5 Formulas to Use When Creating Cracking Headlines

Good copywriting can be a difficult skill to master and headlines should be the main star. They not only tell prospective readers what the article is about but help them decide whether or not it's relevant to them.

Here are five headline formulas that will help your content get all the attention it deserves:

What's the question?

Asking a question in your title is a great way to engage an audience with any content marketing strategy. Anyone that sees the article will be naturally curious, leading to a higher click-through rate (CTR). For the best results and good copywriting, ensure the question is tied into a key pain point or motivation that your audience has.

Examples

Are Your Employees Engaged?

Is Your Company Living Up to its Business Plan?

Can Desktop Still Compete with Mobile?

These articles all have a strong idea of who their audience is and have developed content topics that address key concerns this demographic has. This can be an extremely effective way of giving your readers something of genuine value.

How to...

How-to guides are the bread and butter of many professional blogs, helping your audience to better understand a key area of interest. For brands that are looking to position themselves as an authority in their industry or develop a positive reputation for themselves among consumers, these articles can be an effective and valuable resource.

Examples

How to Move Your Organization To Zero-Base Budgeting

How Quality Content Can Improve Your Blog Visibility

How the Internet of Things is Changing the Future of the Supply Chain

It's not just text-based content that you can use to help consumers understand niche or complicated topics. Infographics and videos can make it easier to explain in-depth matters or processes and deciding on the title for these types of content is just as important.

Be specific

If your content marketing strategy is focused around a niche area, then using terms that are specific to your key industry can lead to positive results. Headlines like these are usually a little longer but can effectively communicate your message to a specific audience.

Examples

5 Ways to Prepare For Invoice Processing At Scale

Increase Your CTR with Google Advanced Snippets

How To Create an Ecommerce Email Marketing Campaign That Drives ROI

You may be targeting a smaller number of readers than when using broad-ranging words but the success rate should be much higher.

X is the magic number

From the Financial Times to the Daily Mail, writers at every level of journalism use this trick to engage their readers. Putting a number into your headline is proven to increase interest and also gives your article a good structure.

Examples

4 Ways HR Can Improve the Retention of Women in the Workplace

Ten Ways to Safeguard Your Savings Income

7 Effective Tips for Growing Sales Using Social Media

Using numbers in your headlines is also a great way to seamlessly use keywords in your title, allowing you to organically generate visitors.

Do the impossible

If your content tells people how to discover a secret or achieve the impossible, who isn't going to click on it? Bold titles that promise to innovate a process or find the answer to a long-puzzled-over question will boost your readership.

Examples

5 Ways to Solve All Your Problems

Filling the Unfillable: How to Hire That Hard to Find Talent

10 Website Homepages to Make You Jealous

Make sure you use an element of caution with this one though. You need to ensure that you're not just creating clickbait and that your headline matches up to the actual website copy. Even more important, you should make sure that each article produced on your blog fits into a wider content marketing strategy or all the headlines in the world will be useless.