A Better Headline
A simple tweak suddenly sent one of my articles from 7 views to more than 3.8k views and 1.5k reads within a few weeks.
Update May 1, 2023
A new tutorial found this morning, The Fine Line Between Clickbait and a Quality Title by Walter Rheine offers insights into the term clickbait and addresses other key details one must consider when deciding on a headline.
Rhine’s piece offers fresh insights on the topic and gives me pause.
Learning how to draft good headlines is an ongoing process, as I wrote previously. Even the title of this article changed a few times after publication.
My latest article to get more views after a title change...
1. “Celebrity Innkeeper’s Financial Mistakes Unwittingly Led to Murder”
2. “How A Mistake By An Entrepreneur Unwittingly Led to Murder.”
It took several changes before settling on headline two. (An image depicting large rocks jutting out of the sea likely was cut out and likely helped, too.)
I am now off to challenge yet another headline rewrite inspired by this latest tutorial. See the source list updated for a link to Rheine’s article.
Dreaming up a good headline for a recent article caused me to delay submitting it for publication.
I thought no one would see, much less read, an article with the headline I had already chosen. Meanwhile, super writers on Medium had detailed articles published on the same subject.
At one point, I pounced on the idea of adding a colon to my headline, but seriously, no colon was going to fix the problem.
You see, as the world paid homage to film legend Sidney Poitier, my piece was titled, Sidney Poitier. And with a snappy subtitle that stripped the mystery out of what the article was about. Why read it?
Many of the articles about Sidney Poitier were homage and cultural reportage of his body of work and impact on Black or African American culture.
But my piece focused on one of his films.
After the publication of my article and a dismal view rate, I continued to research the backstory of the film and the life of Sidney Poitier, determined to find a better headline.
I did.
Without changing the structure of the existing article, I added three brief paragraphs before the close of the piece and updated the source list to support the revised headline.
Original headline submitted Title: Sidney Poitier Subtitle: The movie scene heard around the world
Rewrite draft: Title: Sidney Poitier Subtitle: Why he lost an Oscar Nomination
Final revision See below
After editing the headline, the views took off. I am new at this, so this is my definition of viral. I did not share the article on social media.
See the stats screenshot below. Periodically, the stats continue to rise as they have since I first drafted the article.
But I still have a lot of work to do with learning how to draft better headlines.
A new useful tutorial article on Medium added to the top of the sources list below underscores the reality that having the right headline is vital.
And so is learning how to choose which headline strategy works best.
Thank you for reading!
Sources
No One is Reading Your Article Because of Terrible Headlines. Dennis De Silva.
