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Headline Oh Headline! Why Do You Baffle Me So?
The undeniable headline defeats are getting to me. Anyone else?
The humble headline has been a topic of my brain’s discussion with itself for too long now. The entire seven weeks that I have been writing on Medium, in fact.
I thought it would ease up and sort itself out, give itself a good talking to, and begin to finally make sense to me by now. But I was wrong.
It’s worse than ever. I am lost.
I still don’t know the answer to creating the best headlines, and my days are being sucked dry by the hours of deliberation.
It turns out it’s not just me.
Yesterday, I came across this story by , in which he discusses his own long hours of deliberation over headlines. His main objective in this article is to apologise to his readers for advising them to use a headline analysing tool, which turned out to be a load of codswallop when it comes to writing real, meaningful, and clickable headlines.
He goes on to describe what he considers to be a better way of deciphering how to create good headlines. He did this by closely analysing the headlines used by successful writers, and the titles of their best-performing stories.
