No matter how great your content is, if it doesn’t get attention from your target audience, it’s useless. It can’t generate traffic and conversion for your business. In other words, it fails to complete its job.

Statistics show that on average, 80% of people will read your content’s headlines, but only 20% of people will read the rest of your article. Statistics show that on average, 80% of people will read your content’s headlines, but only 20% of people will read the rest of your article. Share on X That’s why it’s crucial to come up with winning headlines for your content.

A great blog title is the one that immediately captures the attention of your target audience, makes them take action. Whether it’s going to your website, signing up for your email lists or picking up the phone and call you for a premium consulting session with you or purchasing an item from your ecommerce website. That’s the power of a title.

How can you get better with blog titles that actually generate more clicks and traffic for your website? In this article, we’ll show you 5 effective ways to get more out of your blog titles.

Apply the Popular Headline Formulas

In this section, I’m gonna show you the most popular formulas that make a great blog title or headline that guarantees traffic and conversion. Frankly speaking, it’s truly an art and human psychology when it comes to creating titles or headlines for your blog post.

OK, now let’s take a look at some popular headline formulas:

List Style Titles

List style posts are always the best and generate the most shares, clicks and views.

For example:

If I go to Google and type in “become famous on social media”, the first post comes in is this post “6 Ways to Become Famous on Social Media and Make Money” from Visual Contenting.

This is a list post or we also call it listicles.

Some list style posts that you can also use for your blog posts are:

• 10 _______________ Myths You Need To Know
• 12 Ways You Can ________________________
• 5 Awesome Tips About ____________________
• 10 Creative Ways You Can _________________
• 13 Steps to ______________________________
• 9 Ridiculous Rules About ___________________
• 5 Problems Everyone Has with ______________
• 11 Secrets of ____________________________

So why do list style posts work?

The reason why list style posts rock and can draw readers easily is that it’s eye-catching, shows you values and goes straight to the point. Additionally, it’s easy to read, write and consume.

When we’re looking for something, we want it badly. That said, the post that shows us ways or tips or steps to get what we want tends to get our attention. List style post gives us a sense of what we’ll get out of reading the post and how many new things we can learn from it.

The fact that we human love bullet points makes list style posts our first choice when we’re searching for information on the Internet.

You don’t have to take my words for it. Let’s go searching on Google and see how list style posts triumph over other headline formulas.

OK, now I type in “market your new business on a shoestring budget”. As you can see, a majority of search results have a list style title.

As I click on a result that grabs my attention, I have an informative post of “5 Crucial Tactics to Market Your New Business on a Shoestring Budget”. This article gives me a sense of immediately getting what I’m looking for to market my new business on a shoestring budget.

How-to Titles

The second most popular titles are the how to articles. I’m pretty sure any article that you love reading has a how-to titles.

The reason why this type of posts works is that it’s simply responding to people’s demand on how to do stuff. Undoubtedly, it promises to teach or show you some new vital skills that you’re looking for.

Some How to titles can be:

• Why _________ and How to _______________
• Beginner’s Guide: How to _________________
• How to Create ________ Even If ___________
• ________: What It Is And How to Use It
• X _______ Mistakes And How to Avoid Them

One important thing when creating your blog titles is that you should use colorful adjectives and powerful verbs to conjure visualization and emotions from your readers. In fact, this small little thing often makes them stick to your headlines and click the mouse.

A Guide to Titles

A guide post can attract readers who want to get the most important information about a topic, especially if you have a post with the title A Beginner’s Guide. This type of title will help you attract those who don’t have much knowledge about a specific topic.

Why does A Guide to Post work?

It works simply because it promises to deliver all the necessary information about a topic that one needs to know. Once they read your post, they don’t need to search for more information elsewhere.

Some A Guide to Posts that you can use for your next blog posts are:

• ______________: The Only Guide You Need
• A Beginner’s Guide to ________________
• A Step-By-Step Guide to ______________
• The Advanced Guide to _______________
• A Start-to-Finish Guide _______________
• The In-Depth Guide to ________________
• The Ultimate Guide to ________________

No One Will Tell You Titles or Scarcity Headlines

As human, we don’t want to miss out on anything, do we? Neither do our readers. That said, the title that triggers this scarcity emotion tends to catch many eyeballs from our target audience.

