So you have set up your blog, online store or website. But all you can hear is the sound of crickets chirping.
No clicks, no comments or meaningful traffic.
That self-published e-book, guide and online course is not being downloaded or selling like you hoped it would.
That dream of a Hawaiian holiday is on hold again.
Your significant other wonders why you are spending all that time late at night writing, and posting content, with nothing to show for it. Maybe it’s not quite time to give up the day job.
So... should you quit and give up on that dream?
Building a business online is definitely not a “get rich quick” scheme.
It can however become a serious business that a few years ago was seen as only an activity for geeks.
Many people are now making some serious money online. But where do you start? Well, you need traffic.
Traditional high street retail businesses need passing foot traffic to make sales. The greater the passing crowd the more money they make.
You need web traffic. So... how do you get it?
Traffic building is both a slow burn and also can grow quickly if you are lucky.
Today though we’re going to dial it back just a little and focus on crafting those irresistible headlines that can really be the make or break in getting that traffic in the first place
Your headline is the first, and perhaps only, impression you make on a prospective reader.
Without a compelling promise that turns a browser of your content into a reader of your content, the rest of your words may as well not even exist.
So, from a copywriting and content marketing standpoint, writing great headlines is a critical skill.
Here are some interesting statistics.
On average, 8 out of 10 people will read your headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest.
This is the secret to the power of your headline, and why it so highly determines the effectiveness of the entire piece.
Remember, every element of compelling copy has just one purpose — to get the next sentence read. And then the sentence after that, and so on, all the way down to your call to action.
So it’s fairly obvious that if people stop at the headline, you’re already dead in the water.
The better your headline, the better your odds of beating the averages and getting what you’ve written read by a larger percentage of people.
“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
—David Ogilvy
How to Write an Irresistible Headline
Let’s start with a fundamental question: How are posts shared?
It’s not the blog post, tool, or resource that gets shared. That might be what motivates the person who is sharing it, but all that ends up getting shared is the headline. The headline is what you share with your subscribers, it’s what people see in search results, and it’s what gets passed around.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a good headline is going to help your traffic prospects.
What’s less obvious is that sometimes the best way to come up with an idea is to start with the headline. Here’s why: If you start with the resource, you might end up putting a lot of time into it before you realise that there’s no way to summarise it with an irresistible headline.
This is a lot like the death sentence most products face if they don’t have an “elevator pitch” on which to build.
What Makes a Good Headline?
According to a study published in The Guardian, these changes help your headline’s click-through rate:
Headlines with 8 words do 21% better than average.
Using a hyphen or colon will add 9% to your CTR.
Thumbnails and images boost clicks by 27%, so use them on every platform you can.
List posts tend to do better. They do even better if the number of list elements is odd instead of even. In fact, odd-numbered posts do 20 percent better than even-numbered posts.
Headlines that end with a question mark do better according to this study as well.
On top of that, a university study has also found that question headlines do better. They also discovered that question headlines did even better if they referenced the reader with “you” or “your,” as opposed to rhetorical questions or other types of questions.
Headlines that end with three exclamation points get twice as many clicks as headlines with any other punctuation!!!
Obviously, you can do this too much!!! You’ll start to lose your credibility after a while!!! But if you’re going to use an exclamation point, you might as well use three instead of one!!!
What Do the Top Blogs Do?
Posts in the top 20% tended to use the following tactics:
Startup Moon was looking at tech blogs, but some of the most successful posts used words like “kill,” “fear,” “dark,” “bleeding,” and “war.” It looks like violent language gets attention, even when the subject isn’t about violence at all.
The negative spin on a post tends to do better. Words like “without,” “no,” and “stop” showed up in a lot of the top posts. A study by Outbrain reached a similar result. They found that the negative superlatives “never” and “worst” performed 30% better than average and 59% better than positive superlatives.
Obviously, people like seeing numbers in headlines. But it’s not just list posts that do this. Numbers of any kind apparently add credibility to headlines by adding specificity. Bigger numbers also tend to do better because they make things sound more dramatic.
Use digits to represent numbers, not words. Time units also help, probably because they indicate exactly how much time it will take to learn something new. Finally, it’s best if the headline starts with the number.
Guides do very well. Using words like “introduction,” “beginner’s guide,” “in 5 minutes,” and “DIY” will help your CTR.
Piggybacking on big brands and hot topics also helps, even when the articles are only using those brands or topics metaphorically to make a comparison with something very different.
A few random words also seemed to help: smart, surprising, science, history, hacks/hacking/hackers, huge/big, critical.
The study also found that these words seem to hurt: announcing, wins, celebrates, and grows.
Look for inspiration from the top brands and widen your content strategy to include as many themes and ideas related to your industry as you can.
http://buzzsumo.com/blog/most-shared-headlines-study/
https://www.magazines.com/
Okay, thanks for tuning in. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and check out the new eBook over at hotclicks.com.au
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