Why bold claim headlines are trash

The best headline for your offer is rarely your most powerful claim.

“Get your best body ever in 6 weeks or less.”

“Earn $10,000 per month teaching people what you know.”

Marketing gurus will tell you to capture your audience’s attention with a powerful headline like the examples above.

Attention is good. You need people’s attention, but that’s not enough. You can’t stop there.

It might be worse if you get your audience’s attention and then say something you haven’t prepared them to accept.

If you get their attention in the wrong way, you’re worse off than not having captured it at all. If your headline makes a claim that’s too far outside of their understanding of reality, they won’t be willing to read what follows.

The primary purpose of a headline is to convince the audience to read the next sentence. Sentence number two’s purpose is to move people to sentence three, and so on.

You can persuade people to do all sorts of things — including buy your product — in the context of a single email, social media post, or sales page by wisely crafting the sequence of sentences that comes after the headline. And by being strategic about the order in which you unfold your ideas.

You can’t do any of that if you lose people with your headline.

Here’s one of many simple ways to transform a headline that turns people away into one that encourages them to keep reading:

Make it a question.

“It it possible to get your best body ever in 6 weeks or less?”

“Do you believe it’s possible to earn $10,000 per month teaching people what you know?”

Marketing and copywriting isn’t that hard. Just be careful about following the wrong people’s advice.