How To Write Headlines That Get Clicks

Every 60 seconds, there are 216,000 Instagram updates, 277,000 tweets, 2,460,000 content shares on Facebook,and hundreds of thousands of other content being shared across other social networks and messaging app.

So how are you going to get your readers to read the article you took hours to research, write, and edit?

Headlines. And it is becoming more important with each new social platform. Being inundated with hundreds, if not thousands, of updates every day, the average person often only skim through their social updates in search of contents that interests them at first sight.

You Decide To Read This Article Because Of Its Headline

Now you see how important headlines are?

8/10 of readers will read your headline, while only 2/10 will read your article. Furthermore, once these people have reached your page, about 38% would bounce off the page even before they read your first paragraph.

So to ensure your article get the attention it deserves, you have to write headlines that make people want to find out more.

And You Were Interested In The Headline Because It Appealed To Your Self-Interest

John Caples mentioned four main important qualities a headline may posses: self-interest, news, curiosity, quick and easy; and ranked self-interest as the most important one of all.

Why is self-interest so important? Because readers are paying to read the article with their time — a precious and limited commodity nowadays. This is especially true since now we need to make ourselves available to at least 2-3 different social media platforms.

In order to appeal to your audience’s self interest, you have to first understand them, their needs, problems, and right down to the words they are most likely to use to address these issues.

Find Out What Appeals To Your Customer’s Self-Interest

Please everyone and you would please no one.

Understand the demographic and behaviour of your most profitable group of customers and start working from there. By focusing yourself on one specific customer, you will be able to find out his or her deepest wants and needs and craft your offer from there.

Find out how your customers word their self-interest: Google’s Keyword Planner and Google Trend

If you did your customer’s persona research, you would most probably have a list of your customer’s pain point, worries, and goals that they wish to achieve.

But knowing your customers’ pain points aren’t enough; you need to understand how they “think”, specifically how they search.

Take a look at this example between “how to generate leads” and “how to generate sales”. Sales and leads are closely related terms, and both leads to the same goal — revenue.

As you can see, “how to generate leads” is searched far more often as compared to “how to generate sales”. So remember that even though your content might be one of the best on the web, it won’t be read if you get the headline wrong.

But sometimes people don’t really know what they want till they see it. So how do you find out what your readers want if they aren’t searching it on search engines?

This is where Buzzsumo can help; it helps to gauge your customer’s interest through the number of social share a particular topic/keyword gets.

It allows you to categorise your result with date, type of content, country, and language. It also has an advance search function that lets you refine your search through words exclusion, url, author name etc. You can even categorise it based on the most shares for a specific network.

With these tools and information, you would then be able to craft a compelling offer from your headline. That’s not all though… you would still be able to improve on it with some tried and proven headline methods from John Caples.

Some of my favourites here:

• Start your headline with the word “New” — Given that a lot of the contents and products now are variations or outright duplicate of existing content (just take a look at the app store), the word “new” gives readers hope that they might find something different in your content.
• Offer information of value — As we mention before, readers are paying to read your article with their time, so if you promise them valuable information, they might just click on it.
• Be specific in your headline — Aim to be specific if you feature data or social proof in your headline. For example, write “How My Blog Post Brought 286 backlinks. And Counting!” rather than “How My Blog Post Brought Over 200 Backlinks. And Counting!”. You are more convincing when you are specific.
• Offer a shortcut — I am sure all of your are familiar with “list posts” (e.g. 10 ways…, 3 days to…, etc.). And the reason why these list posts works is because they offer a promise of achieving success in a short period of time.

Hopefully these tips gave you some inspiration for your next headlines. Feel free to share other tips below in the comments!

http://www.hashmeta.com/blog/write-headlines-get-clicks/

How to Write Good Copy

Free TIPS on How to Write Good Copy

I can stress enough how important it is to learn and get good at knowing how to write good copy.

At the start of my Internet marketing career, a few years ago, I didn’t know much about this at all. writing good copy is basically communicating well with readers through words. I guess it’s one of those things that some people are better at than others.

I’ll go through five tips below that I have learned over the last few months from some of the GREATEST marketers out there. It is cool to have good mentors and to just have them there as a base to learn off and follow when you aren’t sure exactly what you need to do. Feeling me???

How to Write Good Copy

So let’s get to work and go through some steps that will make it easier for you.

Steps on How to Write Good Copy

Step #1 Write like you talk. It’s that simple.

Have you heard of this before? Before I really knew much about marketing and advertising or what people do on the Internet, I always thought people had to be really professional to attract customers. Don’t get me wrong, I run a professional business and do the right thing by my customers but I don’t write proper.

It is an easy mistake to make when you get started but just don’t do it. Don’t over-complicate things and just write how you speak. You will connect better with your customers and get your message across. It is cool to see people doing it and how their personality really shows through like in the picture above Just remember grammar a little bit but really it doesn’t matter that much at all. be fun, be your self and write EXACTLY how you talk!

STEP #2 Be one-on-one. ‘Hey, it’s just you and me here right?’

DOn’t write as if you are giving a lecture to a million people. Write as if it’s just you and me sitting in Starbucks having a coffee or something like that. Get it? Just chill out and connect with people. When you have a business you are actually selling yourself first and then your product. People are buying you. If they like and trust you, you could potentially have a lifetime customer right in front of you! Awesome feeling or what?

Step # 3 Don’t write in massive paragraphs and long winded sentences that will confuse your reader no-end.

This point is fairly self explanatory right? You can write a lot but be direct. Don’t put too many ideas in one sentence. Makes it easier to read right? Don’t put more than a MAX of 3 sentences per paragraph and you can basically just keep writing forever! This is a massive tip on how to write good copy and keep your readers interested.

Step # 4  Tell your story.

Let people know who are. If you just be yourself, people will relate to you. Don’t try and complicate things and say stuff that isn’t true and stuff that just makes you sound like a whole different person. As with a lot of business, just keep it simple. The first blog I ever created, I made that many mistakes it just wasn’t funny from OVER-complicating stuff.

Dumb it down and keep it straight-forward and real!

Step #5 Break your article up with pictures and videos.

It makes for way cooler reading and will keep your readers engaged. Who just wants to look at words all day right? These pictures will also help you heaps with your SEO if you are blogging or running a website.

So these are a few tips that I have put together for you to learn how to write good copy.

Remember, practice makes perfect so just get out there and start writing.http://www.colinburnett.com/how-to-write-good-copy/