Your hook is the first line.
It has one job: make line two impossible to skip.

Swap the noun for your market and run them.

Pain hooks

  • "You don't have a lead problem. You have a follow-up problem."
  • "Three ghosted calls this week isn't bad luck. It's your booking page."
  • "If your ads only work when you watch them, you don't have ads. You have a hobby."

Confession hooks

  • "I paid $18,000 to an agency to learn one lesson."
  • "I killed our best-performing ad on purpose. Here's why."
  • "For two years I priced my service wrong. Nobody told me."

Contrarian hooks

  • "Stop testing headlines. Your headline isn't the problem."
  • "More budget won't fix a broken offer. It just breaks it faster."
  • "Retargeting is where good businesses go to feel busy."

Number hooks

  • "$95 wasted, at 2am, on a Sunday. Nobody noticed for four days."
  • "6 calls a month to 23 in five weeks. Same budget."
  • "We tested 41 hooks. Two paid for the other 39."

Question hooks (used properly)

  • "What would you do with 10 more consults next month?"
  • "Quick question — do you know what one lead costs you right now?"
  • "Would you still run this ad if you had to pay for it yourself?"

Story hooks

  • "A plumber in Leeds outspent his competitor by doing one thing differently."
  • "She had 400 followers and a fully booked calendar. Here's the ad."
  • "The client fired us. Then asked us back. The reason matters."

Callout hooks

  • "Coaches doing $10k–$30k a month: this is the ceiling nobody warns you about."
  • "Med spa owners — this is why your ad got rejected."
  • "Store owners: your bestseller is quietly losing money."

Want five hooks written for your exact offer?

Try the free Hook Generator →

How to use a swipe file without sounding fake

  • Steal the structure. Never the sentence.
  • Make it specific to one person, not one industry.
  • Say it out loud. If it sounds like a brochure, cut it.
  • Write ten. Run three. Keep the one that pays.

The hook gets the click. What happens next decides whether it was worth it — which is why Adslive doesn't just write hooks, it watches which one is actually making money and quietly kills the rest.

Examples are illustrative. Test everything against your own audience.