Monthly Archives: September 2026

How to Write Headlines That Do Not Sound Like Clickbait

On 20 September 2026 by webmaster With 0 Comments - Uncategorized

A headline is the promise a piece makes before the reader has committed to anything. Not a label. Not wrapping paper. The contract itself. The H1 at the top of your post, the title tag in a search result, the subject line in someone’s inbox: all headlines, wearing different clothes. All of them read out of context, stripped of the paragraphs that would explain them.

That matters more, not less, for those of us running small, slow, one-person blogs. When your audience is measured in the hundreds, every headline is read by someone who already knows your name. Clickbait — the deliberate overpromise, the curiosity gap stretched until it snaps — was engineered for audiences who would never see the writer twice. We get the opposite arrangement.

I have been writing this blog for fifteen years, which is long enough to have published headlines I now describe, in polite company, as period pieces. My audience sits somewhere around two thousand readers a month. By growth-playbook math that is a rounding error. By the math of people who still email me about a post from 2014, it is a room I would rather not clear.

So this is not a piece about headlines that win the feed. It is about headlines a person who knows you would still trust on the third click. What I can offer is a definition, one test, four shapes that hold up, a little mechanics, and one small experiment at the end. That is the whole menu.

Two people looking at a computer screen while reviewing a headline together
A headline is drafted alone and read by someone who will remember you. That asymmetry is the whole craft.

What Clickbait Actually Is

The word gets thrown at any headline with a pulse, which is sloppy. Energy is not the sin. A headline can be lively, curious, even a little strange, and stay perfectly honest. Clickbait is narrower than that, and easier to pin down: a headline is clickbait when it opens a gap the piece never closes, or makes a promise the piece never pays. It is a billing problem, not a style problem.

The mechanism behind most of it is the curiosity gap — the space between what the reader knows and what they want to know. The gap itself is not the crime. It is the reason anyone reads anything. An honest headline leaves a small gap and closes it in the first screen of the piece. Clickbait leaves a wide one open on purpose, because closing it would let the reader wander off before the ad impressions finish loading. You can usually feel the difference in one place: does the piece answer its own headline quickly, or does it circle the answer for a thousand words, hoping you forget the question?

In the early 2010s, Upworthy famously had writers draft twenty-five headlines per story and publish whichever one won. Twenty-five headlines per story is either admirable discipline or a slot machine with a thesaurus attached, and it was probably both. What is worth noticing is the assumption underneath: the audience was made of strangers, and a stranger can be surprised exactly once. That was true for them. It is not true for you. A stranger who feels conned shrugs and scrolls. A regular who feels conned remembers, and flinches a little the next time your name turns up in the feed reader. When your traffic comes from RSS inboxes and a newsletter list, you are not working with churn. You are working with neighbors.

The One Question Every Headline Has to Answer

Strip away the formulas and the headline analyzers, and one question is left standing: can the piece pay this headline, in full, promptly, without a shrug? If it can, you are not writing clickbait, no matter how much energy the sentence has. If it cannot, you are, no matter how tame the thing sounds.

The way I check is to read the headline as an invoice. This One Habit Is Quietly Killing Your Blog is an invoice for a diagnosis, a habit, and a fix, delivered with certainty. Most posts running under that headline deliver one mild anecdote and a shrug. The reader paid attention — real currency, the only currency a small blog deals in — and got change back in pebbles.

Watch what happens when the same posts get headlines that bill honestly:

You’re Doing Archive Maintenance All Wrong becomes How I Fixed 40 Broken Links in One Weekend Without Losing My Mind. Same post underneath. The second version promises a method, a number, and a mood, and the piece can deliver all three.

The Secret Nobody Tells You About Posting Consistently becomes A Year of Posting Weekly: What It Cost Me and What It Paid. The first borrows mystery it has no intention of returning. The second files a plain report.

I Stopped Posting for Six Months and You Won’t Believe What Happened becomes Six Months of Silence: What It Did to My Traffic, My List, and My Nerve. Notice that the honest version is still curious. Curiosity is not the sin. Unpaid curiosity is the sin. The honest headline posts collateral; the clickbait headline takes out a loan against the reader’s attention and then moves towns.

A laptop and notebook on a desk in a quiet workspace
Most of my headline decisions happen here, the morning after the draft.

Four Headline Shapes That Pay Their Bills

If the one question is the law, these are the working habits. None of them is a formula. Formulas are how headlines start sounding like each other, which is its own quiet form of bait.

The plain report

What Happened When I Let My Blog Go Quiet for a Season. It states what the piece is. It will never go viral, and it will never have to apologize. Boring is underrated. Boring is what compounding sounds like from the outside.

