Why do other people’s posts get clicks in the hundreds while your excellent innovative studies stay persistently underrated? You may be missing one of the most powerful user attractions of all – an engaging headline.
In this article, you’ll find 8 elements that will make your headlines winners, and you’ll learn exactly why they are such effective tricks in terms of human psychology.
Surprises in headlines work because human brains are like a novelty. Compared to expected pleasant events, unpredicted pleasant things “turn on” the pleasure centers in our brains even more. Thus, surprises prove to be far more stimulating and grab our attention much quicker than things we know well and even really like. This explains why people can subconsciously prefer an unexpected experience over something they want.
Questions that prime our curiosity is powerful brain influencers. Whereas, if we already know from the headline what we are getting next, our curiosity may be over before it begins.
The best questions are about something readers can relate to or want to know about.
Get emotional
Don’t be afraid to talk about your feelings. Feelings are the energy of your story and if you don’t use them, your story can’t move forward. People can relate to a feeling while they don’t necessarily relate to a number, statistic or even logic.
Stories are the connecting threads of all humans regardless of the arena, use them wisely. If you are struggling to find the emotion behind your story, then you aren’t telling the right story.
Talk to each person
You have to talk directly to someone in order for them to commit their attention. You can’t craft your message for the masses, craft it for one person and the masses will respond. I have told the story before about how I used to hate to write. I hated it because I thought there are all these rules. When I forgot about the rules and just wrote as if I was talking to someone, I found my love of writing. And people began to respond.
Bring them into the story
Your audience has to see themselves in your story. They have to imagine themselves using your product, your service or your advice. If they can’t picture that, then you aren’t telling your story to them. Tell the story and make them the hero. Your job is to get them to believe they are Rocky at the top of the steps pumping their fists in the air.
Remember how that made you feel when you watched the movie? You can hear the music, right? Try to give that feeling to your audience with your stories.
Curiosity
There’s a psychological phenomenon you can use effectively called the curiosity gap, which is the gap between something a person knows and something he or she wants to know. People start to feel a kind of deprivation when they notice a gap in their knowledge.
It’s possible to provoke that feeling by providing just a bit of information. Once a person knows a little, they will want to find out more and fill in the missing information so they can feel better. With this in mind, try to “prime the pump” by giving readers some intriguing (though incomplete) information in your headline, telling them enough to spark their curiosity but not so much that you give your story away.
Headlines
The headline is the most vital part of your feature. Treat the headline as if it were a summary of the article. Ask yourself, Why is this story important? What about it will it grab readers’ interest?
A good headline answers those questions by telling the reader something new, different, or useful–in 20 words or less.
To come up with a good headline, pretend you’re telling a friend what the article’s about, explaining the most interesting aspects of your story.
Keep the wording simple, and avoid superlatives and emotive language. Also, avoid using a brand or client name in the headline unless it’s very well known. Instead, focus on what’s most interesting about your topic.
Leads
A strong lead paragraph offers intrigue from the start. Editors don’t have time to read through the entire article to reach your key point, and neither do your readers. Think of the lead as an extended version of the headline, even using some of the same words.
When writing a lead, try to keep the paragraph short–two to three short sentences at the most. In total, your feature should be close to 400 words.
Don’t worry about your brand at this point–just introduce the interesting aspects of the story. If your lead reads like an ad, it’ll be discarded immediately.
The Second Paragraph
The second paragraph serves to support and expand on the ideas set out in the lead. It’s also a good place to let people know who’s “behind” the feature so there’s no confusion about who provided the copy.
Also, if the article has to be shortened due to space limitations, having the name of the company or spokesperson and your web address near the beginning will be vitally important.
If written well, the first two paragraphs can serve as a brief column item or filler if a newspaper or magazine has only limited space.
Images and Multimedia
A photo can often mean the difference between your feature being chosen for publication vs. them choosing your competitor’s. A photo helps explain the story and can draw the eye of those scanning the page. It also gives editors more options when filling space.
Make sure your photos are high-quality: Always provide digital photos in high resolution (300 dpi) and, if possible, have them shot by a professional. A bad photo will reflect on the quality of your feature.
Other multimedia options include a video or audio version of your story, or additional expert quotes and interviews. A feature podcast or multimedia news release can include all these assets to transform your story into an online experience for your audience, complete with links and reference materials to let them experience more for themselves.
Negatives
Everyone knows that superlatives like “best,” “greatest,” and “biggest” are effective in headlines, but sometimes negative superlatives such as “worst” are even more powerful. Possibly, this is because negatives are unexpected compared with positives and, thus, cause surprise.
Besides, negatives are powerful for tapping into people’s insecurities. Using words like “don’t,” “stop,” and “avoid” often work well since everyone wants to know if there’s anything they should stop doing.
Numbers
The first reason numbers work in headlines is that people like predictability and don’t like uncertainty. Numbers help readers by providing them with expectation management so that they know exactly what they are getting into. Additionally, it seems that the larger the number in the headline, the better the post spreads.
Audience reference
Basically, referencing your audience means using “you” in your headline. Seeing such a headline, the reader immediately feels known and named. The construction gains attention because our brains are focused on solving problems. Actively searching for solutions to problems is part of our survival instinct. That’s why when a reader is in the precise target audience of some headline, he thinks, “That’s for me!”
This tip also feeds into people’s self-interest. In other words, when you speak to your readers’ needs, desires, and emotions, you answer the main question in their minds: “What’s in it for me?”
Specificity
Quantifiable concrete facts, especially those that form images in our heads, are intensely interesting. Figures imply research and add to the writer’s legitimacy. Any kind of specificity works digits, names, examples, projections, descriptions, titles, results, etc. Specificity in the headline demonstrates your article is in-depth.
Also, when you are specific, it provides clarity and assurance to readers about what they will be getting into if they click.
The bottom line
When inserting these elements into your headlines, you may find that one trick works really well for a while but then starts delivering diminishing returns. Don’t worry. Just try another, and keep looking for new ways to engage your audience. Be experimental and playful toward what you are writing and literally ruthless about testing.