What Happens When You Write 25 Headlines Before Choosing One?
Having patience is important when writing headlines. Like other tasks, if you set aside a block of time to write headlines, it will greatly help you to stay focused on your writing and producing blog posts regularly. My friend Randy Clark sets aside regular blocks of time to blog, and that includes writing headlines. In fact, he wrote a book about blogging that you might like: How to Stay Ahead of Your Business Blog Forever.
Writing 25 Headlines
First of all, how do you write so many headlines? When I write headlines, I write them very quickly, without a lot of deep thinking. That is, without overthinking. I run them through CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer and make sure they’re the right length. More importantly, they need a balance of emotional words, power words, common words, and uncommon words. And I want to get a high enough score. For instance, this particular headline got a 76, which isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty good.
Do You Need to Put So Much Effort into a Headline?
Well, yes, you do. Because a lot of people will read the headline without ever reading the article. The headline might get them to read the article. Maybe or maybe not. In any event, writing headlines is indeed a pain in the asterisk, as I’ve outlined before in Headline Writing: Ten Reasons It’s a Pain in the Asterisk!
Using Keywords
One thing about creating headlines is that it’s important to put your important keywords first. So in that last headline in the paragraph above, the words Headline Writing need to be first if those are the keywords.
Need Help with Your Blog Writing?
If you’ve fallen behind (and can’t get up!), I’d love to help you. Contact me and we’ll see what kinds of headlines we can create.
Has anyone else used Sharethrough Headline Analyzer? We’ve been generating headlines using suggestions from the site. It’s resulted in longer titles, the jury is still out on it’s impact on hits.
Hi Kyle,
That’s really interesting. I just checked out Sharethrough Headline Analyzer, and got a few suggestions, such as to add a celebrity and use more “Alert words.” I’ll try them next time.
Thanks for the suggestion. I hadn’t used them before.
Carol
Certainly, I’m watching the metrics. The jury is still out.
Will you write a blog post about it, Kyle? It’s certainly interesting!
Thank you,
Carol