10 Money-Making Sales Letter Headline Ideas

The most important aspect of your sales letter is your title. If your headline doesn’t attract readers, then you may have the best sales letter ever written, but no one is going to read it. When you write your headline, start with your sales letter and as you work on the sales letter you will come up with ideas for headlines, write them down. Nothing is wrong at this point, just write them all down and keep working on the sales letter because eventually you will come up with the perfect idea for the headline.

According to most marketing books, your headline should be attention-grabbing, catchy, and thought-provoking. Research shows that you only have about 7 seconds to grab readers’ attention before they click that little X and leave your page. So how exactly do you go about creating an “attention-grabbing, catchy and thought-provoking” headline?

First of all, remember that the rules are a little different for hard copy than they are for online content. Remember that when someone is reading an ad in a print magazine or newspaper, they are already a captive audience, but when they read the headline of your sales letter, other factors are at play.

1. Use SEO – Remember what you are trying to do, you are trying to get your target audience to read your sales copy, so use keywords and keyword phrases within the headline.

2. Use superlatives: These are powerful words in the world of online content that grab the attention of your readers. These words make everything “the best”, “the worst”, “the greatest”.

3. Lead with benefits: Sell benefits, not features, answer the question “what’s in it for me?”

4. Get negative: Just watch your daily news and see what stands out the most if you don’t believe me. As humans, we are simply driven by fear more than pleasure.

5. Get colorful – Don’t go crazy, but use some colors. The usual ones are red, black, blue, yellow and white. Your white space is just as important as the colors you choose. Don’t blind your readers, but draw attention to important words.

6. YOU – Focus on your reader, not yourself. Again, the reader wants to know what’s in it for them, so try to cut out the “I” words unless you can do it on them.

7. Use emotion – Engage your readers’ emotions using specific keywords like “free” and you’ll get their attention to read more.

8. Establish Credibility – Using words like “how to”, “inside secrets”, and “secret tricks” help establish credibility because they place the writer in the “hip” crowd, so they must know something, right?

9. Use power words: These words usually end in “ed”, at least that’s how you learned it when you were writing a resume. But on the Internet, a power word can be almost any word that grabs attention and makes the reader think: For example, “Warning!” or “Stop” or “Done:”, or even “Danger”, “Secrets”, “Easy”, I think you get the idea.

10. Spark Curiosity – Ask a question in your headline and then answer it with the rest of your sales copy.

By following these ten headline ideas, you can improve your sales letters, web copy, and hopefully make more sales.