Writing a
headline for an article or a blog post could very well be your one shot at getting
a reader’s attention so don’t waste it on cutesy word play or double entendres.
And by all means read the headline out load to yourself and make sure that it
means what you intended.
A recent air disaster was reported as
“Plane Crashed in Final Flight” — some readers complained that the writer was
insensitive to this tragedy which, I am sure, was not the writer’s intention.
Whether you are writing a blog post, an advertorial
(sales pitch mildly disguised as an editorial article), or writing about a
current topic of interest, your headline/title needs to talk to the reader.
Pique the reader’s interest by making it all about him — WHY should you be
interested? WHAT can this (product) do for you? HOW will it make his life
better? Your headline needs to be more about the person reading your words than
about you, your company, or whatever it is you are “selling”.
It’s been rumored that approximately
five times as many people will read your headline than the actual article. A
catchy headline can make the difference whether your reader goes on to read
your article or not
Your
headline should match your content, in other words, the reader should not be misled.
Don’t “promise” something and not deliver. Don’t throw someone’s name in to
your heading unless your article actually is about that person. Your best
headline is LESS than 62 characters including spaces.
Tweaking
your headline a bit is alright, just don’t tweak it so that the heading is
difficult or distracting to read. Instead of typing Tweaking the Heading you might try TWEAKing the HEADing. Before you play with the title make sure that
the venue you are writing for is okay with the bit of wordplay. Some studies
have suggested that you can increase your click-thru chances by adding some punctuation
like hyphens or using a numerical number instead of spelling it out (5 instead
of five) in the heading. Also if you are using a list in your article (7 ways
to…) try to keep the items under nine because supposedly that is easier for
most people to process.
There is a
FREE blog post headline tester which will “score” your titles (it doesn’t
provide what criteria is used) but can help steer you to a stronger headline. You can find this tester at https://coschedule.com/headline-analyzer
Writing Exercise: Go
over some of your past blogs or articles and rewrite the headings to make them
more effective. Use the headline analyzer (listed above) on both the old
headline and any new ones you come up with to see how much you can improve the
score.
Writing Prompt: Pick up a newspaper or magazine and read the
headlines ONLY. Write a few words per headline saying what you THINK you would
find in the article content. Read a few of the articles, were you correct?
Challenge Assignment: Choose one or all three topics to
write a blog about and run your blog title(s) through the headline
analyzer: (1) Why I chose ____ instead
of ____. (2) About the person I want to be the most/least like. (3) An
accomplishment I am the most proud of.
