How to come up with proven headlines for your blog articles? (Transcript)
This is a super simple process that I use to write headlines. So right now, I’m working on this blog post called, well it’s called three different things right now. But the point of the blog post is to show you how to write a blog post, or any type of writing on a regular basis, if you’re not a writer.
So this is the process I use. Right now I have three different working headlines. And I’m using a tool called “Kingsumo. com”. And it’s a cool tool; you can plug in multiple different headlines into your WordPress post, and then rotate them over time as your blog post is out there and measure traffic and shares on each particular blog post to show you which one wins. It will automatically adjust which one is getting most traffic to show that to more people so you’ll get even more traffic. So I’ll plug in three or four titles to every post and see which one wins. But that doesn’t really answer the question of “How do I come to the title” in the first place. And your title is, I hate saying this, the most important thing, ‘cause there’s a lot of things really most important, but it is used- it’s the number one influencer on whether somebody opens your page or not. Now, whether they read and share it is based on the quality of your content. But whether they click and actually open your email, click through and then open that tweet, is based on the headline alone not on what’s inside of it. So your headline has to be good.
So one really good way I found to write, to come up some different headlines really quickly is this: I’ll go to two sites, and one of them is Buzzfeed.com, and the other one is Huffington Post. And these guys write twenty to thirty headlines for every single post. And they use a tool, a proprietor tool that’s not headlines but a tool like it, like this that’s able to rotate the headlines around. And they test every single one of the post. So, here’s an example here of how headlines work. So I got 21 percent more traffic by using this headline. So that’s free clicks that I would not have got otherwise. So anyways, these guys Buzzfeed and Huffington Post, both have tons of traffic coming to their site. And they already have a team of copywriters that do nothing but test that lines all day long.
So, we’re just gonna go to these sites, check out the structure of some of the most popular blog posts, and use that structure in our post. So, I’ll load up these two sites; I’ll get another tool called Buzzsumo. It’s completely free. And you can use Buzzsumo to see what Huffington Post’s and Buzzfeed’s most popular posts are. So not only are we gonna use the popular or use the titles from blog posts from sites to test them, but we’re gonna see what the popular ones are on those sites and use those. So here is Buzzfeed.com. It’s the last six months; it’s the most popular article shared on Buzzfeed on the last six months. So these are the best of the best headlines.
Here we go. The number one is “What Career should you Actually Have”. So how can we rewrite that headline and use it on my blog post? We could write something like— let’s see here. “What career should you actually have?” “What should your writing process actually be?” So that’s a very similar but repurposed for my title, repurposed for my post. Another one should be “What state do you actually belong to”. Not really sure I could use that one. “What kind of dog are you”. Now we can use that.” What kind of writer are you?” That’ll be another one. Let’s see what else we have. “What decade do you actually belong to”. So that’s kind of a question. Not really sure I could use that. “Which Classic Rock Band are you”. “Which US President…”; “Which European country…” I think we’re seeing a theme view. “Which muppet are you”. We might even be able to take some of these and come to blog ideas where we juxtapose one type of writing style to another type of writing style and then create a title based on that. So we actually developed our blog post out of it. So let’s do this for Huffington Post as well. Let’s go to Buzzsumo, and we’re gonna do the exact same thing. We’re gonna put in the URL and then filter it by the last six months so we can see the most popular items on Huffington Post. So these are titles that have been split tested out a while so you get a ton of traffic. And these are the top ones. “The Day I Stopped Saying Hurry Up”. Now we could definitely sue that. “The day I stopped writing”. That’s good. ‘Casue I’m not writing anymore that the point of the post is to tell people I’m not writing but I’m just answering questions, and then, writing is just a way of doing that. So that would totally work and be true to the post. Let’s look at one more. I think you get the point. I like that. “What Richard Sherman Taught us about America”. There’s a couple of things going on here. Richard Sherman was in the headlines; so that’s news jacking. So it’s really good. We’d have to dig in a little bit more to figure out how we could- figure out how we could kinda latch off the back. “Five minutes in a Month in a Mom’s head”. We could use that one. Let’s- oops. Stay on this page. I don’t wanna do that. We could do “5 minutes in my head”. That’s cool; we’re using split test headlines. So those we’ve come up in less than five minutes; we come up with four headlines. And we can test them all and see which one gets results.
So that’s how you can easily come up with headlines that are already been tested and shown to work.