Why does this work, you ask?

The reason is simple. It’s the magic of revealing secret to someone you trust, someone of privilege. In other words, the title gives your readers a feeling of getting the most crucial information that they can’t learn from anyone else. And they’re in the loop and won’t get left behind if they read your post.

For that sense of promise, this type of title works insanely if you put it right.

And remember to only tell the truth. Don’t oversell it. If your content is not up to what you said in the title, you’ll turn them off.

Let’s take a look at some titles using this phrase:

• What No One Will Tell You But You Need to Hear About ____________
• X Things No One Will Tell You Before ________________
• The _______ Advice No One Will Give You
• X _________ Secrets No One Has Told You About __________
• ___________? Here Are X Realities No One Will Tell You

Mistakes to Avoid Titles

Again, as human we are afraid of making mistakes. But we always learn something new from our own mistakes.

What if we don’t make mistakes ourselves yet we still can learn from it? That’s the reason why this title works. This title puts your readers one step forward to learn about the common mistakes they might face doing something.

When you use this type of title, you trigger the fear of making the same mistakes from your target readers. It also promises to give your readers necessary information that they should pay attention to in order to guarantee final success.

Some ideas on this type of titles are:

• _________ Mistakes That Are ____________
• __________ Mistakes And How to Fix Them
• X Mistakes to Avoid When ______________
• How to Fix… Errors That _______________
• X __________ Mistakes to Stop Making Now

Everything You Need to Know Titles

Like the “A Guide to Titles”, this type of titles promise to have all the necessary information you should know about a specific topic. And it helps save a lot of time for your readers once they read your post.

Some titles with “Everything You Need to Know”:

• Everything You Need to Know about __________ And What It Means for __________
• ____________: Everything You Need to Know in X Steps
• ____________: Everything You Need to Know Before __________
• Everything You Need to Know about _________: X Secrets
• A Beginner’s Guide to _________: Everything You Need to Know

Headlines with Popular Phrases

Headlines with some catchy phrases have high possibility to capture your target audience such as

• Here’s Why __________________
• Stop Doing ___________________
• Reasons _______ Will Make You ________________
• What Happened Next ___________________
• What _________ Studies Say about _________
• ______ that Are Proven to ___________
• ______ Ways to be ______ When You Don’t _________
• ______ Data Driven ______ from ____ of the Most Popular _______
• ______ Easy Ways to _____ that Will Skyrocket by _____ in 1 Year
• How to Rock ________ that Will Save You Tons of Time
• How to _______ Your ________ for Massive Growth

Blog Title Generator

If you feel overwhelmed to come up with blog titles that guarantee eyeballs and conversions, this is what you’ll need: blog title generator.

What’s Blog Title Generator?

Blog title generator is a great tool that helps you generate ideas for your next blog post headlines. All you have to do is typing in your keyword and there you go. The tool will give you tons of ideas with your keyword that you can use in your next blog titles.

It’s that simple.

OK, let’s take a look at how we can use this tool in an efficient way.

For example, we have a keyword “online business” (we talk about how to define specific keywords in your niche in the next video) and we want to create a blog post that shows people how to get started with online business or something like that.

As you can see this blog title generator generates a lot of interesting titles related to “online business”. And these titles also use those headline formulas that we mentioned earlier.

OK, that’s it for popular headline formula. Now we go in the next section where we show you how to find perfect keywords in your niche to include in your headlines.

Do Keyword Research

OK, now you know the secrets to create better headlines for your next blog posts to drive more traffic and conversions. However, you need to make sure your headlines are search friendly which mean they have the possibility to be ranked high in search so that your target audience can easily find your content.

How do you find perfect keywords for your next blog post headlines?

We don’t have to say much about doing keyword research for your blog titles as when you have a blog, I’m pretty sure you’re already doing keyword research to figure out what your target audience is interested in and looking for online as well as the terminology they use when doing their search.

Let’s put these information together and make it work for your blog titles.

