02nd Sep 2015 – 
Why is this so Important?
The footer of your website is a great place to promote recent blog posts. Use your A/B testing tool of choice to setup a test on the blog titles you have in your footer or anywhere else on your website. Take this post on Analytics for example, How to Take Conversions to the Next Level with Analytics
Who’s the best audience to show these post titles? The people who visit your blog regularly is the best audience to first roll out these tests to. You can do this by setting up a retargeting pixel. Here’s how to do that:
As you might have noticed, only the copy of the Facebook is different. The headlines of the posts are the same. But taking hint from which one performed better, you can improve the post title. There are several different variations in which you can post to Facebook. Post with/without image or an image that has the post title or description as MarketingProfs does here.
Then filter the results to only see pages that have “blog” in the URL – to see which blog posts drive the most traffic and engagement. If you see that multiple posts you wrote on a specific topic performed really well, while other topics were not as consistent, then focus more on that high performing content.
Test Blog Topics Before You Start Writing
Analyze Your Current Blog Post Titles
When you click on that you will be able to access and determine settings for the split test. For example, the number of messages for the test.
Amanda used Bufferapp to measure the engagement that each tweet generated. She then refines her headlines based on that. The post headline shown below was a result of split testing tweets.
Use SemRush or the Ahrefs Positions explorer to do keyword analysis and find the best keyword to use in your title to try to rank on Google (and other search engines) for the topic.
If there is more information available to update an old blog post and add more value to it, do it! You can adjust the title, reshare, and capture attention for the post all over again.
Find Similarities
Add an image with your social shares as well that has the title variation written on it. See which variation drives the most clicks, retweets, shares, etc. Be sure to share each at around the same time and day so that results are not skewed. Create different variations for each blog post title you would like to test for a particular post you are advertising. See which variation drives the best CTR, lowest cost per conversion, etc.
From the options, Select the button Create a Custom Audience.
Social media can be a goldmine to get feedback from your audience. If you have a big following then test out those ideas directly on your social media following. If not, there’s always paid advertising. Finally, don’t rely on your intuition. Small wins can have a major impact in the long term. So, get out today and start testing your headlines.
- Tweet an insight, idea, or quote
- See how many people retweet it
- If it catches, then write a blog post elaborating on the topic
Click on Tools on the top right side. Next click on Audiences from the drop down menu.
You can set the retargeting from 30 days to 90 days.
According to Andrew, the reason this works is because the headline gives a glimpse of the actual value of the content in the post. If you have a large number of followers on Twitter, then you should be able to split-test blog post titles easily to see which one could perform better when writing the actual headline. Don’t have a huge social following like Andrew?
BuzzSumo offers a lot more insight into the overall type of content on a blog. You can use it to analyze what kind of content is performing extremely well for your competitors. Let’s analyze the Hubspot blog. Analysis shows that their blog posts receive the highest number of shares on Twitter.
The second test had a statement with a strong word “Beware”.
Compile Blog Title Variation Ideas
Research Popular Blog Posts On the Topic
In this post Amanda DiSilvestro shares how you can refine your post titles based on feedback gained from social media channels like Twitter.
You may have chosen a winner for the new blog post title, but you should always keep a look out for new opportunities. Pay attention to how your blog post performs over time, make adjustments to the title and post content if it is no longer getting much attention.
Creative
Set up a subject line test and create an email on the topic you are going to write the post about. Send the email with the first subject to half your list and the other email to the other half and see which one performs better. I am going to show how you can do it on Aweber but any other ESP should be able to help you do the same.
Differentiate yourself
Write down how you could differentiate your title to capture more attention than these competing posts. For example one of the most shared posts on Hubspot, an infographic shows how responsive design works.
It’s specific to those advertising on Facebook —many of whom would give an arm and a leg to increase conversions in the face of mounting advertising costs. The trick is to take a trending topic and give it your unique spin.
Find the Best Keywords to Focus on with Keyword Analysis
Analyze the similarities between the posts that drive the most traffic
When you share your new blog post to your email list, setup a few variations of your email that promote a different blog post title in the email and different email subject line. This is super easy if your email marketing tool has A/B testing capabilities built in, otherwise you will need to create two different emails and send one email to half of your list, and the other email to the other half. Then simply compare the results.
Create a Master List of Blog Title Formats
Not to forget that Infographics and list posts work extremely well for Hubspot.
According to Neil Patel:
- How to posts
- Solution Oriented posts
- Headlines that state something
- Controversial headlines
- Short headlines
- Questions
- Case study headlines
- Intriguing headlines
- Ultimate guides, headlines indicating finality
There are also free tools like SerpLab where you can add keywords and see their ranking. Reshare old content and continue to look for new angles to promote your content. Maybe a new trend has emerged in your industry, and an old blog post can easily be repositioned with a new title, and reshared to “catch the wave”.
5 Testing Ideas to Uncover the Highest Performing Blog Post Title
A/B Test Post Titles on Your Blog
If you know someone that would benefit from reading THE Complete Guide to A/B Testing Blog Titles, feel free to share it.
Key takeaway: Before you dedicate time and resources to writing a blog post, find ways to test if the topic will truly resonate with your audience first. Just like you would validate a new startup idea, validate blog topic ideas.
