Social Media

My interview on writing killer headlines for web content [VIDEO]

Published on November 24, 2011 by Nick Usborne

Recently Ken McGaffin of Wordtracker interviewed me about the craft and art of writing great headlines for web content.

As always, I spoke for too long, so we had to divide the interview into two separate videos. In addition, these aren’t the most finely produced of our videos. I think I sat way too close to the camera!

That aside, we covered some interesting ground.

Too many web content writers pay scant attention to writing a great headline. This is a problem, because headlines have a huge impact both on how many people actually read your content pages, and on how widely shared those pages are through social media.

Published in Social Media, Web Content, Writing for the Web
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4 Examples of Effective Headline Design.

Published on October 20, 2011 by Nick Usborne

Headline design? What does that mean?

It means writing and formatting your headline in a way that makes it jump out from the page, or email, or a smartphone.

It used to be that headlines had to do a single job, on the web page where the balance of the content followed. Read the headline, and then keep reading the body text immediately below.

Today, headlines still have to work well, immediately above the body content, but they also have to grab attention and hook readers when they stand alone.

Here are a few situations where your headline has to stand alone, or almost alone: When used as a tweet on Twitter. In an RRS feed. On a smartphone. In Reddit or Digg.

In these circumstances, your headline has to jump out from dozens of others, and get the reader to click through to the full page or post.

Published in Social Media, Web Content, Writing for the Web
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Social media enables conversation. But do you?

Published on October 18, 2011 by Nick Usborne

Over the last few days I have been putting together a presentation about how to drive engagement through social media.

As I looked for examples, a couple of things struck me.

First, engagement is just a trendy word for conversation, and conversation is a big word for talking. In other words, social media is about talking with people.

Second, I discovered that almost nobody was actually using social media as a means to talk with people.

By far the most common use of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social sites was simply to talk at people. Here is what I’m doing. Here is what I’m thinking. Here is what I have written. Here is some news about our latest product or service.

In other words, most companies are still using social media as a broadcast medium.

However, I did find companies that were taking the trouble to talk with their prospects and customers through social media.

Published in Freelancing, Social Media
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A short video on how freelancers can profit from social media.

Published on October 6, 2011 by Nick Usborne

You don’t need to me to tell you how fast social media is growing. But you may not be aware of some of the actual figures…like how there are almost 700,000 updates being published on Facebook every 60 seconds.

Within the ongoing growth of social media, opportunities abound. And this is…

Published in Freelancing, Social Media
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3 Ways to Make Your Web Content Headlines More Shareable.

Published on September 27, 2011 by Nick Usborne

Making headlines shareable through social media? What’s that about?

Well, if your content page headlines aren’t gaining significant traction through social media, you’re missing the boat.

Today, all your content headlines have to do double duty:

First, they have to work on the content page itself. The page headline has to compel attention, hook the reader, and drive readers into the body of the content.

Second…your headlines have to be shareable through social media.

Published in Social Media, Web Content, Writing for the Web
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