I must admit, I can write some pretty good stuff but one area of weakness that I have is writing headlines. I am always trying to improve on this skill.

I don’t care how good your stuff is, you have about 2 seconds to capture a reader’s attention before they move on. The only tool you have to grab a reader is a good headline.

The subject of my research today is finding good sources of inspiration to create “click drawing” headlines. I am doing this because it is highly relevant to creating any good Social Marketing campaign. The power of a good headline will cause your social marketing efforts to weigh exponentially more for the same effort. In other words, you will gain more traffic by simply spending more time squeezing your brain to make a killer headline that draws clicks.

The first idea that comes to mind is Digg. Go there and look at the most popular stories and you’ll find that just about all of them have some kind of attention grabbing headline.

All of us work hard to create killer content and it would be a shame for your content to go unnoticed because of a crappy headline.

Here are a few resources that I have found to help squeeze some headline juice out of your skull (in no particular order):

1. Digg.com - look at headlines from the most dugg stories

2. Evening Standard Headline Maker - Generated random headlines that make no
sense but can be used to contemplate a good headline.

3. Random Headline Generator - Hit the refresh button and a new headline
appears. Modify the headlines for your own purposes.

4. Digg Headline Generator - Displays Digg headlines, swipe the ones you like.

I am sure there are many more resources out there but just like you my time is limited and I have to move on. One of the best pieces of advice I came across (can’t remember where I saw it) was this…

Create your headline first and then wrap your story around it. Remember, the only purpose of your headline is to draw clicks and get your reader into your story.

Please share any good tools or Internet resources for jogging the brain to squeeze out killer headlines…

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