Anyone who has ever entered a restaurant with an empty belly will tell you that just the smell of food wafting through the air is enough to make any mouth water. Any restaurant owner will tell you that there is nothing better than a house full of starving customers waiting to be served. The Web is like a full house of starving customers – what is your menu offering?
There is a starving crowd wandering through the hallways of the Web, searching and hungering to taste the information and sampling one headline after another, whetting the appetite for more, more, more. You, the writer, are the waiter or the Head Chef who prepares and delivers those meals to the starving crowd looking for just the right place to savor a meal.
Do you cook up the best information to share with a starving world? Are your dinners ever being chosen from the host of meals available on the Web? The headline or the title is the listing on a menu chock full of entrees just waiting to be chosen. You can be prepared to offer up the greatest dinner selection in the whole wide world but if your title doesn’t leave the audience craving to taste more of what you have to offer, in the end, it will never be tasted or recommended to other customers.
Are you writing the best titles for your articles?
The headline should be the taste of things to come. If a restaurant patron ordered the “Savory Chicken Breast in Alfredo Sauce” and the plate arrived covered with a red sauce, chances are the customer would either: return the dinner to the kitchen or leave the restaurant in disgust. Everyone knows that Alfredo sauce should appear as a thick, creamy and white sauce in color. Anything red would imply tomato and there should not be any tomatoes in your Alfredo.
It is the same thing with headlines. If you state the following headline “Five best ways to save money” and the writer doesn’t taste those five ways in five seconds, you may have lost the customer even though everyone is hungry to save money these days. They will just leave your restaurant in search of another to fill the void you left.
Avoid over-sensationalizing what you have to offer
There is nothing worse than expecting a five-course dinner and getting served fast-food. Don’t over-promise and under-deliver on anything that you write for the Web. There are writers who can grab the attentions of millions of readers by writing attention-grabbing headlines. If that is all they have to offer and the bulk of the article is filler, the customer may even turn ugly. Nothing can be as upsetting as searching for just the right headline and opening it, only to find it empty on the inside. That would be like ordering Stuffed Shells and receiving only empty pasta swimming in a sea of sauce. If you are writing on a website where comments can be left behind or your article rated, be prepared for the bad reviews.
Don’t serve something until you have tasted it first.
I do not know many cooks who would serve a dinner to their guests without sampling the prepared food first. Does it need more salt? Is it completely cooked? Does it leave a good taste in your mouth? These are the very questions that any writer should be asking before that piece leaves your computer and gets put on the Web table. Taste everything. If it makes you smile, chances are good that all the folks sitting at your table will enjoy the meal you have prepared.
Every starving waiter or writer likes to get good tips, so I will leave you with the best one:
Remember that your headline will draw them in but it is your meal that they will remember long after the menu has been taken away.
