Write Perfect Headlines With These 3 ChatGPT Prompts
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Headlines are 90% of the work to draw an audience.
Your articles may be beautifully written but it won’t matter unless people click on your stories.
I spend a lot of time on Medium, studying the best advice on how to write captivating headlines.
I used this knowledge to create advanced prompts for ChatGPT to generate captivating headlines that work.
The Generator (Prompt #1)
Step 1 Prompt:
Generate 10 captivating headlines for blog posts that incorporate psychological triggers, promise value, and spark curiosity. Use power words that evoke emotion at strategic points. Test variations with shocking numbers or statistics. Avoid revealing everything in the headline to maintain interest, and tailor the headlines to resonate with the intended audience’s desires, fears, and aspirations. Focus on headlines that promise future insights, solve problems, or unveil mysteries.
Focus on topics around technology, personal development, mental health, personal failure and growth, and the art of writing.
💻 Use this prompt to generate headline ideas for any topic.
Ⓜ️ For this example, I used various topics popular on Medium. You can request headlines on any topic you like by changing the final sentence.
ChatGPT often formats ideas with a colon, like “The Power of Words: Create Headlines That Resonate and Convert.”
Copy and paste the prompt in Step 2 to produce headlines in a Medium-friendly format.
Step 2:
Please rewrite the provided headlines by removing the colon and presenting them as single-sentence ideas without separating them into two parts. Capitalize First Letters.
⚠️ Use the prompt above to remove “:” from the results, and create headlines that can be used on Medium.
The Summarizer (Prompt #2)
Prompt:
Generate 10 captivating headlines for the provided article below, focusing on the entirety of the article and what value it promises to the reader. Ensure specificity to the article, summarizing it’s core message. Leverage power words to evoke emotion at strategic points. Ensure headlines resonate with the audience’s desires, fears, and aspirations. Headlines should be informative, concise, focused on solving problems and accurately summarizing the article’s content.
[Include entire article here]
💻 Use this prompt to analyze your article and create amazing headlines.
Ⓜ️ The article I used for this example was my latest story here.
Remember to follow Step 2 to refine the results into a better format.
The Refiner (Prompt #3)
Prompt:
Generate 10 alternative headlines for the headline provided below. Each alternative should captivate the audience’s attention and encourage clicks, incorporating strategies such as powerful words, creating a curiosity gap, emphasizing the reader’s benefit, using numbers or lists for clarity, posing thought-provoking questions, specifying unique details, or instilling a sense of urgency. Aim to craft headlines that not only resonate with the core message of the original headline but also stand out by promising value and intrigue.
[Insert your headline here]
💻Use this prompt to generate more headlines when you already have a title for your story.
🔎 I used the initial title of this article: Create Captivating Headlines With These 3 ChatGPT Prompts
Remember to follow Step 2 to refine the results into a better format.
Don’t Get Overwhelmed by the Results
Remember; once you have a few ideas you like, write them down on your draft or a piece of paper.
Eliminate ideas one by one until a few favorite headlines remain.
Test these finalists in title format to see how well they look on your screen.
How To Improve These Prompts
The results are not half-bad, but if you are a perfectionist like me, I bet you want something even better. Here are a few ideas to improve upon:
- Most of the results are quite long. If you want shorter Headlines you can add the following sentence to your prompt:
Produce headlines with an average word count of 7.33 words.
2. If the results feel too tacky and cliche, you can add the following prompt to produce clear and direct headlines:
Avoid colorful adjectives and clickbait titles. State in clear and concise language what the article is about and what value it will offer the reader.
3. Experiment with whatever comes to mind. ChatGPT is a language model so express your thoughts as you would to a friend and let it take over.
I don’t like these headlines. I want something simpler that feels more personal and not AI generated. Can you try again?
PS: Thank you for reading!
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My deepest appreciation,
Orestis.
