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3 Simple Questions That Help You Write Better Headlines

written by Stefanie Flaxman
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3 Simple Questions That Help You Write Better Headlines

Writers are communicators, and if you’re proud of your ideas, you’ll definitely want to learn how to write better headlines.

Headlines are your first opportunity to present your marketing story to the audience you want to reach, so you want to be able to communicate your most important points clearly and precisely.

The language you use should appeal to those people and make them want to find out more.

How to write better headlines

Once you’ve learned how to write a headline with your target keyword phrase, incorporate the prompts below into your writing habits to go beyond basic headline formulas.

These questions help ensure your title is the most effective it can be:

  1. Who will benefit from this content?
  2. How do I help them?
  3. What makes this content special?

The answers to these questions most likely won’t produce the exact headline you’ll use, though.

Rather, they’ll help shape your headline draft into a persuasive message that reaches and connects with the people you want to attract to your content. They’ll also help you write killer subheadings.

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Your answers are the keys to writing better headlines

To keep the process of infusing your headline with meaning and fascination simple, I recommend answering each question in one to two sentences.

If you need to write more, it’s a strong sign you should fine-tune your goal for the content before revisiting these questions that’ll teach you how to write better headlines.

Let’s look at the important information each question will help you assess and how the answers will transform your headline.

1. Who will benefit from this content?

The first part of this headline writing tutorial is reviewing your title draft to make sure you use language that intrigues your audience.

For example, your target audience may be marine biologists who have a tendency to procrastinate.

If your title only says, “10 Tips to Beat Procrastination,” for example, you can look for ways to write better headlines by adding words that will attract marine biologists. And you don’t have to explicitly announce, “Hey marine biologists who have a tendency to procrastinate, this content is for you!”

You could try:

10 Tips to Beat Procrastination Faster than a Black Marlin

(A black marlin is one of the fastest fish.)

2. How do I help them?

People don’t wake up in the morning automatically excited to read content.

The promises certain pieces of content make to expand people’s understanding or knowledge of a topic persuade them to read content throughout the day.

And when you learn how to write subheadings, you continually persuade someone to keep reading the article in front of them. The content may even change their lives.

Your tips might help marine biologists accomplish tasks faster, and if they can accomplish tasks faster, they’re less likely to put them off.

Here, you can learn how to write better headlines by adding another benefit to the title:

10 Time-Saving Tips to Beat Procrastination Faster than a Black Marlin

3. What makes this content special?

You may now realize that while a lot of other articles focus on “beating procrastination,” your content is special because it shows how to simplify and organize your daily marine biology to-do list so that each task is manageable.

Now you’ll want to revise a few words from your original headline:

10 Time-Saving Tips to Zip Through Your Work Day Faster than a Black Marlin

Write better headlines that are custom-tailored for your content

We started this exercise about how to write better headlines with the title:

10 Tips to Beat Procrastination

The final result is custom-tailored:

10 Time-Saving Tips to Zip Through Your Work Day Faster than a Black Marlin

If you’re a marine biologist with a tendency to procrastinate, which headline would you click on?

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Reader Comments (36)

  1. Time-saving work day tips faster than a Black Marlin

    Save time with these work day tips faster than a Black Marlin

    You can be faster than a Black Marlin with these work day tips

  2. Hi Stefanie, thanks for the nice tips. In fact, it boosted my power of writing headlines. I’m grateful to all the writers of Copyblogger for publishing quality posts in a regular basis.

    Keep publishing more and more articles so that we can be benefited with those.

    Good Luck

  3. Thanks for another useful, actionable little article! It’s testament to that old adage re: good things coming in small packages. I’m in the process of rewriting a headline and lead right now so this is great timing!!

  4. Hi! I’m a newbie with blogging and this is really helpful. I do not think too much with a headline but now I realized the importance of it. Thanks for the tips!

  5. The final headline is indeed intriguing, informative, has got a number in it and offers a solid value proposition. But don’t you think the sheer length of it would deter a segment of the audience? The “low-attention span” factor could be a possible turn off for a select few.

