Everything You Need To Know About Writing Blog Headlines

Attracting readers to your blog is very often all about the headline you use for your post. Yes, this has been said a million times by other writers, but I thought I would simply state what goes through my mind when I write a headline. These are 5 questions I often ask myself when authoring a headline:

1. Can You Be Provocative? If your headline says something that would stand out in the crowd, it will get noticed.
2. Can It Be Controversial? A headline that boldly holds a point of view that may not be held by a majority is going to stand out.
3. Can It Ask a Question? Often, if your headline is a direct question to your reader, especially a question that they are interested in the answer, then they will often feel compelled to click on that headline and answer the question.
4. Can You Give A Reason Why? You can experiment with wording on this, but the key is to make the headline lend itself to providing some insight into a topic. Phrases like “20 Reasons Why…”, or “The Secret To…” or whatever. It creates a bit of mystery in the mind of the reader and the human psyche is practically rigged to fill in a mystery.
5. Can You Provide Pure How To? Even with the words “how to” right in the headline. People like this kind of content.

When answering these questions and putting together a headline, you always want to use keywords that people will actually search for. Metaphorical headlines, for example, can sometimes work if you’re trying to be cute, but is almost certainly not going to lead to much traffic because people will have no idea what the article is about before clicking and reading.

There are millions of blogs out there. People who read lots of blogs often have many similar blogs in their RSS reader. To get read, you need to make your headline stand out from the crowd.

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