You’re not a writer — you’re a headline creator
One shift that unlocked thousands of views each month
I used to believe “being a writer” meant I need to focus my time on the writing - and the better I wrote, the more my audience would grow.
Then I noticed my best performing articles are the ones I put the least amount of time into.
Sounds strange, until I noticed…
These had the best headlines.
In order to improve your writing, you have to have data. And in order to get data, you have to have a quality headline that captures attention. Without attention, you don’t have data. Without data, you don’t know what to improve (or what’s “better” or “worse” for your audience).
In a backwards-kind-of-way, in order to improve your writing, you have to spend less time on your writing and more time on your headlines.
When you spend that extra time on your headlines, you get the data you need in order to improve writing.
But when you spend that time only on the writing, you create bad headlines. Bad headlines mean you don’t get the data and you’re not able to learn and improve.
If you judge something based on the results it brings in, this means you’re not a writer. You’re a headline creator.
Controversial, but true.
If you want to practice your headlines, get feedback from other writers and radically improve your writing skills and audience building, then click here to join to join the Writerpreneur community. This will be a paid community in the future, but as I’m still building it out in its early stages, I’m letting anyone who joins through this link to have free lifetime access, while others will have to pay for it.
The unspoken-promise of writing
There’s an unspoken promise that makes people flock to writing:
“If you write the best content, the content that is the most engaging, then people will read your writing and you will become an expert in your field.”
Nothing is further from the truth.
Every major writer (and content creator) has pointed out that the pieces of content that “took off” (that gained momentum and rapidly built their following) were not the things that they thought would. In fact, the things that they put the most time and effort into tended to be the things that the fewest people saw.
The idea that writers who write good content get found is an old-school mentality built on the promise of, “build it, they will come. Focus on the quality of what you build and it will sell itself.”
This belief has put more people out of business than any other belief.
You can write the most in depth article, and yet if you package it poorly, no one will read it.
How often has this happened?…
You spend 3 hours doing in depth research, toiling over the structure, stories, and metaphors. When you finally finish, you’re exhausted. You throw a headline on there and click publish. This is by far the best article on this subject, you think to yourself.
The next day to see that 3 people read it…
This is because professional writers are not writers, they are headline creators.
If you view yourself as a writer, this is where you will spend 90% of your time on the content of the writing rather than on the delivery or packaging of the writing.
This is the equivalent of starting a business and spending 90% of your time on building the product. Once it’s complete, you slap a half baked name on it, publish it to a Shopify store and hoping people will show up. It doesn’t matter how great your product is if no one knows it exists.
And if you don’t package the article well, no one will know it exists.
This is why I have come to view myself and other writers as headline creators.
the old system
viewing yourself as a “writer” presents the following staggering flaws:
- You create great content that no one sees
- The content that does take off is usually the “unpolished” content, so you don’t know what to do with that data
- You don’t get enough consistent data to know what works or what to improve
- You don’t get consistent enough data to know what to improve
- Because you view yourself as a writer, you spend more and more time optimizing the “writing”
the new system
Viewing yourself as a “headline creator” presents the following positive information:
- Your content is decent (not amazing, but not bad either)
- Because you view yourself as a headline creator, you spend a formulating your headlines — which means your headlines get better and better
- This leads to more consistent views on your articles
- This data informs you on what people want to read — and therefore what to write more about
- You can now take this data and focus on improving your writing
- This grows your audience dramatically, because you’ve already proven that the audiences wants this information
A new outlook
If the core of someone’s job are the tasks that bring in results, then a writer’ job is not to be a writer, but to be a headline creator. Writing is given afterwards as a thank you for clicking on the headline, but what you’re offering to the audience is a headline.
If you want to improve on your headlines, I have a full mini in depth training on headline creation here on medium. Click here to read that article. And by the way, I would recommend saving that article to revisit later because it’s nearly 5000 words long.
If you want to practice your headlines, get feedback from other writers and radically improve your writing skills and audience building, then click here to join to join the Writerpreneur community. This will be a paid community in the future, but as I’m still building it out in its early stages, I’m letting anyone who joins through this link to have free lifetime access, while others will have to pay for it.
See you inside.
