5 Major Mistakes To Avoid When Writing Headlines For Blogs

How many headlines do you see every day? Plenty. How many interest you enough to read the article behind the headline? A lot less. This is because most headlines do not stir any interest in you, they practically tell the whole story eliminating your need to read the rest of it or they are too wordy and uninteresting. When writing a blog post, you need to avoid these mistakes if you are going to get a great headline.

• The headline offers no benefit to the reader: Your headline should answer the following question, ‘what benefit will my readers see in the headline?’ If you cannot find something to make you think the article is beneficial, your readers will think the same and bypass your article.
• Absence of curiosity in your headline: Most headlines that stand out have an element of curiosity in them. If you do not sweeten your headline with something that piques your reader’s curiosity, you will lose them to headlines that do.
• Lack of specificity: People will normally not read articles whose headlines are not specific in nature. When the headline offers no specific ‘thing’ to look for in the story behind it, it will be ignored as wordy with no real substance and your potential reader will move on to other more promising headlines.
• Too complex: When a headline seems or looks cryptic, readers who are not into unraveling mysteries or those without too much time for such things will not read your article. Such a headline is more likely to put off a reader rather than interest him/her. It is a fact that lack of simplicity is a main indication of poor headlines.
• Lack of a sense of urgency: When a person comes across a headline, his/her mind registers immediately whether it is worth finding out more about the article immediately, later on or not at all. This means that your headline must have a deep sense of urgency to make the reader want to read it immediately.

Some mistakes are forgivable sometimes but the above list should be avoided at all costs. Having any of them is a sure way of coming up with a poor headline.