Keep It Snappy

Tip Of The Day — Day 15– Hitting the headlines

This is part of a series of daily tips for writers which is published to share ideas and suggestions on our craft. Everyone will have different advice on how to write, so the tip below is just a personal selection which I hope you will find useful, and do share any of your own in the comments.

Today’s tip is to make sure that your headline draws the reader in. A good headline will grab the attention and make you want to read more. It should be lively and relevant to the content of the article.

Clickbait

There is lots of advice on this, some promoting “clickbait” suggestions. However while this may have initial success, the reader is often left feeling deceived or disappointed if the article does not live up to expectations.

So if your aim is to have a good reading time for your article it is worth bearing this in mind. For some more on clickbait headlines, the following article is a good one, including examples of such headlines over the years:

Humour and odd numbers

Readers like humour, so clever puns can work well. Another tip is that for some bizarre unknown reason, odd numbers work better than even. So you will often see listicles such as “11 ways you can be a billionaire in 3 easy steps”, (usually involving affiliate marking or cryptocurrency!). Though given the proliferation of listicles on Medium, many clearly AI-generated, I would personally suggest giving them a miss.

Follow the numbers

Having devised your headline it is worth using the Medium dashboard of statistics to see which articles do well, to get feedback on what works and what doesn’t. Survival of the fittest in action!

I hope you found this article useful, and do share any tips of your own in the comments.

Previous tips:

Day 1- The Notebook

Day 2 — Mind your language — learning new words

Day 3 –Quotations

Day 4 — Dictionary and thesaurus —

Day 5 — Location —

Day 6 — Planning —

Day 7 — Reverse engineering success —

Day 8 — Choosing your subject —

Day 9 — Do your own research —

Day 10 — Niches for Riches —

Day 11 — Layout —

Day 12 — Deadlines —

Day 13 — Making time —

Day 14- Subject selection —