As a content writer, when you’re bored or just want to have some fun, you can play with some headline generators.
Perhaps you’ve already done it before. Today, I’m going to show you how headline generators can actually serve you your next big idea.
As I said in the previous lessons, this new course will help you with idea generation. Now that you’ve learned about infrastructure for idea generation and how to build your own, we can finally move on to finding ways to generate new cool ideas.
What better way to start than with something that’s a lot of fun to use, right? 😀
Context: Are you serious about Headline Generators?
Yes.
Yes, and also Yes!
How can I be serious about these weird little things? Well, it’s pretty simple. You don’t have to think of them as the most intelligent pieces of software, and the best part is that you don’t need them to be amazingly intelligent.
You want them to help you out with coming up with new ideas. That’s a task which they do perfectly.
It might be weird to think that simple text generators will help you in the long run to make some nice income, but they really do. Because they don’t get tired. They’re not afraid to write out random stuff.
You, on the other hand, are a whole different story. Sometimes, you’re unable to come up with new ideas because you have an amazingly stressful day that leaves you drained out of all possible energy, to a point in which you can’t even count on coffee to save you.
You’ll most likely generate exactly ZERO new ideas in that state.
Other times, you wonder why you can’t generate new ideas and the answer is simple: you’ve been searching for so long in just one direction, that you started to have tunnel-vision and you’re unable to see anything else.
One other reason why you might have failed at idea generation recently is that you were afraid to just write down random stuff.
Being a content writer is also about experimenting with stuff and having fun with random ideas.
As I stated earlier, headline generators aren’t influenced by any such inflictions, so even though they’re dumb, they can still be of great help with making you generate new ideas for your WordPress site’s overall content.
Oh yes, and also as you will see in the text lines that’ll follow, using headline generators also helps you get better social engagement to your articles and also more traffic because they’re always using proven formulas that work for grabbing attention.
Examples of Headline Generators
Okay, finally we got to my favorite part. I’ve been using one of these headline generators since many years ago, and I really liked playing around with it – using it to support me in my idea generation process for new articles.
When I think about it, at my last startup (the one we built before Squirrly), our blog managed to be consistently updated and it grabbed a lot of traffic. I’m not saying that all of these things happened due to using one of these generators, but they sure did help towards those results.
Keep an open mind.
1) Hacker News Headline Generator
2) Headline Generator from LinkBaitGenerator.com
3) Portent Content Idea Generator
Check them out. Fiddle with them a bit.
Don’t just randomly generate stuff. Think. Capture.
I hope you tried them out and had some fun with them 🙂
Now let’s put them to some real use. Remember: they’re supposed to help you with idea generation.
If you’ve taken the first lesson from this course, then please go ahead and open up your Editorial Calendar.
Think of the keywords and the topics that you want to build your new content around.
Now go to one of these generators and try to come up with new headlines for those topics.
When you get something suitable, write it down in your Editorial Calendar.
Each time you get some new line generated, think about how you can adapt it to your topics/keywords and try making a new article idea out of that.
Next, you’ll see how I use these tools to come up with new ideas. It’s very simple, and you can start doing this right away.
Here’s something that I did, using the second generator I showed you there:
Come on, wouldn’t you just like to read the article called: “10 Ways People Have Gotten Rich Exploiting SEO” ?
That would make a great article. What I’ll do now is to copy this title idea into my editorial calendar. When I’ll have the time, I’ll browse back to it in the editorial calendar and start building a serious article around that idea.
But it’s a new idea that I’ve just generated, all by simply using a headline generator.
Now I can play around and come up with more new article ideas as well.
For this example, I used Portent Content Idea Generator. I wrote down idea generation as the topic I want to write about, and this is the headline the tool first generated for me: “The Simplest Ways to Make the Best of Idea Generations.”
This new one needs a little bit of re-work.
After all, that’s not exactly the best headline (idea generations, what’s that?!?), but let me:
Think
Hmm, let’s call it: “The Simplest Ways to Make the Best of Idea Generation Processes”. Now that would be a great article to have for the class, right?
Capture
After thinking about what the generator showed me, I managed to come up with a great new idea for an article. And it actually took me like two seconds.
Now that I’ve done that, I’m going to capture the new idea in my editorial calendar. Later on, I can refer to that entry and build content around it, find pictures, use Trello to turn it into a Rich idea, etc.
Your titles will start attracting more Likes, Shares, re-tweets, views
The best part of all this is that these generators help you come up with new ideas for fresh content, but they also help your new articles get more likes, shares, re-tweets, views and other social media love.
Kinda changes your opinion when it comes to headline generators, doesn’t it?
Try it out for yourself. See how it works. This could be a new way in which you’ll easily generate ideas.
More about idea generation in the next lesson. See you then.
