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It turns out longer is better—at least when it comes to writing headlines for branded content. Branded content technology provider Polar analyzed a bunch of data provided by premium publishers, such as Oath and Gannett, to see how variation in headlines affected key performance indicators (KPIs). It found that branded content headlines between 90 and 99 characters achieved a clickthrough rate (CTR) of 0.43%, higher than headlines with fewer characters. The “more is better” theory also held true for the number of words included in a headline. Polar reported that headlines with 16 words garnered a CTR of 0.33%. By comparison, pithy headlines of just four words recorded an average CTR of less than half that, at just 0.14%. Some other tips Polar gleaned from its work? Numbers and special characters also resulted in a bump in CTRs. So feel free to figure out how to squeeze an ampersand in there....
I was on Twitter the other day when something leaped out of the torrent at me. “Create unique article on any topic in just a click,” the tweet said. Could this be for real? Could a robot do a better job than I — a professional freelance writer — could? Considering that writers and content creators like me are doomed if so, I figured I better check it out. TRYING OUT THE WORD-O-MATIC So I clicked and landed here , a somewhat dodgy looking page that said Unique Article Creator “is the best article generator tool to generate SEO friendly unique articles from your keyword.” The unidentified people behind the site say the tool finds fresh content and then rewrites it to be unique and have stronger search engine optimization (SEO)....
A few months ago, I published a post titled “Why You Can’t Afford $25 Blog Posts,” and it was one of our most popular of all time. As I was writing it, I remember wishing that someone would do a study on what you really get when you buy bargain-basement content. As a certain book says, ask and you shall receive. Last week my friend Lisa Alexander was kind enough to tag me in a post sharing some, yes, actual research on whether you get what you pay for when it comes to content writers. Let’s take a look….
A short, professional bio is one of those things most people don't think about until, all of a sudden, we've been asked to "shoot one over via email" and have approximately one afternoon to come up with it. That's when we scramble. And when we scramble, our bio ends up reading like this: Rodney Erickson is a content marketing professional at HubSpot, an inbound marketing and sales platform that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers. Previously, Rodney worked as a marketing manager for a tech software startup. He graduated with honors from Columbia University with a dual degree in Business Administration and Creative Writing."... Woof, that was dull. Are you still with me? I swear, not even adding a tidbit about his cats would liven that bio up....
Last summer, we looked at the characteristics of successful headlines on Facebook, parsing the numbers in the NewsWhip database to pick commonalities in the titles of stories that attracted a lot of engagement on the platform. Our findings at the time pointed to great headlines: – Being conversational and descriptive, – Speaking to a personal experience – Being vivid and interesting, – Not tricking or misleading the readers. All of these principles remain the same, especially the last factor, which is now generally de rigueur for any sites looking to seriously develop an engaged and loyal readership through social media. Then at the start of this year, we took another look at headlines that were seeing engagement to see if there were any other obvious trends. Now we’ve identified a few new factors of note for successful headlines on social media, based on the data we’ve seen in NewsWhip Analytics. As well as the advice we’ve already dispensed around headline etiquette on this blog, here are three more factors to consider when looking to pitch the most effective story description to social readers....
It is difficult to overstate the importance of headlines. A good headline can entice and engage your audience to click, to read, and to share your content. In many cases headlines are the thing that is shared rather than the article. So you knew that. But do you know what makes an engaging headline?
To help answer this question we analyzed 100 million article headlines. We have set out below our findings from the research including the:Cox
- Headline phrases that drive most engagement on Facebook
- Worst performing headline phrases on Facebook
- Most effective phrases that start or end headlines
- Optimum number of words and characters to use in a headline
- Most impactful numbers to use in headlines
- Most engaging Twitter headline phrases
- Differences between B2C and B2B headlines.
While there is no magic formula for creating a viral or popular headline, there are many lessons we can learn to improve our content engagement. We shared our findings with a number of content experts to reflect on the implications of the research for writers. We have included their expert thoughts and advice at the end of this post. We have also included a section on how you can analyze headlines yourself using BuzzSumo.
As the response was fairly positive to my original post on headline engagement and best practices, I wanted to share a few more examples before I moved on to other topics. But as I continued to talk about headlines, I kept finding new and better case studies. So what follows really is more of an addendum to the first post, a final notebook dump of sorts, where we at the Chicago Tribune took digitally deficient headlines and really focused on drawing out the compelling aspects. As before, in all of these examples, we at least doubled realtime homepage engagement (click-through rate) after we made the change. We based this on Chartbeat’s heads-up display. So if 50 people were clicking on a headline before, at least 100 were after. Visually, that looks like this…
You have greatness in you. Cultivating it often takes role models, mentors, and loads of hard work. This fun quiz will help you find out which famous world leader you most resemble in your writing and may help you find an inspiring role model.
