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Knowledge Bank

Plan3 min read

Write five titles: the fourth is where it stops being obvious

By Chris and Corey · · Updated

Don't pick your first title. Write five before you choose. The early ones are obvious; the good one usually shows up around the fourth attempt.

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PlanLinked task: Draft five titles · step 5 of the 47
Flat illustration of a pen.

Your first title is almost never your best one. It is the obvious one, the literal description of what the video is, the same title every other video on the topic has. Writing five before you choose forces you past the obvious into the territory where titles actually earn clicks. You are not picking yet. You are generating, and the picking comes later with fresh eyes.

The reason to separate writing from choosing is that judging while you generate kills the good ideas early. You will meet the same discipline applied to tags further down the line, once you get to that step. You write something a bit odd, decide it is too odd, and delete it before it had a chance. Write all five first, no judging, and the strange fourth one often turns out to be the strongest.

Five angles on the same video

A useful way to get five is to come at the video from five different directions, rather than rewording the same one five times. Before you write any of them, checking the top five results for the topic shows you which angle is already taken.

  • The plain description. What the video literally is. Your baseline, and usually the weakest.
  • The benefit. What the viewer gets out of watching. The outcome, not the topic.
  • The curiosity gap. A question or tension the video answers, without giving the answer away.
  • The specific. A number, a name, a concrete detail that makes it feel real and earned.
  • The contrarian. The angle that pushes against what people expect, if the video honestly supports it.

Five directions give you genuinely different options to choose from. Five rewordings of the plain description just give you the plain description in five outfits.

Write all five before you judge any of them. Generating and editing are different jobs, and doing them at once means you reject the interesting title before it is fully formed.

Why the fourth one matters

The first two or three titles come easily because they are the obvious ones. Around the fourth, you have used up the easy options and have to actually think, and that is where the title stops being a description and starts being a reason to click. If you stop at three, you stop right before the good one. Push to five even when three feels like enough.

Keep them honest. A title that promises something the video does not deliver buys a click and loses the viewer in the first 30 seconds, which is worse for the video than a plainer title. The aim is the most compelling true title, not the most compelling one.

Where Chewbr fits

Draft five titles is step 5 of the 47, early in Plan, with the choosing held back until step 26 in Package. Splitting writing from choosing is deliberate, and it is the same reason you draft three hooks at step 7 and pick one later, applied to the title.

Keep reading

Five options give you something real to choose between: picking the title, under 60 characters with the keyword near the front. The words you leave out of the title still have a home in the description.