3 Tactics to Writing Killer Headlines to Boost Conversions

Any writer, marketer, copywriter, or researcher has been there: a perfect article that has zero conversion. It seems that something is wrong with the article itself, but when the analysis starts, the author of the article notices that no one even opens the link to this article. What’s the problem? The problem is a headline.

A headline is a title of your article which should clearly describe the content and highlight the most interesting points. Besides, it should cover all important points that you want to present to your reader. And, of course, it should attract the attention of the audience.

Why are headlines so important for high conversion?

The matter is that this is the first thing a reader sees and they make their decision to read the article or not after reading the headline itself. That is why you need to be very attentive while creating a title. In some cases, it takes more time to write the headline than to write the article itself! Headlines may sell better that the whole content of a huge website.

The headline is the main tool to attract new readers and keep the sustainable level of attention of existing readers. If you analyze any good landing page, you will notice that it mainly consists of titles. These titles perfectly work for business development: a person does not need the texts or the descriptions, they only read the titles. You need to make every title look like the title taken from the landing page.

The headline should be catchy, interesting or even provocative. There are multiple formulae according to which the headlines are built. Some of them are better for marketing strategies, others are perfect for creative writing. Besides, the headlines should be different for different audiences. Also, your goals determine the type of a headline that you choose. Perhaps, the only thing that should be presented in the headline is the value of the product, service, or in our case, article, that we offer.

Of course, the headline should never contain mistakes, as well as your article. However, in some cases, the mistakes are used intentionally to attract the attention of the audience. Still, check your articles in proofreading service before you publish them. You will prevent uncomfortable situations when some of your readers notice a mistake and start to write offensive comments on the quality of your work.

How to create a headline that will kill

As we have told before, the creation of the titles is an art. However, there are some tactics and methods that make this art available to everyone. We have collected 3 basic strategies that will help you with headline generation and bring you closer to the desired writing success.

1. How to…

The first and the most effective method to write knocking out headlines is to use How to formula. We all like useful advice and recommendations that help us in our lives. The headlines that start with How to are intended to solve the problem of the reader and provide them with effective strategies to change their life.

After a How to phrase you need to introduce the problem that is described in your article. Of course, the problem should bother your target audience. For example, if you have a cooking blog, a post with the headline How to choose a new car will not be interesting to the readers. However, they will pay attention to the article How to measure sugar if you have no special devices. The readers of such kind of blog regularly find problems with accessing the gadgets that are present in the professional kitchen but are generally unavailable at home. This headline will make them open the article and find the information that will be useful for them.

How to headlines regularly have a good open rate. Here, the psychological tricks matter: people always want to find out the solutions to the problems that are interesting to them.

2. XX ways to / XX best / XX most interesting

This is another type of headline that helps a person to solve the problem but the problem is not presented clearly like with How to headlines. The headline itself presents the solution. For example, if the headline is 10 best movies of 2017, it helps solve several problems: what movie to watch, how to spend an evening, and what to recommend to your friends. As well as How to headlines XX ways to / XX best / XX most interesting headlines use keywords that people use for search.

This type of headlines is perfect for social media and personal blogs. It won’t be effective for newspapers or magazines, as well as for the informational portals. Also, it is better not to use these headlines frequently as your visitors may be bored with such type of information representation.

3. Free offer

Offers is the main tool to attract the attention of your visitors. If you are the author of the blog, it may be quite difficult for you to create offers for your readers, as you do not provide any services or products. However, if you have your own e-commerce blog, store, and a website for providing basic info about your services, always introduce offers. Here is a trick: you need to create a headline in such a way, your visitors can easily understand the offer. For example Free Bouquet for Ordering 50+ roses! Of course, the type of the offer will depend on your business. But make sure that you introduce all basic conditions of receiving this offer in a headline. The golden rule of this type of headline is to never lie to, you clients.

It’s never too late to learn how to write effective articles with working headlines. If you have already lost many leads because you do not know how to write titles, you can change the situation using our top 3 methods of title creation. Try all of them to define what works perfectly for your business, and enjoy the increase in sales and number of customers!

Guest article written by: Lori Wade is a freelance content writer who is interested in a wide range of spheres from education and online marketing to entrepreneurship. She is also an aspiring tutor striving to bring education to another level like we all do. Lori is used to handling many writing orders at the same time and as she likes sharing her ideas and experience, she decided to write a great article for you to show how multiple tasks should be dealt with. If you are interested in writing, you can find her on Twitter or Google+ or find her in other social media. Read and take over Lori’s useful insights!