Want to Write the Best Title? Then Stack It up Against the Best of the Best from Amazon and Medium
How to start the perfect title? Start it with the words “How To”!
According to Kaggle’s open data source “1.4 million stories collected from Medium”, some 40,000 titles started with the words “How to”.
Not writing a “how to” article? Is it more of a “What is” or a “How I” article? No worries, those are next in the most popular sets of starting words. Here are the top-30 starting pairs:
- How to
- What is
- How I
- Why I
- Why you
- This is
- Are you
- What I
- The best
- Why we
- How do
- Do you
- The future
- Building a
- I am
- The power
- How we
- If you
- What are
- 5 ways
- How the
- Meet the
- The most
- Why do
- Why the
- The art
- 5 things
- Want to
- What to
And the top-30 starting triples:
- How to make
- How to get
- How to create
- How to build
- Why you should
- The power of
- How to use
- How to be
- The future of
- What I learned
- The art of
- The importance of
- What is the
- 5 ways to
- How do you
- Getting started with
- How to write
- An open letter
- How to become
- How to find
- How to buy
- What to do
- What is a
- How to start
- A letter to
- 3 ways to
- This is how
- An introduction to
- This week in
Yup, those are the words that resonated most with Medium readers and made them clap. It's clear that we have a yearning to learn new things and welcome tips and hacks to better ourselves. Note: I’m not saying that you absolutely have to start your titles that way in order to succeed, am just reporting the stats.
I have done something similar in the past using some 4 million Amazon Best Selling titles (here and here) and found that Amazon book title preferences align fairly well with Medium titles.
A Title’s Ideal Length
The ideal title length on Amazon best selling books and Medium’s most clapped articles is between 5 and 10 words.
A Data Science Tool to Score Your Next Title
So I combined all these lessons into a simple web application to score new titles. It is open to all and it is free. It is a work in progress and may have bugs (let me know if you see something weird).
I gave it a whirl with this piece’s title “Want to Write the Best Title? Then Stack It up Against the Best of the Best from Amazon and Medium”. And it gave me a 90% score. Yeah, me! Below are screenshots from the web app:
Title’s Skew
Title’s Length
Analysis of Starting Words
Check it out at http://www.viralml.com/title-analyzer
Thanks for reading and a big thanks to harrisonj for collecting this data and making it available on Kaggle.
Check out my new eBook and sign up for my newsletter at ViralML.com
Manuel Amunategui
Connect on Twitter: @amunategui
Author of Monetizing Machine Learning, Create Income Streams with Online Classes and Grow Your Web Brand, Visibility & Traffic Organically. Curator of amunategui.github.io and ViralML
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +409,714 people.
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