A blog can be made or broken by the quality of the headline. The headline has to interest and attracts the readers, the content in your article is how you make your new readers trust you.
With more and more bad, copied and “fake” articles floating around the WebSphere it can be difficult to get your readers to trust you.
That makes your job 100 times harder to do. Your readers don’t trust you – here’s how you can make your readers trust you.
Click-bait
Have you ever clicked on an article and it turns out to be an article on a completely different topic? That called click-bait. Don’t do it. People want to read content about the headline they’ve clicked on. The most common click bait method is to craft headlines that drive the reader’s curiosity wild. A good example of click-bait that drives curiosity in readers is this “9 out of 10 people can’t pass this simple test”. These types of articles tend to be highly unpopular with readers if you write an article make sure the headline and content match.
Headline variation
A great way of developing trust in your readers is writing the right headlines. Your original headline may change by the end while you are writing the article. A good idea to do is to write multiple headline variation. You should aim to write 25 headline variations. Yes 25 headlines, there a 2 great reasons why you should do this.
Your creativity will begin to flow
Fact: the more we write the more creative we are. So if you force yourself to write 10 headlines you’ll have 15 as brain will keep creating when it is stimulated. I’m not the only people who write headlines like this:
- CoSchedule writes 25-30 headline variations
- Buffer writes 25-30 headline variations
You can reuse your headline variants
You’re not limited to using 1 of your headlines. When you begin to share you content on social media, emails etc, you have the option to change the headlines depending on the platform, why not try a different headline on a different platform? Test and see what works for your network on different channels. You can even reuse headlines for another blog post ideas.
Images for individual platforms
Your headlines aren’t the only thing that can drive new readers. Images also play a big factor in converting readers, especially on social media. If you want to your blog images to follow the latest design trends try this article. There are a few things you should try to maintain in blogs imagery:
- Consistency
- Distinctive
- Specific
Consistency & Distinctive
Keeping your imagery consistent and following a similar style will make your artwork iconic. Readers can be scrolling through their newsfeed and see the article and know that your artwork belongs to your blog because your artwork is distinctive. Maybe think about making a social media style guide, Hootsuite did a great article on this.
Specific
Making you artwork specific to the platform you post on. You need to understand the size of artwork should be on individual social media platforms. If you post on Instagram an image with an image with the dimensions for Twitter, it’s going to look ridiculous. You can find the social media size guide here.
