---
title: Headlines, Hooks, and the First Five Seconds
summary: How to write specific, high-converting landing page headlines that win a visitor's stay-or-leave decision fast.
est_minutes: 6
sort: 3
---

The average visitor decides whether to stay or leave your landing page in five seconds or less.

Not five minutes. Not one minute. Five seconds.

Your headline is the only thing standing between their attention and the back button. This module is about writing headlines that win that decision.

**The Five Second Rule**

The five-second rule is not a metaphor. Eye-tracking studies show that most visitors make a stay-or-leave decision before they finish reading the first screen.

What they are deciding is not whether your product is good. They are deciding one thing: is this for me?

A headline that answers yes to that question in specific, concrete terms will hold attention. A headline that requires the visitor to think about whether it applies to them will lose them.

**The Four Headline Formulas**

There are four headline formulas that consistently produce high-converting results.

Formula one: the outcome headline. State the specific result the visitor wants. Not what your product does. The result they get after using it. "Go from 10 leads a month to 40 in 90 days." Specific. Measurable. Believable.

Formula two: the problem headline. Name the exact problem the visitor is experiencing right now. Not a general category of problem. The specific thing that is happening in their business or life this week. "Still answering the same questions your team should already know?" That is a problem headline. It speaks to a felt experience.

Formula three: the mechanism headline. Lead with how you achieve the result, especially if the method is novel or counterintuitive. "How operators with no marketing team consistently fill their pipeline." The "how" signals that what follows is practical, not inspirational.

Formula four: the credibility headline. Lead with a proof element that makes the claim more credible. "Used by 200+ service businesses to cut owner delivery hours in half." The number, the specific audience, and the specific result all do trust-building work before the visitor has read anything else.

**Why Most Headlines Fail**

Most failing headlines share one or more of these characteristics.

They are clever rather than clear. Wordplay and metaphors require cognitive effort. Visitors do not invest cognitive effort in pages they have not yet decided to trust.

They describe the product rather than the result. The visitor does not care what you built. They care what it does for them.

They are generic enough to apply to any business in the category. If your headline could appear on a competitor's page without changing a word, it is not doing the work of identifying the right visitor.

**The Subheadline's Job**

The headline stops the visitor. The subheadline holds them.

The subheadline has one job: give the one piece of additional context that makes the visitor want to read the offer. It is not a second headline. It is an expansion of the first.

If your headline is the outcome formula, your subheadline gives the mechanism or the audience qualifier. If your headline is a problem statement, your subheadline bridges from the problem to the solution.

**Your Action Step**

Download the Module 03 Headline Testing Sheet below. Write three versions of your headline using three different formulas. Then apply the specificity test from Module 01: could a visitor read this and immediately know whether it is for them? The strongest version advances to your page.
