An Example Of A Great Headline

Feb 03, 2008

Online copywriters and content writers are always stressing upon the overwhelming importance of creating great, compelling webpage titles or headlines. You need great webpage titles to draw traffic from the search engine result pages as well as from the various social bookmarking websites you’re planning to target. I remember a few months ago I had written a post on the subject of creating great blog post titles.

Yesterday morning I was sitting in the balcony enjoying the winter sun with my wife and we were both sipping tea and casually browsing through our respective newspapers. Whenever we are sitting together my wife often jokes that I’m more interested in what she is doing and less interested in my own things. This was one of those moments when my eyes were on her newspaper instead of my newspaper. She gets a Hindi newspaper; I noticed this heading on the first page and immediately thought what a great headline it was.

If you look at the image included above I have encircled the headline. It translates to: Aishwarya Rai and Angeline Jolie may have a common ancestor. The news that was associated with the title had nothing to do with the two beauties, it referred to a recent research that has shown that all the blue-eyed people in the world may have a common ancestor. The team that created the front page layout of the newspaper knows that it would be irresistible for most of the people to ignore the title and in fact my wife headed straightaway to page 12 to see how Aishwarya Rai and Angeline Jolie may be related to each other.

Had they used a simple heading, something like, all blue-eyed people have a common ancestor, it wouldn’t have interested many people.

What makes this a catchy headline? The copywriter knows how crazy people are about reading about both the ladies. Although it is a Hindi newspaper and many readers may not be familiar with Angelina Jolie, even the stray dogs in India know Aishwarya Rai. The readers would certainly like to know with which foreign beauty she shares an ancestor. The copywriter has combined the celebrity status of both the names and created a headline that cannot fail to perform even when it doesn’t talk about them.

Would the readers be pissed off after reading the news because they find out that these two beauties are not related in the real sense? I don’t think so because the headline doesn’t mislead; they both have blue eyes after all and the blue-eyed people are supposed to have a common ancestor and hence they should too have a common ancestor.

Later on I discovered that most newspapers, at least in India, used the same sort of headline referring to Aishwarya Rai and Angelina Jolie.