“Wow” Headlines: 2 Amazingly Quick and Easy Ways with ChatGPT

How ChatGPT can help, not replace you as a writer (said simply, it’s “and,” not “or”)

If you write online content (unless you’ve been hiding under a rock) you know these two things.

1. Without a compelling headline, you may as well not publish. Even a great article, hidden by a mediocre headline, will languish with little to no reader attention.
2. Large Language Models such as ChatGPT are disrupting online writing.

Combine these two facts, add a pinch of “If you can’t beat them use them,” and you understand it’s time to up your headline game on ChatGPT’s back.

Here’s how…

(Enough) Experience Lets You Write Pretty Darn Good Headlines

I’ve been writing online since 2007.

At first, I brought over a lot of writing “knowledge” from my academic background.

Think passive voice with long, dense paragraphs, next to no white space, few headlines, and few if any bulleted lists.

And headlines?

I’d just sling together a few words that said what the article was about. Because I’m sure readers were waiting with bated breath for my next pearl of wisdom…

*cringe*

Fifteen years and many hundreds of articles (totaling well over a million words) later, I’ve learned a few things.

When I decided to write this article, I came up with the following headline:

2 Fast and Easy Ways to Craft Compelling Headlines Using ChatGPT

The well-known CoSchedule headline tool scored it a respectable 81 (you want at least 70 out of 100).

The tool recommended increasing emotional, uncommon, and common words and moving the topic to the first or last three words of the headline.

Note that removing one word (other than “and,” “Easy,” “Ways,” or “to”) would trim the word count to 10 and accomplish the first three suggestions.

Normally, I’d spend 15–20 minutes of head-scratching and “innovative languaging” to contort the headline and cut one of the other seven words, and move “Compelling Headlines” to the start or end of the title.

Not fun, and the results tend to be ok, but not usually awesome.

Enter ChatGPT, Stage Left

Instead, I went to the ChatGPT tab on my browser and typed in:

“Write 20 alternate titles from ‘2 Fast and Easy Ways to Craft Compelling Headlines Using ChatGPT’”

Here are the top 10 variations it offered in descending order of CoSchedule scores (in parentheses):

1. The Fastest and Easiest Way to Write Headlines with ChatGPT (69)
2. Crafting Headlines: A Quick and Easy Guide with ChatGPT (68)
3. Boost Your Headline Writing Skills with ChatGPT (63)
4. Effortlessly Create Attention-Grabbing Headlines with ChatGPT (59)
5. Headline Writing Made Simple with ChatGPT (55)
6. A Beginner’s Guide to Writing Headlines with ChatGPT (55)
7. The Ultimate Guide to Headline Writing with ChatGPT (54)
8. How to Create Compelling Headlines with ChatGPT (53)
9. Headline Writing Made Effortless with ChatGPT (53)
10. Make Headline Writing a Breeze with ChatGPT (53)

Since this takes just a quick copy/paste, scoring all 20 took under a minute.

“But wait!” you may exclaim, “Even the best score for ChatGPT is short of the minimum ‘good’ score of 70, let alone as good or better than your initial headline’s 81!”

If you thought that, you’re absolutely right.

But that’s just our first step.

The crucial next step is to look at the details of the top-scoring versions and mash them up with my original into a better headline than any of the three.

To do that, we start with the detailed CoSchedule results for the best two ChatGPT suggestions.

This one has too many common words and no emotional or power words.

This one also has too many common words but is missing uncommon ones. It also buried the topic in the middle of the title, making it harder for readers to skim.

Mashing up these two ChatGPT suggestions with my original, retaining the uncommon, emotional, and power words, plus the human-important word “compelling” I got this:

Compelling Headlines 2 Ways with ChatGPT: Quick and Easy Guide

Note that reducing the word count to 10 makes it easier to score well, so I dropped the “a” in front of “Quick,” garnering a very nice score of 90!

However, since human readers who’d find this title compelling won’t turn their nose up at it just because I add one single-letter word, I’d add back the “a” to get my mashup version (for a score of88):

Compelling Headlines 2 Ways with ChatGPT: a Quick and Easy Guide

A-Posteriori Headlines from ChatGPT

However, none of the above allows the AI the benefit of “knowing” exactly what the article is about.

So, as a final step, I asked the AI to write 20 headlines given the article’s content (copy/pasting all the above words into the AI’s input line and asking for 20 headline options).

ChatGPT provided the following (again the top 10 by descending scores). Note that not all these suggestions retained the meaning I intended.

