I've been thinking about getting a bigger blog readership for a while and one thing I need to get better at is headlines. I'm kind of okay at writing blog posts (I think) but people like Darren and Katie are so much better than me at headlines.
Who better than Cosmo for inspiration thanks to a link from Steve Rubel to Copyblogger. I mean headlines like
They just draw you in right? Well, maybe...
btw, I'm not really closing my blog I just wanted to see how much interest that headline would drive.
The Cosmo Headline Technique for Blogging Inspiration | Copyblogger
I actually think you're titles are usually pretty good. I can usually spot a "Steve Post" in my feed by the blog title :)
Nice ! i can t believe I fell for this
cheers Scott - glad i'm recongnisable :)
haha!! Cool!
Boo on you! I had a short moment of sadness when I saw the headline in my Live Mail reader.
Glad to see it was just a calculated ploy on your part. :)
You might be interested in a recent post on Jakob Nielsen's useit.com about 'Passive Voice'... It's applicable, however tangentially
I am really glad you are not closing your blog! The beauty to your work is that you have a talent for being connected to a community. Honestly I buy that.
I don't buy many 'headlines' at the checkout counter. In fact as publications go, our market of blogosphere is the great 'equalizer' to grandiose headlines with junkfood filling.. I would rather have nourishing content than great headlines with nothing to substantiate them.
you big blog tease you!
You got me. I was searching for reasons people blog and your post came up. I thought -NO - don't stop blogging. Glad to see it was a calculated effort to catch people's attention. It is clearly working and you are right - with so much noise out there - you have to be clever to cut through the clutter and get someone to take notice. Although you have to be careful not to become the little boy who cried wolf!
Your new title idea worked. I read this post intrigued as to why you would close down your blog.
Hope your blog hit count must have increased :-) you gave a justified heading to this post...i am sure this post would be having highest count soon among all your postings ;-)
increased a little but a long way from being the most popular...that goes, bizarrely, to a post I did that included the Windows 95 launch video. 25k hits??? :)
I worked on a largish online media project for a few years which produced about 600 news stories every 3 months. Our editors and writers tracked their stats with great interest and there were regular prizes for spikes, consistency and that sort of thing.
Over the 6 years I was there we noticed one particular type of headline/story consistently scored very well for both an initial spike but also a long tail of new readers checking it out...
Ones were the headline asked a question... but the answer was always no. It enabled the headline to be provocative, controversial or just plain counter-intuitive ... but it got people to click the link