The Most Important Ingredient to Writing Great Headlines on Medium

How many guidelines forget about it and how the gameful approach to life can help you recuperate it

The importance of headlines for your stories on Medium

Headlines on Medium and any other place you find anything published are vital to attracting potential readers' interest.

When you start writing and publishing on Medium, you learn from those who are successful here or at least have been here for a while and don’t plan to leave.

And all of them will tell you, headlines are important.

Here is what one of the greatly respected authors here and a cheerleader and supporter of writers Shaunta Grimes wrote in her brilliant piece “How to Start Writing on Medium: A Tutorial” back in May of this year:

“The headline, subtitle, and feature photo are very important. I’ll write a whole post about them soon.”

I am sure you can see why these three components are vital. They are the first a reader on Medium sees, and if these — as a team — make the person seeing them curious enough to open your story and start reading it, then you got yourself at least a view.

Finding the most important ingredient under several different names with the same meaning

Taking this advice to heart, I read attentively every guide on Medium, especially the headlines' bits. I also followed the advice of Nicole Akers to use a headline analyzer while writing my headlines. I found this advice among many other great ones in her acclaimed book Make Money on Medium: Build Your Audience and Grow Your Income with Medium.com.

I am glad I followed her advice because the headline analyzer I use is a gameful gadget when I play my “Writing and Publishing on Medium” game.

Recently, after writing on Medium for more than half a year and not planning to stop, I started observing what I did here and why I was having so much fun.

That comes from the practice of turning my life into fun games. This approach, which I call Self-Gamification, brings anthropology, kaizen, and gamification together. From the writers on these three well-known and established techniques, I learned how to study the world around me and myself non-judgmentally and continually, as anthropologists do with the culture they are interested in, how to learn from successes instead of failures, how to appreciate the smallest of successes and steps in progress, and approach each of these steps in the fun, gameful, and playful ways.

One particular tool comes prominent in turning anything and everything into fun games.

Here are just a few ways to describe it:

• What I call “Fun Detecting Antenna” and which is nothing more and nothing less than an awareness of what is fun for you.
• Enthusiasm.
• Excitement.

In my first story about Medium, I discussed what might be the true reasons behind wanting to give up writing and publishing here on Medium or anywhere else:

Here is what I claimed to be the reason number one:

If you are about to give up writing on Medium (or anywhere else), then you are not excited about the writing process — the game — anymore.

And here lies the hint to the most important ingredient to writing great headlines on Medium or anywhere else — your excitement about it.

I have been complimented on many of my book titles and headlines on Medium. Some don’t always follow the common guidelines for writing great headlines or don’t rank well with headline analyzers. But along with subtitles and images, they got many views, and one even got the top position on Google search for “real-life role-playing games,” positive feedback and compliments pointing out how much the readers appreciated the paradox in some of them.

If you look at some of Medium's most successful stories, you will see that not all of their headlines cut well with headline analyzers. Linda Caroll wrote a fun and insightful piece on that with the title “I Tested the Headlines of the Top 20 Stories on Medium. 4 Passed.” and revealing subtitle “What the headlines of popular Medium stories have in common.”

When writing your headlines, Linda Carolle recommends:

“go for clarity.”

I happily join her here. Because clarity is part of the awareness both for yourself and your readers. If you are clear about what your piece is about and what excites you about it, you will be able to relate it both in the headline and in the text. So, when you write your headline, make it exciting for you. If you don’t enjoy it, there is a slim chance your readers will enjoy it.

How to assist yourself in getting excited and bypass fear

Usually, you should find quickly what is enticing for you. But your fear of rejection or even succeeding might nudge you toward second-guessing your ideas for the headlines.

To remove the drama from the process of creating a headline and subtitle, approach it as a fun game, of which you are both the designer and the player.

Just ask yourself the following question:

“If writing a headline for my story was a game, how would I approach it as its designer or player?”

Then test each of the appearing ideas for how excited you are. Use the headline analyzer as your gameful gadget if you want, but also go with the clear and fun headline about which you are so excited that you can’t wait to write a story for and revise and publish it.

Thank you for reading!

If you enjoyed this story, then in addition to it and those I referred to above, you might also enjoy these:

P.S.

To stay in touch and keep updated on the fantastic possibilities of turning life into fun games offers, join my e-mail list, Optimist Writer.