With the growing popularity of self-publishing, there is one recurring question I get from almost every aspiring author: “How much should I budget?” This is a really hard question to answer because the term “self-publishing” encompasses a wide range of very different possibilities. For example, let’s say you’ve written a first draft of your novel and just uploaded it to Amazon via Kindle Direct Publishing. Technically, you’re “self-publishing.” And your only monetary cost is the formatting to get the required .mobi file, which can be done for free via several online tools. Now, if you want to have a chance of selling that book, you need to replicate at least some of the steps of traditional publishing and ensure a certain level of quality and professionalism. This means having your book properly edited, typeset and proofread, and hiring a designer to create an eye-catching cover. Depending on your genre and your writing ability, these can cost more or less. It’s impossible to say, “Self-publishing your book with cost you $X.” However, it is possible to find average costs for the different steps that go into producing a book: editing, design and typesetting. And this is what the data and infographic below focus on....
Below the surface, not in the 20th-century French existentialist sense, but to a much more simple understanding of depth that can actually start to make things happen for your content marketing strategy … whatever it is you’re trying to do online. As Mr. Sartre once said, “Words are loaded pistols.” I happen to believe that is a true statement. But today, without a largely invisible foundation that amplifies your words, they may as well be as impotent as an unloaded .38 Special. Here are three simple “subterranean” lessons I’ve learned (and imperfectly used) over the years, that you’ll find might make all the difference in the visible strategy you employ out there in the world....
You’re busy, so I’ll keep this quick. Following are the simplest tips I can give you to easily — and forever — improve the quality of your writing.
Epic copywriting is an integral part of driving traffic and making conversions. Smashing Magazine even states that “it’s not how can you become a world-class copywriter in a short period of time if you have only minimal experience? It took me 10 years to improve, figuring out these techniques. By practicing them, you’ll be able to improve a lot faster....
Online, your product is unbundled. You get 10 words. Or 8. Or maybe 13, like I used above, to market your work. Digital success is like selling a newspaper story by story rather than day by day or week by week. And in selling that day’s paper, by subscription or newsstand, there’s just less urgency to make the headline awesome on that 150-word story buried at the bottom of page 11. Sections and geographic centers all are comfortable assumptions you can’t make in digital headlines. You must have a certain sense of desperation in writing web headlines, like those eight words are the difference between that column’s or blog’s life or death. Mostly, because it is. You aren’t owed readership. Your headline helps earn it — along with a handful of other factors like author and brand.
So any strategy involving growing and sustaining digital audience must incorporate excellence in headline writing. Must.
A few points to clarify here as we begin. I’ll be discussing writing for readers here, not for search engine optimization. That will be a consideration at times, but mostly we’re talking about people creating headlines for people....
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As marketers, we’re all doing two things: -Writing with the intent to sell something. Maybe it’s a product description in an e-commerce store, maybe it’s a landing page trying to generate a lead, or maybe it’s a blog post (like this one!) that’s trying to sell you an idea. - Writing phrases and clichés that turn off our audience. The point of copywriting to make somebody feel something, which causes action. You’ve likely seen tons of examples of emotion at work in copywriting: - Fear – fear of missing out (FOMO) is a common motivator for companies marketing to Millennials. - Pity – Look no further than the success of the ASPCA commercial featuring Sarah McLachlan. Or don’t. - Hope – Nothing gets somebody to open their wallet faster than the hope of fixing his problem. These are just a few examples. Making our audience feel something by using emotional triggers in our copy helps us sell. But what you don’t want your audience to feel is annoyance, or worse, outright anger, that you wasted their time. The marketing industry is producing more online content than ever, and there will be more tomorrow! If you want to stand out, do your audience a favor by respecting their time and intelligence by banishing the following clichés and filler phrases from your copy....
When writers apply visual thinking to their writing magic happens. This tutorial teaches you how to make your content clearer, vivid, and more persuasive.
Via Penelope
Anyone responsible for writing content headlines understands the challenge of optimizing for clicks while maintaining message clarity. Put your knowledge of effective headline development to the test below. Note, the questions are based on data from Buzzsumo’s survey of 100 million headlines published over a three-month period (available at wsm.co/headlinebuzz).
