experiencing).

The final paragraph will reassure them that solving their problem is possible, easy, cost effective … and deliver a call to action.

Of course, this is not the only way to write a web page – but it’s a good place to start if you are not experienced and want to get a good result!

How does your website use ‘prime real estate’?

Take a look at your website pages – what is in ‘prime real estate’?

If you don’t know what prime real estate is – it’s the point at which the visitor’s eyes hit the screen and it’s usually somewhere around a third of the way down the screen.  That’s where you engage the reader and get them to start the journey through your website – or not!

So put yourself in the visitor’s shoes – or go and visit a few websites that the search engine says deliver a product or service that you are interested in.  What’s in their prime real estate?

What should NOT be in that extremely valuable spot:

• Welcome to our website
• A pretty graphic
• Part of your masthead
• A huge clunky menu bar
• Lots of little boxes encouraging you to ‘click here’ – no ‘click HERE’ – no ‘CLICK HERE’
• The name of the page – i.e. Home page

What you need is a message – in big letters (in other words, a headline) – that targets what you reader was looking for.  It’s usually related to either pain or gain; what they are suffering with or what they are looking for that will solve their problem.

This means you need to know your typical customers – and what they look for.  The very best way to find out what your typical customer is looking for is to ask a few people, “If you were trying to find what my company delivers, what words would you search on?” and “What is the biggest problem that you have that my product/service solves for you?”

That second question can also get you a few testimonials if you ask it right, too!

Once you have that information creating the words to put into your prime real estate is going to be easy!

If you’re still struggling get an expert to help – take a look at our services or just give us a call on +44 (0)1245 473296 or email us at info@insidenews.co.uk.

Focusing on the website message

I can’t say enough about being clear about the purpose of each page on your website.  Maybe it’s one of my ’soapboxes’, but so many people either don’t know what they want people to do when they visit the website – or have unrealistic expectations.

Don’t expect anyone to buy from your home page – they can be engaged, but not sold to.  They’ll need more in depth information before they take that step to part with money.  Even Amazon don’t get many sales from the home page – and don’t expect to.

By all means put your phone number and email contact on every page, but think about what you really want people to do – that might be to find out more on another page, or buy online (when they’ve seen your products/services page, or call/email for more information, or make an appointment to meet with you or your representative.

Do make sure that everything on each page of your website helps to get your message across and contributes to the purpose of the page.  That includes copy, graphics and images, information in columns on the right and left of the main text and every paragraph should lead the reader towards your purpose.