How to Write Great Headlines: It's In The Cards

What's your secret for creating great work?

Here's a sneak peek into one of mine ...

 

Before writing any important sales letter, I sift through my collection of 201 all-time best advertising headlines, each of which is written on a separate 3x5 card. (All 201 are pictured above.)

Examples of classic advertising headlines:

• This is Marie Antoinette -- Riding to Her Death
• How a New Kind of Clay Improved My Complexion in 30 Minutes
• Are You Ever Tongue-Tied at a Party?
• ... and 198 more

I figure it took 20+ hours over the last 11 years for me find and write down each of these classic headlines.

I call it EIEO -- excellence in, excellence out. When you prime the pump with the best advertising headlines ever written, some pretty good headlines are likely to come out.

Yes, it was a royal pain in the posterior to write down all these headlines on 3x5 cards.

And yes it's a pain to spend 15-20 minutes combing through every single one of them in search of the 2 or 3 gems that might be relevant to the project at hand.

But genius is the art of taking pains. No pain, no genius.

And there's no shame in building on the best ideas of others. In fact, you're a fool not to.

Isaac Newton wrote to a rival in 1676: "What Descartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, and especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

(More ideas like these in my Free Report, Guaranteed Marketing for Service Business Owners.)