Headlines And Timing
A little change for the better, here at Emeth
You don’t have to protect my feelings. I know that you don’t read everything I publish here at Emeth. I subscribe to quite a few Substack publications that I truly love, but I can’t read everything that they publish either. There’s only so much time in the day.
That said, I’m given to understand that one of the key indicators of whether an essay will be opened or not is the Title. The Headline.
It’s true, we really do tend to judge a book by its cover.
That would be A-OK, if I had any confidence at all in my ability to write catchy Headlines.
Alas, I don’t.
The creation of a Headline that makes a reader want to click something open is a really specific skill, and I’ve not found a way to develop that skill.
So I just Title my essays here rather willy-nilly, and hope for the best.
But, I may have been saved by technology!
For years now, these posts go out to your email box, and hit the website at exactly 3:00 AM.
Moving forward, some of you will receive them at 2:30 AM instead, and others will get them at 3:30 AM.
All of this is Pacific Time.
I’ve published at 3:00 AM so that it is in email boxes at the start of the day, no matter where one lives within the Western Hemisphere. That for me anyway is the best time for checking and reading email.
My apologies to those who live elsewhere, but most of my readers are in North America. 57% actually, with the other 43% in an additional 121 countries throughout the world, and this platform doesn’t offer functionality that would deliver at different times based on where one lives.
The reason for the half hour change, either way, is a new bit of technology.
Moving forward, I’ll be able to write a number of Titles'/Headlines for each essay. I’ll probably just stick with two. Then at 2:30, a certain subset of Emeth readers will receive the essay of the day, some with one Title, others with the other Title.
After an hour passes the software will track what percentage of each are opened, select the one with the largest percentage, and then send the essay to everyone else with the most popular Title.
That’s a slick bit of tech!
But beyond simply being a cool piece of technology, I think that I’ve finally found a tool that will help me learn how to write better Titles! And that is a very good thing, because that will improve Emeth.
What you might notice, when I include voice-overs, is a difference between the Title on the recording and the Title on the text post, as the final title will be selected by the computer after I’ve created the voice-over. Sorry for that bit of weirdness.
Quite often I’m skeptical of technology, believing that those things that are supposed to somehow make improvements for us often fail to do that. They instead complicate our lives. But, I’m confident that this will be a really great improvement, and am pleased to have a tool that will, over time, help me learn to write more attractive Titles for my essays.
If you are curious, I've used this 'title picker' gizmo for two days and four essays. I've found that it really works!
As an example, for the post above, I wrote three different titles.
The winner, the title you see above was opened by 8% of recipients within one hour of receiving it. Sent at 2:30 AM, 8% had opened it by 3:30 AM.
The second choice was opened by 6.1% within that hour.
The final choice was opened by 5.4% within that hour.
That is a pretty stark difference in my mind, and shows the value of the tool.
Interestingly, when I woke up hours later, I see that I was included in the test group of subscribers this morning. I received the Title most disfavored.
Over on my personal site: https://cmbailey.substack.com/
I chose two headlines for this morning's essay:
Choice 1: "Has My Neighborhood Been Cursed"
Choice 2: "The Curse Of Pear Street"
The Curse Of Pearl Street was opened by 12.1% of recipients within one hour. The other choice, only 7.5% opened it in that same hour. Another stark difference.
I think that I'll really be able to learn to write better titles using this tool.
Hah, that's the well-known marketing technique known as the A / B split... except that we used to do it "manually" (kinda). E.g. setting up two landing pages for a product and measuring the 'clicks' leading to sales... and then deciding to use the winning version.
It's nice that the technology can do it now, and even making the final "decision"