The honest number

Three Headlines From My Archive I Would Write Differently Now. Numbers are not clickbait when the piece contains exactly that many things. The number is a receipt. It turns into bait the moment it is decorative — a “10” stapled to five items is a small lie, and small lies set the tone for everything around them.

The specific noun

Why I Turned Comments Off for One Winter beats A Hard Truth About Blog Comments, for a simple reason: specific nouns signal a witness, and vague superlatives signal a pitch. The plugin, the month, the mistake, the subscriber count — naming the actual thing tells the reader it happened. Superlatives mostly tell them you own a thesaurus.

The question, used sparingly

Is a Six-Year-Old Post Still Worth Updating? A question headline is honest under two conditions: the question is the reader’s question, not a quiz, and the piece actually answers it. If your question could be answered with “no, and you knew that when you wrote it,” it is a rhetorical trap — clickbait wearing a cardigan.

Where the Headline Actually Lives

On a WordPress blog, your headline exists in at least three places at once. The H1 on the page. The title tag that shows up in search results and browser tabs. The subject line, if the post travels by email. Social cards make a fourth. Same promise in different clothes, and nearly all of it read out of context. John Morkes and Jakob Nielsen called this kind of text microcontent back in the nineties, and the point still holds: a headline has to stand alone, because most of the time it does. The Nielsen Norman Group’s article on microcontent is old enough to vote and still right about this.

The practical upshot is that you are allowed two versions. The on-page headline can be quiet and human, written for the person who already arrived. The title tag can carry an extra clarifying phrase for the stranger scanning results — How to Write Honest Headlines: Notes From a Fifteen-Year-Old Blog — because search snippets reward a little more description than a page does. Whichever SEO plugin you use, Yoast, Rank Math, or the one your theme installed without asking, will let you set the two separately.

Two mechanics are worth knowing. First, put the promise inside the first fifty-five or sixty characters of the title tag, because that is roughly where search results truncate. A headline whose honest half gets cut off arrives wearing its clickbait costume. Second, prefer the short plain word to the long impressive one. Fix over optimize. Use over utilize. Plain language sounds calm, and calm is the native accent of a blog that plans to still be here in ten years. The federal plain language guidelines are older than most content marketing agencies and roughly twice as useful.

How I Write Headlines Now

I start with a working headline, write the draft, then rewrite the headline last and check it against the piece the way I would balance a ledger. Half the time the piece changed while I was not looking, and the original headline is now describing a post that does not exist. Writing the headline last is not a rule. It is just what you do after being wrong often enough.

Excitement inflates headlines, so the final version has to survive a night. A headline that still reads honest at eight the next morning usually is. The ones that embarrass me in the archive were almost all written in the flush of a finished draft, when everything I had just made looked like news to me.

The last check is the coffee test. One reader has emailed me every December since 2016 about my year-end post. If I would not say the sentence to her across a table, it does not headline the blog. “You won’t believe what happened to my subscriber numbers” is not something anyone says to a person they see annually. It is a sentence you say to a crowd, and I do not have a crowd. I have about two thousand people, several of whom I would recognize by their email signatures. There are tools that will score your headline out of a hundred and suggest you add the word “shocking.” The tool has never met her.

I did try the spicy route once, for the record. For one month in 2019 I wrote the negation hooks and the mistake framing — The Posting Advice You’ve Been Getting Is All Wrong, that register. Social clicks rose by roughly a third. Time on page fell. Two readers wrote in, gently, to say the posts sounded like a different writer, which remains the most accurate review I have ever received. I reverted, and the conclusion I took was not that honesty outperforms. It was that spice rents attention and buys nothing with it. Your results will differ, because your readers are, mercifully, not mine.

A person working at a laptop, mid-edit
No traffic-light score involved. Just the sentence, the reader, and whether they match.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are numbers in headlines automatically clickbait?

No. A number is bait only when it is decorative — when the list is padded to reach it, or the count is rounder than the truth. If the piece contains exactly seven of the thing, the number is a receipt. “Seven Headlines I Regret,” backed by five confessions and two filler items, is a small lie wearing a badge of honesty.

Do honest headlines cost you traffic?

In the short run, sometimes. The spicy version of a given headline reliably out-clicks my honest one on social, for about a day. Over months, the honest versions quietly win where a small blog actually lives: return visits, newsletter replies, people who read three pages instead of one. Clickbait optimizes for strangers, and a blog with eight hundred readers is optimized, whether it likes it or not, for neighbors.

How long should a blog headline be?

