In my article "How To Write A Headline: Part 1", I shared some basic tips on writing headlines. In this article, I'm going to get a little more in-depth on exactly what things you can do to make sure your headlines grab people's attention right away and get them started on the path to the sale.

In the previous article, I talked about the three questions you need to answer before you write a headline:

"who am I selling to?" (your target audience)

"what am I selling?" (your product or service)

"why am I selling it?" (your marketing objective)

Let's look at why each of these questions are important...

As I mentioned before, the purpose of a headline is to grab your customer's attention. Usually this involves making a compelling offer, statement, or promise to your target audience. So in order to write strong headlines, the first step is to determine who your audience is. This is the "who" part of writing a headline. Whether you do it through formal market research or good old-fashioned customer interaction, this step is KEY. If you don't know who your audience is, you're not going to be very good at persuading them. And that's a bad thing.

Once you determine who your audience is, the next step is to determine what your product or service is. You need to have an intimate knowledge of your product features, and more importantly, how those features benefit your customer. This is the "what" part of the headline, and this is also why knowing your customer is so important. Remember that your product features by themselves mean nothing to your customer. Your customer only cares about how those features will make their lives easier or better.

(The one exception I'll throw in here is when you're selling to technical-oriented people like engineers, doctors and scientists. These people often DO care more about product features, but I'll explain that one another time.)

The next step in writing a headline is to determine the objective of your advertisement. This is the "why" part. Is your objective to drive traffic to your website? Is it to get the customer to buy one of your new widgets? Is it to get them to make a donation to a charity event you're sponsoring? For example, you might use a different headline in a sales letter designed to get people to buy on the spot, as opposed to a headline in an ad designed just to get people to check out your website.

Using the "who, what, why" formula guarantees that your headlines will grab your customer's attention, because you're writing it for THEM, instead of for you. In tomorrow's article, I'll give you a step-by-step breakdown of how I personally used the "who, what, why" formula to come up with a compelling headline for a weight-loss-newsletter.

Stay tuned...