Content Marketing Today

How to Avoid 5 Bad Headline Mistakes That Can Torpedo Your Blog Readership

What I learned from my own blog posts that were poorly read: It’s all about the headline. 

Although quite a few of the articles I have written over the past year were well read, a disconcerting number were hardly read it all.  To understand why, I took a hard look at the articles to see if I could discern a pattern that will enable me to improve readership in 2009. 

There is an obvious  common thread: everything relates to headlines. Here are the five most important things about my headlines that got in the way of the story.  By avoiding these headline blunders, you can count on increasing readership.

1. Just because a headline amuses me doesn’t mean that it will inspire readership. If you are a witty writer, that’s terrific.  That means the text of your article will likely engage your readers and inspire them to come back for more.  But a witty headline won’t work to lure your prospective readers into the article unless it carries an obvious benefit. Even worse, it may be only funny to you and leave your visitors scratching their heads.
2. Headlining an article about ourselves and our accomplishments might interest our friends, but it won’t interest most of our readers. When good things happen, you want to share them.  Sometimes the news may be very exciting to you.  For example, when our book got picked up by McGraw-Hill that was a huge deal for Joe and me.  But, unless we can write an article that integrates that news flash with lessons about how to succeed at content marketing, we may bore the pants off our readers.
3. A clever headline does not necessarily translate into good readership.  A headline that seems clever to me may simply be meaningless to the majority of readers. For example, “RSS is Really Simple… No, Really!” was the headline I used for very practical article to explain what RSS is and how to use it.  I still think it’s a pretty clever headline, but it sure doesn’t communicate the benefit or the essence of the article itself.
4. A headline that is too oblique or unclear fails everytime. Because everyone is in a hurry, you don’t have much time to grab a reader’s attention.  If your reader has to guess the point of the article because the headline doesn’t make it obvious, he will probably breeze right by. Thus, my headline “Best Content Marketing Powered by Story Factor” doesn’t explain anything about the “story factor” or how a reader could make use of the information in the actual article.
5. Big companies like Microsoft when featured in the headline usually did not generate good readership–even when there are critical lessons to be learned for small and medium businesses. I’m still not quite sure why this is true.  I try to use examples from large companies that smaller companies can easily apply.  Nonetheless, my guess is that readers see a big company name and cannot intuitively grasp how anything that such a large company does would be relevant to their own content marketing efforts.  So, unless your target readers identify with the marketing practices of large organizations, you might want to leave their names out of your headlines.

Five headlines that did drive readership

Below are links to some of our most popular recent posts whose headlines have obviously performed much better than some of my losers.  In fact, each of these has had more than a thousand readers.  Conversely, quite a few articles that have valuable content, but are burdened by bad headlines, have attracted as few as 40 or 50 readers.

For each of these headlines, there is either an obvious benefit or, in the case of Cosmo, the proof that sex sells when added to an implicit benefit.

• Sexy Headline Secrets from Cosmo!
• 6 Ways Content Marketing Can Help You Survive the Recession
• When You Are the Brand, Content Marketing Is Crucial
• The Secret to Online Marketing in the 21st Century : It’s the Content, Stupid!
• To Succeed Small Business Marketers Must Unlearn Traditional PR

The bottom line: I always knew that headlines were important. But until I examined my poorly read articles, I didn’t realize just how incredibly Important they are.