Why You Don’t Need to Overthink Your Headlines
By: David B. Clear
Tags: Blogging, Headlines, Writing, Marketing, Oh So Clear

Why You Don’t Need to Overthink Your Headlines

All images by the author.

How do I get a mob of readers to kick down my front door, spill into my living room, and then have them frantically ransack my place before they finally grab me by the lapel, shake me violently, and desperately shout “Article! David, article! Where’s your latest article?!”?

In other words, how do I become a viral blogger?

That’s what I asked myself when I first started writing for an online audience. Luckily, there’s plenty of writing advice out there and, soon enough, I found the answer: It’s the headline, stupid! That’s all that’s standing between your awesome stories and massive viral success.

And so I started writing, all the while dreaming of marauding masses of readers hunting me down for more content. And whenever I had a masterpiece finished, it was time to carefully craft a headline for it. But not any old headline. It had to be a great headline, an awesome headline, an irresistible headline — a headline that would be the literary equivalent of Pringles salted with crack. After all, no matter how good your story is, they tell me, if the headline sucks, no one’s going to read it. And so I’d brainstorm. I’d come up with a good three dozen headline alternatives: how to blah blah blah, why you should blah blah blah, 13 ways to blah blah blah, the number one blah blah blah, the blah blah blah’s guide to blah blah blah…

And once I had my list of potential headlines, I started to read it, rearrange it, subdivide it, expand it, trim it, and revise it. Eventually, the list began to take shape — the shape of a crumpled piece of newspaper that had been boiled in milk for an hour. The list had turned into a confused wide-eyed unintelligible soggy mixture of seemingly random words and phrases.

As advised, I spent as much time on the headline as on the article itself, but the result was only that I became more and more anxious with each advancing minute. Which one is it? Which one! I really don’t want to blow it again! I want my viral article… Please pretty please, just this one time let me get it right.

And so I continued. I continued to forcefully scrunch my forehead skin together with my fingers, hoping that some of the mechanical manipulation would be conveyed through my thick skull and somehow relax my brain beneath it — relax it sufficiently for me to suddenly jump up and shout “Eureka! This is the headline! This is the one!” But, alas, that moment of revelation never came. I just got sore fingers and ended up with a brow sufficiently wrinkled that I worried I’d need a clothes iron. Eventually, exasperated, I’d say “Screw it! This one will have to do…” I’d slap the chosen headline onto my story, cross my fingers, publish the story, and, inevitably, get disappointed when almost no one read it.

Reach matters waaaay more more than headlines

You’ve got to be freaking kidding me. That was my reaction when I saw a story trending on Medium titled “Hi.” As of this writing, the story has 75,000 claps. Seventy-five thousand motherloving claps! There’s no way on Pluto I’d get so many claps even if I was writing a treatise on sardines for a colony of seals.

What the heck?! “Hi”? A polite greeting? Is that the headline secret? Maybe I should write a couple of stories titled “Hello,” “Howdy,” and “Nice to Meet You.”

But of course that’s not how it works. The headline had nothing to do with the success of that story. It was all about who wrote it — a woman called Chrissy Teigen. And although I have no clue who she is, apparently I’m the only one, given that she has 13.7 million followers on Twitter.

The thing is, Chrissy has enormous reach. Whatever she says, it’ll reach a bigger audience than anything you and I could ever say. It’s as if she had a megaphone stapled onto her lips. She could probably burp into a microphone and have hundreds of thousands of people tune in to listen.

So, it’s clear. Headlines are not all that matters. In fact, they’re secondary. What matters way more than any headline is how many people you can reach.

How to increase your reach

My favorite writers don’t need fancy click-baity headlines for me to read them. They could indeed write a story titled “Nice to Meet You,” or even one titled “Gfagafgfsasdre,” and I would read it. What draws me to their stories is that unique thing I’ve come to know them for: their voice, their quirkiness, their sense of humor, their insights.

These writers don’t have a hard time reaching me for one simple reason: I go out of my way to look for their stuff. I eagerly click on any follow and subscribe button that appears under their name and if I haven’t heard from them in a while, I plaster my social media accounts with “OH MY GOD! IS [insert name of writer] STILL ALIVE?!?!” I’m their fan and I love their stuff. I’d cheerfully ram a fishing hook through my lower lip and tether it to their ankles if I had no other way to keep track of them.

And you know what? I’m not the only one. These writers have tremendous reach and that’s so even though their headlines mostly suck. I mean, some of my favorite writers publish blog posts with titles such as “Richard” and “Dog”, which might be good ways to name the members of your family, but they’re not good headlines.

