Discover How the Big Boys Reel You in With Good Headlines

You want to write compelling headlines. After all, it’s your only shot at attracting the attention of people ping-ponging all over the Internet.

You need to get eyeballs on your content if you are to have any chance of building your online business or blog.

The first step in that battle is unfortunately buried in the quality of your headline. It seems almost unfair that the entirety of your content’s brilliance is judged with a passing glance at your simple headline, but that’s the cruel world we live in. So get used to it Bucko!

If you write a shitty headline, nobody clicks and you die a silent online death.

If you write an epic headline or at least a functional one you at least have a puncher’s chance.

Pay Attention to the Headlines You See Every Day

One of your best allies in the fight to find a quality headline is by paying attention to the headlines you see all day.

This is one of those strategies that entrepreneurs like me happen to use as we browse online. I like to look at the headlines employed by the websites I visit to see what I might learn from them or to see how they are being effective in making me click.

This is especially true with major websites such as Yahoo. I love to swipe through their app and quickly review their headline mastery. It’s mastery because they have a whole cadre of brilliant copywriters crafting awesome, compact, and compelling headlines.

What You Can Learn From the Big Boys

Given the particular advantage these major news outlets and industry blogs have, you should take every opportunity you have to be more perceptive and learn from their proven techniques.

I recently ran an experiment on my phone by visiting Yahoo and I want to share some trends and commonalities that I noticed.

For instance, one particular tendency I found was that most of the headlines piqued the reader’s curiosity and used a level of mystery as to what might be revealed in the particular article.

The headlines left you asking questions such as “who?”, “what happened”, “how”, etc.

By making the reader form a question in their mind, they are much more apt to take action and click on the article to get the answer to their question.

My Experiment Results

Let’s take a look at all 55 headlines in the Yahoo app at the time of this experiment to see if you recognize the strategies employed by Yahoo to get you to click.

Really take the time to look at each headline and try to understand what the copywriter was hoping to achieve by wording it the way they did.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see, these headlines provide a great look under the covers of the strategy behind great headlines.

Most of them elicited a response from the reader that would make them want to click the link out of pure curiosity. Many of them used current events and capitalized on the news of the day.

Some used celebrities or your standard bearers when it comes to Internet fluff (see the Rock and Kim Kardashian).

Start to pay attention to what successful websites are doing with their headlines and you’ll be better positioned to benefit on your own blog.