![]() ![]() This addresses a very specific profession, and puts it in a timed context. How to Become a World-Class Copywriter in One Month or Less Question articles are powerful in nature because they strive to answer a question, which is the basic block of providing information.Ĥ. If you don’t explain the best ways to cook pancakes, they will feel cheated. This, more than anything, is why people will click these. It gets them thinking that maybe they have their own reasons, which they want to compare to your own. If the article is “What Are the Best Ways to Cook Pancakes?”, you have invoked the pancake for the reader, and the ratios of flour to milk, and what kind of pan to use. This works because it raises the very question you’ve written about for the reader. Using How, Why, What, Where, and Who is an amazing way to open a potential reader’s mind to the possibility. Answering a QuestionĪnother super common, incredibly click-worthy style of headline is answering a question. It might be a more-clicked article without the “May” - wouldn’t you click “The 7 Harmless Habits That Cause Cancer” in a heartbeat? I mean, really.īut you have to be honest with your reader. The author isn’t 100% positive, because science can’t be 100% positive. We all want to avoid cancer, and we all have harmless habits.Īlso, the “May” of the situation speaks to the authenticity approach. Here there’s a number, the word “habits” again, and a massive topic. The 7 Harmless Habits That May Cause Cancer Again you see an adverb, a number, and a relationship you.ģ. Trending on Medium (when I wrote this), it speaks to all of us. For any baker who has struggled, might struggle, or thinks they don’t ever struggle, it’s a click-worthy post.Ģ. 14 Habits of Exceptionally Likable People It uses a number, an adverb, and a time frame. Penned by the listicle master itself, Buzzfeed knows how to turn you into a click machine. 26 Seriously Useful Baking Tips You’ll Wish You Knew About Sooner The reasons for why listicles work delves into the human psyche - the short of it is that people love numbers, and find that numbers are a compelling way to digest information.ġ. Should End McCarthyism” wouldn’t have flown back in the ’50’s - but they do now. The New York Times didn’t used to publish listicles - “7 Reasons the U.S. ![]() The listicle is probably the most common (and sometimes overused) catchy headline scheme on the planet right now. Why did you click on this article? Because it promised to give you a precise number of catchy headlines and blog post titles, right? The headline to this very article is a good place to start. Let’s dice up these manicured words and figure out why they’re so powerful, and why they elicit the click. I’m going to stick to the authenticity bent, but wanted to be inclusive in case you, reader, are Jaws. While I don’t personally like them, or think they’re editorially sound, you could probably convince somebody they’re worth it. To some, that’s a big bucket of chum thrown on the face of Jaws. Some of them love fear monger titles like “The Woman Who Killer Her Daughter Did It For-You Guessed It, Click to Find Out”. However, there are many people on this planet, most of whom have their own idiosyncrasies when it comes to reading articles. The styles of headlines I’ll outline below fall under this category, and, from my perspective, always should. We don’t want to get the entire gist of the article from the headline, we want to be intrigued, and understand what we’re clicking. ![]() The best headlines are those that entice readers while also giving them the full picture. Except it doesn’t have to be hypocritical, because I still firmly believe that the best headlines, those that are catchier than others, don’t resort to these terrible tactics. Headlines that leave giant holes in their concept so that the reader has to click through just to find out.Īs such there’s a bit of a hypocritical premise to this article, which is about how you can write headlines that draw people in. Headlines that are purposefully truncated to make you read more. In my opinion there are way too many terrible headlines out there. Mostly it’s because I see headlines as an issue, a fight to be fought, in the mind and time colonizing age of the internet. You can maybe catch my semi-enraged tone.
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