Digital Machiavelli #3: Clickbait Titles That Actually Work (And Why)
Exploring a microcosm of narrative design.
Welcome back to my ongoing digital content strategy course, delivered straight to your inbox every week.
What You’ll Learn Today: The good way, the bad way, and the ugly but successful way of creating compelling titles for articles, videos, or anything else that needs a title.
Fundamentally, the reason we even have the term “clickbait title” is because the use of such titles is inherently seen in a negative light. People generally don’t like being manipulated into things, particularly when the manipulation is easy to discern.
But as with many things on the web since its inception, a heaping dose of sarcasm has transformed this negative perception into a fairly positive one, granting you the ability to leverage clickbait to your advantage, just as long as it’s skillfully crafted.
That’s why it’s important to separate the wheat from the chaff, which is what we’re going to do here today.
The Bad
This derails the Clint Eastwood film reference a bit, but we’ll start with the clickbait titles that simply don’t work, to set a foundation from which we can figure out what does.
Bad clickbait titles come in a few distinct flavors, though they’re all unified by a distinct lack of effort.
1. The Hostage Taker
This one is just disgusting. You get a title that’s equal parts boring and insulting.
The Hostage Taker refuses to give you the payoff, and it doesn’t even try to generate some interest with a bit of witty banter.
It just demands that you give in fully and click through, if you want the hostage released.
2. The Get X Quick Scheme
Not necessarily about money, but necessarily about shortcuts.
This particular type of clickbait title has a number of variants, all of which revolve around introducing a quantitative constraint.
Boost Your Sales Numbers in Just Two Hours
Perform This Simple Five-Minute Exercise to Lose Ten Pounds
Come Up With a High Conversion Headline in Three Easy Steps
The problem with this approach at first glance looks to be understating the amount of time or effort something takes, but the real reason you don’t want to utilize this kind of headline is because it isn’t compelling enough.
While many people really value their time, the reality is that this type of title makes your content less a valuable piece of targeted information on solving a problem and more a piece of entertaining trivia, which can hurt your chances of getting clicks from your target audience.
3. The Philosopher
You’ve undoubtedly seen this in the digital wilds before.
This type of title preys on our desire to find out not just how things are done but why things happen, and that can definitely be an effective motivator.
However, as with the above examples, it can be improved, and that inherently makes it a subpar choice, especially if you aren’t a major news publication and thus need to stand out more prominently to a narrower subset of readers.
The Good
Now that we’ve gotten the strategic thinking exercise out of the way, here’s the rundown on how to improve on the above presented low effort titles.
The most direct way to come up with a compelling title that stays true to the idea of clickbait is to simply add more visceral detail.
Instead of…
Check Out the Production Title of Paramount’s Upcoming Action Adventure
…try going with…
Paramount’s Doom & Gloom Appears Aptly Named: Behind the scenes reports shed light on chronically depressed cast and crew
Do this by identifying just about anything else you speak about in your piece of content that isn’t the major payoff, and use that as additional context.
This maintains the allure of hidden knowledge while providing more motivation. If I’m interested in this niche, I’ll click, even though the title reveals the top-level payoff, because I care about the details.
This is an effective way to improve upon existing clickbait trends and get tangible results with minimal effort, since contextual improvements can be applied to any of the “bad” clickbait examples laid out above, and to just about any headline that lacks desired oomph.
The Ugly
Now if you want to take things to the next level, this is the method for you.
Right out of the gate, you hand over the payoff, and you provide additional motivation to actually view the content to find out the details.
The reason this method is “ugly” is less to do with aesthetics and more with the ugly reality of just how much time and effort goes into making this viable, and why the “good” method above may be the better choice a lot of the time.
The broader your promise (explaining the science, citing famous authors, etc.), the more of a burden this puts on the additional information you provide on top of your major payoff.
If you’re producing long form content, this means doing more research and more writing as you expound on the topic at hand.
If it’s concise content you’re creating, your task is even further compounded by needing to cut everything to fit a certain optimal duration.
But the value in this approach is hard to top.
By combining an interesting payoff with the promise of detailed, often evergreen content, you’re creating a title that will stand out to people for a long time to come, and that’s the kind of valuable clickbait that’s worth its weight in optic fibers.