Deliver With Your Headlines

There is a trend with advertorials and online news publications to use outrageous headlines to get clicks. These headlines certainly attract visitors, but do readers have a positive experience? Or are these articles simply train wrecks that attract a large audience only by their horribleness?

You see them everywhere, at the bottom of news sites, advertised on the side of articles, headlines claiming “Hand Sanitizer Can Kill You” or “Weird Trick to Save Your Money on Insurance” or “Major White House Conspiracy to Crash the Markets.” They are like tabloid headlines at the grocery store — while no educated person at the grocery store believes Elvis is disguised as a gorilla living in the Amazon, they will still pick up the magazine and read the outrageous story. But these headlines often leave the reader disappointed, as the substance of the story can never truly deliver on the hype promised by the title.

If your news release gets a lot of readers and most of them feel cheated by the headline, you are simply disappointing a mass audience. That is not the feeling you want to be associated with your law firm’s brand.

You should follow this formula when writing your press releases:

• 1) Title – Promise something reasonably interesting that you can deliver on.
• 2) Summary – Tease the reader a little by giving just enough information to pull them in, but not so much that they no longer have to read the article.
• 3) Body – Close the deal. You promised facts or something interesting, now deliver.

Having a realistic headline that makes the reader feel like their time was well-invested is going to yield much better results than an outrageous headline that brings in more readers. Write an interesting headline and then deliver the interesting goods.