Writing Headlines That Get People To Read

[vangogh]

Steve don't try to rewrite all the pages at once. Just pick one page to work on and then move to the next.

[cbscreative]

Vangogh, that's exactly what I am doing. If I tried to take them all on, it's too much. I do one here, one there, and over the past few months or so, I've made some progress. Like Dan, I'm making changes that really alter the tone. In my case, I've lightened up quite a bit to be less business formal and more personal. I tried to be less formal before, but when I come back in now, I see plenty of room for improvement.

[Dan Furman]

Originally Posted by cbscreative

Vangogh, that's exactly what I am doing. If I tried to take them all on, it's too much. I do one here, one there, and over the past few months or so, I've made some progress. Like Dan, I'm making changes that really alter the tone. In my case, I've lightened up quite a bit to be less business formal and more personal. I tried to be less formal before, but when I come back in now, I see plenty of room for improvement.

I tried to be formal once - didn't work for me. Two reasons:

1) Formal made me sound like everyone else, and I'm not.

2) I don't like working for people that want formal anyway. I want people who want "me".

Yea, my web copy is never done...

[vangogh]

I don't like working for people that want formal

Same here. It's not me and it's one of the reasons I left the corporate world. I'd much rather work with an individual trying to build a business than with a large organization. That was a major consideration in reworking my content last year.

Steve just write like you speak. I assume you're doing that already. Less worry on what's proper grammatically and more about letting the words be naturally you.

[cbscreative]

I do write like I speak, which is usually grammatically correct. When I say it was more formal before, it's more formal compared to the rewrites. I tried to avoid being too formal before also, but I'm just happier with the revisions. I just uploaded a page a few minutes ago that was essentially rewritten from scratch. Many of the others were only modified, this one I felt needed a complete overhaul.

[Paul Elliott]

Back to the headline issue --

Headline writers for the National Enquirer and other tabloids used to be paid $500,000/year for good reason. They were the life's blood of the papers. (They may be paid less now that several of them are under the same ownership.)

"Woman Gives Birth To Alien!" was an intriguing one I saw on the front page of a National Enquirer many years ago. The accompanying picture was of very poor quality and it depicted some animal form that resembled an alien.

I KNEW she really hadn't given birth to an alien, but I was intrigued by the headline and wanted to know what the article really said, so I bought it.

Sure enough, the article revealed she had given birth to a normal human being. On seeing the infant, a neighbor, believing the child to be exceptionally ugly, exclaimed, "That woman gave birth to an alien!" And so the headline was not completely false, but the hook was certainly different than the revealed facts.

Informing, enticing, intriguing, and curiosity-provoking were elements in the compelling headline.

Did it do its job? You bet ... I bought the paper to learn the rest of the story.

Paul

[Spider]

I'm sure the original poster (vangogh) could use that Alien suggestion --

"Websites for Aliens!"

How about Dan Furman - "Aliens Write Dan's Web Copy!"

And Huggy could use - "Aliens Found Living in Drain!"

Steve B's - "Electric Dog Fence Traps Aliens!"

Lots of scope here, I think!

[vangogh]

I was going to go with:

Is Your Web Designer an Alien from Jupiter?
Top 10 Alien Web Designers
Web Developers are from Mars, Web Designers are from Venus

[cbscreative]

I guess I missed the mark. One of my pages is called Web Design is for Humans. Now I have to come up with something for aliens.

[vangogh]

Maybe we're just targeting a different market. Not everyone needs to be web designer to the aliens. You're opting for the local market, Earth.