Monday morning, you're sleepy and the best thing to do is have a coffee and something to read. You pick a newspaper or a magazine and start browsing randomly until you find something interesting. But how do you really decide, will you read the entire articles and decide when you finish? No, of course not, you don't want to stay there till Friday. So you just look at the titles and choose whatever tickles your fancy.
1. The way you put it
The title, that little bastard that makes the difference between "Buy our expensive jeans" and " Top 10 jeans that make you sexy"; it doesn't matter if both texts are identical, no one in their right mind would read something that has "expensive" in the title except if it says "you win an expensive car". So, say something about what you want to write, highlighting the appealing parts and not so much the parts about paying your salary to buy a freaking pair of jeans.
2. Don't lie
This is very important, if you promise people in the title that after they read they will know how to "staying young-10 easy steps" and you just write about something that involves needles, cutting, pumping, 10 month recovery or stuff like that... You're a liar and deserve to write teleshopping adds for the rest of your life. This takes us to 3:
3.Know your audience
Who you write for is essential, remember: ESSENTIAL. If you want to present a new laptop and the article is included in a magazine read mostly by women you don't want to say that it has not one, but two NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-580M-SLI.56637 graphic cards. How should I say it....they don't care!! I'm not saying that all women don't have a clue about this stuff and I'm sure that many man that read this are like "what?!?", it was just an innocent example. A more suitable title would be " Everything a laptop can do,only better, faster and looking pretty"; there you have it, it has the word "pretty" and says that it does everything better than the last season laptops. Maybe it only has only 10 gb of memory more, the screen is one inch bigger and it comes in 3 colours but technically what you said wasn't a lie, you're not a bad person just a creative one. Here, have a cooky!
4. Be funny
Once you know the target audience, you can decide if being funny is suitable or not. Let's say it is; you are allowed to use the force..of laughter, BUT, don't swear or nasty words (not even Playboy uses those, be classy and witty). A good example is the Diesel Spring/Summer campaign (it's not an article, but man it would've made a great one): "Sex sells....unfortunately we sell jeans". See what they did there? They casually threw the word "sex" at the beginning and then they showed you that they are different, special and..sell jeans.
There are some unfortunate cases, let's say, when the author of the article is the laugh. Some examples of bad case practice that takes me back to " go write teleshopping adds": "Panda Mating Fails; Veterinarian Takes Over" makes people think of zoophilia not that some nice vet put music to calm and inspire pandas to have babies.
And now, the last but not the least.... *drum beats*
5. Don't write a lousy article
Yeah, I said this article is about titles but really, if the actual text is rubbish, not even the funniest or the wittiest title can save it. It's like you receive the most beautiful cake ever but it tastes like plastic; a cake should first catch your eye and then delight your taste buds. With an article is the same: the title makes you say " hmm, this should be worthy of my time" and then the text should prove you were right.
When you try to sell something, not necessarily an object, maybe an idea, if you don't buy it yourself ( see what I did there, word play), than it is obvious that no one else will.
Be creative, be passionate and always spell check!
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