Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes
If the front door doesn’t catch people’s attention, they won’t come in. The headlines of anything you write – blog posts, email subject lines, ads, etc., are like doors. It doesn’t matter how great the content is inside if nobody opens the door. So your first job is to get people to want to come inside. Darren Rowse from Problogger wrote a blog post on 15 Ways To Rework Your Next Blog Post Title.
Obviously the article’s focus is blogs, but I think the 8 tips for writing compelling blog post titles are applicable to all headlines. It’s really a small and basic lesson in copywriting. For your convenience I’ve reprinted the first 8 tips, though I recommend you read Darren’s entire post here.
1. Communicate a Benefit – a title should tell readers something that they’ll ‘get’ by reading your post.
2. Create Controversy or Debate – not suitable for every post title but there’s nothing like Debate to get people checking out a post.
3. Ask a Question – in my experience posts with questions in the titles tend to get read more than others – they also are better at stimulating comments from readers.
4. Personalize Titles – for example: using ‘you’ in your post title (and post) can have a real impact and take a post from the realm of ‘theory’ into a more personal post.
5. Use Keywords – keywords that signal to readers and search engines what your post is about can help draw in significant traffic if you use them well.
6. Use Power Words – Not all words are created equal – some evoke a powerful response in readers – words like ‘free’, ’stunning’, ‘discover’, ‘warning’, ’secrets’, ‘easy’ etc all work well in my experience of blogging.
7. Make Claims and Promises – as long as you can back them up in your post – a big claim or promise can get someone’s attention.
8. Humor Titles – be careful with this one – funny can work great but it can also leave your readers very confused if it’s too cryptic…. or if it’s just not funny.Reprinted from Problogger.net
By the way, all these tips are also applicable to Twitter. Your Twitter tweets are really just headlines. Posting links to content with creative headlines you come up with is a great way to hone your headline writing skills.
Tracking however is essential to do this so that you can see which headlines get the most response. Sometimes headlines I think are great end up flopping and ones I think are duds get hundreds of clicks. So make sure you track! My favorite tools to do this are Budurl and Hootsuite.
