Today marks the end of the first week for the March cohort of Ship 30 for 30, and here are 3 of the main things I've learned this week.

Clear Not Clever

This came from our headline writing call, but I think this applies to more than just headlines. Too often, I've tried to be clever in the title of an article; seriously, I have plenty of titles and subtitles on my blog that I thought were clever at the time. Really though, we shouldn't try to be clever in our titles or our writing. My goal is to share and help. Being clever accomplishes neither.

It's only clickbait if you don't deliver on the headline's promise

Endless Idea Generator

This exercise reminded me of the brain dump of everything we need to do from Building a Second Brain, except it starts with writing out every problem we've solved and things we've learned over the past two years. We take those items and group them together into a few buckets. From those buckets, we now have areas, and we can take one of two of those ideas and get more specific about who that would be for, why they would want to read it and start refining the title to be as clear as it can be what the article would be about. Initially, I was hesitant about this, thinking I didn't really have much I've done/learned in the past few years, and I was pleasantly surprised at the number of ideas that came from this.

Restrictions as a Benefit

Another piece from our headline call, but setting restrictions on the title can help clarify what we should write about. For example, X things I learned it's a list. Listing out what the reader should get out of reading the article helps decide if it's something they even want to read. It also allows you as the writer to focus on the X things or sections. Keeping you on-topic and not waxing poetic about nothing.