The Attention Engine – Strong headline and opening paragraph sell your ideas

If Sting never sang outside his shower, would anybody care? Same goes for your news release or blog post.  If you don’t get the attention of your intended audience, they’ll never hear what you have to say.

Brilliant promotions and compelling details about your company can help you drive sales, but first you have to stand out.

Journalists, communicators and ad copywriters have had the principle of an attention-grabbing headline and lede hammered into them over the years.  Don’t forget -  the same rules apply to web writing.

Copyblogger Brian Clark reminds us that strong headlines and openings for web pages make it easier for items to gain traction on news sites like Digg:

"You also have to catch attention, whether it be your own subscribers or competitive Diggers. If you get passed up in the feed reader all is lost.

"And finally… you’ve got to make it brain-dead easy for the content to be submitted. That means your headline and opening should be ready to submit “as is” or with only small tweaks for the site’s community."

There are some proven styles of headline writing and openings, but no automated silver bullet. On a whim, I tried the Diggitizer, which promises to goose up your headline to make it more successful on Digg.  Here are the dreadful results for this post’s headline:

• Awesome The Attention Engine – Strong Firefox2 vs. IE7 headline and opening paragraph sell your idea Funny!
• Major the Attention Engine – Strong Major Breakthrough Headline and Opening Paragraph Sell Your Idea Awesome

I’ll be guest lecturing tomorrow night in the University of Regina’s public relations program on the basics of PR.  I’ll be covering the news release.  You can bet I’ll be emphasizing  stand-out headlines and opening paragraphs.

Tags: headlines, digg, copywriting, attention, communications, promotion, copyblogger