Your Brilliant Post Got No Traction? It's Your Headline
Go to your archive and read through the headlines of your posts. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
Welcome back.
How many stopped you cold? How many made you desperately want to read? Did any seem like the kind of headline that would hole-in-one cause someone to instantly subscribe?
Don’t be generous.
Really, how many?
Headlines are hard.
You’re not alone. I came of age writing for places like The New York Times, where I never wrote a single headline. The editors handled that. It was a muscle I had to build when I came to Substack, and I’m still working on it.
HEADLINES ON SUBSTACK ARE EVERYTHING.
I rarely use all-caps, but this is so important.
If you’re wondering why people aren’t opening your emails or reading or subscribing, it’s (at least partly) your headlines.
I read so many great posts with terrible headlines.
What makes a headline ‘terrible’?
It’s vague, i.e., supposedly meant to spark curiosity, which doesn’t work at all.
It was clearly written by AI for Google’s algorithm, i.e., not written by a human for humans.
What makes a headline ‘great’?
It’s clearly written by a human for humans. On Substack, we aren’t catering to Google’s algorithm. Most subscribers will likely come from the Substack network.
It’s not clickbaity.
It’s not catering to SEO.
How do you write a great headline?
I like NPR’s checklist. A great headline should:
Promise (but don’t overpromise) something
Be specific
Be easy to understand
Lead to a reaction
Capture the tone of the story
Explain why it matters
Include a detail
Put keywords at the beginning (SEO)
To write a great headline, we need to do three things:
Take SEO into consideration
Balance that against a headline optimization tool that looks at the headline’s intellectual, emotional, and spiritual resonance
Go through the all-important final step of beta testing it on actual humans
Resources
Since we don’t have the luxury of an editorial sounding board for our every post, here are some resources you might find useful:
1. Claude.
(There’s also ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI. If you hate AI, skip this.)
I like to come up with a headline and then go to Claude with it. Claude is wonderful. He’s polite and never in a bad mood. He admits his mistakes and apologizes. He just wants to do a good job.
I give him my headline and tell him about the post. Then I ask him to give me three SEO-optimized headlines like this: [Enter your idea for a headline].
You can input your post, but some people really don’t like to do that, which is totally valid. See option 2.)
You will need to remind him that an SEO-optimized headline is 70 characters, so if that’s important to you or you’re taking into account the fact that our readers are typically reading our headlines as subject lines, include that.
2. The Headline Analyzer (here)
This will give you a score based on the (supposed) emotional, intellectual, and spiritual resonance of your headline.
Put the headline you like most into the analyzer.
Test two more and/or variations.
I aim for a score between 20% and 40%. The headline of this post received an 80% rating. That’s the first time that’s ever happened.
3. The SW@W HEADLINE HELP chat
Better than any AI tool. Better than any New York Times editor.
Substack Writers at Work’s chat is devoted to giving you headline help. I created it for this reason: Your headlines are everything on Substack.
Go to the Substack Writers at Work Headline Help chat 24/7 here:
Tell them a bit about your post and any potential headlines you might have.
Ask the headline gurus there to offer their suggestions.
Even if a particular headline doesn’t feel like “the one,” you’ll get real suggestions from real humans and maybe (just maybe) real humans will open your email or click on your post or subscribe.
Best subscription I have ever bought. This article alone is worth its weight in gold. This works beautifully. I write about AI daily and as I'm fond of saying AI is a perfect "copilot" to my writing. Why copilot? I don't let AI tell me what to write; instead, I allow it to nudge me, with me as the "pilot" making all key decisions. Thank you Sarah
Sarah, isn't there a risk to running all of our draft posts through AI? Isn't that just letting AI use and steal all of our content?
These AI-generated headlines are often very long and oriented toward SEO rather than being readable. Keep in mind that many people check email on their phones. If the title is long they won't see the whole thing.