So far, I have written 13 stories on medium over the last six months.
The number of views and reads I get varies from month to month but overall remains relatively low.
I have noticed that some stories seem to be more popular than others.
One thing I regularly ask myself: Is the problem in the title?
Burying the lead
There is the concept of burying the lead. The title should declare the main aim of the article. A novice fails by burying his most exciting fact under a lot of auxiliary information.
Sometimes one of my paragraph’s headings is more exciting than the article heading.
The only way to fix this is to write more and reflect on the titles. As a moonlight writer, I rarely have the time and energy to write hundreds of headlines to train my inner title generator.
Nevertheless, I guess that I will get better over time.
Avoid clipping titles
Then there is the tip from Niklas Göke: you should avoid clipping your titles and subtitles.
I am guilty of having 4 clipped sub-titles, amounting to roughly 25 % of my titles.
I changed that and vow to oversee the limit in the future.
Using headline analyzer
Software engineer that I am, I wondered if there is any software helping you get better. These analyzers could be rule-based or machine-learning-trained.
Sadly I found no machine learning-based solution. All solutions work with word bags and reading-level statistics.
I settled for https://headlines.coschedule.com.
These are the improvements to my current headings. I aimed to reach at least a score of 70 points.
The general pattern is that the headlines are longer and feature more attention-grabbing words.
There are different categories of words (e.g., power words or emotional words). I tried to have at least one word in each category.
At the same time, I wanted an intelligible sentence and one that partly reflects the content.
| Before improvement | Old Score | After improvement | New Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Are you mentally depleted? | 41 | know, if you unwisely exhausted your mental energy supply for the day | 71 |
| Effective cheating with statistics | 51 | 2 intricate ways statistics can influence the perception of the truth | 86 |
| Why do we like other people? | 63 | How a good mood helps to smoothen things | 75 |
| Why nobody has built your leadership | 60 | World Sensation: Why remarkably nobody has built your leadership | 77 |
| Effective leaders listen for stories | 56 | Effective leaders listen for stories that touch the heart and mind | 78 |
| What medium user need to know about leadership | 67 | 4 powerful secrets a medium user needs to know about leadership | 92 |
| Storytelling for engineers | 33 | The world requires influential engineers with a passion for stories | 71 |
| Self-organizing cross-functional teams need a cooperative environment | 57 | Successful cross-functional teams need the luxury of confidence and trust | 73 |
| Discover your team’s common story | 39 | Three old but trusted ways to reveal your team’s common story; | 91 |
| Spice up your presentations with some psychology | 44 | Good presenters embrace these psycho tips in their life | 92 |
| Try these tips before lunch to get more followers | 57 | Try these 9 tips to get more and stronger follower growth | 81 |
| Do you read? | 37 | Knowledge advice: 2 Ways to read a book and improve your understanding | 89 |
| Try these mental tricks to gain the upper hand in conflicts | 64 | Try these priceless mental tricks to gain the upper hand in pointless conflicts | 71 |
| Average Score | 51 | 80 |
I raised my average score from 51 to 80 points. I must admit that most of the headings have a certain edge. They sound like many other social media posts.
What is your opinion? Should a new writer rely on the help of software to improve his headings?