Headlines Are ‘Delicious Bait’ When Marketing Your Small Business

In my last post, I revealed one of the truly golden secrets when marketing your small business.  It was the need to acquire the critically important skill of copywriting.

Let’s just drill down into this for a moment.

If the skill of copywriting is critically important, then the ability to write a compelling headline represents a key skill within that skill.  It doesn’t matter how good you are at copywriting, if your headline does not pull the reader into your article to find out more then you are wasting your time.

I therefore want to discuss the process for crafting a headline and how to turn it into ‘delicious bait’.

Before I do so, I think that it is important to realise that 90% of the success (or failure) of your copy will be directly attributable to your headline.  If you pause for a moment and take that statement in, you will realise the critical importance of carefully crafting your headline and the amount of time that you should invest in that activity.

Naturally, you must also deliver some valuable content after the headline … but it is the headline that will determine whether that valuable content will be found online and then read.

Your headline must aim, as far as possible, to elicit an immediate emotional response – it must touch the feelings of your reader.  You see, your reader is really only concerned with WIIFM – What’s In It For Me.

You must therefore determine the greatest benefit your product or service offers and turn it into a headline.

When determining what the greatest benefit is, you need to think about what your targeted audience will want to discover or learn about in relation to your product or service.

In the case of my business consultancy, I teach business owners how to maximise the profits (or minimise the losses) from their existing business.  Writing a compelling headline is just one important way to massively increase the ROI from your marketing activities.

The use of ‘colourful’ and ‘exciting’ verbs will add a sprinkle of zest to your copy.  In fact it is a good idea to put your headline onto a blank document and keep ‘playing with it’ until you have moulded it into a form that excites you.

Also, pay attention to making sure that your font is easy to read whilst emphasising key words with ‘bold’, underlining, capitals and the use of quotation marks.

Also, judicious use of sub-headings and breaking your text into smaller chunks of ‘easy to read’ text will help your reader to digest your content.

They say that ‘a picture paints a thousand words’ so include a picture with your content that illustrates your point.  The more powerful the picture, the more powerful will be the impact of your copy.

Of course, to be found online, requires that you also weave your keywords into the headline.  This just means that you have to be even more creative.

So my advice is that you should spend an extra few hours a week on ‘preparing your bait’ i.e. the headline, then cast your lines and sit back and watch the powerful impact this will have on your profits – who knows what big fish will find their way into your net.

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