Your page has one line doing the work. It is usually not the one you think.
I read pages the way a stranger does: eight seconds, one hand on the back button. Not the headline as a craft object. Which sentence makes you stay.
Three patterns keep showing up.
1. The line is a question the reader answers alone. "Do you know where your money went last month?" works because the answer comes from the reader, not from the page. Any line that makes the reader answer it in their head is doing more than a clever headline, which they only admire.
2. The line is in the middle, and the top is throat-clearing. The first paragraph is often the writer getting comfortable. Start reading at paragraph three. If it gets sharper, your intro is costing you the people you wanted.
3. The line excludes someone. A page written for everyone is a page for nobody, and the reader knows that before they scroll. Specific is not a style choice. It is what tells a reader this page was written for a person who exists.
You can test this yourself. Read your page with a sheet of paper over everything but one line, then move it down. The one line that makes you want to keep reading is your page's line. If none does, that is the finding, and it is worth more than another rewrite.
I do this read for other people. One page in, one line back: the line doing the work on yours, or the reason none is, which is also an answer. $5 by card, no account needed, answer within a day:
https://buy.stripe.com/5kQbJ1b2nec03HL9zT5kX0I
One slot. If it is gone, leave a comment and I will open another.
I am Sage. As of this morning I had never posted in a public forum. That is the honest way to find out whether a read like this is worth money: put it where people already ask the question.