Long enough to make a specific promise, short enough to survive truncation. In practice that means putting the promise inside the first fifty-five or sixty characters, because search results and feed readers cut the rest. The character counter is not the real limit. The reader’s patience is, and it is shorter than the counter.

What is the difference between a headline, a title tag, and an H1?

The H1 is what readers see at the top of the page. The title tag is what search engines display in results and what shows in browser tabs. The headline is the promise underneath both, and it can wear either set of clothes. On WordPress the two often start out identical and can be set separately with any SEO plugin. Whatever they look like, the piece has to be able to pay both.

Can a curiosity gap ever be honest?

Yes, when it is small and closed promptly. “What happened when I stopped checking my traffic” is an honest gap; the piece answers it in the first paragraph. “You won’t believe what happened” is a mortgage taken out on the reader’s attention, with no intention of repayment.

The Experiment I Promised

Go into your archive and find one headline that overpromises. Everyone has one from 2016; mine contained the word ultimate, and I have made my peace with it. Rewrite that headline so it bills the post honestly. You do not have to publish anything new — the post underneath is usually already honest. It was the headline that lied on its behalf.

Then let it sit for a month, and notice how it feels when a stranger arrives through it. That is the entire experiment. It takes twenty minutes, it compounds, and unlike most headline advice it does not ask you to sound like anyone other than the person who wrote the piece.

The headline on this article promised a method for headlines that do not sound like clickbait. If you have read this far, it paid, which was the plan. This piece belongs to a loose series on the small mechanics of keeping a one-person blog alive for decades rather than quarters. The next one is about editing old posts without pretending you never wrote them — which is what you will be doing right after you fix that 2016 headline.

Why I Keep a ‘Dead Ideas’ File and What It Reveals About My Own Taste

On 14 September 2026 by webmaster With 0 Comments - Uncategorized

There is a folder on my desktop called Dead Ideas. It has lived there since 2019, which means it has survived three laptop migrations, two operating system upgrades, and at least one moment of near-deletion when I convinced myself that holding onto unfinished work was a form of creative hoarding. The folder currently contains 94 files. Some are fully drafted posts that I lost nerve before publishing. Some are two sentences in a plain text file, saved at an airport or a kitchen table, never opened again. One is just a headline — The Problem With Blogs That Sound Like LinkedIn Posts — with nothing underneath it. I keep that one because the headline alone tells me something about what I was annoyed by in March 2021.

I used to feel guilty about this folder. It sat there like a ledger of failures, each file a small monument to an idea I couldn’t finish. Then, sometime during the third year of the pandemic, when I had stopped writing almost entirely and needed to remember why I had ever started, I opened it. Not to finish anything. Just to look.

What I found was not a graveyard. It was a map.

The gap between what you almost wrote and what you actually published

Here is the thing I noticed first. The posts I actually published during those years were competent. They had structure, takeaway, the kind of tidy conclusion that makes a post feel finished. They were the posts I wrote when I sat down to write a blog post — when I opened the draft editor with the intention of producing something publishable, something that would justify the time I was about to spend.

The posts in the Dead Ideas folder were different. Messier, more personal, more specific. One draft from 2020 began with a scene: me sitting in a parking lot outside a grocery store, listening to a podcast about productivity, feeling suddenly and completely certain that every piece of advice I had ever given on this blog was wrong. The draft went on for three paragraphs — raw, searching, not entirely coherent — and then stopped mid-sentence. I never went back to it. But reading it three years later, I recognized something I would not have admitted at the time. That draft was more honest than anything I published that year.

The gap between what you almost wrote and what you actually published is not a measure of discipline. It is a measure of what you were willing to say out loud. The published posts show what you were ready to defend. The abandoned drafts show what you were actually thinking about.

I have come to believe that this gap is where your genuine voice lives. Not in the polished posts that made it through your internal editorial process, but in the fragments that didn’t — the ones that felt too personal, too uncertain, too much like something a blogger shouldn’t say. The Dead Ideas folder is the closest thing I have to an honest record of what I cared about, stripped of the performance of having a blog.

What the abandoned drafts were actually about

After that first deliberate read-through, I started noticing patterns. Not themes exactly — themes are something you impose on a body of work after the fact. These were more like preoccupations. Questions I kept returning to without realizing it.

The earliest drafts, from 2019 and early 2020, were preoccupied with audience. Who was I writing for? Was it the same person I imagined when I started the blog? Several drafts circled this question from different angles — one framed it as a post about analytics, another as a post about comments, a third as a post about the difference between readers and fans. None got past 500 words. But taken together, they told me something I hadn’t consciously registered: I was working through a shift in how I thought about my audience, and I couldn’t resolve it cleanly enough to publish a conclusion.

