How to Write Awe­some Headlines

The impor­tance of know­ing how to write awe­some head­lines has become cru­cial if you reg­u­larly write for the web. Just like on a mag­a­zine rack, authors have a split sec­ond to grab your atten­tion, then lure you into seek­ing more based on that brief intro­duc­tion. A strong first sen­tence helps back the title up, but ulti­mately, you need just as awe­some con­tent. That isn’t what this post is about, and there’s plenty of mate­r­ial telling read­ers that “Con­tent is King” on the inter­net and beyond. A fair ques­tion I won­der is that if con­tent is king, then what is the design of a site?

With the pro­lif­er­a­tion of the web, there have become sev­eral trends I’ve noticed which have become more than trends; they’re now very main­stream, for good or bad. That’s firstly the amount of poorly edited copy online, at least for English-based web­sites. I just fin­ished read­ing a post about how it’s essen­tial to spell-check and review gram­mar, and tie up loose ends, and the post itself appeared to be writ­ten by an 8-year-old, that didn’t speak Eng­lish as a first lan­guage. I am well-aware that many non-English speak­ing peo­ple are online, which isn’t the issue. The prob­lem is sloppy writ­ing causes the reader to stum­ble and fight his/her way through your text. That’s not how you win read­ers. How­ever, that’s more of a gripe about some­thing over which I have scant control.

The sec­ond item that has become com­mon­place is writ­ing lists. And just any old lists; list for “The Most Amaz­ing…” or “The Best EVER…” There are a lot of superla­tives that tend to over­state the mag­ni­tude of the piece, and in the spirit of com­pe­ti­tion, every author seems to be striv­ing to out-do the oth­ers in sheer huge­ness. That dead­ens the reader to the actual good stuff that hid­den in the cracks of Twit­ter and Pin­ter­est and other com­mented and authored sites, unfortunately.

So, inline with break­ing nearly every rule I have for writ­ing inter­est­ing con­tent with this one post, I present a free arti­cle that offers 102 proven head­line for­mu­las (There’s that list again). It’s a pdf, so just be aware.

hipsterHere’s how to write the groovi­est titles…