The most important line you'll write is the headline.
Advertising pioneer David Ogilvy once reported only 1 in 5 will make it past your headline into your copy. Though I don't have a modern day update on the percentage, I suspect, given the immense volume of content available to the active web surfer of today, the percentage of readers that click through to your story is far lower.
In a recent article from SEO technology company Conductor, they report:
A day in the Internet shows that 2 million blog posts, 294 billion emails, 864 thousand hours of video are created daily. Each day also brings 400 million tweets.
That's a lot of competition for your attention. The obvious result is tons of great content is ignored. Your challenge is to quickly engage readers and inspire clicks with headlines that suggest your articles are useful.
In an effort to help you understand a variety of headline approaches that perform well for bloggers, I've created a cheat sheet that spells out nine tips based on the word H-E-A-D-L-I-N-E-S.