Attention Grabbing Blog Titles
First rule of great titles: Grab Someone’s Attention. Pretty simple, right? It’s a deadly simple rule, but a rule that can tie the writer of a blog post, article or opinion piece in knots. Keeping it simple and not too far out in the ozone will help catch the readers eye and attention.
Your Blog, Is Now Live!
You’ve started blogging and are aching to get people to view your newest blog post. You hope people will put your blog posts on the map and readers will pour onto your website with praise and offers to collaborate with you on multiple creative, projects you’re sure will set the web on fire.
Time, thought, angst, along with sweat have built something that is sure to bring praise or at least a few well deserved pats on the back. Right?
But wait. Your dreams of celebrations and accolades may be a bit premature. A full email box and viral tweets with likes toppling over onto each other like an endless row of dominoes, may not happen. At least not yet. 1700 word blog posts written with honesty, wit and pluck are no longer guaranteed to be read by anyone, not even your ever-loving family and friends.
If your writing is creative and authentic with a compelling story etched into the marrow of the blog post it’s gotta resonate with readers and reviewers right? It’s just gotta, gosh darn it!
But hold on, some authoritative estimates say there are nearly a billion blogs shouting and hungering for people to read them, a billion blogs! A billion blogs, that’s one for every seven people on the planet. Wow.
I’m not trying to divert you from hopeful thinking before we even get to the sweet filling of this blog post. Blog Titles. No I’m simply asking you to approach writing and promoting your blog with the same sober outlook you’d bring to the job of building a house, with the same sober clear eyed determination you’d bring to any relationship you are embarking on.
If You Offer It, They Will Buy It!
Somewhere in the Northeastern United States there is a collage football stadium often filled to the brim every other Saturday with students and local towns people hoping for an exciting game.
The fans of both teams assembled to battle are yelling and waving their arms in tried and true unison, hoping to spur their teams on to victory. It’s been a standard scene in colleges around the Northeast since shortly after November 6, 1869 when Rutgers and Princeton played what was billed as the first college football game
Inside the stadium they serve the usual boring fare of hot dogs, nachos w/cheese and assorted bags of chips and ice cream sandwiches. No one I can assure you goes to games in this ivy covered stadium with hopes of purchasing good eats, they go for the game.
Not far from the stadium an enterprising young man ran a catering outfit. This young man wanted to serve good food inside the stadium but his requests for space and a license were turned down each time he asked the college monopoly powers in charge.
But, he wasn’t frustrated and came up with an alternative way to get food into the stadium. Sell it outside the stadium and let the fans carry it inside.
The local town had designated spaces in different areas and made these spaces available to vendors to sell their products. And as providence would have it there happened to be a number of spaces outside the stadium available for use, with the correct permit, of course.
The enterprising young man secured a number of spaces in a row and on the first Saturday of the season setup tables with bright banners selling cookies, coffee and hot ciders with cinnamon sticks.
The idea he reasoned was to start with a limited menu that didn’t infringe of the college monopoly and for a couple of games they stayed quiet. They stayed quiet mostly he thought because almost no one stopped to buy stuff, from the young man’s food stand.
The young man tapped into his vision and out came an idea ahead of its time. He gathered all his employees and asked them to gather around the food stand just as the giant crowds walked by on their way to the stadium entrance.
The crowds started filling the sidewalks on their way to the stadium as they had before, but this time people noticed the young mans employees milling around the area and a wondrous thing happened, they stopped and bought stuff.
The young man did the same thing during the next game and the crowds continued to pickup food and drink before they entered the stadium. And on the 3rd weeks no employees needed to show up and mill around, the crowds organically knew what to do and they did it.
The monopoly made some noise but no one on the own council paid them any attention and they grew quiet.
The key part and the first thing to reach out to your potential readers of your post is the blog title? You may think it’s the well written and enticing content. You may think it’s the humor you’ve infused into your post. Or you may think it’s the strength of your story telling skills.
The correct answer is; none of the above. The key tactic in getting your blog viewed over and over again is to have a strong title.
There are several reasons why the blog title is so important. First of all, when someone uses a search engine to look for information, the keywords in the title of your blog post are what gets the article to pop up on your screen. For example, if you wrote an article on how to diet with weight watchers, you want the key words diet and weight watchers included in the title so that people interested in that subject will be able to view your blog. The more accurately the title describes the blog, the more it will appear as a search engine result on the most appropriate viewer’s screen.
Another reason you want a terrific title is that when viewers are searching through blog posts looking for one to read, they don’t read the whole post to see if it’s what they’re looking for. That would take forever and the person probably would be so inundated by pages and pages of posts that they’d get lost. They would never find the type of blog post they are looking for. Instead, the viewers scan the titles quickly to pick the post they want to read by the most interesting and appropriate looking title.
This means you could have the greatest post in the world, but nobody would be reading it if the title isn’t just as great.
So how do you come up with the perfect title? Well, you want the title to engage and speak to the viewer. You want it to be pertinent to their own life.
“How Do You Use Weight Watchers to Shed pounds?” is a possible title for that article on how to diet with weight watchers. It pulls the reader in and appeals to their sense of curiosity because the title is a question. Also the word ‘you’ makes the viewer feel like the article was written just for their current needs, it personalizes the piece for the viewer.
Something that seems obvious, but is important, is making sure that the title accurately describes the content. If the viewer realizes that the title is lying about the content, they will get frustrated and stop reading the post, so we better make sure that that weight watchers article actually describes methods of weight watchers that will help them lose weight.
You’ll also notice that all of the letters to the title of the weight watchers post are capitalized correctly. It’s important to follow the rules of writing and have the proper punctuation for your stellar title.
Having a strong title is very important and can make or break your success in blogging.
