Of the five stories that appeared on the front page of today’s edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, my local newspaper, every one of them had a subhead just below the main headline.<\/p>\n
In today’s edition of the Wall Street, all four stories on Page 1 also have subheads. You’ll probably find something similar if you check your own local newspaper.<\/p>\n
What lesson can Publicity Hounds learn from this? If newspapers think subheads are important, you should too. Subheads pull readers further into the story. That’s why they’re so valuable. They often explain the “who” or the “why” or the “how”–information that can’t fit into the main headline. <\/p>\n
You should be using subheads–in your press releases, pitch letters, website copy, bios, company profiles, and other copy.<\/p>\n
Subheads are only one of about a dozen sales copy techniques that you can be using in any copy you write. Others include things such as boldfacing copy that you want to call attention to, centering a sentence or a paragraph with wide margins on each side, or adding a post-script. I take advantage of these little tricks all the time to make my emails and pitch letters really stand out from the thousands of others the media receives. And when I worked as an editor, these same techniques caught my eye and often made it easy for me to understand the significance of a story idea quickly, without having to think. <\/p>\n
I’ve always known about subheads because I worked at a newspaper for 22 years. But Lori Morgan-Fererro, an expert on how to write sales copy, reminded me that subheads are powerful. She was my guest during a teleseminar we conducted last year on “How to Write Red-Hot Sales Copy That Woos Journalists.” <\/a> She taught me how to read my copy with almost a new set of eyes, and use those little techniques to turn it from flat to fabulous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Of the five stories that appeared on the front page of today’s edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, my local newspaper, every one of them had a subhead just below the main headline. In today’s edition of the Wall Street, all four stories on Page 1 also have subheads. You’ll probably find something similar if\u2026 Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","iawp_total_views":2,"wds_primary_category":603,"footnotes":""},"categories":[603],"tags":[13,604],"class_list":{"0":"post-25006","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-content-creation","7":"tag-press-releases","8":"tag-writing-articles","9":"entry"},"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Joan Stewart","author_link":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/author\/jstewart\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25006"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25006\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40648,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25006\/revisions\/40648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}