If you want to increase traffic to your site, you’ll need as many well-written post headlines as you can get.
Why?
Because those are the very first words your readers will see.
And if they don’t compel people, they will go somewhere else.
Writing headlines for top-selling magazines is a high-paying gig. That’s because publishers pay big money rolling out these publications so the titles must sell.
But there are ways to write headlines quickly without trying to reinvent the wheel.
In this post, I’m going to hand you a ton of different formulas, titles, and resources you can go to that will make your headline writing much easier.
And the best part?
You can keep these resources and use them at your leisure for free.
So, learn how to write post headlines now by reading the rest of this post.
The Best Places Online to Find Ideas for Post Headlines
There are tons of places you can find headline swipes online.
Back before the Internet, you had to go to stores and buy magazines that had a lot of advertisements in them. Or, you had to get on a lot of different advertisers’ mailing lists and get them in the mail.
Now, you can find all kinds of them just with a few clicks of your mouse.
Perform a Simple Search for Great Headlines
Let’s start with the basics, here.
It’s no accident the most popular search engines will post the highest-ranking posts and articles. And how do posts and articles get these rankings? Usually, because they are the most read and shared by searchers.
Duh.
And to get people to read your posts in the first place, you need to have a decent headline to pull them in.
In order to get better headline ideas, you can use a more advanced method.
If I was writing an article on a particular subject I would just do a search for a subject and then take a look at the post headlines listed to get ideas. However, there was always the sneaking question in my mind as to whether or not the writer just got lucky with this post or some other reason why a post got to the top of the search engine results page.
So, I decided to bump up my technique a notch…
Follow the Leaders in Creating Headlines
This technique requires knowledge of who the leaders are in your industry. (If you don’t know who the leaders are, you need to find out.)
For example, if I were to write an article about Bitcoin I would find out which websites are the most popular for this industry and then get on their RSS feed to keep updated on their latest posts.
I would then scrape their site to find headline ideas. Let’s say I wrote a post on how to start investing with Bitcoin.
I know that one of the top leaders online is BitCoinMagazine.com.
Using Google I would type in the website address first followed by a colon, like this:
bitcoinmagazine.com: getting started in bitcoin
Here are the results:
BitCoinMagazine.com is a very popular site in a crowded subject space online. They know their stuff, so when you see these post headlines, you know they’ve put some serious time into crafting them.
Perform more searches using different industry leader sites to get even more ideas.
Then, take these generated ideas and rewrite different versions of them for your own post headlines.
Use Google Image Search for More Ideas
Another great way to get ideas is to perform an image search on Google for magazine covers.
Take a look at the display of Money Magazine covers above. You can get all kinds of great ideas from them.
Using Bitcoin as our subject, you can create all kinds of ideas just by looking at these covers.
Here are a few ideas you could generate from this sampling:
- How to Reach $1 Million in Bitcoin
- Investor’s Guide to BitCoin
- The 100 Best Digital Currency Moves
- How to Invest $100 in Bitcoin Now
- 25 Ways to Build Wealth with Digital Currency
- The Best Investments in Digital Currency
You could easily play around with these titles and make up all kinds of titles for each one.
And you don’t have to look up just one magazine. In this case, you could have looked up Forbes, Fast Money, Smart Money, Business Today, etc. to find all sorts of great post headlines and swipes.
Another great thing about headlines from magazines is that they are concise.
That’s because there isn’t a lot of room for long titles and because the publishers and editors know the value of short catchy titles, they are short.
Google also likes short titles. When your post appears in Google, you’ll usually see the title. If it’s more than 6 or 7 words, then searchers won’t be able to see the whole title.
Look at Popular Book Covers for Post Headlines
I love Amazon for getting ideas. Amazon has a vast listing of books and many of them are published by companies that have very high standards.
That means the titles have got to sell the books they represent.
Once again, you can cruise through all kinds of titles that hook and sell readers.
You can take these ideas and create swipe files for all kinds of great post headlines from these book titles. Amazon has also let you know which books are the best sellers as well and you can also read the comments from people who actually bought the book.
Do you see the little number next to the star rating system?
That’s the number of people who commented on the book after they bought it.
When you see a book like “The Basics of Bitcoins and Blockchains” above you know it has to be popular to get that many reviews.
Professional writers who know their stuff have written those titles, so don’t let them go to waste.
Use Free Headline Generators to Get Thousands of Ideas
Headline generators are a great way to create post headlines, especially when you are having a hard time thinking one up.
In case you don’t know, these are online tools that help make interesting headlines. They use technology to generate post headlines based on simple information you feed them.
However, I’d like to caution you.
They will not create the best headlines for your posts. You still have to do your search engine optimization work. You should know the audience you are writing for and perform your keyword research, too.
