15 Ways to Write Headlines When You Can't Write to Save Your Life

If the headline doesn’t stop people, the copy might as well be written in Greek.

—John Caples

Q. Where, besides the copywriter's over-caffeinated brain, do eye-stopping headlines come from?

A. The copywriter's under-rated bag of tricks. 

In Content Marketer, copywriter Josue Valles opens his bag of tricks—15 in all—for inspection. Here they are:

1. Steal ideas from clickbait sites like BuzzFeed
2. Lean on "psychological triggers"—specific numbers or razor-sharp benefits ("Reduce payroll 23% by automating absence management")
3. Promise super-fast results
4. Enter keywords into Google and steal ideas from the organic search results 
5. Use proven words (here's a list)
6. Use Portent’s Content Idea Generator
7. Steal words and phrases people frequently use to ask questions on Quora
8. Enter keywords into BuzzSumo and steal ideas from the search results
9. Include the name of a big brand in your headline ("Richard Branson's 15 Hacks for Punctuality")
10. Test the emotive power of your headline with Advanced Marketing Institute's EMVHA
11. Test the responsiveness of your headline with Twitter and Facebook (use an A/B test)
12. Leverage the power of an image
13. Steal ideas from newsletters 
14. Evoke curiosity (hint: use Linkbait Generator)
15. Steal ideas from HARO searches

Bob James' Bonus Hack: Steal this book.

Do Your Customers Feel the Love?

Do your customers feel the love?

Not the majority, finds a new study by Gallup.

Gallup finds that only 3 in 10 B2B customers are emotionally and psychologically attached to their suppliers.

The rest—70%—could care less, and are ready to take their business elsewhere, according to analysts Craig Kamins and Anson Vuong.

But wait! Is it your fault customers don't feel the love?

"A big part of the problem is that when customers make their purchasing decisions, they really care more about the product or service they're buying than the company that provides that service," Kamins and Vuong write. 

"Put another way, they're buying the function, not the brand. This makes them a flight risk."

Company leaders are often the last to know customers feels unloved, Gallup finds. Leaders don't:

• Hold meaningful conversations with customers
• Try to empathize with customers
• Pay attention to burning issues brought to their attention by account reps

Not only is lost business at stake.

Account growth is, too.

Gallup's analysis of more than 200,000 relationships shows that indifferent customers are less likely to want to increase their business with current suppliers, or be an early adopter of new products those companies might offer.

To fix the problem, Kamins and Vuong recommend B2B companies work hard to engage customers with their brands.

"If the brand promise is distinct enough, if the company effectively communicates its promise to the customer and if the company consistently delivers on its promise, then it can fully engage more of its indifferent customers," they write.

To engage customers, a B2B company's brand must promise "impact," according to the two analysts.

"Impact can be the catalyst that transforms indifferent customers into fully engaged ones," they write.

To create impact, a company must:

• Understand customers' businesses
• Bring them a steady stream of relevant new ideas
• Put those ideas to work by tailoring them to specific markets and workplaces

"B2B companies must convince customers that they are buying the brand—not just the function. Each customer will define impact differently, but every B2B company can find a way to improve its customers' business."

Cleaning the Refrigerator

"Busy does not equal important," Seth Godin says, "Measured doesn't mean mattered."

How much time did you spend today on anything of importance?

The challenge lies in the fact that busyness camouflages procrastination.

Fight back! Here are my 10 tips:

1. Pick at least one important item for completion every day
2. Favor the 20% of items that produce 80% of the results
3. Suppress the "urgent"
4. Start before you feel ready
5. Treat your employer's or client's business as your own
6. Take good notes on paper during meetings
7. Don't answer poorly written emails
8. Wear the same outfit every day
9. Tune out the news
10. Complete a simple task first—and take comfort in the fact that even pros procrastinate

A reporter once asked Ernest Hemingway how he faced the blank sheet every day.

Hemingway said, “First, I clean the refrigerator.”

Birds Sing from the Heart

Author and content marketer Erik Deckers recently invited me to discuss "My Writing Process," a dead-horse topic if there ever were one.

But I'll beat that horse anyway, just because Erik asked. Here you go:

Where I find ideas. The wellsprings of ideas are many and inexhaustible. The ones I return to again and again are:

• Other writers—from the sublime (e.g., Emerson, Faulkner, Sartre, Updike) to the ridiculous (names withheld) 
• Pop culture (songs, movies, TV shows, blogs, etc.)
• Current events (AKA La Comédie humaine)
• Memories, dreams, reflections 
• Other people's observations (Take my wife's. Please.) 

How I write the ideas down. My secret sauce is no secret. Writing isn't thinking. It isn't even writing. "Writing is revision," as Tracy Kidder says. "Write once, edit five times," David Ogilvy urged office mates. Priceless advice. Your fifth draft may not excel, but it will beat your first by a long shot. And, as you edit five times, be like the birds. An ornithologist mentioned during a recent NPR interview that birds' voice boxes are lodged deep within their chests. "Birds sing from the heart," she said. You should, too. Readers like it and respond accordingly.

How I assure quality. Copy's never error free, but I try hard to check my facts. In fact, I often spend more time fact-checking sources than writing and editing. (Don't hem and haw: fact-checking is enlightening.) And I proofread, both twice before I hit publish and twice afterwards. Boring task, but my reputation's on the line.

How I spread ideas. Outposting has helped aggrandize my scribblings more than any of my other activities. Adman Gary Slack advises clients to invest in "other people's audiences" more than their own. He's 100% on the money.

For more advice about writing. If you're hungry for sound advice, listen to Paul Simon and Chuck Close discuss the creative process in a podcast for The Atlantic. You'll learn more than you will by reading 50 how-to books, with these four noteworthy exceptions: 

• The Art and Craft of Feature Writing by William E. Blunder
• On the Art of Writing Copy by Herschel Gordon Lewis
• Secrets of a Freelance Writer by Bob Bly
• Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark

Oh, yea, don't forget No Bullshit Social Media.

NOTE: This post originally appeared in Erik Deckers' blog.

Want Social Media Success? Hang out on the Stoop.

When I was a kid, the park was where we went to find our friends, but the stoop was where the good stuff happened.

That's where the stories were swapped, the jokes told, the dreams dreamed, the plans made.

Marketers frame their social media strategies around showing up at parks—i.e., "platforms"—when they should be hanging out on stoops.

"Customer engagement will occur where your fans want it to happen, not where you want it to happen," Mark Schaefer says.

You won't form a successful social media strategy by chasing trendy platforms, because customers "will naturally migrate to wherever they want to be."

Schaefer wonders whether we're asking the right question when we ask "Should we be on Snapchat?" or "Should we be on Facebook Live?"

"Maybe it doesn’t matter if we’re on Snapchat or Facebook Live" he says.

"What matters most is where our customers want to be found, where they want to engage."