Marketing Ninja

The headline is not an exaggeration. I went from about 100 unique visits a day to 2000+ unique visits a day as a result of changing the way I wrote my headlines and it’s only been a week or two since I started improving them.

The first thing that my new headlines did was make it remarkably easy for AjaxNinja to make it to the front pages of DZone, DotNetKicks. Want to know why it was so easy? Take a look at some of the headlines on DZone as of writing this.

sample of DZone’s most recent headlines:

• The Death of “synchronized”? (79 click-throughs)
• Douglas Crockford: The Elements of JavaScript Style (65 click-throughs)
• Type-safe Scala sequence comprehensions (25 click-throughs)

DZone measures the articles on the front page using votes and how recently they were published, but it also displays how many people viewed the story on DZone and subsequently how many clicked through to the source, which is what I have displayed next to each title.

The “synchronized” article actually had a very effective title; it just wasn’t trying to reach me as an audience member but rather JAVA programmers who’ve used the “synchronized” keyword, and it reached them very effectively.

The average poster for DZone is a much, much better engineer than I am and they cover material well and at a fantastic level of depth, but they suck at writing headlines. That’s why it’s been so easy for me to make it to the front page: my headlines are simply more magnetic.

I read a post called Warning: Use These 5 Surefire Headline Formulas at Your Own Risk at Copyblogger recently and I have tried to utilize those formulas in my posts since. I believe that my improved headlines are what has resulted in a big boost in traffic in the past week.

Here are 5 things I have been doing to improve my headlines:

1. Don’t describe what you’re writing about; describe how it can help your readers!

   My Phalanger article is a good example; it’s title is Attention: PHP executes twice as fast when it’s run on ASP.NET. If I had named it Phalanger – Now you can integrate ASP and PHP my title would still be accurate and interesting, but it doesn’t hint as to why anyone would want to check out Phalanger; underscoring some of the performance benefits of Phalanger gives PHP users an incentive to read on.

2. Let the reader know that your article’s solutions are simple/easy

   Take a look at the title of this article; How 5 Simple Headline Improvements Increased my Traffic by 1000%. If you write a lot of how-to articles then this tip is especially pertinent to your blog. Readers love articles that present simple or easy solutions; underscoring the helpful nature of your suggestions with descriptors like “simple,” “quick,” and “easy” in the headline is an easy way to draw attention from readers.

3. Relate your article to a problem that your readers face

   Let’s say I wrote an article about using StumbleUpon and how it sends traffic; what would be the more effective headline?

   • How StumbleUpon Creates Traffic for Websites
   • How to Use StumbleUpon to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

   It’s obvious that the second choice is the better of the two headlines. The first headline will draw readers with a casual interest in StumbleUpon, but the second headline will draw anyone who wants to know how to get people to read their site; which audience is bigger? The second one.

   Just make sure that your content reflects the title; if you don’t even mention using StumbleUpon as a promotional tool in your article then you probably won’t get very many return readers, if any at all.

4. Relate your article to a success story

   Everyone loves success, so why not take your article and relate it to an anecdote or a success story? Let’s return to my StumbleUpon example; which of the two is the more effective headline?

   • How StumbleUpon Creates Traffic for Websites
   • How StumbleUpon Doubled my Traffic in August

   The second headline is again, more powerful, because it gives the readers an order of magnitude by which they can judge the effectiveness or your article’s solution. Readers want effective advice and the best way to demonstrate effectiveness is by positive example. This post serves a good example of such a technique; everyone wants to learn how to increase their traffic by 1000%.

5. Let the reader know how short your article is

   List posts are considered one of the greatest ways to draw readers; the reason is simple: list posts are simple, short, and easy for readers to digest. Readers do not have to do a lot of work; by explicitly bounding your article with a definitive number, like 5 in the case of this article, then they know they won’t have to dig through a mountain of an article in order to get to the good stuff.

   Which of the two headlines is better?

   • Some Tips for Improving Your Headlines
   • 5 Tips for Improving Your Headlines

   The second headline is better because it lets your readers know exactly how much they have to digest! I don’t know if readers prefer larger or shorter lists and I don’t know what the blogging convention is, but personally, I think keeping the advice lists like this one under 10 items and link lists under 20 items is a good convention.

Try improving your headlines with these tips and you’ll see a huge difference!

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