Is your content “Upworthy”?

How many times have you been shamefully tricked into clicking an article titled something like “You Won’t Believe This Simple Trick a Single Mom Used to Rank Number 1 on Google”? Don’t lie, you know you’ve done it. I discussed Buzzfeeds easily digestible content earlier, but before you can get to the content, it’s the title that hooks you.

The power of sites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy is their titles that create such fierce curiosity that you can’t help but dive in and read further. The title of your article is your opportunity to make the reader realize they want to know the answer to a question they may never have outright asked before, like “Why Do Rich People Seem To Always Need More Money?”

Another tactic has to do with taking something complicated (like SEO) and bringing it down to the level of the average person. This kind of hook gets you thinking that not only is this tactic discussed in the article effective, but it’s also easy enough that you can use it with no prior training. This is why you see so many lines like “One Simple Trick a Child Figured Out.”

There is a flipside to this tactic: It’s everywhere. The kind of verbiage used is so prevalent across the web, that many readers have become jaded and will ignore anything that fits the pattern. So the key is to pose the question that your article answers in such a way that it evokes the reader’s curiosity without turning them off immediately. Once you’ve done that, it’s time to let your content speak for itself.

Kevin Drongowski
Integrated PPC