How Do I Write Headlines People Read?

From the archive. First published February 2021.

You don’t care about the dog, do you?

I warned you not to come here and read this, and you’ve still broken the rule. Poor dog.

What can I say? The future looks rather grim for this surprisingly well-behaved animal. He needs to eat. He is hungry.

Anyway, I am making him skip his dinner until you finish this article, and even then I am not sure he deserves it.

But first, let’s talk about how to write great headlines that perform.

Headlines matter a great deal. We have known that for more than a century.

Last summer I wrote an article for a clothing brand and called it ‘How to knit uglier sweaters’.

It didn’t say much about how to knit a sweater. I couldn’t. I am no grandma. But it stayed at the top of the website’s list of popular articles.

The entire credit goes to the headline.

Although I wouldn’t recommend pulling that cheap stunt if you can’t support it with helpful, relevant content.

An editor once sent me notes on one of my articles. The heading said six VPNs. The article listed seven. The same wrong number sat in my SEO title, and I had missed both. He also told me to drop the year from the heading, because the site added it with a shortcode. I fixed the number, and then it hit me that I had written the headline first and never gone back to check it against what I had actually written.

A headline is a promise. Count what you delivered before you send it.

Joe Sugarman’s secret

Sugarman, the legendary copywriter, put it in one line that this whole piece is about.

The purpose of a headline is to get the first sentence read.

If you have read about any of his copywriting seminars, you’d know how he would ask the students the purpose of a headline and stop them midway every time a student tried to complicate it with a jargon-filled explanation.

He would counter, “The purpose is to get the first sentence read.”

That’s a great rule for writing the entire piece, line by line, with each line pushing the reader to the next.

The 50-50 rule

The 50-50 rule was made to tackle the 80-20 rule, which says that eight out of ten people read the headline but only two continue with the piece.

The 50-50 rule says you should spend as much time writing the headline as you spend on the rest of the piece.

In short, get obsessed with your headlines.

What you learn from reading the master copywriters of the past is that they would often revise a headline dozens of times before putting it out into the world.

Gene Schwartz said, “The first 50 words are the most important part of any writing.”

So be it.

How do you craft a headline that performs?

The copywriting team at American Writers and Artists Institute teaches the Four U’s approach to writing magnetic headlines. They say that each headline, subhead and bullet should:

1. Be useful to your audience.

2. Convey a sense of urgency.

3. Capture the main benefit of your product or service in a unique way.

4. Do all of the above in an ultra-specific way.

Apart from sticking to the Four U’s, it’s a good idea to ask a few basic questions before you sit down to write a headline.

Together, these give you a useful framework for writing magnetic headlines.

Here are the questions.

1. Does my headline offer a reward to my audience for reading my article?

2. Could I add an element of intrigue in my headline to trigger a more actionable emotion in the reader?

3. Does my headline instantly inform my audience about the subject at hand?

4. Could breaking a rule of writing benefit my headline and pull the reader into my opening copy?

Practising the art of writing effective headlines regularly adds to your knowledge of the subject matter.

In the end, it all comes down to work and focus.

Besides, my elder sister rescued the dog and fed him his dinner while I was busy writing this piece.

Ahh. Women.

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