10 Ways to Come Up With Your Next Great Headline

​Stumped? Welcome to the club. Even the web’s best content creators aren’t immune to the creativity block that can stop their next post dead in its tracks. Get your editorial calendar back on track with these 10 helpful tricks​ 

Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator

Enter one to three nouns into Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator and the algorithm immediately generates 5 headlines.

Keyword Research  

Google Trends is an invaluable marketing tool for studying the search volume of words and phrases.  Not only can you use it to gauge interest in a topic you are interested in blogging about, but you can use it to discover what are the top searches related to your topic.  

A content marketing search shows the expected meteoric rise of interest in the last several years.      

The high level of interest only solidifies your decision to blog about content marketing, but what should you write about? Scroll down and you’ll see the top, and rising, relevant searches.  

Find a new way to shed some light on a popular query and you are on your way to garnering a large audience for your post.    

#Social Media

Don’t underestimate the hashtag.  Social media is a completely organic way to follow, and join, the conversation around popular topics.  Don’t get lost in the din, there is no shortage of ideas to be gleaned from the social masses.  

Interact with your followers and find out what’s important to them to really tailor your next post to your existing audience.         

Inspiration is all around you  

I’m privileged to work with a passionate team of innovators from diverse backgrounds who never fail to inspire me.  Keep your eyes and ears open in your workspace, you will find that the interesting perspectives of your co-workers can be a great source of insight to inform your next article.

At Digital Surgeons, we're always looking for fun, but useful, ways to hack our day to day tasks.  We built Clicktackle to make it easy to come up with headlines for our blog.  Check out the beta at Clicktackle.com     

Other Blogs

Isn’t imitation the most sincere form of flattery?  Look to what other content marketers are blogging about for ideas.  But don’t beat a dead horse: use fresh angles, visuals, and infographics to make your content stand out from the rest. 

Gamestorming

Constraints drive creativity.  I’ve used the 50/50 technique to growth hack brainstorming and drive ideation.  Create 50 ideas, without regard for quality, in 50 minutes. Shoot for quantity and pick out your best ideas after they flow out with the bad ones.  Don’t have 50 minutes? Gamestorm 10/10 or 20/20 and you’ll be hooked after the subsequent creative outburst.   

Questions

Start With Why? to revolutionize the way you and your business operate.  Start with Why? to answer a pertinent question in your next post.  The right questions always hold all the answers.   

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is a great tool for determining what content the top influencers are creating.  

With the ability to filter by date and type of content, there are endless possibilities for researching what’s been successful driving shares across different platforms using different mediums.

Draw inspiration from an article and “remix” it, or perhaps take a contrarian point of view; either way you know it’s relevant because thought leaders care about it.     

The Sawdust Principle

Just as a lumberyard is able to sell it’s sawdust, all our creative endeavors have beneficial byproducts.  Scan through your last several articles, are there paragraphs that demand more attention and can be turned into their own articles? Data you can turn into an infographic?  Quotes that can become social media posts?

The inspiration for your next piece of content can sometimes be found right in front of you in your own work.    

Standing on the Shoulder of Giants

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” - Sir Isaac Newtown

Look to the disruptive innovators that have redirected the course of entire industries for inspiration.  Ask yourself, what would Steve Jobs have thought of #Mobilegeddon?  Would Nikola Tesla use an IPhone or Android?  It sounds silly but it can be a fun way to reframe your thinking and find a new approach for an article.   

Tired of wrestling with headlines and blog topics ourselves, the team at Digital Surgeons decided to solve the problem the way we always do with a quick hackathon.  Before we knew it, our very own headline generator ClickTackle was born.  Looking for inspiration or a catchy headline? Give ClickTackle a try.