MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

Many peo­ple do their own writ­ing, be it copy­writ­ers crank­ing sub­ject lines and sub-headlines, or “nor­mal Joes and Janes” riff­ing bul­lets and body copy.

Here are a 3 tech­niques that will instantly SPICE up your copy.

The Knew/New Method

I came across this in an arti­cle writ­ten by Sean D’Souza, the author of Psy­chotac­tics. “Knew” are exist­ing ben­e­fits which peo­ple already know about, for exam­ple, how to save money, how to dou­ble sales, how to do proper mar­ket­ing, how to write a head­line… these are things that you already know. But, the prob­lem with things you already know is that they are bor­ing. Because it’s famil­iar, you have no curios­ity to find out more.

But, when you add “new” to “knew”, you can cre­ate intensely pow­er­ful head­lines because it adds some­thing intrigu­ing. “New” is some­thing that is so totally unre­lated to “knew” that it trans­forms the head­line into some­thing curi­ous and intrigu­ing. You always start with the “knew”.

Let me give you an exam­ple. e.g. ‘how to write com­pelling arti­cles’. That is “knew”. You can add a twist by say­ing that it’s the George Bush method to writ­ing com­pelling arti­cles. Sud­denly, there’s some­thing dis­rup­tive because it’s so diver­gent, and there enters the “new”, which throws in the ele­ment of curios­ity to the equation.

Sim­ply put, take some­thing famil­iar and add some­thing strange. This is one of the most pow­er­ful head­line for­mu­las I know, and it can be used for bul­let points as well. I use a lot of this. It trans­forms your copy in a new and com­pelling way.

Spe­cific Tar­get Approach

Again, this is from Sean D’Souza. You start out with the tar­get, then you name the ben­e­fit you want to accom­plish in the head­line you are writ­ing. Sup­pose you are com­ing up with a head­line, lets say as an exam­ple, “How to Write Head­lines”. If you use that as the head­line of your arti­cle, it’s a very weak headline.

So, what do you do? One of the things you can do with this approach is inject ben­e­fit into the head­line. For exam­ple, “How to Write Head­lines That Draw Money”, where the ben­e­fit is “That Draw Money”.

The sec­ond thing you could do with this approach is by adding a numer­i­cal goal to it: “How a Head­line Can Gen­er­ate a 200% Boost in Prof­its”. The “200% increase” is the tar­get. Basi­cally, whichever spe­cific tar­get approach you use, the end result deliv­ers what the bul­let or head­line wants to accomplish.

Remem­ber, make it as spe­cific as you can. Any­thing that is vague will lose your read­ers atten­tion. Let me show you some other exam­ples that is strength­ened with a spe­cific tar­get. If your topic is on writ­ing body copy, your head­line could be “How to Write Body Copy to Attract Joint Ven­ture Part­ners”. Then comes in the speci­ficity. “3 Ways to Write Body Copy That Attracts Joint Ven­ture Part­ners.” The head­line is strength­ened because it talks about some­thing spe­cific, and a tar­geted result it’s work­ing towards.

National Enquirer Approach

This is one is extremely straight­for­ward, because the name says it all. You go into the National Enquirer, or any tabloid for that mat­ter, and swipe the head­lines there. It’s very effec­tive because it’s a very non-traditional way of doing it. It’s a breath of fresh air from the nor­mal, stan­dard Inter­net marketing-type headlines.

This approach cap­tures people’s atten­tion because it doesn’t fol­low nor­mal head­line for­mu­las, it’s not like “Who Else wants To Earn Mil­lions?”. Don’t get me wrong, although the con­ven­tional head­line for­mula still works, it has its place. One of my recent head­lines using the National Enquirer method pulled in a much higher con­ver­sion rate com­pared to what we pre­vi­ously had.

More head­line mad­ness is here.

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About the Author

Kenneth Yu is a tormented artist, but he was determined not to be a starving one. This is the primary reason why this D&AD award-winning advertising creative has plunged into the world of Internet entrepreneurship, and the rest -- as they say -- is history. Straddling both the creative and business realm, Kenneth combines bullet-fast ideation and his vast experience working with the big brands to alchemize marketing gold as the Head Copywriter and Marketing Strategist in MindValley. He shares more out-of-the-box marketing and copywriting tips (plus cool irreverent stuff) on his Twitter

Check out other posts by Kenneth

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