Have you ever written a fantastic article and you haven’t got any link love from it? Maybe that’s because no one got interested in reading it in the first place. Why? Because of your headline!

Many people don’t bother to read your whole article if they’re not amused with what they see in the first few paragraphs, but even more people won’t go beyond the headline. Take me for example, I follow many RSS feeds and I don’t have time to read them all (especially those that don’t offer full feeds), but instead, I just focus on those whose headlines grab my attention and make it impossible for me not to read the whole article. You see, by writing magnetic headlines you’ll force people to read your whole article, so you’ll find yourself with more visitors, reader comments and what’s more important – more links to your posts!

About writing effective headlines?

1) ‘How to’ headlines - How to headlines are the most used ones in the blogosphere, so you have to write a damn good one to catch your reader’s attention. The trick is to express all the perks of your post. Here’s an example – ‘How to complete paid surveys and retire early’. This headline would be much effective than just ‘How to complete paid surveys’. Why? You’ve given your visitor a reason to read more about paid surveys, because he’d surely like to retire early.

2) ‘How I’ headlines – People are always interested to learn from somebody else’s experience. If you write an article like ‘How I made $1000 in a month’ be sure that people will want to know how you did it.

3) ‘The secret of’ headlines – People are attracted by mysterious and secret stuff and always want to know what the secret you’re unveiling to them is.

4) ’Quick way’ headlines – Impatience is in human nature and readers will jump on opportunity to save their precious time with your speedy solutions to complicated matters.

6) List post headlines – People give a lot of value to this kind of posts because they give a lot of information about a topic(s) and are easy to comprehend. Headline for list post has to be revealing. You don’t want to have a list post headline like ‘Increase paid survey revenue tips’; you’d better use something like ‘7 ways to increase paid survey revenue’ instead. While this seems fairly obvious, many bloggers fail to mark their lists as such.

7) Funny headlines – Even if there’s nothing funny about your article, providing your visitors with witty headline will often make them read it.

8) Provocative headlines – If you write a critique post, be sure to express your negative feelings in your headlines. Something like ‘Paid surveys won’t ever make you money’ followed by an exclamation (!) mark.

9)* Relating headlines and posts – This tip is related to all of the above (except tip No. 7). Your headline must be synchronized with post’s content. You don’t want your readers to expect one thing, and get something completely different in return because. How do you keep balance between headlines and posts? There are two ways:

a) Write your headline first and build your post around it to create the perfect balance.

b) Write your post first and after you’re done, think about what headline would suit it best.

10) Headline aesthetics – You could score some points with the look and feel of your headline. Increasing the size of the font will add some visibility to your post, and so will use of bold, italic or different colored font. Capital letters in your headline could also help you. Let’s compare, ‘Get paid to complete surveys’ and ‘Get Paid To Complete Surveys'. Even though the second headline is not grammatically correct, it stands out more than the first one.

11) SEO aspect of headlines – Search engines give a lot of attention to headlines, so you should incorporate related keywords to them.


technorati tags: headline, blogging, writer tips, increase traffic