With millions of blog posts published each day (and that number is rising as you’re reading this), you have to use every blogging best practice you can find to stand out from the crowd. One best practice that is often over- looked is the power of an awesome blog title. Let’s face it, it doesn’t matter if you write about the most interesting subject in the world, if your blog title is boring, your blog will never get read.
Below are 6 simple tips to help you create blog titles that get clicked.
Start with a working title.
A successful blog starts with a clear goal which includes; defining the buyer persona you are writing for, an effective keyword strategy, and understanding where your persona is on their buyer’s journey. This is all before you’ve even started writing. Thankfully, one thing you don’t have to come up with at this point is a polished title. Creating a working title helps you get you started until you are ready to start fine-tuning. For example when I began this blog the title you would have seen in our draft folder was ‘XX Best Practices for Blog Titles.”
Deliver what you promised.
Nothing is more disappointing than being promised the moon and all you get is a piece of green cheese. What do I mean? If your blog title promises 15 Top Tips For Beating the Pants off the Competition than those tips, better be tops. And while it’s important to make your title ‘pop’ nothing will cause your readers to lose trust in your blog faster than over-promising in a blog title and under delivering in the actual blog post.
Make it fun and/or sexy.
In the world of B2B it’s easy to get jealous of our B2C cousins. It seems they get to have all the fun creating fun and sexy campaigns, and we are stuck with being staid and predictable. Not so! B2B marketing can and should be fun and dare I say, just a little sexy too. Here’s how.
- Use strong language. Titles such as , “B2B Blog Titles that Don’t Suck”, or “7 Ways Your B2B Blog Titles are Making you Look Stupid” definitely stand out in a crowd.
- Always Alliterate. A quick English 101 refresher – alliteration is using a string of words that begin with the same sound or letter. Here are some examples; 10 Brilliant B2B Blogging Best Practices, Simple SEO Strategy for Your Startup, Wonderful Ways to Wow your Prospects. It’s a fun and simple way to make your blog title pop,while still having a strong impact on your reader.
- Make value clear. People like to know what they are getting. That’s why you will often see brackets at the ends of titles to denote format and content, like [Infographic] or [Free Ebook].This lets your readers know exactly what they can expect.
Take note: All of these suggestions hinge on making sure whatever format you use is in-line with your brand and won’t offend your buyer persona.
Optimize for SEO (when you can).
In a perfect world your blog title will be fun, sexy, and SEO optimized. Unfortunately, some keywords you may be trying to rank for will sound unnatural in the middle of your blog title. The trick is, if you can optimize your title for search and still sound natural, that’s great, but clarity should always be your primary goal. While keywords are important, it’s more valuable to have a title that gets clicked and shared frequently, which in turn can have positive impact on its ranking on search engine result pages.
Keep it short.
This part is not so much about what you say, but how short you can say it. 65 characters and under is the sweet spot when it comes to blog titles. Why? Because titles under 65 characters won’t get cut off in the search engine results. Plus, dont’ forget social sharing. For it to be tweetable you want to keep it under 100 characters, that’s right 100, not 144. Why? This gives you room for a URL and for people to retweet it. And since your blog title will be so amazing, it’s going to be retweeted over and over!
Two heads are better than one (in other words brainstorm).
Bouncing ideas back and forth with a co-worker is a great way to come up with a fresh spin on your blog title. Together you may be able to come up with a whole slew of catchy titles that will take your blogs to a whole new awesome level.
In the ever growing world of blogs, following best practices to come up with your blog title is just one way to stand out from the blogging crowd and to help make sure your blog post is clicked on again and again. Want some more ways to edge out the competiton?
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