TIPS | WRITING

The Best TRICK I Stole From Another Writer

DON’T Use Clickbait Images

Hi,

First of all, I’d like to thank The Maverick Files and his article, Learnings and Observations From My First 1,000-Views & $25 Story for inspiring me to write this piece.

I’ve noticed this phenomenon happening to all of my articles. Success, bust, success, bust. It was a repeating pattern I needed to break out of.

The problem was, I was trying to be as irrelevant as possible with the images I chose for my articles.

“If I put an image that doesn't work with the title or what’s written in the article people will wonder what that’s all about and click on it.”

Tried it. It didn’t work. In fact, it had the opposite effect. What does a Medieval looking woman with make-up smears have to do with glitches on the Medium website? Nothing? That’s great, let’s use that. This article, was a dud.

Then I did something unusual, by accident. I wrote a title that whereas interesting, actually described exactly what was going to be written and even gave away the secret it was promising in the subtitle. I chose a normal image that made sense. My intuition said it would be my biggest failure.

Mind you, I’ve only been doing this for just over a month — blogging. I didn’t know shit from apple butter when I started. I was simply a hatchling pecking at everything and finding out whether it was good or not as I went along. This was the article in question.

The Maverick Files put it so succinctly:

“Factual Images Provide Authenticity

This one isn’t easy to do in all stories — but where you can try to use pictures that are authentic and relate to the story — whether it is your own clicks, illustration, or a picture directly related to the topic.

It is hard to find such images that are copyright-free, but Wikimedia Commons can often be a good source when writing real-life stories.”

Again, here is a link to his article.

As I looked through my work I discovered that there is a huge discrepancy between when I used images that were relevant and when I tried to be clever.

In the future, I will try to be less clever.

Thank you, The Maverick Files.