How To Trick Wine Drinkers into Reading Substantial Wine Writing

If you write or publish anything and you aren’t using AI to analyze what works, what’s being read, and what’s not being read, you are leaving significant insights on the table.

That said, I’ve been diving into the past 10 months of clicks at The Spill, my other newsletter that curates daily links of top wine content and sends this curated list of links to subscribers who get it for free.

Now, in curating the links to content that I include in The Spill, I do what I can to draw attention to the best writing, the most substantial thinking, the most insightful content I find. I want to both highlight this kind of effort, and I want to expose subscribers to the good stuff.

In looking at what subscribers click on and when they click on it, I’ve come to the conclusion that individual writers and publications can boost readership of this more “challenging” kind of writing by engaging in a bit of mild Bait & Switch. Let me explain.

When I look at which 50 articles were most frequently clicked on over the past 10 months of The Spill, that list is oversupplied with content with headlines that include the following:

-THE BEST….
-THE TOP (NAME A NUMBER)
-…OF THE YEAR
-MUST SEE (EXPERIENCE, TRY, ETC)

Folks are so completely drawn to the idea that they will miss out on something important if they don’t investigate what is “the best” or “the top” or is a “must see”, that they are drawn to headlines that include these terms like bugs to the light. Here’s how publishers and newsletter writers should take advantage of this kind of human nature.