Are You spending a lot of time writing Clickbait Headlines like Buzzfeed?
Then you might just be doing the worst thing you could ever do for your blog..
A Clickable headline is what every blogger wants to write because his ultimate objective is to get readers to click on that link and come over to his blog to read his blog post.
There are 2 noteworthy points in the above statement. First, readers clicking on the link because of your headline. Second, they come over to your blog and read your post.
Does a Clickbait headline satisfy both these points?
It will not, because it is meant to take care of only the first part. The second part is to be taken care of by your content. You need to ensure that your content ties really well into the headline that the reader clicked on.
And it is here that the problem lies.
I remember how the headlines formula changed after sites like Buzzfeed and Viralnova emerged on the blogging horizon. All of a sudden it was all about traffic from social media and, Buzzfeed like posts were all over your social media feeds, especially Facebook feeds.
The inquisitiveness that the headline created made people click on those and a multi-million dollar business named Buzzfeed was born.
But this trend did a lot of harm than good to blogging and content marketing in general.
There are so many instances where you would have clicked over a headline to be taken to a post that sucked from the beginning till the end.
Why You Shouldn’t Focus too much on Clickbait Headlines
Something that a site like Buzzfeed destroyed was genuine content generation and the use of genuine headlines – headlines that conveyed the essence of a post.
While a lot of bloggers adopt this style of writing headlines, this might just not be the right thing to do.
Let us see why it is not the right thing to do and why writing Clickbait headlines could prove disastrous for your blog.
The Unnecessary Hype
The Buzzfeed like headlines generate inquisitiveness by creating an unnecessary hype.
I still remember one of those headlines that I saw in my Facebook news feed, that read – “8 Horrible places in the World that You would never want to visit – the 6th is the most Frightening”.
While the headline in itself was interesting, the last few words generated an inquisitiveness to find out what that 6th place was and hence I clicked over to go to the post.
And what did I find..
Absolutely nothing different from the rest of the 7 places that were quoted there. All of them were equally frightening and the 6th one was no different from the rest. Though the post was interesting, I felt I was cheated by the headline.
In spite of an experience like this, I still clicked on many more such headlines that I saw in my Facebook newsfeed and most of them turned out to be just the same – an unnecessary hype.
Something that you need to keep in mind is that such headlines generate a lot of hype and it is almost always, very difficult to live upto that hype that you have created which eventually means you are going to upset your readers, if your content doesn’t live up to the expectations generated by the hyped headline.
Clickbait Headlines are a Fading Trend
This trend of writing clickable headlines is soon fading. After all of the fake links that people click over to see content that is nothing more than just crap, it was just a matter of time that people realized that these headlines were nothing more than hoax.
More than the way Buzzfeed dealt with it, it was the way other websites copied this strategy over.
Their objective was only to get people to click through and they never really cared about the quality of the content that they were creating. As a consequence, the internet was full of crap articles with only a click worthy headline.