Those few words of your post title could be what brings in traffic, making your blog go viral and spreading through the web like wildfire, or scaring all potential readers away, not even giving themselves the chance to discover your well-written gem. While there are only a few words in your blog post title- they are the most powerful words you’ll write. The power here is due to the fact that to most of your readers, the decision as to whether to read the rest of your post relies on them.

Why Blog Post Titles Matter

Blog post titles appear in:

  • Search engine results
  • Links from other bloggers
  • Social Media Sites
  • On your archives page
  • RSS Feeds

In all of these situations, the post title is all the reader will see, and here is where the reader makes the decision to read on. Write a title that’s confusing or boring, and you’ll bet your ass that not very many people are going to read it.

Crafting a Blog Post Title – 7 tips

How do you craft a blog post title that get people to read your blog post’s opening lines? There are several ways on writing a blog post title that will draw your readers into them. Below are seven tips on crafting a blog post title for you to keep on your mind the next time you’re looking for those right words (and every time).

Personalize Titles

When writing blog posts, you’ll most likely be writing for a vast audience of hundreds or thousands of readers. While this is true, you can make the reader feel like the post is targeted to their specific situation, especially if you personalize the language that you’re using. This can be done several ways, but the easiest way to do so is to simply use the word ‘You’ in your title.

Humor Titles

The art of comedy is a useful technique when it comes to drawing readers into your blog – IF you manage to pull it off. This technique is very useful at attracting readers from social media sites, but keep in mind that this isn’t always great for search engine results. It is possible however, to skillfully craft a humorous title spliced with search engine friendly key words.

Use Key Words

As introduced in the previous tip, key words are essential to gaining eyeballs from search results traffic. Also, including keywords tells search engines what your content is about, which will put your post higher in results for related searches.

Another interesting reason key words come in handy is because it grabs the attention of people who are visually scanning for content – I noticed this when I was looking into finding out more before buying a kindle(which I love) over the holidays. I found myself looking through an RSS feeds, taking in information in a hurry, scanning for the word ‘kindle’, before making the big buy. Because I was in a hurry, the keyword was a great attention grabber.

Ask a Question

When you ask a question, those who see it are wired to respond. Questions are great because is also leads the reader to actually leave comments on your post as well. Again, this gives you a personal touch to your post title, which we’ve discussed earlier in this list, because questions often include the word, ‘You’, rather than just some random question. I’ll write more on the importance of questions in a later post.

Create Controversy or Debate

When a reader sees a title that signifies a controversial topic that’s open for debate, they’ll often want to join in the discussion by commenting on your post. Not only will they comment on your post, but these comments will often be responses to other commenter’s comments, which they’ll be inclined to check back to. The great thing about this is that now these readers active in the discussion, will have an incentive to subscribe to your RSS feed to check out what other people are saying. Always remember to keep your content relevant to the title.

Use Power Words

It’s important to take advantage of prime words that evoke a powerful response in readers, and it will be worth it to find out what they are. There are several of these power words lurking throughout our vocabularies, but I’ve managed to pin-point a few into a small (yet powerful) list.

Easy – Mankind strives to make life easier and more efficient. Any information on accomplishing this is to humans like moths to a flame.

Free – There’s something about getting something for FREE that triggers something in most of us.

Stunning – Using words like ’stunning’ draw people in for them to judge whether the post lives up to it’s name. This is a ‘big claim’ technique.

Discover – Curiosity is one of man’s greatest weaknesses.

Secrets – Again with curiosity, this triggers a response because it promises to show us something that we don’t yet know. Similarly you could use ‘little known ways’ to secure the same response in the reader.

Be careful when using these words however. Sometimes they can leave a negative response in readers who may assume the title wont live up to it’s claim. This has been learned from years of misleading advertising schemes we’ve all ran into at some point on the web. Just try to show that you’re legitimate, without coming off as cheesy, and you should be fine.

Communicate a Benefit

This is SO IMPORTANT.  When a potential reader is going through the web and comes across your post and they see a title that promises to meet a need they have, they’ll almost always click your link to read on. Identify a need in potential readers and tell them that reading your post will help them with this problem or need with your title. These are the most direct type of titles that almost SCREAM at those who come across them, and tell them what they’ll get if they read your post.

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