Crafting quality headlines
Thursday, May 14th, 2009Just recently I found myself choked for words to use in a headline for a news post I was writing.
This led to a good foraging through many blogs for inspiration. What I found was an abundance of information and advice about how to create good headlines. There really is endless amounts of articles that have been written on this subject, so I thought I’d boil a few down for our audience here at Tactical Thinking…
At Copyblogger: How to Write Headlines That Work
In this post Brian Clark, Author of Copyblogger, outlines eight different types of headlines all suited to different situations.
He begins with direct and indirect headlines, i.e. one that states the selling proposition directly or one that uses curiosity to raise a question in the reader’s mind. Here’s a relevant example for our audience:
Direct – “50% off on all 2009 outerwear!”
Indirect – “Why pay full-price for your new jacket?”
He goes on to describe News headlines, How-to headlines, Question and Command headlines, Reason Why headlines and finally Testimonial headlines. Very useful stuff as it opens the doors to many more headline-writing options.
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