Your guide to the perfect headline

More depends on a good headline for a post than you might imagine. Social research has uncovered powerful truths about writing a headline that inspires lots of online sharing.

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Let’s start with this question: How are posts shared?

It’s not the blog post, tool, or resource that gets shared. That might be what motivates the person who shares it, but all that gets shared is the headline. The headline is what you share with your subscribers, it’s what people see in search results, and it’s what gets passed around.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a good headline helps your traffic.

What’s less obvious is that sometimes the best way to come up with an idea is to start with the headline. Here’s why: If you start with the resource, you might put a lot of time into it before you realize there’s no way to summarize it with an irresistible headline. This is like the death sentence most products face if they don’t have an “elevator pitch.”

The ingredients of a good headline

According to a study published in The Guardian, these changes help your headline’s click-through rate:

Strategies the best blogs use

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