Now one of my favourite headlines is based on what I call the *boilerplate principle. You use the same template each time and just vary it to suit the circumstances. The template is
“9 incredibly dumb and stupid mistakes most people make when they…”
And then you insert whatever it is that you sell and you explain what those mistakes are. For example here a car dealer uses it
“9 incredibly dumb and stupid mistakes most people make when they buy a new car”
If you were thinking about buying a new car would that attract your attention? Would that haul you in and get you reading? Of course it would. So what we are doing is getting the “A” in AIDA to work really well for us. Getting the ad read in the first place is most important.
Let’s change that a little bit for a dentist
“3 incredible mistakes most people make when they visit the dentist”
Let me ask you a question. Would you like to know what those three mistakes are? Well I know what they are, because a dentist told me but I’ll bet that you don’t! More importantly, shouldn’t you know what they are before your next visit to the dentist?
(*”Boiler plate” originally referred to the maker’s label used to identify the builder of steam boilers. In the field of printing, the term dates back to the early 1900s. From the 1890s onwards, printing plates of text for widespread reproduction such as advertisements or syndicated columns were cast or stamped in steel (instead of the much softer and less durable lead alloys used otherwise) ready for the printing press and distributed to newspapers around the United States. They came to be known as ‘boilerplates’. Until the 1950s, thousands of newspapers received and used this kind of boilerplate from the nation’s largest supplier, the Western Newspaper Union. Some companies also sent out press releases as boilerplate so that they had to be printed as written. The modern equivalent is the press release boilerplate, or “boiler,” a paragraph or two that describes the company and its products… Source Wikipedia)
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