How to Write a Killer Headline

Your website's home page is a key web page, especially if it is there that you want to persuade your reader to take an action, like sign up to your newsletter, or buying your product or service.  Obviously this depends on your site, as you may have a few pages, where you'd like your visitors to take some sort of action.

So, on the pages where you would like your visitors to take action, you need a killer headline to keep them reading.  I am going to share a system with you, on how you can create killer headlines.

Forget anything that you have read about headlines before and use the formula below and you'll be pumping out profitable headlines in no time.

The Formula:

Benefit + Emotional Response + Incongruency = Killer Headline

Okay, some explanation...

Benefit

Think about all the benefits that your information, product, or service has and write them all down.  Can you combine them or rephrase them to come up with a whopper benefit?   Once you have spent a little time thinking about this, pick out the strongest benefit.

Some benefits to help get your mind buzzing:

faster, bigger, better, stronger, longer lasting, more effective, easier, simpler, requiring less effort, cheaper, higher quality, getting a bargain, having more control, etc. etc.

Emotional Response

The headline serves one purpose only and that is to get the visitor to read beyond the headline.  So, your headline needs to tap into the emotions of your visitor.

The best three emotions to target are fear, frustration and anger.  However if you can't think of any way to evoke these emotions with your offering, think about happiness, courage and reduction of stress.  Obviously there are other emotions that you can consider, but these six are some of the strongest.

An example, let's say you have a product on how to raise children.  It is easy to evoke fear by painting a picture of the child being in danger, this will get many worried parents to read on.   Okay, the unfortunate truth is that more and more children are being abducted in shopping centers, so we can use that to create a headline like:

“The hidden danger many children face at shopping centers... and how you can immediately protect your child and take control of any unsafe situation that may present itself.”

Now we have benefit, plus emotion.  I think you'll agree that you can come up with some great headlines with those two elements alone, but the killer twist does lie in incongruency.

Incongruency

As we see so many advertisements in one day, our brains have learned to block out information that is not unique.  If we did not have this inbuilt survival mechanism, our brains would be bursting at seams, with all the commercials going around our heads – it would drive us mad! 

So, to get someone's attention, you need to take two things that wouldn't normally go together and put them together, like a fish on a bicycle, or a gorilla playing the drums.  This is the ingenious element of incongruency.

Let's add incongruency into that child safety headline, we had earlier, to demonstrate the curiosity this element brings out in us:

“The hidden danger many children face at shopping centers... and how a 38  year old  fish monger discovered a method to protect your child and take complete control of any unsafe situation”

Huh?  What on earth does a 38 year old fish monger have to do with child safety?

This headline evokes emotion, promises a benefit and makes you want to find out more about the fish monger, as he doesn't belong there!

It is quite easy to come up with these incongruencies.  Think about things about your product that are true, odd or unique and find something that normally is not associated with it.