This Headline is Broken
Or, 35 Paragraphs Begging Marketers to Write Better
I’ve wanted to write this post for a long time — and, as is so often the case, I find that Seth Godin has beaten me to the punch, in a more thoughtful rendering of the argument than I’m likely to achieve. But let’s do it anyway…
I hate list posts — or more specifically, I hate their headlines. Godin has a good formulation of the trope:
([Integer between 5 and 10] WAYS to [action verb like avoid or stumble or demolish] [juicy adjective like stupid or embarrassing or proven] [noun].)
Every week, I scan hundreds of headlines from blogs about marketing, data, design and social media. And every time I scroll through my feed reader, the headlines all blur into one; an amorphous mass of numbers and florid adjectives and idiotic rhetorical questions.
After a point, you start to tune out the noise and just focus on finding the signal — the keywords which actually tell me what your article is about. But it’s exhausting for me as a reader — and demoralising as a writer to see what looks a lot like wasted creative energy. Back to Godin:
Daily, this talented writer trades in his art for what feels like a job writing. But he’s not writing, he’s not building a following, he’s not doing work that matters. He doesn’t actually have a voice, he’s doing piecework, work that will be replaced by someone else’s output as soon as his boss can find someone cheaper.
[…]
Practice doesn’t make perfect. Meaningful practice makes perfect, even if you don’t get paid for it.
There’s a parallel here with the famous remark from early Facebook data scientist Jeffrey Hammerbacher:
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”
Something about the subordination of craft — especially a craft like writing — to the search for strict, repeatable, scalable processes just sits wrong with me.
To be clear: the data and the orthodoxy would appear to be against me on this one. It’s common knowledge that numbered list headlines are just more clickable. But a lot of the research and received wisdom about this appears to elide or ignore the possibility of some kind of ‘list shock’: what happens when readers are presented with a list of lists?
I don’t have any revelatory new data to share, and if Seth Godin can’t break this orthodoxy then there’s no hope of me pulling it off. But for what it’s worth: you can keep (most of) your list posts. Just give them better headlines. Just stop and think a bit more.
‘Formulaic’ means ‘safe’ means ‘unoriginal’
People writing about how to write headlines (or how to write at all) always tend towards the prescriptive: sooner or later, every young writer ends up on the pointy end of Betteridge’s Law.
It’s true that my professional roots in newspapers and magazines give me an old-fashioned view of what makes a great headline; I luxuriate in an arcane, literary, completely analogue style of headline writing — but I’m not naive. Writing on the web is an altogether different endeavour, with a different set of motivations and challenges. But that doesn’t mean we have to be unoriginal.
The fundamental mission remains the same, whatever medium you’re working in: communicate what the article is about in as few words as possible with the biggest possible hook. Erik Deckers has a good explainer on writing effective headlines over at Convince and Convert, and a quick Google search will unearth several hundred more like it.
The problem is that rigid adherence to formulae like ‘X ways to do Y’ looks ever more like a crutch for unimaginative, uninspired writing — and not a very good one at that.
The astonishing success of the clickbait pioneers — from the Huffington Post to Upworthy via BuzzFeed — created a new religion for web copywriters: one obsessed with the clickability of punchy headlines with an emotional hook, designed to play off the curiosity gap and preferably front-loaded with a number in order to quantify the value prop. But let’s not forget two variables too often ignored:
- Your blog is not BuzzFeed. Your audience is probably not BuzzFeed’s, either.
- In any case, BuzzFeed and Upworthy win their readers primarily on social platforms — where a mixture of peer-to-peer dynamics (recommendations from friends) and additional stimuli (the text and images wrapped around the headline) muddle the ‘what makes readers click’ calculus.
Things become formulae — and formulaic — because we see industry leaders doing them, and winning. They become safe options because they work. But as with all things, there’s a saturation point at which they will just stop being effective. In fact, according to one of Upworthy’s editors, that process is already beginning:
Then he lets everyone in on his newest data discovery, which is that descriptive headlines — ones that tell you exactly what the content is — are starting to win out over Upworthy’s signature “curiosity gap” headlines, which tease you by withholding details.
Writing for children and machines
Previously, the whole situation was complicated still further, and our options even more limited, by the necessity of making headlines machine-readable, not just human-hooking. But Google got smarter, especially with regards to exact-match keywords, and that’s a now more subtle art.
A similar problem (call it a lack of ambition) extends beyond the headline, into the actual structure of the post itself — and I suspect this shares responsibility with headline dogmas for the proliferation of histrionic, awkwardly-written post titles.
List post formats and curiosity-gap headlines are not inherently Bad Things. They’re just not appropriate for every occasion, and they’re too often used as a shortcut; a way to avoid having to write prose.
This is usually defended as a concession to short reader attention spans, but that’s a patronising argument and — like so many click studies — usually supported only by small-sample studies producing data of dubious value.
In part, I suspect it’s a by-product of the quantity over quality mindset I’ve criticised before. We’re all solemnly ordered to produce content at an industrial scale, and that takes time and resources. Breaking complex concepts into quick-hit lists that are easier to produce and faster to read seems like a win-win, right? Not when the result is a reductive summary that fails to provide the information it promised in the headline.
Essentially, it’s a question of top-down or bottom-up design: do you write a headline and then churn out some copy to slot in underneath it, or do you write the post you set out to write and then give it a headline that fits? For me, there’s no contest — the former is a quick road to inanity.
Headlines are the final piece of the puzzle, not the first, and they shouldn’t be written to a formula powered by SEO dogma or virality snake oil, but rather measured against one simple criteria: does this title effectively (and honestly!) articulate the content of the post in a way which would make someone want to read it?
Postscript, via a wiser head than mine
Months after I originally wrote this essay, I came across this excellent post by Moz blogger Isla McKetta. She articulates brilliantly much of what I was railing against in this essay, and does it better than I did.
She conceptualises the headline science debate as a conflict between ‘clickability’ and ‘credibility’, and presents some interesting (though non-conclusive) data. But it’s this section where I think she really nails it:
This is where headline science can get ugly. Because a lot of “perfect” titles simply do not have the quality or depth of content to back them.
Those types of headlines remind me of the Greek myth of Tantalus. For sharing the secrets of the gods with the common folk, Tantalus was condemned to spend eternity surrounded by food and drink that were forever out of his reach. Now, content is hardly the secrets of the gods, but are we tantalizing our customers with teasing headlines that will never satisfy?
For me, reading headlines on BuzzFeed and Upworthy and their ilk is like talking to the guy at the party with all those super wild anecdotes. He’s entertaining, but I don’t believe a word he says, soon wish he would shut up, and can’t remember his name five seconds later. Maybe I don’t believe in clickability as much as I thought…
(NB—in future, I too will be using a combination of Greek mythology and social awkwardness anecdotes to explain what I mean.)
A version of this post first appeared on the Stipso blog.
