Who here has had trouble coming up with great headlines?
Or topic ideas?
*raises hand*
“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” – David Ogilvy
One of the biggest sins in creating content is making the actual content world-class but having a half-assed headline. Thankfully, there’s a FREE solution to help you with your headline ideation woes.
I like to pull my inspiration from blogs that a.) I like b.) write consistently good headlines.
I also like to take the manual work out of processes.
I’m going to show you how to automatically pull headlines from your favorite blogs and push them to a Google spreadsheet for future reference.
It’s very easy to do and the spreadsheet you create will ultimately help you come up with better ideas faster.
Enter IFTTT
IFTTT is a free web application that connects other apps with each other; basically automation that anyone can set up. For a non-technical marketer like myself, it’s a huge timesaver because I have so many apps that I use for my business. If a sales lead comes through my WordPress blog, I can push it to a Google spreadsheet automatically. If a new blog post is up on our blog, it’ll go to a chatroom so everyone knows that it’s time to help promote that post. I can even connect my mobile device with my Google calendar so it automatically enters an event when I enter a certain location (like home).
Here’s a video to help explain it better:
1. Make a list of your favorite blogs
First, decide the category that you’re writing for. Then make a list of your favorite blogs in that category. For this example, I’m going to use one of my favorite copywriting blogs – Copyblogger.
2. Find the RSS feeds
The next thing you need to do is find the URL for the RSS feed. If you don’t know how to find the RSS feed for a URL, click here.
In this case, I’d use http://feeds.copyblogger.com/copyblogger:
Note: you’ll have to repeat this process for each website that you add. I recommend no more than 3 to start with.
3. Connect with Google Drive
Next, you need to connect the RSS feed with Google Drive:
4. Edit the columns you want
Almost there! Now it’s time to figure out what columns you want to appear in your spreadsheet. I prefer the following:
Viola. All set.
Now you will have topics from your favorite blogs populating a spreadsheet where you can pull headline inspiration from or future topic ideas from.
Conclusion
I like the flexibility of everything sitting in a spreadsheet because i can easily delete, highlight or bold anything I want.
Using this process has helped me shave off a few hours each month.
What is a few hours worth to you?
photo credit: Lego Guy 1 via photopin (license)