9 seconds.
That’s the attention span of your customers on the Internet, and that’s how long you have to grab their attention and persuade them to engage with your blog post.
This means that crafting the perfect blog title is vital in order for you to compete in this 9-second attention world. And to help you, here are 9 steps you can follow to write the perfect blog title.
#1 Write for one person – before figuring out what to write, you need to know who you are writing for…and then focus completely on connecting with that one person. It might be a customer you already know, or a persona that you create to help focus your writing.
#2 Make it engaging – having decided who you are writing for, the next step is to make your title engaging. That’s a very clichéd thing to say, but the question is…how do you do this? After all, what’s compelling to someone who loves steak may not be compelling to someone who’s a vegetarian.
And so the key to making your title engaging is to think about your customer’s fears and desires…and then make a compelling promise that addresses them.
#3 Keep it short and sweet – keeping your title short and sweet is vital. Since your customer is likely to come across your title in the SERPs of Google, keeping your title under the 70 character limit guarantees that your customer will be able to read the title in its entirety.
#4 Think about keywords – the issue that trips many people up in writing blog titles is whether or not they should write an engaging title for their reader, or stuff their title with keywords that will delight the search engines. This is a tricky step. But the goal is to write a title that enables you to delight your reader using the keywords that they are searching for.
#5 Use headline templates – similar to baking, there are numerous headline ‘recipes’ or ‘templates’ that you can use to make the headline writing process easier and faster. You can find numerous headline templates using Google, and here are a few links to templates that you can use right now:
• 10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work
• 41 Classic Copywriting Headline Templates
• 5 Headline Templates That Grab Readers
• 15 Twitter Headline Templates That Pull Twitter Traffic
#6 Learn from others – as well as using headline templates, look at what your competitors are doing as well as others in your industry and beyond. Observing what’s working (and not working) is the fastest way to learn how to write a perfect blog post title. Here are some actual examples to inspire you:
• Do You Make These Mistakes In English?
• The Amazing Secrets of a One-Legged Golfer
• Amazing Human Computer Humiliates Wall Street for 21 Consecutive Years
• Boy Eats Own Head
• How Chipper Jones Saved Atlanta Braves Star From Epic Snowstorm Traffic Jam
#7 Write your headline first – writing a blog post without a headline is like boarding a train without checking its direction. In other words, you have no idea over where you’ll end up, or whether it’s somewhere you want to go in the first place. Writing your headline first gives you direction and lets you know where you are trying to take your reader.
#8 Write more than one headline – writing more than one headline forces you to dig deep in really thinking about what headline would engage your reader’s 9-second attention span. The art of perfecting your blog titles is found in constant writing. Or as the brilliant writer Ernest Hemingway said: “The only kind of writing is rewriting.”
#9 Get feedback – they say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And the only person who gets to decide whether your blog title is ‘perfect’ is your reader. So get feedback on the headlines you’ve written from actual customers, do split-tests on the different headlines, and then learn from the feedback that you get.
If you’re looking for a team of specialists to help you with developing excellent website content, writing compelling blog titles, and engaging your customers…contact Graphic Alliance by clicking here now.
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