Does your headline grab your audience’s attention to get them to stop and read your blog? Your headline is that critical first impression that will draw people in or leave them looking elsewhere for information.
If you don’t put enough thought into your headline, you can have outstanding information; but no one is likely to read it. Stella Anokam of www.stellaanokam.com in a recent article “Why You Should Spend Time To Write Attention-Grabbing Headlines” said, “Do you know that over 50% of your traffic (and sales too) are lost due to your headline writing?”
Sometimes great articles don’t get as many clicks because of a poor headline while a great headline will get more. When you add the fact that people will tweet posts or send them around on the social media/bookmarking sites, what other readers only will see are often the headlines. That makes your headlines even more powerful ways to get traffic when you think they are. They can either make or break your efforts to generate traffic.
You do have to be careful not to stuff your keywords into your headline. One problem with doing that is that you might wind up with a headline that is too general and doesn’t quickly tell the reader what the article is about.
Who are your potential readers? People who are looking for information fast, who browse and scan in a hurry are your readers. They check quickly and will only actually read posts whose headlines reach off the computer and stop them from going on without looking. Then if your headline gives a clue about what you have written about and is cool enough to make them curious, you’ve got readers.
You can work for hours on your headline at first, but as you get into the groove of thinking them out you will find practice makes perfect. You can also test different headlines to see what pulls people into your article. There is no law that says that an article and its headline are set in stone once you publish it. You can actually rewrite the headline and see what happens. Stella said that occasionally she redoes the headline of a low performing post and it starts getting more traffic.
She added, “It’s no surprise why the better headlines get more clicks.”
Related articles
- Copywriting 101: How To Nail A Killer Headline (entrepreneurs-journey.com)
Jaco Grobbelaar, owner of BroadVision Marketing, helps business owners and business professionals put marketing strategies in place that consistently secure new clients. He can be reached at jaco@broadvisionmarketing.com or 707.799.1238. You can “Like” him at www.facebook.com/broadvisionmarketing or connect with him on www.linkedin.com/in/JacoGrobbelaar.