Five mistakes teams make with headline writing

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit headline writing.

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

What to watch for

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• The headline decides whether the rest is read
• Specific beats clever
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Say what the reader gets. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Turning this into a decision

The short version

Content is the part of a project most likely to be underestimated and most likely to delay a launch. Three things worth confirming about headline writing before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Specific beats clever — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.