The headline is the most important piece of any blog post. Without a snappy, descriptive headline that sucks readers in, your post stands no chance of getting read. The best content can be instantly killed by a bad headline. It’s just that simple.
But don’t worry, there’s good news. Writing better blog headlines is actually pretty easy. By following these helpful tips, you can start writing powerful headlines with your very next post. And once you do that, you’ll find that your promotion efforts get much more results than before.
Here are my top 5 tips for writing better blog titles, so that you will no more have to worry about how to write better blog headlines. Add your own tips by leaving a comment.
Top 5 Tips on How to Write Better Blog Headlines
1. Keep it short—You need to grab your readers’ attention as quickly as possible. They should be able to glance at your headline and instantly be sucked in. Remember, online readers tend to scan content in an F-shaped pattern, and many studies show that most people only read the first few words of your headline. This means you need to keep it short and put the most important information at the beginning.
But this isn’t the only reason to write brief headlines. Think about social media marketing. If someone Tweets out your post and you have a long headline, they won’t have enough room to add their own comments to it. Also, if someone decides to submit your post on Digg, ReddIt, or a similar social voting site, a long headline could exceed an allowed character limit.
2. Don’t mislead your readers—I’ll never forget the first time I was misled by a blogger. The headline was a top 10 list offering tips for better online marketing. When I clicked the link to read the story, there were only 2 tips. The author said that if you wanted the other 8, you’d have to come back and read his next few posts. Nowhere in the headline did it say “Part 1” or anything else to indicate it was a series. I felt duped. And what’s worse is when I checked back a few weeks later, he never added the other tips.
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Don’t lie in your headline. You may be able to trick people into clicking on the post that way, but as soon as they find out you’re full of it, they’ll leave and probably never come back. By all means, you can be creative and clever, but above all else, your headline needs to be clear and honest.
3. Don’t overlook the proven headline templates—Like I just said, feel free to be creative in writing your headline. In fact, I believe experimenting and testing different types of headlines is very important (more on that later). However, it’s also foolish to ignore proven headline templates that just work. List headlines (like this one), how to headlines, benefit-driven headlines, leading question headlines, and insider knowledge headlines (the secret of___, or things you didn’t know about ____) have been proven to work time and time again.
Don’t believe me? Check out the homepage of Digg, ReddIt, Sphinn, or whatever other voting site you can think of. More times than not, the majority of the headlines will be in one of those formats. You can also see these headlines used on the covers of the most popular magazines. They suck readers in.
4. Optimize your title for search engine traffic—If you optimize your posts correctly, you can get traffic for years to come through the search engines. Of course, content optimization starts with writing a keyword-rich title. So, do some keyword research, and incorporate relevant terms in your posts.
One word of caution: Never sacrifice readability for the sake of SEO. If the keyword just doesn’t make sense in the headline, don’t use it in there. It’s better to have an interesting, catchy headline than a boring, optimized one.
5. Experiment—While I believe all of the tips in this list can help any blogger improve his or her headlines, the truth is we are all in different situations. What works for one blog may not work on another. The only way to find out what works best for you is to test out different styles of headlines. Never assume anything. Keep experimenting until you get results that show which headlines your readers respond best to.
What tips would you offer for writing better blog headlines? Share your ideas as comments.
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Thanks for the headline templates! I’ve picked up on some of that already. I saved those into my notes.
Some sites really demand that they be marketed by writing for others.
.-= Rusty Ferguson´s last blogpost >> Super Typhoon Juan =-.
Glad to hear that you liked the tips. Hoping to see you around more often
I plan to visit daily. I’m new here.
Your reply was perfect timing as I was trying to remember where this post was. I had just pulled up my notes as I was about to write a blog post and I didn’t make my notes clear enough.
Title is going to be something like “Do you want to be a blogger” or maybe “Do you want to be a money making blogger?” I’m not sure which is better.
Perhaps I will do a story with both titles.
Now I’ve added the URL to this post to my notes.
Sounds great!
By the way, if it were me I would have gone for “Do you want to be a money making blogger?” title as it sounds much more interesting and comes with a sense of attached incentive!
Let me know when you have written and published the post and I’d love to read it
I agree, I like that better. Glad I said something! Consider it stolen. haha.
I’ll let you know if I’m feeling bold. People like my writing but my freshmen comp professor sure didn’t and I’m stigmatised for life now.
You know, when I read that, I thought you had changed it a little. You’re right, it is much better. It looked better to me hours later.
The article is published now. It is the first article on the site in my author url.
thanks for the site and the help.
You’re welcome
I loved reading your article and left a comment too
Well thank you. After finding some mistakes, I was not happy with it.
I saw your comment. Since I installed the no follow fee plugin you recommended I suspect I’ll see more people eventually.
Thanks for letting me know. Heading your way, right away
.-= TechChunks´s last blogpost >> 15 Amazing Behind-The-Scene Pics Of Google Offices =-.
After you left you comment, I found several typos… So, for now on. I will write one day and publish the next day. Maybe then I wont be so focused on what I thought I said.
Thanks for stopping by. What is your guest blogger policy. I THINK I’ve seen guest bloggers here.
Glad to see you’re interested in becoming our esteemed guest bloggers team.
Looking forward to see you joining our team of writers. Regular writers have great potential to earn from their articles too. Here is more on the policy – http://techchunks.com/write-for-us
Yes, I’ve spent my time on Ezine but I need to write for others. I plan to work on that very soon. I will check out that link now. Thanks!
Really good visual appeal on this website , I’d rate it 10 10.
I think Sometimes negative approach also works such that it can invite readers to enter into the post and read the content though the title is quite contrast to content.
But I consider the Title plays most important role to drive visitors from both search engines as well as Social Media!
I would like to add one more always research and if the competition is too in much post titles then choose a unique headline !
Well Gagan, I have to agree with your thoughts to choose blog headlines and I think it’s key to any webmaster to choose more attractive, short, unique titles which can grab attention to readers who came from search engines!
Lately I read many tech blogs who provide quality content and unique too but doing big mistake to choose same title like other blogs and sometime you put their titles you will find first page with almost same title so it’s always be excellent to have more unique and attractive title.
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Short and sweet does it for headlines. It is important that your headline is attractive and catches the eyes of people from far. Having a nice headline and content that is not related to your headline will totally drive people away from your site. They will feel cheated and taken for fools so this is not appropriate.
Nice tip for bloggers……. I will utilize these all the tips for writing heading of my blog post. Nice to know.