So how do you come up with a good headline? Use the so what technique.
So let’s say you sold an e-book about how to teach your child self-defense. So you say, “I’ve got 7 simple tips on how you can allow your child to perform all the ancient Chinese kung fu drop kicks and fist pumps that most people don’t know about.”
That’s an OK benefit. So you teach your kid how to punch and kick, but so what? You’ve got a little bit of interest because you’ve got the ancient Chinese stuff and a little bit of curiosity, so how can I do all this with just seven tips? But I say so what?
And then maybe you might reply, “All right, for my level 2 headline I’ll revise it to, ‘In less than 30 minutes, your child will be able to impress his friends and avoid bullies and get more confidence while he’s going to school.’” So that’s your response to the so what.
So instead of just he can kick, and he can punch, you say, “He can do it in 30 minutes, and he can get more friends, and he can get rid of bullies.”
So you write that down and you say, “So what?” You can say, “All right, he’ll get more friends; get rid of bullies. That will allow him to get better grades, and he’ll have a skill that will travel with him later in life. And he will be able to protect his family if he has one or prevent himself from injury or even death. So you could say, “Teach your child to prevent himself, his future family, his friends, his co-workers from injury or even death from just 30 minutes of training using these 7 ancient Chinese tips that can work at any age.”
Isn’t that a cooler headline than, “Oh, just learn these 7 tips on how to kick and how to punch.” So just by asking yourself “so what,” you kind of break the headline down into more useful terms, and you make it more specific, and you kind of make it more of a broad appeal. I know it doesn’t seem like you can give something more broad appeal by making it more specific, but that’s just how it works.
And you might think I’m full of crap, but I just thought of that niche off the top of my head, and I revised that headline off the top of my head.
So that’s another way to try to boost your conversion. So take an existing headline and try to pull out a good benefit by using the “so what” technique and make a sub-headline; or even if the sub-headline is good enough, then remove the original headline and promote that sub-headline to the headline.
So I know you’ve seen these sales letters with lots and lots of texts and huge, chunky paragraphs and endless bullet points. And they’re kind of boring. It’s really easy to scroll through and skip over a lot of the text, even the text that’s supposed to be important.
Take advantage of scruffies!
So to counteract this you add graphics. And you know how I feel about graphics. I don’t like big, huge graphics that distract, but I do like graphics that draw in attention. So you can add these things called scruffys. And you’ve probably seen them. They’re graphics that do things like underline text in a real like sloppy line as if someone wrote a marker on the page. Or you take a red arrow that’s pointing to a very important paragraph or you have the text “true story” right underneath a real story. Or you have a pointing finger, or you have a screenshot. You just add some kind of a stock photo, even a tiny clock just to say, “Here’s a really quick tip that you’ll learn after you buy my course.”
So just go through your sales text and if you have two-thirds of a page of just text, then decide – think about what your sales letter is talking about and go to Google images and find an appropriate image.
I had a sales letter once where we were all talking about a goldfish. I can’t remember what it was about, but it was something like the goldfish only has an attention span of two seconds. So that’s how a lot of your customers are, and I had some kind of attention grabbing PHP script or something. But I put a little picture of a goldfish right next to the paragraph. So people would be scrolling and they’d say, “What the heck? I’m reading about a PHP script, and he’s got a picture of a goldfish here.” And then they end up reading the paragraph, and they get sucked into the story, and they’ve got to read the whole entire story to know how the goldfish relates to this PHP script I’m talking about.
So that’s how you do it. You could even open up your graphics editor like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro or whatever, and you draw in the underlined stuff or write the text “true story” using the paintbrush tool. Or you just go to Google images and find pictures of clocks, arrows, pointing fingers, or you make screenshots if it’s appropriate of your software program or of your HTML templates or of your manual in action; or if you have a dog training product show a picture of a dog. Do like a before and after photo or just a photo of yourself. Just have some kind of graphics to draw attention to the slow parts of the copy