[MUSIC] In the last lesson, I explained why it's worth scouring magazine covers to steal a headline that you can then adapt from your content. This is effective, because magazines have to sell, and that means they have the best headlines out there. Continuing on the theme of attention within the framework, in this lesson, I'll discuss additional thoughts to consider when writing your headlines. Think of this lesson as a checklist, if you will, of the types of things you can do, or should do, with headlines. In this lesson, you'll consider and evaluate which techniques you want to adapt and begin to write attention-grabbing headlines. A few more thoughts for you on headlines. Number in headlines, and there is a reason that these do so well. So don't get scared off and think that numbered posts or list posts are just automatically stupid, because they are not automatically stupid. Whether they're stupid or not depends on the quality of the writing that you put into them. That formulaic-seeming, Seven Ways to Accomplish This Thing You Want, 101 New Uses for X. I know they feel stale, but the reason they're used so often is a number in a headline just pushes some kind of little button in the audience brain that makes them curious to know more. And part of it is that they are specific, and specificity almost always works better to get attention on the headline than vagueness. We are just more curious about the specific than we are about the vague. So numbers are great, and in fact, you can play around with using extremely specific numbers. So if you're going to say 70% of all content marketers are making this mistake, do you know what it is? Instead of saying 70% go with something like 70.42%, drill down into those significant digits. Get some real specificity there. Round numbers are appealing to us, they're appealing to our brains, but they're not as intriguing as the not round number, the specific number. One thing you can do right now to start getting better traction on your headlines is to include a benefit or a promise in the headline. Let the person reading the article, listening to the podcast, watching the video, know what they're going to get out of it. So talk about things like reader problems, audience problems. Talk about solutions to problems. Talk about what the person if going to be able to get or have or become or turn into or improve as a result of reading your content, benefits of your content. Now, very important, do not make promises that you're not going to keep. And this is why the clickbait social media headline-rich media sites get so much grief is because they have a really hot sounding headline and then they don't keep the promise. The article is lame, and weak, and thin, and not exactly about what it said it was going to be about. As a content marketer, always make sure that your headline is not writing a check that your content can't cash. Make sure you can back it up. If you can't back it up, back off the headline a little bit. Make it a little quieter so that it matches the content. So I'm not saying make your content boring, I'm saying make your content more interesting. But don't let the headline be us and then the article be a disappointment. You just train people not to click on your stuff when you do that. Another really important thing to understand about headlines is they need to be clear rather than clever. And again, as artists, and as writers, we love word play, we love puns, we love cleverness, we love interesting uses of language, but most audiences do not respond well to that. And if the headline is confusing in any way, and particularly if they don't get the benefit, what benefit am I going to get out of reading this? They will not click on it. So you're much better off with a headline that is specific and useful than a headline that uses a lot of curiosity. Now, the social media traffic sites do use a fair amount of curiosity that will tend to be in the form of a gossip headline like, what is Kim Kardashian doing at the beach? [SOUND], right? Those are curiosity. They're gossip headlines. They're curiosity about something, but there is a benefit in there, which is you're going to get to read gossip about a celebrity. That is a benefit. So it's not really curiosity. There's curiosity about what specifically you're going to find out, and that kind of curiosity is very useful in a headline. So one of the great classic headlines, are you making common mistakes in English? It's an old classic direct response headline. The benefit is finding out which mistakes you might be making or might not be making in English. Are you embarrassing yourself? Are you going around saying something that's just making you look foolish? So that's a use of curiosity that really works. But vagueness, where the person really doesn't know what they're going to get on the other end, and they don't see how it benefits them, that kind of curiosity headline does not tend to do well. And anything confusing does not tend to do well. People just have too many other options they can click on, dozen of different things that are not going to confuse them. So a few other elements of capturing audience attention. One of them is urgency. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't. A lot of the content you'll be creating probably is evergreen. However, if there's an urgency element, for example, if you're writing a piece of content for something that does have a deadline, like entering a contest or taking advantage of promotion, the urgency element needs to be in your headline, and you need to convey it and communicate it. Don't be shy about that. I think a lot of writers are not sure, well, should I mention the deadline, or should I mention some other headline element? Always go with the deadline if you have an element of urgency. We talk a lot at Copyblogger about the combination of meaning and fascination, and that's an important element of attention. You have to make yourself useful, that's the meaning part. You have to talk about topics that your audience cares about, and you have to solve problems that they care about solving with your content. So it can be anything from nutritional advice, to information about a surgical procedure, to fashion tips on how to wear clothes that make you look better. It doesn't have to be serious. When I say it solves a problem they care about, not all the problems we care about are serious. A lot of them are frivolous. But the audience has to care about it, and you pair that meaning with some fascination. That's what I was getting out with that curiosity element, you taste things a little bit. So you have a solution, and you have conveyed that you have a solution to something they cared about, but they don't know what the solution is. Or they don't know how it works, or there's a little known resource that you found that can help them out, or there's a mistake they might be making. So there's that element of curiosity and fascination, something that makes us want to poke in and learn more, but it's always paired with usefulness. And remember, the question of what is useful, or what is meaningful, does not confirm you as the marketer, and it doesn't come from your organization, it comes from the audience. If it's meaningful to them, then it's meaningful. A few other elements that are very important to capturing audience attention, one them is images. Images are incredibly powerful. They work very quickly in the human brain. We have an emotional immediate response to images that works much faster than words can start to trickle through the system. So pairing your content with a great image can be really, really effective and really important. And of course, anybody who spends time on social media knows that the prevalence of memes is just growing and growing, and that's a powerful image, typically. Some kind of image that evokes an emotional reaction, often a humorous reaction, but it doesn't necessarily need to be. Do be mindful of using images that are really graphic. Images of injuries or suffering in some way, because the emotional response of revulsion can be stronger than the audience's desire to know what you have to say. So think about that, too. Images can work both ways. They can repel as quickly as they can attract. So think about attracting images, images that are pulling people in and making people want to know more. Site design is important, so if you have an organization or a client or your own website that looks really dated, that looks really 2004 called, and they want their web design back, that matters. That actually does matter. It matters sometimes from some architectural reasons, because that site tends to load slowly. Not always, but if it's loading slowly, you're going to have a problem, because people, their attention span is unbelievably short for something like waiting for a webpage to load. And if the design looks very stale, very dated, very unappealing, that can again create an instant repulsion effect. As opposed to a clean, modern, contemporary, good-looking design, we'll just tend to grease that track to get that person rolling into your content. Also, sites that look better will tend to get more social sharing. They just do. Life is not fair. Good looking sites get more attention than bad looking sites. And fortunately, it's much easier to do something about a bad looking site than it is about a bad looking person. People like attractiveness. And of course, there is another element of getting attention to your content, and that's promoting your content. Getting people with large audiences to notice it and share it and getting your own audience to notice it and share it. But we're going to talk about that in the acceleration session, because they're very closely aligned, and what you learn for the one will also benefit you from the other. So that's it for today. That's attention, important topic. And we are, of course, going to be through all of the seven As in a deep dive. Some of them are with Brian and me, and some of them are me doing a solo A, like this one here. And in fact, the next A that we've got is action. So that's going to be the next session in the sequence. So looking forward to seeing you then. Thank you for your time and attention. This is Sonia Simone.
