Make good use of subscript tips to grab readers’ attention

This article was originally published in Economic Daily

Last time, we talked about the key marketing elements that attract attention, including: commitment, curiosity and data. A reader wrote to me and asked me, what should I do to write a title that people are willing to pay attention to?

Mi Meng’s subscript strategy

A few years ago, I once read a report that talked about the bidding method of Mimeng, a writer from the other side of the Taiwan Strait: How can each of Mimeng’s articles achieve a high click-through rate of “100,000+”? And what did she and her team do? First, Mi Meng will write 50 different titles in one breath, and then put these 50 titles into a WeChat group of 5,000 people for voting, and the members of the community will jointly select the best title.

After that, Mimeng officially published the article with the title selected by Queping. Well, did you think this was the end? In fact, this was not the case. Her team finally formally wrote a 10,000-word tracking report based on netizens’ responses to this article.

Well, when you see this, you may feel a little surprised: It’s just an article, does it need to be so complicated? But I believe you should be able to get some inspiration from Mi Meng’s story!

Having said that, if we can’t give each article 50 titles, we can at least give three titles, right? Then, from these three titles, select the one that best grabs the reader’s attention.

I must tell you that subscript is not as difficult as you think. The real difficulty is not how to quote from other sources and make full use of writing skills.

Empathy is the key to subscripting

The key point of subscripting is to first put the readers first, try to start from their perspective and think about what troubles, needs or things that need to be solved by the readers in daily life? In other words, this is the so-called “Thinking from someone else’s perspective”.

Well, this part depends on everyone practicing together! Next, let me summarize some things to note about subscripts:

Four important things to note when subscripting

First of all, what does a good title do? I think the issues related to target audience must be implicit, and the target audience must also be clearly told what benefits or inspirations they can get from it?

Secondly, how to grab attention through the title? I suggest you talk more about the benefits, newsiness, and pique everyone’s curiosity. For example, you can think about it: Is there anything that the reader needs that will be helpful in his daily life? What are some things that have never been seen before, or that look different? Try to get the reader to guess what it is? And then stimulate their motivation.

Next, a good title must answer the following questions of the reader: What is this article about? What are the key points of this article? Why should readers care? And why should readers read now?

Finally, I would like to give you a little suggestion, which is to use punctuation marks wisely! In titles, commas, exclamation points and even dashes are most commonly seen, and you can use them at your discretion. This can not only improve readability and help readers read, but also arouse everyone’s curiosity. Some people even say that good use of punctuation marks can help sell products!

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☕️ Invite Vista to have a cup of coffee

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