How to write an attractive title for your online articles

Did you know that, according to a Twitter survey, 80% of users admitted that they had passed along to their audience, at least once, articles they had not read and had picked only because the title made them “look cool”? This is, if you like, the modern equivalent of the old days, when noble heads sat at a lavish table under a medieval chandelier and pretended to have read that French novella everyone was talking about.

Twitter users don’t pass along a title that doesn’t make them look “cool”, and, on a larger scale, the same happens to many of the more than two million articles published every day: many of them never get read, despite very good content, because of unappealing titles.

“There are no dull products. Only dull approaches to interesting products.”, said Raymond Rubicam, David Ogilvy’s mentor, several decades ago. The same could be true of an article’s title: a good piece can be buried by a poorly chosen title. The problem, in these cases, is figuring out what makes a good title and a not-so-good one.

So, if you are looking for recipes for high-impact titles or simply want to learn how to write catchy titles, you are in the right place. Below, we share a few insights to help you write titles that grab the reader’s attention.

Tips & tricks for a high-impact title

Back to Raymond Rubicam: the youngest of eight children in a poor family, he dropped out of school and spent the next 10 years or more roaming the country as a porter, stable hand, cinema worker, clerk and, eventually, car salesman and newspaper reporter.

Eventually, at 20, he went and asked for a copywriting job at F. Willis Armstrong’s agency in Philadelphia.

He would later write: “I sat in the lobby on a bench so hard that, if I strain my senses, I can still feel it. On the ninth day I exploded. I wrote the boss a letter meant to produce either an immediate interview or a black eye. He stormed into the lobby, waving the letter and shouting: <The ads you’ve written so far aren’t much, but there’s something in this letter.>”

Attention-grabbing titles are, if you like, the modern equivalent of Rubicam’s letter. So how do you write a high-impact title?

• Appeal to the reader’s emotion and curiosity

A good title has to stir an emotion. Or make you act (in our case, it has to make you read the article). A title like “The art of public speaking: rules and tips for a flawless presentation” may not stir any emotion in the reader. It is a dry, descriptive title.

“How to give a decent presentation, even when you hate public speaking” is much more likely to resonate with readers for a fairly simple reason: it is a friendly, unpretentious title and, on top of that, it appeals to a universal emotion: we are all afraid of speaking in public.

If you look through the TEDx talks on public speaking, you will find that all the speakers, paradoxically, repeat the same thing: they are all afraid of speaking in public, and their apparent lack of stage fright is just the result of practice.

• Present the biggest benefit, but not in a misleading way

Another proven trick is to put the biggest benefit of the product or service you are writing about in the title. (Example: Cook a delicious turkey breast quickly and easily or Create your own e-card in just five minutes).

Also remember that a title is meant to be informative, so it should present the biggest benefit without being misleading: don’t promise more in the title than you deliver in the article.

Otherwise, the result will be a very high bounce rate (thebounce rate represents the readers who click your title, land on the website, are unhappy with the content they find and leave immediately).

• Include a keyword, but don’t overdo it

When you write an article, you write it for the reader, not for the search engine. Even so, including a keyword in the title can help your article reach more of the readers looking for that information.

For example, if you want to write an article about how to write an attractive title for search engines, it would be a good idea to take a look at search volume. You will find that phrases such as title ideas, attention-grabbing titles, high-impact titles, article title, catchy titles have a higher search volume than phrases such as “catchy headlines” or “good titles”.

So, for the SEO impact you need, you could put one of these phrases in your article’s title. Be careful not to overdo it, though: two or more keywords could lead search engines to treat your article as spam and penalize it.

An attractive title doesn’t mean much without content to match 

These are just a few of the things you can do to write a title that appeals to both readers and search engines. Still, remember that an attractive title without content to match is, in the end, irrelevant.

Remember that offering quality content is the best way to attract organic traffic, and quality content is, broadly speaking, content written by people for people. Unless you are in “Westworld” or “Black Mirror”, it is best to keep your tone as friendly and human as possible.

Last but not least, when it comes to attractive titles and attractive content, the most important thing is practice. In most cases, writing a catchy title is not a skill that comes from some obscure or unique talent, but from practice.

Raymond Rubicam, Ogilvy’s mentor, left behind two aphorisms for new generations of creatives in advertising agencies.

The first was: “Resist the usual”.

The second: “In this world, the beginning of greatness is to be different, and the beginning of failure is to stay the same.” It is a view shared by the best-known people in the content industry, from William Zinsser, who many years later wrote roughly the same thing in “On Writing Well”, to Ira Glass, who said in “The New Kings of Nonfiction” that the kings of content are all dead and the industry is still waiting for new ones.