First impressions matter…

The Good Stuff Lands Right In Your Hand When You Write A Great Headline

It’s not in your head, it’s in your headline, baby

Headlines have one purpose: To draw readers into your story. If the headline doesn’t do its job, no one’s reading your words.

Imagine you own a ladies' dress boutique with a gigantic display window that faces the sidewalk on a busy downtown street in your city.

What will you show in that window?

Will you show your priciest and most extravagant ball gowns or display simple, inexpensive cotton shifts?

You need cash to pay bills, so I think you’ll try to entice shoppers into your store to spend their money and time with you. You’ll fill that big, beautiful picture window with your most dazzling and expensive dresses, won’t you?

As a writer, your headline acts much like that boutique display window. It gives your readers a peek at what’s inside. It arouses their curiosity and makes them want to read more.

More than any other factor, your headline determines whether a reader will click into your content.

Depending on where you’re writing, you might need a brilliant image to go with your piece, but I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times a picture was so amazing or unusual that it compelled me to click into the story.

It’s the headline that piques the interest.

Headlines matter whether you write blog content, advertising, short stories, epic novels, resumes, or Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace ads.

It’s all copy. It’s all marketing, whether or not you want to think in terms of sales.

As writers, we don’t sell tangible products that consumers can touch, hear, or smell.

What we sell is much more important than mere possessions.

We’re selling thoughts, dreams, knowledge, instruction, experience, hope, opinion, information.

We’re defining our present, exploring our history, carving our future.

We’re building each other up, we’re calming each other down. We’re trying, persuading, demanding, cajoling, consoling.

We’re sharing our humanity.

We’re selling magic.

We want others to read our words. It’s important that they read our words!

That’s why we write. Not to hide our writing way down in a deep hole.

We want to share our thoughts with others.

Headline Help

This writer opines that to write an irresistible headline, we must first know our audience. The principals of engagement stay the same no matter the prose or the poetry, but we should know to whom we’re writing. Otherwise, how can we pique their interest?

For instance, it makes sense to sprinkle some professional jargon in a piece aimed at a specific trade, but if you’re trying to reach a broader audience, then you’d never include jargon in your headline.

Regardless of your audience, your title should provide enough detail to provoke interest but just enough mystery to make clicking uncontrollable.

Other important considerations:

· Give as much detail in as few words as you can manage. There’s nothing wrong with a lengthy title, but it’s good to be as concise as possible, too. You don’t want to give away the entire story in the title, and you don’t want to fatigue your reader with complicated descriptions, either.

· Readers don’t like clickbait ads, so avoid them. It’s okay to make a shocking statement, but make sure you back it up in your article. Make your article interesting and accurate. You want to reward your reader for clicking!

· Optimize your headline for people, not search engines. Humans respond to emotion, so make the most of that. Intrigue, humor, compassion, fear, anxiety, all of these and more will catch attention. If you’re writing keywords into your article, use them in your headline, as long as they make sense and inspire feelings.

· Use a headline tool to help you write headlines. Sharethrough Headline Analyzer likes longer, more descriptive headlines while Co-Schedule often encourages shorter, punchier titles. SEOPressor helps you create headlines for better online optimization and you can get lost for hours playing with Tweak Your Biz Title Generator. I also like Portent’s Content Idea Generator for that same reason.

“Five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” — David Ogilvy

Medium agrees on the importance of a great headline. Read what they have to say:

Jeff Goins offers smart advice, too:

Now, go make some magic!