If you are a bloger or an online editor or content contributer I’m sure you had this dream.  You write a killer peice of content, or create a killer online video.  You submit your site’s link for the killer article or peice of video to Digg (or any other social news or sharing website) and poof, you hit the front page, your content is featured, your getting so much freaken traffic that your site goes down from all the traffic   Oh and you get lots of new readers to your site of course, generate more income either from ads or whatever you are selling on your site, and live happily every after

Now back to reality, it probably hasn’t happened yet.  You have probably wrote many articles that you thought were killer peices of content, or made awesome kick-butt videos.  Yeh they never got the traffic you thought they deserved.  How come?

Well maybe your content is great but I’m guessing your Headline stinked.  Yes this is a problem I noticed even with my content.  Which is why as I’m learning about headlines from copyblogger I wanted to share my notes and findings with you.

Writing that Killer Headline, start taking mental notes, or even better bookmark this list and come back to review:

• Usually 8 out of 10 people will read your content’s headline first and if their attention isn’t hooked they are off to the next site.  This is especially true for Stumble upon users, and others on social news websites.
• Start with the headline first.  Your headline should attract the reader by communicating what they’ll get out of reading or viewing it.  Writing your headline first will also help you stay focused when you write your post or make your video.
• Target keywords in your headline and content.  Don’t target the most popular keywords, target the variations instead.  These don’t have as much competition and will get you ranking high on the search engine in different smaller niches.
• How To type of articles are the best for hitting digg’s and del.icio.us front pages.  People want useful information.  Start your headline with “How To”.
• Your headline should be all about the benefits.  Everyone is busy.  As they are browsing the net they want to know the short and sweet end result before investing any more time in your content.  If the benefits are attractive, the browser’s attention is hooked and he becomes a loyal reader.  After the “How To” you gotta focus on one or two benefits. If you can link the two benefits it’s even better. A famous headline is “How to win friends and influence people”.  A few more are….
  • How to Save Time and Get Things Done
  • How to Get a Better Job and Make More Money
  • How to Save Money and Retire Rich
• Quick way to come up with such a headline is to use this formula.  How to [some boring task] That [Rewarding attention hooking benefit]
• Another formula that works is leaving out the to portion.  How [I got or to get] [an awesome benefit the reader probably wants].  Like “How I ranked in Google’s top 10 results from Day 1″.  This actually is true, my latest niche blog ranked #9 out of 3.5 million related sites in Google search results the first day it was indexed by Google bot.  Leave me a comment if you’d like to find out how.  If there is enough interest I will share my secrets
• List posts get attention.  The bigger the list the better.  10 reasons… 20 tips to… 10 steps to …
  • check out copyblogger for examples
• Copy blogger also has some more good headline formulas