marketing tips Archives

Headlines That Work vs. Headlines That Don’t Work

4 Mar 2022 by Daniel G. Taylor

writing headlines — Photo by **nappy** from **Pexels**

You’d think that after a decade as a copywriter (which is what I did before I became a mental health speaker), I’d have known better when it comes to writing headlines.

But last week I broke the cardinal rule of good copywriting. I sent out an article in my email newsletter, also published on my blog, with the headline: Do What Seth Godin Says. A terrible headline!

Before I get into the specifics of why it’s such a bad headline, let me give you some context.

This screenshot shows the stats for the overall performance of my email newsletter:

As you can see, that last email/blog post tanked. Indeed, until yesterday, it only had a 23.4% open rate. And my average open rate is 39.40% (if you’re not already getting my email newsletter, fill out this form and you’ll get it every Friday morning, plus a monthly reading list).

So What’s Wrong with Writing a Headline Like, “Do What Seth Godin Says”?

First, most people do not know who Seth Godin is. And if you don’t know who he is, why would you care what he said, and why would you read the email?

Second, the headline offers no benefit to the reader, explaining the value they’ll get because of investing their time in the article.

So how could I have rewritten the headline?

A Highly Effective Framework for Writing Headlines

I’m an AWAI-verified copywriter, and while I was studying with American Writers and Artists Inc, I learned a formula for creating powerful headlines, known as “The 4 U’s.”

Great headlines are:

Urgent: They give your readers a potent reason to continue reading right now.
Useful: The headline offers something that’s of value to the prospect.
Unique: They suggest that what you’re offering differs from every competing product in the marketplace.
Ultra-Specific: They avoid being vague.

The way to use The 4 U’s is that after you’ve come up with a list of potential headlines (how to do that is a topic for another time), then give each headline you’ve written a score for each one of The 4 U’s.

Example of a Bad Headline: 1/4

For example, let’s apply The 4 U’s to “Do What Seth Godin Says”:

Urgent: No, so it gets a zero.
Useful: No, so it gets a zero here, too.
Unique: OK, I’ll give myself a point for this one. The idea of doing what Seth Godin says is certainly unique.
Ultra-Specific: No, so another zero.

So my total score (just in case you haven’t already added it up) is one out of four.

Writing headlines, great headlines, means you want to aim for a score of three or four using The 4 U’s.

Example of a Good Headline: 3/4

Now let’s take another example and cross the fourth wall, examining The 4 U’s as they relate to the headline of this article: “Headlines That Work vs. Headlines That Don’t Work“:

Urgent: No, so it gets a zero here.
Useful: Yep, the headline promises that if you read the article, you’ll learn something useful for writing headlines. So I’ll give myself a point here.
Unique: Yep, I Googled and while there are lots of “Headlines That Work” articles out there, mine has a unique headline. Go me! Also, scored a point here.
Ultra-Specific: Yep. It promises you’ll learn about headlines that work and headlines that don’t work. So another point.

In total then, the headline of this article gets a score of three out of four points on The 4 U’s.

Now, I don’t actively seek copywriting work anymore. I’m having too much fun as a mental health speaker, and for that reason, I wrote this article to give events coordinators some tips on how to write effective subject headings for emails or headlines for other marketing materials they create to sell out their events.

That said, however, I am available on an extremely limited basis to work on copywriting projects that inspire me. As a copywriter, I’m now only available through Finda.Team, owned by the co-author of the book I’m currently editing, Joe Bellissimo.

My areas of specialisation are:

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) for websites, meaning that I get more people finding your site through Google and then when they get to your site, I turn them into leads so you can sell your products or services to them.
Email marketing, such as sequences of emails so that you and your subscribers get to know each other and you’re able to target your products to them, and regular email newsletters so you stay at the “top of your prospect’s mind” when they think about businesses in your space.

Once you’re at the Finda.Team site, you’ll need to select a plan. If you have any difficulty getting set up, you can book a time with Joe and he’ll walk you through the process step-by-step.

OK, commercial over.

While I didn’t have as many people read last week’s email newsletter as usual, I had some people read it. One of these people was Roger Donnelley, CEO of the NDIS Provider, The SALT Foundation, where I work part-time as a digital marketing officer.

He wrote this lovely comment:

You are on the way to becoming a marketing genius and will not have to quote Seth anymore when posting.
Roger Donnelley, Founder & CEO, The SALT Foundation

So even though few people read the article, those who did got something out of it.

But if no one opens your email or clicks on the link to your blog post, what’s the point?

