Learning to Write Effective Article Titles

Writing articles for any reason should always make an impact on the reader. Careful sentence structure, good proofreading, and good grammar are and should be the rule of the day. In this day and age on the internet, I see so much pure garbage out there that it is pathetic.

Getting the message out is okay. Doing so in a manner that shows poor skills in the English language only kills credibility, and does the marketer more harm than good. Polishing your skills as a writer is something you should always be striving to do.

Certainly, there are different markets, and a different tone at most times needs to be taken. You do not want to use a stuffy, formal tone in your articles. This is okay, I suppose, if you are writing for The New England Journal of Medicine, but when writing for the internet, you need to reach most people at their level. Not long ago, I read some where that television ads are targeted towards people with only an eight grade education, and after seeing some of the commercials lately, I tend to believe that. Most of the commercials today are an insult to intelligence. You must remind yourself, however, that they are effective. and no matter how offensive they may be, they sell product. In internet marketing, that is the name of the game.

I am a firm believer in using free tools. Many are available, and if you look to the web and do a little intensive searching, you can find just about anything to help in your copywriting efforts. Everyone knows that the title of your article makes or breaks you in getting people drawn into your article. If you don't grab them in the first 3 seconds, they are lost to you. It is your job as a copywriter to insure your title appeals to one of three human senses - intellectual, spiritual, and empathetic. Depending on the market you are writing for, your job is to write a title that appeals to one of these three senses.

So how do we go about evaluating the effectiveness of our articles, and how do we insure that we are targeting the human responses we wish to engage? It is quite simple. Go to http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/ and enter your headline in the text box there. It is an easy way to know if you are getting it right. Most people, when speaking, use words having an emotional marketing value of around 20 percent. A good copywriter will hit values of 40 to 50%, and the most talented 55-70 percent. How effective is the title of this article? It is at 50%, and is a perfect balance appealing to the intellectual, emphatic, and spiritual human responses.