We’ve seen e-mail subject lines where a one word change increased click-throughs by 46%. Open rates were nearly identical and the e-mail creative was exactly the same for both versions, but click-throughs went up by 46% in the second. If the ad was sent to 2,000,000 e-mails, the winning version would lead to 17,000+ more clicks, all from changing a single word.
With the message editor you can choose which subscriber lists to send the message to. Research from Aweber shows that clear subject lines always outperform creative subject lines. The following clear and creative subject lines were pitted against each other:
Click on the cringe icon on the bottom left side to view the pixel code.
Key takeaway: Your A/B testing will be much easier if you have ideas for variations ready to test. Make sure that these ideas are informed ideas, and you will have a better chance of finding a variation that beats the original.
A/B Test Post Titles via Email
How to do that?
Of course they were email subject lines, but they are headlines nonetheless. As seen above, the benefits of testing your blog post titles may be greater than you think, and it’s really not hard to get started. In this post, we will share with you how you can test your blog post topics and titles to uncover the very best variation that gets you more clicks to your content.
You will now see options for what percentage of subscribers to send the email. The percentage of subscribers adds up to a total of 100% for your messages combined. For example 60:40 or 50:50. For this case it should be 50:50.
A lightbox will appear with three options. Click on the option that says website traffic.
Google Analytics > Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages
- Are Blacklisted Link Shorteners Getting Your Emails Blocked?
- Grow Your Email List 99% Faster: How One Site Did It
- 43 Free Animated GIFs For Your Email Campaign
- Email Timing: A Look At 6 Marketers
- Email Marketers, Here’s What to Watch For in 2012
- What Do Teens Really Think Of Email?
On this post on IncomeDiary, David Aston shares the article headlines that resulted in attracting 1000000 readers to Income Diary. These ideas include:
- Customer Spotlight ? SEER Interactive
- AWeber’s AWesome Anthony A.
- Selling Digital: The Perfect Last-Minute Christmas Gift
- Getting Earth-Friendly Beyond Email
- Threadless’ Frequency Alert: Hot or Not?
- Why You Want Your Emails Filtered
Test Titles via Social Media Sharing
This is how the code looks like:
Key takeaway: Don’t just publish blog posts, do an initial round of testing and optimizing, and forget about it. Check back in as results come in and time passes. You might uncover new opportunities to improve or optimize the post to capture attention again.
Test Titles via Paid Distribution
Test titles on Facebook
1. Build an audience’s list
Infographics beat all other posts in terms of social media shares, followed by list posts.
Data from Quantcast shows that Buzzfeed now averages 196.4 million unique visitors per month globally.
[Tweet “You can find trending topics with the help of Trends24, Reddit and #Google trends. #content #cro”]
Take note of the similarities, and if there are any patterns with the post titles that drive the most traffic. Do the same using a tool like BuzzSumo – put in your blog URL to see how many social shares all of your blog posts have gotten. For example, on analyzing the CrazyEgg blog with Buzzsumo I got this list of posts as the top performing ones:
Either use an A/B testing tool like Convert.com to test the titles on your blog against a specific goal, or use a tool like it. How to a/b test blog post titles in WordPress? Heard of this plugin— Title Experiments Free. It’s a nifty little tool to get you started with A/B testing blogpost titles. What’s more, it’s free?
Clear
This plugin calculates the click probability based on how many times a title is displayed, and how often it is clicked by the users. Don’t choose the time setting to be greater than 10 minutes as it can considerably slow the site down. You can choose as many different post titles as you want and see which one performs better than the rest.
2. Place the code on your site
There are so many blog post formats and ways you can position a post. You can make it a list post with a # at the beginning, a how-to post, a guide, a course, checklist, etc. One format may work great for a particular topic, but have lesser results with another topic. This is why how you position the post format is important to test.
Test titles on Twitter
Ever see his post titled ‘Growth Hacker is the New VP of Marketing’? Yeah, that was first tested as a tweet before he ever started writing a full-fledged blog post. Enough people liked the tweet, and he decided that a blog post about the topic might resonate well with his audience as well.
In order to identify the people who visit your website, you’ll need to insert a Custom Audience pixel onto your site. Here’s how:
How to do this for your site?
Test multiple variations to see which drives more clicks. You might also want to track how long people remain on the page after clicking to see if the title is misleading or not. A good title will drive clicks and engaged readers.
Let’s say that your best performing post is “Best marketing tools for dentists”. You can write additional posts revolving around the same topic like “Best marketing tools for a new dentist” or “How to market your dental site?” etc.
Keep Optimizing Blog Post Titles Over Time
You can test titles even before you actually publish the post. Andrew Chen follows a three step formula to determine winning post titles:
They receive the least interaction on weekends. If your site is followed by people at work then it’s best not to publish on the weekends.
Scroll down to Settings on WordPress and click on Title Exp settings to configure the plugin.
Most of you may use a caching service like MaxCDN or a plugin like WP Rocket to speed up your site. This can cause issues with the split test as the titles won’t load and change alternately due to caching. So enable Javascript for post titles. Also to avoid any indexation issues, it’s better to select the option that says “Search engines should see first title”.
In Conclusion
[Tweet “Feedback, even from from just a few relevant people can be significant. #growth”]
Go to the Facebook Ads Manager:
In this case we need to retarget the new blog post titles to people who have visited your website. So the first option is the best one.
