5 of My Most Viral Headlines and What You Can Learn from Them
Clickbait copywriting might work, but it doesn’t make people trust you. Here’s what to do instead
I used to be the Viral Editrix for Bark & Co’s BarkPost. I landed that title because my copywriting was that good - my posts kept going viral both in our niche market and outside of it. While these posts are all dog-centric, every industry can learn from them.
I picked five of my favorite headlines and broke down why they work. Use these tips instead of disingenuous clickbait the next time you need a headline or even a slogan.
5. Vet Tech Rescues Chocolate Lab No Bigger Than a Chocolate Shake
There are a few things that make this title work, most importantly how visually descriptive it is. This article had an excellent photo, but you don’t need it. The copy does the heavy lifting. We know exactly what’s happening here.
The second thing is that it uses repeating words. And, it’s a word that skews the emotion of the piece. We tie lots of emotion into the word “chocolate.” It’s a food that elicits a lot of memories. What does it make you think of? Sweetness? Comfort? Childhood? Innocence?
What also works is what’s not in this title. The working title of this piece had “from euthanasia” in it. I could have left it in there, but then it would cancel out the work the word “chocolate” was doing. We’d hit a sweet spot, only to swing to something negative. The point of this copy was to make people feel good.
And that’s super important - the point wasn’t to make people click, it was to make them feel good. In the end, they did click, because I made them feel good.
4. Dog with Fireman Fetish Gets Rescued from a Burning Home
How do you make a standard story interesting? You say the weird thing.
This could have been “brave firefighters rescue dog from house fire.” In fact, a lot of news aggregators said exactly that. I didn’t and that’s why mine went viral.
Of course, you have to be careful with your genre of weird and when and how you use that weirdness. This particular joke wouldn’t work in all contexts. You have to know your audience, your industry, and your platform in order to gauge your weirdness accordingly.
3. Shelter Dog wants to help you shovel snow this winter
The question you should ask before writing any headline or slogan is “is this special enough?”
For this, the specialness that I chose was to make it relatable to people’s immediate real world experiences. In other words, it was timely. Shovels weren’t the only thing this shelter dog was running around with. This could have been “Silly dog plays with garden tools” and that’s funny, but it’s not special. When you write something that makes people think “damn, I could have used that this morning” even in a joking way, it will always work.
2. Dogs Stellar Hearing Skills Foil Major Jailbreak Plot
That’s a lot of words that feel like they shouldn’t go together, but they do. It’s a bit of a tongue twister and might confuse people for a second. Your audience will do a double take because it will result in a “what a minute, wtf did I just read?”
Like all of my headline tips, you don’t want to overuse this strategy, but inject clever wordsmithing once in a while to keep things spicy.
1.Teenage boy walks 300 miles to save his dog from war torn syria
I have a lot to say about this headline and story. I’ll do a lot of that in a follow-up. For this post, what’s important is that it encapsulates my advice for copywriting and for journalism in general:
Tell the story no one else is telling and make it human
When I wrote this headline, much like headlines today, victims of war weren’t referred to as people. They’re depersonalized as “refugees.” Children aren’t referred to as children. They’re minors or young adults. Much like today, people didn’t want to see the humanness in the people being bombed out of their homes. But I knew that how I positioned this story, that no other outlet like mine was talking about, could bring life to something that our media had depersonalized.
I could have called this boy a refugee. I could have made the dog the focus of the story. I didn’t. He was a teenage boy who, just like so many of us, would have died for his dog. So, that was the story I made the conscious choice to tell with this headline. I chose personhood over societal and journalistic conventions of the time.
It went viral within minutes.
