Great Blog Post Titles

 

The title of your blog post can completely change its destiny. People often decide whether to read your post – and ultimately take action – based on the title alone. It may also determine whether or not they share your post. So it’s crucial that you spend time crafting your title and getting it right.

A lot has been written about blog post titles. There are a lot of theories and formulas out there, as well as “swipe files” you can use to find template titles.

But while swipe files can be a useful place to start, a lot of the formulas get overused.  So you need to be careful about using them too much on your blog. By all means read them to see how they work, but always try to adapt them for your reader.

Rather than give you yet another formula, I’m going to share ten things I try to do when I’m writing blog post titles. For each title I try to do at least a couple of things on this list (but never all ten).

Let’s go through them.

1. Communicate a Benefit

With each title, I try to communicate a benefit or make some kind of promise about what the post will deliver. I want readers to know just from the title how they’ll benefit from clicking the link and reading the post.

When I’m trying to decide whether to read a post, I always subconsciously ask, “What’s in it for me?”

I think most readers ask questions like this. What’s the benefit? Will I be entertained? Will I be informed? Will I learn something new? Will I hear something newsworthy? Will I feel inspired?

2. Think About Keywords and Search Engine Traffic

Search engines are the number one source of traffic to both my blogs. So I’m always thinking about how to get my posts ranking higher.

Every time I write a title I ask, “What would someone type into Google to look for this information?”

If I don’t ask that question I’m potentially ignoring half the traffic that could come to the site, particularly over the long-term. We tend to see social media traffic coming in when a post is first published, but after that 99% of the post’s traffic comes from search engines.

3. Evoke Readers’ Curiosity

While it clearly communicates what the post is about, there’s also a bit of intrigue. You need to read the article to find out which three lenses.

Another good way to evoke curiosity is to take a negative slant using a word such as “mistakes”,You could also go with a “what the pros won’t tell you” angle.

You need to be careful with curiosity. Most readers don’t like ambiguity. They want to know what they’re getting. So if it’s a choice between curiosity and communicating benefits, go with the latter.

4. Use Questions

This technique works well with those  we’ve covered already. People type questions into search engines all the time. So by thinking about those questions, you can often come up with great blog post titles.

You could use the question itself as the blog post title. Another good opportunity to use a question in your title is when you want your post to start a discussion or debate. But again, be careful. If you put a question in the title, make sure you answer it in the post. If you don’t, readers will be disappointed.

5. Break Your Title into Two Parts

Sometimes you want to do two things in one title or headline. Splitting it into a title and subtitle using a colon is a great way to do this. We do this a lot with our ebook titles, where we want to both communicate what the ebook is about and convey something aspirational.