How to Dance with the Devil In the Pale Moonlight

Highly annoying yet extremely cute graphic aside, this post has nothing to do with devilment, dancing or moonlight. It’s about writing eye-stopping headlines in a world of scrolling information.

It’s happened to you. You’ve been scrolling down your Twitter stream, your FriendFeed home page, your Google Reader subscriptions, your Inbox. And you’ve stopped short to click on something that caught your attention.

Maybe, like me, you’ve secretly dreamed of having someone stop scrolling to pay attention to your headline so you could get more clicks, sell more products, or just stroke your ego for most-visited post that day.

Eventually I learned from having that experience several hundred times – and saving things that jolted me out of my routine in a folder – that there are 5 things I can rely on to crack out a quick but click-worthy headline when pressed for time.

(There are other things I do, one involves software, another reading magazines, but we’re talking about doing this in a time crunch. One like, where you’ve pledged to blog daily for 100 days and start over each time you miss a day.)

And the main thing I’ve learned is that getting someone’s eye to stop is all about pattern interruption. So here are five pattern-interrupting ways that I use to write hot headlines on the fly – with examples of their risks and rewards.

1. Use a Well Known Line from Popular Culture (TV, Music, Web)

Risk: People may not get it, or they may stop reading when they realize your line has absolutely nothing to do with what you’re writing. I took that risk today.

Reward: If people DO read it, you’re connecting to something they’re familiar with, something they may have liked or loved to hate. You’re stating you have something in common, without stating it. Most people who get this headline have seen the 1989 Batman movie, with Michael Keaton.

My favorite part of that period was realizing how much I under-estimated Keaton’s ability to not jut play, but become Batman.

2. Use a Cliff…. Hanger

Risk: People won’t jump off cliffs to follow something they don’t care about. If you pick the wrong thing, the cliff hanger will backfire.

Reward: In what Mr. Joyner taught me is the Zeigarnik effect, people can’t seem to resist the urge to get the rest of incomplete information. This is why even bad soap operas are funny.

It’s why you watch a bad movie to the end.

And also why Hollywood sequels are so popular even though each subsequent movie is normally less satisfying than the original by a factor of ten.

3. Pick a Question Everyone Wants the Answer to

Risk: Answer the question incorrectly or with information people don’t want to hear and they may never trust your answers again.

Reward: Choose wisely, answer well, and it’s just-add-water popularity.

4. Choose the Unpopular Side of a Controversy

Risk: You’re making yourself either the straight-shooter or the bad guy. Much fewer people buy from the bad guy. They don’t trust him.

Reward: Even if you’re the bad guy, when people love to hate you, everyone is talking about you. If you subscribe to the idea that even bad publicity is good publicity, that could work for you.

Example: More people apparently listen to Howard Stern that hate him than love him. They want to know what to villify him for next. Right or wrong, it made him a legend.

5. Say Something That Doesn’t Make Sense When Out of Context

Risk: It can come across as a typing error or mistake that you were too dumb to catch. Hyperbole is your friend here, so that no one could imagine you didn’t do this on purpose.

Reward: It’s a sure pattern interruption whenever the mind has to pause to try and make sense of something. There’s a dash of Zeigarnik in here as well, as the brain will follow the trail to find out if it was right, or to make sense of it all.

As an added bonus, put your text in context and you’ve given your reader a memorable way to solve a problem, recall a solution, make a connection. And when they remember that, they’ll often remember you too.

The moral of this blog post?

In most places where someone is going to encounter a path into your site, it’s through the headline. Pattern interruption is a sure way to get them to continue down the path.