Jim and Stew Smith discuss the importance of headlines with an amazing sub-conscious prop that Jim created to grab your attention by “not” grabbing your attention.
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Transcript…
Jim Edwards: Hey guys, Jim Edwards here and welcome back to the latest episode of the Sales Copywriting And Content Marketing Hacks Podcast…
I’m your host Jim Edwards along with my trusty co host, Mr. Stew Smith…
Stew Smith: Hello, everybody…
Stew, what episode number is this, like 47?
Stew Smith: Yes…
Jim Edwards: 48, 47?
Stew Smith: 47.
Jim Edwards: We’re in heaven in 47, yes…
You’re a smart guy…
Your dad owned a newspaper for a while, didn’t he?
Stew Smith: Yes…
Jim Edwards: What is wrong with this paper Stew?
Stew Smith: Well, it’s the Wall Street Journal, and all the headlines are blacked out…
Jim Edwards: Why would the fact that the headlines are blacked out matters Stew?
Stew Smith: Because it just looks like a bunch of nothing…
Jim Edwards: Yeah…
Stew Smith: My brain doesn’t take it in…
Like there’s nothing that is bringing me to focus on anything…
Not even a cool picture…
Jim Edwards: Right?
Cause this picture could be anything…
I mean, this could be like a riot at Target…
It could be like the start of a flash mob.
You don’t know even what the picture is about without the headlines.
And so this illustrates perfectly how important headlines are, because when they’re missing, and you know they’re missing, your brain goes,
“Well, damn, I don’t even know what to pay attention to”…
I don’t know what to read…
I don’t know if it interests me or not…
I just don’t know…
Stew Smith: That’s a really cool visual because I never really thought about it on that subconscious level…
Jim Edwards: Yeah…
Stew Smith: I mean, that really brings a subconscious out for me to say, I don’t know what the hell that is.
Jim Edwards: Right.
It’s you, and you certainly don’t know which articles you want to read, and you’re not going to sit there and read all of the articles because life’s busy and there’s Facebook to be looked at.
So that’s an important thing.
And it’s interesting.
I had an experience, gosh, it’s been 20 years ago, probably…
I used to do consulting for a title company.
I was one of the first people to start teaching how to use the internet to get more leads in Real Estate.
So they would find me all over the country, and I would teach all these top realtors that were their clients about ultimately about direct response copywriting.
And so I went, I was in Orange County, California.
And the night before I was gonna teach there all week.
In fact, I even got a picture here on, but I was going to teach there all week, and the title rep came in; he was going to prep me…
He was gonna get me straight…
Let me know that this was the toughest audience, and these people weren’t interested in having people coming in from out of town…
And he was actually pissed that I had been rammed down his throat by his boss, for me to go out there.
And so he was, he wasn’t happy, so he was trying to let me know that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and these people weren’t going to listen to me and they just didn’t listen…
They knew everything already…
And I said, okay…
I wasn’t intimidated, but I thought to myself I need something to really grab their attention, and I don’t know how well you can actually see that picture, but that’s me standing, that’s me in my little suit…
Stew Smith: Nice looking at you!
Jim Edwards: In there talking to him and stuff…
And so when I was leaving the hotel to go into a taxi, yes…
A taxi, there were no Uber’s back then…
Okay…
Uber was like a German word…
So I went in the gift store, and I picked up a copy of the LA times just to read something in the paper on the way.
And I was looking at the paper, and I was looking at the headlines…
I said, Oh, I got it…
So when I got there, I went to the office manager, the lady who’s in charge of the whole place…
I said, “Hey, do you have any duct tape or masking tape?”
And you’re not going to believe this…
This lady whips out this huge roll of duct tape from her desk drawer…
And I didn’t even ask lady, why do you have a big old roll of duct tape?
I just said it was fate…
So I went in the conference room, and I did exactly this to the LA Times, and then when they all came in, they all did look like they kind of had an attitude, like I shouldn’t be here.
So I skipped the whole usual intro of who I am and why I’m here and what we’re gonna learn…
And I just held up the paper, and I said…
“Hey, what’s wrong with this paper?”
What’s wrong with this?
What’s missing?
And everybody’s like…
“Oh, the headlines are missing”…
I said, absolutely…
Why does that matter?
“Well, we don’t know what It’s about”…
Well, why does that matter?
You don’t know what it’s about…
“Well, we don’t know what we want to read”…
I said, Oh, okay…
I just kept digging in and digging in and digging in…
Well, we don’t know what we want to read…
Well, why does that matter?
“Well, because we don’t want to know if it’s a waste of time or not”…
Oh, so the headline lets whether it’s going to waste your time or not…
I said, Okay, so, here’s another page I want y’all to look at…
And I held up, they had a full-page ad on the back of the paper…
And I said, well, what’s wrong with this?
And some smart ass in the front says…
“Well, how do we know you didn’t cover anything up?”
And I said, exactly.
And I didn’t say anything for like 10 seconds…
I said, there’s no tape on here…
What’s missing?
Oh, the headline…
There’s no headline…
Yeah…
And if there’s no headline, nobody knows if it interests them or not…
Does it?
So you’re pretty much wasting your time, right…
Stew Smith: And money.
Jim Edwards: And money…
Right…
Let me tell you what those people ate up, everything I taught them that day…
And their group manager came to me and said, you know what?
“That’s the best training we’ve ever had”…
And the title representative said…
“Men, I’ve never seen them pay attention like that”…
And so the point of it was that…
Hey, it was a cool visual, but it shows how much we take for granted headlines and how important headlines are for everything that we do in an ad…
The headlines is what makes people click on your actual funnel page…
It’s what makes people know whether this is something they should pay attention to or not.
It pre-frames them…
It moves them onto the next thing.
And your video is the first words out of your mouth to let people know that whether it’s something that’s important to them or not.
In an email, it’s the subject line that lets them know whether they should even open the email or not.
I mean, it’s the thing that starts the whole process, and yet it is a total afterthought for most people.
No, what I’m saying…
Stew Smith: Oh, absolutely…
Let me tell you a quick story…
My parents worked at the Swanee Democrat and Live Oak, Florida…
Jim Edwards: Swanee?
Stew Smith: Yeah…
From the 70s, 80s, and 90s…
And I was a young kid, and I would do odd jobs around there…
Mostly manual labor stuff cause they didn’t want me touching anything that had to do with the paper.
So, but I was always intrigued about how they made the paper.
I must’ve been eight years old, and I remember there was a person whose job it was to make all the headlines of all the stories.
That one guy!
Jim Edwards: Physically laying out the type or this dude’s whole job was just to come up with headlines?
Stew Smith: Both.
So he would come up with the headline, put it on there…
And it was, and it was a fun thing too…
I mean, they made a lot of fun out of it…
There were some horrible stories that had headlines, but for instance, this is one that has stuck with me forever, probably because it’s horrific…
But there was a drug deal gone bad, right in our little town of Live Oak.
And I think some dude was decapitated.
Right?
And so a headless body was floating down the river type of thing…
Jim Edwards: Damn son.
Stew Smith: Oh yeah…
I mean it was crazy stuff…
And I just remember the guy coming up and said, how’s this headline?
Headless body found in the river foul play suspected.
Jim Edwards: Oh, my God!
Stew Smith: I just remember me…
I was like 10 years old, just dying up there…
That was one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard…
I think it really made a point to a…
Jim Edwards: (It’s jacked up…)
Stew Smith: (It is reject up…)
Jim Edwards: It’s like a headline from mad magazine…
Stew Smith: Yes, yes…
But anyway, it was one of those things that I saw the importance of headlines at a very young age that the publisher who was my dad had a guy made sure all the headlines were done right…
Then my mom was also an editor there, and she would go proofread the headlines because the last thing you want is a spelling error in a headline…
Jim Edwards: Okay.
That is really cool…
I was just thinking myself, I wish I could have downloaded the brain of that dude that all he ever did was headlines…
Stew Smith: Yeah.
Jim Edwards: I mean that’s, you talk about a specialized skill and under-appreciated guy.
He was sitting on a million-dollar info product and probably went to his grave with all that knowledge in his noggin, taking it all for granted.
Stew Smith: Yeah.
Like I said, this is long before the internet, this was how people got their news and.
It was pretty important…
Jim Edwards: Oh yeah.
Well I mean, in the end, the headline, if you think about it, especially in a new stand or something, the headline is what sold the paper…
Stew Smith: Yeah…
Jim Edwards: Today’s headline, when they had, they did two days back when the newspaper was the only way you got news…
They did two a day, and kids would stand on the corner and just yell out the headline.
The headline was what sold the paper…
And I think that’s an important thing to understand is that you can’t take the headline for granted…
You cannot leave it as an afterthought…
And that’s one of the reasons why scripts are so important…
That’s why blueprints and swipe files and stuff…
Because that dude who did those headlines at the newspaper, he had a giant swipe in his head…
I mean he whether he realized it or not, he was plugging stuff into proven formulas that he had in his brain that other people had used as well.
And the difference between news headlines and sales headlines is a very thin line.
If it’s not even a line, it’s like one of those Venn diagram intersects…
Stew Smith: Yeah, they meshes?
Jim Edwards: Yeah, they mesh together…
We just did that finger, Venn…
Stew Smith: There you go…
Jim Edwards: I think the big things that’s why you need to have a collection of headlines…
You need to be able to use scripts…
That’s why we have Funnel Scripts…
That’s why we have the Jim Edwards method premium…
That’s why we have all these things because it’s…
I’m going to grab something real quick…
I want to show you just I’ll be right back, kids.
Stew Smith: Hmm.
Cause his props are pretty good.
Jim Edwards: Okay…
I’m back…
So we just got done with the gym boat, and we had this really cool workbook, and in the workbook, I had tons of scripts…
And so like this one, what I do in one sentence, I had all these scripts that people could fill in…
But this is better than nothing…
I mean this is better than not having anything…
Stew Smith: Sure…
Jim Edwards: But what really brought home to me was like damn, fill in the sentence, kind of a pain in the ass…
But with using the Jim Edwards method or using Funnel Scripts, I just fill it out once I whacked the button…
And it fills all of these in for me…
Instead of having just page after page after page, the software does it…
But the bottom line is using proven templates for your headlines is how you can kind of skip to the end.
Because I’ve told this story before as well…
I was selling this CD and the five steps to getting anything you want…
I’d gone in the studio, I’d done a studio recording of this, had all this stuff that’s me and my cool Hawaiian shirt…
But I’d done all this stuff, and I started selling it, and a hundred people come to the website, nobody buys 200 people…
Nobody buys 300 people, nobody buys…
I’m like, Oh my God, I’m gonna have to go get a job…
All this stuff…
And it’s all these things go through your head…
And then I asked a question, to this day, I just asked this question all the time, what would a great copywriter do?
What would a great marketer do?
And the answer that came said, man, test a different headline.
So I immediately changed the headline…
The headline that I had in there was something to the effect of how I went from trailer trash to rich and famous online, which I thought was a great headline, but nobody else liked it because it was all about me…
It wasn’t about them…
So I changed the headline to something else…
And within three or four minutes, I finally got a sale.
And I don’t remember what that headline was, but I said, okay…
What most people would do in that situation is they would they’d say well, I guess this offers not all that good…
It’s working now a little bit…
We’ll just get what we can from it and move on to something else…
I said, bullshit.
I’ve worked my ass off on this thing…
I gotta do better than this…
So I said, let me try a different headline.
I started thinking, I said, okay, I need to use a proven headline…
And I thought of a headline that had gotten me to spend money recently, and it was on a search engine promotion guide, and the headline was basically how to gain an unfair advantage in the search engine wars.
So I said that probably wouldn’t work, or something like that…
How can I adapt that?
And then this headline came into my head…
It said, how to gain a positively unfair advantage in business and in life…
I said, Hey, that’s pretty cool headline…
So I put that up on there…
Within five minutes, I had five sales…
So I’d gone from zero sales to one sale to five sales…
So a 500% improvement over the one and an infinite improvement over the first one because of zero basic math thing.
And we went on to sell six figures of this in a really short period of time and that I will never forget and nothing else on the website changed…
The offer didn’t change, the price didn’t change, sales copy didn’t change, the story didn’t change, nothing…
The stack, nothing changed.
The only thing I changed was the headline.
And so that brought home the power of the headline…
And I have to learn this…
We always have to learn these lessons over and over and over…
So I pay super, super attention to headline…
Then I started taking for granted and then stuff happens…
I’m like, “Hey, you’re not doing the headline…
You’re not taking advantage of the first sentence…
You’re not doing what you need to do”…
And then results go to shit…
And then you can say, okay, I’m going to make this better.
So that is like the most poignant example I could ever give from my own life of the importance of a headline…
Russell, in his book DotCom Secrets…
He talks about something that he learned from Eugene Schwartz, who was a great advertising legend…
He talks about hot, warm, and cold traffic…
That hot traffic, basically the people know who you are…
And so in that case, you can use a headline that contains your name and contains your product name.
Warm traffic, they know they have a desire, they’re just not sure where to find the solution…
Then cold traffic basically says that all they know is they have a problem…
They don’t know about you…
They don’t have much product…
They don’t know if there’s a solution out there…
And so what people will do is you get dyed in the wool in such way.
You’re like these people know who I am, so I need to talk about my product in the headline…
And they get hard and fast rules…
And I would tell you not to do that…
That to understand that sometimes someone’s biggest problem is that they know they have a desire and they don’t know how to get it…
So you don’t just talk about their problems, you can ask a question…
Are you sick and tired of feeling like crap all the time?
Yeah…
You can just ask a question…
Do you need to get better at pull-ups and pushups?
Yes…
Are you scared you’re going to fail your next PT test…
Do you want to be a PT god?
I mean, do you want to dominate?
One of the guys on the Jim boat had a really great headline it was…
I teach people how to dominate on the mat…
And he was focusing on…
Stew Smith: Martial arts.
Jim Edwards: Martial arts…
I teach people how to dominate on the mat…
Stew Smith: That’s cool…
Jim Edwards: That’s very cool…
Now is that hot, warm, or cold?
I don’t know, but I do know that if I was interested in anything to do with jujitsu, that would get my attention.
Jim Edwards: I guess the whole point of this podcast is to reinforce to you guys how important a headline is…
And the headline is not just on your page, on your funnel…
It’s not just for newspapers…
Your headline is really the thing…
No matter what you’re putting out there, sales copy content; it’s the first thing that lets people know, “Hey, you need to stop and pay attention to this”
This is something that matters to you.
And if it doesn’t matter to them, they’re going to go by anyway…
That’s the other thing…
It’s like if they’re not interested, they’re not interested…
If nobody’s interested in the Wall Street Journal, they’re not even gonna look at the headlines.
But if they are interested and you have no headline, you’re letting money walk out the door.
So that’s the bottom line.
What are your thoughts, Stew?
Stew Smith: Well, Jim, you just showed a newspaper, and you applied it to funnels, which are on websites…
But you need to apply this to your webpage as well, whether that is store storefront or your blog posts, whatever, need to have a really good visible title that people can see when they open your page…
But there’s one little place where you can put a very smart title, and that is in the title of the HTML…
A lot of people sometimes forget to go into the HTML and put an actual title in there where it may have a default…
Like for my website, if I don’t put anything, it’s just going to say, Stew Smith fitness, right?
If I forget to put in a title, so what happens on a search engine when someone goes find you and that article pops up?
All it sees the title is Stew Smith fitness…
Jim Edwards: Right?
Stew Smith: So you need to manipulate that title inside your HTML on your webpage so you can actually have some specifics of that content up on the search engine because that’s how some people find you…
Some people find you on social media, some people find you on search engines, they may find you somewhere else…
But I would say when people are scanning Google in that first couple pages, that title matters…
Jim Edwards: Absolutely…
And if you’d like to get better at writing titles Copywriting Secrets, a great Christmas gift, Copywriting Secrets, secret 6…
So on page 37, I teach you the fastest ways to come up with amazing headlines…
And if you’ve already got the book, make sure that you go review that…
It’s literally secret number 6, page 37 go review that…
If you don’t have the book yet, you can get the book absolutely free.
Over 12,000 people as of this recording, have already gotten their copy of the book…
And I will actually pay for the book for you…
All you have to do is just pay a small shipping, and we’ll send it out to you…
So if you enjoy learning how to make more money than this is the book that you need to get…
So if you’ve already got the book, go review that…
If you’d like to learn more, go ahead and claim your copy…
So what else should people do as a result of this amazing podcast episode, Stew?
Should they go subscribe?
Should they go join our group?
Stew Smith: Absolutely…
They should do that…
But also check out when you do decide to look into Jim’s book, we also did an audiobook version of that, that was quite popular…
Jim Edwards: And it wasn’t quite popular…
Is quite popular!
Stew Smith: It still is…
Jim Edwards: Yeah…
People actually like that…
If you like our banter, if you hate Stew and me, then you don’t buy the book…
But if you think Stew and I are funny and good looking, then you definitely need to get the audiobook version though…
You will not see us in the audiobook version.
You can imagine how good looking and smart we are…
Stew Smith: Hey, maybe we should put the video out there of you reading the book and me just sitting here listening…
Jim Edwards: (and kill sales…)
Stew Smith: I’m joking.
Jim Edwards: So I don’t think I had a good hair day that day…
Okay, well, that’ll do it, guys…
So go check out…
Go get the book copywritingsecrets.com go check out if you’re not already a member of the Sales Copywriting Content Marketing Hacks group, you should be on Facebook…
It’s free…
We do all kinds of cool stuff in there when it comes to sales, copywriting, and content marketing and…
Stew Smith: yeah, there’s thousands of people in there that are very helpful people…
People post some headlines up there, they get feedback from it…
It’s really nice…
Jim Edwards: Yes…
It’s surprising…
Stew Smith: Yeah…
Jim Edwards: Unlike most Facebook groups…
But actually good stuff happens in there instead of people pitching you on crap…
Stew Smith: Yeah…
There’s no trolls in there…
Jim Edwards: Cause we throw them ou
Stew Smith: We’d take care of it…
Jim Edwards: We kicked them out.
Stew Smith: Yeah…
Jim Edwards: Cool…
All right…
Oh, and if people want to know more about you and what you’re doing, Stew, where should they go?
Oh, well, you can always check out StewSmithfitness.com. I’m a fitness writer, and that’s what I do…
I work out and write about it and help people prepare for their service dream jobs…
Jim Edwards: There you go…
Or you have old guys like me get back into good shape…
So if you’d like to suffer for a good hour, hour and a half every morning and love the rest of your day because God, I’m glad that’s over…
Then Stew can help you as well…
Stew Smith: Well, thank you, sir!
Jim Edwards: Talk to you guys later…
Bye…
Stew Smith: See ya.
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