By Dickie Bush & Nicolas Cole - Ship 30 for 30

How do you write effective headlines?

The truth is, how well your writing performs is directly correlated to how effective your headline is at STOPPING the reader in their tracks, getting them to pause, think, “I need to read this,” click, and give you their attention. If your headline does not accomplish this goal, you do not have an effective headline.

So, before we dive into headline templates anyone can use, let’s recap what makes a good headline in the first place.

What Makes A Good Headline?

• The headline is clear, not clever. Clever headlines (while they might prompt a laugh from your friend), usually end up confusing the reader more than they do “hook” them. The reader reads these clever headlines, can’t immediately tell what they’re going to get in exchange for reading, and then scrolls right past. Instead, you want your headline to be crystal clear: what is this about? Who is this for? And what’s the PROMISE? (What does the reader get in exchange for reading?)
• The headline makes a PROMISE. Headlines that don’t make promises don’t get read. It’s not enough to say, “This is about X.” You have to take it one step further and say, “This is about X, and this is what will change in your life if you click to read.” Without a PROMISE, the reader can’t quite rationalize why they should give up 30 seconds or 3 precious minutes of their life to read a bunch of words on the page.
• The headline is specific. If you are writing for a General Audience, your headline needs to be specific about a universal problem. And if you are writing for a Niche Audience, your headline needs to be specific about a problem relevant to a specific audience or group of people. If your headline is not specific about the problem, the audience, or both, it’s vague. And anything that’s vague is confusing, and anything that’s confusing won’t hook the reader.
• The headline takes a stance. The worst headlines are ones that try to be “something for everyone.” They avoid taking a stance or leaning too far in any one direction. As a result, the reader doesn’t quite know what sort of journey they’re going to go on, or why any of it matters at all. Instead, you want to write headlines that are polarizing: the reader is either going to say, “Wow, this is exactly the problem I was struggling with—and I think I just found my answer!” Or you want the reader to say, “This isn’t for me. Period.” A lot of writers steer away from being polarizing out of fear that they won’t attract “enough readers.” But the truth is, when you try to write something for everyone, you end up writing something for no one.
• The headline teases the ending without revealing the answer. All great headlines have what we like to call a “Curiosity Gap.” This means the reader understands what the piece is going to be about, who it’s for, and what they can expect to get (or learn) in exchange for reading it—but the headline doesn’t give them the answer. They have to click to fill in the middle. Headlines that don’t do this, and instead just give the answer (“Drinking Coffee Gives You Anxiety”) make the reader think they already got the purpose of the piece and, as a result, don’t need to actually click and read it. You must tease the ending without giving it away.

“Isn’t That Clickbait?”

The first question all writers ask when they hear our methodologies on writing effective headlines is, “Isn’t that clickbait?”

No—and here’s why.

It’s only clickbait if you fail to keep your promise to the reader. If you write a really compelling headline and then the content doesn’t deliver, it’s clickbait. You baited the reader with a big promise, and then failed to deliver on that promise.

However, if you write a headline with a big promise and then KEEP your promise, the reader isn’t going to sit there and think, “Meh. This piece was really helpful but I don’t like that I got clickbaited into reading it.” No, they’re going to think the opposite. In fact, they’re not even going to remember how or why they clicked the headline. They’re going to be too busy sharing the piece with 3 of their friends, saying, “You have to read this.”

There is almost no finer example of this on the Internet than Naval Ravikant’s Twitter thread, “How To Get Rich (Without Getting Lucky.”

https://twitter.com/naval/status/1002103360646823936?lang=en

By every definition, this title should be considered “clickbait.” It follows that tried-and-true formula of creating a Curiosity Gap for the reader, is clear about WHAT it’s about, WHO it’s for, and makes a pretty big PROMISE (“Get rich without being lucky? I’m in!”).

And yet, to date, it has 53,000 Retweets, 9,000 Quote Tweets, 168,000 Likes, and too many comments to count.

Now, did Naval’s iconic, Twitter-breaking Twitter thread rack up all those metrics simply because it “clickbaited” readers? Of course not.