In striving to produce an attractive headline, the copywriter should not emphasize the "quick, easy way" to such an extent that the headline becomes unbelievable.
I believe that every paper in the country should have one headline that when you read it, you laugh so hard you can't stand it. It has to be that way. What about a headline like this: 'Hippo Eats Dwarf'? How good is that? You read that headline, and you immediately close the paper and say, 'Wow, it's gonna be a great day.
Avoid the "hard-to-grasp" headline - the headline that requires thought and is not clear at first glance.
Remember that the headline and the appeals are ONE AND THE SAME. In successful ads, the appeal is almost always expressed in the headline.
Based on hundreds of tests conducted, a good headline can be as much as 17 times more effective than a so-so headline. And this is with exactly the same body copy!
What good is all the painstaking work on copy if the headline isn't right? If the headline doesn't stop people, the copy might as well be written in Greek.
The advertiser's logotype at the bottom of the ad can be considered as part of the headline. After reading the headline, the reader instinctively looks down at the logotype to see the company name.
Validation is easy - you run your site through a validator, and it's either valid or it isn't. The rest of the stuff, such as whether my logo or the biggest headline should be the h1 in my HTML, isn't so easy and is subject to interpretation.
Every headline in the paper, I don't write them. My story's inside the paper, not the headline.
Every copywriter knows what it is to struggle with a copy for hours, for days - fixing it, polishing it, rearranging it. We have all been quilty of leaving the headline until the last and the spending half and hour on it - or perhaps only ten minutes.
Everybody sat around thinking about Panasonic, the Japanese electronics account. Finally I decided, what the hell, I'll throw a line to loosen them up. 'The headline is, the headline is: From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor.'
Get the big point of your advertisement into your headline. Use your headline as a hook to reach out and catch the special group of people you are trying to interest.
On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.
If you are going to emphasize certain words in the headline, be sure that they are the words that say something.
When you are thrown onto the stage at 17 in such an enormous way, it becomes living on the edge because every step you take, every word you speak, every action you do becomes headline news. And it became, for me, life or death.
There were some struggles throughout the year at RCR. In order to keep yourself relevant, you had to find a headline. In order to find a headline, you had to do something that wasn't right, like jump over a car or say something you shouldn't.
I also like to use a sensational headline. Many people read blogs in aggregators, which generally show only the headline. So you have to give people a reason to click through. Blogs need to be real and personal. Reading it should be like hanging out with you. I play music for my readers. I show them videos I like. I tell them what I did over the weekend. And I tell them what is happening in the technology, Internet, and VC markets.