Headline Research

I want to show you a couple of little research here that a couple of people have done. This one is done by BuzzSumo, and it’s talking about analyzing 100 million headlines. Here’s what we’ve learned. 

It’s talking about the Facebook engagement score, it is specific to Facebook but I think since it’s a dominant platform, we can apply these learnings to lots of different areas in digital marketing. The top phrases starting headlines; X reasons why, or X things you, or this is what; they are the best top phrases starting headlines of all times. 

On the left-hand side, we can see all the different combinations, but those three were the strongest. The top headline phrases, they’re not starting; this is within the actual phrase; this will make you, this is why, or can we guess. They are some of the top performing phrases within a headline. 

This is how you can finish it, the ending headline; …. the world, …. x years,…… goes viral; there’s a whole bunch of them more there. The particular top 2 are quite standing out.  This is how you don’t do it; worst performing headline phrases; control of your, your own business, work for you. 

I feel like some of those could be influenced by the Facebook platform, that might be different from LinkedIn, that might be different from email if you’ve got a work relationship.At least from the Facebook engagement perspective, control of your, your own business, and work for you were not the ones to use in terms of the headline phrases. 

This last article that I want to show you really takes us back into the headline generation work that we’re doing before when we were looking at analyzers. 

7 things we learned from 31 days of A/B headline testing. You can’t honestly call your content high quality if it isn’t getting read. And if your headline is boring, people won’t click, they’ll ignore you.That means lots of bad things for your business and brand. For instance, you won’t grow your audience, attract links naturally, boost your social media engagement and shares. 

Generating a great headline is trying to boost engagements, trying to get people to share. This lesson is trying to show you the tools like the 4U’s, headline generation and analyzer tools to try and get the best headline. 

But the problem with that is, the headline that you end up with in the end is just rubbish. If you did all those exercises, it’s so click and just so long and it’s like hang on, what are we actually trying to achieve here. 

Are these tools actually useful for you, so I have some interesting accounts for you; the TL;DR version of this particular article. The article here, which is 31 days of A/B headline testing or conducting A/B headline testing. 

Can we trust the scores of free headline analyzers to accurately predict which headline will get the most clicks? No, you’ll be wrong more than half the time.Then you’re probably thinking, why did you get me to do this.

Are headline analyzers worth your time anyway? Yes. Although you’re really writing your headline for one tool’s algorithm, it forces you to re-examine every word you choose carefully. When we are looking at CoSchedule and ShareThrough that have their own algorithm; I even hinted a bit towards that when I created the video for you. 

The more headlines you write and test, the more chances you have to discover the right headline. If you aren’t testing, you’re potentially missing out on traffic, rankings, leads, shares, and revenue. 

The more data you collect, the more you’ll know about what your audience responds to. Ultimately, this is why you need to A/B test your headlines. The whole point of this is to give you lots of different ways to show you how to build the best headlines. 

Please use these tools as a guide and do your own A/B testing to make sure that these headlines are working for you. I really hope you enjoyed this lesson on headline generation and how you can generate the best headlines for your business or brand. 

This was a free course on digital marketing skills on demand. I encourage you to have a look around and see if you’ll get any value from any of the courses in this program and if you don’t hopefully, I’ll see you out there in the digital marketing world another time.

See you.