14 Best-Kept Killer Hook Secrets That Grab Your Audience And Hook Them

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Hook your audience and you can make millions. Fail to find that elusive hook or slant and you’re doomed to mediocrity. Your hook is that critical.

Hooks aren’t just interesting, they’re fascinating and remarkable slants.

These slants resonate with the reader by triggering curiosity and promising a remarkable reader benefit. The forces of a great hook are so strong they’re like a black hole sucking the reader deeper into the copy, even when the reader doesn’t want to read an advertisement, sales letter or story.

Once hooked, the reader must continue reading to satisfy the insatiable curiosity and desire that hooked them in the first place. As ace copywriter John Carlton discusses at length in his Fishing for Hooks article, finding and selecting the right hook is one of the biggest challenges a writer faces.

The hook determines the headline content, the introduction paragraph and extols the primary benefit. Finding the best hook takes time and effort – a LOT of it. The best hooks are simple and brief, hitting the reader like a nail on the head. In marketing, these hooks reflect the Unique Selling Proposition (USP).

These four proven headlines encapsulate the USP and serve as effective hooks for their creators:

Federal Express – “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight”

One-Legged Golfer – “Amazing Secret Discovered By One-Legged Golfer Adds 50 Yards To Your Drives, Eliminates Hooks and Slices…And Can Slash Up to 10 Strokes From Your Game Almost Overnight!”

Cosmopolitan Magazine – “50 Ways To Thrill A Man – Warning By #18 He’ll Barely Remember His Name”

4-Hour Workweek - “The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich”

Pick up a copy of National Enquirer (if only you still could), The Globe or the other tabloids and you’ll see firsthand the art of developing storyline hooks and slants at its best (and worst, at the same time). Reporters and editors are professional hook developers. They excel in hooking their readers into picking up their magazines, skimming them and then buying them – by the millions.

So what are some of these best-kept hook “secrets” anyway. Well, actually they’re not secrets at all. Professional writers choose the slants and hooks that will be used for their stories, book titles and articles every single day.

Here they are, excerpts from “The Most Common Slants to Capture Reader Attention“, in “Nonfiction Book Proposals Anyone Can Write“, by Elizabeth Lyon. These are the slants recommended for book writers to develop the best possible book titles – the ones that sell the most book copies.

These slants used to develop hooks for book titles can be used to locate and construct effective hooks on virtually any topic.

Below you’ll find two examples in each category. The first is a published book. The last is an imaginary title as if I was brainstorming for a slant on a book about ‘cats’ (assuming your audience is cat lovers, for example):

1. NEW – what’s never been done before, the cutting edge. Example: New Rules of Marketing and PR, or New Cat Breeds.

2. MONEY - any allusion to the buck attracts attention. Example: Big Profits from Small Stocks, or Million Dollar Cats.

3. SEX – either direct reference or sexual innuendo. Example: Nuts! The Battle of the Bulge, or Furry Bedwarmers: The Cat in Your Life.

4. SECRETS - inside accounts, behind the scenes. Example: Secrets of Fat-Free Baking, or Behind Bars: The Untold Story of Impounded Cats.

5. PROMISES - this slant offers the moon and better deliver. Example: Eat More, Weigh Less, or Cats That Can Change Your Life.

6. FIGHT OR FLIGHT – meant to arouse brain-stem feelings of survival, this slant gets adrenaline rushing. Example: Jungle Rules: How to be a Tiger in Business, or Catting Around: Stalking Big Cat Home Videos.

7. FEAR - when you want to make your reader afraid, use this slant. Example: Warning: The Coming Dark Ages, How to Survive the Collapse of Civilization, or An Endangered Species: Big Cats Fall to Small-Armed Men.

8. NUMBERS – whether the numbers refer to time, pounds, age, or anything else, it’s a classic slant. Example: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, or Ten Ideal Vacations for Kittys.

9. LOCATION - an idea that implies a place. Example: In the Kitchen with Rosie, or Bedroom Designs for Catting Around.

10. AMAZEMENT - a slant that gives you a believe-it-or-not feeling or elicits amazement. Example: Remarkable Discoverys! , or The Cat Who Dog-Paddled the Channel.

11. SUPERLATIVES - any title or headline that involves extremes, such as worst, best, longest, shortest, richest, poorest, etc. Example: The Greatest Team of All Time, or The Sleepiest Cats in the World.

12. REVERSALS - minority viewpoints or an opposite stance from the prevailing views on a subject. Example: Roughing It Easy, or Seeing-Eye Cats.

13. TRAVEL – Unlike location, or in addition to it, the travel slant makes clear the out and about orientation of the book. Example: The Cat Who Went to Paris, and His Human, or Cruises Cats Love.

14. HUMOR - a humorous slant on an idea is enough to provide the sharp focus that every subject needs. Example: Chicken Dishes by Nora Drumsticks, Crocodile Dundee by Ali Gator, or I Purr, Therefore I Am.

There’s a tendency to want your headline, title and product to appeal to a broad group of buyers. In reality, these days it’s typically best to narrow your focus so your hook, headline and USP appeal to a more targeted group. This causes your message to resonate and jolt the audience into action.

So, let’s examine the headline examples used in this post.

Post Title: ”14 Best-Kept Killer Hook Secrets That Grab Your Audience and Hook Them”

Slants Used: NUMBER, SUPERLATIVE, SECRETS, PROMISES

Federal Express – “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight”

Slants Used: PROMISES, LOCATION

Slants Used: AMAZEMENT, SECRETS, PROMISES, NUMBERS

Cosmopolitan Magazine – “50 Ways To Thrill A Man – Warning By #18 He’ll Barely Remember His Name”

Slants Used: SEX, NUMBERS, AMAZEMENT, HUMOR

4-Hour Workweek - “The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich”

Slants Used: AMAZEMENT, PROMISES, TRAVEL, MONEY, SECRETS

Great hooks are elusive. They’re hidden from plain sight. Like the “one-legged golfer”, which was only uncovered after asking the client how he discovered these new golf techniques that he was selling. He said he was talking to this one-legged golfer, who explained how he discovered how to beat the other players by using his disability to his advantage.

Great hooks are remarkable. They grab the target audience’s interest and demand an answer.

Great hooks are relevant. They encapsulate the primary benefit and speak directly to the reader’s own selfish desires.

Great hooks resonate. They strike a chord within our existing memories and experiences, triggering an emotional response. These hooks tap into stories, memories, beliefs and values that already exist within the reader.

The art of hook-making remains a difficult, yet worthwhile endeavor – for marketers, writers and bloggers. The better the hook, the more fish that will be caught and weighed in each day. The better the hook, the more ReTweets and email forwards a viral message receives. And the more likely word of mouth will spread like a wildfire.

Fortunately, we have many avenues available to quickly and inexpensively test and validate hooks today, including email, Google AdWords ads, Twitter, Facebook and blogs. We can test a hook, slant and headline, measuring the response rates, blog comments, ReTweets and other actions each one causes – then choose the hook and headline that resonates and provides the desired response.

Finding and crafting great hooks requires knowledge of the target audience, some detailed detective work, careful selection of slants – and the courage to stand out and rock your readers’ world.