The title is the most important part of anything you write. It has been well known that a headline must be strong and be able to capture your reader’s attention. Your blog post title is a headline. While creating an attention grabbing headline is important, that is not what this post is about. This post is about creating relevant titles.
To share a story with you, the other day I was sitting in a meeting and someone was giving a presentation entitled, “Creating positive employee relations” Now since this was for my nine to five job, the title interested me and I was looking forward to hearing what the presenter would share.
After being drug through this presentation and forcing myself to stay awake, as it mercifully ended, my co-worker leaned over and said to me, “That is NOT what I thought this was about.” Needless to say, I agreed and we were both sadly disappointed.
The information the presenter passed along was interesting and informative however, we felt like we were misled or duped. This caused us to think less of the presentation and the information he provided.
You create this same situation if your blog titles are misleading. If I were to begin this blog post with the headline, “FREE! FREE! FREE!” It may capture your attention and you may begin reading it to see what you could get for free but, as you continued to read, you would realize that I wasn’t giving anything away for free. You may scroll to the bottom of the post just to be sure, but then you’d leave frustrated thinking it was all a scam. The title wouldn’t have reflected the actual content.
You can still create an attention grabbing headline that does not mislead your reader and yet doesn’t give away all of the information in your post. This is the balancing act that you have to manage in creating a title. There are many good books and sources out there which can help you to create great titles.
One of the things I did early on was to create a swipe file. Which is nothing more than a file of examples. I took a look at magazines and saw how they crafted the titles of their articles. Then I removed the specifics and created a fill in the blank form. For example, “ How to _____ so you can ______.”
You can then use these fill in the blanks to write your titles. You can even do the same for sales pages and opt in forms. However, I would still suggest picking p a book or two on how to craft good headlines. But always keep in mind that your headline or title should be relevant to your topic.
If your headline or title is misleading then that is exactly how your reader will feel, misled. If they leave feeling like that, it will be that much harder to get them to come back
So how do you keep your titles relevant?