The headline in an advertisement

The headline is the most important part of any selling material. This is true whether it is a sales letter, a brochure, a press advert - or a Web page. Its purpose is to get the reader's attention.

For many years, professional sales people have used the classic 'A-I-D-A' sequence in their selling approach:

• Attention - if you don't get the prospect's attention, everything else you do will be wasted.
• Interest - get and keep the prospect's interest.
• Desire - arouse the prospect's desire for your solution to their problem.
• Action - getting the prospect to act in the way that we want them to - and the way that they want, too.

The headline is the attention getter. In anything other than face-to-face selling, you generally have about five seconds for your headline to persuade the reader or viewer to carry on to the rest of your material. It's got to be good. That means that "every headline should be the best you've ever written" (Patrick Quinn in "The Secrets of Successful Copywriting").

Here's a few suggestions of what can make a headline a success line:

• Ask how or why
• Offer an immediate benefit
• Offer a challenge
• Make it BIG (but not too big!)
• Make it relevant to what follows - don't disappoint people
• Name a price

We don't suggest that you try to get all of these ideas into one headline. But you could try to incorporate a couple of them at one time.

Oh - and never use your own business name as a headline. People are just not interested in your name!

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