If you use content marketing to grow your business, then you’re likely using headlines on a regular – and frequent – basis. You need to drive people to your blog and website with great blog headlines. You need headlines for videos, images, infographics, emails – pretty much all the content you create as part of your strategy. Headlines can make or break your content’s success – a great headline will get people to click, to share with their friends and followers, to leave a comment, to open an email. A bad headline on the other hand…won’t get much traction and you’ve essentially spent time and resources into creating content that’s not getting you results.
In this blog post, I’m going to share 4 super easy tips for writing more effective headlines.
Use powerful words and phrases that drive emotion
Some words have more power than others; and in most cases, it’s because they provoke certain emotions, whether consciously or subconsciously. Plus, not only can they trigger emotion, but they’re also highly effective and catching reader’s attention. In fact, headlines with a high emotional value tend to drive more shares than other types of headlines.
So, what kinds of words can drive emotion?
There are numerous types of words that can drive emotion; particularly, adjectives: words like “beautiful”, “amazing”, “powerful”, “valuable”, “unique”, “exciting”, “worrying” and so on can make for very powerful words that drive strong emotions from your readers.
For example, a headline like “How to build a website” is very clear and gets straight to the point – the reader knows exactly what they’re getting if they click on the link. But it also doesn’t drive any emotion – so what if they scroll right past it because of that?
If, on the other hand, you use a headline like “How to build an amazing, high-converting website for your business”, not only is the message still very clear, but it also drives emotion from the reader with words like “amazing” and ”high-converting”.
Use keywords and phrases that drive curiosity
One of the best ways to “hook” someone into reading your content, opening your email or sharing your blog post, is to try to drive curiosity; and this, too, you do by using certain keywords and phrases in your headlines.
But how do you drive curiosity with one or a few simple words? What kinds of words and phrases should you use to get people to want to find out what they’re getting if they’re reading your content?
First, there are the simple, straight-to-the-point words like “secrets”; for example: “5 Internet marketing secrets that no one is talking about”.
Secondly, you can use certain adjectives as well to drive curiosity; for example, using words like “unbelievable” and “shocking” can have a powerful effect on people and make them want to read your content in order to find out what’s so unbelievable or what’s so shocking. For example: “5 Unbelievable videos you need to see right now”.
Then, there are certain phrases and combinations of words that can be very impactful and drive curiosity, phrases that make the reader stop and think for a second, “Why?” or “What?”; for example, some of the most widely-used words from the top shared content on Facebook are phrases that are designed to drive curiosity: “will make you”, “this is why”, “can we guess”, “are freaking out”, “is what happens”, “make you cry” and many, many others.
Use popular content formats
Sometimes, it’s not just about the words you use but also the format of your article – and that format should come across from the headline so that the reader knows immediately what they’re getting into. If they’re clicking on that link.
The most powerful content (and headline, for that matter) formats are clearly lists posts/listicles. Posts like “5 top tools that (…)” and “10 easy ways to (…)” are extremely popular for a few simple reasons: they’re super easy to read and skim which is so important when you’re on the go; their headline makes it very clear exactly what you’re getting when reading; it’s a fun format that gets people excited.
Other very popular types of post are “how to” posts – anything from a super quick how-to post that explains how to do something in a few paragraphs to super extensive how-to guides of thousands of words. It’s quite easy to imagine why these types of posts are so popular: they provide a lot of value to the reader (if the post is high quality, of course) and their headlines are very clear and the reader knows exactly what they’re getting into: “How to write powerful headlines that drive emotion”, “How to bake the perfect pizza in 5 easy steps” (an example of how you can combine the listicle/how-to formats in your headlines).
Questions can also work quite well as headlines – particularly when they start with words like “why” and “what”: “Why is your business not getting the results it deserves?”, “What are the biggest digital marketing mistakes that are holding you back?”.
Questions make people curious and to want to know the answer – and therefore, they’ll click on that link to find out more.
The formula for writing effective headlines: popular headline phrases
Using certain words in your headlines is more effective because they drive emotion, curiosity – but the reason we know they are effective is because there have been quite a few extensive studies made on the subject.
For example, on OkDork you can find an analysis of 1 million blog headlines, based on their total social media shares. Their findings were quite interesting:
- List posts are by far the most popular form of content, followed by How to
- Headlines with “you/your” in your headline tend to perform very well
- People love a good giveaway or freebie (so use the words “Free/giveaway”)
Another huge study – this one analysing 100 million headlines, with a focus on Facebook engagement - comes from Buzzsumo, which found that certain phrases perform much better than others: “will make you” is by far the most popular headline phrase, followed by “this is why”, “can we guess”, “only X in”, “the reason is” and “are freaking out” – amongst others of course which you can see in both studies.
It’s worth experimenting with these keywords and phrases in your own headlines to see how it affects your results – particularly when it comes to social media and getting more shares.
Conclusion
Writing amazing headlines is certainly not an easy job; it takes a lot of learning (about your audience and about what works) and experimenting before you get a handle on how to write great headlines.
That’s why it’s a good idea to actively test and monitor your headlines and subject lines to see which ones work and which ones don’t; that means monitoring your content marketing results closely and trying to understand why some headlines performed better than others and what you can do to improve future headlines.