What my favorite writers have in common, however, are two things:

They have build a reputation for producing great stuff and

they have been publishing stuff for a loooong time.

They’ve been hooking people one by one for years, sometimes a decade or longer. They don’t try to appeal to people who fall for catchy headlines, scroll at warp speed through articles, and then hurry off to the next catchy headline — people who never take the time to look at who wrote that piece they just zipped through.

You see, the people who really matter when it comes to increasing your reach are not the masses who furiously click on any sensational title. The people who matter are those who already have a bigger reach than you and who can multiply your own reach by giving you access to a bigger audience. These are publication editors, fellow writers who’ve already made it, and, yes, influencers and celebrities. Unlike the masses, these people are unlikely to be impressed by a fancy headline. But if you have a collection of consistently awesome content, then they may take note of you, the writer. And if they do, they may send opportunities your way that can explode the size of your readership: they may offer you a column, begin to feature your stories, or just flat out tell the world about you through their own channels.

So, how do you increase your reach to stratospheric levels as a nobody? Well, you have basically two options: the wonder-hit approach touted by headline-worshipping writers and the awesomeness approach.

The wonder-hit approach

This approach is all about hitting the jackpot and having a couple of your stories go viral for reasons no one really understands. It’s about getting catapulted into stardom through convoluted network effects on social media and by having unwittingly pressed just the right sequence of buttons on obscure recommender algorithms. It’s an approach where headlines matter a lot but, unfortunately, it’s also an approach you cannot rely on.

No matter what course-peddling bloggers tell you, no one can reliably manufacture viral hits. Even big publishing houses, multimillion-dollar movie studios, and star-studded record labels put out flops every year. So, when a big-name blogger goes through his archives, picks out his three top stories that happened to go viral, and then pompously tells you how amazing the headlines of these stories are, take that with a coconut-sized grain of salt. It’s mostly hindsight bias that’s talking. More likely than not, the blogger is just rationalizing after-the-fact why those stories went viral and he’d be incapable of telling you which of the twenty stories in his draft folder will be the next hit, if any.

The awesomeness approach

The second option to increasing your reach relies on being patient and publishing amazing stuff consistently. It’s an approach where headlines matter much less and it’s what has made my favorite blogger well-known, with her “Richard” and “Dog” headlines.

Now, I don’t mean to imply you should name your headlines Peter, Michael, Cat, and Goldfish. It’s not that with the awesomeness approach headlines don’t matter at all. You should still put some effort into them and make sure they accurately convey what the story is about, but you don’t have to put a disproportionate weight on them, feeling as if your success as a writer hinges on each and every headline.

With the awesomeness approach you simply focus on producing great content consistently for a long time. You’re not trying to compete with flashy titles in an environment saturated with clickbait. You’re instead building a reputation over time and thus individual stories with their titles matter far less. What matters is your whole body of work.

To illustrate this, think of the entirety of all the articles you’ve ever published as a book and of each individual article as a page in that book. As you’re writing page number 197 — your latest article — your goal is not to turn that page into a viral hit. So what you scribble at the top of that page — the headline — doesn’t matter too much in the grand scheme of things and is not worth fretting over. Instead, all you’re trying to do is create another insightful and fun to read page that will nicely fit into your corpus. Your goal is just this:

To keep your handful of fans happy as they keep reading each new page you publish and To ensure that if your metaphorical book happens to fall into the lap of someone with influence, they’ll be so impressed with what they see when they flick through it that they’ll consider using their powers to give you a boost.

Unlike the wonder-hit approach, the awesomeness approach is something you can rely on. It’s not mysterious, but straightforward. You publish great stuff and you do so consistently for a long time. It’s something you can plan to do. Best of all, the approach doesn’t preclude occasionally getting lucky and having a post go viral too.

Wrapping up

Do headlines matter? Sure. Is the right headline the missing secret ingredient for your stories to go viral? Maybe, but I doubt it. And if it is, then no one knows what the right headline is anyway. Even if you have a marketing team behind you that can extensively A/B test your headlines, you may not be much wiser. After all, an article with a headline that might have taken off yesterday may not draw much attention today.

So, instead of fretting about headlines, just learn what’s generally recommended and then go with what feels right. Don’t obsess about them. It’s much more sensible to work on your reach instead:

to keep your current fans happy so you don’t lose them,

to win over new fans one by one by positively surprising anyone who stumbles upon your work, and

to build a relationship with editors and other influential people.

And you don’t do any of that by crafting perfect headlines, if these even exist. You do it by building a reputation for quality work — by consistently publishing good stories with decent headlines and doing so for a long long time.