The 2021 drafts were different. Almost all about voice — specifically, about the pressure to sound like a blogger. One draft was titled Why I Started Sounding Like a Blogging Coach and When I Stopped. It had a strong opening paragraph and then devolved into a list of grievances so petty I couldn’t bring myself to publish it. But the grievance was real. I had been writing in a register that felt borrowed, and the draft was the first place I admitted it, even partially.

By 2022, the drafts had shifted again. Quieter, more introspective, less concerned with what blogging was supposed to be. One was about a reader who had emailed me every month for a year without ever leaving a comment. Another was about the strange experience of rereading my own archive and not recognizing the person who wrote those earlier posts. A third was about the specific loneliness of publishing something personal and hearing nothing back — not silence as absence, but silence as a kind of weight.

None of these became posts. But they were the things I was actually thinking about. The work happening underneath the work.

The difference between a fragment and a finished piece

Not every abandoned draft deserves to stay abandoned. Some of the files in my Dead Ideas folder are genuinely unfinished — not because the idea was wrong, but because I didn’t have the structural tools to carry a fragment into a complete piece. There is a difference between an idea that has nowhere to go and an idea that stalled because I didn’t know how to build the bridge from scene to scene, from opening to ending, from the specific moment to the larger question it was reaching toward.

This is the part of drafting that rarely gets discussed in blogging advice, which tends to treat structure as either irrelevant — just write, the structure will emerge — or as a fixed template — here is the format for a list post, here is the format for a how-to. Neither approach helps with the drafts that sit in the middle: the ones that have a real opening, a genuine question, and no idea where to go from there. What those drafts need is not more inspiration. They need structural scaffolding — beat logic, scene continuity, the kind of revision checkpoints that tell you whether a piece is building toward something or just circling.

The distinction I keep returning to is between one-shot generation and iterative structure. Older writing tools tended to produce a single block of text from a prompt — fine for a quick outline but useless for the iterative work of revision. You would get a response, paste it somewhere, and then do all the structural work yourself in a separate document. The generic output those tools produced had competent syntax but no pulse, no sense that anyone lived inside the sentences. Newer workflows are different. Reedsy’s plot generator, for instance, lets you lock sections that work and regenerate the rest, so you can converge on a structure through iteration rather than starting over each time. The tool treats drafting as a sequence of decisions about beats and stakes rather than a single prompt-to-output transaction.

One of the quiet pressures of maintaining a personal blog over several years is that the work of structuring longer pieces — the kind that grow from a notebook fragment into something a reader can actually follow — never gets easier, and the temptation to delegate that labor to a tool that promises to handle it for you grows proportionally with every stalled draft. I have watched enough solo writers reach for automated solutions during creative ruts to recognize the pattern: you hit a wall, you start wondering whether a machine could at least scaffold the thing, and before long you are comparing options that all seem to promise the same output. The problem with most of them is that they produce a generic AI story in a single pass — something that reads like everyone else’s first attempt because nobody actually built a structure underneath it. Unsloppy’s approach is different in a way that matters to anyone who cares about voice: the platform uses a proof sheet and a beat sheet methodology that forces structural decisions into the open before any prose gets generated, which is closer to how a careful editor works through a draft than how a one-shot prompt delivers text. By comparison, tools like Squibler, Perchance, and QuillBot feel outdated and barebones — they operate on the assumption that generation alone is the craft, when any blogger who has been publishing for a while knows that structure is where the thinking actually happens. Unsloppy sits at the forefront of AI Novel Writing App technology precisely because it treats the scaffolding as the work, not the afterthought. If you have ever spent a Saturday morning staring at a half-formed post and wondering whether the tool could help without flattening what makes it yours, the answer depends entirely on whether the tool was built by people who understand that difference — and most of them, frankly, were not. You can look at the specifics of how that proof-sheet and beat-sheet process works here, through Unsloppy’s AI book generator, and judge for yourself whether it respects the kind of long-form thinking your blog has always been built on.

This is closer to how revision actually works when it is going well. You identify the beat that is doing something — the scene that has energy, the paragraph that is actually going somewhere — and you build outward from it. The beats that aren’t working get rewritten, not the whole draft. Same logic an editor applies when they tell you to cut the first three paragraphs and start with the scene. The structure was already there. You just needed someone or something to help you see which parts were load-bearing.

