5 Ways To Improve Your Headlines
Like any other aspect of content creation, your headlines can improve over time. Here are 5 actionable headline creation tips to speed up your headline skill acquisition.
1. Study high quality headlines
BuzzFeed and Upworthy are masters of breaking through the non-stop social media stream.
By contrast, many magazines and newspapers live and die by their newsstand sales. They’ve got dedicated experts who just work on their front page headlines and callouts.
Want a cheap education? Get a year’s subscription to Cosmo (even if you’re male!)
Headline resources every marketer needs:
BTW-It’s helpful to have a list of power words to inspire you. While there are a number of valuable lists including Morrow’s and Co-Schedule’s, I’m a fan of Henneke’s power word list. (Also check out Henneke’s writing tips.)
2. Practice writing headlines every day
Stephen King advises writers to show up at the page every day to write. More specifically, he said.
“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
The same holds for building your headline writing skills as well. Select 5 articles from your daily content diet and write 5 different titles. Even better carry your practice around with you and edit the titles to improve them.
Keep your title practice and assess it weekly. Don’t just use the same 5 fill-in-the-blank formats.
Think of this activity as morning pages for headlines. The objective is to build up your headline writing muscles. Like going to the gym, it requires repetitions over time.
3. Include your headline in your first content creation pass
Big Bold Branding’s Pamela Wilson recommends start writing by creating a backbone for your piece. Specifically she means the headline and main point subheads. Wilson purposely avoids calling it an outline due to the elementary school-related baggage the word is associated with.
I like Wilson’s approach since your writing must appeal to scanners. This exercise ensures you’re on track.
To support social media distribution and minimize social media creation time, evaluate the shareworthiness of section callouts. Bear in mind that no matter how great your headline is, you still need other versions to continually repromote your content across social media.
Include an image with each headline (to attract visual learners and shares) and keep the words per section to 300 (for search-ability.)
4. Invest in A/B testing your headlines.
To increase your social media reach, especially on Facebook, supplement your content distribution with paid promotion in the form of advertising. This is a page straight from Priceonomics and Larry Kim’s playbooks.
Start with a small buy (under $50) to A/B test your best titles. If you’re trying to reach a broader cross-section consider running these tests for different audiences.
Note: BuzzSumo invested in Facebook advertising to maximize their recent research’s reach.
5. Optimize your headline for search.
Search is content marketing distribution long game compared to social media.
To this end, include the keywords in your headline, preferably towards the beginning of your title.
BuzzSumo found that an average of 15 words and 85 to 100 characters. This is higher than the recommended 60 characters for search.
Average Number of Words In Headline – BuzzSumo -Chart
Average number of characters per headline-BuzzSumo Chart
By contrast, Hubspot and Outbrain analysis, which is tied to outcomes, stays within search and social media recommended lengths.
Headline Length – Hubspot and Outbrain Data – Chart
More next Monday…
Time flies when you are having fun! I am looking back today, back to where I first started writing this blog. A very dear friend said that I should write a blog….I thought she was kidding, my writing ability wasn’t the best. Just because you think you are educated, doesn’t mean you can write, and who would read what I write anyway? She said….write what you are thinking…that’s a laugh as I am usually ranting and raving about some real estate problem or whatever. She persisted and here I am maybe 4 or 5 years later (editor note: That first post was actually January 17, 2011 – 6 1/2 years ago!)….I lost track of the time. I do know I rant and rave about mostly professionalism and how I believe a real estate professional 
should act. I think it hits many of you cause you comment. Many of you have told me that you print it and hand it to your agents, which is gratifying as then I know there are more of the professionals out there than there are the ones I rant about. So all of that being said……..this is a shout out to Deborah Boza-
Valledor who started me in my ranting and raving journey so more of us can remember to be good to each other, be as professional as we can to our clients and in turn we make our profession better. Deborah is amazing, she adds the caricatures of me pounding on the desk, and just brings my rants and raves to life. But better yet, she makes me think of what we all do every day to help our customers move into a home and become part of the fabric of our community. So thank you Deborah……from me and my readers!
