A picture may paint a thousand words, but the words in your headline can be more important than any image you have in your article. Take Twitter, for example, you have 140 characters in which to promote a headline and a link and perhaps a hashtag or two. No images to catch the eye. The headline must be clear, punchy and enticing. It is your sales pitch.
A headline can also set the tone of an article, because you can use it to inflect attitude or mood. For example, ‘Why my XXX phone drives me crazy’.
Short headlines win every time
Headlines that make statements and bold claims are often shareable, as well as those that offer solutions to problems. (eg, ‘How to get more YouTube subscribers’, ‘The 10 best image libraries’, ‘The secret of cheaper car insurance’).
Short is sweet for Twitter, and remember that people scan pages, so they won’t really read the whole headline anyway. In fact, people in scan mode often read only the first two or three words before jumping to the next headline in a list of articles, so you might want to think about word order.
Is, for example, ‘Cheaper car insurance tips’ better than ‘How to get cheaper car insurance’? If ‘cheaper’ is a better trigger word than ‘how to’, perhaps yes. If it encourages people to stop, read the whole headline and then the article, that’s a good thing.
Test headlines with split testing
You can test blog content headlines a number of ways. Put a few sample headlines together and run a mini focus group, in the office, among customers or online. You could run a series of articles with different headlines and track which ones get the most visits and the most social engagement. This would work best with some kind of split testing, which you could do with an email newsletter – where you send one version of the email to half the audience and another (with different headlines) to the other half and then compare the click-throughs.
Write the headline first
I often like to write an article to fit a headline. Sometimes I write the headline first, then the article turns out to not match what I thought it would say and I come up with a more suitable headline afterwards. The great thing about writing the headline first is that it’s like coming up with a great product you know people will want to buy, then working out the technical and manufacturing details later.
Sir Alan Sugar used to come up with product ideas and put a price on them before he even knew how he was going to make them. He knew the product and the price would drive demand. He filled in the details later. Writing your headline first is a bit like that – make the announcement, then make sure the offer (or the text) backs up the announcement.
Have pun with it
Use humour and wordplay in your headline writing where you can. Even if the subject matter is serious and business-like, you can still use great wordplay (eg ‘Efficient chips: takeaways go digital’). Puns don’t have to be as groan-inducing as the one I used above. You can use the double meanings of words and phrases to induce cleverness (eg, ‘How to lose pounds whilst saving a few quid’).
Read the previous articles in this series
1. How to write a blog: Knowing your audience
2. How to write a blog: Hatching article ideas