Creating a good headline is an important part of blogging. It helps with SEO through keyword usage and it help with reader retention as it entices your visitors to read more.
You have less than three seconds to catch a reader’s attention so a great headline really is essential to gain people’s longer term attention. Once you catch them for those 3 seconds they give you an extra 30 seconds, which is where you article comes into play, but without a good title, it’s unlikely too many people will make it as far.
Well here is a great tool to help you come up with great title ideas within minutes. It’s a tool I’ve used to create the title for this article and it’s totally free!
Let me introduce you to the:
Link Bait simply refers to certain content on your site that entices a reader to not only stay longer (great content encourages greater time spend on your site) but also encourages them to link to your site too in order to share you great content with others.
For bloggers, a major area of LinkBait creation is the of course your headline and associated article. You can spend hours coming up with interesting yet useful headline and topic ideas, or you can simply use a great free tool such as LinkBait Generation to come up with amazing options. You simply type in your main word and it will generate ideas for you.
Here are some examples.
In the first test I simply used the word blogging to come up with great article and headline ideas:
- 6 bits of Blogging advice that will land you in prison
- 9 crazy ways that Blogging is infiltrating pop culture
- 7 things about Blogging that science can’t explain
- 8 ways Blogging can be used as a weapon
- The top 7 most disturbing videos of all time about Blogging
- 10 ways Blogging can help you get a date
- 6 incredible Blogging hacks
All these great title and topic ideas were generated in under a minute!
Lets try something a little different and use the keyword ‘marketers’
- 5 life lessons learned from marketers
- Why marketers sucks: myth vs. reality
- 8 unbelievable ways marketers has been used by the military
- 7 bizarre ways marketers can kill you suddenly
- If marketers had a love child with Satan it would look like this
- Why marketers should scare you more than Osama Bin Laden
- 10 surprising ways marketers will be different in 20 years
Ok, not every suggestion there was great, but there are a number of cool ideas within them that I am seriously considering writing about. Not bad for a few minutes work.
So if you are stuck for topic ideas, then give LinkBait generator a try and see if it can get your creative juices flowing again.
Nice find…the tool itself is a nice linkbait generator….although it would be better if they gave you a list of titles rather than one at a time…for the record, here’s one that they came up with “10 virtually instant ways to improve an email list”.
Pretty good title it came up with there… might have to steal it!
What a fantastic blogging tool, thank for sharing! I know that when I’m perusing blogs, the headline is what will either make me stay or keep clicking to the next one. And I love when the headline promises that you’ll walk away with immediate knowledge, such as “5 Life Lessons Learned From Marketers”…I feel as though the post will be an immediate value add to my knowledge base!
Hi Dee, great little tip you shared there! I’ve tried it out and you’re right, some of the results can actually inspire you to write blog posts that you wouldn’t necessarily have thought of previously. I’m also putting this to good use to generate Email Subject Headers, seems to be working well too. Cheers!