How to spawn titles quickly for content and email marketing

With all the writing and email marketing I do, I've had to quickly improve how I create my titles. I don't have the luxury of taking days to create the perfect title.

Here's the system I use.

  1. Draft 3-5 basic titles that give the gist of the article. Pick the best one.
  2. Consider how that title will look if it's shared on social media. Tweak it to be more compelling and attractive to busy strangers. Draft another 3-5 variants. Pick the best one.
  3. Replace any dull words, cliche sayings (that aren't ironic), and other shorthands.
  4. Add a context that makes sense SEO-wise (keywords). For example, since I write about Shopify "for your Shopify store" is the most basic example.
  5. Compare the final title with the previous ones and see if it's clearly better. If not, go back and try again.

This process is intended to be quick and get you good-enough results. Sometimes it creates a star, other times a dud. But it only takes me 3-5 minutes per article and I can always re-title it later on if a piece takes off.

This sort of ongoing optimization is how you need to approach SEO. You can't expect overnight results, your work will take months to bear fruit.

One SEO optimization that works well is structured data.

Mostly because the data helps Google's algorithm which makes their job easier.

You can either audit, code, and test your store's structured data by hand or install JSON-LD for SEO and have the structured data you need for several types of Rich Results.

It's already helped a few thousand Shopify stores with their structured data and it could help you too.

P.S. As a reward for reading the full article, here's the actual work I did on the titles. Took 2 minutes, 53 seconds.

Eric Davis

Would you like to get a daily tip about Shopify?

Sign up for Eric's Daily Shopify Tips to get my daily email with a tip for Shopify every morning.

Each tip includes a way to improve your store: customer analysis, analytics, traffic, SEO, customer acquisition, Rich Results, CRO... plus plenty of puns and amazing alliterations.

Plus you'll get free access to my Premium Resource Center for free.

Join 4,400+ other Shopify store owners and sign up before the next tip is sent.

I won't send you spam. Unsubscribe at any time. Powered by ConvertKit

Topics: Content marketing Copywriting Email marketing Writing

Next: Testing URL redirects in Shopify to rescue lost traffic
Previous: Don't deceive your users.
Would you like a daily tip about Shopify?

Each tip includes a way to improve your store: customer analysis, analytics, customer acquisition, CRO... plus plenty of puns and amazing alliterations.