    • That’s a great point! If you’re concerned about the length, you can keep fine-tuning until you get the best version for your audience and website. That’s a fun part of this exercise … it looks like other people in the comments are experimenting with their own versions too. 🙂

    • Yes! I am a strong believer in using action verbs. I have been spending a lot more time on my headlines and I am really seeing strong results.

  11. Thank you for yet another useful article. I’ve shared this with my team. Keeping our reader’s needs front-and-center always helps us focus on the benefits.

  12. Hey Stefanie,

    I would definitely love the final headline because, it has every thing that can force someone to go even further and click to open the post. The only thing that I want to convince here is; don’t you think the title length is too much and it would not be readable for Google in terms of SEO.
    Either way, Its a nice write up.
    Thanks for sharing!
    Riyaz

  15. This is truly a helpful post for people like my who most of time end up writing a headline in the same tone. My headlines are either questions or tips with the simple words like “How to beat procrastination for a more productive day?”

    I also try to check the score at different tools like Coschedule headline anlayzer, and usually get score between 55 to 70.

  16. Once again awesome article..Headlines is very important. As I am mostly click on catchy headlines that are related to my search.

  20. Headline is an awesome tool for almost all but when you write for many people, you should be a lazer and send correct message in seconds. I like make short a/b test headlines using facebook ads with Adespresso. In 3 hours max I can see the best performace in my headlines previously to publish.

  22. Hey Stefanie,

    I am enjoying the articles more and more here. I think one thing you missed (and may be I would like to add it in a blog post later 😉 is the online headlines suggestion tools which are available freely. These tools won’t of course replace a human completely, but I have seen that their suggestions can bring up words which otherwise generally do not come to our mind easily.

    Regards
    Sai

  23. Catchy Headlines plays a very important role in getting CTR. Thanks for tutorial on writing better headlines. I will be waiting for your new post.

  24. I agree with Riyaz that the headline in this example is too long, so I appreciate your comment to keep tweaking it for your audience. It goes to show that everyone, and every audience, is different. Thanks for sharing your tips and suggestions.

  25. Hi Stephanie, I do wake up to read content – LOL. I do but anyways I LOVE your analogy with the marine biologists. That tip was very helpful. Thank you! I am always working on making better headlines along with the content.

  27. A catchy headlines is extremely important to capture audiences attention. Thank you for these tips.

  28. Hi Stephanie,
    I could totally get point 1 and point 2. But when it comes to point 3, I felt like I got lost in a maze.
    The article started with How to stop procrastination keeping Marine Biologists in mind.
    But, when it ended in Step 3, the focus word stop procrastination is gone.

    From an SEO standpoint, this may not look good, if my focus keyword was how to stop procrastination.

    My Doubt is, should I ignore the focus word while thinking about Step 3, ie: saying how the content is special?

    • Hi Vaishak,

      Thanks for your great question about how these steps relate to SEO.

      If your focus keyword is “beat procrastination,” you have a couple of options.

      First, you might want to use this version for your SEO title:

      10 Tips to Beat Procrastination Faster than a Black Marlin

      And then use the more detailed version as the headline for your post — the one that your subscribers will see (and hopefully share):

      10 Time-Saving Tips to Zip Through Your Work Day Faster than a Black Marlin

      That way, the post satisfies your SEO needs and you have a more custom headline for your community to see and share.

      Or, you could get more creative in step 3 and craft a custom headline that also works for SEO. Something like:

      Beat Procrastination Faster than a Black Marlin: 10 Time-Saving Tips to Zip Through Your Work Day

      I hope that helps!

  29. Great blog post Stefanie and such a good breakdown of how to think about what you will be posting before simply setting off and writing something people wont be looking for. I like to create a sense of urgency, identify a problem which someone may not have thought about (I use Google Trends alot for this) and then create a plan for the fix of a problem you weren’t even aware you had – or the true problem, if this makes sense. I like how you approach this and will use it in my next blog post. I write both fiction and non-fiction pieces as well a speaches. I have a series on Anglo-Saxons as well as a fictional murder mystery set in Anglo-Saxon times where the would-be detective is name Father Eadred. Anyways, I really enjoyed this post and will be sure to read more of your posts in the future.
    best regards
    Lindsay

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