It’s true.
No matter how good your article is, nobody will ever read it if it has a trash headline that doesn’t motivate them to click.
You cannot mess this up.
And how do you write the perfect headline that actually gets people to click on your article?
Curiosity has always been a big one. It’s huge.
If your headline doesn’t make them curious, why would they care about what the article is about?
But many online writers still get this wrong…
Not all types of curiosity are equal.
It needs to be curiosity revolving around something that your audience really cares about.
Your headlines need to have audience-sensitive curiosity points.
Did you hear what I just said?
Let me explain what I mean:
Let’s say you have a self-help audience, okay? You write on articles about personal growth and becoming better.
Now you’re writing about a new AI app that helps with productivity and mindfulness.
Look at these two possible headlines for such an article:
1. This new AI app is shockingly good
2. This app does wonders for your productivity and happiness
But which do you think is going to appeal to your self-help audience more?
Guess what? It’s the second.
Yes they both instill curiosity. The first one has a lot going on for it with power words like “new” and “shockingly good”.
You’d think there’s not much difference between these two right?
But the fact is they’re appealing to completely different audiences.
This new AI app is shockingly good
Who do you think this appeals to? It’s certainly not people who are looking for self-improvement advice.
This headline will appeal more to AI enthusiasts. A tech-savvy audience who want to stay up-to-date with recent AI developments.
This app does wonders for your productivity and happiness
See the difference? Here we still create curiosity about an app, but the curiosity focus is on becoming more productivity and happy. Self-improvement.
Two decent headlines. But one will perform poorly for the wrong audience and leave you scratching your head.
I’ve come across this multiple times in my online writing journey.
Like in one my articles I originally used a headline like this:
This new AI service saves you thousands of dollars on a new PC.
Guess what? Within the first few days it was already on track to perform clearly below average.
And then change the headline to this:
Shadow PC is amazing 😲
And the article made an amazing recovery in the following days.
Why?
Because I had an audience of tech enthusiasts and the first headline simply didn’t appeal to them as much.
They weren’t interested in buying a PC or saving money or whatever.
But with the second headline, I change the curiosity focus of the headline from saving money to the service itself.
I even included the name which would make people unfamiliar with it even more intrinsically curious about the service.
Bare curiosity is not enough.
The curiosity points in your headlines must be aligned with the nature and interests of your audience.