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.