HEADLINES ON SUBSTACK ARE EVERYTHING.
I rarely use all-caps, but this is so important.
I read so many great posts with terrible headlines. Unsurprisingly, those posts get no traction.
Why?
They’re vague, i.e., supposedly meant to entice. (That doesn’t work.)
Or they’re really AI-ish.
We want human headlines that resonate with humans, not (just) SEO.
Why?
We aren’t catering to Google’s algorithm on here.
Most subscribers will likely come from the Substack network.
And many people think SEO is dead anyway.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t care about SEO, just that we don’t have to cater to it.
So here’s my super-secret key to headlines that will make readers more likely to open your emails, read, and engage and entice potential subscribers to subscribe.
This headline-writing workflow does three things:
Takes SEO into consideration.
Balances that against a headline optimization tool that looks at the headline’s intellectual, emotional, and spiritual resonance.
Goes through the all-important final step of asking actual humans if they’d be engaged by the headline.
The point is to take your current headline and measure it for
SEO (if you’re interested in that),
human response (as assessed by AI), and
actual human response.
My how-to-write-Substack-viral headlines workflow:
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