How to Find Well Done Headlines and Why They Work

When it comes to a lot of online con­tent, such as ebooks, arti­cles, blog posts, etc., the head­line is the first thing peo­ple see. It is also the first step that decides whether they are even going to read your content.

A good head­line is entic­ing, it cre­ates curios­ity. It makes you want to know what it’s all about. It makes you click, right? And that is what we want with our own content.

So how do you fig­ure out what is a good head­line and what’s not? A good way to learn what works is to fol­low by exam­ple. Look at what gets you to click.

Check out your email. We all get a lot of email every­day. And even though you prob­a­bly spend a major­ity of your time skim­ming through it, there are some that just grab your atten­tion and make you stop. You may even click on it. But it doesn’t mat­ter, the head­line already did it’s work.

These are the kinds of exam­ples you want to look for. The kind that get your atten­tion. If you read blogs on a reg­u­lar basis, same thing, take a closer look at the ones that you actu­ally slow down to read.

Take a look at these par­tic­u­lar pieces. They prob­a­bly did a cou­ple things.

- pre­sented a prob­lem that you can relate to

- pre­sented a solu­tion that may solve said problem

- cre­ated curiosity

- it shocked you

It could have been one or a com­bi­na­tion of these that stopped you long enough to read it. And that’s the trick right there. Look at the head­line and see what it says in it that made you stop. Even if you didn’t actu­ally click through, you still paused. And that’s what you want. That lit­tle moment right there.

Peo­ple are in a hurry con­stantly or may have a “been there, done that” atti­tude or they may be lazy. What­ever the rea­son, the major­ity of peo­ple are not on the look out for your con­tent (unless they know you of course). So you have to get their atten­tion. To cre­ate a good head­line cre­ates a pause, no mat­ter how small, in their busy day.

But there is also another piece to this lit­tle puz­zle. What else in the head­line grabbed your atten­tion that may not be so obvi­ous?

It seemed directed at you.

And in a way it was directed at you. When the author of that con­tent cre­ated it, he prob­a­bly had the idea of his pre­ferred audi­ence when did his work.

Who are you try­ing to attract when you are cre­at­ing your con­tent? That lit­tle bit of infor­ma­tion can make a dif­fer­ence between a head­line that works and one that no one notices. Think of one per­son that most closely relates to your ideal audi­ence and form the head­line to them. Cater to them.

Keep these things in mind when you see head­lines, espe­cially the ones that draw your atten­tion. The point of this blog though was to point out a web­site that, for the most part, does some fairly effec­tive head­lines on a reg­u­lar basis.

Yahoo.com

This may seem a lit­tle obvi­ous or not, but it’s one of the pages I go to on a daily basis. For you it may be a dif­fer­ent page. Maybe a news page that you come across often. But go ahead and click that link above and take a look at the links in the news sec­tion. See any­thing that catches your eye? No? Maybe try again later.

This site is one of the sites I see all the time as it’s the page I end up when I log out of my email. And there have been sev­eral times that I ended up click­ing on a link (or at least want­ing to) when I didn’t intend to. Then I end up read­ing an arti­cle that I didn’t have in my schedule.

Am I say­ing that they always have good head­lines? Not at all. In fact there is a good por­tion of the time when I keep right on going with­out a sec­ond glance. But there are other times when I end up click­ing on a story any­ways. And that is an effec­tive head­line in some form or another.

So keep an eye out for some­thing that grabs your atten­tion and makes you pause. Take a look at this head­line and fig­ure out what makes it effec­tive. Think about the mes­sage it is por­tray­ing and who it’s aimed for. Use that in your own head­line work. Before you know it you’ll be able to make effec­tive head­lines with­out think­ing twice.

~Chris

Do you have a web­site that has this effect on you? Do you catch your­self read­ing some­thing you didn’t intend to and won­der why?

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