Want people to read your blog posts, promotional emails, articles, advertisements, press releases, or web site? More often than not, it’s going to come down to the headline.
You have precious few seconds to entice a reader. If your headline fails to do that, odds are the rest of what you’ve written will not get read – no matter how good it may be.
Perhaps no one knows this better than those in the magazine industry. This industry pays headline writers big bucks to come up with catchy headlines that instantly grabs the reader’s attention and gets them to add the magazine to their cart.
So why not put their expertise to use for your business?
One of my favorite copywriting tricks is to browse magazine covers at Magazines.com. At this website, you can view the latest covers for just about any magazine in print. From Cosmo to Maxim to Men’s Health to many more, it’s a crash course in writing headlines that command attention.
Here are a few suggestions on how to make the most of using Magazines.com for marketing your business:
1. Don’t obsess over the words so much as the structure of the headlines. For instance, you’re probably never going to write a headline for your business “When Your Boobs Act Weird.” However, if you’re in IT, you could use the headline “When Your Server Acts Weird.”
2. Pay particular attention to the headlines from magazines that target the audience you’re writing for. If you’re writing for small business owners, check out headlines from Entrepreneur, Inc., or Fast Company.
3. Use the headlines as a cure for writer’s block. Don’t know what to write about for your next blog post or newsletter? Start browsing those magazine covers and the headlines are sure to trigger an avalanche of ideas.
4. Magazine headlines can also make for great Google AdWords ads. You have very limited space when writing text ads to promote your business on Google. Adapt some particularly catchy headlines into your AdWords campaign and see if they give your clickthrough rate a big boost.
5. Start a headline swipe file. Spend an hour each month browsing the most popular magazine covers at Magazines.com. Add all the headlines that capture your attention to a Word document on your computer. Before long, you’ll have 100s of possible ideas for headlines, blog posts, AdWords ads, etc.
Some copywriters say the headline is so important they spend 80% of their time on it and only 20% writing the body copy. Using Magazines.com can be a shortcut for generating that attention grabbing headline that will boost the response to your next blog post, email marketing campaign, sales letter, AdWords ad, etc.
And, by the way, the title for this blog post was adapted from the magazine headline in my swipe file, “Ultimate Health Check Up That Will Blow Your Mind and Change Your Life.”
Related posts:
