About Asking For Headline Critiques ... LIMITATIONS

[Raydal]

A common copywriter's exercise is to show 2 headlines
and ask copywriters to guess which was the winner.

This helps to improve your headline writing skills but also
turns up some real surprises. Even though there are "rules"
to writing headlines (like rules to write music, a song etc.)
it's difficult to judge the value of a headline beyond making
an intelligent guess.

For example, I only write headlines for my clients sales letters
after I have studied their product, market, competition, swipes,
and still you are 'guessing' until you get the hard numbers from
when the sales letters goes live.

My point is: Don't expect magic from asking for a headline
critique just based on your original headline. There's a TON
of other research information that you are not sharing that
will allow the copywriter to do a half decent job.

So I can take your 'bad' headline and make it better, but I
really cannot write you a great headline based on your
original headline alone.

The same applies to a sales letter. Fixing up a low-converting
sales letter is often 10 times more difficult than writing one
from scratch (at least for me.)

So it's best to give as much information as possible when asking
for a headline critique beyond just your original headline.

-Ray Edwards

[Chris Ramsey]

Great post Ray.

Guys, Ray is completely correct in his line of thinking.

For example, lately I've gotten a lot of attention here in this forum because of a "Free Headline Rewriting" thread I posted.

It's possible that there are some real winners in there, but nobody will know unless they are tested. Not to mention those headlines could be used on a number of different products.

Because I was not given the chance to fully review a product or service, I was unable to craft a headline that was truly unique for that specific product. You really do need that to stand out these days.

You can use as many "Who else needs..." headlines as you want, but unless it's directly related to your product, it may mislead your readers. And that can be a problem.

Again, great post Ray. Thanks for taking the time to contribute so much to this forum.

[yonaswedo]

Someday, I need to use your services Ray if I'm able to pay.
I'll PM you to bother your time for checking my sales page.
Thank you for your post.