Tricky Tightropes: Headlines and More

Experimenting with headlines can be tricky especially when trying to be creative in your writing. Knowing what you’re writing about is the easy part but a title, if you gave yourself the time you could probably spend hours and not find the right one.

I've been working on promoting engagement on my recent report about Nicaraguan president Nicolas Maduro. And I found inspiration in Backed by Science: the 25-Headline Upworthy Challenge by Caitlin.

[embed]Backed by Science: the 25-Headline Upworthy Challenge medium.com

Upworthy’s method gets into how you can elevate your posts by creating multiple titles for a single post. By testing actual engagement you can see what attracts interest.

I decided to do this myself. By creating various titles, I was able to increase the traffic on my post. The traffic didn’t increase to dramatically, but it was enough to show me that creating various types of headlines can attract interest.

Something else I learned was that picking the right tags makes a significant difference, picking tags that are relevant or specific to your posts. Picking the right tags can be the difference between being seen or passed by, by the algorithm for other articles that are designated topic specific.

If you take anything away from this post, take away that effort counts. It may be small, but in the grand scheme of writing, it makes a significant difference between having your post read or not.