1. Two Fast and Easy Ways to Amp Up Your Headline Writing with ChatGPT (88; changing “Two” to “2” to get this score)
2. Headline Writing Made Effortless: 2 Fast and Easy Ways with ChatGPT (87)
3. How to Boost Your Headline Game with ChatGPT: A Quick and Easy Guide (83)
4. Boost Your Content Game with ChatGPT’s Headline Writing (69)
5. Writing Headlines? Don’t Miss Out on ChatGPT’s Disruptive Power (66)
6. From Meh to Wow: Transform Your Headlines with ChatGPT (65; it didn’t score so well, but I like it, so I later borrowed something from it)
7. Writing Headlines Made Simple: Learn with ChatGPT’s Help (64)
8. Transform Your Headline Writing with ChatGPT’s Help (62)
9. Craft Winning Headlines with ChatGPT’s AI Writing Assistance (61)
10. ChatGPT: The Revolutionary Tool for Creating Attention-Grabbing Headlines (60)

Now that the AI ingested all the keywords in the top part of the article, it had much more to work with, and its top two versions scored a more-than-respectable 87 and 88…

Can we mash up these two with our previous best “score-90” version?

Well, they both need emotional words, and the first has too many common words and too few uncommon words (given the total word count of 13, which is a bit long for my liking anyway).

Since the second version is closer to my preferred length, let’s start with that one, replace “fast” with the emotional word “quick,” and move “effortless” to the start so we can get rid of “made,” reaching 10 words.

Effortless Headline Writing: 2 Quick and Easy Ways with ChatGPT

This scores the same 90 as our previous best effort and sounds more compelling to boot.

However, I don’t love the word “Effortless” because it’s misleading.

Yes, using ChatGPT makes writing compelling headlines easier, but as you can see from our journey above, effortless it’s not.

Also, I really liked something about the lower-scoring “From Meh to Wow: Transform Your Headlines with ChatGPT” so I borrowed the “Wow” for our next effort.

Removing “Effortless” opened space to add “Amazingly” which I think is fair, leading to our final title, which scored the highest yet, 91.

‘Wow’ Headlines: 2 Amazingly Quick and Easy Ways with ChatGPT

ChatGPT Does Best at Helping, Not Replacing the Writer

With 15 years of experience, and a couple of those years using CoSchedule’s headline tool, my initial headline effort scored a respectable 81.

I could have just gone with that, and in the past, I would have.

However, with ChatGPT around, I knew I could do better. To that end, I used the AI two ways.

First, I asked it for 20 variants just based on my initial title. These averaged a poor 53, with the highest just under the minimum acceptable score of 70. However, by taking the best aspects of the top two variants and my initial title, I got a great score of 90.

Still, the title read a bit clunky.

As a second way of using ChatGPT, I let it chew on the article content (to that point) once it was written and asked for 20 new headlines. This effort gained a lot from having access to much of the article’s content, adding 9 points to its average and 19 points to its top-scoring variant.

The top two variants now both scored in the high 80s and mashing them up with the previous best version resulted in a new title that scored 90, read better, and seemed more compelling.

However, I thought it was too clickbaity.

I tweaked it some more and arrived at our final result, which scored the best, 91, and seemed compelling without being (IMO) overly clickbaity.

Couldn’t I repeat the second step, letting the AI chew on the second half of the article too?

In truth, I could.

However, that would take more time and effort, and I think it’s unlikely to improve the score beyond 91 without making it read worse and/or more clickbaity.

The Bottom Line

As a human reader, none of ChatGPT’s efforts seemed especially compelling to me (though I did like the “Meh to Wow”).

It’s only by taking the best aspects of ChatGPT’s best suggestions and those of my initial effort that I reached what I believe is a title that does more than merely score well (according to yet another algorithm).

Using ChatGPT in these two quick and easy ways allowed me to move from a respectably scoring but humdrum effort to a punchy-sounding compelling headline with a 10-points-higher score, and more importantly, one that reads well to a human and sounds compelling without going over that fine line into clickbait!

That’s why I think that while ChatGPT isn’t great at coming up with compelling headlines on its own, it’s a great tool to help us writers improve our headlines.

And if you’re interested in doing more with ChatGPT than improving headlines, here’s an example where I used it in the article-writing process…

Disclaimer

This article is intended for informational purposes only, and should not be considered financial, investment, business, tax, or legal advice. You should consult a relevant professional before making any major decisions.

About the author

Opher Ganel has set up several successful small businesses, including a consulting practice supporting NASA and government contractors.

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