Every day there is more and more content online, the competition for the reader's attention is intensifying, and convincing people to read this or that text is becoming more and more difficult. How they work with headlines, what they think about clickbait and what editors have learned from years of communication with the audience.
Conventionally, there are two media business models. Some make money on scandalous content that appeals to primitive emotions, while others make money on something more intelligent and profound. We don't know how to make scandalous clickbait, and we are not interested in this - we work for a different audience.
How to create a creative headline
When it comes to how to draw attention to a headline without resorting to outright clickbait, we can share our experience - it may be useful to someone. The creative title for essay generator has two functions: informational and teaser. Informational - to inform the reader what it's about, and teaser - to draw him into the article. If only the first function is constantly performed, the reader learns the whole essence of the material from the headline, does not go inside the text and the media goes bust because of low traffic. If only the second function is performed and the content inside the article consistently disappoints, the reader becomes embittered at the media for manipulation. Nothing good comes of this either. Here's a snippet from our guide:
A good headline informs and intrigues at the same time. This balance is clearly demonstrated in genre movies: we watch an action movie or a romcom, knowing perfectly well what will happen at the end, but the interest doesn't let us go because we don't know exactly how it will happen.
There's nothing wrong with a loud headline; the headline is always worth bringing out the most interesting of what's in the article (but only what's there, not making anything up beyond that).
Here again, there are two aspects. If we're talking about the core audience - the Knife's regular readers who subscribe to it on social media - then a really interesting piece cannot, by definition, fail. If it fails, it means that it was not interesting for the reader, that is, the editor misjudged the expectations of the audience, cheated on the structure and language, made a mistake when choosing a topic or a journalist who could not present this topic coolly.
If we talk about new readers, in the results of a search query, they see only a small piece of text with keywords and a headline. They don't see a caption explaining the text, nor a teaser (one sentence describing the text, which is pulled up in a social network snippet). That's why the headline is super important. And to make sure headlines are clear, relevant and engaging, every day two editors, myself and an editor with a degree in philology, evaluate their quality, adjust them, or come up with new ones.
Problems that require compromises occur with specific, complex longreads and interviews that touch on many topics at once. These compromises are realized in the following way: the first part of the headline is metaphorical and unexpected, the second part is informative and businesslike.
The headlines are perfect, in my opinion, because they are simple and accurately reflect the content, which in itself is interesting to our most intellectual reader.
In online journalism, the value of the headline has increased dramatically from a consumer perspective. In print newspapers and magazines, people used to read a lead or announcement in addition to the headline. Now everything has changed: the lead is inside the material, it is no longer part of the package. That is, the lead will only be read by someone who has already opened the article, and for this he must have sufficient motivation, which must be created through the headline.
Almost gone is the school of wordplay; what's left is a conservative approach. Most headlines, even in very high quality and large publications, tend to answer simple questions that begin with "How," "Why," and so on. We, as a publishing house that has been on the market for more than a decade, have exactly that orientation. All the more so for the Lifestyle segment. We try to make the headlines as simple and clickable as possible for news materials, and for our "how-to" and "how-to" stories.
We've had quite a few quality pieces that we've sold with pretty vulgar headlines. But that's okay. To interest our audience, who are not used to reading complex articles on serious topics - like business or economics - we try to sell stories with headlines that are familiar to them. And it works. What's more, simple headlines are also indexing.
