Are boring headlines killing your blog?

In my last post, I told you how excited I was about the prospects for my blog, No Meat Athlete, now that I've started writing only content that I'm proud of.

Since then, it's gotten even better.  How?  I "discovered" a simple trick that has increased my traffic by 20% since I started using it (really).  I'm hesitant to take credit for the discovery, since it's been known in the copywriting business for decades.

Ready?

Write the headline first, and keep rewriting the headline until you love it.  Then start your post.

So simple, yet nobody's doing it.  Just look at the headlines of people's blog posts.  They're an afterthought, one more nuisance to go along with tags, categories, and if you're doing search engine optimization, the url and meta tags.

I learned this from a series of posts on Copyblogger all about strong headlines.  If you do have to take a day off from blogging to read this series, do it.  (The rest of the site is fantastic, too.)

Why write the headline first?  According to Brian (the guy in charge of Copyblogger), when you do it, you make a promise about the purpose of the post.  When you write the post, you fulfill that promise.  And your post turns out a heck of a lot better than if you hadn't promised anything.

Along with this little nugget, my favorite posts in the series are two sets of headline formulas that work.  Literally, if you're feeling lazy, you can just pick one that fits without doing any thinking of your own.  If it works, why change it?

The result of my new found headline savvy has been unprecedented numbers of retweets and Facebook shares.  (If you're one of them, thanks!)  Try it, you'll see.  My word of warning: don't go crazy with the headlines.  My recent No Meat Athlete post is called "The 7 Secrets of Post-Workout Recovery," and that's about as far as I'm wiling to take it for now.  I don't know, something about "Give Me 5 Minutes and I'll Give You the Body You're Dreaming Of" just seems a little much.  In other words, don't be sleazy and don't make promises you can't keep.  People will notice, and they won't come back.

I hope you read some of the Copyblogger posts, give this a try, and let me know how it works for you.  As I said, it's done wonders for me.  I've been so excited about No Meat Athlete recently, and Health Blog Helper has suffered for it with an extreme lack of posts, but I truly believe that the stuff I'm learning is going to make this blog better over the long haul.

Now go write some headlines that spread!