“Your headline is your first and biggest weapon in the battle for eyeballs”
Andy Maslen
When discussing copywriting, what first comes to your mind?
Must be alluring?
Must it be able to make readers interested?
Or cool writing that has an impact on company product sales?
I think that’s what Andy Maslen is trying to show in his book entitled “The Copywriting Sourcebook”. This book tries to answer readers’ concerns and questions regarding copywriting in this era. Therefore, in this article I will review Andy Maslen’s book and provide an objective view of how this book is very interesting to use as reference material for social marketers like me in particular, and for readers who are interested in copywriting.
This book is actually very suitable for beginners. This is evident from the fact that some of the material explained in this book is very comprehensive. Before reading this book, I always wondered about my writing so far.
-How do you make an interesting headline?
-How can my writing have an impact on sales?
-Is my writing persuasive enough?
-How can I create various types of writing when under pressure?
-What type of writing is most suitable for marketing or sales?
After reading this, Andy Maslen seems to have helped me answer these questions. Therefore, this book really inspired me to improve my copywriting method so that it is not only useful for the place I work now, but also so that it can become a provision for me to further upgrade myself. Below I will convey some of the things in this book
Andy Maslen explains several things about headlines. According to him, headlines are very important in copywriting. It even becomes the main key in a piece of writing. However, in order to produce headlines that attract readers and want to make money from marketing campaigns, headlines are the main weapon.
So where do we start? Andy Maslen says we can roughly divide headlines into three categories:
-Those promoting news
-Those arousing curiosity
-Those offering a benefit
Actually, this book says there are no definite rules for writing headline formats, but Andy Maslen found headlines that work well a lot of the time. For example, the opening is like this:
“How to save IDR35.000 a week on your famly’s food bill”
So, if we want to add a sense of newsiness, the simple trick is to add NOW: at the beginning of any headline. Not only that, I took several things from his writing regarding headlines. According to him there are a few ideas to keep you going.
For new products (or things you want to appear new) start with,
Announcing…
Introducing…
Finally…
Now…
It’s here…
Use storytelling or editorial techniques
Why Susie had to turn down an offer of marriage
They laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play (a classic)
Ask your reader a question
Can health and safety be improved in your business?
What would you do with a million rupiah?
Based on the tips from Maslen’s writing, I can conclude several things, in order to make easy and interesting headlines, we need to remember that headlines are key. So to be able to make interesting headlines we have to position that we are readers so that we know whether our writing is useful or not.
I think Maslen’s writing in discussing headlines is interesting enough to help beginners understand headlines. However, I personally feel that the format and tips explained by Maslen are still too general and tend to have been explained in many other books. So in my opinion we still need to develop the tips offered by Maslen. Moreover, in his writing Maslen does not explain the target reader, so he tends to over-generalize the headline format. In fact, a headline still has to be tailored to the target reader. But unfortunately this book does not explain this. But overall, the article is worth reading and being used as a reference.
Reference: Maslen. 2010. The Copywriting Sourcebook. Marshall Cavedish Business