And my ultimate point is that that’s the exact purpose of a headline: to get your readers to keep reading.

So please share your thoughts and feedback in the comments. Did you agree with my analysis of the headlines from last week and this week? You’re welcome to disagree (respectfully, of course).

5 Ways to Sell Even When You Hate Selling

1 Jul 2016 by Daniel G. Taylor

Learn 5 ways for how to sell more—even if you hate selling! — Photo by **RODNAE Productions** from **Pexels**

In this newsletter, I’m going to show you five ways to sell more—even if you hate selling.

Over this past week, I’ve made three significant sales.

The first was in one of my side businesses: Melbourne Professional Resumes. The client hired me earlier in the year to write her resume. Now she has a specific job she wants to apply for and needs a cover letter. What made this significant is that she’s a returning customer.

[Update 9 Mar 2022: I’ve moved on from the resume business, so please don’t ask if I can write your resume. However, if you’re after tips check out this episode of my friend James Fricker’s podcast, Graduate Theory: “On Resume Writing and Authenticity with Nimarta Verma.”]

It’s fairly easy to make a single sale. But the purpose of sales—and business—is to start and build profitable relationships. The litmus test of success in sales is whether your customers buy from you again and again.

The second sale was to a new copywriting client. She’s tasked me with writing an ad that gets even more people to her entry-level event.

The third sale was to another new copywriting client, but a long-time friend. It’s the largest single sale I’ve made.

Personally, I love sales. But I totally get why many people hate selling. Many people carry a lot of baggage about money, and those “mind viruses”—as prosperity activist Pat Mesiti calls them in The $1 Million Reason to Change Your Mind—impede you from making the most money you can.

Here then are five ways of selling effortlessly:

1. Build Your Subscriber List

Your emails need to be valuable, or people will quickly unsubscribe from your list. Make it clear what value you offer your audience. Write powerful headlines (or subject lines).

My pitch at networking events for my email newsletter is:

“As reviews editor for Business First Magazine, the inflight magazine on Virgin flights in business and first classes, I read heaps of business, self-improvement, and personal finance books. In my newsletter, I share the best ideas that I learn from those books. Would you like me to add you to my subscribers?”

Even if you’re not set up to sell anything straight away, opportunities will come your way just by showing off what you do well.

When you’re in touch with people regularly, you’re the first person they think of when they need—or know someone else who needs—a copywriter, a resume writer, a hypnotherapist, a coach, or whatever you are.

2. Help Before You Sell

Your attitude should always be to help, not sell. If your attitude is to sell people, you will repel people. No one cares about you or your product (network marketers especially take note!). People have their own problems, their own concerns, and their own goals. Help them solve their problems and achieve their goals and people will reciprocate and buy from you—or refer you to people who will.

And when you help people often enough, they’ll help you when the going gets tough.

3. Turn Up

While no one cares about you, they will always hold it against you if you don’t care about them.

The way to show you care about people is to keep your agreements—and to deliver even more value than they’re expecting.

I promise a weekly email newsletter, Thought Leadership, and a monthly email newsletter, The Leader’s Bookshelf.

You may not notice if they don’t turn up in your inbox until you think about hiring me. Then you may think, “I haven’t heard from him in ages. I have a copy project, but is he still copywriting? Maybe I should call him. Actually, this other copywriter stays in touch with me regularly. I’ll just ask her if she can handle my copywriting project.”

Whether it’s in person or online, keep your agreements. Turn up as expected.

[Update 9 Mar 2022: My weekly email newsletter is now called Your Leading Edge and arrives in your inbox every Friday morning. My monthly email newsletter is still called The Leader’s Bookshelf and gets sent on the second Tuesday of each month. You can check out the June 2016 edition or the April 2022 edition.]

You can subscribe to both emails by filling out this form now:

But here’s a little known secret: Online promises—when kept—are worth more than offline promises. Why? Online, so few people do what they say they will that you stand out when you become someone people know they can count on.

4. Unlock the Power of the Fabergé Method

If you’re doing those first three things right, you’ll tap into the Fabergé Method of networking.

The name of this method comes from a Fabergé Organics shampoo commercial in the 1980s, featuring Heather Graham. I learned about it this past week from The Golden Thread newsletter.

In the commercial, Graham tells two of her friends about Fabergé. They then tell two of their friends. Who tell two of their friends. And so on.

Master the first three ways above, and the Fabergé Method comes into play. When you deliver useful content, help people, and show up, you build your reputation. That reputation means that people will tell others about you. When those other people get to know you, they’ll then tell other people about you.

