Write the seven headline traits

These seven come from a meta-analysis of news coverage — research into which headlines performed best, done on media rather than on marketing. They are pieces to mix, not a formula to fill in. That is deliberate: a formula produces headlines that look like everybody else's, and combining the pieces yourself is what makes yours unique.

1. The seven, in order

1. Recent. As recent as you can make it. News is called the news because it was new. Something that happened an hour ago gets more attention than something from a year ago — I just did this and this just happened beat any version in the past tense. Two videos on the same topic, one from five years ago and one from two hours ago, and the fresh one usually wins; and if a tutorial says ten years ago, it usually does not get clicked at all. There is a second instruction hidden in that: you can, and probably should, keep making things about the same topic, because the topic is not what went stale.

2. Relevancy. Personally meaningful to the person reading it. Nurses pay attention to what affects nurses rather than to what affects accountants. If your audience is mothers, write about what affects mothers, not what affects fathers. It sounds obvious and it is still missed routinely at the point where the headline actually gets written.

3. Celebrity. Prominent people, authorities, the well known. Normally nobody cares what another human being has for breakfast — and then it is somebody famous, and many people do. A dull subject can be made interesting purely by being about a prominent person.

4. Proximity. Literally close to home, geographically. A house on fire on the other side of the country does not hold your attention. Your neighbor's house certainly does. Get it as close to where they are as you honestly can.

5. Conflict. Opposing ideas, opposing people, opposing forces. Pineapple against no pineapple on a pizza. Good and evil, hero and villain, freedom and security, justice and mercy.

That last pair is worth understanding, because it explains why some conflicts never resolve and are therefore permanently interesting. Justice and mercy are both genuine ideals. Neither side can prove the other wrong, because both are standing on something real. Conflicts built that way are eternal, and eternal conflict drives sustained interest — so when you are writing, put the opposing ideas next to each other rather than arguing for one.

6. Unusual. Odd, unique, bizarre, rare. The six-fingered man at an old-time circus, whom people paid simply to look at.

The sharper version: a basketball shot that takes a thousand attempts to land once. Shooting a basketball is not unusual; making that particular shot is. And what you are actually packaging is the value of the time somebody does not have to spend — they get the one landed shot without the 999 misses, which is a very high return on their attention. (A shot like that is put at a thousand attempts, and also called one in a million; the mechanism does not depend on the number.)

7. Still unfolding. Stories still in progress. Dynamic, evolving, with plot twists available. It is why news coverage of a live situation updates minute by minute, and why somebody going into labor produces requests for updates every ten minutes: anything could still happen.

2. Stack them

The traits are additive, and the extreme case shows how far it goes. Take something that happened just now, that is deeply relevant to this particular person, that involves somebody prominent, that happened next door to them, that contains a real conflict, that is genuinely one of a kind, and that is still unfolding as they read.

That is seven out of seven, and it would hold essentially everyone's attention.

3. Working it in practice

Take a flat line and add traits one at a time. What follows is an illustration of the method rather than a set of headlines to use. The worked figures on this page are invented.

Traits used	Headline
None	How to reduce staff turnover
Relevancy	How dental practices reduce staff turnover
Relevancy, proximity	How dental practices in this state reduce staff turnover
Relevancy, proximity, recent	The staff-turnover fix three local practices started last month
Plus conflict	Pay raises or better schedules: what actually stopped three local practices losing staff
Plus still unfolding	Pay raises or better schedules — we are three weeks into testing both, and one is losing

Notice that the line gets longer and more specific rather than cleverer.

4. Where the headline sits

The headline is not only a line of text. On anything watched rather than read, the first few seconds are the headline — they do the same job, and they get the same scrutiny. A short video that was re-cut only in its opening seconds, with nothing else changed, went from a few thousand views to several hundred thousand.

That is why the naming of a thing deserves disproportionate effort: how good the thing is determines whether people who engage go on to buy, but what you call it determines whether anybody engages at all. How to test a name before you commit to it is on SOP 13.

5. What this page does not cover

Choosing the subject the headline is written about is on SOP 22, matching the format of the platform is on SOP 20, and holding attention once the headline has worked is on SOP 23.

Keyword research, search optimization, thumbnail design and paid headline testing at scale are not covered on this page.