If you chec­ked out my pre­vious post, “Websites That Write Your Salesletter For You,” I recom­men­ded Digg​.com as one of the sites to help you write bet­ter head­li­nes and create bet­ter hooks in sales copy.

Spe­ci­fi­cally, find popu­lar news sto­ries that grab atten­tion, and model your head­li­nes based on them using word-​​substitution.

For exam­ple: when I go to the site Digg​.com and choose a ran­dom headline…

“The Dan­gers of Not Drinking”

I can turn that into a head­line for myself.

That article title took something con­si­de­red to be bad (drin­king) and found a way to tell you that NOT doing it… is dan­ge­rous in some ways. The sub­ject in this head­line is “drin­king”… so you can just change the word “drin­king” into something that’s com­monly thought to be bad.

For exam­ple, in the weight loss niche, you might say, “The Dan­gers of Not Eating Des­sert!” In the pay-​​per-​​click niche: “The Dan­gers of Bid­ding Too Low!” All those head­li­nes demand that peo­ple read on.

Check Digg.com once per day and copy down the three or four most attention-​​grabbing or fun­niest head­li­nes you see. This will not only build up your swipe file, but will also make the head­line wri­ting pro­cess intui­tive for you.

How about a cou­ple other great head­li­nes I found?

• 5 Peo­ple Who Broke the Rules of Social Media and Succeeded
• Man Steals Car to Get to Court on Time
• The Death Penalty for Porn
• Man Arres­ted Trying to Smug­gle Wife In A Spea­ker Box

Here’s how you make the Digg swipe file pro­cess a daily acti­vity. If you’re using the Fire­fox brow­ser to Digg, click the orange RSS icon to subsc­ribe to that feed, and save it into your Book­marks Tool­bar… NOT the book­marks folder.

This will add a but­ton to your brow­ser that you can click at any time, and read the list of head­li­nes without actually rea­ding the artic­les or visi­ting any web pages where it might dis­tract you.

Add the RSS feed to your browser’s tool­bar and take three minu­tes out of your day to write the best five Digg​.com head­li­nes of the day so you can become a mas­ter head­line wri­ter… and even if you don’t want to wait that long, you can still use word substitution.