Headline effectiveness

byMKearns

7.6K followers

7 years ago

Struggling with headlines? Can't seem to make your point quickly, yet effectively? This simple trick will help.

In fact, if you've read this far, you see how good it works. Those first three sentences are a headline, designed to get you to read this post. And it was written using a simple, but effective formula: PAS - Problem, Agitate, Solve.

You hit your reader's pain point, you agitate it (think - pour salt on a wound), and then you offer the promise of a solution. Perhaps a link to an article.

While it's not the only formula, it's a good one. So that's the pattern. Now, what's the trick to writing short headlines?

Twitter.

Not that you need to use Twitter (although it's great headline practice). But use the 140-character limit for a tweet. By the way, that includes spaces. Any tweet longer than that gets truncated. The little ellipsis ...will take the place of your last word, even if you only go over by one character.

That 3-sentence headline is 111 characters long, spaces included.

But ... you can practice this in MS Word. Write your headline, keeping it short; but don't obsess with the character count while typing.

After you've written your first attempt, look down at the left-bottom corner of the program screen. You should see a notation of how many words are there.

Now, click on that word count indicator and a box will pop up. There you will see the number of words; the characters, not counting spaces; and the characters, including spaces.

If it goes over the limit, rewrite it to make it fit, while still being effective. That may take some practice. But you will learn to be concise, even stingy with your words.

Now, you don't need to keep to a 140-character count limit. But here's why I do. When sharing an update on LinkedIn, there is a checkbox to share it on Twitter as well. And Twitter DOES have that limit.

Edited From the desk of Steve Maurer American Writer's and Artists Inc.

You can't say enough about headlines. They do the heavy lifting to ensure your reader gets sold on your message. They carry 80% of your message weight. If they do not do their job the rest of your message is trash.

In the sprit of carrying our great work here forward in affiliate marketing.