How to Write a Medium Title That Rocks
Part of The Ultimate Guide to Better Writing on Medium
The title is the single most important part of your writing on Medium. It is the make-or-break element, the thing that sets how successful your piece can be. It’s one thing other than your photo readers see and use to decide whether to click your post or scroll on. So how can you make your Medium title and subtitle shine?
Format Your Medium Title Correctly
Seriously, this one is important. Format your title properly. Capitalize every word in your title except prepositions and don’t put a period.
This is the most common mistake I see out there. It makes me sad every time I spot a good article with a great title written out like a sentence. It’s not likely to get curated.
Not sure what to capitalize? I run most of my titles (and headers, too) through Titlecase. It’s a handy website where you simply copy and paste your title into the box, and it gives you back the correctly capitalized title version with no trouble. Your title will be correct and curatable with no fuss. Although if you want to format your titles on your own, here’s a guide to AP title case.
Don’t forget to handle your subtitle properly too. According to Medium, subtitles should be written out like sentences. So don’t capitalize anything other than the first letter and proper nouns and add necessary punctuation.
Without the right formatting, Medium curators are likely to reject your otherwise great article. Correctly punctuating and capitalizing your title and subtitle gives your post a better shot at curation with nearly no effort.
Make It Engaging
I’ve already written a post on how to make a great title for your blog post that I recommend you check out. But here are some more things you should remember when titling your Medium post.
To attract readers, your title must not only tell them what your post is about, it must also tell them why they should read it. Your title needs to tell readers what they are about to read and what they’ll get out of reading.
Let’s look at a few good titles on Medium as examples:
- “How To Become an Instagram Influencer and Start Earning Money”
- “What If You Only Sometimes Work Out?”
- “It’s Okay If You’re Not Resilient”
These are three recently trending articles on Medium, and two of them are from Medium’s own publication, Elemental. So you know these are the kind of titles they look for and that do well on the platform. They’re all different titles on very different topics. Yet, they all do good by telling you what they are about and why you should read them.
Number one, “How To Become an Instagram Influencer and Start Earning Money,” is beautiful, plain, and simple. It tells you the article is about to explain how you can become an Instagram influencer, step by step. It also spells out why you want to read this article and perhaps become an Instagram star-to make money.
Number two, “What If You Only Sometimes Work Out?,” tells you the article is about the impact of occasionally working out. Why should you read it? Because if you work out sometimes, that’s a question on your lips and you want it answered. A title that asks a common question lures readers in with the “why” being an answer to their questions.
Number three, “It’s Okay If You’re Not Resilient,” suggests the article will talk about a lack of resilience. Why you should read this is because you might lack resilience and hope this article will comfort you. Readers love to be told their flaws aren’t so bad.
All these titles clearly communicate what they offer and why readers should click. These two factors are great for building strong titles that grab readers’ attention and get them engaged.
Interested in reading more Medium tips? Check out my article “The Ultimate Guide to Better Writing on Medium” on my blog. Know any tips for creating titles on Medium? Let me know in the responses.
Excerpt from an article originally published at http://www.mintmillerwrites.com on November 13, 2019.