Headlines: Half the Story
For a brand, story or book, your headline is half the work
Whether you’re writing a short story, a book or naming a brand, your headline — your title — is half the work.
That’s even more true today with readers scanning more than reading, spending an average of 15 seconds looking at a typical online page before moving on.
“They don’t necessarily read a page from left to right and from top to bottom,” says Don Tapscott, author of Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World. “They might instead skip around, scanning for pertinent information of interest.”
Your headline, book title or brand name implies the work’s mission or purpose. Get the headline just right and anything is possible.
Your headline is your roadmap showing where you are going
Get the headline or name wrong and no one will even bother to read past it. As advertising legend David Ogilvy said, “unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90 percent of your money.’’
With digital media, changing a single word in one headline can increase clicks by 46 percent so headline writers are taught to remember the “four u’s,” or headlines that are:
