Headlines are a crucial part of any blog post: they need to grab a potential reader by the eyes and drag them into the article before they’ve had a chance to question whether ’10 Infamous Procrastinators’ is something they’re actually interested in. However, that’s not the end of the headline’s job… it also has to set up the article in a way that won’t leave the reader disappointed. That means no sensationalist nonsense, no misleading sentiments and no outright lies.
Here are my five top tips for reaching headline nirvana without sacrificing your readers along the way:
- Good headlines aren’t a product of the digital age; they’ve been around for years and years. Check out more conventional media, like your local rag or magazine rack, to learn some of the oldest tricks in the trade.
- Test your headlines. You don’t need to do this for every post you write, but try testing a few different headlines on different audiences to see if you can pick up any pointers for what goes down well. If you have an established Twitter following, try out a few one liners to see which get the most click throughs. Alternatively, you could ask friends or family to pick the most intriguing headline out of a group.
- Use a formula. Copyblogger has an excellent range of ‘fail-safe’ headline formulae, for example ‘Who Else Wants [blank]?’ or ‘Little Known Ways To [Blank]‘.
- Sleep on it. If you’ve been banging away at a blog post or article all day, chances are your brain won’t be as fresh as it was five hours ago. You need to think creatively about a headline, so give your mind time to step back from the subject matter and reapproach it from a new angle the next day.
- Slim it down. A great headline gets the interest of an article across in very few words. A wonderful exercise for learning the ‘art of headlining’ is to take your whole article, cut out half the words, cut in half again, rinse and repeat until you get down to something headline-length. This might not be the actual title you use, but it’s really good training for recognising the most important elements of a story.
The bottom line? Never underestimate the power of a good headline, but remember it has to work with rather than against your article.