Headline craft
Headline Craft
Overview
Five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. A headline does three jobs at once: it tells the reader what they’re about to get, gives them a reason to care, and signals what kind of piece it is.
Core Concepts
1. The five-times rule and the 80-cent budget
Ogilvy’s empirical claim: five times more people read the headline than the body. The practical implication: the headline is where 80% of the work happens. Joanna Wiebe’s discipline: never write fewer than 10 headline variants before picking one. Ogilvy demanded 16.
2. AIDA mapped onto a headline
| AIDA stage | Where it lives | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Attention | First 3 words of the headline | Stops the scroll. |
| Interest | Rest of the headline | Promises a benefit, names a tension, or opens a curiosity gap. |
| Desire | Subhead / deck | Adds the second beat — specificity, proof, or who-it’s-for. |
| Action | First line of body / CTA | Closes the loop the headline opened. |
3. The “you-frame” rule
A headline pointed at the reader outperforms a headline pointed at the writer, the product, or an abstract topic.
- Topic frame (weak): “The future of distributed databases”
- You-frame (strong): “What your replication setup is costing you (and how to fix it)”
4. Numbers in headlines: odd, specific, and not too round
BuzzSumo’s analysis of 100M headlines: numerals increase CTR by ~36%.
- B2C top performers: 10, 5, 15, 7, 20, 6
- Odd numbers outperform even numbers for curiosity-driven content.
- Specific numbers outperform round numbers. “$1,247 saved” beats “$1,200 saved.”
5. Curiosity-gap vs declarative headlines
Declarative headlines state the conclusion in the headline itself. Good for hard news, technical posts.
Curiosity-gap headlines withhold the conclusion to drive the click. The failure mode: clickbait — a gap so wide the body can’t close it.
6. Channel-specific length budgets
| Channel | Sweet spot | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Web article H1 | 8–12 words | |
| SEO title tag | 50–60 chars | Google truncates beyond pixel width |
| X / Twitter | 60–70 chars | Under 70 chars lets retweeters add commentary |
| Email subject line | 30–50 chars | iPhone portrait shows ~35–40 chars |
| Push notification | 25–40 chars | Verb + benefit only |
7. News vs feature vs op-ed vs SEO headline registers
- News headline: Active verb, present tense. “Atlas adds vector search for Voyage embeddings.”
- Feature headline: Label or question form OK. “The quiet revolution in how databases handle vectors.”
- Op-ed headline: Argument-forward. “We’re thinking about vector search wrong.”
- SEO headline: Keyword-front-loaded. “Vector search benchmarks: 12 databases compared (2026).”
8. The deck / subhead pairing
A deck does three things:
- Expands what the headline could not fit.
- Answers the question the headline raised.
- Earns the scroll.
Sizing: Heds are 6–10 words. Decks are 10–25 words.
Example rewrites
| Weak | Stronger | Why |
|---|---|---|
| “The future of databases” | “What your database will look like in 2027 (and why it’s not what you think)” | You-frame + curiosity gap |
| “MongoDB launches Search Nodes” | “Search Nodes cut Atlas query latency 4x in production” | Verb-led, evidence-led, benefit-front |
| “10 things to know about indexes” | “9 indexing mistakes I found in 200 production clusters” | Odd number, specific evidence |
Anti-Patterns
- The “we” headline. “We released a new feature today.” The reader doesn’t care what you did.
- The label headline. “Distributed Systems Notes” names a folder, doesn’t earn a click.
- The pun headline. Ogilvy banned them in 1963 and the data still says he’s right.
- The bait-and-switch. Headline promises X, body delivers Y.
- The under-specified curiosity gap. “What we learned” without a hint of what you learned.
References
- Ogilvy, David. Ogilvy on Advertising (1983).
- BuzzSumo headline studies.
- Wiebe, Joanna. Copyhackers headline formulas.
- PMC, “When curiosity gaps backfire” (2024)