After writing my how to write blog titles post, a few people reached out and mentioned that they didn’t know how to use Power Words or they didn’t know which words were classed as them. So, I decided to create an ultimate guide on how to start using Power Words in your content. Hopefully this answers all your questions, but leave me a comment if not!
Why You Should Use Power Words
Whilst you may think of yourself as completely rational in your thinking, many of our decisions are made on an emotional level. Power words are words with a stronger meaning, that trigger an psychological or emotional response. When it comes to your titles, you want to nudge your reader to click and read by using power words.
Power words can also be used in your content body and on social media. When you look at the PDF, you’ll realise that you’re probably already using some naturally in these spaces. But their uses are to persuade and help influence the audience to use the call-to-action included. Whether it’s read, share, comment or buy – bloggers have been using these words for years. So you can improve your own content by using these powerful words too.
How To Use Power Words
So now I’m sure you’re thinking “But how do I include them?” and forcing power words into a already created title can be difficult. So here’s some tips for you.
What Feeling Should Your Headline Manifest?
Take some time to look through your content and make a decision on what feeling you would want your audience to have towards it. This can be strong emotions like happiness or anger, or that the feel the content is simple, authoritative or complete and comprehensive. Your content can even include multiples, but choose succintly what you want the headline to convey to the reader.
For example, for a guide post like this one you may want the task to feel simple and easy for beginners or you could want it to feel complete and authoritative for an audience looking for the full package. For a horror book review, you may want to use words that express fear or a beauty product review that plays up vanity. Unfortunately it’s not one size fits all, and the context of your content and your audience will also inform what you use.
Which Power Words Fit Your Content?
After choosing your feeling you can use the PDF to find words within that category, and note down the words which you think best ft the content. In this step, focus solely on your content and the target audience rather than the headline or title itself. You can always re-write your title to include the perfect power word, but not all power words are the perfect fit for the content you’re writing. Some words just won’t fit with the context, and that’s fine.
For example, on this post my feeling was simplicity. I wanted to convey that my content is simple and easy to follow (which I hope is correct too!). But the words painless or bare bones are words that just don’t fit with the content of “using power words”. Instead I went with how-to as my main power word in the title, but basic or cheat sheet were also possible contenders.
Create Multiple Titles with Power Words (and Choose One)
After choosing potential power words, check if each one will fit naturally into the title you’ve already got and write multiple mock titles. If it doesn’t fit, you can re-write the title all together. Create multiple options and then you can choose which one you believe will be more powerful at catching your audience’s attetnion.
If you power word doesn’t fit in naturally, you can even add a tagline or subtitle after the main title. For example, with book reviews I often keep it simple as “Book Title + Review” but then have a short snappy sentence after which describes the book with feeling.
List of Power Words
I have a full list of 1000+ power words in the PDF below:
Using numbers as well as power words helps too. Numbers as digits (i.e. 1000) stand out in a block of text or your title. Numbers also trick the brain into thinking the data is more trustworthy, which is why backing up research with statistics and numerical data is preferred. After all these tips I hope you now know how to start using power words in your own content. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments!