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A lot of great writers suck at titles and this is what they taught me about writing…

Seth Godin has a title that scored zero in the headline analyzer

Linda Caroll
xo Linda
4 min readNov 14, 2018

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Seth Godin has a post title that scored zero in that headline analyzer everyone recommends. Seriously. Zero. Zip. No score.

It all started with a stupid thing I read…

I honestly think I suck at titles. Like, I pull them out of the damn air.

One time I had an article I thought was pretty good, but no one read it.
Like, NO ONE. A big fat ZERO.

So I changed the title and in one day it had hundreds of likes. Which explains why I started reading about writing better titles. Because, duh! Suckage.

Anyway, so I was reading about better titles and I read one weird old tip that said to write 50-100 titles for every article and you’d eventually get the hang of good titles. My first thought was — are you frigging kidding? Um — no!

(because, if I had to write 50-100 titles for every article, you’d forget who I was before I wrote the next article, because hot damn that’s a lot of titles…)

So I got this crazy idea to check out the titles of some of my favorite writers and see how…

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xo Linda
xo Linda

Published in xo Linda

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