How to Use A.I. to Generate Blog Post Headline Ideas

Writer is now an official Superpath partner! Its A.I. writing platform offers a suite of features to power smarter, faster work. Superpath members can get 20% off enterprise plans—just let them know you came from Superpath. By the way, the following post was written with Writer. 🙂

When you're staring at a blank screen, it can be tough to come up with a headline that accurately reflects your article. You want something that will grab attention and make people want to read more. This is where A.I. can help get your creative juices flowing.

Writer can help you come up with ideas for headlines by taking into account what you've written and what would be most likely to get clicks. It can also suggest different ways to word your headline to make it more effective.

This is a huge help because it takes the guesswork out of coming up with a headline. A.I. can help ensure that your headline is effective and accurate, which will help your article get the attention it deserves.

In this tutorial, Writer CEO May Habib explains how to do it. You can also read the transcript below.

May Habib: Hi everyone. I am May, with Writer, and we are doing a series of tutorials with Jimmy from Superpath on what Writer can do for content marketing and content marketing workflows. Very excited to dive in.

Jimmy Daly: The first one we're going to talk about is how to generate headline ideas with Writer. So, as a reminder, we're talking about practical use cases for AI. To me, this is one of the most exciting. It's a place where a lot of teams get stuck, and we'd love to hear a little bit more about it. And then, also, see it in action, in Writer, so folks can get a sense of how this might actually fit into a real workflow for them.

May Habib: Amazing. Thank you, Jimmy. So, headlines are a big use case for Writer and AI in general, and there are two out of the box templates that address that need. So, we've got the ability to generate a headline from an existing one, and then totally riff from scratch on one that you've got, an article that you've got. Where we've got the headline generator open here, and the QuickBooks teams blog open. They are a fantastic customer, so I'm going to use them as our guinea pigs here. We're going to copy the headline of that article, and click generate content to see what Writer comes up with.

Jimmy Daly: Cool. Fun fact, I used to run that blog in 2017.

May Habib: You are joking.

Jimmy Daly: No.

May Habib: Oh my gosh, they're such an amazing team.

Jimmy Daly: I wish we had had this back then.

May Habib: Amazing. Well, check this out. So, I love, I'm actually going to just put little bullets in front of all of these, so we can see them. So, success was on the cards for these small businesses. I like, see them blossom in our small business success playbook. So, this is just a little bit shorter, why these small businesses succeeded and how you can too. Lessons from successful small businesses. So, a lot of different takes on that headline. Now, let's say we didn't have one that we were starting from. So, let's go back to co-write and we're going to go back to blog headlines from scratch. What we could do here is actually take, let's see if this has enough information. Take some information from the blog itself, so the national small business starting and running. So, this is the meat here. I am going to, you know what, I'm actually going to do the first three paragraphs after that intro, and I'm going to put it here. And our persona, the audience is small business owners. You'd know very well as it's evolved. Was it small business owners when you were running it too?

Jimmy Daly: Yeah, which was actually a mindset shift to stop thinking about startup founders and start thinking about folks who might run a laundromat, or a deli, or a gas station, very different.

May Habib: Very interesting. All right, so here are some examples. Again, let's look at their headline that they chose. See, that was in the small business, success was on the cards. I love that. Success was on the cards. 10 small businesses that made it big, how they did it, which always does very well. Inspiring tales, achieve big things. Awesome. So, I love a lot of these headlines. I love the headline that the team came up with as well, but it definitely allows you to do, just think a little bit broader than what you may have been thinking about and come up with things that you didn't have to think of yourself. Customers, Jimmy, with Writer, can train and be more hyper specific. So, we have customers who will build templates that are explicitly like, give me the most creative far out headline that you can. So, there's something in machine learning called temperature. And so, it definitely is possible to play around with the suggestions that Writer provides, and do things like ensure that they are a certain character count or things like that.

Jimmy Daly: Really cool. Can we touch on temperature for one minute?

May Habib: Yeah.

Jimmy Daly: One of the goals of these tutorials is just to demystify how this works a little bit. It feels magical when you pull back the curtain. There's obviously some really cool technology happening, and I'd love to know, I'm sure it's probably fairly complicated, but we'd love to know a little bit about temperature and how that works.

May Habib: We can definitely, probably do a set of tutorials on basic machine learning concepts that modern marketers should know. I do think that's something that we try to do in our marketing and community. But, temperature is basically the set of instructions that tell a model how much to deviate from what it thinks the inputs are trying to, that the user is trying... What output is a user trying to get from the input. So, it is, think of it as distance traveled from where the inputs might have come from.

Jimmy Daly: Got it. That's really interesting. I can imagine. So, getting back to the headlines, you're trying to come up with new headline ideas, maybe you're doing a lot of content aimed at generating organic traffic. All of your articles are the ultimate guide to keyword. It's a really cool way to just start getting a little more creative, trying to find more interesting angles that's really difficult to do on your own, so I love the idea of being able to just spit out a bunch. You could take one that you really like, maybe even workshop it a little further, do a few rounds of that.

May Habib: I love just the ask Writer anything one. And so, on that note, Jimmy, let's say it was generate a list of 10 article ideas that can inspire small business owners. So, I'm still, I'm just ideating about what could I write about to get to that audience. And for context here, we can actually put in, let's see. This is an interesting stat. I actually want to write about this, but there are a lot of different angles that very specific point of view nugget could take, do you know what I mean?

Jimmy Daly: Mm-hmm.

May Habib: So, let's see what Writer thinks about this. List of 10 article ideas for a business blog. So, this is what we call AI whispering. So, the better you get at using Writer, the more you understand what the inputs need to be for us to get a great output. So, let's look at some of these ideas. How to start a business on a shoestring budget? That would've been great actually for the QuickBooks blog. How to make your small business stand out in a competitive market, online visibility, building a good reputation, how to make it more sustainable, how to make it more customer centric? This is basically a month of editorial. Work-life-balance, which I really love. That could have been a nice angle for actually an SMB blog.

Jimmy Daly: Really cool.

May Habib: So, the ability to use AI as a brainstorming partner is just a huge benefit.

Jimmy Daly: Really cool. Love that. Headlines are just, I find a sticking point for a lot of teams, so what an interesting way to get the creative juices flowing. In the next tutorial we're going to go deeper in to ask Writer anything. So, why don't we head to that one. We'll have a link for everyone to go to that and we'll see you there.

Cool. There you go. Thank you so much May and your team over at Writer for being such a great partner to us at Superpath. You're building an awesome product. We really appreciate you spending time to help us get up and running with it and, frankly, your support is what helps us keep this community free, so we really are grateful for that. For those watching, if you do want to learn more and give Writer a try, go to writer.com. There's a couple of different plans you can choose from. There's also a free tier if you just want to kick the tires. So, writer.com. Thanks so much for watching and thanks so much to the team at Writer for your support. Take care everybody.

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