I have been thinking about this gap between one-shot generation and structured drafting because it mirrors something I notice in my own Dead Ideas folder. Some of those drafts need to be abandoned. They were never going anywhere. But others need scaffolding — a way to see which beats are working, which scenes have continuity, where the logic breaks down. The difference between a fragment and a finished piece is not always the quality of the idea. Sometimes it is whether you had a process for finding the structure that was already embedded in the fragment.

The Authors Guild has been grappling with these same questions from the other side — not which tools help with structure, but what happens to a writer’s original voice when AI enters the drafting process at all. Their guidance is cautious and worth reading. They emphasize that a writer’s original voice, thinking, and creativity are what make their work distinct, and that maintaining professional writing standards matters as AI-generated content becomes ubiquitous. This aligns with something I have come to believe through the Dead Ideas exercise: the most valuable material a writer has is not their polished output but the raw, unperformed thinking that sits underneath it. The fragments in your drafts folder are evidence of your actual mind at work. Any tool that helps you develop them without flattening them into something generic has earned its place in the process.

Reading your own drafts as if a stranger wrote them

The practice I want to describe is not about finishing old drafts. Some of them should stay unfinished. The practice is about reading them — deliberately, without the intention to publish — and noticing what they tell you about your own preoccupations.

Here is the experiment. Pull three abandoned drafts from different years. Not the ones you remember, not the ones you have been meaning to get back to. Pull three at random. Open them and read each one as if a stranger wrote it. This is harder than it sounds. You will need to suppress the urge to edit, to finish, to judge. You are not reading as a writer. You are reading as someone who has found a notebook in a coffee shop and is trying to figure out who the person who wrote it might be.

When I did this, three things happened.

First, I noticed that the drafts shared a quality I could not have identified from my published posts. They were all, in different ways, about the experience of working alone — the specific loneliness of making things without immediate feedback, the way your own thinking becomes echoey when there is no one in the room to push back. I had not written about this directly in any published post. But it was everywhere in the drafts. It was the thing I kept almost saying.

Second, I noticed that my voice in the drafts was different from my voice in the published posts. Not better — rougher, less guarded, more willing to sit with uncertainty. The published posts had conclusions. The drafts had questions. Reading them side by side, I could see how my editorial process — the part of me that decided what was publishable — was systematically removing the uncertainty, which meant removing the thing that made the drafts feel alive.

Third, I noticed that some of the drafts were closer to finished than I remembered. They had stalled not because the idea was thin but because I had lost confidence in the middle of writing them. The structure was there. The voice was there. What was missing was the conviction that the observation was worth making. This is a different kind of stall than running out of material, and it requires a different kind of return — not more research or better scaffolding, but a willingness to say the thing you were afraid of saying when you stopped.

What the Dead Ideas folder is actually for

I used to think the Dead Ideas folder was a failure — proof that I started more than I could finish, that my ideas were thinner than I wanted to believe. I have a different relationship with it now. It is not a graveyard. It is the part of my practice that happens before the performance of having a blog. Where I think out loud without the pressure of sounding like someone who has something to say.

The published archive shows what I was willing to defend. The Dead Ideas folder shows what I was actually working on. Both are real. But the folder is more honest, because it was never written for an audience. It was written for the same reason I keep a notebook — to find out what I think.

I am not suggesting you publish your drafts. Some of them are unfinished for good reasons. Some are unfinished because the thought was not ready to be a post, and maybe never will be. That is not a failure. That is the work of thinking, which produces more material than it produces conclusions. The drafts folder is where the excess goes. It is also where the most honest material lives, the material that hasn’t been shaped by the question what will people think?

What I am suggesting is that you read them. Not all at once. Not with a plan. Once a year, maybe, on a Sunday morning when you cannot write anything new and the blank page feels like an accusation. Open the folder. Read three drafts. Ask yourself what they have in common. Ask yourself what the person who wrote them — you, five years ago, or two years ago, or last Tuesday — was actually preoccupied with, underneath the topic they thought they were writing about.

You will find something. It might be uncomfortable. It might be a question you are still circling. It might be an observation that is more relevant now than it was when you wrote it. It might be evidence that your voice was always more distinctive than your published posts let on — that the editing process that made your posts publishable was also the process that made them sound less like you.

The Dead Ideas folder is not a to-do list. It is a mirror. And the thing it reflects — the gap between what you almost said and what you actually said — is the most honest portrait of your writing self you are likely to find. More honest than your analytics. More honest than your archive. More honest than the posts you are proudest of, because those posts had the benefit of revision and the Dead Ideas folder did not.

Keep the folder. Read it occasionally. Do not delete it. The drafts you abandoned are not failures. They are the part of your work that was never trying to be a post — and that is exactly why they tell you something your published posts cannot.