How to Write a Headline: The 16 Formulas That Still Work in 2026

By Frederik Baun, conversion copywriter and founder of Words Sounds Visuals

I write headlines for client landing pages, blog posts, and ads for a living, and these are the 16 formulas I've never needed to reach past.

The Problem With 100-Formula Lists

Search “headline formulas” and you’ll find lists running well past 100 entries, one template and one throwaway example each, sorted by number so you can scroll fast.

The Copyhackers headline formulas ebook runs to 65, curated down from a much longer internal set, and even that felt like too many to hold in my head mid-draft.

More options sound like more value. But in practice, 100 templates just means you spend 20 minutes scrolling and land on whichever one sounds cleverest, instead of the one that fits your page.

I used to keep a list like that too, a few years and a lot of client headlines ago.

Then I noticed something. I only ever reached for the same 16. They cover every awareness level, every format, and every audience I write for. Reaching past them was just research pretending to be work.

So I cut the list to 16. Below is what survived.

The 16 Headline Formulas I Reach For

Each one does a specific job, so the point’s to match the formula to the moment instead of picking whichever example sounds smartest on the page.

16 sounds like a lot until you remember it covers landing pages, blog posts, ads, emails, and social captions in one list. That’s roughly three formulas per format, about as many as a person can hold in their head while writing.

Four Headline Rewrites, Before and After

A formula on its own is just a shape. Here’s what it looks like once you fill it with something specific.

The second row’s the one I think about most. A coaching client came to me with “The Ultimate Guide to Marketing” sitting on a lead magnet that had pulled 11 downloads in four months.

Nobody downloads that headline, because it could describe any guide on any topic written by anyone. I narrowed it to her real audience, service businesses under 10 million in revenue, and named the real deliverable, a sales page.

The guide and its content stayed exactly the same. The headline is what changed. That’s what moved the download rate. It finally told a stranger what they were about to get.

That’s the pattern behind every row in that table. The empty version names a category. The working version names the reader, the mechanism, or the number. A formula only does its job once you drop something real into the slot it left open.

Which Formula Fits Which Page

The formula that works depends on the reader and the page. It also depends on how far along they’re in recognizing they have a problem.

Someone who’s never heard of your solution reads a headline one way. Someone already comparing three competitors, card in hand, reads it another way completely. Match the formula to where the reader stands.

Run the wrong formula against the wrong stage, and it still reads fine. It just does nothing.

“The Secret to Six-Figure Coaching” in front of someone who’s never considered hiring a coach answers a question they haven’t asked yet.

Move the same secret in front of someone who’s already comparing three coaches, and it lands, because now it’s answering the question they’re holding.

Matching the Formula to the Page Type

Awareness stage tells you the psychology. Page type tells you the specific slot the headline has to fill. A cold hero headline and a warm pricing-page headline are doing completely different jobs. That’s true even when the reader’s at a similar awareness stage.

Here’s the breakdown I run on every landing page project, section by section.

Seven page types, seven formulas, and every one earns its slot because of what the reader already believes walking in.

A consultant I worked with had “Transform Your Business With Our Proven System” on her cold hero, the page every cold ad landed on first. Nobody transforms a business by clicking a headline, and “proven system” describes nothing.

I swapped it for a Named Audience Callout instead, “Consultants, Here’s How to Fill Your Next Cohort Without Running a Launch.” Cold traffic needs to see themselves named in the first three words, or they assume the page isn’t for them.

A SaaS founder had “The Ultimate Pricing” on his comparison page, the page visitors hit after they’d already read the homepage. That reader isn’t cold anymore, so a Value Prop headline undersold what he needed.

I rewrote it as a Without the Sacrifice headline, “Get Every Feature on the Pro Plan Without the Per-Seat Fee.” The objection he was fighting at that point in the funnel was cost per seat.

A coach I worked with ran the same headline on her lead magnet opt-in and her webinar registration page, “Learn the Secrets to Six-Figure Coaching.” One page converted fine. The other barely moved.

A cold visitor opting into a free download and a warm lead deciding whether to block 90 minutes on their calendar are answering different questions.

So I split them, a Warning formula on the opt-in and a Who Else Wants formula on the registration page, and the registration page conversion rate caught up within the month.

Headline Formulas for X and Twitter Run on the Same Bones

This one surprises people, but a landing page headline and an X hook solve the same problem from two different angles.

A landing page headline has a few seconds before a visitor bounces. A tweet has less than that, because the reader’s mid-scroll and hasn’t even decided to stop yet.

The formulas that win on a landing page hero also win as a scroll-stopping hook, just compressed. I Did This and Got This is the one I reach for most, on both.

A first-person cause-and-effect line does the same job in a tweet that it does at the top of a page. It gives the reader a reason to keep reading the next line instead of scrolling past it.

I run the same test on both. Read the line cold, with no context, the way a stranger will see it.

If it needs the paragraph underneath to make sense, it fails as a landing page headline, and it fails just as hard as a tweet.

Where a Formula Stops Doing the Work

A headline formula gets someone to look. What happens after the look is down to the page underneath.

I’ve watched a client run a headline through every formula on this list, land on a strong one, and still lose the sale two paragraphs later.

The sales page never delivered the specific promise the headline made.

The formula did its job. The page didn’t do its part.

Headline formulas and subject line formulas do different jobs too. A landing page headline has one shot at a stranger scrolling past it.

An email subject line competes against 40 other unread messages sitting in a warm inbox. That needs a different anchor entirely, so I keep a separate breakdown of the 17 subject line formulas I run on every send.

I built a free headline writer that runs a topic through all 16 formulas at once and scores each one.

Use it if you’d rather skip the manual pass. What your page delivers is still on you to know.

No formula, 16 or 100, replaces having something specific to say.