How to Write Great Headlines: 21 Creative Headline Examples

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Scan. Dismiss. Scan. Dismiss. Scan …click!

This is what your audience is doing today. This is what we’re all doing today. In our inbox, on social media and on blogs, we scan through headlines, dismissing most and clicking a few.

Winning that click depends on the headline, more than anything else. It’s impossible to overstate their importance. We are all judged instantly and ruthlessly by this short set of words.

The average person sees 1,300+ headlines each day and dismisses 99.7% of them.*

*Totally fabricated, but a great headline.

Even if you do everything else right, blogging your fingers to the bone, everything will fail if you get this one thing wrong.

So here are our headline best practices. Let’s look at all the places they appear and how the success factors vary…

So a great headline isn’t just one thing. A single article may have different headlines in different places. It’s adapted for each context. Do not try to make one size fit all.

Now on to the checklist for writing great headlines.

1. Make a promise. Be specific.

The key to the click is to understand this: Before any of us click anything, we do a split second cost-benefit calculation.

Is the benefit of clicking (the value of the content) higher than the cost (two seconds of my time)?

Here’s what’s happening in your visitor’s brain…

The job of the headline is to indicate the benefit and to make a promise to the visitor that it’s worth it. And to do it in less than a second.

The more specific the benefit, the more likely the visitor is to click. Great headlines make specific promises.

Ask yourself as if you’re the reader. “What’s in it for me?” The answer should jump off the page. If it doesn’t, get ready to hear crickets. You’re about to fail.

The ability to imagine the readers’ perspective is the key to success in writing headlines. Empathy is the greatest marketing skill.

Charlie Meyerson

Award-winning journalist

“Assume your audience isn’t interested. Write a headline that spotlights the most compelling, most irresistible part of your content.” 

Barry Feldman,

Feldman Creative

“The pulling power of a magnetic headline traces to its promise. Simply stated, it’s a benefit.”

Jeff Goins,

Goings, Writer

“Every headline needs to offer a promise that the body copy delivers on. I don’t know about you, but I like my promises to be more than vanilla. They need to sound like amazing opportunities. Otherwise, they’re not much of a promise. The way to capture attention is to employ powerful words in your headline that get the reader excited to read the whole article.”

2. Use power trigrams

A few years back, Steve Rayson of Buzzsumo did a study to learn what makes effective headlines, and what correlates with social media engagement. His research was different in two ways. First, he looked at a LOT of data: 100,000,000 headlines. Second, he looked at trigrams, which are groups of three words.

As it turns out, certain trigrams have huge correlations with social engagement.

This chart shows the average number of Facebook likes, comments and shares for headlines that include these trigrams.

When these trigrams appear at the beginning of headlines, the headline is much more likely to get social engagement…

Warning! No clickbait!

If your first reaction is “this is clickbait” please keep reading. I am not recommending writing clickbait headlines. Do not try to trick the reader. Your article must deliver on the promise in the headline.

Continue to the full article.