In your blog, you obviously want to publish high quality content in all of your posts to enhance value and shareabililty. However, there is some evidence that if you really want to maximize the chances of your content going viral, you need to—no joke—strongly consider making your titles more menacing.
That’s what Iris Shoor, head of marketing at Takipi, contends in this post on her Startup Moon blog which outlines how her analysis of blogs revealed the significant impact that title wording has on a post’s sharing potential. While the reviewed blogs were all tech-related, one of her major findings was that post titles that used words like “kill,” “fear,” “bleeding,” “dead,” and other sinister-sounding words were often among the most, if not the most, shared articles on their sites. Who knew?
She also found that incorporating other less alarming but still negative-leaning elements in titles also helped push shareability—words like “no,” “stop,” and “without” were especially effective. Think along the lines of “The gadget you cannot live without” rather than “The gadget that will change your life.”
There are other interesting and practical revelations in Shoor’s post, but the main takeaway is the attraction of titles that convey doom and ruin. You’ll never look at your blog post titles the same way ever again.