How to write killer headlines

Posted by Angel

Your headline is your hook. It’s the first thing you’re readers will see and it’s the first point at which they will decide to carry on reading or not. Interest them and they will hang off your every word, but confuse them, bore them, make them indifferent – then you might lose them for good.

When you write a headline, you want to lure a reader into the story. If your headline is too bland, the reader will likely assume the story is just as boring and move onto another post or, worse still, another blog.

Deliver the goods

Short, snappy headlines always work over something long and drawn out. One common annoyance that even the pro bloggers are guilty of from time to time is writing misleading headlines. If you promise one thing and deliver another, no matter how good your post is, the reader already has one hurdle to overcome. You want to reading process to be as fluid as possible.

Keep to the point

You shouldn’t need to explain your headline. I detest headlines that use quirky facts, such as, “Cows have five brains,” and then lead into the post saying something like, “We aren’t luck enough to have five brains, but here’s a way to make money blogging.” It’s an ugly trick that copywriters use sometimes.

List ‘em up

The easiest posts to write headlines for are lists. You can write “My top 10 Wordpress plugins” or “My top five reasons for leaving a blog” and the reader then knows exactly what to expect in the post. If you know your audience and have written something they will be interested in, then you don’t need a fancy headline. Writing a headline telling people, “How to…” is also a good way to draw attention to a strong blog post. “How to make money blogging” is one example.

News headlines for news stories

As a journalist, I like to read news headlines, but obviously these should be reserved for news pieces. “Yahoo unveils Google-destroying service”, for example. When writing a news headline, you need a verb in there to give the story a sense of action and, well, news.

This ain’t War and Peace

Some bloggers try and get a bit abstract with their headlines. For a novel, a thesis or a poem, that’s great, but there’s no need to get too deep with your blog posts.

Pose a question

One of my favorite techniques for writing headlines on blog posts is to ask a question, such as, “Is Google under attack?” Asking a question makes the reader become involved in the story even before he or she has started reading it. If you ask a question that your readers can answer or can relate to, then you’ve got them.

Claim your position

As a reader, one of the most eye-catching type of headlines reads something like, “How I made $100,000 blogging about cherry blossom.” If you tailor such a claim to your audience and to the topic you write about, you will get people interested. Make sure you can back your claim up though, because there is nothing worse than an unfulfilled promise.

Call to action

If you have a product you want people to sign up for or a website you want people to visit, calling your readers to action in the headline is an effective technique. You could say something like, “Sign up for Pay Per Post and make $20 with your first post.” I tend to avoid blog posts that have overly aggressive calls to action because they come across as being pushy. Your readers will ask, “What’s in it for me?”, when you call them to action.

The knack of writing headlines is something that comes with practice. Read other blogs and decide which headlines make you interested and what make you think “meh”.