Headline writing for small teams

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. Most advice about headline writing assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

What to keep

The headline decides whether the rest is read. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly.

Where to start

Say what the reader gets. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

How to tell if yours is fine

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
• The headline decides whether the rest is read — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.