The Double-Whammy Headlines: What Makes A Great Headline Great?

Your headline is a key element in determining whether your content will be read or not, so it’s very important that you spend time crafting a great headline.

So how do you make your headline compelling? What makes a great headline great?

First, make sure that you get your message across in your headline – it may be the only thing your readers read. Second, use a double-whammy headline.

What’s a double-whammy headline?

It’s your regular compelling headline with a little extra on the side. See the headline of this blog post? That’s a double-whammy headline. A headline with a sidekick. 

Here are some more examples:

5 “Five-Minute or Less” Blogging Tips That Yield Big Results. I’m Using Tip #1 in This Title.

Love Letter Discovered on a 500-Year-Old Mummy. What It Says Left Me Absolutely Speechless.

Why Small Businesses Don’t Grow—And How To Use Autoresponders To Increase Business By 27% Every Year

How to Tell if You’re Entpreneur Material. Or Not.

 Each of the first half of the sample headlines is already a good headline that can stand all by itself without the add-on. It could still rock the show without having its sidekick, but it sounds much better and it is more compelling with the add-on, which is the goal of the double-whammy headline. 

Don’t overdo it..

Of course, you don’t want to use your raincoat even on a sunny day. Point is, you don’t have to use double-whammy headline on every single blog post that you create. Compelling headlines like the ones below still works without their sidekick.

 “How to Create Powerful Headlines and Increase Your Click-Through Rate”

“Why You Should Avoid Facebook Fake Likes Like a Plague”

What We Can Learn From Google & Coca-Cola About Creating Great Marketing Contents”

“Why Your Content Marketing Never Works Out The Way You Planned”.

Mix regular compelling headlines and double-whammy headlines on your blog posts so that you get the impact you’re looking for.

 Final Thoughts

What’s worse than a bad headline? Bad content. Make sure that you do not under-deliver. Many content marketing campaigns fail not because their headline fall short, but because the content did. Using great headlines to sugarcoat low quality posts can do you more harm than good. You may be able to bait readers to click, but once they find out your content’ is not that great, they get disappointed. 

Great headlines alone can’t make a content go viral, but great headlines with great content can