Spend 37% More Time Writing Your Headline

Patrick Altoft sometimes spends 20 minutes crafting his titles. Why?

The headline or title contains the most important words in your article or blog post.

It’s the first thing your readers will see. It determines whether or not they will continue reading. So, you can take 3 hours to write a useful 1000 word post, but if your headline is boring, well… you’re missing out on a lot of traffic.

You’ll get more clicks from the search engines because your title is attractive. In the same way, you’ll get more clicks from Blog Rush. Also, some RSS readers only show the title.

Attractive titles make your site stand out from the sea of sites with crappy headlines.

What You Can Do With The 37% More Time

Edit your title. Rewrite your headline. Try different variations of the title. You proofread your body text, right? Do the same for your headline.

Be Specific. 37% is more interesting than 50% :) Also, list posts are great because they force you to be specific.

Use successful headline templates. (I’ll aggregate some of the best headline templates this week, so stick around.)