I am terrible at writing headlines. And it can take me a very long time to come up with even a boring headline. It just isn’t one of my strengths. When I wrote primarily for consumer pubs and newspapers, my lack of talent for zippy headlines didn’t matter since the editors wrote all the headlines. While this worked the majority of the time, there were several unfortunate headlines given to my work most notably the essay about refusing to cut the crusts off of my kid’s sandwiches that ran in the local paper with the headline “Not a Crusty Mother.”

However, when writing content marketing deliverables, especially blogs, white papers and web articles, the clients now expect the writer to come up with great headlines. This is especially true for smaller businesses where you are working with non-writer types. Writers who have the natural gift of catchy headlines are ahead of the game on this. But as hard as I try, I am not in that group. But since clients judge writers on page views and great headlines drive page views, it is an important skill for all writers to learn. I recently spent some time researching best practices and learned the following key points:

1. You don’t just want people to click your headline, you want the right people to click your headline. We are so conditioned that we want high page views and as many clicks as possible. In fact entire websites (yes, Buzzfeed and Upworthy, I am talking about you!) pride themselves on sensational headlines. But in content marketing, the goal is to solve the problems of your target audience and to build trust in the brand. So, you want the headline to get the people who are likely to buy the brand’s products and services to click on the headline. If you get a gazillion views, but they are not the specific audience that is interested in the brand, then honestly the piece of content is ineffective. Content Marketing Institute’s article How Headlines Can Help Your Online Content Find its Audience: 3 tips does a fantastic job of explaining this and giving specific advice on how to achieve this.

2. Yes, Keywords are important. You can improve the search engine rank of your content by using the right keyword and placing it near the beginning of the title. People are also going to read your article if they know exactly what it is about and the earlier that question is answered in the headline, the better. Bullets 3 and 4 on Content Marketing Institute’s article Content Strategy for Awesome Blog Post Titles  provide excellent insight on this.

3. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. If you are stuck, look at the many different lists available of proven headlines to get some inspiration. I personally found Copyblogger’s e-book How to Write Magnetic Headlines (You have to register to download, but it is worth the 30 seconds for this book and the many other free resources on the site) to be the best source of headline ideas.  On the flip side, be sure to note headlines formulas that will most likely backfire on you.

4. Length matters. A lot of really smart people have spent tons of time researching the optimal length for headline. But interestingly, the length and format of the headline depends on if you are planning on primarily focusing on social media, search engines or email to distribute your content. So determine how you want people to find your content and then use the very detailed research from CoSchedule to find out the length you should aim for. I also highly recommend using CoSchedule’s Free Headline Analyzer when experimenting with different headlines. I found their analysis of important, unimportant, power and emotional words to be very interesting and helpful.

Do you have any tips for writing great headlines? Any particularly bad headlines that have been given to your work by editors? What do you find hardest about writing headlines?