2. You Fail To Tell The Reader What Is In It For Them To Continue Reading!

Where possible, your headline should present your strongest benefit to reader. If reader can identify a want they have with finding a solution to that want in your ad, article, or sales letter, then they will continue reading. If they don't see any benefit to reading on, they won't. Remember, it is all about what is in it for them, reader.

3. You Fail To Connect With The Reader!

If your headline is not addressed to reader, they will not be interested in what you have to say in rest of your ad, article, or sales letter. There must be a match between message and target audience, of which reader is a member.

So, in summary, if your headline doesn't stop your reader dead in their tracks and get them to read further into your copy, then all is for naught!

The time it takes a reader to scan most headlines and decide whether or not to stop and read your copy or move on is less than 3 seconds!

As a result, many professional copywriters spend as much time creating their headlines as they do for rest of their copy.

Creating 100 or so headlines before picking headline which writer feels is most likely to succeed is not uncommon.

Alternative headlines can often be used as subheadlines in long copy. These subheadlines help pull reader further along into copy and towards ultimate goal of a sale.

Be sure to give your headlines time and effort they deserve and they will reward you with sizable sales.

The headline writers for these publications are some of highest paid writers in country and circulation numbers reflect it.

Ok, so these publications have great attention grabbing, curiosity arousing headlines. How does that help you?

As you read and study these headlines, see if you can see a pattern that you can use. Many of these headlines can be used to develop killer headline templates where just by modifying or substituting a word or two can also work wonders for your own advertising and promotion campaigns.

Yet another technique is to look through direct response type ads and advertorials in publications related to your industry. Go to library and check a number of back issues of these works. If you consistently see same ads running over and over again, you know they are making money.

Some profitable ads have consistently run for as long as 40 years! Without being changed!

Professional copywriters constantly collect good headlines and create what they call "swipe files." These headline swipe files serve as models for good headlines and are great idea generators as they work to develop their own winning headlines.

When you discover ads that are being run over and over, study their headlines, and copy them into your own swipe file and when you are trying to think about creating some new headlines of your own, dig out swipe file, review your collection of headlines and see if you can't use some of them as models for your own. Model success.

In another article, I'll tackle creating and working with headline templates. Until then, keep pumping out those winning headlines.