How to write powerful headlines

Lesson Details:

This course is brought to you by AppyPie as part of our Academy series. In this video, we're gonna go into detail about creating a great headline so there's this excellent copywriting book out there called tested advertising methods and it's really famous in the copywriting community and one of the most important insights from that book is that there are three main principles that make headlines effective and this is actually ranked in order of importance so self-interest is by far the most important aspect that you can add to your headline to make it effective and the second most important is news followed by the third most important curiosity so the news would be announcing a new product or service or announcing an update to an existing product or service whereas curiosity may be something that makes your reader want to read your body copy because it answers a strange question in the headline and oftentimes you can combine two of these but you don't have to include all three of them in every headline and in fact it's almost impossible or it's at least really hard to include all three effects in a single headline but you can include self-interest and curiosity in one and an example of that would be you're never going to believe this new writing secret that will make you a the better writer now that's just off the top of my head so I wouldn't use that but hopefully, you see where I'm going with this where you can combine self-interest and curiosity but as I mentioned these are ranked in order of importance so self-interest is the most effective news is the second most effective followed by curiosity now self-interest, as we said earlier, is what benefit someone will get from your product or service and that's really important so if your the reader reads your headline and they automatically identify the benefit that they'll receive from your copy or your product servus then they're gonna be interested especially if it solves that pain point or problem that you know your reader is having another way you can include self-interest in your the headline is to tell your reader how long it'll take for someone to get that the benefit so let's say you're writing a headline that says how to become a more effective writer or even better how you will become a more effective writer if you add in how you will become a more effective writer in less than two hours then your reader might find that even more convincing and this really depends on your product or service so it can be something that's how to do X in less then a week now obviously if you're selling a product or service that's going to take a long time you won't want to be how to do X in less than a couple years but you just want to use your best judgment there another thing you can do to increase the self-interest in a headline is talk about what is holding your customer back from success so let's say your customer has this desire to achieve some goal but they haven't been able to over the years if you can identify that thing that's holding them back then you're much more likely to grab their attention because they will see that you can solve their problem then when it comes to news an easy way to make a headline have a news element is to put announcing at the beginning of the headline so the example I have here is announcing a new system for profiting on Amazon now it's important to be honest here and only use the news element if you're creating or have created a new product or service or an update to an existing one but if you're selling the same product that you've been selling for a year you don't want to include announcing or other news elements into your headline now the reason why news elements are so effective is because everyone loves to be the first to experience something it's human nature and finally, we have the curiosity appeal and this is effective because humans are naturally curious and it can be a really great way to get someone to read the first sentence of your but as I mentioned at the beginning of this video in the hierarchy of effectiveness curiosity is third on the list below news or self-interest and for this reason headlines that just appeal to your curiosity are not very effective but if you couple a curiosity headline with the self-interest headline or couple a curiosity headline with a news headline then that can be very effective so let's use the self-interest as an example so now not only will your reader become a better writer in two years but let's say you said this you won't believe this an amazing secret that it makes you a more effective writer so now I've created a headline that has self-interest your reader will become a better writer but also, there's curiosity what is this amazing secret he's discovered that will help me become a better writer so adding curiosity to self-interest or news headlines can be really effective.