5. Remove Emotions from the Selling Process

What do you do when you’re selling to someone and they say they don’t have a lot of money?

This tests what mind viruses you have.

When you allow emotions to run your sales process, you make a lot of assumptions based on your own “mind viruses”.

What does it mean when someone says, “I don’t have a lot of money”?

If you’re talking to someone who works in a factory, not having a lot of money means something completely different than if you’re speaking to a multimillionaire CEO. Never assume that “I don’t have a lot of money” means they don’t have enough money to afford your services.

Successful selling is not about getting the very most money while delivering the very least in service. It’s all about achieving a fair exchange of value.

And the way to do that is by following a script. A well-structured script removes the emotion from the selling process, and it allows you to determine if your service is a good fit for that person. And if it is, it helps you encourage them to buy.

One question that’s always included in my scripts is: “How much were you expecting this would cost?”

First, this eliminates people who have completely unrealistic price expectations.

Second, if their figure is in my price range for the project they’re after, I can make them an offer that sounds like a bargain—an amount still within my fee range, but cheaper than what they were willing to pay.

Third, it helps me see how I can give them a premium offer and what value I can bring to it to get them to choose that over the original price.

Conclusion: You Can Learn to Love Selling

If someone hates selling, it often comes down to two reasons.

First, they don’t believe their product or service genuinely helps people. When I watch my mentor Dr John F. Demartini sell his signature program, The Breakthrough Experience, from the stage, I see him moved to tears because he understands the power of the program to transform people’s lives. I’ve done that program twice and can attest to its power.

If you know your product or service helps people, you can focus on helping them and caring for them—not pushing them to buy.

And sometimes helping people means you admit that what you’re selling isn’t the right thing for them.

Second, they don’t place a high enough value on themselves and see their true worth. Too often people undermine their sales efforts because they don’t believe in themselves or the value they bring.

One unexpected tip that leads to you placing a higher value on yourself is saving a portion of your income to either build your savings or grow your investments.

The bottom line is that with the right training, you can learn to love selling.

What holds you back from selling more? Please comment below.

Join me in a free webinar I’m running on “The 5 Greatest Rules of Selling for the 21st Century” (and yes, this is still current as of 9 Apr 2022) by filling out the form below:

3 Lessons from Running a Crowdfunding Campaign

24 Jun 2016 by Daniel G. Taylor

Daniel G. Taylor crowdfunding campaign — Photo credit: Joyce Ong

You may or may not know that recently I went through a rough patch. In the first six months of this year, I lost my partner of four years, my grandmother’s home (which had been in our family for 60 years), and my pet child, the notorious Mr Scruff.

Stick with me, though, because I guarantee I’ll make you feel good by the end of the article.

However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.
Stephen Hawking

When I had to move out of Grandma’s home—and move fast!—I launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the moving costs.

Here are three lessons I learned from doing so:

1) Completed is Better Than Perfect

Seth Godin teaches this. No one cares about your ideas. They only care when you ship something. If you have a blog, publish content. It’s better to launch something and then adapt it based on feedback rather than getting something to a point that is theoretically perfect. Reality snaps theory. Any theory will need to be changed to match reality.

I launched the crowdfunding campaign before I was ready.

And it worked.

2) Relationships Trump the Law of Exchange

Money goes to those who have earned it. To make my appeal attractive, I offered 7 services to donors. Of these, only one was popular (a personalised reading list, where I recommend books you’ll enjoy and find helpful). The other offerings were great value—my copywriting services at half the usual price. No one wanted them.

But people continued to donate.

When I offered something to the donors, a common response was, “Pleasure mate, no need to give back. Hope all goes well for you.”

Likeability is one of the key factors in success. It’s a foundation for relationships. Without relationships, life is meaningless. People donated because of the relationship I had with them.

That is a powerful piece of knowledge.

The purpose of a business is not to make a profit. It’s to start a profitable relationship with a customer and keep that relationship going for as long as possible.

3) Place a Positive Spin on Your Story

When it comes to downers, my story has all the elements. But people get enough bad news from the mainstream media. Don’t add to that mess through your social media posts (or your crowdfunding campaigns).

When I showed my initial campaign to one of my American Writers & Artists Inc. teachers, Gary Hennerberg, he said my story needed a positive spin. To be precise, I needed to show how people donating would help me transform from the darkness of yucky circumstances into the light of new hope.

There are a bunch of marketing lessons packed into the points above. Please comment below with what you think of them.