I thought that the success of my article depended heavily on how interesting its content was. I was wrong.
Your article can be crazy insightful, deliver so much value and useful knowledge that each and every single fake guru out there will feel sorry for posting bs content.
Let me tell you something I recently discovered: your article is only as good as your title. Can you believe it? For me it felt like an epiphany. I don’t know why, but people don’t talk about this enough.
I sometimes see banger articles get published, I read them because I’m already active in the niche, then look at their title and it’s vague and boring.
How do you expect a person randomly scrolling the feed to actually click on YOUR article if your title is boring, and not on John’s?
How do you grab the person’s attention with just your title?
That is a complex question, but from what I noticed it all comes down to human attention. Attention on social media and Substack revolves around 3 main points:
Title or hook: this one stops you scrolling.
Thumbnail: this one grabs your attention and makes you click.
Content: this proves the title wasn’t clickbait.
In today’s article we’re gonna cover the first one: your article title.
How to craft a banger title that people would want to actually click on?
Subscribe to No BS AI. One real copy-pasteable build like this every week.
Bad vs Good
Ok, let’s cut the crap and look at what actually makes a title eye-catching versus one that just sits there. Two of my own published titles, same newsletter, same list, 13 days apart.
“How to Treat Claude Like A Game Character - The Overview.” Vague topic, no number, no reason to click unless you were already deep into my niche. 97 views.
“How to make your writing stop sounding like AI in 35 minutes.” A real problem, a real number, a real timebox. 173 views. Same newsletter, same size list. Almost double.
Step 1: make it tangible
A number tells the reader exactly what they’re getting before they click, so there’s no guessing left to do. “How to make your writing stop sounding like AI” is a topic. Add “in 35 minutes” and it becomes a promise you can act on right now.
The number also has to be true. I don’t round a 27-minute process up to 35 to sound cleaner, I write down the actual time it took me. Readers can usually tell when a number was invented for the headline, and it kills the trust you need for the next title to work too.
One more thing nobody tells you: a number also works as a filter against your own bad titles. If you can’t put an honest number on what you’re offering, that’s usually a sign the article itself is still too vague to write.
Step 2: first person
Write it as something that happened to you, not as advice floating in the air. “How to Stop Sounding Like AI” is still fine. “How I Stopped Sounding Like AI” is better, because now there’s a real person behind it who actually did the thing, not some anonymous guide.
This is also a filter on the article itself. If I can’t honestly write “how I did X” because I never actually did X, the article shouldn’t exist yet. First person titles keep me from publishing theory I haven’t tested on my own stuff first.
There’s a second reason it works, one I didn’t expect. “I” titles feel like a lower-risk click than “you should” titles, because nobody’s telling the reader what to do, I’m just telling them what happened to me. They get to decide on their own whether it applies to them.
It also changes how you write the article once the title is locked. A first-person title forces the whole piece to stay grounded in what actually happened, the exact steps, the exact time, the exact result, instead of just randomly drifting into generic advice halfway through.
Step 3: one concrete promise
Pick the single result the reader actually wants and put that in the title, not the topic. Nobody opens an article about “titles.” People open an article that promises their next one will get read. The topic is what the piece is about, the promise is what the reader walks away with, and the title only has room for one of those.
You see the pattern here?
One promise per title, never two. “Stop Sounding Like AI and Grow Your List” is two different articles wearing one headline, and it reads like it’s trying too hard. Pick the promise that’s actually true for that specific piece and cut the rest.
The promise also has to match what’s inside. A title that oversells and an article that undersells is the fastest way to lose a subscriber for good, they open once, feel tricked, and never open the next one.
In practice
So to summarize all 3 steps:
Make the title tangible, people respond to concrete numbers, not vague claims.
Writing it from your personal point of view will add more credibility.
Pick one topic, one promise and deliver on it.
And because this is a practical newsletter for you folks out there, here’s the exact prompt to use for crafting better titles for your next article:
You are helping me write the title for my next Substack article. The title is also the email subject line, so it has one job: make the right person open it.
Here is my article:
[PASTE YOUR FULL ARTICLE, OR ITS FIRST 3 PARAGRAPHS]
Step 1. Before you write a single title, fill these 3 lines and show them to me:
- The loop: what keeps happening to me or to the reader, in plain words. Not an event, not a measurement. Words that carry a loop: still, again, every morning, keeps, repeating, forgets.
- The benefit: what stops happening once they read this.
- The move: the one thing I did that stopped it.
If you cannot fill line 1, tell me the article has no title yet and stop.
Step 2. Write 5 title candidates. Every one has to pass all of these, and you check them by counting, not by feel:
- The promise lands inside the first 40 characters.
- The whole title is under 60 characters.
- It does not start with "How to" and it is not a question. "How I" is allowed and encouraged.
- No suffix. No "- Complete Guide", no "- The Overview", no colon label doing the same job.
- A person is in it: "How I", "my", "you", "your".
- It names a loop, something that keeps happening, not a one-off event.
- At most one number, and only if the number is the whole story. Otherwise the number moves to the subtitle.
- It does not just name the tool or the topic and stop there.
Step 3. Give me the output as a table with 3 columns: the title, its exact character count, and which lever it uses (loop, first person, negative framing, number).
Step 4. Under the table, write one subtitle for your best candidate. Under 90 characters, saying who it is for and what they walk away with. It must not be a line that would fit any other article. If the title took the loop, the subtitle carries the number.
Step 5. Tell me in one line which one you would ship and why. Then stop.Subscribe to No BS AI. One real copy-pasteable build like this every week.
Talk soon,
Ilya