People Who Hate Writing Headlines Can’t Stop Using These Free, Easy Tools (That Actually Drive Results)

Does this sound familiar?

You work on your article for hours, maybe even days. You do your research, find an interesting perspective, brainstorm fresh ideas, edit it time and again… until you finally get the courage to hit “publish”.

You’re proud of your article. You know it’s packed with practical information your target audience really needs.

But your target audience doesn’t read the article. You post it on every social channel you’re active on, you pay for native advertising, and your target audience just doesn’t click through.

If that’s the case, you’re not alone. Chances are you’re struggling with one of the biggest challenges in writing: headlines.

That’s why company after company has created tools to make your life easier. It’s time to change your story, and start using some fun tools that help you create headlines your target audience can’t ignore.

Headline Tools that Do the Work for You

In a hurry or don’t have the energy to come up with an enticing headline after you’ve spent days on an article? No problem. These headline tools will do it for you.

These tools work great before you start writing, too. If you don’t know what to write about, just grab one of their ideas and develop an article around it.

Answer the Public

Log in to Answer the Public and you’ll see a video background of a bearded man just waiting around for someone to ask for his help.

Choose your country and type your keywords in the search box.

Immediately, you’ll get dozens of questions, prepositions and other content and headline ideas, which could easily keep you busy for months.

TweakYourBiz

If you like to have many options, but also like them categorized, consider TweakYourBiz.

When we typed “headlines” in their search bar, we got a long list of headline ideas, categorized into “lists”, “best”, “how to”, “questions”, “love”, “celebrities”, “secrets”, “snarks”, “business”, “motivation”, “problem”, “the kitchen sink”, and even “sex”.

As with any instant headline tool, you’ll get some great ideas, and some that might sound like this:

• Death, Headlines and Taxes: Tips to Avoiding Headlines
• Headlines May Not Exist!

Of course, the idea here is to use these tools as inspiration and initial help, then to test it out further.

HubSpot

HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator might not offer as many ideas as Answer the Public or TweakYourBiz, but it gets right to the point, with headline templates you can easily use.

Simply type 3 nouns, and get blog topic – or headline – ideas.

We typed “performance”, “marketing” and “headlines” – and this is what we got:

Try the tool several times using the same nouns, and you’ll get some extra options. Otherwise, sign up to HubSpot’s email list using the form below the topic list you get, and they’ll send you enough headline templates to last a year.

Portent

If you want to understand why some headlines get clicks and others don’t, check out Portent’s content idea generator.

Portent only gives you one headline option at a time, but it takes the time to explain why that headline works, and it spices the explanation with humor.

Headline Tools that Energize Your Headlines

When you spend a lot of time trying to figure out the perfect headline, you’ll often feel creativity flowing, but sometimes you’ll feel like nothing you do makes your headline better.

When that happens, search the words in your headline using the following tools, and get some fun ideas.

B-Rhymes

B-Rhymes defines itself as “a rhyming dictionary that’s not stuck up about what does and doesn’t rhyme”. In other words, B-Rhymes isn’t worried about the grammatically correct definition of rhyming. All it cares about is that words sound great together.

You can use it to add some lightheartedness to your headlines.

Using the words in the screenshot above, you could write Guidelines for Writing Headlines on a Deadline for an Airline.

Thesaurus

Sometimes our words come out too long, too short, too simple, too complicated, too rare or too common, and for the life of us, we can’t find a better alternative.

That’s where Thesaurus.com comes in. Type your “problematic” word into its top search bar, and you’ll get synonymous, antonyms, and a bunch of other related words.