// Blog Post Titles

GUARANTEED

TO Drive YOU MORE TRAFFIC

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Crafting Killer Headlines

How much time do you spend crafting a great title for your blog post? Would it surprise you if I said that the headline is as important and, at times, more important than the actual content of your post? Great, I’ve caught your attention!!

Let me now prove to you how important it is

Ian Cleary Co-founder & CEO

RazorSocial.com

“8 out of 10 people that read the headline don’t read the rest of the blog post” – Copyblogger

That’s scary isn’t it!! Imagine seeing a blog post on your Twitter feed. If the title doesn’t appeal to you there’s no way you’ll look at the blog post. In this case the title is more important than the actual content!

This is why the headline really matters…

My goal for this guide is…

that you start creating better headlines and generate more traffic as a result of this.

Goal of this Guide

When you’re thinking about your blog post title it’s important to consider the most popular types of titles. Let’s begin by taking a look at some of the most popular and useful types of titles that you could use. It’s not a case of using the same type of post all the time, it’s important to have a variety of post types and also to test out which works best for your site.

Different Types of Titles

People are attracted to list posts. They are easy to read and skim through. They can flick through the article to find the item in the list that is relevant to them.

List Posts A list post is where you are listing out a group of items one after each other.

For example: 7 Ways to Build Email Subscribers

ACTION: Go to www.buzzsumo.com and put in a competitor that blogs regularly. I bet you that you’ll find at least some of their top posts will be list posts! DID YOU KNOW?

List posts typically generate twice as many shares as

normal posts and therefore drive more traffic

How to Posts

When you see ‘how to’ in a title you…

When I checked Buzzsumo for my site it shows that List and How To posts are the most shared content.

want to read the rest to find out if this is relevant to you!

know it’s going to teach you something so immediately it is appealing to you.

Negative Headlines

HIGHER AVERAGE CLICK THROUGH RATE

Study by Outbrain (an advertisement network) found that negative words in headlines perform better than

positive words

63%

Negative headlines capture your attention. Instead of ‘How to’ try out ‘How not to’ do something. It’s often a good idea to find a popular piece of content from a competitor that is a ‘how to’ post and change that around and create a post about how not to do something quite similar.

That doesn’t mean to say you use negative keywords all the time but using this tactic every so often works

7 Things You Must Avoid if You Want To Succeed

10 Disturbing Secrets Every Waiter MUST Lie About to Keep Their Job

7 Things Your Doctor Will NEVER Tell You (Unless You Know How to Ask!)

Be Provocative

This entices people to read your post. It also works great on social media channels. For example, on Twitter if you see a question you might want to click on the links to find out the answer.

Questions in headlines spark curiosity

Case Study

Highlights What is Possible:

People love case studies because it showcases what other companies have achieved and that you can achieve it too.

Case Study Example

Author: Brian Dean from Backlinko

Brian is a master of this. Here’s an example of a case study title from him.

http://backlinko.com/viral-marketing

NEWS Headline This is a news announcement, for example, ‘Launching Our Course To-morrow’. On our site I avoid any news headlines because people don’t come to our site for news. They come to find out how to do stuff! If your site is a news site then that’s different.

WHY? This generally works

well e.g. Why You Need to Stop Exercising

Today’. Why sparks some curiosity.

DIRECT & SPECIFIC You tell it as it is. I released a post recently:

26 Social Media Monitoring Tools [Reference Guide] It’s a list post but it also specifically outlines that it’s

a reference guide.

COMMAND This is where you are telling people what

they will Get e.g. Get the 7 Secrets of

Success We have Never Shared Before.

Other Types of Headlines

Images courtesy of Shutterstock

Emotional & Power Words These are words that add a punch to your headline. They appeal to the emotional side of a person and

really capture their attention.

17 Killer Facebook Post Ideas for Small Business Owners

It’s a list post ‘Killer’ is going to capture the audiences attention It’s benefit driven – it contains post ideas It’s targeted – suitable for a small business owner

Why it’s compelling

How to Speak in Public… Even If You Hate Public Speaking

It’s a how to post It’s a little bit quirky so it will capture attention e.g. Even if you …. Hate is an emotional keyword

The Secret of Successful Podcasting Who doesn’t want to know secrets

Emotional & Power Words Still unsure? CoSchedule have an editorial calendar plugin with access to over 1,000,000 titles. They did a study with a grouping of the posts and found the higher the emotional score the more shares the content gets!

See if your most shared posts have a high emotional score!

Check out the Headline Analyzer Tool on the next page

Here are 180 power words to help write emotional headlines

coschedule.com/blog/emotional-headlines/

A useful tool for testing out your headlines is the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer! All you do is paste in your blog post title and select the category of post. You will then be given a rating out of 100%. The higher the score the better. Anything above 20% is good and higher than 50% is extremely difficult to get.

Headline Analyzer Tool

This title will appeal to the emotional side of the reader which is generally good. I have found that my most shared posts

achieve a reasonably high score. It’s FREE

I found this formula on goinswriter.com and

it’s quite good

Formula for Headlines

NUMBER adjective keyword promise

Trigger word

or

EXAMPLE: How you can Easily Double Your Online Revenue in 31 Days

Promise – Double Your Online Revenue in 31 days

Keyword – Online Revenue

Adjective – Double

Trigger – How

There’s a very clear benefit in this title and it’s also very specific – 31 days.

I did a post recently about increasing social

shares by 97%.

Of course I can’t say for definite that you’ll increase shares by 97%

but it’s possible you could! Just having 97% in the title certainly

increased the shares.

Research on Headlines

Interesting to note: Even though list posts are the most popular type of posts

they are only used in 5% of all posts (i.e. room for more list posts)

Using You/Your in your headlines is very popular. You want to appeal to your audience. It’s all about them, not about you!!!

Free/Giveaway is also quite popular. Your blog post could be just about running a competition.

CoSchedule (provider of editorial calendar plugin) and Okdork (personal site from Noah Kagan, founder of Appsumo) recently researched over 1 million headlines. Here’s a table of the most popular word/phrases in the post headline.

Variation A: What does Google’s Hummingbird Update Mean for E-Commerce Business? Variation B: What the new Hummingbird SEO Algorithm Means for Ecommerce Business

Winner: The question won with 700% more clicks!!!

Question or No Question

My goal for this guide is…

that you start creating better headlines and generate more traffic as a result of this.

Split Testing Headlines HubSpot published an article which showed the results from testing 2 different titles for the same blog post. It’s amazing to see the difference in click through rates based on the article. Here are some examples:

Variation A: The Simple Template for a Thorough Content Style Guide

Variation B:

7 Steps to Creating a Thorough Style Guide

Winner: B – 200% more clicks!!!

Number or No Number 2 1 3

Other Tools & Resources

Portent Tool for generating a good title. You paste in your keywords and then you can cycle through some ideas for blog post titles.

Buzzsumo

portent.com/tools/title-maker

www.buzzsumo.com

Content research tool. If you enter in a keywords or domain name it will show you the most shared content based on

these. This is very useful to see what titles have worked well before for either

you or your competitors

Our Summary

www.razorsocial.com

Invest time in creating a great headline and you will reap the rewards. If you action only one thing in this document just test out your blog post title with the Emotional Value Analyzer and this will immediately help with increasing attention and shares of your blog content.