I was reading a Gary Halbert letter which said that to learn about writing headlines, you should check out Jay Abraham’s “2001 headlines.”
I looked it up, and couldn’t find it. There are a “2001 Greatest Headlines” and a “Greatest Headlines by Jay Abraham” but they aren’t the same thing.
Obviously, we all want resources to get better at writing headlines, so I figured I’d put together this quick list of free resources for writing headlines so that you could get a bit more in-depth practice.
- Gary Halbert’s Newsletter
I figured I’d mention the Newsletter for the billionth time on this site. It’s where I was reading in the first place when I stumbled upon the “2001 headlines” idea. (This gave me another idea which I’ll share with you at the end of this article.)
Gary Halbert is the archetype of salesman-through-words. Check out his newsletters, but ignore the ever increasing articles that aren’t by him on that site.
- ViralNova
ViralNova is a great site for learning about writing headlines and content in general.
If you ever wanted to see what the average internet viewer is interested in, you could “read” Viralnova.
You know that ViralNova does what it does well. It does images, videos and headlines well. It has to, because it has practically nothing else on it.
- The Daily Mail Website
I talked about The Sun yesterday. Newspapers have basically been selling millions of copies for over a hundred years on the strengths of their headlines. This means that you can learn a lot from them.
When it comes to learning from headlines, you want to pick a site with good headlines.
The easiest way to ensure that you do this is by picking a news outlet where people will say, “That’s not reputable!” whilst sharing the link at every possible opportunity. That’s how you know they are hooked by the language.
The Daily Mail serves as a good example of this. You could pick another one though.
- 2001 Greatest Headlines
This is the file I was looking for in the first place. Apparently this isn’t by Jay Abraham. I don’t know.
http://jobarnesonline.com/public/images/2001headlines.pdf
It’s a list of loads of headlines that you can chop and change and use for your own nefarious purposes.
- 100 Greatest Headlines
This is another PDF file that I found available just by a Google search.
http://togethertothetop.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/100greatestheadlinesJayAbraham.pdf
It’s apparently by Jay Abraham. This one is good because it has a reason why the headline is effective.
Of course, you might not agree that they are effective, but even if you mangle the headline itself beyond all recognition, you’ll probably find that using the “reason” to build a headline will work.
That’s all folks.
P.S. I went on a random goose chase looking for 2001 headlines before finding those PDF’s, which I guess are the right ones.
If you wanted to drive traffic or build interest, you too could also do what Gary Halbert did – either intentionally or otherwise.
Say you’re selling two products or an affiliate for two products – simply merge the two titles. People will get confused and seek out “the truth” or whatever.
I don’t know how effective it’d be, but it worked on me. It also worked for The Necronomicon.