No, I didn’t forget that headlines are important. – SCN Encourager 11/7/2013

And apparently, some of you didn’t either.

I received a few interesting responses back from yesterday’s Encourager about “rock star” email subject lines.

I’m always appreciative for your feedback and I employ my “political campaign” experience to categorize it appropriately.

When I receive responses to an Encourager that are critical and negative, I place them into the “undecided” column.

When I receive responses back which are totally unrelated to anything I’ve written about… or were perhaps even sent to me in error… I post these in the “high praise” column.

I only use two columns. Life is good.

This evaluation method may not appear all that scientific to you, but it always lets me show whoever gets trapped into listening to me that readership for the Encourager is consistently trending upward.

My results would be way off the charts if it weren’t for one reader (a persistent 100% cynic) who writes to me about the Encourager at least two or three times per week.

This really skews my calculations drastically and kinda gets my goat.

I tell my wife this, but she simply refuses to stop emailing me.

A couple of school communicators responded and referenced the article about email subject lines by writing, “How come your didn’t mention headlines? They’re important, too!”

Ahh… such a lavish compliment like this makes me blush.

The ol’ “high praise” column was on fire yesterday!

Thank you so much!

Now naturally, I know that writing over the top “sports star” headlines are as essential to “getting your stuff read” as offering up “rock star” email subject lines.

I’m no fool.

I also know that I’m not particularly good at crafting them so I just ignored them entirely.

Ignoring something is not the same as not knowing about it.

So here’s the absolute best article I’ve seen on the topic of creating great headlines.

Jeff Goins is a young writer… a best-selling one… and he’s a “headliner” at many writing conferences and workshops.

You’ll find value in his article below. Guaranteed.

5 Easy Tricks to Help You Write Catchy Headlines

Of course, I wanted to plagiarize it for an Encourager.

But why give Cindy one more thing to email me about?

She’s already distorting my “undecided” numbers enough.

Tom Page, SCN