You set up your blog, you write frequently, you have a great subscriber base, so you’re done, right? Hardly. A blog is only as good as its most recent posts, and in order to keep people thinking you’re good they must be reading, and with every post you must compel them to do so, and it starts with the title.

What’s Old Is New Again

The title of your blog post is like the headline of a news story in the newspaper. It must be true to the topic, yet have an element of sales to get someone to read it. Especially today, where people do not go out of their way to buy a newspaper and rather have a lot to choose from online, the title of the blog post has to resonate with them and be the entre to your writing.

It’s Not Just You

As the choices of what to read are almost limitless, coupled with the lack of attention span and overall time of the reader, people need to understand in seconds what your post is about and make a decision to read it or not. And in many cases, it has nothing to do with you personally, but moreso with your competition. Many people read blog posts with a blog feed aggregator such as Google Reader. If they go a few days – or even hours – without reading, the number of unread posts can quickly accumulate, as shown with the accompanying screen shot from my own Google Reader account. When faced with this, people will just scan headlines to get beyond the sheer number of posts and back to a manageable number for a later time. Your wonderful, thoughtful writing can be a victim of someone’s lack of time if it doesn’t catch their attention.

Where many times the headline comes first then the text of the post itself, before you go live with it, review the headline to see if it matches what you just wrote. If not, take a few seconds to adjust it, and this time invested may mean all the difference for someone else to take a few seconds to read what you wrote.

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