For example, let’s say your blog is about teaching people how to blogging and you want to create a series of posts talking about this topic. You can find more keyword ideas related to blogging and use them for these series of posts using these tools: Ubersuggest from Neil Patel and SemRush.

This post will show you how you can do keyword research to find appropriate keywords for your next blog posts using Ubersuggest.

Most keyword research tools will show you the search volume, competition level and cost per click (CPC) for a specific keyword as well as some keyword ideas that you can also use.

You can make your decision on a number of keywords you should use in your next blog posts based on these criteria. And remember to always find the balance between keyword search volume and its competitiveness.

Analyze Your Headline

OK, now you have appropriate keywords for your next blog posts. You also know how to create perfect titles for these posts using popular formulas. Now what?

Analyze them.

Make sure they’re worth it and can generate results for your business.

Here’s a few things to keep in mind when it comes to creating headline for your post:

Always do keyword research for high possibility to rank on search engine.

Write for human.

Yes, you can find keywords to get a chance to rank on major search engines however, try to make it both search friendly and user friendly. Nonetheless, it’s human that will read your content. So write for your target audience. They’re the ones who will buy from you.

Add more emotions to your headlines.

Strong words that evoke emotions help you stand a good chance to be clicked by your audience.

Be specific and unique.

Hubspot revealed that in testing over 3 million headlines, they noticed that titles that give people more information about the type of content format they’re getting (putting [Interview], [Template] or [Infographic] in the title) performed 38% better than those that didn’t include that information.

What does this mean to you?

Be more specific and unique about what you’re going to give your audience in your content. They want to know what they’re going to get from clicking on your post.

How do you know if your title is unique?

Simple. You can use quotation mark in your search for the title and that’s it.

Being specific in your blog title also gives your audience the information and answer they can get upon reading your post. They know it worth their time when they click on your post because they are well informed about what they’ll get from your content.

Don’t oversell.

Your title should reflect your content. Don’t oversell it. When you promise to give so much in the title yet you don’t have what you told in the first time, you can easily turn your potential customers off.

Analyze your headline.

CoSchedule has a tool that can help analyze your headline and give you a score. In our experience, a score above 70 is pretty good for a headline.

This tool analyzes your title based on your word balance and title’s length. I figure out the tool rather interesting as it gives you a sense of whether your headline is great or not. It also recommends how you can improve your headline.

According to CoSchedule’s guide to writing great headlines, there’s a few things you can implement to improve your headline’s effectiveness:

• Use keyword of your content in the headline.
• Keep a balance between common, uncommon, emotional and power words.
• Limit your headline’s length between 50 and 60 characters.
• Limit the number of words used in your headline from 6 to 7 words.
• Use positive emotions in your headline.

If you finish analyzing your headlines, it’s time to make it work for you.

In the next section, we’re going to show you how to do A/B testing and determine the best titles for your blog post.

Do A/B Testing

OK, now you have some great blog titles and their score showing that, in theory, how they will perform. Now is the time to get to the reality, A/B testing your blog headlines.

So how do you A/B testing your blog titles or headlines?

Fortunately, we also have tools for this type of work. In this case, we can use Optimizely. You can have your Optimizely account setup, install Optimizely WordPress Plugin, fill in your three headline variations in the plugin and wait for the results based on your goals. You can set your specific goals in the Optimizely platform.

Practice Makes Perfect

Now you know a number of headline formulas, how to do keyword research for your headlines, analyze and A/B test them to determine the most effective titles for your next blog posts. Keep repeating these steps and you’ll know the secrets to make killer headlines.

As we always say, practices make perfect. The greatest advice that I can give you when it comes to creating blog titles is always on the lookout for great headlines. When you run across any headlines whether from a blog post, a Youtube video or a social media update, if they catch your attention, they can do the same for everyone else. Write them down, take notes, you will need them later.

Graphic Templates for Your Next Blog Titles

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Links to Download

You can download these templates or edit via your Canva account here or you can grab all of our templates via the following links.

Powerpoint File

Canva File

Instruction to use Canva file: Log into your Canva account, open the link above and then customize the templates to your needs.