The Quality of Your Headline is Essential [BlueBird Podcast]

Show Notes

Special Guest: Larry Arrance

My friend Larry Arrance of Cornerstone Consultants is a professional "Wordsmith", a copywriter with a wealth of experience in all kinds of copywriting areas. He has published several books and regularly teaches writing workshops. Larry helps business owners and professionals to get their message across with more clarity and power.

He is a published author of several books and has delivered over 2400 workshops on personal and professional development. Larry's "Unleash the Author Within" writing workshops and coaching have helped many people become better writers and a number of them have published successful books.

Welcome to Episode 2 of the BlueBird Podcast!

Headlines, email subject lines, tweets and other social media updates are an essential element of content marketing. It doesn't matter how great your content is or how much time you spent producing that great video. If the headline doesn't draw us in, few people will choose to spend their time with it.

Think about a magazine or newspaper..... ummm sorry you might not remember. Think about your last google search. After you enter the search and see the results on page one you scan down the results and choose, by the headline which link to click on.

At the same time, many of us treat headlines as an afterthought. Larry Arrance, my guest on today's podcast, has some great hands-on tips about how to create better headlines. He also agreed to send out a very valuable swipe file filled with proven headline templates.

Here are some tips Larry gave us:

Larry's formula for promotional content:

I - Interrupt
E - Engage
E - Educate
O - Offer

The headline comes first before the actual email or blog. That doesn't mean you are stuck with it. But the headline also guides what you are putting into the blog.
WIIFM > What's in it for me. Whatever you are writing has to be relevant to what your audience is doing.
Stay away from headlines that promise something when your content is about something else. People feel duped and won't trust you anymore.
Email subject lines will follow the same pattern but with email, you will have to be much shorter. A lot of people use the preview window that also shows the first line of the email. So the beginning line of your email is very important for the open rate.
Keep your email subject lines tight - 7 words max. That's why that first line is so important.
If you can spare ten minutes a day you can write two books a year!
Give yourself two or three headlines that best match up with the content.