(This post is part of a series about creating the MENs story. You can begin at the Introduction.)
Every story you tell needs an introduction.
Your audience sees the headline first in everything you create:
- Ads
- Lead magnet, sales, and OTO pages within funnels
- E-mail campaign subject lines
- Blog posts for organic traffic
- Social media posts in your groups, pages, etc.
Headlines have one purpose: they need to make your dream customers stop and look to spark their curiosity and desire to know more.
That’s it.
When writing headlines, don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Instead, use tried and true structures.
Devote Time to Your Headlines
You should spend 50% of your time writing headlines. Ok, that might be a bit extreme, but the point is that headlines are critical.
Try to write 10-20 headlines for a story, creating many options for testing. You will test headlines the most, so place substantial effort to craft many to choose from.
Another Reason For Great Headlines
A great headline will attract your dream customers, but it will also repel those who are not. You want the wrong people to stop reading just as much as you want the right people to be intrigued. The last thing you want is to spend money generating leads that will never join your community or buy from you.
Headline Structure
Headlines use some of the elements that would already exist within the Fire Came Later Framework:
From your Dream Customer
- Dream customer – who is your dream customer? An entrepreneur, a retired couple, an unhealthy businessman, someone who has trouble dating?
- Pain – what does your dream customer want to avoid while trying to achieve results, or what issue might be holding them back from success?
From Your Offer
- Results – what results do your dream customers desire that your offer provides that your story showcases?
- Timing – how quickly does your offer provide those results?
- Niche – what is the name of your niche? This is also your primary keyword.
Headline Structure
There are five types of headlines you should use. These are common headline structures that you encounter every day. Let’s look at one here – the ‘How to’ structure.
The ‘How To’ Structure
This headline type can identify how to do something your dream customer wants to do. It can have two structures, using the above elements:
- How to [results] for your [niche] in [timing], even if [pain].
- How to [results] like the most successful [dream customer] in [timing] do, even if [pain].
For MENs
From your Dream Customer
- Dream customer – 30-something professionals that work under pressure
- Pain – making mistakes and wasting time / ignorance
From Your Offer
- Results – mentoring and a road to wellness
- Timing – 3 months
- Niche – health > wellness > overall wellness > men’s mentoring membership club
How To Headlines for MENs
- How to Improve Your Overall Wellness with the Latest Men’s Membership Club in 3 Months, Without Wasting Any Time
- How to Achieve a Better Work/Life Balance with an Exclusive 3 Months Membership to MENs
- How to Find the Right Mentor, Restore Your Confidence, and Take Your Career to the Next Level
- How to Take Your Career to the Next Level By Restoring Your Confidence with the Right Mentor
- Men: Learn How to Improve Your Health in 3 Months Even If You Think You Are Too Busy (Hint: You Aren’t!)
Conclusion
With these headlines, I can start testing my ads, e-mails, landing pages, etc., to see what is most effective for my dream customers.
You should always have a testing strategy, and all your tools should offer some type of A/B or split testing functionality. Start with two headlines, drive traffic, then evaluate whatever your goal is—clicks, conversions, sales, upsells, webinar registrations, etc. Whichever headline is the winner, put it up against another and continue testing.
Plus, if conversions start to dip, you already have a collection of headlines ready.
Remember, a great headline is almost half the battle, so spend half your time on them.
One Final Note
There is one other element that can supercharge your headline—your sub-headline. However, you need the full Fire Came Later Framework to learn about that. Click the button below to get the whole Framework.
Remember, this post is part of a series:
- Introduction – an overview of the process
- Pre-story – a few exercises before you create a story
- Story outline – let’s look at an aspect of the FCL Story Outline Framework
- Write – let’s understand how to write an FCL story
- Final story – one of the story lengths the FCL Framework helps produce
- Headlines – let’s write some headlines for ads, sales pages, email campaigns, etc. (this post)
- Story summary – let’s distill the story down to its essence
Each post will link to the rest, so it will be easy to see the entire process.
Remember, the FCL Framework helps create very specific types of stories—that will make your dream customers see you as their guide and your offers as their path to success.
Ready for the Fire Came Later Framework?
The FCL Framework is the best method for structuring and writing stories that create belief—belief in you as the guide and your offers as the path to their success.