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Great headlines increase readership of your content by a dramatic margin. It makes no difference whether you're writing articles like this one, ads for your business or sales letters. Learning how to write a headline will greatly increase the results you receive from all your writing efforts.

Unfortunately being able to write a great headline has become a bit of a lost art for most business owners and marketers. In fact unless you've had direct response or internet marketing experience you might not even be aware of how powerful they can be. The truth is without some sort of headline it's very unlikely that your writing will be read.

So without further ado here are my top tips for writing great headlines:

Tip #1 - Tell them the benefit
You have to quickly explain why anyone should listen to you. If you clearly state the benefit of reading your information from the very start the reader can then decide whether they want to know more. This means that you're also going to have to write about something that is particularly interesting to your target market.

Tip #2 - Make them curious
A good headline should leave the reader wanting to know more. A curiosity headline should place a question in the reader's mind that they just have to know the answer to. However be sure to answer the question in the rest of your writing or your reader will walk away unsatisfied.

Tip #3 - Share a great story
People are psychologically trained to enjoy and respond to stories. By creating your headline based on his principle, you can grab a reader's attention with a strong opening and then guide them through the rest of the story. When you use this approach make sure that your message is clear.

Tip #4 - Get emotional
The human race is guided by our emotions (whether we like to admit it or not) and we can use this to get someone's attention. A great writer can grab the reader by the heart and lead them through an emotional journey. We can make our message a lot more powerful by stimulating a person's emotions.

Tip #5 - Study the best
Top copywriters all collect swipe files of favorite materials over their lifetimes. When they see something they like they make note of it so that they can then use it in their own writing. You can do this yourself and a great place to start is by searching out the most successful headlines and reading through them before you begin to write.

Tip #6 - The answers in the test results
Even the copywriting legends can't always pick what the winning headline will be. This is why it's so important to test different variations of your headlines to determine which is the most effective. A simple split test of one headline against another will often deliver amazing results.

At the end of the day
Writing great headlines is a mixture of art and science. There are many formulas for creating headlines and if you do some searches for copywriting you'll come out with many useful resources. The important thing is that you must put what you learn into practice.

Perhaps the most crucial lesson is to test your headlines to find a winner. We never know what will be effective until we put it in front of real live people. By using this process you'll learn how to write a headline that grabs attention and gets your message read.