Field notes
Playbooks, teardowns and the occasional argument — everything we have learned helping creators grow across every major platform.
A series prefix is a fixed cost paid on every episode forever, chosen when episode one is the only thing that exists and the prefix still looks tidy.
The two style guides agree about almost every word in almost every title. The exception is prepositions of four letters or more, and that single rule is the whole difference.
The 100-character limit is the number the upload form enforces. The numbers that decide whether anyone reads your title are 70, 60 and 40, and nothing mentions those.
The "1-2%" target repeated across the web has no source. Two things about a keyword are checkable - whether it is present and where it first appears - and they are what to measure.
Most of what gets called clickbait is taste. A narrow slice of it is covered by published policy, and confusing the two is why the advice on this subject is so bad.
Power words are a copywriting convention, not a ranking factor. What is measurable is position: a first line built entirely from function words has spent its one chance on nothing.
Leave the preheader empty and every inbox fills it from the first text in your email — usually a link nobody clicks. It is the cheapest fix in email marketing.
Gmail on a desktop gives a subject line about 340 pixels — the tightest surface in email. A phone gives more. The count that matters is a width, not a character total.
Google gives a desktop snippet two lines and a phone three. The useful target is one clear promise inside about 155 characters — and Google may still use a passage instead.
A title tag is cut by width, not by character count. The desktop column is about 600 pixels — which is anywhere from 45 to 75 characters depending on the letters.
A search snippet is assembled, not published. Google picks the title, often rewrites it, chooses the description from the page, and cuts both to fit a fixed column.
Title case and sentence case are conventions, not rules, and the styles disagree with each other. Here is what each does and which to pick.