100 Of The Greatest Headlines Of All Time

[SARubin]

Here’s a little sumthin’ I just found while digging through my personal archives. I don’t remember exactly where I got this from, but I’ve had it for a while now.

It’s called 100 Greatest headlines by Jay Abraham (if you don’t know who Jay Abraham is, it would be well worth your time to google his name)

Now in all fairness, let's give credit where credit is due... This list originally came from Victor O Schwabs book "How to write a good advertisement" back in the early 20th century. But I first got it from Jay, and that's why I mentioned him here.

Anyway, I’ll post the first few here, and if anybody is interested in seeing the rest… just let me know…



1. THE SECRET OF MAKING PEOPLE LIKE YOU
Almost $500,000 was spent profitably to run keyed ads displaying this headline. It drew many hundreds of thousands of readers into the body matter of a “people-mover” advertisement — one which, by itself, built a big business. Pretty irresistible, isn’t it?


2. A LITTLE MISTAKE THAT COST A FARMER $3,000 A YEAR
A sizable appropriation was spent successfully in farm magazines on this ad. Sometimes the negative idea of offsetting, reducing, or eliminating the “risk of loss” is even more attractive to the reader than the “prospect of gain.”

As the great business executive Chauncey Depew once said, “I would not stay up all of one night to make $100; but I would stay up all of seven nights to keep from losing it.” As Walter Norvath says in Six Successful Selling Techniques, “People will fight much harder to avoid losing something they already own than to gain something of greater value that they do not own.” It is also true that they have the feeling that losses and waste can often be more easily retrieved than new profits can be gained.

What farmer could pass up reading the copy under such a headline — to find out: “What was the mistake? Why was it ‘little’? Am I making it? If it cost a farmer a loss of $3,000 a year, maybe it’s costing me a lot more? Perhaps the copy will also tell me about other mistakes I might be making.”


3. ADVICE TO WIVES WHOSE HUSBANDS DON’T SAVE MONEY — BY A WIFE
The headline strength of the word “advice” has often been proven. Most people want it, regardless of whether or not they follow it. And the particular “ailment” referred to is common enough to interest a lot of readers. The “it happened to me” tag line, “by a wife,” increases the desire to read the copy. (This ad far out-pulled the advertiser’s previous best ad, Get Rid of Money Worries.)


4. THE CHILD WHO WON THE HEARTS OF ALL
This was a key-result ad which proved spectacularly profitable. It appeared in women’s magazines. The emotional-type copy described (and the photograph portrayed) the kind of little girl any parent would want their daughter to be. Laughing, rollicking, running forward with arms outstretched, right out of the ad and into the arms and heart of the reader.


5. ARE YOU EVER TONGUE-TIED AT A PARTY?
Pinpoints the myriads of self-conscious, inferiority-complexed wallflowers. “That’s me! I want to read this ad; maybe it tells me exactly what to do about it.”

As you go along, you will notice how many of these headlines are interrogative ones. They ask a question to which people want to read the answer. They excite curiosity and interest in the body matter which follows. They hit home — cut through verbose indirectness. The best ones are challenges, which are difficult to ignore, cannot be dismissed with a quick no or yes and without further reading, are pertinent and relevant to the reader. Note how many of the ones included here measure up to these specifications.



So there’s the first five. If you want to see more, just let me know…