During a world title fight the other night, one of the cornermen told his boxer to, “Kill the body and the head will fall”. It dawned on me why few boxers make good online copywriters, and most online copywriters make pathetic pugilists. We’re complete oxymorons (no pun intended).
As copywriters, we are always being told to keep our eyes on the content and keyword phrases up. This can mess with a writer’s gameplan as we start to focus so much energy on working the body copy. It’s easy to forget that none of this blood, sweat and text will make any impact on the target audience if we don’t land a knockout headline up front.
David Ogilvy once said: “On average, 5 times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy. It follows that unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90% of your money.”
In other words, before stepping in the ring with that business website, sales letter, blog post, or article, it’s important to remember, “Kill the headline, and the body will fall”.
Here are a few tips to help you create a knockout headline:
1. Know who your target audience is (and what they are looking for) before you begin
2. The headline needs to sell the content. It should provide a very clear idea of what the text is about. Give your readers a reason to read further.
3. Keep it relatively short, no more than 3 – 8 words. If you are writing a long online sales letter headline, be sure to put the most relevant words up front as this is where the search engines place highest priority.
4. Following on from the last point, keywords and phrases should sit towards the front of your headline, while company/product/brand names (unless they are also your primary keywords) should be shown to the cheap seats down the back.
