The "Headline Spearhead Hack"

🧪 HOOK SCIENCE

Get More Clicks To Your Headlines Using The “Spearhead Hack”

Warning: Even your best ideas will be ignored if they aren’t packaged in a way that grabs your audience’s attention within the first 3 seconds.

The "Spearhead Hack" is a headline technique I sometimes use:

It’s when you use the most attention-grabbing aspect of a piece of content as the headline.

The content itself may cover a wide range of topics.

But the headline just refers to the most unique, unusual, or curiosity-inducing point.

I didn’t have a name for it, but the spearhead metaphor works well.

The headline hack was inspired by RealLifeLore’s viral YouTube video “Why 80% Of New Zealand Is Empty” — (8.2 million views at the time of writing).

The video goes through a lot of fascinating New Zealand info — geography, colonial history, socioeconomics, and more.

But all of the information revolves around and relates to one attention-grabbing point — the fact that 80% of New Zealand is empty.

This eye-catching fact is then used as the headline — it acts as a “spearhead” that cuts through the noise and gets your attention.

The result?

You click through — eventually drawn into watching the whole 23 minute video.

If the video was simply titled “The Geography And Socio-Economic History Of New Zealand”, the content wouldn’t have gone viral.

In fact, it would probably have failed.