The skill of writing great headlines is more important than you might think. It’s the first thing a reader will see and if it’s not engaging, it will be the last thing they read on your website.
So, what makes a good headline? If you remember nothing else, always use the word ‘you’. After all, you are talking to your reader and the information is for their benefit, isn’t it? Not, ‘I’, ‘we’ or ‘they’ but ‘you’.
Make copious use of ‘how-to’ titles. ‘How to repair your PC in less than an hour’ is sure to grab your reader’s attention if he has a PC that’s not working. The ‘how-to’ title is a winner and always gets plenty of readers.
‘Reasons-why’ is another terrific eye catcher. ’5 reasons why you should visit Paris this year’, ’10 reasons why you need know about this new tax law’. Curiosity is a powerful emotion to evoke in your reader.
Another favourite headline suggests a solution to your visitors problem. If you think about it, most products solve a problem. So, can you write a concise title that shows you have the solution to a specific problem?
But the most popular title, I think, is the top 10, top 9, top 8, etc. ‘The top 10 European spa resorts’, ‘the top 5 web hosts voted by you’. everybody wants to know who or what the best are. This headline is an evergreen winner.
Posing questions is a great attention grabber. ‘Why is the UN present in war zones?’, ‘how is social networking changing the face of the Internet?’ There are plenty of wonderful questions that get people involved.
‘The secrets of search engine optimisation’. Now you may think the ‘secrets’ has become overused and ‘corny’, but it’s still constantly used in headlines and titles, and always draws visitors and readers.
And last, but not least, the ‘how I did it’ title is another headline that plays on curiosity. ‘How I generated £1million of new business in just 3 months’. If you read that headline, you have to know how it was done.
There’s no great mystery to writing great headlines, just the application of a few techniques. Happy writing.
