Why the most clever blog titles may kill your blog’s readership.
In the world of copy writing, headlines make or break the ad. A great headline isn’t just important for advertising, a great headline can make or break a blog post as well. There’s no doubt about it,
Great Blog Titles grab attention.
Great creative blog titles not only grab the attention of human readers, but the search engines as well. However, clever blog titles, while they may capture attention, may not encourage your reader to click and read more.
Dharmesh Shah discovered this harsh truth when he wrote a guest post on Hubspot: Forget digg: Join Mixx Where You Can Still Become A Power User.
He reports on his home blog SEO 2.0 in his post Top 10 Reasons Why Great Content Fails on Social Media that he suspects that the wording of the headline played a significant factor in the failure of a GREAT article.
The headline is crucial, without a proper, intriguing, kick-ass headline the best content will fail.
What the heck is it about? Nobody knew and thus it failed even on Sphinn where otherwise it would have ruled the homepage. I was silly enough to submit it without changing the headline.
Basically the original title just does not give you a clue what the post is about and why anybody should care for it.
Remember, when you’re creating content for the largest publication in the world (the Internet), your audience isn’t seeing this article within a specified context. A blog title that generates a ton of clicks from your RSS subscribers may elicit a big YAWN from other sources such as Digg, Sphinn, Stumbleupon or even Google.
Creating great blog titles takes time.
Make sure that your blog title gives the uninformed reader a clue about what information the post contains. Sometimes the most clever blog title may be the worst thing you can slap onto your great blog post.
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