I’m guessing with a headline like that, you’d want to read the story.
Yes, even those of you who normally quaff fine wine and read the Guardian.
Sure, it’s a fairly provocative headline, but the fact is, it’s grabbed your attention and pulled you in.
While I am not suggesting you need to be so dramatic to get people’s interest, I would say that I am given far too many documents and presentations that have about as much immediate appeal as a Sunday plastering the walls of the house in woodchip.
Of course it would be nice to think that the quality of the work would be enough to draw people in – but in a competitive World, you need to be seducing from the get-go, and that means framing your presentation or document in a way that makes your audience want to pick it up, not pass it by.
Again, I am not suggesting you suddenly start using titles like …
“Why Facebook Users Have Bigger Cocks Than MySpace Users”
or
“Television Makes People Horny”
… but I am suggesting you need to remember a title is incredibly important and to just write some blandom is [sadly] potentially going to undermine all your hard work.
The best analogy I can use is this:
For years, women have said [when looking for a man] that a sense of humour is much more important than looks.
Hahahahahahaha!
Let’s be honest, the reality tends to be [I say ‘tend’ because I am obviously one of the exceptions] that a woman will only want to find out if the guy has a sense of humour if they find him a bit attractive to look at in the first place.
In other words, the headline is the ‘physical appearance’ and the document is the ‘sense of humour’.
Yes, that is a shit analogy but it’ll have to do for now.
Anyway, think of titles that make your audience want to know more.
Think of what they are looking for in and write it around that. Or look at your solution and write something relating to that. Maybe you used a different approach to the normal process? If you did, think about basing it around that. There’s millions of ways you can approach it, just don’t be dry or overly rational because as much as we all like to pretend differently, in most cases, the good looking ones tend to get the first focus of attention.
And don’t even get me started on how important it is to make sure the document/presentation looks good …
Anyway, if you’re interested in the ‘flying dildo’, you can go here.