I thought the phrase "Titles are 80% of the work" did not match the exposition in TFA. Consider these three interpretations:
1. "Titles are 80% of the work" describes how much effort he puts into the title, and how much he suggests.
2. "Titles are 80% of the value" describes how much value readers personally get from your work, regardless of whether they share it or not.
3. "Titles are 80% of the signal that determines whether a blog post is shared on social media" describes how much they drive sharing, and suggests that a good title is worthy of a non-trivial amount of thought.
I personally feel he was trying to say #3, and definitely not trying to say #2. But he literally wrote #1, and somebody might be deluded into reasoning as follows:
If you ought to spend 80% of your time on the title, and if it's responsible for 80% of the sharing, and all you care about is sharing, then it follows naturally that you want to put 80% of your time into it (#1), and that since you only put 20% of your time into the content, and since it only contributes 20% to whether you get ephemerally famous, it needn't provide more than 20% value to the reader (#2).
But despite that, I feel he was trying to say #3 only.
You're correct, but the wording is the kind of cheap, buzzwordy advice that we regularly see online. The post literally opens up with "I want to cross-pollinate a tweetstorm on lessons I’ve learned..." Instead of spending so much time on the headline, he could have spent some more spellchecking.
Don't get me wrong, a good title will draw me in, but the content better match my expectation if I am to come back for another post.
> If you want good advice, follow Jeff Atwood's post on the subject
Ironically, the title of that post is the very click-baity "How To Achieve Ultimate Blog Success In One Easy Step".
More to the point, that post was written so long ago that it nearly pre-dates Twitter and Facebook. It preceded the shuttering of Google Reader by six years. Jeff has great writing advice for sure, but the way that content travels online has changed drastically.
Does that excuse writing click bait titles? No. But the author wasn't advocating doing that.
Titles can be written to be intriguing without being sensational or misrepresenting the content.
Also I think there is some implication that "clickbait" articles are either uselessly short, rehashed or outright stolen and exist purely for the ad impressions.
That said, I think some of Andrew Chen's titles are right on that knife's edge of sounding like stereotypical clickbait, despite his articles being too well thought out to be truly in that category.
If the title were really 80% of the work, that doesn't say much for the content. And other things in the post around focusing on frequency etc. set off my alarms. That said, if you dismiss the importance of headlines and use vapid boring ones, you're probably not getting the [EDIT: readership} you could.
I think naming things is hard... at least that's my take on it.
I often find that a variable/function/class that is harder to name than to use or implement while programming. I expect the issue would be a little more prevalent in writing. You want something short, not click-baity, memorable and with the right connotation. I could see that taking more effort than writing the post.
When putting an idea in words, the less words you use, the more effort it takes.
I myself write fairly long and well-researched essays but I also spend quite a long time to figure out what the title should be. That doesn't take anything away from the time and effort I put in.
The more famous you are, the more cryptic you can be but to most it's just a fact of life that you need to spend time making your content easily shareable.
The point the author made was very clearly "titles are important" for anyone who understands hyperbole and reads him honestly. I can't believe any well-intentioned reader would believe that he spends literally 80% of his time crafting titles.
In the context of the post this is the very first "lesson" the author displays. He then expands on his claim with a bunch of metrics. There is nothing to infer hyperbolicity, no implied sarcasm or joke, and any well-intentioned writer would not waste their reader's time with nonsense masked as a statistic.
But it's true. It is one of the most important parts of your essay if you want it to be read and live off of being a professional blogger. It has nothing to do with the content of the essay your write.
And that's my point: if you spend 80% of your time working on a title, you won't have spent nearly enough time on the content for it to be worth reading.
The title is what readers see first. If content and title don’t match then yes it’s trash. But that doesn’t mean that having a good title isn’t important.
If you want good advice, follow Jeff Atwood's post on the subject: https://blog.codinghorror.com/how-to-achieve-ultimate-blog-s...