According to my experience, the first thing you need to do if you do not want that your headlines fails, is to ask a question that your readers can’t answer. In this way, your readers think that you have an answer to their problem or get a promise by you, and more probably keep reading your article and discover something they didn’t know, yet.
In these 3 years I’ve used a lot of questions in my headlines to attract my readers in order to attract the reader attention. But isn’t simple. Usually, once wrote a solid post, I think twice before publishing it. First and foremost, I look at the headline, then the content, so I decide if it’s a good post.
Image Credit: Dubbei
Once decided the headline, and published the post, the first thing to do is checking out the response of the article from part of readers. Of course, when you get a huge spike in traffic, it means you’ve nailed the headline.
However, there are other ways to get a response. Usually, to check if the headline is doing well, I look the number of retweets through www.retweet.com. In this way you get a lot of information about how your headline works.
Change Your Headline, A Little Example
Whether your post title fails, one thing you can do is to just rewrite the title a bunch of times on twitter every hour until you get visitors by the title that works.
Just an example of headline I’ve published:
Title: Are Your accused of spam?
What is the mistake?
In this case, the answer to this question could be simply “no.” This headline wasn’t a good choice for the post because most people have never been accused of spam. With this headline visitors may don’t be interested to keep reading the full article.
So, I’ve fixed it, and here the result: Are you sure you’re not doing spam?
This headline sound much better. Why? This headline create in the mind of your visitors a huge doubt: I’m doing a good job? The only solution is to read the full article to have an answer.
Test, Test, Test
Despite the post was launched, the most of the damage has been done. The post was updated in feed readers, digged, and tweeted, and you think that your new post title fail. So, learn from your mistake, and think before update it.
These are some food for thought, but there are other ways you can use to get a successful headlines. So, let me know what are your better ways to avoid a headline fail.
