Scrolling Culture
How to choose headlines so that readers will click
Writing is an art, and I love the artfulness of it. I love molding and shaping my words, as a potter would clay. I love nuance. I love metaphor. I find poignant double entendre down right orgasmic!
For a logophile like me, there is no more indulgent…more self-indulgent…step of the writing process, than choosing a juicy title for my work. It has to be meaty. It has to be meaningful. One would have to ponder it in order to really get it…
Here’s the problem with my self-indulgence: It’s out of step with the overwhelming amount of content served up by the information age.
Welcome to scrolling culture 2020 Medium is Tinder, just for words and ideas
In our fast-paced 24/7 world, most readers are too impatient for nuance. Their time is too scarce and too precious. At least, that is until we’ve won them over.
When writing online, my readers have to choose me three times before they’ll meet my ideas in their fullness. When they first encounter my piece, it is on a home screen with dozens of other stories, or in a long list of search engine results. To get to me, first they’ll have to:
- Focus their eyes on my story amidst the sea of others
- Choose to click
- Choose to read
It is not my artfulness or my insights that draw in my reader. I have to convince them to give my work a chance first.
I have three tools to convince my readers to give me, a writer whom they’ve never met, a few minutes of their very precious time and attention:
- My headline/Header
- My Subheading
- My Feature Imaged
With these three elements, I have to prove to my prospective reader that what I have to say is worth their time. And, I have about 10 seconds to do it.
Gone are the days that our readers pull our words off of dusty shelves, holding weighty hardback books in their hands as they ponder their power. It is in that old-world context that titles like Great Expectations or A Room of Her Own, ripe with nuance and meaning, have their place.
They are titles. We are writing headlines.
While you might choose to title a blog post somewhere in the body of it, that is not the function of the large preview text that displays in search results. We are not writing titles, as Dickens or Woolfe were. We are writing Headers and Subheaders.
A headline is not a title.
It’s a bid for attention.
Understanding Human Nature
To effectively craft your headline or Header and your Subheader, you need to understand basic human nature.
B.F. Skinner, father of Behavioral Psychology, demonstrated that mammals are motivated by two forces and two forces alone: Self-preservation and reward, learning quickly to associate simple behaviors with their immediate consequences. His initial studies were performed with mice, who adapted their behavior in predictable and demonstrable ways when offered a reward (sugar water) or punishment (electric shock).
Humans are no different.
The dominant motivation in human beings is self-preservation. We are hardwired in our reptilian brain to protect against life-threatening situations. Responding to this wiring is preverbal and virtually instantaneous. It is what is triggered when we’re scrolling and swiping at lightning speed.
When we’re safe, the most powerful motivator of human beings is the promise of pleasure or reward, life-affirming pleasure most of all (food, sex, capital ($)).
Readers give us 10 seconds to convince them that our work is worth their precious time. In that short amount of time, the best way to do that is to address one of these two primary human motivators.
Effective Headers and Subheaders address one of these two questions:
- Will reading this article prevent against death, loneliness, pain, shame or scarcity?
- Will reading this article increase reward or pleasure?
If the answer is “yes,” readers will click. If it’s no, then the chances are far lower that they will.
It is considerations like these that tools like this Headline Analyzer from Advanced Marketing Institute assess, having assigned a emotion rating to every word. A similar dynamic can be seen in real time by comparing your Header/Subheader with google search terms here or here, as people google what they want and what they fear.
I was able to put these principles to work when crafting the header and subheader of my recent story “The Mistake that is Costing Us So Much Pleasure.” This header/subheader is a double-win because its first phrase triggers the human fear response (ie. “Uh oh! What mistake? Am I making that mistake too?”), and the subheading promises reward (“More pleasure? Yes please!”). That the image is eye-candy does not hurt the story’s prospects either.
By orienting my Header, Subheader and Image around the basic human instincts to protect against fear or seek reward, while stimulating the eyes with something alluring or relatable, I make the case to my reader that my words will address a basic human need; that giving me their time will make their lives better.
It still hurts sometimes, when I can’t give my work the artful title that I wish I could. Even this piece might have gained more readers had I titled it “Are You Making The Same Mistake That I Did?” but I opted instead to tell you directly what the article would be about in four words “Headlines are Not Titles.” Such a choice is not elegant; it’s pragmatic, and it meets you, my reader where you are, when you’re scrolling your favorite feed. Once I hook you, I hope that you’ll read with me through to the end, finding that my words make your life better in some way.
Great Resources for Crafting Headers and Subheaders
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