What are Your Secret Desires?
No, no, not those kind of secret desires. As a business owner, you have daydreams of what success looks like to you. You probably don’t go around talking about these publicly, because they feel private and personal to you. You’d likely be a little embarrassed to lay them bare before others.
Right now, I want you to take a moment to catalog your business success daydreams. I want you to write them down. Seriously, write them down, because there’s an important point to this. I’ll wait while you do.
All done? Okay. Here are some of the ones that were on my list (yes, they’re real, and no, they’re not outrageous):
- $10k a month income
- 10k subscriber and follower counts
- More time to spend with my family
- Never doing work below my pay level
- More time to write fiction and work on other creative projects
- Some kind of workflow and client management system I would actually like that works
Headline Magic
I hope you’re seeing the seeds of great headlines in those. If you were selling something that would help me achieve any or all of the above, would I be interested? Hell, yes, I’d be interested.
The reason why you had to write down your list of “secret desires” is because I wanted you to make them concrete in the form of exact words. Once you have that, it’s easy to start constructing headlines out of them:
- What I Did to Reach $10,000 a Month in Income–Ethically
- How to Grow Your Twitter Followers to Over 10,000 (Without Being a Spammypants)
- The Super Duper Hoo Ha Project System: A Review
Try It and See for Yourself
Try it with your own daydream list. Turn them into exactly the kind of headline that YOU would stop everything for and click on. Take a few minutes to do this. I’ll still be here on your screen until you’re done.
No, really, DO IT.
All done? How was it? Eye-opening? Maybe a little frustrating?
Get Inside Your Clients’ Heads
Now, this next part is going to be really fun: do the same thing, but I want you to envision your clients’ secret desires. Write them down, put them into concrete words. Create at least twenty of them. I’m serious: twenty. Why so many? Because if you go past the point where you normally would have quit, you will surprise yourself and start creating gold (big life lesson, right there, my friends). You have more insights into your clients than you think.
Here’s where the folks who think “everyone” is their customer falter and fail. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: everyone is not your customer. You can’t be all things to all people, you’ll end up being nothing to nobody. Figure out exactly who your customer is, down to the tiniest demographic detail. You only want to appeal to that person. Always write as if you’re writing to only one person. That person. Your perfect customer. Like you’re in a bar with her, having a drink and an important conversation (like how I’m “talking” to you, right now… do you feel it?).
Spinning Dreams Into Gold
I bet you know what comes next: take those secret desires and turn them into headlines. The words for these headlines are already there in your clients’ daydream statements you wrote. You can see from the examples it’s easy to turn them into headlines. Remember that headlines make promises to the reader, and the article text has to deliver on that promise.
If you do this, it’s like taking your customers’ dreams and spinning them into gold for you. What you write will resonate, and you’ll connect with potential clients like never before.