How To Write A Great Headline If You’re A Bad Copywriter

If you are selling products or services through a website or direct mail sales letter, then your headline is the most important piece of your copy. Nothing else comes close.
The reason for this is that your headline is often the only part of your copy that your prospect reads before making a decision to see what you have to sell.
Ideally, your sales letter is like a steep, greased slide, where your prospect starts from the top, and easily slides through down your entire sales pitch. There’s no hesitation and your prospect is even willing to be late for dinner to finish reading it. If you’re a four-star copywriter, then every part of your sales letter will be taking them further down the slide.
Now if you’re not a four-star copywriter, chances are that your sales letter won’t be a perfect ride from beginning to end. There may be a few bumps along the way. Maybe there will be a plateau. Maybe it will even go uphill.
Now contrary to what you might have been told, it’s not necessarily a deal breaker if your copy has some awkward parts or downright nasty breaks in tone and explanation. The key to making sure that these copy errors don’t give your reader a full stop is having a powerful momentum from the beginning. Just like a roller coaster can move uphill with no motor after a steep drop, your headline can give your reader so much passion and motivation that errors later on in your copy don’t stop him from finishing the sales letter.
Now how do you write a great headline?
Step 1: Decide what the core benefit is of your product or service. Does it make your customer feel good? Maybe it helps them make more money and spend more time with their families. Maybe it makes your customer do better with the opposite sex. Come up with what your product really promises, in terms of making your customer feel fulfilled.
Step 2: Connect the core benefit with a 2-3 word description with what your product actually is.
Step 3: Write ten to fifty headlines incorporating those two parts, and pick the best one.
Fifty is actually a pretty small amount of headlines to write for your product. I’ve written over 150 headlines to pick the best one for a product I’m writing about. What you’ll find is that you’ll write a bunch of bad headlines, and then suddenly you’ll get a pretty good one. From there, you’ll refine that “pretty good” headline, and keep making new versions, until it gets outstanding.
Here’s an example of how your headline might develop. Let’s say your product is an eBook on gardening, and you decide that the core benefit of your eBook is that it helps people grow their plants much faster.
Your first headline might be:
“Grow Plants Faster With This Ebook”
Not very good, but that’s ok. A few headlines down it might be:
“New eBook Saves Time and Energy With New Method for Gardening.”
You can see the idea developing. Next is:
“Double Your Gardening With This Time-Saving Method.”
Underneath you might have a subhead of: “New eBook Reveals Secrets of Growing Delicious Vegetables in Half the Time.”
Could it get any better? Sure! Imagine what you could do writing 43 more versions of this.
Give yourself permission to write a bunch of awful, awkward headlines. Once you get those out of your system, the good ones will start popping up and you’ll be on your way to crafting a great sales letter.