What Mistakes are you Making in your Headlines?

Only a small percentage of viewers will read your blog post or article. As our time is scarce, we only want to invest in articles that will bring value to our lives  - personal or business. In order to get the viewer to click on your tweet, Facebook post or link from a search, follow these nine guidelines to increase your click-through-rate.

1. Plan Your Headline: this is where the majority of your time writing the blog should be spent. Ensure it will resonate with your target market.
2. Quality not Quantity: Focus on value rather than length.
3. Use numbers: Headlines containing numbers tend to outperform other types of headlines. Use a low number to illustrate a concise blog or a higher one to emphasis an in-depth article. Oddly, odd numbers.
4. Build a list of interesting adjectives such as Effortless Painstaking Incredible Essential Strange which will help grab the reader’s attention
5. Try to create original content and use case studies and data to help illustrate your points.
6. Experiment with trigger words such as: what, why, how, or when. But don’t use a number with a trigger word. Using action words (verbs) is also a good tactic.
7. Arouse Curiosity: Headlines with questions can be effective but never to ask a question that your reader can answer “no“ to. Similarly, if you answer the question in the headline, there is no need for people to read the article!
8. Made a valuable promise: what the reader will learn in only a few minutes that will be incredible useful?
9. Say NO to Positive Superlatives: A study by Outbrain found the average click through rate on headlines containing negative superlatives such as “never” or “worst,” surprisingly performed 63% better than those containing positives, like “always” or “best”. It also showed that having a positive superlative under-performed compared to no superlative at all. Words such as best, fastest, cheapest have been overused causing readers to switch off. However, negative terms are more likely to interpreted as authentic and genuine.

The headline is your showstopper – get this right and your article will actually be read and hopefully shared!