There is a moment, about ninety minutes into a draft, when the first headline you wrote starts to feel inevitable. It will pulse on the page. It will read like the only possible answer. This is the moment to delete it.
The reason is mechanical. The first headline you write is a headline written for you — the writer — to settle into the work. It tells you what the page is about. It is a placeholder dressed up as a finished line. Show it to your client and they will nod, because nodding is what people do when something is correct without being right.
The second headline is the one written for the reader. To get there you need a draft you can throw out. Most copywriters do not throw it out, because by then they have published a Twitter thread about how good it is and are emotionally on the hook. We have a rule at the studio: every page that ships has to have at least one headline that did not exist twenty-four hours before sign-off. Most of the time, that headline is the one we keep.
The other rule is dumber and more useful: read the headline aloud, in the room, with another person there. Bad headlines collapse the second you say them out loud. Good headlines just sit there, calmly, like a sentence somebody once said over dinner.
Words come last. Everything before them is research.
Filed under Craft · TextImpactForge Issue Nº 042. Back to all pieces →