Getting attention for your headlines requires breaking through the clutter and meeting people where their heads are already at. Your headlines must speak to your audience’s desires or problems.

Focus on them. Ask them questions. Involve them in a conversation. Entertain them. Give them something to talk about.

You get the idea. They’re the only one in the conversation who matters. You’re lucky if you have five seconds to capture attention, and keep it, even if only for a blink.

Do these 25 copywriting headlines ideas get you thinking?

1. Give people something to talk about: “How this Community Gave the Boot to Wal-Mart”
2. Use one of the most powerful words in advertising – “new”: “A New Source of Income for Small Businesses”
3. Introduce a story: “How Windmills Cut Unemployment by 50% in This Midwestern Town”
4. Announce some news: “Just Announced:  Tucson to Host the First Global Energy Summit”
5. Reveal a hidden benefit:  “Coffee Lowers the Risk of Heart Disease”
6. Give a direct command: “Do Not Go to Sleep Tonight Until You Read This”
7. Address your audience directly:  “Doctors: The One Thing Your Patients Won’t Tell You”
8. Make an emotional appeal: “Please Don’t Throw Me Away”
9. Use humor: “Do These Vacuums Really Suck?”
10. Use puns: “Advice to Wives Whose Husbands Don’t Save Money – By a Wife”
11. Talk taboo: “This is the Worst Thing You Can Do in the Bathroom”
12. Create drama: “What This Business Banker Was Told to Do With Loan Applications”
13. Use a quote: “’This is real stuff for real people’- Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream”
14. Be controversial: “Arsenic in City Water Nothing to Worry About”
15. Provide a list: “The IRS’ 10 Top Triggers for a Tax Audit”
16. Ask an intriguing question: “Could You Be Paid Enough to Do This?”
17. Reveal facts: “Fortune Magazine Reports – 84% of College Students Have Credit Card Debt”
18. Note a case study: “St. Jude’s Announces Surprising Consequence of Childhood Obesity”
19. Use “how to” phrases: “How to Attract Customers With No Marketing Budget”
20. Share a secret: “What Your Dentist Can Predict from Your X-Rays”
21. Use the word “wanted”: “Wanted: Retired Police Officers for Health Study”
22. Offer something for free: “One Day Away From an Herb Garden With This Free E Book”
23. Use a before and after statement:  “He Couldn’t Find a Job Until He Learned this Skill”
24. Use one- or two-syllable words: “Stop Snoring. Save Your Marriage”
25. Give a direct command:  “Don’t Let Your Car Mechanic Do This to You”

Your first few attempts to create great headlines might fail miserably. A couple of the biggest mistakes you can make:

“I KNEW I COULD IRRITATE YOU WITH THIS HEADLINE!!”. Unless that’s the reaction you were shooting for, turn off the caps lock (and forget that “1” has an exclamation above it).

“I Made Millions With This One Trick” . Don’t insult your readers with sensational or unbelievable claims. You’ll get them to take action all right – “delete”.

Avoid those two, and try one or two of the other 25. Let me know what you came up with. If your headlines put my list to shame, I’ll know my work here is done.

But it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement and make some blogging mistakes early on.

Here are ten common blogging mistakes that a lot of us make when we first start out.

#1: Going Full Time

This one deserves to be listed first because it’s one of the worst blogging mistakes you can make. People who blog full time are people who slowly built a following up over several years of blogging part time. When you first start out, you really shouldn’t be spending more than, say, an hour a day on your blog. Luckily, there are writing jobs on the web where you can hone your skills as a writer and work on your own hours in the meantime. Check out constant-content.com where you can sell your articles to various websites.

#2: Waiting to Monetize

You never know how much money you might be missing out on if you wait until you have a hundred followers before you start monetizing. Start monetizing right away, get those banner ads and affiliate links on there. At first, you won’t be making a lot of money, but along the way towards building a better blog, you may as well get every dollar you can.

#3: Polling

When you run a poll in the beginning and you wind up with three votes total, it just makes you feel a little silly, and it makes your blog look kind of, well, pathetic to the people who stumble upon it. When someone discovers your blog, they shouldn’t feel like they’re invading on some private group that consists of nobody else but the blogger and a couple of people he or she knows in real life.

#4: Starting Without a Focus

Over time, your blog will come to encompass pretty much all of your interests. For now, though, try to keep it fairly streamlined. Keep it about movie reviews or music or cooking or whatever it is you want to write about, just keep it focused enough that, when a reader stumbles upon your blog, they know what to expect for the next dozen entries they read. If you’re looking for a niche, check out the statistics and see if you can come up with a blog that hasn’t been done before (you can check out a lot of other fascinating stats while you’re there, too).

#5: Trying to Land Big Sponsors

Just sign up for Google Ad Sense and other ad revenue programs. Worry about landing big sponsors later on down the line. Typically, Coca Cola and Maxim aren’t going to be interested in buying ad space on your site until you have tens of thousands of subscribers.

#6: Prioritizing Style Over Content

Style and content go hand in hand, and content should always guide style. Check out Woo Themes where you can get an amazing customizable & SEO friendly theme for your blog.

#7: Using an Impersonal Tone

When writing to the public, there’s a tendency to want to use third person impartial tone. This works for some blogs, but most of them use a personal tone to feel more like a real back and forth with the reader. It’s also easier to be funny or entertaining or witty or creative when writing in first person. Unless your blog really calls for an impartial tone, just write in your speaking voice.

#8: Ignoring Your Readers

You’re not a star yet. As long as you have time to talk back at your readers, do so. You may be disappointed that you only have ten or twenty of them for now, but if you don’t respond to them, you won’t even have ten or twenty a week from now.

#9: Choosing the Wrong Host

What you’re looking for is a good, basic and not-too-pricey package at a site like hostgator.com, where you get unlimited storage for four bucks a month. Some bloggers choose to go with a free host like a basic blogspot.com account, but then you may have difficulty switching over later on down the line if you want to switch to a pay host: You lose all your backlinks, your traffic, you have to move all that content over etc. etc., it’s basically like starting over from square one. You may as well start with a cheap host and just upgrade your service package if you ever need to in the future.

#10: Starting a Forum

If you’ve got fans and readers from around the world who want somewhere to talk with other readers, well, that’s when you start a forum. A forum with exactly one member (you) just looks silly.

Conclusion:

The basic rule of thumb here is not to bother doing anything, really, until you get to a point where you absolutely have to.

• Don’t quit your day job until you wind up making enough money from the blog to support yourself, and you don’t have time to work your day job anymore.
• Don’t expand to a bigger host until you get to a point where your current host can’t support what you want to do with your blog.
• Don’t pay a graphic designer to redo your whole blog with an original theme if your inexpensive theme is still a hit with your readers.

The bottom line is that great content and style trump all, and you can’t rush it. So have fun for now, just write about something you enjoy writing about and enjoy the learning process.