The Best Headline Generators Online List
Copywriting Course Headline Generator
Man, I’m a big fan of the Copywriter Neville Medhora. He has a crapload of resources on his site that are not only useful but entertaining as well. (His stick-figure cartoons are hilarious!)
Neville has a cool title generator on his site that helps writers generate hundreds of titles in a matter of seconds.
If you get the time, check out his Copywriting Course, it is one of the best resources on copywriting you can get your hands on.
Portent’s Title Generator
I haven’t been on Portent’s Title Generator in a while. It used to resemble a chalkboard, but they have updated it since then.
All you have to do is feed in the term you want to write the headline for and it will automatically give you a title at a time. If you want to see more titles, click the button that says, “See Another Title”.
I like the Copywriting Course generator better because you can see the entire list all at once. This one makes you continually click on the button to see the next version. (Probably done that way to keep you on the page longer.)
The Hoth Headline Title Generator
I like the idea of loading all kinds of data on the front end to make titles.
If you use the Hoth Title Generator you’ll have to feed it all kinds of information on the front end. Once you do that, all you’ll have to do is hit the “Create Headlines” button. You will then get a list of headlines based on what you put it.
However, considering the amount of info you have to type into the fields, you won’t get too many titles you can use.
Yeah, they’ll give you a list, but the quality isn’t too good.
I think out of this list, you could use one or two of these titles.
When you click on “Generate More Ideas”, you’ll get more results. So there are plenty more ideas to choose from if you keep clicking the generate button.
Blog About Title Generator by Impact
This is kind of a fun way to create post headlines on the fly. Impact’s Title Generator is a little different than most of the other generators I’ve used.
You can use it to make titles and to get ideas for blog post topics if you want.
At the very top of the page, Impact will give you ideas on what your subject could be about.
You can click on the refresh button on the right and get all kinds of different ideas for blog posts.
Once you do that you can add a few words to create your blog headlines which will be displayed below in the notebook.
Using these four headline generators you can create thousands of headlines over time. You can copy and paste them and keep them in a file for future use.
Post Headline Books and Ebooks as Resources
I have several large shelves of books with all sorts of writing resources on them.
I also have a huge number of headline eBooks on my hard drive.
If you are going to be a serious blogger, copywriter, or information marketer, you will need resources at your fingertips. My suggestion to you is to start collecting and filing them so you can get your hands on them quickly.
In this section of my post, I’m going to show you where you can get books cheaply and eBooks with all kinds of headline swipe files for free.
I told you earlier that Amazon is a great place to find ideas for post headlines. Well, it has some great books you can use too.
Two of the books I’ve bought from Amazon are excellent for creating post headlines.
“Words that Sell“, and “More Words that Sell” are the titles of two excellent books you can use.
You can swipe and deploy all kinds of great ideas from these books by Richard Bayan.
Actually, you can use the ideas in these books for all kinds of copy like headlines, calls to action, bullet points, introductions, etc.
It’s easy to find the phrases and words you need because of the way the book is organized.
Free Ebooks You Can Use for Headline Swipes
I’m going to list a junk load of places you can go to and get free post headline ideas. These are in eBook format so all you have to do is download them and save them on your computer for future reference.
I’m simply listing them so that you can start downloading. (Many times you’ll have to give the website your email address to get these resources, but that’s a small price to pay for excellent resources like this.)
- Jon Morrow’s Headline Hacks
- Copyblogger’s Magnetic Headlines
- 70 Magnetic Headlines by OptiMonk
- ThreeDeep’s Guide to Writing Effective Headlines
- 30 Fun Headline Resource Formulas by Wordplay
- Neville Medhora’s Headline Writing Formulas
- Steven Fabian’s Copywriting Swipe File
- Write Strong Headlines Quickly and Easily with Peter Sandeen
- Blog Marketing Academy’s Headline Writing Formulas
- 41 Classic Copywriting Headline Templates by Amy Harrison
- Data-Driven Headline Writing Strategies by HubSpot
- The 100 Greatest Headlines Ever Written – Jay Abraham
- Feldman’s 125 Quick Tips to Sharpen Your Copywriting Skills
- The Ultimate Copywriting Handbook
- 100 Good Advertising Headlines
- Eugene Schwartz’s Headline Writing Formulas
- 100 Headlines for You
- Headlines Exposed: 100 Hypnotic Headlines for You to Use
- Copywriting: The Definitive Guide by Backlinko
- Swipe Files’ Headlines
Conclusion
I’m sure by now, your brain is full.
I hope I’ve crafted a post headline resource that you can use again and again as you write your compelling copy. At the end of the day, you will learn how to write headlines that will get readers’ eyes on your blog posts.
If you have any ideas on how to write headlines, or how to get your hands on even more swipe files, please leave a comment in the box below. It would really make my day.