The purpose of a headline is to draw your reader in. You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to write an article, so you definitely want your audience to read it! It’s important to come up with a headline that’s catchy and makes the readers ask themselves, “What’s coming next?”

Write 40 Headlines

If you want to write a good headline, then write at least 40 possible headlines. From those 40 headlines, you can then go ahead and choose your favourite. After 40 headlines, you’re bound to have all sorts of ideas. They will range in quality from “I’m too embarrassed to show anyone this” to “wow I nailed it!”

Just remember that when you’re writing headlines, do not edit yourself. We’d love to believe that intelligence, wit, and humour flows from our fingers and onto the computer screen – but that won’t always be the case. At times you’ll feel that a particularly distracted chimpanzee at his typewriter would do a better job than the shamefully bad headline you just wrote. Don’t worry about it. Just breathe and move on to writing the next headline. If you write 40 headlines, then you’ll definitely find one or two that you’ll like.

Keep It Simple, Stupid

Make your headline quick and catchy. It shouldn’t be boring; you should intrigue the reader into wanting to read on. If you write a long headline like “Here’s a brand new gadget that will help you to crack eggs without getting shells in the bowl,” your audience will be bored before they finish reading it. Keep the headline short and engaging.

Having said that, don’t just stop at a one or two word headline! A headline like “Lipstick” or “Clean more” won’t engage the reader. Even if your article is amazing, ground-breaking, life-changing, and earth-shattering, it won’t matter. Your reader hasn’t been given a reason to read it, and so they likely won’t.

Don’t sell

People are bombarded with thousands of articles and advertisements every day. Your audience isn’t stupid. They can smell a sales pitch from a mile away, and they will tune out immediately. Your product may be the best thing since sliced bread, but that doesn’t change the fact that no one likes being sold to.

Just think about the last time you saw an advertisement in a magazine. Did you get excited and want to read about it? Probably not. You probably stuck to the articles that seemed interesting and informative – even if those articles were surreptitiously selling something.

So avoid writing headlines that sound like you’re trying to sell. If, for example, you were trying to writing a headline for a cleaning product, it would be better not to say “We’re having a 15% sale on our cleaning products,” and instead write something like “Now you can get really dirty on a Saturday night.”

5 Types of Effective Headlines

How-to headlines

How-to headlines can be intriguing. You can fulfil a reader’s need to know something, which will make them more likely to read on. A how-to headline can be as simple as “How to build your own website in 20 minutes.” It’s not wildly creative, but anyone who is interested in building a website will probably continue reading.

How-to headlines don’t necessarily need to start off with the “How to…” formula though. Sometimes the how-to part is implicit in what’s being said. If, for example, you were trying to sell a premium brand of whiskey, you could give a how-to about drinking it: “Ice drowns big ships and good whiskey”

Create a ‘happy negative’ headline

This is one of the hardest types of headlines to write, though it can be extremely effective. The idea here is to say that your product will do something that is seemingly negative, but which is in fact clearly beneficial to the reader.

One of the best examples of this is a famous headline from The Economist. Their magazine is marketed as making readers smarter. Hence the headline: “Lose the ability to slip out of meetings unnoticed.” It seems to be a negative thing (you can’t slip out of meetings), but is clearly positive (you will be valued).

Question-driven headline

This can be one of the easiest types of headlines to write – so long as the question is an interesting one! It should also be relevant to the brand that you’re representing, of course. It’s particularly important to keep these headlines short, as questions can quickly turn into a 30-word snoozefest.

The best way to know whether it’s a good question or not, is to ask yourself honestly whether you would care about it. Would you be interested if you were asked this question, or would your eyes glaze over?

So if you had an article about a cleaning service that tidies people’s homes, a straightforward question might be: “Could your house do with a tidy?” That’s fine, but it’s a bit boring. Slightly more intriguing would be “Do you really know what’s hiding under your bed?”

Emotion-driven headline

Create a headline that tugs at the heartstrings, and your reader is bound to want to know what happens next. This works particularly well if you are representing a brand with a serious message, where humour definitely would not be appropriate. For example, if you were writing for a cancer trust, you might say something like “Eighteen-year-old John is one skydive away from completing his bucket list.”

Particularly innovative, witty, or intriguing headlines

This style takes a lot of practice and isn’t easy to do. Avoid clichés like the plague (please excuse the obvious irony of that statement).

There are no hard and fast rules to write something that’s innovative, witty, and intriguing. It may come out of your 40 headlines, and it may not. Just remember to try to think of a quirky way to say a simple thought. For example, if you had an article about the health benefits of iron tablets, then you may want to say: “Iron will keep your body strong.” A more interesting way of doing this is to say “Pick up 2 grams of iron daily for a powerful body.” This is the time to experiment with words and have a bit of fun with it.