How to Write Catchy Headlines Customers Can't Resist [6 Secrets]

Writing great content is a good starting point, but getting it to be read is another. This is where a good title comes in. 

Titles are what helps to sell the content that you spend hours painstakingly creating. Titles are represented in search engines, email, and social media. It comes as no surprise that searching for ways to write and craft titles is on everyone's list as their number 1 concern.

Here are some of the frequent questions that are asked. How long should my headline be? What words should I use? What words should I avoid? Should I optimize it for search or for social or both?

Here's where this article comes in. We've come up with a quick formula that makes this method easily repeatable. This is a valuable resource for our team and it will be a valuable resource for anyone who's just starting out.

The secret to writing catchy headlines your customers can't resist.

1) Start with a working title.

Start with an idea / a rough draft. This is your working title. This is a stepping stone for you to come up with your perfect title.

Don't confuse a working title with a topic. Topics are general ideas, and how a writer chooses to tackle the direction of the topic can affect the outcome.

A working title on the other hand is very specific. It serves the purpose of guiding the creation of a single blog post. 

Here's an example

A topic covering:

1. Sales. 

You can come up with the following working titles:

1. How the Right Tools Can Help You to Sell More
2. The Ultimate Guide to Sales Tools
3. 5 Crazy Tips to Help You Close Sales Quickly

You would have noticed by now that each of these working titles are different, it also shows that none of those titles is perfect. But it does serve as a specific enough guide for your upcoming content.

2) Stay accurate

Accuracy is extremely critical. Don't downplay this. It sets the expectations of what a reader expects to see. Don't do this. Don't overkill and overwrite a claim in your title. Unless, of course, you have evidence for it in your content.

For example, 10 Crazy Solutions That Give you Instant Sales, All Other Sales Methods Fail to Compare. Unless, of course, you really have the suggested 10 crazy solutions, if not you're likely to create more distrust in your brand and organisation than what was initially intended.

One way to be accurate is to add a bracket with the following few words [New Report], [Latest for 2021]. This sets a clear expectation and readers know exactly what they are getting themselves into. 

3) Make it sexy

Being accurate does not mean you can't find ways to make your title pop. There's an art to language and you should not be afraid to use it.

• Have some fun with alliteration
• Use strong language
• Make values clear
• Make it visual
• Focus on the "who" not the "why"

4) Keep it short

There isn't a one-size-fits-all solution to how long or short your title should be. All we can suggest is it depends on what your goals are. Knowing your goals will guide how and where your headline would appear.

There are many suggestions as to how title length will have an impact on email / social / search / etc. So it really depends on what your objectives are. A great way to learn what works is to run a few tests to see what works best for the particular audience you are targetting.

5) Try to optimize for both search and social at the same time

It's very hard to optimize one asset for everything. But there's nothing stopping you from being able to deliver for both.

The secret? Focus on keywords you know your audience is already searching for and find what works across different channels.

One great tip is to make sure that your headlines are tweetable. Try keeping it within the 120-130 character range if possible because this leaves so much space for people to include a short comment if they choose to manually retweet and cite you.

6) Brainstorm with someone with a fresh outlook on your title

Sometimes looking at things too long can lock you into a perspective that is sometimes difficult to break out of. The goal is to get another person to mutually agree on a title for that content that you are publishing. This doesn't need to belong. All you need to make sure is that you have a few ideas on a list for you to discuss things together.

Conclusion

Titles are integral to sales. It leads the person's interest in content to allow for information to be communicated.