Brilliant content is valuable. There’s no question there. Rand told us this back in 2006 and the landscape for generating ideas has only grown since. Unfortunately, the more content we create, the more important it is for OUR content to rise to the top.
If content is King, headline is Maharaja.
So how do we write headlines and titles that get shared and seen? Nathan Shafran delved into this recently with his post Data insights into headlines readers click.
Nathan has shown us that numbers are good, superlatives are good and sentence case is good. I love the insight he shared but it isn’t always easy to think of a headline that will stand out and rise above the noise. As much as I understand the value and importance of grabbing attention, I am guilty of having killed excellent content with a title that sucks.
No more!
I read Nathan’s post the same week I attended a seminar about the Six Thinking Hats skill that is used for group discussions, brainstorming and creating an environment for productive meetings. I took something I learned in that class and applied it to Nathan’s data.
Everything you need to create a killer title is right in front of you.
Let me walk you through a real life example for a post using published recently.
Step 1: Explore
Flickr keeps the Explore page fresh with photos that it has deemed “interesting”. The content found on this page is updated daily was usually uploaded to Flickr fairly recently. It’s always fresh, it’s always new and that makes it a hot-bed for inspiring content.
Make sure to have your sticky notes and marker ready so that you don’t have to search for them when you need them, a whiteboard could work too. Then visit Explore and resist the urge to look at the photos.
Close your eyes and hit “page down” a couple of times. There’s no right number or wrong number. Trust your gut to tell you when to stop. Open your eyes, and focus on one image.
Immediately write down the first five words that come into your head. Don’t think about this, just start writing! There is no wrong or foolish response.
This is the image I landed on when I was looking for inspiration for my post:
Step 2: Sticky notes
At this point, you should have five words on sticky notes sitting in front of you. This was what came to mind when to when I saw this bird in flight.
That’s flight, eyes, beak, orange and serenity. That all makes sense, but how do I turn that into useful content?
Step 3: Evernote
I keep an informal content calendar of my upcoming recipes and concepts I want to explore in Evernote. For each of my writing projects, or teams I work with the method is a little different depending on the editorial needs. The key is finding something that works. You want an easy place to jot down ideas as they come to you.
This is when I looked at some of the ideas I have saved for later and the dots started to connect. I wanted to see how I could connect the words on my sticky notes to a theme I have been playing with.
Last month many of my posts were dedicated to BBQ as I am competing in a BBQ festival in a couple of weeks. Using some creativity I took a look at each word on my sticky notes to see how I could apply them to my chosen topic – BBQ. If you are used to creating content this may come naturally.
Here’s an insight as to how my mind got to work:
| Flight | There’s a whole lot of prep that takes place before that first flight. |
| Eyes | Attention to detail can be make-or-break in the wild, or on the grill. |
| Beak | Beak led me to pecking which led me to taste. |
| Orange | Color, beauty, creativity and food as an art form. |
| Serenity | The state of being calm, peaceful, and untroubled. Perfect! |
At this point, the content creation was easy. I’d gone from “hmm, I want to write something with a title that doesn’t suck” to “5 Things Hummingbirds Taught me About Competitive BBQ” in about 10 minutes.
In the example above I started with idea generation for a title and worked a post to match it. This is a great way to approach your content creation. Make sure you keep an Evernote or Excel sheet full with ideas and share it with others around you. Populate it with upcoming sales, campaigns or conferences you plan to attend so it’s always full. Don’t delete ideas, put them in parking lot and review them every few months — relevancy can change.
But what if I’ve already created my content?
Sometimes you have content and you want to find a title for it… like this post. I knew I was writing about headlines, and I really didn’t want my title to suck. In fact, I didn’t even think about the headline until this post was half way finished.
I went out to Flickr once more and my eyes opened on this photo. The words dance, joy, sing and freedom came to mind and I played with three or four titles before deciding freedom was the most emotive. Freedom resonated with me, but I also felt it was the most reader-addressing word that I had jotted down on sticky notes. Who doesn’t like a sense of freedom?
While working on the titles, I took another look at Nathan’s post to be sure that I could incorporate some of his findings. If you can, bounce the title off a couple of co-workers or friends before the post goes live and gauge their reaction too.
The key behavior to change is to focus on the title as a worthy piece of content in its own right. Pay a little respect to the Maharajah!
How does this happen?
This technique works because you’re forcing your mind to think differently. Rather than the typical “suggest a topic” approach to content creation, you are pushing your mind to a more creative place. This method is called lateral thinking.
Lateral thinking is solving problems through an indirect and creative approach, using reasoning that is not immediately obvious and involving ideas that may not be obtainable by using only traditional step-by-step logic. The term was coined in 1967 by Edward de Bono. – Wikipedia
Had I sat down with a beer and a buddy to discuss how we can write another piece of content about our BBQ team, I would have come up with another boring roundup post.. By freeing my mind of the preconceived concept, I was able to create content with a blank canvas.
In my case, I liked the idea of a list. My starting point was “numbers are good in titles”. I know more about hummingbirds today than I ever thought I would, and most of that information came from one Wikipedia article. I certainly didn’t set out to write a YouMoz post about my post either – this evolved out of my other post, but that’s the road this lateral thinking exercise has taken me down.
So next time you need a title for a post, just close your eyes and scroll. Give your mind the chance to connect the dots and see what will come of it. Try it once. If it fails, go to your traditional brainstorming methods and I’ll go back to BBQ.