“If you use a poor headline, it does not matter how hard you labor over your copy because your copy will not be read.” John Caples A good headline is one that resonates with your audience not one that resonates with someone else’s audience. This is why copying a viral headline format that worked on BuzzFeed or Facebook is a bad idea, particularly if you write for a B2B audience. Our latest research reveals the headlines that resonate with B2B audiences including: The top phrases that start B2B headlines The most engaging phrases in B2B headlines The most shared numbers in business headlines The top words and topics that resonate with B2B audiences The optimum length of B2B headlines Key lessons for business content writers The research is based on an analysis of 10 million articles shared on LinkedIn. See our methodology note at the end of this post.
In marketing circles, we tend to rely on things like flow charts, diagrams, and pyramids. But according to Hausmann, that’s no way to tell a story. “You wouldn’t summarize a trip by saying, I’d like to show you a couple of the key message points and summarize those for you in a beautiful pyramid and diagram,” he says. To close the time and efficiency gap between the typical (and boring) marketing strategy language and creative execution, bringing a screenwriters’ toolkit into the process can make a world of difference, according to Hausmann. At #ThinkContent Summit 2017, he provided step-by-step instructions for “brand scripting,” which he defines as identifying a company’s core brand narrative and building the story structure that aligns all executional efforts. Take a look at Hausmann’s script for content marketing success, illustrated through the brand Beats by Dre....
It's one thing to write great content, but it's another thing to get it read and ranked -- which is where nailing the title comes in. Titles are what sell the content. They represent it in search engines, in email, and on social media. It's no surprise, then, that some of the most common questions we get concern crafting titles. How long should my headline be? What words should I use? What words should I avoid? Should I optimize it for search, or for social? Or both? Luckily, we've come up with a simple formula for writing catchy headlines and blog titles that you can reference from here on out. So let's just dive right in, shall we?...
If you’re like me and writing up to eight posts per week while juggling multiple businesses, it can be seriously draining. So out of pure necessity, I’ve experimented with a plethora of different tools to aid me in the process of generating new content ideas. Some have been home runs and some have been strikeouts. But there are seven in particular I really like and want to share with you....
The most direct way is to catch readers’ eyes is with a provocative headline. We’ve looked at headlines before, looking at how publishers can optimize theirs for social and the best practices for headlines on Facebook.
Knowing the headlines that work gives your content the best possible start to attracting attention on social.
Armed with years of social media metrics, we turned to NewsWhip Analytics to analyze how headlines of ten top publishers has changed in just the past two years. Let’s take a look....
Whether you’re trying to become the next top blogger, or just working in an office, writing is a vital key to success (even if it doesn’t seem like it). New research by Harvard has found that writing is one of the most overlooked, yet vital skills in business. Harnessing the power of good writing can accomplish everything from boosting your productivity to improving your leadership (not to mention it will help you create awesome stories). Luckily, there are some ways to easily improve. Stephen King, one of the world’s most successful authors, isn’t shy about sharing the tricks and tools that helped him sell over 350 million books....
Content chunking is quite similar – it is the process of breaking down content into smaller, bite-sized bits of easily digestible information that are easy to comprehend, learn, and commit to memory.
A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but how do you take the 100,000 or so of them in a book and consolidate them into a single image? Book covers help readers instantly decide if a a book is meant for them. After all, a single image is a lot quicker to digest than 150+ pages of text. So how do you make sure that a cover captures the soul of a book and intrigues the right reader to pick it off the shelf (whether physical or digital)? Start with genre. This article explores how to design book covers for different genres of literature, so when your book is judged by its cover, it’ll come up a winner....
Lake Superior State University on New Year's Eve released its its 42nd annual "List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness." The university collects nominations all year round on this Facebook pageand releases the word to honor the new year. The word cloud is from the university, showing some of the previously banned words. Previous lists and more information about the project may be found here. The 2017 list and the reasons given by the university: You, Sir: Hails from a more civilized era when duels were the likely outcome of disagreements. Today, we suffer on-line trolls and Internet shaming. Focus: Good word, but overused when concentrate or look at would work fine. See 1983's banishment of, We Must Focus Our Attention. Bête Noire: After consulting a listing of synonyms, we gather this to be a bugbear, pet peeve, bug-boo, pain, or pest to our nominators....
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A paradox? More characters and more words mean more clicks.