Tips For Writing Great Headlines
The key to effective online writing is to have your readers click a link and read your story, blog post, etc. Headlines are the tools that writers use to make that happen. Here are some of our best tips for writing great headlines.
- Keep it relevant – Your headline should tell your reader exactly what to expect from your article. If your article is about bobsledding, then your headline should make it clear that’s what the article is about. Readers don’t want to click a link and find out your article is about something else.
- Make a promise and follow through – Every good headline makes a promise. “100 of the best restaurants in Chinatown” is pretty specific. The reader knows what the article is about and expects to be told what the best restaurants in Chinatown are. It has a promise. The hard part is delivering on the promise, but it’s also the important part.
- Show how easy it is – Some headlines do this better than others, but if the reader thinks it is easy to get the benefit of reading your story, then they’ll read it. “3 ways to jump a rope,” “1 simple tweak …”, and “5 ideas to spark …” all tell the reader that the answer to their question is just one click away. It’s really easy.
- Don’t try to be clever - You may think it’s cute to play with words and offer a double entendre. Some of your readers will too. Others will be turned off by it. But the real reason you want to leave the clever out of your headlines is because it doesn’t sell the story. A reader might laugh at your clever headline, but she likely won’t read the story.
Follow these tips to successful headlines and you’ll watch your readership grow.
Social Media Optimization Tip: Headlines Make All The Difference
Optimizing for social media traffic is a bit different than optimizing for search engines. But there are similarities. When you optimize your landing page for search engines, keywords are extremely important. After all, people will find your site by those keywords. But with social media, while keywords are important, they aren’t the most important thing. Social media users look for something different.
First and foremost, they want a unique experience. Keywords are good for ensuring those social media pages achieve better rankings in the search engines, but what happens if someone finds your content in Digg or StumbleUpon and arrives there from a search engine? You still want them to go to your website and that will take a different approach than merely sprinkling your content with keywords.
Your headline is very important. It should attract attention. More than that, it must get the click. Social media users have two things to go on in deciding whether or not to read your content: The headline and the description, or summary. The headline, more than anything, will determine whether or not they read your content.
What should a headline do? Three things:
- Arouse curiosity
- Tell the reader what to expect from the content
- Use your primary keyword
Understand that Nos. 1 and 2 and more important than No. 3 when it comes to social media optimization. Yes, you want your keyword there for the search engines, but human readers care about the content. It must answer their most pressing questions or make them believe that your content will answer those questions. Get them to click. That’s the goal. And if you achieve that then you’ve done your job.