I Wrote a Blog About Click-Bait: What Happened Next Will Change Your Life.

Click bait is the enemy of Journalism. If Journalism was Superman click bait would be Lex Luthor, or Tom and Jerry, or Kim Kardashian and Amber Rose. (What ever that means)

So when my lecturer told us to look to Upworthy for writing inspiration I felt like Sherlock asking Moriarty for help with a crossword.

But in reality my analogues aren't quite accurate. If click bait is Lex Luthor journalism is a small tubby toddler with an ‘S’ drawn on his forehead in felt tip.

Traditional Journalism has taken to the new online market place like a duck to sulfuric acid. An inherent snobbishness has obstructed it’s ability to harness the Internets ‘pay per click’ model.

This has allowed sites like Buzzfeed to create more engaging, and importantly, more profitable, content from images of cats than newspapers with stories of war, corruption and scandals.

Click bait site’s best weapon is their use of headlines. When profitability is based on clicks an intriguing headline can make an article irresistible.

So in a few weeks I’ll be part of a team taking over a real businesses’s social media sites. ‘Engagement’ is the key to online marketing success. Twitter’s advertising utility charge $2 per engagement so that’s the monetary value of a good headline.

As a lover of words this is a challenge I relish. Much of the impact of my previous writing has been intangible so the prospect of being able to put a number on it is strangely exciting.

So I embarked on a quest into the dark recesses of click bait websites. An endless hole of “shocking” , “unbelievable”,”incredible” bullshit. But what I was interested in was the headlines. How they drew the reader in. Here are the main repetitive themes.

Lists

A craft mastered by Buzzfeed. The ‘listicle’ is traditionally read at speed by procrastinators. By dividing content into lists you inform the reader that they’re not about to open a tab of Dostoyevsky but a pleasant brief distraction from their awful lives. These often use numbers to give the reader a firm idea of content length before embarking on a click.

Keywords

If you want your content to come up on Google then you want to cram as many google-able terms into your headline as possible.

Pain/Pleasure

Many popular headlines are based around the promise of reducing pain or triggering pleasure. ‘Top tip so you don’t loss your job’ or ‘How to get that promotion’ use pain points to give instructive content more authority.

Curiosity

An easy tool to use. Give the reader a whiff of interesting content but force them to click to find out more.

And finally- do you use questions!?

Question are a strong way to insistently make a reader think about your content. Giving them a question and the promise of an answer upon clicking it a surefire way to create engagement.