If you look at some of the most successful content on Facebook, a lot of it wil fall into the category of ‘clickbait’. What this means, is that the title has been devised specifically to compel people to click on it. Now of course that has always been the purpose of pretty much any link but in this case, the difference is that this objective is pursued at the cost of al others – it doesn’t matter if the title is descriptive, accurate, useful… as long as it gets clicks.
And it really works!
So what kind of techniques do titles use to become clickbait? Usually the aim is to leverage the curiosity of the reader – to ask some kind of question or to create suspense with some kind of cliffhanger.
So for instance, you might say something like:
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‘You’l never believe what happens next in this video!’
Sometimes the title wil even take a first-person narrative perspective such as:
‘I’m so glad I read to the second paragraph…!!’
Another, slightly more subtle trick, is to make a list article and then to make one of the points sound particularly more interesting than the rest. So for instance:
‘Top Ten Ways to Save Time At Work – Number Two Changed My Life!’
This article is descriptive but then has the added trick of making the second item sound particularly interesting and even more so than the rest. The hope is that the prospective reader wil be so eager to find out what number two is all about, that they’l click on the link even though they normally might not.
Clickbait titles work and they work very well but make sure that you use them with caution. If your titles are too obviously clickbait, they wil likely trigger a cynical reaction. Facebook users are becoming used to seeing clickbait and as such, they are now wary of such titles.
The real problem here is that many clickbait titles just fail to deliver on their promise. They promise to blow your mind but then offer underwhelming solutions. Sometimes the links don’t even lead to full articles!
So what can you do about it? The trick is to try and be a little more subtle about it and a little less deceptive. In other words, you still want to spark curiosity and interest but the difference is that you’re going to spark 14
curiosity with a genuinely interesting topic that people haven’t heard before (how novel!).
Say you have a fitness website. How often have you seen articles saying
‘Ten Ways to Get a Six Pack’ or ‘How to Lose Weight Without Starving Yourself!’. Al of us have read variations on that same article countless times before and as such, we’re kind of sick of hearing it. It’s no wonder that you have to resort to what amounts to trickery in order to get people to click again.
But now imagine an article on a new supplement that people haven’t heard of before. Or how about a new training technique called ‘cardio acceleration’? What about the fitness benefits of parkour? Or the different ways you can combine martial arts and weight training?
What you have now is a genuinely new topic that sounds interesting to anyone who is interested in the subject. There’s no reason to lie or to trick
– this just genuinely is an interesting topic. This is what will make your articles really stand out. It goes deeper than just the title, it’s the topic and it’s the initial idea that leads to the creation of something new and different.
This is in many ways the most important step in your article writing process.