With over one billion websites on the internet and over two million blog posts daily, your online content is facing some tough competition.

Blogs and news items need to be eye-catching and engaging to read if they are to succeed in building and maintaining your brand reputation.

The saturation of online content and its ready availability, coupled with the lower attention span of today’s readers, means content has to grab the audience from the first few words. On average only eight out of ten readers make it past the headline.

So here are three top tips to help make your blog or news item get noticed.

Keep it short and sweet

A headline needs to summarise the content whilst also selling it as an interesting and worthwile read to your audience. Keeping a headline brief and to the point is an important rule.

Make it meaningful

As well as keeping a headline short, you need to make it meaningful.

Why would your audience want to read it? The best way to create a meaningful headline is to take a step back from your content and think who it is aimed at and why they might be interested. Then pull out one interesting angle that’s going to hook them in and shape it into a punchy headline.

The ideas here are a great starting point:

How to: inspire your audience e.g. “How to use SEO as part of your PR strategy”

Question: get your audience thinking e.g. “Is your PR working with your SEO?”

Reasons why: entice your audience with a list e.g. “Five reasons why integrating PR and SEO will improve your brand reputation.”

Top tips: attract your audience with some helpful advice e.g. “Top tips to improve your social media strategy.

Avoid click baiting

Click baiting is the popular habit that some websites use to lure readers without explaining what their content is about. Headlines such as “You won’t believe what happens next…” or “This ingenious trick will change your life” – we all fall for them but their frustrating nature will disappoint your reader and damage your reputation. A headline does need to be attractive, but it also needs to keep your readers on the page once they have clicked through.

In summary, headlines need to be short but meaningful, interesting but not teasing. It’s a skilful balance and if you can get it right you will be past 1st base in terms of attracting your audience’s interest.

If you would like help with blog writing, PR strategy, SEO or anything else to build and manage your company brand get in touch with us at hello@genesispr.co.uk or call 01473 326400.