Sitemap
Pen With Paper

‘We Elevate Your Stories’– Amplifying new voices, celebrating creativity, and ensuring your best work shines. We’re a family of readers and writers, supporting, uplifting, and helping each other’s words make a real impact. Welcome to your writing home!

Member-only story

WRITING HACKS

Your writing is good, but your titles are killing your income

Master it or stay unseen, with proven insights from BuzzFeed and Upworthy

4 min readJun 16, 2025

--

Photo by Stephen Phillips - Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash

When I say “your titles are killing your income” I mean it gently, but seriously. No matter how honest or deep your writing is, if your title flops your story sometimes does not even get a chance.

Why titles beat writing 9 times out of 10

Content sharing expert Jonah Berger found in a study of nearly 7,000 New York Times stories that emotion and how it is framed in the title makes people click and share. We scroll quick, but if the title tugs at curiosity, awe, anxiety, we stop.

Another study, this time of 912 million blog posts, showed long headlines (14–17 words) get 77% more shares than short ones. Meaning, detail intrigues even on Medium, where simplicity often wins.

So yea, titles matter more than most of us realize.

Titles that broke through with some real examples

  • 57 Costumes That’ve Already Won Halloween, and It Literally Hasn’t Even Happened Yet

Why it works: FOMO + immediacy + specific number. BuzzFeed nails it as usual. Here…

--

--

Pen With Paper
Pen With Paper

Published in Pen With Paper

‘We Elevate Your Stories’– Amplifying new voices, celebrating creativity, and ensuring your best work shines. We’re a family of readers and writers, supporting, uplifting, and helping each other’s words make a real impact. Welcome to your writing home!

Adarsh
Adarsh

Written by Adarsh

Founder & Editor of "Break. Breathe. Become." Curious mind on a journey, writing about anything that sparks my interest. Exploring life, one story at a time.

Responses (1)