When writing a piece of information, the final variant of the title is usually written at the end. However, it is the first information a reader sees before deciding whether to read an article or not. Therefore, it is important to develop an effective and winning headline strategy. Headline in any article is an instrument in achieving success since 10 out of 10 people will read a title, but only 2 out of 10 will read the article itself. Headline development requires specific strategy development in order to be a successful tool in business writing.
Strategies for Headline Development
- The same content can be presented under lots of different titles, which vary a little and highlight the most vivid aspects of article. Such strategy of headline development may help increase the article readability by 500% (Tate, 2013). Each title is sure to find its reader and the variety in titles may help creating the best possible variant of naming an article.
- According to Safran (2013), 36% of readers prefer seeing numbers in titles. Therefore, another strategy of headline development may be referred to the use of numbers. Such phrases as “10 top”, “15 best”, or “12 worst” are the best possible variants for the titles, which will be noticed.
- Using negative superlatives can be a good strategy for writing a headline. According to the research conducted among 65,000 article titles, the articles where titles contained negative superlatives were 30% better, from the position of the readers (Bennett, 2013). Therefore, discussing the disadvantages (the worse issues) in the title is an effective strategy of headlines development.
- One more strategy for headline development is addressing to the audience. 21% of readers are interested in such articles (Safran, 2013). This can be a winning strategy for writing. The examples of such articles are as follows, “The aspects of something you need to consider” or “Are you interested in something?” and the like.
- The use of capital letters in writing is an effective strategy one must adhere to. However, despite the widely spread prejudice, only 21% of people prefer to read the titles with the capital case. The vast majority of readers prefer sentence case headlines (61%) and only 7% of respondents prefer low case headlines (Safran, 2013)
- No matter which strategy has been selected, it is important to consider the length of the article. It is also a part of the headline strategy one should adhere to. If an article title is too short, readers will not perceive the information seriously as those cannot be informative enough. At the same time, too long articles will not be read till the end and the readers will lose their interest in the article in general. Thus, the old rule must be applied, that an article title should be no more than 8 words or 70 characters.
- The use of correct words in a title is an effective tool in headlines creating. Having decided to refer to the most effective words in titles creation, one should choose some of the following, “this is the”, “will make you” and “when you see” (Lee, 2014). These words are considered as the most effective, basing on the analysis of 3,016 headlines from 24 top content sites (Lee, 2014).
Therefore, it should be concluded that having referred to correct strategy of headline creation, one will be able to develop a top quality title to the article, which hill receive the highest visit rates.
