Publications always have the benefit of wrapping their headlines and titles with powerful imagery or explanations. In the digital realm, those luxuries often do not exist. Everyone’s content looks very similar in a Tweet or Search Engine Result. We must grab busy readers’ attention better than our competitors so that they click-through and get the content they are seeking.
On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent 80 cents out of your dollar.
David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man
Notice I did not say how to write clickbait, or how to get readers just to click. Every time you do that, you lose the hard-earned trust of your reader. And trust is the desire of every marketer who wishes to do business with their next reader. It’s why most clickbait sites aren’t selling anything but ad space. They need numbers to increase their ad rates, not the trust of those visitors.
Salesforce Canada has put together an infographic, How to Write Powerful Headlines That Demand Attention. In it, they speak to utilizing the following methodology.
SHINE Method of Writing Good Titles
- S – Be specific about the topic that you’re writing about.
- H – Be helpful. Providing value to your audience increases their faith and trust in you as an authority.
- I – Be immediately interesting. Generic keyword-stuffed titles don’t cut it.
- N – Be newsworthy. If someone else has written a better article, share theirs and save your time!
- E – Be entertaining. Marketing speak and industry lingo is going to put your audience to sleep.
The infographic recommends CoSchedule’s Blog Post Headline Analyzer, which provided me with a B+ on this headline. This score was high because of the How to element. The overall score is based on their Emotional Marketing Value algorithm which predicts how well the headline will be shared based on the vocabulary used.
One simple trick that great copywriters continue to show me that works is how to wrap your title around the word you or your so that you are forced to speak directly to the reader. Speaking directly to your reader personalizes the experience and builds an instant connection between you and your reader, encouraging your readers to click-through to read the rest.
