How to Create an Effective Blog Post Title - 7 Tips

Your post title can make your blog viral, spreading the word like wildfire or scaring away potential readers, denying them the chance to find your beautifully written gem. While there are only a few words in your blog post title- they are the most powerful words you'll write. This is because most people will decide whether or not to read the rest.

Why Blog Post Titles Matter

Blog post titles appear in:

Search engine results

Other bloggers' links

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. You can be sure that few people will read a confusing or boring title. 7 Tips for Writing a Blog Title

How can you create a blog title that encourages people to read the opening lines of your blog posts? There are many ways to write a blog title that draws your readers in. Here are seven tips to help you create a blog title that will draw your readers in.

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. You can do this in many ways. The easiest is to 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. Keywords tell search engines about your content, which will make your post appear higher in search results for related searches.

Key words are also useful because they grab the attention of people who are visually scanning content. This is something I discovered when I nebojsa cvetkovic was researching to buy 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. It's great that questions encourage readers to leave comments on your posts. This gives you the opportunity to add a personal touch and make your post title more interesting. As we discussed in this list earlier, questions often include the word 'You' rather than a 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. They will comment on your post and often respond to comments made by other commenters, which they will be more inclined to return to. This is a great opportunity to get readers involved in the discussion to subscribe to your RSS feed and see what others are saying. Always remember to keep your content relevant to the title.

Use Power Words

It is important to use prime words that elicit a strong response from readers. It will be worthwhile to discover 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- It's the act of getting something for free that most people find appealing.

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.

Explore - Curiosity can be one of the greatest weaknesses of man.

Secrets- This triggers curiosity again as it promises to reveal something we don't know. Similarly you could use 'little known ways' to secure the same response in the reader.

Be careful when using these words however. These words can sometimes cause readers to feel negative and believe that the title is not true to its claim. This has been learned from years of misleading advertising schemes we've all ran into at some point on the web. You should just show legitimacy without appearing cheesy and that you are trustworthy.

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